Emily adjusted the radio on the plane again. Still nothing but static. She didn’t understand. She was sure that Major Smith must have been wrong about the radiation. The radiation from the nuclear material should have been all high frequency waves. High energy and dangerous to people. But the exact opposite of her low frequency radio waves being detected and transmitted by the plane’s radio. It would interfere a little of course, but not nearly this much…
And she was definitely in areas with blistering amounts of radiation. She had a tangy sensation in her mouth and every part of her skin was tingling slightly and her eyes were itchy. But her powers were healing her, so she barely even noticed the uncomfortable feeling after a while as she kept listening and fiddling with the plane’s radio.
She still was only picking up strange static on the plane radio no matter what she did or how she adjusted it. She was sure that there must be plenty of people who had survived the blasts with equipment. Military, it had been a while people should have been able to even build their own radios by now.
How could she have been hearing nothing? Getting no signals at all on any channel? It took her a while, but eventually after thinking aloud, things fell into place like they always seemed to these days. The blockage must be from the ash choking the skies and making the horizon fade into a dull and murky haze.
The ash itself must be interfering with the signal and preventing her from hearing anyone too far away even with the radio waves.
But that would just decrease the receiving distance. There was still a chance she could find something, find more people that would have the equipment she needed if she got close enough…
She flew for hours, monitoring the fuel gauge closely as she did so. She heard a few things that she thought could be distorted signals, but nothing clear enough to pinpoint or communicate with anyone. She saw movement and a few camps or makeshift towns of people below. But none looked like the military or anyone who would have the type of equipment that Emily needed to make a vaccine.
Eventually she reached the tipping point. She hesitated for a few more minutes and listened closely to the radio hoping for a signal. There was only more garbled murmurs among the loud hisses and pops rumbling in the background. Signs of living people with access to some technology, which reassured her. But not enough to know where someone who could help her would be.
Defeated, she turned the plane around and started flying back the way she came. She should be able to make it back, but she’d used over half of her fuel coming this far.
But she’d make it back, she had to get back to Sean even if her being able to make a vaccine in the near future seemed ever more impossible by the moment.
It would be fine. Major Smith was probably right. A few more weeks and the quarantine would make sure no new people were infected and the disease was eradicated in the area. Then they all could work together to survive. Hopefully without Major Smith shooting her again.
She ran out of fuel thirty five miles from where she came from. The fuel gauge was flashing brightly, and Emily stared hard at the navigation screen for a few minutes to memorize it as she slowly brought the plane down.
She had taken flight by instinct, surely she should figure out how to land too? Emily furrowed her brow and stared silently at the pilots panel and did her best to figure out how to extend the landing gear and work the flaps of the plane to slow down. She was now barely fifty feet off of the ground and she heard the engines sputtering as they started running on fumes and cutting in and out.
Emily pressed buttons and flipped switches and somehow managed to deploy the landing gear as the plane kept moving down thirty feet off of the ground as she muttered to herself. The engines sputtered one last time and cut out. The nose of the plane dipped and Emily frantically struggled to keep the nose up as the plane fell in a free fall the remaining twenty feet to the ground on the open plains.
With a solid crunch and screech of crumpling metal, the landing gear folded inwards from the force of the fall. The plane tilted to the side and the plane’s nose impacted the ground and it started carving a long furrow in the dirt and open grasses of the plains. Emily was thrown forward against the console of the plane and thrown to the side as the plane tilted to the side as the wing on her left dug into the ground and started warping and tearing into pieces as it dug into the ground next to her.
After fifteen seconds or so, the jet finally slid to halt with one wing and engine completely destroyed and Emily was sure the whole bottom almost completely destroyed where it had scraped across the ground.
Emily lay on the floor after being thrown around, her bruises and cracked ribs already healed as she sat up.
“Well, it was out of fuel anyway,” she muttered to herself, “Not like I was going to do anything with it when it was empty.”
The door out of the plane outside was completely destroyed, so she was forced to smash the front windshield of the private jet and leave that way. It was surprisingly easy. She seemed to be stronger than she remembered being. Only a few strong blows with the metal of her stolen pistol had broken the windshield and scraped the edges free of sharp glass shards that would cut her as she crawled through.
There wasn’t anything useful left in the plane for her to use. So keeping the map of her planned flight path in mind, she exited the wreckage of the plane and started walking away with nothing but the slightly torn clothes on her back and her stolen pistol with six rounds left in its magazine. It took her some time to figure out how the gun worked, but she thought she knew the basics now of turning on the safety and ejecting the magazine when she needed to check how much ammo was left.
Once she was fully outside she took one last glance at the demolished plane before turning and started jogging in the direction of the city and back towards Sean.
She was in the open plains of grass right now. Actually…
Emily eyed the area in front of her and saw that there were withered stalks of corn lying on the ground in a perfect square. A farmer’s field. Small grasses were poking through and had grown through the gaps and made it appear like natural grasses. What had killed the corn? Had it been the radiation that Emily could still taste on her tongue? The light dusting of ash covering the ground in all directions? The darkness from the ash above and the red sun in the sky even in the middle of the day?
But the area around the city should have fields of corn that had survived. So not everything was lost. The ash hadn’t been nearly as thick in the sky as it was around her now. Let alone the amount of radiation Emily was sure she was being bombarded with on all sides by now.
But now the open plains felt slightly sinister as she sprinted as fast as she could across the open space among the withered husks of the corn and the short grasses. She knew roughly which direction to go and saw a small dark blot on the edge of the horizon after sprinting for three full hours. She never grew tired no matter how fast she ran, and even smiled a little bit as she absolutely ate up the distance as she ran full tilt and left little clouds of Ash to puff up in little clouds behind where she ran.
The layers of ash that had used to be nearly an inch thick on the ground where she started began to lighten and fade as she ran and the dot on the horizon grew bigger and bigger over time.
Eventually after the sun rose the next day after running through the night, Emily noticed that there wasn’t any ash on the ground at all. Around three or four in the morning the open and shriveled crops had started transitioning from completely dead to a few sickly and browned surviving plants.
By the morning almost half of the fields of the corn now looked relatively healthy, more and more looking healthy the farther she ran. They were near ready to harvest, and Emily realized with a start that this must have been how Major Smith and the military had been feeding everyone in quarantine. They must be harvesting the corn in the surrounding fields and packaging them up somehow to deliver to the buildings.
Nothing else made much sense. But if that was the case there wouldn’t be much variety, you could only survive on so much corn Emily assumed.
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Emily had nearly gotten lost three or four times as she ran as the stalks of corn rose and blocked her view of her goal visible much larger on the horizon now. Especially in the dark of the night when even that landmark was invisible to her, she had found herself turned around and somehow in a place with sickly and dead crops again despite her best efforts.
But she had finally found a road as morning turned to noon with the red sun in the sky reached its peak in the sky and started to sink. A blustery winter wind blew across the fields, the slightest hints of frost creeping across some of the leaves of the corn stalks. It was getting colder.
A few signs every few miles pointed her the way as she followed their directions as she ran. It was just her running at incredible speeds and gripping her pistol in one hand as she went. Occasionally switching which hand she held it in as the sensation of holding it in one hand made her feel oddly unbalanced as she moved across the ground.
And then like no time had passed at all, she was there. The road opened up and turned from the smaller back road into a wider four lane road that came from seemingly nowhere. That was the sort of thing you saw a lot when people built cities like this wholesale where there had only been empty fields before. Just poor planning really, to have a little back road and empty fields around a dense urban city. But that’s what the Americans had decided to do, so here it was in all its glory. Emily ran down the large road through the suburbs for a few more minutes towards the skyscrapers and the main city itself in the distance less than two or three miles away now.
She slowly came to a stop as she saw Major Smith and a group of over a hundred other soldiers and an assortment of vehicles blocking her way.
She walked forward until she was in earshot.
“Where’s our plane?!” Major Smith shouted as Emily stood there looking at him.
“Crashed,” She replied, “Ran out of fuel. I couldn’t find anyone. Nothing but garbled radio signals up there. So I came back.”
Major Smith hesitated before glancing at the other soldiers around him looking rather nervous as they pointed their weapons at Emily.
“What about the radiation?” Major Smith barked, “How’d you survive?”
“I healed. You saw. So, what happens now? What- Are you going to shoot me again? I’ll just heal. It won’t work.”
Major Smith paused before raising his hand in the air. Emily’s heart raced as she watched him. There was nothing she could do, they had vehicles and she would never be able to outrun them even with her endless stamina. When they started shooting her, she’d just have to try to charge through. Escape into the city, lose pursuit before circling back to meet back up with Sean again…
Major Smith’s hand fell and Emily dived forward and was struck by a dozen bullets at once. Many others flew behind her to where she had been standing before. But only about a half of the soldiers had fired their weapons and were just staring at her as she scrambled forward towards them, unable to stand as the bullets pushed her back with every strike.
“Fire! Fire, kill her!” Major Smith demanded as she scrambled towards the line of soldiers on all fours as she was shot over and over again. The pain had nearly overwhelmed her, her screams only cut off by a rush of coolness washing over her as everything reached a tipping point.
Everything felt cold and logical again as she crawled forward on all fours like an animal as fast as she could. She stared at Major Smith with dead eyes as she moved.
“K-K- Kill her!” Major Smith stammered and took a step back as he drew a pistol from his hip and started firing at her. Most of his shots missed her as they sailed over her crawling form, except one that landed in her shoulder blade. Her focused mind barely registered the pain as she kept crawling towards the line of soldiers on all fours as fast as most men could run with her endless stamina pushing her body to its absolute limits over and over to increase her speed while staying low to the ground so the soldiers would have a harder time shooting her.
She idly noted that less of the soldiers had stopped firing their weapons at her and were just watching her charge with wide eyes and expressions of abject fear on their faces.
“M-M- Monster!” One man shouted, “Run! Get away!”
“No, don’t-” Major Smith shouted before finally landing a shot with his pistol directly into the top of Emily’s skull in a spray of gore. Everything went black.
When Emily woke up, everything was still cold and logical. She was lying flat on her face on the ground and half buried in some sort of rock.
“Keep firing!” Major Smith shouted in a hysterical and cracking voice, “Kill- Something has to be able to kill her. We can’t let her escape-”
A loud boom sounded out and everything went black again.
Emily woke up face down in a crater. She wasn’t being shot anymore, too deep in the depression in the ground for the soldiers to have a good angle to shoot her anymore.
She crawled up the side of the crater, her mind only focused on getting into the city. Her pistol and clothes had been destroyed long ago. She realized in her emotionless state that she should have used the weapon to kill a few of the soldiers at the start. Despite not wanting to hurt anyone, these men kept trying to kill her. Shooting her. Keeping her from returning to Sean.
But she hadn’t done that. And she still didn’t want to kill anyone. She emerged from the edge of the crater and stood as the assembled soldiers stared at her. There were only a dozen or so and Major Smith left. Only one of the military vehicles remained of the forces that remained. She stared back at the remaining soldiers.
“We’ll find your brother!” Major Smith said in a cracking voice and a fearful expression as she took a step towards them as they all flinched, “We can’t hurt you but he’s not a freak like you probably. He’ll bleed the same as the rest of us.”
Emily’s eyes focused and in her emotionless state she could finally confront the truth that she had been avoiding. She would have to kill this man. He was threatening Sean. He’d kill Sean. He wouldn’t stop, not unless she stopped him. She took another step forward.
“Sir?” One of the remaining soldiers said in a trembling voice, “I don’t think she liked that.”
“Don’t you threaten my brother,” Emily said calmly even as her anger started bubbling up and breaking through the coolness shrouding her mind, “Don’t you ever. Back off and just leave us alone. Why are you like this?”
“Why am I like this?” Major Smith shouted as the other soldiers started edging away from him as Emily took another step forward with her bare feet slapping against the ground.
“Why wouldn’t I be like this?” Major Smith said, “You’re just like this virus. The bombs. You’re some fucked up CODA experiment meant to wipe us out once and for all. Not even human. I’m sure those CODA assholes have some secret bunker somewhere all wrapped up and safe even after what they’ve done to the rest of us who didn’t fit their nice little molds and in their little pristine boxes! CODA will emerge from the ashes to build that perfect ‘utopia’ that Peter Rose talks about all the time. I’ll fight you to the end if it’s the last thing I do, freak! I won’t let you destroy us again!”
Emily took another step forward, and the other soldiers turned and started running away as Major Smith just stood there staring at her with his trembling pistol pointed towards her. The other soldiers had hidden, but Emily could feel their eyes watching her from all around as they hid behind the buildings on the side of the street.
“Please,” Emily begged, “I’m not a weapon. You’re just seeing shadows. Don’t make me do this. Please.”
“I’m already dead, freak,” Major Smith said, sounding tired and resigned as Emily took one final step so she was less than ten feet away now, standing there completely naked in front of the soldiers.
“I already died along with my country weeks ago. We’re all just dead men walking. Or woman. I know you won’t die yet. But at least I won’t make it easy for you.”
Major Smith’s pistol let out a loud crack and everything went black around Emily as the bullet entered her skull.
She woke up having fallen slightly forward while she was unconscious. She pushed up with her legs to leap forward and tackled Major Smith to the ground. As they hit the ground Major Smith’s arm went wide and he dropped his pistol and it went wide and skittered away from the both of them on the pavement.
Then she killed him. It took a few tries as he kept surviving and coming awake to fight her again as she unconsciously held back her blows while fighting. He never stopped fighting her no matter what she said. What she did. How she begged. So eventually she killed him.
Tears streaming down her face, she stood to her feet with trembling hands and stumbled off deeper into the city in a hyperventilating panic, ignoring the eyes of the hidden soldiers that she knew were watching her in fear from the shadows.
Several sickly people almost emerged from nearby alleyways to attack her, but when they saw the blood coating both her arms and her entire naked body, they quickly backpedaled and made a loud racket as they fled at high speed from her.
Emily was red from head to toe and her hair had disappeared to leave her completely bald again. Most of this blood was hers, caked on like thick red war paint coating every exposed patch of skin. But some of it… Some of it wasn’t hers. Her hands were trembling again as she finally found herself in front of Sean’s apartment. She looked behind her. There was a large trail of blood behind her dripping from her body in little globs and droplets on the street.
Emily wiped her tears from her face and just stood there at the front door of the apartment complex for a few minutes not doing anything. Should she clean herself? Find some clothes? What would Sean think about her? She was a murderer. And not like before when she had snapped and killed those men in some strange fugue state. This was… she remembered everything this time.
Eventually, Emily just put her bloody hands on the door and went inside. She was an emotional wreck, she couldn’t stay out here. Why couldn’t Major Smith just have stopped, why had he forced her to do it? She had to go inside, make sure that Sean was safe and healthy.
She had to make sure that it had been worth it.