When the World Was New, Submission 10 by Lee Martin

It took her almost a half hour to climb through the debris and decay of years of neglect. The city had been build so quickly, so efficiently. Obsolete locations sat buried, partitioned, sequestered. Relics lay hidden behind walls and under streets, most never to be seen again.

She was familiar with the Corridors from her days of hiding after The Breakdown. A discarded fallout shelter acted as her home for a month following it. Running from Hunters she became very adept at finding somewhere to go when the time came. The time always came.

After crawling through the trash and time she came to a great void space. She felt the palms of silence press gently against the sides of her head and imagined what the vaulted ceiling looked like now. Her flashlight beam fell sharply on the word “RECORDS” carved in marble high above where she stood. Large columns held up the word, which was flanked by a frieze of people or animals, deteriorated to form a marble mass of man and beast, neither identifiable from the other. She climbed the stairs and found the doors missing; the opening was guarded by a lazy shopping cart on it’s side.

Inside. Thousands of rows of bookshelves, some empty, some burned, all covered in several inches of dust. Her flashlight beam sparkled as every step she took kicked up flakes of dust.

She spent several minutes just walking around, looking up at the shelves. Occasionally she wiped a spine with her small hand to reveal the title. “CENSUS DATA 3DE101,” “BUILDING PLANS-AREAS 13-15A,” “Poèmes saturniens.”

About 20 of the bookcases had fallen over, and corpses of books were piled on top of each other. She walked by downed stacks and saw a map cabinet and opened the doors; a tall roll of paper sat in the corner. She took it out and spread it on the floor, placing a book on each corner. On the paper was printed a map of a very large city. Buildings and streets were labeled. Her eyes slowly traced a line that represented a long bridge over water, but could not tell where it led, for a large corner of the map had been ripped away.