Scorched (13 page)

SECTION FIVE

New Endings:

“Did you eat something that didn’t agree

with you?” asked Bernard. The Savage nodded.

“I ate civilization. It poisoned me.”

-- Aldous Huxley,
Brave New World

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Old Beginnings:

I couldn’t let them hurt her. That was reason enough for me. That was all I needed to leave Nanash and return to Newbury, spoiling their attack and saving Kaolin.

I burst through the Earth like a spiraling ball of fire, immune to dirt and gravity and right and wrong and the planet and all that was within. I pushed through melted tunnels, corroded and divided.

I had taken a pair of unwatched spikes because I needed, because I wanted. I cut through terrain, heading toward my world, toward the all that mattered, toward my other, toward my heart. I could feel it thumping and beating and pulsating and screaming my name, urging me to move quicker than I had ever before. I needed to move quicker than ever before. I needed to get back before the water was tainted and my future was tarnished.

I clobbered through the ground, furious and unforgiving, uprooting innocuous specs of dirt that smacked me in the face and clung to my tiny hairs, unwilling to fall back to the ground where they may lay dormant for all eternity. And then, I punched through, and I could breathe again.

***

I found the Mayor and told him the Nanashi plan of infecting the drinking water. He immediately sent a couple dozen guards to squash the attack while he sent the other soldiers to protect the border, in case of a subsequent breach.

I was held in chains for several hours until their attack was confirmed. The Mayor and Riley watched me from a distance, discussing matters I could not hear until they finally approached.

Riley sat in a chair across from mine, except he had the ability to walk away if he chose.

“Jennifer said you were inducted into the NaNa tribe. And during the raid, James saw you dancing freely amongst the savages.”

The Mayor took a seat beside Riley. “Now, we understand Kaolin was brainwashed by the NaNas. We’re just trying to figure out if you were as well.”

He leaned forward and spoke softly, but that didn’t take away any power from his words. If anything, it made his speech more potent.

“See, I can rationalize that to the people. You two are victims. Captured and transformed. Weak wills, you see? Tinier brains.” He gave Riley a look, prompting his Chief Advisor to leave the room.

“I like you, Spec. I do. And you just saved a lot of peoples’ lives. A lot of good peoples’ lives. Maybe my own. Maybe you saved our city. Maybe our entire race. Did you know that? Did you know you were doing that when you came back? Did you understand the consequences of your actions?”

I watched him closely as he watched me even closer. It had only been recently that I was forced to understand what people were saying when they were saying something else. He wanted a hero, not for my benefit but for his. I was the closest thing he had to a son. If I were to have betrayed the city, how would that look on him? But if I had purposely saved Newbury, I would be a hero and so would he. 

In Newbury, it mattered what other people thought. It’s a strange concept; each of their well-being depended on the group’s consensus. The Mayor was mayor because people chose him to be. In the Hive, people did their jobs and that was that. It didn’t matter if you kept to yourself or didn’t. Being liked was a personal decision, not mandatory. In the hive, we worked for each other and survived off the other. We only lived if each person put in the effort. In Newbury, survival depended on one’s ability to be liked. The Mayor was supreme in Newbury but in the hive, his words would be meaningless.

“Is that what you meant to do, Spec? You came back to save our city. You’re a hero then…”

I was not good with words. It was inconsequential for me growing up, but here, I was at a disadvantage. I wonder though, if I was born Newburyian, would I be a master of words like the Mayor? Would I think the hive was a strange and backwards place? Would I think a person like my father was immoral or bad for the person he was, for the things he did? Would I think he just didn’t know better like the Mayor did I? If I were born in Newbury or Nanash, would Spec even exist? Or would I just be a duplicate of those I have met on my journey thus far? A leader? A warrior?

And after some time without a response, keeping the Mayor in suspense, something he was not used to, I replied: “Yes. I came back to save Newbury.”

The Mayor was pleased. Never had a man been so happy to hear a lie.

“Good,” he said as he unshackled me. “Let’s go celebrate.”

***

The city came out to praise Spec, the Hero of Newbury. The music played, soft and pleasant and the dancers moved in a square, soft and pleasant. And that’s when I saw Kaolin standing with James. She was watching me from across the dance floor. Hundreds of people stood in our way of reconnecting but I had overcome sturdier barriers.

“Oh my God, Spec! You infiltrated the NaNas, that’s so amazing!” a boy shouted as I walked across the dance floor.

“Is it true they bathe in human blood!?” a girl squealed.

“I heard they can bite through bone. Did you ever see that!?”

I pushed past adoring faces and spotted Bryan standing in the middle of his own crowd, showing off his knife throwing technique.

“The key is pinching the tip and the quick release. That’s how I took down all those beasts and that traitor, Cotta.”

I stopped for a moment and stared at the boy. I watched him regale others of how he took down the evil Cotta, how he helped invade the NaNa village and rescue the good while purging the bad.

Death wasn’t a foreign concept. In the hive, a lot of people died before their bodies could mature. I was able to witness the beginning and end to many lives. I was no stranger to the concept of finality. I had seen siblings die the moment they entered this world, born without life. I had left my father behind and by leaving, he had died. If there was one thing I knew, it was death. But never had it caused me the pain that it had with the passing of Cotta. Never had I been so angry. Never had I felt an injustice, but how could I? Growing up, there was no such thing as justice. There was no concept of fair. Things happened and that was that. The world wasn’t cruel, it just was. But now, I realized, people were cruel. They added misfortune to the world that could not exist without their existence. But they also brought goodness as well. They were the ones who filled the empty with right and wrong.

And as I watched Bryan gleefully laugh about ending my friend’s world, I felt a deep sense of contempt, or at least that’s what the emotion felt like as described by Joey. How do I explain a feeling I had never known? How can I tell another the pain I’m feeling and know they understand? Just as when we stare at a color. Do we both see the same colors, or do we just have the same words for an experience we assume we are sharing? Different eyes, different world.

But there Bryan was, being lauded by others for doing a cruel act. Why was it cruel? Because I deemed it to be. It was cruel and that’s what I believed and so it was true. To those cheering him, they believed his actions to be just. They believed him to be a savior. How can one act be both right and wrong?

I thought about the world that once was. Was it just one big Newbury? One Nanash? One Hive? Was it an amalgamation of all three? I dream of going above, but I do not wish to go back to what once was. I do not wish to see the cruelty that existed before my time. Bryan shakes another’s hand and I wonder, did the Sun congratulate itself when it scorched the surface and every lingering civilization?

There was a time when people had greater weapons than swords and spikes, but what’s the point of such ways to kill people when you have no need to kill? Would Newburyians have swords if Nanash did not exist? If Kaolin and I made a new Hive, would we build our own swords?

I continued to push through the crowd and my thoughts when I finally reached Kaolin and James. She embraced me and squeezed tightly as James watched with a deep resentment in his eyes.

“The big hero,” he said indifferently as his eyes spoke differently.

“No. You’re the hero,” I replied. “You saved Kaolin from the massacre.”

“That’s right. I would’ve rescued you too, but you looked a lot like a NaNa.”

“Well, looks can be deceiving. Or so I’m told.”

“Yes, they can be.” He smiled and patted me on the back. “Let’s celebrate!”

He took me by the hand, firm and powerful and pulled me over to a lady who stood before a variety of alcoholic beverages.

“What can I get you?”

“A bottle of wine!”

The two of them shared a laugh and we all began drinking…from a glass of course. From the bottle would be uncivilized.

Everything became hazy as the world became blurry. James became funnier and the music became better.

I grasped Kaolin and kissed her. I didn’t care that James was watching or all of Newbury. I was impervious to their thoughts.

She laid her head against mine. “We need to leave,” she said. “I don’t want this. I don’t want any of this. I don’t want the eyes on me, I don’t want the chains around my throat.”

“What do you want?” I asked, ready to give her anything.

“Unfiltered air. Unfiltered ideas. I want to leave.”

I nodded. “I’ll take you wherever you want. Whether the surface or the center of the Earth. As long as you’re beside me.”

“I want the surface. Tomorrow. Before they figure a way to separate us again.”

I smiled. “Done.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I am Spec:

How many times had my thoughts been sparked in another’s mind before I ever considered them? How many conversations had been spoken and uttered above the ground years before they were extinguished, resurfaced beneath the surface within me? Is there such a truth as new or fresh or novel in a world with incalculable moments with innumerable members with brains and voices of their own? Have my yearnings been yearned by many before? Will my desires be desired by my descendents deep in the future?

I am Spec. There will never be another me. There will be similar iterations, but there will not and cannot be another Spec. There is only one Kaolin and only one Valasca. The one Cotta died with Cotta…

But was there truly only one Cotta? Was he only one? Was he a singular voice and presence? I remember the young Cotta, before he ever chipped into the dirt with his ax. I remember the Cotta, covered in filth, tunneling through to the Old Hive. I remember the Cotta dripping with water, cleansed of the soil and past. The Cotta entranced by Newbury and the one reborn in Nanash. He was a copy of himself, skewed and changed by the world. He moved like the river that almost brought my death.

I am Spec. Tomorrow I will be as well, but tomorrow I will be different. Yesterday I was different, but I was Spec. Before I left the hive, I was a Spec who dreamt of the surface and nothing else. And now, I dream of Kaolin. I am different, and just like the river, I slowly alter the world around me. If it weren’t for me, Cotta would be alive. Would Joey be alive? Would Newbury be alive? How can I, nothing more than a grain of dirt have such an impact on a world made of infinite grains?

It was night and I was back in the Mayor’s house, in Joey’s unaltered room, sleeping in the bed beside a memory that would not vanish. Kaolin was back in her home, being repressed and suppressed, but it would be for the last time. I thought about destiny, a concept introduced to me on my journey, the idea that events which have happened could only happen. That there is one future and it has already been decided. The idea that Cotta and Joey needed to die because they were to die. Destiny was an invisible man writing my story, and I could do nothing but observe it. All of my thoughts were his thoughts and I was forced to live them. He introduced the solar flare to our planet and forced me out of the hive and willed the knife into Cotta. He controlled the all that was. But I refused to believe it. I refused to believe any of it, even if it was his will making me refuse. I believed I had control over my own choices and decided my own fate. And since I believed it, it was fact.

I arose from the bed and sunk downstairs where the Mayor sat again, like he had so many times before. He picked at the tip of an ancient knife, once used in a battle on the surface long ago. He held it firmly in his hand as my shadow cast across him.

“The Hero of Newbury!”

I watched him from afar. I didn’t say a word because I did not know what to say. I had no words to say.

“Take a seat.”

I stood for a moment, watching him glare into my eyes. He pointed at me with the knife and repeated, “Take a seat.”

So I sat, across from the man with the weapon.

“You know what my father said to me the day that he died? Of course you don’t, how could you? Let me rephrase that. Would you like to hear what my father told me?”

He picked at his nails with the tip of the knife, scratching the underbelly, freeing his fingers from grime.

“Yes.”

“He said to me, in his raspy voice, because he was manly, you see. And manly men have raspy voices. I couldn’t look up to the man if he squeaked like a mouse. You don’t know what a mouse is, do you? You don’t know a lot of things. My father would love you -- you embody everything he told me the morning he died. He said, ‘Son,’ in that raspy voice of his, remember? ‘Son, live every day as if it were your first.’ Not last, not like that saying you hear everybody say. No, he said ‘Son, live every day as if it were your first.’ I always wondered, ‘how do I do that?’ But then, how could I live every day as if it were my last? How do I know what my last day would be like? If it were like my father’s, I would be living every day immobile in bed, sick and beleaguered. But now, I’m supposed to live it as if it were my first. See the world with eyes wide open, full of hope and mystery. But how does one infuse mystery in a story read time and time again?”

He moved the edge of the knife from beneath the nails to his tip, shaving small slivers off as he spoke.

“How do I see anew that with which has already been seen? But you do. You do, Spec. Because you’re a child. You were born alone and only grew when my son saved you. We gave you eyes and ears and showed you what life should be and you lived, by God you lived! And now look at you. Time has passed and yet, every day is still your first. And here I am, glued to my chair with a glass in my hand, like the day before and the day before and before that. Living my last day on repeat. Have you heard that ignorance is bliss?”

“I heard it before, spoken by a gleeful child who repeated the words but had no sense of its meaning.”

“Well, it’s true. No child is born unhappy. Oh, they cry. They cry a lot, but they don’t know sadness. They just know need and want, and for a child, they are one in the same. But the child is ignorant. Because the child has no fear because it knows no fear. It does not understand the concept of death. It does not understand the concept of losing something it needs. No, that’s taught. That’s taught by the people who control whether that child gets what it needs or doesn’t. Fear is infused by civilization. So to live every day as your first is to live without the fear that is learned thereafter.”

“Then, by what you’re saying, I don’t live every day as my first. Because I’m filled with fear.”

He slammed the knife down on the table so swiftly that he erased any memory of it ever being in his hand. He laughed, heartily, as if he just heard the funniest joke ever told.

“No
no
no
no
no
no
no
no
! Spec, what are you afraid of?

“You.”

I watched him as closely as a person could watch another and he watched me back, sizing up my answer. I could see the thoughts race through his mind.

“Good. You should be. I could kill you while you slept and nothing significant would come of it. You would be gone, I would still be mayor, and Newbury would continue to thrive.”

“No,” I said. “You’re wrong.”

He laughed again. “Prove it.”

“Do the ignorant know they’re ignorant?”

“How could they?”

“So, how could you? You seem full of bliss. What does that say about you?”

“You confuse laughter with happiness. A childish mistake. But understandable.”

“What makes you think you’re smarter or wiser than I am?”

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“You’ve been around more than twice the amount of my life, but you assume you’ve lived more than twice the amount. You were given knowledge I didn’t have access to for most of my being, so you assume you’re more knowledgeable. But what have you lived? A truly isolated existence. You see a moment from one angle. You see only in two dimensions. You cannot see that the line is actually a circle. You’ve never been forced to step around a situation and view it from another perspective. You stand glued to your spot as the world turns in front of you and assume what you see is the only. But it’s not. You are one man in one place in one moment of time. You rule this space, but one quake can fill the hole. One solar flare can destroy everything that is you.”

“You’re getting better at speaking,” he said dismissively. “Like a child mimicking its father.” He stared at me for awhile and I could feel my being fill with dread. “I enjoy our conversations, Spec.” He grabbed the knife from the table. “And you’re right. I do live alone, but I make it so. It is my choice to willingly bind my hands. And one day, maybe sooner than you think, you will too. It’s an inevitable decision made by all free men. It is better to live in a world you can see clearly than live in one with no boundaries. It is better to really understand one thing than have a vague recollection of the multitude that is the universe.”

We sat, staring at each other, listening only to the humming of the refrigerator reverberating through the kitchen and buzzing into the living room. In one hand was his glass, half empty, but how many times had it been filled? In his other hand was the dagger.

The humming continued and at the moment, that’s all that mattered. That humming. Those vibrations. That energy flowing from the river to the mill to the turbine to the house to the refrigerator to our ears in the living room. How much time it took for that energy to be transferred, I did not know.

And then, after moments of listening to only the buzzing, I asked, “Do you think life can exist on the surface?”

“Is that where you think you’re heading? To see God with your own eyes?”

His hand tightened around the knife and the humming pulsated within. Buzzing and buzzing, reminding us we were still alive despite our own silence.

Humming and humming until, the noise quickly muted.

Our heads turned toward the kitchen, simultaneously as if we shared one mind. And a moment lingered where we both were filled with fear. Him for his own life, and mine for Kaolin’s. Two people, different in almost every way, filled with the same fear.

And then, the house’s lights shut off and the city went dark.