From Nothing to Something

Chapter 4

Ash hurried down the mountainside. No one had ever seen anyone outside the Refuge before. 

Well, except for the rumors of the Isolates. People think that they went insane, and they were sent out here, and that they were dangerous. 

They looked pretty sane to Ash. He slid down the rest of the way and made a run for it. 

As he arrived, he started to see spots in his eyes. His joints became wobbly as he staggered into a building made from tattered cloth. The few dozen people inside turned to look at him. 

"Hello." He pointed to his arm. "I need help." 

Then he collapsed to the floor. 

After Ash fell to the floor, the people sat there, motionless, for a few seconds or so. Then they all got up and carried them into an old building that used to be called Rite Aid. 

As they came in, more people helped carry him to an old tattered bed. As the people checked his pulse, they brought over a tray of medicine. One shot a sedative into his back as some people nursed his wound.

Ash woke up to a steady beeping. He opened his eyes as someone took a wet piece of cloth off his forehead. 

He looked at his arm. The lines were definitely shorter, and the wound was stitched up. He thought that it was healed. 

"It's not healed yet." A voice said. Ash turned around to find a girl putting the cloth onto a little cart filled with empty syringes. The girl had long purple hair that was tied up in a ponytail.

"It's not?" Ash asked. 

"Nope. We just gave you a little medicine to make it slow down a little bit. We need Refuge medicine to heal it completely." 

Ash nodded grimly. In the Refuge, if you have a wound, they bring you to a Hospital where they can heal anything. In a matter of hours you can walk out again. 

"You have about 20 days until it spreads again. 22 days until you're dead. Before, you barely had a few minutes. You were lucky that you found this place in time."

Ash suddenly sat up. "Where am I?" He suddenly asked. 

She laughed. "Come on, I'll show you around." 

She pushed the shattered glass doors open, and the sunlight hit Ash straight in the face. He closed his eyes. 

"You've never been outside the Refuge, right?" She asked. 

"No." Ash answered. 

"Then you've probably never seen the tides." 

Ash opened his eyes to find a vast ocean stretched out in front of him. The road disappeared in a medley of different waves. 

But the most surprising thing was the lack of pollution. 

"Where'd the trash go?" Ash asked her. 

"There's so much water, the trash just spreads out. There are a few islands here and there, though."

Ash walked over to the other side of the road. From there, he spotted the Refuge, a tiny island among a blue ocean. It looked like the walls were the only things that was keeping the water out. 

He walked over a few more steps, and spotted the landfill. The trucks were partly submerged in the water, like crashed ships. 

"Can we go up there? I want to have a better look around." Ash said, pointing up to the only trash mound that towered over the rest of the city. 

"Sure." She said as she started for the ramp that led all the way up. 

After several minutes of climbing, she started talking again. 

"Have you heard of the term Isolate in the Refuge?" She said.

"Yes." The Refuge was pretty much built on top of the ideas of perfection and equality, and that's why the idea for the Groups started. People merged into the Importants, the Unimportants, and the Isolates.  

"Well, we are the Isolates." 

That sentence struck Ash odd. 

"But aren't Isolates insane people?" 

"Really? You guys think that now?" She laughed. "I was born in the Refuge, and then the Importants came in and kicked us out here. We couldn't even say good-bye to our neighbors. But nonetheless, I'm still perfectly fine."

"But..." He started.

"I was like that, too.  I thought that the Importants were nice people of equality, but they were the ones who kicked us out."

There was silence as we came up at a turn. 

"Did you know that some of these trash towers are hundreds to a thousand of years old?" She said, completely forgetting about the Refuge's cruelty. 

"Really?" Ash said. 

They went around the corner, and saw that the road ended in a large crack split down the tower. Ash hadn't seen this before last time. Ash looked up, and saw that instead of nice and smooth sides like other towers, this one was sagging, little strands of old trash hanging down. 

"Yup, definitely a thousand years old." He said. 

There was a little wooden bridge stretching across the chasm. The girl started across that. Ash followed, making sure not to step in some of the holes that littered the bridge. 

They eventually made it to the very top, where an old flag hung limply on top of an old flagpole, no wind to reveal its pattern. 

By then, they were far above the cloud level. But even though thick, heavy clouds lingered in the horizon, there were no clouds below us, so he could see the town and surrounding areas clearly. 

The town was not actually a town. It was a small city. From up there, Ash thought that he could still hear the sounds of their ancestors as the bustled around this city. 

Ash looked behind him at the water. In shallow areas, I thought I could see weird shapes in the water, like old cars, and in the deep areas, buildings. 

"This is the tallest point in miles. The next tallest mound is over there, Mount Refuse."

Ash squinted, and he thought that he saw a mound about as tall as ours just as clouds rolled over it. 

"If I send a signal from here, will the Refuge see it?" Ash asked. 

For once, she was silent. 

"I...I don't think I should tell you." She said.

"Tell me." He begged. 

"Alright." She sighed. "Once, there was someone just like you, came up here with a wound, asked for help. We gave him some. I gave him a tour around this place, like I'm giving you right now. When we got up to this point, he suddenly left."

"A few hours later, when we were all sleeping, it was pouring rain. I woke up to the sound of a Hellfire, one of the helicopters of the Refuge. We all emerged from our tents, and saw that there was a bright beam of light shooting off of the point that we're standing on. We didn't know until later that he had made a searchlight from scrap metal."

"A few minutes later, the Hellfire hovered over this spot, and dropped a ladder, and a figure climbed up it. At first, I thought it was a fellow Isolate, pretending to be an Unimportant. But it was the guy that we had saved earlier."

"A few days after they had gone, a whole squadron of Hellfires had showed up, only that they were all armed with machine guns. They started shooting our camp. Most of us made it to safety, but some people died, including my mother."

"We didn't know until way later, but the guy had ratted us to the Importants, and told them that we were insane people who tried to eat his limbs."

This term shocked him. 

How come the Importants had lied to him about everything?