by Joe Hart
Meaningless. That’s what all words are in the face of this. No sentiments can withstand the quiet of death.
Tia leans against Ian, and Merrill kneels, placing one hand on the stones before standing and leading Chelsea away. One by one they turn until only she, Rita, Sherell, and Newton are left. Rita says something, telling her to come with, but she shakes her head. Slowly they file away except for Newton who stops beside her and brushes one long-fingered hand down the side of her face. Then he’s gone and she’s alone on the wind and snow-bitten plain outside the small town that will never shelter life again.
Images swirl in her mind like the snow around her.
The NOA agent saying she is a mother and the keystone.
Her daughter floating in the tank.
Vivian telling her to come home.
Eli grimacing as he tells her the story of the woman he loved, seeing Ella falling over and over again.
The white blanket wrapped around him as he’s lowered into the ground.
Zoey’s knees buckle and she places a hand out to keep from falling. Her fingers meet the cold, soft earth between rocks.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, letting the hot tears finally fall. “So sorry. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.” She cries, the snow accepting each teardrop like a gift. This is exactly what she’s feared since the day she felt herself caring about the group—that she would not only lose them but be the cause of it as well.
Should’ve stayed at the ARC and none of this would’ve happened.
Not true. Terra would’ve been sold into the Fae Trade and there’s no telling where either of them would be now. She would probably be on the fifth floor, strapped to a table with tubes running out of every orifice.
But Eli would still be alive.
Yes. He would.
There is no rebuttal for the fact. No comfort. He is gone forever.
She cries harder, the sobs wrenching something loose inside her. The memory of Merrill telling her she already has a family comes unbidden. This death, the danger at the silo, is all because she wanted to find her heritage. Because she needed to find who she is.
But now it’s abundantly clear. She is chaos. Disaster. Pain.
A murderer.
It doesn’t matter anymore who her parents were or where she came from. Nothing can change who she’s become. And those she loves have suffered for it.
Don’t let them go. The ones you love. They disappear.
She pushes herself upright, hands and face tingling with cold, frozen tear-tracks like burns on her cheeks.
Don’t let them go.
Let them go.
Disappear.
Zoey rises slowly and gives the grave a final look. “Thank you,” she says, and walks toward the edge of town leaving footprints that start to fill in with snow as soon as she’s gone.
She finds them in the lunchroom, most settled in their bedding on the floor. Tia, Chelsea, and Merrill sit around the table, the last bottle of moonshine between them. Zoey starts to walk past them but Merrill calls out to her.
“You haven’t said a word,” he says when she nears.
“I don’t have anything to say.”
He searches her face but she keeps it emotionless. “You know you can talk to us, any of us, right?”
“I know.”
“Can’t believe he’s gone,” Tia says, words slurring. She reaches out and takes another long pull on the bottle. “I keep expecting him to walk through the door or hear him say something smart.”
Chelsea puts an arm around the other woman. “I wish I would’ve—”
“It’s no one’s fault except the man who shot him,” Merrill says, drinking from the bottle himself. “And he’s dead so the blame is gone. What we need to do is get some sleep and focus on what our next move is.” He looks at Zoey and she drops her eyes before nodding.
Without saying anything else she walks to her bedding and arranges it near the door. The low mumble of conversation gradually lulls her past the visions of Eli in the white blanket and she closes her eyes before the tears can come again.
Merrill wakes with a start. He sits up, wincing at the throb in the base of his skull. Too much ’shine. But even then the crashing reality of the day before sinks in. It is a blanket of lead laid over his shoulders. He tries to imagine the coming days without Eli beside him, to rely on, to joke with. He imagines life without his friend and he wants to lie down again and go back to sleep until the hurt is gone. He starts to but stops, propped up on one elbow.
Why did he wake up?
He rolls over and scans the room. Chelsea breathes softly next to him, Tia on the other side of her. There is Lyle against the opposite wall with Seamus dozing near his feet and Nell between Rita and Sherell. Newton lies on his back, one hand holding Sherell’s. This almost makes him smile but he doesn’t, the persistent inkling that something is wrong like an itch in his mind.
He rises, guessing the time. It’s maybe an hour before dawn, the light sterile and cold coming in past the blinds. He tries to remember who was on last shift for watch and recalls Ian saying he would do it, noticing the old man’s blankets in a pile, and that’s when he freezes.
There is an empty space near the door that shouldn’t be there.
Zoey.
He steps quickly over Chelsea and Tia, moving into the hall and through the double doors. Ian stands beside the entry to the clinic. His head snaps around at the sound of Merrill’s approach.
“Is Zoey with you?” Merrill asks.
Ian frowns. “No. She was sleeping when I came out around midnight.”
“Damn it.” He spins away, hurtling through the doors, and calls her name, his voice bouncing down the corridor and back. He steps into each room along the way, hoping against the rising dread that she’ll be there, curled up and sleeping, just needing to be alone, but all are empty.
Stopping outside the last office he feels a draft of much colder air coming from beneath the door. He tries to open it but it’s jammed. After two thrusts of his shoulder against the thick wood, the chair propped against the handle on the other side snaps and skids across the empty floor.
The broken window Zoey had mentioned to him the day before gapes to the predawn world beyond, a piece of paper with writing on it nailed to the sill. He doesn’t need to move any closer to make out the footprints leading away from the clinic through the snow.
6
Zoey hikes up the side of the small ravine to where the wind has blown the ground free of snow.
She gazes back in the direction of the town she never knew the name of, but it is already lost to the distance she’s covered. Only a glow in the east tells her she’s moving the right way, that she’s trekked far enough that the group won’t be able to find her easily. She made sure by walking toward the eastern horizon before doubling back at a clear spot in the road and circling well outside the town so her trail will be difficult to track. She doesn’t doubt they will find it, but by then she’ll be gone.
A hollow ache fills her at the thought of them discovering she’s left. Finding the note explaining why. Why she can’t risk their lives anymore. Because as long as NOA exists they’ll be hunting her, and the ones she loves will be considered disposable or at the very best, leverage to get her to do what they want.
I have to disappear before I lose them all.
The ground levels and she jogs for a bit, the pack on her shoulders sloshing with the two full water bottles she took. Below them is enough dried meat and canned food to last at least a week. But she doesn’t know how long it will take her. How many miles she’ll have to go before finding a vehicle that runs.
The land is uneven and rough beneath the coating of snow. She trips several times and has to slow as she enters what looks like a field of rock beside a rise that brings her up higher than she’s been so far. The expanse stretches on for miles broken only by the occasional hillock or gulley, the curtain of a rolling snowstorm obscuring the northern horizon.
>
Her stomach turns at the sight of the distance. So far. But there’s no choice.
She reaches into her pocket and draws out the vial of blood, turning it over a few times. Something so small with such massive implications. Zoey considers tossing the vial into the snow and turning south. She could walk until it got warmer and the world forgot her. Maybe then she could do the same. Forget the family she’s gained, forget the love, forget Lee.
Forget her daughter.
Her hand clenches around the vial. She knows she could never do that. She has to be sure that Vivian’s message and the baby aren’t all a ruse, something to lure her back. And at the very least Lee deserves to know he is a father. That is if she can find him.
She starts down the opposite side of the hill, walking quickly until she’s running, sprinting from all other thoughts except finding a working vehicle.
Because she’s not sure she’ll be able to walk all the way to Seattle.
7
Lee gazes out over the calm bay, hands chilling through his gloves as he holds on to the support railing of what once was the Space Needle.
He focuses on his breathing, trying to bring it under control after sprinting up eight hundred stairs to the observation deck where he stands now. Closing his eyes, he breathes in slowly through his nose and out through his mouth, willing his heart to slow. Gradually it does.
Lee stretches his right leg, which always tenses up and cramps faster than his left, and watches the boiling fog hanging over the bay. It is as thick as he’s ever seen it since arriving here over seven months ago.
A recollection of stumbling into the outskirts of the city sweeps over him. Bloody, beaten, starving, two fingers broken on his right hand. He remembers the failing of his vision, the guard post door opening and the first kind voice he’d heard in nearly a month saying, God Almighty. What the hell happened to you, son?
Son.
He grimaces and walks around the circular observation deck, the view unhampered by safety cables that were cut years ago. They hang limp like unearthed worms through support bars, some lank and swaying in the wind, clacking against the sides of the structure in a sad offbeat. Suicides were the reason the cables were strung in the first place. He’d read it in a swollen and weathered book he’d found in a small shop a stone’s throw from the Needle’s base. The aversion to even picking up a book had been monumental to overcome; each time he saw one he thought of Zoey, and then of his father.
Lee swallows and bats at one of the loose cables. In the early years of the Dearth there had been dozens of suicides every morning to clean up. Ray had told him this after nursing him back to health in the small, ground-floor apartment in what the old man called “Skid Row”; a teakettle almost always hissing quietly on a hot plate. Garbage men! Ray had exclaimed, redressing the slow-healing wounds while he lay helpless and weak on a cot. Garbage men pick up garbage, not bodies, or pieces of them after falling five hundred feet. Damn outrage it was. But our union wouldn’t back us. Some bureaucratic bullshit about pulling weight in a time of need. The old man had batted a hand at the air as if knocking a fly away. No one else would do it, that’s all. We were accustomed to stink and dealing with other people’s refuse. But let me tell you, son, no rotting garbage can prepare you for the smell that comes off a human being busted open on the concrete. The mind can’t make sense of it even after seeing it over and over. And we cleaned them up every morning for a year. Shoveled them into the backs of the trucks and did our rounds like usual until the shooting got too bad. Then we hung up our keys and hid like anyone had to do who wanted to stay above the soil.
Lee flexes his hand unconsciously, feeling the last tinges of ache in the mended bones. Ray had told him he’d have arthritis in the fingers when he gets older since they didn’t heal exactly straight. The old man had said it in an apologetic way, looking at the floor as if ashamed. But Lee couldn’t have appreciated him more. Kindness, he’d found out the hard way, was a limited commodity in the world beyond the ARC’s walls. Most dealt in pain and suffering instead.
He stops to gaze out over the opposite side of the Needle, his back to the sea. The air is devoid of cloud and haze, the early morning light graying the mountains beyond the city. Somewhere in that direction she’s probably warm in a bed with a fire to sit by when she wakes. There are people to take care of her, Rita and Sherell no longer her enemies. Food and drink and her damn books always nearby.
Lee releases his hold on the steel bar, blood rushing back into his palms, and ignores the memory of her lips and her body pressed against his.
Instead he recalls the howling wind in his ears as he fled down the side of a mountain.
Yells in the dark behind him.
Injuries bleeding beneath his clothes and terror pumping through every vein.
The men had ambushed him at his small camp several weeks after he’d left Ian’s cabin, their eyes wild and hungry in a way he didn’t understand until they started beating him, tearing at his clothes, saying things in lustful grunts that made their intentions all too clear.
He’d fought, but they’d been stronger. So the choice between hiding away somewhere in his mind while they did what they wanted with him and flinging himself off the nearest mountain edge was an easy one.
It was a miracle he hadn’t broken anything more than his fingers.
The fall was quick and shockingly painful since he had no time to prepare himself for impact in the blinding dark. He’d rolled for a dozen yards and come to rest against the base of a huge pine, back throbbing, skin torn, hand mangled.
Then he’d run. Run until his lungs were two burning bags inside him. Run until he’d fallen again in a rockslide above a clearing. And that’s where he’d ridden out a day and a half, listening to the calls of the men searching but not finding him, not daring to stand up even to urinate but simply wetting himself like a child until he lay in his own fear and filth. When their cries had trailed off far to the east, he’d walked down to the clearing, which turned out to be a desolate highway that eventually led him to the guard post, and Ray.
The bitter anger at Zoey flares like a fanned ember as he remembers. His injuries and debilitating fear were nothing compared to seeing Reaper’s knife edge lick the light before disappearing into the soft skin below his father’s chin.
Lee shoves himself from the railing and makes his way to the stairs, jogging down them at a brisk pace, letting his simmering rage fuel him. He hits the street at a run, keeping an easy pace that brings him to the first intersection where he takes a left and heads up the steady incline of hills the city is built on. Most buildings to either side are empty, abandoned, and crumbling into side streets that aren’t used regularly. Much life subsists lower, closer to the ocean along the ports and rocky coastline. Above the businesses that still operate daily are the residences; the farther from the water, the less life there is.
Truth be told, he prefers solitude nowadays. Ray and Connor’s company is fine, but beyond that he finds the steady rumble of conversation in the pubs grating, the flow of bodies when the workday is done overwhelming. He recalls the order of the ARC, the daily routine, the rigidity of rules. It made sense. It was home.
And it was also there for the sole purpose of keeping some of the last women on earth complete and utter prisoners.
Lee frowns at the inner voice, the one he considers a remnant from before Zoey escaped.
The terror you felt running for your life from the men in the mountains? That was a fraction of what Zoey and the others endured. Still have to endure. Look at where you are. Seattle, the last city in America. Could a woman jog through the streets as you’re doing now?
No. The city is civilized compared to what he’s witnessed of the outside world, but the answer is still no. A woman would be caught and held against her will, fought over, and possibly killed, just like when the Dearth began.
He pushes himself harder, thighs burning as he reaches a plateaued street and swings right down an alley. The
anger recedes as it does when the voice of reason begins to speak and in its place is the haunting ache to see her again. Hold her. Kiss her. He knows it wasn’t her fault that his father died. In fact, when looking at it objectively, his father was a major proponent of her escape, smuggling her books the way he did. There is no one truly to blame except perhaps the Director and NOA itself, but the anger is still there no matter how much reason is applied.
Lee trots to a stop before a brick building rising four stories above him. A steel door is positioned beside an exterior zigzag of stairs leading to his living space on the top floor. He takes several cleansing breaths of the cool, moist air and enters the lower apartment.
Inside, the smell of stale tea, soiled clothes, and camphor meets him. The space is largely one room, the kitchen opening off the entry and leading into the dining and living area. To the left is the tiny laundry room where he spent weeks healing, and near the back of the apartment is a single bedroom.
A wet cough issues from that direction and Lee’s hope that Ray is getting better evaporates.
“That you, Lee?” The voice is thick, smoky.
“Yeah.”
“Bring that bottle of hooch, eh?”
Lee sighs, glancing at the bottle on the cluttered table considerably less full of amber liquid than it was the night before.
“Looks like you had enough last night.”
“That’s why I need some now.”
“Ray—”
“Don’t make me get up off my deathbed to come out there. I’ll give you a good kick in the ass if I have to.”
Lee can’t help but smile as he snags the bottle’s neck and carries it through the apartment. He considers the state of the place. It’s not dirty, just in disarray. Clothes hang from the backs of chairs, empty teacups sit on bookshelves and tables alike, a pedal bike Ray’s been talking about fixing for months stands in one corner, wheels up. He’ll have to come down later after his shift and tidy up. He stops in the doorway to the bedroom where the camphor smell is the strongest.
