The Differents | ✓

T H I R T Y - S E V E N

Sniper, who I've rarely seen panic, dropped his smile. "I don't know," he said quietly. "We're here, we've made it. That in itself doesn't feel real. So far we've planned for just the immediate future, but what about now?"

"I say we find the centre of this city and work from there," I suggested, taking the lead. "We can sleep, dry off, eat, and hopefully wait the rain out. Then we can go look for other people. There's bound to be at least one person here."

He pulled me into a hug. "Okay. That sounds like a good plan."

Sniper said he had spotted a large building while we were still in the outskirts of the city, so we headed toward where he guessed it would be, hoping we could rest there. I didn't really have a plan for where we would dry off and sleep, so it sounded like as good an idea as any. As we walked, I began to notice the state of the city. It was most definitely abandoned, which didn't surprise me much, but the buildings got less depressed-looking as we neared the heart of the city. Maybe there was hope for finding other humans, after all, if the buildings seemed to be in better condition.

We crossed a bridge spanning a small river, walked for a little longer, and came to a stop in front of the building. It was the biggest thing I had ever seen, with too many details to count. It had a huge staircase centred in the front, that connected to multiple pathways leading through the large expanse of grass outside the building. Window after window spanned its exterior, and sections that almost looked like towers stuck out of the building and gave it texture. Each tower was topped with a greenish-coloured dome that ended in a sharp point, and each dome was the same size except for the middle one, which was the biggest of them all and adorned with a golden statue right at the top. The stone material of the building was decorated expertly, complete with stone arches, decorated overhangs, and carvings of beautiful women standing on top. I stood in awe for a minute, taking in its grandeur.

Sniper, however, was more cautious. After he had gotten over the initial shock of seeing the building up close, he bent down and looked at the grass.

"Someone's definitely been here in the last few months," he said. "Look at how short the grass is."

I went through lots of emotions at once. Fear, then realization, then surprise, then hope. What if there were Masks or bad people here? But what if there were survivors and humans living outside the grasp of the Core?

"What do we do?" I asked.

"I don't think it's safe to stay this close. The buildings around here are still kinda intact so why don't we stay in one of them?"

We chose one a safe distance from the building and a little further up the street. It wasn't hard to get inside the building since the glass of the doors was already shattered and coating the once-red carpet of the first room. It looked like a lobby of sorts and had a big desk as well as a seating area. I stepped through the door frame, my boots crunching on the glass, and looked around. There was a doorway in the far corner of the room with a big EXIT sign above it, and a shiny pair of doors near the desk. We went toward the shiny doors but found they had no handle, and the button next to them didn't work when we pressed it, so we headed for the other door. It opened into a tall spiral staircase that seemed to stretch upward forever. The door made a loud slam as it closed and the sound echoed up, up, up, until we couldn't hear it anymore.

We started up.

By the time we had reached the second floor, the stairwell was starting to make me claustrophobic. Every passing moment felt like the small space was getting narrower and narrower, and I pushed the exit door open without giving it a second thought. Luckily for us, the building seemed to be completely abandoned and no one was around to see us except for a couple of birds that had flown in through one of the broken windows.

We walked out into a hallway that had conserved more of its details than the lobby, but was still pretty damaged. The red carpets had lost some of their colour and what might have been gold paint on the textured wall was peeling.

Sniper wrinkled his nose. "Should we try the next floor?"

We tried three more floors before settling with one that didn't look horrible. It was still dusty and obviously hadn't been used in years, but at least the windows weren't all broken.

I tried the first door I came to, and found it locked. The same was true for all of the other doors in the hallway. Upon closer inspection, it looked like they could be opened with the swipe of a card or the turn of a key, but we were beyond tired and just needed somewhere to rest, so we smashed a hole in the door and unlocked it from the inside.

The room was actually beautiful, as were so many of the buildings in the centre of the city. I felt a little bad about destroying things that were undoubtedly old buildings with years of work put into them, but as soon as I saw the plush seats and the soft-looking bed, I changed my mind.

The inside of the room matched the lobby and the hallways, and had various red carpets and rugs on the floor, complete with gold tassels that matched the mostly intact tassels on the bottom of the velvet curtains. The wallpaper stuck with the red and gold theme, and added in some silver and white, and there was even a tiny corner of the room that had an arrangement of old-looking kitchen items. I tested the stove but no flame appeared, although the oven worked. It didn't bother me too much, though. Having this beautiful room was more than enough.

Sniper opened a door in the wall, and found an equally fancy bathroom. He turned the handle on the tap and after some sputtering, a thin stream of water started to flow from it.

Seeing the water made me realize the mess we had been making from our own wet clothes, so I dropped my bags onto the bed, opened the curtains (and tried to ignore all the dust that jumped into the air from it), and shooed Sniper out the bathroom so I could change. The bathroom was surprisingly small for such a fancy building, but it had everything that I needed nevertheless. I turned on the old shower and after a few minutes of a thin stream of cold water coming from the shower head, the water started to heat up and become stronger. It was the first time I had been fully warm in what seemed like a much longer time than it actually was. I found it strange how we had only been out of the Core for what, three days? And yet it seemed like so much longer than that.

I heard a happy shout from the adjoining room and a knock on the bathroom door. "The water works out here too, and there are some cans of food in the cupboards!" Sniper yelled through the door. "And there's a working TV!"

"Don't watch it without me!" I yelled at him. Letting the water run down my back, I half-wished he would join me, but shook the thought out of my head in embarrassment.

After I had changed and dried off, I waited for Sniper to do the same and we settled onto the bouncy sofa after throwing some pillows at it to get rid of the dust. He picked up the remote, which looked so different to the ones at the Core -- so many buttons -- and stared at it.

"I think you have to press that button," I said, leaning toward him and pointing at a big red button at the top. POWER was written under it. He did, and the television jumped to life, startling me.

The first thing I noticed was that the video had no colour. On screen, a woman was talking while looking at the camera, and behind her was a busy street full of people. People! She seemed to be telling the day's news or events in the city, and went up to people at random and asked them questions. I then noticed that almost everyone looked the same. No abnormally tall people, no heavier people, no one hunched over, no one in a wheelchair. They all looked confident, healthy, but all very similar. Their faces and physical features were different but that was the only thing that distinguished them.

The thought was just forming in my mind when Sniper voiced it. 

"Are those the Normals?"