Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

The Great Collapse

AIDEN

After that close call, emotions are running high, and we’re both on edge. But the promise of hearing more calms Zach enough to get us moving again. So we continue heading down the path.

I’m frustrated by Zach’s insistence about digging into my past. I guess he has a right to know some of it. But I’m not willing to tell him about certain things. Things that are too important and must be kept secret. And things that are too emotionally raw for me to bring up. But there are some details I can share. Maybe it will be enough to satisfy him for now.

“Let me start at the beginning. I lived with my family in Brookline, a suburb of Boston. My mom and dad were visiting my abuelita in Chicago, and my brother was at college in California. I had the house to myself, so Marcus practically lived there. Then the Great Collapse happened.”

Zach cuts in. “You know, I never really knew much about the Great Collapse. Power and Internet went out and stayed out. Stores went empty, and people started dying. That’s all I know.”

“Oh, shit. Really?”

“Really.”

I feel a little stunned. “So you don’t know about the earthquake?”

“What earthquake?”

“Wow. Okay. From the very beginning. Marcus and I were at home when it happened. We were watching TV, when an emergency message came up. Then our cell phones and the landline rang at the same time. The caller ID was 911.”

Zach cuts in. “Yeah, I got a reverse 911 call too. But my uncle and I were out fishing all day, and I missed it. When we got back, power was out, and my voicemail had stopped working, so I never found out what caused it.”

“Man, I didn’t know how totally cut off you were. Didn’t your friend Ezra tell you anything?”

“Ezra doesn’t even have a TV.”

“Huh. Well, the emergency was a massive earthquake—nine point one, I think—struck off the coast of Antarctica. It opened up this enormous trench in the ocean and created a hundred-foot tsunami heading north in every direction. Any place in the world within ten miles of a coastline was evacuated, and that included Boston.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t know about this.” Zach’s face is a little pale.

“Yeah, I assumed you did.”

Zach shakes his head. “So what did you do?”

“We packed all the food we could into backpacks and hit the road. The streets were a disaster, backed up for miles. But luckily, we were on a dirt bike, so I drove over lawns and took bike paths and things to get out of town. My family owned a cabin about fifty miles away. When we finally got to the cabin, we locked ourselves in, drew all the shades, and huddled by the TV.

“We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. This massive glacier in Antarctica, the Thwaites Glacier, just liquefied. It’s larger than the state of Florida and collapsed into the ocean in a couple of hours. Way faster than anybody thought it would happen.

“The tsunamis hit South America, New Zealand, and Australia first. Buenos Aires, Auckland, and Melbourne were all hit with a massive hundred-foot wave. The cities were gone. Wiped off the face of the earth.”

I pause and glance over at Zach. He’s been listening quietly this whole time, but now he’s as white as a sheet.

“The coastal cities all got hit hard?” he asks in almost a whisper.

“Yeah, they did. New York, Hong Kong, Boston. All ruins.”

“Seattle?”

Shit. I didn’t think about how Zach might react to this news. Guess I could have eased him into it a bit more smoothly.

“Seattle fared better than most. It’s not right on the ocean. But there was still a storm surge. And global sea level went up by ten feet because of the glaciers.”

Zach’s face is a tempest of worry.

“I can stop,” I say, concerned about triggering him.

“No. Please. Keep going.”

I scan Zach’s face. “Okay. Let me know if it’s too much.”

“I will.”

“Well, Marcus and I watched TV for as long as we could. Anderson Cooper coined it the Great Collapse. When he said it, he was talking about the collapsed glacier. But it ended up having a double meaning—the collapse of civilization. Before the TV went dead, most of southern Florida was underwater. Miami, Houston, and Los Angeles, gone. Then CNN stopped broadcasting. One by one, the other networks all went dark. Nine hours after we saw the first warning on TV, the power went out.”

Zach shakes his head. “So when we got back from fishing, all this had already happened. God. We were out catching fish when the whole world was melting down around us.”

I stop walking and look at Zach. I don’t want to unload too much on him at once. I had no idea he was in the dark about this, and it’s a lot for anybody. But he seems determined to hear more.

“So what happened to you guys?” Zach asks. “How’d you end up with the Collective?”

“We stayed at the cabin until we ran out of food. Then we headed out. We ran into a group of survivors and traveled with them for a few days. They told us how people were getting sick, and some people who survived were losing their minds. The rumor was that the water in the tsunami spread some disease. People on the coastlines were getting sick, but it was spreading inland fast.”

“The Infection came from the oceans?”

“Yeah.” I have a pang of guilt for not telling the whole truth. But there are things I can never reveal to Zach, like how the military created the damn disease. When the tsunami struck the stockpile of XT58 with a direct hit, it released into the world. It thrived in the ocean water and spread inland quickly. Other stockpiles on the West Coast, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East suffered similar fates.

“The world might have survived the tsunami and sea level rise by itself. But not with the Infection spreading and the world’s power grid and communication networks gone—all governments effectively beheaded. Civilization collapsed quickly.”

Zach’s face has gone even paler. “It all makes a lot of sense now. I wondered how things got so bad so quickly. The disease spread so fast.”

“Yeah, a mass migration of people leaving the coasts carried the disease inland in no time. The first time I saw an Infected man, I could barely believe it. He flat out killed three people in our group before we stopped him. And ten of us got injured enough to draw blood. I was one of them. By some stroke of luck, Marcus was back in our tent and didn’t get hurt. Within a day, nine of the people injured started getting sick. Everyone except me. That was my first hint I was immune. Our whole group fell apart in a couple of days when one of the sick people started attacking the rest of the group. From that point forward, Marcus and I knew we were better off alone. So we kept traveling from house to house, looking for food. But it kept getting more difficult. That’s when we ran into Connor.”

Zach stares at me, eyes wide. “You mean the guy who’s hunting us?”

I frown and nod. “Yep. We knew something was different about him because he didn’t seem as destitute as everybody else we ran into.”

“Just like when I first saw you,” Zach says.

“Yeah, I guess so. He figured I was immune like him, since I’d been exposed a few times but survived. So he brought us back to this bunker deep underground. Over a hundred people, all doing medical research. They needed people like me who were immune, who could scout and deliver things. That’s how I joined the Scientific Collective and became a courier.”

“What happened next?”

“Hey, look.” I point up ahead. “Our destination, I presume.”

On the horizon, the junkyard comes into view.