Ultraviolet (18 page)

The asphalt was cracked and broken with thick tufts of tall grass standing in the gaps. The metal guard rails were all rusted red and mossy green, and had collapsed in whole sections. Most of the signs and lights had fallen, but half of their posts still stood, leaving the naked steel poles standing watch over the empty road.

A thin layer of leaves and dead grass covered the asphalt in huge green and brown carpets, and I had to slow down even more to keep the bike from slipping, and to make sure I didn’t fly off into a ditch. The farther we went from the city, the more the road seemed to melt into the woods and the hills, slowly fading away as it was buried and consumed by nature.

Trees leaned out over the road at extreme angles, probably stretching year after year to reach the bright sunlight falling on the open road. But it wasn’t sunny now and the branches hung like dead arms and clawing hands in the darkness.

“How far should we go tonight?” Felix asked. He didn’t have to raise his voice. We were going so slowly that there was no wind and it was easy to talk.

“I don’t know. Until we feel safe, I guess.”

“I don’t know how safe we can be. Out here, it’ll be easy for them to pick out the signals from our phones. They’ll know where we are.”

“Not mine. I’ve got a free VPN line to Minsk Mobile. There’s no way Cygnus will ever get access to a Russian phone company’s logs. No one messes with the Russians.”

“Nice. I guess I’ll just keep mine off for now.”

“Yeah. I can switch you over to my plan later.”

We rode over a huge bridge spanning a valley, and I think I caught a glimpse of a river at the bottom, but it was too dark to be sure. The stars were just starting to come out, but the glaring lights from the city meant that no one ever saw more than a couple dozen stars on a clear night. I didn’t expect to see many more out in the burbs.

We passed under bridges, and saw poles and rusted signs, and hints of old buildings above the tree line, but mostly it was just a dark, leafy highway, stretching on and on before us. On a whim, I took an exit ramp to the right and headed a bit more north on some other, nameless highway. More trees, more grass, more dark shapes against the dark sky.

I took another exit and suddenly we were in a residential neighborhood, or at least the remains of one. The roads were littered with fallen tree branches and we slowed to a crawl to weave through them. There were more little malls, or maybe they were schools. We couldn’t tell. The houses were huge, but most of the windows were broken, and some porches had collapsed.

And everything was dark.

I hadn’t realized how truly dark a place could be with no street lights, or glowing windows, or flashing billboards.

I stopped in the middle of a road, surrounded by the remains of several very large houses. “Well, I guess we should pick one.”

“That one.” Felix pointed to a dark shape on the right.

“Okay. Why that one?”

“It’s brick. Brick doesn’t rot, so… that one’s less scary.”

The porch steps creaked as we walked up them, but they didn’t crack, and a quick slice of a holo-knife broke the lock in the rotting door, and we went inside. I was expecting all sorts of grossness. Rotting furniture covered in mildew and animal carcasses, I guess. Instead, we found nothing. The rooms were all empty, except for some dirt in the corners and a musty smell in the air. We checked all the rooms in the house, just glancing around, but every room and closet and cabinet was empty.

“I guess these people moved into the city with all their stuff. I wonder if they actually sold the house, or just abandoned it?” Felix sneezed.

I shrugged. It was a warm night and the room with the cleanest floor seemed to be the master bedroom, so we spread out our blanket and ate a little supper in the dark. It was extremely quiet. No traffic, no neighbors, no TVs. Just insects. Lots and lots of insects. I had no idea what type they were, but I hoped they wouldn’t have any interest in us.

We sat and looked up through the window at a handful of little stars.

“So what do we do tomorrow?” I asked.

“No idea. I guess we look for food, and then find a place to live near the food, right?”

“I guess.” I leaned against him. “Do you think there are any other people out here?”

“Naw, I doubt there’s… huh.”

“What?”

“Nothing, I just remembered something I read about a guy, urban legend stuff, a bunch of jokes about some guy called Dean who set fire to a boat and then went to live in the woods and ate trees.”

“Wait. I think I saw those posts too. A couple years ago?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

I frowned. There was probably nothing to it, but if you believe that all urban legends are based on some little kernel of truth, then maybe there really was someone in the woods. Why not? We were living in the woods now, more or less. “What if there are people out here? I mean, there could be. People who just got fed up or stressed out and just walked out of the city and started living off the land out here.”

“Maybe. But wouldn’t we hear about them? Wouldn’t they pop up in the feeds every now and then, like when they sneak into the city for supplies, or when some kids go out to get drunk in the woods?”

“I don’t know. But if there were people out here, how would we find them?”

“They’d be way off the grid, far from the cities, maybe up toward Pennsylvania, or down in southern Maryland, in the middle of nowhere so the companies wouldn’t care about them,” Felix said. “But if we drove far enough, fast enough, then maybe we’d stumble onto them after a few days or weeks.”

I shook my head. “I want to find them tomorrow.”

“But how?”

I smiled. “Global, night view. They’ve got an infrared filter.” I pulled out my phone and pulled up Global Maps and saw a high resolution map of North America, and I zoomed in on Maryland. Then I switched it over from day to night view, and the image went dark except for the bright clusters of lights around Baltimore and Washington, and to a lesser extent, Annapolis.

“How old is this image?”

“Six months,” I said.

“No lights in the woods,” Felix pointed out.

“No, but watch this.” I turned on the infrared filter and the map changed from black and gold to blue and red, and now the woods were lit up with little pinpricks of heat. Deer, dogs, foxes, raccoons, anything big enough to be picked up by the satellites.

“There.” Felix pointed and I zoomed in on a spot down near Annapolis, but still well into the woods. There were four or five bright spots, partly hidden, but still clear enough to give the vague impression of being human. “Where is that?”

I switched the map back to daytime view and overlaid the old town names. “Crownsville.”

A little icon popped up where the heat signatures had been, and I clicked it. I read the notation, and laughed.

“What?” he asked.

“It’s an old fairground. These people are living at the Renaissance Festival.”

“Wow, I always wanted to go there.”

“Really?” I stared at him.

“No.”

We laughed.

“Well, we’re going to tomorrow.” I turned off my phone and lay down, and he lay down beside me, close, but not touching. So I rolled over and put my arm across his chest. He was warm, and he put his arm around me and kissed my lips, and I kissed him back. And that’s all that happened that night.

I swear.

The next morning we both felt terrible. It had gotten a bit cooler in the night, and our one blanket had been busy providing too little padding underneath us, so we were achy and sore and chilled, and neither of us had slept as well as we had hoped.

We ate a little, packed up, and headed outside. It was a bright sunny morning and the forest was alive with birds singing, and strange padding noises in the dead leaves of the undergrowth. I saw a family of deer trot down the road right in front of me, and I heard weird animals chattering in the distance. I glanced to my right and saw a raccoon sleeping on the end of the porch under an old door mat. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

“Lux, bike.”

We headed back to the highway, slowly and carefully over the broken, grassy road, and turned south. Felix held my phone and from time to time he gave me directions. We kept to the highways as long as we could, so the roads were mostly safe. We only had to wind around two fallen trees.

But then we had to leave the highway, and things got tricky. The road to Crownsville was long and winding, and covered in tree branches, along with a few abandoned cars and some big rotting mounds of lumber that I couldn’t identify as houses or sheds, or anything at all. But eventually, after an hour and a half of rolling and squinting and double-checking, we found it.

On the far side of a huge empty field, we saw the wooden walls, all but the last traces of paint faded and stripped by the elements. And beyond the walls, we saw the buildings.

“Lux, bike off.”

We walked through the open gates of the fairgrounds and into the strangest place I had ever been. It was very hilly, but all the undergrowth had been kept clear, so the sloping ground was merely hard-packed earth punctuated by very tall trees at regular intervals.

There were funny little buildings lining the clearing, which ran down and back up the hill, and around a corner out of sight. Most of the buildings had collapsed into colorless mounds of wood and earth, and they made a sort of wall around the clearing. But a handful of the buildings, the larger ones, were perfectly clean and showed signs of recent maintenance. We saw fresh, unpainted boards and there were clotheslines with clean shirts and pants on them, and off to one side there was smoke rising from a small fire pit.

“I think we found people,” Felix said.

“I hope they’re friendly.” I took half a step and stopped. “Just in case, Lux, armor one with helmet.”

The suit flashed and the military armor appeared. Even though it was weightless, I could feel the energy in the air, swirling around my body, and it made me feel safer.

“All right, who sent you? Who do you work for?” A man with a crossbow leaned out the open window of the house on our left. He had a thin beard and very short hair, almost like he had shaved his entire head and it was all growing back in together. I thought he looked older than me, but he was really thin so maybe it was just the lack of baby fat talking.

Felix put his hands up.

I didn’t.

“We don’t work for anyone,” Felix said. “I used to work for Cygnus a ways back, but they fired me.”

“For what?”

“I showed them how to make a better sort of aluminum, and that was apparently a big no-no.”

The man with the crossbow raised an eyebrow. “Okay. What’s her story? What’s with the… whatever that is?”

“It’s holographic armor,” I said. “I invented solid holograms after I got laid off from Cygnus, and now they sort of want to kill me for inventing it, more or less.”

“Huh. I guess I can see that.” He angled his crossbow away from us. “Got names?”

“Felix James.”

“Carmen Zhao.”

“Well, howdy. I’m Jeff.” The guy with the crossbow glanced down and I realized he was looking up our names on his phone.

“You have phones?” I asked.

“Of course we do,” he muttered. “We’re outlaws and refugees, not savages.”

“But how do you charge them?”

Jeff pointed upward. “Solar panels on the roofs.”

I nodded. “Cool.”

“How many people are here?” Felix asked.

“No questions,” Jeff said, still focused on his phone.

“I can save you some time, if you just look up the name Ultraviolet,” I offered. “That’s me. That’s us.”

He raised an eyebrow and continued tapping away on his phone. “Interesting.”

“Yeah, that’s us. Interesting,” Felix muttered.

“Ignore him,” I said. “Look, we’ve been running all over the city the last few days, trying to help my parents and my friends, and now… we just want out. No more fighting Cygnus, no more trouble. I know we can’t go back, so we’re not. We left. And we went looking for anyone else who might be out here, and we found you.”

“Yes, you did.” Jeff put away his phone and focused on us again. “I just saw some interesting clips. That’s some slick gear you have there, Miss Ultraviolet.”

“Thanks.” I smiled.

“And now you just want to retire to the countryside and live here with us?”

“Well… maybe.” I nodded. “If that’s all right with you. We don’t really have a plan, exactly. We’re just making it up as we go along at this point.”

“It shows.”

“Hey!” Felix glared at him.

Jeff waved his hand to dismiss the remark. “No offense. You seem like a lovely couple of terrorists, but we can’t afford to have a pair of lightning rods like you here. So if you don’t mind, kindly show yourselves out.”

I blinked. “Really? Just like that?”

“Well, ordinarily I’d be just tickled to make friends with folks who’ve been smashing up drones and offices,” he said dryly. “That’s right up my alley, it really is. But seeing as how you’ve got a whole mid-Atlantic conglomerate and the BPD tearing up an entire city to find you, I really can’t take the risk.”

“They’re doing what?” I pulled out my phone and scanned the headlines. He was right. Cygnus, Susquehanna, and a handful of other major companies had financed a city-wide manhunt for me and Felix, and in the last few hours alone they had broken into dozens of private homes and interrogated hundreds of people, none of whom had anything to do with me or Felix, as far as I could tell. “What the hell is going on? What are they doing?”

“They’re undoing everything we did,” Felix said softly. “All the public relations, all the fans, all the support, gone. You’re not the hero anymore. Now you’re the reason everyone is scared, or had their door kicked in, or their brother got detained. Everybody hates us now.”

“Looks that way,” Jeff said. “So if you don’t mind, please get the hell out of here.”

I didn’t move. I was too angry and confused.

What the hell was it all for? We left the city. I sent messages to Frost and Brian, they knew we were gone. But they were terrorizing the city anyway. Why?

“It’s about the future,” I said quietly.