Fragment 2

John had cursed his luck many times during his life. There was his name for instance. A simple, common name, one that was given to many, too many. Letters and numbers were usually appended to differentiate you from all of the others.

He'd always done his best to remind himself that it could be worse, that how he reacted to his misfortunes was the important thing. Who could forget poor Throckmorton. Old "Morty" had become the bully when he got tired of being the victim, and had ultimately made himself the victim for life, trapped between four walls that he would never leave.

John gazed down the length of the eerily empty street, and rubbed his eyes. He was the only one in sight, and he wondered if he was the only one who was seeing the mountain, that was usually nothing more than the picturesque backdrop of his normally bustling city, erupt.

Sure, the scientists always said that it could erupt any time at any time during the next millennium. But that was supposed to mean that it was highly unlikely that it would happen during his lifetime!

John was a man of his times. He knew that what he did next would be important, to future generations, if not to himself, as he raised his phone and selected video.

The list of groceries the other people in his apartment building had requested was forgotten. He just sat there in the middle of the street watching the dark cloud billow up from the mountainside. It spread out oddly in the wind, looking nothing like the mushroom clouds he'd seen in documentaries. Sharp points expanded to either side. It looked, he decided, like wings.

Enormous wings that spanned the mountain itself.

--

The air tasted sour, bitter, sweet, and salty. He breathed in deeply, tasting it for scents that he recognized. The wind still carried the taste of the plague beneath it all. It wasn't over.

--

John lowered his phone as the cloud over the mountain seemed to suddenly fold up, and then dissipated. He wondered if volcanoes erupted in stages.

He posted the video before moving forward. He needed to get food before his pass expired if they weren't all going to die today. The virus was keeping the world on lockdown, and no one could guess how much worse things would get before they started getting better.

At the store, he was distracted as he filled his basket, because he was trying to browse news sites. The virus still hogged the headlines in every feed. A few layers down it was alternately politics and shortages. Finally he found what he was looking for in his social media feeds.

He hadn't been the only one who noticed, although his video might be the clearest, since the ones he could see on a quick scroll were all partially obscured by window frames or buildings.

There had been a small earthquake that accompanied "the release of gasses" from the mountain. There were already petitions for a team of geologists to be released from confinement to go up the mountain and get enough data to predict whether or not there would be more, or larger quakes, or if the mountain was getting ready to actually erupt.

John couldn't help heaving a sigh of relief. If they were sending scientists up the mountain, then no one seriously expected the thing to explode. He turned his attention to grabbing everything on his list.

The cashier's eyes were judgmental when he presented the small mountain of supplies at the register.

"It's for everyone in my building," John tried to explain.

"Sure," the girl replied tiredly. "Present your identification."

He quickly dug his card out. She didn't touch it, despite the gloves, mask, and head to toe overall she was wearing. She just snapped a photo, and said, "Form of payment?"

"Bank card," John replied with a wince. It was a risk, since companies were shutting accounts down for 'abnormal' charges right and left, but there was no way for him to bring payment from everyone in his building in an era when physical currency was becoming a relic from the past.

They'd had more than half the residents in the online chat where they'd decided how to handle supply runs, and John wasn't sure that he'd ever spoken to a tenth of those people before. But they'd all agreed, in order to reduce the number of transactions that the essential service providers had to monitor, those who could afford to pay for an order for the entire building would be the shoppers.

In return, John and the other fifteen who had signed up, would theoretically have their rents paid by the others until the amounts they'd spent during the global emergency were repaid. He had his doubts about that, but he wasn't going to let anyone who sheltered under the same roof starve if he could help it.

--

His eyes had taken longer to adjust than his nose had, but when his vision cleared, he had seen a vast expanse of structures covering an area larger than the mountain itself. He had closed his wings with a clap that shook trees loose from stones that had cradled them since they had first tasted the sun, and dropped to the ground.

He had been regretting his age after awakening, but now he was glad that he was no hatchling. Hunger, and a thirst that made his very bones ache, tore at his reason. But he was old, and strong, and skilled. If the plague had not died, but had spread to such an extent, then logic dictated that the resources to support them in such numbers also existed.

There would be food and drink down there. Enough to sate even a dragon.