We walk up the middle of the street, our backs to the wind.
I can’t shake the feeling that the blackness of the skyscrapers is all wrong. They’re skeletons, nothing but ominous profiles in the pouring ash. Closer to a range of improbable mountains than anything man-made. Some are leaning, and some have toppled, and in the hardest gusts, high above us, I can hear the groan of steel framework torquing past its tensile strength.
I note a sudden tightening in the space behind my eyes.
It comes and goes in less than a second, like something turning off.
Amanda asks, “Did you just feel that too?”
“That pressure behind your eyes?”
“Exactly.”
“I did. I bet it’s the drug wearing off.”
After several blocks, the buildings end. We arrive at a guardrail that runs along the top of a seawall. The lake yawns out for miles under the radioactive sky, and it doesn’t even resemble Lake Michigan anymore, but instead a vast gray desert, the ash accumulating on the surface of the water and undulating like a waterbed as black foam waves crash against the seawall.
The walk back is into the wind.
Ash streaming into our eyes and mouths.
Our tracks already covered.
When we’re a block from the hotel, a sound like sustained thunder begins in the near distance.
The ground trembles beneath our feet.
Another building falls to its knees.
—
The box is waiting where we left it, in a remote corner on the parking garage’s lowest level.
We’re both covered in ash, and we take a moment at the door to brush it off our clothes, out of our hair.
Back inside, the lock shoots home after us.
We’re in a simple, finite box again.
Four walls.
A door.
A lantern.
A backpack.
And two bewildered human beings.
—
Amanda sits hugging her knees into her chest.
“What do you think happened up there?” she asks.
“Supervolcano. Asteroid strike. Nuclear war. No telling.”
“Are we in the future?”
“No, the box would only connect us to alternate realities at the same point in space and time. But I suppose some worlds might seem like the future if they’ve made technological advancements that ours never figured out.”
“What if they’re all destroyed like this one?”
I say, “We should take the drug again. I don’t think we’re exactly safe under this crumbling skyscraper.”
Amanda pulls off her flats and shakes the ash out of them.
I say, “What you did for me back at the lab…You saved my life.”
She looks at me, her bottom lip threatening to quiver. “I used to dream about those first pilots who went into the box. Nightmares. I can’t believe this is happening.”
I unzip the backpack and start pulling out the contents to catalog them.
I find the leather bag containing the ampoules and injection kits.
Three notebooks sealed in plastic.
Box of pens.
A knife in a nylon sheath.
First-aid kit.
Space blanket.
Rain poncho.
Toiletry kit.
Two rolls of cash.
Geiger counter.
Compass.
Two one-liter water bottles, both full.
Six MREs.
“You packed all this?” I ask.
“No, I just grabbed it from the stockroom. It’s standard issue, what everyone takes into the box. We should be wearing space suits, but I didn’t have time to grab any.”
“No kidding. A world like that? Radiation levels could be off the charts, or the atmospheric makeup drastically altered. If the pressure is off—too low, for instance—our blood and all the liquids in our bodies will boil.”
The water bottles are calling out to me. I haven’t had anything to drink in hours, since lunch. My thirst is blaring.
I open the leather bag. It looks custom-made for the ampoules, each glass vial held in its own miniature sleeve.
I begin to count them.
“Fifty,” Amanda says. “Well, forty-eight now. I would’ve grabbed two backpacks, but…”
“You weren’t planning to come with me.”
“How fucked are we?” she asks. “Be honest.”
“I don’t know. But this is our spaceship. We’d better learn to fly it.”
As I begin to cram everything back into the pack, Amanda reaches for the injection kits.
This time, we break the necks of the ampoules and drink the drug, the liquid sliding across my tongue with a sweet, borderline unpleasant sting.
Forty-six ampoules remaining.
I start the timer on Amanda’s watch and ask, “How many times can we take this stuff and not fry our brains?”
“We did some testing a while back.”
“Pulled some homeless guy off the street?”
She almost smiles. “Nobody died. We learned that repeated use definitely strains neurological functioning and builds up a tolerance. The good news is the half-life is really short, so as long as we’re not slamming one ampoule right after another, we should be all right.” She slides her feet back into her flats, looks at me. “Are you impressed with yourself?”
“What do you mean?”
“You built this thing.”