Sickles began live ammo training at 4:30 am every morning on the dot, waking up every Sickle in the Marriott as an intentional alarm clock. We then had twenty minutes to brush our teeth and put on our clothes before basic, which never truly ended for us. Sickles needed to stay fit to protect Uncle Sam, so we started at 5 with a run that ended at 5:45, allowing us a short break to prepare for our duties at 6.
That gray and rainy day in June was no exception. My boots splashed over puddles on 1st Ave, watching streams roll to storm drains—singing cadences, with one officer leading the tune and all the Sickles following.
“To pro~ve you’re a~man!”
“To pro~ve you’re a~man!”
“You must wipe it with your~hand!”
“You must wipe it with your~hand!”
“Stranded.”
Enlisted soldiers laughed as we passed, voices drowned out by the sound of early morning gunfire. It must’ve been Tuesday because the Sickles were doing tracing drills. A drone carrying rifter meat flew around the harbor, wrapped in a Chinese dragon costume, as Sickles shot at it with sniper rifles. The incendiary shots were visible even during the day—burning red hot. One hit the dragon, burning brightly in the sky as it flew around. Yet the officer hit his receiver and began yelling. “Green Delta trace failed! I repeat, Delta trace failed. Aim literally anywhere else!” The Sickle’s officer turned to her. “Congrats! Now everyone’s shootin’ at your mistake!”
“I-I’m sorry!” the Sickle said.
I ignored the scene playing out and kept running, keeping pace, seamlessly switching from the bastardized Eagles cadence onto a classic rendition of “Mama, Mama Can’t You See?”
What the Marine Corps done to me?
A fresh Sickle running behind me couldn’t ignore the scene, so he asked, “W-Why are they doing that? She hit it….” The Chinese dragon was still burning in the air with a flare-like burn happening where the fire was shot.
“’Cause she didn’t hit the core,” I whispered. “Look, unless you’re a sniper, you’re not gonna kill a Delta with one shot. That’s why tracers tag the general area with an incendiary, allowing anyone with infrared to know where to shoot. But what happens if the Sickle shoots something that isn’t anywhere near the core, and everyone fires at it?” He fell silent, understanding. “Yeah,” I concluded.
“But… isn’t that hard?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yeah, it’s hard. That’s why you gotta stay just above par so they don’t nomina—“
“I don’t hear you singing!” the officer yelled.
“Louder, louder!” I yelled, earning some chuckles. It was a pun because that type of chastisement was meant to say, I can’t hear you! to the group, so the soldiers said Louder, louder to raise the volume. The officer thought it was amusing, so he picked it up louder as he led the pack.
“And if I die in a combat zone!”
“And if I die in a combat zone!”
“Box me up and ship me home!”
“Box me up and ship me home!” I exhaled deeply and kept running, preparing for my Reaping duty.
2
I met Lieutenant Rudd at the east gate of Pike Street, right across from the iconic Pike’s Place Market sign, which was perfectly preserved, only increasing its post-apocalyptic feel somehow. He was surrounded by three teams of five and one of four, the fifth being me. It seemed everyone was there fifteen to thirty minutes early and was waiting for me. It was awkward.
I saluted Rudd. “Reporting for duty, Sir!”
“Welcome,” Rudd said absently. He sounded distant, even for him, as if he were living out some strange and lucid Lovecraftian dreamscape, and the peacemaker had finally arrived to guide him home. “Join your team. I’d tell you to behave, but everyone was pleased by… whatever you did on the Lunk. So keep it up.”
“Was that a compliment?”
“No, it was a prayer.” He flicked his fingers twice, and I turned around to find my normal Scavenging party—and a new woman who gave me the chills. It wasn’t her appearance that bothered me. She had blonde hair under a green felt adventuring hat and a body made for a sundress (whatever that meant—it doesn’t make sense, but if you took one look at that woman, you would’ve thought the same). Beyond that, she was probably 27 but looked like she was born to be 35, having one of those egg-shaped heads that aggressively rejected pretty girl makeup contouring, but always looked damn friendly before, during, and after college, children, and divorce. If she baked pie, I’d eat it on my deathbed. Guaranteed. No, what bothered me was that serene confidence on her face, as if we weren’t about to journey into a monster-festered hellscape, risking our lives for morphine and chocolate bars. She looked like Akash.
“Ah, don’t be nervous, hun,” she said in a befitting Southern accent. “I don’t bite.”
“Wish she did,” someone whispered behind me.
I looked back, emotionally stressed, after spending a life learning to avoid workplace harassment like the plague. After all, this woman wasn’t normal. If she was a Sickle, sure, whatever. The simple fact was the law didn’t care about us, so if people were dicks, the Sickles duked it out with social laws and tribal violence. Since not everything was worth the war, language and culture were much more lax. That said, when it came to officers and breathers and guests, those careful rules multiplied, becoming oppressive and dire. So I said, “Sorry about them. There’s always a few bad ones,” as I looked back.”
“Ah, don’t pay them no mind,” she said. “Come thirty, I’ll be beggin’ for the ‘tention. Just don’t start none of that funny business, and y'all'll be fine, ya hear?”
“Uh…” I looked at Fiona for her confirmation. The woman was just like me, distinctly an ethnicity but almost disappointedly American. Only instead of Japanese, she was distinctly Irish with bright red hair and freckles but a West Coast accent, Seattle attitude, and habit of wearing “Mom jeans” and white “Dad shoes” as a style trend when she was off. She took one look at me and mentally communicated, Don’t you fucking dare before turning back.
Caleb and Jamal—the other two people on our team—laughed. I frowned.
“Don’t you go ‘round worrying about her neither.” Suddenly, I felt aether wrapping around my cheeks like smooth, caressing hands as the southern woman spoke. It made my body warm and fuzzy and content, and a thin shiver of non-sexual pleasure moved from my spinal cord to my limbs, and her voice, it came down almost aetherial, half in my head and half out, creating this distorted, hallucinogenic experience when she talked to me. “The name’s Laura,” she said in a trance. “Laura Marington and you’re fine by me. What’cha do with her or anyone else is your business. Ya hear?”
“Uh….” I felt inclined to answer immediately but didn’t like speaking without thinking, so I drew from my trace Sena reserves to slow the world down. Instead of slowing, something aggressive happened. The Sena shot through my brain like a crack of a whip, and the clouded glass I was looking through suddenly shattered, allowing me to breathe and see and feel normally again.
I took a deep breath. “What was that?”
“Nothin’ but the breeze, hun,” Laura said with a strange smile, ignoring the water drizzling down on the ground around us. “So let’s enjoy it.”
I didn’t know what to make of it, but I can tell you this: from the moment I met Laura Marington, I knew she was a terrifying individual. I caught all of this in an instant as if I had seen a picture for a few seconds before passing it off—and I never forgot it. But maybe it was her face or her gentle eyes, filled with amusement, intrigue, and sincerity, but I couldn’t find it in myself to hate her after testing me. That said, no matter how much I may have liked or believed in or trusted Laura Marington in the future—I would never let my guard down around her again. That was a guarantee.
3
I used to say that Seattle Metro was 20 minutes from everywhere. It was far too expensive to live in the city, so people lived in Burien and Renton and Kent and Bothel and Redmond and North Gate and literally anywhere else but Seattle. And no matter where someone lived, it was at least a 20-minute drive (or $60 Uber) to anywhere you wanted. And when people wanted to meet up, they normally met up in Seattle proper, hitting Capitol Hill, University District (where University Washington was), or, ironically, Pioneer Square, Occidental Square, and Waterfront Park—all of which were in Pier Zero. Wherever you lived, it was the same—you would drive and see massive buildings forty to seventy stories up, carving black silhouettes into the sunset and then lighting up bright as beacons of progress.
Things had changed.
The ride to Redtown—which was in the area where Redmond once stood—was bleak. We got into Humvees and passed through two checkpoints, rolling through fifty-foot, turret-lined walls made of reinforced concrete and steel gates. The moment we exited the walls, we got a bleak yet picturesque view of Seattle proper—a city of broken skyscrapers.
The first rift that opened in Washington opened right next to Columbia Center, a 70-story office building that pierced the skies. The stalks immediately crashed through the windows on live camera, ate thousands of office workers, and then built nests in it. Not a month later, the military evacuated all citizens in the region and used statistically-fired missiles to demolish the buildings. The Goliath structures crashed down on the buildings, vehicles, and roadways without distinction, creating a shattered wasteland of steel and glass. Those skyscrapers were still visible from a distance. Some lined the roads like fallen trees; others leaned on other buildings, charred black from additional missiles—pumped full of chemicals to keep the stalks out.
We took an exit for I-5, a highway that was remarkably well preserved, considering that the highways were effectively shut down the day of the Rapture. Turns out, a ten-car pile-up is all it takes to shut down a six-lane highway, and there were massive thirty-car pile-ups on both sides from people who tried to break up the piles like breaking in a game of pool.
To deal with the thousands of cars on the highway, the government had soldiers put all the cars into neutral and then pushed them off the road with snow plows, creating an eerie scene with cars pushed on either side of the road, leaving only a narrow path for one vehicle. That’s what we were weaving through.
“And oh, bless her heart,” Laura said, recounting a story about her niece to Caleb and Jamal. “Poor girl was so determined to get that ribbon back that she done got stuck in the washer machine.”
Caleb and Jamal snorted with laughter as we drove down the highway, wind in our faces. Fiona and I were silent for other reasons. Fiona had a self-victimization problem before becoming a Sickle, and then becoming a Sickle validated all her concerns, making her even louder and hated until she just decided to keep quiet, and I, for one, didn’t want to talk to a psychopath that fucked with my mind.
“So how’d she get out?” Caleb asked.
“Well, I found her, of course,” Laura said. “She was kicking her cute little legs around like she was ridin’ a bike, pumping back and forth, screaming ‘help me!’” The guys snorted with laughter, and I smiled. “And it was just so damn funny, I couldn’t even help her. So she starts flailing and screaming, voice reboundin’ out of the drum like a microphone, and her father comes runnin’ in. He sees me laughin’, her screamin’, and he thinks I’m torturin’ his daughter. So he yells, ‘What are you doin’?’ But I swear on the book this man took one step into the room, saw his little peach, and burst into laughter with me.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose as the others laughed.
Laura continued telling this story until we hit 520 East—and the true adventure began.
Let’s start with some context. Seattle’s surrounded by water. It’s not exactly an island, but it’s close. To the west is the Puget Sound, a channel that separates the United States from Canada. To the east was Lake Washington, which separates Seattle from Mercer Island, Bellevue, and Redmond, which now house the Mercy, Belltown, and Redtown sanctuaries.
We started in Seattle. That meant that we had to take a massive bridge over maw-infested waters. And this bridge had been through hell. Like everything else, it was gridlocked at the beginning of the Rapture. Then, stalks and claws swooped, growled, and pounced, ripping the cars and people apart. Eventually, the military went to reclaim the bridge and ended up in massive firefights with beasts throwing around cars and blowing chunks out of the bridge. The only reason it was still around was because it didn’t have suspension lines that stalks could crash into. But it did have another problem—
—it was a floating bridge.
That’s right. It floats. It has to be because the waterbed is too soft.
You may be wondering how they made a bridge float. Well, I’ll tell you: they create massive hollow blocks of reinforced concrete and throw them into the water—and they float. The concrete. It floats.
Now, I’m not going to get into buoyancy because I have absolutely no fucking clue how it works. All I know is that if metal boats can transfer 60,000 tons of dry grain over the ocean, it shouldn’t be that surprising that one ton of concrete can also float. Or, that if one of these concrete breaks and fills with water, the bridge will collapse. And considering that the Governor Albert D. Rosellini Bridge is the largest floating bridge in history, and its floating on maw-infested waters, it cranks up the danger level to the maximum degree. Most importantly, the bridge had two broken pontoons—and was bobbing.
The reason we were being sent over was because 520 was the main highway between Belltown and Redtown, so we had to clear out monsters.
It was going way too smoothly until we hit the bridge. The water beyond the small white railing started boiling with flopping fish, and the actual bridge groaned, moving slightly like a classic scale getting pushed down and released.
“I fucking hate this part,” Jamal said, gripping his stomach.
“Get your shit together,” Caleb said. “I don’t wanna die because of your seasickness.”
I ignored them and looked around, waiting for the screech of stalks. They always came when the fish started jumping. It was just a matter of when.
“Start the grill,” Rudd said over the radio.
“Roger,” Laura said, taking the lead.
She tossed out jerky to the rest of us. Then she radioed in again. “Permission to give Private Nakamura Sena meat.”
The line remained dead for about a minute before Rudd came online, releasing a long sigh. “Why?”
“The stalks are a comin’, and they’re comin’ hard. Having a sena on cleanup only makes sense.”
I chewed on my jerky in confusion. It was dry as a rock and barely activated God’s Vision. In fact, I’m not sure if it did. My ability to see aether just kinda flipped on like it did during my fight with Kensey. Maybe it was just triggered by the meat. I wasn’t sure. There was something different about me.
Rudd sighed. “Will you take responsibility?”
Laura chuckled. “Oh, hun. You know I would, but people only blame the actin’ officer.”
There was a long pause. “Don’t die,” Rudd said.
Click.
“Ain’t he a peach?” Laura said, pulling out a separate bag and throwing me a piece of jerky. Caleb, Jama, and Fiona watched in envy. Traited meat increased survival rates. “Eat up.”
I watched her like a hawk as I took a bite—and then almost spit it out. It wasn’t sena jerky. There wasn’t a grill. My tongue didn’t even tingle. It was just normal beef jerky.
Laura smiled at me. I glowered at her.
Caleb looked at me and then the meat, silently communicating that he’d like me to share. I ignored him and popped the rest into my mouth, chewing it while glowering at Laura, who was feeding off my annoyance.
“What’s your problem?” Fiona asked.
“Nothing,” I said, sitting back and looking at the sky. I was fucked without sena meat if there were a lot of stalks.
Don’t worry, Laura said directly into my mind.
My eyes shot open, and I looked at her.
Her eyes widened innocently. “What?”
“Oh, my fucking God…” I seethed.
Oh, hush now, she telepathically communicated. You can’t learn gatherin’ if you actually start grillin’, and I can’t teach you ‘bout sena control if people could hear me.
I narrowed my eyes at her, puzzled.
Keep lookin’ like that, and everyone’s liable to figure us out, Laura grinned.
I turned away and looked to the sky. How are you doing this? I thought.
There were about thirty seconds of silence until my eyebrow twitched.
If you’re tryin’ to talk, I’m sorry, but that ain’t happenin’ anytime soon, Laura said. You can’t gather, let alone link.
I frowned.
So? You wanna get started? Laura asked, stretching her limbs and grabbing her rifle. That’s when I knew shit was going to get out of hand again.