“We’re fighters,” is all I can think to say. And it dawns on me that I’m trusting her way too much. That it’s impossible to trust anyone as much as I want to trust her now. And that I’ve let my guard down maybe because she’s a woman. Or because she’s just a voice making promises over the radio. But I let her go on because the high I’m riding must be as good as the red powder. And she asks me—have you come across anything? And I know what she means. Mountain skylines. But as she says it, and as I stare at what I thought were the remnants of the pack, I know I was wrong. They’re mountains. Or an island. Or something. I’m sure of it. Because now I can see shades of gray shale against the white. I almost squeal it out to her.
“I see some now,” I say, and even before she responds my hand grips tightly around the handle of the gun. Like she’ll spring out with her band of face eaters as soon as she knows my location. That she’s waiting to do the same thing to me as the ones in this ship wanted to do. But her voice keeps pulling me in the opposite direction—each time I hear her talk to me, it sounds strangely calming, like hers is a voice I’ve heard before a million times. And it keeps soothing my doubts, telling me I really can trust her. That I have no other choice.
Let her know what they look like races through my head, trying to move my tongue to speak. And she keeps asking for the description. But for some reason, I can’t say anything. I don’t want anyone else to come near Voley or me. There’s no one left to trust in the world. They all died out there on the pack and in the Colorado snow. So I let the radio fade to white noise and silence, and then I shut it off. It’s not worth the risk, is it? We can do it on our own. We’ve always done it on our own. And leaving the radio off from my fears that have mixed with elation into some kind of powerful fuel of adrenaline, I float across the deck under the rising heat and find my way down into the compartment. I grab the peas from the floor. The engine rumbles louder than the rain now, and I think that the last drops are hitting. And soon it will be dry and hot again. And that maybe we’re running right back into the pack, or the same death mountains we escaped from after Nuke Town. But I don’t care. We don’t need anyone’s help. And I break open the can and let Voley slop it up between the bars. I pet him and ask him what we should do.
“Should I tell her boy?” I ask. He lays down, placing his head flat on the ground with his nose poking through the bars. The can is bone dry now, and I pull it away as he tries to lick the shredded metal. Finally he just closes his eyes as I pet him, content to not answer me and fall asleep. I flick his ear and let my mind wander. For a strange and long spell of time, I lay down on the dirty floor next to him. My mind drifts off, playing through a thousand scenarios of hope and death, measuring each one against the facts. The blue is back. There is land again. We have a ship. We have food. We don’t need help from anyone.
But then something else pushes through my head. How long will it be until you run out of fuel? Food? You’re all alone and you’re going to die eventually. This is your only shot. Before too long, you’ll drift out of range forever, and then that’s it. No more luck. No more chances.
And it fills my head like a light bulb: Remember where she is—she’s in Leadville. That’s the place. That’s the only place you’ve ever tried to get to. And suddenly there’s not even a question. We’re going to Leadville, I tell Voley, and I go back up onto the deck. And as I approach the radio to tell her where I am, I remind myself that there’s enough ammo here to put up a good fight. But we have to take the shot. So I tell her:
“I see mountains,” I say. I click off and wait for the reply. It comes back almost right away, like she never left the radio. She asks me to describe it to her.
“Three triangle peaks. To their right, a long flat slope going up. And then, the right side of the thing has a hooked edge. Like an r. The sky is almost all blue right above, and the rain’s letting off.”
It takes forever for her to respond, so long that I start spying out over the water, expecting a sneak attack. Regret starts to build as I repeat, Hello? But she doesn’t answer for another twenty seconds. Then, finally, she tells me to hold on. Something urgent in her voice makes it sound like something has her captivated. Maybe she’s a prisoner of someone else, and they use her on the line to lure in their victims. But I know it’s all paranoia now. That it’s eating me alive because my body is so beat up. And finally, through a choked voice, she asks me if I see another island directly behind the one I’m looking at. I tell her I don’t see anything behind it, but as soon as the words spill out of my mouth, something appears between the indents of the three peaks. A long flat shelf of gray rock. I can only see a hair of it. But there’s definitely something there, behind the peaks. I don’t tell her though, and I ask her where that is—what she’s describing. She tells me to wait it out and look for another, long flat table of a mountain. She calls it Table Mountain. And if that’s what I see soon, then they might just know exactly where I’m at. I do everything I can to hold back, and I try to fish for more information. All I get out of her is that it would be too lucky. Too lucky to be Table Mountain. But she’s saying it like she thinks it really could be.
“Where the hell is Table Mountain?” I finally squeeze out, angered that she might be playing games with me.
“Close to Curley Peak. Less than 100 miles from here,” she says.
“We didn’t drift to Kansas?” I say, my gut dropping through the floor.
“You wouldn’t be getting through to us if you were that far. The signal is too clear.”
And I can do nothing more. All of the sudden it pours out of me. I tell her where we are. I tell her I see the long flat table of gray behind the three peaks. And then, in just another minute, after exultations and another voice crying out, she tells me they’re going to send out a boat.
“What direction are you drifting?” she asks me. And without telling her any of the details, I just tell her to look for a ship. She asks me what I mean, a ship, and I say I can explain later, but I’m in a ship now. And I can follow her back to Pikes Peak in my ship if that’s where I really am. And like she’s suddenly lost all faith in me, her voice goes limp and she asks me, dead cold: “Who’s with you?” And I know. She thinks I’m the one setting her up now. That somehow it was all a ploy. And that I’m a hostage of the evil men that roam the Colorado sea and they’re using me to get to the location of Pikes Peak to take everything that’s left of their civilization there. To burn the veneer down for good. But I tell her twice: I’m alone. Alone. Me and Voley. We took a ship. They tried to take us but they couldn’t. And I tell her I’ll leave it at that until we meet. Until I see if this is all real.
Somehow, she’s half-satisfied with that. But I feel like I can trust her more now for some strange reason. Because she was worried that I might come to hurt her, and that means her own company can’t be too bad. Not if they’d fear me. Not anything I can’t take on with four machine guns and a lot of ammo. But something else tells me I won’t need to. It’s the strangest sensation in the world—the old feeling that I’m finally heading home. That we’re going to rest at last. And turning the wheel just a little bit to angle us in on the mountain range, I head back down to Voley.
Chapter 30
The day passes too slowly, and keeping the ship by the land is all I can do to bide the time. I go up and down, feeding Voley and talking to him, petting him, and getting some water in his cage, and then coming back up top and watching the land and the steady ocean. Nothing looks dark in the sky until night comes, and when the light of the sun starts to disappear, the stars come back out like clockwork. As if they’d never went anywhere in the first place. Always watching us from behind the layers of film and wind.
Finally the waiting gets the best of me and I turn the radio back on, hoping to find out how long it will take the boat from Pikes Peak to make it 100 miles. When I get nothing but static, I play the visuals from the day over and over in my head, imagining where the shoals might be if I drift in too close to the
long mountain range. Every half an hour I start to feel the boat tugging, like the sea wants to drag her in toward a long underground table of rock. The dark shape against the deep gray doesn’t give me a good idea of depth perception, and all I can do is turn the wheel and shoot back out to sea some, and then turn off the throttle. Everything rolls softly and gently, and the rain comes down over me like fine mist. I wait as patiently as I can for something other than static to pierce the radio. Finally, sometime in the middle of the night, I hear a voice come through. It’s her.
“This is Pikes Peak. Copy?” says the woman. I don’t wait—instead I come on right away, desperate to know if this is all real, to see someone who might be good instead of evil. When will they reach me? I ask. And then I hold my breath, hoping it wasn’t all a lie, or that they turned around—or worse yet, the sensation in my gut that they never even launched. All of it just a false alarm. They were looking at the wrong map. Or maybe the ice has closed in around them. But she comes back loud and clear and confident:
“Unless they hit weather, they’ll see you sometime in the morning.”
And then, after I have her repeat that for me, I listen to the details of the boat: a red and black cutter vessel—two men aboard. The thought alarms me—two men—but I don’t let it derail my hope. We’re in too deep now and there’s no turning back. I’m convinced they’re going to save us. Take us to Leadville. And then, right before I’m about to cut out for the night and go back down to Voley for a bit, she asks me, for the first time since Plane Floe, about the equipment. I lock up, because I have no idea what to say. Whether to keep the lie going, or to spill everything over the radio now and risk the rescue turning back. When she asks again when I don’t answer, and the static starts to drill into my ears, taunting me, I shut the radio down to make it look like the battery died. And then, having finished my conversation with Pikes Peak for the night, and resting on the wild hope that a boat shows up in the morning, I head across the pattering deck and down the stairs to waste the night by Voley’s side.
Every fifteen minutes I go back up and spend a half hour watching the mountains, making sure they stay far away. Once in a while I pull the ship away across the flattened swells, but never much, and I go back down to keep Voley company. The thought crosses my mind to dump the bodies overboard, but I know there’s no way I can move them up the steps. And just like that, back and forth and tormented by projection, the night dissolves into dawn.
Chapter 31
With bleary eyes I stare out at the gray horizon in every direction, looking for some kind of sign. The slit of blue wakes up in the sky above, first crossing through its color patterns of pink and orange. By the time the golden disc is too strong to look at, I’m starting to fall asleep. I didn’t sleep at all during the night, and now the boat seems to be lurching a bit, drawing too close to the range. I turn the wheel sleepily and punch the throttle until she runs a bit, and then let off and watch. When I catch myself waking up from small dreams, I force myself to my feet and start pacing. Up and down the entire deck, and then, I start running. As fast as I can to wake my heart up. Get the blood flowing before I fade out and the ship is sucked in upon the rocks. It’s the only thing I can do. It dawns on me I’ll need to figure out how much fuel is left, and where extra fuel is stored. Just in case all of this falls through—in case no one comes and I have to run us away from the land. But then, on my fifth lap, rounding the stern and turning back up along the starboard gunwale, I see the shape. A lightning bug on the water, shooting a white trail and zooming along in a line. At first I think it has to be pirates, but then, I see the color—bright red. The cutter. All I can do is scream for Voley over and over, until I lose my calm. And then, everything comes crashing back down to reality and I gather up the guns. Two from downstairs and one on the deck and I bring them all into the wheelhouse. And from there, with one in my arm, I watch out through the glass and mirror sea, through the mist of drizzling rain, as the boat jumps right over the swells toward me. The next thing I know, the thing is slowing and pulling up alongside of us.
I stand over the rail and look down, and it dawns on me that this is a mirror in reverse of the situation two days ago, as the men of this ship had stood and looked down at me, with their guns in their hands, watching, knowing exactly what prey they had stumbled upon. Not knowing that the girl they thought they could take for a bounty would kill them all. And the feeling of my power comes into me, almost too much, but necessary to deal with whatever is about to happen. And then, with a long gray beard, so old that he looks like he could hardly be a threat, steps out from the rain tarp of the cutter an old man. Next to him is a younger man, and they’re both wearing dark green rain suits. Together they wave up, but it’s clear that the younger one has a gun in his hand. He’s trying to keep it tucked under his side, but I see it and call out to them, keeping my aim steady and pointed right down on their heads:
“You throw the gun into the water,” I say. And then, the old man speaks up before the younger one can do a thing. He asks me if I’m the one from the plane, and when I don’t reply, he asks me how I came to find a ship. It’s too many questions, and all I do is keep the machine gun trained on them and repeat what I started with, telling them that I want the gun over the side. I see them start to talk to each other, and then, the old man tells me to watch.
“See?” he says. And then, the young man holds up the pistol and drops the cartridge out.
“Not good enough,” I tell him. And then, after they talk more, the old man convinces him to throw the gun into the water. I watch it drop, but I know they’ll have more.
“No guns are worth anything close to what you’ve brought us,” the old man says. The wind rushes up and blows away part of his cap, and I see the worn smile come over him. I know he means the equipment that I don’t have, and that it’s the only reason that he could convince the younger one to throw away the gun. But I realize that since I’m going to follow them back, and they’ll be in front, I don’t have too much to worry about. They won’t be boarding the ship.
“The woman,” I say. “I want to talk to her.” My mind is racing a mile a minute and I’m cursing myself for not thinking the whole thing through ahead of time. And then, the old man tells me to get back on the radio if I want to talk to her, because that’s the only way I’ll get her. She’s not with us, he says. And then I realize that the reason I’m stuck, unsure of what to do, is because I don’t have any trust left to give out. Not even when they’re five feet below me on the cutter, far enough away that they can’t jump on board and without a gun that I can see. And I know what I have to do. I have to trust them, after all that I’ve been through, I have to let them take me.
“I’ll follow you,” is all that I can get out, and when I see that the old man just nods, and then nothing more, I take it he’s going to play along. I get back to the wheelhouse and wait for the cutter to pull away. And then, just like that, I’m chugging along behind them, tracing their wake through the ocean, all the way through noon and into the afternoon, the mountains long out of sight. Not once do we stop, and every minute I feel heavier and heavier, as all the adrenaline of my run and the encounter is fading away. The night without sleep is catching up to me. The journey is endless and monotonous, and the blue strip above looks like it’s hardly moved at all, as if we haven’t gone anywhere—like we’re going in circles. I have no idea in hell how they’re navigating, and I don’t even care. I’m too tired to care anymore. Finally, when I start to nod out, I turn the radio on to try and wake up. The static comes through the wheelhouse, and then, after only one try, the woman’s voice comes on.
“I’m following your men,” I tell her. Her voice lights up and she says if the ship I’m in is anywhere close to as fast as the cutter, she’ll see me tomorrow. She tells me that she knows I must be close to dead, and that the last thing I’ll want to do is explain what happened to me, and she says I won’t have to do any of that until they get me cleaned up and fed. And Voley
too, I tell her. And she asks what I mean. She’s forgotten.
“Voley. My dog. You’re going to clean him up and feed him too.” And she tells me yeah, him too. I admit to her that I can barely stay awake. She tells me to flag down the boat and that they’ll help me, but I tell her no, I can’t. I can’t because Voley’s trapped downstairs and I can’t keep an eye on him and them at the same time. She asks me what I mean, and I can’t muster the energy to explain. All I can do is keep asking her questions about Pikes Peak. What’s the elevation? 14,500 feet. Do you really have running water? Running hot water. What do you eat there? We have enough canned food here for a thousand people to live for five years. What about the face eaters? They don’t come here. Or I should say, we don’t let them in. Stay awake now, alright? You’re almost halfway. What about the weather? Since I’ve been here, we see the blue most of the year. Sometimes storms cover it, but sometimes the rain stops completely. And sometimes it snows bad and the ice closes around us. But it’s not the rain of the East. And it’s not the hell of the far West. From what we’ve heard anyway, this is the best place still going. I ask her about other places, if she’s heard of Blue City out in Utah. Never heard of Blue City. But I wouldn’t doubt there’s more than a few encampments out there. What about Mexico? I ask in a thin voice. Once we have the equipment you’re bringing us, we’ll know about what it’s like in Mexico. At least we’ll have a good shot to know. Hell, we might know what’s happening in Europe.
I just keep rattling them off until the line gets quiet. I can’t ask any more questions and she doesn’t have anything left to tell me. But something comes into my head. One last question. And right before I fall asleep, I ask her: Why do you trust me?
There’s a long silence, and I think the battery is dying because the white noise rises and falls abruptly in volume, and I almost slip into a dream before she finally comes back. She sort of clears her throat, like she doesn’t really have any kind of answer. A sign of guilt I think, maybe the truth now coming out that she really doesn’t trust me. That Pikes Peak can’t handle any more living bodies. That I’m only good for running her the cargo, and then they’re going to kill me. Store me for food. There’s no moral weight to a lie anymore. So there’s no moral weight to trust. In my mental fog it makes sense to me before she finally croaks out her answer.
The Blue (Book 3) Page 23
