“You barely know me. You don’t even believe my story.”
“So talk about yourself, and your world. Tell me so that I can believe you, so that I can know you.”
“If I can find a way home, I’ll leave without a second thought. This is like a nightmare compared to my world. I can’t stay here. It’s not for me.”
“Then why come here in the first place? What’s so great about Dirt anyway?”
Gabriel smiled at her joke.
“The city I come from, if you include the suburbs, covers hundreds of square
miles. Millions of people live there. There are buildings so tall that they stretch into the sky. Next to the city is a huge lake of fresh water. To the south are flatlands and rolling hills covered with grain and corn. It’s green and lush. The sky is a little boring compared to here. There’s only one moon and the sun is smaller, and yellow, and warm.
During the summer everything is hot, and so humid that you’re soaking wet five minutes after going outside. During the winter things get miserably cold sometimes, but it always warms up again in the spring.”
“Sounds like a place out of a story. I can see why you wanna go back. With that wonderful place to return to, why would anyone choose to stay here with me.”
Sighing deeply, Gabriel had a peculiar feeling of doubt about his desire to return home for the first time since arriving. What was wrong with him today?
“There’s no telling what we’ll find at the Spires of Infinity,” he said. “The doorway to other worlds might just be a kiddy story after all.”
Sam was quiet, not looking at him. He had the impression that she was
embarrassed for spilling so much to him.
“I don’t belong here, Sam. You know that as well as I do.”
“Neither do I,” Sam muttered.
For probably the first time since his father left, Gabriel was almost feeling bad for another human being. Empathy was something of a new experience for him. He could imagine being in her place, meeting someone that was civil and generally friendly toward her, only to have him leave her behind because he wanted to go home. He was still leaving the second he found a way off this radioactive rock, of course. Knowing that there might be a way home had given him a sense of purpose he’d not felt since his arrival. He wasn’t going to let anything stand in his way until he was drowning any memory of Ethos away in as much vodka as he could get his hands on.
Chapter 11: Ruin
When the very pull of gravity holding her feet to the ground lurched, Kari knew that there was something very wrong. Between one step and another she seemed to weigh twice what she should, and then light as a feather. Stumbling, she fell with a very queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. The strange fluctuation in gravity lasted only a split second and then it was gone, but in it’s aftermath the ground shook, and the sound of crumbling stone came from far off.
Helping her up, Michael placed a hand on each of her shoulders to make sure she was steady, before letting go. Nodding gratefully, she tried to scrub away the stench of sulfur permeating the air away from her nose. She almost expected her fingers to come away bloody it was so strong. To someone that relied heavily on her sense of smell to identify people and sense their moods, having her nose so deadened by the stink was like being blinded.
“What was that,” Jonathan looked on the verge of vomiting.
Scanning their surroundings, Kari was shocked to find they’d arrived on their first seemingly lifeless world out of the dozen they’d visited so far. Nothing even resembling plant life could be seen amidst ruins of a great city that spread out as far as the eye could see in every direction around them. No birds flew across the burnt orange sky. Not even bugs crawled along the ground. The world seemed utterly dead beneath her feet.
A blood red sun shone from the sky as if viewed through a haze. The queer light gave little illumination, leaving much of the ruined city around them bathed in dark, threatening shadows. Craters and other unmistakable signs of war pockmarked the land.
Some were only a pace across, but others engulfed entire districts of the tidy grid that the streets seemed to follow. Toppled towers leaned on neighboring structures, or completely crushed them, ending in jagged, broken off stumps. Some buildings looked untouched by the destruction, while others were completely flattened, or in various states between.
In the distance Kari could make out the remains of several palaces. Huge domes were caved in with ragged holes blown through stone walls. One dome seemed pierced by a huge spire that appeared to have broken from its own top.
Mixing with the stench of sulfur, was the smell of char. Everywhere Kari looked she saw ash, finely coating everything, and in little piles all around the paving stones that were cracked and blackened by fire. Here there was a porcelain bowl, and there a half-burnt wooden doll. Piles of clothing, and other such possessions, appeared to have been tossed aside by people fleeing in terror. Nowhere did she see any remains.
“What happened here,” Michael gasped.
“This is terrible,” Jonathan agreed.
Turning in a slow circle, the closest thing Kari found resembling life were the toppled and semi-demolished statues, one at every street intersection.
“This city is huge,” she whispered. In the dead silence even a whisper was deafening in her ears. “Where have all of the people gone?”
“Right here,” Jonathan visibly gagged as he toed a pile of ash on the ground.
Taking a step closer, Kari gasped when she saw that amidst the ash were small
fragments of fire-blackened bone and a single gold tooth that was miraculously unscathed. Turning another circle, she scanned the streets in every direction. Hundreds of identical piles of ash were within sight, thousands even. If the rest of the streets in the city held as many as this one did . . .?
“Millions,” Michael said, his wolflike ears drooping. “There have to be millions dead. How? Why?”
Cupping her hands to her mouth, Kari took a deep breath. “Hello? Is there
anyone left alive?”
Adding their own shouts to hers, the twins joined in. They could have yelled
themselves hoarse and not even the dead would have heard. Falling silent, Kari gestured for her brothers to as well. Blanketing the city once more, the palpable silence settled over them like a shroud.
Hitching her pack, Kari pointed toward what looked like a fortress on the horizon.
“Let’s go there. If there’s anything to be found about what happened here, it’ll probably be there.”
“Smart as always,” Jonathan nodded, checking his broadsword.
“Indeed,” Michael agreed, also checking his weapons.
Settling into Kari’s bones, the eerie silence filled her with unease. The back of her neck prickled with the sensation of being watched, but there was no one to watch her save the dead, which was a frightening thought.
Moving steadily toward the fortress, they climbed over rubble to an adjacent
street when a fallen tower blocked their progress. Kari tried hard not to step in any of the piles of ash out of respect for the dead, but it proved impossible. She winced inwardly every time one of her heavy leather boots sent a puff into the air.
Many of the streets were made impassable by rubble, fissures and craters.
Navigating to streets that were clear was hard due to the fact that partially standing buildings often blocked Kari’s sight. Many times it turned out a street that appeared clear from a distance wasn’t.