Copys

It’s been approximately six months since the world went under and I don’t find my complaints are what I would expect them to be. 

Sure, I miss the luxuries of hot showers or decadent desserts. Going to the bathroom in the woods with someone keeping watch so that you don’t get murdered certainly isn't ideal. On more than one occasion, I’ve had trouble sleeping and wished I had a movie to watch to wind down.

These are inconveniences I can live with, though. That I have lived with. That we all have lived with. Me, Ren, Titus, Faulkner, Hanna, and Pim—our little family.

My one complaint isn’t who’s around me but who isn’t.

Delavigne.

When the masked men came stomping through all of our homes and flooded our streets with their tanks, I didn’t have time to do anything. Not to come up with a plan, not to protect my girlfriend, Dela. They knocked me out before they even entered my place. The smoke bomb came rolling in, and there was nowhere to go. It knocked me out before I could even call out Dela’s name.

“Connor,” Ren calls now, pulling me out of my daily rumination. Not a day or night goes by without me thinking about Delavigne. She’s never not on my mind, and I haven’t given up on her. “Do we want to head back for the night?” 

I focus back on the task at hand. “Yeah, sounds good.” He and I have been out hunting. Luckily, the world isn’t to the point yet where we have to kill, skin, and eat squirrels. We hunt in towns, in grocery stores and cleared out apartments. Our sport is saltine crackers and canned goods. 

The building we’re in is totally empty as far as we know. We sneak through the corridors anyway, cloth covering our faces, making sure that even if we do get caught by a roaming camera, it can’t scan our features. 

We wouldn’t want our likenesses to get into their hands—we all know what happens when they do.

Just as we exit the building, one of them shows their face. It takes on the appearance of an old woman, unsuspecting and docile. You can tell, though, from the way she acts when she hasn’t yet noticed a human lifeform. She shifts back and forth robotically, eyes flitting too quickly across the area before her. 

A Copy—not really an old woman on her own, a mere replication of the one she likely killed.

The Copys used to be extremely obvious, faces uncanny and wires exposed in places where the armor of their bodies failed to hold up. They've gotten scarily better recently.

The robot before us walks away on her stiff legs, giving us our opportunity to make a run for it.

After Ren and I make our way out of the main streets and back to our cabin in the surrounding forest, he finally asks the question. “Any closer?”

My crew knows about my mission—firstly, to stay alive, obviously, and to protect them in the meantime. But my second-most important mission is to find my girlfriend. 

I’m not an idiot. I know there’s a high likelihood that she’s…not with us anymore. Moved on. Passed. I refuse to say ‘dead’ in context with Dela.

However, if it were me caught by the madmen and placed away from Dela for months, I wouldn’t want her to give up on me. I wouldn’t expect her to come looking, of course, but I would hope she was out there waiting somewhere. So, I’ll do the same for her.

I look for signs when we go out. Seeing if I can find anything that would lead me to figure out where they took her, or if she could be alive, or if anyone has gotten taken away and managed to escape. Have I found anything concrete in the last six months?

Hardly ever, and certainly not today.

“Nope,” I answer Ren simply. He nods, mouth pressed thin. Ren and the others care about my mission as much as I do. It hurts them just as it hurts me. Less so, obviously. But they sympathize.

Ren and his twin sister Hanna somehow escaped before they were caught. The way I understand it, Hanna rolled out onto their roof from her second-story room seconds before passing out from the bomb they threw. Ren found her lying there and jumped into the pool with her in his arms. He broke his leg and yet somehow managed to get both himself and Hanna out of the suburbs and into the wilderness, away from the chaos. Ren’s leg was patched into a makeshift cast by Hanna, a nursing student before the end of times, and it mostly healed. It still gives him a bit of trouble, but not as much as it probably should all things considered.

No one knows exactly who all was taken, or why them specifically. There’s not enough information to make a correlation. 

Translation: I don’t know why they took Dela and not me and maybe I never will.

And it kills me freshly every day.

The only way I'll ever get answers is by finding her—alive and in a well enough state to give me any answers after these six long months that she's likely been tortured and broken down, hopefully able to think and speak at all.

This is a feat even I am willing to admit is near-impossible.

I tell Ren and myself, "Doesn't mean I'm gonna stop trying, though."

...

Author's Note:

Hi there! This is a continuation of a prologue I wrote for a contest here on Vocal. It is on my page titled 'Offness,' if you have not yet read it. That part was posted under Fiction as per the contest rules, but this part and the others will all be under Chapters.

I randomly got struck with the inspiration for the next part of this story. I plan to continue it, though I'm not sure what the timeline will look like. It will likely be a shorter story, but it will pack a punch nonetheless. I look forward to your thoughts!