Meanwhile in Florida
St. Petersburg, Florida
8 May, 2075
Two young men lounge on a battered blanket, toes firmly dug into sand. Water laps at the earth a few feet away from them, glittering in the dusk light. A seagull cries somewhere nearby, echoed by a flock a little further down the beach. The two pass a cigarette back and forth, grey curling up from the tip and trailing away into the western breeze. Salt lays heavy in the air, definite but almost unnoticeable; they've never known anything else.
The sound of footsteps approaches, one determined step after another. Neither one bothers to open their eyes. They know that tread.
A young woman plops herself down in-between them, her dark skin just a shade off theirs. She wriggles in, wielding her elbows like the precision weapons they are, unafraid to nip here and there when she isn't obeyed fast enough. The other two roll their eyes but let her push them to the edges of the blanket, sides pressed against hers.
"Did you hear about that mess up north?"
She's face-down, words muffled by the blanket. Both of them hear her. Neither one replies.
The girl turns her head just enough to expose one glaring eye. When that doesn't get the results she wants, she snatches a hand out snake-quick, plucking the cigarette out of a hand just as it's about to be passed. She sucks it right down to the end, then flicks what's left out towards the seagull.
Overlapping protests don't stop her from burrowing back into the blanket smugly, letting loose the resulting smoke in a thick grey cloud. "I
said, did you hear about that mess up north?"
The boy on her right, Matteo, shrugs. "Something about Chicago being crazy, again."
Thomas lays back, eyes closed once more now that the cigarette is gone. "Don't they have pizza to argue over?"
Yolanda huffs warningly, getting her elbows back in striking distance of their kidneys. "They declared war on the Vics."
That gets a considering silence. "Woah," Matteo declares.
"Think they'll make it?" Thomas' eyes flick open, scanning restlessly over the stars as the wink into place. He wasn't born yet when his mother made the trip from Puerto Rico over to Miami, from Miami to St. Pete. But he knows the stories she won't talk to him about, fit himself under furniture late at night to listen to her talk to his grandmother about it. He knows what the Vics did to people like him.
"Nah," Matteo says. He's St. Pete back through four generations. He grew up on stories about how hard Tampa Bay crashed in the first days of the Collapse, how the tourist economy trickled into nothing and everyone went hungry. His family may have never seen a Vic in the flesh, but they know as well as anyone how far their destruction reached.
The three of them lay there while the sun paints reds and oranges over their clothes, reflects jewel tones onto the waters at their feet. Yolanda curls into them both, a chilly breeze ruffling her hair. No one knows where her family came from. Her mom died in childbirth in a house where no one spoke her native tongue, and the doctor raised Yolanda as her own. Another history lost to the Vics.
"I hope they do," she says, just loud enough for them to hear. "I hope they kill every single Vic dead."
"Yeah," Thomas says, "I do too."
Matteo doesn't say anything out loud, but he wraps an ankle around Yolanda's, and lets them have their prayer.
