Three A.M. (26 page)

“Tom … Tom, what is it? Tell me. Please. What are you thinking about?” She was by my side, holding my right hand in hers and wiping the tears from my face. With great strain, I lifted my eyes to hers.

“The people on the roads…” She nodded, her face receptive, saddened. “It was radiation. The meltdown. When I learned from Kirk that it was all radiation, I knew in the back of my mind … Radiation isn’t contagious. They made us shoot them so the truth would die, not a virus.… We killed the truth.”

She wrapped her arms around me, and I buried my head in her chest. Slowly we rocked back and forth. She whispered in my ear, trying to comfort me, saying it wasn’t my fault. Her skin was warm and smelled faintly sweet beneath her sweater. My cheek lay against one of her soft breasts. Gradually my breathing slowed and my head stopped spinning with flashes of long-ago death. I lifted my head and looked into her eyes, inches from my own.

“Thank you,” I mumbled. She kissed me on the forehead. It was as if she had absolved me of my sins. I gently disengaged myself from her arms and leaned away, stretching my neck. The fire crackled loudly as a thick log split. I rose and grabbed a few more large pieces of wood and tossed one on top of the flames. A great cloud of embers broke free and rushed skyward in the night, swirling like a flock of angry fowl. I watched the last of this cloud of sparks rise upward until each had burned out and disappeared, followed every few seconds by a glowing ember or two that rose when the fire snapped and popped.

“Just like life,” I said quietly.

“What is?”

“I was just thinking about the fire … the embers. They glow brilliantly for a little while. They’re alive and in motion and they’re warm, then they burn out. Then they don’t glow ever again. Sometimes there’s this big surge of them. Once that’s risen, shined and cooled, there are a few more following all the time … drifting up more slowly … less sure of where to go because they have no group to follow.…”

“That’s us,” Rebecca said quietly.

“Yeah, that’s us. We didn’t get caught up in the fire’s hottest flare-up, so now we have to drift free and alone, until we burn out.” Another branch cracked in half and a few more embers rose. One of them, slightly larger than the others, began spiraling upward clockwise with the group but then seemed to catch its own breeze, drifting laterally and then down and coming to rest on the forest floor. It sat there, still glowing a faint, dying orange for several seconds before fading into ash. I glanced over at Rebecca and saw that she too had watched this cinder.

“I guess sometimes some of them do make it back down still burning. Still alive.”

“Sometimes,” I said, trying to return her hopeful smile. “Every once in a while, they can even start fires of their own.”

*   *   *

The fire had burned low. It was just a few smoldering embers now, faintly glowing orange beneath ashen shells. Rebecca’s body was curled almost into fetal position, her back pressed against my chest. I had one arm around her. Still half-asleep, I blinked my eyes in the darkness and tried to figure out if anything had awakened me. It was perfectly silent, and I could see nothing amiss by the fire’s dying light. I eased away from Rebecca. She sighed softly and pulled the blanket more tightly about her neck.

I rose stiffly in the cold air and stretched my legs and back. There were still a few logs left, and after stepping over Becca’s slumbering body, I placed one down into the coals. Kneeling, I blew gently onto the embers, coaxing a little life out of them. Eventually a few tongues of flame licked upward and caught one end of the new piece of wood. I sat down beside the fire and held my hands out to it, warming them.

The thick branch crackled and snapped as it became ever more consumed by flame. Each time a pocket of air exploded into sparks, I jumped a bit at the sharp, violent sound. It seemed too loud, piercing the silence of the night. Slowly I felt hairs rise on my neck and on the back of my arms. It hadn’t been quiet when I fell asleep; there had been insects humming and animals flitting about in the darkness. Now there was barely a breeze.

I stood slowly, bile rising in my throat, and padded softly over to where the rifles leaned against a tree. I grabbed one and racked back on the bolt, the metallic click impossibly loud. I strained to hear anything, moving away from the fire a few more feet. Animals are silent like this only for a reason—that much I knew.

My breath came out in plumes of mist, quickly dissipating in the flickering light. I could hear my heartbeat and feel my hands trembling. I squeezed more tightly on the gun’s grips and took in a deep breath, holding it and closing my eyes. Silence … and then … very faint. Very far away … I exhaled and breathed in again, listening.

It almost sounded like distant thunder at first. Maybe a series of rumbling explosions very far off. Slowly the noise grew more steady, ever louder and finally pronounced. Helicopters. Once I placed the sound of rotors chopping through the freezing air, engines started whining beneath the blades, their sound was drawing closer, growing quickly.

Hastily I lay down the rifle and dashed back to the fire. “Becca,” I said firmly but trying to sound calm. “Wake up, sweetie.” I rolled the fresh log, now burning brightly, out of the fire with my foot and began trying to claw dirt from the frigid ground to throw onto it.

She came to slowly, muttering. “Tom … what—the fire. What are you doing?”

“We need to get it out. Now.”

“Why?” she asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. I kept frantically kicking and scratching at the ground.

“Listen,” I said, pausing. She sat still and cocked her head to one side. The rhythmic bass of the thumping rotors gradually filled the clearing.

“Is it thunder?” she whispered.

“Thunder would suit me just fine. It’s helicopters.”

Her eyes went wide and her hands instinctively flew to her neck. “Oh, Christ! What do we do?”

“Just help me get the fire out. Then, nothing. It’s a big forest, we’re just two people. We’ll sit tight.” It was the truck I was worried about. Lights would reflect off the glass in the clear, dark night. Oh well, not a damn thing to do about it now. Together we managed to get the flames tamped down, and then I covered the glowing coals in more loose dirt and gravel so nothing would flare up. Becca sat with her knees drawn to her chest, her face stretched tight with terror. I was frightened too, and a lot less new to this kind of thing than she.

I lay my rifle across my lap and sat beside Rebecca, barely able to see her in the little bit of celestial light filtering through the trees. Her eyes stared vacantly into the night. If there were four-hundred-some miles to the diameter of the exclusion zone, then they weren’t likely to be looking in this area randomly. Tire tracks or some sort of surveillance or something, I guessed. Who knows, maybe they were just traveling along the roads and wouldn’t think to follow a little dirt path through some fields and into the woods. That was entirely possible, even.

“They’re probably just following the highways,” I whispered.

“Do you think that, or are you just saying it?” she replied, her voice cracking. I could see tears beginning to run down her cheeks.

“I hope it, okay? It’s very possible and … I hope so.” They drew ever nearer. Had to be six, seven choppers at least. Big birds. The forest thundered with their roaring blades. Then, a few hundred yards off, powerful shafts of light pierced the canopy above and began to streak the forest floor. Rebecca screamed and threw her arms around my neck. Her voice was carried away as the rotor wash began to stir the air around us. Three and then four different beams strafed the forest, and I caught glimpses of still others far off to the sides. The howl became deafening. The lights were scarcely a hundred yards away, bouncing around among the trees, illuminating the night.

I looked down into her eyes and saw not fear but a great sadness and resignation. She pulled my ear down to her mouth and called out above the din, “I’m so sorry, Tom. I’m so sorry.”

I looked at her, holding her cheeks between my hands and shook my head. Then I pressed my lips to hers and her mouth opened eagerly. Her hands were on my back, my thighs, my ass, and then up my shirt. She peeled off my jacket and then pulled her own sweater over her head.

“You don’t want this, Becca!” I shouted, stopping her hands as she began to strip off her T-shirt. She shook loose and pressed one hand over my mouth, peeling off her shirt with the other. She grabbed the bottom of my shirt, trying to get it off me. I pulled it off for her, and by the time it was on the ground, her pants had followed. I stripped naked, and then she fell on top of me, her breasts near my face. Like some starving infant, I pressed them to my mouth. She moaned and I felt her lips on my forehead, one of her hands snaking down between my legs and taking hold of me.

Our lips met. She was on fire, biting, licking, her tongue flitting about, serpentine. I grabbed her about the waist and flipped her onto her back on the pile of blankets and shoved my face down into her crotch, the bristled skin of my cheeks dragging roughly across her soft, tender flesh. No matter—she screamed with pleasure amidst the howling winds and thunderous roar and slashing lights, and then I slid upward and was inside her.

The world could have collapsed in that instant and not taken us with it. Galaxies twirling and smashing into one another would have had to take a seat and wait until we were through with each other. Thrusting and moaning and in ecstasy from head to toe. Her eyes opened briefly and met mine, and it was pure joy. Bliss. Her nails raked across my shoulders and she arched her back and her screams drowned out the helicopter blades. I rose up on my forearms and threw back my head, driving ever deeper until I too cried out into the night, cried out so that I could hear nothing but my own victory yell and feel nothing but a perfect warmth and joy spreading from my loins to my very fingertips.

I fell down on top of her, and her tongue found mine. Our lips stayed together for a long time until finally, breathing more steadily, I realized something. “They’re getting farther away,” I whispered in her ear.

As we made love, it had seemed the lights and thunder were all around us, circling and zeroing in. But now the roar was slowly fading away into a distant rumble, and the searchlights were a dull glow, ever receding. She wrapped her arms tightly around me, eyes staring upward attentively. Slowly she relaxed and her grip loosened, her hands running gently across my sweat-covered back. She looked up at me.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

“Thank you … thank you…” I stammered back.

“Will you stay in me for a while?”

I nodded and slumped downward, partially supporting myself with my elbows. Her hands gradually slowed their ministrations across my back.

“Are we safe?” she asked, her voice sounding very small and far away.

“We’re safe for now.” A faint smile grew on her face and stayed there as she drifted off to sleep. Slowly I withdrew from her, sighing with pleasure. I wiped myself off on the sleeve of my shirt and then wrapped several of the blankets tightly around her lovely sleeping body.

Dressing, I stood up to stretch and lit a cigarette. We had been lucky, but it was our first day on the run. The remaining nights were limited. No doubt about that. I had the makings of a plan in my head, and I paced to think it through, careful not to rustle too many leaves or snap twigs that could awaken her. My mind kept wandering, though; I had just had sex with her. From the red dress to the blazer to the girl cooking me eggs … I had just had her. And it felt pure, righteous. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. To wake up beside her and listen to her slumbering breaths. To feel her fingers running through my gray hair. I wanted to protect her forever, however long that was and whatever protecting her ended up meaning. Her chest rose and fell as she took long, slow breaths, and her face was perfectly at peace. It wasn’t going to be easy.

*   *   *

I had been awake for about a half hour. The sky was pale blue, and in the forest all was cast in a muted, dreamlike purple gray. I could see my hands but not the veins and scars crisscrossed along their backs. I could see the shapes of the trees but not their colors or textures. The air was bitter cold but crisp. It felt wonderful to be alive. I was lacing up my boots, careful not to wake Rebecca. We were going to have a long day ahead of us.

I slinked away from our campsite and made my way through the awakening forest to where the truck was parked just inside the last stand of trees. The fields beyond the woods were still gray and dormant, but a touch of gold had crept into the eastern sky. I walked past the truck a few yards and stood leaning against a young sapling, looking out across the land. It was silent save for the occasional songbird.

There was no sign of human life. Not even a hint it had ever existed. I knew it was a false, bittersweet landscape, but I liked it this way. Better than the purgatory from which I had escaped, certainly, but in the darker corners of my mind, I had always felt that I was born at the wrong time. I should have lived a thousand years ago—maybe more. I would like to have had no concerns beyond the only three that counted for a damn anyway: sustenance, shelter, and sex. Everything else is padding, clutter. Even the pleasures derived from reading or a glass of scotch or a sunset or all of it are superfluous if you’re fed, safe, and have two sets of genitalia willing to collaborate.

Perhaps a greater connectivity to others is virtually essential. Sustenance, shelter, sex, and a bit of conversation, then. I had that now for the first time in my life, in an odd way. We could hide in the forest, live off the land, make love, and then lie back and whisper together. My ship had come in, but the port was on fire. Soon enough, we would sink back into the gray depths again. Unless we acted rather than waited, rather than stood by, hoping.

I turned away from the brightening countryside and walked back to the truck. After opening the door, I leaned in and rifled through our rations. I grabbed a little bag of dried fruit, a can of black beans, and about a cup of rice. The concussion of the slamming door echoed through the trees and I winced, berating myself for the carelessness. There was no one to hear—I told myself that several times. It was just us and a million acres. My hope was that for them having patrolled this area last night, we would have at least a day of relative safety. I needed just one day.