SecondWorld (9 page)

Miller slowed as he approached the palm trees. The oddity appeared to be a statue of some kind. He pedaled harder and the rest of it came into view. It was a massive hand, its bottom seemingly torn apart. A red-tinged, lily-filled reflection pool surrounded the scene, and in the courtyard lay bodies; perhaps a hundred of them. Some were reaching up.

Alive!

Miller jumped off the bike and ran for the courtyard. “Hey!” he shouted. “Are you okay? I have air!”

His mask fogged over as he waded through the lily pond. Clouds of rust billowed around his feet. Reaching the other side, he removed the mask and looked at the people, wondering why they didn’t respond. Then he realized the truth.

They weren’t dead.

But they had never been alive.

Statues.

“Damn,” he muttered before returning the mask to his face. As he turned, he noticed that the distortion from his curved mask, coupled with the statues’ lifelike poses, created the illusion of life.

He spun around, taking in the scene. The bodies in the courtyard reached out for the giant hand. Intertwined bodies made up the base of the statue. The people looked tormented. Emaciated. Anguished.

Miller turned to the black wall of granite that encircled a portion of the round courtyard. The highly polished surface reflected the late-day sun struggling to shine through the haze of falling red flakes. He shaded his eyes to see the wall more clearly. “Son of a bitch,” he said when his eyes focused.

There on the wall, spray painted in white, was the symbol from the news report—the lightning bolt encased by a crosslike circle. Beneath the symbol was a message, applied thick, with rivulets of white paint that had dripped down to the ground. It read:

Welcome to SecondWorld!

Miller realized that this wasn’t just graffiti. A quick walk to the granite wall confirmed it. The first panel told a story dated 1933. What followed for two more panels was a complete history of what the Jewish people had endured during World War II.

This was a Holocaust memorial.

The target of this symbol and its message revealed a deep hatred, one straight out of history. His head snapped away from the wall as though struck. The symbol, in this context, became clear to him. The lightning bolt—no, the thunderbolt—was the Nazi symbol for the Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s elite military unit known as the SS. They were the overseers of the Nazi death camps. The two S-shaped bolts, typically next to each other, had been combined.

Anger welled within Miller. He wasn’t a believer in God, but his great-grandfather had been, and he’d been killed by the SS in Auschwitz along with millions of other Jews across Europe. Thinking of Nazis, he recognized the rest of the symbol as a Celtic cross, which had been adopted by American white supremacist groups. The combination of the two symbols seemed to suggest that these were modern, American Schutzstaffel. The muscles on his back bunched with tension.

Whether they were still in the area, surviving from air tank to air tank like him, or holed up in a bunker, had yet to be seen, but they were prepared. And they had already named their post-genocidal world, SecondWorld.

This isn’t over,
Miller thought.
If they haven’t attacked the rest of the world yet, they will soon.

When he tore his eyes from the wall, he realized he’d been gripping the handgun in his pocket. A part of him hoped that whoever painted this symbol would show up. Give him an outlet for his anger. But nothing moved, other than the endless red flakes. Whoever painted this was long gone.

After returning to his bike, Miller cut through a large golf course free of bodies. Apparently, no one wanted to golf during the apocalypse. The open space increased his speed, but he felt exposed—watched. Leaving the golf course behind, he took to the sidewalks, preferring to stay in the buildings’ shadows. He could be easily spotted in the stillness of the city, but he didn’t like the idea of making himself an open target, just in case someone out there felt like taking a potshot.

He reached Mount Sinai Medical Center ten minutes later. The hospital was large and nicer than most he’d visited. In fact, with its light brown exterior and surrounding palm trees, the place looked more like a hotel than a hospital. As he approached the building, the doors to the emergency room slid silently open.

Emergency power must still be working,
he thought, but forgot all about the door when he looked beyond it.

Miller jumped back. Bodies filled the emergency room—piles of them. Vomit covered several, as well as a dusting of rust. Strangely, almost all of the victims were covered in blood. Something awful—something terribly violent—had happened here. Did the people turn on one another, desperate enough for medical attention to kill off any competitors?

A little girl’s face caught his eye. She was buried beneath three adults, her eyes closed. Peaceful. As though she had simply fallen asleep there. But Miller knew she hadn’t. The death she had experienced would likely have been anything but peaceful.

Swallowing hard, he stepped back, out of the building.

The doors closed behind him.

He found the main entrance on the other side of the hospital and entered the lobby, steeling himself for a repeat of the emergency room scene. But there were only a few bodies here. He forced himself not to look as he moved past them, focusing instead on a wall-mounted map and directory off to his right. Reaching it, he ran his finger over each department as he read the list. He made a note of every place he thought might have oxygen tanks, then paused. His finger lay on the
BURN WARD
label. Fourth floor.

He knew that people with severe burns were sometimes put in oxygen tents. Could he spend the night in one? Breathing freely? He hadn’t really slept since leaving Aquarius. As he assessed his need for sleep, he felt his legs grow shaky. His vision blurred. It was almost as though his body, knowing that sleep was near, began shutting down in preparation.

He knew he could sleep in the rebreather without issue. It was good for another twelve hours and he had two spare oxygen tanks strapped to his belt, not to mention a hospital filled with them. But to sleep freely, on a bed … well, that sounded like heaven. He headed for the elevators and pushed the button. The doors opened immediately.

Emergency power is
definitely
still running.

The elevator rose quickly. With a ding, the doors opened to a stark white hallway. A dead nurse lay on the floor, crumpled up into the fetal position. He stepped out and the doors shut behind him. In the silence that followed, Miller thought he heard the wind. He held his breath and listened.

It wasn’t the wind.

It was a child.

Weeping.

13

Miller spun around, trying to discern the cry’s source. He moved beyond the empty nurses’ station, stopped, and listened again. The sound was faint, rising and falling in volume, but never loud. He moved down the hallway, passing open doors. Some rooms held corpses, some were empty, beds still made.

A shadow shifted in the room at the end of the hallway.

He ran toward it.

His chest pounding from excitement, he slowed as he approached the door, caught his breath, cleared his mind, and entered. The corner room had two walls of windows, one looking out to the north, up the coast, and the other back to downtown Miami, which was aglow with orange light from the setting sun.

An opaque sheet of plastic hung from the ceiling and descended over the room’s bed like a tent.

A small body, obscured by the plastic sheet, lay on the bed. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought the person was looking at him. The weeping stopped, followed by some sniffling.

“Are you here to rescue me?” a sweet voice asked. It was a child. A girl.

“Yeah,” he said. “I am.”

“You can come under. It’s okay to breathe in here.”

Miller looked beyond the tent. Next to the bed was an array of equipment including large tanks of oxygen and air. An oxygen tent. Was this girl…?

He removed his mask so she wouldn’t be afraid, knelt down, and lifted the plastic from the floor. He quickly pulled it over his head and let it fall again.

The girl, dressed in a hospital gown, smiled at him, but the smile only lasted a moment. Her lips were swollen and split in several spots. The skin on her left arm looked like it had melted. It was red, swollen, and in some places, cracked and oozing.

She noted his attention. “The bandages hurt when they dried out. I took them off.” Her voice was weak. Frail. “There are other burns on my stomach and legs, all on the left side. Not as bad as my arm, though. The hospital gown hurts a little, but I didn’t want to be naked. Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“In case you came.”

“Me?”

“Or anyone else.”

“Right.”

“I’m thirsty.”

He was sure she couldn’t drink through those lips, though maybe a straw would work. “I’ll be right back.”

He slid out from under the sheet, donned his mask, and found her IV bag. Empty. She’d been dehydrating to death. Alone.

“I’m Lincoln Miller. You can call me Linc if you’d like. What’s your name?” he asked.

“Arwen.”

“Nice name.”

“It’s from Tolkien.”

Tolkien?
“How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“Listen, Arwen. I’m going to go get some supplies. Stuff to help you feel better. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“’Kay.”

“Be right back,” he repeated as he left the room. He searched the hallways for a supply room, ignoring the bodies and his rising emotions. His focus was on Arwen now. He found a door with a brass label that read
MEDICAL SUPPLIES
. He tried the handle. Locked. After stepping back, he kicked the door three times, right below the knob. On the third kick, the door crashed open.

Cabinets and closets lined the walls of the room. Each was filled with impeccably organized and labeled medical supplies. He opened and closed five doors before finding a cabinet that held nearly twenty IV bags labeled
SALINE—0.9% SODIUM CHLORIDE SOLUTION.
He took five and left.

“I’m back,” he said upon return to Arwen’s room. He moved straight for her IV, checked the label to make sure he’d taken the right kind, and then switched them out. The liquid drip began immediately. Only then did he notice that Arwen had yet to respond to his entry.

Miller pulled up the plastic, climbed beneath, and found the girl lying still, her eyes closed. He pulled his mask from his face and knelt down next to her. He didn’t dare check for a pulse for fear her red, swollen skin would crack open. Instead he held the back of his hand beneath her nose and watched her small chest.

He sighed as he felt air move across his hand and saw the subtle rise and fall each breath brought to her chest. She was still alive and she had moved over on the bed. Before, she’d been on her back at the center of the bed, now she lay on her unburned side at the edge.

She’d made room for him.

He shook his head, wondering who was taking care of whom. That small gesture of companionship, he realized, had rallied his fighting spirit. He slipped out of his gear, placing the rebreather, handgun, water bottle, and several protein bars on the floor next to the bed. The exhaustion, chased away by the adrenaline of finding Arwen, returned with a vengeance.

He climbed onto the other side of the bed, careful not to bump her little body with his. The bed was firm, but comfortable. The air smelled of burnt flesh and hair. He looked at the back of her head. Her blond hair had burned from the shoulders down, but the hair on top revealed the child she had once been.

He ran his fingers through her hair and wondered if she’d been in one of the apartment fires he’d seen on the way to the hospital. Or perhaps her burns had happened before the catastrophe hit. There was no way to know, not now, anyway.

As he stroked her hair he wondered what his life would have been like if he’d taken a different path. Could he settle down? Have kids? Could he put a little girl to sleep on a nightly basis? He wasn’t sure and had no real frame of reference. Kids never really took to him. What he felt positive about was that he was damn glad to have found Arwen alive. On his own, he might get depressed, or distracted by the horrible setting. But with a child to protect, he’d be at the top of his game. He wouldn’t let the kid die. Not this time.