Survival/Apocalypse16 min read
The Ring, The Solar Panel, and the Last Bus South
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"I'll be quick," I told the class chat, fingers trembling even as I typed.
"Stock up in the dorm," I wrote. "Keep it low-key."
"You sure?" Bianca asked when she came back and I told her over the sink. Her voice was tight, but practical. "My mom said the city's got a problem."
"I called my parents," I said. "They said it's serious. Just—don't advertise it."
"Okay." Kailani's face softened. "Let's go together."
Jimena nodded, but I could see her hands were already busy packing a tote. "If this is real, I don't want to be the girl who said 'I should have.'"
"We'll be like thieves," Bianca joked, but there was no humor in it. "Quiet thieves."
We were four girls who had learned to share late-night ramen and cheap shampoo, suddenly planning like conspirators. I was Colette Lawson, a voice in a class chat that became a lifeline for a short, urgent time.
"We'll ask for the manager," I said.
"Say it's for a club," Kailani suggested.
"Yes. Say it's for a club." I forced a smile, even though my throat felt dry.
The manager believed us—maybe because he liked the idea of involving students, or maybe because the world was too stunned to interrogate. He wheeled boxes out from the warehouse while we scribbled numbers on a list and swallowed our panic.
"Ten boxes of self-heating meals," I read aloud. "Two of compressed biscuits, batteries—the whole look."
"Don't take everything," Bianca said suddenly, eyeing the sanitary goods. "If other girls need them—"
"We're not going to leave the town with all of it," I said, and then softened. "But we can't strip them bare either."
We took what we could carry, what fit the small dorm room with no fridge, with only two small windows and the smell of instant noodles and shoe leather.
"Don't be the first to tell," I told the chat I wrote earlier. "Keep quiet."
"You're a bit cold," Jimena said. She was young in a way that still surprised me—she believed in people the way you believe in fair weather. "But you're right."
That night we piled boxes, bottles, batteries, medical basics. I kept my phone on silent. My parents wired money; the voice on the other end had a steady, sleep-deprived calm I'd heard a thousand times in labs and meetings: "Don't be loud, don't be a hero."
"Low profile," I repeated. "Survive quietly."
We taped the boxes, balanced water barrels, stacked blankets. We traded extra blankets for solar panels, because supplies would be useless if the lights went out. We pulled a favor from a physics senior—Julio Clayton—who didn't blink when we told him about the city.
"If you can get a student card, I can bring the panel tomorrow," he said, like it was normal.
He brought his friend Julio Rousseau too. Julio R. was the kind of person who smelled of muscle and certainty; he hauled boards and hammered, laughed in a way that made us relax.
"Girl repair," Julio Clayton said with a half-smile as he bent to drill into our balcony. "Say it's for your girlfriend."
"Nice lie," I muttered.
"Works every time," he said.
He and Julio R. installed the panel where the sun kissed our balcony at noon. They showed us how to flip switches, how to save a little juice. Julio R. left a spare the way you leave a flashlight.
"You're welcome," he said. "If you ever need a hand—"
"Don't get attached," I said, and we all laughed until we didn't.
We fortified doors. We hid. We learned to sleep in shifts. When the screams started, we were crouched on the floor with our backs against each other.
"Open up!" someone pounded at the door. "Open!"
I could hear the voice outside, young and crazy with fear.
Bianca fingered the hammer left at the shoe rack. "He's at the door."
I remembered my father's voice from that morning. "People in panic do worse than nature."
"Don't open," I whispered.
We had tightened every bolt. We had jammed planks across the frames. The banging diluted into the noise of the campus and, later, silence.
"Those are the infected," Kailani breathed. "Are they—"
"Yes." I couldn't say more.
We slept in a piecework battle rhythm: breathless, few hours of nightmare, awake. We tied up Jimena that first night because she couldn't stop wanting to run to the hall and tell everyone what she thought was right. She hated being tied, but she stopped trying.
"Promise me you'll untie me when this is over," she sobbed.
"We will," Bianca said.
"Maybe," I said. "But for now—we hold."
Days turned into a cadence of rationing, of counting bottles, of listening to the far scream. The city grew quieter. The internet blinked to life once, and a Government message told us to head south: safe zones along the coast.
"We'll go," I told the room. "But not alone."
Julio Clayton tapped on our window with a small paper—big letters, clumsy: BLUE TOOTH. He and Julio R. had mapped out who had signal range on the block. Soon, an odd network formed: friends across balconies, messages tucked into Bluetooth names that said floor numbers.
"It'll save lives to coordinate," Julio Clayton said. "We use drones. We move quiet."
"Old workers," Julio R. laughed. "The drones are old employees—everyone knows them."
They were. The small humming drones, the ones that had once delivered pizza, became our scouts. They sang on the evening air, small beacons of hope.
Then the day came we decided to leave. The Government messages predicted a wave moving south like a black tide. We couldn't stay for a tide that would swallow dorms whole.
"Who will drive?" I asked.
"No one? Julio R. knows enough," Julio Clayton shrugged. "He and I can do this."
"They've borrowed a bus for a trip," Julio R. said, and my stomach did a flip. "Student Union. They left it in the yard."
"It might be our last ride," I heard myself say.
We went with four more—three from their block. Eleven souls under an old bus sign. We tied our boxes, we wrapped ropes, we felt the engine like a pulse.
On the road, small towns gave us moments of ease. Scavengers became a bigger problem than the walking dead. At a gas station, a lone burned-out worker made us hurry. We stole fuel from a broken pump and kept moving.
At dusk of the second day of driving in the open, the tire screamed flat. Someone swore. The bus slowed, and then the back of daylight split into shrieks as the infected closed in.
"Run to the shop!" Julio R. shouted. "Now!"
We bolted toward a small convenience, but two infected had already blocked the door. Panic turned bodies into recklessness. I saw something rush toward me—a limb, then a hot hand, then a weight. My world narrowed to the iron taste of fear.
A hand—Julio R.'s—caught me, shoved, then struck the creature with a crowbar. "Move!" he barked.
I looked up. He was a tower of motion. Dust and sweat, mouth cutting orders. He shoved me into the shop, then stopped.
"Julio!" I shouted. "Get in!"
He was at the entrance when the first infected lunged and latched onto his arm. He didn't scream. He looked at me and gave that thin smile he always reserved for improbable things.
"Colette," he said, his voice a rough thing. "If... if you meet a girl from Xi'an named Kaori—give her this. Tell her not to wait."
He shoved his palm into mine. A ring lay there, simple and warm with his skin. He handed me a small chain and I closed my fingers over the cold metal without thinking.
"No." My throat failed. "You—"
He laughed once, soft and ridiculous. Blood darkened like ink at the corner of his mouth.
"Tell her—don't wait," he repeated.
The infected surged. He pushed the door closed. "Go," he said to the group. "Go!"
He held the door, and as I watched his shoulders were pressed into the iron grille. He turned, raised his hand, and grinned at me, like a boy called to some impossible dare.
"Colette," he called over the noise. "Look after them. Look after yourself."
Then he stepped back into the hungry press, and the crowd swallowed him. The ring was warm in my palm.
I remember the way the world felt fluid and distant then—how the taste of metal became a compass. I remember turning the ring over on the chain and promising something that didn't yet have words.
"We have to go," Wells said, then, though we had not yet met him the way the world would later remember him.
We ran and ran until the sun was a coin, and then the bus was gone with half the group's things. We survived by a thread stitched with the help of people we did not yet know. We stole a night in a ruined farmhouse. We huddled and tried to sleep.
When we reached the coastal screening station—when the man with a tired, suspicious face asked whether we had been bitten—we told the truth. A box of small white cards, a test that felt like scorekeeping, and then quarantine. We were split, questioned, found surviving.
Days later, someone with a posture like winter came into the isolation yard.
"I am Wells Berger," he said. "Command. Second Rescue Team."
He had an even voice. He had eyes that took inventory of you and then decided if you were worth the risk.
"You're lucky," he told us, blunt. "You came in which convoy?"
I told him about drones and about the ring and about Julio R.'s last smile. He listened and then—unexpectedly—he smiled a private smile. "We will get you to the island," he said. "But we cannot promise everything."
He kept his word. The facilities at the base were a kind of miracle after months of rationing. My parents were there—my mother with new lines of fatigue and my father with eyes that trembled. We clung and we cried.
Julio R.'s ring sat on the chain at my throat like a heart. I could not hand it away yet. It burned with the memory of his grin.
"Who is Kaori?" Wells asked one night when the moon was a broken coin over the water.
"A friend," I said. "A girl he loved. I promised."
He said nothing. He only wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. The touch was small but not casual. "You carried someone else's hope," he said. "That's heavy. You don't have to carry it alone."
We started to rebuild lives on the island—teaching, fixing, building. People laughed. People planted things in soil that had known other lives. Once, weeks later, I took a small boat and found Kaori Sasaki. I told her Julio's story, I placed the ring in her hand. She cried. We were three strangers connected by one brave mistake.
The months became a year, and one day the world found a way to fight back. Vaccines, cautious radio dispatches, people with maps and lists. The island celebrated the news like rain. Then, we followed the slow arc of recovery until we could step back onto a mainland that was trying to remember its name.
We rebuilt the campus. We went back to the dorms like ghosts walking into a house that had been refurbished in our absence—different by the edges.
Time passed. I stayed in touch with Wells. Weeks turned into months; months turned into the small, steady building blocks of life. He had a way of bringing a broken hinge back to working order and of fastening his eyes on someone when he spoke as if pulling them out of a crowd. We became friends. We became something quieter and stronger.
"We should be honest," he said one night as we sat on the rebuilt dorm balcony and watched students practice drills. "I never left that night at the shop. Someone stayed to hold the door."
"You did what you had to," I said.
"No. I wanted to. I would have."
He took my hand. The ring at my throat warmed against his palm.
"I want to stay," he said. "I want to stay with you."
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"I'm sure," he said, and though we both knew the weight of the word, his certainty was gentle, like a roof beam well-placed.
We married later, small and fierce. I told no one about the exact moment I said yes because of the way the chain felt, the way a promise had already been made under a different sky.
Years later: the campus had grown back, rows of young faces learning and laughing. We had come to a place of matches—jobs, gardens, new classes. The island people had new roles. We were not heroes. We were survivors with a ring and a story.
Then one day, at a public distribution center where food and secondhand clothing were parceled out, a familiar, ugly figure appeared.
Cade Cochran.
"Don't tell me," Bianca hissed when she saw him in line. "Isn't that—"
"It's him," Jimena whispered. "The one who left."
He was the one who'd taken advantage of fear for charm. He'd been the boy at the dorm window handing fake words like a charm. In our early months, we'd watched him bring a truck and a band of boys, use a drone to lure away the walking dead, and when it came time to bring Jimena down from the rope, he called it off and told her to climb herself. When she froze, he drove away with the boxes.
He had abandoned her in front of our windows. He had left her to be mocked by the path of the world.
And now he stood at the food line under the huge tarp where survivors queued. The distributions were public—official. Anyone could come. The place had an open mic and a board for complaints.
"Do we let him take anything?" Kailani asked. Her voice was a knife.
"No," I said. "We don't have to start a fight. But we won't let him go unspoken."
I walked up to the board where names of complaints were pinned. I wrote two sentences and pushed my paper toward the volunteer standing at the table.
"Excuse me," I said, and when he looked up I saw him—the smirk like a dent in a piece of metal. He looked thinner, with harder eyes, but the mouth had the same angle. "You were at our dorm. You left Jimena in the rope."
He blinked. "I don't know who—"
"You brought a truck," I said. "You used the noise to pull the infected away. When it's time to lower her, you didn't. You left. You abandoned her."
He laughed then. "This is harassment," he said. "I did what anyone would do to survive."
"Anyone?" I repeated. "Anyone would have at least come back."
He stepped forward. "You can't accuse me without proof."
"There's plenty of witnesses," Wells said, and he had come up behind me like a steady, solid thing. His voice was calm but a blade. "I was there, Cade. Julio R.'s last stand was for a dozen people. He left the ring with Colette. You drove away."
Cade's face changed—first a flicker of anger, then a smaller panic. He tried to laugh again. "What does this have to do with now? We all do what we must."
"What you did," Jimena said, stepping into the circle now with her hair in a messy braid and eyes raw but steady, "was leave a girl without her food. You left her alone."
There were murmurs now from the queue. People had been hungry for stories that were not about raw triumph but about accountability.
"Did you think no one remembers?" Julio Rousseau's voice joined us. He had scars down his forearm and his jaw was set like stone. "You left her. You took our boxes."
Cade's face convulsed between defiance and the realization that a wider audience had gathered. "You all survived," he said. "So what's your point?"
"The point is," I said, voice quieter than the pulse in my ears, "that the little betrayals stitch the world into something cruel. You made a choice then. We choose who we are now."
For a moment he tried to smile it away. "You're making a scene."
"It is a scene," murmured a woman nearby, who had once been the head of the camp's distribution. "We're allowed to host truth."
A volunteer stepped up with the distribution register. "We record complaints," she said. "We have a hearing."
They called for witnesses. Seven people came forward—neighbors from our dorm, others who had seen him drive, others who had seen his team act as decoys. They gave plain testimonies: the drone's whine, the truck's lights, the rope still taut, the runaway leaving without loading the boxes they said were for "safety." Each voice was simple, each voice was true.
Cade shifted. The first stage was denial—simple, angry, confused. "You all are mistaken," he said. "You want me punished because you didn't get what you wanted."
"Is that all?" a teenager spat from the back.
"No," he said, louder. "I had to survive."
"And who starved because of you?" Wells asked. "Who lost the weight of food to your wheel?"
A mother in line stepped forward and pointed at him. "My boy went out for water and didn't come back. I saw him with your truck in the same hour. I don't know what you did, but it's true. You slowed us."
His face lost its color. He tried to find another step. "I—" He searched for authority, for some kind of official. "Where is the commander?" he called.
Wells's hand tightened on my shoulder, not violent, but there. "This is an open forum," he said. "We will listen."
The crowd's mood hardened. He began to speak faster, small words tumbling like loose change. "I did what I had to do. You're all hypocrites. When it came down to it, you looked for people to blame."
"Is that what you think?" Bianca shouted. "You think we would rather point fingers than survive?"
He looked around, measuring the faces. People were filming. Someone snapped pictures. The volunteers asked him to sit and accept an inquiry. "We will determine what's fair," the organizer said.
He refused at first, then the weight of watches and phones made him small. His expressions moved like a film: from anger to indignation to denial, then to a startled flash of fear, then bargaining.
"Look—I'll give you my fuel," he said. "I'll hand over supplies."
Hands rustled. "Prove it," someone said.
He raked through a backpack like a man searching a grave for a lost ring. "Here," he said, triumph like a thin blade. "I have food. Take it and be done."
People watched as he opened the bag. Inside were stale biscuits, a tin without a label, a handful of coins. Not what he had promised. Not enough.
The crowd's patience thinned into something louder. "You left a girl," Julio R. said. "You left trust."
Cade suddenly hit another pivot—shame. His shoulders collapsed. He tried to laugh, but it came out a choked, ugly sound. The bargain failed; the audience closed in.
"Please," he said, voice hoarse. "Please—I'm trying. I've been alone. I didn't think—"
"Why didn't you come back?" Jimena asked. Her voice was steady. "You could have risked dust and noise for her life."
The crowd leaned in. A mother snapped a photograph and held it like a verdict. Some of the volunteers began to record his voice. People murmured. Some were honest: "We have rules for taking in people who've hurt others," one man said.
The hearing decided not to hand him to some official because officialdom was thin. They decided something else that fit our cracked world—a public, restorative justice.
"You will return what you can," the organizer announced. "You will accept days of community service. You will sponsor the family you wronged until they no longer need to depend on others. You will stand, each morning, at the distribution table and offer apologies. You will not handle supplies for a year."
He swallowed. "And if I cannot?"
"Then the community will vote on further measures," Wells said. "Exile. Public record. If there is theft under the guise of giving, the consequence is severe."
He tried to bargain. "If you put it on me, I lose everything. I have nothing left."
"You should have thought of that before," Julio R. said. "You cannot take a life and call it survival."
The worst moment wasn't the verdict. It was the mutating of his face as the people he'd used began to step away. His friends—thin men who had once grinned with him—stood at a distance. One of them spat in the dust. Another walked off, avoiding eyes.
He went from arrogance to hunger to a child's plea. "Please," he begged, "I can change. I can work. Give me a chance."
"Change is built in public," Jimena said. "We will watch."
They appointed tasks: cleaning communal kitchens, hauling scrap for reconstruction, working under supervision. He could not touch the food distribution until a year had passed. He had to kneel in front of the families he harmed and offer a spoken apology—public, documented, in front of cameras.
The day he apologized he could not stop shaking. He said words, some of them honest, many rehearsed. The crowd's reaction was a pattern: some cheered—more for closure than for him. Some spat. A few filmed and posted.
When he finally begged me—"Please, Colette"—I looked at him and felt a cold bird of memory fly up my chest.
"You left a rope," I said softly. "You left a girl."
He collapsed into an ugly heap of a man who had been taught only to put himself first. For a long minute he had nothing but the sound of the crowd breathing.
Then someone from behind me, a woman whose son had been rummaging at a roadside months ago, stepped forward and slapped him across the face—not to injure but to wake. The crowd gasped. He crumpled, real and noisy and human.
He begged. He denied. He tried to explain. He pled for work. The volunteers set a list of reparations: a year of supervised labor, weekly attendance at the forum where he would listen to stories of those he had hurt. If he missed, he lost his right to apply for food aid for a year. It was a punishment that was social and practical and humiliating.
We watched him lose ground in the eyes of the world. People who once shielded him with jokes now crossed the plaza when they saw him. His former smirks were gone, replaced by a small, thin man who avoided being filmed.
In the weeks that followed, he worked in a way that was visible: he rebuilt a wall for a widow; he carried water for the infirm; he salted beds for the sleeping tents. Sometimes he did his work with stubborn care. Sometimes he lagged. People judged. He pleaded. When he tried to charm a girl in line, volunteers moved him aside.
The punitive arc was not a single dramatic fall. It was slow ruin of reputation, the kind that lives in the way vendors refuse him, in the way his name is left out of invitations, in the way children point. He became a cautionary example.
On a morning months later, when a new family came to the distribution center and he offered a handshake, the mother hesitated and then declined. She told her child, "See him? He once left people behind."
His face finally broke in a way that could not be mended by contrition alone. He knelt in the dust, not begging now, but simply writing "sorry" on the floor with his finger until the letters blurred.
I did not clap. I did not shout. I watched from the line, hand around the chain at my neck. The ring moved against my skin like an old pulse.
We had given him his chance; the public's verdict was both mercy and knife. The survivor community had chosen a punishment that fit our fragile world: no jail, but no forgetting, either.
When the crowd dispersed, some applauded the community for taking a stand. Others whispered that public shaming would not fix the hunger he had caused. But the record was set: betrayal had consequences in our rebuilt town. The people who had been brave enough to speak out had been heard. The ones who had deceived had been shown the cost.
I kept the ring tucked against my sternum. Wells squeezed my hand, and the sound of the distribution hub faded into a normal day.
"That was necessary," he said quietly.
"Is it finished?" I asked, not sure if justice ever finished.
"No," he answered. "But it's started."
We walked away from the plaza into sunlight and the smell of fresh bread. The solar panels on the rooftops blinked like small, stubborn suns.
At night, I sleep with my fingers curled around the chain Julio Clayton had given me, and sometimes I still think of the way he smiled at me before stepping back into that press of the dead. I think of how a small ring tied people across distance, how a solar panel kept our lights, and how a bus carried us south.
"Remember the drones?" Wells whispered one evening as we watched a student group practice a rescue drill.
"I do," I said. "Old employees, humming like a lullaby."
He looked at me, eyes a harbor. "We will keep going, Colette."
"I know," I said. "We'll keep going. And I'll keep this."
I touched the chain at my neck, feeling the round metal against my palm.
On the plaque at the distribution center later, someone nailed a small line: "Never forget small betrayals; they rot the future." Below it, someone else had affixed a tiny drone pin and, beneath that, the word "Julio" in a child's scrawl.
When I pass, I sometimes smile and murmur, "I kept the ring. I gave it where he asked." Wells squeezes my hand. We walk home under solar light and the watchful hum of the old drones.
The world is slow and crusted with its wounds, but it also has moments of clear, sharp goodness—the ferry whistle, the clean bandage, a warm bowl of lentils, the hand that builds a new door. Those things are the measure of us now.
I keep the ring in my palm at times. It feels like a secret and a promise. I tell Kaori's daughter Julio's story sometimes, the simple one about a boy who smiled even as he went under.
"Why did he smile?" the child asked once.
"Maybe because he knew he had done something brave," I said. "Or maybe because he trusted someone enough to pass on a small thing and ask a favor."
She nodded, as children do. "So we have to be brave?"
"We have to be honest first," Wells corrected, and the child laughed.
The ring is still here, the solar panels still gather light, and the drones still hum. We keep going.
The End
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