Melissa la Cruz - Frozen

Beyond the fence was a mountain of junk. A century of trash tossed over the border, forgotten and left to rot in the endless cold. “No wonder they call it the Trash Pile,” Nat said, a little awed by all the strange electronic equipment, rusted, burned-out cars, and mountains of plastic, cardboard, and glass.

“My family was from Cali,” Wes said, peering out the window over her shoulder. “My dad said his dad’s dad used to talk about it—how pretty it was, how you could go from the mountains to the desert to the beach. They’d moved after the Flood, of course, and did the March down the Ten. Vegas was the only city left standing. Family legend had it they went straight to the casinos.” He leaned back and gave her a wry smile. She could see that he was still in pain, but trying to make light of it.

“What’s that?” Farouk interrupted suddenly, pointing at the twinkling lights far in the darkness and what looked like distant figures moving through the frozen garbage landscape.

“Don’t mind that,” Wes said curtly. “There’s nothing to see out there. Nothing we want to see, anyway.”

Nat kept silent, staring at the moving lights, wondering how much Wes had told his crew about what they would face out here.

“How’s that second fence coming along?” Wes asked.

The boy turned back to his device, working furiously. The LTV was barreling through the rocky roads and the next barrier was coming up soon. They had to disable it or they would fry.

“There’s some code on it I can’t figure out. It’s got to be one of the German ones—those are the hardest,” grumbled Farouk.

“They must’ve changed it since the last time we did a run,” Shakes said.

“German codes?” Nat asked with a frown.

“The army recycles codes from the old wars. No one can make up new ones. They were lucky to find these,” said Wes.

Nat knew it was the same story for everything. The generation that had come up with the heat suits and discovered cold fusion were long gone: survivors from Before, who remembered a different time, when the world was still green and blue, and who’d marshaled their resources and knowledge to figuring out how to survive the cold. But there were very few scientists these days, and the only books that remained were the physical ones that dated back to the early twenty-first century.

“Can I try?” she asked Farouk.

He handed her the device, a small black phone with a tiny keyboard. “It’s talking to an old Enigma machine, using radio signals. The fence is locked by a certain transmission, but I can’t figure it out. I need to send a message to the machine that’s holding the wall. But this is all it’s giving me,” he said, showing her the screen of numbers.

She stared at the sequence, at the pattern it made, and typed out an answer. “Try it now,” she told Farouk.

He studied her work, then hit the send key. “Here goes nothing,” he muttered.

But a few minutes later, Shakes called excitedly from the driver’s seat. “Fence is down!” he whooped, checking the electromagnetic sensor.

“How’d you do that?” Farouk asked.

“I just saw it.” She shrugged. Numbers came easily to her. Patterns. She’d been able to break the code, and read its simple request. TO OPEN GATE SAY HELLO. She’d simply typed the word “hello” in the code and the fence had opened for her.

“Good work,” Wes said. “You’re almost part of the team.” He smiled. “Hey!” he said, noticing that Daran and Zedric had opened the food packs. “You boys better share.”

Zedric threw him a foil-wrapped object and Wes caught it deftly. “Mmm. Curry pizza burroti.” Wes grinned. “Want a bite?” he offered. “Best McRoti in Vegas. And looks like the boys picked up some McRamen, too.”

“No, thanks.” Nat shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

“I’ll leave you a piece if you change your mind,” he said. He offered her his chopsticks. “Pull for luck,” he said.

She took one side and the sticks broke off, leaving her with the bigger half.

“You win.” He grinned. He was such a Vegas boy, superstitious about everything, including the chopsticks-wishbone game. He began to unwrap his food, whistling a melody that sounded familiar.

“What is that?”

“Dunno. My mom used to sing it,” he explained, and his face pinched a little.

“Listen, I know you from somewhere—don’t I? I feel like we’ve met before,” she asked him suddenly. She was certain of it, she just couldn’t place him, but it would come to her soon enough. That tune he was whistling . . . if only she could remember, but her memory was gray like her lenses, cloudy; she could put together bits and pieces but not the whole thing, not her whole life.

“Nah, I don’t gamble.” He smiled, taking a big bite of his burroti.

“Only with his life,” Shakes said, from the front. “Hey! What about me?” he said, holding up his hand, and Farouk tossed him his own multi-cuisine mash-up.

“I swear I’ve met you before, and I don’t just mean from the casino the other day,” she said to Wes. It was suddenly important that she remember why his face was so familiar to her. “But I guess not.”

Wes regarded her thoughtfully as he ate. Nat became worried that maybe he would think she was flirting with him—even if she wasn’t. Besides, she thought with a secret smile, if she was flirting with him, he would know. She was about to say something else when Shakes released a yelp from the front seat that startled everyone, including Nat.

“What is it?” demanded Wes.

“Drones in the sky; they sent a seeker team out,” Shakes said, pulling out his scanner, which was beeping. He shook his head as he peered out the window at a small black plane circling the distant horizon.

“Where?” Wes asked, sticking his head out the window.

“Not sure. He’s off the radar now.”

“Fine, we’ll take the back roads,” Wes said. “Seekers stick to the main highway. We’ll have to loop around, take us close to MacArthur, but it’ll be okay. We should be able to shake them once we—” Wes never finished his sentence, as a blast of cold air hit and a cloud of silver flakes filled the cabin.

“What now!” Daran yelled, as the flakes flew up his nose. They were everywhere. A second gust of wind sent more snow pouring through the openings.

The boys yelped and Nat batted at the flakes, feeling them fall on her eyelids, her ears. “Burglar alarm,” Wes said tightly. He explained the silver cloud wasn’t smoke or snow. Crossing the fences had released nanos—machines no larger than a grain of dust that sensed and recorded human pheromones. Nanotechnology was old hardware, just like the fusion batteries; it was from the last global war before everything started breaking down. The military didn’t know how to upgrade the system, only how to maintain it.

“They’re like robo-bloodhounds,” Farouk said excitedly. “They catch your scent and then feed it into the defense network.”

Wes cuffed him in the shoulder. “What are you so hopped up about?”

“I’ve never seen one before, is all,” Farouk said. “A nano cloud, I mean.”

Wes gestured out across the garbage-strewn landscape. “The locals call ’em pop-cans. The bombs are usually hidden inside old soda cans, and the Pile is littered with them.”

“What do they do?” Farouk asked.

“They pop,” Shakes said, cutting in. “You get close enough for one of them to sniff you, to make a match for one of the pheromones that just got transmitted into the system, and they blow, taking out whatever part of you is closest to it.”

“We’ve never been in the system before,” Daran complained. “I didn’t sign up for this. I ain’t losing an arm or a leg to a soda can.”