All alone in the empty city…

Emily dangled her legs from the edge of the roof and stared absently onto the fields of ice stretching into the distance.

She had no idea how long it had been since Sean’s death had left her hollow. With him gone, it was like all the rest of it finally hit her all at once. She’d been so frantically helping him, focusing all of herself on doing what she could to protect him. She had never really accepted the rest and just pushed it to the back of her mind. Luke’s death, her parents, everyone who’d died because of all the bombs and because of her virus. Because of what she’d caused. What she'd done.

She grieved for all of them at once as she no longer had anything to distract her anymore from it all. Nothing to keep the pain and loss at bay. She let the emotions wash over her, nothing to hold her back from doing so now that there was no one left for her to cling to.

Was she the only person left alive? The ice kept climbing through the streets rising up and up like a swelling wave as the days and years passed in an endless blur of depression and lackluster attempts to drag herself to doing anything of worth at all through the dull haze of her grief.

Emily kept working on the radio, but all it returned was static. There were no more seasons to break up the monotony. Only the endless chill of winter, and the constant swirling taunting snowflakes raining down from the sky as if to taunt her. Her skin couldn’t tell the difference between the chill of deep winter versus that of what used to be summer. Both were far too cold now. Both a deep freeze that covered everything in the city with a thin layer of ice as soon as the slightest bit of moisture touched them.

The snow was now built up to the eighth floor of the buildings. Emily had relocated all of her things to the tallest building in the city. A hundred and twenty stories tall. She could see the houses and suburbs around the edge of the city had already been fully swallowed by the ice. As well as almost every other building that had been in the city. With every passing day more and more of the city was swallowed by the growing glacier below.

A glacier down here in the midwestern North America. And it didn’t appear to be stopping its ascent upwards to swallow her and what was left of the empty city.

Maybe she should let it swallow her. Let herself be trapped in the ice forever.

Maybe she was the last person left. What the use of any of it? To resist the ever rising tide of grief and ice?

She fiddled with the radio and kicked her legs idly as they dangled off the roof. The radio only gave out more static and fizzes and pops.

The ash had been mostly knocked from the sky, at least down below. Knocked down by the rain and snow in those first years. But above the clouds there was still more ash hanging there menacingly, remaining there even after all of this time. The sun was still red most days as its light peered through the fog of the ash in the high atmosphere.

She put the radio down on the roof behind her and sighed. With most of the ash below a certain height knocked down out of the air, she should have received a signal by now. The ash above shouldn’t have blocked her signal for a massive area around her.

There was no one alive within hundreds of miles that could respond. It was the only explanation. Everyone else was already dead.

Emily swung her legs up and stepped back onto the top of the roof and went back inside to the lavish apartment on the top floor. All the chairs were moldy and worn down from use. The lights flickered and gave out at points from decay despite her best efforts to fix them.

It was time to move on. She had stayed and grieved for long enough. It was time to move south.

Sean wouldn’t have wanted to wallow here uselessly.

Even if it was hopeless, at least it was something she could do.

There was nothing but painful memories left in this empty shell of a city for her.

It was for the best that she’d be leaving it behind.

— — —

Emily bundled up in her heaviest jacket and winter gear. As well as the same old hiking backpack as she had had years ago bursting with equipment strapped to her back. She was wearing a pair of skis and had snowshoes strapped to the outside of her pack.

She didn’t bring any food or water with her. She had a tent, but she didn’t need it. Even the clothes she was wearing were nothing but a comfort to her. The only other thing she brought was her radio and the electric generator for it. As well as some batteries and extra components to repair it all.

She had managed to find a compass on one of her infrequent scavenging trips of her surroundings when she got in the mood. It would lead her south.

Down there where it was warmer there must be people alive. Somebody alive.

Anyone alive.

So with her cross country skis and poles, she started moving south.

The days and months passed in a blur as only endless plains of ice stretched out around her. Every once in a while she would stop and listen to the radio again hoping for a signal. But there was nothing. Just more static.

She fell into crevasses in the ice when she wasn’t paying attention. One moment she was moving across the sheets of ice, and the next the thin layer on top would break under her weight and send her tumbling into the deep pit in the ice below.

She had panicked the first time, afraid that she’d be stuck down there forever. As she fell down through the open cavern of the crevasse, she eventually landed and rolled until she impacted an ice shelf dozens of feet below the surface. Luckily her pack stayed with her and nothing inside was damaged from the fall. As her body hit the ice, there was a brief burst of pain before it faded away again as she healed again.

Somehow despite everything, Emily’s body was still warm no matter what happened to it. She spent a few minutes attaching everything securely to her pack with some rope the first time. That included her skis, gloves, and boots. She took off her socks and carefully stored everything firmly in her pack so it wouldn’t fall.

She took out a knife and held it in one hand and started carving some hand and foot holds part the way above the little icy shelf she’d fallen onto on the icy wall leading up to the surface far above her.

Then standing there with bare feet and unprotected hands she reached out to the icy wall in front of her and put her hands and feet in the available hand and footholds a few feet off of the icy shelf. She had the pack on her back and the knife in her right hand as she waited there for a few minutes.

The heat from her body melted the ice and slowly widened the tight gaps until they were solid handholds. Once she was secure, Emily raised one foot and raised it nearly to her knee height before pressing it against the wall. It started slowly melting inwards into the ice as she applied pressure with her toes even as her other limbs kept slowly tunneling deeper and deeper into the little tunnels in the ice she created with her body heat as they melted.

Once Emily’s new foothold was secure, she took her hand with the knife and reached up and carefully carved a pair of new handholds above her.

She took her left hand and reached up and started pressing her fingers into the handhold and slowly started melting it away as she waited.

Like that she slowly inched her way upwards. Pressing her bare hands and feet into the ice wall as she climbed, not tiring in the slightest due to her endless stamina as she remained there clinging to the wall with all of her strength.

When she needed to, she used the knife to chip at the ice and carve the starters for the hand of footholds to speed up the process.

Despite her expecting things to go wrong, she never lost her grip. She kept climbing up the sheer wall of ice until she reached the top and the icy ceiling. There was a thin sheet of ice above her. She could see a few feet away the circular hole with cracked and jagged edges that she’d made when she’d first fallen through, but the icy covering on the top extended a few more feet before it met with the wall.

Emily took one of her fists and started pounding hard on the icy ceiling, sending chunks of ice from the icy ceiling above falling down into the deep canyon and bouncing into the darkness of the icy crevice below.

Eventually she broke through and was able to crawl back outside and collapse back onto solid ‘ground’ again. Panting heavily in relief in the heavy bank of snow. Not from exertion, but from knowing that the stress of focusing on not falling was behind her for now.

After taking some time to collect herself as she lay face down in the ice and snow, she carefully sat back up with her pack and put her gloves, shoes, and skis back on. She didn’t need the gloves, but she wanted to wear them anyways. It didn’t feel right to wear the rest of this winter gear without wearing the gloves too.

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From then on she carefully used her poles to explore the ice in front of her to check for crevasses if she got suspicious. There was a certain discoloration and sometimes even sound that changed as she skied across the glacier that she could detect that signaled a crevasse would be nearby.

The ice of the endless glacier was surprisingly loud, the ice shifting and cracking below her as the ice settled and moved. She fell into several more crevasses as she traveled, but eventually learned the tells of the glacier and what spots to avoid and around which to be careful just by sound alone.

She used the same method as before to climb out of the crevasses, and while she lost a few minor things after she fell, she didn’t lose the radio, the compass, or any of her other important equipment.

After a few more weeks of traveling passed, she hardly fell into the crevasses anymore. Even with her newfound skills sometimes they snuck up on her and she plunged through the ice no matter how much her instincts told her that it should be safe in a given spot.

But she was still getting better, and as long as she didn’t drop anything into the deep pits it was only a short delay of a few hours. Nothing more than an inconvenience really.

It wasn’t like she had anyone else to protect or push her to go faster. What were a few hours or even days wasted here or there?

— — —-

She kept traveling south, and eventually she reached an ocean. There were icebergs and creeping ice inching off from the shore and covering the beaches. This was the gulf of Mexico, it must be. There were icebergs here. Icebergs off the gulf of Mexico.

Emily stared at the massive floating chunks of ice floating through the water for a few hours before checking the radio again. Only more static. There was no one there.

She headed west for a while and followed the coastline as best as she could while going south as well.

The ice grew thinner and the icebergs on the ocean grew less and less common as she went. But there was still ice no matter how much she traveled.

She was in Central America. Was the ice thinner here? She could hardly tell with the white expanse on the land. But she’d seen the top of some buildings poking from the ice at points, skyscrapers in buried cities. Going inside, everything was written in Spanish, and she figured out that she was in Panama at the moment based on a few maps she managed to find.

She kept going. Ice in Panama. Was the whole world covered? She kept walking and after some more time finally the glacier fizzled out as she reached its edge.

She took off her skis and put on her heavy boots which had seen hardly any use for this whole journey as she stood on top of a boulder. Below she could see the frozen trees of what seemed to have formerly been a jungle. All the trees were covered in frost and dead with their leaves brown. All of the underbrush was a wet mess of decaying and rotting plants. And sometimes the corpses of the animals were covered in frost and barely decomposed at all it seemed.

After a few hours, Emily finally left the ice behind and was walking through the dead forest. Only her loud footsteps cracking the brittle layer of branches and brush beneath her feet interrupted the silence and sounds of wind around her.

She checked her radio and made sure it was still working. It warbled strangely and her heart raced as she dropped what she was doing and adjusted the signal as best as she could. But she didn’t manage to improve it. But there was something out there, transmitting. Somebody might still be alive.

Heart pounding, Emily picked up her pace and started jogging slightly as she kept the radio in her backpack. Without worrying about falling into the crevasses anymore she should be able to move as fast as her legs could carry her.

Time passed rapidly as the warbling signal on the radio grew stronger as the temperature rose. The persistent chill that had permeated her skin for what must have been years slowly faded away as she kept jogging forward through the decomposing corpse of the jungle. She was far from the ocean by now as she adjusted her course whenever the signal on the radio grew weaker. She was still heading roughly south but now had diverted east as well as the days passed as she jogged.

Despite all the decay of the jungle and the death of the normal wildlife, she started seeing some small shrubs and green shoots poking through and growing despite the harsh conditions. Even if the plants looked sickly and small, she still hadn’t seen a single living animal so far besides the odd insect or two.

She went up mountains and down into valleys and the temperature kept warming until it felt like a pleasant buzz on her skin. It was… like a warmer fall day now. Not exactly hot, but enough that she could have said in confidence before the bombs dropped that it wasn’t cold out.

She smiled slightly as she kept moving and following the signal on the radio. This was survivable. Maybe there were people that had survived here. She hadn’t talked to anyone in… So long. The loneliness ached in her chest as she felt herself utterly starved for even the slightest amount of human contact after so long of being alone.

She kept moving and things kept warming up. She startled as there was a rustle in the debris below her feet. Something running away from her. She caught a glimpse of it, it was some sort or rat or rodent as it squirmed away through the stacks of branches to flee.

The green shrubs were a little healthier and more numerous now even if they looked sickly. There were even a few beginning sprouts of what Emily was sure must be trees. With much more living things with the warmth in the air, many of the old jungle trees and brush underfoot had rotted and decayed into fresh soil and cleared space for new growth. Although many of the massive jungle trees with their leaves stripped from them remained standing even though Emily knew that they were dead.

But the signs of life improved her mood. Something had survived and life was recovering despite what had happened, if slowly. She hoped it was recovering, that’s what it looked like as she kept following the radio signal.

The odd word was coming in through the static now. Emily carefully listened to it whenever she grew bored and had to take a break from her jogging. The only odd thing she noted is that the disjointed words that she heard appeared to be in English rather than Spanish like she would have expected. Based on how East and South had traveled by now, she thought she was probably in the Amazon rainforest and maybe even Brazil by now.

Finally, Emily stopped as the distortions turned into vaguely comprehensible speech. She let out a sigh of relief and took her radio and turned on the transmitter. But it was two or three people talking to each other, not some kind of automated signal at least.

She adjusted the setup for a minute and unfurled the collapsible antenna that she’d constructed. She climbed one of the dead trees with just her and the radio while leaving her bag on the ground at the base of the great tree.

Reaching the top she looked into the far distance among the stands of the dead trees. Squinting her eyes she thought she saw what could be a clearing on the horizon. But it could have just been a river or divot in the terrain rather than a sign of human activity. She’d been fooled before.

But the voices on the radio told her there was somebody nearby. She wedged the antenna in the crown of the tree and climbed back down to sit on a sturdy branch ten or feet below, the wire connecting the transmitter pole to her radio trailing behind her.

She held her device and after a deep breath hit the transmit button.

“Hello? Is anyone there?” She said before hitting the button again and waiting. The voices on the radio stopped.

“H-llo?” one voice said, parts of their speech dissolving into static, “W-o -s t–re?”

Emily reigned in her emotions as she heard another voice in what seemed to be forever.

She kept talking into the radio, but the man on the other end didn’t seem to be understanding her properly.

“S-nding h-licopter. St-y p–t.” the man on the radio said. Emily scrambled down the tree and grabbed her pack. She quickly relocated to the closest natural clearing she could find with her still transmitting radio held at her side.

She waited in the clearing for some time. Without a watch or any other way to keep time beyond day and night, the concept of hours, minutes, and seconds wasn’t so clear to her anymore.

But eventually, she heard the thump, thump, thump, of helicopter blades approaching from the distance. She turned and watched as the helicopter circled her position before slowly lowering down to land in the open space that Emily had found.

The helicopter lowered and settled on the ground, shifting slightly as its weight crushed the accumulated mat of branches and organic matter below it. The blades of the helicopter kept spinning as the side door to the helicopter opened.

Emily froze as she saw the man standing in the doorway. His eyes widened as well as he stared back at her.

“Emily Stenson?” He shouted out over the sound of the helicopter as Emily started walking towards him.

He held out his hand and she grabbed it and he helped her into the helicopter with her heavy pack held on her back.

“Mr. Rose,” Emily shouted, “You made it? But weren’t you at CODA?”

Peter Rose, former leader of CODA, reached behind him and gestured to the headset that he was wearing. He handed another headset to her and she put it on.

“Mr. Rose? You survived?” she said again, “How are you here?”

“I’ll explain everything when we get back,” Peter Rose promised over their headsets as the helicopter blades rumbled and they lifted off of the ground and started flying away, “I’m sure you’ve got a lot to tell us too. We thought we’d already found the last one of us years ago.”

“Found? What are you talking about?”

“People with healing like us,” Mr. Rose said, “Granted by the Shadow. Never thought I’d meet someone else from CODA again, let alone someone as talented as you. You’ll do a lot of good around here.”

“There’s more?” Emily said in excitement, “But wait. How do you know about the healing? I never said anything.”

Mr. Rose’s face went through a variety of expressions before he sighed.

“You have to be,” he said, “Between the still growing ice sheets covering the planet and the high radiation levels, I’d be surprised if anyone else survived past the fifth year. Especially here where all of the bombs dropped. We’re standing in a fatal bath of nuclear radiation right now. The fact that you’re not dead is evidence enough.”

“No…” Emily said, “That’s impossible. What about islands? There should be something…”

“We can only hope,” Mr. Rose agreed, “But we haven’t detected any signs of life from our satellites.”

“Satellites? You have satellites? Wait, fifth year? How long has it been?”

“Yes, we have satellites. I had the codes to the old CODA models and we rigged up a transmitter to communicate with them. Those that survived the bombs EMPs, that is. We haven’t seen any evidence of human settlements besides ours for over seven years now. As for how long… It’s been almost fourteen years now since the bombs dropped.”

“Oh.”

Mr. Rose put a comforting hand on her shoulder as he saw her expression.

“But some of us survived and we can rebuild,” he said, “Not everything is lost. With our powers, I’m sure we’ll find a solution to this eventually.”

She perked up slightly and nodded.

“Thank you, Mr. Rose. I just… hoped that it would be better news.”

“Call me Peter,” Mr. Rose said, sounding a bit amused, “I’m not your boss anymore.”

“Okay… Peter,” Emily said to Mr. Rose, the word feeling strange as it rolled off of her tongue, “I can’t wait to meet everyone.”