MAY 25
The next thing I knew, I was getting a nudge to my shoulder.
“C’mon,” came a voice. “Rise and shine, miss sleepyhead.”
I stirred, noting I was lying on my belly, chin between my front hooves. “Don’t call me that,” I mumbled.
“Don’t be such a spoilsport,” Jill responded, laughter in her voice. “Breakfast will be ready in a few minutes.”
I sat up and fought the urge to rub the sleep from my eyes (figuring that hooves to the eyeballs would hurt). “What time is it?”
“About nine-ish,” came the response from the kitchen area. “You slept pretty solidly.”
“Probably the best sleep I’ve had since this thing began,” I acknowledged.
Chopping sounds came from the kitchen at that point, so I presumed Jill had her mouth full of a knife handle. I sauntered over to the televisions and did a sweep with my eyes.
It looked like one or two that had been showing empty studios yesterday now had solid blue screens - the modern equivalent of static. The generators are starting to go out, I mused. The rest of them had nothing new of note. Weather for May 23 was still on the ‘bug’ (the term for the little icon in the corner of the screen), and headlines weren’t being updated.
I heard Jill come up beside me, and a plate of greens was deposited on top of the counter I was sitting by. “Want some milk?”
“Seriously? It’s still good?”
“It’s been in the cooler over in the grocery section. Expires the 29th. Regular or chocolate?”
“Wow. Chocolate, please.”
Jill smiled and pivoted, heading off.
I munched on the stuff I previously would have called ‘what food eats’. It actually tasted fairly good, despite the fact that it should have been bland (at least, to my opinion), especially since it was all a couple days old. Maybe Jill was some kind of kitchen savant?
“Foh, ell ee- aang on a ecken,” Jill said as she returned, and set down the plastic milk jug she’d been carrying by the handle in her teeth. “I guess I’m gonna have to get used to that. Sorry. Anyway, tell me about yourself.”
“About myself?” I said, holding onto the jug with one hoof and using another to force the lid to turn.
“Yeah. Who were y… I mean, who are you? What do you do? Where are you from?”
I smiled wanly as I got the lid off the milk jug. “I think we can safely use the past tense,” I told her, then chugged half the jug down. “Like I said, my name is Thomas James Wright. Yes, like the TV director. As far as I know, I had the name first, he can get in line behind me.”
Jill giggled as I took another drink. Was I more thirsty as a horse? Wait, wasn’t that a cliche?
“As for what I did, I programmed computer systems. Databases mainly. So you can see, my skills aren’t very transferable.”
“You never know,” she shrugged. “This could end up being reversible.”
“I’m gonna have to take the pessimist’s stance on that,” I argued, waving a hoof at the TVs. “Everything’s starting to wind down. Even if the millions of people who should be surrounding us right now appear all of a sudden, it’ll take forever to get people back into places and get them started up again. Take the nuke plant, for example. It’s a very secure facility. How do you get people into a very secure facility where the people who are supposed to be inside to push the only button to grant you access have vanished? Unless they reappear in exactly the same place they were when they left. If that happens, what happens to you and me?”
“You’ve got a point,” Jill said with a grimace. “But still, even if things don’t return to normal, statistical odds say we’re not alone, and when civilization restarts, we’ll have tasks we can do. Right?”
I shook my head at her smile. “You’re definitely taking the optimist angle, aren’t you?”
“No reason not to,” she said. “So, Tom… are you from around here?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “I lived just north of Markham.”
Jill brightened. “Don’t you want to go home?”
“Hell no,” I shot back, probably with more force than I should have. “I… I mean, no… I…”
Her voice softened. “You’re afraid of what you might find. Or not find.”
I clenched my teeth, squeezed my eyes shut. “My sister and nephews live across the road from me.”
Jill collected me into a hug - or at least as much of a hug as two ponies can perform. “I understand,” she said. After a moment, she took a breath and released me. “Let’s move on. Have you tried those yet?”
Her hoof was angled at the wing on my side. “Y-you saw the sum total of my experience with getting them to move, yesterday,” I blushed. “I have honestly no idea why they splayed out like that.”
“You can’t unfurl them?”
“Nnngh,” I answered, grunting as I strained to spread them out. They quivered slightly, and I let out my air in a sigh. “I just don’t have any idea how to move them at all.”
“Hang on a second,” she said, and got up, retreating to her sleeping area briefly. Upon her return, she had a clipboard in her mouth, with paper and pencil trapped in the claw.
“I’m going to take note of our differences,” she said, putting the clipboard down before her and taking up the pencil in her mouth. It was mildly easier to understand her that way than it had with a plate in her mouth, but not by much. “Ohay. Oo have bings, I have a orn.”
I watched her make notations on the paper with the pencil, impressed at her skill, but keeping quiet.
“Anyhing elph?”
“Well, the obvious is I… well,” I said, gesturing to myself.
“Oh! Of courph. I arted ouh as a girl, you joined the barty late,” she said, smirking around the pencil as she scratched on the paper.
“Rub it in,” I sighed, rolling my eyes.
“Burn shidebays,” she said.
I blinked. “Huh?”
“Burn,” she repeated, making a motion with her hoof. I finally figured out she wanted me to turn 90 degrees, and I did.
She blinked. “Oh…”
“Oh what?” I asked.
“I bibn… *ptew!* I mean, I didn’t notice, you don’t have, a, um... “ Her voice dropped to a whisper as she blushed. “Abuhpickr.”
“A what?”
“A…” She squeezed her eyes shut, then squeaked it out: “A butt picture!”
I was speechless until she turned sideways before me, and even then, I was still at a loss for words. First, how had I missed that? Second, what did it mean and why didn’t I have one?
On Jill’s flank, above her rear shoulder (if that’s the right term), was what looked like a tattoo - if tattoos were able to be made from fur. On both sides of her behind was a full-color image of an old-fashioned quill and inkwell, with a piece of scroll-like paper beside it.
“Did you have a tattoo before..?” I asked.
“No,” she shook her head. “Wanna hear the strange part?”
I stared flatly at her. “Sure,” I said, sarcasm dripping from my voice. “Tell me the strange part compared to us turning into talking alien ponies overnight, not to mention the rest of the world disapp-”
“I’m a writer.”
“What?” I asked.
“Not my job, though,” she said, waving a hoof. “I was a lab tech for an oil company. And I do mean was - I got laid off six weeks ago during the downturn. But my hobby has always been writing.”
“Like novels and such?” I asked.
Jill nodded. “Yup. Fiction mostly, but I also have been a writer as far back as my school newspaper. I’ve done the office newsletter for a few places I’ve worked, and wrote stories off-and-on for a small newspaper in the town I lived in.”
I looked at her ‘butt picture’ again. “So you think we’re being categorized by our skills?”
“Could be. But I don’t remember the abduction or the alien branding ordeal,” she quipped. “But if that does explain me, it doesn’t for you.”
I shrugged. “It could have been part of the, um, misfiling,” I said, searching for a word for my ‘situation’. “Or maybe they couldn’t figure out what picture represents ‘snarky’ best.”
“Pfft,” Jill smirked, suppressing a giggle. “Anyway, I guess I owe you some answers, since I got some from you. I’m Jill Dannon. Jill’s short for Jillian, but only my mom gets to call me that when I’m in trouble. I’m single, no kids, only child. I already told you my job situation, and my parents have passed. I’m atheist, so I have no theories on why we were spared when everyone else got taken away.”
“We actually sound like we have some stuff in common,” I responded. “My mom died of cancer 6 years ago but my dad is-” I winced “-was still around. I told you about my sister and her kids. I’m not religious either. I’m single as well, and I’m 41.”
She blinked. “Oh.. you don’t seem that old. I mean! I didn’t mean it like that,” she blushed. “See, this is why I didn’t tell you how old I was, because I was worried we’d get in an awkward position.”
I smirked. “I thought it was because a girl never reveals her true age?” I countered.
She smiled back. “You just did.”
“Har har, that’s never going to get old,” I deadpanned.
“I intend to get some more mileage out of it yet,” Jill winked. “Anyway, cliches be damned, you’re 10 years my senior.”
I nodded, not knowing what else to do. “I don’t know if that really applies any more. We both look the same age to me.”
“And how old is that?” she replied.
I shook my head. “Your guess is as good as mine. Three days, technically?”
“Ohh. Touche,” she grinned, then stood up. “Anyway. What are we going to do today? Pull that radio out of your truck?”
“I had a different idea about that,” I responded. “It makes more sense to keep it in there if we end up using it for supply runs or exploring. Do you remember if there’s still a Radio Shack, or whatever they call it these days, in this mall?”
Fifteen minutes later and the exceptionally creative application of a paint can and a broomstick handle later, we were past the security barrier and inside the local electronics shop.
“I miss the days when these things had real radios in them,” I mused, walking the aisles.
“My uncle used to say the same thing,” Jill said.
I waved a hoof at the wall of inert techno-gadgets. “All these toys and junk… nothing worth using in our situation.”
“Yeah, you’d think the stockboy would be more considerate of the survivors of the apocalypse,” Jill quipped.
I smirked. “Exactly.” My eyes brightened and I quickened my pace. “Aha! Jackpot.”
“What is it?”
“A rare find these days, but we lucked out, it seems.” I tapped a hoof on the item on the demo shelf. “A base station ham radio. With this we can talk between here and the truck, at least, and probably make calls out to see if there’s anybody else out there.”
“Does it work?”
“I’d hope it’d not be on the shelf if it was broken,” I said, searching for the on switch. Finding it, I watched and laughed when the dials sprang to life.
Tuning in the local repeater and hoping it was still at least on battery backup, I tried to key it up, and got a return, though it was very staticky.
“That probably means…” I said, looking around the back of the radio and then tracing cables. “Aha. Yup,” I said, pointing to an antenna just propped against the wall in a nearby corner. “We need to get that higher and more in the open.”
Using a cart appropriated from a service corridor, we loaded the radio, antenna, some extra cable, and as much of the ‘junk’ that we thought would be useful, and headed back to the Wal-Mart.
“So what’s your plan?” Jill asked.
“I want to find the roof hatch in the store. The base of this thing is magnetic,” I said, kicking a hoof towards the antenna. “Put it on the top of the roof hatch. Run the extra cable from there back as far as it’ll reach towards the radio. Hopefully that will put it somewhere decently near our lair. Whatever distance we can’t cover we can make up for in speaker volume, I’m sure.”
“How are you going to get up to the roof hatch? There’s probably at least one ladder involved.”
I thought back to my perils on the first day, climbing and descending a simple set of stairs. “No problem,” I said with false bravado. “It’s gotta be done.”
It took about an hour to find the hatch, in the back room/warehouse side of the store. Luckily, it was at the top of a metal stairway, and I could maneuver along those without getting wounded these days. Antenna in my mouth, cable streaming out behind me, I reached up to shove the hatch open.
“Be careful,” Jill warned me from below.
As I pushed on the hatch, unlocking the latch (hey, that rhymes), something felt strange, and before I could react, the hatch whipped open with a loud CLANG, and wind and water blasted in at me.
“Whoa!” Jill reacted. “Is it ever storming out there!”
Only then did it dawn on me that the white noise that had been in the background for most of the afternoon was a fierce rainstorm pounding down on the metal roof of the store. Now it was pounding down on me as well.
“Maybe we should put this off until it clears!” Jill called up to me.
“We’ll drown if I don’t at least get this closed,” I exaggerated, forcing my way up through the hatch. I stepped on to the roof and reached down to pick up the dropped antenna, and-
BOOM!
Oh yeah. Brilliant idea, being on the top of a metal building, trying to mount an antenna, in a thunderstorm. You’re just throwing away any smarts you had left, aren’t you?
Jill shouted something up to me, but I couldn’t hear her over the din. As I set down the antenna and tried to reorient it so it would stick to the flipped-over top of the roof hatch, the wind picked it up and sent it tumbling, extra cable and all, towards the edge of the roof.
“Dammit!” I snarled, and went after it.
Every time I thought I was within reach, it would snake out of my jaws’ grasp. In a full gallop, I chased the black cable, focused on nothing but it, until I finally chomped down on it-
-and realized, a fifth of a second too late, I was barrelling over the parapet.
The loading dock behind the store seemed miles distant, even though it was only two and a half stories below me. I squeezed my eyes shut and said, Well, I guess I’ll find out if I can make these things work. Flap, damn you!
I concentrated with all my might to unfurl the wings at my sides and make them keep me aloft. They were stubborn in their uselessness - I only barely was able to make them open up a little, but then confusion kicked in as I came to an abrupt stop.
Hanging upside-down from one back leg, I thought maybe I’d become entangled in the cable, but then I remembered that the very end of it was in my mouth, and the rest including the antenna dangled well below me. I craned my head up to see what I was caught on, and would have gasped aloud if it hadn’t meant I would have dropped the antenna.
Jill was at the edge of the roof, staring fiercely at me, her horn glowing a bright yellow, same color as her eyes. And a band of color around my right back leg was glowing the same hue, accompanying a feeling of a firm but unrelenting grip.