The Secret of the Locket

Have you ever wanted something so much that you were willing to give up everything you had on the off chance that you might achieve it? Weary long nights and fevered days spent in pursuit of a dream that no sane man would believe, have you ever done that? It can be so freeing, pursuing your longing without care. That feeling of freedom almost makes up for the fool’s errand that was my own when I decided to leave The City.

The pollution was heavy outside the dome that kept the city clear. Toxins ran rampant and the wildlife learned to flourish with it. Thick, vibrant jungles of radiated monstrosities that fought tooth and claw and with whatever other twisted mutations they had to survive. Rivers of pollutant-hardened predators that fought with opportunism and stealth in a frenzied circle of life that regularly decided to involve the land-dwelling creatures simply seeking water. Some of the plants even held a semblance of their own sentience, although no one took the time to document it. Not anymore. I feel I was the only one taking the time to witness any of this as I kept myself moving forward through the shadows of the poisoned canopy above.

This all started with the locket. I’d found it at a junk sale in sector five. Some clearing out of an old apartment building that needed to be torn down and recycled. It was dingy and small and badly tarnished, but I liked the look of it and picked it up. Brass with a few inlaid gemstones, which I didn’t notice until after I’d removed the tarnish from the outside. But the inside held the real prize, the real treasure. At least, the lead to one.

Back when hologram projections were popular, they used to put them in everything. Giant displays outside of stores, interactive media at home, even putting them into clothes and glasses. The locket really wasn’t any different, but the message wasn’t some heartfelt, nonsense message. It was a map with a voiceover on it, talking about a treasure. A bunker with clean water, rations, generators, hard fuel and even weapons. The voice had been addressing their granddaughter about the bunker, but if this locket was in an estate sale, I doubt that she’d ever found the bunker or else she’d be rich. All the stuff listed could net in money from collectors or the socialites in the upper towers of The City. I could go from some schmuck at a factory line to a top dog with cash to burn overnight if I was able to get a fraction of that stuff back to The City.

So, I’d made a plan. I exhausted every favor I had, called in every friend I knew. I needed my own supplies. This journey wouldn’t be easy, but I only at least needed to get there. I could restock and come back on my own. For the trip there, I needed everything I could. I knocked on doors until my hands were bruised, I made so many calls that my voice was growing hoarse, and my friends were barely able to stand me near the end of it. But I got what I needed. Every scrap of supplies I’d gathered over the course of six months finally came to fruition as I cashed in my final favor and got a way out of The City’s dome by riding along a garbage barge leading out.

I could barely breathe even through my filtering mask. The air was thick with toxins, leftover gifts from our forefathers when they decided to build their own utopia at the cost of everything else around them. I’d made it my goal to try and preserve my filters if I can and hopefully clean them at the bunker when I arrived. There wasn’t any guarantee there would be any there, after all. So I’d choked a bit here and there as the filtration was set to low, but I thought it would be for the best in the long run. It wasn’t my biggest problem, however.

The predators that I’d mentioned before, they were active, and they were hungry. There wasn’t a chance I’d get anything close to a firearm or even a stunning charge, so scaring things off with a flaming torch and a rusted machete was about as close as I could get to a form of self-defense. I’d felt that I was being stalked by something as I’d kept myself moving forward through the toxic jungle, but I would always shake it off. I’d decided against even approaching the water after watching some six-legged thing with the head of a leech swallow a bear-sized beast whole. From what I could see, the circular, grinding rows of teeth within it’s maw would have taken care of any resistance the thing had given in the first place. It would have reduced my body to a fine paste, I could tell that much.

I slept very little. The bunker was weeks away but I couldn’t trust myself to sleep more than a few hours a night. The toxins did strange things to my dreams and I woke up sweating and panicked half the time. I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched in the dark. My only relief was the locket and the map inside of it. The soft glow of the hologram and the ancient voiceover were strangely comforting. It reminded me of what I was looking for. It helped me persevere against the things out in the jungle.

Over time I found remnants of the civilization before The City. I spent a lot of time following old roads, following the veins that used to pump the lifeblood of our civilization. I rooted through old husks of withered buildings to search or anything leftover that could be left as supplies. It was rare to find anything that hadn’t already been looted by others who had left The City. The thought of others being out there should have been comforting but knowing that it was normally hardened criminals put into exile had made me reconsider that thought. I hoped I’d not encounter anyone this whole trip. I was already having a bad enough time with the wildlife.

A week turned into two. I’d barely seen the sun through the canopy and the broken towers of the old world. The trees seemed to breathe in the poisons and pollutants around me and ooze it out like black sap. The buildings all told different stories and I would find myself slowing down to listen. The ruins of a hospital that had been picked apart by men and torn apart by monsters. The empty shelves of libraries, unable to tell what they carried and unable to say if any of it was saved. The smashed windows of a school and the gutted buildings that they had. They all told a story and I felt myself lost in the thoughts of what could have been back before the world was eaten away by the toxins of our ancestors. These thoughts were strangely comforting, to know that people thrived out here. Maybe they could again. But I wasn’t here to see if people could live, I was just out here looking for treasure and occupying my mind. At least it made me lean on the locket a little less.

The stalking feeling I’d felt since the beginning never let up, and as two weeks turned to a month, I started seeing things. Maybe it was the toxins getting to me, but I saw shadows in shadows running through the jungle. Eyes there one moment and gone the next, skittering noises and footsteps. I felt like I was being hunted. Even after I’d dealt with chasing off a pack of massive mosquitoes, I still felt it. After avoiding being devoured in a creek by a tentacled monstrosity, I’d felt it. The feeling wouldn’t go away, but I was getting so close. The treasure was only days away. Anything following me could happily do so, up until I grab a gun from that bunker and take care of it. I was running low on mask filters, even when I was trying to spare them as little use as I could, and it was the same with water. I’d lost supplies in fights and trying to run away, and the times I quickly had to break my small camp to flee when something came lurching into a building following my tracks or my scent, I know I’d left things behind. I didn’t have enough to get back, not by any practical means. No amount of luck in the world would help me if I turned around. In time though, the stalking became a reality.

I’d found the bunker, after a month and some change of traveling through the jungles of the new world and following the highways of the old and finally reaching the bottom of an old shopping mall. The metal doors had been locked this whole time. Nothing had gone in, nothing had come out. I was trying to open up the bunker doors, and eventually was able to get a reaction from the locket itself. It started beeping and the same beeping echoed from the doors. It was a soft tune, and I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what the song was. Something old and classical. But the door began to open, grating and sliding loudly as the lower portion of the building seemed to shake with it. It was loud enough I never heard the shouts or the sounds of guns going off behind me.

A group of men had found out what I was doing. They were better equipped and had been following me this whole time. At least, that’s what I saw and what one of them told me. I was feverish at this point with the toxins. I was obviously sick and at first thought it was a hallucination. A searing pain in my leg and the thundering sound of a rifle going off was able to bring it all to reality. I’d worked this hard, come this far, and it was going to be taken from me by people above me. I was in pain, ill, and furious all at once. They told me to give them the locket and wait out here while they went into the bunker. I didn’t listen. I ran, turning heel and sprinting straight into the bunker. As I left the doors began to shut behind me and soaked up most of the bullets. What got through didn’t hit me, but my leg was hurt. It still is.

I haven’t managed to get very far. I don’t know how to open the doors again. I’m hurting and sick and I patched up what I could with some bandages, but I’m not a doctor. I’m not going to be bringing this back. I’m not even coming back. I managed to rewrite the voice on this map in the locket and I’m thankful you’ve listened to my rambling, whoever you are. If anyone somehow finds this, please tell my family I’m sorry. My name is-

Memory Capacity has been met. Replaying audio recording.

Have you ever wanted something so much that you were willing to give up everything you had on the off chance that you might achieve it? Weary long nights and fevered days spent in pursuit of a dream that no sane man would believe, have you ever done that? It can be so freeing, pursuing your longing without care. That feeling of freedom almost makes up for the fool’s errand that was my own when I decided to leave The City.