Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Jim Kirk is stealing an airplane when the world ends. It's old MacKinnon's crop duster and Jim's never flown anything before, but he figures he's a quick learner and it's something new to try. Flying that is, not stealing.

So he sneaks over to the rusty machine after he sees the old man park it in a field and go inside the house for lunch. It's nice that no one ever locks their doors or takes the keys out of the ignition out in the rural farmlands of Iowa, because five minutes later Jim's got the plane rolling, the old farmer is hobbling after the plane, yelling and waving his arms, and just as the crop duster is about to crash into the fenced copse of trees at the end of the field, the plane is airborne. 

This is easy, Jim thinks to himself through the euphoria of adrenaline that seems to lift off the top of his head and hazes his vision around the edges. He's still low enough to see the details of fields and bushes and the faces turning upwards to stare as he skims the rooftops of the town three miles from the homestead. 

Then the sky goes white. 

Jim jerks the controls hard in reflex but the plane is suddenly dead, banking sharply to the left and down. He curses and struggles to right it when a low rumble and a wave of heat catches up to him, washing over the tiny crop duster, growing louder and louder over the silence that is the engines until it fills his ears, an incoherent shout that rattles his teeth and makes his eyes water. He claps his hands over his ears and the plane begins to roll again, bucking hard in sudden winds that batter the small craft. He barely notices. 

Then the noise stops and Jim grabs the controls again as if in a trance. The sky is fiery red. At the horizon to his left an angry shape billows to the sky, a shape that makes his heart lurch, that's he's only seen before in history textbooks captioned The beginning of the end of World War 2 in the Pacific theater. He doesn't realize how lucky he is to not have been blinded. 

It's north or east. Maybe Chicago is in that direction. Maybe New York. Can you even see that far? he wonders crazily. God, is it the Russians? Chinese? the North Koreans? --his mind yammers, and he firmly shuts that part of his mind down. Screaming in panic won't help with what's immediately important: landing in one piece. Priorities. Prioritizing. It's a tactic he learned from his dad, before George Kirk died three years ago in Afghanistan. God, so many must be dead. Is it just one strike, or many? One city, or all? Just America, or the entire world? 

Then he realizes he's been hearing a high whine, and as he looks up from frantically scanning the ground for a likely place to crash-land dark shapes are coming at him from out of the red glare on the horizon. 

He stares for a moment and the shapes grow bigger, impossibly fast. "Fuck!" Jim screams and jerks the controls hard to the right. But the plane is still incommunicado and even at the best of times not a fighter jet, so it's got all the turning finesse of a dead cow. Holy shit, they're shooting at him. Bright flashes of light arrow past, searing the air. 

Then the big metal things are upon him. They look like some sort of futuristic hover plane, his mind screams at him from a distant, compartmentalized part of his brain; the rest of him is working on autopilot. As they go by one clips him and shears the wing off as neatly as running a knife through butter. 

I'm only seventeen and I don't want to die, you fucking bastards he thinks, smashed to one side as the plane breaks apart in mid-air, the brown and yellow blur that is the ground coming towards him at frightening speed. 

I forgot to feed the cats is the last thing he thinks before he hits.

#

It's snowing.

He grows aware of it as he opens his eyes, fat grey flakes falling from the sky onto his face. But there's something off about it. It's not cold, for one; he can't feel the little spots of chill on his face as they hit, and as they continue to come he becomes aware of a growing sense of unease.

He doesn't realize what the grey flakes are until he's lain there for a while, wondering at the greyness of the sky and at snow in July, and he licks his lips. Then he knows.

Ashes.

Realization comes with memory and he sits up with a gasp, suddenly all too aware of a splitting headache. His wrist protests as he gingerly touches his forehead. Everything hurts so much that he's afraid to look down, expecting to see himself bleeding out into the dark soil, but he seems intact. All limbs there, no wounds beyond superficial scratches and bruises.

God, he's alive.

He twists to look around. The sudden movement brings on nausea so severe he finds himself face down in a pool of that morning's breakfast, breathing raggedly as his vision clears.

He wipes his mouth with one dirty hand and more carefully turns to see the twisted wreckage of the plane behind him. He must have been thrown clear when he'd crashed, his landing cushioned by the soft, tilled earth of the soy bean field. He realizes the depth of his luck when he notices a pile of rocks only a few feet away from where his head landed, dug up that spring to be thrown away.

Then he looks up, fighting dizziness.

It's a nightmare landscape, that obscene mushroom looming over the far horizon, now stretched to one side in the middle as if pulled by a childish finger. Thick black plumes of smoke rise from points everywhere he looks and they're close, very close. His disoriented mind whirls, wondering briefly if he's died and this is hell, before he picks out the gnarled pine tree that marks the corner of Brody's and Jameson's properties that's the only pine in Riverside County, and he knows exactly where he is.

Houses. Those are houses that are burning.

"Mom," he whispers, and starts to run.

#

The corn blocks his view as he goes, the breath rasping in his throat and his head throbbing with each step. He allows himself the luxury of hope as he nears the Kirk farm, but that traitor part of his mind, the clicking remote part that's cataloguing and analyzing everything like a computer, knows what the pall of smoke means. The chill in his gut grows as he pushes through the tall plants.

Something makes him stop just inside the edge of the field, something instinctual that perhaps was passed from wilder forebears living in hunted fear millions of years ago, and this is what saves his life.

The Kirk farm is still smoldering, and Jim has time to wonder how long he was out and if his mom and Sam might have been able to escape, when he sees movement out of the corner of his eye and freezes.

It looks like a man, but even at a distance it's obvious there's something very wrong with it. Even without the gleam of dark grey metal, the shoulders are too broad, the chest too deep, the legs too long. It's an obscene parody of a man and Jim doesn't truly understand what it is until Frank runs up behind it, screaming incoherently, and tries to take its head off with a shovel. It's a good foot taller than Frank, who's 6'2, and it reaches out one-handed as the shovel simply clanks against its head as if made of tin. Frank screams as it crushes his head like a grape, a terrible, squashing sound.

Holy fuck, it's a robot, Jim thinks numbly, and now knows beyond a doubt that his mother and Sam are dead. The rage and grief that bubble up into his gut make him shake, and he finds his hands curling into fists. The cornstalks around him tremble in sympathy too, a dry, rustling sound, transmitted to other cornstalks around him like a wave.

The robot's head snaps around.

Jim sucks in his breath and eases back on his knees, willing himself to be invisible and to not even breathe, rage going ashen in his mouth. Sam was a child of the 80's and a tv remote-hogger, so Jim’s been hostage to enough bad 80's scifi movies to hope that this particular monstrosity's not equipped with heat detectors or motion sensors or x-rays or anything.

He hears the whirr-clank of its servo joints as it comes over and he knows it's fatal to run. He presses his face into the loam, inhaling the rich organic scent of the earth, and prays.

It stands there, clicking and whirring. If Jim reaches out just two feet to his right, he can touch its leg.  

Finally it makes a long sound, an electronic screech-moan like a fax machine crossed with rusty joints, and moves on.

#

He digs the remains of his mother and brother out of the ruins of the house the next morning, looking over his shoulder the entire time, and buries them by the apple tree. He wishes he could take them into town to bury them by his father but he doesn't want to risk being caught out in the open on the road; he no longer knows how safe it is out there, and he thinks they would understand.

He buries Frank where he fell.

They'd never gotten along, the gruff older farmer never understanding or tolerating the rebellious child not of his own seed, who dreamed wilder dreams than he could ever conceive, of life in the big city or even in the stars. They'd been antithetical to each other, both strong-willed and big-mouthed, until Jim had simply begun spending more time out of the house than in and had begun his career as juvenile delinquent in earnest, but he owes the man at least that modicum of respect. No one deserves to die that way, and everyone deserves a proper grave.

The only thing Jim salvages from the house for himself is a charred photograph. His father, mother, Sam. Himself as a baby. They're all at Disneyworld and they all look young and happy, impossibly so in this world that Jim now finds himself. 

He turns his face away from the cloud and starts to walk. 

Chapter Text

Jim is witness to the near-extinction of the human race, though he doesn’t realize it until much later.

There'd been almost no one since the first week, the week that he spends hiding in an irrigation ditch covered in weeds, hearing screams, gunshots, artillery fire,  that eerie mechanical screeching, dull explosions, the pounding of panicked feet. Smells burning houses, burning people, a thick, sweet smell like burned pork. But it’s the helplessness that Jim will always remember, the memory lingering like a canker sore on the surface of his mind. Biting down on his tongue, tasting blood, nearly senseless with rage that he can do nothing. 

He’s seventeen, almost eighteen. Death is a machine and cannot be killed, not without more bullets than he has. 

He’s seventeen and doesn’t know how to save anyone, only himself.

That first week, the world empties. 

Then he picks his way out of town: down Jackson, along Shoyo Creek, across soy and corn fields, avoiding roads. 

Eternal winter, begun in July. Now it’s December, and the deadly cold has settled in like a vise, with no sign of letting up. Jim shivers as he treads through the silent landscape, gray with snow, skeletal trees jutting out of the hoary frost like accusatory spires. Nuclear winter, he thinks he remembers from late-night Discovery Channel documentaries. God knows how long it’ll last. Maybe forever. He misses television. Sometimes he amuses himself by reciting entire scenes from movies and shows under his breath. He thinks he’s gotten most of Mean Girls down pretty good.

He's heading in no particular direction except away, which happens, in this case, to be south.

He’s doing okay, by his own estimation. He’s still alive, after all, and not puking or shitting blood and his skin’s not sloughing off in sheets, so he probably wasn’t dosed with enough radiation to be immediately fatal. The thought of dying young of cancer, however, is a cosmic joke. Dying young seems to be the order of the day in this strange new world, cancer the least of his worries. He thinks he’s traveling downwind from the fallout and that’s gotta count for something, though there’s really no way to tell. Every breath might be poison, poison in the very roaddust he breathes despite the scarf he keeps tied around his mouth and nose, but an even more pressing concern is edible food, drinkable water. Shelter. Weapons. Such priorities order his hours, his days.

The town he’s walking through is really more a glorified one-lane suburb. It must’ve been a nice place once, tree-lined, quaint little overpriced antique stores, clothing boutiques, frou frou coffee shops, sleek expensive cars parked out front. An eon ago, he would’ve stolen the cars and gone on a joyride. Now the cars are useless, dust covered hulks. The buildings are bullet riddled and empty. Some have caved in from some unimaginable explosion that his Hollywood-educated mind can barely imagine -- rpgs, maybe. Tanks. Artillery. There’s a large Abrams tank overturned in the middle of the cracked main street, incongruous among the egg-shaped minivans and sleek sedans. He hunches his thin shoulders under an even thinner shirt against the unseasonal chilly breeze. 

The Walmart, or what used to be one, is just up the street and two blocks down Hamilton Avenue. He moves cautiously but unhesitatingly along, worn shoes barely making a noise on the crumbling pavement. 

He’d scouted this place out a week ago, but had put off scavenging until now, when his supplies had gotten to the point of being nonexistent. Dangerous, this is, the Walmart the tallest building for miles around and a beacon for any mech-head to come along and set up shop, waiting for any survivors to happen by, but his supplies badly need refreshing. 

His stomach rumbles. Canned food, and water. First priority. Then extra clothes. Maybe snowshoes, or if he's extra lucky, cross-country skis. The nightstick he'd scavenged off a dead policeman is strapped around his waist on one side, the Glock on the other, also from the same source. Maybe, he hopes, he can find a Snickers candy bar.

He goes from shop to shop through the alleyways. He hates not having a line of sight, but he’s gotta stay out of the street. Hunger is a state he’s had to get used to. Silence is another state he’s gotten used to too, so when he hears the muted thunder of feet and shouts, at first he doesn’t know what it is.

Then there’s a muffled thud and then a sharp cry of pain. Jim’s about to make tracks in the opposite direction because his own urge to go out and meet the first survivors –people – he’s seen in weeks or no, they’re making a lot of fucking noise. And a lot of noise means the mech-heads will be right behind, and the sound of running feet never bodes well. He’s learned that the hard way.

Then someone rounds the corner and runs right into him. Jim goes down, knocked right off his feet, and hits his head on the pavement with a dull crack. The white pain that spikes through his brain pierces the numb haze he’s been functioning under for months, absorbed almost completely in the animalistic instinct to survive. 

What the fuck he’s about to say, but it’s been a good long time since those parts of his face have had to function and the synapses are still reconnecting from brain to mouth while the -- person -- Jim has a brief impression of frantic eyes, wet cheeks and hot breath against his skin and a hissed, accented, “Sorry! So sorry! I --” and a bony knee goes straight into his stomach and knocks the wind right out of him again. Then the person -- boy -- is up and pelting down the street. His legs are pistoning up and down, his arms working, and Jim sits up just in time to nearly get run down again by a small group of people. Jim realizes for the first time in his life that it only takes three to make up a mob, if the mob is sufficiently murderous enough.

The man in the lead fobs a rock with enough force that Jim can hear him grunt with effort. His aim is true; the rock carves a perfect parabola in the still, gray air and hits the boy in the head hard enough for Jim to hear the loud thunk and see the blood fly from even a hundred yards away. The boy stumbles sideways like a drunk, then crumbles.

“You got him!” the second, a woman in faded khaki cargoes says. The vicious triumph with which she hisses it stills Jim where he’s started to rise in alarm and sinks him back down to the pavement, breathing concrete dust. Jesus fuck, these people are crazy, is the thought that would’ve occurred if he’d the presence of mind to think clearly, but instead what’s running through his head is WHAT THE FUCK CRAZY CRAZY THESE PEOPLE ARE IS THAT KID DEAD – andthen the leader sees him. 

Shit.

Motions at him. The other two come over and grab him by the arms before he gets his legs unscrambled enough to run. They half-drag, half-frogmarch him over close enough that Jim can see that leader guy isn’t doing too good; he’s got weeping sores on his face and his gums are black and red at the edges. And his breath stinks, puffing around Jim in a miasma. 

“You American?” The leader demands. This question is so far from what Jim expected -- does America even still exist? – he’d expected questions more along the lines of Who are you or What are you doing here, or, covering all three W’s for extra credit, Where are you from? that he just gapes at the man. 

The guy shouts the same question again and looks to give him a slap so Jim jerks a nod, quashing the remnants of his teenage rebellion that urges him to hike a foot into the guy’s balls. 

The people relax perceptibly. At a motion, Jim’s arms are freed. He hopes they don’t notice how badly his hands are shaking. His nerves are singing, high and taut. He’s in the company of dangerous people, as lethal and unpredictable as tornadoes. Most long-term survivors fall into a type – resourceful, athletic, pragmatic to the point of ruthlessness – but these people’s derangement bakes off them like waves of heat.

“Leave him, he’ll only eat our food,” the woman says as leader guy hunkers down close, leaning into Jim’s personal space again, and says, “Lemme give you some friendly advice. This,” he twirls a finger to indicate the street, the town, probably all its environs, and probably the Walmart too, Jim thinks dismally, “is ours. You,” ruffling his hair, “are American, so how about I give you five seconds to get out of town before I brain you with a rock like that commie motherfucker over there?” He smiles chummily. The scary thing, Jim realizes, is that the guy’s not really crazy. The whole worldhas gone askew.

Jim decides a tactical retreat is the smartest, most strategic thing to do, the choice being lobbying to join this strange, homicidal, pro-American...gang, or getting the fuck out of town long enough to figure out what the hell is going on. After all, there’s three of them, they’re obviously not against helping to make mankind just that much more endangered, there are a lot of rocks lying around and the second man -- who hasn’t even spoken a word yet – is holding a long metal pipe. 

Jim decides strategy with his id. Then he thinks instead, fuck it, and there’s a moment of sheer savage satisfaction when he slams his skull into the asshole’s face and caves the guy’s nose in. 

Blood spurts, shockingly bright against the ubiquitous gray. 

Then Jim’s up like a dervish, grabbing a good-sized chunk of concrete off the asphalt, and he plants one foot into the woman’s stomach and dashes her across the face with the jagged rock. There’s a lot of screaming, and more blood. Man with the pipe just stands there, pipe apparently forgotten, gaping at Jim as if he’s an apparition arisen from hell.

If this were some cool Tarantino flick this would be where Jim snatches the pipe and brains him, but he’s starting to feel a little sick at his own violence and his hand and head are singing a veritable hallelujah of pain. 

He almost pays for the hesitance with his life. The leader guy’s rolling around on the ground, his banshee screams garbled with phlegm and blood, but the next moment, quicker than a snake, he's on his feet again and reaching for Jim. Jim backpedals and nearly trips over the woman who’s splay-legged on the ground, out like a light. 

The only warning is the high whine of a rocket launcher. Jim's reflexes have been honed to a fine knife edge in the months he's been on the road so he throws himself without thinking hard behind the Abrams, cursing himself -- Stupid, stupid, wasn't paying attention – and then the ground surges forward and he's slammed into a storefront on a blastwave of orange fire and sharp concrete chips.  Then the harsh burr of machine gun fire, the tell-tale ground-jarring clanks of a terminator that Jim should've heard before now, would'veheard if he hadn't been distracted by –  

The kid is still on the ground up a ways from Jim. He's stirring. Jim tries to send him the telepathic message STAY DOWN! Pretend to be dead! but the kid touches his forehead and looks around, obviously dazed and not comprehending the meaning of the heavy rattle of gunfire and screams. 

They need to get out of this sudden battlezone, fast. Even if the leader, who's doing a passable imitation of Rambo, continues to distract or even manages to kill the mech-head -- where a terminator is, a hunter-seeker will soon follow. 

The second man's still standing there in the street, shell-shocked or something, miraculously untouched with bullets flying around him. The other man screams at him to get your idiot ass down, you stupid motherfucker, what're you do-- just as he's neatly bisected by the cyborg. It must be a new model, Jim thinks numbly, watching it slice the man in half with a gleaming blade twice the length of a man’s arm that's suddenly appeared out of its wrist. Holy jumping Christ. 

Jim seizes his chance as the machine then turns to the leader, who's still screaming incoherently as he's shooting at it – even high caliber machine guns are next to useless, Jim knows, and surely the guy knows it too, but Jim doesn't have time to wonder or care. He scurries forward, hoping the cloud of gunsmoke and ash obscures him from view as he reaches the kid. It's awkward lifting him, and Jim nearly slips and falls on top of him. 

He pants harshly into the kid's face, "Help me, damn you," too frantic to be gentle. He feels something wrench in his back as he tries to haul him up into an improvised fireman's carry -- the kid might be bony but he's a heavy bony, then the kid gets enough of his brain online to gather his legs underneath him and help out as Jim manages to half-stagger, half-drag him towards an alleyway leading off the street. 

The shooting suddenly stops. Jim drags him faster, faster, praying to the God he's no longer quite sure exists that it's just a little farther, a few more feet to shelter in the alleyway, that maybe the man has won out somehow and the sudden eerie silence will be broken by shouts instead of – 

Metallic clumping steps. Jim swears under his breath and haws hard to the right into an adjacent alleyway, hating that feeling of being hunted, hating how normal that feeling’s become. 

There’s a dumpster, a godsend. Jim flings the lid open and throws the kid in unceremoniously – there goes his back again, he’ll be feeling that in the morning, if there IS a morning – and climbs in after him, too frantic to be careful of the jagged edges and the garbagey, rotten smell that lingers despite the cold and disuse of six months. 

The boy grunts but doesn’t cry out as Jim lands on him hard – not too hard, it’s soft and slimy at the bottom of the dumpster that smells none too fresh, that Jim doesn’t particularly want to identify – and twines his thin hands into the front of Jim’s shirt. Jim hears him stifling his quick breathing and Jim realizes with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that he’s forgotten to close the dumpster lid. It’s still open to the gray anaemic light but it’s too late to close it now, those implacable footsteps coming closer and closer. 

Jim braces himself over the boy, breath held, waiting for the metal hand to reach in and yank him out or for the bullets to start flying or for that deadly blade to saw into the side of the dumpster. He hopes for the first option. Maybe – just maybe, he can buy the kid enough time to get away; dying like a crushed cockroach will be worth something then, more than his own entire wasted life has before. 

The footsteps pause at the entrance of the alleyway for an interminable moment. Then it’s gone, clumping on down the other alley, the sound fading into the distance. 

Jim keeps himself taut as a bowstring for another minute more, in case it comes back or is playing a game of cat-and-mouse. The machines aren’t that devious, he thinks, but obviously they upgraded something with that new hardware, and who knows if it wasn’t a software brain upgrade too? 

When he’s finally sure it’s gone, he relaxes and looks down. The kid isn’t staring at him, but past his shoulder and out, obviously waiting for a metal head with glaring red eyes to loom over the rim to kill them both. He shifts and meets Jim’s eyes, then gives him a wan smile. 

“Jim Kirk. Nice to meetcha,” Jim says to him, and the kid’s smile brightens. 

“Pavel,” he replies. “Chekov.” 

# 

It's strange not being alone again. 

Alone is a state that Jim’s gotten used to, he thinks as he follows Pavel through brush and crannies barely large enough for children and small-ish teenagers to climb through. Jim nearly gets stuck a couple times. He hit his growth spurt several years ago, but he manages to keep squeezing through the increasingly small openings and keep the kid’s scrawny ass in view as they crawl along on hands and knees. Survivors are few and far between. As the months progressed there’ve been less and less of them, especially apparently the ones who’ve maintained some semblance of civilization, and he’s not planning on losing this one. 

In Jim’s head, he’s begun marking time in relation to the apocalypse. The life he’d known before seems an eternity and a world away. Now he thinks in terms of day seventy-two or Year One, not 2004 or even December. 

Finally they emerge into what had been a small park, having short-cutted through several stores and the crumbling foundation of a house. The playground seems to have escaped damage, but any nostalgia for happier times is negated by the blasted, dead trees and the rusted, pitted look of the metal slide and monkey bars, the wooden supports rotting away. The bark groundcover, once fresh and smelling faintly of wood, has deteriorated now into a scouring black dust that covers every surface. The merry-go-round rotates slowly in the harsh breeze, its joints groaning rustily with every revolution. Jim shivers. 

Pavel sets off cautiously along the tree line. “Don’t touch any of that,” he warns, gesturing at the playground, and Jim notices the accent again. “I’ve got it booby-trapped.” 

Notices, but doesn’t ask – out in the open is no time for getting-to-know-you conversation, so Jim just nods. Looking closer, he can’t tell anything’s been altered until the kid points out the way the entire heavy play structure is rigged to collapse; the rope bridge can be dropped to entangle an intruder like a net, the metal slide has an explosive underneath it to turn it into shrapnel – 

“Wow. That’s – this is really cool.” Jim marvels, totally blown away. Surviving and doing this all on his own, but Pavel can’t be that much younger than Jim himself. He's got some height to him, but he's too skinny, all big eyes and mop of curls, with not much else to him. Jim’s not exactly an idiot himself – his school guidance counselor always said he was too smart for his own good, which was why he’d hated school and all its boring busywork – but he has the distinct feeling that he’s a trained monkey next to this kid. 

The kid beams at Jim’s praise, cheeks pinking. The smile breaking over his dirty face making him look somewhere in the neighborhood of nine. “And,” he says proudly, pointing at an expanse of ground that looks just like…ground, “I put in a punji pit.” 

Jim’s struck by a thought. “You’ve been here a while, haven’t you?” 

Pavel’s smile fades, and he shuffles a little bit, giving Jim all the answer he needs. 

"Where are you from?" is Jim's next question. Which is a mistake, because Pavel's thin face cramps with sudden fear and, oh right – that homicidal gang. The question, so simple and innocuous before, has apparently taken on more sinister overtones. 

Probably it’s best that Jim avoids people in the aftertimes, if this was what humanity has come to. 

"It's okay," he interrupts himself quickly. "You don't need to tell me, I was just wondering." He studies Pavel, at that look of wary fear that fades not one iota, and adds, "No really, I don't care if you're from--" He chooses his words carefully. "France or wherever. Seriously." 

Now Pavel's face has uncramped, and recramped into a look that’s indignant. And with a hint of contempt, which is a far sight better than hunted fright. "I'm from Russia." 

"Right." Jim grins some more, not at all sorry that that disturbing expression, like he’s lived a lifetime of sorrows in his few years, has disappeared from that young face. "Sorry." 

Pavel's hideaway is a large pipe jutting out of a bank in a deep culvert behind the playground restroom. The bottom of the embankment still damp with runoff, and Jim's boots squelch in the mud. The entrance to the pipe is overgrown with shrubbery and cattails that are dry enough to rustle, except Pavel eels through them as silently as a cat, Jim less quietly despite his best efforts. 

Inside the pipe is dry, and dark. Pavel rummages in the back a bit before there’s a click and then the sharp but not particularly illuminating light of an LED camping lantern flickers on. Pavel has been here a while, Jim sees; in the uncertain light he can see shelves of books, somehow attached to the corrugated metal; rough carpet on the ground, mismatched pieces evidently patched together from different sources, and what looks to be a cot in the back. 

Jim runs a hand over the spines of the books, marveling. Books are still around, of course, but now they're like relics excavated from a distant past. Even if there were time to read anymore, paper will never be made again. Books will never be printed again. The spines have titles that now sound exotic: For Whom the Bell Tolls. Watership Down. The Princess Bride. The Notebook. Dune: Heretics. Then one that Jim remembers from high school: On the Beach. 

"I don't like that one," Pavel says quietly. 

"Yeah." People clinging to the last dregs of life in the face of nuclear apocalypse and certain death, it isn’t exactly light reading even back when it was only hypothetical. 

"I only kept it because –" Pavel stops. "I spent a couple months living in a library. It was fun. All those books to read!" He seems to light up at the memory, then sobers again. "But the library had too many windows. I got chased out by the robots. I went back, but they'd burned the library to the ground. This was all that was left." 

Jim pages through the novel thoughtfully, feeling how the pages are furred on the edges, the corners creased from constant reading. "You think there are still people alive? Like, in Australia?" 

When Pavel doesn’t reply, Jim turns. The boy is staring out the entrance of the pipe, at the rapidly darkening sky where there are no stars. His face is remote, sad. "I don't know if we deserve to be," he says finally. 

Quiet then, that kind of disquieting true quiet that lies on the ground like a woolen blanket, when there are no sounds of insects or birds or cars going by in the distance. 

“You mean, those people in town?” Jim says, awkward and unsure if he should be even bringing this up but knowing, needing to reassure the kid of something he’s not sure he can promise anymore. “We’re not all crazy.” 

A snort then, with that alien cynicism that Jim has come to realize that he hates to hear more than anything, not least because he’s pretty sure Pavel started life as an irrepressible optimist. “Not yet, anyway,” Pavel says. He drops the ragged fabric that serves as a blackout curtain for the door. “Why don’t we get some rest?” 

# 

Maybe it's the sound of their voices that draws the Harvester. Maybe the Harvester is equipped with an infrared scanner and picked up their heat signatures. It's impossible to know, really, and it's all too easy to assign even the most implausible super power to this seemingly omnipotent, omnipresent, inhuman enemy. 

The only warning Jim gets is the crash that are the playground booby traps being set off, the thud and crump and then the long shrieking moan of the machines having him on his feet in an instant. After a quick, cold meal out of cans, they'd gone to sleep in their clothes, exhausted from the day. His body aches from the abuse it's taken that day, his head pounding sickly, and even with the burst of adrenaline there's still a moment of disorientation as he fumbles for his boots before realizing he’d never taken them off. 

"Come on," Pavel hisses. He grabs a pack out of a corner and throws it over his shoulder. "Grab your things. Follow me." He heads towards the back. 

Jim doesn't question; he only grabs his own bag and follows him into the dark, feeling rather than hearing the rending of pipe metal when the machines breach the little hideout. There’s a hollow bang, then a louder explosion, then a rush of hot air like an invisible wave lifts them off their feet. Jim tumbles forward several yards, rolled like a pebble on a high wave before he catches himself on his palms, scraping off a yard of skin in the process, and shoves himself back upright. Now the route they're traveling is filled with acrid smoke and flying shreds of burning hot metal. 

Coughing, choking, Jim stumbles on blindly until a hand grabs his and yanks him forward. Then they're running, running, taking turns and corners seemingly at random until they emerge out the other end of the pipe into fresh air.  

Pavel doesn't stop there. He keeps pulling Jim behind him, either his night vision or familiarity with the terrain allowing him to run nearly flat out as Jim flounders along in his wake, tripping over tussocks of grass and the occasional pothole or curb, his lungs unable to get enough oxygen. 

Finally, when Pavel judges it safe, he pulls Jim into a recessed alcove of what seems to be a church. Smoke rises behind them, flames visible in the inky night sky. They must have run at least a mile. 

"Your books," Jim pants, dismayed. 

Pavel is silent for a long moment. "It’s okay," he says finally, though his voice tells Jim that he is very far from copacetic. "We are alive. That’s most important. And I have my bag. I’ll--" his breath hitches for a moment. “I’ll survive.” 

"There are probably other libraries, too," Jim says, dismally aware that they aren't  talking about just the books now; Pavel's also lost his home, his sanctuary, and Jim is at a loss what to say. He's never been good at comforting people but right now he'd almost prefer Pavel to swear, or cry, or to throw a fit, or just any normal reaction to immense loss. This level of stoic maturity in someone so young seems…wrong. 

"Probably," Pavel replies, his voice a careful study of control. He turns back to Jim and his eyes widen. "You're hurt." 

It's only a cut on the side of Jim's neck, probably from flying shrapnel, and not a particularly deep one. Jim barely feels it. 

“It’s not a big deal,” Jim tells him, after prodding at it and determining it’s stopped bleeding already. They don’t have time or light to have a closer look. Pavel's bag turns up a first-aid kit and with a bit of iodine and a bandage, and after a bit of hasty fumbling in the dark that’s rather more like an game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey than first aid, they move on. 

# 

Pavel, displaying a genius for machinery, jumpstarts a Prius that they discover abandoned alongside the highway. Maybe it would've been wiser to take a bigger car, a faster car, one that might be able to withstand or outrun an attack. They don’t quibble with their find, however; the EMP hadn't reached far enough to fry the car's circuits, and its battery has just enough juice that its idiot lights flicker and stutter the first time Pavel tries the engine, and then hums to life the second. 

They take their drabs of luck where they can, and a car that is nearly soundless and doesn’t have to make frequent, unreliable stops to siphon gasoline, more than makes up for its lack of power or off-roading capability. 

It feels luxurious almost to the point of sin, riding along with the headlights off as dawn breaks across the horizon, smears of bleary orange and rose as the sunlight refracts off the poisons in the atmosphere. Jim drives at first, weaving the car in and around debris and other cars in the road, Pavel keeping a sharp eye out for drones and scouts. They drive during the day so they can spot any incoming machines on the horizon. Nights are spent hunkered down in the car, eating MREs from Pavel’s go-bag, keeping all lights low or hidden under a blanket also unearthed from Pavel's seemingly bottomless sack. They play chess with an ancient travel set. 

It might very well have been the beginnings of a bucolic road trip in the grand tradition of all the terrible coming-of-age movies Jim saw growing up, except they’re not heading anywhere in particular. 

And Jim’s cut does turn out to be a big deal. 

Who knows what poisons are in the air or dirt. What would have been a minor injury in the Before, easily and quickly healed, by the second day is hot and painful to the touch, and is leaking a thick, yellow fluid.

No antibiotics are to be had, if they even know what to look for in the burned out and looted hulks of Walmarts and Targets and other stores that they pass. 

By the third day, Jim can barely turn his head or swallow. His neck has swollen and turned an angry shade of red, red lines creeping ever downward and upward like spiderlines. Pavel takes over driving duties as Jim tries to sleep, the window fogging with the press of his hot forehead, and even from the corners of his eyes Jim can see Pavel casting long, worried looks at him. 

After an eternity – it may have been the fourth or fifth day; now burning with fever, Jim's lost count – Jim says, his voice whittled away to a hoarse rasp, "Pavel." 

Pavel's hunched over the steering column, peering through the windshield. They’re driving through a dust storm, half rain, half ashes, that plasters a thick layer of damp ash  across the windshield that totally obscures their vision. The thick goop resists all attempts of the wipers and windshield fluid to remove it. "Yeah?" he says. He mutters a word in Russian under his breath. “We might need to stop soon. Probably not safe to keep driving in this.” 

"If I—don't make it. If it gets down to it. You should leave me." Jim’s fully aware it sounds melodramatic as fuck, and normally he’d kick his own ass, but he’s never been so serious, so literal, as now. 

"Hey, did you hear what I said?" 

"Yeah. Yeah. Now shut up." Pavel seems almost angry, though Jim can't muster the energy to wonder why. 

"Good. Don’t want to repeat myself. It hurts to talk." 

"Then shut up." 

"You're going to do what I told you, though?" 

"You're stupid, so shut up now." 

"Pavel." 

"No, you asshole. Stop talking." Now Pavel sounds like he might start crying, so Jim cracks open his eyes – when did his eyelids get so heavy? – and looks at his profile in the dim light. "Can – let's talk about this later, okay? You're not going to die. I'm not going to let you. You won't die." 

Jim swallows and leans his head back against the headrest. God, that hurts so much. 

"Besides, if you die, I'm going to call you an asshole, okay? Bury you and then make you a headstone that says, RIP, Here lies a total asshole. Because you survive a stupid nuclear apocalypse and then killer cyborgs, and you die from a cut? Fucking asshole." 

Jim chuckles at that. "I'll keep that in mind." 

Pavel is silent after that. Then, as Jim's drifting off into a semi-conscious doze that's more coma than sleep, he hears Pavel mutter something under his breath that makes Jim smile: Asshole. 

# 

He doesn't know how much time passes after that, only a dark blackness in which pain comes and goes in waves of throbbing sensation, but his eyes seem to be dipped in cement and the only thing he is really aware of is the thrum of the engine, then the shudder of the car coming to a halt. Then silence. 

Silence. 

Blank. 

Then the chock of the door opening and closing, and Jim thinks, despite his brave words to Pavel earlier: Don't leave me here. 

He drifts more on that void of pain, thinking, Well, that's it. I wonder if Pavel really will bury me. 

He doesn't want to go, but the gray suck of its call is irresistible. After all, there's nothing much to stick around for, this emptied world filled with man-made destruction. 

Blank. 

Then the door on his side opens and he nearly falls out. A set of strong arms catch his slide though, and a voice snarls practically in his ear, nearly loud enough to hurt, "Damn kid, get his legs! No, go to the left – no my left, idiot." 

Inexplicably, Jim finds comfort in this gruff voice, the evident irritation in it and the complete lack of fear telling him that maybe, just maybe, he’s in safe hands. That they’re safe, if only for a short while. 

Before Jim passes out for good, he smiles once more.