Thunder rumbled above him, and he looked up at the clouds with darkened eyes. “Looks like I should get inside.” His gaze met the camera again. “That wasn’t a half bad entry, I hope.” He managed a smile. “Stay tuned for more. Others will include: More Disaster; Wolverines; How to Do a Cartwheel; Really Bad Historical Decisions; What Were Ornithopters?; and A Brief History of the Organisms That Roamed Earth before Humanity Evolved and Subsequently Killed Everything.” He reached up and switched off the recorder.
H124 stared at the dark screen, thinking about what she’d seen. Had things really been so different? She turned off the PRD and placed it on the bedside table. Her eyes were heavy. She closed them, imagining a world of green, a world of life, a world of possibility. . .
She spent the next few days sleeping, eating once or twice a day, and reading. She was starting to pick out more and more words, able to figure out what they meant in the long way of spelling them.
Bldg became building. Bthrm was bathroom. She read through a series of books called field guides. The tree she’d seen that first day once had thousands of varieties and grew in things called forests. The one she’d seen was a sweet gum, she thought, from what she could remember of it. The images in the book showed whole hillsides full of them. She’d only seen a handful when she was outside. Everything else was a wasteland of cement and abandoned buildings like the one she now hid under.
The little spiky plant that had blanketed the ground was called grass, and it too had many variations. In some place called the Great Plains, it had covered vast landscapes.
She read about weather, learning that the ice storm she’d encountered was called hail, and that storms could manifest via tornadoes and hurricanes.
The opossum puttered around the weather shelter, having taken to sleeping under one of the cots during the day. At night it roamed through the small space, eating, drinking, exploring. She changed the dressing on its wound a couple times, and as before, it played dead. But the third time she did it, it just sat there and let her touch it. It sniffed her arm, curious. She felt a shared camaraderie, two lone survivors who could very well be the only living things for miles.
Above them she could hear the rain pelting the outside of the building. Wind roared through the hollow halls. She checked her PRD a few times every day, hoping to hear from Willoughby.
On the third day, she sat down at the table, chewing thoughtfully on an MRE, and decided to watch another video on the old PRD she’d found.
She clicked on an entry, watching as Raven’s face appeared. He stood in a forest, but the trees were black and leafless, stark against a searing blue sky. He adjusted the camera, turning it away from himself to expose the view. Blackened trees stretched all the way to the horizon.
Then he turned the camera back on himself. “This was once a vast pine forest, a living place full of animals and plants, like ferns and berry bushes. Woodlands like these stretched all across the western half of the continent.
“But as the earth warmed up too rapidly, the forests died. There were these beetles that laid eggs under pine bark, and their larvae would feed inside the tree. Cold winter temperatures usually kept the population of these beetles in check. But as the earth got hotter, cold winters became rarer, and the beetle population exploded. Drought made trees even more susceptible to beetle attack. Beetles devoured whole forests. The dead trees were more prone to fires, and with all the crazy storms that erupted as global warming increased, lightning strikes constantly set everything aflame. Entire regions burned. Eventually, all that was left were these scarred remains of habitats that were once teeming with wildlife.”
He showed the camera around again, and she saw all the burned trunks, the fallen charred logs, the desolation of the barren landscape.
“I’ve seen images in books and videos of what they used to look like. One really stayed with me. I recorded it.” He pulled out his own PRD. Bringing up an image, he held it in front of the camera.
She saw a verdant forest whose enormous plants were clustered in the shade, its wildflowers winding about the tall grasses. In the distance, a massive mammal with sharp claws tore apart a fallen log.
He pointed to the animal. “That’s a bear. They’d pull apart logs looking for grubs and bugs to eat. Three species of them used to roam all over the continent, one even living way north where vast sea ice used to form, but now they’re just legend.” He looked thoughtfully at the bear. “I would have loved to see one.”
H124 set down the PRD, feeling a sinking in her gut, and moved to the bookshelf. She wanted to see more photos of these extinct animals. She opened a book on birds only to find it hollowed out in the middle. Hidden inside was a small piece of flat metal, wide on one end, slender and grooved with serrated teeth on the other. A piece of paper folded beneath it showed a hand-drawn map of the street above, with a red X on a street a few blocks away. The words Allow five hours’ charging time were scrawled underneath the map. She lifted the metal, bewildered. Then she took it along with the map and slid them inside her tool bag. Maybe it was time for a little exploring.
She waited until the thundering of rain became a dull roar, and donned her jacket. Seeing the opossum sleeping soundly under one of the cots, she slung her bag over her shoulder. She exited the weather
