A Post-Nuclear Wonder

Chapter 2: Second Birth

I woke up with the feeling of solid rock against my face. Clearly someone must have dragged me out of the water and helped me back to consciousness. They must have taken off the mask and air tanks as well, because I couldn’t feel their pressure on my face or back. Why couldn’t I hear my savior, though? Was I temporarily deaf? Were they somewhere else, getting help or supplies?
That’s when it occurred to me that I was not wet. Surely if they had dragged me out of the water and I could feel the rock below me I would still be wet, or at least be able to hear the sound of the waves crashing near by. I opened my eyes slowly. But what I saw couldn’t be right.
I was lying on a massive cliff, over looking a great canyon, expanding miles to either side and in front of me. Towers of stone climbed up the air in various areas, some only a few feet tall, others even taller then the cliff that I laid on. I pulled myself up, and turned around to just find more of the same behind. I realized that I was not on a cliff, but instead on one of the many rock towers. God, what was the name of these things?
“Ugh, I can’t remember anything…” I muttered to myself. Then there was a soft thud on the ground beside me, and I turned to see a medium-sized dog with burnt-looking legs. “How… How did you get up here? What happened to you, buddy?” He tilted his head to the side, and his tongue lolled out. He barked at me, then jumped forward, landing on top of me. He kept barking in my ear until I pushed him off, screaming, “What the hell is wrong with you?” He barked once more, then ran off, jumping down the edge.
Without even thinking, I ran after him, throwing myself down after him. There was a rush of wind, blowing strongly against me from below. For a split second everything blurred to a strange green-ish tint, and the next thing I knew I was standing upright at the bottom of the canyon. Off in the distance I could see the dog running off towards a man, who seemed strangely familiar. I was sure I had never seen the man; he was very well built and had a slight tan. Never in my life had I met such a man, and yet there was a quality about him that seemed vaguely familiar.
As the dog approached him, he turned around and saw me. There was a strange look on his face, as if he were seeing some kind of a ghost. He ran down the path towards me, and stopped abruptly in front of me. “Jacry, is that you?” The name registered in the back of my mind, and after a second I realized why.
“Um… I… I think so, yeah.”
The man’s arms crashed down on my sides, gripping me tightly and lifting me in the air. I had no idea what was going on, and after a second he put me back down. I looked into his face, and after a second, it occurred to me where I had seen him before. That last week before the accident exploded back into my head, and I found myself looking into the weary eyes of a friend I once had.
“…Zers?”

Chapter 3: A Shocking Reunion

“Where the hell have you been?” Zers asked, clearly shocked at the fact I was standing here before him. “And why haven’t you changed? You look exactly the same as you did when I saw you last!”
I stared at him blankly. There was no way he could be Zers. He was obviously much older then he had been just a few days ago, and not only that, but he actually had some muscles. How could he have changed so much in such a short time? It didn’t make any sense. And yet, there was something about the look behind his eyes that just screamed “Zers.” Wait a second… BEHIND his eyes…?
“I… I jumped into the water… And then the nuke landed… And then… I don’t know. I have no idea what the hell is going on right now.”
Zers glared at me for a second, then slowly nodded. “You know, there always was something strange about you. Come on, let’s take you down to see Kain. Maybe he’ll have some idea about what the hells going on with you.”
Zers turned around then, and began jogging off. Man, he was fast! I quickly started after him, but he was going to fast for me. After only a couple of minutes, he had disappeared from sight. I was about to give up trying to catch up when the edges of my vision blurred green again, and suddenly I was directly behind him again. The green  faded away slightly, but there was still a small trace of it left, and I no longer had any problem keeping up. Where was the tint coming from, and what exactly did it do? Did it have something to do the explosion? Or was I just losing it?

---

After a little while we pulled out of the canyon and found ourselves in front of a small house. Or, rather, the ruins of a small house. One of the walls was missing entirely, and there were a bunch of holes in the roof. The inside was completely covered in dust, and there was little furniture inside. I could see an average-looking man inside, though he seemed a little short. He wore jeans and a dirty-white shirt.
“Yo, Kain!” Zers yelled. “Look who I found out in the canyon!”
The man in the building looked out towards, and surprise flashed across his face when he spotted me. What’s so surprising about me lately? Do I look funny?
“Jacry! The hell you been?” the shouted.
“That’s what we’re here to found out,” Zers replied for me. He slapped me on the back, and said, “Our friend here doesn’t remember jack-shit!”
“Hey,” I mumbled, but before I could say anything else, Kain ran over and grabbed my face. He pushed it from side to side, scrutinizing every aspect of my face.
“Well,” he said to himself, “I can’t see and injuries on the surface. No welts, bruises, scars…” He tapped me on the forehead with his knuckles and asked, “That hurt?” I rolled my eyes in response. As if.
Kain reached into his back pocket, and before I could react had slapped a small, metallic device on the back of my neck. “No breaks, then. Better check for radioactivity.” I felt a strange white glow enter my system. I felt it poking around the inside of my body, and meanwhile the thought entered my mind, why could I FEEL the color of the energy? That doesn’t even make sense. The energy had only been in my system for the entirety of two seconds, when I couldn’t stand it anymore. I rejected the feeling it gave me, and it was forced out of me and back into the disk on my neck, which immediately sizzled and fell to the ground. Kain stared at the dead chip on the ground, then slowly transfered his focus up to me.
“How did you…? No level of radioactivity could… There’s definitely no radioactivity in you, but there is something. Something… Even stronger.” Kain whispered in a defeated voice.
“Please shut the hell up,” I said. “Your making it sound like I’m the ultimate weapon or something. And don’t even suggest that,” I added as he began to open his mouth. “I’m just a normal kid.”
“Well,” he said feebly, “That’s part of the problem. You see, you shouldn’t be a kid anymore. In case you haven’t noticed, neither Zers nor I are kids any longer.”
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask about that. How has Zers changed so much? And, now that you mention it, who the hell are you?”
“What, you mean you don’t remember me?” Kain asked with a puzzled look.
“Not at all. I’ve been trying to figure out who you are ever since I got here. There’s something familiar about you. It’s… It’s behind your eyes, somewhere.”
Kain didn’t seem to be paying attention entirely, and as soon as I was done talking, he shouted, “Chest bump!” and jumped towards me. A memory flashed behind my eyes of a fat young boy doing the same thing. Instinct took over, and I jumped up into the air, and Kain bumped into me. Despite being larger then me, he still bounced backwards and fell on his ass.
As I landed back on my feet, the memory repeated itself, and the two persons matched together, despite not looking at all like each other. “Ok, NOW I remember you.” I said as he pulled himself back upright.
“There we go!” he said with a smug look of satisfaction. However, his expression quickly switched back to a somber one, and he began to pace back and forth. “Still, it doesn’t make sense that you can possibly be here. After what happened, we were all so sure…”
“Ugh!” I screamed. Kain and Zers looked at me with looks of surprise. “Will someone please explain to me what the hell is going on!” I demanded of them. “How can you to have changed so much? I’ve only been gone a maximum of a few days, you two shouldn’t have changed this much! And where the hell are we? I don’t remember there being a place like this anywhere near where we lived, so where is it?”
Kain and Zers looked at each other for a minute, clearly not wanting to explain what was going on. I was getting angrier and angrier with each silent, passing second, when I heard someone approaching from behind us. I spun around and looked at who was approaching. There was a man and a woman entering the house, both of whom seemed as if they were slightly removed from the rest of humanity. The woman was brunette, and looked as if she were surveying the space around her for some kind of mistake in the walls and ceiling. The man was blond, and looked prepared to jump at any moment if a threat revealed itself. They were both wearing long cloaks, and I couldn’t quite understand why they seemed so tense. We were standing inside of an open building in the middle of an apparent desert at the edge of a large canyon. I highly doubted that anyone was going to jump us out here.
The couple entered the building, and the woman finally noticed me. Looking at her, I noticed that she, too, looked vaguely familiar, though I could not quite understand why. We looked at each other for a short while, and the air around us was tense and quiet. For a moment I thought that she was going to jump me and try to kill me, when suddenly her face brightened and she joyfully yelled, “Jacry!” she jumped forward and embraced me, and after a second of struggling I pulled away. “Ok, why the hell is it that everyone knows who I am?” I demanded of the group now surrounding me. The woman cocked her head, as if she were a dog that had just been told to do something it did not understand, and looked at me with a puzzled look. The look quickly changed to one that told me, “You’re an idiot,” and that was when it registered who she was. “Oh. Hi, Lamine.” I said, and her face brightened once again.
I turned to the man Lamine had entered with, and noticed that unlike everyone else, there was nothing about him that registered. “Ok,” I said to him, “This time I’m sure we’ve never met.”
He chuckled, and said, “No, we haven’t. I came into the picture afterwards.”
“Afterwards?” I asked, confused, “After what?”
He suddenly stopped laughing. He turned to Zers and Kain and demanded, “You mean to say that you to haven’t told him?”
“Well… I mean… We were going to… But it’s just so…” They began to mumble, but the man cut them off.
“Look, I’ll tell you quite frankly. Obviously, you have no idea what’s going on. Chances are, last thing you remember is the nuke falling, right?” I nodded slowly, wondering where this was going to go. “Well,” he said calmly, “That wasn’t yesterday. It was ten years ago, and when it happened, you died. You’ve been officially dead ever since.”