Burn Out Read online

  He hadn’t trusted Markus on other matters though, and after Markus’ hand lingered too long on my back during one visit, he’d warned me about his reputation with women. I guess that with so few females left, he thought he should give them all a try. He’d come by to visit several times after my father’s death, but I’d never trusted him much. Markus’ main concern was Markus.

  He’d taken off on a trip six months ago to check out a nearby solar system, and had stopped by to visit before he left. There’d been rumors that a group of prominent Consulate members had finally found a decent planet. As Markus had never tested his ship for long outside the atmosphere, he wasn’t sure it would make it and said he didn’t want to be responsible for my death. He told me that if his ship held up and he found the planet, he’d come back. Though Markus could at best be described as shady, I believed his promise that he’d return for me.

  In the meantime, I had to figure out what to do with the guns if the planet turned out to be real. There was no way I was bringing them with me and letting them fall into enemy hands. Unfortunately, they were heat-resistant but I could bury them deep in a cactus grove—I just had to make sure I wouldn’t need to use them first. I’d waited, and waited, and then waited some more. Even with Markus’ crappy old ship, I knew he could have made it to other galaxies and back in a week or two. After several months had passed, I was sure I’d been left to die.

  Markus set down the water and pulled out a flask from his jacket. He offered it to me, but I declined. He took a long pull from the silver container before screwing the top back on. “What can I say? It’s been a wild ride. I started having mechanical problems with the space drive.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Whatever.” The space-drive technology—something to do with the eleventh dimension, M-theory, and other crap I didn’t understand—could bend the space-time continuum. Ships like Markus’ could travel between several galaxies in a week, where it used to take several hundred years. The Consulate ships were even faster.

  He leaned over across the table and smirked. “Also, it turned out to be harder to find Caelia than you’d think.”

  I gasped and leaned forward, my heart leaping in my chest. When Markus first told me about the possibility of an Earthlike place, it sounded more myth than fact, like he was just as likely to find a planet inhabited with vampires and unicorns as one with water. “You found Caelia? In the Hydrus system? Is it habitable?”

  Markus studied me, enjoying my anticipation. “Yeah, sure as hell is. Water, air, trees, you name it.” He gestured at all the contraptions around us that kept me alive in this subterranean tomb.

  My mouth hung open at his words. “Seriously?”

  He grinned at me. “Yep. And there are colonies everywhere.”

  “Colonies of people?” The Consulate’s first, second, and final exploratory missions had been total busts. They’d given a pathetic speech on GlobalNet, proclaiming that all hope was lost and everyone should prepare for “the end.” They even used air quotes when saying “the end” on the broadcast, as if we might confuse it with the end of something more trivial—like water.

  Markus laughed. “Of course, people. I wouldn’t be this excited if I was talking about cacti.”

  “How is that possible? They didn’t broadcast it on the GlobalNet, so how …” The answer hit me like a big red giant. I stared at Markus. “They only told the people inside the pod cities, the rich people.” Only the rich were allowed to live in the pod cities. The rest were left to fend for themselves on the outside.

  Markus nodded. “They’re the only ones who could afford the fee the Consulate charged for passage to Caelia. Plus, I’m guessing their ‘planet repopulation plan’ hinged on the hope that doctors, scientists, and various other rich, smart people would reproduce. I’m sure they didn’t figure any of us would survive long enough to find out about it.” He cracked his knuckles. “They figured wrong.”

  Markus watched my face, which I kept blank. Rage bubbled deep down inside but stayed buried, where emotions should stay. Rage was useless, hope only brought pain, and love ended in death.

  He cleared his throat. “I think it’s safe to say the human race will continue, although I know you don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing.”

  After the oceans dried up and all hell broke loose, the pod cities were designed to provide a safe, comfortable environment for the law-abiding citizens. What a crock. But the rich reacted the same as the poor when a new planet wasn’t located. They panicked. Many felt that if the world was ending, there was no need to follow laws. The nickname on the GlobalNet for these people was burners—those who used the sun’s burn out as an excuse to be total assholes. Some killed their own family members for an extra cup of water.

  I shrugged. “A year alone in this hellhole and suddenly the thought of being with other humans makes me downright giddy.” The news broadcast on my Infinity had gone dead shortly after the government reported my father’s death. I’d thought the outage meant everyone in the pod cities had died. “Speaking of other humans, I’ve had no luck trying to find anyone on the GlobalNet. Did you see any signs of any other people?”

  Markus crossed his hands behind his head and sighed. “Sweetcakes, I hate to break it to you, but I’m pretty sure it’s just the two of us down here. It’s nothing but wasteland as far as I can see from my ship. Even our pod city looked deserted.”

  I blinked away tears. Sector 5, where we lived, used to be the continental United States before the oceans dried up and Earth became one giant, happy continent. Now there were only sectors. Each of the six sectors had a pod city, with the Consulate members scattered among the cities to help “maintain order.” If the other sectors were as empty as ours, we really could be the last two people on Earth.

  He looked at me and leaned forward. “It’s been difficult for you, hasn’t it?”

  Unbelievable. Did he really think I was going to spill my guts to him? My eyes fell on my sister’s painting on the wall behind him. Wildflowers. Colorful flowers that didn’t exist in our world. She’d been so determined to make them come to life again somehow. Though we’d had a few decorations in our place in the pod city, she couldn’t have remembered that house—I barely remembered it myself.

  My sister had begged me to look up pictures of flowers on my Infinity. She’d been obsessed with them and thought they were the loveliest of all extinct things. It bothered her that we didn’t have real ones. The cactus flowers were the closest thing, but their white petals sat high atop the limbs and my sister complained she couldn’t see them from the ground. I used to worry she’d try to climb up the cactus and impale herself on one of the giant spines.

  The fact that the only thing providing oxygen could also kill us pretty much summed up our world. She’d made the painting the week before she died.

  So yeah, things had been hard, but I wasn’t telling Markus that. The fact that he might be the only man left on Earth didn’t make him any less slimy. But since he was my ticket out of here, I produced a wistful smile. “Yeah, it’s hard without them. I miss my sister … and despite everything, my father was a great man.” Unlike you.

  His attempt at a caring smile was pathetic. I cut him off before he could say anything else. “What about you, Markus? Still running guns—or have you run out of people to run them to?” He’d sold illegal weapons ever since he figured out how to fly his dead father’s ship. And thanks to the Consulate laws, all weapons were illegal, so he had plenty of business. His father had been in the same line of work, and though Markus never spoke of his untimely death, I figured it had something to do with his job description.

  This made him laugh. “You’re right that my prospects are … drying up … here on Earth.” He paused, delighted in his joke. “But Caelia is a new place and the colonies are trying to establish themselves. They’re mighty unstable right now. Lucky for me, man may travel far and wide, but he still loves his guns.”

  “So, you mean it’s Earth all over again.” I s
ighed. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

  He laughed. “You watch too many old GlobalNet shows—sometimes you talk like you’re hundreds of years old. Yes, it’s like Earth, minus the astronomical temperatures. Caelia’s sun is where ours was back before the ’roid hit it.” Markus smashed his fist into his palm like I needed a visual. He smirked. “People are already soaking up the rays—right next to the oceans.”

  While I had no intention of lying out in the sun on any planet, the thought of standing knee-deep in an ocean of water transfixed me. Almost every day, I gazed with longing at the three-hundred-year-old picture on my Infinity, taken before things escalated and destroyed any chance that future generations would see water. I yearned for water. So much so that I would do almost anything to get Markus to take me there. There was only one thing I wouldn’t do. I had promised my father that in the weeks before his death.

  Of course it was the one thing Markus wanted. “Come on, Tora. You know why I’m here. What are you going to do with all those guns? Be reasonable.”

  Why couldn’t he have asked me for sex? Although dying was only slightly less preferable to having sex with Markus, I could’ve at least strung him along until I figured out an alternative. Disgusting, I could handle. Betraying my father, I couldn’t.

  I realized I could hand over the guns to Markus and be zipping along to Caelia within a few hours. But at what cost? Bringing weapons of mass destruction to a new world wasn’t what I wanted for my family’s legacy. I’d rather die than see the guns fall into his hands.

  I shook my head. “You know I can’t do that. My father—”

  “Your father made these guns for the Consulate,” he pointed out.

  He was right. As conditions spiraled over the last three hundred years, scientists frantically tried to develop ways to reverse the sun situation—most recently, my dad. It wasn’t until Dad told the Consulate that there was no hope that they changed his assignment to weapons creation. They told him it was in case they ran across hostile foreign species while they searched for greener pastures. Liars.

  “Yeah, before he realized what they were going to be used for. Then he regretted it so much, he spent the rest of his life making sure people like you didn’t get your hands on them.” I clenched my fists, ignoring the pain that pulsed through them. “That’s why he made sure they wouldn’t work for anyone but me.”

  Markus looked surprised by my last statement. Apparently Dad hadn’t told him about how he rekeyed all the triggers. Oops. Guess I shouldn’t have mentioned that part. His eyes narrowed. After a long, hard look at me, he took his feet off the table and pushed back his seat.

  I gulped and thought fast. “The Consulate left you on the outside to die just like the rest of us. Still, I’m guessing that’s who you want to sell the guns to. Why deal with those creeps?”

  “Survival. To use one of your old quotes, ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ Don’t you want off this planet? I’ll take you to Caelia right now. You won’t die here, all alone. All I’m asking for in return is the guns. Do you have any idea how much money we could make if we sold them?” He stood and took a step toward me.

  He was a good head taller and had at least eighty pounds on me. I knew what he was thinking. My heart skidded in my chest, and sweat broke out on my brow. Act tough. I couldn’t show fear or he’d win. Luckily, my father had taught me well. I leaned forward on the table and crossed my legs so that my right leg reached over my left. Trigger was tucked into my right boot but I didn’t want to risk dropping it with my bandaged right hand.

  I smiled up at Markus. “I think I will have a swig of that paint thinner after all.”

  “That’s my girl.” He looked down to grab the flask. “It’s quite tasty if I do say so—”

  Taking advantage of the distraction, I used my left hand to pull the gun out of my boot and pointed it at his head. “Okay, asshole. You can leave now.”

  Markus put his hands up in surrender, but didn’t look very scared. The fact that he didn’t even bring a gun meant he didn’t expect a fight. In fact, he smiled. “Have you ever actually shot anyone? I’m guessing not.”

  The irony wasn’t lost on me that I was using a gun to protect other guns from burners who would use them against me. Still, I was the one aiming a gun at someone. Say something else before he realizes how scared you are. “You wanna find out? I can shoot well enough with my left hand—and I’ve got endless ammo in case I miss the first time.” I hoped he didn’t notice the faint tremble in my hand.

  Markus kept his hands above him. “Do you really need a gun to solve this?”

  I flashed a coy smile and batted my eyes, trying to ignore the tightness in my throat. “My father told me a girl should never be alone with a boy without protection.” I held Trigger steady. “What can I say? I’m a careful girl.” I gestured toward the door with a flick of my head. “Now get out.”

  He took a step backward but didn’t seem ready to give up. “How exactly do you think you’re going to get off this planet without me, Tora? I promised your dad that if anything happened to him, I’d look out for you. Don’t be crazy.”

  I snorted. “Crazy? I was crazy to think you came back here to help me. Did you promise my dad you’d steal his guns too? No, you only came back because you either thought I was already dead, leaving all of these guns for the taking, or you were hoping I’d be so desperate to leave here that I’d do anything.”

  I stood and took a step toward him, not lowering Trigger. Anger replaced my fear. “So maybe I was crazy to think you had a decent bone in your body. I can see I was wrong—you’re a total burner. I don’t know why my dad didn’t see it. I should kill you right now.” I hoped he wouldn’t call my bluff, because I hadn’t killed a thing in my life. Even though he deserved it, I wasn’t sure I could take him out.

  Markus frowned, but took another step backward and bumped into the ladder leading up to the door. “I’m a man of opportunity, always have been. Your dad tended to see the best in people and might have overestimated my character. Still, I think offering to take you with me was pretty decent of me. I won’t be back again, you know. This is your last chance.”

  I wanted to kick myself for wasting a glass of water on him. I pressed Trigger’s engagement button. It instantly recognized my energy and glowed a soft blue color. “I don’t want to hear another word from you or I’ll start shooting, I swear it.”

  Markus turned, helmet in hand, and scampered up the ladder. He pushed on the door and glaring reddish light flooded the chamber. I held my bandaged hand to my eyes to shield them from the sun, but kept Trigger aimed at his retreating form. He turned back to look at me for a second. I couldn’t tell if it was scorn or pity I saw in his eyes before he pulled his helmet down. The door slammed shut, blocking the sun.

  I kept the gun pointed at the ceiling until my hand grew sore. After some time passed, I powered it down and placed it on the kitchen table. I sank into my chair and rested my head on the table.

  Markus was gone and he was never coming back. That burner was my last hope for getting off of this rock.

  Damn.

  Chapter THREE

  THE WINDS WAILED THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT. THE HOWLING penetrated every nook of the shelter and echoed inside my sleep chamber. Though it was impossible, I could have sworn my sleep pad, which hung from the ceiling, swayed underneath me from the breeze. I shuddered as I lay awake in the dark, yet there was an odd comfort in the sound. Something about the noise made me feel I wasn’t alone.

  Three weeks had passed since Markus left, and I had no doubt that he’d told the truth for once and had no intention of stepping foot on Earth again. He was probably passed out somewhere on Caelia after a night of boozing.

  Maybe I could have risked letting Markus take the guns with him, and then tried to dump them in space, but something told me he would have found a way to overpower me. No way could I let those guns move to a new world. On the plus side, I didn’t have to consi
der having sex with him, and my father’s guns were safe. Even though they wouldn’t work for anyone else, I didn’t want to take any chances that someone could reprogram them the way Dad did. I’d find a way to get rid of them before I offed myself. I was back to Plan B.

  The shrieking in the air continued. The nights had grown increasingly violent in temperament, as though they could fight off the sun’s endless assault on the dark. The sun was much bigger than it had been when there were oceans, its brilliant shade of red quite unlike the small, golden-yellow sun I’d read about on the GlobalNet. After it finished its vast expansion, it would devour Earth before shrinking to nothing. Not that there’d be anything alive here to witness it.

  After tossing and turning for hours, I finally drifted into sleep.

  My sister’s voice permeated my dreams, and a small hand tugged at my shirt. “Come on, Tora. I wanna play hide-and-seek.” I blinked and sat up, confused, struggling to make out her features in the dark room. Her eyes gave off a strange glow, but before I could get a better look, she giggled and ran away from me. “I’m going to hide. Count to ten,” she called. I got to my feet, but frowned. We weren’t in the shelter anymore. We were back in our pod in the city, but something seemed off. It was daytime—the room should be lighter.

  Laughter echoed through the pod and her singsong voice sounded like it was coming from everywhere. “You’ll never find me.” I heard the click of the front door.

  “No,” I yelled. “You shouldn’t go outside.” I shook off my fog and ran down the hall, but stopped short in the front room. There was no furniture, no anything. The room was completely bare. My pulse quickened and I hurried out the door, shouting her name.

  Stark white pods lined the grids in neat rows. Bright light flooded the city through the dome. Though it consisted of a special substance that muted the sun’s damaging rays, the Consulate still discouraged people from going outside for long. They didn’t understand that my sister craved the outdoors the way my mother craved pain meds. A slight breeze stirred due to the main wind generator that continuously pumped recycled air through the dome.