“So why didn’t you kill Alice and I?”
“Who?”
“My friend. She was the one who dropped down beside me when you started shooting. You didn’t even try to shoot us – you only fired five times, once for each of the others.”
“As I’ve told you before, I don’t kill unnecessarily. Killing you and your friend wasn’t necessary for a few different reasons.”
“Which are?”
“Alright, let’s talk through the scenario strategically: there were seven of you in the clearing: three men and four women. I was starving and very low on strength and energy. To get to that doe, I had to kill the men, because I could definitely not get past them on my own in my weakened state. That left four women, which was a little too many to have attacking me as a group. You and your friend were the smallest, and the least likely to fight me for the deer once I came to claim it. So, I shot the other two women and left the two of you alone.”
“We had guns. How did you know we wouldn’t shoot at you?”
“Because you didn’t know how many of me there were. You had no clue as to whether someone else would fire on you if you moved. It was the perfect setup for me to run and get the deer with minimal lives lost.”
“Minimal. Eighteen people died so you could eat that deer!”
Gideon flinched. “I didn’t kill all of them; there was some confusion in your numbers.”
“Which you caused.”
He stopped walking, turning to face me. “Candace, I was starving. Remember the conversation about the trees? Just because the tree is beautiful and alive doesn’t mean I choose the tree over myself.” He turned away and started walking again. “Is there anything I can do to convince you I had no choice?”
“You did have a choice. You just chose the most selfish option.”
“So you would have let yourself starve to death, rather than kill eighteen humans to eat?”
“Possibly.”
“Ha. Let’s just see what your natural preservative instinct leads you to do next time you’re faced with that exact same scenario. And what about those squirrels we just ate?”
“What about them?”
“They were alive. We killed them so we could survive.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“Why? Because they’re not human?”
“Well, yeah.”
“But you’ve seen humanity, Candace. Humanity is destructive. Humans aren’t worth anything more than any other creature on this planet. How many animals have you killed in your life so you could survive? Way more than eighteen, I’d wager.”
His words nagged at my chest. Some part of me felt the truth of them, the understanding that humans were no better than animals, and to kill an animal might be just as bad as killing a human.
But it wasn’t. It just wasn’t.
Gideon kept talking. “Besides that, what have your motivations to kill humans been? Because I’d certainly say that your killing of those people who attacked me was selfish. As was your desire to kill me.”
I gaped at him. “What? That was most certainly not selfish.”
“Yes, Candace, it was.”
“I did – was doing that – for my parents.”
“Candace, I’m sorry to say this, but your parents are dead. They don’t need anything anymore, and they most certainly don’t need you going around killing people. You killed my attackers because you wanted to be the one to kill me, even though the only reason they were going to kill me was in hopes of getting something I might have, something that would help them survive – a life in sacrifice of three lives. But you killed them because you didn’t want them to kill me – because you wanted to kill me. You wanted to kill me because you hoped it would somehow make you feel better about your parents’ death. And then you decided not to kill me because you found that it might be easier to live with me than to kill me. What part of that wasn’t selfish?”
My chest was on fire at his words; anger blazed through me. He had no right to say that. None at all. He’d killed my parents.
“You’re no better than me, Candace. We are just two individuals trying to get through life here on earth.”
I stopped walking. When Gideon noticed, he stopped, too. But I didn’t look at him. Instead, I just turned around and walked away.
I walked several yards off – far enough away to make me feel like I had some distance. Then, I climbed a tree.
I settled in between its branches, listening for any sign that Gideon had followed me.
There wasn’t any.
This might have scared me, the thought of him walking on without me, but I was too angry to think about that at the moment. I just sat there, my whole being burning. If he disappeared while I was gone, that might be for the best anyway.
I was angry at him for saying what he had, but mostly because he was right. It was selfishness that had motivated me to kill those people. It was selfishness, my previous desire to kill Gideon. And that meant he was also right about me being no better than him. I had nothing to hold against him.
But I still couldn’t forgive him. It hurt too much.
I sat in that tree for about an hour. The anger faded, and then I just wallowed in the pain of loss; I missed my parents, and it hurt to know there wasn’t anything I could do for them. Even killing Gideon wouldn’t be for them.
Of course, this meant Gideon was also right about my love for them. It wasn’t lack of love that kept me from killing him. Maybe I was just a decent human being, like he’d said. Maybe it’d been my lack of selfishness.
Or, like he’d also said, maybe it had been my change of desires – my selfishness turned toward a different desire: the desire not to be alone.
I sat there, alone, basking in the aloneness that was both a fear and a desire; it was so rare that I managed to be alone, but there was also the fear that it might, one day, become permanent.
Then, finally, came the anxiety that Gideon might be gone.
I climbed down from the tree, returning to the streamside.
There he sat, his back against a tree as he watched the water. He looked up as I approached, then stood.
“That took you long enough,” he said, stretching his back.
“You didn’t leave,” I commented, falling into step with him as he began walking again.
“I’m attached to you, remember?”
“I thought maybe my selfishness would have finally convinced you to go your own way.”
“The point of what I’d said wasn’t that you’re selfish. It was that self preservation is a requirement of life, and it was an instinct both of us have.”
“Self preservation?” I didn’t see how that connected to my selfishness.
“In your case, the preservation of your mental state.”
“Ah. So I would have self imploded if I hadn’t decided to follow you that first day?”
“Possibly. You didn’t have it in you to let me go.”
“Would I have self imploded if I had killed you at the carnival?”
“Probably not. However, you recognized that it might no longer be your best option – that’s self preservation.”
“I kind of hate you.”
“Haven’t you always?”
“Well, no. I started out hating you; that faded to dislike, and then to a general neutral feeling, then to a slight preference for you. Now, however, I’ve returned to hating you.”
“That’s quite the degree change. Why?”
“Because you always seem to be right.”
He took my hand right then, without looking at me, and continued to walk; he interlaced his fingers with mine. “That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, you know.”
“I know. But it’s definitely an annoying thing.”
“It’ll be less annoying when you’re a little older.”
“No. It’ll always be annoying.”
“As long as it doesn’t motivate you to leave me.”
“Because you don’t want me
gone?”
He smiled, still looking ahead rather than at me. “I enjoy your company. Remember?”
Chapter 11
“We should be nearing a good shopping area now,” Gideon said a few days later, still limping along.
“Do you have a map in your head, or something?”
“No, why?”
“How do you know we’re getting close to a shopping area?”
“I’ve been around here before.”
“Really? Have you walked along this stream before?”
“Yes.”
“But you hadn’t been to that carnival.”
“I’d been to the edge of it; I’d never gone in before, because of a string of circumstances out of my control.”
“Huh. So none of this is new to you.”
“You are new to me.” He was holding my hand again; he’d never said a word about this new behavior, but repeated it often. I let him because it felt nice, and it had really been just a small step further from the little touches before. His hand was large and warm and calloused, and made me feel as if I could never be lost while it was there.
True, in a way, if he already knew where we were going.
“Where else have you been?”
“I’ve been to a lot of different places.”
“Do you know where south we’re going?”
“I have an idea of a good spot, yes.”
“Have you been to the east?”
“I’m from Wisconsin, remember?”
“I mean further east than that.”
“Like Virginia?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been to every state in the continental U.S.”
“Wow. Really? Why?”
He shrugged. “What else is there to do?”
“So you just travel?”
“In the north in the summer, in the south in the winter.”
“What about the middle?”
“I get around to going there, too. Usually in the ‘middle’ parts of the year.” He smirked down at me; I rolled my eyes.
“We were too busy trying to be immobile to ‘travel’ for the sake of traveling. Immobility meant the opportunity to grow food, and to trade. The most traveling we did was when we were looking for scarce commodities.”
“Like medicine.”
“Yes.”
“We need to exit the trees here.” He angled his head to the right; I hadn’t noticed the trees thinning until now, but he pulled me along. “Have you ever been inside a shopping mall?”
“Er, only the ones with pharmacies.”
“So about two.”
I smiled. “Something like that.”
“Then this is a great one for your first.”
We hit the sidewalk, buildings jumping up around us as we exited the trees.
“Is that the mall?” I asked, pointing at the biggest, widest building of them all; the rest were just small restaurants and bookstores. I was pretty sure we were both hungry, but the food inside restaurants had been the first commodities to disappear when the economy went down the toilet. Too bad, because the faded photos of food on the front of some of the windows looked absolutely mouthwatering.
“Yes, that’s it.”
“And you’ve been inside before?”
“This is the best time of year to need new clothes.”
“How long ago was that?”
“About five years, I think.”
“What are the chances there are any clothes left?”
He frowned. “Not good, but we’ll have to start searching somewhere.”
“Or join a nudist colony.”
“Good luck finding one still in existence.”
When we got there, he held the door open for me; this was just a gesture, as the glass had long since been smashed, deeming the doors useless.
“First stop: Macy’s.”
The store was dark, only lit as well as the outer sunlight allowed. Mannequins and hangers littered the floor. Metal racks stood useless, several of them tipped over. The broken glass of the doors had caused debris from outside to blow in, collecting in the corners in large piles from several years of decrepitude; I thought I saw a human leg sticking out of one pile, and quickly looked away. As for the carpet, it was as if it had never existed; a thick layer of dirt and mold covered the top, and there were even a few green sprouts growing out of it in the areas that periodically caught sunlight.
“Very promising,” I told him, trying not to sound too sarcastic.
“Not very promising, because it has its own entrance. This stuff would have gone first.”
“I can see that.”
“If there’s anything useful left, it’ll be in the interior of the mall, and probably in the back of whatever store that is. We’ll need to check each store’s stockroom.”
“That’ll take a long time. Should we plan on camping here?”
Gideon glanced over at the leg I’d noticed. “If there’s anywhere that feels nonthreatening. I mostly prefer having open sky over my head so I don’t feel trapped, but we’ll see what we find. Come on.” He pulled me forward; we walked through Macy’s, checking the storeroom as discussed, then entered the wider part of the mall.
The mall had two floors, railings separating us from the open air between them. The sun gleamed down through the high windows, lighting the fronts of each retailer but not making it through to their inner accommodations. The outer halls were cleaner than Macy’s, though not by much; the dirt had simply not managed to travel far from the broken doors. We could see a few figures ducking from one doorway to the next, but the mall was mostly deserted.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to something taking up a lot of space in the middle of the walkway, one floor below us.
Gideon pulled us closer to the railing to see what I was indicating. “Huh. I believe that is the remains of an ice skating rink.”
What had once been the ice was now dry dirt; the ice had long since melted away, turned into mud, and then completely vanished.
We stood there, looking around, for a few more moments, and then walked into the nearest store to begin our search for proper attire. No clothing remained. We searched through store after store, leaving just as empty-handed as the few other humans flitting in and out of entrances.
Something crunched under my foot; I glanced down and grimaced at the rotting mouse corpse. “Maybe we should take a break,” I muttered, looking around at the endless line of shops.
“It’ll be easier to find things in malls further south,” Gideon told me, leading me over to a bench.
“So this is a waste of time?”
“Are we in a rush?”
“Well, the faster we reach some warmer states, the less we’ll need clothes.”
“We’re going to need clothes either way; we’re not going to make it with my injuries.”
I sighed. “I know.” I looked around at our surroundings. An Easter rabbit twice as large as Gideon was positioned not too far away, neon Easter eggs strategically arranged at his feet; dust covered both the rabbit and the eggs, causing the once cheerful colors to look faded and bleak. “I like the forest better.”
“That’s because you still can’t appreciate the beauty of what is; you’re still focusing on what this mall used to be.”
“Is that really so wrong?” I asked.
“No, except for the part where you keep getting depressed about it. I think this mall is amazing for how nature has taken over. The mall still stands, but it’s not in the right of humans anymore. It is in the right of nature. That bunny?” He gestured to the rabbit. “Look how the sunlight catches it, bringing out the dirt and residue that covers it. Humans couldn’t make the sunlight do that; nature’s made it beautiful in that way.”
I squinted at the rabbit. “But it’s not serving its purpose anymore.”
“It’s purpose now is a relic; a reminder of what was, and what now is.”
“But that’s sad.”
“What’s sad? T
he rabbit used to represent the candy industry forcing what used to be a religious holiday into another holiday where they can rot children’s teeth, and encourage greedy little children to whine for the opportunity to rot their teeth. Now, candy doesn’t exist. The bunny’s covered in dust. The only beauty in it anymore is the sunlight on its ceramic surface.”
“Well, what about the skating rink?” I craned my neck to look over the railing at it.
“What about the skating rink?”
“Was there anything wrong with it being the way it was? A fun way to spend time together, and to get some exercise?”
“Except we don’t need exercise anymore, because we’ve been forced back into a hunter-gatherer mentality. That ice rink represents one of the few pure, joyful things humans created. Now, we don’t have time or resources for its upkeep. That’s not a bad thing; we have other stuff to worry about.”
“But wouldn’t it be fun to skate?”
“Probably.”
“So therefore the remains of the skating rink represent loss.”
“The remains of the skating rink represent the government’s lack of capability in keeping the economy running – that’s all. If you want to skate on some ice, we can stay up north for the winter, wait for all the lakes to ice over, and then skate on those. Ice skating isn’t extinct; humans just aren’t in charge of when it’s available anymore.”
I mulled this over.
“Do you want to stay north and skate this winter?” he asked.
“No; it’s not worth being cold,” I told him.
“That’s how I feel.”
“But I do wish I could know what it was like to skate.” It had only been about thirty years since the end of American civilization – long enough for me to know that it would have been fun.
He rolled his eyes, then pushed himself up. “Come on,” he said, grabbing my hand and pulling me up.
“Where are we going? I thought we were taking a break.”
“Nope. We’re going ice skating.” He was hauling me toward the run-down escalator.
“I thought the point of the conversation we just had was that we couldn’t go ice skating unless we stayed up north for the winter.”
Humanity Page 11
