The pounding sound increases, so close now that I know if I stand up, he’ll be right on top of me. But something in me tells me I have to do it—that if I stay still, then I really have no shot. Without looking back out, I watch my feet and the ground, unwilling to see the antlers again, and sprint as hard as I can. The sound of the giant fades behind me and all I see is iron flake dust kicking up. My side smacks into the side of a high stack I didn’t see and searing pain shoots along my hip but I keep going. When I finally throw my head around midstride, to see where the red man is, I hear the scream. It’s Sid.
I spin and run backwards, watching Sid try to fight the monster. And then I see Maze and my gut sinks as she launches right into the fray. For all the safe distance I’ve gained, I throw it away in an instant at the sight of her and turn back. My body rends itself in a furious charge toward them. Complete madness courses through me. It’s only when I make it back to our hiding spot that I can tell what’s happened.
At first, I think the red beast is hurt, because it’s back is hunched over, and I can’t see its head anymore. It leans over, like it might fall, right in front of Sid. I realize he must have hit it with a fatal blow, because his eyes open wide, like he’s triumphed, and then he looks right at me. But then I know how wrong I am—it’s not triumph, but a pleading look of desperation. Like he wants me to help him, and it’s not the red monster that’s hurt but him. Maze cuts into the path, and she’s all I can see, charging right up to the beast’s backside. And that’s when it happens.
The enormous red mound of back muscle rises, as if in anticipation of her arrival, like it heard every step coming up from behind. The red man reaches full height and then, in a swinging turn, slams Maze off her feet. I see a sliding glint of silver—her knife—fling off into the dust of the scrap yard, and then she tumbles away into a slanted stack of rusty crates. The rattle deafens everything else, the stack collapses and she disappears, and then there is nothing but a long moan. And when my eyes can’t follow Maze anymore, and all I can see is the cloud of red flakes from the earth, I take in the gore. It’s Sid. His stomach is impaled in two places, the antlers spearing straight through, splaying out. The pleading look in his eyes is gone the moment I see his face again, and then the monster, somehow carrying the full weight of Sid on his head, turns to face me. Sid’s gored belly drips bright red down the antlers, blending into the dark dye of the monster’s face. Its stark white eyes, cold and wide open, fix on me, and I stop running. Everything in the world freezes. My hands attempt to position my knife into a stabbing position, as if I’ll have a shot. I wait for the charge, for the thing to take action and destroy me like it’s done to Maze and Sid, but nothing happens, and then there’s a call. When I look up to the rim to where it came from, overlooking the scrap yard, I see the source—one of the thin red demons, wood and metal spear in its hand. He calls the strange noise down to us again, and then another one appears next to him. More and more start to appear, as if the antler monster has somehow silently beckoned them all to return. And then, when more and more of them appear, it makes sense to me—they never intended to move on from the scrap yard. It was all just to scout ahead.
Renewed thumping distracts me from the ridge above—when I lower my eyes, knife almost slipping from my hand from sweat, I see Sid move. Alive still, writhing, and trying to work himself free from the antlers he’s tacked to. But he can’t, and the bloody tips that protrude through his body suddenly lower, pointing right at me. The hulk runs forward so that all I can see is Sid’s bloody back bobbing up and down, concealing the enormity of the beast driving it. At the last second I feel my muscles pull, snapping me from certain death. I dive hard behind one of the biggest stacks of junk. As soon as I’m away, I hear the bang as the giant rams right into the stack. A quick pain flashes through my foot, and then lights on fire, snaking up my whole body, until in the next moment it all goes numb. But there I see something—bright white eyes, on the ground for just a moment. It all happens in slow motion—Sid rolling away over the dirt, leaving a trail of red grime where he’s managed to unhook himself from the horns. And the monster doesn’t move, recklessly stunned by the iron rack in its blind chase for me. And when I look at it, downed right next to me, all I see are the whites of its eyes, closing and opening to the sound of grunts, as it furiously tries to hoist the heavy blocks that fell on its back.
The blocks start to slide away as it gathers its strength again, but before it can escape completely, and its eyes find me for a killing blow, I thrust my knife forward. The hit is direct, and the knife glances along tough skin, sliding as if against metal, but landing in the softness of an eye—the white erupts into red and I look away, but I still twist and dig and twist and dig until the thing roars something of the worst kind of pain, a shriek that seizes up my whole body.
From the pain the beast starts bucking and the knife slips out of my grip. A block crashes just by my leg, almost crushing me. And then, I see the antlers rise. There is only the full height of the red man, his one eye closed and the other bleeding, the handle of my knife still sticking out. In an agonizing whine, the thing raises its hands and rips out the knife. I try to edge my way back, put some weight on my foot, but it still won’t cooperate with me. I push and push, dust rising around me as I wait for the thing to open its good eye and find me. The sound of a hundred footsteps clap all around us and I know—the rest of them have found us. They’ve seen it all and now they’ve come to finish the job even if the antlers can’t. But something catches my eyes near the giant’s red legs, and when I look close, thinking I’ll see the slithering remains of Sid, his last surge of life, I see Maze instead. Quickly getting down, the flashing silver of her knife shining in her hand, I see her stab. A quick shot right behind its knee. A new wail erupts, louder than before. And then, in one tremendous earthquake, the red hulk topples into the spilled metal blocks and bounces off of them. One of his antlers pops, snapping from the top of his head. The next thing I know, I see the dark lines of Maze’s eyes. I hear her voice. She’s panicking.
“Get up!” she yells. She wraps my hand around hers and pulls me to my feet. We slouch away to a nearby pillar of trash. We drop and sit for a moment, because it’s too clear—the spear-wielding marchers are all around us now. That’s when we see Sid. Pulling himself, right through the middle of the open path, out toward the shoreline, where his boat must be. A last crippled attempt to make it out alive.
“No, no, no, no...” Maze mutters, her voice too loud. And then, when a few of the red marchers see him crawling out, they draw around him, so many that we can’t see him on the ground at all anymore. Hollering voices fill the scrap yard with mad chanting. They all look down at him, walking in circles around, until Maze steps forward, like she’s going to run in to save him. I hang my full weight on her, hoping I can stop her.
“He’s gone,” I say. Whether or not it’s the truth that stops her, I don’t know. But she doesn’t even try to break my hold, and we watch the frenzy. And then, we hear Sid’s cries as the spears start to drop down into the circle, repeatedly stabbing into him. The terror lasts only a minute, and just that fast, almost impossibly fast, they scramble away from Sid, leaving him lying in the middle of the path. A cloud of dust particles hovers over him, and then, there’s the giant again—his antlered body hoisted up by several red marchers, being carried away. The footsteps fade, and then, it’s like they’ve left the scrap yard again. Every last one of them. Before it’s safe, and before I want to move at all, Maze pushes me against one of the heavier crates so I won’t fall and runs out. When I regain my footing and limp over to her, he’s still alive. He’s even talking to her.
“Help me up,” he says. I see the carnage immediately. The stab wounds, many of them, but only centered on his hands and feet. And I know, there’s no way he’ll ever be able to use them again, even if he survives. But it doesn’t matter, because through his moans for help, I see his stomach, and the red pockets where the antlers were, soaking thr
ough his shirt.
Maze wraps him in her arms, and then tries to lift him but it’s impossible. She tells me to help, and together we manage to drag him along the ground a bit toward the shoreline. Every few feet we put him back down to rest. His moans suddenly stop. He just starts mumbling incoherently about the boat and something about the Resistance. The Ark comes out of his mouth, but Maze doesn’t say anything back to him and neither do I. We just keep pulling his body. Finally, we reach the last piles of rubble and pass onto the rocky steps of the coast. But it’s one long descending slope of fractured rocks, and I know right away there’s no way we’ll be able to get him down to the water. From our position I see his boat bobbing in the surf and the forbidden block of metal attached to the back—a motor.
Maze signals for me to put him down, and together we lay his body on a flat crust of rock. Suddenly, he starts to make sense. Maze leans over him, down and close, and I just look away. When I turn for a moment, trying to understand what they’re whispering, I see her kiss him. And then, he starts to talk about the Nefandus. He curses something, and says something about bad luck. All of the sudden, the talking dies. I watch Maze rouse him, telling him to say where we need to go. It’s like that quickly she’s accepted it—that he’s going to die—and now, it’s just a matter of getting information. But she starts to cry. Soft and awful sobs that make me know it’s more than that, and I step away.
As he chokes out mangled phrases and she leans into his chest, taking in his last waking minutes, I turn from them. I can’t watch anymore, and instead I scan the junkyard. But there’s no sign of the red marchers. Not hiding up on the ridge or poking out from the edges of the forest or anywhere in the scrap lanes. I’m convinced they’ve gone for good now, transporting their antlered monster. And then I twist to face the writhing foam of the surf as it whips against the rocks and splashes high. An emotion rises suddenly in me. Anger. All of it directed at myself.
How could I have so badly misread the signs? All of her playful touches. The way she flung her hair back and looked into my eyes and smiled. The closeness of her and how I always seemed to make her so happy. But I know—hearing her crying for him—it was all an illusion. Something I created myself. And the warnings of my friends—stay away from her—sound inside of my head.
To forget everything, I look out at the tower and make it my whole existence. It’s thin needle that rises thinner and thinner, cutting the sky forever. The idea that we’re going to try to reach it replaces my anger for a moment, replaces everything. I wonder who the red people are, and how they fit into all of this—if Sid is telling her in his dying breaths. I hear her whispering to him, and when I look again, unable to resist any longer, I know that he’s dead. When she finally stops whispering, and notices me watching her, she stands up. Then, just as quickly, she ducks back down and digs around in his pocket, finds something and takes it. Motioning to me, she says we have to go. I follow her down without a word, dropping toward the ocean over rocks blackened by slime, until we’re wading through water. Right up to the boat, and then, we tug it close and tip ourselves in. Sid’s keys go in and then the rumble of an engine starts. In just another moment, we’re slicing through the whitecaps. All I hear is the wind and all I see is her hair. And through my mind flash thoughts of blood against red skin and the last kiss she gave to him.
Chapter 9
Maze steers the boat through the surf and into deep water. Bits of spray launch over the front and rain back down. Salt hits my lips. The rocking unsettles my stomach after a few minutes and I sit down, watching her lead us somewhere. Eventually, we’re lined up right along the coast, running parallel for what seems forever.
After a long silence, something too heavy for me to break through myself, as my mind circles around whether she’ll still be the same person after his death, Maze asks me to take the wheel of the boat. She tells me it’s easy—just keep us along the coast, and don’t bring us in any closer. And then I sit down and hold the wheel. She walks away, to the back of the boat, and just looks out at the water. At the tower and the blue white sky. I tell her to come and talk to me. And then, almost by instinct, something left over from a lifetime of Fatherhood sermons, I thank God when she comes back over.
“I’m really sorry,” I say, somehow knowing it’s way too soon. But a force compels me to do it anyway, like I need to interact with her before she slips away. She sits down in the passenger seat, her eyes fastened straight ahead.
“It’s okay,” she says. Her voice is steel. And after, as much as I expect there to be more, there’s nothing else. I want to ask her what she knows, what he said with the last of his strength, where we’re going. I want it all at once, because the emotional drain of Sid is fading, replaced by new fears. They swell inside me as I watch the failing height of the sun.
“He called them Nefandus,” I say. I know I shouldn’t have referred to him again by her face, but the words are out and it’s too late.
“They’re the same as the Fatherhood.”
I wait for more, but there’s nothing. No explanation.
“They don’t look the same,” I say.
“Another dogma tribe,” she says. Her voice is cool and even suddenly, and I almost convince myself she’s okay again, that fast.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I ask.
“There’s a camp. We’ll find it if we follow the coast long enough.” Then she pauses, filtering through something. “That’s what he told me.”
“Resistance camp?” I ask.
She nods her head. Without realizing I’m doing it, I take my right hand off the wheel and reach over and touch her shoulder. I rub her back for a second and then pull away. She doesn’t react at all, one way or the other.
I wait, hoping she’ll want to talk more, but I can’t figure out anything more to say. I just focus on the small waves, riding over them, little hills that remind me how sick I feel. Every once in a while I glance over to the shore line to make sure we’re staying in a straight line. And then, without prompting, she tells me what she knows.
“He only told me a little about them. They believe in the same thing as the Fatherhood, for the most part. Their dogma is sin. They think—Sid said they think that by maintaining enough sin in the world, they cause the contrast that creates goodness.”
“Makes as much sense as the Fatherhood,” I say, and just like that, she laughs. It’s quick and sarcastic and she stops herself. I look over, and for a moment, fading from her face, is her old smile. Like a flame my heart leaps up, as if through all of this, that by the death of Sid, I should have some reason to hope again. But it dies just that quickly, and her face sours into nothing again, just a plain stare toward the horizon. For a long time we fall into silence.
“They’re the only ones we can trust. The Resistance. They’ll help us get out there,” she tells me.
“To the tower?” I ask.
She nods.
My mind swirls into a thousand new questions as she falls silent again. I want to know if this is what Sid told her. But it must be. I want to ask if they’ve ever tried going out there before. And if they did, what happened to them? But I don’t press it—and we glide forward endlessly over the small swells. My eyes fall to the numbers on the dials of the boat’s dashboard. With curiosity I try to make sense of each of them. One of them clearly reads GASOLINE, and its needle is about halfway down to the bottom. For a moment, I think of being stranded on the water, this far out. Images of sharks, something the kids in Acadia used to joke about, sharpen in my mind.
The sky stays clear and we keep riding the coast in silence. I test my ankle, twisting it in every direction, figuring out which ways it won’t cooperate. I tell myself it’s not that bad. It’s another twenty minutes before Maze makes the suggestion I could never have expected to come from her mouth.
“Maybe we should go back,” she says.
She looks at me with half-dead eyes. At once I’m torn, because she’s acting just like I would, and it wi
ll be too easy for me to cave in. It’s the most I can do to utter “Why?”
“It all depended on him. They would trust us because he brought us.”
“They’ll trust us,” I say, unsure why I’m saying it. And then, for a long time, we fall to more doubt and silence, but neither of us turn the boat around.
The coast stays the same for a long time—just the cascading layers of blackened rock, some vertical and sheer, rising into verdant foliage, and I watch the lines slowly go by—each one layered into sloping steps, mismatched eons of stone that end in the white breaks of the sea. That’s when I see the bodies.
“Maze,” I say. As if out of a trance, she looks at me. “Look at the woods.”
She turns and sees them too. Body after body, all of them dressed in black and white. The robes of the Fatherhood.
She gasps and then studies the polarized silhouettes.
“What’s that around their necks?” she says, straining to see. She tells me to get up and look, knowing I have better vision. She takes the wheel and steers us toward the coast, just a few hundred feet from the first visible reef. That’s when I make out what I see.
“Chains,” I say. “They’re all hanging from chains.”
WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) Page 10
