I am a pretty strong swimmer, usually, but all this time spent clinging to rocks has taken a toll on my strength.
My father carries Nadena on his back, but she is almost too weak to hold on.
The End of Everything
We have moved as far up the hillside as we can.
One of the women I recognize from the village, Maella, spent the night next to us on the rocky hillside cradling her infant. I watched her wearily as the sky brightened slightly in the dim morning light. The baby had cried off and on through the night, weakly, but was now still.
Maella saw that her child would not last much longer, so she wrapped it in a soggy scarf and tossed it out into the dark waters. It didn’t even struggle as it sank slowly beneath the surface.
I watch her in the dim light as she strips off all of her clothing, madly clawing at the dank cloths, alternately moaning and shrieking. She has gone mad.
Many people have taken off their outer garments, because they weigh them down and stink with mildew. Everything feels slimy. There is no point in modesty now.
When Maella finishes stripping, I see she is covered with wriggling leeches. I get up to go to her, to help her with the sucking horde of creatures, but she shakes her head, and then dives head first into the water, following the course her poor baby took.
A great wailing has arisen from the people crowded onto the hilltop.
The ark has moved down the valley, out toward the area where the Euphrates empties into the ocean. There is a slight lightening of the sky, although the heavens have opened up and it is hard to tell where the water rising on the earth meets the water falling from the sky. I don’t know if it is morning or nighttime.
The name of Noah is rising from the hillside, a chant to the faithful from the faithless multitude. “Noah, Noah, Noah … ” on and on the chant is repeated. It is as if the old man has become a god.
I am like a sea creature, my hair streaming down my body. Maybe I will form gills and slip into the sea like Maella did. One by one the people around me disappear under the surface of the sea. Maella was the first to throw her baby out into the water, but many more have since followed suit.
Mother and father, and Nadena, are somewhere under that dark water. They were all gone when I woke in the early morning from a fitful, exhausted sleep.
I try not to think about them.
A roaring fire could cook up some of those leeches. I bet they would be good roasted and streaming with juicy fat, the blood boiling from their mouths! I am being eaten alive by the leeches and swarms of insects. I try not to feel the itch and pain of those sucking mouths attached to me.
I am shivering violently against the rocks. The muscles of my thighs strain painfully as I push higher up the hillside, scooting upward, scraping my backside against the scrub and rocks. I can no longer stand up. The rising water keeps coming. The rain keeps falling.
I am trying to pray to Noah’s “One True God” but it is hopeless. If He exists at all, He appears to have turned his back on the world.
If given another chance, I will be faithful to the one God! Please, please save us!
I haven’t seen Gareth in quite some time.
The last I saw of him, he was pushing off the rock on his little raft, saying he would come back for me when he found land.
I think about the crimson silk I would have worn to our wedding, and the children we will never have.
It appears that Noah was right about all of this. That weird old man was right, and we were all wrong, and we are paying the price for our arrogance.
The ark is bobbing along the surface of the water, his family is safe, and they have plenty to eat. It comes to me, then, that they are all relaxing inside that ark. There is nothing else for them to do. They are relaxing, like we used to do most of the time while they toiled.
I hear distant wails, and the cries of people closer around me. My eyes are closed against the horrible sights.
I hear sounds of people drowning, gurgling, and vomiting into the water as it rushes into their stomachs and lungs.
Nobody is helping anybody else anymore. Nobody reaches out to other mortals, because we cannot save each other or ourselves.
Some voices raise to the heavens, to the God of Noah.
“Save us, save us.” Save us.
There is a great repenting going on, and sorrowful voices rise to the heavens. The sound is a din of regret, washing over the ears of the few that are left to hear.
I lose my hold on the branch that is holding me in place, and now with nothing to grasp, I float on my back in the cold, dark water. I feel the leeches dropping off. They won’t thrive, either, because of the salt water from the sea. I open my eyes to take a last look.
I feel the largest leech lodged beneath my left knee drop off, and a gush of my blood spills forth, blooming scarlet in the brackish water.
A bloated carcass of a man floats by, staring sightlessly at me, its mouth agape. Two miserable birds stand on the corpse, exhausted, the water pounding their backs, wings drooping. As I watch, one of them sways and then falls sideways into the water. Its beak is open and its tongue floats out on the water. Its golden eye doesn’t even blink as it’s sucked down into the deep.
For a moment, I think maybe I recognize Gareth in the ghoulish, sightless cadaver, but the bloated white flesh is really barely a man at all now, more like a sausage skin or a boiled dumpling. My mind insists on images of food, even now.
Still floating on the surface, I turn my gaze downward to my own body, and I see my breasts are the color of a fish’s underbelly. A fish mouth opens beneath a nipple, sucking listlessly at my flesh. A shark floats silently up to the corpse across from me, and strikes at it half-heartedly. I see that it, too, is sick. Maybe from eating the rotting flesh of the people of my village.
If, by some miracle, I was to be plucked from this nightmare and laid out on dry linen sheets beside a roaring fire, I would rot nonetheless. There is nothing left of me.
I imagine even my very bones are soggy and soft. My ear picks up only the sound of water sloshing in and out of it. I feel as if my brain is floating in my head. There are no more cries. I have no strength. I feel nothing but an all-pervading sense of horror that is larger than myself, larger than my village, larger even than the world.
The last thing I hear is the sound of my skull crashing against something hard, something that does not yield in the darkness.
I imagine Noah’s boat rising on the crest of the water as I am sucked under the surface, spinning down, down, down into an eternal abyss.
CONDEMNED
Elle O’Neill
MATTHEW 27: 15-18, AMERICAN STANDARD VERSION
15 Now at the feast the governor was wont to release unto the multitude one prisoner, whom they would.
16 And they had then a notable prisoner, called Barabbas.
17 When therefore they were gathered together, Pilate said unto them, Whom will ye that I release unto you? Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?
18 For he knew that for envy they had delivered him up.
CONDEMNED
Elle O’Neill
He’d read The Hunger Games books when he was eleven. He’d found copies stashed in the attic of the dormitory of Routlege Academy, his private boarding school. But he’d never thought he would be in his own special version of it five years later.
Forty-seven years after the third book in the trilogy in the series hit the shelves, the fit hit the proverbial shan. Politically speaking. Well, everything speaking, actually. And a decade after that … well, it was worse. So when he found those books hidden away like they were meant for him and him alone, he felt a certain sense of ownership and possessiveness that he couldn’t remember ever feeling before that moment, covered in dusty sunbeams, cobwebs in his hair—the very image of a kid enjoying a moment of discovery in a place where he ought not be.
By the time he was sixteen, he was stealing glue from
classrooms and unsecured supply closets. Not for snarfing—huffing, they’d called it, back in the day—but for book repairs. He’d read the books that many times. They were his favorites. As he grew into himself, he often thought about Katniss. The end of her braid curling around his finger. Her lips pressed together in a whistle, a singing kiss of defiance for the world. He wanted to be defiant, to be outrageously, dangerously—even violently—revolutionary. He wouldn’t mind meeting that singing kiss with a kiss of his own, either. More than that, too. Routlege Academy—The Finest Preparatory School for Boys in the World.
Routlege Academy—The Most Hellish, Sexless Purgatory for Boys, more like.
“Purgatory” because he was about to leave, per the certified letter he’d received this morning, just after the third bell.
Society had indeed gone to crap. Stowed away in his private school, Barabbas Meriwether had perhaps been a tad too young and way too isolated to know just how much. It didn’t go to crap in a fancy way, like in The Hunger Games—there were no particular districts, no icons, and no spectacular fashion trends. In fact, there was in some ways very little of anything at all. Society consisted of Politicos, The Ones, and The Masses. More descriptively, “the tired, poor masses.” Barabbas had once overheard at a debate meet that the “tired, poor” bit comes from a poem about a statue, but Barabbas had never been able to track down that poem. He figured the kid who’d found it had come across his own dusty sunbeam somewhere. Or he was lying. Tough to say.
Barabbas was part of The Ones—he knew that because of his school. Only boys from The Ones went there. No girls, no Politicos, and not a single fellow from The Masses. He didn’t even know how many of them there were, but he’d heard they outnumbered The Ones and Politicos many times over. But he’d never met or seen any of The Masses, or the Politicos.
The town car pulled up in front of what had once been a city hall, based on the engraving on the facade of the building. It was stone, copper, and stunning, he thought, not for the first time wondering why he was summoned to this building—and why his uber-strict Headmongrel, Dr. Fresse, had acquiesced. Maybe Fresse had had as little choice as Barabbas.
What the hell did he care, though, really? He was sixteen and this was his first time off Routlege’s grounds since he was five. Yup, five. Even the air seemed less stale, less stifling here, just standing elsewhere, on different gravel, at a different angle to the sun and wind, than he’d been in years.
The car ride had been enjoyable, but a bit tedious—enjoyable out the window, tedious in its cramped interior for the duration. By his watch, they’d driven around fourteen hours to get here to fulfill the summons on time. He took the blissful opportunity to stretch, hearing the pleasant-gross internal workings of his neck and shoulders, lacing his fingers through each other, and stretching his arms forward. Even his hands had been feeling confined in there.
As he reached to give his hair a good wake-up tousle, he heard the door at the top of the stone steps grind its way open and pivoted his body mid-tousle toward the sound, only to find a tall silhouetted figure there.
“Mr. Meriwether, thank you for your prompt arrival.” The words rumbled politely in his general direction.
“Uh, sure. Glad to be here.” For now.
“Do come in. There’s much information to convey, and only so much time.” Polite rumbling impatience, this time.
Barabbas cleared his throat, stooped to grab his vintage leather suitcases, his coat and hat laid over them, and walked confidently toward he had no idea what.
Inside, he was reminded of the attic at Routlege—lots of dusty sunbeams in here.
The shadowy tall guy led him toward ornate cherry double doors carved beautifully with trees. Barabbas smiled to himself, thinking of the strangeness of cutting down beautiful trees, making them into beautiful doors onto which the craftsman carved … trees. He mumbled, “Trees thou art, and unto trees thou shalt return … ” and shrugged when his escort turned his head toward Barabbas with an irritated scowl.
Without knocking, the man grasped the brass handles on each door and opened them both inward, exposing a very masculine room, as if unveiling something important.
Not knowing what else to do, Barabbas walked into the room, setting his luggage down at his feet, cushioned by a circular rug that must have been fifteen feet in diameter. The pattern was of an old world map and he briefly thought maybe he was about to become an explorer or something before he tossed the idea as silly. There was nothing left to explore.
Hearing the doors shut behind him, he looked around the room, started to find a desk, occupied, in the far corner.
“Nice of you to come, Meriwether. Come here.” The voice was deep, commanding. Leaving his baggage on the rug, Barabbas made his way toward the desk, stopping a meter or so from its edge.
He squinted his eyes a bit, thinking a healthy dose of suspicion wouldn’t be a bad thing. “Who are you?”
“Senator Joseph Randolph Klein-Hoffer.”
“You’re a Politico?”
“Yes.”
Barabbas considered what to say next but, before he decided on a direction, the Senator asked, “Don’t you have more questions, son?”
“Um … ” Barabbas arched an eyebrow, “Why’m I here?”
“Obviously you have that question.” Klein-Hoffer sighed and picked up the few folders from the blotter and tapped their edges on the desk ceremoniously, getting them into tidy condition. “You, Barabbas, are one of The Chosen Ones.”
“Yes, I know. From the letter.”
“No, I don’t think you do know. You know you’re from The Ones. Fine. The Chosen Ones are different. As their representative, you’re going to be part of an exhibition.”
This got Barabbas’s attention. “Okay … ” He swallowed, feeling half excited and half suspicious. “ What … kind of exhibition?”
“Oh, it’s a very important community building exercise for society that we have annually. The Chosen Ones participate, the Politicos adjudicate, and The Masses will … ” He held his hand in front of him, waggling his fingers as if tickling the word he sought in his direction. He snapped his fingers. “Evaluate.”
Barabbas made a face, reflexively showing his confusion. “Does this exhibition … have … a name?” he queried, unsure of what he should be saying at this moment.
“Course it does. For The Chosen Ones, those like you, it’s just called ‘The Exhibition’; for Politicos, like me, and for The Masses it’s broadcast under the name ‘Condemned’.”
Well that didn’t sound good at all, Barabbas thought.
“So … I’m not the only one here, then?” Barabbas looked around, half expecting to find someone else in the room with them.
“Other than the crew you mean? No. There’s you and one other.” Thrumming his fingertips along the desktop, his other hand fisted and propped on his hip, Klein-Hoffer continued, “Unfortunately, I really can’t say any more than that at this time. Fair is fair, right is right, and all that. You’ll find out more in the morning, when things truly begin. For now, the fellow who brought you in—Abe—will escort you to your accommodations. We’ll talk more tomorrow. Alright?” He paused, eyebrows raised, for a heartbeat, then cradled his folders and brusquely exited the room.
“Um … alright,” Barabbas mumbled to the empty room. He walked back to the circular rug and his baggage, stooped to grasp their handles, stood straight once more, and—bags in hand—awaited Abe’s escort and whatever else lay ahead.
Some accommodations.
It wasn’t that they were bad. They were just … odd, he thought. Especially, you know, when you’re used to an all boy’s boarding school as cold and uninspiring as new lodgings were extravagant, vibrant, and creative. It was as if someone thought, “What will this young man be used to?” and then opted to provide the opposite.
Satin-bound pillows covered the floor. Okay.
All the art in the room—sculptures, painting
s, tapestries? All nudes. Weird.
The fixtures gleamed. Barabbas didn’t know diamonds from dog shit, but he could swear they were actual gold. Whaaaaaat?
And … craziest of all: He had a TV.
A tee-vee.
Perhaps to the people here, this was all normal. Or maybe these accommodations were supposed to be a treat for him. Hell, they could be sub-par and he’d never know it. How was he supposed to feel in here? Rewarded? Ashamed? Normal? Special?
He hadn’t realized he was still standing mere feet within the doorway, his luggage hanging from his hands, until there was a moderately polite (or was it moderately impolite?) throat-clearing behind him.
“Your dinner, Mr. Meriwether.” Abe stood behind him with a cart piled with covered dishes. “Where would you like it?”
Barabbas looked around, searching. “Is there, like, a table or something in this room?”
Abe sighed. “Would you like me to get you a table, Mr. Meriwether?”
He thought. “Uh … no. No, I don’t want to inconvenience you, Abe. It’s okay.” He looked around again. “I’ll—uh—I’ll figure something out. Just leave the cart, I guess.”
“Of course, Mr. Meriwether.” Abe gave another sigh and left the room, shutting the door as quietly and politely as he was capable of doing, Barabbas figured.
“Here goes nothing,” Barabbas said aloud to another empty room. He walked toward a corner occupied by a few potted palms, left his luggage there, and returned to the cart. He was hungry and the scent of warm food snaking through the air around him was making him hungrier by the second. Feeling this hungry, who needs a table?
The television caught his eye again. He began pulling the cart in that general direction, kicking pillows aside as he walked, carving out a path for himself to navigate the room. At least as far as the TV. Stopping a few feet away, he quickly assembled a pile of pillows into something of a seat. He grabbed a couple napkins from the cart and spread them on the pillows immediately in front of him. Friends of his had occasionally stayed in hotels and he knew from their stories the concept of “you break it, you bought it” and didn’t want to risk damaging anything in the room.
In the Beginning (Anthology) Page 14
