All That Remains

By Caitlin McColl

A collection of 3 short post apocalyptic and fantasy stories

All That Remains - Amelia, a young woman who once thought herself damaged after an accident leaving her with a prosthetic leg and arm, realizes her imperfections are an advantage in a post-apocalyptic world

How You See The World - a young man realizes that fantasy really is reality

The ArcHive - Martin Knightsbridge lives underground in a city that is segregated depending on what part of ‘The Tree’ you were born. Born in The Roots, he has never been to ‘The Branches’. Where there’s a will...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caitlin McColl
• Release date: Sep 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005192365

Caitlin McColl

Since childhood, Caitlin has written mainy fantasy - with dragons, wizards and other fantastical monsters. But now she writes Steampunk, stories that makes our world just a little bit more interesting, with the ability to mask the humdrum days we all have - those cold, grey, rainy, depressing days. The days you accidentally sleep in, lock yourself out of the house, battle morning rush hour and realize your still wearing your slippers. Caitlin lives in beautiful Vancouver, Canada with her husband and her dog.Amazon: www.amazon.com/author/caitlinmccollInstagram: instagram.com/caitlinmccollauthorSeptember 2020-Published The Clockwork Universe and The Stained Glass Heart, follow ups to Under A Starlit Sky. Also re-did covers for books.-Published All That Remains - a free short story collection from 2017-Republished The Diary of Dr Jekyll that was published by a Seattle based publisher that is no more2015-Released a free ebook compilation of stories from her short story blog, Under A Starlit Sky, collectively called The Dark And Shadowy Places.Hope you enjoy!

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All That Remains

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Copyright © 2017 Caitlin McColl

All rights reserved.

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All That Remains

Amelia, a young woman who once thought herself damaged after an accident leaving her with a prosthetic leg and arm, realizes her imperfections are an advantage in a post-apocalyptic world

Chapter 1 – All That Remains

It was a phrase that Amelia Brown heard a lot in the days following the accident. All that remains, the accident investigation officers kept saying to others, as she lay in the hospital. All that remains of her car, all that remains of the store front. It seemed like that phrase was contagious, because the doctors and nurses started saying it too. All that remains of your leg, Amelia, they’d say in soft, soothing tones. All that remains of your arm, they’d add. As if the parts that were left was a negative thing, she always thought. She had hit one of them. It had appeared out of nowhere, and she’d swerved, but it still hit her, and then she hit the storefront. At first, she felt awful about it, but not anymore. Not when people finally started to realize what they were.

Since the accident, Amelia Brown had felt self-conscious about herself. She still wasn’t used to seeing smooth, hard, shiny material where there was once soft, matte skin. Her prosthetic leg and arm on her left side hadn’t taken all that long to get used to, even though sometimes it chafed and itched when she first put them on. The thing that almost bothered her more was that she was, or rather had been, left-handed, so she had to train herself to write with her right hand now. That still kind of irked her, because the smooth, flowing handwriting of her former self was now jagged and jumpy and looked like something a young child would do instead of a woman in her mid-thirties.

But that was almost six months ago now. Amelia laughed at the thought that she had been irritated by her unruly penmanship. That was the least of her worries now. And she wasn’t self-conscious about her fake limbs anymore either. In fact, she was grateful. Never in a million years would she have thought that surviving a car accident and coming away with new body parts made of special plastics and stainless steel would be a blessing, rather than a curse.

But here she was, sitting on top of an apartment rooftop, screwing on a new hand. She was now a weapon, if she wanted to be. And in this new world, always having a weapon was the only way you could even hope to survive. People who didn’t carry weapons were just fooling themselves. Her mother’s face rose in her mind, unbidden, with her brown hair tied back in its usual two side twists and her dimpled smile. She focused on putting on her hand. She didn’t want to think about her mother, and her mother’s insistence on not using weapons. She didn’t want to think about where that got her.

She placed her regular hand in the satchel that lay slung across her body, hanging at her hip. It clattered against the other interchangeable bits and pieces of her that she could use depending on the circumstances – different leg attachments for hiking, running, climbing. And different hands, or at least things she could put on in place of her hand. Inside the bag was an assortment of knives, lock picks, needles, and even one that was an axe head. She hadn’t thought that that would ever come in, she winced at the unintentional pun, handy, but realized it was useful for breaking through stubborn wooden doors, or boarded up windows. There were a lot of those these days.

But at the moment she was putting on her telescope hand. With her living hand, as she liked to call it, she extended the telescope to its furthest point and lifted it to her eye, squinting with the other instinctively. A cold wind blew across the top of the building and she shivered pulling the shawl she’d thrown over her shoulders around her a bit tighter.

Amelia was so focused on what she was looking at, across the ruins of the city, with jagged remains of buildings sticking up like broken, rotted teeth that she didn’t hear the person who had come up behind her.

Chapter 2 – An Unlikely Group

Hey there, pretty lady, the man said, his shadow falling over her and causing the cold roof to become infinitesimally cooler.

Amelia started and tried to scramble up, but remembered she’d removed her leg to be more comfortable.

She whipped around, her heart her throat and her live hand instantly going for her bag so she could pull out one of her knife prosthetics.

Whoa, whoa, easy there! the man said, raising his hands up defensively and taking a step back. I just came up here to see how you were doing.

Jeremy! Amelia shouted in a lowered voice, so anyone below wouldn’t be able to hear. You scared me!

Jeremy Atwell shook his head apologetically. Sorry, I didn’t mean to. Like I said, I just came up to see how you were doing. Sam said you went up here to take a look.

Jeremy was part of the team, along with Sam and a small handful of others. He squinted at Amelia through his wire-rimmed glasses, to block out the rising sun which had begun to hit metal and glass of the surrounding buildings with blinding ferocity. Jeremy still looked mostly like his former self, except didn’t wear suits anymore, of course, and instead was dress in a rumpled long-sleeved shirt and similarly creased tan khaki pants. He no longer looked like an accountant, but an accountant on holiday. Except with the additions of a bullet proof vest and protective padding around arms and legs, with enough mobility to be able to run if necessary.

Amelia bristled at the interruption, more due to the fact that she was angry at herself than him. She had been unprepared for his arrival and hadn’t been