Burning Petrichor

Silence reigned, broken only by the sharp pants of exhaustion ringing within the empty space. The moon shone down through the gaps in the ceiling soaring overhead, pathetic shelter from the soon-to-be downpour, acrid on the wind but for now invisible in the sky above. The woman’s breath hitched once, twice, and then fell silent. Her reaching hand flexed towards the child and dropped, landing amongst the grit and dirt of the decaying building.

A locket tumbled from her fingers, chain still wrapped around the digits. The surface once smooth was now pockmarked with age, the heart of silver unable to withstand the harshness and struggle of the new world.

The woman’s last gasping breath seemed to echo within the empty space, a sigh filled with the unfulfilled promise of a mother to their child: I will protect you.

The child didn’t understand, and felt only relief at the cessation of the sounds of pain the woman had been making for however many hours they had huddled inside the building. The tumble-down walls blocked the worst of the wind even if the chill still crept within with sharp claws. It was the lack of noise that roused her from her stupor, made her raise her tear-stained face towards the one constant in her life up until now.

The relief was short-lived, creeping tendrils of fear wrapping tightly around the child’s heart as her murky eyes travelled from the motionlessness fingers, up the arm to the almost-stillness of her mother’s chest. She rose on shaking limbs, her voice calling out to the woman that would never say her name again. It was confused at first, before her cries turned to fear. She crawled closer, leaning over the woman.

But the eyes that no longer met hers were clouded as they flickered back and forth, the woman's features slack. The woman didn’t pay attention to the small form in front of her, no matter how closely the child pressed her own face against the other, no matter how hard she shook lifeless shoulders back and forth. While the chest still rose and fell beneath her fingers, the child knew enough to know that this deep stasis wasn’t truly life, even if it wasn’t quite death itself.

Her mother, as she had known her, was no more.

The daughter threw herself backwards then, heedless of the sharpness of the rubble beneath her fingers. The clouds began to gather overhead in earnest, blocking the light of the moon and to make true of their promise of rain. The child knew that she needed to find better shelter, to leave this place and seek something with an intact ceiling. She needed to hide, both from the acid that would soon unleash from the heavens above but also from those that she knew would be coming.

Her mother’s eyes watched something she couldn’t see, the blank stare heralding the coming of the others. The blank stare was a symptom of succumbing to the virus, she’d been told, one her mother had fought against since she’d escaped. One she had railed and run from, long enough to bear and raise her daughter who was now defenceless in this dangerous world.

The child knew she had to make a choice, and soon. The others would come and take her mother away, that much was certain. She knew once someone gave up to the virus, they would be found, sooner rather than later.

But she didn’t know how long it would take.

And therein lay the rub: her mother was no more, the woman who had raised her with warmth and love and hope, was gone. In her place lay a lifeless shell, watching things in her head no one else could see. Waiting. Others would come, and take that shell away from the daughter, and her mother had never dared tell her what came next. She’d just trail off, her voice chill and frozen fear in her eyes.

But the rain was also coming, the rain that would destroy and decay and erode any organic matter that it touched. The mother was gone, but her body remained. And the child, no matter what her mother had drummed into her day after day of eking out what could barely be called survival, still felt sentimentality towards the shell in front of her eyes. It still looked like her mother, after all, even if it would never speak in her voice again.

She had time to run and hide away from the others, or she had time to erect a shelter over the both of them and hope she could do it well enough the rain would slide harmlessly off. Once the rain hit the ground, it was safe.

That too had been taught to her in a thousand different lessons, not all of them painless.

The child chewed at her filthy fingernails, eyes flicking back and forth between her mother and the gap in the wall that represented her freedom.

Her stomach chose that moment to gurgle, an inappropriate reminder that despite the tragedy in front of her, survival was more than freedom. Her body was still small and weak, and despite nimble fingers and a quick mind, she was frightened of existing in this world without an adult to rely on.

Her eyes stopped on her mother, and she knew if she chose this moment to run, she would always regret it. She climbed to her unsteady feet, feeling lightheaded from both hunger and the monumental decision she couldn’t believe she was making. She paused one moment to reach forward again, grasp the chain of the locket in both grimy hands and tug it from her mother’s lax grip. She stretched the chain open wide, and draped it around her neck. After a moment, she tucked it beneath her shirt, the cold metal a shock against her bare skin.

It was enough to get her moving, to get her sluggish mind to start working. She considered briefly dragging some of the larger pieces of rubble over, to build a small shelter around where the shell that had been her mother lay, but rejected it almost immediately. Easier still to pull and drag her mother over to a sturdy corner, and build a shelter there where there was already some structure.

The child was small, but determined, her hands clasping her mother’s cloak around the shoulders and using it to drag her body, motionless but for the slight rise-and-fall of her chest and her ever-roving sightless eyes, over to a corner she deemed suitable. At first, digging in her heels as she tugged, she thought it was going to be a failed endeavour before she’d even properly began, but slowly she was able to move it, the grit sliding beneath the cloak making it easier.

She was panting after several steps, but just set her jaw and kept moving, knowing it was a race between her determination and the coming rain.

The others she would deal with after, if she could get that far.

***

When the first drops of rain hissed down, the child stiffened, and burrowed closer to the warmth of her mother. In the darkness of her shelter, built of sheeted metal and misshapen stone, she could pretend that the woman beside her was asleep instead of in stasis. If her breaths were longer than they should be, if her fingers didn’t twitch at all, she could pretend that it was just the deepness of slumber.

Soon, her own breathing stilled and slowed, her exhausted body dragging her down into unsettled dreams.

***

She didn’t wake when the rain stopped, nor when the sun rose to heat the world. She didn’t respond when their boots crunched in the debris, nor even when the first of them reached silver-gloved hands to shift the rough confines of her shelter.

She stirred a little when all of these things combined conspired to touch heated sunlight to her face, but quieted again when a helmeted shadow loomed above to block the harshness of the light. They extracted her carefully, wrapping her in a blanket almost as soon as she was clear to protect her exposed limbs from the light that would burn within minutes of exposure. She sighed drowsily when she was held tightly in someone’s arms, her sleep-addled mind imagining her mother rather than the impassive stranger that bundled her close.

Their words would have woken her, had they been speaking aloud.

Silence reigned and so, she wouldn’t wake until it was too late.

Unsettled dreams to a loud, nightmarish reality.