The Edge of Over There

by Shawn Smucker

  “You’re the new guy from yesterday, right?” a girl asked him. She wore a red bandana over red hair and had a round face. He thought she was probably in her early twenties.

  “Yeah. I’m Leo,” he said.

  “I’m Sandra. This is Kate, Rob, Justin, Mary.”

  The people she pointed to paused and looked over at Leo. A few smiled, a few nodded, but they each returned to their own quiet conversations.

  “How long have you been here?” Leo asked her.

  “Me? I’m not sure. Feels long. Maybe a year. Maybe five years. No one really keeps track of that kind of thing here.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “I didn’t have much choice. I found a lot of trouble outside. Someone told me about this place and I thought, hey, why not? Same with most of the folks here—everyone had to get away for one reason or another.”

  Leo hadn’t thought of that before, but it made sense that the people who had escaped the world had a reason to do so. He looked at the mob a little differently after that, wondering what each person had run away from. He thought about why he was there.

  “So that’s the only reason you came, to get away from your life?”

  Sandra shrugged. “Mostly, yeah. But there are other reasons too—rumors. About other things.” Her voice trailed off.

  “Like what?” he asked, his interest piqued.

  She sighed. “You’ll probably think it’s crazy. I do too. But some folks say the fountain of youth is here somewhere. The secret to living forever.” She gave a jaded kind of laugh.

  Abra’s Tree, Leo thought.

  “Whatever,” she said, as if debating herself. “To be honest? If I had a chance, I’d get out of here, head back to the real world. This place is mostly a dump.”

  Leo couldn’t argue with that. The entire city seemed like it had been reduced to rubble.

  “And you? Why are you here?” Sandra asked him.

  “I’m looking for someone,” Leo said.

  “Huh,” she said, looking at him with a strange expression on her face, as if she’d noticed something about him she hadn’t before. “I’ve never heard that one before.”

  But she didn’t ask any more questions. That seemed to be one of the unwritten rules—no questions. They walked in silence for a few blocks. The rest of the mob was quiet that morning, and Leo wondered if they were always so subdued when the sun first came up.

  “Quiet group,” he said with a chuckle.

  The five people he had met looked at him quickly before glancing at each other.

  “So you haven’t heard?” Sandra asked him.

  “Heard what?” Leo asked.

  “Where we’re going. That’s why everyone’s so quiet this morning.”

  “Where are we going?” Leo felt rather ignorant having to ask so many questions.

  Sandra stared at him with tired eyes.

  “We’re going to war.”

  For the next hour or so they took a roundabout way south, their passage obstructed and turned this way and that by strange roadblocks, piles of furniture and rubble. Sometimes they cut through darkened buildings lit only by sunlight streaming through small windows, particles of dust orbiting through the rays. Sometimes they jogged along alleyways, moving in columns two people wide. As evening had fallen the previous night, the group had filled him with a sense of dread, almost awe, but now, in the light of day, they seemed little more than what they were: a large group of misfit young people meandering through a broken city.

  Leo noticed a young man about his age who drifted back through the group. He probably caught Leo’s eye because he wasn’t talking to anyone else—everyone seemed to be in a small group of some sort, but this one, with his hunched shoulders and gaze shifting from side to side, traveled alone. He reached the very back of the group and was only a few feet away from Leo as the tail of the mob followed the rest around a corner.

  One minute the young man was there, and then he was gone.

  Chaos broke out for a second. A different group of about twenty people came running back from the front, and the entire mob stopped so abruptly that in some cases, where people hadn’t been paying close attention, they lurched into the people in front of them. Leo peeked back around the corner from where they had come, and in addition to the twenty or so who had run through the mob, another ten young men and women sprinted out from the surrounding buildings. They wore black clothes and moved fast, running over the rubble and the crumbling sidewalks in a balanced, subtle way. They all had one target: the boy who had left the group.

  Soon they had him, like those images you see on nature shows of lions converging on a running, wounded wildebeest. The poor boy tried to run this way and that, zigzagging among his pursuers, but soon they were on top of him. They picked him up and carried him, legs flailing, into the first floor of a neighboring high-rise. Five minutes later the group came out.

  The boy did not.

  The original twenty ran back up through the middle of the mob, and the group proceeded to walk forward.

  “What was that about?” Leo hissed to Sandra.

  She looked at him with wide eyes and held a finger in front of her lips. She looked around before edging closer to Leo, talking into his ear.

  “You don’t leave your Frenzy. That’s what that was all about.”

  “What’s a Frenzy?” he asked.

  Sandra beckoned at the entire group. “This is.”

  Leo nodded.

  “There are always others watching,” she said. “Don’t try to leave. It’s impossible.”

  Leo nodded, but inside he felt despair creep up into his throat. He was wasting too much time! Abra would be gone soon, and he’d be left here forever! What had he gotten himself into?

  Lunch was passed around: bags and bags of the berries Leo and Abra had eaten on the path to the city, and large plastic jugs of clear water. Again he was amazed at how filling the fruit was. And drinking the water somehow left him with the same satisfaction as eating food. He couldn’t understand it.

  The group stopped walking for a long time, and Leo looked around hopelessly for a way of escape. But while he scanned the buildings and the alleyways, he couldn’t get the image out of his mind of the young man trying to escape, and the group chasing him down.

  “Where does all this food come from?” he asked Sandra while they sat in their small group.

  She shrugged.

  “No one knows,” Mary said quietly, the first thing Leo had heard her say. “It’s one of the main reasons people follow Jeremiah. We don’t know where to get food here in the city.”

  She took a large handful from her cup of berries. She gulped from the container they shared, and some of the water ran down the sides of her cheeks, trickled a long line down her neck, and made wet spots around the collar of her T-shirt.

  Leo wondered where Abra was. He wondered if she had found the Tree yet. But there were no answers. It seemed to be a city made up of only questions. The red sky brightened and the breeze grew stronger, carrying the smell of some nearby sea. But no answers. There were never any answers.

  In the afternoon, a rustling started at the front and made its way back, like a ripple in a pond, and they started out again. Walking, walking, walking. They destroyed every building they passed like locusts stripping leaves. It was almost as if they couldn’t help it, as if something about their presence in that in-between world drove them to tear it all down.

  After one especially destructive hour, Leo turned to Sandra. “The city is huge, but destruction at this rate? Seems like the whole city should be rubble by now.”

  “This city is a strange place,” she said, and the others in their little group nodded. Sandra paused. “I’m just going to say it—you don’t have to believe me. You’ll see it soon enough for yourself. But a lot of times we’ll come around the corner to a street I’m sure we’ve already destroyed, and there it is again, new as can be.”

  “You mean, the city regenerates?”

&n
bsp; Sandra shrugged. “Not when we’re around. Not even when we’re close by—you’d have to hear that taking place, right? And sometimes we’ll turn onto a street and it will still be in ruins. But I think it’s when we don’t go somewhere for a long time and then return. I don’t know. If you last long enough, you’ll see.”

  If you last long enough. The phrase struck Leo, reminded him of his situation.

  Just before dark, the Frenzies arrived in a large open area of the city. Leo still couldn’t figure out if the city had ever been populated or if it had always been an empty metropolis, somehow set down in this strange space in the universe. But when they turned into the square, Leo was shocked. Not by the tall buildings that surrounded them. He wasn’t surprised at the openness of the square, which reminded him of Times Square, though he had only seen it on television. He didn’t even take note of how the Frenzies split up and headed in different directions, their first sign of disarray since the night before.

  No, what got Leo’s attention was the fact that there were thousands of other young people waiting there, and a few of them started cheering when Jeremiah’s Frenzy arrived. This caused a lot of smiling and nodding within the group, and even a few hugs between individuals of different Frenzies, as if they had been together before, not long ago.

  Leo stayed close to Sandra and her group as they wandered the area looking for a place to spend the night, and soon they were on the third floor of a darkened building. The evening seemed to come quick there in the city, and they stood inside the glass walls, looking out on the square.

  “Who are you looking for?” Sandra asked him when she had finished eating. Leo wondered if he would ever tire of eating the berries they gave them. He couldn’t imagine it.

  Leo held up a finger, asking her to wait while he finished what he was eating. He swallowed heavily.

  “My sister,” he said. “Her name is Ruby. My father brought her in here many years ago.”

  Sandra nodded. “I heard a legend about a young girl living somewhere in the city,” she said, “but I never thought it was true. That would be ridiculous, right? A little kid, here? Who would do that?”

  “It’s no legend,” Leo said. He felt a lurch of excitement. Someone had heard of a child in the city! It had to be Ruby.

  “How’d you get in here?” he asked Sandra. Around them, people settled in for the evening. There were groups of four or eight playing card games. A few pairs threw dice up against a wall. At the far end of the room, someone sitting on a chair and surrounded by a large group of people on the floor appeared to be telling a story. Someone else played quiet tunes on a mournful harmonica.

  “I think everyone came through the crypt. I don’t think there is another way.”

  “Yeah, me too,” he said.

  They sat there in silence for a moment, listening to the quiet voices around them.

  “Do you think you’ll find her?” she asked.

  “I hope so,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  She paused a moment before starting again. “You know you can’t get back out, right? The door is locked from the other side. We tried it once, and we nearly got lost in the darkness.”

  He stared at the ground, not sure what to say. He was worried about telling the truth, but he didn’t want to lie to Sandra. She had proven herself trustworthy so far, and there was something about her that felt separate from the Frenzy, as if she would leave if she could. That was it: Leo thought that Sandra didn’t really belong there, with those other people.

  “I know someone,” he said, looking around to make sure no one else was listening. “I know someone who can open the door.”

  Sandra looked at him, uncertain. “Really,” she said in a flat, disbelieving voice.

  Leo nodded. “Yeah. But she’s not going to be around forever. She might already be gone. If I can’t find my sister and meet this girl back at the gateway . . . she’ll leave us behind.”

  Sandra took all of it in without saying a word. He saw something in her eyes that he didn’t recognize at first, something soft and distant. He realized it was compassion. She started to say something, and he thought it was coming out of that space of kindness. He leaned in closer as the people on the floor grew louder, but he still couldn’t hear. There was a surge of people moving to the windows, and Sandra and Leo were overwhelmed.

  He looked around, wondering what was going on. Ever since that young man had tried to run away and instead had been quickly eliminated, Leo had been on edge. Anxious. The sudden movement of everyone around him caught him off guard and made him jump to his feet. Someone opened all the windows, and everyone on that level crowded toward the space overlooking the square. People struggled to see over each other’s shoulders, trying to get a better view. Leo had already been close to the glass before the mass movement, so he had a front-row seat.

  The city felt ominous in the half-light. The narrow spaces between the buildings where the red light crept through made the streets look like they had narrow strips of red laid over them, thin paths lining the solid black shadows. Every window, for as far as Leo could see, was dark.

  Four large spotlights turned on, making loud thunking noises as the switches were thrown. Leo hadn’t been close to artificial light in days, maybe a week, and to him those four spotlights were like four suns suddenly brought into existence. Their rays went up and up forever, into the sky. And in their midst, the center around which they all revolved, stood a figure.

  He seemed small at first, lost in all of that light, and because no matter which direction you viewed him from he had light behind him, he looked like a shadow man, the outline of a man. He was a person turned into pure darkness. For at least a minute there was only silence, and Leo was sure that everyone else was doing exactly what he was doing: holding their breath.

  The figure raised his hands slowly until both arms were lifted, turning him into the shape of a cross. Leo remembered a Bible story from his childhood, when his mother had occasionally taken them to church in downtown New Orleans. In the story, there was a leader watching a war, and as long as that man’s arms were raised, his army continued to win. But when his arms dropped, his army began to lose.

  A voice called out to the thousands in the crowd, incredibly loud considering it was not amplified with a microphone or speakers.

  It was Jeremiah.

  25

  “WELCOME!” JEREMIAH SAID, and the applause started off small and scattered, but gathered and grew like a storm until it was crashing through the streets.

  His arms came down.

  And then the war was lost, Leo thought.

  The applause died down.

  Whispers swept along the glass in hiss-shaped silence as Jeremiah prepared to speak.

  “He managed to unite the Frenzies,” one voice whispered.

  “He’s the leader of all of us,” someone else said in a hushed voice.

  But one sentiment was whispered more than any other.

  “Now the war begins.”

  “A handful of you were here when I first arrived in the city,” Jeremiah said in a somber voice. “When we had nothing. We lived off the scraps we found along the edges. They hunted us, those who lived in the center of the city. They drove us into the forest time and time again. They wanted to keep everything for themselves.”

  He pounded the air with his hands. He struck at the injustices, each one of them, and tore them down with his own fists so that all of those watching from the surrounding buildings could barely contain their excitement. Scattered applause began again, but Jeremiah struck his way through it.

  “Not this time!” he shouted. “Their actions led us to destroy the city, one block at a time, one building at a time, one brick at a time. If we couldn’t have it, no one would have it. And our numbers grew, because everyone who arrived recognized the strength of our cause. Now, those who would have driven us into starvation are nothing more than an island in the midst of this great city. We have surrounded them.”

 
A round of cheers shook the square again.

  “All we want is to live peaceful lives,” Jeremiah said, and his voice pulled at the emotions of everyone listening, even Leo. “All we want is to settle down and have children, create a new society. That’s it. That’s all we want. But they have proven that they Will. Not. Let. This. Happen.”

  Boos sounded out like the moaning of the Wailers.

  “I know. I know! We will see peace. I promise you. But first, there must be war. There must always be war before peace, because peace is precious, and nothing precious is free. Peace does not come without a price. Peace must be fought for.”

  He paused, and in the distance Leo could hear the approach of the Wailers. It was like the sound of a freight train approaching from miles and miles away: first the distant throbbing, and as the train grows closer the detail of the sound emerges. Finally, as it races over your head, there is the ear-piercing scream of the whistle.

  “To peace!” Jeremiah screamed, and the crowd went wild.

  The Wailers began racing through the streets on their way to the water at the opposite end of the city. First one at a time. Soon they came in small groups of two or three. At the last it was a steady stream of light and shadow, bright white and cloaked gray and the deepest blacks, all swirling and dashing around Jeremiah, who by now had raised his arms again.

  Leo remembered how Abra had stood in the midst of them. Leo shook his head to clear the memory, and at that moment the spotlights winked out.

  “C’mon,” Sandra said to Leo and the rest of her group. The six of them ducked and squirmed through the crowd that was cheering now and plastered against the glass, hoping that the speech wasn’t over. She led them into a nearby stairwell and they went up and up and up. Leo almost asked her why they were going so high, but he decided against it, instead staring at his feet as they scaled each and every step. Up. Up. Up.