Nothing in her voice told me that she was lying. There was nothing I could do to hide my shock.
“Wait…
“That's a long story.”
“Well, we have time.”
“I suppose so,” Makara said, “though I don’t really like to talk about it. Where I’m from, it’s much colder, and darker. They call it sunny California for a reason, huh?”
“Doesn’t seem too sunny to me.”
Makara smiled. “You’re hard to please, then.”
“What happened to Bunker One? How did it fall?”
“Bunker One was huge. It held ten thousand people.”
“Ten…
“The Bunker came from the Cold War era. During the Dark Decade, they expanded it. But none of that matters now, because everyone who lived there is dead. Everyone except me, as far as I know.”
There was nothing I could say to that. Nothing at all, other than…
“That’s what happened to us. People started getting sick, and dying and…turning on each other.”
Makara nodded. I was surprised to see none of this surprised her.
“Did Bunker One fall in the same way?” I asked.
“It fell in a similar way. It was an attack of demons.”
“Demons?”
“They are what they sound like. They’re monsters, from Ragnarok. They’re still very rare around here. You can find them in areas called Blights. You'll know them as soon as you see them, because this weird, purple fungus grows thick on the ground and stinks up the land. All the trees are coated with pink slime. All animals avoid it – except the demon animals, and you will know them because they stink like rotting corpses and have all white eyes.”
When she said “white eyes,” I couldn’t help but think about Chan, and everyone the xenovirus infected in Bunker 108. It was an image I had been trying to push out of my mind all week. But it sounded like it had happened at Bunker One, too. Only, that would have been twelve years ago. If that was the case, then the human strain of the xenovirus was much older than my father had thought.
I remained quiet as Makara continued.
“The monsters attack any living thing on sight,” Makara said. “That’s how unaffected animals turn – they are bitten, and they become part of the Blight.”
“So, you’re telling me these monsters attacked Bunker One?”
“Yes. They're a lot thicker in Colorado, I guess because it's closer to Ragnarok Crater. But now, it's spreading, even as far as here. It's starting to affect everything. I saw my first Blight in this area about a year ago, farther north. There's more of them, now. There have been mysterious deaths, even by Wasteland standards.”
“It’s nothing demonic,” I said. “It’s the xenovirus. I had no idea it was this dangerous. Not until last week, anyway.”
“When you live underground, you’re blind to what's going on upside. These Blights have been old news here for at least a year.”
“What happens to the animals it affects?'
“They become stronger, faster, and deadlier. A huge wave hit us, that night. Where they all came from, I don't know. There were thousands. But they were animals of all kinds – birds, wolves, even bears – all rotting and twisted, attacking as if of one mind to destroy us. And there were some that have no name, which look like nothing this world has ever seen.”
“Were there people turned into them, too?”
“No. I have never seen people turn into these monsters. Is that what happened at your Bunker?”
I nodded. “Yeah. There’s apparently a new strain that targets humans, too.”
“Then this is only getting worse,” Makara said.
“The bodies exploded, sending purple slime everywhere,” I said. “That seems to be how it spreads.” I thought of Khloe, with a shudder. “Bites also seem to work.”
“Anything that’s infected gives off the slime. It can be pink, or purple. Pink for plants, and purple for animals. The explosions, though…I’d never heard of that until now. That’s very disturbing.”
“How did you escape your Bunker, then?” I asked.
“When the last helicopter took off, I wasn’t even supposed to be on it. My father ran with me in his arms across the helipad with the monsters behind us. He threw me into the helicopter just as it was lifting up. Someone onboard grabbed me. I still remember my father’s face as he fell away, as more of those things overwhelmed the tarmac. He was buried in a wave of them, his arms outstretched, screaming my name. I cried and cried, but we were already flying away.
“The journey to California was incredibly cold. We were supposed to join Bunker 114, but they didn’t have room for us. So, we were to touch down in L.A.. The plan was for the Bunker survivors to find some uninhabited corner of the city and start new. But as we got closer, the helicopter blades just…slowed down. I don’t know if we ran out of fuel or something else, but that next moment, we were spiraling toward the ground.
“We crashed. By some miracle, I survived. I was thrown out of the helicopter and landed in some grass nearby. I was knocked out, and woke the next day to find the helicopter turned on its side like some dead thing. Everyone else had died in the crash – all except me.”
“Lucky.”
“I know. My luck didn’t end there, though. My older brother had escaped in an earlier helicopter that had flown to L.A. as well. I thought he had died.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. But it doesn’t matter now, because he actually
“So, what happened after the crash?”
“I escaped, with nothing more than a broken collar bone and a few bruises. I ended up staying at the crash site for a day before heading into the ruins of the city. On my way there, a patrol found me, not from another Bunker like I thought. It was the Lost Angels.”
“Lost Angels?”
“A gang. A man named Raine was their leader. He took me under his wing, and in time I forgot about my past. Soon, I was reunited with my brother, Samuel. He left the community the Bunker One survivors founded, and came to join us. A good thing he did, too. The Bunker survivors were taken and enslaved by the Black Reapers, another L.A. gang. They were our bitter rivals.” Makara sighed. “That was twelve years ago. Another life.”
“God…you must have been, what, seven or eight?”
“Seven. That’s as much as I remember, anyway. I guess I was tough, even back then.”
“Which makes you nineteen now?”
Makara nodded. “Nineteen. Nearly twenty. The point of the story is…yeah, you will cry sometimes. Life sucks, there’s no way around that. But you never know when good might come. Maybe it won't, but you shouldn’t count it out. And besides, that’s what makes us human, right? Even if it seems impossible, even when there is no point; we fight to the death, with smiles on our faces.”
I was quiet for a while. Hearing her story made me feel better, crazily enough – something I would have thought impossible just minutes ago.
'Thanks, Makara. Believe it or not, this actually helps.'
“Get to bed, kid. Story time’s over.”
She lay down, and wrapped herself up. I heard her snoring almost instantly.
I didn't know how she could fall asleep so fast. Despite my exhaustion, I lay there for a while, thinking. I thought about how narrowly I had escaped Bunker 108. I didn’t know if I had it in me to survive another encounter with something infected with the xenovirus, human or not.
But at least I had Makara. Makara, who would teach me how to survive out here.
However, the more I saw of the Wasteland, the more I saw how the odds were stacked against me.
