Chapter 5

It is flooding again. Fubuki and Mitsuru are huddled up next to me as we watch the rivers of water rage beneath us. We are safe in our cave, for now. It is rainy season again, and although I am not sure whether the seasons have kept a true pattern over the years, I sense or maybe hope that slowly the world may be growing steadier as each season passes. I can't be sure.

Fubuki sits up next to me, his eyes sharpen and concentrate on something beyond the rain and wind. I follow his eyes and see a pillar of smoke in the distance. Smoke? During rain?

Could it be a person? I can't help how fast my mind jumps to that option. It's unlikely, but I know there have to be more people out there. Somewhere. Kumakawa said there were other teams. How else could a fire start when there's all this rain? I glanced back down to Fubuki. I think it's been around twelve years since I've seen another person. With the seasons so mixed though, I'm not sure.

Filled with a quiet sort of urgency I stand and look through the sheets of water coming down. Smoke. As I stare I'm almost afraid that the black column will disappear right before my eyes.

I can't leave the cave. If I tried to climb down right now I would fall. Fubuki and Mitsuru wouldn't be able to get down. We have to stay here. But I can still stare, try to pin down the smoke with my eyes.

After escaping down the snowy mountainside my feet are blue. It's a unique color. Sadly, I don't like blue. My body shivers uncontrollably. The shadows that followed me after I landed have finally disappeared and I am left alone with my tears and shaking. For once, I am grateful to be alone.

At the base of the mountain there is no more snow, although it is still cold. Slowly, while I gather my senses, I rub feeling back into my feet. I need to warm up, otherwise I am going to freeze to death long before my comrades would find me. I can't start a fire here, out in the open, where they'll see it either. That would be a dead giveaway. A dead giveaway. Dead. Haha. Even I think that's a bad pun. But they would find me and kill me or I'd end up in that God forsaken icy encrusted jail up the mountain again. The pain in my head that came with the cracked phantom has finally subsided and I take a long look around me, almost cheerful when I've finished crying from the fear of it.

I am free. The sky is a pale blue and about a hundred feet behind me the snow starts. There are pine trees sprinkled around me. I sit beneath one on a pile of pine needles. I am really free. My head clears a little more and I vaguely recognize the landscape. This is no hallucination. I think I remember seeing this mountain in the distance once.

When they first took me up the mountain I had been blind folded, so I wouldn't know how to get back down. Ironically, that was what had heightened my senses and helped me to remember something else. Sulfer. When I was first taken to my prison I had smelled sulfur.

That means that maybe, possibly, there are hot springs around here somewhere. I can't smell any sulfur right now, but if I did and was able to find a hot spring I would be able to warm up.

The next moment another thought crosses my mind. If there is a hot spring around here, then my comrades probably already know about it. Silently, I curse the yellow-eyed man, Goliath and the others. I try not to think about the woman. All those luke-warm wash downs. They'd probably been using the hot springs the entire time.

I look back up the mountain, trying to picture which direction I came down, what I was able to see from the window of my prison. I huddle closer to the pine tree, rubbing my arms with pine needles this time in the hope that it will encourage more heat. I close my eyes trying to picture it.

The straight jacket. My arms are tied, perpetually folded. The smell of old wood. The clink of iron. I see rusted bars and blue sky beyond it. I strain against the chains, against the jacket to get closer. To see. To see anything but wood and ice. The edge of the hillside comes in view. There are more mountains in the distance. And snow.

I gasp, shivering even harder. I shudder in disgust and move my arms, desperate to feel the move and stretch of my muscles after remembering. I get up.

Damn the hot springs. I'll make a fire without smoke.

I move my arms and pump my legs as I walk down the mountainside, looking for dry wood. A minute later I settle next to a formations of rocks that lean out towards the top of the mountain. The fallen wood next to them is dry, and I take a small pile of pine needles and set them underneath a tepee of wood I leaned together. The next minute a small spark of fire has started amidst the pile. I lean down and blow on the flame until it starts to really catch. Then the wood above the needles catches.

Relief floods me as I start to feel a little warmth on my frozen toes. A couple more hours and these little piggies wouldn't have been going anywhere ever again. I laugh. That was a bad pun too.

Then another emotion floods me as I take a moment to think. I started that fire really fast. How did I start the spark? I look down at my hands and see a blackened rock and the broken shutter. The shutter is still bloody.

The shutter and rock sail across the fire, as far as I can throw them. I clutch my elbows, eyes wide as I try to slow my breathing. Both items remain prone of the ground. I look at my hands again. Blisters.

It's been far too long since I started a fire with flint.

My shoulders shake and I start to cry again. I cover my face with my hands. I don't want to look at the world right now. I just killed a man. Here I was, getting mad at a them using a hotspring. I killed him.

Although I don't know Goliath's name, I can't forget his face even in the darkness of my hands. The woman's face is the one that visits me next. Her lips are pressed together, and I can see that look of disappointment she had when her face appeared at the window of my cell, the look of patience when she said my name. "Al."

She decided to trust me again. She had sympathy for my pain, my madness. I killed one of our comrades. I killed one of only 5,000 humans that I know remain alive. The weight of this knowledge makes me sink to the floor, my head down on my feet, next to the fire. My muscle burn as they strain to hold the stretched position, and I push myself further, enjoying the pain.

I can't bring Goliath back.

But I can ensure that I stay alive, because right now every human life that is left is essential. I can't rejoin my comrades, but I can find another group. I can continue the mission that we were all sent here for. I can survive.

Out of the corner of my eye the shadows thrown by the fire start to form, and the darkness smiles at me. I clench my teeth and close my eyes.

The next day I reach the base of the mountain. It's there that I smell the sulfur again. At first my immediate thought is to move away from the area as fast as possible. I stand on the edge of a cliff and consider. I have no shoes. I have no food. I have no tools. Those are perfect ingredients to concoct my ensured death.

I am fairly sure that my comrades do use the hot springs. Which means that I could use whatever items they happen to leave lying around while they enjoy those heated waters. I can't help but smile. Well, they get the bath, and I need the supplies.

I move to the left, heading towards where I can smell the sulfur the strongest. As it gets stronger I crouch, moving forward on my hands and knees. After a few scratches and an unfortunate encounter with something that has to be related to poison ivy I reach a rock outcropping, and I can practically feel the heat.

I look over the edge.

I see long black hair that reaches a midback that I can't help but recognize. She is sitting at the edge of the water, fully clothed. Faster than a breath, I jerk myself back and press my face into the dirt, the image engraved into my mind.

That woman's here. Why didn't I think of that?

After about two days of waiting the rain has lightened. After the morning of the first day, the smoke disappeared. I can't say that I am surprised.

The skies clear and finally the three of us make our way down the cliffside towards where the smoke came from.

I throw a rock, and Mitsuru catches it, going along ahead of us. As I walk, I can't help but think. Could it really have been other people who made that smoke? Experience tells me that out here unusual things tend to be dangerous and better avoided. It's how I've survived.

I look at the ragged edges of my clothes, the thinness of my body, feel the slight ache that I got after sleeping in a cave for two nights. If this can be called living.

I remember reading a manga about a man who was shipwrecked alone on an island. He lived alone there for years. There is something that I didn't pay attention to when I was reading the book, but now passes into my mind periodically. In the story, this man kept himself busy. He built himself a house and furniture. He planted crops and found animals he could use for milk and meat. Even though all of these things were difficult, in the story he seemed happy.

That's what I can't understand now. I am here. I am alive. I hold on. But I am not content. If I were content then maybe I would do what he did and build myself a house, grow food and create for myself a life in one place. How could this man be content when he was alone?

I have come to realize that I am not like this man. I can't stay in one place. I can't build myself a home because I am not ready to stop. I think the reason I keep on moving from place to place is not because of the changing seasons or even the dangerous animals that I've seen. I am looking for someone. Anyone. I can't be like that man in the book. Happy and alone.

I don't want to believe that I am the last human left alive.

Rough fur pushes up against my hand and I look down at Fubuki. He pants and whines at me a little. I look up again, and now I can smell what he smelled too. It is the smell of mildew and smoke, along with metal.

I grip my backpack and continue forward. Mitsuru rejoins us, her fur stiff and on end. She whines too as we walk closer towards the smell.

A few minutes later, I can feel heat. Steam comes up through the wet grass and trees from farther into the forest. I stop and put my hands around my face, trying to get a better take on the smell. This doesn't feel like smoke. It feels more like steam, and if there is gas in it, that could kill me.

I take in a cautious breath, smelling mildew, smoke, and metal. It hasn't changed. Fubuki looks up at me, practically sitting on my feet in his need to be near. I take another breath. There's water there too. Maybe steam and smoke?

It smells like burning. I want to go back. It would be the cautious thing to do. But if there's a chance, even a small one, that someone else is awake and nearby I don't want to lose it. I can't lose it.

I start walking forward again. The ground is soft and now my shoes are soaked. I'll have to build a fire and dry them after this. If there is an after this. I can't stop.

It is almost as if I'm hypnotized. I take a few steps in the smoke and steam, and the dark outline of a building comes in view, as I pass a row of trees. A few more steps, and I can see that the building, which is barely jutting out of the ground, is what had been burning.

Mitsuru barks. Then she grabs me by the pant leg, yanking. A burst of steam shoots out of the ground, half catching me in the face. Pain sears across my left side and I land painfully on the wet mud. I gasp in pain, but don't scream, my hands covering the burn.

My head is spinning. A bit of my hand brushes the burn and this time I do cry out, my vision going grainy before I can fight my way back to clarity.

Mitsuru nuzzles my other arm and I grab onto her, still dizzy and now feeling weak with the pain. Fubuki comes up on my other side and I slowly stand all the way up. Intense relief fills me. They're both okay. It seems that neither of them were hit.

I look back towards the burnt shape. The building is about fifty feet away. A spurt of steam comes up, about ten feet away. I flinch. Another one goes off, closer to the building. I don't know why, but now it seems that every few seconds another jet of steam comes out of the ground between me and the building.

I should probably go back. It is legitimately dangerous here. But I can't, because now the question has grown even more urgent in my mind. How could a building burn in the middle of a steam field?