The three survivors lowered their weapons after a long, tense silence. The woman in torn fatigues finally exhaled, her shoulders relaxing.
"You're… a human, right?" she asked cautiously, eyes scanning Aaron from head to toe. "Not one of those…. those things?"
Aaron didn't answer right away. The light glinted off the dull plates of his armor, off the faint seams where metal met fabric. When he finally spoke, his voice came quiet, measured.
"My heart beats," he said. "Isn't that human enough?"
The boy gave a nervous laugh, though it sounded more like relief than humor. "Then you're the first lone survivor we've seen after that apocalypse ," he said. "We thought Neon City was done for with only a little more than fifty."
The young man's prosthetic arm nodded, remaining warily out of reach. "There are others," he said, his eyes staring out into the distant horizon. "Fifty, maybe more. We're in the old Aurora Shopping Mall. If you're going nowhere, you can join us."
Fifty.
Aaron hadn't heard a voice for quite some days yet it felt like years. For one moment, something close to hope stirred in his heart, then he stamped it out. Hope, of course, under the current circumstances, was only another kind of death.
The woman's gaze was on his armor. "That armor…where did you obtain it? And what's that on your wrist? There remains no technology available that works."
Aaron's glance went to the wristwatch. The ticking beat of Quanta's quiet mechanism. "I made it and it's blessed to survive," he stated as a matter of fact.
That response had left them stunned. The boy stared at him like he'd just confessed to having built a god from scrap metal.
None of them said another word as they walked on.
Their footprints were swallowed by the street.
The city itself was of steels and memories of broken concrete, charred vehicles half-buried in the road, skeletal towers swaying in the wind.
The holographic panels are broken.
The faces of long-dead models smiled and froze mid-expression before dissolving into static.
The woman, who introduced herself as Marla, led the way through the maze of wreckage.
"We stick to the day," she said over her shoulder. "The moment it fades, the shadows move. You'll see them sometimes. Don't look at them for too long."
Aaron did not adhere to her warning. He was already picking up on the stares. The intangible bodies at the edges of perception.
As they passed by a tipped-over bus, the boy murmured, "Do not walk on that sigil."
Aaron glanced down. A ring of salt and ash had been drawn along the ground.
"Protection sigil," Marla complained. "Keeps them from crawling up through the ground."
He never even asked what they were. The answer hung etched on all charred walls and all wailing whines of wind.
The Aurora Shopping Mall towered out of the mist like a monument to a forgotten empire. Fifty stories of shattered glass and rusting steel, its name still just readable under a veneer of grime.
Marla stood before the front door, looking at it with a derisive kind of pride. "Home," she said.
Aaron led them through a side door that had been blockaded with curved rebar and refrigerator doors. There, the air was filled with smoke and people breathing when they breathed.
The lobby was now a fortress. Carts, shelves, and mannequins blocked every doorway.
Few men and women remained at guard with homemade clubs with taped knives on broomsticks, sharpened crowbars, splintered chair legs.
On seeing Aaron's armor, there was a conditioned response.
Every conversation stopped. All heads turned to a single being. Their eyes narrowed with rampant desires.
Some were speechless in awe.
Others with jealousy.
A few with seething hatred.
Whispers rent the air:
"That's pretty advanced…"
"How? Everything's dead."
"Maybe he's one of them. Maybe he brought them here."
Aaron felt the air grow thick around him like a garrote. His hand passed over the edge of his armor not for protection,but for merely reflex.
The boy got up quickly. "He's with us! We picked him up outside!"
That eased the group a bit, but not much. Suspicion still hung in every look.
The survivors had repurposed the lower levels of the mall into a hive of desperate survival.
Barrels of fire trash to provide them with warmth.
All of them lying on the floor on blankets.
A line of used vending machines taken apart for scrap.
Aaron had witnessed children huddled under blankets. A woman cleaning blood from a kitchen knife. An old man praying to someone or something.
The first floor is the main area of living protected by shopping cart barricades and broken glass.
Beyond the second floor , the top floors were closed off.
As they went up the emergency stairs, Aaron noticed that the walls had names, dozens of them. Each accompanied by a cross or date.
He couldn't help but wonder how many of the names were still alive.
They came out onto the second floor. A cavernous open area formerly held by high-end stores, now reconfigured as a kind of war room.
In the center of this was a bearded old man, rumpled in a black topcoat, a worn cuff on his arm with the letters: CIVIL DEFENSE.
He looked up as Aaron walked towards him, his eyes shining and sharp in the dim light of a fire barrel.
"Marla," he growled, his voice flat though gruff, "brought a visitor?"
"Yes, sir." She stood before him. "Found him in the Market District. Alone."
The old man gazed at Aaron in silence for several seconds.
There were others standing around him. A nurse-like, one of her fifty, a thin young man with tattooed designs on the back of his neck, some other survivors, all stiff and strained.
Finally, the leader spoke.
"Where did you come across that armor, boy?"
Aaron's answer was deep, as always. "I guess I made it."
There was a flicker of shock on the old man's face. Then he nodded, slowly, as if memorizing the response so he could recite it in the years to come.
He settled back into his chair, fingers locked together. "We've had passersby through here before. Some decent, some not. You'll pardon me if I don't make it easy."
Aaron said nothing. He wasn't surprised.
The man smiled faintly, a hard, weary smile.
What's your name, kid? Mine's Elias Marren. I run this little slice of heaven in hell or try to."
Aaron hesitated for an instant.
He'd almost forgotten the feel of saying his name. Names were worthless when the world no longer heard.
Now, with pairs of eyes upon him, though, the sound mattered.
He breathed slowly.
A halt then he add,
"Aaron."
The voice floated around there, light and heavy at once like a firefly attempting to find its way around in the darkness.