J. Souders - Revelations

“I don’t know,” Asher responds, and even he has a slight waver in his voice. When he squeezes my knee in comfort, there is nothing comforting about the tremor in his hand.

And while I can’t help but think we should turn around, curiosity has me gripped tight. We push forward. The closer to the center we get, the more haphazard the placement of the cars and statues. It is as if the child playing with his toys got tired of setting them straight and just tossed them about and left them however they fell.

I stare at yet another statue as we pass by so closely I can see the expression on its face. Its mouth is wide open as if screaming and terror is etched all over its face.

When we finally get to what appears to be the center of town, the building that stood there is completely gone. The only thing left is a huge crater where it stood. Bits of metal, concrete, and glass litter the circle.

Asher leaps from the horse and strides toward the crater. Curious and unwilling to be left alone in this morbid city, I follow at his heels. When I make it next to him, he reaches out and grips my hand tightly in his. And this time I don’t pull away. In fact I squeeze harder, clamping both my hands around his. In this dead city of fake people, it’s nice to have a connection to someone alive.

Together we walk to the center of the crater, then stop. He releases my hand and kneels down in the dirt to sift through the wreckage. After a minute or two he lifts something up and studies it, then sighs, and hands it to me.

I take it and look it over. It appears to be a human hand, carved in stone and cut off at the wrist.

“What is this? A piece of one of those statues?” I scrutinize the piece. It feels like stone, but it’s different. More porous. It makes my skin crawl just holding it.

“Yes. And no,” he says, studying more of the debris. “They’re not statues.”

“Then what are they?”

“They’re … they were people.”

I drop the hand, a sour taste filling my mouth. When he looks up at me, his eyes are filled with horror. I almost wonder if it isn’t just a mirror reflecting back what I’m feeling.

“This town was destroyed with a nanobomb.”

“Nanobomb?” For some reason the term sounds familiar to me, but I can’t place where I heard the term.

He stands, brushing the dirt from his hands. “They were used during the War when they wanted to overtake an entire city, but didn’t want to completely destroy it, or wanted to keep it useable. It was the quickest way.”

“How?” I wheeze out. My chest feels like there’s a band around it compressing until I’m breathless.

He meets my eyes and I know what he’s going to say before he does. “When the bomb explodes, it disperses nanobots—tiny robots so small that they’re invisible to the human eye—into the air like an aerosol. When a person breathes the aerosol in, they breathe in the nanobots, and they start attacking the body from the inside out. Sort of like a virus. In this case, it caused the body to calcify at an accelerated rate. Virtually turning them into stone statues.”

Toward the end of the twenty-first century, nuclear weapons were almost completely abandoned in favor of the more effective bioweapons. These weapons could easily clear out entire cities, without making them uninhabitable for invading soldiers.

—EXCERPT FROM A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE 21ST CENTURY , “BIOWARFARE”

Evie

“Oh, Mother,” I gasp, but a band of fear must be compressing my chest, because when I suck in a breath it catches in my throat and I start coughing. Coughing so hard that blackness creeps in the sides of my vision until all I can see is a pinprick of the scene in front of me.

Asher slaps my back as if I’m choking, but it doesn’t help. It only makes it worse, a metallic taste coating the back of my tongue. But finally I stop and, while I’m catching my breath, I look around at the statues that stand outside the circle. It’s all so hard to believe, but explains a lot of things. The way they’re dressed in real clothes, the poses, the looks of terror.

“But … why are they still here? Why did they just leave them like that?” Tears sting my eyes and my voice shakes, but disgust is almost as prominent as the sadness ripping through me that anyone could be so callous.

Asher won’t meet my eyes when he says, “I don’t really know, but considering how much damage there is to the surrounding buildings, I have to think this was one of the sites where they tested the prototypes. They probably realized that this city was too far gone to do anything with it and left it.”

Now the disgust is definitely more prominent than the sadness. It makes me speechless. The lack of respect is just mind-blowing.

Asher is watching me with a strange look. “Did you ask for your mother a minute ago?”

At first I have no idea what he’s talking about and the change of subject is a little jolting; then I realize he means what I said before I started choking.

I wince and slump my shoulders, ducking my head so I don’t have to look at him when I say, “It’s just something I say … sometimes. When things surprise me.”

“Why?”

It doesn’t sound anything other than curious, so I relax a little. “I don’t know. Gavin says it’s something from … before. One of the things that stuck in my head even after I lost everything else. I don’t know why I do it, and Gavin doesn’t tell me…” I trail off when I realize how silly that sounds. My saying something and expecting someone else to tell me what it means. It’s ludicrous. I hate it. Feeling helpless like this.

Asher stares at me with this strange look on his face, before he shakes his head. I think I hear him mutter, “Despicable,” but before I can question him, he smiles at me and says, “You’re a strange one, Princess. Come on. We need to find somewhere warm to sleep before you shiver yourself into pieces.”

It’s then that I notice I’m a bundle of tremors. Every muscle in my body aches, especially my heart, which is beating furiously in my chest. My lungs feel like they’re being compressed against my ribs. I rub the heel of my hand against my rib cage.

My teeth are chattering again, but I can’t tell if it’s from fear or the cold. Either way, I just want to leave this city. There’s no way I’m staying here. Not with these statues watching over us.

When I say as much to Asher, he says, “We don’t have much choice. This is the safest place until sunrise.” As if to punctuate his claim, a howl disturbs the quiet of the town. I rub absently at the scratches on my legs. “Besides,” he continues, “this is where I told Gavin we were heading. If he’s coming, he’ll try to meet us here.”

I can tell he doesn’t really believe Gavin is coming, but I’m not willing to take the chance. If waiting in some creepy town is what I need to do, then that’s what I’ll do. “Where do we start?”

“Let’s try to find a spot inside one of these buildings.”

That, of course, proves easier said than done. Almost all of the structures are so badly damaged they’d either provide us no protection from the elements, or are in danger of falling over. It isn’t until we get to the other side of the town, as far from the bomb blast as possible, that we find one relatively intact. It’s the smallest of them. Just a squat block building with a flat roof.

Asher kicks open the door, and peers inside, like he has at least a hundred times in the last hour. But this time, when he emerges, he has a smile in his voice.

“Found one.” His voice is scratchy from exhaustion.

While I get down from Starshine, he pulls a flashlight from one of the packs. “Come on, we’ll check the rest of this building out together. I don’t want to leave you out here all alone.”