Kristi Helvig: Burn Out

“LONG TIME NO SEE, TORA.” MARKUS PROPPED UP HIS brown boots on the thermoplastic-fiber table. He slurped the meager cup of water I’d given him, and his dark hair fell over his eyes.

In spite of my happiness at the sight of another human being, I couldn’t help but remind myself that this particular human was Markus. I eyed him with suspicion. “Yeah, I’m surprised you came back.”

He was one of a handful of people I’d had contact with since we came to the shelter. Though he was only twenty-one, he had his own ship—almost unheard of outside of the pod cities—and had conducted business with my father on occasion. He’d helped my father transport the weapons to our shelter from the pod city. And despite Markus’ illegal business ventures, my father trusted him enough from their dealings that if a new planet was ever found, he wanted Markus to fly us there.

He hadn’t trusted Markus on other matters though, and after Markus’ hand lingered too long on my back during one visit, he’d warned me about his reputation with women. I guess that with so few females left, he thought he should give them all a try. He’d come by to visit several times after my father’s death, but I’d never trusted him much. Markus’ main concern was Markus.

He’d taken off on a trip six months ago to check out a nearby solar system, and had stopped by to visit before he left. There’d been rumors that a group of prominent Consulate members had finally found a decent planet. As Markus had never tested his ship for long outside the atmosphere, he wasn’t sure it would make it and said he didn’t want to be responsible for my death. He told me that if his ship held up and he found the planet, he’d come back. Though Markus could at best be described as shady, I believed his promise that he’d return for me.

In the meantime, I had to figure out what to do with the guns if the planet turned out to be real. There was no way I was bringing them with me and letting them fall into enemy hands. Unfortunately, they were heat-resistant but I could bury them deep in a cactus grove—I just had to make sure I wouldn’t need to use them first. I’d waited, and waited, and then waited some more. Even with Markus’ crappy old ship, I knew he could have made it to other galaxies and back in a week or two. After several months had passed, I was sure I’d been left to die.

Markus set down the water and pulled out a flask from his jacket. He offered it to me, but I declined. He took a long pull from the silver container before screwing the top back on. “What can I say? It’s been a wild ride. I started having mechanical problems with the space drive.”

I rolled my eyes. “Whatever.” The space-drive technology—something to do with the eleventh dimension, M-theory, and other crap I didn’t understand—could bend the space-time continuum. Ships like Markus’ could travel between several galaxies in a week, where it used to take several hundred years. The Consulate ships were even faster.

He leaned over across the table and smirked. “Also, it turned out to be harder to find Caelia than you’d think.”

I gasped and leaned forward, my heart leaping in my chest. When Markus first told me about the possibility of an Earthlike place, it sounded more myth than fact, like he was just as likely to find a planet inhabited with vampires and unicorns as one with water. “You found Caelia? In the Hydrus system? Is it habitable?”

Markus studied me, enjoying my anticipation. “Yeah, sure as hell is. Water, air, trees, you name it.” He gestured at all the contraptions around us that kept me alive in this subterranean tomb.

My mouth hung open at his words. “Seriously?”

He grinned at me. “Yep. And there are colonies everywhere.”

“Colonies of people?” The Consulate’s first, second, and final exploratory missions had been total busts. They’d given a pathetic speech on GlobalNet, proclaiming that all hope was lost and everyone should prepare for “the end.” They even used air quotes when saying “the end” on the broadcast, as if we might confuse it with the end of something more trivial—like water.

Markus laughed. “Of course, people. I wouldn’t be this excited if I was talking about cacti.”

“How is that possible? They didn’t broadcast it on the GlobalNet, so how …” The answer hit me like a big red giant. I stared at Markus. “They only told the people inside the pod cities, the rich people.” Only the rich were allowed to live in the pod cities. The rest were left to fend for themselves on the outside.

Markus nodded. “They’re the only ones who could afford the fee the Consulate charged for passage to Caelia. Plus, I’m guessing their ‘planet repopulation plan’ hinged on the hope that doctors, scientists, and various other rich, smart people would reproduce. I’m sure they didn’t figure any of us would survive long enough to find out about it.” He cracked his knuckles. “They figured wrong.”

Markus watched my face, which I kept blank. Rage bubbled deep down inside but stayed buried, where emotions should stay. Rage was useless, hope only brought pain, and love ended in death.

He cleared his throat. “I think it’s safe to say the human race will continue, although I know you don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing.”

After the oceans dried up and all hell broke loose, the pod cities were designed to provide a safe, comfortable environment for the law-abiding citizens. What a crock. But the rich reacted the same as the poor when a new planet wasn’t located. They panicked. Many felt that if the world was ending, there was no need to follow laws. The nickname on the GlobalNet for these people was burners—those who used the sun’s burn out as an excuse to be total assholes. Some killed their own family members for an extra cup of water.

I shrugged. “A year alone in this hellhole and suddenly the thought of being with other humans makes me downright giddy.” The news broadcast on my Infinity had gone dead shortly after the government reported my father’s death. I’d thought the outage meant everyone in the pod cities had died. “Speaking of other humans, I’ve had no luck trying to find anyone on the GlobalNet. Did you see any signs of any other people?”

Markus crossed his hands behind his head and sighed. “Sweetcakes, I hate to break it to you, but I’m pretty sure it’s just the two of us down here. It’s nothing but wasteland as far as I can see from my ship. Even our pod city looked deserted.”

I blinked away tears. Sector 5, where we lived, used to be the continental United States before the oceans dried up and Earth became one giant, happy continent. Now there were only sectors. Each of the six sectors had a pod city, with the Consulate members scattered among the cities to help “maintain order.” If the other sectors were as empty as ours, we really could be the last two people on Earth.

He looked at me and leaned forward. “It’s been difficult for you, hasn’t it?”

Unbelievable. Did he really think I was going to spill my guts to him? My eyes fell on my sister’s painting on the wall behind him. Wildflowers. Colorful flowers that didn’t exist in our world. She’d been so determined to make them come to life again somehow. Though we’d had a few decorations in our place in the pod city, she couldn’t have remembered that house—I barely remembered it myself.

My sister had begged me to look up pictures of flowers on my Infinity. She’d been obsessed with them and thought they were the loveliest of all extinct things. It bothered her that we didn’t have real ones. The cactus flowers were the closest thing, but their white petals sat high atop the limbs and my sister complained she couldn’t see them from the ground. I used to worry she’d try to climb up the cactus and impale herself on one of the giant spines.