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The sun had almost completely sunk behind the horizon, throwing a riot of red and orange hues across the sky, punctuated periodically by the deep, sullen blue of low-hanging clouds. In the fading light, a battered Camaro pulled up to the giant, broken husk of a building that dominated the immediate landscape, kicking up a thin plume of dust as it went.
The car shuddered to a halt, and its doors popped open, spilling out five human figures. Four of them immediately set to stretching cramped limbs and backs, groaning in relief at their release from the confines of the vehicle.
“Oh, quit whining, you nerds,” said the fifth. She had hair that was bright red beneath a thin veneer of filth, tied out of the way of her face with a minimum of attention paid to style. In her hand she carried the Camaro’s steering wheel, which she had popped off as she had exited. “We’ve got to hurry and get our camp set up.”
“Easy for you to say, Max,” groaned a young man with an untidy mop of curly brown hair. “You’ve had the front seat all to yourself all day. Would it kill you to let one of us ride shotgun?”
“With as irritating as you lot are? Probably, yeah. Camp, Dustin, now.”
Dustin stuck out his tongue at her. “Come on, Lucas, back me up here,” he said to the dark-skinned young man beside him.
Lucas shook his head. “I’m with her. About camp, I mean, not about us being irritating. We should get our fire going as soon as possible.”
“We should set it up inside the building,” a third young man, small and slight, put in. “Less visible that way.”
“Good call, Will,” agreed Lucas. “Max, I’m assuming you’re going to be keeping an eye on the car?”
Max leaned on the hood of the Camaro, the ghost of a smile crossing her lips. “Gotten to know me that well, have you, Lucas?”
“Maybe just a bit,” Lucas replied, grinning at her. “Hey Mike, can you give me a hand with--Mike?”
Mike didn’t respond. He had wandered over to the entrance to the building and was staring into the darkness inside, apparently lost in thought.
“Huh,” Lucas breathed. Now that their attention had been drawn to it, the others felt themselves caught up in the building as well. Even Max seemed oddly drawn in. It had a sort of presence about it, as though it were hiding something behind its crumbling facade. “What was this place, anyway?”
“You don’t know? It was some sort of lab, back in the day,” Dustin said. “Did all sorts of wild experiments, according to the stories… reaching out to other worlds, unlocking the limits of human potential. That kind of thing.”
“Ridiculous,” Max growled, tearing her gaze away to glare at the ground.
Mike turned back to the rest of them. “I’m… going to have a look around inside,” he said.
The others looked at him like they thought he was crazy.
“You’re crazy,” Lucas said.
Mike crossed his arms over his chest, although the defiance of the gesture was ruined by the fact that he was hugging himself slightly. “I’m not crazy,” he said. “It’s just… if we’re going to be staying here for the night, we should make sure that nothing’s going to crawl out and attack us while we sleep, right?”
“Hmph,” snorted Max, laying herself back to sprawl lazily on the Camaro’s hood. “Don’t go getting yourself killed, Mike.”
“Careful, Max.” Mike’s lips twisted into a wry smile. “I might start thinking you actually care about me.”
Without lifting her head or looking at him, she raised her hand and flipped him off.
“Okay, but seriously, though.” Will’s face was drawn with worry. “Joking aside… don’t go getting yourself in too deep, okay, Mike?”
“I promise that if I get in trouble, I’ll scream really loud,” Mike said, waving him off. “Really, guys, it’s probably fine. I’m sure there’s nothing actually in there, I just… want to know for sure, you know?”
They didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t say anything more before turning back and vanishing into the darkness.
- - -
Dust and rubble crunched under Mike’s feet as he walked deeper into the lab, his makeshift lantern held aloft so that he wasn’t groping blindly in the dark.
He’d lied to the others. From the moment he’d laid eyes on the building, he’d found himself seized by the certainty that there was something in here, lurking in the depths. Not a threat--no, he wouldn’t have gone in alone if he’d thought there was danger.
It was more like there was something in here that needed to be found.
The flame in his lantern guttered, making the shadows around him flicker, and Mike’s breath caught in his throat as he spotted one that hadn’t disappeared as the light shifted. He approached it cautiously, telling himself that he was seeing things, the atmosphere of the building was messing with his head… but as he drew close, he couldn’t deny what he was seeing. There was a human form slumped against the wall, unmoving.
It was dressed in the sort of armor pieced together from scrap metal that was commonly worn by those who styled themselves as raiders of the wastelands. Mike and his friends had had plenty of close calls with their type, when they were out hunting for supplies to steal or just tormenting people for the hell of it. He kneeled down to examine it closer. They were dead, long dead in fact; the corpse had dessicated, leaving only a crumbling layer of dried-out skin clinging to skeletal remains. More disconcertingly, the head lay sideways at an unnatural angle, suggesting that the raider had been killed by a sudden, powerful twist of the head that had snapped their neck. There were a handful of brutes out there capable of pulling off such a feat--had there been a close-quarters fight in this hallway, sometime in the distant past?
Something caught his eye as he looked up from the corpse, and he gasped. At the far end of the hallway, beyond the reach of his lantern’s light, was a pale shape that Mike’s eyes, only partially adjusted to the darkness, couldn’t entirely make out. Even as he watched, though, it moved, flitting sideways to disappear down one of the hallways that forked off of the one he was currently in.
Mike climbed to his feet. His rational instincts told him that he should fall back, warn the others and return with backup. He hadn’t been listening to those at all today, though, so why start now? Besides, that sense of being here to find something was stronger now, driving him forward.
Purposefully, he walked on, turning down the hallway that the pale shape had disappeared into. He didn’t see anything that looked like it, but there were two more dark shapes sprawled on the floor a little ways down.
Sure enough, these shapes were corpses as well, both wearing the same makeshift armor that the other one had been wearing. One of the corpses was lying partially against the wall, as though it had slid down to the floor--an impression reinforced by the gigantic dent in the wall, as if something had slammed into it with incredible force. Mike swallowed, drawing the obvious conclusion. The other corpse was facedown in the middle of the hallway, with no immediately obvious cause for how it had gotten there--until Mike glanced up and noticed another impact dent, this one in the ceiling . There was a large, uneven spot in the middle of it that looked unsettlingly like dried blood.
Finding the first corpse had been unsettling enough, but now Mike was starting to feel well and truly in over his head. Deciding to exercise the better part of valor, he turned back the way he had come--and yelped in surprise when the light from his lantern washed over somebody crouching just a couple of yards behind him.
She was squatting on her haunches, balancing herself with her fingertips on the ground in front of her. Her hair was an unholy mess, sticking out in all directions at uneven lengths, as though it had been clumsily hacked short with a knife, and she was wearing something that looked like a slightly-too-small hospital gown, although it and her skin were so uniformly caked with filth that they were somewhat difficult to distinguish from each other in the low light. She had flinched back when he yelled, and was staring at him with a look on her face, not exactly expressive, but tight with an animal wariness that Mike had sometimes seen before, on people who’d let life in the wasteland get to them too much.
Her eyes, though… there was something in her eyes that drew him in.
“Hey,” he said, holding up the hand that wasn’t holding the lantern in a soft, placating gesture. “Sorry, did I scare you? I’m not going to hurt you, I promise.”
She continued to stare at him. At least she wasn’t pulling away--that was a good sign. Probably. “I’m Mike,” Mike continued. “Who are you?”
Another long stare. Mike was about to try to ask something else when she slowly pushed herself forward, crawling toward him with long, cautious movements, eyes still fixed warily on his face. He held himself still, giving her his best reassuring smile, and when she’d gotten close enough, she held out her arm, turning it up so that he could see the inside of her wrist. He frowned as he peered down at it--there was something there, tattooed in stark black ink.
011.
“Eleven…?” he said. “What’s eleven?”
Still gazing at him, she lifted her other hand and pointed to herself.
“Oh… Eleven, I get it,” he said. “Nice to meet you, Eleven.”
She cocked her head to the side. “Nice to meet you?” she repeated, inflecting it as a question.
“Oh, you talk!” he said. Too forcefully--she flinched back from him again. “Sorry,” he said, softer. “Yeah, it is nice to meet you. Are you staying here?”
She shrugged. “Home,” she said, apparently by way of explanation.
“I see… that’s, uh, nice.” Mike grinned at her again, and she seemed to relax just a little bit. “Me and my friends are just visiting--staying for the night, upstairs.”
She frowned. “Friends?”
“Yeah, the others--Dustin, Lucas, and Will. And Max, too, she’s kind of our—”
“What’s ‘friends’?”
He blinked, train of thought derailed mid-sentence. “Oh,” he said. “Well… friends are like people that you can trust, you know? People that have your back.”
Her frown deepened, and she turned, looking down over one shoulder.
“No, not like that!” Mike laughed. “I mean… friends take care of each other, and protect each other. Having a friend means that you’re not alone.”
“Not alone…” She was staring at him again, but the tension and wariness had melted out of her expression, and she seemed more thoughtful than before. “Can we be friends?” she asked, abruptly.
“Uh--yeah, of course! If that’s what you want.”
She nodded. “I do want.”
“Okay… great! That’s great. I guess you should probably come up and meet the others, then. You’ll like them, I think.” Mike nodded down the hallway. “Come on, let’s go, El.”
She cocked her head to the side again. “El?”
“Oh, sorry… ‘El’ like ‘Eleven’. You know, shorter, and… not a number…” Mike rubbed awkwardly at the back of his neck. “I mean, kind of like me. My name’s actually Michael, but people call me Mike because it’s easier to say. I guess I figured I could just call you El… is that okay?”
“Yes.” She nodded, firmly. “Okay.”
- - -
Calling the expressions on the others’ faces ‘stunned disbelief’ would be underselling the point a bit.
“So… everyone, this is El,” Mike said. “El, everyone.” She was crouching behind him, peeking around his torso, one hand with her fingertips on the ground like before, the other clinging lightly but insistently to his shirt. “She’s been living in the lab… I don’t know, probably for a while. I kind of thought she might like to get out of there, and she seemed agreeable to it…”
Dustin tilted his head, almost craning his neck to get a look around Mike at El. “What is she?”
“A person,” replied Mike with a surge of irritation.
“A person who’s living in the basement of an abandoned lab?” asked Lucas.
“It’s not the weirdest place we’ve found somebody living.”
“It’s pretty up there, man,” Lucas said as he raised an eyebrow.
Will stood up from the fire and crossed over to where Mike and El were standing. El drew back slightly as he approached, her grip on Mike’s shirt tightening. Will gave her a gentle smile, holding out a chunk of charred meat he’d been cooking on their campfire. “Here,” he said. “Are you hungry? However you feed yourself out here, I can’t imagine that you’re getting enough…”
El’s eyes fixed warily on the meat, then flicked up to Mike.
“It’s okay,” Mike said. “Will’s my friend, you can trust him.”
Her expression didn’t relax any, but she nodded slowly, extending a hand to take the meat from Will. Then she fell on it with a ferocity that made it clear that, yes, she was very hungry.
A loud snort drew everybody’s attention to Max, who was leaning in the doorway to the outside. “Didn’t anybody teach you not to feed strays, Will?” she asked. “It just keeps them coming back for more.”
Mike shifted uncomfortably as Will retreated back to the fire. “I mean, if she’s gonna come with us—”
“She’s not,” Max replied flatly. “I’ve got my hands full as it is keeping you four idiots alive. I can’t afford to take on another stray.”
“Max, come on! She’s gonna die if we just leave her here—”
“She’s been doing well for herself so far.” Max eyed El critically as El glared back at her. “For quite some time, in fact, if she’s been here for as long as it looks like she has. But even if she would die, so what? There’s no shortage of people dying, out there.” She gestured vaguely behind her at the outdoors. “Are you going to insist on bringing every single one of them along? Or does it only matter for the ones you’ve taken a shine to?”
Mike crossed his arms. “Yeah, well, maybe we can’t help everybody, but right now we’re here, and we can help her, so we should.”
“Hmph. Tell you what, Mike. If you’re so keen on her, then why don’t you just stay here with her? It’ll get you out of my hair, at least.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. Why do you have to be such an unbelievable asshole all the time?”
Max started to move forward, striding angrily towards Mike. “Look, I’ve had just about enough of your—”
She was interrupted by an earsplitting scream from El, who thrust her hand forward, fingers splayed. Max’s momentum abruptly reversed, her body getting thrown backwards as though it had just been slammed by a large, invisible object. She flew a couple of feet through the air before hitting the ground, rolling, and coming to a stop against the wall.
Lucas shot to his feet, followed shortly by Dustin and Will. “Shit! Max!”
Mouth agape, Mike looked down at El, her hand still outstretched, breath coming in ragged pants, lips lifted into a snarl. All at once, the corpses he’d discovered in the depths of the lab--which he’d managed to forget about in the novelty of meeting El--came back to him, the pieces clicking together in his head. “Oh shit,” he breathed.
El turned and looked up at him, expression shifting to something else--mournful? Ashamed? Across the room, he could see Lucas turning towards him as well, looking thunderous, but before harsh words could fly, something cut through the stunned silence.
It took Mike a moment to parse the unfamiliar sound. It was Max, and she was laughing.
“Oh, wow,” she chuckled, bracing one hand on the wall as she pulled herself to her feet. “I take back everything I just said. She is definitely coming with us.”
“Wha—?” Mike, Lucas, Dustin, and Will all blurted in unison.
Max rolled her neck as though trying to work out a kink. “I said that I couldn’t take on another stray…” She grinned at El mid-roll. “But this girl’s no stray. She’s a fighter, and I can always use another fighter on my side.”
“You can’t be serious,” Lucas said.
“Can’t I?” Max chuckled again as she rolled her neck back around the other way. “Go ahead, pull her up to the fire and let her have a share of our rations. I’m going to go look through our spare clothes, so she doesn’t have to wear… well, that.”
El had been watching Max as she spoke, and as the redhead stalked back out the door to the Camaro, she looked back up at Mike with a wide-eyed, bewildered expression. Mike didn’t have any answers to offer her. “Max is like that,” he said. “You learn to just go with it.”
They took a seat by the fire, El still hovering as close by Mike as she could. Will and Dustin passed around portions of food for them, their usual mixture of preserved rations and awkwardly-cooked meat. Lucas sat on the other side of the fire, leveling a look at Mike that made it clear he still had reservations; Mike gave him a look in return that made it clear he didn’t care.
“I guess there was something going on in this place after all,” Will remarked between bites.
“Ooh, you think she’s, like, a leftover experiment or something?” Dustin asked.
El shivered, so subtly that only Mike noticed, being right next to her. “So hey,” he said, a little more loudly than was natural. “Max said something about wanting to run by that trading post in the next few days, right? You guys thought any about what you’re going to try and get your hands on?”
Sure enough, the question sent Dustin off on a rambling tear about the supplies he wanted, Will fumbling to keep up with him. Only Lucas seemed to notice what Mike had done, and he contented himself with lifting an eyebrow to communicate that fact to Mike.
El’s voice, murmuring softly beside him, stole his attention. “Are you mad?”
“Huh?” Mike looked over at her. She’d curled up into a loose ball, her knees drawn up to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs. Was she upset? Her body language was so tense and skittish by default that it was hard to gauge what was unusual. “About what just happened, you mean? No, I’m not mad. I mean, maybe don’t make a habit of throwing Max around like that. She’s not always going to take it this well.”
She nodded. “I’ll try.”
That was fair enough. Max came back in with a bundle of clothing under her arm, all but tossing it at El (to Mike’s deep irritation--could she not see how easily El startled?). After a brief misunderstanding and outburst where El attempted to shuck her hospital gown in front of the entire group, she scurried off into another room and returned dressed in a long-sleeved shirt, slacks, and worn pair of boots--plain, but serviceable. Fashion was a luxury these days, after all.
At length, the fire began to burn low, and the group’s conversation died down with it. They often ended their days this way, staring into the dying embers in the company of whatever thoughts they weren’t willing to speak aloud. Mike could imagine what was going on in the other guys’ heads, given that it was probably not much different from what was going on in his. Max was more of a closed book, but she’d been like that as long as he’d known her, and he didn’t work too hard at trying to puzzle her out anymore.
He gasped in surprise as something touched his arm. El wrapped her hand around his bicep and pulled herself up against him, laying her head against his shoulder. “Okay?” she asked softly.
“Y-yeah,” he responded in a low voice. “Yeah, this is okay.”
She made a small, contented noise. After a minute of watching the remains of the fire, she said, “Mike?”
“Yeah?”
Her face scrunched in concentration, like she was trying to summon up the right words. “It’s… nice to meet you too.”
The wasteland was a harsh, painful place to live in, all told. Tonight, though, for the first time in a long time, it felt just a little bit easier.