Short Stories From the Mind of Brite

The Consequences of Air

AN: SO here's another short one from school. It probably isn't scientifically accurate (or possible), so don't be too nitpicky. Also, to those of you who are like, "Bro, where ever is your other story [about the obnoxious girl stuck in the maze]?" two things: One, thanks for sticking with it. Secondly: I will continue it.

The Consequences of Air

Lio:

Jean’s coughing again.

    It’s all I can do not to shudder as the breathless hacking spews from the woman who practically mothered me. She’s lasted longer than a lot of the others, I try telling myself. It’s a wonder she even reached thirty. But that doesn’t mean that it’ll be bearable to see her go.

    “Lio. Hey. Are you alright?” Neea pipes up from her side of the infirmary cot, her blue eye glistening. She knows I’m hurtin’ pretty bad with Jean in this state.

Before I go on, let me just make something clear. If the mutey-lungs here have made me leader, Neea’s my second-in command. She can read me like a book, she’s smarter than anyone I know, and if anyone ever has the audacity to challenge me about putting that much trust in a girl lacking an entire face, I’d go at them with a knife (this actually happened once, and Nee stopped me with such ferocity that onlookers probably thought she’d been the one to start the qualm). Point of the matter is, she means the world to me.

And since she means the world to be, it’s no use lying about what’s going through my head. “No. Jean’s gonna die, just like all the others. And we’re gonna have to be the adults, ‘cause God knows that Erebos isn’t gonna do anything besides sit around and mumble about his dead family.”

“I think you’re being a little too hard on him. He’s not really as callous as you make him out to be, you know; he’s been through a lot,” she sighs, giving me a sad smile with the good half of her mouth. “Anyway, can I take some of the others on a SS?” SS is this kinda-stupid term she made up that stands for ‘sustenance search’. She could just say foraging, but for some reason she always uses these funny, old words. Honestly, sometimes I think that she’s the only one who listened when Jean was teachin’ us about proper English.

“Go for it,” I respond. Nearly all the mutey-lungs are younger than us, and most of those are younger than ten. They gotta have food at that age, apparently.

Neea gets up to go, her light hair pulled into a short ponytail, and for a moment I can’t see the shrivelled skin and eyeless eye socket on the disfigured side of her face. For a split second, I’m struck by how pretty she is. Still, for what it’s worth, I like her better in her entirety. “Love you, Lio,” she calls in her typical goodbye as she starts off. We’ve known each other forever. so I guess in that time, ‘love you’ has kind of become our mode of operation- even if i wish it meant something a little more than that.

“Love you too, Nee. And don’t forget to take headcounts, ‘kay?” I remind her. She nods, showing that she’s heard me as she bounds off to get a group together for her food-scavenging.

Then my head turns back to Jean. We’re not blood related, but when the chemicals meshed with the air ten years ago, she was the one who took initiative and got everyone in Boston (that wasn’t panicking) here to the campus of what I guess was the Boston University. She was barely out of college herself at the age of nineteen. And there I was, this little five-year-old who had never seen a leader.

My parents had left me, maybe to find a place where the air’s turpitude wasn’t as suffocating or harsh as it was here, which was a lost cause, because I guess it was happening all over America (nobody knows about the world, because most news crews here weren’t young enough to have adaptable lungs and died). A lot of others left, too, because even if it was ages ago, I remember the bodies littering the streets.