Cordilias

Chapter 2

For the city seeming desolate from above, the streets were unordinarily busy. No one took the side walks any more; they were cracked and overturned by dozers or the Surge. The street was the safest place to take. Cars could no longer run off the lack of petrol left so there was no real reason to fear being hit. That was except for the people. Everyone gathered here, in the Center, because it was the only place many felt safe. It was a place where they could barter for things that kept them alive, share a cot, or borrow a syringe. All the reasons why I had avoided it for so long.

Those who passed by seemed to only pay attention to themselves. Many who wandered around me walked like zombies. Some had the yellowish eyes showing the high of Mystery in their blood streams. Others held dark circles from exhaustion. And as some grazed my arms, I grimaced as their body odor infected my nose.

The crowd seemed to swallow me and slow down as I tried to bob in between everyone. A few shops to the right or left had cardboard signs in their desolate windows and shadowing interiors: Mystery Sale, Food for Labor, Housing for food, their neon signs burnt out. If times hadn't changed, the signs would be glowing neon bright in the dusk, advertising diners and clothing chains, their lights inside warm and welcoming. But the Surge had taken that all away.

An electrical impulse had been sent from an abandoned military base 3 years ago, forcing all of the electricity to seize. It caused a minor earth quake, ruining most of civilization on the ground. All wires were fried, electrical boxes melted from the heat. Any hope of having light in a household was gone, shipments never again making it to the city. That's when we all realized They were real. The people outside of our city who controlled everything.

No one knows their name. All we know is their damage and decimation. Routine checks, coming in their shaded vans to scope the city for people. Who They chose was random. It was a very public thing, pulling a man off the street, mid-drive and disappearing. They never targeted those in hiding; it's as if those people didn't exist to them. Which is why Kali's disappearance was so strange.  

I wondered if those who lived in the Center had grown accustomed to such a thing; if they hoped a passerby witness could help save them when those gloved hands reached out and claimed their fate. Idealism that Kali would be envious of.

I remember her asking me about them one day as I got home with some food from the cannery a few blocks away from the hospital where I worked.

"A? Who are They?" She sat at our metal patio table, the table we used to eat on, as we enjoyed seats on crates that had been left by ships, spooning Dole fruit cocktail in her mouth.

"They who?" I took out cans of beans and spam, setting them one by one out of my bag, on the table, purposefully occupying my eyes. Kali had this strange ability to tell when a person was lying just by looking into their eyes.

"You know, They." She tucked her brown curls behind her ears to prevent the strands from impeding in her gorging. I had always wondered where she put it; downing 3/4 of our stock and staying as thin as a stick. "Marie says that they're aliens from Mars that have made camp just over the hills and that they take people to clone and make their own children," Kali said as she swallowed the mush in her mouth. "I wonder if they're lonely."

"Marie was a side effect of Mystery; she has no brain cells left, don't listen to her," I had finished taking out my cans and sat on a crate across the way from her.

"Well Del said..."

"They don't know anything Kal, they've never seen what They do or even who they are." I passed her another can of the fruit cocktail and the conversation ended at that.