Humanity (5 page)

“Do we really have to play that again?”

“Is that your first question?”

“No. I don’t have any questions for you.”

“Well, I have one. Why does giving me
your water not threaten your life?”

“For one thing, I am currently reliant on
you for survival. That medicine you have? I have no clue what it is, or how
often to take it. I rely on you for that information. I could kill you for it,
sure, but I would be just as helpless as before. I’d probably even die of an
overdose.”

“What’s the second thing?”

“There’s a storm coming.”

“What?” I glanced toward the sky. “I see
absolutely no clouds. The sky’s a perfect blue.”

“Stand up and walk over to this side of
the bridge.” He pointed right. “Then look as far as you can to the West.”

I did as he suggested. Sure enough, there
was a little line of darkness gathering.

“How’d you know that was coming? It
couldn’t have been visible for longer than the last ten minutes.”

“I could smell it.”

I wrinkled my nose. “I thought you said
you were twenty-eight.” Only old people could
smell
rain.

“I did. What? Am I too young for you?” He
leered at me.

“Whatever.” I sat down again.

We didn’t speak.

After another hour I gave him more
medicine.

Three hours later, I heard thunder.

Then the rain started to beat on the
bridge above our heads, pouring down the sides. Gideon started rifling through
his backpack, bringing out several bottles and lining them up between us. He
tilted his head at me, asking me without speaking.

“Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled, balancing each
of them in my arms and taking them all to where the bridge’s shelter ended. I
took each of their lids off, then placed them within the stream of water. I
followed this with my own bottles, then returned to sit beside him.

“You’re two inches closer to me than you
were before,” he noted.

I scooted a little further away. “There.
Happy?”

“I’ll manage.”

I made a face. Happiness was a
meaningless term to most people these days. For me, happiness had been seeing
the way Mom and Dad loved each other, and the way they loved me. There was
nothing much more than that. Could Gideon possibly be happy? He was alone, and
he was a murderer, and I was going to kill him. That didn’t give a person much
to be happy about.

I wasn’t happy. I didn’t know if it would
ever be possible for me to be happy again, but a good start would be Gideon’s
death.

We soundlessly watched the rain fall. The
rain made the whole world feel quiet and clean, peaceful. It felt almost like a
sanctuary to watch it from under the safety of the bridge.

We watched the water slowly trickle into
the bottles, watched as the water level of the bottles rose.

Out of boredom, I took out my new gun,
tauntingly locking and unlocking the safety.

“I’m hungry,” Gideon said.

“Too bad.”

“It’s nice to have someone else besides
myself to blame for it, though.”
“You’re blaming me for your hunger?”

“You’re currently my caretaker, right?”

“Wanting you alive and wanting you not to
be hungry are two very different things.”

“No, they’re not. You want me in my best
physical shape so that, when you kill me, you know that it was entirely your
victory. Isn’t that why you’re healing me? Therefore, if you take advantage of
my situation and starve me, just because you can, then you’re purposefully
weakening me while I am unable to fend for myself – unable to do so because of
injuries
others
, not you, gave to me.
Therefore, when you kill me, I’ll be weaker than otherwise, and your victory
over me will be lessened.”

I looked up at the ceiling. “That’s a
pretty good argument for me feeding you. And I’m hungry, too. But there’s a
problem.”

“Yes?”

“There’s
nothing to eat
.”

“The rain’s going to stop soon, and then
animals will come out and gather to the renewed water sources. And you have
that gun, which you have so nicely demonstrated for me.”

“You want me to go hunt on my own.”

“No, no. Something will be along.”

I didn’t answer this. He seemed to be
waiting.

The rain stopped. A few birds took refuge
in the bridge’s supports.

“You could have shot those without me,” I
pointed out, raising my gun and aiming.

He smiled benignly. “Yes, but then you
wouldn’t have targets to practice on for when you kill me. After all, you’ve
only shot that gun three times.”

“And I was a perfect shot,” I replied. But
I grinned as I pulled the trigger once more.

Chapter 5

Crickets chirped in the darkness. I
nudged Gideon with my boot as I stood over him.

“Gideon. Medicine time.”

He groaned as he woke. “It’s the middle
of the night. Do I really need to be taking it now?”

“This is the only time we’ll have to wake
up for it. The doses get spread further apart until all risk of infection is
gone.”

“Mmmnn.” He pushed himself up a bit, then
held out his hand for the pills; I handed them to him. He swallowed them,
followed with a bit of rainwater. He took a deep breath, running his hand
through his hair. “What’s the prognosis on my injuries?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how long till I can walk around
like normal again? How long until I have full use of my arm?”

I bit my lip, sitting down to face him.
“The damage wasn’t too bad; the wounds were quite clean. Still, it’ll be
several months before you’re one hundred percent back to normal again. Then. .
. Well, actually, you might not ever feel one hundred percent the same. But
that’ll be about as good as it gets.”

He stewed over this. “They weren’t trying
to kill me,” he noted, nodding at the bodies still lying in the street; a few
scavengers had begun to peck at them after the rainstorm. We would need to
either bury them, or move soon, otherwise they’d attract larger animals.
Though, as long as they didn’t sneak up on us, that might not be a bad thing.
We’d need to eat.

And I didn’t like burying bodies. And I’d
have to do it alone, since Gideon was damaged.

“No. I think they were just after
something they thought you had, like food or ammo, or something. Of course, the
wounds would have been fatal if I hadn’t been here, but they didn’t do that on
purpose. Their guns were just too brutal not to get the blood flowing.” We both
knew what I meant about the guns being brutal – even if their carriers hadn’t
wanted to kill on contact, the guns themselves had been built for death.

There was another silence, filled with
the chirping of crickets. “You’re not waiting till I’m a whole man to kill me,”
he finally said, informing me.

“Yes, I am.”

“No. Because otherwise you’d be stuck
with me for too long.”

“What’s too long when you’re avenging
your parents’ death?”

“Can you stand me for that long?”

I smirked in the darkness. “Maybe.”

“I don’t think you can.”

“I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean, maybe
you should make a compromise. As you said, I might never been one hundred
percent of the man I was before.”

My stomach clenched. I had already felt
wrong about waiting till he was healed before I killed him. There were a lot of
sick people in this world, but I wasn’t one of them. I just wanted to make up
for the lives of my parents. The lives
he
took.

“My shooting arm is still in perfect
condition,” he continued. He pulled his gun out of his pocket, raising it to
point at me. “I could shoot you right now, no problem. Boom, dead. So why
should you wait till I’m healed?”

I didn’t answer him, staring at his
silhouette in the dark. It
would
be
to easy to kill him this moment, this second. But then his death would be over.
Finished. I’d have to move on.

“If I can shoot you right now, that makes
me a threat,” I pointed out. “So, if you can still fire that gun, then why aren’t
I dead yet? Are you just waiting till you convince me to kill you, and then
you’ll kill
me
?”

“No, because I need you right now. You
have the medical knowledge, you’re giving me my medicine. And if there isn’t
any food around here I can shoot. . .”

“So you can’t shoot me right now.
Therefore I can’t kill you right now, because it would be an unfair advantage.”

“So I wait till you’re done with the
medication. I don’t really need you to hunt for me; I’d do fine on my own.” He
nodded at the dead bodies inviting scavengers.

“So you wait till you’re done with the
medication. And then you shoot me under the presumption that, because you don’t
need me anymore, I am then a threat.”

“Precisely. So you should consider
shooting me at that point. We’ll have ourselves a little standoff. Agreed?”

I hesitated.

“Or is there something else?” he
asked.
 
“Maybe you don’t really
want
to kill me.”

“Oh, I want to kill you,” I replied
fervently.

“Are you sure? Or are you enjoying the
excuse to put it off? Perhaps you like the hunt. The feel of having your
vengeance just beyond your reach, ready and waiting for you to claim it. After
all, when I’m dead, you’ll just have to get on with your life. You’ll have
nothing else to focus on other than letting go of the death of your parents.
And, as you’ve previously pointed out, you don’t want to do that.”

“Okay, new plan,” I said, pulling out my
gun and pointing it at him with both hands. “I kill you now.”

He shrugged, laying back down and closing
his eyes. “Go for it. I’ll be happy to have it over with. Though it’s been nice
to have something to look forward to, even if it
is
my death. When you travel alone, there isn’t much.”

I watched him, gun ready. Emotion rolled
through me in waves. My parents’ faces, how it would feel to have the moment
over: success, elation, then emptiness. Nothing but dark emptiness, perhaps for
the rest of my life. As Gideon said, nothing to look forward to.

He was right.

I sighed, shoving my gun back into my
belt and laying down a few feet away from him.

“I live to breathe another day.” He
chuckled.

“Don’t get used to it.”

“For the record, Candace, when I killed
your parents, I didn’t know I was splitting a family. If I had known that, it
might have been enough to convince me to starve to death, rather than steal
that meat.”

“You know, we might have shared it with
you. All the death might have been completely unnecessary.”

“
Might
being the key word. Highly unlikely. There were twenty of you in that group, to
start, and that suggests there might have been more waiting back wherever you’d
set up headquarters. Even once you were down to seven, there still would have
been others wanting a piece of that doe, and then you only had the one single
doe. I took my best-odds opportunity. I don’t kill for no reason – I needed
that meat, and I saw only one way I could get it.”

“But you might have decided to starve if
you’d known you’d split a family,” I stated, unconvinced.

“I might have mentioned this to you
before . . . I had a family, once. Families hold a special place in my heart.”

Would him having had a family really make
him second guess his decision to kill a part of one?

“What was your family like?”

“Pretty much like yours. My dad. My mom.
We also had an aunt who traveled with us; she was only about ten years older than
me, had been with my mom since their parents’ deaths before that. I think I was
nine when my mom was killed. My dad and aunt didn’t live much longer. I think
my mom’s passing made them lose a bit of the drive to live.”

“What happened after that?”

“What do you mean? There’s nothing left
to the story. They were dead.”

“No, I mean, what happened to you?”

Gideon shifted against the ground. “I
scavenged on my own for a while, then found someone to help me along until I
was old enough to
really
do some
damage as a loner. Ten’s a bit young to fire a gun that can do any harm.”

His telling me about his family felt like
he was opening up, but he now seemed to be getting tense again.

“Who helped you?” I asked.

“None of your business,” he replied.

He was closed again. Him telling me more
would have been too personal, I guess.

I thought about everything he’d said. “So
your mom grew up in a family, too?”

“Yeah.”

“What about your dad?”

“Uh, yeah, I think he did.”

“Both my parents, too. I guess people who
grow up in a family must value them more, or something. Then they’re more
likely to start their own.”

“You think the
idea
of a family gets passed along.”

I shrugged. “Why else haven’t they become
extinct? Even with the United States completely broken and beyond saving, families
still exist amidst all the violence and suffering.”

“Honestly? You’re right, but it’s
completely idiotic. Not only are you bringing up a family in a world where that
family is bound to be hurt and torn apart, but you are also giving yourself
more reason to be weak. Families are a source of weakness. Love is weakness.
Like how your life is completely falling apart because your parents are dead.
If you hadn’t always known life as it existed from within a family, you would
have learned how to survive without a family a long time ago.”

“Gideon, that’s so . . . negative.”

“Is there any reason for me
not
to be negative?”

“No. It’s just that . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m going to sleep.”

“Fine. Goodnight.”

I rolled over and waited for Gideon’s
breathing to deepen. When it did, I stayed up thinking. In a way, he was right.
But, then again, he was also wrong. Love might have been a weakness, but it was
also a driving force. For those eighteen years that I had been part of a
family, I had something to live for each and every day. Now, that was gone. How
could anyone stand that? Love, families . . . those were something to live for.
Gideon had nothing to live for, not since his family was taken from him
eighteen years ago. And all I was living for was the moment – whenever in the
future that might be – the moment I killed Gideon.

Would it really have felt any different
if we’d never had a family in the first place?

Maybe. We wouldn’t have known what it
felt like to have lost it.

But I also wouldn’t have known that this
world had anything good left in it to offer. The world had fallen apart.
Violence and darkness had taken over. Even then, humanity still had something
to offer.

I would just need to figure out how to
take a piece of that for myself, even though my parents were gone.

After
I killed Gideon.

~ * ~

The next morning, while Gideon still
slept, I stripped off my heavier top shirt, leaving both it and my gun resting
on my backpack. I carefully placed the backpack at the far edge of the shelter
the bridge provided, as far away from Gideon as possible, with the shirt lying
on top to hide the fact that the gun was there. I felt safe enough to leave the
gun behind, safe enough to assume I wouldn’t need to shoot anyone, safe enough
to assume I wouldn’t need to use it on Gideon. But I wouldn’t put it above him
to rifle through my stuff if it was within his reach, if he woke while I was
still gone. And I especially didn’t want him realizing I’d left the gun.

Because it wasn’t as if I’d be able to
hold it while I was gone anyway.

He wouldn’t be able to get to my stuff if
it wasn’t within his reach, since his leg was too injured to use, so therefore
I thought it fine to leave behind. I got tired of carrying it around
everywhere. Leaving it made me feel light, free, without the extra weight it
provided.

I slipped to the top of the bridge with a
rag and a bottle of rainwater. There was a group of trees a few yards from the
bridge, and I wanted this opportunity to clean myself a little. I’d barely done
any of this since my parents’ deaths, not wanting Gideon to slip away while I
was gone. Now, he would be unable to do so.

Secluded in the trees, I stripped myself
bare, then rubbed my skin with the wet washcloth. It wasn’t very thorough, but
thorough cleaning was rare anyway. At least I was able to get the majority of
the grime and residue.

I redressed and went back to the bridge.

“Why do you have prenatal pills?” was
Gideon’s greeting. He was sitting with my bag in his lap, exactly in the
location I had left the bag. My shirt was lying beside him, and he was rifling
through the bag, looking at different pill bottles.

Anger and frustration raged in me, and I
rushed at him.

“Whoa, not so fast!” he started, pointing
my own gun at me.

“How did you get over here?” I furiously
demanded, fists clenched.

“A man with two working limbs can do a
lot with ten minutes,” he informed me. “You shouldn’t have underestimated me.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay, you’ve got
my gun. Can I have my stuff back?” I shivered in the morning air.

He tossed my shirt at me, and I
immediately pulled it over my head.

“Now the rest of my things.”

“Which ones are my medication?”