Chapter 1

My eyelids fluttered. Voices fluttered around me. I gasped, my lungs popping open painfully as if stuck together. This wasn’t my bed. There had been a group of old men and women in white coats telling me how to use it. How ridiculous. Teaching a grown man how to use a bed.

“- ear me?” a voice drifted in through my memories of explosions. Inconsequential. Why was I so tired just waking up? What was it about this bed again? There had been a war. I wondered where it had happened, then remembered: everywhere. I felt my head being pushed, my brain sloshing painfully inside as if after a hangover, and belatedly realized I’d just been slapped. How rude.

“Wake up!” the voice suddenly blared agonizingly loud. Pinpricks began spreading from my toes and fingers upwards. Other voices filled the room, too many for me to process. I managed to flip my eyelids half-open then squeezed them shut again trying to groan in pain at the brilliant light but lacking the strength.

“-art –ting -ose need- out of h-”

An arm was propping me upright. My lips felt wet. My chest hurt. I realized I’d passed out again.

“Stop. He’s breathing.”

I blinked. Vague humanoid shapes blurred in and out against a flickering back light as my eyes adjusted. I closed them again and tried to speak but nothing came out. Doctors. It had been a team of doctors talking to me before I went under. This wasn’t a bed. It was a suspended animation tube. I’d been sedated in a chamber filled with a thousand of them.

smack

“Guh...” I managed at another slap dragging my mind to the present. People were breathing heavily and cursing under their breath some distance away. My sense of smell had returned ... regrettably. The rancid air somehow combined the worst of both a sewer and a butcher’s shop. Focus. What had seemed like brilliant light at first was now a flickering gloom. My entire body felt like it had run a marathon, but turning my head a bit I tried taking stock of my situation. All around me was the chamber in which I’d been preserved from the apocalypse, filled with other suspension chambers like my own. Old brittle plastic tubing which had been plugged into me now lay strewn carelessly about my limbs. For the first time, it occurred to me to ask myself how long I’d been in suspended animation.

I had time to note a squarish dark female face before my attention was entirely fixated on the leather pouch pressed against my lips. Trickling water filled my mouth, metallic, lukewarm but more welcome than Dom Perignon under the circumstances. The nurse lay me back down and I slept.

I was jostled awake as they were lifting me out of the tube, two pairs of arms under my legs and torso. A lamp emitted smoke somewhere near my head. I tried getting my bearings. I was being carried past a continuous row of the same metal and plastic tubes. In stronger light they looked corroded, fragmented. The entire hall reeked of death. Most of the tubes were completely inert and unopened. The few which still sported blinking LEDs had been forced open to reveal mostly inchoate, putrid masses with the odd bone sticking out of them. A mummified visage confirmed the suspicion. I convulsed softly, too weak to retch properly.

“N-nurse!”

Multiple voices around me laughed in unison.

“Nurse? Listen to this one.”

“Nurse, please ... what happened?” I continued, still reeling. They deposited me onto some kind of tarp.

“What happened?” one of them grunted bitterly, heaving with exertion leaning over me. “What didn’t happen? You’ll find out soon enough, boy.”

The tarp lifted. As they hoisted me into a tunnel halfway up a wall I got one last glance at the ruined high-tech underground facility which had been meant to save humanity. Nothing but rubble, death and rot.

Drifting continually in and out of consciousness, I remember being hauled outdoors, lying next to other nude figures as we were given more water and our limbs were being massaged painfully. When we began shivering we were wrapped in robes and lifted into some large covered cart. Then began a very long trip. As days passed we got more water and some vegetable mash and strips of dried meat for food, but no information. We all looked similarly desiccated, skeletal. At one point one of us failed to wake up, and two rough-looking women simply hauled her corpse out of the cart refusing to answer our alarmed inquiries, cursing at their own misfortune for having one of us die on them.

In my brief conscious episodes I tried getting my memories together. We’d had the latest war to end all war, complete with bigger battlefields, bigger bombs, bigger massacres and bigger epidemics than any other before. While radioactive clouds drifted over the landscape and fifty different plagues killed off the remainder, the government, after doing its best to exterminate us, began a last-ditch effort to save what it could of the human species. The facility I’d been consigned to had been gigantic, around a thousand stasis pods lined up deep underground. All I knew was it was a chance at survival, and I’d taken it. No-one knew where all the facilities were. No-one was meant to know. One last-ditch paranoid defense against sabotage. There were five of us lucky survivors in the cart after the corpse got tossed, two men and three women. A 0.5% rate of success. Probably better than anyone had hoped with untested technology.

Among the creaking and jostling of the day’s trip, I noted the absence of a combustion engine and the snorting and grunting of draft animals. Our cart itself was a box of oiled sheet-metal interlaced with plywood, primitive but sturdy, and like nothing spawned by prewar society’s automotive factories. We creeped along a dirt road, roughly northwards. Something had gone horribly wrong out there while we slept, and the worried looks on the others’ faces confirmed I wasn’t the only one who thought so, but we didn’t get much of a chance to look around the few times we were let out to relieve ourselves by the side of the road. Bogs and scattered lakes interspersed with sparse, lonely scrubland.

“I heard them talking earlier” confided the only other man while gnawing at some hardtack and mystery meat jerky, a tall, broad-shouldered lumberjack type who looked as though he’d had a lot more muscle on his bones once upon a time. None of us had much strength to talk, and our rescuers weren’t very invested in educating us. We all slept through most of each day, our decrepit bodies gradually rebuilding the mass we’d lost in suspension.

“It doesn’t sound good.” He continued in a low voice in between bites. “Think they were talking about selling us.”

“Selling?”

“Mm-hmmm. I heard them arguing about prices. Five arguments, five prices. Sounds like they think ‘tha big un’ is gonna get them the most money whenever we get to this ‘Fort Loud’ place they’re taking us to. Guess I should be flattered.”

“That doesn’t have to mean anything” I countered. “Maybe it’s a reward? For saving us? From the government I suppose.”