Read Under a Broken Sun for Free Online Page B

side of the girder.  It felt like it was gonna snap.  “Marilyn,” I yelled, “on the count of three, lift straight up.  Don’t lean back, just straight up.”  I looked at her to make sure she got the message.  She nodded, her face contorted in pain. 
    We either drop Ashley, drop ourselves, or somehow pull her up.  “One.  Two.  Three!”  We yanked and I sat straight up.  Then in one motion, I twisted to the side and brought most of Ashley’s body on the girder.  That was enough.  She grabbed the other end of the girder and pulled herself over.  
    She hugged herself to the girder and sobbed.   “I wanna go home,” she cried.  Yeah, that makes two of us.
     
     
    Almost across.  Ashley gripped my shirt, ensuring that if she fell she didn’t fall alone.  Walking on the girder became like walking on hot coals.  My shirt clung to my chest as sweat poured down my back like a leaky faucet.  We wouldn’t be able to keep up this pace in this heat.
    As we stepped on concrete for the first time in what seemed like hours, Ashley collapsed in relief and Marilyn had to catch her from behind to stop her from falling backwards.  More cars littered the other side of the bridge, and the fires up ahead didn’t help the heat at all.  Part of me almost wished I did fall into the river.  At least it’d be cold.
    In the city we walked amongst the towers of cement buildings and the deserts of concrete roads, each absorbing the heat of the sun and shooting it off like invisible flames.  Other people milled around, mostly wandering aimlessly searching for some hint as to what happened, who to trust, and where to go next.  A police officer would occasionally ride a bike or a horse past us, but you could sense the scales in the city were tipping towards chaos.  I didn’t know where but some ticking time bomb sat waiting for someone to set it off.  A pissed off guy who gets shoved by a cop.  A woman starving and needing to feed her baby.  Someone gets breathed on wrong.  Then riots, looting, who knows what.
    “Where are we going?” Ashley whined.  I began to wish I had ditched her at the airport.  A flash inside of me even wished she’d fallen off the bridge.  I pushed that away.  Pain in the ass, sure, but still.  She was just a kid.
    I looked around.  “Hospital.  And a drug store.  We need supplies.”
    “I’m hungry,” she whined again.  I turned to her and saw Marilyn loaded and ready to smack if required.
    “When we get to a drug store we’ll get lunch.  Got any cash?”
    Ashley shook her head.  I looked at Marilyn who just shrugged.  “I didn’t have time to go through the tip jar.”
    I had twenty bucks in my wallet – didn't matter.  I had a good feeling that no one was accepting credit cards anymore, and money was the least of our worries.  Hell, most of the cash registers were electronic anyway.  Probably couldn't open them without a key or a sledgehammer.
    A left turn down Market Street, and there at the corner stood a Rite Aid.  Even at that early hour in the morning, people crept out of their houses, whispering to each other about what was going on.  Why wasn’t anything working?  What seemed like an overnight power interruption hadn’t been fixed.  Phones were dead.  Many people cried as they realized something really fucked up had occurred.  Whispers of Armageddon.  Of the Second Coming.  Of World War III.  Everyone needed an explanation, and no one could give them one.
    We turned to the Rite Aid entrance.  Closed.
    Everything, in fact, was closed.  Lights out. 
    I went around the back and tried the steel rear-entrance door.  No luck.  “Now what?” Ashley asked.
    Back to the front.  I checked left, then right.  No movement on the street; people too confused or scared to do any damage so far. Well, the looting has to start sometime.
    I picked up a cinder block from an abandoned worksite nearby, walked it to the front door of the drug store, and