Deserted

by L. M. McCleary

  CHAPTER 2

  I was waiting in the shadow of a cliff, watching the perpetual sandstorm rage in the distance. I wasn’t going to risk getting lost within it; not today. The Pirates shouldn’t be long now, though. I attempted to pat the horse I rode on but she would sway her head when I did. Thankfully she was being patient…for now. I had already spent fifteen minutes trying to restrain her as she wanted to bolt off into the desert, with or without me. She still pranced ever so slightly as we waited, though; those Pirates really needed to show up soon. The sun was already close to sleeping when I finally saw a swirling vortex rush through the wasteland. Kay was right; they can move incredibly fast. The tornado of sand stopped briefly outside of the Outpost and a few figures were clearly seen within it. Moments later, the Outpost’s storm started to recede and the vortex kicked up again, blazing through the field and I kicked my horse forward; this was the chance I was waiting for. She jumped left and right for a minute, shaking her head but as I continued to urge her she finally charged forward, blasting through the wasteland and arriving in the path the Pirates had inadvertently cleared for us. She continued running, albeit slower this time, and it had appeared that we made it just in time. The sands immediately closed in behind me and the winds were quickly starting to swirl around my face as the trail attempted to close in on us. I tried to urge my horse further even faster but she rarely listened; she was hard to control and would attempt to nip at me if she saw my hand anywhere near her face. Her gait was slowing as sand started to blow into my face, the path quickly becoming ensconced in sand.

  “If you don’t go any faster then you’ll suffer just as much as me.” I breathed into her ear, “The town ahead is full of food and shade; maybe you should keep that in mind.” I patted the horse’s neck and while she still seemed to shy away from my touch, I did feel her quicken at my words. We could still see the path ahead through the dust in our eyes, although barely. I no longer tried to urge her faster; she would do this of her own accord, regardless of what I might suggest. Instead, I held on tightly and ensured my bandana was tied on properly as the whirling sand threatened to swallow us whole. The world ahead was once again ablaze in heat, making it difficult to see much of anything with the sandstorm nipping at our heels.

  I ducked my head down behind my mare and took quick, short breaths. “We can do this,” I chanted to myself. “I didn’t come all this way just to fail now.” By the time I looked back up again I could see the small specks of buildings in the distance and I giggled in relief.

  “Great job, girl.” I patted her neck and she glanced back at me with big, angry eyes. “Okay…sorry.” As the mare charged forward toward the Outpost I mumbled to myself, “you’d think I would learn that by now.” I sat upright, letting my body hang loose as I focused on the town’s ever increasing size in my view. The sandstorm seemed to be receding from my face now and I lowered my bandana, looking behind me. It still raged as hard as it ever had before, but it seemed to become slower as we got closer to town.

  “That must be why it seemed to close so quickly from the wasteland…to keep people like me out. It doesn’t matter too much once the Outpost is within sight.” I returned my gaze to the town ahead, making out its mud huts quite clearly now on my left. “How exactly does that work, though…?” I wondered aloud, “how can a sandstorm follow directions?”

  We had barely even entered the Outpost when my horse suddenly started to buck and bray beneath me. “Woah, woah…” I could barely even respond as I started to slide off her back. Being a smaller horse, I managed to jump off her and land on my feet quite easily and she took no time in running off as I did so. I wasn’t sure where she was headed, but I never saw her again. Perhaps she knew the place or knew where the good oats were hiding?

  “Or maybe she just hated you.” I mumbled to myself as I gathered my bearings. “Not everyone is Ponika.” The words hurt my heart.

  I wandered through the rows and rows of thatched huts and small tents, each section looking the exact same as the last. People wandered past me in large crowds and stared at me in a studious manner; was it because they didn’t recognize me? Or was it something else…? Their gazes caused me to do myself a once-over, inspecting for anything out of sight. I even felt my face, wondering if something could have happened to it during Dr. Krastanov’s procedure. While my face felt incredibly soft from the sand that had littered my fingers, I had felt nothing else out of the ordinary. My clothes were dirty, sure, and my hair was slightly frazzled but that should not be something worth walking into one another for. I tried to make the situation less awkward by waving and nodding at the groups, hoping that a friendly smile could assuage their concerns but it only made them pull back in shock. As the rows of homes never seemed to end, the behaviour of the Outpost’s denizens quickly became an irritant.

  “Whatever,” I had said finally to myself. I had no time to worry about their problems anymore.

  I pushed through groups of women who chittered at the sight of me in hushed tones, so focused on me that it often created a traffic jam of people as I tried to squeeze my way forward. My patience was quickly growing thin when I spotted the tip of a tent in the next row; surely it must be my father’s. As I strolled through yet another crowd and focused my eyes on the open slit of the tent I overheard a man beside me make an odd comment as he stared at me in awe.

  “A lone Pirate,” I believe he had whispered and as I continued to rush toward the tent I couldn’t help but furrow my brow. Was he talking about me?

  Mere steps from my father’s usual whereabouts, I pulled out his vial from my backpack and attempted to see my face in its contorted reflection. The dark green of the vial made it difficult at first, but as I turned the bottle over in my hands I suddenly caught a small speck of something that meant little to me but must have meant something to others: a strand of long, grey hair that had been pulled out of my ponytail and dangled loosely near my ear. I grabbed onto it with my fingers and drew it near to my face, twisting it around to see how thickly it had been engulfed in some kind of dust or ash.

  “From the Facility’s doors?” I said to myself. I started to scrub it and the substance came off quite easily for the most part; a few small spots remained bright white in the sunlight but it was a drastic improvement. I wasn’t sure what that had to do with Pirates, though, but it was the only thing that I could see that looked out of place. Removing the ash from my hair brought back a frightening memory, though. The decrepit man in that haunted town…was he not angry about silver hair as well?

  The thought formed a pit in my stomach, but I had no time to think on it; Chester and Kay were my concern. I tried to pat down my clothes and struggled to keep the stray strand tucked neatly behind my ear.

  “Why the ‘lone’ comment though?” I thought aloud. The words were out of my mouth the second I realized the answer and I chuckled and just what I had done. “Walking among the people, waving with them and smiling…that is most definitely not what the Pirates I saw had been doing.” I smiled briefly at the notion of being confused with a Pirate. Oddly enough, it made me swell with excitement; I’m sure a Pirate’s life must be full of adventure. I saw my beaming reflection in the vial and became aware once again of my father’s scribbled name on the other side. I traced my fingers around it and thought quickly on the idea of my dad shedding some light on the whole Pirate thing. My excitement had waned when I thought about the more important task at hand, however. I looked up at the open tent and gathered my breath; the thought of the confrontation ahead filled me with fear that enveloped my previous enthusiasm. Cradling his vial, I made my few steps forward as my heart started to beat wildly against the bottle that I now held to my chest. I stood in the clearing of the tent’s entrance for a moment, seeing the figure of my father scribbling wildly onto a sheet of paper but taking no notice of me. My steps towards him crunched on the rough sand inside the tent, causing him to jump in surprise.

  “You’ve returned!” He laughed heartily as he attem
pted to stand in the low-hanging tent. “We wondered what happened to you; are you okay? What happened?” He reached towards me, the same concern on his face that he used to show when I was a child. I took that as a hopeful sign.

  With my father’s large hands on my shoulders, he guided me to the stool that sat opposite his and urged me to sit, ensuring I was comfortable before returning to his own. He stared at me eagerly, ignoring the now ferociously-turning vial that I held in my hands. I looked into his bright green eyes that shone brilliantly in the few stray speckles of light that escaped his now hanging lantern. He had the same look on his face as the day he had brought Ponika home to me. It was a heart-wrenching look that reminded me of far too many things that I had loved and lost. It momentarily distracted me from the entire reason I had rushed to get back here.

  “So what happened?” He asked excitedly, “where did you go? How did you even manage to leave in the first place? Did you ask the Pirates for help? What were they like?” The questions came at me in rapid succession, leaving me almost dazed as I decided which one to answer first. In the end, I decided to answer none of them as I held out his Memory Vial instead. With is eyes now focusing on it, he appeared mesmerized and the liquid inside sloshed violently in his presence.

  “You need to see this.” I said meekly. Chester didn’t even look at me now as he gingerly took the vial from me. “Try to think about a wife…a house…a child or a small village. The vial should take over from there.” He slowly glanced up at me, his brows furrowed and his lips pursed. “Let it show you the things you don’t know.”

  He gazed into the vial as its swirling liquids shifted into images of us when I was young. He was reading me a story as I bounced on his lap; I was too young to remember this vision but my father watched intently. I had hoped that it was sparking his memories to come back to him. His face seemed to grow more sombre with each passing memory in the vial. A new vision now appeared; a memory of me when I was maybe four or five. I had fallen while running after Kay and cut my knee open on the few pieces of tile near the fountain. I had started crying and my dad was there instantly, holding me in his large gruff arms and telling me everything would be okay. He wiped my knee and bandaged it quickly while rocking me on his lap and I threw my arms around his neck, sobbing into his chest. He carried me home and offered me ice cream; something our town rarely received and we would always try our best to save it for a special occasion. My little face had lit up when I saw it and dug in immediately.

  The vision of my father laughed and said, “For my brave little girl,” and he hugged me as I quickly forgot about my injury. My father was always very affectionate and I had missed that greatly during the years he had been gone.

  Chester’s eyes seemed to moisten as he watched the scene unfold and he eventually looked at me. “I have a daughter?” He choked out.

  I merely nodded in response, waiting for his other memories to form. The vial swirled violently once again and visions of my mother suddenly appeared, showing a more loving and cheerful side of her than I had ever known. They were painting in our basement and joking around with each other…I had never seen her laugh so hard. They were throwing paint on each other’s canvas and speckling the walls in the process. My mother had suddenly stopped in her art and gave a coy glance at my father, laughing at nothing and putting her arm around his waist in a tight grip. He smiled and did the same to her. They finished my father’s art together and admired their work in a huff of smiles and exhaustion. The painting was beautiful and one I had never seen before; I don’t know what happened to it. It was an image of golden streets lined with large, beautiful homes made of brick. There was a sunrise in the distance that bathed the sky in brilliant reds and yellows as it slowly ascended above a grassy hill on the horizon. I was already amazed by my dad’s talent as it is but when they worked together the palette seemed to explode on canvas. I was immediately drawn to the picture and wished I knew what had happened to it.

  The lantern in the tent was picking up speed as the wind started to whirl inside, casting eerie splotches of light upon Chester’s slight grin. “A girlfriend, or…?” The vial sat low in his lap now, almost hidden beneath the table.

  “…your wife.”

  Chester nodded. “I should have known. It’s just so hard to believe…” He looked towards me momentarily and the vial before him suddenly shifted. The sound of laughter was heard coming from it and we both drew our eyes downwards, although it was difficult for me to see past my father’s large hands and the cluttered table between us.

  There I was; just a few days before my dad left us. We were in the cluttered basement, standing before two empty easels. He tried to teach me about art; something I never seemed to be very good at, even though my parents clearly were. The vision of my father had a book in one hand and a palette in the other and he was educating me on the various primary and secondary colours but I wasn’t in the mood to learn; I teased him and had painted stick figures on the canvas he had given me that now lay lopsided on the floor. I had painted so many insignificant figures and symbols, in fact, that my father had taken the canvas away until I could take the training seriously. It was a memory that I often pushed from my mind as I had felt it was the reason he had left; that his laughter was merely masking his anger at me for disrespecting his work…his passion.

  Chester scrutinized the vision, fingering his lips as he thought. “You know, she looks an awful lot like you.”

  “It is me.” I replied instantly.

  He ran his hand through his wild, curly hair and exhaled heavily. “How could I not know this?”

  “You left when I was 15,” I said with a sigh, “it was Christmas Eve. You said you’d be right back but you never did. Mom was a wreck, you know.”

  My father looked towards me with a doe-eyed expression. “What happened?” He whispered meekly.

  “I don’t really know. I was hoping you could tell me.” We both gazed down at the vial in his hand and suddenly saw Christmas Eve appear in the glass; just how I remembered it.

  It wasn’t the kind of Christmas Eve that my parents were used to. I’ve seen pictures of an immaculate and vast world of sparkling white snow and crystalline trees as icy flakes descended from above…I’ve seen the coloured lights that decorated the homes nearby, heard of a man named Santa who brought presents to all the kids around the world. Yeah, I’ve heard the stories and seen the images but that’s not how it was anymore and not a Christmas I was used to, as I was born after the Reckoning. His ‘miracle girl’, my father always said; with the stress it put upon my mother, they were afraid I would not make it.

  Like always, we were celebrating Christmas a few days before the New Year but we didn’t have a tree or anything like that. I mean, how could we? That didn’t stop people from finding their own makeshift ways to bring back the holiday spirit and our home was no different. Our neighbours used to cover a corner of their house in greens and reds, usually with a coloured blanket upon the floor to put the gifts on; it was their own version of a tree. Our house, however, was slightly different as my parents had painted an exquisite work of art together and hung it in the corner, piling gifts beneath it.

  It was a painting that had depicted a small family sitting cozily around a gigantic and bulging tree that had glowed with the soft hues of green and red lights. Golden ornaments had dangled precariously from each jagged branch of the tree and a large fireplace burned fiercely behind it, illuminating the focal point of the painting and casting large shadows over the various sized gifts that lay haphazardly beneath the tree on a small, red rug. It was a beautiful painting and I had loved it growing up; of course, it was never seen again after my father left.

  But my dad’s vial left nothing out. There was the painting now, in all its glory, propped up against the wall of the stairs with a few small gifts sitting neatly in the corner below it. Three wooden chairs were strewn around our makeshift tree as we sat and enjoyed each other’s company – even my mother. Christmas was the
only time you could find a constant smile on her face. My mother and I were sitting next to each other and laughing at something my father had said but I found it difficult to hear the vision as it lay smothered in Chester’s burly hands.

  “I’ll be right back,” my father had said; that much I somehow managed to make out quite clearly, probably because I knew it would be coming.

  “I remember what we did while we waited for you to come back,” I stared at the table before me, “Mom had just finished with her baking for the day and the house smelled incredible; like chocolate chips and cinnamon. We were sitting quietly and nibbling on cookies that were still too hot to touch but far too delicious to put down,” I giggled at the memory, “I kept sipping my hot cocoa, thinking nothing of it when you had left. It was an awkward wait, though, since mom and I are more like strangers in the same house than family…you were really the only reason we went near each other at all.” My fingers wrapped tightly around my leg as I struggled with the memory. “It was close to an hour before mom started to get worried. She went into town to see where you had gone and it was all downhill from there.”

  Chester had looked at me and nodded every so often at my tale but his face showed no inkling of recollection. We caught each other’s eye momentarily and then focused our attention back to the vial. The vision showed my father leaving the house, his face beaming with holiday spirit and slightly red from the glasses of wine. Just as I had feared, however, my father did not visit a neighbour to wish them good fortune, like he always did at Christmas. No…instead, the vial showed my father heading north, towards the Meeting Place. The closer he got to the edges of town, however, the cloudier the vial became until the green liquid misted over the entire memory and nothing more was seen. My father and I exchanged glances but neither of us knew just what exactly had just happened.