Batteryville

The Fallen City

It was just rubble.

What had been huge steel and glass buildings were toppled over on their sides. What had been huge stone and brick buildings were bombed out shells with no roofs.

We were stopped at the edge of the water and Shawn had handed me binoculars.

Erin had her own and she said, "Everything is smashed."

"Yeah," Shawn said, "But this city was mostly like that before."

I said, "Before the Big One?"

"I'm kidding. It was in bad shape but not that bad. Actually my dad says it was coming back. But it got hit hard. Bombs dropped on it, viruses, riots. Little bit of everything."

I moved the binoculars back and forth and just saw rubble. On both sides of the river. There were pieces of what must have been a huge bridge dangling from the supports in the middle of the river.

"More than a little bit, it looks like." I handed the binoculars back to Shawn. "And that's what every city looks like now?"

"So I'm told. This is the only one I've ever actually seen."

"They don't all look like that," Erin said. "Not all of them."

Shawn shrugged and looked at me.

"Where we're going, it's really nice," Erin said.

Shawn said, "When the viruses went through they killed people, in big cities they killed millions of people so there were all these rotting corpses. And they bred more disease."

"Not every city."

"Every big city," Shawn said. "It's the way germs work."

Erin was putting her binoculars back in her bag and she got out the phone. She turned it on and ran her thumb over the screen a few times and then turned the phone towards Shawn and said, "This is where we're going."

"Well, you're going the right way," he said. "Just stay along the lake and keep heading east. But you really think it looks like that now?"

"Yes, of course it does." She put two fingers together on the screen and then spread them apart. "Look, you can see the walls back there, between the buildings."

Shawn said, "I don't know."

"You can, look." She flipped to another picture and zoomed in on the background again. "Right there, that's the top of a wall."

I hadn't realized that Erin had been studying the photos so closely.

"If that's a wall, it's pretty high, like ten stories," Shawn said. "How do you think you'll get over that?"

"We aren't going over it, I know a way in."

She was staring at the picture, zooming in on different parts of it.

Shawn looked at me and raised his eyebrows and I nodded, agreeing with him that it seemed crazy.

But for the first time it didn't seem too crazy to me.

The closer we were getting to the city, the more things we were seeing, the more I was thinking that Erin and Marcos's crazy conspiracy theories might be true. Maybe some cities were more ready for The Big One than others. Maybe it was an inside job.

And we were on the outside.

Erin was saying, "We better get going, thanks Shawn."

I said, "What do we need to watch out for?"

"Everything," Shawn said. "We never go past here. Are you sure you want to?"

Erin was closing up her bag and getting on her bike and I said, "Yeah, we do."

"Okay, well, good luck."

We shook hands and I got on my bike.

Erin was pedaling slowly, which was different for her, so I caught up easily and rode beside her. I didn't say anything for a while. She kept looking past me towards the city as it got smaller and further behind us.

She said, "How many people do you think were in that city?"

"I think it was actually two cities, one on each side of the river. There were countries then, two different countries."

"How many people?"

"I don't know. A million? Two million."

"And they all died?"

"Most of them, almost all of them."

Erin was still looking back at the giant rubble. "Someone dropped bombs on the city and used some kind of weaponized virus, right?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," she said, "the virus wasn't, what do you call it, naturally occurring? Like the plague?"

"I don't think so. That's the theory anyway."

"But the bombs, there's no way bombs are naturally occurring. Look at that," she stopped pedaling and put both feet on the road and looked back at the city in the distance. "Those buildings didn't fall over on their own, there were definitely bombs."

"Yeah," I said, "there were definitely bombs." I'd always believed that because people who had actually been there like Ms. Morrison and Gita and my friend Roy at the Goodwill store all said so. It wasn't a crazy conspiracy theory, they'd actually seen it.

"So who did it?" Erin said.

I was still looking at the fallen city and I said, "What do you mean?"

"Well, someone built the bombs and created the viruses and then dropped them on the cities. Did they use planes?"

"Roy said something about drones."

"So, someone sitting in a bunker far away operated a drone by remote control and dropped bombs on cities," Erin said.

"I guess so, yeah."

"So where are they now?"

"Who?"

"The people who built the bombs and operated the drones. Where are they now?"

I said, "They could be anywhere."

"Exactly," Erin said. "Anywhere. Still in the bunker, in a military base somewhere halfway across the world, on a space station."

"I don't think on a space station."

"Sitting at a café in a city."

Right. She was right. I said, "I guess it's possible."

"It sure is." She started pedaling again, faster this time, back to her usual speed and I had to scramble to keep up.

I took one last look over my shoulder at the rubble that was the city and I was thinking, but who decided which cities got hit and which ones didn't? Were the people we were going to see the ones who'd made those decisions?

Could they be the good guys?