NC Byway

Deca forgot about NukeCorp and made it her single, solitary goal to reach the mountains.

She hadn't truly forgotten, of course. It was more of a temporary change of priorities. She had buried the idea of NukeCorp so far back in her subconscious mind that, had Reca woken up and asked her about her destination, she probably wouldn't have even mentioned it. Right now it was intangible, a gray cubist mark on a thin little map. The mountains were as real as ever, looming ever-closer, and so they were much easier for Deca to conceptualize.

It was quite a shock, then, when Deca found her original goal forcibly drawn back into her conscious mind by a new development- or rather an old, old development. It was a road running east to west, the kind vans were made to drive on. The tar was faded, yes, and the yellow lane dividers were tough to see without squinting, but it was unmistakably a road- moreover, despite the towering dunes looming over it on all sides, there was no sand on its surface.

Her tires had been reinforced long ago by the van's old driver, the founder of Andistronica. Driving through the desert didn't wear them down- still, she practically leapt at the opportunity to have a go at driving on a genuine paved surface. The complex on the map was actually northeast of the mountains, and the original plan had her going north and then east, but she decided to veto that decision and go east first instead. It didn't matter as long as she reached her destination. Deca might complain, but she was the one driving.

She maneuvered onto the smooth road with renewed vigor.

Reca noticed that the path ahead was perfectly clear as far as the eye could see. Reca noticed that there was an unstable street sign in the distance, though she couldn't read it from this far back.

Reca didn't notice the particles of sand falling from her wheels. Reca didn't notice the jets of flame that erupted from beneath the road to consume the sand as soon as it made contact.

It was all well and good, for if she had noticed the peculiar mechanism, perhaps she wouldn't have kept on driving. Perhaps she would have gone north first after all. Perhaps the following events wouldn't have happened, or perhaps they would have happened quite differently.

Deca arrived at the street sign.

It was bent nearly in half. The pole was rusty, and whenever the wind blew nearby, it would teeter like a spinning top and emit a loud, unpleasant creaking noise. It was a miracle that it was still standing. The actual sign itself was severely rusted too, but it was still readable, if barely.

"NC Byway," said Reca, abruptly narrating Deca's thoughts. The creaking of the sign must have woken her up.

'I bet NC stands for NukeCorp,' thought Deca.

"Hey!" exclaimed Reca. "What if NC stands for NukeCorp?"

Deca had no way to say 'I was just thinking that' with her light-based van language, so she decided not to say anything at all. She would allow Reca to have the glory this time.

"I wonder why that other road is covered in sand," Reca pondered.

Other road?

Deca did a double take and noticed that there really was another road, albeit one mostly obscured by sand. The sign, then, marked the junction between the streets- that made more sense than it being placed arbitrarily at a nondescript point along the road it referred to. Then again, did 'NC Byway' actually refer to the sandless road? Deca had never been one for traffic rules, given that they hardly existed after the apocalypse. If a sign was perpendicular to one road and parallel to another, which road was it supposed to name?

She racked her brain for an answer but came up empty-handed. If she had ever possessed that piece of knowledge, she had truly forgotten it.

It didn't matter.

Reca had a choice. The sandless road ran east to west, and the sandy road ran north to south. She wasn't past the mountains yet, which meant that she had to go east either way, but she would also eventually have to go north to reach NukeCorp. Reca would normally speak up at times like this, but she was lethargic; judging from the shape of her body on the roof, she was lying down on her back and soaking up rays. The near-death experience last night must have done a number on her. Deca couldn't bring herself to wake her traveling companion up, but she was growing increasingly flustered by what might have, early on in the trip, seemed like a simple choice.

The creaking of the sign echoed inside of her hood, bouncing from wall to wall until it was all she could hear, all she could think about. She needed to get away at any cost. there was no room to think- it was like flipping a coin. All she had to do was-

She decided to turn down the sandy road.

The transcendent feeling of asphalt on her tires faded and the familiar, gritty sensation of treading on sand returned.

The path ahead was no longer clear. It refused to do the thinking for her- instead, she had to keep watch for bits and pieces of the sunken street that were still visible through the sand. She could see the boundaries of the byway (if this was, indeed, the byway) by piecing together the occasional clear patches, and she was grateful for the guidance; as long as she had some vestige of civilization to cling to, she felt as if her perception of time wouldn't warp.

No longer would hours of driving feel like days. No longer would minutes of driving feel like seconds. She had an anchor to reality, and, rather than letting her intuition guide her along the ruined path, she hung onto her senses and ravenously made note of every detail. No one ever told her that adventure would be this mind-numbing. She needed stimulation.

She was so excruciatingly focused on the road that she didn't even notice the fence ahead of her until she bumped into it and felt a jittery, throbbing, high-voltage electric shock coursing through her shell. The midday stars scintillated madly before her eyes...

she shuddered under her own weight...

then she blacked out.

"Deca?"

There was no response, unless one counted the slow, irregular wisp of smoke rising from the engine as a response.

"DECA!"

Reca's heart pounded. She hadn't touched the fence, but she was shaking so hard it wouldn't have been unreasonable to assume she had. For one thing, she was stranded in the desert with no way out except on foot. For another, she was entirely alone...

Her eyes, ever-astute, settled on a dark spot at the base of the nearest mountain to the left.

There was an electric fence here- a surefire sign of civilization. It needed power to work. The power had to come from somewhere. There also had to be a way to open the gate.

The fence (and its gate) straddled a small gap between two mountains. There was nothing beyond, save for more of the same sandy road. The mountain on the right had no visible irregularities. Right now, Reca had only one feasible option: she needed to investigate the dark patch. If it was nothing- a natural deformity in the rock, or a trick of the light- she would have nowhere at all to go. Was this how it was going to end? Would a traveler, many years in the future, stumble across her body and wonder how she perished? Would the sand cover her up first?

Even under the sizzling sun, the idea that someone might someday walk over a dune concealing her body gave her chills.

Hope wasn't lost. There was still the dark spot. Getting there was all that mattered.

Practicing an overabundance of caution, Reca slipped through one of Deca's still-open windows and fetched a can of beans from what little remained of the prepper's stash. It had been cold when she received it, but it had now been warmed gently by the sun. Come to think of it, the sun was sort of like nature's bonfire. No, wait, that didn't really make sense.

She put her morbid thoughts behind her. She put the can of beans into her pants pocket. She put one foot forward, and then the other foot, and then the first foot again...

'That's it,' she thought, 'I just have to keep doing this.'

She felt a little silly for having thought of walking as some miraculous new strategy, but the brevity let in the morbid thoughts again, and she blocked them out with a sturdy mental electric fence.

Methodical steps weren't helping her. Reca broke out into a sprint, driven by existential dread and the desire to see Deca flash her headlights again someday. Miraculously, the dark spot on the mountain seemed less and less like a trick of the light... and more and more like a door! A door with no handles, though. How was she supposed to open it? Was this the end for real? Had her hunch meant anything at all?

As she crumpled onto the sand in front of the door, she suspected it hadn't-

And then there was a great whirring of gears and a thunderous sliding of metallic components, and the mountain opened up.

'What did I do?' thought Reca. 'Did I do anything? Did I cause that to happen?'

If she hadn't- that seemed more likely, given that all she'd done was fall over- then who had?

If there was an answer to that question, it would surely be found within the mountain. She had nowhere else to go. Directly behind her, the sand stretched out ad infinitum, and to her right, her old friend sat, irresponsive and smoking. She could no longer bare to look. Her breathing exercises came in useful for the first time since she had left Andistronica.

Sunlight illuminated the space past the door to an extent. She could see that it was a narrow passage that sloped gently upwards into shadow, out of the sun's scorching reach. The tunnel was concrete-coated rather than carved naturally into the rock, and incomprehensible graffiti adorned the walls- Reca wasn't the first person to have discovered the passage, then.

A musty chill seized her bones as she entered. The paint was dry- this wasn't another Rivergal situation- but it still somehow put Reca on edge. It was as if someone else was in the passage with her. There was nobody, as far as she could see, and it wasn't as if there was anywhere another person could hide, but-

There was a great whirring of gears and a thunderous sliding of metallic components. Reca and her deja vu were plunged into darkness as the doors closed behind her, sealing the passage away. Seconds passed under cover of darkness. What had happened? Was the feeling more than just a feeling? Was there someone-

A light snapped on at the end of the passage, pulsing yellow. There was still nobody. Not behind her, not ahead of her. But then...

Reca had no time to consider the ramifications of any of this. She rushed to the light, which flickered with every step, and noticed that there was a trapdoor beneath it. This one had a handle! One half of Reca felt like an intrepid adventurer locked in a battle of wits with a mysterious, faceless adversary with the power to move doors and turn on lights. The other half felt like a lamb being led to slaughter. Both halves hoped that the former's view of the world was the accurate one.

She reminded herself that a can of beans could be used as a bludgeoning tool in a pinch and gave the trapdoor a tug. It gave way. There was a staircase- back to ground level, she assumed, given that the tunnel had sloped upward. With Deca by her side, she would have been inquisitive, curious... even enthusiastic. The stark cold seeped through her shivering skin and reminded her just how alone she really was. She swallowed a mouthful of saliva and, nearly forgetting how to walk, stumbled down onto the first step.

One foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other.

The trapdoor closed behind her. She really shouldn't have been surprised, but she jumped nonetheless and ended up clearing three steps in one swift movement. When she got back on her feet and tried to go down another step, she found that she was already at the end of the staircase and floundered clumsily onto the floor. At least no one saw it happen... right?

"Come on," she muttered, "turn on the light."

Seconds later, a white fluorescent ceiling light sputtered on. It nearly sounded angry. Just a coincidence, probably, but unsettling regardless. What kind of person would enable their lights to express emotion on purpose?

Maybe the same kind of person who would set up a creepy mystery labyrinth inside of a mountain. Ugh.

The room was tiny and stuffy, not too different from the passages preceding it. There were only four things of note within: the staircase back up to the trapdoor, a machine (presumably an ice machine) with the word 'ICE' stamped onto it in a nondescript block font, a small speaker mounted to the wall above said machine, and a complex control panel that occupied around half of the space. As soon as Reca considered that the panel might control the fence, it crackled to life, glowing harmoniously in a veritable LED rainbow- the screen in front of it flashed blue and then switched to displaying white text on a black background.

WELCOME GUEST USER

Guest user? Well, that was accurate, Reca admitted.

SELECT INTENT

Intent?

Reca, wobbling like jelly in an earthquake, made her way to the panel and noticed that a particular section was lit up brighter than all the others. It was a 7x7 grid of small, circular buttons. 'EMAIL', read the first. 'CAMERAS', read the second. 'FENCE', 'DOORS', 'THERMOSTAT', 'BROADCAST', 'FIRST AID', 'ICE'... first aid!

Reca knew nothing about vehicular maintenance. She knew less about it, by her own estimate, than anyone she'd ever met. Deca always maintained herself, so she had never needed the knowledge. Would first-aid for people also work on vans? Would it be different depending on whether the van was sentient or not? After skimming through the rest of the buttons, she decided that 'FIRST AID' was the most promising. She could always come back and press more of them later if she fixed Deca.

SELECT AID TYPE

Reca was confused. Where was the list of aid types? Her eyes drifted back to the button grid and she was momentarily surprised to find that the text on the buttons had changed.

The first one said 'INJECTION'. Not so promising. The second one said 'BANDAGES', which also didn't seem quite right. 'GAUZE', then 'SURGERY', then 'BREATHING DEVICES', then 'VITAMINS'. Reca realized she didn't know any more about first aid than she did about vehicular maintenance.

"Can I have some help?" Reca called to no one in particular. She felt silly for asking. No one was there to hear her. No one was lis-

Suddenly, the screen changed.

"NO," it read.

Reca harrumphed. Whatever this entity was, it didn't have to be so rude. She might have made a snide comment if her friend's life wasn't currently sitting in this thing's invisible hands.

After closely vetting each of the first aid options, she settled on a button that read 'DEFIBRILLATOR'. No sooner had she pressed it than a concealed opening in the wall revealed itself, spitting what Reca assumed was a defibrillator onto the floor. A small manual popped out seconds later. An afterthought? If so, the thing that had brought her to this room wasn't infallible. A smirk almost crossed Reca's lips at the idea.

"Okay, thanks," she said, finding humor in her dire situation. "Can you reset the panel so I can try some other stuff?"

DO IT YOURSELF

"Fine."

There was a button labeled 'RESET' near the grid. Hitting it restored the SELECT INTENT screen.

The button for e-mail produced an error message- NO CONNECTION FOUND. CONNECT, RESET, AND TRY AGAIN.

Disappointing, but also reasonable.

The second button had a much more interesting result. It displayed fifty camera feeds, all grayscale and muddled with static- it was tough to see any of the individual images on a screen with so many of them. The top of the button grid had turned into a number pad, and the remaining buttons had gone dark. Reca tried entering the first number that came to her head: 51.

ERROR: FEED NUMBER MUST BE BETWEEN 1 AND 50

It made sense in retrospect. She thought for a second and then entered 49, because it paradoxically seemed more random than 50. Unfortunately, the resulting image was almost as unclear and artifact-laden as it had looked on the 50-feed grid. What little Reca could make out of the room on camera was uninteresting- it seemed empty and nondescript.

Inexplicably, Reca felt like the camera feeds were real-life spoilers. Could they be rooms inside of the NukeCorp complex? A corporation like Reca assumed NukeCorp was (though it also could have stood for 'NukeCorporal', or maybe 'NukeCorpulent') might have access to all sorts of weird, futuristic technology. A security camera system managed remotely from a hidden mountain base seemed like the bare minimum.

The button marked 'FENCE' let Reca use a lever on the control panel to open the electric fence, which she did quickly. She had expected that the button marked 'DOORS' would control the doors in the base, but she hadn't expected to see about sixty additional doors available to control. Where were they? Opening and closing them produced no audible sound, so she assumed they were far away.

The thermostat seemed needlessly complicated. It had a hundred different locations, each with its own customizable temperature, and Reca couldn't for the life of her figure out which location corresponded to the room she was currently in.

'BROADCAST' commanded her to speak into a microphone on the control panel. That explained how the thing controlling the computer was able to hear her before. To her confusion, though, she couldn't hear her own voice being played back. Maybe the PA system was broken.

The button labeled 'ICE' made the ice machine dispense a bag of ice. Typical.

One by one, she tried out every button on the grid. The endeavor was part distraction, part scavenger hunt- she was searching for potential help with Deca's situation, yes, but she was also trying to distance herself from it. Every setting seemed less consequential than the last. She played around with the brightness of the lights, the extractor fan, the emergency protocols, even the built-in calculator. She tried browsing the web, but received the same error message that had appeared for e-mail. She reached the last button- the power button- with a heavy sigh and a sinking feeling. Had this really been a waste of time?

Regret brewing in her stomach, Reca grabbed the defibrillator in one hand and the bag of ice in the other- the ice could help her with the desert heat, maybe. It was really more of a sentimental attachment she'd developed in her twenty minutes by its side, but she balked at the realization. 'You can't replace Deca', she told the ice in her head. It did what any bag of ice was wont to do: that is to say, nothing.

The trek back to the fence with the items was twice as arduous as the trek to the door had been, despite the fact that the distance hadn't changed at all. As Reca examined her goods, she realized she had forgotten one crucial feature of ice: what happens to it when it warms up. The bag was now halfway full of water. Cold water, nonetheless, but still water.

She left it on the roof and prepared to use the defibrillator. There was one problem, though: she didn't know how! The manual was written in a script she didn't recognize, and the images were unclear, supplemented by lengthy captions with recognizable warning symbols next to them. How was she supposed to heed the warnings if she couldn't read them?

As she broke down, burying her knees in the sand and holding back tears with all of her might, she thought things might be over for the third time that day. What could help her now? What if she messed up and killed Deca? What if Deca was already beyond repair? She racked her memory. She thought back to her early, early childhood, back when the lights in Andistronica worked and there were books in the library and everything was rose-colored. She pored over each memory. There had to be something that would help...

There was. There was something.

As it came into focus in her head, though, that tiny sliver of ephemeral hope seemed to dart back and forth, just out of her reach.

The memory was simple. One of the adults in the village had repaired another adult's RC van... and he had done it by opening up the hood.

That was it. Surely that wasn't enough.

She frantically vetted every other memory in her head. Nothing. Maybe she was going to fast. Maybe she had missed something.

Time was of the essence.

Reca popped Deca's hood, fully expecting to see something akin to the internal mechanisms of the RC van. An engine, an oil tank, some kind of connector to the solar panels.

Instead, there was a mass of slowly pulsing flesh.

It was alive- there was no question about that. What was this? A parasite? Some sort of growth? It resembled the dead thing in the engine of the buried car on the first day of the trip. She had never seen anything like it.

Its skin was almost translucent in places, revealing disgustingly alien internal organs, including a beating heart that steadily circulated dark green blood. Its veins bulged and palpitated. Smoke spun up where it touched the edge of the shell. It oozed a sort of greenish fatty fluid, and Reca found herself unable to look at it with both eyes.

She didn't understand. She just knew she had to do something- she couldn't be complicit in the death of her friend. If she didn't try, she was no better than a coward.

Reca switched on the machine and, with all the emotional force she could muster, plunged the pads onto the fleshy expanse that she assumed was the thing's back. A current flowed through them and sent the thing rippling. She shut the hood. Had she done it right? What if she had just flubbed it? There were a hundred warnings in the manual, and the longer Deca didn't answer her, the louder her inner monologue seemed to get. She did it wrong. A defibrillator was the wrong tool. There was no going back. She was stupid, she was immature, she she should have learned more...

"Deca," she said, tears clogging her throat and stinging the corners of her eyes. "Answer me. Please..."

There was no answer. Not from Deca, not from the bag of ice on the roof, not from the strange computer text being from back in the control room. Reca curled into the fetal position and found she couldn't tell the burning pain in her stomach from the burning pain of the sand on her skin.

Ice... she could use an ice pack.

Fighting every one of her impulses- all of which were telling her to lie down and accept her fate- she struggled her way over to the ladder and managed to scale it, approaching the bag, which was now only about 20% ice. She hugged it. Maybe it could replace Deca. Her thoughts devolved into incoherency- all that mattered was the cold feeling. She hugged it. She would never let it go. She would never let it slip a-

She realized far too late that she hadn't tied it tight enough.

Her hug had opened the floodgates and sent the ice water tumbling from the bag. As it spilled down the windshield and onto the hood like the world's smallest white-water rafting destination, she felt as if her hope had vanished along with it. It dripped into the sand. Reca didn't know whether the drops on her face were ice water or tears.

Deca felt something.

Deca felt a strange jolt, an unusual sensation that activated all of her signals- from her interior lights to her headlights to her horn. It was cold and wet and sent shivers across her hood. Water- icy water. A few drops of it flowed through cracks in her hood and made chilly contact with her actual flesh. She was lost in a turbulent, confusing mixed bag of sensations- the shocking cold, the wetness, the... crying.

How long had she been asleep? Who had- rudely- woken her up? How had she gone to sleep, anyways? The last thing she saw was a midday sky full of stars. Wait a minute- that wasn't possible.

The crying got louder. Reca?

She activated her horn again. Then again. Where was Reca? Why was she crying? Was it because Deca had been asleep?

Suddenly, Reca slid down the windshield and onto the hood. Her sobbing became less and less frequent. She maneuvered down onto the sand in front of Deca and gave her what passed for a big hug- really, what she was doing was spreading her short arms across the front of the van, because she couldn't get them around even if she tried. The sentiment was the most important part, though, and it was there in spades.

'It's okay,' Deca wanted to say. She wanted to say so many other things, too. But she couldn't. Right now, she couldn't really talk to Reca. How could they be friends?

The answer came to her during the makeshift hug.

They didn't need to talk. Maybe things would be more convenient if they could, but they didn't need to.

Things had always worked out. Things would continue to work out. They had to, otherwise there was no reason to even have hope. Maybe it was insane to expect that they'd both come out of their journey alive, but it seemed to them that they needed that insanity in order to keep going.

Now that things were fine again, Reca felt silly for crying and thinking about death. Deca felt silly for allowing herself to bump into the fence. They both sat, feeling silly, thinking about where to go and what to do next. Reca loaded the defibrillator into the back.

The tears dried, as so did the ice water. The duo simultaneously decided to let their worries evaporate in the same way- for now. There were still unanswered questions that gnawed at Reca's mind, but she suspected that she'd find resolution at NukeCorp, which surely had to be close; after all, the electric fence just oozed 'big evil corporation'.

Reca's mind slowly recovered, and she noticed a memory that she'd overlooked in her moment of pain. It was easy to miss. She had only been, what, two years old at the time? She scarcely recalled those years. But it had been before the icebox in the kitchen shack had broken down. The adults returned from a hunt empty-handed except for the unconscious body of the settlement leader's son, which had been draped, limp, over the shoulders of two other people. They had laid him down in the square and produced a bucket of ice water and thrown it over his face. He woke up, writhing and screaming, not a moment later- could that have been what had happened today?

She put it out of her mind.

With a mutual agreement that needed no words, Reca and Deca headed northwards through the gate. Neither of them noticed it closing behind them.