WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story)

by Turkot, Joseph

  One of them, and then another. Finally there are three. Only one of the faces I recognize: it’s Garren, and in his hands is the silver shine of his gun. The barrel points toward the struggling Red Horn, and then, there’s another painful clap of sound, a rush of light, and the strong stench of smoke. Without a sound, the large red body flattens against the ground. His antlers point up, a wide arcing silhouette like veins running to the sky.

  “Jesus...” I hear one of them say.

  “They saved us,” another voice says from behind me. It’s Maze, as soft and weak as I’ve ever heard her, but fully alive, and I twist to see her. As I stare into her eyes, tears down her cheeks, the fear that we’re not really saved forces my eyes up to scan the forest. But there’s nothing out there. The red men are all gone.

  Rafe and Gala and Garren, the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen in my life, run over to us and start to cut us free without saying a word. Only Gala mutters something. She’s discovered something on the ground. And then she says it: “Logs.”

  By the time they work us both free, we’ve jostled enough over the table, sliding over slick warmth, that we’re both covered in Logs’s blood. And then, before there’s an explanation—why they’ve come for us, saved us, risked their own lives for just one of their own, against an entire horde of demons—we’re running into the forest. Maze asks where we’re going and Rafe just tells her to be quiet. I stumble on as best I can, battling the throb in my leg. And then we just continue to march. Soon, the pain in my leg is replaced by a euphoria, a materializing sensation that I’m really alive, and so is Maze, and we’re still together. As I follow their backs, the feeling overrides everything else.

  We jog on, wending between thick growths of trees, finally spilling out onto a flat dish of rock high over the edge of the coast. Far below us I spot the running line of the shore, black and gray crags, whitecaps washing over them where they spike too far into the ocean. And then, my eyes have to glance up. I take it in again, for the millionth time, at the line of the sea’s dim horizon, ejecting up from its center, into the speckled canopy of the world—the tower. That’s when we stop, and I realize when I reach them that the only reason we’ve paused is for Garren to catch his breath. He hangs the long gun down his side and leans on it, and then Gala goes up to him and whispers something. He nods, and then I see it—the long streak of dark red, running down his side, right underneath his left armpit. I want to ask how badly he’s hurt, and how many survivors there are at the camp, and what we’re supposed to do now. Half of my questions are directed at Garren and the rest at Maze, but I stay mute. And then, with wonder, I just watch her.

  She approaches them without stopping to check in with me, looking overcome with urgency again, like the euphoria of survival has already worn off in her, and she needs to set to the task of the tower again, right away, more seriously than ever before. And my premonition is confirmed right away with her words—she asks Garren, as he breathes horrible rasps over the gun that supports him, if he’s going to help us or not, because if he’s not, then this is where we part ways.

  “What?” says Rafe, almost breaking into a laugh. “We just saved your lives.”

  Maze ignores him, her eyes on Garren, waiting. I walk up next to her, summoning every bit of strength I can, enough to mirror hers, standing erect and looking at Garren, showing my solidarity with her. We stare together, waiting. And as much as I don’t want to cast off into the woods alone, in the opposite direction probably from our saviors, back toward the fleeing trails of the Nefandus, I stand my ground with her. Whatever she wants.

  “Rafe,” Garren says between squeezed breaths. “Go with Gala. See she gets the trail, without a Red Horn coming down her back.”

  Rafe just nods reluctantly, as if he doesn’t want to go, but I feel it—there’s something underneath the demand. Something of a misdirection. Rafe goes, just leaves and follows Gala right into the woods. When Garren is sure we’re alone, he tells us.

  “We didn’t come because of Logs,” he says. And it’s like he’s desperate that no one else hear but Maze. I push in closer. Somehow, I think he must mean her and me, but as he presses his head right into her, nearly touching hers with his, I know it’s only to her he’s speaking. “You’ve got the mark.”

  “What mark?” Maze asks.

  “On your god-damned leg,” Garren says. And right away I know. I’ve seen it a thousand times. The tattoo. Stretched out because she had it since she was little. Something from before she came to Acadia, from the time before she remembers things. Three tiny lines that intersect a half-circle. Small and black. Not a birth mark. Something someone cut into her skin a long time ago.

  My eyes instinctively wander down her leg, right to where the mark is, on her ankle. But her shoes and pants conceal it. I half expect her to draw up her pants, to confirm he’s right, as if she doesn’t know the very thing engraved on her own skin. But she just watches him, and I realize—he must have come in. Sometime in the night. Sometime while we were sleeping. Looked at her body. I see her face tell me she must be realizing the same thing, but then she just asks:

  “You going to tell me what the hell is going on?”

  “They’re not crazy—your stories. I told him to find you. To get you out. Once I found out you were so close. It just took longer than I thought.”

  A wall of confusion smashes my head, diminishing the last bits of comprehension and euphoria I have. Endless questions scream through my mind, but I wait for Maze, who must have the same ones. But she stays quiet and it kills me, like she somehow already understands and is just letting it sink in. That Sid was some pawn of Garren’s, baiting her out of Acadia. And as if Garren senses her sudden dejection, he says that Sid should have been done with it the first time he saw her.

  “But he fucked up. He fell in love with you,” he says. “And he died. But it doesn’t matter, because you’re right, and you’re here.”

  “Why tell me?—why trust me not to tell them?” Maze says. “No one knows any of it. I could tell them everything.”

  “You won’t,” Garren says.

  “Why not?”

  “There’s no them left.”

  Garren struggles to remove his weight from the gun and stand upright.

  “We’re going,” Maze finally says.

  “Yeah. And I’m taking you.”

  “To the tower?” Maze says.

  “To the tower,” he replies.

  I wait for more, for it to all make sense, but there’s nothing—nothing about what the mark means on her leg, or how many of the Resistance really survived the attack. We just start to walk again, the conversation dead, until we meet up with Rafe and Gala. I finally work up the nerve to ask her, fearing that she’s kept an infinite number of things from me now, and with each question I ask, I’ll reveal more of how little she really trusts me. But when I ask her what the mark is, Maze tells me she has no idea. Ask him, I tell her, anxious, as we trail the three who lead us down a beaten trail, back into the dark woods, away from the coast.

  She stops for a moment, turns to me, and looks into my eyes. An ancient feeling rushes through me, mixed now with as much confusion and anxiousness as hope.

  “I will. But I—I almost don’t want to know. I don’t want to be part of it,” she says.

  “Part of what?” I say.

  “Any of it.”

  “You think you’re part of something bad?” I ask.

  “Look at it, Wills,” she says. And for her entire life in Acadia, the wide span that I’ve known her, I think of how her obsession with the tower has been the one constant—the one driving force, external, around which all of her energy has revolved. Where all of her imagination bends. Where her theories all stem from. Yet it’s only now, when shows me the mark—exposes her olive skin—that it becomes so clear, so impossibly obvious. It’s almost too much for me when I realize I’d never put it together before. The line, cutting up into a half circle. The curve of the Earth. The rise of the lin
e. The tower.

  The questions I had before multiply forever, but I ask none of them. Because it’s all I can do to just comprehend the lines on her ankle, and I have to take my eyes away from the tattoo, her beautiful skin, and put them back on her face. Behind her, in my periphery, I see that the three of them have paused, looking back at us, wondering what we’re doing stopping. If we’re about to run for it. Garren calls out to us. Neither of us hear him and neither of us look away. And there’s no question from my lips, because somehow I know she’s not hiding anything this time—she really doesn’t have any answers. Not for this one. Not even a theory. Just that she’s somehow bound up in the thing itself.

  A heavy feeling floods through me, seems to flow into me right from her eyes, that the great slice in the sky might have nothing at all to do with the Ark, or something that would erase the ignorance from the world. In the wake of the Nefandus, it might very well be something more terrible and evil than we could ever imagine out there, cutting up from the sea. Some kind of darkness we should have never sought out at all. But looking one more time, as she pushes her pants down, I see the tower in black ink on her skin. There’s no mistaking it, and I know now—there was never a choice for her as to her fate. And maybe too, never one for me and mine. Not since the day she first stepped foot in Acadia.

  Another shout comes from behind, this one impatient and angry, accompanied by the sound of heavy footfalls. It’s Rafe, running over to see what’s holding us. And as all the confluence of meaning and startling realizations boil away in a moment’s eternity of her eyes, locked tightly to mine, she says it—the words that give me an instant tremble.

  “I did hear you.”

  She says it fast, without looking away. And I know somehow what she means—that she heard me tell her I love her as she lay about to die. But before I can reply, beg if it means there’s hope for us, Rafe wraps me up in his arms, locking me in a barrel against his chest and pulling me away, telling Maze to follow. I try to twist back and look at her, to see if she’ll say anything more. To see if she’ll return it. But there’s nothing but her dark hair, and her face pointing down, her eyes fixed on her legs, on her ankle. And no more words come from any of us until we’ve marched all the way back to the corpse-riddled camp of the Resistance. It isn’t long before Garren calls the survivors together, declaring that he has something very important to say.

  Part 3

  Chapter 11

  As the forest and the rocky coast start to reveal their color under morning sunlight, we reach the edge of Resistance camp. Salt air coats my tongue and I see the place. A ruin. Things in my head shift away from the vision of dead bodies, replacing them with a dream of Maze. Like I am going to fit the puzzle together now. Some deep part of myself beats the refrain: Forget all her words. Look at the actions. Nothing else.

  I gather it all up into myself—the absolute truth about my history with Maze. Always clear, yet only now can I see it—the separation between what I believe and what I’ve been shown by her. As if my projections about her feelings for me have somehow always painted the wrong perception—a perception that she wants me like I want her. The knowledge of my self-delusion beats anger into me as I fall behind everyone else and watch her go, watch her arms and then her legs, thinking of the tattoo, and why she bothered to tell me she’d heard what I said. That I love her. As if it meant something to her. And by the time we’re right in the center of Resistance camp, circling round the dying fire and the strange lines of blood-streaked sand, and the red-skinned corpses, I decide: the first chance I get, I’ll tell her exactly how I feel. Again. But somehow I’ll be clearer this time. More direct. And it won’t happen while we’re under the knife of the enemy. She’ll have to answer.

  What’s left of the Resistance walks out from the hut houses surrounding us, tired bodies crawling into the dawn light, a cool fog enveloping everything, doing its best to hide the slaughter that’s just passed through like a storm. Somehow I can still smell death in the air, a strange scent mixed with the salt, and the faces look worn, tired from caring for the dead and dying, some of which I know, besides the red skeletons strewn about, must still be hiding inside their homes. At once, Garren calls out to everyone. I sit down, too exhausted to stand any longer, finding a log that’s far enough away from everyone that I’ll stay invisible. But Maze walks right up to the place where Garren prepares some speech, next to everyone else. And filled with anger and the returning throb in my leg, and with the crash of fading adrenaline, I just close my eyes and listen, head cupped in my hands.

  “How many are dead?” he asks the small crowd.

  “Six,” says someone. “The rest are wounded—dying.”

  “Christopher, and Doss?” Garren asks.

  There’s a pause that must mean the ones he’s asked for are dead. When he says nothing further, it’s all I can think to imagine that they must have been the doctors—the Resistance’s only hope to stem the number of dead from increasing. But I don’t ask anyone, and no one is near me. I am removed from everything, my eyes open again, plied to Maze, who is fixed on Garren’s every move. I can’t help but feel that something strange is coming on. I think about him—how he must have snuck in, looked at Maze’s tattoo as she slept. How much he must really know—how much she must really know. And then, the horrible bug that has so long possessed Maze but never me begins to come for me, to gnaw at the back of my mind. The reaching, the longing to draw up some terrible conspiracy to make sense of this. The Fathers in the Deadlands, the Nefandus raid, Sid, the tattoo, Garren’s secret beliefs about the tower. Suddenly it feels like Garren drew us to him all along, or at least Maze—and Sid, the Resistance, are all just part of his ploy to get her. Because she’s valuable to him somehow. She fits what he wants. But then—before I can devolve into pointless thoughts of desperation, of needing her, of telling her all of my feelings in isolation—my mind conjures up the Ark. And for all the strength of my memory, I can never remember Maze telling me how she knows about the Ark. How she even came to the idea that it could exist at all. The foolish part of me always assumed she just thought it up herself. Some genuine creation from her own imagination—the overactive work of her own desperation—her need to make sense of the Fatherhood, of the world and the history so obviously and intentionally shrouded by the dogma of the Fathers. And at last, right before Garren finally opens his mouth, the fact that his great healers must be dead settling over him enough that he can speak again, I imagine the After Sky. For some reason, I hear it—the part of the scripture that I’ve listened to every week since I was first old enough to attend Father Gold’s sermons: And in the After Sky, once the toil has been done with here on the Earth, the great knowledge of God will be revealed—in death, the mystery of faith will be known, and all of history, and of future, shall be known, then, and forever after. For this, unity with God in the After Sky, we pray.

  At first I don’t even hear Garren speaking. It’s like the idea of the Fatherhood’s afterlife, some eternal heaven after death for souls, something I’ve always dismissed as bullshit, known as bullshit on an intuitive level, is really the Ark. Or that the two are connected. As if metal, or the whole of technology, brought people to a real, living After Sky. Insight flashes through me: that the Fatherhood explains—with their myths, stories, and lies—the same world that used to be explained by truth—before the Wipe, explained by technology and science. Those great sources of sin. Replacements of God. False idols.

  At once my mind goes through a list of things I remember, all of the supposed truths of the Fatherhood. I try to correlate them to potential truths about the way humans really used to be. Back when human intellect was genuine, unclouded by holy texts, as Maze has always said it was before the Wipe. It’s too much for me to put together, and the flooding ideas collapse and roll away from each other only to reform and reconfigure until I feel sick. Like there’s too much conspiracy after all, and there’s nothing I can do about any of it. It’s only when I hear the last bi
ts of Garren’s speech that all my frenzied sense-making halts in an instant, my head lashing back to present attention:

  “...two boats. Gala and I, and the two refugees, will go. She—” says Garren, and then he pauses and turns to Maze, to let the camp know that he is speaking of her now, “has confessed knowledge that will help us understand why the Nefandus have come into our land. If they are coming again. I must make the trip. We’ll be back in a day’s time. Rafe, you’re in command here.”

  For a moment, I watch Rafe mumble, try to protest. He says something about how he should go, and that it should be someone else left behind in charge. I think I hear him say Gala’s name, but Garren silences him quickly. Someone asks Garren what he knows, but he refuses any information. His words are brusque and quick, and then, the last question he answers is about the departure time.

  “Tomorrow. First light.” And with that, he instructs that someone attend to our wounds, to the best of the camp’s ability to do so, and that the red bodies be taken into the forest or thrown into the sea. Anywhere but in sight.

  “And our own dead?” asks Rafe as Garren begins to walk away.

  “Bury them, if you like.”

  I stay on the log, my mind bent upon the proposal—a trip in a boat, somewhere out into the ocean, just Maze, me, Gala and Garren. I want to chase him down and ask him myself, figure out why, because nothing about leaving, heading into the sea, makes any sense. But his fatigue, his wounds, have worn him down, and he refused even his own men. Gave no real information. And I know it has to do with Maze, and that he’ll tell me nothing.

  I let him go and watch Maze talk to Gala and Rafe about something I can’t hear. A boy, as young as me, walks over and asks where I’ve been hurt. I finally remember my own pain, and roll up my pants. I see the dark bruise running up from my ankle, the tears of scabs, their ooze running sideways, already crusting my hair into mats. Stay here, he says, and then he’s gone and back again with a jar of thick paste. He rubs it down my leg slowly. It tingles until a cool numbness empties all feeling.