Somewhere Under the Rainbow

Thea’s phone buzzed once. The first alarm – two hours until sunrise. Her stomach filled with dread. She called forward to where Christina was leading point, followed closely by Sal and further back, Leon.

“We’ve got two hours! The first place we see, we’re taking it!”

Up in front, Christina gave a short nod that would have been barely distinguishable had Thea not been used to looking for it. Leon’s back sagged a little out of relief. He always felt safer indoors, and Thea couldn’t fault him. Now that they were passing through Indiana’s giant swaths of farmland, shelter was becoming more and more scarce. They’d managed to scavenge some tents and tarp, but there was the persistent fear that it wouldn’t be enough.

“There!” Christina’s deep voice cut through the air. “I think I see a house!”

Thea quickened her pace, cutting through swaths of grass to catch up to the other woman. Sure enough, just peaking over the next hill was what looked like a quiet, if slightly rundown farmhouse. The walls were still standing, so it would do the trick.

Sal whistled. “Those are awfully big windows, and they don’t look covered. I think it might be safe.”

Thea let out a sigh of relief. They were lucky. There was more than enough time before sunrise to make shelter, and an old farmhouse might have some good loot.

-----

The first thing they did upon arrival was pull out their weapons (if you considered a couple chair legs and an aluminum bat to be weapons) and fan out, searching the house. It was an older house. Cobwebs spanned every corner, and the floorboards creaked in several spots. Luckily, no squatters made themselves apparent, and so they unpacked their tarp and began covering the windows, keyholes, large cracks in the wall—anything that might be a risk. They didn’t talk, working methodically with the practice of people who had done this too many times. When this was finished, it was pitch black. It was almost funny. A couple years ago, Thea would have been afraid to be in a dark, deserted house like this. Now, it was comforting.  

They flicked on their (yellow) phone flashlights and immediately went to scavenge. Leon went straight for the bathroom cabinets, hopeful as always for some medicine. Christina went for the kitchen. Sal, for any electronics. And Thea, she went for the desks. Her pencil had been growing rather short, and she was worried. Unfortunately, she had little luck, thought she did manage to find some clothes which didn’t seem too oversized.

At three buzzes from her phone, Thea shouted, “Half an hour!” and they all converged in the living room. Surprisingly, it was a good haul for everyone else. Leon had found some Tylenol, which would hopefully shut him up about the fever he claimed he had (though they’d all checked his temperature and found him clammy, if anything). Sal had found another battery pack, which meant that he and Thea didn’t have to be the only ones with functional phones during the nights. Christina had unearthed a stock of dried beans, preserves, and canned tuna, which was a major get (tuna, she’d learned, was very high in Vitamin D).

They laughed and chatted and bragged about their finds, and the air in the room was light until Thea’s phone rang out, loud and startling and abruptly ending any conversation. 10 minutes.

On cue, they huddled in the center of the room and watched with bated breath as the sun slowly climbed. No light snuck through. They’d done a good job.

Thea removed an old plastic straw from her backpack, stuck it through a section where two tarps overlapped, and peeked through. Outside she could see the sun shining (oof, it was always way too bright), and, as the seconds ticked by, a faint blue-green haze forming in the air.

She pulled back. They were safe, though this area, like every other place they’d been so far, was not free of the Bloom.

When the Bloom had first started, no one knew what was happening – only that anyone who lived near Lake Eerie were beginning to get sick. When it began to spread outwards, hospitals had gone into panic. People were falling into convulsions, vomiting in the middle of intersections, and strangely enough, it was the fittest people who were getting sick first. Scientists finally figured it out when Michigan’s air had turned green. It was a cyanobacterial bloom—an evolved form of toxin-releasing bacteria highly dependent on sunlight for energy that had taken to the air. They were so dependent that they couldn’t survive in the shade, going as far as converting to spores that lay dormant during the night until the sun peeked over the horizon once more. What was left of humanity was all but nocturnal.

Leon went to sleep right away, while Sal was messaging one of his forums on his phone. Thea set up a pillow for herself but found that she was unable to sleep. She should be happy—they’d been incredibly lucky, but truth be told she was disappointed that she hadn’t managed to find any pencils.

“Hey,” a whisper. Thea rolled over to see Christina holding out a small box, and her breath caught. “Open it.”

Thea unlatched the lid to reveal a small pile of colored pencils. The insides of the box were covered in random criss-crosses of colored lines where they’d rubbed up against the sides.

It was the most beautiful thing Thea had seen in quite a while.

“Christina… you found this?”

The other woman nodded. “There was a child’s room across from the kitchen. I figured you might have passed it over.”

“Oh.” The happiness that had been bubbling up suddenly flattened. A child’s room. She wondered what the chances were that the family had simply left behind a fully stocked house and left for somewhere safer.

Sal seemed to read her mind. “Eh, don’t worry about it. It’s not like we haven’t been in a billion other dead family’s houses.”

“Sal!”

“I’m just saying. We probably even stepped over their skeletons on the way here.”

Christina scowled. “Listen, you little turd. Show some respect.” 

“Why should I? We have to deal with the facts, and the facts are that they’re dead, and we’re squatting in their home. If they were smarter, they’d still be around.”

“Smarter?” The expression on Christina’s face grew dark, and Thea knew this wasn’t going to end well. “Look around. We didn’t survive because we were smarter or better than anyone else. If anything, it’s the opposite.”

It was true. Before the Bloom, Thea had been a computer nerd with an unhealthy obsession with Webtoons and manga. She spent most of her life copped up in her room. Ironically, the same antisocial behavior that her parents had harped on her for had saved her life.

A lot of the survivors were like that. Leon was a hypochondriac who feared leaving the house. Christina was a stoic woman who could be blunt at the worst of times, and so had very few friends to speak of. Sal, a conspiracy theorist who’d believed the world would end soon and so had hunkered down. The Bloom, it seemed, had killed off all the normal, competent people and they were what was left behind. They’d found each other in what remained of the world and stuck together simply because they hadn’t been competent enough to rob each other.

Or at least, that’s what Thea had thought at first.

Sal looked furious. “Speak for yourself! I saw the signs of what was coming.”

“You’re an idiot who saw a bunch of random events and called it causation. You really think government bird drones caused the Bloom?”

“The pollution—”

“H-hey guys,” it was Leon, finally woken up. “It’s too early to argue. Can we please just sleep?”

“Shut up, Leon,” Sal and Christina said in unison. They hadn’t even turned to look at him.

There was a moment of silence, and then Thea started to laugh. She couldn’t help it. The sleepy confusion on Leon’s face, Sal and Christina’s unity despite the anger on their faces. Christina looked up at her, startled, and slowly a smile spread over her face as well.

Sal didn’t smile, but he did roll his eyes and make a scoffing noise, and just like that, the tension was broken.

Thea wiped away a tear. “Leon’s right. There’s no point in arguing. Sal, you know that your conspiracy theories were stupid. And Christina, you know that’s a sore point for him.” Now it was Christina’s turn to scoff. “We’re all we have, guys.” 

After a moment, Sal said, “Sorry Leon. You know we’re grateful for your weirdly specific knowledge of medicinal plants, even if you never shut up about your ‘illnesses’.”

Leon shrugged. “That was a pretty bad apology even for you, but I’ll take it if it means I can go back to sleep,” and with that, he and Sal fell into some light-hearted bickering.

The colored pencil box was still in Thea’s hand, and she turned it over, feeling the worn smoothness of the wood.

She turned to Christina. “Thank you, Christina, really. This means…”

“I know.” They were quiet for a second, Thea not wanting to push the moment. Christina spoke up again. “Keep drawing. It’s beautiful. And if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, I’ll deal with them.”

Thea felt her chest warm, and she laughed. “I think we’ll be okay.”

Tomorrow, they’d wake up and keep pressing forward. And the days after that? Who knows. Hopefully they’d stick to the plan and make it to The Emerald City – the last safe haven from the Bloom due to their use of green and yellow light, which the cyanobacteria couldn’t process. But even if they didn’t manage to find it, Thea thought, her heart warm and ears full of Sal and Leon’s chatter, what she’d told Christina would still be true.

They’d be okay.