She ascended the slope until it ended at another set of great metal doors. A series of bolts locked it from the inside. She disengaged them and braced her back against the cold metal. Then she pushed, but they wouldn’t budge at all. She strained and strained, looking for a bolt she must have missed. But she didn’t see any. It hadn’t been opened in a long time, and here the rain had seeped through, probably rusting the hinges tight. She’d have to retrace her footsteps, figure out where this door opened on the surface above, and use some kind of lever to pry it open. Then she could push the vehicle out and let it charge.
She reengaged the bolts and returned to the vehicle. She locked the double door too, then covered the machine with the tarp.
Eagerly she hurried back through the tunnels and climbed the ladder to the surface. She threw the trapdoor shut and hastened through the misty gray streets back toward the weather shelter, hoping she would find books on these vehicles so that she could figure out how they worked. Once again she stared up and down the street, but didn’t see anything on the move.
Inside the shelter, the opossum had emerged from under the bed, munching happily on some grass she’d managed to scavenge the day before.
She went to the shelf and scanned the book bindings, looking for something that might describe how the vehicle worked. At first glance she didn’t see anything.
Then she came across a thick tome with the word Atlas on its binding, and pulled it out, wondering what it was. It was full of maps. She’d been wondering how far she’d come from the city, but without any markings on her PRD’s maps, she couldn’t be sure. She read the coordinates off her PRD and looked up that location in the atlas. As she flipped to the pages, she was blown away by the beauty they contained. Color filled every page, offering so much useful information. Not just roads and landmarks, but rivers, city boundaries, locations of rest areas, historic sites, even old mines. She couldn’t imagine why something like this would ever go out of use.
She picked up her PRD and swiped its map feature back to retrace the way she’d come since leaving the city. The location of the shelter went beyond the scope of her PRD. It showed only the glowing arrow with the location Rowan had entered for this place. She stared at the vector, marking a spot in a vast gray area, with no marked roads or structures. It was like the outside world didn’t exist at all to this device. It made sense; people in her city had no reason to leave. Well, most people, she thought, with a pang of isolation. Anger welled in her at the memory of that midnight chase through the city, burying any notions of loneliness.
But at least where the city was concerned, Willoughby’s PRD was loaded with detailed information, far more than what her own had held. Hers had included streets and buildings, so she could locate where she needed to remove a body. But Willoughby’s showed how many people lived in each building, what each edifice’s function was, even places where workers labored and which buildings had the most up-to-date media installations. She set her starting point as the place where she’d learned of the asteroid.
She clicked on the show coordinates button and looked them up in the atlas. She flipped to the correct page, but it didn’t show her city at all. Instead there stood a building called The University of New York. An inset map showed the campus. She’d been walking around in the Earth and Planetary Sciences building. She stared down at the map, marveling at all the things that simply weren’t there anymore. New Atlantic had been built on top of it.
She looked at another page that showed the area directly east of where her city now stood. Those buildings she’d seen out in the ocean had been etched in her mind. According to the old map, it was once called Manhattan, and the sea had been much farther east when this map was made.
She flipped through pages, measuring how far she’d walked using the scale bar. It had taken her three days, and she’d walked thirty-six miles.
She left the atlas open and returned to the bookshelf, resuming her search for a book about the vehicle she’d found. So many volumes had titles she didn’t recognize, so she had to pull down nearly every book and examine its cover. At last she found one with a photo of a similar vehicle on the cover. It was called the Automotive Repair Guide. Inside were wiring diagrams, photos of machinery and tools. Helpful diagrams labeled what each part of the vehicle did—steering, brakes, electrical systems. The book described a car that ran on something called gasoline, with frequent warnings not to have an open flame around this fuel source.
Tucked inside the book were hand-drawn diagrams and instructions for the solar modifications that had been made to the car. It showed where extra batteries were stored, how to fill them with water, how to repair tires. It also diagrammed a wench system designed to pull the car up out of the storeroom and into the sunlight. She studied the pages until her eyes started to hurt. She ran her fingers through her tangled hair.
Now that she’d been dry a few days in a row, her hair was coated in grease. She had to get clean. But the shelter didn’t have a disinfectant chamber. Instead it had a small space next to the toilet with a dial on the wall and a nozzle overhead. She wasn’t sure what it did.
Taking a chance, she turned the dial in the small space, and water sprayed out of the nozzle. It smelled like
