Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition (7 page)

Down on the surface lay a complex network of what appeared to be raised railways and roadways. They expanded outwards from a focal point ahead of her current location. Without a compass, she couldn’t say if it was north or south. Whatever place the mass transportation corridors converged at warranted a look.

Pulling back, Eight-Four-Two-Zero abruptly felt intrusive. This crypt that she occupied was not hers to be in, the danger of her presence preying upon her. She returned to the elevator and thanked whatever nameless force saw her to the lobby safely. Outside once more, she adjusted her course and headed for the convergence of the railways and the roads.

For several hours after that she catalogued her observations on the rate of deterioration exhibited by the stone, the metal, and even the texture of the soil. The repetitive scenes found at each building confirmed her mounting theories. The city’s end had been swift and unexpected. Much of it was structurally intact, though in poor condition, and bore few signs of conflict.

Her theories regarding her own presence were scant by comparison. Try as she might, Eight-Four-Two-Zero could not explain how she had survived the catastrophe, nor how it came to be that she awoke so much time after the city’s extinction. She was so involved in her own thoughts that the collision took her by surprise, as did the voices and sounds of life that accompanied it.

She was being trampled by the person that had unwittingly stormed into her. He was so desperate to escape, so sure that she was the enemy, that he didn’t care if he was clawing himself away from her. Directing her foot into his stomach, she escaped first, dragging herself away from the scuffle while the man’s companions callously watched him stagger back.

The other man in the group of three made a point of approaching her and offering his assistance. Accepting the outstretched hand, Eight-Four-Two-Zero studied the other survivors dispassionately. Irritated by the lack of an apology from her attacker, she brushed herself off. Judging from their clothing, identical as it was to her own, the people in front of her did not pose a serious threat. Sure, the one man with long black hair was a bumbling idiot, but that didn’t mean the others were. In fact, the other woman examined her as sharply as she could without being rude.

“Sorry about that,” the man who had helped her up began, apologizing on behalf of his companion. “Twenty can get a little distracted.”

“I wasn’t distracted. She attacked me,” Twenty yelled.

“I didn’t attack you,” Eight-Four-Two-Zero fired back contemptuously. “I was walking and you walked into me.”

“Likely story. Exactly where were you walking to?” Twenty demanded.

“What is he? Your attack dog?” she replied in kind, addressing the well-mannered man.

“Sorry. I’m Seven. And this is Eight,” he said of the woman behind him.

“What’s your name?” Eight asked.

“Eight-Four-Two-Zero,” came her reply, as if engraved into her forehead.

“Another Twenty?” Twenty asked, his voice icy.

“Do you own the number?” she countered.

“As a matter of fact, I
do
,” he answered impetuously.

“Mature. Real mature. Then I guess I’ll need to be Zero. Or Null,” she conjectured, toying with the sounds of each word in her head.

Illuminated with cheer and smitten with the idea of another female in the group, Eight exclaimed, “I like that! It’s very creative!”

“Really? You think so?” Null inquired, her voice shy. For reasons beyond her understanding, Eight’s opinion mattered to her. She felt unnerved by valuing a stranger’s opinion so quickly after meeting her. “I don’t want to sound arrogant.”

“Not at all. It’s much better than a number,” Eight sighed, allowing her envy show.

“So, Null, where were you headed when Twenty tackled you?” Seven asked politely.

“I did not tackle her. She attacked me!”

Ignoring Twenty, Null answered, “I was inside one of these buildings a few hours ago. From up there I could see a network of railways and roads that seem to converge a good distance ahead.” Her explanation elicited an unexpected reaction from her companions.

“Really? That’s great!” Eight declared.

“Great? How is that great?” asked Twenty. “There’s still a giant monster rampaging through the city. This sounds terrible, to be honest.”

“Monster?” Null inquired, lifting a skeptical eyebrow. Seven proceeded to explain their encounter with the formidable predator that had demolished the better part of four city blocks. Mortified to discover that what she thought was a joke was, in fact, a nightmarish reality, Null reconsidered her own theories of the city’s fall.

“And that’s what you were doing? Running away from it?” Null pressed.

“Mostly. Although we really need to find supplies and shelter. Soon,” Seven finished.

“We should go with Null. All of us,” Eight said, raising her voice at the last part in Twenty’s direction. Already rebellious, Twenty crossed his arms and pursed his lips. “If every road, highway, and transit method converge where Null thinks they do, then it must be an important location. Maybe it has records, maybe it can tell us what happened...”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Seven agreed.

“No it doesn’t. This sounds like the opposite of a good idea. We should hide. Or move by night. We should do everything possible to avoid getting eaten by a monster,” Twenty protested.

“Do what you want,” Null dismissed his opinion. “I’ve wasted enough time standing around.” Turning on her heels, Null proceeded on her journey towards her objective.

“Oh, I like her,” she heard Eight whisper to Seven.

“Did you wake up sick? Like we did?” Seven asked Null, when he and Eight arrived at her side to match their pace with hers.

Null nodded. “It was strange. I don’t remember anything before I woke up, but I did have a dream.” She noticed how the tension abruptly rippled through her companions and guessed that her experiences were identical to theirs.

“What was your dream about?” Eight said, gently prying for information.

“I barely remember any of it. I’m not sure, but I think it was a memory. From very long ago,” she admitted, realizing that she must sound crazy. But then she considered the fact that only minutes ago they had been the ones telling her about a monster terrorizing the city. Insanity, it seemed, was in good supply at the moment.

“Interesting. That must have been a fascinating memory,” Eight said.

“Memory?” Twenty’s voice was an unwelcome intrusion into the conversation. He found his way in front of the others and asked demandingly, “You remember something?”

“We all do,” Seven answered on behalf of himself, Eight, and Null. From what Null gathered of her new group’s dynamic, Twenty regarded Seven as the only individual worth being serious with. “Don’t you?”

“Of course not! My mind’s blank before waking up at that power center. I haven’t remembered anything beyond the taste of vomit all day,” his surly comment accused them of an unfair advantage.

“You seem closed-minded to me,” Null commented, allowing her harsh observation to hit Twenty like another punch in his stomach. “Maybe that’s why you can’t remember anything? If you don’t want to, you won’t.” Eight concurred but Seven, Twenty’s only ally, kept his silence.

“Or maybe I’m not reckless. Maybe I’m not looking for ways to get us all killed. You people seem arrogant to me. Completely ungrateful. We survive the death of a whole city and you want to go looking for answers? We should be looking for a way out of this place.”

Twenty’s vitriolic assertion shocked Null, who conceded that his point had merit. His disposition was to accept his survival as a gift and, without question, abscond with it. That was a path Null felt certain she couldn’t walk and it was the majority’s will that kept Twenty in tow behind them.

“There’s a railway station,” Null pointed to the platform station ahead of them. They burst into a short run, approaching the stairs that led up to the rusted metal station and the line it suspended in the air. “Directory!” Null gasped, seeing the aged sign standing beside the stairs.

Seven’s chivalric attempt to clean some of the grime away, sparing the ladies the dirty task, backfired. He stumbled away from the pedestal, Eight grabbing his shoulder and pulling him to safety.

“Don’t worry, it won’t hurt us,” Null assured them, recognizing the translucent material from the elevator’s control scheme. It created a luminescent map of the city, hanging vertically against the directory’s screen. Glancing over her shoulder, Null saw Eight’s tight grip on Seven’s shoulder lessen, and the two separated in an attempt to save themselves from the embarrassment. Still, Seven’s bright red face brought a grin to Null’s, and she continued her explanation.

“This is what their signs are made of. And this one’s a map,” she pointed at the intersecting lines of that noted the transportation lanes. “See, I was right. The majority of them converge...here,” she pointed at a location that she could safely say was near the center of the city.

“Haven,” came a small voice. Null saw Eight approach the sign, pointing near its top, and she repeated the word. “Haven. That was a word from the song, but it’s also the city’s name.”

“Day of wrath, oh day of mourning.”

“See fulfilled the Founders’ warning.”

“Haven and Earth in ashes burning.”

“When from skyward we descend,” Null finished, aware that Twenty had rejoined the group, compelled by hypnosis to participate in the recitation of the lyrics with Seven and Eight. Alarmed, he shook himself from his stupor, glancing from Seven to Eight to Null, his expression overridden by suspicion and fear.

“I hate it when that happens,” he snapped.

“Another mystery,” Null agreed, shaken by the words that wandered from her of their own will.

“We’re not going anywhere by standing in one place,” Eight decided, taking the lead and shaking off the last of her shame. Seven followed close at her side and Null’s intuition, echoing out at her from the same dark spot as the lyrics, told her not to be surprised at their protectiveness of one another.

Null worried that they wanted a few minutes alone together. At the station’s platform they leapt the short distance onto the railway itself. To walk alongside Haven’s pillars, the buildings that kept the tomb-like city standing, felt surreal. This city was a feat of engineering, a marvel that must surely be undefeated in the world.

“Did the map give you a better idea of how many people lived here?” Null overheard Eight ask Seven, the two of them still a short distance ahead of her. And, maintaining his unimpressed pace behind her, was Twenty.

“Yeah,” he relented, his voice distracted.

“That bad?”

“They clustered everything as closely together as possible. The level of urban density suggests that they didn’t trust the land immediately surrounding the city for cultivation. I wonder what the bordering land around Haven is like, for them to have built up instead of out.”

Feeling compelled to speak, Null asked, “You haven’t figured it out?” She discarded any pretense of privacy and walked alongside them. Luckily, the railway was wide enough to support at least five people, but Null kept a wary eye on its edges.

“Figured what out?” asked Eight, her brow heavy with worry.

“There is no land around the city. There’s only water. We’re on an island.”

“An island?” Seven’s abysmal reaction was obvious to Eight and Null. “How are we going to find any food or water on an island?”

“I had an idea that this was a coastal region, but I didn’t think that on top of everything else we were stranded on an island,” Eight admitted, her shoulders sagging with exhaustion. “How did you figure out that Haven sits on an island?”

“I think that in my past life I was something of an architect. That was why I went up into the building I told you about. It was there that I saw the ocean in both directions. It occurred to me that we might be on a peninsula, but the map at the railway station would have depicted that. If I had to guess the dimensions of this island, then I would say we’re on an island with a narrow northern region, a wide southern cape, with at least three peninsulas extending horizontally away from the western coast.”

“Then whoever built this city, and whoever caused its end, was here on this island,” Eight surmised.

“A city on an island,” Seven repeated in a wistful tone.

“Who picks somewhere like this?” Twenty balked at the idea of a city on an island, having silently rejoined the group. “Thanks to their bad municipal development, we’re out of food and out of shelter.”

“If it comes to it we can eat the artist first,” Null declared.

“Oh, ha ha ha. Don’t you have a building to go climb up?”

“I’m sure I could, but I wouldn’t risk it,” Null chuckled. “They’re forged from some type of molecularly enhanced titanium, I’m sure of it even though I don’t know how I know that. If I had to build a city like this in a place like this, I’d start with that material. It’s lightweight but strong and extremely resistant to the elements.”

“Then why wouldn’t you climb up?” Twenty wondered, confused by her elaborate detailing of Haven’s elemental makeup.

Null cleared her throat. “I bring it up because the building I surveyed showed horrible, and I mean awful, signs of metal fatigue.”