A new day dawned on a new world, the old one having finally reached its end. Just not quite as expected.
The end of the world came and went, but not with a fizzle and not with a bang; but rather, with ten billion tiny shudders. No global calamity swept through the continents, no war escalated to fill the globe, no invasion ravaged the the cities and town, no plague or pandemic destroyed the population. Instead, the end of the world of human civilization turned out to be terrifyingly unremarkable, but devastatingly unstoppable.
Everyone, literally everyone had seen worse, or so they thought. In comparison to the natural disasters in recorded history, their own corner of the global apocalypse rated perhaps a 2 out of 10 in severity. Every tiny disaster was easy to understand and well within our ability to predict. Explosives exploded, flammables flamed, and technology broke down.
The problem was that it happened all at once.
In the end, every last city eventually fell, to one degree or another, but not to war or famine or zombie invasion. Rather, each city and town, each metropolis and concrete jungle collapsed entirely under its own weight. The loss of facilities, loss of connection, loss of transportation and utilities and emergency services all compounded in a way that brought the world's cities to a frustratingly unspectacular demise. It turned out to be mankind's dependence on their own fragile expectations that made the small disasters impossible to manage. Then one city after another was laid to waste by the combination of countless little failures and our inability to address them as the infrastructure of daily life was consumed in otherwise manageable fires or floods or human panic.
The impact of the apocalypse was therefore entirely within the range of risk that everyone accepts as a normal part of modern life. The distance of our fall was never greater than the height of our climb. Unfortunately, by the time the collapse arrived, mankind had climbed so very high.
Still, that wasn't the whole picture, it was only the apocalypse.
The end of the world came and went, but that was just the end. That was just the scenery. That was just the canvas upon which the ink of this new history was to be drawn. The end of every story, after all, is just some other beginning.
And in the beginning, the morning descended like a hangover.
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Samantha was the first to wake. She tried to go back to sleep, but her whole body ached and throbbed. Worst of all was her left arm, the one that had been torn open by the coyote. It had been gruesomely awful to look at last night, like an aggressively personalized anatomy lesson. Now the injury throbbed hot in her veins with every heartbeat.
Despite the eye-watering pain, it had clearly improved quite a lot overnight. Two of the muscles had been torn completely in half in the attack, and Evelyn had magically reattached it all without even using stitches. It hurt like hot metal in her forearms to move her fingers, but at least now she actually could move her fingers. She had gone to bed the previous night unsure whether she would ever be able to use her left hand again. Whether the extent of this progress was all due to something about Samantha's amazing constitution or just to Evelyn's use of healing magic was not a settled question. Evelyn had insisted that her healing ability was hampered beyond all reason by her lack of mana. However, Samantha had been injured enough times before to know that her degree of recovery was unnatural to say the least.
As for the healer herself, Evelyn slept next to her father on some blankets strewn out on the floor in front of the banked fire. They both looked like they had reluctantly stopped whatever they were working on last night. They had made minimal preparation for bed and instead simply dropped, unable to push themselves any further. As far as Samantha knew, they could have fallen asleep only moments ago.
The common room was nearly silent; just the sounds of sleeping and breathing and the occasional rustling of blankets. Faint light filtered in through the tall windows, but the fog outside made it hard to tell the time. Perhaps 5am. Her sleep has been plagued by unnatural nightmares, arguably not a surprise given what she'd gone though. Now awake, she felt far from rested. Once again, she tried and failed to go back to sleep, the pounding in her forearm constantly interrupting her every time she tried to clear her mind.
David's left arm had served as Samantha's pillow for most of the night, and she continued to lean against him now. She absently ran the fabric of his sweatshirt between her fingers thinking about David's own injuries hidden beneath that shirt. His skin had been shredded to tatters by the mountain lion last night. Sitting next to him, she felt tempted to have a peek and perhaps compare his recovery to her own, curious to find out whether he was in any better condition to take on whatever awaited them. The thought of going outside again amongst all those teeth and claws made her shiver with anxiety, so she tucked her knees to her chest and pulled up the blankets to cover her eyes.
Left in the silence with nothing but her thoughts, she found her mind again replaying the events of the previous night. It more than simply frightened her; it haunted her. She had always known that she wasn't a fighter, but never had that fact been put so starkly on display as during the animal attacks. When she and Gary had been attacked, they had simply flailed about in half a panic. Neither of the animals should have been particularly dangerous, and yet she and Gary were both lucky to have made it home at all.
By contrast, David had been attacked by a creature capable of slaughtering their entire group in a matter of seconds. He had even been ambushed from behind. And yet he had grabbed the monster with one hand and beaten it senseless with the other, and then kicked it away like a football as if to show it just how lucky it was to escape rather than the other way around. This difference between the two fights was dramatic and telling. It showed her not only what was possible, but also how far behind she truly was.
Samantha continued to hide under the blankets, ostensibly because the morning was cold, but mostly because she kept scaring herself. Her wandering mind, always a source of trouble even in the best of times, now kept stumbling into the shadows and returning with new intrusive thoughts about what terrors waited for her just out of sight. She saw glowing, hateful eyes in the darkness and felt pressure on her mind to just give in and let the shadows claim her. She tried to push it out of her head and bury the waking nightmares with distraction. But the pull from the darkness never went away, always waiting there just below the surface. She held David's arm to anchor herself to something real, and she counted her heartbeats like the ticking of a clock to occupy her mind in the silence.
Time passed ever so slowly, and eventually everyone woke up. Samantha could tell when someone awoke because they would, without fail, immediately start complaining about how badly everything hurt. Everyone, that is, except Evelyn. Evelyn, bless that girl's kind soul, agonized instead over how badly everyone else hurt, and how little she felt like she was doing to fix it all. Altogether, things did not look good; everyone severely needed healing except for the healer who couldn't meaningfully heal anyone at all. Even their most conservative plans about what they intended to accomplish that day seemed ludicrously ambitious as their reality became more clear.
The day started out reasonably enough, all injuries considered, because David took it upon himself to cook and clean despite his condition. His injuries made him tense up and hiss with almost every movement, but he still made breakfast for everyone, got the fire burning again, and even washed the dishes. Originally, Samantha just let him go at it. She had offered to help several times, but he insisted and told her not to worry about it. She didn't like it, but it felt wrong for her to just step in and take charge in someone else's house.
But halfway through her pancakes she realized that this wasn't actually David's house either. He had forcefully stepped in to do all the housework so that Evelyn and Gary wouldn't think it was their responsibility. Everyone needed those two to instead work on fixing the magic; nobody else could do it for them. Staring down at her fork, Samantha realized that David wasn't the boss of the housework any more than she was. So, from that point forward, she worked side by side with him on every task while ignoring his constant grumbling that he could do it himself. She only had one usable hand, but even her one good hand was still 50% more hands than David had without her.
The day progressed, full of rest and chores and vague worries about the uncertain future.
One of Gary's inventions from last night, a "collection array" he called it, did more than just power things like his new lightbulb marble. By pulling in mana from the environment, it also allowed them to charge gems much faster. This helped, but not nearly enough, and Evelyn continued to ration her healing. It turned out, though, that Samantha and Gary had self-healed far more quickly than the others. They didn't know why this was the case, but the reduced strain on Evelyn's resources was a welcome reprieve.
For most of the day, Gary and Evelyn worked quietly at the table in the common room, with a growing collection of papers covered in strange drawings scattered around them in messy piles on the table, chairs, and floor. These occasionally glowed with colored light and seemed to affect the world around them in odd ways when the lines on the pages lit up. Little gusts of air puffed into existence. Pens and cups and discarded cutlery moved about on their own and once even levitated for a brief moment. At one point, Gary set his lunch on top of one of those drawings, and his half-finished bowl of soup flash-froze with a loud snap, while at the same time, the chicken sandwich went up in flames. As Gary dashed to remove the burning lunch from their workspace, Evelyn just glanced up, shook her head, and went back to work, muttering something about conservation of energy and being more careful about side effects.
Sometime in the early afternoon, Dana got involved and began learning the art of creating those magical drawings with Gary and Evelyn. Her injuries still made walking nearly impossible, but Evelyn had stabilized her enough that she could safely, if perhaps painfully, sit up with the two of them at the table. Bringing her up to speed on how the magic research worked took some time. Still, Dana was nothing if not a fast learner, and her involvement promised to speed things up in the future.
With the three of them occupying the common room doing important work, Samantha and David hauled James outside to help them with the chores and give the other three a little quiet and space to work.
The Cabin was built on the side of a hill. Technically there was a whole mountain back there, but you wouldn't know from looking out over the back deck, as the trees were just that tall. The backyard, if you can call over 400 acres of pasture a "backyard," sloped upward away from the house about a quarter mile. To the left stood the newer buildings, including a machine shop for tinkering on inventions and storage for stuff that didn't fit in the basement. Past the shop, a trail ran to the neighbor's house where Samantha had been staying. To the right lay the bulk of the property, including the horse stables and pasture. A bit further away stood a disused greenhouse which, for reasons that probably made sense 30 years ago, was separated from the stables on two sides by a high cinderblock wall. Finally, straight back from the house and occupying the majority of the view lay a small slice of mountain paradise, including a tiny creek with a small, beautifully overdone wooden bridge.
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It was a few hours till sundown and the day had been going pretty well given the circumstances.
Samantha was out taking care of the horses with James when she heard David swearing at something. Despite how terribly fun it was to shovel horse manure, her curiosity got the better of her and she took a break to find out what seemed to be the problem.
"What seems to be the problem?" she asked, trotting up the hill to where David stood with hands on his hips and a frown on his face. Nobody could frown quite like David. He scowled at the structure in front of him as though it had just insulted his cooking.
"The problem? This. Right here," he said, pointing at something Samantha had previously always just ignored. It looked like a concrete pipe sticking straight up a few feet out of the ground, just wide enough to crawl inside, assuming claustrophobia was your jam. The pipe ended around waist height with something like a lightweight manhole cover, which David had opened in order to peer inside.
"Is that for the water?" asked Samantha, taking a look for herself.
The concrete housing apparently just provided protection for a small inspection port. The rest of the cistern was buried, a huge tank made of what looked like plastic or fiberglass. David stepped back so that Samantha could see better. It was too dark inside to make out any detail, but with effort she could see a shimmering surface a long way down.
"Exactly. We pump water out of the well right over there," he said, pointing to a small shack even further up the hill, "and we keep this tank topped off pretty much all the time. But with the power out, the pumps aren't running and we're slowly draining the cistern."
"You're saying that this was completely full yesterday?"
David grunted an affirmative.
"And you call this draining 'slowly'?" she asked, looking at the water level.
"Hmpf, sounds like you spotted the problem. Good job."
"Are we screwed?"
"Yep."
"Can we fix it?"
"Nah, it's not actually broken. It's just that some of this water system works differently when the power is out, and I forgot to take that into account. Gary rarely ever runs this house without the generators anymore, and it's been a while since that was important."
"So what do we do?"
David shrugged. "We need pumps. I don't think it's safe to try to run a generator right now; it would probably just blow up in our face like Dana's did. But water pumps don't have to be electric, so maybe we can rig up something mechanical."
"Hmm. That sounds..." she tried to imagine what a purely mechanical pump would even entail, but nothing came to mind. Nothing at all. "That sounds complicated," she concluded, "how long do you think it'll take?"
"Honestly? I have no idea. First we have to figure out what we can even do. Hopefully not long, though, obviously."
"How long will the water last, then?"
"Maybe... the rest of the evening? Probably tonight as well."
"Huh," she said. She wasn't sure what to make of that, and she snuck a peek over her shoulder at David's expression. He looked concerned, and the implications made her worried. So she did what she always did when she was worried: she pretended not to be.
"That's a lot less than a week," she observed, giving him a raised eyebrow.
"Yeah, I had forgotten that the horses use the water too."
"Your estimate last night was way off," she elaborated.
"Yes, I noticed. Thank you."
"Cool. Because your prediction sucked big floppy donkey balls."
"That was... colorfully articulate... as always, Samantha. How did we manage without you?"
"Mmm-hmm! You sure have missed me, haven't you!"
"Yep," he chuckled, shaking his head.
"Not that the estimate mattered, I suppose," she continued, "we couldn't have done anything about it last night anyway. Still, that was a staggeringly bad prediction on your part."
"Yes, I see that. Thanks Samantha."
"In fact," she mused as if to herself while rubbing her chin for dramatic effect, "if you had asked the rest of us, literally everyone would have given a better guess last night than you did. How intriguing."
"Truly. Thank you, Samantha."
"Even James, and he wasn't even listening!"
"Mmm-hmm. Thank you, Samantha."
"Perhaps you could make a note to double-check your--"
"Your advice is as helpful as anticipated, Samantha. I am truly privileged to have you back with us, Samantha. I had nearly forgotten the soothing glow of your kind words, Samantha." His words sounded annoyed, but the grin on his face and his head-shaking chuckle as he said them let her know that he wasn't upset.
"Yep! What else are people like me good for, if not to provide you with a stream of cheerfully obvious commentary?" Samantha grinned.
"People like you? Don't sell yourself short, you've got a lot more going for you than you think. And it's not just your award-winning commentary that makes you fun to be around. Plus, your other talents don't make me quite so vaguely uncomfortable. So there's that."
Samantha opened her mouth to fire back her next comment and then froze. Vaguely uncomfortable?
David glanced back, noticing her silence, and flashed a good-natured half-grin at seeing her stunned expression.
"Anyway," he said, "we've gotta do something about the water today before the sun goes down. Are you coming?"
He replaced the cover on the cistern and started walking down the hill towards the house, but Samantha just stood there looking vacantly at the place where he had been standing.
Uncomfortable.
Samantha's mind wandered back again to the previous night. It had been late by the fire after everyone else had gone to sleep. She had been ignoring the cold, and for hours she had used the conversation with Dana to distract herself from the looming fear and helplessness that swirled around her after the animal attacks. The paralyzing emotions had stalked her from the darkness all evening, but she kept them from striking by simply refusing to think about it. It had worked for a while, but then after Dana fell asleep, the fear and worry hit her like a truck.
She had fled and sat herself next to David; it was the only sensible defense. Then she was hiding next to him under the blankets, safe from the broken world outside. He seemed to welcome her. It felt warm and cozy after a day that had left her feeling shaken and a night that had left her feeling lost. She had been hurting from her injuries and was so frightened about dealing with the future, but then next to him she felt safe and warm and content and happy and so very, very comfortable.
Had that been a mistake? Was she making this awkward? Did she make him feel uncomfortable?
Her relationship to David had always been a bit complicated. David had a much more well-defined and well-established responsibility for Evelyn. Samantha was just, well, just Evelyn's weird best friend, full of bad ideas and terrible jokes who kind of lived with them sometimes.
Things had always been pretty bad for Samantha growing up, but whenever her father was out of jail things got especially scary. Through all of it, for as long as she could remember, Gary had made a special effort to provide her with a safe place to stay whenever she needed it, no questions asked. She could just show up any time, even in the middle of the night, and she'd be met with warm food and a soft bed. What's more, everyone at the house was always happy to see her. More than happy, even, and not just because she was Evelyn's best friend. They all truly cared about her in a way she'd never experienced anywhere else. Around the time she turned 14, Samantha was given her own dedicated bedroom at their house. And while David didn't technically live there with them, he was around so often watching after Evelyn that he was practically an honorary family member.
Just like she was.
"Did I miss something back there?" David called from down the hill. "Whatcha looking at?"
Samantha startled back to reality, embarrassed to realize she had lost herself in her worries again.
It was getting worse. She has always been at war with her own emotions since the time she was a little kid. But this was getting rapidly out of hand. She couldn't think. She noticed it last night, but it was getting worse really, really quickly. It had been so bad this morning that she had to hide under the blankets from her own damn thoughts. She was having increasing difficulty controlling herself. She found herself frequently acting impulsively, without thinking. And while that made her worry, it wasn't even the scary part.
Should I tell someone? She thought to herself, Would anyone even care? The whole world just ended, are my little problems important enough to talk about? What would I even say?
"Dear Room Full Of Everyone I've Ever Cared About: I'm pretty sure I'm slowly losing control over my mind and body. I'm scared and don't know what's going to happen to me. But don't worry, I'll probably only hurt myself. So you should all be fine. Sincerely, Samantha."
That should do it.
She looked down and saw her right hand was shaking again. Her left would be shaking too if it hadn't been in a sling. She focused and tried to make it stop, but that just made it even worse.
Not again.
It felt almost like a panic attack. She hadn't had one of those since she was a teenager. This wasn't exactly the same thing; she didn't shake like this back then. But she recognized a few of the other symptoms. Her breathing was catching now and her vision was starting to tunnel.
And why had the panic attacks ever stopped, anyway?
It was right when she took up the babysitting job. There was something about other people's problems; they seemed so normal, so relatable and yet so manageable. It was like the world began to make sense when she started taking care of James, and even her own issues became something she could understand and deal with. He had been a real handful at the beginning, but over the months and years she had grown to understand him. He wasn't a typical kid but nobody ever was, right? She certainly hadn't been. By helping him, she had probably learned to understand herself a lot better and just stop worrying about herself.
Yeah, it was probably James.
"Samantha, what's going on? Did you see something? What are you looking at?" He seemed agitated now and more than a little worried. She'd been staring blankly at the same rock for over a minute.
Should she tell him?
"It was probably James," she said out loud, still looking down at her trembling hands.
"What?" he asked, walking back up the hill toward her. "Is something wrong with James?"
Samantha closed her eyes for a second trying to push herself back into the present. It was getting even more difficult. James? Was there actually something wrong with--
A shout from across the yard froze Samantha's breath in her chest. It was James. His shout was panicked and confused.
Without even thinking, Samantha started to run.
His shouts were coming from over by the greenhouse. There was plenty of stuff between here and there, but she didn't try to navigate around anything; she just ran straight toward the sound. The rest would sort itself out.
"Ah! Get off! No! What are-- No! Stop! Ow!" James's outbursts came rapid-fire from a long way off.
Samantha hadn't stopped to think about what the problem could be, she just heard James in distress and started moving. Now that she was on her way, possibilities played out in her head of what she was going to find when she got there.
Memories of the animal attacks last night took prominent position in those mental images. Visions of James being torn apart by an angry coyote refused to be dismissed and made it hard for her to breathe.
Another shout from James, this time clearly in severe pain and crying in helpless distress only solidified her fears. Samantha was certain of it now: James was under attack by some sort of creature, and wasn't defending himself successfully. Every second she took to get there translated directly into him getting hurt even worse, perhaps even permanently. His screams echoed in her ears with dire implications.
"No..." Samantha muttered under her breath as she ran, "no no no no no..."
She effortlessly vaulted over a large copse of bushes in her way without so much as a thought as she gathered speed, then dove between the bars of a wide gate. A quick nudge with her hand as she cleared the gate redirected her body's momentum, allowing her to spin her head-first dive into a feet-first landing without breaking her run. She'd been a gymnast when she was younger so a bit of tumbling just came natural, but even she was surprised at how instinctual it all felt. Perhaps the fact that a friend was in danger brought something out in her.
The shouts came from just the other side of the tall cinderblock wall up ahead, probably twelve feet high on this side. The sensible thing to do was to enter the attached building through the door a short distance away, navigate between the storage containers, and out the door on the other side. That would take her to the other side of the wall, and then she could circle back to where James was and assess the situation. That would be sensible.
But sensible wasn't really Samantha's thing right now. Her brain had been giving her nothing but trouble every time she tried to use it today, and she didn't trust the damn thing any further than she could spit. By contrast, she had been running on pure instinct and raw emotion from the moment she heard James's cries, and honestly the change had been serving her well so far. So, sensible solutions were currently off the menu. Instead Samantha did the one thing that seemed like a good idea in the moment. She ran up the wall.
It took a bit of footwork combined with a post, the wall, and a nearby tree, but no other option ever crossed her mind. As she ran, she wrapped the fingers of her left hand around the straps of her sling to keep her bad arm from flapping and getting in the way. Then without even slowing in her approach, she used the post to leap halfway up the wall, took a few running vertical steps, then kicked off the wall to a wide branch of the tree growing nearby. She landed on the branch with her knees pulled in like a coiled spring, and then launched herself backward over the wall, clearing it head first and face-up like a high jump crossbar.
As she flew over the wall she tucked her knees in and rotated herself into a backflip while arching her head backwards toward the ground to get her first look at James.
It was even worse than she had feared.