by Steven John
I thought about it for a minute. “I’ve got no clue. But it will be. We’ll stay together.” I wrapped my arms more tightly around her. “How much further do we have?”
She shrugged and pulled back from me a bit. Her eyes were drying. “Maybe half an hour. A bit less probably.”
“Let’s get moving. I’ll drive.” She fixed me with a cautious smile. “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine. You need to rest anyway.” Nodding, she walked back around the truck, and I climbed up into the driver’s seat. “Which one is the gas?”
She smiled and I turned the key. The engine rumbled back to life.
12
I held five or six thick logs under one arm and a mass of twigs and brambles under the other. It was nearly true night, and I could see very little around me in the dark forest. The small stream that ran near our campsite gurgled in the blue gray haze, but I wasn’t sure if it was to my left or right. I had lost my bearings entirely. It was almost silent, save for the flowing water and the occasional chirp of a bird. Every once in a while, there was a rustling or crackle of dried leaves disturbed by some unseen creature.
Each noise sent shivers down my spine. I used to love forests, but on this night, the woods felt as foreign to me as the ocean’s floor. I felt trapped in some endless catacomb beneath the thick canopy and among the encroaching undergrowth. Just little squirrels and possums and things, I told myself. Crickets and owls. Just get back to camp.
Becca had directed me off the paved road and onto a little strip of dirt at dusk. We followed the neglected path a few miles into the hills and finally into the outskirts of the woods. The dirt road had ended abruptly in a clearing, but she knew the way well and had taken the wheel, inching us another half mile through the trees and thornbushes and undergrowth until finally we could go no farther. We set up camp about a hundred yards from the truck beside the stream as the last light left the sky.
I strained to hear her, but no promising sound came. I’m not sure why I was so frightened to call out, knowing the only things that would hear me would be timid little animals, but still, any words were stuck in my throat. I began to walk toward where I thought we’d made camp. My heartbeat quickened. I crossed a little clearing and stumbled as my foot caught on a root. There were a few stars visible through the gap in the foliage above.
I took in a deep breath and knelt, trying to calm my nerves. Three stones, all about equal size and alabaster white, rested by my boots. I rose to my feet, tasting bile. All around me, the same pale hue shone through the dried leaves and brambles, reflecting the moonlight. To the left was another pile of the strange stones; one, less buried, was cracked in half and I could see that it was hollow, concave. The remains of rotted teeth. A skull. I took a faltering step backwards. Something under my heel broke with a sickening snap. Gasping and coughing, I lurched out of the clearing and back into the forest.
I stood very still for a few minutes to regain my composure. I was determined not to let her know anything of what I’d seen. Finally I worked up the nerve, and throat still dry with horror, I croaked out her name.
For a minute, no response came. Then, about fifty feet away from me, a little flame came to life in the forest. Drawn like a moth, I practically sprinted toward the light. She was kneeling, looking up toward me as I entered the campsite. She lifted her thumb off my lighter, and again we were in darkness.
“I’m freezing,” she said softly, rising to take some of the wood. Her hands found my arms and slid down to the twigs and brambles, and she took several of them from me. “Can you hold the lighter while I make the fire?”
“Sure.” I set down the rest of the wood and reached out to find her. My hand grazed past her breast. “Sorry!” I whispered quickly. I could sense her smiling as she put the lighter in my hand. I flicked it and knelt, illuminating a little space she had cleared in the dirt. She worked quickly, breaking the smallest twigs into kindling and stacking sticks around them into the shape of a little cabin. Or bier. We did not talk for several minutes.
When the fire was set, she took the lighter from me and touched it briefly to the bottom brambles. They crackled and twisted, and soon the larger branches were smoking until one by one, they burst into flames.
“You build a hell of a fire,” I whispered.
“Dad taught us. He used the same kind of scientific approach to the simplest things.” She leaned in close to the flames, blowing gently on the embers. Her face flickered in the dancing light, orange and red playing across her eyes and tinting her golden hair amber. “I swear he would have eaten his breakfast with a compass and protractor if there had been a way to.”
I smiled and leaned back from the fire, my legs crossed before me, palms on the cool forest floor. The flames licked higher into the night. Three rifles glinted where they leaned against the closest tree. I’d left the rest under the back bench of the truck. No sense in hauling them all out here. We had brought the blankets and some food, leaving the rest locked in the vehicle. The water from the stream was cold and sweet, and Rebecca assured me it was safe. Her father had done the same for her years ago.
With the fire crackling and Rebecca at ease, I felt relaxed out here in the forest. It was profoundly dark, and through the treetops, I could barely make out the stars in the sky. She seemed more comfortable than I had ever seen her, and it rubbed off on me. It was a temporary peace, though. Whether we stayed camped out here for a night or a week, we could not sustain this indefinitely. What tomorrow would bring concerned me, but at least for tonight I felt safe and secure. I did my best to banish thoughts of an uncertain future and lit a cigarette as I watched the light dance across her angelic face.
She looked up at me and I did not look away. She smiled.
“You’re beautiful.”
“Thank you,” she said with sincerity, holding my gaze. “So what now?”
My heart skipped a beat, not sure what she meant by that. Her face was earnest and concerned. Not a come-hither look if I’d ever seen one. But her eyes fixed me with an intensity I would not have recognized before. She was a complicated girl. Probably more confused and conflicted than suited her intelligence. I was resolved to be nothing but a protective, positive force. In my mind I put ice on my loins—injected them with novocaine and ordered them to bed. But the curve of her neck … the hint of cleavage peeking out from her low-cut sweater … the firelight dancing across her and turning her flaxen hair into a waterfall of amber and gold.
“We’ll need to travel by dark. At least it’s getting on toward winter and dark for so long … If we drive hard, we’ll make it only fifty miles a night at best, considering all the off-road we’ll have to do, avoiding checkpoints and searchers.” Her eyes settled on the fire. A vacant veneer crept over her face. Maybe she had meant the What now? I would have liked. But the moment was gone.
“The next town—the first place where they’re not in control … You know how to get there?”
“I guess,” she said quietly. Then, her voice more firm, “Yes, we can get there. There are lots of checkpoints and only one road for the first hundred miles, but the truck should be able to handle the fields.”
I nodded. We exchanged no words for a long time. It was a painful silence. I wanted to level with her, to tell her she was amazing and beautiful and that I yearned for her … lusted for her.… I wanted to tell her I had bought a bottle of vodka for her. I’d masturbated to a specter of her red-dressed alter ego, and here she was before me, alone in the forest … and I would not act.
I wondered how much all cities had changed since I had been stuck in my own, since I had been stuck in time. I assumed everything would look just about the same. That bothered me more than a brave new world of flying cars and pneumatic tubes would have—it was like I had been in a drug-induced coma, and now, for reasons no more cogent than it had begun, it was over. She was still watching the fire.
“What are you thinking about?”
She looked up at me and smiled. “You.”
“That won’t take long,” I said, looking away. I hoped she couldn’t see the blood rush to my cheeks in the flickering light.
“I was just thinking about how I feel I know you, but I know so little about you. Don’t know what were you like as a kid. What sports you played. What you were afraid of.”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “I was always scared of being alone. Of being lonely. So I worked my whole life to be all alone and not need anyone or have anyone need me, so that I could never be abandoned. That’s what I was like as a kid. That’s … it’s—”
“How you are now?” She finished for me.
“Yeah. That’s how I am,” I whispered.
Rebecca rose and walked around the fire. She knelt behind me and began massaging my shoulders. “Will you tell me about yourself? What you’ve done … seen…”
“I don’t know.… What do I say?”
“Say one time I went to the beach and I found a shell. Say once I saw an elephant. Tell me about skinning your knee in a soccer game.”
“Once I went to the beach and skinned my knee. There was an elephant there too. He found a shell.”
She laughed, her voice rising into the cold dark air. It felt divine to have inspired that wondrous noise.
“Okay, I’ll tell you about me.”
I told her everything. I told her about Salk’s giant nose and about his pills. I told her about the two girls who had broken my heart. I told her about bruising ribs and smashing in faces for handfuls of wrinkled dollars. I told her about guarding the roads as part of a squad of boys unwittingly tasked with delivering death. I told her how I dreamt of her so many nights and of how I had watched her through the shower curtain. Her hands wrapped more tightly and sensuously around me at that, sliding forward down my chest. I was losing myself in her. Soon there was nothing but the warmth of the fire on my face and the ministration of her hands on my body. I was talking to her, to myself, to everyone. I dictated my autobiography—I babbled out a diary entry for every event I had so long sought to suppress. It was euphoric—it was awful. I was scarred and healed all at once. Maybe for twenty minutes, maybe an hour did I carry on until finally I realized she was talking to me and that I had been silent for some time.
“Tom … Tom, what is it? Tell me. Please. What are you thinking about?” She was by my side, holding my right hand in hers and wiping the tears from my face. With great strain, I lifted my eyes to hers.
“The people on the roads…” She nodded, her face receptive, saddened. “It was radiation. The meltdown. When I learned from Kirk that it was all radiation, I knew in the back of my mind … Radiation isn’t contagious. They made us shoot them so the truth would die, not a virus.… We killed the truth.”
She wrapped her arms around me, and I buried my head in her chest. Slowly we rocked back and forth. She whispered in my ear, trying to comfort me, saying it wasn’t my fault. Her skin was warm and smelled faintly sweet beneath her sweater. My cheek lay against one of her soft breasts. Gradually my breathing slowed and my head stopped spinning with flashes of long-ago death. I lifted my head and looked into her eyes, inches from my own.
“Thank you,” I mumbled. She kissed me on the forehead. It was as if she had absolved me of my sins. I gently disengaged myself from her arms and leaned away, stretching my neck. The fire crackled loudly as a thick log split. I rose and grabbed a few more large pieces of wood and tossed one on top of the flames. A great cloud of embers broke free and rushed skyward in the night, swirling like a flock of angry fowl. I watched the last of this cloud of sparks rise upward until each had burned out and disappeared, followed every few seconds by a glowing ember or two that rose when the fire snapped and popped.
“Just like life,” I said quietly.
“What is?”
“I was just thinking about the fire … the embers. They glow brilliantly for a little while. They’re alive and in motion and they’re warm, then they burn out. Then they don’t glow ever again. Sometimes there’s this big surge of them. Once that’s risen, shined and cooled, there are a few more following all the time … drifting up more slowly … less sure of where to go because they have no group to follow.…”
“That’s us,” Rebecca said quietly.
“Yeah, that’s us. We didn’t get caught up in the fire’s hottest flare-up, so now we have to drift free and alone, until we burn out.” Another branch cracked in half and a few more embers rose. One of them, slightly larger than the others, began spiraling upward clockwise with the group but then seemed to catch its own breeze, drifting laterally and then down and coming to rest on the forest floor. It sat there, still glowing a faint, dying orange for several seconds before fading into ash. I glanced over at Rebecca and saw that she too had watched this cinder.
“I guess sometimes some of them do make it back down still burning. Still alive.”
“Sometimes,” I said, trying to return her hopeful smile. “Every once in a while, they can even start fires of their own.”
* * *
The fire had burned low. It was just a few smoldering embers now, faintly glowing orange beneath ashen shells. Rebecca’s body was curled almost into fetal position, her back pressed against my chest. I had one arm around her. Still half-asleep, I blinked my eyes in the darkness and tried to figure out if anything had awakened me. It was perfectly silent, and I could see nothing amiss by the fire’s dying light. I eased away from Rebecca. She sighed softly and pulled the blanket more tightly about her neck.
I rose stiffly in the cold air and stretched my legs and back. There were still a few logs left, and after stepping over Becca’s slumbering body, I placed one down into the coals. Kneeling, I blew gently onto the embers, coaxing a little life out of them. Eventually a few tongues of flame licked upward and caught one end of the new piece of wood. I sat down beside the fire and held my hands out to it, warming them.
The thick branch crackled and snapped as it became ever more consumed by flame. Each time a pocket of air exploded into sparks, I jumped a bit at the sharp, violent sound. It seemed too loud, piercing the silence of the night. Slowly I felt hairs rise on my neck and on the back of my arms. It hadn’t been quiet when I fell asleep; there had been insects humming and animals flitting about in the darkness. Now there was barely a breeze.
I stood slowly, bile rising in my throat, and padded softly over to where the rifles leaned against a tree. I grabbed one and racked back on the bolt, the metallic click impossibly loud. I strained to hear anything, moving away from the fire a few more feet. Animals are silent like this only for a reason—that much I knew.
My breath came out in plumes of mist, quickly dissipating in the flickering light. I could hear my heartbeat and feel my hands trembling. I squeezed more tightly on the gun’s grips and took in a deep breath, holding it and closing my eyes. Silence … and then … very faint. Very far away … I exhaled and breathed in again, listening.
It almost sounded like distant thunder at first. Maybe a series of rumbling explosions very far off. Slowly the noise grew more steady, ever louder and finally pronounced. Helicopters. Once I placed the sound of rotors chopping through the freezing air, engines started whining beneath the blades, their sound was drawing closer, growing quickly.
Hastily I lay down the rifle and dashed back to the fire. “Becca,” I said firmly but trying to sound calm. “Wake up, sweetie.” I rolled the fresh log, now burning brightly, out of the fire with my foot and began trying to claw dirt from the frigid ground to throw onto it.
She came to slowly, muttering. “Tom … what—the fire. What are you doing?”
“We need to get it out. Now.”
“Why?” she asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. I kept frantically kicking and scratching at the ground.
“Listen,” I said, pausing. She sat still and cocked her head to one side. The rhythmic bass of the thumping rotors gradually filled the clearing.
“Is it thunder?” she whispered.
“Thunder
would suit me just fine. It’s helicopters.”
Her eyes went wide and her hands instinctively flew to her neck. “Oh, Christ! What do we do?”
“Just help me get the fire out. Then, nothing. It’s a big forest, we’re just two people. We’ll sit tight.” It was the truck I was worried about. Lights would reflect off the glass in the clear, dark night. Oh well, not a damn thing to do about it now. Together we managed to get the flames tamped down, and then I covered the glowing coals in more loose dirt and gravel so nothing would flare up. Becca sat with her knees drawn to her chest, her face stretched tight with terror. I was frightened too, and a lot less new to this kind of thing than she.
I lay my rifle across my lap and sat beside Rebecca, barely able to see her in the little bit of celestial light filtering through the trees. Her eyes stared vacantly into the night. If there were four-hundred-some miles to the diameter of the exclusion zone, then they weren’t likely to be looking in this area randomly. Tire tracks or some sort of surveillance or something, I guessed. Who knows, maybe they were just traveling along the roads and wouldn’t think to follow a little dirt path through some fields and into the woods. That was entirely possible, even.
“They’re probably just following the highways,” I whispered.
“Do you think that, or are you just saying it?” she replied, her voice cracking. I could see tears beginning to run down her cheeks.
“I hope it, okay? It’s very possible and … I hope so.” They drew ever nearer. Had to be six, seven choppers at least. Big birds. The forest thundered with their roaring blades. Then, a few hundred yards off, powerful shafts of light pierced the canopy above and began to streak the forest floor. Rebecca screamed and threw her arms around my neck. Her voice was carried away as the rotor wash began to stir the air around us. Three and then four different beams strafed the forest, and I caught glimpses of still others far off to the sides. The howl became deafening. The lights were scarcely a hundred yards away, bouncing around among the trees, illuminating the night.
