Name: Greenling
Story: All Great Things/Standalone
Colors: Lawn Green #10 (inner tube)/Camo Green #14 (armistice), Iceberg #6 (longest night)
Supplies and Styles: Bichromatic
Word Count: 4,642
Rating: PG
Warnings: Mentions of death and disturbing events which largely happen offscreen.
Summary: The world slowly adjusts to the idea of apocalypse, and a girl goes on a field trip. Set a little less than a year after the events of AGT's first story, so sticking it there.

Comments, criticism, and questions are all appreciated.

Also, done with Iceberg yaay.



Nothing at all woke Kara; the slow realization in her drowsing state that she heard nothing, sensed no movement, shocked her nearly to her feet in an instant. She stumbled forward in the trickle of warm sun from the little window, rubbing sleep from her eyes. The room was empty. The sun was high. She was alone. She ran immediately to the door and yanked it open, spilling out into the hall.

She expected to be laughed at. There should be people in the halls, maybe even an adult with some explanation and instructions on how they would get home. That was the only point to them, after all; but there was no one. There was no one in the little rest area with the folding tables, or in the remains of the convenience store past that. She turned and headed back inside, to the other little shower-rooms where they had spent the night in twos and threes. Every one was empty. No people, no backpacks. A sick feeling rose in her stomach, imagining what could have happened.

Outside, the sun shone down hard on the flat plain and the long, narrow highway. Kara took a moment to try to let her eyes adjust, searching as much as she could without going out into it. The stench of burning asphalt floated up to the truck stop from the highway, and from her vantage point she could see how the still-boiling, melted holes in the landscape matched up to the colorless holes in the sky. Somewhere around the side of the small hill were the remains of the bus.

Kara stepped back inside, trying to think and not to vomit.

*

Ms. Montoya taught ninth and eleventh grade history, in her words, because she'd lived through most of it. No one was quite sure if that was a joke, in part because eleventh grade was Modern World History and she was by all accounts a very old woman, but mostly because when she said it she had a way of looking down her nose at a person like a particularly vicious hawk looked at a mouse. She was a stern teacher, though not a hateful one, standoffish, and polite. She was the sort of person that adults swapped rumors about, but no student ever did. There was an unspoken feeling that talking about her drew her attention somehow, and no one felt like testing it. She was also Kara's homeroom that year, and that had made things easier than they otherwise would have been; for two periods a day, no one talked about her, no one tried to make the day any longer or more interesting, and no one talked about Louisiana.

Not that the latter was Kara's problem exactly; she hadn't been there or known anyone there. Her personal problems were those of the garden variety small-town outcast, of having a family in the wrong business, making the wrong friends, kissing the wrong person, and scaring teenage boys. Most of the time, her life didn't even have the grace to be terrible, just lonely and seasoned with spiteful comments. Louisiana, by the time school had rolled back around, had been settled in public opinion as a curiosity, a world-changing event in the same sense that the deposition of a tiny country's dictator or that kid who invented solar panels made entirely from hair were technically world-changing events. Whatever had happened in late May to put parts of a major city and a section of coastline under quarantine didn't even have a single settled name, and though some people talked a great deal about the seeming media blackout, or the lack of government involvement in the response to the event or its aftermath, or the simple mounting realization that several hundred or a few thousand people had been mauled to death by God knew what, few seemed to want to do much about it. People were outraged, the internet made jokes about zombies, and for those not directly affected, life went on.

But then it happened again.

October came in warm and windy with a little rain. It was mid-afternoon on a Friday, time to sit around in the cafeteria and wait for the buses home. Kara sat at the end of the table, flipping through a book for an English assignment. It was noisy in the echoing way school cafeterias always are, but it was still obvious when the din suddenly ramped up a few levels.

She looked up. It had started a few tables over, where a pack of seniors had been openly ignoring the rule against having cell phones out- as opposed to being more subtle about it, which the rest of the school promptly proved they had been doing. The original group started to stand up to get a better look, three girls leaning over one's shoulder, hands over their mouths, looking angry or frightened. As the word spread, teachers started coming over, but where there should have been a lecture, they just looked nervous and started speaking to each other. The football coach's drill-sergeant voice rang out, ordering people to be calm.

She realized what had happened when a freshman's voice rang out over his: "It's real! Holy shit, CNN! It's real!"

Through the bus ride home, the adults kept the barest threads of order. The air was heavy with tension as the news spread, and all the arguments of the previous summer were resurrected. It happened to Philadelphia, this time, and the information coming in was a lot clearer: people running around mauling other people, maybe with claws; areas where electronics didn't work, or gave weird results, like a camera that took pictures of the right places, but how they looked years ago; a short, flickering video of what might have been a man or a canine-looking creature the size of a car tearing into another monstrous-looking creature/person. Was it zombies? An infection? Superheroes? Magic? Aliens? Kara got most of it third-hand, the only person on the bus who couldn't get the internet on their phone. It made her fidget not to know, but listening was better than asking.

Kara kept the TV news on that night while she made dinner for herself, and curled up on the couch with her laptop and a huge bowl of shells and cheese. She watched as a third event happened in the same night off the coast of Singapore, and reports of other, smaller events flew in from all around the world, though most (but not all) were of dubious origin. She watched a man with whiteish dreadlocks who the news guessed might have been CIA preempt a Congressman and call the events "shatters" without having to think about it. She watched blogs light up with activity, and messengers flare with friends who were just as glued as she was. She skipped homework. The teachers would understand.

She fell asleep after the worst of it died down, curled up in a blanket with cold macaroni on the floor.

*

After several minutes of forcing herself to calm down, Kara went back outside, searching for at least some indication that yesterday had happened, that she wasn't still asleep somehow. The dirt and sand had been more or less still since yesterday afternoon, and walking down through the parking lot, she noticed a long line of overlapping footprints leading down parallel to the highway, meeting it several hundred feet past the holes. Those hadn't been there before. She tried calling out, her voice wavering a little, but no one answered. As soon as she saw the bus, pitted and rusted all along the front left side, she turned back.

The inside of the truck stop was a very neat wreck, hastily dismantled and abandoned, long enough to be dusty but not nearly enough that things were falling down. Metal shelving was knocked over or shoved into corners, empty jugs of cleaning supplies had been left sitting out, and the in-store Taco Bell still had a few chairs left that hadn't been bolted down. "WE ID" stickers, pizza advertisements, and other such things were still stuck up around the counters, more or less intact. There was a trashcan in the corner; she thought to check inside it, and it did have the few candy bar wrappers and plastic sandwich bags left from what her classmates had eaten in lieu of dinner last night. It was a four-hour drive back to Colorado from from Santa Fe, and they'd gotten about an hour and a half north on I-25 by the time the world started falling apart. There had been plans to have lunch and dinner at restaurants before and after the ride, so the remains of Saturday's lunch and a few snacks were all anyone had.

Kara sat down in the floor with a long, shuddering sigh, where the front counter blocked the sun coming in. and tried her cell. It still wasn't making calls, emergency or otherwise, and it was running out of battery. She realized she hadn't had a shower in a while, her braid was coming undone, and her scalp itched with sweat. She wondered if her Dad had noticed yet that she hadn't made it back.

She sat there for a while, considering her options. The place didn't have running water, electricity, or food, so she couldn't stay for very long. On the other hand, she had no idea where she was, whether they'd even crossed state lines before they'd crashed, and she hadn't been paying much attention to the scenery in the bus. If the others had really, intentionally left, she knew at least that Ms. Montoya wouldn't have left her behind. Her classmates might have, but not the teacher. That didn't help answer anything, but if someone had been here, what if they were coming back? Weren't there people who tracked and dealt with things like this?

Kara took a deep breath, clenched her fists and every muscle in her body, and forced herself to relax again.

Realistically, there was no point in making plans with so little to go on. It looked to be about noon, so it was too hot to go walking for hours without water even if she did want to, and it would be too cold at night in early spring. The class had mostly searched the place last night, but she hadn't seen it all herself. If she could get through the day and night, and nobody came, maybe she'd go in the morning.

Kara wandered around inside for a while, until the worst of the heat was gone. There was nothing in the kitchen, nothing in the freezer. There was an office in the back of the store, which was locked, but it had a doorknob-plate with big flat-head screws and she managed to get it off with her house keys. There was about half an old bottle of water under the desk, and she drank most of it, though it was gross and plastic-tasting. She immediately felt a little better.

Eventually she decided to go outside and face the bus. It no longer smelled so strong, but it was pitted with holes and speckled with dried asphalt- she wasn't really sure if asphalt could do that, if it even could boil, but she had no idea what kind of sense any of this was supposed to make anyway. The right front tire and axle were basically slag. Somewhere around here, Ms. Montoya had... done something with the bus driver. She didn't want to know what. She was content with just the nightmares about the girl who'd been splashed in the face with asphalt.

There was nothing left in the bus. Everything had been collected; really, it had been a longshot anyway. She sighed and stepped back outside, but from below, she noticed something else: in the back, there was a chain-fenced area that looked like an empty pool, and next to it, a tall wooden fence that probably hid a dumpster, but might have a generator. She considered that she was not yet nearly hungry enough to dumpster-dive, presuming there was anything in there, but the sun and the hunger and the stress were making her deeply irritable. Still, it might be worth checking out.

What she saw after walking back up the little hill changed her mood considerably. Around the back of the truck stop were piles of things, plastic and trash strewn around by previous scavengers, animal and human. Half a dozen inflated inner tubes were scattered down the other side of the hill down to the sparse treeline, probably the remnants of some stray childrens' game. Most importantly, there were a pair of vending machines, knocked over but possibly intact. She ignored the fenced-in area and jogged over. One was an older-looking snack machine with a big plexiglass front, and the other looked like a Coke machine. A new burst of energy guiding her, she decided to roll over the first one and see if there was anything in it. It had hinges, so it wasn't quite on the ground; so long as she could get a good grip, she thought she could try.

She squatted on the ground, grabbed the machine, and heaved. It scooted back against the other machine with a high squeal before it moved, and Kara winced and dropped it. Her arms hurt. She gritted her teeth, caught her breath, and tried again. Nothing, except she nearly strained something. It wasn't even that heavy, but she just couldn't get a good angle on it. She made herself consider that that was a good sign: it meant it was possible there was something left in it.

She growled and stood up, pushing her bangs back out of her face. The fence was old wood, and if she was going to strain something, she decided to do it on that. She grabbed a hold of the top of one of the boards with both hands and jumped. After only a few seconds of hanging on, she fell hard on her back- but part of the fence came with her. She took a moment to catch her breath.

It didn't take long to find a rock and fashion a lever, which made things much easier. The plexiglass looked like someone had already tried to break it, but it was just scarred, not gone. There was clearly food inside it- maybe a dozen, maybe more little candy bars and bags of stuff. Her stomach damn near roared at her. She hit it once with the rock, not expecting it to work, and it didn't. And the lock was one of those stupid tubular circle things. She'd never successfully picked one of those- they usually required actual tools, not just basic knowledge and patience.

She went back inside and decided to search the office further.

*

Kara stood awkwardly outside the bar, shouldering her backpack. It was a dark, blocky two-story brick thing that had been around since at least the '70s, but the sign out front was new, and even in the early hours of the evening there were half a dozen cars in the lot. That wasn't fun. She crept in and tried to shuffle past the patrons without attracting too much attention; the bartender, thankfully, gave her a glance and then ignored her as she slipped past him, ducking under the bar and into the back.

The office door was cracked open, but it was empty. The whitish faux-leather chair shone under the fluorescent lights; she took the liberty of a seat, dragging her books out to do some homework. She shoved the keyboard aside and turned the monitor off.

It was maybe half an hour before Kara's father finally came in. He stopped just inside the door, a hairy mountain of a man in a cheap suit and round glasses.

"What the heck are you doing here?" His voice was quiet, with an edge of surprise. "What happened?"

Kara sat her pencil down. "I need you to sign something before tomorrow. Didn't think you'd be home."

He sighed. "Is it bad?"

"No," she said sourly. She took the permission slip out of her notebook and sat it on the desk. "There's a field trip in history next month, last weekend in March. Uhm. We'll be eating meals there, so I'll also need some extra money."

He picked it up and looked at it; he hesitated, and the more he hesitated, the more Kara shrunk down into the seat. When he started pulling on his beard, she knew something was wrong. "Santa Fe? That's a pretty big city, isn't it?"

"Dad, I know what you're saying, and there's no evidence it targets big cities. I'm not in any more danger leaving than I am staying here." She had expected this, and rehearsed a response. Her voice, she thought, was admirably calm. "There'll be teachers there like any field trip."

"Leaving Friday evening and you're coming back on Sunday." He looked her in the eye. "You really want to go?"

"I think I can handle being ignored in Santa Fe as well as I can here," she couldn't stop herself from saying.

His expression didn't change much; he just grunted. Kara fidgeted, picking up her pencil and glancing back at her books. She didn't really want to go, being around that many people, but she wanted to leave more. The extra credit wouldn't hurt, either.

"I was actually going to give myself the day off tonight. Do you want to go somewhere for dinner tonight?"

"Just home," she said quietly.

He shrugged. She gathered up her books, and they drove home in silence.

*

In the office, Kara found several paperclips, some tape, and after taking apart the rolling chair, a large nut. That had no good reason to work, but she downed the last of the water in the bottle and got to it, determined that if she was going to die, she would at least die doing something.

The sun settled lower and lower in the sky; Kara lost track of time, if she'd had it in the first place, trying again and again on the lock on the snack machine. She went through three paperclips just trying to find the first tumbler, then the second was much easier. Eventually, she got what sounded right, and taped them all together onto the nut.

It broke. Snapped right off. Kara swore every four-letter word she knew and some a lot longer. She caught her breath, and considered, for the first time, leaving. There may have been no one there- there may have been no one left at all in the world, for all she knew- but maybe there was something, somewhere. Maybe if she was alone, she could find a car abandoned on the side of the highway with the keys still in the ignition. Maybe she could just get out of this area and her phone would work again. Maybe if it was cold, at least she wouldn't be so goddamned hot. Meanwhile, her fingers were busy molding another set of paperclips.

It was just about dark when she yanked the door open with a clang, fake key falling to the wayside. She immediately grabbed a handful of candy bars and started eating. The first one was chocolate and nougat, which she usually didn't like, but at that point it smelled like victory. She rolled over the drink machine with her lever- considerably easier than the first time- and munching a bag of popcorn, started in on it.

At some point, she heard a loud barking.

The plains behind the truck stop became rolling hills, real ones rather than the semi-artificial bump the truck stop was on, leading off into a jagged treeline in the distance. There was a dog maybe halfway between the trees and the truck stop, with perky ears and a curly tail. It looked pretty healthy, maybe a little dirty, maybe a little hungry, and she couldn't tell if it had a collar. Before she could decide whether it looked dangerous, it barked again and trotted towards the hill, tail waving like a flag.

Smiling and with the happy rush of sugar running through her, she decided to take her chances. There were a few pieces of beef jerky in the wreckage of the vending machine, and she plucked one out as it bounded up the the hill. It was a huge male dog, bigger than she'd expected; thankfully, he stopped a few feet away from her, ears back and tail still wagging. Kara held out her hand for him to sniff. He did, giving it a wet slurp on top of that, then promptly sat down and barked again, loud enough to hurt her ears. She laughed and ripped the packaging off the jerky. The dog's tail went nuts, and it shifted its weight back and forth but didn't get up until she tossed the jerky over his head.

"Fetch!"

The jerky arced a long ways, and the dog ran after it, leaping high in the air and catching it in his mouth. Just as he'd landed, Kara heard a low whistle, and he froze, ears perked.

At first, she couldn't tell what she was looking at, except that she hoped very much it was a person; the sun was quickly nearing the horizon in front of the truck stop, and the shadows were getting longer. That's what it looked like at first, behind a large and leafy tree, but then it came closer and she saw it was a girl. She was short, not quite little-girl short, but she was slight, a little bit smaller than the dog if it stood on its hind legs. Her hair was bleached white, her skin was a soft light brown where it wasn't burnt red, and she wore a patterned sundress far too light to be wearing walking around in the desert. The dog trotted up to her, and it must have been her dog, because when she put her hand out, he dropped the jerky. Kara had never seen a dog do that before.

Where the girl could have come from, whether there was a town nearby, whether she was one of the things that came out of the cracks in the sky, Kara had no idea. The way the girl moved, Kara would almost believe she was something from another world, or some kind of fairy princess, outside of doubting things like that would get sunburnt if they did exist. Something fluttered in her chest, and she frowned sourly. This was a little much to happen at once.

She realized she had been staring a while when the girl looked up at her, shocking the frown back off her. Somehow, she didn't expect that, so sudden and deliberate. They stared at each other for a while, the dog looking between them; finally, Kara's stomach growled and she glanced away towards the food, and when she looked back, the girl was backing away.

"Hey!" The word was out of her mouth almost before she'd considered it. "Hey, I'm alone! Don't go!"

The girl paused for just a moment, then started walking faster. Kara gritted her teeth. "Please! I need help-" her voice cracked- "I don't know where to go! Please."

Kara's heart dropped out of her chest, and then again when the girl did stop, nearly to the treeline. She just stopped again, and said nothing. Kara sighed deeply, fists clenching and unclenching, and set herself to at least shoving some of her vending machine spoils into her pockets. Then she heard the dog running towards her again, and turned to see him leaping up to catch the piece of jerky she'd originally thrown.

She paused. The dog looked at her, then back at the other girl, and when no one said boo this time, inhaled the jerky in one slurp. Kara sat up, taking another strip of jerky out (though her stomach complained), stripping it, and tossing it not quite all the way to the dog.

The dog dashed up, caught it, looked back at the girl, and ate it. He noticed none of the tension between the two humans. Meanwhile, the girl crept closer, back up to the tree she'd been hiding behind before. She seemed unwilling to enter open land.

"What's wrong?" The girl didn't shout, but it was loud enough for Kara to hear clearly. Her voice was low and soft, with a sharp edge of warning.

Kara stood up again, her legs wavering a little from crouching too long. She felt equal parts relieved and angry, and didn't bother hiding either. "My class was on a field trip. We got stranded here... now everybody else is gone. I don't know why and I don't know where I am."

After another moment's hesitation, the girl walked several more steps forward. "How long have you been here?"

"Just since yesterday afternoon. I just found food and water in these machines, and there's not that much of it..." Kara crossed her arms and frowned. "Where did you come from?"

"Not around here," she said brusquely. "Give me some and I'll help you."

That took Kara back. "Wait. Where are you from, then?"

"How is that your business?"

"I just-” She frowned again. “There was a Shatter nearby. How do I know you're not one of those things that come out of them?"

"Aren't you the one asking for help?" She could see the smirk on the girl's face. "I don't know how you'd know, but I'm not one. Now do you have enough food and water for me?"

Kara looked down at it. Maybe she did and maybe she didn't- she had no idea how far she had to go. There were another two bottles of water among the sodas, at least, along with some Gatorade.

“Yeah... sure.”

The first thing the girl did when she made it up the hill was grab a bottle of water and a handful of candy for herself. She kept one eye on Kara, as if she were afraid the girl would suddenly grab a knife and turn on her, or something. It was a strange thing, but it made sense; the girl didn't seem like she'd eaten in a while.

“So what's your name?” After the girl took her share, she grabbed a soda and a bottle of water and started walking towards the door.

“Call me Sophie,” she said between candy bars.

“Okay. I'm Kara.” She wasn't entirely sure where they went from here. “So, it's about nightfall... I don't know where to go, but I was thinking that since no one came back for me, I might leave in the morning. Especially now that there's water. Do you want to come with me?”

“You're that kind of lost?” Sophie asked. Her eyes got a little softer, or maybe Kara imagined it.

Kara frowned. “Are you sure you're not something weird?”

“What?” Sophie asked incredulously. She squared her shoulders and gave Kara an irritable look. “I'm a human being. It's just... been a while since I've talked to someone who... it's not any of your business.”

They stood there in silence for a moment, neither entirely knowing what to do with the other. The dog started sniffing around, tail still wagging. Finally, Sophie broke the silence.

“Thank you for the candy bars, though.” She turned away from Kara, walking slowly past her towards the front of the truck stop. “The dog's name is Ichi, by the way.”

“Ichi. Cute name.” Kara smiled at the dog. “He obviously really likes you. It's good to have some companionship, I guess.”

“I guess.”

They went inside as the last rays of the sun refracted through the cracks in the sky like a prism.