Emily woke up all at once to the sensation of falling. The world was a confusing mess of sound and light all around her. She was in pain and flailed blindly screaming as she felt heat burning away at her skin. She hit something hard, what felt like a chunk of concrete as her body kept burning and she flailed blindly as the light kept burning at her from all sides.
But despite her burning, somehow she wasn’t dead yet. After a few more everlasting moments of torture, the flames died down and suddenly all the pain and burns washed away as if they had never been.
The endless light died down around her as she lay there on something rough, curled into a ball. She unfurled slightly and looked around as she realized she could finally see.
She was laying on top of a pile of rubble. She stared at a metal dishwasher a few feet away sitting on top of a pile of stone. It was warped and twisted, melted into a solid mass and looking like a half melted stick of butter.
Emily looked around in confusion only to freeze as she saw a mushroom cloud slowly rising less than two miles away. Everything between the cloud and to Emily was completely flattened. Everything was twisted and melted and warped by the heat. The tires on the cars had melted into the roads, all the glass had shattered. Every building had collapsed and every piece of wood and blade of grass had caught aflame and burned.
Emily finally felt her brain snag on something and she turned back to the rubble.
“Luke?” she asked weakly. She stood up, barely even registering that she was naked and shaved to scalp apparently before frantically scrambling over the rubble desperately.
“Luke!” she shouted louder, “Luke, c’mon! If you’re under there just shout out, say something! Please, Luke. Luke, don’t be dead please…”
She waited for the sound. But all she could hear was the crackling of flames and creaking of metal. The sizzle of twisting plastic and grumbles of shifting rock. But nothing that could be signs of life.
“Luke, you’ve… You were right there,” Emily said, reaching out to touch a still cooling rock in front of her. She barely even noticed when her hand prickled from the heat. Not enough to burn her, but right on the edge of being too hot to touch.
Somehow Luke was fine. She had survived. Luke must be fine.
“Luke’s alive!” She said firmly, “I can’t… I have to Know. Is he alive?”
I’m sorry, little Emily. He died in the explosion. You know that already.
“He’s dead,” Emily whispered to herself, “I… How am I alive? Why? Why me? I have to Know!”
I don’t know. I… I wish I knew. But we’re special somehow. Things will get better I promise. For a little while at least. You have so much ahead of you, you’ll save everyone. Just focus now for me, okay? Focus on our task, distract ourselves with work. What should we do? Get some clothes maybe?
Emily looked down at herself in surprise, the pain and raw emotion on her face easing just the smallest fraction.
“I’m naked,” she said before looking around at her burnt surroundings. She stood and looked around before looking back at the rock she had collapsed onto. She stared at it for a long moment before tearing her eyes away.
“I survived the explosion somehow,” Emily said and looked back at the growing mushroom cloud that had started casting a shadow over the ground in front of her. She could see in the distance even more growing clouds scattered about the city. All of the nukes that had targeted CODA’s city.
“How did I survive?” Emily asked herself.
You’re an Immortal, little Emily. You’ll regenerate from any damage now. You won’t age. Not even a nuke will be able to kill you. Nothing will be able to kill you ever again. You’ll survive everything from now on.
Emily hummed and stared at her hand for a moment before shaking her head.
“Immortal, superpowers. That can’t be right. It must be something else. Now, I should find some clothes and get out of here. I… I have to find Mom and Dad. They might have been out of the blast zone.”
She walked around away from the growing mushroom cloud. The world soon was shrouded in darkness as the mushroom cloud grew to cover the skies and turned the evening sun red as it was shrouded by a hazy ash from above.
Emily kept walking away from the cloud, keeping on an eye on anything that could be clothes. It took her over ten minutes before she reached an area where there was a building that was still standing among the large piles of rubble that she had been scrambling over.
For some reason she hadn’t gotten tired even with all the exercise of scrambling up and down the piles of rubble as she moved.
She went in the first standing building and went inside. And immediately retched at the sight within. She tried to vomit at the sight, but her stomach was empty and nothing came up but acid as she dry heaved on the floor.
A charred and mummified body covered in black ash lay on the floor of the building just inside the door. She turned away and stumbled into the street, and finally burst into tears as it hit her all at once. Luke… Luke was gone. All of this wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t helped those Empire terrorists when she and her family were kidnapped. If she'd just refused...
“Is this my fault? Could I have stopped this, I have to Know!” Emily chanted.
No, it can only be. There is no change. That’s what the Shadow said. None of this is your fault Emily. You were just doing your best. Blame the people who launched the nukes, released that virus, not yourself for being a victim. Now about those clothes. Let’s keep going, right? We… We still have to search for our parents. We have a mission, we can’t give up now when they still need our help. It's good to have a goal, something to push you to keep going on when everything seems hopeless.
Emily took a shaky breath to calm herself down. Right. She had to find her parents and clothes. Keep it together, Emily…
She kept walking while ignoring the smoldering bodies that she caught sight of as she kept moving. More and more buildings remained standing as Emily kept moving away from the mushroom cloud, and some things weren’t completely burned anymore. She didn’t go inside any of the buildings, too traumatized from her last experience.
At one point, she realized that she was in a ruined shopping district. She must have been walking for miles in a daze.
“Now, where would the clothing store be…” Emily wondered as she peered through the rubble for something resembling cloth.
Over there, twenty five degrees to your right and past that red car that crashed into the street light. There’s a clothing rack that I found. Huh, it seems I have a real form this time. Something to scout around and see things that you can’t… Phase through walls like a ghost and float. Although I can only go so far from you when I do so. Huh, how about that? And I can only talk to respond when you ask a question of me. How strange… I wonder how much of this you can understand?
Emily’s head turned to the right and she perked up as she spotted a clothing rack with a bright blue shirt swinging from it. She scrambled over the rubble to get past the crashed car into the store. She frowned as strange thoughts of ghosts and Sinestra swirled within her head for a moment. There was no time for her delusions right now. Sinestra was gone, and Emily had to stay focused so she could find her parents.
All the shirts on the rack were singed and the hems and sleeves were blackened. But the main material looked fine. Emily quickly shrugged on the short sleeved blue shirt and ignored the uncomfortable bite of the blackened hems on her bare skin. She quickly scavenged the rest of the store until she was fully clothed again. Except…
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Emily stared at her bare feet covered in concrete dust in confusion. She raised her left foot and inspected her sole. Hadn’t she been scrambling over the rocks? Hadn’t she felt it scraping open her feet? She looked at her hands. Hadn’t she felt something cutting her palm as she moved? Had it scrape across that sharp piece of rebar sticking out between a crack in the field of rubble?
She had thought that the wounds stopped bleeding because they got clogged with dust or something. Bad, but something to deal with later. But as she brushed off the gray dust covering her hands, Emily saw that her hands were completely smooth and uninjured. Not even the smallest scrape or bruise on them. Her feet too. Not a single scrape.
And this place had no shoes, so it was a bust anyway. She sat down heavily and kept inspecting the bottom of her foot, poking the skin carefully as if to make sure that it was real.
“What the…” Emily said, “What is happening to me?”
You’re an Immortal, little Emily. You’ll heal. All your little scrapes and bruises healed while you weren’t paying attention. Like those healing spells that Zeena’s love interest kept casting on her in the game. But let’s ignore that for now. What should we do next? Probably keep walking until we find living people, right? There must be some out there at the edge of the blast zone. Maybe they need help too.
“Right… Gonna ignore that for now. Maybe see if I can find some shoes on my way.”
Emily walked out of the store and kept walking, using the mushroom cloud behind her as a guide to walk away towards the edge of the city. Her parents were staying at Border Station Three near the border to the American Democracy Faction territory after they had left the capital to escape the media. Emily had to get over there at some point. But first she had to find some people and figure out how to get there. It was over thirty miles away, she couldn’t just walk there just yet straight through the devastated city.
— — —
Emily kept walking. She eventually found a pair of heavy boots that she put on to cover her suspiciously unhurt bare feet. But just as she had hope that she would meet people, there was only more silence and the sound of shifting rubble.
Finally, finally, she heard a voice. She rushed to the side and saw a man with his leg pinned under a fallen street light.
He was letting out rasping breaths and Emily rushed up to him.
“Are you okay? Is your… Oh god,”
The man burbled through sightless eyes as his gruesomely broken leg squelched under the heavy street light that he was pinned under.
“I’ll… Crowbar?” Emily said, “How can I get that thing off of you?”
In the white van three cars back. There’s a car jack inside the back. If you set it underneath then you should be able to lift the pole enough to pull him out. But… he doesn’t look good. He probably won’t make it. Especially since he was blinded by the light of the nuclear flash.
Emily looked around and through intuition her eyes were drawn to a white van down the street. She thought she saw a company logo of some kind on the side. Maybe it would have some equipment that she could use?
She went over and after a few minutes of trying to figure out how to open the back realized she was being stupid. She went to the front and smashed the windows that were somehow still intact with a rock she picked up off the ground. She carefully crawled inside onto the seat. She tried to be careful to not land on one of the glass shards, but despite her care, she felt something pinch her palm as she was halfway through the window. She had slipped slightly as she was half draped over the window and reflexively held out one hand to catch herself on the seat covered in glass shards below.
With a hiss she withdrew her hand and started to panic as she saw the giant triangular wedge of glass embedded into her palm. It was bleeding at the edges. Just as Emily tried to figure out what she should do, the shard glass suddenly fell out and to the ground below with a soft clink.
“What the hell…” Emily breathed as she looked towards the piece of glass sitting on the ground looking like it had been perfectly cut at the point where it had contacted her palm. And the palm of her hand that was perfectly healed without even the slightest sign of injury.
“Is it… Is there still glass in there?”
No, it should have dissolved away into nothingness when you regenerated. Focus, car jack remember? Let’s keep crawling into the front cabin of the van.
“Is this stage two of my hallucinations?” Emily said doubtfully, “I… I hope all of this is a dream. Luke is alive, none of this ever having happened. I'm in a mental hospital, but everyone is safe. It must be a dream, right? It'll all go away when they give me some more medicine?”
No, it’s not a dream. You know that. You’re distracting yourself, we can process your Immortality later. Just focus on what’s important in the here and now. Helping people we find and finding our family. We can get through this together. You can do this, young Emily.
“Probably not,” Emily answered her own question, “Alright, let’s try that again…”
Emily crawled inside the van through the window again, without cutting herself this time. She experimentally tried to open the door again from the inside, but it was no use. The door was slightly warped somehow and so it was stuck closed. Probably something wrong with the mechanism inside of the door itself stopping it from opening it even when she hit the switch that should have unlocked it.
There was a mesh window separating the front cabin from the back of the van, and no obvious way through that Emily could see. She hunted around looking for something she could use and found a set of keys eventually. Starting the car was a no go, just as she had expected it to be. Nuclear weapons let out EMPs to disable electronics that weren’t hardened if they were used in it right away. Emily was sure that was one of the first things that the attackers had done with their missiles. Cars had so many electronics in them these days that she’d be surprised if she’d be able to find any were able to start right now with all of their electronics fried.
She carefully crawled back outside through the same window and went around to the back and unlocked the back doors of the van.
She opened it and was greeted to the sight of all sorts of tools that she might need. There was only one problem. She recognized a crowbar at least but had no idea what the rest of this could be.
“Is there a car jack?” she asked herself, “What do they even look like?”
There, fifteen degrees to the left on the floor. That bright red diamond shaped thing. That’s it.
Emily hesitantly picked up a heavy item that she spotted. Was this it? It did seem familiar, but she’d never actually used a car jack, only heard about them before. She assumed it would be helpful than a crowbar would.
She lugged the heavy item back to where the man was trapped and started setting it up, only to stop. The man… the man wasn’t moving anymore. His sightless eyes were staring upwards and his groaning had stopped and she hadn’t noticed since she was so focused on the van down the street.
“Fuck!” Emily swore angrily before turning away from the man. Why couldn’t she have been faster? She could have saved him! She hesitated, unsure what to do or say to the dead body of the man.
“Sorry,” she said to the corpse and then turned away and started walking off again towards the outskirts of the city. She left the car jack behind, it was far too heavy to lug around with her as she moved.
She tried to save more people on the way, but none of them ended up surviving more than a few minutes despite her best efforts.
But finally… After everything seemed bleak and hopeless… She finally actually saved somebody. They were pinned under something and unable to move, but once she pulled the woman out, she didn’t bleed out and die. Or cough up blood onto her and drown on the fluids as Emily panicked and tried to figure out what to do…
But the woman survived, and wasn’t blind because her head had been pointed away from any of the nuclear explosions when they went off. So she wasn’t blinded by the initial blast of radiation from the explosion.
The two of them together kept moving to the edge of the city after Emily briefly explained her thoughts. The woman was coughing and looked pale, but other than that seemed aware enough as she followed after Emily.
The woman fell behind as Emily’s seemingly unlimited stamina made its appearance as they kept moving at Emily’s fast walking pace.
Emily slowed down and kept the woman moving faster by helping her limp along with an arm slung around Emily’s shoulder.
The two of them kept moving, Emily stopping occasionally to help when she noticed somebody was stuck under something. And she started running into a few healthier people that were doing the same as well.
Everyone gave Emily odd looks though. Everyone looked a little sickly and injured as they stood there. But Emily looked completely unhurt, the dust and blood caking her body the only sign that anything had happened to her at all.
Eventually Emily and the woman she’d helped joined a group of ten or so healthier people who were also helping extract the survivors from the rubble. The woman drifted away and Emily lost track of her as she kept rushing around and helping the group with her seemingly endless energy.
“Look, Jack,” one of the men said eventually, “Much as I hate to say it, we’ve got to go. Find shelter, just… I don’t know. What about the radiation, man? I want to help people, but we’ve got to protect ourselves too. Not all of us have as much energy as Emily.”
“You’re worried about radiation?” Jack said, “Cancer’s the least of our worries right now. There’s still more people out there.”
“I think we should vote on it,” the other man said, “We’ve done our part. I’d like to survive if I can. But if the group wants I can stay a bit longer. Sleep in one of the houses nearby maybe. But the sun will set in less than an hour. I don’t want to sleep here. Do you?”
Jack hesitated before nodding, “Fine, vote. Stay?”
No one raised their hands, even Jack after a brief pause.
“Leave?”
Everyone raised their arms including Emily despite her feeling horrible for doing so. She had to look for her parents, they needed her help too.
The group of ten walked away to the edge of the city where the dense city transitioned to more green spaces and suburban neighborhoods.
As a group, they broke into a nearby abandoned house after knocking on the door to see if the owner was still there. Then they set up and set up some blankets and mattresses for the group to sleep on. Emily lay down on her space, and despite feeling wide awake in one moment, as soon as she decided that she wanted to sleep she was out like a light, asleep in an instant.