WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story)

by Turkot, Joseph

  “Even if he’s right,” she says softly. “And they did come from up there.” She looks out to the tower, barely visible in the clear night as a black slit cutting the sky in half. “It still doesn’t matter. Wills—we’re not going to the tunnel, okay? We’re going home.”

  I nod and tell her quietly that she’s right. It doesn’t matter. And we’re going home. For a brief moment the thought of my real home floods my mind. Acadia with its soft tree-lined yards, shaded walks and quiet nights within high fences. Safe and quiet and my mother. How the dogma never warranted leaving such a beautiful place. Not for this kind of hell. But when the idea leaves me, and I’m back on the beach, with the rocks and the trees and the sweeping ocean and stars, I think that there’s nothing more beautiful than here. It’s the reason we left, somehow. To find this beach. When I hear the footsteps approaching, I look up to see that it’s Maze. For the first time, she’s coming back to us instead of waiting. I start to realize she’ll take turns with me finally, that she’s accepted it and decided we’ll move faster in the end if she helps. But her words show me how wrong I am when she’s right back and in front of us, blocking our path. Her eyes don’t come to mine at all, but search somewhere behind me, far back into the dunes.

  “They’re coming,” she says. I twist around in one panicked jerk, expecting the Nefandus to be crawling right at us from the woods. But they’re still far away, three shadows. Traveling the beach the same way we came, coming right for us. And when I watch them long enough to know they’re not walking after us, but running, and their shadows start to grow too fast, I look back at Maze.

  “Don’t leave me,” Gala says. And I look at Gala and tell her I won’t, out of instinct, but Maze says my name.

  “If you don’t leave her, you die,” she says. “Do you want to die right now?”

  “Fuck her,” Gala says. “I’m fine, come on.” And then Gala tries to release me and walk on her own. She falls right away, down into the sand and grunts, like she doesn’t want us to hear the tremendous pain she’s in. She squelches her groaning and rises to her feet, leaning back out so I’ll hold half her weight again. “Come on, come on,” she repeats, making me start to walk with her.

  At first we go a few steps, slightly faster than the walking speed we’ve been doing, but I can’t help but turn my head around each time we slow down. When the shadows have grown to twice their size, I realize we’ll never make it. And it’s all in Maze’s face when she stands directly in front of me, blocking us.

  “I’m going,” she says. “This your choice? You’re going to leave me like this?”

  I think I hear sadness in her voice, and then I see it. A tear on her cheek.

  “Move,” Gala tells her.

  I don’t do anything though. I just look at Maze. I think about how right she is, and how much I don’t want to die. But for some reason, I can’t just let go of Gala, push her wet arms off of me and ignore her last complaints, and let them get her. And it’s Maze who does it for me. Gala musters everything she has to scream. She curses Maze, and Maze pulls me away. Gala crumples right to the sand. She says my name, over and over, as Maze pulls me by her arm, until together we step into our own jog.

  “Wills, come back,” she yells. When I look back, I have to ignore her face, even though the fear in her voice pierces me. I ignore her and focus on the shadows—they veer toward her with the shouts, her cries for help a siren for them to find her where she lies crippled on the beach. Her only word, my name, a beacon of death. And then, when they reach her, I hear different kinds of screams. And I know they’re taking her. Maze tells me we need to get off the beach—that it’s too open. Without protest I follow her up between some of the rocks until we’re making a straight line up a slope and into the trees. It’s my last look that tells me what’s happened. Two of them have her, hauling her together in their arms. She screams until it turns to crying. Some kind of desperate shouted kind of crying. And the final shadow stands on the beach, ready to keep going, to come after us. At first he does, like he’s going to run on, alone, after us into the woods. But then, just before we turn and lose sight of the beach altogether, the shadow turns around and starts to walk back to the two carrying Gala.

  “They’re leaving,” I say.

  She ignores me and we march deeper into the forest until she finally breaks silence.

  “You have the map?” she says.

  After I tell her yes, she just leads me on, as if she’s been through this forest a million times before, until we come into a thick grove of trees that’s so dark we can’t walk through. The bushes run high, tangled with stabbing thorns, and we stop. I can’t tell if we’ve been walking an hour or ten minutes. My leg finally starts to let me know how much I’ve done to it—that somehow I’ve managed a near jog for too long and I need to sit and rest. When I sit down, without waiting to see if Maze thinks it’s okay, I look at all the blood. I think of Gala—her two bodies—the one from my dream and the one that the Nefandus are carrying away. And if they have healers, and they’ll heal her in time, just so they can sacrifice her. I think about how she’ll be sacrificed alone, and how Maze and I won’t be there to save her like they were there to save us. Something about it sends me down so low that I want to turn back. To become a martyr, as if I owe her that for some reason. But Maze sits too, right next to me, puts her arm on my shoulder, as if she needed the rest as much as me.

  “How’s your leg?” she asks.

  “It’s been better,” I say. And then, she tells me to hold still and she starts to play with the shirt on my leg.

  “Don’t unwrap it!”

  “It’s coming loose. Relax,” she says. And then, resting the shotgun down on the ground, she tightens the bloody shirt, and the next thing I know, her hand grabs her own shirt and she stands up, just enough to wipe some of the blood off of my face.

  “Think we can open the map yet?” she says.

  I tell her it’s too dark to see it anyway and that I’m hungry. I didn’t notice it, but now, all of the sudden, I’m so hungry. She tells me she is too, and that maybe we can find something to eat. I don’t even begin to think about how there could possibly be anything to find. But she returns right away to the map.

  “Is it dry?”

  I reach in my pocket and pull it out. Soaking wet still.

  “Leave it here. We’ll start moving in a couple minutes,” she says. And then she takes the soggy paper and sets it down on a rock near our feet.

  “We’re going to starve to death if they don’t get us first, aren’t we?” I say. And all the visions of finding food, or killing small animals, pass through my head as impossibilities. That neither of us has any experience staying alive in the woods.

  “It takes a month to starve to death,” she says.

  “How do you know?” I ask her.

  “I heard it.”

  “From who?”

  “From the Book of the Metal Keeper, verse ten through forty-two.”

  I almost laugh at her. She smiles at me.

  “The story of the wanderers? In the desert?”

  “The nuclear desert, remember?”

  “Was it thirty days they went without food?”

  “Yeah. Of course they also had the help of God, which I think, we’re going to have to do without. I don’t know whether he’d want to help us much now, with us wanting to destroy him and all,” she says.

  And then I do laugh. I can’t help it. The idea is too absurd. But somehow, even joking, she’s said it. Exactly what our quest is. To kill God. I want to tell her that she’s right, that that is what this is really all about. Killing God.

  “Maybe he’ll help us find some water at least,” I say, trying to keep the smile on her face. Her out of place laughs. “How many days do we have without water? I don’t remember a sermon on that.”

  “I have no idea. I could really use some water.”

  All of the sudden she looks around, as if there’ll be water right in front of us, somewhere
in plain view. But there’s nothing but dark forest. When we don’t say anything, and the darkness of night starts to talk to us in quiet animal noises, I tell her we should wait it out until morning. Find a hidden spot to sleep. Then, for a long time, she looks as if she’s considering it.

  “Let’s do it,” she says at last. And then we’re on our feet again, groping through bushes and trees, backtracking enough until we find another angle to walk, stopping once in a while to listen for the sound of wolves or red walkers. Nothing ever comes from the silence and we keep going. Finally we find a stretch of empty earth that runs underneath a long overhanging piece of granite. At first I want to tell her that I’m sure a bear lives here, and my mind flashes back to the Deadlands. The bear we saw from on top of the skyscraper. But I don’t say anything because my body won’t let me.

  We push in as far as we can go, and then, once we’re blocked from view of everything, we lie down on the cool dirt. It’s wet, but I dig down as much as I can anyway, right against Maze’s body. Her incredible warmth makes me feel like I’m suddenly wide awake again, and that I have to talk to her, and kiss her, and touch her, but my body tells me no, that everything is far too tired for me to think about it. So I just wrap my arm around her, and she doesn’t fight it at all. And together we lie, waiting for a long time and listening to the outside noises. The dark movements and occasional snapping branches. Then, there’s a wolf call, and a long wailing bird. And after enough repetitions, when nothing finds us and the night goes on, even though I’m sure a creature is walking right in front us in the blackness, coming into our cave to eat our necks in the dark, I say Maze’s name. Just to see if she’s still with me. But she’s gone. Completely asleep. For a moment, the thought comes back to me. To touch her. While she’s completely asleep. And then, guilt rises and I curse myself for the thought even coming into my head. And all at once, I desperately wait for sleep to take me too, so that I can leave everything.

  Daylight spills into our nook and after we get up I realize just how exposed we really were. That we weren’t concealed at all. My leg aches until I stretch a bit, and then Maze, rubbing her eyes, freaks out like she’s seen a red walker. I ask her what’s wrong and she just starts away, running a few feet into the woods. She starts checking everywhere on the ground.

  “The map!” she calls back. But by the time I get to her, she’s already found it.

  “Dry enough I think,” she says. And then, very slowly and carefully, she starts to open it. At first it cooperates, but then entire squares of the map crack off. Finally, we have it on the ground, like a broken puzzle, and we start to piece it together. It’s as if she’s comprehending the broken squiggles perfectly, and in just a moment, she tells me just where she thinks we crashed, and where we walked to, and where we are now.

  “That would mean we’re almost there. There’s no way,” I tell her.

  “Do you remember the turn on the beach? The one that passed that long jetty of rocks?”

  “No,” I tell her. And for a moment I try to remember, but then for the first time in the new day, I think of Gala, and everything that happened as we walked the beach last night. I shut it out just as fast, trusting Maze completely that she knows what she’s talking about. That she really has identified something on the map to show us where we are.

  “Here it is,” she says, pointing to something that looks just like she’s describing. “So we have to be somewhere here.”

  I try to make sense of it, but all I can see is where the tattoo marking is, and where she’s saying we are, and how close the two are to each other. I want to tell her we can’t go through with it, that it would be better to try to get back to Resistance camp. To head all the way back, find our way farther inland, and maybe take the highest trail. Get to a place where we know there will be some food and water and safety. But I don’t say anything. Because I know they’ll never help us. Not now. Not if we go back alone, without their leader. And at best they might chase us off. At worst they’ll accuse us of getting them killed. Or killing them ourselves. So I tell her I’m ready. She grabs the shotgun and we head into the forest, and before an hour passes, we hear the waves beating against the rocks on the beach.

  We don’t say much and I follow as fast as I can, managing the strange angle of my foot, and in the broad daylight, it’s as if all I can see is the tower. So impossibly far away in the ocean but so enormous. I start to think of where we’re going, where she thinks we’re about to reach, some kind of underground tunnel. How ridiculous it is, and how it doesn’t matter that I didn’t suggest going back, because we’ll have to do it anyway, since there’s no way there could be a tunnel under all those miles of ocean. And then, before it even feels like we’ve walked five miles, Maze says we have to go back into the forest now. I ask her why, just enough to get the explanation that she’s pieced it all out on the map. She starts to show me the fragments, long enough that I tell her to forget about it, that I just need to keep moving or stay stopped. And the hunger starts to bother me more and more as we head into the woods again, breaking up the rising slope of beach and past the last line of rocks to find black soil again.

  We go on and on for what seems like an endless march through the same pattern of trees and boulders. The smell washes over me, relieving me somehow of all my anxiety, and I begin to somehow forget my hunger, as if the scent and the air is reviving me. Do you feel it? I ask her. The air? She tells me it’s beautiful but doesn’t say another word. I watch her ass and her legs work over the rocks, how focused she is, like everything that’s happened—Sid, and now Garren, and Gala—doesn’t mean a thing to her. And how if I had gone too, last night, she’d still be just as focused. Like a machine. The thought scares me and I have the craziest idea for a second—she is a machine. As if the tattoo, and her orphanhood, the mystery of where she came from, must mean she’s really a robot. Something from the height of technology, just before the Wipe. A human replica. The apex of human hubris. The greatest and last sin was in making man’s likeness in metal and plastic, instead of in God’s image. Somehow I never understood what the Fathers meant by those lines. But now, somehow, it makes sense. That man would have reached a point when humans were indistinguishable from other forms of technology. That they had grown to be one and the same, just as the Fathers prophesized man and God would become one and the same in the After Sky. The thought rips around, seeming to make more and more sense to me until at last I have to open my mouth. I make it out like a joke, just to see her reaction.

  “You know how Father Gold said that in the After Sky, you become one with God?”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Sounds pretty boring, eternity. Doesn’t it?” she says, not a hint of fatigue, either from hunger or thirst or the relentless walking. Everything in me wants to say it—well what if, if the After Sky is a place and all, and technology replaced God like they say…what if it really means that man and machine became the same? Like you couldn’t recognize them apart from each other? But none of the words come out, because all at once I have the vision of Maze’s face. The look of sadness and of fear that I’ve seen on it over the past day—the helplessness and the humanness. And the absurdity of my thinking kills every bit of desire to ask her.

  “Yeah, eternal boredom,” I finally say. And then she lets it drop. As if I had no follow up to ask. And then, when I decide I want to really see what she thinks, because I realize that the humanness she has would have been part of making the machine just like a human—that in the end, the two would have had to share every trait, including vulnerability and weakness and fear—I am distracted by something white and out of place along the trail. At first I think it’s a shade of rock. A small off-color stone or maybe even a shell, somehow carried far into the woods. But when I move a bit off the path we’re going, just to get in close and see what it is, it becomes clear and I back away and almost yell.

  “What is it?” Maze says, stopping and coming over, the shotgun rising in her arms, ready to swing again at any momen
t.

  “I think—it’s a human skull.”

  Maze goes in closer than me, kneels, reaches out almost like she’s going to turn it on its side to be sure, but instead she just rises back to her feet.

  “It’s been here a long time,” she says. “No skin or anything left on it.”

  “Where the hell’s the body?” I say.

  And at that, Maze looks around, starts to walk a little farther to look for some sign of bones.

  “Must have been dragged off by—” she starts, but the words fall dead out of her mouth. Something kills it and she can’t say anything else.

  “What?” I say, hobbling over a few boulders to reach where she’s left the main path. But she doesn’t have to tell me because I see it too. Another one. Just the same as the other. Definitely human and alone, without a body. Cleaned of flesh.

  “Let’s go,” she says. The sun beats through the canopy, making me sweat a bit, and in a few minutes it’s as if we’ve forgotten the skulls, until the next blotch of white appears ahead of us, off to the left this time.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I chant. But we just keep walking until we’re right beside it. There are three of them, laid together, all the same as the others—white, cleaned of flesh.

  Maze slows down to a careful walk, holding the shotgun up, as if she expects something to jump out at any moment and try to rip our heads off. I slow down and get right beside her.

  “We should turn around,” I say. She doesn’t answer and I pray that she’s considering it, but then I know she’s not. She tells me this is just the way to the tunnel.

  “We don’t even know what to look for,” I say. I try to hide how scared I am until we see the next pile of skulls and then she knows. I stop completely.