“So what do you want?” she says.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you one chance. Prove it to me. Prove to me that it’s not all bullshit and false hope, like the rest of the dogma tribes that fill this world now. Not just another incarnation of the empty pseudoscience that pervades this primal world.”
Maze patiently waits, but there’s no more. Garren stands and finishes his cigarette and puts it out. I watch Maze turn to me suddenly and her face lights up.
“What did we see in the Deadlands?” she says.
I try to think of what she’s trying to get me to say but I can’t figure it out.
“On top of—”
“The mirror,” I say.
“What mirror?” asks Garren, sparked at once.
“It sends sunlight to the tower. Powering something up there.”
“Impossible.”
“I saw it,” I say. “It moved, pointed right at the tower, right at the bright point near the top.”
“Moved?” says Garren.
“There was a map, a relic—something one of the Fathers found. Locked in a safe,” she says.
“So you broke into a Father’s safe and took a map that led you to a mirror in the city?” Garren says.
“On top of one of the tallest buildings,” I say.
“Okay then, that’s good enough for me. You’ll take me there tomorrow. If it’s true—if there’s a working machine—a mirror sending light to the tower—you’re free to go. Better yet, I’ll help you get there,” Garren says, sitting upright. “And Wills, you’ll stay here and tell Gala everything she wants to know about Acadia. We have a deal?”
I nod my head after Maze agrees and Garren moves to leave. “I’ll have some food brought in. And—for both of your sakes—I hope you’re not wasting my time.”
And then, after lighting another cigarette and leaving a trail of smoke, he leaves. We wait for someone to come in, to guard us, but there’s nothing but sounds of laughter outside. I think about asking if we should make a run for it, because we have our weapons, and the boat is only a few hundred feet away. Somehow, I know that the same thoughts are running through her head. I look at her, my eyes saying it, that we have to go. It’s like she reads my mind because she shakes her head no.
“This is our best bet,” she says.
“They’re going to kill us,” I say.
“No they won’t. He knows.” And then, with weakness in her eyes she admits it. “Wills—he’s right. It’s my fault.”
Something bold leaps into me and I pull close to her, my hand resting on her shoulder.
“It’s not your fault.”
“He wouldn’t have come back. Not once. Why did he say he loved me?”
“He believed what you told him. That was his choice. You didn’t know about those things.”
“It wasn’t the tower or the Ark. He came back because of me,” she says.
Suddenly she screams in frustration. I look through the door and hope no one notices. Then when I look back at her, I see the old resolve. The look that tells me she’s got her head together again and she’s figuring things out.
“Tell me,” I say, anticipating the ideas she’s sorting through.
“Okay—we do what Garren tells us. Every last thing. And you tell Gala everything she wants to know.”
“You sure?”
“He’ll help us. He’ll help us get to the tower.”
“How do you know?”
“Just a gut feeling. Once he sees the mirror for himself. It’s the best shot we have now. I don’t like our chances just running out. Not with all of them out there by the fire.”
There’s a silent expression of concentration on her face, and then I take my arm away from her. Just that fast, the warmth of the world is gone. All I want to do is hold her, take her in close and find somewhere safe for us to be together. To fuck the consequences and kiss her. But I know it’s not the right time. That now, after Sid, it will never be the right time.
We hang in silence until Rafe appears at the door. Behind him is the fading glow of twilight.
“Hungry?” he says.
“Yeah,” I say, my stomach churning at the smell of food. He puts two bowls of soup.
“Hot from the fire, be careful,” he says. “Garren says you’ll sleep in here tonight. You know not to leave, right?”
“A trip to the Deadlands calls for a good night’s rest anyway. We’ll hold off our escape for now,” Maze says. Rafe smiles and then leaves.
We devour the food. I burn my tongue twice and then sit quietly in the last rays of the afternoon sun. The chatter outside grows louder, as if there’s some kind of celebration happening tonight. I wonder if it’s like this every night. A wall of fatigue suddenly hits me and my eyes drift over to the single bed in the corner of the room.
“I’ll take the floor,” I say.
I walk over and throw one of the blankets down on the ground. She doesn’t refuse, and from her head space she doesn’t even acknowledge me. And then, after another hour, we’re both lying down and everything is dark outside. The drunken noises eventually start to soften.
“This wasn’t my first guess on how day one would go,” Maze says, breaking the long quiet.
“It wasn’t mine either,” I say. My thoughts turn to Garren and the others. “What do you think of them?”
“The Resistance?” she says.
“Yeah.”
“They don’t like the rest of the world. At least the two parts we know.”
“Fatherhood and Nefandus?”
“The Nefandus doesn’t seem as organized, but who knows. I wonder if they’re as big in the world as the Fatherhood. What do I know,” she says without her normal confidence.
“How are you going to take him—I mean, without the map,” I ask her.
“I’ll remember,” she says. And just like that, it’s her again. There’s no doubt in my mind that she will remember somehow, even though we must be terribly far from the old city. I think of Father Gold, and the Fathers who were wandering out in the Deadlands. It dawns on me that they might run into them again out there. I start to wonder how the Resistance would react to them. Would they kill them on sight? Or take them captive? Maybe Gala would just give them a stern word about believing too strongly in any one thing and then let them go. But Gala will be with me, I remember. And then the horrible image flashes through my mind—the hanged Fathers. All dangling from metal chains. Who was responsible?
“Those Fathers—they were too far away to have been from Acadia, right?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says after a long thought. “Maybe.”
“If they weren’t, I wonder where. The next town from ours—I don’t even know its name.”
“Hah,” she laughs, quick and sharp. “You’d think we’d know that by now?”
“Yeah. Fathers don’t like information about the outside world getting around, do they?”
“No, they don’t.”
I want to ask her if it’s true—even though my gut tells me it is—if she really got Sid going on all the conspiracy theories. But I think better of asking. I know it’s way too soon. All I can do is push the questions away.
“So we go to the tower after tomorrow?” I say.
“If his word is good.”
“What if it’s not?”
“We go anyway. They didn’t take your knife, did they?” she says.
I shudder at the thought of heading out into the sea, instead of along the coast where we can still see land, swim ashore if we have to. The idea of complete aloneness, even with Maze, rips through me. Just us and the waves.
“We do it on our own,” she says after it’s clear I won’t respond. And then, there’s not another word between us. After a while I realize she’s asleep. I lie on the floor, wrestling with my head, turning my body back and forth and finding no comfortable position. I hear the last mutterings outside die away. The footsteps of drunken Resistance men fade away, and I ima
gine them finding their own shanties, finding sleep. Devoid of the restlessness I feel. And it’s like the whole world is at peace but me. I’m the only one—racked with terror and questions.
I wonder for a minute about Garren, about how much we can trust him, or any of these people for that matter. They look and act so differently from everyone I’ve ever known. And the way they carry themselves too—it’s as if they live without any law or order. The rules of the Fatherhood are completely absent here. I try to let the insanity of the idea sink in. The thought grows so large and crawls around in my head. It’s surreal. I think of all the confessions I’ll never do again, and how it really doesn’t matter at all if I touch metal anymore. And then, when I’ve grown tired of thinking of the things I hate about the Fatherhood, and my fears about the Resistance and what they’ll do to us, my head returns, as always, like the horrible magnet she is to me, to Maze.
I roll onto my side so that she’s in the corner of my eye. Even though she’s sleeping, I try to be careful as I watch her. The soft curve of her cheek.
The story plays images one after the next in my head—she wanders off, time after time, and meets Sid by accident. He’s beautiful, and she falls in love with him. She learns from him about the Resistance, and he learns about the Ark and the secret importance of the tower from her. She fills his head with the great schemes she’s always had. And he touches her.
Somehow she convinces him of it all—what the tower is, that there’s an Ark—an untainted record of human history from the time before the Wipe. The truth behind why it happened even. And maybe he doesn’t believe a word of it, not really. But he pretends, because he loves her. Who wouldn’t?
And repelled by the image of them together, I think of myself. The same old self-pity. I channel through my history with Maze, trying to apply logic, replaying all the signs I misinterpreted. Trying to convince myself I had good reasons to believe that somehow we would end up as more than friends. My mind betrays me again and jerks back to him and her, together on the coast. Meeting, embracing, kissing, and sex. But what concern is any of this to you? I scold myself. I batter my ego with the thoughts, and all the while, the obsession takes from me all feelings of danger. And when hope spikes in—the endless taunt I’ve known all my life, rekindled by the thought that Sid is dead—I trick myself into thinking I have to act a certain way around her. As if the overly protective person I used to be—have always been—is the reason she couldn’t love me. But I know it’s all bullshit. There is nothing, nor will there ever be, between her and me. And I’ll probably die before I accept that. Still, I watch her, silently unable to wrest the love from my heart. And I tell myself, over and over, a tortured loop—you’ve always been in love with her. Since you first saw her. This is your curse.
Eventually the meandering thoughts wind down and I reach a point of relief, sensing I’m close to sleep. Wild calls rip softly across the night, birds or frogs in the forest talking to each other. Dreams begin to capture me, and I go in and out of visions of beach. Trapped all night with her, wolves watching us, the idea that I could kiss her still a possibility then. It’s when I am about to do it—to lean in and kiss her in the water, as we both stare out to the tower, that I’m woken by the noise.
It’s so subtle that I think I’m imagining it, or that it’s spillover from the dream. But then it comes again. Light steps, many of them. I sit up and look at Maze—her eyes are still closed and she’s sound asleep. Waiting, I hear the noises continue outside. I wonder how long I’ve been fading in and out, and how deep into the night it is now. When I’m convinced it’s real, I stand up and quietly walk to the far window. A cool breeze pushes in and I get a vision of the outside—forms pass by that are no longer red, blackened by the night, but I know what they are. The shapes are unmistakable. Spears and a long parade of lanky bodies coming through the trees. They move slower than they did in daylight. And then, after several pass by closely, I see splintering cuts of darkness against the sky—the silhouette of antlers.
“Maze,” I whisper. And before I know what I’m doing, my hand is down on her shoulder, shaking her back and forth.
“What?” she says, coming right to life, as if she hadn’t been sleeping at all. She sits up and glares at me, a drowsed look on her face.
“Nefandus,” I say. She sees me look back out the window and rises to look for herself.
“Shit,” she says, jumping down from the bed.
“Where are you going?” I stammer as she quickly moves to the center of the room. I can’t imagine going outside into the darkness with those things out there but she’s heading right for the door. I tell her we have no idea where we are, that we can’t go outside. Our surroundings are completely foreign. We’ll be lost and killed in the dark. But she’s got it in her head to go. And I know—it’s something about Sid’s death. She’s more reckless now than she’s ever been.
“We can’t stay in here—there’re too many of them.”
“But—don’t you think we should let them—Garren—”
“Wills, they’re all asleep,” she says sharply, looking at me for just a second.
“There’s got to be a watch,” I say. She pauses to consider it.
“We go now—straight to the dock and take the boat.”
Everything in me wants to object, find a reason why we’d be safer holed up here even if we could make it out into the water. But I see the look in her eyes and I know there’ll be no compromise. I stay or follow. For a moment, anger flashes through my head that she’ll leave me behind. If I say no now, she’ll abandon me. And it’s as if I’ve expected her to take care of me since I committed to coming. That I’m her burden. But it’s not true—I’m less important to her than the Ark. Something jerks inside me—just trust her. One more time. And I hold my knife firmly and just creep after her toward the door.
The grounds look empty when we step outside, as if the footsteps and the shadows had all been imagined—only the light of the dying fire and huts with dark windows. Maze leads me between two of the huts until we reach a stretch of forest to escape into, and from there, we watch the houses and the clearing where the fire is. In just another moment, the forms prove themselves real, engulfing the farthest hut. At first, it happens quietly, and I almost think they don’t intend any harm. Silently I watch as one of them enters through an unlocked front door, and then another, but then the scream comes. It’s loud and cut short. The quick silence of someone’s throat being cut.
“Fuck,” I whisper.
Only a moment later, after the scream, loud shouting erupts from another part of the camp. I recognize the voice—it’s Rafe, but I can’t make out what he’s yelling. Finally the calls become clear:
“Nefandus!”
“We’re under attack!”
All at once, from the black, I see Garren storm right into the clearing. There’s something shining in his hands, reflecting the fire, but then it disappears, only to flicker again. I ask Maze what’s in his hand—some kind of metal rod—and then, when she says she’s not sure, the bang of thunder erupts so loud that I have to regroup to figure out what just happened. With the noise a flash of light spreads and diminishes in an instant, revealing for a moment the crumpling form of one of the red walkers.
“He has a gun!” Maze says.
A sermon I’ve heard a million times jumps into my head. It’s Father Gold’s voice: Besides metal, many atrocities angered God in the old world. Before the age of technology’s inexorable advance, there was gunpowder.
“How?” I ask, but Maze doesn’t have time to answer—one of the shadows, lanky and quick and with a spear in its hand, turns toward us, as if it can see us behind the bushes.
My first instinct is to run, but Maze says to stay still and she holds her knife out. I buck every instinct I have and force myself to stay put, following her lead. The creature pauses as another flash of light and thunder erupts behind it, the bang almost deafening. Through the moment of light, I see the man’s red face an
d bright eyes—his stare directly on us. As soon as darkness returns, I see his shadow lower—his body and the spear straightening out directly at us. A soft word comes from his mouth, something in another language, and then he charges. Maze jumps away and I roll onto the ground in the opposite direction. Screaming fills my ears, and then, in the blackness the form is right on top of me. It’s the same as before, but this time, from the corner of my eyes, I see more of them surrounding me—long dark horrible forms crowding in. And then it comes, before I can move my hand at all to stab up—a shattering pain in my injured leg. The knife drops from my hand as I shriek, and the red man just rises up off of me, pulling his spear back out of my leg. My hand jerks down and finds warmth and wetness, blood over my fingers, and I can think of nothing but the desperate hope for another flash and thunder of the gun, or for Maze to spring out and save me, but the next thing I know, hot arms coil around my legs and my belly and lift me off the ground.
“Bleeds!” says the red man’s voice. And then, against the sound of distant screams and fighting, I’m bouncing up and down, deep into the woods. I hear one more gunshot, but it’s too faint now to matter, and the only thing I can think is that I’m dead.
Branches whip me and I hear the running of other feet all around. For a moment, as I try to twist and free myself, it crystallizes in my head that they didn’t kill me, but that it must be for something worse that they’re taking me. And then, all I can do to ignore what’s happening is imagine my wound—I picture the blood I’m losing, and how I need to reach down and touch my calf to find out, but I can’t, because each time I flex my arm, attempting to reach down, the Nefandus cinches my body tighter and grunts his disapproval. My head presses against sweating skin, and the rank odor of his body fills me with nausea. I twist my head, trying to see starlight, but he quickly cranks my neck back down, like he needs the world to remain dark for me. And all I want to do in the world is see if Maze is running after me. Or is she’s being carried away with me. If somehow we’re in this together still. But there is nothing to see, and only the terrible smell and the darkness and the panic rising in my chest that, before very long, every last bit of my blood will have drained onto the forest floor, and that will be the great forgotten ending of my life.
WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) Page 12
