Entropy--Chapter Two
Chapter one
Entropy (C) 2022, all rights reserved
Chapter two
When the last batch of pickled hardroot go on the shelf, I’m tired and almost ready for bed. I settle down beside Ehnzo on the single mattress, laid against the wall so that we can both see the AV. He’s beginning to relax a little since the sirens haven’t yet gone off, and we share a bucket of puffed hardroot between us.
He’s not so bad.
On the AV, the nosy neighbor has just dropped in to see the lady of the house fixing a costume for her son’s school play on the dangers of mutation, and is clearly about to misunderstand what she sees. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I’m going to get to see what happens, since the ground has started to tremble and it just cut to a news anchor sitting solemnly behind a desk.
“Oh no, here it starts,” Ehnzo sighs, pulling down the lead-lined hatch that works as a double-shelter in the event of storms, radiation, and monster attacks, securing us in a bubble with only the AV visible, broadcasting to integrated speakers.
“Citizens of Paradise City and the Greater Usoa Region of the Discordian Supercontinent,” the man says, holding up a tablet he’s reading from. “If you have not gone to your shelters, now is the time. Reports are coming in of a sandstorm arriving from the north and a radicane from the south. It is believed that these two storms are going to collide near Paradise City. Damage to the domes in the superstorms is expected to be…”
“Looks like it’s going to be a long night,” Ehnzo muses, wrapping the blanket around us both.
“Yeah,” I sigh, disappointed and annoyed. “That broadcast is going to be on until the all-clear sounds.”
Right on cue, the sirens sluggishly roar to life, filling the miniature dome with an ear-splitting drone for five whole minutes.
“Well,” Ehnzo muses softly, “if you want to get some sleep, I can stay up…in case there’s an emergency.”
Whether I like it or not, in a few weeks this guy will be my husband, so I might as well start learning to trust him.
“Okay,” I tell him, stretching out opposite his direction, foot to face so the blanket still covers us both. “You going to be okay?”
“Yeah, no, I got my tablet in my bag. I got some work to do, and a few books. I’ll be fine.”
His voice is soft and cautious. He’s trying not to overstep his bounds and make a good early impression. I might have only known him a short time, but I feel safe enough alone with him.
So I settle in for the night, close my eyes, and try to get some sleep.
***
The miniature dome bows in on itself with a pained shriek that snatches me out of sleep like a sandtunnler to a desert hopper. My kitchen is currently sitting on top of us, and our shelter is straining under the weight.
“Get out!” Ehnzo yells, wrenching open the pull-down dome with the strength of a SWAT and ushering me through. The ceiling is cracking, groaning under the weight of whatever just fell on my house.
Ehnzo pulls me by the hand, his armored vest under his arm.
“We have to go now!” he shouts, all authoritarianism and calm under pressure. He pulls me under the doorframe, and roughly throws me into the vest, and then pushes me out of the cellar and into the living room.
“The radiation—!” I protest.
“Not the time!” he growls. “We have to get to the City Center!”
Wrapping his arm around me, he ushers me through the front door and sprawling onto my knees at the neighborhood streets.
The dome…the great protector-of-all has blown open. A great glass piece of it is sitting where my house used to be. There’s so much screaming, and I just want to go back to bed.
“What’s happening?” I ask as Ehnzo pulls me back to my feet, wrapping his arm around me again to stop the shaking.
“A lot of bad stuff right now, but I got clearance to get you into the City Center. You’re going to be fine.”
He pulls me down the street, dodging rubble and debris. The wind is blowing sand everywhere, scalding my skin, to say nothing of what the radicane might be doing. Something massive screams for its life in a deafening, low-frequency moan, and I look up just in time to see a massive skywhale crash into what was left of the dome from the open side behind us, shredding its thick hide against the jagged edges, spilling blood and ballast oil before dropping onto the merchant district like a bloody slab of meat onto a cutting board. A lot of the screaming stops.
“We gotta move!” Ehnzo hisses, pulling me again.
The last thing I see is a flying stop sign.
***
The pain wakes me up sometime after full dark. I’m sprawled out on pavement, under a sheet of metal that might have at one time been a roof or wall, sheltered by a sideways ‘mobile, gears and circuitry facing me.
I just lay here, staring at the exposed guts of the ‘mobile, staring up past the dome into the black sky. There’s a flickering glow from somewhere, probably a fire or something from the damage. I just lie here until I hear Ehnzo’s gasps of pain.
When I manage to stand, I’m dizzy and bleeding, and everything’s a bit foggy. I was…in my shelter? So what am I doing on the street?
Ehnzo is leaning up against the ‘mobile, hand over his side in a pool of his own blood.
“Great Sol! Ehnzo!” I breathe, running to his side, which is a dizzying mistake that almost costs me a twisted ankle.
“You’re alive!” he sighs, his voice heavy and dreamy. “I was worried!”
“Don’t worry about me, what about you?” I ask, trying to pull his hands away from his side as he instinctively fights me to keep it covered.
“Took some shrapnel to the side,” he answers through a hiss of pain.
I feel his armored vest on me, heavy like guilt. The gash in his side is pretty nasty. He needs it dressed if I’m going to get him to City Center.
“Don’t drink the skywater,” he tells me, like a commander to a junior officer. “radicanes have messed-up skywater.”
“Noted,” I answer, my vision clearing as I reach down to the hem of my shirt and start tearing it off to make bandages, sticking the strips to the injuries as I pull them off and moving down to my ankles for more.
“I’m thirsty, Sola,” he asks like a child. “Do you have any spikefruit juice?”
“I’ll go get you some,” I promise as soon as I think the bandage job is going to be as good as its going to get.
“Wait here and try to rest. I’m going to be right back.”
I stand up again, swaying, and move around the ‘mobile to get a better look at what I’m dealing with. Paradise looks like early colonial ruins, tall buildings cut down at the waist, collapsed homes, and fires burning in the distance. I smell blood and smoke and sand, with a metallic tang that might be left over from the radicane.
After making sure Ehnzo can’t see me, I drop to my knees, shaking, my eyes drawn up to the endless black void of the sky, which feels like an open mouth about to suck me in, and I am naked and exposed before it.
One more domed city gone dark. One less population of the human race. One step closer to the end of everything.
Like my ancestors have done for generations, I push that away to the back of my mind and focus on what is immediate. I need to find medical supplies for Ehnzo before I can move him to better shelter. That will be in the ruins of nearby homes.
A wise person, their name lost to time, once said, “Keep calm and carry on.”
***
When I return to Ehnzo, I have a bottle of contraband that someone had stashed in the back of their cabinets, which is illegal to drink but should help clean his wounds, and an emergency kit taken from the inside of someone’s ‘mobile, which is currently in their living room.
He’s still alive when I get back to him, but he’s warm and clammy to the touch, and carrion birds have realized the dome is open and are prowling around him, rubbing their muzzles with the single claw at their midwing.
Maybe he still has his club on him. If those things get hungry enough, they’ll skip waiting, and that counts for me, too.
After I get his wound clean and properly patched, I feel around in his pockets but don’t find his club. Instead I grab the twisted stem of a stop sign and run at the birds, swinging it wildly. They hiss and squawk, baring their sharp teeth at me and lash at me with their powerful, clawed feet and prehensile tails, but move back a ways to keep watch. They are patient feeders.
Drained, I take a spot next to Ehnzo, eyes wide, jumping at every little noise, my makeshift club in my lap, watching for birds and beasts, back to the ‘mobile. I sit here for hours until the sky starts to turn deep maroon, and then then blood red, as the dim cinder of the star Tartarus begins to rise in the sky.
Blinking in the unfiltered sunlight, I check on Ehnzo. He’s still warm and clammy, but his breathing is a bit better.
“Wake up,” I tell him, shaking his shoulder.
He opens up bleary eyes and blinks in the sunlight, holding a shaking hand in front of his hand to the sky.
He probably hasn’t seen the free sky before, either, or at least not often. Perhaps as a young officer he was on guard duty as the traders arrived, but only the traders see the sky and sun for what they are.
“We need to get moving,” I insist, getting up, stiff and cold from the night before, and pulling on his hands.
He’s a lot bigger than me and getting him up and bearing his weight on my shoulder is difficult, but it’s better than staying here.
“You should keep going,” he protests. “Go on without me. Leave me here and send a search party when you get there.”
He’s more lucid. That’s a good sign.
“What kind of future bride would I be if I left you out here for the carrion birds?” I laugh bitterly, watching a circling, bald-headed brownish beast with long, hooked claws on its feet, staring at me hopefully with lizard-like eyes.
“It’ll take more than a few birds to take me down,” he chuckles. “You’ll move faster on your own.”
“In two weeks, you were going to be my problem anyway,” I reply breathlessly as I lug him over broken streets and lives. “What’s a few days early?”
“Well, then as your husband-to-be, it’s my responsibility to keep you safe. You can’t stay out here with the dome open like that. You need to get to the City Center before they send out the evac trains out.”
“We got time,” I argue. “Someone has to keep them running.”
“Depends on how many made it to safety. By the look of this, not many. They’ll send out scouts soon. Just leave me somewhere they can find me.”
“This isn’t a normal quake,” I growl, shifting his weight and looking grimly at the shattered dome covered in whaleblood and ballast oil. “They might cut their losses instead of sending scouts.”
The carrion birds are fighting over bits of skin with a few other mangy scavengers, wild hunting spiders and crawling terrors. There’s even a very large blade bug, its dark chitinous hide gleaming in the dusty sunlight, using its proboscis to lick the ichor away.
“It’s a risk you’ll have to take,” he insists.
“Please,” I laugh again, bile rising in the back of my throat. “My dad ran out on us, my mom’s in the fertilizer pits. You’re legally all the family I got.”
“Lucky you,” he snickers. “A SWAT that can’t protect you, with no home, and potentially a hole in his lung.”
“You’re not bleeding from the mouth.”
“I taste blood in the back of my throat.”
“That’s your split lip.”
I sit us down in the shadow of a collapsed house when I can’t carry him anymore. Relief crosses his face before he realizes I’m sitting down, too.
“I need a break, and we both need food and clean water,” I explain. “I’m going to catch my breath and then see if I can scrounge up some food.”
“Just leave me here,” he argues again. “More than carrion birds are going to want that carcass.”
“All the more reason I can’t leave you behind,” I huff, standing up. “There was at least one hunting spider on the dome, and they’re not picky eaters.”
“They follow the smell of blood,” he winces, shifting his position. “They’ll be after me.”
“I’m all cut up, too, so hush.”
Naturally, I check the house we’re against and as luck would have it there’s an unbroken jar of pickled hardroot and some sweetgrass jerky, and a lightly squished spikefruit whose pulp chamber sounds intact.
And so another night in the open sore of a dying world.
Chapter three
Entropy (C) 2022, all rights reserved
Chapter two
When the last batch of pickled hardroot go on the shelf, I’m tired and almost ready for bed. I settle down beside Ehnzo on the single mattress, laid against the wall so that we can both see the AV. He’s beginning to relax a little since the sirens haven’t yet gone off, and we share a bucket of puffed hardroot between us.
He’s not so bad.
On the AV, the nosy neighbor has just dropped in to see the lady of the house fixing a costume for her son’s school play on the dangers of mutation, and is clearly about to misunderstand what she sees. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I’m going to get to see what happens, since the ground has started to tremble and it just cut to a news anchor sitting solemnly behind a desk.
“Oh no, here it starts,” Ehnzo sighs, pulling down the lead-lined hatch that works as a double-shelter in the event of storms, radiation, and monster attacks, securing us in a bubble with only the AV visible, broadcasting to integrated speakers.
“Citizens of Paradise City and the Greater Usoa Region of the Discordian Supercontinent,” the man says, holding up a tablet he’s reading from. “If you have not gone to your shelters, now is the time. Reports are coming in of a sandstorm arriving from the north and a radicane from the south. It is believed that these two storms are going to collide near Paradise City. Damage to the domes in the superstorms is expected to be…”
“Looks like it’s going to be a long night,” Ehnzo muses, wrapping the blanket around us both.
“Yeah,” I sigh, disappointed and annoyed. “That broadcast is going to be on until the all-clear sounds.”
Right on cue, the sirens sluggishly roar to life, filling the miniature dome with an ear-splitting drone for five whole minutes.
“Well,” Ehnzo muses softly, “if you want to get some sleep, I can stay up…in case there’s an emergency.”
Whether I like it or not, in a few weeks this guy will be my husband, so I might as well start learning to trust him.
“Okay,” I tell him, stretching out opposite his direction, foot to face so the blanket still covers us both. “You going to be okay?”
“Yeah, no, I got my tablet in my bag. I got some work to do, and a few books. I’ll be fine.”
His voice is soft and cautious. He’s trying not to overstep his bounds and make a good early impression. I might have only known him a short time, but I feel safe enough alone with him.
So I settle in for the night, close my eyes, and try to get some sleep.
***
The miniature dome bows in on itself with a pained shriek that snatches me out of sleep like a sandtunnler to a desert hopper. My kitchen is currently sitting on top of us, and our shelter is straining under the weight.
“Get out!” Ehnzo yells, wrenching open the pull-down dome with the strength of a SWAT and ushering me through. The ceiling is cracking, groaning under the weight of whatever just fell on my house.
Ehnzo pulls me by the hand, his armored vest under his arm.
“We have to go now!” he shouts, all authoritarianism and calm under pressure. He pulls me under the doorframe, and roughly throws me into the vest, and then pushes me out of the cellar and into the living room.
“The radiation—!” I protest.
“Not the time!” he growls. “We have to get to the City Center!”
Wrapping his arm around me, he ushers me through the front door and sprawling onto my knees at the neighborhood streets.
The dome…the great protector-of-all has blown open. A great glass piece of it is sitting where my house used to be. There’s so much screaming, and I just want to go back to bed.
“What’s happening?” I ask as Ehnzo pulls me back to my feet, wrapping his arm around me again to stop the shaking.
“A lot of bad stuff right now, but I got clearance to get you into the City Center. You’re going to be fine.”
He pulls me down the street, dodging rubble and debris. The wind is blowing sand everywhere, scalding my skin, to say nothing of what the radicane might be doing. Something massive screams for its life in a deafening, low-frequency moan, and I look up just in time to see a massive skywhale crash into what was left of the dome from the open side behind us, shredding its thick hide against the jagged edges, spilling blood and ballast oil before dropping onto the merchant district like a bloody slab of meat onto a cutting board. A lot of the screaming stops.
“We gotta move!” Ehnzo hisses, pulling me again.
The last thing I see is a flying stop sign.
***
The pain wakes me up sometime after full dark. I’m sprawled out on pavement, under a sheet of metal that might have at one time been a roof or wall, sheltered by a sideways ‘mobile, gears and circuitry facing me.
I just lay here, staring at the exposed guts of the ‘mobile, staring up past the dome into the black sky. There’s a flickering glow from somewhere, probably a fire or something from the damage. I just lie here until I hear Ehnzo’s gasps of pain.
When I manage to stand, I’m dizzy and bleeding, and everything’s a bit foggy. I was…in my shelter? So what am I doing on the street?
Ehnzo is leaning up against the ‘mobile, hand over his side in a pool of his own blood.
“Great Sol! Ehnzo!” I breathe, running to his side, which is a dizzying mistake that almost costs me a twisted ankle.
“You’re alive!” he sighs, his voice heavy and dreamy. “I was worried!”
“Don’t worry about me, what about you?” I ask, trying to pull his hands away from his side as he instinctively fights me to keep it covered.
“Took some shrapnel to the side,” he answers through a hiss of pain.
I feel his armored vest on me, heavy like guilt. The gash in his side is pretty nasty. He needs it dressed if I’m going to get him to City Center.
“Don’t drink the skywater,” he tells me, like a commander to a junior officer. “radicanes have messed-up skywater.”
“Noted,” I answer, my vision clearing as I reach down to the hem of my shirt and start tearing it off to make bandages, sticking the strips to the injuries as I pull them off and moving down to my ankles for more.
“I’m thirsty, Sola,” he asks like a child. “Do you have any spikefruit juice?”
“I’ll go get you some,” I promise as soon as I think the bandage job is going to be as good as its going to get.
“Wait here and try to rest. I’m going to be right back.”
I stand up again, swaying, and move around the ‘mobile to get a better look at what I’m dealing with. Paradise looks like early colonial ruins, tall buildings cut down at the waist, collapsed homes, and fires burning in the distance. I smell blood and smoke and sand, with a metallic tang that might be left over from the radicane.
After making sure Ehnzo can’t see me, I drop to my knees, shaking, my eyes drawn up to the endless black void of the sky, which feels like an open mouth about to suck me in, and I am naked and exposed before it.
One more domed city gone dark. One less population of the human race. One step closer to the end of everything.
Like my ancestors have done for generations, I push that away to the back of my mind and focus on what is immediate. I need to find medical supplies for Ehnzo before I can move him to better shelter. That will be in the ruins of nearby homes.
A wise person, their name lost to time, once said, “Keep calm and carry on.”
***
When I return to Ehnzo, I have a bottle of contraband that someone had stashed in the back of their cabinets, which is illegal to drink but should help clean his wounds, and an emergency kit taken from the inside of someone’s ‘mobile, which is currently in their living room.
He’s still alive when I get back to him, but he’s warm and clammy to the touch, and carrion birds have realized the dome is open and are prowling around him, rubbing their muzzles with the single claw at their midwing.
Maybe he still has his club on him. If those things get hungry enough, they’ll skip waiting, and that counts for me, too.
After I get his wound clean and properly patched, I feel around in his pockets but don’t find his club. Instead I grab the twisted stem of a stop sign and run at the birds, swinging it wildly. They hiss and squawk, baring their sharp teeth at me and lash at me with their powerful, clawed feet and prehensile tails, but move back a ways to keep watch. They are patient feeders.
Drained, I take a spot next to Ehnzo, eyes wide, jumping at every little noise, my makeshift club in my lap, watching for birds and beasts, back to the ‘mobile. I sit here for hours until the sky starts to turn deep maroon, and then then blood red, as the dim cinder of the star Tartarus begins to rise in the sky.
Blinking in the unfiltered sunlight, I check on Ehnzo. He’s still warm and clammy, but his breathing is a bit better.
“Wake up,” I tell him, shaking his shoulder.
He opens up bleary eyes and blinks in the sunlight, holding a shaking hand in front of his hand to the sky.
He probably hasn’t seen the free sky before, either, or at least not often. Perhaps as a young officer he was on guard duty as the traders arrived, but only the traders see the sky and sun for what they are.
“We need to get moving,” I insist, getting up, stiff and cold from the night before, and pulling on his hands.
He’s a lot bigger than me and getting him up and bearing his weight on my shoulder is difficult, but it’s better than staying here.
“You should keep going,” he protests. “Go on without me. Leave me here and send a search party when you get there.”
He’s more lucid. That’s a good sign.
“What kind of future bride would I be if I left you out here for the carrion birds?” I laugh bitterly, watching a circling, bald-headed brownish beast with long, hooked claws on its feet, staring at me hopefully with lizard-like eyes.
“It’ll take more than a few birds to take me down,” he chuckles. “You’ll move faster on your own.”
“In two weeks, you were going to be my problem anyway,” I reply breathlessly as I lug him over broken streets and lives. “What’s a few days early?”
“Well, then as your husband-to-be, it’s my responsibility to keep you safe. You can’t stay out here with the dome open like that. You need to get to the City Center before they send out the evac trains out.”
“We got time,” I argue. “Someone has to keep them running.”
“Depends on how many made it to safety. By the look of this, not many. They’ll send out scouts soon. Just leave me somewhere they can find me.”
“This isn’t a normal quake,” I growl, shifting his weight and looking grimly at the shattered dome covered in whaleblood and ballast oil. “They might cut their losses instead of sending scouts.”
The carrion birds are fighting over bits of skin with a few other mangy scavengers, wild hunting spiders and crawling terrors. There’s even a very large blade bug, its dark chitinous hide gleaming in the dusty sunlight, using its proboscis to lick the ichor away.
“It’s a risk you’ll have to take,” he insists.
“Please,” I laugh again, bile rising in the back of my throat. “My dad ran out on us, my mom’s in the fertilizer pits. You’re legally all the family I got.”
“Lucky you,” he snickers. “A SWAT that can’t protect you, with no home, and potentially a hole in his lung.”
“You’re not bleeding from the mouth.”
“I taste blood in the back of my throat.”
“That’s your split lip.”
I sit us down in the shadow of a collapsed house when I can’t carry him anymore. Relief crosses his face before he realizes I’m sitting down, too.
“I need a break, and we both need food and clean water,” I explain. “I’m going to catch my breath and then see if I can scrounge up some food.”
“Just leave me here,” he argues again. “More than carrion birds are going to want that carcass.”
“All the more reason I can’t leave you behind,” I huff, standing up. “There was at least one hunting spider on the dome, and they’re not picky eaters.”
“They follow the smell of blood,” he winces, shifting his position. “They’ll be after me.”
“I’m all cut up, too, so hush.”
Naturally, I check the house we’re against and as luck would have it there’s an unbroken jar of pickled hardroot and some sweetgrass jerky, and a lightly squished spikefruit whose pulp chamber sounds intact.
And so another night in the open sore of a dying world.
Chapter three
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