Cyberpunk

and listened to Van scratch his legs and then heard Van type a little.
    “They’re back up,” he said.
    Felix whooshed out a breath. He sent the message to the newsgroup, one that he’d run through five drafts before settling on, “Take care of the place, okay? We’ll be back, someday.”
    Everyone was going except Sario. Sario wouldn’t leave. He came down to see them off, though.
    The sysadmins gathered in the lobby and Felix made the safety door go up, and the light rushed in.
    Sario stuck his hand out.
    “Good luck,” he said.
    “You too,” Felix said. He had a firm grip, Sario, stronger than he had any right to be. “Maybe you were right,” he said.
    “Maybe,” he said.
    “You going to pull the plug?”
    Sario looked up at the drop-ceiling, seeming to peer through the reinforced floors at the humming racks above. “Who knows?” he said at last.
    Van scratched and a flurry of white motes danced in the sunlight.
    “Let’s go find you a pharmacy,” Felix said. He walked to the door and the other sysadmins followed.
    They waited for the interior doors to close behind them and then Felix opened the exterior doors. The air smelled and tasted like mown grass, like the first drops of rain, like the lake and the sky, like the outdoors and the world, an old friend not heard from in an eternity.
    “Bye, Felix,” the other sysadmins said. They were drifting away while he stood transfixed at the top of the short concrete staircase. The light hurt his eyes and made them water.
    “I think there’s a Shopper’s Drug Mart on King Street,” he said to Van. ‘We’ll throw a brick through the window and get you some cortisone, okay?”
    “You’re the Prime Minister,” Van said. “Lead on.”
    They didn’t see a single soul on the fifteen-minute walk. There wasn’t a single sound except for some bird noises and some distant groans, and the wind in the electric cables overhead. It was like walking on the surface of the moon.
    “Bet they have chocolate bars at the Shopper’s,” Van said.
    Felix’s stomach lurched. Food. “Wow,” he said, around a mouthful of saliva.
    They walked past a little hatchback, and in the front seat was the dried body of a woman holding the dried body of a baby, and his mouth filled with sour bile, even though the smell was faint through the rolled-up windows.
    He hadn’t thought of Kelly or 2.0 in days. He dropped to his knees and retched again. Out here in the real world, his family was dead. Everyone he knew was dead. He just wanted to lie down on the sidewalk and wait to die, too.
    Van’s rough hands slipped under his armpits and hauled weakly at him. “Not now,” he said. “Once we’re safe inside somewhere and we’ve eaten something, then you can do this, but not now. Understand me, Felix? Not fucking now.”
    The profanity got through to him. He got to his feet. His knees were trembling.
    “Just a block more,” Van said, and slipped Felix’s arm around his shoulders and led him along.
    “Thank you, Van. I’m sorry.”
    “No sweat,” he said. “You need a shower, bad. No offense.”
    “None taken.”
    The Shopper’s had a metal security gate, but it had been torn away from the front windows, which had been rudely smashed. Felix and Van squeezed through the gap and stepped into the dim drugstore. A few of the displays were knocked over, but other than that, it looked okay. By the cash registers, Felix spotted the racks of candy bars at the same instant that Van saw them, and they hurried over and grabbed a handful each, stuffing their faces.
    “You two eat like pigs.”
    They both whirled at the sound of the woman’s voice. She was holding a fire axe that was nearly as big as she was. She wore a lab coat and comfortable shoes.
    “You take what you need and go, okay? No sense in there being any trouble.” Her chin was pointy and her eyes were sharp. She looked to be in her forties. She looked nothing like Kelly, which was good, because Felix felt like running and giving her a hug as it was. Another person alive!
    “Are you a doctor?” Felix said. She was wearing scrubs under the coat, he saw.
    “You going to go?” She brandished the axe.
    Felix held his hands up. “Seriously, are you a doctor? A pharmacist?”
    “I used to be an RN, ten years ago. I’m mostly a Web designer.”
    “You’re shitting me,” Felix said.
    “Haven’t you ever met a girl who knew about computers?”
    “Actually, a friend of mine who runs Google’s data