Free Breathe by Sarah Crossan Page A

route into the city. But it would be hard to find a way through without having to climb dozens of dicey walls and fences. And it’s started to rain. Hardly a downpour, but enough to make mud of the fields. I pull the scarf Bea gave me over my head and tie a knot to keep it in place. And so I walk along the deserted, warped road instead of taking a rougher, safer track.
    Tourists can walk for miles without being reminded of the carnage out here, and in the pod we all try to forget what The Outlands really look like. The farther from the pod I get, the worse the devastation. There is rubble and garbage everywhere—evidence of the chaos at the end: hundreds of rusted-out cars and buses and vans and shopping carts and blanched tree stumps and collapsed telephone poles. Every now and again I spot something simple and ordinary—like toothbrush. What happened to its owner? The old billboards remain in place but their messages have long since faded away. It is eerily quiet. My own footsteps are the only sounds I can hear. I can no longer make out the hum of the pod’s recycling stations. There are no trams rattling along. And there are no people, of course. No one to reclaim all the spoons, trays, sunglasses, kites, wheelbarrows, bowls, and everything else.
    There were people. Many years ago. There were millions across this country until The Switch, when the population dwindled to half a percent of what it had been, not merely here, but everywhere. Across the whole planet, the bulk of humanity was annihilated within a few years. I shudder to think of all the bodies that must be buried in the yards around me. Because that’s what people had to resort to, eventually, when the graveyards started to overflow. Then even the mass graves couldn’t take the numbers, so they stopped burying the people. They burned them instead. And when the only ones left were weak and choking, they stopped doing even that; they simply left the bodies to rot wherever they fell.
    I recall the video footage from history class of decaying bodies in beds and baths. Bodies on the roads next to abandoned cars or in them. People were still sitting up—bodies large and small, adults and babies, some bodies with the flesh decomposing, some already stripped leaving nothing but an arrangement of bones. The animals had gone long before that, destroyed in droves as soon as people figured out what was happening. Used for food when the farmers quit farming. Even the domestic animals were eaten up. No one entertained the idea that the creatures might have had just as much right to the air as the people. Then again, no one thought the trees of much value either.
    In the distance, thunder rumbles, and it starts to rain. As I gaze upward I imagine that a crooked telephone pole is really a branchless, leafless tree. The thought makes me angry. I know why they cut the trees down. I know the problem: the world’s population was soaring and people needed to eat. And the solution was to log all remaining forests and use the land for farming. But how could everyone have been so stupid as to imagine that the oceans alone could provide the planet with the oxygen it needed to survive? And they didn’t care what they used to grow food. The trees, the soil—nothing was safe. No one predicted the havoc billions of gallons of toxic runoff from agriculture would cause the oceans. No one imagined the oceans could die. And not so quickly. But that’s how things usually go. We always think we have time. We didn’t. Within years the oxygen level in the atmosphere plummeted to four percent.
    This isn’t the version we get at school. There we’re told it was China’s fault—all those factories. It was India’s fault—all those babies. It was America’s fault—all those shoppers. The rain begins to come down harder. I open my mouth to the sky.
    I’m meant to think of myself as one of the lucky ones—a descendent of someone who managed to survive. And how did humanity survive?