Crashing Tides

by Gwendolyn Marie

  The thrashing with the branch continued, but before she could bring down the branch one more time a grip came around her arm. Hector held her firm, not wanting her to continue in such unequivocal rage. The hold surprised her considering the Chaot’s blood on her and the risk of infection she presented. A hazmat glove concealed Hector’s skin, but still she did not want him to take a risk for her. Her clobbering of the Chaot displayed a part of her soul—an anger uncontrollable, a wrath unconfined. In his hold though, Hector stopped her downward spiral, and for that she looked gratefully towards the one who held her at bay.

  Hector looked back. His face contained relief in finding Nyx but also a distance that separated him from the potential infected: her. With the striations of blood marking her, he did not know whether he would be forced to put her down. One thing seemed certain to him—he would soon find out. But even if he had to put a bullet through her head, the least he could do was calm her. To bring an end to her beating of the lifeless evil, for that had made his blood run cold, more so than any appalling acts by the infected themselves.

  From the darkness of the forest, two figures appeared behind Hector. The two Chaots from the town moved to the scene with a hungry delirium. She pointed behind Hector at the approaching Chaots, to warn him that she was the least of their problems for the moment.

  Hector let go of her, turning toward the two Chaots. His gun blazed with an indignation to destroy, yet with a composed self-control in his attack. Watching the demolition that he now wrought, Nyx was still. She let her arm drop to her side and with it the branch, that was covered with the innards of the beast. The weapon fell from her hand to the ground. She backed away from the war-torn zones and toward the solace of forests. She could escape this blight, and simply leave.

  To ignore, to not face what may happen. That Hector’s subsequent target may be her. She had to go against the possibility that her fate would be the same of the devolved human that now withered behind her.

  Devolution. Her memories called from the haze, hearing voices filled with scientific authority surrounding her. There is no such thing as devolving. Only evolving, only moving forth. Nature adapts, metamorphosing into the most successful course of evolution, into what is the fittest. Even if we do not see it as advancement—it is.

  And so, she did not wait for the outcome of Hector’s battle with the two Chaots, not wanting to see if she would be Hector’s next target. She ran from him toward obscurity, looking behind her toward the shots and then above, wondering if another tree-bearing Chaot would jump down upon her. Looking everywhere as she ran through the forest—except right in front of her.

  And because of that, she ran straight head long into another.

  A muffled groan came as she collided against Leander and fell down. At first thought she assumed it was a monster and she backed away from the outstretched gloved hand. Idle wishes came and left that she had not abandoned her only weapon, the tree branch. However, as her gaze reached Leander’s, relief came, but inevitably her instinct prevailed: to get away. To run. Not just for her own safety, but for his.

  “No,” Leander said. “Stop.”

  His voice digressed from its duty-driven timbre; passion melting the formidable. The sight of Nyx, seeing the blood on her skin. Did he believe he had lost her to the disease? No. Hope flickered visibly in Leander’s face, or so she believed, and he would not give up on her yet. It was possible that the Chaot’s blood had not entered her system. She stopped. She did not flee. The hope in his eyes was like the gem hidden inside Pandora’s box. She did not want to lose it, and she knew she would if she ran.

  Hector joined Leander and Nyx, having finished off the two Chaots. He readied himself as if awaiting the orders to neutralize the situation if it should escalate. Heavy inhalation, the breath escaping from his mouth in rasps behind his mask. Controlled, but telling of the battle he had just finished.

  She knew if the disease had invaded her, the soldiers would kill her now to avoid the threat she could become. Regret and remorse: both were abandoned in times of the post-apocalyptical war. The only option was death to the contaminated—her end for their continuation. For their survival.

  Backing away from the two, she knew the likelihood that Hector would shoot her. Yet she remained, hesitant to make the first move.

  Trees scattered, shaking in the distance. The wind ... or something else?

  Hector spoke first breaking the silence between the three, breaking her impression of him. A formidable voice, but not as crude as she had expected. Not animalistic nor of a brute without mind, but strewn with intelligence. Not as a scientist aged in book knowledge, but instead with dignity, understanding, and a wisdom that could never be taught.

  “You have my word: I will not chain you again. I will not kill you,” Hector said.

  And with those words, she let go of her fear and stepped forward. Her decision irrevocable, to walk alongside these warriors.

  Chapter Six

  “Since you would not follow us, we followed you,” Leander said, his voice muffled through his hazmat mask. Outfitted in protective gear, he removed all trace of the Chaot blood from Nyx. He made sure she was not wounded for the blood to intermingle with her own. After a period of waiting to see if the imminent threat of being turned passed, Hector had left to stand guard. Dio and Megaira were determining the location to proceed in their mission, leaving Leander to take care of Nyx. Take care of—whether that meant simply to cleanse or to kill her if her behavior spiraled down, only time would tell.

  Washing her skin with antiseptic cloths, Leander cleansed the blood from her. Along her cheek and across her forehead, he wiped away the contagion.

  She wondered if he feared she would change into a Chaot, yet no trepidation showed on his face. Perhaps he learned it in the army: never allow the predicament to be known to the wounded. That way it allowed the victim, as well as himself, hope. Hope was something they could not lose—what she had seen in Leander’s eyes and heard in Hector’s voice. Or perhaps she read him wrong. Was the lack of concern tied to being distant, for when faced with a potential enemy it was always best to remove all emotion.

  “Giving you the choice to stay or leave was the only option I could think of at the time. It would have been impossible under the current circumstance to force you to come against your will. Yet, alone in this wilderness, you would not last. And you are important to us. We could not let you go, we had to find out how you survived for so long. But it was my fault. I thought we could better track you, keep you out of harms way while seeing where you led us.”

  Leander said, speaking to her while he continued removing the remaining fluids. He shone an ultraviolet light over her skin, wiping away the particles invisible to the naked eye. “We lost you for awhile in the town. Finally, we found you in the tree with the Chaot, and that was when we intervened. I wish I made a different decision. I cannot change what happened, but will do my best to protect you if you will let me. Will you stay with us now, Nyx?”

  She did not respond at first. Why did she stay, she asked herself. The Chaots for one. They would impose their will on her even more than the soldiers. She chose the lesser of the two evils, if it even was a choice. Leander has stated that they could not let her leave, so the question he asked was merely extraneous. But what enticed her to stay was her growing interest towards Leander and the soldiers. Curiosity called, she had to abide.

  “I need ...” You. To understand you. But she could not admit to this need. “... to understand what happened.”

  That was not it at all, and he seemed to read through her partial truth. However, he did not push her. The wind picked up as if in sequence to bring her hair astray.

  “When you understand, will you still stay?” he questioned, albeit reluctantly. It was a question he did not need to ask; he knew the answer. If she no longer desired to walk with these soldiers she would simply and unequivocally leave. She was the dissonance within the melody of life; her chords played inharmonious
yet flawlessly. Though her footfalls away would seem abrupt and misplaced, to her they would be perfect poetry.

  “Will you?” she asked back, as a smile took her lips, so ebullient in posture even after the terrors she had beheld. It seemed as if he was about to answer, but instead he took out a pair of scissors from the med kit.

  “Sorry, but I’m going to have to remove your shirt,” he said, beginning to cut it away after her nod of permission. She flinched as he removed it, for it was the only remnant from her time with the Fisherman, proof that he was not simply of her invention. She could not lose his wisdom. Leander gave her several white cloths to cover up before removing the residual fluid that had soaked through the shirt to her skin. With the Chaot’s blood removed, he could see that her skin was not broken. Given that and the duration of time that had passed without side-effect, she was well beyond the threshold of risk. If the tree-dweller’s blood did contaminate her, the symptoms would have already deemed her life carnal. And though she did not see fear before, she saw a subtle relief now come over him.

  “I would like to take a sample of your blood,” he said. She knew why without explanation, for if the disease was as destructive as it seemed, any survivor could be seen as a potential subject to research in hopes to find a cure. Perhaps having almost lost her had brought reason to Leander—for it was not just her he would have lost. And though she hated to be seen as purely a subject, she held out her arm so he could take her blood. This would cut any ties he had to her as research, she hoped, and what would be left was solely their bonds as individuals.

  He took an vial of her blood and concluded with a clear disinfectant over her body to complete the sterilization. It was cool, almost reminiscent of the ocean’s chill. She shivered underneath his touch. As she did so, he paused, not wanting to overstep his bounds. He knew war time allowed no place for relationships. For love. But love was the most dangerous of combatants, for nothing could bar its merciless torrent from the gates.

  “I wish we had a Hazmat field uniform for you that would fit, but what we have is too large and hence ineffective. This will fit large as well, but should not pose too much of a nuisance,” he said as he gave her a shirt, boots, and combat pants.

  He turned and walked back toward Hector, leaving her alone with the clothing to provide her with some privacy. She put on the clothes, though was not accustomed to the feel of so much fabric constricting her.

  Clothing. Conversation. Comrades around her.

  Confining. Controlling. Capturing her.

  Nyx walked next to Leander, only catching an occasional glimpse of the others far ahead. Megaira led with Hector securing the path; Dio carried up the rear to make sure none followed them. The two soldiers had returned from scouting with relative success. They had met up soon after Leander had finished decontaminating her; Nyx had only been able to make out whispers of the previous exchange. What she heard had been a puzzle, but who better to decipher the paradox than the one who walked besides her.

  “Why do you need me now, you have my blood,” she questioned Leander, unexpectedly interrupting the silence.

  She caught him off guard, for most of their conversations had been one-sided. He embraced the turn of events with gratefulness, though aware that she might slip again into her shell.

  “If there is a chance you are immune we would want to do more tests. But the chance of immunity is ... well, from the reports that had come in to us before we lost contact, there was none. The disease is prion based, such as mad cow disease. One hundred percent of those exposed face the inevitable. So though I have your blood that is most likely a dead end. But you survived, out here somewhere. And I hope some answers may come from knowing how.”

  “And a type of duty,” he continued. “The integrity of our humanity is all we have left that sets us a part from extinction. It is important to realize what we stand for, rather than sink to the level of the Chaots. The infected. It is important to help those in need.”

  “Tell me more about the infection,” she asked. He had spoken the word in a way that inferred an intentional infection. She had believed it to be a disease before, but now it seemed like more. “What happened?”

  A pause at her question. He found it strange she did not know. How could one not know?

  “I only am aware of some of the details. I expected you, a land survivor, would know more than I do.”

  “Land?”

  “Yes, land,” he answered, realizing she did not know what the Thalassic was. “We are from below the sea, a part of an underwater colony, the Thalassic. It is an establishment for scientific government research based off of Maine’s coastline. It is how we survived, while most of the rest of humans ...”

  The sentence was left unsaid, for they did not need to be reminded of those that now ran in human body but without human soul. Rather, he proceeded to explain exactly what had happened to create such beings of uninhibited strife.

  “The War began. We always knew that when it came, the fate of the world would be decided in its battlefront. In hopes to destroy the enemies and not the land, germ warfare commenced as the primary strategy. It specifically targeted the humans while leaving our amenities and resources untouched. The Thalassic is unaware of the specifics, for we lost contact shortly after the outbreak begun. Being underwater granted us safe refuge for it separated us from the outside, unbreachable in our security and completely independent. However, we were left in the dark when the communications surface side failed.”

  “From what we gathered from intelligence,” Leander continued, “the infection is caused by a type of military-designed prion that served as a bioweapon, let loose by our side in the air and waterways. It was supposed to render the enemy dead by targeting the brain and ending life immediately. I believe the creators responsible did not predict the outcomes of releasing such an atrocity to the world. They tried to wield a beast which could not be tamed, for the prion had a mind of its own.”

  Our side. She studied his face, seeing the weight of sorrow as he spoke. Soldiers do not give such orders, they are pawns set upon boards, the only choice given to them is which side is the lesser of two evils. Often that choice is even removed, and who they fight for is determined by where they were born. She could see that he did not agree with the use of such weapons, but also probably did not even know of their use until too late. But rather than make excuses, or lie to her, he told her the facts.

  “Death did not come to the targets. They were not immune though; the contagion still affected and destroyed specific regions of the brain. It created what had chased you. What we call the Chaots, since chaos rules them.”

  “If the contagion had killed upon contact then the targeted areas would have been easily contained and quarantined as what was planned. But those who survived as half-human—as Chaots—spread the infection before any quarantine could be established. The bio-agent was used against us as well, in a desperate dying attempt from our enemy, not to ‘win’ the war, but to make sure we also suffered the consequences. The disease propagated because of these unforeseen consequences. It carried like wildfire worldwide, being unbiased with whom it destroyed and made into another vector,” Leander finished, looking toward Nyx, his gaze showing confusion as to how she could have survived the Armageddon without knowing it had ever occurred. Part of him probably wished to blame it on post traumatic stress, that she had forgotten due to the nature of the horror, or a possible head trauma. Another part must have known it must be something more.

  His story did not sadden her nor make her wish the war had been prevented, since it was from a time before. A time that did not matter to her, for it was beyond what she could remember. Not that she lacked empathy, it was as if it was a story of battles in past history. If you wished the past to change, in turn you also wished that you did not exist. No matter how small the point of impact, the ripples reached out indefinitely in time and would change the face of the world.

  And the creation myth Leander wove was just that�
��a myth to her. The Chaots and the end of humanity simply was the world she now lived in and all else represented fairy tales told of legends of old to explain why. The infected in her mind made into wild beasts, a beauty in their own right, even if twisted. And she believed one should not pity the beasts nor seek to destroy the prides which hunted among the gazelles. Though beware the predator’s fouled bite and strike to live if need be. But these Thalassicians were not like her; they sought return to the past, to a civilization that never was civilized to begin with.

  “We waited for almost a year aboard Thalassic wondering what was happening on the surface after communication was lost. First we waited to ascertain that the air was clear from contagion. Luckily Chaots themselves can only transmit the disease through direct bodily fluid contact—the bio weapon remained airborne only in the human-initiated attacks. Yet even after establishing the air’s safety, the Thalassicians continued to wait. They hid behind excuses of why not to venture upward—from seeing if the threat would somehow extinguish itself, even to the idea we should abandon the hope of ever living surface side again. However, one cannot sit around forever in safety but naiveté.”

  A grimace conjured along his mouth as he spoke, causing her to wonder if indeed all of Thalassic was behind his squadron’s movement upward. Surely if they were self-sufficient some would wish to stay underwater beings and not risk their own contamination. She could only guess how many would support Leander in the effort to come from the seas to the land.

  “It was why you were not initially greeted with open arms, Nyx,” he explained. “No one survived up here that we knew of. They all either became a Chaot or died at the hands of one. So now I ask again, how did you survive? If you are somehow immune, however unlikely, we need more than a vial. If you are part of a community of survivors, we can help each other. Either way, you could be what we are looking for.”