Dazzle Ships

by E. E. Isherwood

  Wen chuffed, content to end it there.

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Sure.”

  “Good,” he said with typical cheer. “Follow me.” He didn’t wait for either of us girls to say anything else. He fast-walked to the east, taking us up to another ridgeline, and, I figured, toward where he knew to find that exit. For my part, I was totally lost.

  It took us ten minutes of walking in silence before someone broke the seal. Alex, in the front, yelled to Wen a few boulders behind me. “Why didn’t your bring out your boyfriend? I’ve never seen you two more than a chamber away from each other.”

  “Tell me, Alex, do any of us get more than a chamber from the others?”

  “You got me there,” he laughed with his usual good humor. I’d found privacy when I found the secret room with the open crack in the roof leading to the Outside. But I squandered that by telling Reba about it. It was such an amazing gift; I couldn’t keep it to myself. I couldn’t help but dwell on whether that was a mistake or if it all worked out for the best. By the time we reached the summit of the next hill, I still wasn’t sure.

  “Ah, this is the right way,” he said as if reassuring himself.

  “You mean you don’t know,” Wen chided.

  “He’s not bad in the Outside world,” I said with surprising humor. I’d been unable to maintain the angst with Wen. Besides, it was true. He always seemed to know where he was going.

  When I reached the top and could see over to the other side, I considered changing my answer. We weren’t at the emergency exit. Not even close.

  “This ridge goes that way,” he pointed left, “a half-mile or so and makes a peninsula in the lake. It sticks out like a finger,” he laughed, “and the waterway gets narrow through here until it meets with the dam.”

  From our vantage point high above the water, we could see the lake behind us, the finger of land to our left, and more water in a narrow channel in front of us. The dark blue water was striking in the late day sunshine. It sparkled and twinkled as the waves rolled randomly in the bathtub-like confines between the two sides of the dammed up valley. The concrete structure stood sentinel, keeping the lake in front of it. The water was very close to the top of the dam, which seemed dangerous.

  Beyond, I could make out the bridge over the river far below. Alex and I had seen it from the other side just yesterday.

  “So we’re not getting your magic dog,” I said with steep sarcasm. “Do you have someone else fetching it?”

  2

  “Ha, ha,” he replied. “We will. You have to start trusting me. We came out far from that door. While we were by the lake, I wanted to see this before we go back into the canyons. We have to know something more about the Outside. And,” he said with flair, “since you’ve been out here before, I hoped getting you up here would jog something loose from that brain of yours.”

  He pointed to my head.

  “Well—” My feelings were all over the place. “Okay, then.”

  I stepped away from both of them, but Wen shuffled over to me soon after. “You may not trust him, but I’m telling you the truth. I’m not here because of him. I’m out here for me.”

  I didn’t face her. We both looked out over the water and down to the dam. A massive pile of driftwood and debris floated in front—caught there forever with no one to remove it. On each edge of the detritus, water cascaded over concrete spillways and into tunnels, as if it was being drained. Movement caught my eye, though I doubted myself immediately. As we talked, I watched it to be sure.

  “I do trust him. He and I have—a complicated past. We’ve helped each other out here. But on the Inside, everyone seemed to be someone else. Mr. B. The Commander. Alex. Even me.” That surprised me. Was I a different person, now?

  I sought answers, but turning to Wen made me realize they could never come from her. She’d been a victim of the memory wipes, just like everyone else. Unless her memories came back, she’d effectively met me for the first time last night. I doubt I’d changed very much since then. Looking beyond her, to Alex, I silently admitted he was the only one who knew what I was like since the day I entered the Complex. Any answers I sought about my personality, fate, or whatever made me who I was, had to come from him.

  Or the Commander.

  Ug. Shut up.

  Before I let myself argue the point in a continuous loop, I re-focused on Wen. She’d been patiently waiting for me to continue.

  “Anyway, until I have a reason not to, I trust you, too.” I smiled because I meant it.

  With a slight nod, she offered me her hand. I took her firm grip and responded in kind. “Then I trust you,” she said with a stone face. “Not that we have much choice. Out here, we have no food. No friends. No help.”

  “I have a little food,” I replied quickly. I pointed to my belt pack, which Alex had gotten for me. The emergency rations and water purifier would keep us all alive for some time, even if we didn’t find real food. There was a whole lake of water to drink.

  “Well,” she smiled, “I guess we’re on our way.”

  Her grin was infectious, and I felt profound relief to have one more ally. “I suppose so.”

  I let myself study the waterway below once more, intent to see if what I’d seen earlier was real, or if the shadows of the evening were causing me to see things that weren’t there.

  Alex, it turned out, was looking there, too. “I see movement down there. On the debris.”

  Wen’s reply was dry. “I see them.”

  I felt my skin crawl. Any movement down there, in the shifting mess, could only mean the dead walkies were there.

  “Yeah,” I said in a dour tone, “I was hoping I was seeing them wrong.”

  “There are hundreds of them,” Alex said while pointing. “Look in the water in front of the jam up. Tons of them are splashing around in the open water. Trapped, I think. They can’t get up the steep sides of the channel, nor can they climb the face of the dam itself. Plus, they’re too stupid to swim back out into the main lake.”

  “How do you know that,” I asked. I could hardly make them out in the shadows from so high up on our hilltop. I certainly couldn’t attribute intelligence, or lack of, from so far away.

  “Everything we know about them says they’re stupid. They can’t fight. They can’t organize. They just stand around for decades because they can’t figure out how to go around stuff. I think they’ve been stuck down there for a long time.” He dragged out the word ‘long’ to make his point.

  “There!” I said, louder than I wanted. “I saw one go over the waterfall, into the tunnel.”

  Alex responded with a “Huh?” sound in his throat.

  “They fall over the side and go down the tunnel. I bet that’s why they showed up in the river below. They get swept down the river and come out wherever they surface. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  I’d been thinking about how the walkies found us that day, and while part of me thought the Commander had somehow orchestrated an elaborate trap for us, the more likely scenario was also the most boring: it was chance.

  “Yeah, I think you got it, Bells.” I could hear the smile in his voice, even though I wasn’t looking his way. He called me Bells after I failed to reach the final victory bell on our class climbing test—something I was convinced he'd done to be mean. Over time I learned to like it; it was his term of endearment for me. “There must be so many of them caught down there that more than a few make it over into those tunnels. Maybe that happens a lot, which means what we see down there may not be very old, after all. But there sure are a lot of them.”

  Wen had hopped up on a large rock while Alex and I were piecing together the scene at the dam. I only noticed she faced a different direction when she called out to us.

  “Guys, you have to see this.”

  3

  The hilltop ridge continued out onto the peninsula to our left, but to the right it dipped down and headed for the dam. The builders had hollowed out a larg
e, flat area which stretched for miles to the southwest. The sun was getting low in the sky, and when we all got up on the rock, it bathed us in its radiance, even as it fell away. Also taking a bath in its light were a million vehicles parked in a jumble below us. I recognized this as the other end of the parking lot of relics Alex and I had seen on our earlier adventure. The same crane far out in the distance. Somewhere down there we lost our pursuit. Well, Alex gave them the shake. I let him do the heavy lifting on that one.

  “Okay, we have to check this out,” Wen opined.

  I was less sure. There had to be walkies down there. Probably more of the digging zombies. The vehicles were old and useless; that much I knew. Going down there would serve no useful purpose.

  I leaned to Alex and spoke quietly, even though I knew Wen would hear me. “You’re not thinking of heading down, are you?”

  He closed the distance to me and bumped my shoulder. “Keep that staff ready. We can find a weapon for Wen down there. Plus,” he added, putting a hand up to stop me from my reply, “the emergency door is right about there.” He pointed in the direction toward the opposite end of the parking area, though slightly to the right of it. “It will be faster to walk the flat ground than go back on these rocks and go around the whole thing.”

  I wanted to scream. How could he side with her?

  Oh, crap.

  I tried to look at it with some objectivity. Was it better to cut straight across?

  As I absorbed all the detail of the world below, I noticed several small … .What are they? A word was trying to form, but it was like that word had to fight its way to the surface. Planes. That's right. They are called planes and … and they fly through the air. Airplanes. They were parked on the edges, like they’d been pushed out of the way to make room for the cars and trucks.

  Another phrase bobbed to the surface. “It’s an airfield. Was.”

  The all-knowing Alex added, “Yes, obviously it's an airfield.”

  I pointed to the planes. One had its wing severed and sat directly on the pavement, like a dead bird that had fallen out of the sky and flopped flat on its stomach. Hints of the original white peeked out from the red dust that coated everything.

  “An … airfield,” Wen said in a wistful response, as if she was struggling to remember what the words meant. She visibly strained herself looking here and there at the expanse of wreckage, as if searching for something in particular.

  “And I guess you’re right,” I said with resignation. “Walkies are everywhere. We’ve been lucky we haven’t seen any up here, but our luck is bound to run out.”

  “That’s brill! The old Elle is back.”

  “Yeah, don’t let it go to your head,” I replied, not unkindly. If I was going to make decisions based on which of us he agree with, I feared we were heading for doom. Of course, if Wen had wanted to go down to the dam, and Alex agreed, I’d readily walk the other way. This girl has limits on trust.

  As if they heard my thoughts, both of them jumped off the rock and started down the slope. At first, they moved toward the dam, but that was just how the landscape was laid out. It got flatter a bit farther down the slope; then the route went away from the dam.

  It was almost dark by the time we’d gotten close to the edge of the abandoned vehicles.

  Alex spoke like it was something dramatic. “The world’s last traffic jam.”

  “How’d you figure?”

  He always seemed to have insights into these sort of things, and I had to keep reminding myself he’d been there at the end of the world. Live, and in person. Though by his own admission it was so long ago he’d forgotten many of the details.

  “Look at how the cars near the edge are parked in tidy rows. But there are some beyond those that are up the hillside. I can imagine those late people speeding their cars past the others so they could park them safely. If you look into the distance, the lines get jagged and chaotic, like those latecomers didn’t care so much about order. By then, it was only survival that mattered.”

  He’d been walking but halted and turned to Wen a few paces behind him.

  “Elle and I saw the far end of this jumble. There are tanks and military vehicles in various states of decay. It looked to me like they’d made it here, but just abandoned their rides like everyone else. Maybe they were the rear guard. I don’t know.”

  With a fading smile he got moving again.

  I remembered seeing those big tracked vehicles. I’d been impressed at the time, though after seeing the Harvester I found it hard to imagine those little things could ever scare me.

  Wen’s voice was soft as we all came to the bottom. “I think I remember an airfield. Not this one, though. All I can see is fire.” She touched her temple, coaxing the memory from her. “It’s so close.”

  “It’ll come to you. Mine are coming back, too.”

  “You guys are lucky, in a way. Your memories are hidden, but at least they are there. Mine are gone forever.” Alex sounded forlorn.

  “Hey, at least you remember some stuff. Between the three of us maybe we have the brain power of one normal person.” I laughed, hoping he’d do the same.

  He glanced at Wen, then at me. His smile was forced, but I studied his eyes and saw them smile, too. He was trying.

  I looked past him, aware of something new.

  “Oh, crap. Get down,” I ordered with a shush.

  I guided them to the first vehicle we could find, so as to not be out on the face of the slope. We peeked through the bare metal frame of a car. There, a hundred yards down the edge of the Old World traffic snarl, a group of people sat in the back of a big box truck. A small fire gave them away. It would only be visible to someone coming from our direction.

  Just as we would be visible to them, if it had been any brighter.

  “We are not alone,” Alex whispered with a dramatic flair.

  4

  “We’ve got to see who they are,” Alex suggested, as if it were obvious and necessary.

  “No,” Wen and I said in harmony.

  “Yes, we do. They might be able to help us,” he said.

  “Or kill us,” Wen replied.

  “Yeah, maybe. But not everyone out here can be bad. If they’ve got a fire, they have to be intelligent. They are at least making an effort to hide. They’ve got to help us. I’m telling you, we need to get some intel about what’s going on in the world. That’s the only way we’re going to go after the Commander.”

  We debated it for a couple of minutes. In the end, we decided to split the baby, as Alex called it. We were going to get close enough to see the people inside the truck but then come back once we had that information and discuss what to do next.

  The plan was to walk into traffic, then cut over. Going the other way, along the hillside, would only get us caught out in the open.

  I gripped my staff, wishing for the first time that the dull glow would go away. If I started swinging it, the blue would be visible for miles in the clear night air. As we started, I practiced holding it as still as possible at my side.

  The moon hung low, just over the ridge. It provided enough light we could move through the tangle of cars and trucks without too much stumbling and noise. Though the light was too faint to see colors, I sensed they all had faded and become the same red as the desert. Only a few select cars had paint that didn’t seem to fade, though the dirt muted them just the same.

  Alex snuck alongside a long box truck and stopped at the car behind it. He nestled himself against one of the doors. The whole thing had slumped on rotted tires.

  He motioned us over with exaggerated gestures and a hoarse whisper. I got so close I could smell him. Not in a good way, I’m sorry to say. We’d all spent the day sweating in the sun. Creeping in the warm night was doing us no favors, either.

  It is what it is.

  He pulled me so he could speak into my ear. “We’ll wait here for a few minutes to see if they send anyone out.” I heard the words but felt them tickle my earlobe, too.r />
  Before I could reply, he left and repeated the exercise with Wen. I stubbornly fought the urge to be jealous. This was the wrong time if nothing else.

  I was laughing at myself when I felt a shift in the air.

  Movement.

  A shuffle in the dirt.

  “Don’t. Move.” The voice was low, like ours, but very firm.

  “We aren’t moving,” Alex replied. “And we don’t want any trouble. We’re … lost.”

  I sensed many bodies around us.

  “Lost, huh? We’ll see.” Then, the voice said to someone else, “Get them up.”

  They snagged my staff and Alex’s knife straight away. A few moments later, they found another knife on Wen. I didn’t even know she had one.

  I expected them to march us over to the campfire—they had to be scouts, or lookouts, or something—but they poked and pushed us up and into the large truck we’d just walked alongside. We’d stopped right outside their back door.

  I panicked when they shut the door behind us.

  “Go to the front,” the voice ordered.

  A dull green light began to light our way. In a few seconds, I could see the entire space. Bedrolls lined one side. Animal hides lined the other. I couldn’t imagine what they’d been, and the green light washed all the color away. Metallic junk filled the very front of the truck, so we had to stop a few yards short.

  “That’s far enough. Turn around,” he commanded.

  Wondering if this was where I get shot dead, I was shocked when I saw the entire interior. The bedrolls weren’t empty, for starters. As the green light became overbearing and bright, I made out several bodies shaking themselves awake in the bags. A handful of young men and women stood about midway down the length of the truck. One of the men held my staff, which now glowed a steady blue.

  “Tell us who you are. What tribe are you from?”

  A young woman spoke up. “They’re from ‘Ex-co. Have to be.”

  Another young voice chirped from the beds: “No, must be Uintan. Look at their skin.”