“My feet hurt.” said Lo. Lo, or Little One, was officially named Zoe, but no one called her that outside of the most dire of emergencies. For months everyone had joked about how they’d need to change her birth certificate one day to match her “real name”; as if anyone was issued birth certificates anymore.
“I know, Little One. But we have to keep moving, the storm wall’s too close right now. Your turn to sit on the truck starts in ten minutes,” said Rory, wincing as a bump in the road- if you could call it that- caused em to dig eir thumb too hard into eir foot as ey tried to massage it.
“It’s not even moving right now!” Lo whined, giving Rory her best puppy eyes.
“It is and you know it. It’s always moving. If we were close enough to see it move without Katie’s binoculars, we’d be fucked.”
Aidyn, surely the only person left on earth who still cared about not swearing in front of children, shot Rory a glare. Ey promptly ignored it.
“But my feet really, really hurt!”
Sighing, Rory put eir shoes back on eir feet and jumped down onto the ground behind the truck, carefully lifting Lo into the spot where ey had been sitting. Once Lo was safely seated on the back of the truckbed, ey moved to eir usual walking spot near the left front corner of the small column of people that trailed behind the biggest passengers truck.
“You shouldn’t spoil her like that, you know.” said Phoenix, pushing her way up to walk next to Rory.
“What are you, her mother?”
Phoenix rolled her eyes but didn’t acknowledge the quip. “She’s getting to be too old to be babied like this. Are you going to let her sit all the time when she’s Mike’s age?” Mike was 14 and currently driving one of the supply trucks.
“If she picks up driving as fast as Mike did, she can sit all she wants, long as it’s in the driver’s seat.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Do you s-”
A loud voice cut her off. “Ruins ahead! Ruins ahead! Scouts, scouts, anyone? Anyone?”
Rory raised eir hand, grateful for an excuse to avoid another repeat of the You Can’t Baby Lo Forever, Rory argument. “I’ll go!”
A brief jog through the mud was all it took for Rory and the small handful of other volunteers to reach what had once been a small cluster of houses. Like every other sign of civilization, they had long since been devastated by the enormous storm that now covered at least a third of the planet. Thank the gods for the Eye, Rory thought, glancing at the eye wall in the distance. Rory was 25, old enough to remember before the runaway greenhouse effect, but Little One hadn’t been born until after humanity was reduced to caravans forever running to stay in the center of the eye. Even Mike’s earliest memories were of near-constant storms, although he did recall some things from before the superstorm had formed. If Rory could do anything to give either of them any semblance of a childhood, ey would. Wish it wasn’t hell on my feet, though.
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