by Grant Pies
“So then you must believe in God, in a higher power telling us what is right and what is wrong,” she said.
The train flew past buildings and light poles, blurring the outside world. The tracks under us clicked in a steady pace, and the car rocked back and forth in a calming combination of sounds and movement.
“God? Nah.” I shook my head. “I’ve never thought much of fairy tales or ghost stories. Although it would be helpful in times of loss. It would soften the pain, I suppose.” Up ahead I saw a train platform. The hydraulic brakes hissed as they slowed the train down. Both Vesa and I leaned towards the front of the train at the sudden change in speed.
“So what’s left?” she asked. “How do you determine what is right and wrong? If not the law or God, then what is there to guide you? Fate? Do you believe in fate? Or free will?”
The train slowed until it eventually stopped. The doors opened, the few remaining passengers got off, and no one else stepped on. Vesa was settled in and not going anywhere. The doors closed and the brakes hissed again.
Gradually we sped away, leaving Flagstaff behind in a blur. The further away from the city we got, the clearer the sky became. It was bright and sunny out, and the train passed by fewer high-rise buildings and illuminated billboards. There were more open spaces dotted with old structures that had been abandoned and crumbled in the last decade. This was the beginning of the first collapse of the city. It would fall and be built up again and again before we simply gave up thousands of years in the future. The landscape I sped by was a prequel to what I knew was to come.
“I wouldn’t call it fate so much as a lack of choices,” I answered as I stared out the window. A gray building with a collapsed roof passed by in a blur. “I don’t think you have a choice as to what you are doing. I know I don’t. Or at least I didn’t.”
“How do you figure that?” Vesa asked. She fidgeted with a ring on her thumb, spinning it around and around like she was winding an antique clock.
“It’s something my dad told me,” I said. “He said our universe just circles around on itself, like a rerun on TV. It’s not fate, and it’s not free will. It’s something different. It’s like an echo of a life that existed when we actually had free will. Maybe I had a choice what to do many lifetimes ago. But not anymore.”
“But every TV show rerun has a premier, right? It’s new at some point.” she asked. “Even if you’re right, everyone gets one chance to do what they want before any cycle sets in.”
Ruins of a city that were abandoned for taller buildings in the city center flashed by my eyes. Hues of gray and dark red blinked by.
“No, you’re right. We all had one life to set the tone. But now I’m just doing whatever I decided to do at the beginning of time. Whenever that was. I’m just reliving the same thing over and over again. Going through the motions.”
“Maybe the only happiness any of us can find now is that at least at one point in time, for one lifetime before this, we were allowed to live. To really live. To make choices that weren’t made before. To meet people that we really never knew before. To see places that weren’t familiar to us already. Hopefully an earlier version of me lived a life free of déjà vu. I just hope that whatever that version of me did in his life, whatever he experienced, was worth all the other shit he’s put me through.”
CHAPTER 12
5257
NEW ALCATRAZ
“You don’t think it feels colder out?” Ward said.
“No, Ward. I do not think it feels colder out.”
Alma arranged the newly chopped piles of wood in a small corner of their hut. She slammed each one down on top of the other harder than she really had to. Ward pulled off his thick leather boots. He moved a boiling pot of water from the fire and poured some into a second bowl. After some time, he slowly dipped his feet into the steaming water.
“What about you, boys? You think it feels colder than it did last winter?” Ward asked.
Ransom and Merit merely shrugged.
“Don’t bring them into this. You do this all the time,” Alma said in a quieter tone, so the boys wouldn’t hear. “You find something to worry about. You invent some problem that we have to deal with. A problem that you always feel would be solved by venturing out to some unknown location.”
“Like what? What else have I come up with? What other problems have I invented?” Ward asked, but didn’t really care if she answered. He didn’t match Alma’s quiet tone, so the children heard his side of the conversation.
“Like when you said we would run out of water last summer. Or when I was pregnant and you wanted to go out looking for medicine.” Ward looked away from his wife. She had a point, but he didn’t want to admit it. “These are just excuses.”
“Well, so what?” Ward said through clenched teeth. “Excuses or not, there’s nothing for me here—. For us,” he corrected himself. “Every day I go out there and I chop those trees down for everyone else in this village. Avi hunts for food, and Bran cleans the pelts. Day in and day out, we do the exact same thing. For years! Generations!”
The boys had stopped what they were doing and were listening to their father.
“And what do we have to show for it? A forest that is half chopped down and nothing more.” Ward pointed in the direction of the forest. “Any day now, I could drop dead out in that damned place. I could collapse in the snow. A tree could crush me…or the boys. How is that any safer than going out there?” This time Ward pointed in another direction away from the forest. “There is something out there, Alma,” he said in a gentler, more convincing tone. “These lights and whatever powers them came from someplace. Someplace that is still sending power to these bulbs.”
“You’re just like my father. Always going on and on about this other place, like you’ve seen it! He tells these stories to the boys, and fills their heads with ideas of an alternate life. Like things could be different than they are now. Better,” Alma said and stomped around the hut. She pretended to pick up items and straighten up.
“Maybe a bit of hope isn’t a bad thing,” Ward said. This time he spoke quietly, almost to himself.
“Well what my father doesn’t say, what he doesn’t tell your sons, is that the last people that went looking for this magical, hopeful place never came back! Maybe it exists. Maybe years and years ago, before even you or I were born, someone went there and made it back. Maybe they brought these bulbs with them, and maybe they turned on some magical machine that powers these bulbs.” Alma pointed at the bulb that Ransom held in his hands. “But not in my lifetime. Not in your lifetime. We have never seen anyone leave here and find anything. No vaults. Nothing.” Alma walked back over to Ward and knelt in front of him. The steam from his foot bath wafted into the air.
“We are here. You, me, Merit, and Ransom. This.” Alma waved her hands around their hut. “This isn’t meaningless. At least not to me. I don’t need something else. But I can’t do this alone.” Alma faced her husband, gripping her hands around his knees.
Ward lowered his head and sighed. He moved his feet out of the water, which was now a muddy soup, blotted his feet dry with a cloth, and moved to their bed, throwing the blanket over himself and facing the back wall. He didn’t speak until the next morning.
Before the sun came up Ward awoke, dressed, tucked his woven necklace with the blue gem under his shirt, and packed a few pieces of dried meat in a pouch. He leaned over and kissed Alma on the forehead.
“I love you, Alma.” She rolled over and opened her eyes just slightly, smiling a little. He stood over Merit and Ransom, sound asleep in their shared bed. He placed a hand on each of their heads and ran his fingers through their thick hair.
He picked up his axe and examined it. It was worn. He couldn’t guess which would need to be replaced first, the sharp stone or the wooden handle. He wondered in that brief moment whether it would still be the same axe should either part be replaced. What if the stone was replaced and later the handle? Would it still be his axe?
He leaned it against the door frame inside the hut and turned to look at his family one last time. Ransom rolled over and squinted through his eyelids at his father. He saw the axe leaning next to the door and his dad’s pack slung over his shoulder, and furrowed his brow. Why would his father leave with a pack? Why would he leave without taking his axe?
“Dad?” he whispered.
Ward simply held a single finger to his lips before opening the door and stepping out into the cold. Ransom laid his head down and fell back to sleep.
Outside, Ward walked through the village of huts, the rising sun at his face and the forest at his back. It was quiet and calm. His feet crunched into the snow under his feet. With each step, he put more distance between himself and the forest where he’d spent years of his life, and ventured out towards an unknown location.
CHAPTER 13
5280
NEW ALCATRAZ
Ransom drove his sharpened axe into one of the few trees that remained in the forest. Wind pushed snow into his face. His hair hung just above his chin, and early bits of gray streaked through his otherwise dark brown hair. Even though it was cold out, Ransom had his sleeves rolled up, revealing his strong forearms and tanned skin. After only three swipes with his axe, the tree cracked and fell away. He looked back to see the field of stumps between him and his home, then turned to look at what remained of the forest.
As he walked through the forest he could tell which stumps were his and which stumps were of his father’s making. He brushed his hand on the stumps left behind by his father. He thought back to the times when he and Merit helped him carry the wood back to the village, but he quickly shook away those memories. If Ransom squinted enough, he could see all the way through the forest to the other side. By next year the forest would be gone.
“Dad!” A young boy clumsily ran through the field of old stumps with his hands clasped in front of him. “Look. Look what I found!” The boy reached his father and slowly opened his hands. A bright blue-green beetle with wings and a pointed horn protruding from its head crawled on the boy’s cupped hands.
“Oh, yeah,” Ransom said and kneeled down to look in his son’s hands. “It’s beautiful. Where did you find it?” The boy pointed back toward the village, which was now twice as large as it had been when Ransom was a child. The crop fields off in the distance had doubled in size as well.
“Over by the base of the mountain. Past our house,” the boy answered. Ransom looked at his son and raised his eyebrows. The boy looked away.
“Gray…” Ransom said and paused.
“It was out there.” Gray pointed in a direction other than where he originally said. He dropped his head to avoid his father’s stern gaze.
“How many times have I told you? You aren’t to go out that way. You only walk toward the coast and the forest,” Ransom said pointing behind him to the forest and in front of him towards their village. “You don’t go out there.” Ransom pointed to his left and right at the endless space around them covered in a shallow layer of snow. “It isn’t safe for you. It’s not safe for anyone.”
“It wasn’t far, Dad,” Gray interrupted pleadingly. “I’m sorry. Can I keep him?” He motioned down at the beetle in his hands.
“Ask your mom,” he answered. “Now go home. And stay clear of Higgs’ house. He’s got something bad, and I don’t want you around it.”
The boy turned and jogged home. Several birds flew overhead. In the distance, noises came from the sheep and other animals corralled on one end of the village. The bulbs that hung in the village when Ransom was a child were still lit, only a little dimmer. They served as the only reminder that something more than this village existed in their world. The only evidence of a world that had passed them by. That had left everyone behind. Or that everyone had left behind, depending on how you looked at things.
But most people would rather ignore the bulbs, and pretend they were just as natural as the hardened mud they used to build their huts, or the snow-dusted cacti that littered the desert landscape. With each season that passed, or each full moon that went by, the bulbs became more commonplace to the villagers. A fixture. Wherever they had supposedly come from was just a fable passed down from generation to generation.
Ransom finished chopping the tree into separate parts. He threw two logs into a thick woven sack on the ground, and slung the sack over his shoulder. He managed the weight of the pieces of wood without any struggle, holding the axe in his other hand, and dragging it behind him. The sharp stone traced a line through the snow on the ground all the way back to Ransom’s home. Once there, he dumped the sack on the floor and leaned the axe against the wall near the door.
His home was similar to the one he grew up in, but slightly bigger. Everything in the village had grown as he grew. More huts. More crops and animals. More people. Less bulbs for each home. Less space between their village and the steep cliffs that lined the coast. Ransom knew their population would grow faster than they could build homes, but he didn’t want to worry about that. There was nothing he could do about it.
“Did you see that bug Gray brought home?” Ransom’s wife, Aurora, asked. “It was disgusting!”
Ransom chuckled as he sat his tools down. “So you didn’t let him keep it?” he asked.
“Of course not!” Aurora replied. “I shouldn’t be surprised you made me be the one to tell him to get rid of it. You know, you’re going to have to be the bad guy once in a while.”
“C’mon, this way he’ll respect you when he’s older. You’ll be the disciplinarian,” Ransom said with a grin. Aurora smirked back at him. The two embraced lightly and kissed each other on the lips.
A loud knock on the door interrupted their conversation. Aurora clung to Ransom a bit longer, and then opened the door. Merit stepped inside without an invitation, and a cold wind blew in behind him.
“Well, come on in, Merit,” Aurora said sarcastically. Merit gripped a knitted hat in his hand. His thinning hair was disheveled and his hands were coated in a dried, cracked layer of orange mud that looked like it had been there for years, like it was just part of his skin.
“Hey, Merit. What’s up?” Ransom asked without turning toward his brother.
“Oh, nothing much. We’ve just been collecting materials for more homes. We have to dig deeper to get the same amount of mud that we used to, and it still isn’t the right consistency. By summer, we should have a few more built.” Merit paused briefly. “Art and his wife are having another baby, you know?” Ransom nodded his head. Aurora glanced at her husband to try and decipher if he knew the reason for Merit’s unusual arrival. “And I know Fort and Rika are trying for another.” Merit looked down at the floor. Something else was clearly on his mind.
“Yeah, our town is growing, that’s for sure,” Ransom said in an indifferent tone as he shed some of the sap-covered clothes he wore out in the forest.
“Soon we’ll be building places up by the cliff. Rake and I think we’ve figured out a way to build two-story homes. We’ve been testing it out for some time now, and we think it’s just about ready. But you know there’s only so much space between here and the coast.” Merit was finally getting to the real reason he came to see Ransom.
“So it’s this again?” Ransom asked. He didn’t feel like wasting time on useless conversation after a day’s work. “This is what you came over for?”
Merit shrugged reluctantly, like he didn’t want to discuss the topic, but felt he had to.
“Our town is growing, Ransom. It is spreading out. It used to be we had bulbs stretched around every street, and each home had two or three bulbs.” Merit pointed at the single bulb that barely lit up the one-room hut they stood in. “We are gonna grow out of this place, like it or not.”
Merit knew people here counted on him. Not because he was particularly skilled, but because there were only a limited number of able-bodied people in their village. He would have left in a second if the rest of the village relieved him of these unspoken responsibilitie
s. He dreamed of the day no one relied on him. Maybe that was why he was overjoyed each time someone in the village reproduced. He saw each new baby as his eventual replacement. He didn’t marry or have children of his own, since they would only serve to permanently tie him here. If that happened, he would never be able to break free. He would never be able to leave. Is that why he never really treated me like family? Ransom thought. Is that why Merit has stayed so distant our whole lives?
Ransom sat down in a chair and leaned forward to pull his shoes off his feet. His hair hung forward in his face. He clenched his jaw, the muscles in his cheek protruding slightly.
“And what, you want to go looking for more bulbs?” he asked, chuckling. “You want a group of people to risk their lives so you can light up your two-story homes? No, I take that back. You want a group of people to disappear, never to return? Is that it?” Ransom sat back in his chair and locked eyes with Merit. “You do this all the time, Merit. You come here and ask for permission, like some—ˮ
“I do this because someone has to!” Merit interrupted. “I do this because, for one reason or another, people look up to you around here, and they don’t want to hurt your feelings. But many of us don’t agree with you on this. And they ask me to come see if I can change your mind.”
“By ‘they’ you mean Tannyn, right?” Ransom asked, but Merit didn’t answer. “Well,” Ransom responded. “Maybe you can send a group of those people out there, and when they don’t come back you can take their bulbs. Hang ’em all around your mud mansion.” Ransom ran his hand through his hair and pushed it back out of his face.
Merit sighed in frustration. “It isn’t about bulbs and light. You never get it. You want to make it about something else, but it’s about survival. I don’t want to go and come back. I want to go and stay there.” Merit said this like it was a revelation, like it would convince Ransom.
