Chapter 3.1: Dead Zone
It only takes half an hour back out in the streets before Dead Boy hears the distant sounds of human howls rise up through the fog again.
“Damnit!” he mutters under his breath. How are they tracking me so quickly? They couldn’t even they find me on that hilltop last night, and now…
The howls seem to be coming from his left. He'd been careful back at the ridge to orient himself southward toward the distant hills of Metatropolis before he plunged himself into the fog where all directional markers became lost. He knows how the way the hills are positioned, the hooting and shouting could actually be echoing in from almost any direction, but the hollow pit in his gut tells him different. He’s certain they’re trying to drive him west, to pin him against the seawall.
He quickens his pace, trotting down an icy hill as fast as he safely can. Just as he reaches the bottom, he hears a new sound coming from behind him. A low, sustained rumbling reverberates over the hill, the sound interspersed with revving pops and grumbles. It’s an engine.
A heater truck! he realizes with a flash of hope. That means, who? A Metatropolis patrol, or maybe a convoy from one of the kingdoms. Perfect! While not exactly NBAZ allies, any of these foreign governments might at least give him a ride in exchange for information about this crazy gang, who just may be a new threat to the entire region.
He turns back and struggles up the steep hill, panting in his exertion to catch the truck in time. At least his pursuers’ hooting and hollering has stopped; they must see the heater truck as a threat. But by the time Dead Boy crests the hill, the engine sounds have already died down to a faint receeding drone far away to the left.
The trill of a laughing female voice resonates through the fog, dangerously close. Katana calls out to him, “Where aaare you Del Rey? We’re gonna find you, ya know. Aren’t you even curious about what we want?”
As he turns to flee back down the hill, her taunting voice follows him, “Where aaare you?”
That’s a good question, he realizes with frantic despair. Wish I knew myself.
###
“Read the signs,” Jamar told him one bitterly cold evening in the deep fog during the first couple weeks of his training. “Be like a scientist, an archaeologist of the ice!”
Dead Boy found that hilarious. “What the hell do you know about archaeology?”
Jamar shrugged, bumping shoulders with Dead Boy. “Bout as much as you do. We had the same teacher after all. Miss Tin Pan? Remember her?”
“Extinction event 2.0!” they both chimed in chorus. Miss Tin Pan was always going on about how humanity had survived another great extinction event like that which had wiped out all the dinosaurs, so it was up to us to learn from the mistakes of our past, yadda yadda yadda.
“See? You gotta read the signs, just like ol’ TP taught us. We can read clues about the Frozen from where and how they died and what they looked like when the big freeze set in. Which ones were homeless. The rich, the tourists.”
With a grand sweep of his arms, Jamar put the entire street on display—what they could see of it through the thick fog, at least. “So, take a look around and tell me how to get to the nearest Crypts entrance!”
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Dead Boy had never been this far south with Jamar before. They’d just come down the far side of San Bruno and had only been walking the foggy street for maybe fifteen minutes. There hadn’t been many Frozen to worry about earlier, but now the street widened out and numerous icebound corpses stood preserved mid-step on the sidewalk. Dead Boy could barely make out the street signs through the thick fog: they were on the corner of Holly and Mission.
“I thought Mission was north of the mountain? I dunno, Jamar, I haven’t studied the southern maps enough and I feel like we got turned around or something.”
“This is Mission Road not the street,” Jamar said with a laugh. “Totally different neighborhood! But so what? Doesn’t matter. Be an archaeologist.”
Dead Boy meandered down the sidewalk lost in thought, gazing at the Frozen as their wraiths slowly stirred from slumber. An inkling of an idea began to dawn on him. “The freeze came in the morning, right? So all those Frozen businessmen in suits? They must’ve been walking to work.”
A pause.
“Or at least, to the nearest subway station,” he added slowly, “Cuz the streets were closed to cars when the Fall came, on account o’ the snow and ice.”
Jamar nodded, a smile playing on the corners of his lips.
“And most of the guys in suits are facing this way,” Dead Boy said, heading up the street with renewed purpose. “So our Crypts entrance must be just up ahead. Come on!”
A new feeling rose up in Dead Boy as he trotted along the sidewalk past scores of Frozen, Jamar close behind him. Ever since Jamar took him out on his first training run, he’d been constantly filled with fear, awe and wonder at the madness of the apocalypse that had destroyed the old world. But now, he felt self-sufficient for the first time. He felt like he knew what he was doing, like he had a purpose.
That was when he knew for certain he’d made the right decision to become a runner. Now, he’d finally found a place where he belonged.
###
He’s running purposefully through a wide parking lot, skirting around a squat fog-filled shopping mall that’s packed with Frozen, when the howls intensify. They’re louder and closer now, pushing in fast.
“Why the hell did I ever listen to Jamar?” he mutters under his panting breath. Come out on a run with me, he said, it’ll be fun, he said … some idea of fun!
He veers off to the right, tearing past a series of two and three-story apartment buildings, but this new street just loops back around toward the hunters. He dashes into the grounds of the nearest complex, past the buildings and scales a brick wall at the back of the property. The fog is so thick that the ground below the wall is just a blurry shadow, but with the howls now echoing very close behind him (damnit damnit DAMNIT!), Dead Boy holds his breath and jumps.
He lands feet first on a steep downslope, slips hard onto his side and skids thirty feet on the ice before crashing painfully into a dead tree that’s somehow evaded the scavenger’s axe these past thirty years. He scrambles to his feet (grabbing his own dropped axe in the process) and flees into a new complex of buildings very unlike the residential area he’d just escaped from. After five minutes of confused careening past a series of curious buildings of various heights with no obvious signage, he groans uneasily as he spots a Frozen sporting a sweatshirt with a brazen logo that instantly clues Dead Boy in on his new location.
“SFSU!” he mutters under his breath, unable to believe his bad luck. On a normal day, he might be interested in scavenging around the university grounds for a change, but not with a pack of crazies hot on his tail; gridlocked city streets are easy to navigate, but the confusing, looping mess of the campus paths and roads already has him thoroughly disoriented. Not to mention he knows that the deadly wide park and ice expanses of Lake Merced border the campus to the west and are to be avoided at all costs.
The howls are only slightly farther away now, but still pressing in fast. Dead Boy has no idea which direction he’s heading—he just charges onward away from the howls, hoping that his route somehow takes him south and east toward a safer escape route than risking the open fog.
He has no such luck. He’s just run across a softball field, fleeing terrifying cries of “There he is!” behind him, and scrambled over a tall chain-link fence, when he suddenly realizes that he is now sprinting through a much wider open expanse dotted here and there with cracked, twisted trees that loom rapidly before him in a fog so thick he can barely see four feet ahead. New shadows slide toward him in the gloom on his peripheral vision, denizens of this forgotten, forbidden place.
Jeers and shouts continue floating in from behind, but muffled now, almost as if the sounds are being carried to him on lapping waves. And as Dead Boy runs ever onward—unavoidably approaching the open ice of Lake Merced—a deepset dread intensifies in his gut with every blundering step.
Everyone knows you don’t go out onto open ice.
###