Silver Umbrellas

Ten-- Treasures

The rest of the trek lasted for half the day, leaving Tino and Alice only a little bit of time to spend in the city before they would have to make tracks back in the other direction. To heed her warning, they approached the first building lots carefully while making sure to keep their eyes peeled for any movement anywhere. Most of the restaurants and stores were nothing more than piles of broken glass the rain couldn't disintegrate, and the sight brought a melancholic frown to her face.

"Wow... It all looks so flat," Finland commented under his breath. The sound of droplets pattering onto the umbrella was noisy but lessening gradually. Maybe they would catch a brief few minutes of rain-less walking today!

"Yeah," Oregon agreed softly. "It's sad... But let's go this way." With an index finger she indicated an asphalt road and concrete sidewalk that somehow wasn't eaten through. "The mall is this way."

"The mall?" he repeated while raising his eyebrows. "Why would we be going there to look for food?"

"Well... There's a lot of glass in the mall, so something useful might have survived," Alice explained hesitantly. "Maybe even food, if we're lucky. But the grocery stores are all watched by them, so we shouldn't go that way yet."

"Alright," Tino consented after a moment's pondering. "We'll have to come back here tomorrow if we don't find any food there, though."

The thought of having to keep coming to the city and back, increasing their chances of being seen y Tyson's cronies, was enough to make Alice feel the urge to shudder. She did shudder, in fact, but Tino blamed the cold end-of-November wind for it. 

Eugene, Oregon, was once a very bright and eccentric city full of tastefully old buildings and state-of-the-art skyscrapers all at once. A vegan or vegetarian could have lived there comfortably considering all the special restaurants and stores that carried the necessary foods for that lifestyle. And there used to be so many people there, too; its population was much larger than that of Oregon's capital city, Salem. As Oregon herself walked through empty, flat land intersected with untouched asphalt roads and concrete sidewalks, a pang of longing and heartache was sent through her chest and into her very soul.

This city... was a ghost town.

"... The streets are still intact," Tino noted after he felt like the silence between them had lasted long enough. "And the sidewalks. I suppose the acid can't eat through them?"

"I guess so," Alice answered twice because her voice had come out as little more than a whisper the first time.

As they walked, she took note of the buildings that used to be there, but were now nothing more than piles of shattered glass. 'That lot used to be an Olive Garden, and just past it there was a Barnes & Noble bookstore. And there's Valley River Center.'

Of course, VRC was hardly any different from the surrounding area; the only really signficant detail that set it apart was all of the piles of glass, and some of the skylight domes that had fallen down as a result of their supports being eaten through by the rain. Cautiously, keeping their steps light and measured, Tino and Alice stepped off the blank parking lot and onto the sidewalk that surrounded the once grand mall.

"Stay close to me, in case there's trouble," Tino whispered to her, though it didn't really need saying when they had to share an umbrella for survival. Even so, Alice nodded once and kept her eyes trained forward while she maintained a grip on the bottom of his brown jacket.

The foundation nearly everywhere was completely exposed, revealing concrete and holes where less durable metal structures had been anchored within. Every single store that had once existed there had had a wall of windows facing the hallways, so lines of shards and even whole but fractured sheets of glass were lying at either side of them as they navigated through the empty shell of a mall. Some of the bits crunched underfoot, but neither paid that fact much thought.