In the back of a van parked in the middle of the road Lily sat. Across from her, staring into her soul with a placid expression on its face was a chubby seal plushie. She stared back, as if trying to win this battle of wills.
“That was an explosion.”
The seal didn’t reply.
“It exploded. Like, like, boom!”
Lily was shaking. Her hands hadn’t stopped trembling since they’d stopped. She was not sure she could drive safely, even with no one else on the road. So she’d stopped to discuss with her friend.
“I’d be mad about how absolutely cliche the whole thing was if it hadn’t been so real! I feel like I can still feel it vibrating in my bones. Did I make it explode? How? I asked for answers, not an explosion!”
The seal stared at her, judging.
“Okay, fine. I fucked around with supernatural shit and I found out. That’s my bad. But I’m still in distress. You could at least give me some sympathy here.”
Lily sighed. She was thirsty, but had already finished the one extra bottle she had grabbed. Her muscles didn’t want to work. She was shaking half as much out of exhaustion as adrenaline. She was filthy, covered in ash and grime. She hadn’t showered for days before the world ended, and she’d done nothing but exert herself since.
“I need a bath. But I need to calm down before I can drive. Hmm.”
The seal seemed to agree. Okay, she was projecting. But she felt like she needed to talk or she’d really lose it.
“You’ve been with me through a lot already buddy. We gotta give you a name. How about… Stanly? Nah. George? That just makes me think of Costanza. Maybe something to commemorate this moment? Ash! Ehh, maybe something more positive, and less cool. We aren’t cool in this house, understand? Although, we didn’t look at the explosion! Oh! I got it! Micheal! No. Bay! Bay. Because you’re a seal. And also, explosions! Micheal Bay!”
She grinned. The seal was ambivalent.
“It’s settled. Now what though? I really wanted to find an internet connection, but I’ve been pretty wrecked… Wait. No waffling Lily! You got this. I’m not going to sit here and be indecisive. I need to accept my physical limits. We’re going back to the boat. I need to eat, drink, and bathe. Then we can figure out what’s next. Okay Bay?”
With that settled, she climbed into the driver's seat. Setting the GPS to take her back to the harbor, she set off. The drive was very shaky, but she desperately needed to drink and rest.
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Lily parked next to the burned out shell of her first car. It felt a little awkward, but it was right in front so she might as well. Climbing into the back she collected her things. Bay, one of several clean sets of clothes, and… Her vase. She stopped.
The everburning flame was out. She might have to rename it. Wait, no. More importantly, since when? She tried to remember. She saw it burning higher in front of the green flame. Why was it out now? Was it out for good? More like neverburning flame. Lily shook her head. Her mind kept drifting because she was a wreck, but this seemed important.
She grabbed the vase and climbed out of her van. Oh well. She’d give it a careful examination. Maybe in the bath. But for now, it was time to return to her boat. She checked the ropes holding it to the dock to be sure nothing had changed. She wasn’t sure she’d done the best job securing it, but it seemed to be good enough.
Although if a storm came in she might want to work harder on it. But, now wasn’t the time. She ascended the ramp, and entered her little cabin. Tossing down her things, she let herself fall forward onto the bed.
“Everything’s so hard, Bay. I did it. I faced down that stupid fire. But I can’t keep going at this pace. I have limits. Even with plenty of sleep, and a nap, my body just can’t keep this up. I’m not strong enough. I’m injured. My muscles are worn to the point of barely obeying me. The cold this morning really fucked me up. What can I do? Do I take care of myself first, and miss out on my chances to secure a lot of things? Or, do I keep pushing myself like this, damn the consequences?”
Bay seemed contemplative. Well, regardless she was already here at the boat. She had to do some self care. So, she got up, and grabbed a bottle of water. Heading to the bathroom, she started the water running for a bath.
“Hmm. I wonder where this water comes from? I probably have to fill up somewhere, right…?” Lily wished she had a better understanding of the technology that was now so important to her life. Well, she’d just have to learn!
When the bath was filled, she got up and did a few last minute things to prep. She gathered clean clothes, her neverburning vase, her phone, a towel, and a couple oranges. Then she undressed and slowly lowered herself into the bath.
The warm water felt like it was melting the tension off of her muscles as she sank in. A slight groan escaped her lips as the feeling washed over her. “Fuck that’s good.”
Lily closed her eyes and just enjoyed the sensation for a few minutes. She reflected on her day. She should be proud of herself, right? She had done a lot of good. Well, not as much as the first day but she was contending with her ruined body. So, it evened out. Today wasn’t over! She’d figure out something productive she could do when she was out of the bath too.
So why didn’t she feel proud of herself? That had been bothering her. She just felt… tired. The intellectual part of her mind was arguing with the emotional one. Intellectually, she knew she’d accomplished more in the last two days than she would have in a year if left to her own devices. Emotionally though…
She recoiled inwardly from even allowing herself to be introspective about her emotions. But, if not now then when? So, she let herself sink into it. Emotionally, she just felt worn down, more than anything. She still felt hopeless. Sure, she had done a few good things. It was day two. She was sure the dominoes that led to her death had already started falling. She just didn’t see what horrible mistake she’d made would kill her yet. Because she was incompetent.
No, she told herself. No. That’s stupid. She should be proud. If anything, she’d learned that she was actually very adaptable if push came to shove. Sure, she was a traumatized wreck of a human. But trauma did help sometimes. She felt weirdly like she was more suited for the end of the world than a simple shopping trip. In a way, that had been proven. She could do this. Even if it hurt. Even if it ground her down and down until there was hardly anything left of her mind and body.
So, why did she feel this way? Probably emotional exhaustion. At some point she was going to have to stop rushing and emotionally process everything that had happened. Everyone was gone. Why didn’t she care more about that? The stars were gone. A sickening dread filled her thinking about that. Nope. Nope. Nope. Not ready for that can of worms yet.
She jolted upright and her eyes popped open, stuffing those thoughts down as deeply as she could. “Okay. Let’s focus on something else huh? Yeah, something else.”
She turned her attention to the vase. She upturned it, dumping the little piece of wood into her hands, and staring at it up close. It was definitely wood. It seemed surprisingly unburned, despite having been definitely on fire. A couple parts of it looked singed, but otherwise… it was just a piece of wood. So why was it on fire before? Why was it not on fire now?
Lily stared at it. Okay. This and the green fire had been… anomalies. Supernatural junk? Magic? Lily always had felt weird about the idea of magic. In some stories magic is just an asspull that can make things happen without having to explain them. That kind of magic was stupid. The other kind of magic, where everything adhered to a logical system of how it worked… well, it was hard to even call that magic right? You can use whatever word you want for it, but if it’s a natural force that behaves in a predictable and observable way, then magic is just applied science to a system that isn’t like the physics of our world, right?
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So, which kind of supernatural was this? Was random stuff happening around her that she’d never be able to explain? Or, was this just a new set of rules this world now worked on? If it was the latter, she just needed to understand them. If she could understand the rules, she could work around them, or even use them to her advantage.
Fine. She would believe in magic, but not as some mysterious uncontrollable force. She would learn the rules. She would apply the scientific method, figure out how these anomalies worked, and then… do good things with them. Like not exploding. Yeah.
But, right now she needed to focus on the wood. It wasn’t on fire. Why wasn’t it on fire? It had been earlier. She assumed the explosion had somehow made it go out. Although, that could just be a coincidence. Earlier she had been able to see something in the air interacting with the green fire. Was that stuff important?
Lily took a deep breath. “Observation mode, activate!” She tried to clear her mind and focus on seeing the world around her rather than being in her own head. Observe everything. Everything.
Lily was in a bathtub. It was a nice large bathtub, and despite her being tall for a girl she was able to fit in it nicely. The water was warm, and steam was rising from it ever so slightly. The bathroom itself was a little cramped between the bathtub, sink, and toilet. But it was serviceable, and each of those things was quite nice despite there not being much space around them. The walls were wood paneling painted white. The tile floor was white with black dots between the tiles. The sink was done in a modern minimalistic style that didn’t particularly fit the rest of the room. Her clothes were laying atop the toilet, spread out for her to put on when she was done. The towel was on the floor next to her, with her phone resting on it. And in her hands was a piece of wood.
It was small. She could close her hands around it. It seemed to be an ordinary piece of wood. Was there anything abnormal about it? Anything at all? She dipped it in the water. It got wet. She tried to tear a small piece off. She couldn’t. But that was hardly conclusive, she was weak as shit and exhausted.
“What is different about you?”
She waved it over the bath water, and caught something. It was very small. But, she had a sense for it. She squinted. No, somehow it wasn’t really sight that she was using to sense it. Still, she stared as hard as she could. Something was around the wood. She could tell. Something wasn’t quite right about the air around the wood. Well, not the air exactly.
She moved it back and forth again. Yeah. When she moved it, it was a little easier to see. Because the effect was around the wood, not just on it. Moving it made it change more than holding it stationary so it was easier to catch. She continued waving it back and forth slowly.
After a few minutes of this, she was pretty sure she could see it while it was still too. There was something off. It seemed to be coming out of the wood? Leaking slowly. Like a gas leak, but one that stayed generally around the wood itself. It was more of a halo than a sphere, but it was hard to tell what angle it wanted to keep around the wood. Except… there was one part where the stuff was just leaking off completely. Like a popped cell, it seemed to hold together around the wood, but not right there. There it was just leaking off into the air. It wasn’t huge, and the stuff seemed to dissipate when it passed through there.
“Hmm. Are you… broken? Is that what happened?”
So then, how did she fix it? She tried to touch the broken part, but her hand went right through. Of course. If this stuff could be touched, she would have felt it by now. Wait.. she… did feel it? She ran her hand through that spot again. It was very, very subtle. But she could kind of feel it. Only in the spot where it was leaking and the stuff was moving the fastest. It was tingly. A little like static electricity in the air.
She half smiled, half grimaced at the wood. “You and I aren't going to be like Marie Curie and Radium, right? I discover you, you kill me with some horrible magical illness for it?”
She focused, and tried to pinch closed the bit that was leaking with her fingers. Nothing changed. So, she shrugged and put the wood down on the side of the tub. “Well, I don’t have to figure out every mystery on day two. Maybe I can find another spooky spot and try to repair you there?”
She sank up to her nose in the bathwater. The water was starting to get cooler at this point. But it felt so good to be even sort of clean. This had been the right call. She would need to honestly think about what she could do with the rest of her night that wouldn’t damage her body. If she hurt herself too much, she was going to ruin her chances of survival. Preserving knowledge aside.
She grabbed her phone and decided to do one last thing before getting out of the bath. Carefully holding it so that it wasn’t over the bathwater, she popped open youtube, and looked up “How to anchor a boat.”
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Now clothed and sitting on the front of her boat (Prow? Bow?) Lily held her head in her hands. She glanced at her anchor, now deployed properly. Well, mostly. To get it set properly, she would really need to unhitch the boat from the dock, but now she knew what she had gotten wrong.
You were supposed to give it a lot of slack, not none. Also, usually you threw the boat in reverse and gently pulled back until the anchor caught on something. That way you knew it was set, and the slack prevents it from being pulled ever so slightly off a ledge and then not anchoring you to anything if you never go back to a point that shallow. Last night her anchor had just been dangling into the sea, not touching anything! No wonder she had drifted!
“I’m so dumb! Ugh! Okay. I know how to do it properly now at least.”
She opened her phone. “What other knowledge do I need in the short term?” It was 4 PM. The sun would be down in about 4 hours. Already a few of the links she had clicked didn’t work. Youtube was still up and running, but google searches could be a bit spotty. The searches worked just fine, but the links… not so much.
A couple of them had cached versions she could still access though. Besides, youtube had been a good resource. It was funny, she’d actually signed up for their premium service in the last hour. Why not? Money didn’t matter anymore, it was automated so it still worked, and no ads with the ability to download videos so they would be available for 29 days after the internet stopped working? Perfect.
She’d been clicking through and downloading how to videos for a huge variety of different things. How to install solar panels, how to maintain a boat, how to fill the fresh water tanks on your boat, how to pilot your boat, how to purify water, how to siphon gas, how to grow crops, how to milk a cow, how to care for chickens, and more. Anytime a thought occurred to her, she was popping open the app and downloading the first three results for ‘How to X’. She would watch them later. Right now she just had to make sure she had them.
She should have done this this morning. Clothes or no clothes, going out into town had been stupid. Her body needed to recover. She understood that a bit better now. The bath had been refreshing, but she could have caused permanent damage from overexertion, or worse. If she hadn’t been fast enough, that explosion would have killed her.
There was a difference between being proactive and being dangerously cavalier. As it is, she was dreading her next step. It was time to take the boat out again, she’d decided. She was going to drive (pilot?) it north along the coast and look for a still standing house with a private dock. She knew rich houses sometimes had them, so if she could find one that wasn’t burned down, she wanted to. That would give her a home base to work from that she could access her boat from.
Then she’d scout nearby houses in whatever rich neighborhood it was to find one that had an operational internet connection. Or! Wait. Was satellite internet a thing? It was, right? She would look for a house with a dock and satellite dishes. They might still have a connection. Rich houses were pretty likely to have solar power around here too. All in all, it seemed like a good solution. Lily was sure she’d still have to go out scavenging tomorrow either way. She still wanted a cow and some chickens, and if she waited too long they were going to be a lot more difficult to find.
In the meantime, Lily had a few things to do. She unloaded her van the rest of the way, carefully leaving it unlocked with the keys on the driver’s seat. She pulled up the anchor, still kicking herself for yesterday night. Then she headed down onto the dock to untie the ropes holding the boat there. That was quite a process. Would this be so annoying every single time, or would she eventually get used to it?
As she was untying the bit from the back she noticed something. The boat had a name. Well, most boats did. But she hadn’t thought to check it before now. I mean, it wasn’t really important was it? Printed on the back of the boat was ‘Beloved Lily’. Lily stared at the text. That was a coincidence, right? People named boats after women. So, it was just a coincidence, right? Her stomach roiled.
“Oh, I don’t like that. Okay. Think, Lily. Think!” How had this happened? We have ‘magic’. Even if she didn’t understand the rules of it yet, supernatural things were clearly possible now. So, what combination of rules had made a boat appear out of midair right when she would need it? That was a lot more complicated than an explosion, or a piece of wood that burned weird. A boat was… a boat! But more than that, it couldn’t have just been grabbed from her mind or something. She didn’t know how it worked, or all the features it had. Not to mention…
Beloved Lily.
She would never have named a boat that. Not on any level of her consciousness. It was a silly thing to get hung up on in some regards. Really, the boat appearing at all was still a huge mystery. But something about this really stuck in Lily’s mind. She had been willing to assume (at least for now) that she had conjured the boat somehow. But the boat having a name like this seemed to contradict that. She had been feeling beyond hateful towards herself when it had arrived. So, what gives?
Well, she was sure she wasn’t going to get any answers just from staring at it. So, she finished untying it and went back inside. She grabbed her portable blu ray player, and a few things to watch, and sat down at the captain’s seat. Making sure her phone was properly downloading videos, she started up the boat and carefully pulled away from the dock and into the harbor. She oriented herself north, and accelerated to a nice comfortable speed.
Weirdness aside, she thought she was finally starting to get used to this.