by Jae Hill
“Thank you,” she said, kissing me on the cheek and grabbing the blanket and wrapping it around herself.
She walked down the hill toward the campsite and sat on the grass in front of the stove. To my surprise, she started the stove right up, having watched me do it a couple of times.
I gathered all my wet clothes and brought them next to the little furnace that was pumping out heat into the chilly night air. They were almost dry, but they needed heat to dry fully. After arranging them around the stove, I sat next to blanket-clad Rebekah. She parted the blanket to allow me to warm up next to her. I could feel her soft, undressed skin next to mine under the blanket. We cuddled for warmth until my clothes had dried in the chilly night breeze. I turned off the stove and we retired to the tent for sleep. She curled up next to me that night, and held me tightly until morning.
SMALL TOWN EXPERIENCES
The next day, we packed everything up and started the hike down the canyon toward Livingston. We had at least two days left when we came upon the ruins of Gardiner. At first I thought we might have reached Livingstone early, but after checking my digibook, I confirmed our location. I hadn’t initially seen this town on the map in my notebook, but there it was: another crumbled bygone of crumbled, bygone era.
We poked around the town for anything useful that could salvage. The old brick firearms store still had its walls standing, but the wooden roof had collapsed long ago. We found some guns, but there was no ammunition. I found a skeleton behind the counter, but didn’t let Rebekah see it.
Frustrated, we started to leave, following the highway out of Gardiner, when we saw an old corrugated metal garage that hadn’t fallen over. I pulled open the door and there was an old galvanized metal fishing boat on a trailer.
I was so excited. I dropped my backpack and climbed up into the boat. I didn’t expect the outboard motor to turn on, but I pulled the ripcord anyway and it didn’t even sputter. I hopped down and looked around the garage. There were some life vests and oars on the wall. There was also some other camping gear, including a large canvas tent and a few smelly old bedrolls, as well as some metal cookware. I threw it all in the boat.
Rebekah stood watching me as I scurried about. “How are we going to get that in the water?”
I paused. The trailer’s four rubber tires had long since deflated and were cracked. I found some old metal hedge-clippers and cut away the rubber. The trailer would be heavy, but we only had to move it a couple hundred meters to the river.
That was a harder challenge than expected. Rebekah and I rigged up some old nylon rope and pulled as hard as we could. It took nearly three sweaty hours to get the boat to the water over dirt and rocks and dried-up sagebrush, but finally, as we neared the slope, the trailer started moving on its own and rolled down the hill. We dove out of the way as the trailer picked up speed, bounced heavily, and flipped twice, throwing the boat into the water with a tremendous splash.
We climbed into the flat-bottomed boat and pushed off. Sweaty, hungry, and exhausted, we let the swift current take us downstream. Every once in a while, the boat would hit a rock or grind along a sandbar, but generally, it moved quickly and without stopping too much.
The next few days were thankfully uneventful. We floated north, then northeast, then east as the river curved. It fell away from the mountains out into a broad river valley. Livingston was a shamble of a town, and hardly anything remained at all, so we kept floating on. Occasionally the boat would take on some water in the rapids or it would get jammed in some thick tamarisk on the river banks, but it kept moving. We never saw another person. We slept at night in the tent on the shore, cuddled close against each other.
One day, while floating, Rebekah laid her head down on my lap and I stroked her hair with my fingers, much like my mother had done to me when I was small.
“So your name is Pax,” she said softly, “which is Latin for peace. What about Semper?”
“Semper means ‘always’,” I said, still running my fingers through her dark, slightly oily hair.
“So are you all Latin names?” she asked.
“No, some are named after Greek gods and goddesses, or some other pantheon of gods, or after the heroes of ancient stories. I assume all of your names are religious in nature?”
She nodded. “Most come from the Bible. A few don’t but they’re rare.”
We floated along silently for a moment.
“Did your robot girlfriend used to be pretty?”
“Who, Adara?” I chuckled. “No. Well, yes. Well, she wasn’t when we were little but now she is. Well then she was. Then she got rid of her body, I guess. Sorry for the long answer, yes, she was pretty until very recently.”
“Would you have married her?”
“We don’t have marriage,” I explained. “I didn’t even know what marriage was until a few weeks ago. We have a formal business arrangement based on logic, good genetics, pedigree, and accomplishments.”
“That sounds boring,” she groaned. “Don’t you believe in love? True love.”
Yes, I wanted to say, ever since I met you.
“No,” I replied instead. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“Love is when you’d die for someone,” she replied, rolling her head to look into my eyes. “Love is when God gives you the greatest gift of your whole life. Love is when you can’t eat or sleep or breathe or anything without that person being on your mind.”
I smiled at her. “Well then maybe I do know what it is.”
She blushed and hid her face as we floated on.
The gunshot wound on Rebekah’s thigh began to fester, and it was giving her a lot of pain. By the third day of our float trip, I pulled out my half-used tube of Mitocaine and applied it liberally to her wound. She withdrew, at first, from the touch of my hands on her bare thigh, but then relented and even sighed as my hands massaged the medication deep into her wound. My fingers traced up and down her leg, aching to move higher, drawn by some magnetism. I kept control of myself.
As we floated on, Rebekah became excited. She told me that she knew this place and that there was a beautiful castle up on the hill about three hours walk to the south. I laughed, but she insisted that the castle was real and she had visited the Strong family as a child. She suggested that the family who lived there might have some food to replenish our supplies. I didn’t really know what to believe, but we decided to delay for a day and head south to find food. We tucked the boat into the droopy willows at the water’s edge and hiked along an ancient road for about fifteen kilometers. The whole way she shared stories about the Strongs: an ancient family who owned all this land and were wealthy and powerful out here in the “free lands.”
Soon, we saw a well-kept village with a sign over the entrance that read “Asgard.” A few small houses surrounded a central park. A large warehouse stood a few hundred meters behind them. The “castle” of which she spoke was a huge house perched on a hill overlooking the town.
As we approached, the smell was horrifying. There were bodies splayed out in the tall grass. Rebekah approached and wrinkled her nose.
“These folk have been shot,” she grimaced. “Not demons or your robot warriors. Just evil men. Recently, too. Within the last week.”
“Let’s not stick around to see if those evil men are still here,” I suggested.
She looked longingly at the “castle.”
“What if they’re still up there?” she pleaded. “What if they need us?”
“We’re not armed,” I insisted, before grabbing her hand and nearly dragging her back to the boat, where we camped until the next morning.
That night, Rebekah woke up screaming. It was a shrieking, horrific noise unlike anything I’d ever heard before. She was sweaty and shaking, and at first pushed me away, but then pulled me close and held me until she fell asleep. I had my own issues with everything that had occurred over the last few months, but I lived my entire life burying things deep below the surface and being ashamed of emo
tions. She didn’t have that luxury. I hoped she would be able to come to terms with this someday, or hide the feelings away like I had.
By morning, we were back in the boat again. I was growing tired of the monotony, but the company couldn’t have been better.
“So you grow all your food indoors,” she giggled.
We had agreed not to talk about food, but apparently that was on her mind. Our supplies were running low and there was little to be found on the shore, so we were rationing what I had in my bag. The famine was why Rebekah’s family had abandoned Great Falls and headed into the Preserve for food. There was no game. No cattle. No fish in the river. Hardly any greenery at all as we floated along down the river toward Magic Valley. I couldn’t blame her clan for risking their lives to get a bite to eat. I’d never really been hungry like this.
“In big glass greenhouses,” I nodded, as she curled up next to me on the floor of the boat. “We can precisely control the temperature and light and grow huge harvests with minimal work.”
“How do they get pollinated?” she asked.
I was surprised that she even knew about biology like this, but I suppose someone who lives off the land would have to know at least something about how it works.
“They used to rely on honeybees,” I said. “Even after the wild bees went extinct, they kept hives in greenhouses. Later they perfected the robotic bee. They don’t make honey, but they can actually make sure they pollinate each flower with the right type of pollen. It’s very efficient.”
“What’s honey?” she asked.
I forgot that bees had been extinct here for centuries. Something about pesticides and hive collapse. It was covered in one of Sanders’ history lessons back at the Academy.
“It’s a really sweet sticky substance. Thicker than syrup—you have syrup right?”
She nodded and grunted.
“Yeah, so imagine the thickest, sweetest syrup,” I said. “It’s delicious.”
She looked at me strangely. “How do bees make syrup?”
“They chew up a bunch of pollen and nectar and then vomit it up,” I smiled.
“Okay,” she said, frowning. “Let’s not talk about food anymore.”
We drifted on down the river through the bleak, dusty countryside. There were a few trees along the river now, but still nothing to eat. I couldn’t have imagined that this place we were headed to would have been any better than the last three ruined towns we’d seen, but to my surprise, on the fifth day of floating, we arrived at Magic Valley, which was a real and bustling town.
Ancient canals had routed water into farmlands and there were folks out working the fields, surprised to see anyone floating down the river. Rebekah waved at them, excitedly. Great Falls had experienced a famine but just a few hundred kilometers away, it seemed that this town was a bit more prosperous.
We floated into town and tied up our boat near what could be called the downtown. There were a few hundred people milling about or rushing from place to place on horseback, and while the town was not nearly as large as the capital, it must have had as many people as my small fishing village of Valhalla.
With our gear on our backs and with grumbling stomachs, we picked along through the dusty gravel streets and ramshackle buildings. A few ancient masonry buildings had been renovated and were still standing, but most of the structures were hastily constructed out of debris or logs.
Walking through the central square was a smelly and loud affair, the likes of which I’d never seen. Merchants were shouting and hocking their wares. Scrawny cows and goats were herded down the crowded streets. The town reeked of sewage. Disheveled people were slumped against the edges of the streets, begging for food. Everyone—rich or poor—stared at me as I strode by.
We arrived at a small house on the outskirts of town where Rebekah told me to wait around the corner. She knocked on the door and threw her arms around the older lady that answered. They talked for several minutes; I couldn’t tell what they were talking about but Rebekah pointed at me and the old lady’s face dropped. She looked around, and motioned excitedly for me to come over to her. We scurried inside.
“Oh my Lord,” the old lady said, looking at me, “you’re a flesh-and-blood child of the robots? It’s like he prophesized. That is most worrisome.”
“Who prophesized?” I asked. “And hi, by the way, I’m Pax.”
“Hello Pax,” she smiled, “I’m Leah. I’m Rebekah’s great aunt. Obadiah was my brother.”
“I’m so sorry about what happened,” I said.
“No bother,” Leah said, “Death comes to us all but only in the Lord can we have new life. Obadiah now rests with him, in Heaven, I’m sure. When we grieve, it is not for those we have lost, it is because we are the ones who have lost.”
I was dismayed by her attitude. Heaven seemed to be the justification for everything in these people’s lives—why you behave properly or why dying isn’t so horrible. Our society mourned every single member who died because their passing was a tragic and permanent loss for all of us. We grieved because the dead would never get to experience all the places of wonder and majesty across the cosmos. This other, strange society shrugged off death as necessary and inevitable, to get to some place they couldn’t even prove existed.
Leah led us into the living room. There were all kinds of knick-knacks and vases and bowls adorning the shelves. No pictures or portraits like in my house. No vacuum robots or dust-repellent shelves. Just dusty and old looking, but nicer than anything I had experienced since leaving the Preserve.
Rebekah and Leah sat on one couch while Rebekah relayed the story of the warrior-form raid and the other events of the last two weeks. I sat silently, but Leah kept looking at me as Rebekah spoke. A few times, tears welled up in her eyes, but she stifled them. This old lady had lost so much of her family that I couldn’t even comprehend. Until I’d left the capital almost three weeks ago, I’d never even known a family that was more than two parents and a single child. Rebekah had lost so many people close to her in such a short span of time, and Leah, for all her long years, had seen so many of her family die as well. Some had died from diseases, some from conflicts with other groups, and almost none from old age.
I felt sorry for them. Just as they felt sorry for me not knowing the glory of God, I wished these people could have embraced our way of life and found that eternal life they were seeking. I wished that they could have opened their minds to technology and medicine. As long as they relied on their Space-God to take care of them, they would never truly take care of themselves.
Leah excused herself to go make a batch of tea. I think she was being overcome by her emotions and needed a minute to herself. The only person I’d ever lost was Semper, and even then, I was ill-prepared to deal with it.
Rebekah came over to the couch where I was sitting and took my hand in hers. I could see her eyes were red with sadness, but she wasn’t crying. She was learning to deal with the trauma she had recently experienced. Though her father and brothers had died at Highway Bridge, she hadn’t watched it happen first-hand, and hadn’t felt powerless about it like she had with Obadiah.
“What was Highway Bridge?” I asked her. “No one ever wants to talk about it.”
“It was a battle between our folk and the monsters of the east,” she said solemnly. “They came, looting and raping and murdering from somewhere in the Heartland. They burnt every town and murdered every man, woman, and child, and then ate their victims. They didn’t have guns. Most were unarmed or had big blades. A rider came from town to town warning us and asking us to gather enough men and guns to make a stand. We sent everyone we could to the old highway bridge over the Big River, but could only muster a few hundred men. I guess the monsters had tens of thousands. Our folk ran out of bullets and were about to be overrun when they decided to blow up the bridge. They stopped the monsters, but everyone on the bridge died. Everyone. Only a handful of men made it home. That was four years ago. Before I left to live with Grampa.�
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Leah came around the corner back into the living room carrying an old tarnished silver teapot and cups, which she handed to us and filled as she spoke.
“Those monsters, from the Heartland, oh good Lord they are hideous,” she said. “They’re filthy, covered in boils and pus. They have bloodshot eyes and scars all over and hardly speak a word you can understand. Some of them—we call them ‘hulks’—they’re as big as a full grown grizzly. You can empty a rifle into them and they barely flinch. And their leader….”
Rebekah sipped her tea slowly. I tasted mine and it was unlike the teas I’d tasted before. It was grassy flavored with bits of fruit.
“Do you like it?” Leah asked. “It’s a blend of Mormon tea and dried blackberries.”
“It’s tasty,” I told her, though I still hadn’t made up my mind.
Rebekah resumed our conversation. “But those monsters are just tools of the most evil creature on this planet. The devil walks among them. Oh, he looks like a man, sure, and calls himself ‘The Reverend’ but we know he’s the demon ruler of Hell.”
“The Reverend?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Leah nodded, “a reverend is a preacher or a holy man. Well this man believes he was sent by God to cleanse the world of nonbelievers. He led the monsters at Highway Bridge. He has the blood of thousands on his hands. And he prophesized you would come.”
I was startled. “Excuse me?”
“At Highway Bridge, right before they attacked, he supposedly yelled out that one day, a boy from the West would come bearing a magic glass with all the knowledge of the world inside it. He said that if anyone ever found this boy and the magic glass, to turn him over and be bestowed power and riches in this life, and a seat at the left-hand of the Father in the next one.”
“But I don’t have a magic glass,” I protested and then stopped.
