Chapter 2 – The Garden

The moment of weightlessness right before the rope pulled tight was always a rush. It was equally terrifying and exciting, knowing the only thing that separated Lauri from life and plummeting fifty-two stories was two-hundred-year-old braided nylon rope. It was one of the little treasures she had found in her expeditions out of Skytop.

Prior to this find she was forced to use wires and cords scavenged from old computers that she had tied together to form a makeshift climbing line. In her mind, discoveries like the durable nylon more than made up for the danger involved. Lauri still thought back to those early days before everything started to change.

She was too young to officially apply to be a Greenmen Scout, but she yearned to see what the world was like outside of the same four walls every day. Most of the people in the commons she grew up around were perfectly content spending their entire short lives in their tower where relative safety was provided.

“There is so much out there we don’t know,” Lauri said one day to herself. In her eyes she was just the person to discover everything that lay in wait out in the world. This was when she was thirteen, but now at sixteen she has already been sneaking out of the tower whenever she could for the last year and a half.

It was not a painless process, but to Lauri it was worth every risk. Leaving the tower always started with one simple step, straight off the edge.

When she had only just begun sneaking out, she found it was much better to get a bit of momentum before going out the window. The tension on the wire would swing her back in to the room three stories below if she did it just right. She would have of course preferred to play it safe, but in some ways, Lauri knew there was more risk involved in going slowly than just taking the leap of faith.

She found that by securing her rope to a support column in a section of the sealed off hallway that she had unblocked, she could create a strong anchor point from which to descend. The rope was easy to hide due to the fact that each floor had sections that had been sealed decades ago.

The idea of course was to limit ways that an intruder could invade their home. Lauri couldn’t help but think how silly that was, in the last sixty years there hasn’t been a single recorded event where an enemy had made it past the security floor. They were losing livable space, and for what?

Her secret to success was to bypass the Security floor and Greenmen Floors all together. That is why she had to move quickly, passing the windows of sleeping quarters of the scouts was the part of her plan when her escape was most likely to be found out. After one particularly stressful situation where she had to hang in place for several moments outside the window of a scout that woke in the night, she decided there had to be a better way.

Before ascending the rope that night, she used a handful of crushed flower petals she collected to stain a section of the rope. The hope was when she swung it would mark where the rope connected with the top of the window frame entering the abandon room. Her idea was that if she knew the exact placement of where the rope connected to the frame, she could time the jump right so that the end of her swing would deposit her safely into the room. To say her first attempt was a bloody failure, would be an accurate description.

Misjudging the swing by only a foot, she fell short of the opening and slammed into a glass pane with enough force to crack it. As she gasped, she had to hold in a scream as she muttered, “Holy hell that hurt.” Luckily, the glass was thicker than she had expected, and only had a slight crack from the force of her body hitting it at high speed.

Lauri was beginning to think she was more hurt than the window, seeing a dark purple bruise forming along her side from the impact. It hurt like hell at first, and only got worse as she cut her hand wide open on the cracked glass trying to push herself in to a position to climb back up. The climb took much longer than before, but she had learned from her mistake.

She spent the next two weeks fully recovering, and on her next jump everything went exactly as planned. Since that night, it was common for her to leave under the darkness of night and return before first light anywhere from three to five times a month. She had no reason to believe tonight would be any different.

After making her jump without issue she tied the rope off so that it would be barely visible to anyone passing by the room she used to make her escape. Creeping to the door, Lauri listened for movement but heard none. It was two in the morning, she had four hours to explore before she had to return to her home up above. If she were back by six, there would be a buffer of an hour before the first scouts departed at seven.

“What’s on the menu today?” she whispered to herself pulling a map from the makeshift green bag that she had previously stashed nearby. The bag wasn’t anything special, just some canvas tied together with a couple of straps to keep it secure with a draw string. The convenience of having it allowed her to range just a little bit further out, making all the difference.

Everything within three rings of the tower had been picked clean long ago, but she knew going just a couple of moments further would get her to the fourth ring out. The fourth ring still held unlooted buildings that were hers for the taking. While looking at her map Lauri had noticed three buildings marked to choose from. A grocery store, storage complex, and a bookstore. This took just a moment to stop and assess each building.

There was what used to be a well-kept grocery store, that was long overdue for a restocking. It was possible she could find tools or other miscellaneous items, but unlikely she would find anything worth the walk. The next potential target was an abandoned storage complex. Many of the rooms were locked, but she knew the scouts had visited some time back and had also been interested. They, however, hadn’t gotten around to going back to pop the locked units open.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

She was thinking about all the secrets they could hold, and Lauri’s mouth was watering in excitement. It wasn’t often she got to explore spots that hadn’t already been picked clean.

The last place was a bookstore that was in disrepair even before the fall. She knew that books had gone out of style before when electricity was a common part of everyday life. It was easy for people in the past to pick up their handheld devices and have access to vast libraries worth of books. Although that was no longer a possibility. If you wanted to learn something new, then books were the way to go.

Their existing medical and mechanical textbooks had both come from the city’s central library. Unfortunately, many of the books there hadn’t held up to the test of time and had become unreadable. The bookstore today was an opportunity for her to obtain new information that others had not been able to access.

In the end though it was the personal storage units that had caught her attention the most. It was a sizable fenced in compound that had a spiked gate, and only one entry point through the main lobby. “You’re mine today,” she said with a huge grin, pointing to the spot on the map where her journey would take her.

Lauri descended the tower easily enough, she made it down the forty-eight stories in just under fifteen minutes. Before she knew it, she was walking through the abandon overgrown streets that were filled with lush plant life.

She loved to think of this area around her home as her own personal garden, it was the only place where she went simply to enjoy the view. In the past people tended to their gardens for fun, not just because they needed its food to keep them alive. She dreamed of having a garden like that of her very own one day and now it had become her new mission in life.

Lauri knew the world was a dangerous place, but during the time before the light it just didn’t seem things could possibly be as bad as they were. The rampant of course slept just like humans, and they slept deeply. In all the times she had been out exploring she had only run in to active rampant a handful of times but moving cautiously she had always managed to avoid them noticing her. That’s why it had caught her so off guard when she heard a clatter in the distance of something being knocked over as she approached the storage building.

Slowly lifting the jacket, she wore to keep herself warm in this cool morning air, Lauri put her hand on the grip of the finely sharped combat knife attached to her belt. She may be young, but she was not so foolish as to travel outside Skytop without a way of protecting herself.

She dropped low, and as fast as she could manage while crouching, she closed the distance between herself and the side of the building. Slowing her breathing, she tried to reduce how much noise she was making. Lauri listened carefully but could only hear her heart beating in her ears.

However, she couldn’t stay like this forever; time had passed quickly in her walk here and it was now almost a quarter to three. Taking a deep breath and holding it, Lauri peaked around the corner of the building to peer down at the adjacent streets.

Two blocks away in the center of the street she could see three rampant, they were engaged in trying to bring down a gigantic fur covered animal. It was almost twice her height with serrated horns, and a long muscular figure. She didn’t recognize the animal, but it was an impressive sight taking in its sheer size alone. It bore a faint resemblance to a stag that she had seen in recovered history books.

They didn’t see her as they were fully focused on their prey, they were trying to make it their next meal. She watched on in horror as they threw themselves at it from all sides as if they weren’t afraid at all. The first rampant lunged at it, only to be gored all the way through by the horns of the stag. The horns came straight out of its back with a wet pop, blood began dropping below the rampant’s suspended form at once.

It didn’t attack alone though, a second one charged the animal from behind looking to tackle it. The stag was also ready for this. Raising itself up on to its front legs and kicking with horrific strength the rampant’s chest caved in instantly from the impact. There was a thunderous crack when the kick landed, and Lauri knew that bones had been shattered even from this distance. The force sent the would-be attacker flying backwards where it slammed in to the wall of a nearby building.

If it were only those two the animal may have used this opportunity to escape. However, while it was defending itself from the first two attacks it had missed the third rampant closing in on it. As his back feet landed the last monster attacked, swinging with a wild overheard strike towards its back-left knee. With a sickening crunch, the knee was completely destroyed. The stag let out a pained bellow as it collapsed to the ground unable to support its own weight.

Just as quickly as it had begun it was over. Once it was on the ground the rampant that took its knee began to claw at its side. Lauri looked on unable to move as the rampant that had been gored raised its hands high and brought them down with enough force to snap the horns.

Standing back up the monster ripped the horns from his body as if it were nothing then brought them down directly into the stag’s head. The stag was dead without another sound. Lauri was terrified, a shiver of unease ran through her body. She leaned over slightly more from her hiding place to view the rampant that had been kicked. What she saw caused the blood already running cold in her veins to freeze in an instant.

It was standing as if it had not been hurt at all. The bones in its clearly visible chest began to crack and shift beneath the skin, reforming back perfectly to an uninjured state. The two that had been wounded were visibly thinner than before, as if they hadn’t eaten in weeks.

It even seemed to her that the rampant that had been gored now had disproportionally sized arms, one being much smaller than she thought it was before. Terrifyingly enough it looked as if there hadn’t been a fight at all.

She knew that she needed to move and get out of sight before they noticed her, but Lauri just couldn’t take her eyes off everything she was seeing. The group of rampant set upon the animal and tore it apart in a frenzied state. They were shoveling animal parts in their mouth as fast as they could, without any regard for what they were eating. Meat, skin, bone, it didn’t matter to them. It was all just food that bought them precious moments before the hunger set in anew.

To her surprise, after a few minutes of feeding they stopped. The three of them, using their considerable strength, hoisted the animal in the air. They began carrying the remains further down the road until she completely lost sight of them.

This was the cue she needed to get moving, she realized that watching the fight had annoyingly cost her another ten minutes. It was just past three in the morning already, and Lauri only had about two hours until she needed to head back.

It was time she got started, she hopefully tried turning the doorknob to the front entrance door. She was absolutely amazed and delighted when it opened without any issue at all. It looks like the Greenmen that came here before hadn’t thought to lock it on their way out. ‘Why would they’ she thought, this far from Skytop there was no one that would have wandered here by chance.

Excitedly, Lauri made her way through the lobby building and exited the side door into the main storage yard. She was looking over the lot and could see that there were four small streets that made up the main area, they were lined with eight storage units on each side. All together she figured there were about sixty-four units, “Let's get this started!” she proclaimed quietly while walking towards the nearest wall of units, beginning to look for the small crowbar she kept in her bag.

She didn’t know what treasures this place might hold, but now that Lauri had made it here, she was about to do everything she could to find out. In her excitement she missed the roars of pain coming from only a couple blocks away from her, they were drowned out by the loud creak of the storage unit gate being lifted after nearly two centuries of sitting in place.

The rampant that she had just seen taking down the stag, were being ripped apart by a large dog. It was covered in barbed bones protruding from the sides of its face as well as all over its massive body. All the while a man sat back and chuckled gleefully as he watched his pet enjoying itself. “Who’s a good boy? You are!” he said with an inhuman smile, as the blood flowed freely in the street.