A Crack in the Sky
Read A Crack in the Sky Online
Authors: Mark Peter Hughes
For my wonderful parents,
Suzanne Winnell Hughes and Peter Hughes
Chapter 8 - The Wild Orange Yonder
Chapter 9 - A Few Innocent Questions
Chapter 10 - Girls in Boots Crushing
Chapter 12 - Through the Looking Glass and What Eli Found There
Chapter 13 - The Way of the Future
Part 2 - The Tower at the End of the World
Chapter 14 - Control and Disposal
Chapter 15 - Savages and Kings
Chapter 17 - Learning Floor 9-B
Chapter 19 - The Nature of Nature
Chapter 21 - One Small Victory
Chapter 24 - A Cog in the Grand Design
Learn More About Climate Change
prologueI am thirsty all the time now. The air is heavy with bugs and the dust coats my throat. Our little reservoir, the pool in what used to be somebody’s leaky basement, is almost dry. Soon we will have to leave this place
.
Rosalia is not well. She needs water
.
I am careful not to show my concern. As each day passes I catch the others looking up at the sky, watching for signs of the first storm. We hope for rain even though we all know that it will arrive as it always has—like an angry fist that will blast away our shelters, sweep through the few buildings that remain, and flood the streets. The hard, red earth will turn to mud so thick and soft that we won’t be able to walk without sinking to our waists. The flooding will also bring more insects. They will buzz in our ears and fly into our mouths. They will bite us
night and day, covering our skin with sores until our eyes swell shut
.
There are seven of us now. There is safety in numbers. Last month the twins found a little girl wandering alone in the desert, weak and disoriented. We all argued, but in the end we agreed to take her into our clan. We fed and washed her and have since been showing her how we survive, where we look for moisture in the dry times and where we can find shelter during the storms. We are teaching her to stay off the main roads. The old highways, most of them crumbling and overgrown with weeds, are not safe. They leave you exposed to enemies waiting to jump you
.
Most of all, we are teaching her to stay hidden
.
We sleep during the daytime to avoid the heat. At night we hunt animals and search the ruins for anything useful, anything that might be traded on the black market. But always we gather again before dawn and take cover together wherever we can. An abandoned gas station. An old bus left to rust in an open field. Sometimes we construct temporary shelters out of car doors or plastic bags, whatever we can find
.
We are survivors
.
We are thieves of fortune
.
We are gods and goddesses of the wild
.
Yesterday amid the rubble I found an old magazine. Amazingly, the paper was unspoiled. There are beautiful glossy pictures of smiling kids our own ages, teenagers relaxing beside swimming pools. It’s
hard to imagine there was a time when people had so much clean water they used to collect it in backyards and splash around in it. But here are the pictures
.
In the magazine there are also advertisements for makeup, music video downloads, and old-fashioned movies. There are images of celebrities I’ve never heard of and articles about things I’d never even considered:
How to Find the Perfect Pair of Jeans
.
Five Ways to Detect True Love in a Kiss
.
Everyone keeps asking me to read the magazine aloud. I have already worked through it cover to cover three times
.
This morning we got word they are selling oranges in the open-air markets by the dome. It might be a trick and it might not. Either way, I volunteered to make the long trek, not just because of the fruit but also because they say filtered water flows inside the dome walls. If this is true I will try to tap into it. I told Rosalia this, but she said not to try anything foolish. She told me she is worried I will fall prey to bandits or to one of the packs of starving, mutated animals that roam the wasteland. I told her not to worry. What else can I do? As long as there is no trouble, I can be back in two or three days and she will get better
.
Rosalia met an old man once. She says his hair was long and gray and that he breathed through a machine. He told her he could remember back when things weren’t this way, before the bugs and the bad
smells and the heat and the storms and the highwaymen. He said these are the Final Days, the last gasp at the end of the world. But someone is coming for us, he said. El Guía—a child veiled in shadow, a great leader who will appear accompanied by a disfigured beast of terrible power. He will deliver us to a new place where there are no dry times, where water is plentiful and storms don’t kill. He said he saw all this in a dream
.
Rosalia believed him, but I do not. I don’t believe in prophets any more than I believe in the perfect pair of jeans. What I do believe—what I
know
—is that too much sun affects the brain. Heatstroke makes people imagine things that aren’t there
.
Things are getting bad. I hold Rosalia’s hand as she talks nonsense in her sleep. This evening I will go deeper than ever into the ruins in search of water. If I cannot find any, maybe I will at least come back with something to trade with the black-market water dealers
.
“Sleep,” Rosalia whispers beside me. “And when you go, be sure to come back before light.” She drifts off again, and I lie awake listening to the metallic echo the wind makes as it whips through the debris. Eventually my eyelids grow heavy
.
When I sleep, I dream of swimming pools
.
—From a torn notebook discovered in the
desert at the edge of the Atlanta Dome
PART Ithe artificial city
1eli
Something was wrong.
Thirteen-year-old Eli Papadopoulos could feel it.
Just as thunder boomed in the distance, there was a faint bursting sound from somewhere outside his bedroom window. Eli spun his head just in time to witness a tiny spray of sparks falling from the artificial sky. Debris drifted to the ground like faraway fireworks and quickly disappeared, leaving an empty space where some of the pixels had gone out—a dark spot, almost unnoticeable in the five-mile-wide hemisphere of blue light.