by T. Rudacille
***
The food was pretty decent. The cots were relatively comfortable. Even after a week and a half of watching the movies they had stored, we weren’t bored. We were able to talk to people from other countries and learn how they had discovered that the world was ending.
With everyone, it had all started with the dream.
One man from France told us about seeing a creature very similar to the one we had seen. When we asked if he had killed it, he shook his head.
“I should have.” He said through his heavy accent. “I know it was somebody.”
“Did anyone you love go missing?” Alice pressed him gently.
“Yes. My wife and my brother both went missing. I know that she was the one following me. I should have ended it for her, but I could not.”
To think of that man’s wife tossing and turning in some unknown purgatory we couldn’t begin to picture clearly disturbed Alice so much that she stopped sleeping through the night. I would wake up, hearing the people all around me snoring or breathing steadily, and Alice would be sitting up in her bed, squinting at her crocheting book and trying to follow the instructions, or doodling, or reading those books about the rich kids at a New York City private school that she had insisted on bringing, all by the very dim light of her dying flashlight.
I didn’t want to ask people about the monsters anymore, but Alice insisted on getting all the information we could.
For some, it was the Watchers we had encountered. Other people described being stalked (and in some cases, attacked) by giants wearing fur and armor.
“Like a giant? Or a troll?” I pressed eagerly.
“If I had any idea what you were talking about, I would choose one or the other.” The strange woman from Maine answered. “But since I don’t know…”
It didn’t matter, so I didn’t explain it. How she didn’t know what a giant or a troll was, though, I didn’t know.
“I just know that those things were huge, and they would have killed me if he hadn’t stopped them.” The woman beckoned to her husband.
“What did you do to stop them?” I asked, ready to file his answer away for future reference.
“I found my own beast, I guess. I beat the crap out of the thing. I’ve never done Karate or anything like that a day in my life. But I was like a cage-fighter, man. I’ll admit, it was kind of cool.”
I smiled slightly, remembering how it felt when I had ordered the cop to leave, only to see him turn and stride away as though I had simply bid him good evening.
Another person, who spoke a million miles a minute with words I had never heard used in conversation before, explained seeing some strange, child-like creature.
“It only had a circle with teeth in it. It wasn’t a mouth, per se.”
Weird…
All of that was fun for a week or so. Then, Alice and I began to grow restless as we awaited the day we could leave the ship. After exploring every part of it, we were ready for some open air. The walls were beginning to feel like they were closing in. Though the ship was large, we were beginning to feel like were closed inside of a shoebox.
One night, we all got a scare. Randomly, while everyone was in the cafeteria having dinner, the ship began to bob up and down only slightly. Nobody stopped talking; they were paying no attention to the vibrations that Alice and I felt beneath our feet. Then, there was a deafening bang, and everyone in the room was thrown up into the air several feet, only to come smacking back to the ground. For a minute, our stomachs dropped, and I knew in my heart that we were plummeting right out of the sky, falling into the infinite space below us. There was nothing that would catch us in the dark open space beneath us.
But then, just as the screams of terror and the shrill emergency sirens reached a deafening peak, it was over. I looked up to see a girl a little older than Alice and I clutching a sobbing little girl close to her. An older man, presumably her father, had his arm around her shoulder. She shook him off and stood back up with the child still attached to her chest. One of the other girls with her was being ushered to her feet by a pretty red-headed woman who I could only assume was her mother.
The first girl and the man were the ones we had seen in the hallway. I had only seen fractured groups thus far, and they were the first family where all of its members appeared to be intact. They appeared to be doing alright. That made them the luckiest group, in my opinion.
Alice and I were walking back to our room one night when the little girl I had seen came running around the corner, giggling as her older brother chased her. Behind them, the two girls were walking in silence, not looking at each other.
“I am sick of this ship.” The older of the two muttered as she stared straight ahead. The younger gave no response.
“Well, I guess we’re not the only ones who just want to freaking get to Pangaea already.” Alice muttered to me as the door to our housing compartment slid open to let us in.
“Are we going to live here on the ship, or are we going to rough it out in the wilderness?”
I was trying to distract her from what I knew was a severe case of cabin fever. I was experiencing the very same thing.
“Definitely the wilderness.” She replied as we laid down on our beds that we had pushed together. “I’m sick of this ship, too. Once I’m off of it, I’ll probably never come back inside.”
“You’ll have to come inside to eat.”
“No, I won’t. We’ll learn to hunt and fish. We’ll live off the land. Isn’t that what you always said you wanted to do? Remember? Your parents were calling you like, every five minutes that day, and you got all frustrated and said you wanted to go live on an island where there was no service. You said we would learn to hunt our own food, and we’d live in a log cabin we built out of the trees there.”
“No.” I corrected her. “I changed my mind, remember? I said that I’d rather live in a house made out of palm leaves. It is way more authentic.”
“It might be more authentic, but I would definitely prefer the log cabin. I like having doors and windows. I like kitchens.”
“Well, we wouldn’t have a stove.”
“That’s okay. We would cook outside on a fire, and we’d bring the food in to eat in the kitchen. I can picture it; we’ll have oil lamps lit instead of having electricity.”
I realized then that we were no longer talking about the fantasy I had dreamed up while frustrated over always being wired in with everyone. We were talking about Pangaea. I laid back, picturing what she was saying.
“We’ll catch our own food.” She continued, “We’ll cook it ourselves. We’ll make plates out of rocks and silverware out of bamboo shoots.”
“I’ll build us furniture out of trees. Maybe we’ll find some way to make paint, and you can start painting again.”
“Yeah. We’ll find some way to make fabric, and I’ll sew us curtains and blankets and cushions for our couches.” She laughed and covered her face. “This is so ridiculous.”
“No, it’s not.” I told her after propping my head up on my hand and turning to face her. “It’s cool. I like talking about this, believe it or not.”
“I barely believe it, because I know how you are about feelings.”
“Hey, I am a sensitive guy.”
“Yeah, right. And Satan liked to snuggle.”
“Did you just compare me to Satan?” I asked, trying to feign offense. “That's low.”
“No!” She exclaimed, picking up her pillow and whacking me in the face with it. “I was just kidding. You can be very sensitive sometimes. Like when I force you to watch any movie based on a Nicholas Sparks book. You think I don’t see the man-tears, but I’ve seen them.”
“You’ve seen nothing!” I exclaimed in mock outrage before we both started laughing raucously again.
The people on the other side of Alice’s bed were scowling at us. They were a couple that had clearly been married for many years. Every time I looked over at them at night time, they were turned away from on
e another. I never saw them exchange a word of conversation, either. They spent a lot of time praying, speaking loudly enough to God for all of us to hear. One night, when I was feeling particularly grim, I wondered if one day, after spending every waking moment together for many years, Alice and I would become like them. My parents had been toying with the idea of getting divorced, and they had been high school sweethearts, if people still even use that expression. Was that just marriage? It begins and it ends before death parts the two involved?
Alice and I were, for all intents and purposes, married now. We were on our own, living without the constant supervision of our parents. We were traveling on that journey together. Once we got to Pangaea, because we were together and because we were all that either of us knew, we would be living together. We loved each other. Were we doomed to scowl at those in the midst of young love one day because they had exactly what we had lost?
Those were heavy thoughts for me at that age. But after everything, it was easy to travel down some deep cerebral path into the meaning of it all, into the past and the future. I believed that Alice and I would be together forever. She believed the same. As we talked about where we saw ourselves on Pangaea, we believed in our permanence as a couple even more resolutely.
We were going to build our log cabin, hunt our food, build our furniture, and make a life for ourselves. Some people would kill for that chance, but we hadn’t needed to. We were forced into that life by some cruel trick of fate where every other option was incinerated.
It was thrilling. It was terrifying. It was the best and the worst of scenarios.
I never would have survived those days of uncertainty without her there, helping me hatch those crazy schemes and believing in them with me. I never would have survived all that came to pass later without remembering all we had dreamt up. It had seemed so childish at the time; it was almost completely ridiculous. But it never left me. Those days with her have still never left me.
Violet
“Look, Maura! Look at it!” Penny exclaimed excitedly as she pushed her way through the large crowd of people gathered around the window at the far end of the Atrium.
“I see, darling. That is something, isn’t it?”
“Look at the stars! They’re still so far away!”
I looked over at Brynna to see her covering her mouth to hide a tiny smile that had emerged. Elijah nudged her with his elbow several times, practically bobbing up and down. He had always been the one obsessed with space and there he was, flying through it.
“Hold this.” He handed Brynna his water bottle, “I’m going to go stomp on children so I can get a better look.”
Brynna laughed now, and I couldn’t help but join in.
“We were the first to see it, you know.” James told me as he leaned against one of the pillars by the wall.
“You two were the first people awake?” I looked between the two of them in disbelief.
“I believe so.” James replied, “Well, there was another woman up, but that’s a grim story for another time.”
“What happened?” I asked, and my smile faded abruptly.
“It’s nothing.” James dispersed my need to know such a dark thing with an easygoing tone and a shrug of his shoulder. “You and your sister, you're two of a kind. You're fascinated with all things morbid.”
“Her husband had a heart attack in his sleep and died.” Brynna chimed in bluntly.
When James and I looked over at her, me in shock and him in the beginning phase of anger, she exhaled the smoke from her cigarette, shrugged her shoulder, and raised one eyebrow.
“You asked.”
Irritation welled inside of me. I hadn’t wanted to know that. The fascination with morbid things that James had commented on always resulted in me feeling an almost exaggerated, out of proportion level of sadness or disgust. Perhaps it was guilt at being so enthralled by the macabre. I hadn’t needed to know that and yet I had asked. She had told me. Neither of us acted in my best interest.
Brynna should have avoided the topic for my benefit the way James had. When I was young, she exhibited some sensitivity on emotionally heavy things. As I got older, she became more and more forceful with the truth. Once I had reached the age of seventeen, my feelings were not spared on anything. I sympathized for Penny; when I looked over at her, I saw that Elijah was holding her up so she could see out of the window better, and her eyes were lit up with such amazement at what she was seeing. I pitied her suddenly and painfully. On one particular day, with no precursor to the sudden change, she would find Brynna, who was warm to her now, suddenly cold and hardened. Her feelings would change from adoration and a perception of safety to what bordered on hatred for having to face the scary world without her older sister’s guidance.
“Really?” James snapped at Brynna in disbelief.
“Pardon me, but she is my sister. I will decide what she hears and what she does not, thank you so much.”
“And what was the purpose of telling her that? Oh, that's right. There isn't one.”
Brynna shrugged.
“It is the reality of the situation. We can’t afford any naivety here. Not anymore…”
“Where are Mom and Dad?” I asked her, just as Elijah returned from the group, beaming like a schoolboy who had just tripped and landed on top of a particularly good-looking and well-built woman. But upon hearing my question, his smile disappeared and he looked at Brynna quizzically.
“So, that is what I was saying earlier to you, James.”
Brynna looked up from the pamphlet she had been reading. She was a pro at pretending she hadn’t been listening to what someone, especially I, had said.
“Don’t use me to avert the situation.” James replied snidely, “You’re so eager to answer questions, why don’t you answer hers?”
Her expression darkened suddenly when her eyes met his. I watched her hands start shaking and braced myself for an explosion of rage. She meandered through life, suppressing every tiny feeling that crossed her heart. Her insides inflated slowly until finally, like a balloon with too much air, they burst loudly. When that happened, we all knew to steer clear of her. The rages were unlike anything any doctor had ever seen.
But she took a slow, cleansing breath the way she had once read she was supposed to do when her anger reached that point. When she spoke, her voice was trembling and jumping an octave every couple of seconds as she forced the shout back down into her stomach.
“This is more important.” She took another breath. “You seem to know everything about our current predicament, so let me ask you this: Why is this ship so intricate? It was originally intended to be a means of escape. It was supposed to be our transportation. Why does it look like the interior of a vacation resort? I feel like I just won a radio contest.”
“Didn’t I explain this to you, dear?”
Oh boy…
“People like your parents, who were going to escape the earth, surely wouldn’t be transported on anything that wasn’t state of the art. God forbid they travel like the rest of us. Actually, when this ship was being built originally, it was because it was going to be used to transport anyone who could pay a large sum of money to Pangaea for an intergalactic vacation. Instead, people like your parents commandeered it to escape what was going to happen. Even though what just consumed the planet was completely, one hundred and fifty percent, the fault of your parents.”
My heart dropped with a resounding thud that echoed in my ears. I covered my mouth in horror, feeling my brain starting to twirl end over end inside my skull.
Brynna’s arms were around me, and I was being ushered to one of the many couches.
“You accuse me of insensitivity, and then you pull that?” She snapped, “What is wrong with you?”
“Don’t be a hypocrite. You did the same damn thing.” James hissed at her furiously, but when he spoke to me, his voice was gentle. “Violet, I’m sorry. Despite what she may believe, I wasn’t doing that to upset you or her. I was just
frustrated. I should have edited myself. I’m sorry.”
I shook my head and looked from him to Brynna and back again.
“It happened?” I managed to murmur tremulously, “It happened while we were asleep?”
Brynna looked up at James.
“You were awake, dear, so why don’t you scar her further and tell her exactly what happened?”
For a moment, I really thought he was going to whack her in the face. Granted, if he had, Elijah would have killed him. But thankfully, he suppressed his outburst and looked back at me, his eyes warm.
“Whatever it was, it shook the entire ship. They made an announcement to those of us that were awake that ‘the event’ had happened. We’ll never know exactly what it was. But you had the dream, Violet, so you can surmise. Whatever it was, I’m sure it was quick, okay?”
“But Mom and Dad…” I was rambling now, barely able to process a word of what he had said. “Mom and Dad are here, aren’t they?”
“Where are they, Brynna?” Elijah asked in a voice devoid of all emotion. “What did you do?”
Maura and Penny were starting to make their way back to us. I saw them getting closer in my peripheral vision. Brynna would be attempting to put an abrupt end to the conversation any minute now.
She answered him so quietly I barely heard her. But when she spoke, her voice was firm, unapologetic.
“I had no choice.”
My body jerked upwards so that I was standing. My heart dropped even further and yet still managed to beat although it was no longer in my chest cavity where it belonged.
“You left them?!” I screamed at her, and everyone in the Atrium turned to stare at us for a second, their jabbering ending abruptly so they could listen.
“What did you do now?” Maura asked Brynna irritably.
Brynna normally would have given her an earful for insinuating that she must take responsibility for causing someone great emotional upset. But now, she had my arm firmly in her grasp and was pulling me towards a door at the end of the hall. Once we were outside, and the door had slid shut behind us, she pushed me up against a wall, her body trembling with rage.
“You listen to me,” Her voice was shaking along with her body, “I had very little time. I had a decision to make, and I made it. They screwed everyone, Violet. They were responsible for this. And guess what? Your Mommy and Daddy were going to take off and leave everyone they had screwed over behind! We just beat them to it.”
“You left them! And they’re dead now!” I screamed at her as tears ran from my eyes. “You killed them!”
“I did nothing. They killed themselves! Let me make this quite clear to you: You are here, you are alive. I had a choice between saving you and saving them. Observe your surroundings to determine what my exact choice was.”
“How could you do that?! They’re our parents!”
I couldn’t make sense of it. I couldn’t fathom such grief. My parents had always been distant, and sometimes, I truly believed that my love for them was waning. But now they were gone because of Brynna. I hadn’t even been able to say goodbye.
“They were nothing to me, Violet.” She scowled at me for showing such an abundance of weakness. “If you were even half as intelligent as I am, if you had even an iota of observational and inferential abilities, you would say the same thing.”
“You’re evil!” I pushed her, but she barely stumbled. “You’re evil, and you’re a bad person and you’re a… a… bitch! You’re a …”
I meant every word that I shouted. I meant every awful thought that I couldn’t quite transform into words. I hoped that she would be left behind someday. I hoped that she would die. After she was dead, I hoped that she would burn in hell for being so heartless.
She crossed her arms over her chest and watched me, shaking her head slightly, waiting for me to be done. Behind her dark-rimmed glasses, her eyes flashed not with hurt at any of the terrible things I was saying, but with a mild irritation. I wanted to rip her apart. I couldn't believe how badly I wanted to kill my own sister.
“I hate you!” I shrieked, “I hate you, Brynna! I wish you were dead instead of them! It should have been you!”
Our mother and Maura had both screamed the same words at one point in her life. If Brynna were human, what I had just said would have reduced her to a sobbing, broken mess. But her eyes only burnt even more brightly as a smile formed on her lips.
“You know that, don’t you?”
I laughed in bitter rage through my tears. I would keep screaming my insults, accusations, and cruel wishes for her demise until she broke. I would keep screaming until I lost my voice, if that was what it took to bring her down.
“You know that you were the one that deserved to die!”
“Yes, sure,” She replied, in that maddeningly calm, arrogant way. “I knew I was the one who was supposed to die. You are right, Violet. You caught me.”
“You stupid bitch! You evil bitch! It should have been you! Do you hear me?! It should have been you! You should have stayed behind! You should have died in that pool!”
I was throwing the worst event that had ever happened to us at her mercilessly, and above all the other things I said, I would feel the most guilt for hurling that terrible accusation from our past at her. I would regret all of it later, but mostly that. I was saying all of those awful things to my sister, who had, in her later years, been the one who raised me. She had molded me into the person I was. My parents had never been there, and when Maura was gone for three years, the responsibility of Penny and I landed on Brynna’s small shoulders.
I knew that. But I also knew that despite all they had done, I loved my parents, and she had left them to die.
“Plus, you knew that they would have left you behind! You knew they didn’t want you! I couldn’t understand why before, but I do now! They would have left you because they didn’t love you! Because you’re evil!”
I collapsed on the ground in a fit of tears, wanting to kick my feet and scream until my face turned red and my lungs no longer drew in breath. I could feel her gaze resting heavily on me. I could feel every last bit of her contempt at seeing what she believed was a pathetic display of failed strength.
“Have your tantrum, little girl.” She said after a long moment of watching me, “My stars, this is disappointing… I raised you better than this drama, Violet Mae.”
With that, she turned and calmly walked away.
