As We Know It

Chapter One

Somewhere dark and underground

All doors really should be automatic.

It’d make life much more convenient.  You come up to your front door carrying a load of groceries and you don’t have to futz with your keys, standing around for five minutes trying to figure out how to open a door that feels like it hates you.

This door definitely hated her.

Why wouldn’t it? She hadn’t used it in years. Only now, finally—stupidly—did she want to open it up and waltz on out like she owned the place?

Where did she even plan to go? Did she think she could lazily stroll through a world that for all she knew was full of toxic waste, rats with human ears, and human flies? Did she really hate the door that much?

Maybe.

Maybe she was jealous of it. It'd seen a lot more fresh air than her.

God, what a stupid train of thought, she said, like she had been anywhere close to rational thought since she'd first walked into the room.

She creeped her hand out towards the door, jolting back like it had been doused in nuclear waste for the past three years. Well, it kind of had been.

She signed, leaning back against the rusted steel walls, too tired to care about tetanus—thinking about the past for the millionth time that day.

Angela Weathers; top contract attorney at her firm, lover of parties, name brands, and biannual vacations to wherever the dart landed on the map, never used to think about the past.

Angela; the last surviving human on earth, just sits in the dark talking to herself about it until she falls asleep. On a good day.

I should have just gone to the main office. She grumbled for the billionth time.

"There were some important documents in the bunker. Some. Nowhere near enough to even warrant coming down here to check. Daryl mentioned switching to the web every other day, you’d think someone would have listened."

It was that time of day again. A special hour or three she took each day to practice her main hobby, standing next to the door and pretending for a minute there was someone else on the other side of it.

‘Why did you?’ She imagined them asking, ‘When you heard the sirens, you could’ve walked out, the door was closing slowly enough.’

Groaning dramatically and banging the back of her head against the wall, wincing a bit. She’d just finished her retie the night before—if she was gonna die, she'd do it pretty—and she'd always been so tenderheaded.

I don’t know. Probably the same reason no one else came down. Maybe they panicked. Maybe they froze. Maybe their brain just made the smart decision for them.

She turned to face the door, half-heartedly reaching for it again, more so to fidget with it than anything.

You’d think a group of thirty-somethings would be able to either follow the nuclear war briefs we’d been getting since we were ten or make up our minds about whether or not surviving it would have made any goddamn sense.

‘Well, of course it made sense!’  They’d say, ‘this place has everything you could need! Shampoo, jugs of water that taste off even though they’ve only ever contained water, just enough spironolactone to last you up until sometime between today and next year...’

Canned peaches, canned chicken, canned ham—the perfect birthday dinner—shoes that are too big for me and super ugly, she kicked the ankle high industrial combat boots she hadn’t even attempted to put on.

She stared up at Pam Grier’s form on the wall. The third Calendar she’d picked out from the infinite dust-covered supply of them in a cardboard box she’d moved to the darkest corner of the room sometime last year, marking the date.

April 26, 1985.

The third year. The third actress. The third time she’d spent her birthday inside her bunker. She could never begin to call it her home.

How many more could she celebrate here?

Truth was, it didn't matter. It didn’t matter how much food or water she had left. It didn’t matter how well the shelter’d been built. It wouldn’t have mattered if the place was stocked with red velvet cake and Maine lobster.

She’d never been alone. Even when she’d moved, she’d had her friends, she’d had her coworkers, she’d had a whole city of people just waiting to go from strangers to friends.

There hadn’t been a single hint of static from the emergency two-way radio in three years.

Living there, alone and scared was much worse than anything that could happen to her out in the open.

Right?

Right.

She knew that.

So why couldn't she open the damn door?

She stood up—a little too quickly—ignoring the dizziness from the familiar rush of blood.

She smacked her cheeks and tried not to think about all the times she'd done so in the past, just to have a girlfriend come over and fix her ruined makeup for her.

She never forgot the code. It’d been conveniently hidden under the eighty-seventh can of beans and she’d stared at it so often she remembered it after she'd forgotten her mother’s phone number.

She pushed all the right buttons and heard a little ringtone that probably used to sound melodic. Or at least a little happy. Maybe a little annoying after a while, but still, a cute fun little song thought up by an intern.

All that came out was a quiet rhythmic groan.

She could've opened the door then. She should have, honestly.

Why didn't she?

Was she killing herself just by thinking of abandoning the only thing that's been certain after all these years?

Her books—as boring as they were—she couldn't take them with her. If she didn't instantly pass out from toxic sludge inhalation, she'd need to be able to move. Carrying around fifty-seven American classics in the hopes of finding a nice spot in the shade to reread them wouldn’t be the wisest decision.

No, she said That’s not it, that’s not the problem.

The quiet came back. She didn't have the energy to make it a decision.

The hatch was open before she realized her skin was touching metal.

She felt closer to a robot programmed to do nothing but keep taking one slow step after another until its batteries died than a human being, moving down the short hall.

If she’d been conscious enough to realize what she was doing, it would have felt endless.

The sensation of the brown leather boots meant for someone five shoe sizes bigger than hers squeaking against the floor would soon be the only memory she had of leaving.

She wouldn’t have been caught dead in them before.

Tamara alone would have killed her herself if she didn't listen to her demands to go change.

‘If you’re gonna die, you have to do it wearing something cute, you can’t just be in an ugly ghost outfit for all eternity. What am I supposed to say when we meet in the afterlife and all my friends see you have those things on?’

Angela laughed now whenever she thought of her. The crying got boring after the first year.

She wouldn’t have wanted her to be a sad sack forever.

She wouldn’t have wanted her to be leaving the bunker either, but she couldn’t make everyone happy.

She’d never really been concerned with that particular activity, to be fair.

She knew she was brilliant. Her mom had about twenty trans pride flags and Harvard summa cum laude graduate bumper stickers on her car. She’d gotten her first—and last—job straight out of graduation on the other side of the country at twenty-five. She’d still had a drawer full of twenty-something letters of recommendations waiting to be mailed out somewhere in her old bedroom drawer.

She also got stuck in a baby swing at a playground. At age twenty-seven. While sober.

That was it, that was the problem. There lied the reason she couldn’t bring herself to do any more than stand in front of the second, and last door. The final barrier keeping her in and all of the fifty foot women and godzillas out.

She was thinking. Something Angela either did too much or too little of at any given point in time.

The days she was really lucky—when everything always worked out for the best, were the days when she got to choose which one. As rare as they were.

Today’s as rare as any other. Not much distinction between them anyway.

Angela made the decision fairly quickly to do a bit of both.

If she was gonna live, not just survive but live and thrive, she’d obviously need to think sometimes.

But if she was going to die—which she was fairly certain she was—she didn't want to realize it until it had already been good and done with.

With both hands on the comically normal looking doorknob, she closed her eyes and tried and failed to empty her mind.

She wanted to rip every horrible thought straight out of her brain and toss it into the brand new paper shredder she had for a solid two days back in her office.

She imagined shredding pictures of Godzilla. Pictures of barren and gray wasteland, of the horrible chill that comes with stepping out into a nuclear winter that everyone around her had been talking about for years, of the loudest sound she'd ever heard in her life. The sight, one she’d narrowly missed—of her family, her species, and the only world she'd ever known—now her favorite—die.

But you can’t really shred most of those things, can you?

She opened the door.

Chapter Two

An incredibly boring boardroom in a castle it’s occupants do not deserve to own

There was not a single person in the small group of elders—which they’d resolved to refer to themselves as before they’d even agreed upon a space in which they’d meet—below a thousand years of age, including Patience.

However, out of all of them, Patience was the only one who’d bothered to make an attempt at filing their discordant excuses of paperwork, responding to the concerns of their citizens, and trying to steer conversations to the policies they needed to approve of or at the very least begin to discuss—and Patience had been stirred from their slumber just one year ago.

"I am certain all our societies would flourish if we taxed them for their honey."

Terry, the queen of the spring court, spoke. He was a tall and spritely being who hadn’t done so much as read any of the pamphlets Patience had handwritten for each of them. His neverending tirade of insisting on both complete anarchy—not that he’d know that word as it was too hard to spell—for the thousandth time.

Terry, we have been over this. Not only would there be no use for these meetings if we made no effort to put a system of any kind in place, we risk conflict and bloodshed and the well-being of our citizens. The lack of unity between nations is what led to this in the first place.

The leader of the Siromo tribe of mermaids, Amaka said.

At least Patience thought it was her, she was the only person he could hear over the crowd of voices who all insisted the best moment to share their rebuttal was the exact same time as everyone else.

They got out of their chair, one of thirteen golden thrones that rested around their egregiously large golden roundtable. Scratching their nails along the designs carved out of opal and lapis lazuli.

Excuse me, I am in need of some water, he said, his words hanging ignored in the air.

He walked through the enormous halls of the castle, fighting the temptation to change his form to avoid the long walk to the castle door.

They were too big. The stone could be damaged and they would end up being responsible for reupholstering the walls. Solely because no one else would. 

He shifted the moment he’d stepped out of the castle, allowing his skin to harden and the flesh of his back to lengthen to the size of a three story building stretching their leathery wings before flying the short distance to the lake.

Patience stared at their reflection for many more minutes than it would take to shift and take a sip of water.

Who was he?

He’d barely remembered his family.

Their father was kind, they thought. They hoped.

The last memory he’d had of him was the day he’d met his mother.

They were out hunting, Patience had been about to pull the trigger, to kill some kind of bird or deer, perhaps.

It didn’t matter, they had missed the shot when a sound rumbled through the air.

Initially, both him and his father assumed rainfall would soon come and it was only a bit of thunder, but the more Patience thought about it—each time hearing the sound in his thoughts with the same clarity as his first listen—the more certain they were that it couldn't have been it.

To say it was a sound felt disingenuous. It wasn't a sound or a feeling exactly.

Woefully simple as it was in their mind, it was just big.

The calling heaved through the air with such a strength, they feared it would become corporeal and take them away from wherever they rested.

They couldn’t forget her, no matter how long they’d tried to.

With her wild red hair always in four braids that reached far beyond the floor in her tall and daunting human form.

They were the main reason she preferred to stay a dragon, she’d told him once. 

Easier than detangling hair, she’d said.

She had been the one to hold him when he’d cried. They couldn’t remember why they cried so often.

They didn’t think they could forget the sensation of her cool scales as she nuzzled him the way a cat does a kitten, however.

She had made many a night sleeping in the dark woods as a young lord feel safer than they ever had inside their stone walls. Wolves were not as frightening as dragons; there was never much reason to be fearful.

It was unwise of her to grow old. The one thing she did that infuriated Patience after all of the years they’d spent together. Her only unforgivable act.

She said she hadn’t wanted to watch him die. She said that no mother should have to watch her child age and wither away. That she would instead gift him with what she had been gifted eons ago, leaving him to be the only dragon alive.

She chose to die. She chose to leave him alone.

Patience could not honestly say he’d ever stopped being angry.

He mourned.

He slept his days away until the amount of time he spent awake and aware of the world shrunk with each passing year. By the time they were able to feel anything other than misery, they had realized that being aware hadn’t improved their days by any significant measure.

They were awake now, however. They couldn’t go back to sleep.

These people were not suited for the title they’d adorned themselves with. He wasn’t either, but he had been once, he thought.

If he did nothing—if he let the remains of what people had used endless amounts of magic and time rebuilding fall to ruin, she’d have given him this gift for no reason at all. 

That would be unacceptable.

Their musings were interrupted by the sound of a door flying open from a mile or so away.

Followed by the feral gaze of the vampire queen, binding him to the ground for one eerie moment before she barreled into the forest.

They didn’t realize they’d been shaking until moments after she’d run off.

Their cool blood may as well have been frozen solid under her gaze.

They did not like that woman.

She definitely had a strong heart, for lack of a better word.

Patience was a royal now. It was his job. He’d agreed to his position when the time came.

Why she had agreed as well he would never understand.

The vampiress had never spoken to Patience—or anyone for that matter—and yet, they found themselves consumed by either irritation, awe, dread or some deathly combination of all three at her every action, or lack thereof.

Aside from her demeanor, she wasn’t extraordinarily unique. She’d behaved like every other ‘Elder’ had; with no real regard for the reason they were there.

The humans were dead.

As was their trade, their policies, and more of their animals than any creature left behind would like.

The world—at least as every last semi-immortal being knew it—had changed beyond comprehension, and the entire remaining population had entrusted this too small room full of under-qualified individuals to come up with something resembling a solid plan.

The few months immediately after the humans had died were horrendous.

The fairfolk nearly went extinct from the lack of breathable air and foliage.

Every being left behind had to work to bring the planet back. Despite the fights, trickery, and grief, they'd managed it.

And they'd be damned if they let them bring them to the point of destroying it all over again.

These meetings, exhausting as they were, were more than casual parties. They meant and would continue to mean the beginning of every decision yet to be made for the rest of the world.

They weren’t aware of it. They were preoccupied with trying not to listen to the echo of Khalida’s footsteps through the forest; but she was not simply taking a break.

They would, of course, be the one to see to her return.

She would be the reason they’d see a great deal of things they’d never imagined.

Chapter Three

Deep in the woods

The thing you'll have to remember about Khalida, is that she's not selfish. Not in the true sense of the word.

To be selfish, you’d have to be aware of the fact that you are a person. That you exist. That the people around you have lives and feelings and that this fact should matter to you.

Most days, Khalida was not a person. She was a force. A force that used to need to eat.

She still could. She thought about it sometimes. As much as something like her could think.

Khalida was no longer one to think.

When she was a child she thought constantly, even more so as a young adult.

Then the first century passed and she hadn't aged a day. All the time, all the money, all the vastly different lives; they added up.

With the nine hundredth body and the millionth piece of gold, it became increasingly difficult to recognize whether those around her—or even herself—mattered.

When Khalida was in the meeting, imagining how the leader of the good neighbor’s spring court would taste and what noise she’d make when she felt her teeth in her carotid—not the most ideal place, but beggars couldn’t be choosers and it’d be a great deal of work to find a better spot—and she smelled it, she was confused.

‘It’ being the scent, somewhere off in the woods. Sweat, dirt, and human.

And the faintest hint of Guerlain Shalimar.

Did she think before she ran after it?

Yes. More than she should’ve.

Chapter Four

Angela

When she saw the kids—kids? She still wasn't sure, they were way too small to be kids—standing at the very top of a tree and giggling to themselves about a joke she immediately knew she'd never get, Angela thought for a second that maybe things would be ok.

This changed after she realized their size.

And their pointed ears.

And their limbs that bent at weird angles, and the thousands of colors on them that no human should be able to see, let alone have in their clothes and skin.

One of them jumped straight down the length of the tree, catching themselves