“Do you think Sawyer and the rest will go for it?” Xander says.
“I don’t care,” I say. Nothing left to lose, I remind myself. “I’m going. I’m not staying here to starve or freeze without even trying.” A few cells of my weed-addled brain cling to a faint hope that my parents are safe somewhere. And something in me wants to at least try to get back to them. Even if I die on the way, I have to try, because maybe trying will make all that other stuff go away. The suspensions, getting arrested, probation, the judge and his disapproving glare. My utter failure to make something of everything they did for me. And all the things we said to one another that none of us meant. I wanted to make it all better. Tucker would have understood. He knew how important it was. The others see only my surface: tough, reckless, and snarky. I hate to dissuade them of that, even now when a little attitude adjustment might be sensible. But since when am I sensible? “I’d rather throw myself into a Nahx cooking pot,” I add, for effect.
“It may well come to that,” Lochie says.
EIGHTH
Wait.
Wait here.
Stay here for a while. Try to think.
Disconnect and find something to eat, and a drink of water. The hole in my chest is shrinking, and the armor plates have knitted closed. It aches, but I can breathe again, without wanting to scream anyway.
Pain filled up my mind for a while. I couldn’t think at all. Pain is not supposed to do that to me. They even tested me, I think. I don’t remember that very well. Except for the pain part. I might have pretended it didn’t hurt because that’s what they wanted. That was stupid, I now realize.
That was before Sixth joined me. Before the battle. Before I figured out the only thing I’m good at is doing really stupid things. And breaking stuff.
I need to find some others. I’ll tell them she didn’t get up. I’ll tell them I waited with her while the sun rose and set and rose and set again. She didn’t get up. I left her there. I’m scared that was a mistake. Maybe I should have waited for a transport.
I’m not supposed to get scared.
Eighth is defective.
I’ll tell them. Maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe they can take me back to a hub and fix me. Fix my mind. Restore my directives. Or give me new ones. I barely remember what the old ones mean. They buzz in my brain like bees behind glass.
Dart the humans. Leave them where they fall.
I hope no humans find me.
I don’t think I can do that again.
Sweet painless muddy death, my chest really hurts.
RAVEN
This is not a democracy!” Sawyer shouts in my general direction.
“I’m sorry. I don’t remember joining the marines, either.”
We’ve been arguing about leaving the camp for over an hour. Topher and Emily are outside training the others with rifles and crossbows, so our conversation is punctuated with gunshots and the snap-twang of the bows.
“You are a minor, Raven. So are Topher and Xander.”
“So we don’t get a vote?”
We’ve already ascertained that if those of age vote, Mandy, Sawyer, and Felix vote to stay, and Emily and Lochie vote to leave. Three to two. Sawyer knows the vote would go the other way if us “minors” had a say.
“Leaving is suicide,” Sawyer says. Snap-twang goes a crossbow outside. “We’ve seen their ships over the foothills. They’ll pick us off like ducks on a pond.”
“Staying is slow suicide. Those ships will find us eventually.”
“They might not. They haven’t yet. We’re well hidden. And we can survive here. We have excellent shelters and plenty of land to grow things come spring. We’ve kept all the seeds from the fresh fruit and vegetables. We can hunt. We have guns.”
Jesus. He’s hard core. Even Lochie with all his bug eating, is not as dedicated to this post-everything way of thinking. Sawyer and Felix are the real deal. I suppose they’ll expect us girls to breed, too.
As though he’s reading my mind, Felix adds this: “We could be the only humans left on Earth. We have a duty to keep our species going.”
Though this makes me groan, his fatalism is not without cause. Weeks have passed since we’ve managed to capture a video signal. Felix’s theory is that a point-to-point base station up on the mountain has been destroyed. But Sawyer is all I Am Legend about it, without the flesh-eating zombies. Actually, for all we know, the Nahx might be zombies. Though, so far, we haven’t seen any flesh eating.
“So, what?” I snap. “We pair up and start popping out babies?” There’s a bang! ding! from outside as someone shoots down a can. I twitch.
I don’t think Sawyer knows how ridiculous he sounds, or how delusional. Because to me, and maybe to Topher, too, Tucker’s loss cemented this reality: Death is already inevitable. Not inevitable in the sense that everyone dies one day, but the sense that we are all going to die soon. The only remaining question is how. Do we die fighting, or crying in our beds? No one who knows me would be surprised that I choose to go down fighting. I’ve always been a fighter.
Illegal hold, I think, of Tucker pulling me off the dock with him. All of us who would vote to leave loved him in some way, I realize. Me and Topher, obviously. Xander had been friends with both of them for years. He and Lochie bonded instantly when they discovered their mutual love of Belgian beer and hanging upside down from tree branches. And Emily . . . well, girls always loved Tucker.
Tucker is our vanguard, our pioneer into death, even though he was running away from it when it caught up with him. I want to be running too, when it comes for me. At least running, if not fighting. Tucker’s memory deserves that.
“Look, Your Majesty,” I say. Felix rolls his eyes. “There is no age of majority after an apocalypse. Can we agree on that? And even if there was, how could you stop us from leaving? Five of us are going. I’m not going to lobby Mandy, though I’m pretty sure she will be joining us when it comes down to it. We’ll take a fair share of what’s left of the food and weapons and see you later. How does that sound?”
I don’t wait around to hear their response.
“Someone give me a gun,” I say when I reach the others. Topher hands me a rifle obligingly.
“Just the targets, right?” he says with a nervous smile.
I shoot three rounds with the rubber bullets we have for practice, none of which come close to the cans propped on the fence at the other side of the field. The recoil of the rifle pounds into my shoulder painfully on the next round, but the bullet hits a fence post with a satisfying crack.
“Nahx armor is bulletproof,” Topher says quietly as he reloads the rifle. There was a surprising amount of both live and rubber ammo in the gun locker. Maybe they were expecting a plague of bears.
“Bulletproof? How do we know that?”
“It was in one of the last videos we caught. Those emergency broadcast network ones. Facts-about-our-enemy sort of thing. You didn’t watch that one?”
I shake my head. I watched a few of the early videos—battle scenes mostly, if it can be called battle when civilians are mowed down as they run away. Some were long-range shots of cities on fire, or explosions. There was one, which streamed every day for two weeks, of what looked like a Nahx ship blowing up, but that might have been faked. Anyway, I stopped watching. I decided to pretend it wasn’t happening, that Tucker and I were on vacation together. All that seems like a very long time ago already, like a half-forgotten story from childhood I didn’t know I was quite done with.
I press my eyes closed. Topher has seen me at my worst, and I him, but this doesn’t seem like the moment to show weakness, or emotion, or that I’m a human being. I feel him give my arm a squeeze and a pat. When I open my eyes, he’s walking back to the cabin, the rifle propped on his shoulder.
“Wanna try the crossbow?” Emily says.
I ignore her and follow Topher to the cabin.
“So what do we do?” I ask him. He’s sitting on the edge of one of the beds, looking out the window
at the lake. “If we can’t shoot them, what do we do?”
He has the rifle resting on his knees, one hand gripping the barrel. “One guy thinks there’s a weakness in the neck. Another thinks knives or arrows might work. You know, since they go through Kevlar and stuff. Maybe it’s the same kind of armor.”
I take a moment to run my own little video in my head. “Arrows, okay, maybe I can see it. But knives? How do you think a knife fight with a Nahx would go down?”
“Best-case scenario is you’d both end up dead.”
Down on the lake a group of Canadian geese takes off, heading south, as if nothing has changed in the world. I wonder if they even notice, or care. The sky is clear, the air is still. It could be any other autumn day.
Snap-twang!
Except for that.
“We’re all dead anyway, though,” I say. “Right?”
Topher nods, watching the geese.
EIGHTH
The relief of being able to think more clearly is worth the effort it takes to breathe without my mask. What a choice, breathe or think. I check my elevation. Just over 5,000 feet. I could breathe better if I went higher up, but I’m scared now. Sixth said the Rogues, the noncompliant lower-ranked Elevenths and Twelfths, are up there. I prefer to avoid them, as she instructed. They are dangerous, as inclined toward violence against their own kind as humans. Each other, too, Sixth said.
I need to focus on remembering the things she said, on what she taught me. If I stay at this elevation, I have a few hours before I need to reconnect. I can think. I can try to organize my thoughts. I wasted an hour sleeping, but I needed the sleep. When I woke up a lot of the fear and confusion had drained away, and I could assess my situation a little more rationally.
I’ve really screwed up. I should not have left her. I’m sure the transport came eventually. Or maybe it will still come. When I reconnect, I’ll walk back down there. Maybe she’s still there. Maybe she got up at last. She might be wondering where I am.
I wonder whether she’ll look for me. I think I would look for her if it were the other way around. But . . .
I’ve never heard of one of us getting up after so long.
The color and the smell of the trees up here help me concentrate. This is the kind of thing I could never tell her. I know enough to understand I’m not supposed to care about the color and smell of pine trees. I knew enough not to tell her how sometimes I would lose thoughts right after thinking them. She would tell me something, and a moment later it would be gone, leaving a blank space in its place.
Eighth is defective.
I’m more defective than even Sixth knew. But at least I can think now, better than when I’m connected anyway. I still have a giant empty wasteland for half my mind, but the other half works okay. It’s hard not to worry about the emptiness though, about the missing thoughts. Have I forgotten important things? Even not knowing what they are, they feel important, if missing things can be important.
I miss Sixth. She is important.
Important. Defective.
I need to get back to a hub somehow. Find a transport, get back to a hub. If she’s still alive, then I’ll rejoin her and we’ll continue the preparations. If not . . . I don’t want to think about that. I’m sure I’m not supposed to care.
Maybe another one will like me more than she does, won’t get angry when I make new signs.
You have all the signs you need, defective low rank. She would hiss as she said it.
Another one won’t call me defective and shove my hand off her shoulder. We’re supposed to walk like that, so I can push her down if there’s any threat.
I think she’s dead. I hope that thought will slip away too, but it doesn’t.
If I close my eyes and reach out, it’s almost like my fingers could find her shoulder. It’s easier to walk, easier to forget the pain in my ribs if I think like that. That’s wrong too, but I don’t care.
RAVEN
We leave two days later, at dawn. Sawyer, Felix, and Mandy agree to come with us finally, because Mandy could see that being left in a remote wilderness camp with a gay couple might not be all that she dreamed of from life. And Sawyer and Felix couldn’t let us all go on our own. They are the senior camp leaders, after all.
Before I leave I want to visit Tucker’s grave. Alone, I plan, but of course, when I reach it, as the sun is peeking up over the valley ridge, Topher is there, sitting cross-legged, his fingers trailing in the loose earth.
“What a surprise to see you here,” I say. A pathetic attempt at levity.
Topher sighs. “My parents will want to know where he is.”
If they’re alive, I think.
“If they’re alive,” Topher says, looking up at me. I’ve dressed for the journey and armed myself. “Knives?” he says, eyeing the two hunting knives, one in each thigh holster, strapped over gray cargo trousers. A third is tucked into the top of my hiking boots.
“I never could get the arrows to go where I wanted them to,” I confess. “And the rifles make my ears ring.”
“You’re quite the soldier.” He gets up and brushes the dirt off his jeans. He has a rifle and a crossbow slung over his back, a quiver of arrows, rounds for the rifle, and a hunting knife strapped to his thigh. Quite the soldier. “I’ll leave you alone, if you want.”
“No, it’s okay. I wanted to say good-bye. You can stay. I want you to stay.”
He clasps his hands in front and looks down.
I stare at the grave. The pine and birch wreath still looks fresh and green. Our waxy handprints are undisturbed. I wonder how long the grave will look like this. With no permanent headstone, soon it will be lost among the fall leaves, the snow. Eventually, no one but us will know he’s here. I try to memorize the more enduring landmarks, the birch tree, the angle of the lake behind it. Will I be able to find this place again in years to come?
Am I going to have years to come?
Once I imagined a future with Tucker. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, the two of us being who we were. I knew there would be dark moods and mistakes made. I knew it would be hard. But nothing could be harder than leaving him here in his grave. I never imagined that.
“Good-bye, Tuck,” I whisper, glad that Topher is here to witness it. “I love you, always.” I’ve said this to Tucker a million times, but it feels important for Topher to hear it. He never understood our love. He was like all the adults around us who called it “a rebellious infatuation.” Maybe now he sees it differently.
“That’s it, then,” Topher says, nodding. As we walk away, he squeezes my hand. Just for a second, but it means the world to me. I’m not even sure why.
We don’t know what we’ll find outside the security of our little hidden valley. Tucker was nearly five miles away, over the ridge and deep into the foothills, when Topher found him. So there are some Nahx that way. We’re going the other way, around the lake and following the river that feeds it, to the mountain at the other end. There are so many nooks and crannies in the Rocky Mountains; people could be hiding anywhere. If we find them, we’ll join them, or they’ll join us. There is strength in numbers, or so they say.
We make a motley group. We’re all dressed in dark clothes, with generous amounts of camouflage and army green making up our attire. We’re also armed to the eyebrows—rifles, crossbows, knives. Only Emily has a traditional bow and arrow—she’s the only one who is fast enough to make it practical. We all have bear spray too. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in this post-invasion world, at the mercy of a hostile superhuman foe, we were set upon by bears? Or wolves? I wonder whether bear spray deters the Nahx. Do they even breathe?
We each have a heavy pack. The boys are carrying the last of the food, which is heavier. The girls have clothes and blankets. We have sleeping bags tied to our packs, wet-weather gear, and a few cooking supplies. None of this is new to us. We spent the summer with nothing to do but train for the end of the world. And we all already had some game. Tucker and I could fight. Lochie and Xander ar
e practically mountain trolls. Topher just knows everything. Emily grew up in a yurt or something, and Mandy spent last summer living up in the far north working with Inuit nurses. Sawyer and Felix were in the British armed forces. They both joined up at seventeen and served eight years.
We are well prepared to survive anything, excluding an invasion by a hostile alien race. Even nuclear holocaust would be easier to survive than this. We have iodine pills, for God’s sake, for the radiation. Sawyer has a Geiger counter. He was going to teach a workshop on how to use it. It’s all so funny I could cry.
We hike for three hours, stopping for a break where the lake narrows into the riverbed. Some of the trees are just starting to turn, which is not a good sign. It’s been getting colder. Perhaps we haven’t noticed, what with the end of the world and all, but the nights are going to be cold. And no more are we all cozied up together in an insulated cabin. Xander better be right about the resort being a two-day hike. Our sleeping bags are not all-season. We weren’t exactly planning on spending the winter, or even the fall, out here.
Add freeze to the list of possible deaths. Starve, get shot with a toxic dart, blown up, or die of melancholy. I understand freezing is peaceful, at least. The pain stops and you fall asleep in the snow, maybe not even knowing you’re going to die. That might be quite nice.
We barely speak while we rest, drinking a little water and nibbling on dry noodles and chocolate. We had an obscene amount of chocolate in the camp pantry. Apparently, they had planned for s’mores every night. That’s a lot of chocolate and marshmallows. Diabetes might be another way to die.
I need to break out of this morbid state of mind. Obsessing about the manner of my death is going to suck all of the fun out of actually dying.
Late that afternoon, we come across a narrow swath of burnt forest. Charred black trunks spike upward like medieval torture devices. The forest floor is scorched and featureless.
“This looks recent,” Sawyer says. “This summer recent. There’s no regrowth.”
Zero Repeat Forever Page 3
