Sapience

by bret Wellman

  At first all we could see was brush and overhang as my car bounced along the broken road. We were driving through a tunnel of forest that seemed to close a little tighter with every mile. If most of the leaves had not already fallen off the trees we would not have been able to see at all. I still cringed every time an out stretched tree branch squealed against the side of my car.

  Eventually we came upon a large cement wall. It was very old with many worn vines growing wild across its surface. It was apparent that no human had laid hands on it in a long time. A layer of snow painted the top white and you could see bits and pieces of graffiti under the foliage.

  This was it, the end of the Kingdom and the beginning of the dead lands. We were about to cross into a place unlike anything we had ever seen before. In a way this was the world’s largest man-made desert.

  As we got closer to the wall we noticed a huge hole had been created where it touched the road. It looked as though somebody had taken a sledge hammer and beaten a path for vehicles to get through. There were chunks of cement scattered everywhere.

  I hadn’t placed much thought into how we were going to get through the wall. If it wasn’t for this we would have had to turn back and find another way. I wonder who else was trying to get to the dead lands. What could they be trying to accomplish by creating this path?

  “Shall we?” Brianna asked.

  There was plenty of room for my car to slip through as the hole seemed to be knocked out for much bigger vehicles.

  With a rising sensation of excitement, I realized that for the first time in my life I was no longer inside the Kingdom, I was free. If only this place hadn’t been destroyed, if only freedom didn’t mean exile.

  Chapter 17

  The dead lands lived up to their name, all life ended at the wall. Behind us you could see the trees sticking up into the air, in front of us was nothing but flat land. Because of the salt, even the snow had melted leaving nothing but dirt from horizon to horizon. Suddenly I knew what it must have felt like to step on the moon.

  “It’s a complete wasteland.” Brianna said.

  “It reminds me of pictures of the ocean.” I said “I feel so small.”

  Other than the plethora of craters and the occasional chunk of steal that shot up in a tangled heap through the dirt, the ground was basically smooth and flat.

  “And you know what else? No speed limits.” I pressed the gas pedal to the floor and started shifting gears. We were soon kicking up dust as we flew across the flat land. I kept one hand tight on the wheel and the other on the shifter, though the land was flat at high speeds it still felt bumpy.

  “Don’t you think you are going a little fast?” She asked, clutching her seat belt with two white knuckled hands.

  “Not if we want to find some cover by night fall.” I knew there had to be some place to take shelter. The border had been bombed worse than the rest of the country, maybe not enough for anybody to survive on the inside but there would still be standing structures if we drove far enough. I knew I would never be able to get a full night’s rest if we were parked in the wide open plain with no place to take cover.

  It was well over an hour before I saw anything but flat land on the horizon. What started out as a little speck turned out to be a farm. The farm house had long since been blown in half but the barn was still intact. The sun was just touching the edge of the earth as we rolled up. A wind vane squeaked ominously from the roof of the barn as I killed the engine.

  “Now what?” Brianna asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Stars soon began popping up across the sky. It looked normal at first but with the absence of any light pollution we were soon submerged under an unbelievable blanket of glistening art. Every detail shined down on us in vivid contrast.

  I talked Brianna into lying on the hood with me, under our new sleeping bag. Being in the dead lands was like being one of the last people alive on earth. This place had once been alive and bustling with life, now it was just me and Brianna. In some ways it was actually better, in others it was definitely worse, most of all it was just different. I felt like I could breathe better out here, it was easier without the Kingdom lurking over you. Yet there was no life, there was no anything, only a raggedy old barn and a half imploded house. It was quiet too, there wasn’t even so much as a cricket making noise.

  “Let’s play a game.” I said as she traced my hand with her finger.

  “And what game is that?”

  “It’s simple, all you have to do is answer five questions in a row wrong and you win. You haven’t played this before have you?”

  She rolled over to face me, looking determined. “Nope, let’s do this.”

  She looked so set on winning. Too bad for her, she didn’t know that this game was a finely tuned trick developed by Lillie. Simple, yet effective.

  “If I win, you give me a kiss.” I said.

  “And if I win, I get to pick what we eat tomorrow.” She said.

  “Deal, so are you ready then?” I asked.

  “Yup.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Five hundred years old.”

  “What color are your eyes?”

  “Orange.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “Outer space.”

  This is where the trickery begins, I pretended to be confused. “How many questions was that?”

  “Sixty.” She said, looking smug.

  Little did she know that she was about to fall right into my trap. “You have played this before haven’t you?” I asked before she had time to regain her composure from her victory over my phony trick question.

  “No I haven’t, honest!”

  And there it was, she had taken the bait and answered the fifth question right.

  “You just lost!”

  “No, I said sixty.”

  “And I asked if you have played this before.”

  Her expression hardened as the meaning of what I said sank in. She gave me a quick peck on the lips (My victory prize) and rolled back over, crossing her arms.

  “Looks like somebody is a sore loser.” I said.

  “No, you’re just a cheater.”

  She was purposely not looking at me so I grabbed her side and began to tickle. She tried to fight away as she thrashed in a fit of involuntary laughter. Unfortunately for me, she wasn’t your average girl and quickly turned the tide against me. I have suffered many kinds of torture in my life but never anything like being tickled. It felt so good and yet so bad at the same time.

  When the battle was over and we were both panting and laughing, Brianna gave me the kiss I had truly won. This time it was long and passionate.

  It wasn’t long before the cold silence of the night had crept its way back and our minds had returned to our bleak situation.

  “Will they kill him?” Brianna asked in a hoarse whisper.

  Her head was resting in my stomach, I looked down as she stared up at me. “Spencer?”

  “Yea.”

  “Adrian and Lillie would never let that happen.” I said.

  She didn’t look convinced. “But he was captured, what can they possibly do when the Kingdom already has their hands on him?”

  I ran one hand through her hair. “They are the two smartest people in the world, they will find a way to get him out.” She closed her eyes but didn’t respond so I decided to go on. “When I was little I always liked to search the dictionary for new words I had never heard before, if I found one I fancied I would encode it into my everyday vocabulary. I once found a word that I thought represented better than any other the gift a mental user possessed. The word was sapience and it is defined as wisdom or a deep understanding and realization of people, things, and situations. Adrian and Lillie are going to get Spencer out because they have something the Kingdom doesn’t, sapience.”

  As the night grew colder and colder we eventually ended up on my front seat huddled together under the sleeping bag for warmth. By the time th
e sun came up my eyes were burning, my neck was killing me and a strong aroma of salt had filled the air and saturated my mouth.

  Brianna was lying on top of me. Apparently sleeping two deep in an Aston Martin can be a pretty hard thing to do, the seats don’t seem to want to cooperate. Brianna, however, was sound asleep. She didn’t even wake as I slipped out from underneath her and opened the door.

  It was cold outside, I could see my breath. Lucky thing I had been wearing my jacket the day before. I pulled it tighter around myself.

  The barn we parked next to was as you would expect a barn to be after a few hundred years of neglect, very weather damaged and about to collapse at any moment. There was a twisted and charred tree trunk spiraling out of the ground a few yards away. Salt glittered up at me through the black dirt and you could see every step I took imprinted into the ground as if I were walking in extremely dirty snow. I looked over at what was left of a two story farm house, a bomb must have been dropped on it a long time ago. The roof had collapsed and I could see into the exposed bathroom and kitchens.

  There was a side door that I used it to slip inside the barn. The light coming through the cracks in the walls striped the room with morning sun.

  The ceiling was high and came to a peak. There was a sketchy looking loft overhanging at the far end of the room with a rickety hand built ladder leaning against it. Somebody had built a wall that split the barn right down the middle creating two large rooms. The first must have housed animals, I could still smell them.

  I walked around for a while, the walls were covered in old rusty tools. Shovels, pick axes, a couple of pitch forks, I walked a little farther and saw some hammers and a saw, they were all hanging from nails that protruded from the wall. Other than that and a few stray pieces of straw scattered across the hard dirt floor, the entire room was empty. It was as if somebody had ransacked the place.

  I walked through a door that lead to the other half of the barn. It was the same except there was no loft on this side and in the far corner was a large curvy object under an old tarp. I could see two shiny black tires peaking out at the bottom of the tarp as I got closer.

  There was definitely a car under there, but what kind?

  Dust flew through the air as I ripped the tarp off. Underneath was a mint condition muscle car. Well, mint condition if you didn’t count the steel plates welded all over it or the machine gun turret on the sun roof.

  I couldn’t believe it, the entire barn had been stripped except for a sweet car, who in the hell would take everything else but leave this behind?

  It was such a ferocious looking vehicle, transformed so amateurishly into a killing machine.

  There were three jagged lines on the hood. Once upon a time I would have known what they meant. Too bad my brain no longer worked the way it used to. If I could remember correctly, the markings had something to do with the date.

  I walked around trying to see what kind of muscle car it was but there was too much armor plating, my best guess would be a charger.

  It was nice to know that not everybody was willing to go down without a fight. To me, this car was a symbol. It was a weapon built by the people with one goal in mind, stopping the Kingdom. This proved that with enough incentive, we could fight back.

  I replaced the tarp out of respect for the person who had once owned this car and made my way back to the front of the barn.

  Brianna was sitting in a beam of light and dangling her feet from a loft. She smiled when she saw me. Suddenly the barn didn’t feel so empty, no it felt as if all this open space was meant to be here.

  I climbed up the old rickety ladder and sat by her side.

  “This place is so old.” She said. “Can you imagine what it must have been like when it was first built?”

  I shrugged “It probably looked like a barn then too.”

  I expected at least a giggle, I got nothing.

  “When are we?” She asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Kingdom lets us know that there was a time before but that it was insignificant and should not be counted. Instead they keep track from the day the Kingdom was born, therefore they say it is the year two hundred and eighty.”

  I had forgotten that Adrian, Lillie and I were the only ones in the Kingdom that knew the truth about these things. I suspect that president Mead might know too.

  “It’s the year twenty-three hundred and fifty-eight.”

  “Twenty-three hundred!” She looked like she was going to fall off the ledge from sheer shock. “Humans have been around for two thousand years?”

  “Brianna, two thousand years ago was when they decided to put a number on it. Humans have been around for over ten thousand-“

  “Ten thousand!” the expression on her face alone was enough to make me laugh. You would have thought I had just told her the world was flat or something.

  “So what does this mean, that the president thinks ten thousand years is insignificant?” She asked.

  “I guess so.”

  “What else don’t I know?” She asked. “Why are things the way they are now? What was it like before?”

  “Before?” That was a vague word, did she mean the country’s history or the world’s? “Well let’s see, from what we could tell, it was better before. I think I already told you about the economy collapsing and the Meads buying their way into power. What I didn’t tell you was about the domino effect that came after and hit almost every nation in the world. New nations were formed, President Mead destroyed Canada, threats were given by all and eventually nukes were aimed in every direction by everybody. No one wanted to end up like Canada. I guess you could say that was the beginning of world war three, the new cold war.” I paused to think if there was anything I had missed. “No country ever truly climbed out of that great depression. They all fell into this state of submission.”

  She sat for a while, visibly thinking over what I had just told her. “I wonder what it would be like if none of those horrible things had happened.” She said.

  It was then that a weird feeling crept into me. At least that’s what I thought at first. As the seconds ticked by the feeling grew stronger until it was an actual physical rhythmic thumping. A matching noise began to grow.

  “Do you hear that?” Brianna asked.

  Realization set in hard. “It’s a helicopter, they found us!”

  Years of combat training kicked in, there was no panicking, no irrational thought, just a well-rehearsed reaction to an ambush. I had to find a tactical advantage, but where? The barn was so empty.

  “This is the closest thing we have to a weapon.” Brianna said, tossing me a shovel.

  “Ok” I said “That has to be a recovery helicopter which means a sweep team is already right on top of us. We are sitting ducks up here. Make a run for the door that separates the two halves up the barn. We can at least switch rooms if things get to out of hand in one.”

  She gave me a quick nod and raced down the ladder. I saw shadows that blocked the sun as men scurried along the outside of the barn. By the time I got to the ground Brianna was already across the room.

  One of the Kingdom’s soldiers appeared in the doorway just as she reached it. He was dressed in all black, holding an assault rifle. He towered over her.

  Brianna put her hands together and an ice spear shot from her wrists. It hit the soldier in the stomach, piercing through both bullet proof vest and flesh. She had his rifle before he hit the floor. There was no hesitation, her eyes constantly scanned the room.

  I ran as hard as I could, gripping the shovel in both hands, I was way too exposed.

  She spun and shot another soldier coming in from the other direction.

  I reached her in time to use the shovel to knock out a third man sneaking up from behind. His gun strap was wrapped around his shoulder. I pulled on it hard trying to loosen it. I could see another soldier through the door to the other room, I shot him with the rifle still tied up, giving me enough time to get it free
.

  I took a quick survey of the situation. We had poor cover, our backs were against the wall and we were extremely outmanned. There had to be a way, if we could just keep them from getting a footing on the inside of the barn. The car! The one under the tarp, if we could get there we could punch it out of here.

  Three shadows crept along the outside of the wall, I fired on them, and all three went down.

  I turned, looking through the door at the car on the far side of the room, we had a lot of open space to cross. I popped a soldier trying to climb in through a small window and he tumbled back out. As I was still looking another came into view and fired in at me. I was forced to turn back into the first room as bullets riddled the door frame.

  Soon there were soldiers coming out everywhere. Every time I blinked it seemed like there was another. They were lining all the windows of the back room, cutting off our retreat. I couldn’t even look back there without getting shot at.

  Brianna’s clip went empty which is bad because I couldn’t hold off all the soldiers by myself. She ran forward, sliding on her hip like a baseball player near the door. She yanked a gun off of a dead soldier as I shot one that tried to come in and grab her. She tossed me a spare clip as she raced back to my side.

  I fired a round off into the back room hoping it would stop anybody from trying to slip in through one of the windows.

  The soldiers trying to run in began to dwindle. Their new tactic was to shoot through the cracks. They couldn’t get a very accurate shot, but they could get one. Tools fell off the wall as they were hit by stray bullets. I could hear them as they whizzed past and struck the wall behind me.

  I tried one last time to at least look at the car and was forced to turn back, the soldiers back there definitely had a more clear shot. Brianna and I fired at the shadows as they blocked the sun from coming through the cracks, some went down others were saved as the wall stopped our bullets.

  To make a run for the car was to die, to keep fighting was to die, to surrender was to die. I looked over at Brianna, blood was pouring from a gash in her forearm where a bullet must have grazed her. She paid no mind to the wound and kept her eye looking down the barrel. Splintered pieces of wood showered down on us from the wall.