Chapter 34 – Collapse
I stared at the orange sky above what was unmistakably Jubilife, trying to stay calm. A quick glance towards the cloud-covered peak of Mount Coronet confirmed that I wasn't seeing things, and that my hometown was indeed going up in flames. The timing of it all did make me wonder why it was happening, though. Slenderman hadn't appeared on the news as he usually did prior to the terrorist attacks.
"Sir, I need to get back there," I said to General Harding, who was looking uneasily in Jubilife's direction. "Sir!"
He gave me a sad look, and slowly shook his head. "I'm afraid I can't do that."
"Sir, my family is there," I said, my voice shaking with some barely-suppressed panic. "I need to get to them-"
"We have no idea what happened back there," he cut me off, "and in the interest of your safety, I will not Shadow Sneak you over there. You'd just hamper the rescue teams, believe me.
"And since your folks like at the edge of town, they should be safe. If there's one place the terrorists would attack, it's the radio tower, and that's at the heart of town."
"You... you...," my voice trailed off as I digested his words. Not able to come up with a coherent response, I ended up leaning against the front wall of port control for support, feeling lightheaded. "I really hope you're right, sir."
He put a hand on my shoulder, his expression looking like a mixture of sympathy and fatigue. "Same here, kid."
We ended up going back to his apartment, and watching the news. He apparently decided that I needed someone to keep an eye on me to stop me from going back to Jubilife, somehow, and so I wound up at his place.
The news – or the lack of it to begin with - wasn't encouraging at all. As far as we could see, the broadcasts on half of the television channels were down thanks to the attack on Jubilife's radio tower (that was confirmed), and the others were only providing sparse details. No news was available on whether the suburbs at the edge of town had been hit, though.
Jubilife had been one of Sinnoh's most tightly guarded cities, what with it being our central communications hub and all that. Decades ago, it had just been the location of Sinnoh's largest radio tower, but as time went by, the radio tower had been renovated, modified, and upgraded to include almost all the broadcasts in Sinnoh. If it was on the air, it was routed through the tower at some point, be it for censorship or signal amplification.
Which was why, at any given time, the sheer amount of military personnel present near the city center was staggering, and civilians weren't even allowed near the radio tower any longer. In fact, the tower's own broadcasting facilities were considerably dangerous, with all manner of electronic traps and defences built-in. Somehow despite all of the government's efforts to secure their main broadcasting facility, it seemed that the terrorists had managed to... do something at Jubilife.
If only I knew something, anything about Jubilife's current status.
"Here, kid," General Harding offered me a cup of warm coffee. "Something to keep you going while we wait for any news."
"Thanks, sir," I replied, taking the cup of coffee from him even though I didn't feel like eating or drinking anything right then. "Not going to sleep?"
"As if," he snorted softly. "You'd be out my front door as soon as I doze off, don't think I don't know that. So I'm going to keep watch over you until we actually know what's happening here."
"Just when will that be?" I asked him, watching as a news crew flew over the burning ruins of what looked like the Jubilife town hall.
He sat down next to me, taking in the sight of the emergency crews arriving and starting to put out the fire. "I don't know, kid. I really don't."
It was three hours later, and just past midnight, when the news of my father's death reached me.
xxx
"If you'll just sign here, we can arrange for a cremation," said the haggard-sounding orderly. "In these circumstances, we'd advise that as opposed to a traditional burial."
"Circumstances?" I echoed numbly.
He gave me a sympathetic look, and pointed to the form I was supposed to be filling in. "It says here that your father got crushed to death by a collapsing ceiling. The undertakers could fix him up well enough, but you know how it is, really. Sometimes the corpse... doesn't look its best."
For a moment, I just stood there, before finally understanding the meaning of his words. When they sank in, I grimaced, and offered him a nod. "Alright, then. Where do I sign the form, again?"
Two days had passed since the terrorist attack at Jubilife, and most of the rubble had been cleared already. According to official sources, the Jubilife radio tower had been the primary target, which was a bummer, really – anyone with half a brain could have figured that out for themselves. Presently, the death toll was already in the thousands, and was climbing steadily with each passing hour.
As always, the terrorists had found their own ways to bypass security. Nearly half of the city had been literally shaken to bits and demolished as the tunnels which the terrorists had excavated beneath the ground collapsed, and the fact that high explosives had been placed directly beneath the radio tower's foundations had basically ensured that nothing above the tunnels was still standing. From the aerial view offered by the surviving news crews, it looked almost as if a titanic plough had worked its way through the city, starting from the radio tower and working its way towards the cemetery, which was apparently the point of entry for the terrorists' tunnel.
Jubilife had often been called the best well-planned city in the history of Sinnoh, a marvel of modern engineering and city planning. But the terrorists had come and cut a massive swathe of destruction straight through the neat rows of houses, the grid-like streets, and the people whose quiet, orderly lives had been torn apart by the chaos.
As it so happened, my family's home had been caught somewhere in the middle of their collapsing tunnel. The house had been demolished, and the rescue crews were just only getting round to the edge of the city.
If my mother and her pokemon were still alive under all that rubble after forty-eight hours, they would be lucky indeed.
General Harding, for once, was quiet. He had gotten emergency leave for the two of us and taken me to the Jubilife hospital – the terrorists had angled their tunnel around it, thankfully – and accompanied me to sign off on the management of my father's body. He had also force-fed me an unhealthy amount of coffee, watering it down so that I wouldn't end up overdosing on the caffeine or some crap like that.
For once, I felt grateful to have him around. And not for the first time, I felt bad about my earlier plots against him. When my fatigue, guilt, and plain old shock of losing my father eventually got together in my mind, though, I ended up collapsing into a corner of the hospital's crowded lobby, feeling like every bone in my body had been removed.
When General Harding offered to take me back to Canalave, I couldn't even answer him.
xxx
The fuss about the Jubilife bombing died down soon enough. While it certainly had a higher body count than the Canalave bombing had, the fact that our communications had been so severely handicapped made the news travel a whole lot slower than it had during the aftermath of Canalave. Most of the television networks were operating again, but the broadcast were inconsistent and mostly of very poor quality.
Word on the streets was that if the terrorists had wanted to show just how complacent the government had been, and how it had put all its eggs in the same basket for what was arguably the most important weapon in their arsenal – the media – they certainly had proven their point. Some wondered if the other continents had also been affected, since there was a distinct lack of news from the foreign states, too.
And within a few days, it was confirmed. The radio towers at Lavender town, Goldenrod city, Castelia city, and Mossdeep had also been attacked, and so civilisation had ground to a halt in five of the biggest cities on Earth thanks to the terrorists and their not-so-little stunts.
I barely noticed all that, frankly, since I was busy at the Canalave hospital. The rescue teams had eventually managed to dig my mother out from beneath the ruins of our family home, and had sent her off to the hospital. She was hanging on to life by a thread, the doctors said, and was very lucky to have survived the entire ordeal.
Getting her transferred to the Canalave General Hospital was easy enough, since I had a teleporting shellder at my disposal. Seeing her lying on that hospital bed hooked up to more machines than I'd have thought possible wasn't.
Finding out that Bruiser and Amy had died trying to protect their trainer when the house had collapsed was even harder on me than my father's death. Allan had survived, but just barely – he was a barely-coherent wreck. From what I'd been told, he'd actually used whatever psychic powers he had to try and hold up a large chunk of rubble for the three days that the rescue teams took to get to them, and it had been those actions of his that had prevented Mom from being completely crushed by the collapsed house. Naturally, he was just a hair past the threshold of insanity by the time they pulled her out of the wreckage, and was currently restricted to his pokeball for fear of him going feral.
"She is stable for now," the doctor said, sounding strangely distant, "but we're expecting her to be able to turn around. We've seen patients in worse shape recover from these injuries, so it's quite safe to say that she'll be fine barring any... unforeseen incidents."
"Thanks, doc," I muttered in reply, sitting down and practically sagging into the hard sofa outside the intensive-care unit.
She nodded. "If you have any questions, do enquire at the nursing station. Excuse me."
With that, she spun on her heel and left me alone outside the ward. I stared at her retreating back for a while, before she went into another patient's room and disappeared from my sight. I felt hollow on the inside, almost as though I hadn't eaten in a few days, and I swear I was starting to hallucinate due to a lack of sleep.
It was only when they closed the ward for the day that I left.
xxx
"Trainer, you've got to eat, you're all skin and bones now," Silas urged me, nudging his plate towards me with his tongue. "Here, have my share."
I just stared at the plate, and flicked my gaze in his direction, seeing the worried look in his eyes. Somewhere at the edge of my consciousness, I was aware that he'd just offered me his food. Somewhere within my depressed, confused fog, I was aware that I normally would have been poking fun at him for that little bit of kindness. Raw fish was all there was on the plate, but I was feeling too tired to eat, anyway. Hell, I felt too tired to fall asleep.
"Nah, I'm not hungry," I managed to reply. "You carry on, then, Silas."
"Trainer-" he started, only to go silent as I pushed the plate back towards him with a trembling hand.
Getting up, I left him at the mess hall's table – he could always teleport back to our room whenever he finished.
I didn't miss the sad look he cast in my direction when he thought my back was turned.
xxx
"Is you all right, young man?" Babamon asked me when I dropped Silas off at the vault for some exercise. "You look like you need a break."
"Life goes on, Babamon," I replied, even as Silas let out a low whistle. "Just keep an eye on him, would you? I think he's turning soft in the head."
She cocked her head to one side. "What makes you say that?"
"He offered me his food last night at dinner," I told her, as I turned around and headed back out of the vault. "Make sure he's healthy, would you?"
"Trainer!" Silas exclaimed, sounding aghast. "Babamon, you know what's going on, don't you?"
I wasn't around to hear her response – by then, I'd closed the vault's doors behind me.
My stomach growled like a ravenous arcanine, but fortunately, it wasn't going to harass me with gastric pains anytime soon. God bless magnesium hydroxide and its acid-neutralising properties.
xxx
"Hello, anyone home?"
I blinked like confused mareep, snapping out of my reverie as General Harding waved a hand about in front of my face, looking concerned. A week had passed since my mother had been transferred to the ward at Canalave General's ICU, and work had been going on as it normally did. I'd clock in and work from eight to five, and then head to the ward before it closed at eight.
"Sorry, sir," I replied absently, as I shook my head to clear my thoughts a little, and continued sorting out the documents in front of me. "I must have spaced out for a while there."
"Look at me, would you?" he said, sounding worried. I turned to look at him, and he frowned. "Holy shit, you look like death warmed over. When was the last time you shaved?"
Puzzled, I ran a hand over my chin, and sure enough, he was right – there was some stubble there. Not something you'd usually see on me, since I was a Nazi about keeping clean-shaven.
"... and when was the last time you ate. Food, that is?" he asked me, his voice taking on a sharp edge. "Or slept properly?"
"What?" I asked him in return, caught off-balance by the sudden barrage of questions.
He glared at me. "Babamon says you aren't eating, and that Silas tells her you're abusing milk of magnesia to keep the gastric away. Oh, and Fen told me about you fainting thanks to low blood sugar in the pool the other day. Care to explain yourself?"
"I'll clean up and have a meal tonight," I said irritably, as I looked him in the eye and wincing a little as I took in just how unhappy he looked. "Look, it's nothing big, alright?"
"Yes it is," he said, sitting down and raising his eyebrow at me. "Stop what you're doing, right now. And I don't mean the paperwork."
"Life goes on," I muttered, turning back to my work. "Even if people die, life goes on and so does work-"
"For fuck's sake, look at me!" he snapped, causing me to jump a little in my seat. I felt several of my joints popping as I did so, and couldn't help but make a face – had it really been that long since I'd had a good stretch?
By then, General Harding had already made his way around his desk, and had grabbed me by my right arm. "Damn it, I knew something was off. Come on, kid. We're going for a drink."
"But we've got work to do!" I protested, hardly believing my own voice when I heard it. "Sir-"
He spun me about and gave me a flat look. "You've been working yourself to death. How long more do you think you can keep this up? If Fen hadn't pulled you out, you would have drowned in the pool!"
All I could do was to stare at him in return.
His expression softened, and he patted me on the shoulder. "Just come with me, all right? The work can wait."
Nodding slowly, I followed him out of the office.
xxx
"I thought you said we were going for a drink?" I asked General Harding, as we headed back to his apartment. "Sir?"
"How many times must I tell you to stop calling me that?" he sighed. "Just one thing to do before we go for a drink, rookie. Need to meet someone."
Just as I was about to ask him about who we'd be meeting, we arrived at his apartment. He unlocked the front door, and gestured for me to step into the apartment. I did, and what I saw – or rather, who I saw – in the hall made me freeze on the spot.
"Hello," said Ben the gardevoir, an uncharacteristically downcast expression on his face. "We meet again, it seems."
"What's all this about?" I asked warily. Had it all come down to this, then?
General Harding nudged me towards Ben, and let out a heavy sigh. "Ben knows what to do. It won't take a minute."
I stepped towards the sofa, and Ben got up. He offered me a hand, and I extended mine to shake it-
-only to feel as though a bucket of ice-cold water had been emptied over my head.
Even before I could do or say anything else, I felt a strange kind of warmth bubbling up inside me. It was almost like one of those manic, uncontrollable giggling fits I tended to get after I'd gotten thoroughly sloshed, but somehow... this felt different. By the time the warmth had reached my head, I felt as though I wanted to do nothing but to curl up into a ball and go to sleep for a long, long time.
The world started spinning around me, and I felt lightheaded. I tried to reach out an arm to steady myself, but my body could have been driftwood for all the control I had over it right then. Ben might have been right there in front of me, holding my hand, but at that moment, everything else seemed to blur into nothingness, as the warmth continued to envelop me.
When I fell, I really didn't feel anything at all. It was almost as if time had slowed down, and the air around me had liquefied. I hit the ground with an oddly muffled sound, and saw rather than felt the vibrations that went through my body upon impact. For a short while, I just lay there, as the warmth ebbed away.
Right as the last of the warmth had dissipated I felt a heavy weight pressing down on my chest. A wave of fatigue washed over me, leaving me feeling even more worn out than I had been when I'd stepped into General Harding's apartment – something which I wouldn't have thought possible.
And then came the thoughts which I'd been trying to keep locked away in the furthest, darkest corner of my mind.
Dead.
Realisation hit me like a head-on collision with a brick wall, and the pressing sensation on my chest intensified. Within seconds, I was starting to feel as though I was being buried in wet cement, and it was becoming difficult to breathe.
Dead.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. They weren't even near the center of town, for goodness sakes!
Dead.
Why?
Gone.
Silence descended on me, wrapping itself around me like a shroud. In the quiet, another long-banished thought came to my mind, from the days when Sean was still alive, and when everything had been much simpler.
"Ever wonder what happens to us after we die?" Sean asked, looking pensively into his soda bottle. "I mean, do you believe in Hell and all that?"
"Maybe," I shrugged. "Why?"
"Eh, I don't know," he took a swig from the bottle, and swallowed hard, his eyes watering a little as the gas bubbles made their way up his nose. "Grandma always told me to never pity the dead. She says those who deserve pity are those who got left behind."
We sat there in silence for a while, just watching the sunset and dangling our legs in the water, two teenagers who had nothing but the next day to look forward to. The two of us knew that he wouldn't be in town for long – he never did stop by for longer than a day or two whenever he returned – and that tomorrow he'd be gone again, resuming his training journey. And of course, being the sentimental bastard he was, he couldn't even let us finish a nice evening swim without bringing up one of his usual morbid discussion topics.
"Your grandmother's weird," I told him, as I wrung my shirt out over the water, watching as the water's surface got hit and distorted by the droplets I'd squeezed out of the fabric. "But maybe... I guess it makes sense."
He nodded, and set his bottle down on the ground next to him. "Maybe, and maybe not. But just in case anything happens to me, you know what to do, right?"
I didn't answer him, and to his credit, he didn't press me for one. We'd had that conversation a few weeks before he'd started his journey, and I wasn't as cavalier about death as he was.
"We'd best get going, then," he murmured, as he stood up and stretched. "I've got a long day tomorrow."
"You'd better get some rest tonight, then," I said, slowly getting up and wrapping my still-damp shirt around my neck like a scarf. "Need to crash at my place?"
He thought about it for a moment, and nodded with a grin. "Can do. Pokemon center's always running out of water in the showers, anyway, hah!"
As we headed back to my home, he slapped me on the back. "You're a good buddy. Just want you to know that."
I felt a sinking feeling in my chest just about then. Sean had been my only friend since elementary school, and seeing him off after his trips home never got any easier.
Three months later, he was dead.
Sean had been dead for two years and I'd thought that I had come to terms with it, so why was the sinking feeling back? If anything, it felt even worse than it had been back then at his funeral.
The world slowly came back into focus all around me, and I realised that Ben was actually hugging me. For the first time since I'd met him, I realised that he was taller than I'd thought him to be – he was definitely about six feet in height. And yet, right then, he looked small and frail. Defeated, almost.
Something inside me died a little, not because a carnivorous psychic was hugging me, but because the effect of those deaths finally seemed to have caught up with me. They were only two people, really. Two boring, miserable, insignificant souls. But in their own way they'd mattered to me.
Images of Bruiser and Amy flashed past in my mind, and I literally felt as though something had broken inside my chest. Everything just felt so... empty.
Slowly, I got Ben to relinquish his grip on me, and sat down on the sofa he'd occupied earlier. General Harding was nowhere to be seen, along with any of his other pokemon. It was just the two of us in the hall, Ben and I. Just like it had been during those days spent in the sun with Sean, when afternoons were lazy, nights friendly, and silence calming.
Ben settled down on the sofa next to me, and patted me on the back.
"It's not fair, Ben," I whispered, as I stared at the back of my hands. "It just isn't."
Silence was all I got in return.
xxx
Later, General Harding dragged me to Seeny Mohammad's diner and forced me to have some soup. Silas was also there, and the two of them made sure that I finished an entire bowl of the stuff. It tasted like cardboard to me, and felt even worse when it sloshed into my stomach – probably felt that way thanks to me not eating anything more substantial than plain crackers for nearly a week. He then sent me back to my dormitory, with strict instructions for Silas to make sure I got a good night's rest.
Instead, I ended up waking up in the middle of the night, feeling nauseous. A groggy Silas barely managed to teleport us into the showers before I puked my guts out all over the tiled floor, and I was only slightly surprised to see some blood mixed in with the vomit. Dizziness overtook me, and I crashed to the ground, narrowly avoiding the puddle of vomit. Silas immediately teleported away, and when he returned, the dormitory medic was with him.
That was the last thing I saw before I blacked out.