Zee and Todd

The next day Zee and her friends were waiting on the curb of their block for Jack to pick them up. He was supposed to take her friends home but it had already been an hour.
“Zeeee, it’s hoooot,” Rosie whined for the tenth time.
“Can’t we just go inside and wait for your brother?”
“Sorry guys! Mom is having a business meeting over at the house in a few days and the carpets need to be cleaned with us gone.”
“I wish that you told us that before I wore a sweater outside!” Andrea udrey whined too.
Audrey was wearing a too small tank under her sweater and the eighth grade boys across the street kept coming by to say hi. She ignored them and Rosie whined even more. Zee was on the phone trying to contact Todd. It was eleven. Todd should have been awake by now. She called his number for the tenth time and his beautiful face came up on the video screen.
“Zee… what do you want?” he said half way out of bed.
“Where’s Jack?! You guys left last night and he was supposed to take the girls home! You know that I don’t have a car!”
“And it’s hooooot!” Rosie grabbed the phone and gave her serious look with sweat rolling down her face.
The video moved and Todd kicked Dax hard in the gut and moaning came from the floor. Todd attempted to ask Dax where Jack was but he only fell back to sleep saying that Todd should ask him himself. Zee rolled her eyes and Becca stole the phone from Zee.
“Alright you annoying duo. I’m not planning to get an improper tan sitting on this sidewalk. If you see Jack tell him that we’re walking!”
The girls shuttered at her tone. They all knew when Becca lost her American accent and went to her family’s accent she was serious. Becca wanted to be an actress some day. One year she spoke only in an Australian accent that Zee even believed that she was from there. Her family was from India and she wasn’t afraid to hurt anyone if it meant that Jack was the topic. Jack loved his own personal stalker and made an effort to stay away from her.
Becca hung up the phone and grabbed her things.
“But Beccccca, it’s too hot to walk!”
“There’s an eighty percent chance of rain for this afternoon, Rosie! I don’t want to walk either, but I’m not going to get soaked.”
Rosie agreed with that and the four of them ran off down the road. The girls all lived in the city and that was a half hour walk. Luckily, by walking very fast, they were able to get to the bus which took them straight to the city. Zee giggled and poked at Becca’s anger marks on her forehead saying that Jack was fine. Becca didn’t believe her saying that Jack never left them hanging before.
“Something’s up… I just feel it.”
Andrea leaned over and cocked an eyebrow saying that just like how she felt that they were going to have a pop quiz in History last year and they studied their butts off, to see that it wasn’t true. Becca exclaimed that they were then able to get their grade up by all that cramming anyway. Becca and Andrea argued a bit and Zee sighed. Rosie was talking to some kid on the bus who was crying and Zee looked out the window.
The bus ride was quick and by the time they got off, the air pressure changed dramatically. It was colder and the sky was a dark gray. They all walked a block to get to Becca’s family apartment. She yelled into the speaker a few times to get their dull of hearing land lord to open the door. Once it opened she motioned to Zee to call her once she found Jack. Zee rolled her eyes saying that he was just being forgetful today.
Once she left Andrea leaned over to Zee, “I still think that her family are spies.”
“Really, Andrea?”
“Come on! You know my mom! Her theology has seeped into my mind!”
Andrea was Mom’s best friend, Sarah’s, daughter. Andrea stole her mom’s beautiful orange locks and dad’s modeling genes. His family has own a modeling agency for generations now. Andrea was walking bare foot down the side walk and stopped at the housing buildings that her family lived in. Zee and Rosie saw her enter though the beautiful lobby, high five the receptionist and waved good bye to Zee and Rosie.
“I’m jealous of those two for living in such beautiful buildings,” Rosie sighed, “you don’t have to take me home!”
“Come on Rosie. What if an evil pack of cats comes and attacks you? You almost got killed by that squirrel the other day!”
“That’s not funny!”
“Rosie, everyone on your block is like your best friend! Even the druggies and that undercover cop!”
Rosie laughed. She may be an air head sometimes but she was tough. She lived in the older homes on the oldest part of the city. Luckily her neighbor hood wasn’t all that bad. The rich couples who used to own the apartments like Andrea and Becca started moving towards the older homes a few years back and crime started to go down.
Rosie and Zee then stopped suddenly. The world around them started to get very green and sirens started to go off in the background.
“Seriously?” Zee said looking up to the sky.
“Zee, come on! We need to get somewhere safe!”
They weren’t anywhere close to her house. They were passing through old development areas. The older part of the city had been tearing down some of the old buildings to make room for some new ones. It was sad and Zee’s mom hated seeing the beautiful structures leaving, but the new codes of the city needed to be applied and restoring the houses would take too much money. There was mainly dirt and trees around them and Rosie’s neighborhood was still another twenty minutes away.
Zee’s phone was buzzing about the emergency broad cast about a tornado warning in the area, but she ignored it for right now. The air picked up and Zee knew that they needed to get out of there. If only Jack had picked them up. Zee then heard Jack’s ring tone and quickly answered it.
“Jack where are you?!”
“Where are you?!”
“I was taking the girls home! Which Mom told YOU to do!”
He growled on the other end, “Okay, look, I’ve been… busy all morning. Just stay where you are and I’ll find-”
The phone was taken from Jack and a hard voice was yelling at Jack in another language and then the line went dead. Zee looked at the screen on her phone. Phones haven’t changed much in 25 years. Actually most things haven’t changed in 25 years much to Zee’s surprise. There were better alternate fuel sources, America had finally gotten its government back in line again, and technology got a bit better. Though there weren’t any flying cars, people didn’t live forever, and there was no way to get out of our solar system.
Zee had to admit that her birthday wish that she had every year was that she would go see space. She begged Dad to invent something that made space travel possible, but Mom always burst his bubble saying:
“Quinn, hunny- make flying cars, make a death ray even, but please don’t do something that will take you far away from us!”
Her greatest fear was to loose Dad and even if he could make something that could make someone travel faster than the speed of light through space, he doesn’t have the money for it. Todd and Zee were lucky that his time travel devise worked! That cost the tax payers a few good billion dollars to make.
“Zee!” Rosie shouted.
Zee noticed how bad the wind got. She saw Rosie a few yards away with a door open. The door looked like a hatch door to some under ground shelter. Zee ran for her life against the wind and joined Rosie by the door. A stair way that leads into a dark abyss lay in front of them. The sky got even darker and Rosie pushed Zee down into the stairs. She slammed the door shut and stood there for a moment listening to the wind.
Zee pulled out her phone and changed its function to a flash light.
“So… where are we?” Zee asked shining the light around.
“I’m not sure… I almost tripped over the door…”
Zee started to walk down the steps and Rosie cautiously walked behind her. The stairs were concrete and chipping slightly. It was like no one had been in these stairs for a good fifty years or more. Rosie pulled out her phone to try to call her mom, but she noticed that there was no signal down in the tunnel they found.
“Zee, how far underground are we? I can’t get any signal!”
“Not that far…” Zee looked back up the stairs, “but don’t you hear that?”
Rosie stopped and a slight buzzing fell over their ears. They followed the tunnel to a large door that was locked. Rosie tried to convince Zee to go back but Zee stepped forward and pulled the lock to see it unlocked. As the door opened musty air filled their lungs.
“Is that…”
“A computer?” Zee walked forward.
There were thousands of tubes and blinking items coated in brown dust. The room was circular and the main powerhouse of the computer was in the center of the room.
“My people senses are tingling…” Rosie said looking around the room.
Zee was about to ask but Rosie was already running off. Rosie always knew if someone was hurt. Zee couldn’t believe if anyone was in this dust coated place but soon enough Rosie was shouting in fear. Zee ran and found her behind the computer panels. There were two people on the floor. Dried blood coated the floor and the men who were on the floor were only corpses. Zee knew where the musty smell was coming from now and Zee backed up by Rosie saying that they had to get out of there. Now.
They turned to leave but Rosie stopped.
“Do you hear that?” she said turning around.
“Only the computers. Come on lets-”
“No, there’s someone else here…”
Rosie then ran off down a hallway that was beyond the dead bodies and she disappeared. Zee didn’t want to continue, but she ran off after the girl. Zee spotted some office rooms and then a door that was open. Zee heard a crash and she ran inside. There was a man in the other room still alive. He was slouched on the floor trying to regain his balance of the room. He looked like that he was bound to some contraption but Rosie got him out.
“Rosie! Get away from him!” Zee said trying to get her out from the strange guy on the floor.
“But he asked for help!”
“Rosie! Don’t be a fool! Get away from him!”
She frowned and knelt to the floor seeing if he was alright. He looked up with a blind fold over his face.
“W…w…”
He couldn’t talk right and Rosie helped him up. Zee had her phone out just in case. She had it set to a stun gun, the best feature her dad placed on the phone for security reasons. Then she lowered her weapon noticing something on the man’s back.
“That tattoo…”
The man heard Zee and turned his head to her.
“My brother has the same one.”