Ain't Talkin'

Alex Markus never got out of new San Fran that night. He’d hidden huddled in a corner with his arms around the little girl and his back to the world, protecting her with everything he had, honoring the last words Walter Roche had said to him. Not a lance of white, not a bullet, not a flaming explosion of kerosene or gasoline, not even a single pebble of rubble had touched him or the girl. After a night of shrieking noise, collapsing buildings, dying tanks of combustibles erupting in the night and human beings being torn asunder, the sun rose over the Sierra’s and lit the streets of New San Fran.

Tangles of metal beams and rebar framing were a thicket of briars and brambles. Bodies fouled the air, the stink of their guts thickening and wafting in the growing heat of the day. All the world was covered in a newly fallen shroud of dust and debris and detritus, muddy from the rain. Through the evening, the wasteland had vomited into and cut a swathe through the city.

The occasional wastelander filtered into the city, searching for anything of value in the fallout. Corp and Res soldiers picked through the bones, searching for comrades and friends, paying no attention to their old hatreds for the nonce. Citizens of the city tried their best to hold it together, though those of them that numbered in the dead were few and far between, unfortunate souls who had been stuck in the wrong place, causality of war.

“Uncle Alex?” The waif girl asked.

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Where the angel go?” She looked over the wreckage with doe eyes and two fingers in her mouth.

“I don’t know.” Markus felt tears well in the corners of his eyes.

A sign for Mission Street stuck out of the world at an angle. Down the way from it, south with the rising sun at their left shoulder, was a crater in the earth. The mouth of hell itself with teeth of steel girders and concrete points. At the bottom of the crater, there was nothing. No anything, simply wreckage and burned-black rubble.

“I don’t know where he went.” Markus told the little girl again as they stared down into the pit. A water main had split and the bottom of the crater was filled with some inches of stinking brown seawater siphoned in for the city. A good ten yards deep and fully empty.

“What’s my name?” The girl asked, looking to the rising sun where seabirds had taken flight and cut little black letters over the bay.

Alex felt himself choke in his throat and start to weep openly. Of course they hadn’t named her. And she was asking him. He did all he could. “What would you like your name to be, sweety?”

“You called me ‘moisy’.” She giggled, thinking it was a funny name.

Alex breathed out spit and snot hard in a sobbing laugh. Mercy. He’d spent the night covering the girl with his body and begging for mercy.

“Okay, sweety. We’ll call you Mercy, would you like that?”

“Uh-huh. Look birds!” Mercy pointed at the sky and ran away over the rubble, chasing seabirds in the sky and giggling, waving her arms in the way that kids do when they’re running without a care in the world.