Chapter 1
*Note: This fanfiction contains many original characters. If you don't prefer to read that type of fan fiction, feel free to try out any of the other stories in the 7 Seeds section. Either way, I hope you enjoy your reading. :D
The first independent breath that the girl took after she woke up was stiff, painful. She drank in some air, choked, and started to cough; leaning over the side of the coffin she was in.
The water beneath her was sticky with age, and even the little taste of air that she got between chokes reminded her of her grandmother, old but unrotted. A minute later, she coughed up a mouthful of black and spat it on the ground. The coughing subsided, and finally she managed to take in a clear breath.
She looked around herself. Above her head, the sun shone brightly against a purple blue sky. The sun was framed by the top of a hole. She was underground she realized. Thick vines crawled at the edges of the hole and down into the room where she sat. Looking down at herself, she realized she wasn't actually in a coffin. It was a human sized capsule. A cryotube. The word came to her suddenly and without warning. She was in a cryotube because the scientists said an asteroid was going to hit the earth and they were all going to die. The knowledge ticked into her head second by second in pieces. Cryotube? Why would they stick her in a cryotube?
Because cryogenics was plan Z. If everything else failed. If everyone else died.
The girl turned and started to cough savagely over the edge of her tube, spitting out another mouthful of black substance. She felt queezy. What was the stuff? She started to sit back up when she saw it. The rubble.
Plan Z included putting groups of 10 people in cryosleep and letting the cryogenics system wake them when the atmosphere was clear again. That was how it was supposed have happened. As the girl recognized the corner of metal sticking out from the rubble that stopped a few feet away from her as another capsule, she started to feel sick. They had been crushed. All the other capsules had been crushed underneath the rubble.
The sun had set before the girl managed to lift herself outside of the capsule. Every moment hurt, and as she had forced herself to stand, she had gotten an odd thought. Maybe this was how babies felt. All in pain and scared. No wonder babies always screamed. Just like them, she had been reborn.
She shouldn't have bothered.
In the end, she hadn't been able to stand up or walk. She had slid over the edge of the capsule and had rolled onto the ground. She lay there, panting on the ground. It was then that it occurred to her that she was clothed. Shouldn't she been naked? Taking a moment to look at herself the girl saw that she wore a heavy-duty cargo pants made out of Cordura fabric, and a black cotton t-shirt.
She stared at her hands. They were wrinkled and pale, like the color of a corpse. She shivered, putting her hands back down at her sides.
Eventually clothing deteriorated, just like everything else. Which meant that maybe…just maybe it hadn't been that long since she'd gone to sleep. Maybe it had only been a few years. Maybe the asteroid hadn't even hit. But that would mean that she and the other nine had been forgotten.
Anger, like an injection, flooded her veins. They were dead. Dead. If what they had done, what they had sacrificed for this had been for nothing…The girl's brow wrinkled. Sacrificed? She'd sacrificed a lot, but she couldn't remember what it was. What was it again? The girl looked down at her hands again. Name? What was her name?
She looked up at the sky. Who was she? She'd been picked for Plan Z, but she couldn't remember why. Other than the mission—she couldn't remember anything at all.
The girl sat up quickly, her body obeying in a sudden memory muscle impulse. She gasped as her lower back and arms cried out at her. For a moment, she just sat there, hunched over, trying to endure the pain.
The girl looked at the hill of rubble that led to the top of the hole. She needed to get outside. She looked around her, trying find something, anything to help her rise and crawl out of this mass grave.
A dirt eaten, almost unrecognizable sign caught her eyes when she looked at the remaining wall that was intact. Looking closer she realized it wasn't a sign. It was a map of the United States. Peering at it she saw now that is was preserved behind a pane of plastic.
An urgent feeling she didn't understand filled her. She needed that map. It was important. She just couldn't remember why.
The girl leaned forward and managed to get on her hands and knees. The sensation of her skin pressing against the ground brought tears to her eyes as the feeling of a thousand firecrackers raced through her deadened skin.
One hand moved, then a knee. She was a little closer. The case was about five feet away. Hand, knee, hand knee.
When she reached the side of the building where the case was bolted to the wall, she leaned against it, and allowed herself to whimper for a moment. She gripped her elbows and closed her eyes, taking a five-minute break.
When she was ready, she leaned against the wall and started to rise.
Her legs shook as if she was about to fall, but she doggedly continued to claw her way up the wall. Her hand brushed the edge of the case and she felt around for a clasp.
Nothing.
Damn.
The girl wanted to cry. She'd have to find something to break it now.
That's when her hand brushed a long metal object that she hadn't noticed before. It was a hammer that hung from a hook on the side of the case, just like for a fire extinguisher. The girl knew what to do. Clasping the metal in her hand, she drew her hand back and smashed at the hardened plastic.
The old brittle plastic gave up instantly. Instead of shattering, which would have made a very satisfying sound, it crumbled and she ended up poking a hole through the case. The way it came apart reminded her more of a fungus infested nail crumbling than of plastic snapping. It was old.
The girl set aside the pill of fear that this thought imbued in her, instead she worked on tearing apart the remaining bits of plastic from the edges of the case with the hammer. When the edges were mostly clear she dropped the hammer and carefully pinched the edges of the map and pulled the fragile parchment from the case.
With a great sigh of relief, she slid back down the wall until she sat in a fairly comfortable position on the ground. Without the plastic in the way, she now saw that the map was speckled with large red dots…and a few small green ones.
Looking at the map another detail came back to her. Michigan. She was from Michigan. She was still…in Michigan? She peered at the state at the top of the map. There were two dots in it, one red and one green.
The girl traced Michigan's hand-like shape and touched the center of the wrist where the red dot was. Then she touched the green dot, where the second knuckle from the left would be if it were a real hand. Grand Rapids.
What did the dots mean?
Touching her head, the girl searched into the echoing emptiness of her mind. She couldn't remember. After a light headache started at the edges of her brain, she stopped and closed her eyes. It didn't matter. The asteroid hadn't struck. It could have struck. There were people out there, and soon she could find them and get some help.
She almost crumpled the map in her hands, but something mocking and fearful inside her made her stop.
In the time it had taken her to crawl to and retrieve the map, the sun had risen to the top of the sky. Its warmth allowed new energy to seep into her from her skin, and finally she felt dry from the waters of the cryotube.
With shakiness that drove her slightly mad, she opened one of the compartments of her cargo pants and slid the rolled up map inside. She started to get on her knees when she glanced to the side, and saw the hammer she had used before. That would be useful somehow. She grabbed the hammer and stuck it head first in her large waist pocket. Then, on her hands and knees, she crawled towards the mountain of rubble.
A disgusted shiver went up her spine as she used the edge of the other capsule that had been jutting out to lift herself onto the pile of dirt. She reached out and touched a boulder farther up the hill lightly. If she put too much pressure on the mound, it would roll. She looked up and realized the hill was riddled with boulders. At the top a jagged piece of metal, which she assumed had once been a part of the ceiling, was jutting out of the dirt down towards her like strange teeth at the opening of the mouth of the hole. She would have to get over that too.
Pulling out the hammer again, she buried the back of the head into the dirt and used her other hand to dig into the dirt while she crawled carefully upward.
A tendril of dirt scurried down the mound past her.
She bit her lip and continued to crawl. Slowly she got higher and higher up the mound. Tendril after tendril of dirt skittered down the mound behind her. The girl stuck the hammer back into the dirt again and moved her knee forwards.
Her knee slipped and suddenly she was on her belly. She groaned as a hard rock jutted into her stomach.
Gripping her hammer hard, she lay there for another moment. Then she got back onto her knees and continued to crawl.
Three-fourths of the way up she realized how high she was. Looking down she figured that she was about fifteen feet up the mound, ten feet up in the air. A few more feet and she would be at the jagged metal at the top of the hill.
To get over that she would have to stand.
Her arms and legs were now shaky and she could feel the sweat dripping beneath her shirt and under her armpits.
Finally, she reached the area beneath the jagged metal. It stood straight out from the dirt, vertical to the ground's horizontal. The metal was twisted, and to the girl it looked like it had been torn apart. What could have punched a hole through a metal ceiling?
Just guessing from the ground, she figured that if she were standing the metal would go up to her upper thighs. It was also sharp enough that it would definitely make her bleed if she touched it with her bare hands.
The girl looked from the metal wall to her own hands. She held a hammer.
Right now, she figured the best way she could do this was to roll over as fast as she could. If she only let her legs touch the metal edge as she crossed, then the Cordura fabric would protect her.
Lifting her hammer, she hooked it on the edge of the metal and pulled on it, using it as a prop to stand up. For a moment, she thought the hammer would slip through her sweaty fingers, but then she was standing.
Now all she had to do was lift her foot over the wall and she would be able to roll over. Her whole body shaking, she leaned on the hammer and started to lift her leg. The edge of her boot rested on the top of the twisted metal, and for a moment, the metal took most of her weight.
She could do this. The girl smiled. She was almost there. She took a deep breath, starting to lean forward so she could roll over the metal. Then her grip on the hammer slipped.
Her hand slid forward and wildly she grasped for anything to catch her. She caught the piece of metal and a fiery line of pain went down the center of her hand and down her arm. She rolled.
Her head slammed against the other side of the metal as she fell forward. Her vision went blurry for a few moments and in the next, she realized that she was screaming. Forcefully, she clamped her mouth shut, tears coming to her eyes.
Tearing off her shirt, she twisted the cloth around her arm tightly, and used the arms to knot it there. Then, with that finished she closed her eyes again, her hands touching her elbows.
She didn't even care that her face was in the dirt.
It hurt. It hurt. It-hurt-it-hurt-it-hurt. What if it got infected? At least she needed to find some water and wash it off.
The girl groaned, opening her eyes and sitting up. Finally she would get to see what the top of the hill looked like. She took a deep breath and raised her head to look around. Sitting up, she realized that she was kneeling on the vines she had seen before, and in front of her she saw a forest dense with moss and strange lavender colored grass. Lavendar? She almost reached out to touch a blade, but then stopped. This was Michigan, there were all sorts of plant life, just because she didn't recognize it didn't mean that it wasn't normal.
Looking to her right, she saw that a little wall jutted out of the ground to her right. A wall? The girl smiled, no, it had to be a sign. It was just too odd. Crawling to it, she used the hammer to start scraping off moss. Faded blue words started to become readable. WELCOME TO MACKINAC ISLAND. The girl frowned, Mackinac island? Mackinac island was in lake Huron, next to Canada, which meant that Canada would be in front of her, and…she turned around.
When she saw it, she couldn't quite believe she had missed it before. Behind her, instead of the freshwaters of Lake Huron, or even luscious tropical growth, what she saw was a desert of dust and sand that stretched on as far as she could see.
Lake Huron was gone.