WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (10 page)

  Part 2

Chapter 7

My legs pound into the grass and the trees zoom by in a blur. Everything burns inside me—the very heart of my being screams out. It’s the enormity of the decision—to leave everything behind. Like Acadia’s a giant and bright box that contains the pieces and people that make up everything I know. And the burning destroys it and a new idea surrounds me. I’m completely free.

            Each leg pumps harder as I weave in and out of trees and notice the gnarled trunk, gashed by lightning, where I know I need to turn. I twist and sprint on, my mind descending from the fire into something deeper—something impossible and cold and dark. It’s Maze. Her everything—the new entirety of my world. It crosses repeatedly through me—
she’ll be all I know from now on.

           
I remember the time before she first talked to me, when I was intimidated by her beauty. But each word rolled easily from her lips, and she looked at me with a steady smile, something like genuine interest in her eyes. An impossibility to me then. And now, she is the only thing I’ll have in the whole world. That, and the outside—the burnt rubble cities, the dark wolf-forests, and the strange, endless body of water that surrounds everything. But it’s the thought of night that terrifies me. I think of all the things that will come to kill us—more than just wolves. Bears, and worse—things my imagination conjures up—monsters left over from before the Wipe. But out of the whole dark madness, not a single thought about the Fathers breaks into my head. It’s as if the fear of them and their system is within the walls of Acadia, not without, and I’m forever past it all. Somehow I forget that I’ve seen the Fathers where they shouldn’t be, inside the Deadlands. For a moment I reel at the possibility of what their presence there could mean. But at last, when I reach the patch of thin woods, trees so sparse that I’m tearing through a meadow all of a sudden, I think of Maze again. Her eyes and her lips and the darkness that always frames them. It’s more than her beauty. It’s her mind. Where she’s taking me with it. Right into the deepest theory she’s ever thrown at me.

And besides all of that, there’s something else more important. At last, as I run through the final bit of meadow, I start to stitch up with anxiety. Because I know I have to do it. One way or the other. I have to take the chance. The one I blew at the beach. I have to kiss her. Make it happen. Sink or swim. Like love could keep us alive in the world.

When my forehead is sweating, and I know the old sewer tunnel should be right around the corner, I hear a noise and freeze. Without my feet crashing over high grass, there’s just silence—nothing but light wind battling the branches overhead. I start to question whether I heard anything at all when it comes again.

            “Wills!”

            I twist, the sound registers, and then I see her smile, like a salve, spreading across her face.

            “I can’t believe it—I just took off. Father James was talking to me, taking me to the chapel, and I just ran,” I say. Quiet love sears me inside—the forever question mark. She cuts over to me and without a reply, she hands me the knife again. I grab it from her hand but she yanks back before I can get it.

            “You do realize you’re about to break one of the primary tenets of the—”
            “Didn’t you know they made me a Head Father for ratting you out?” I cut her off, then I snatch the blade from her. “But you could make me step down if you really think we can change the world,” I say, riding the high of her eyes. And she keeps hers right on mine.  

            “Do you remember the other day, when I told you I know how to get out there?” she asks me.

            “To the tower?” I say.

            “Yeah.”

            I nod yes.

            “Well I wasn’t kidding. I know a way. We’re going to go out to the damned tower and we’re going to get to the Ark.”

            For a moment, the sheer exhilaration of everything that’s happened vanishes and I’m left with a very brief pang of reality. I see the cold and long and tremendous ocean separating us from the tower. I see the lack of food, and the knowledge that I didn’t bring anything. Like I ran too impulsively and should have prepared supplies. And I see the green-silver slits, wolf eyes, hunting us from the gloom of the brush. The broken spires of the city and the wandering Fathers that chased me. And a quick dread, fast to rise and slow to fade out, surges through me—the mystery of the unseen dangers and darkness that lie in wait for us. The horrible things that have to be out there. Things even she has no clue about.

            In my weakness, just for a moment, the old desires return—timorous Wills, the safe guy I’m working to destroy with every fiber of my being, tells me to return home. Go back now, before I get too deep into this, too far—far away enough that I won’t even know the way back. All of the disasters hidden by time rise before me and even Maze’s beauty does nothing to allay their power for a moment. But I shudder deeply and let it all roll away, and then, in another instant, each and every last qualm combusts into nothingness at her touch. It’s light and quick upon my arm. So fast, but electric. And again, her warmth. I relent. I ask her how the hell we’re going to get out to the tower.

            “There’s a spot. A scrap yard beach. And there’s a trail through it. At the end, there’ll be a metal boat.”

After I get over the idea she’s been all the way out along the coast by herself and never told me, I want to bark at her—
no Maze. We can’t trust some piece of shit rust tub to carry us into the surf.
But I stop myself. It’s all part of the leaving. I’m leaving my mother, and the Fatherhood, and every single piece of myself I don’t like.

            “An old, rusted boat?” I ask.

            “No, a good one,” she says.

            “How do we get the boat out to the tower?”

            “It has an engine.”

            For all the surprise I had about the map and the mirror, her recklessness and lack of planning begins to jar me again. She knows no engine is still working, even if we found fuel. Any we’ve ever seen have been browned and flaking and ruined from the rain. Still, I don’t tell her how nuts this all is. Instead I walk right into it, a scheme worse than any I’ve ever been drawn into. I feel like I should kiss her now, because I’m sure we’ll die in the water and I’ll lose my chance. But the impulse leaves me as she walks away. I watch her go, and she stops suddenly. As if she knows I’m staring at her. But she just ducks down near a bush and draws out a canvas sack. Then another.

            “You know, I knew you’d come,” she says, turning back at me, smiling. The sunlight breaks through the branches just right, catching her cheeks.  

            “How?” I ask. I walk over and she hands me one of them.

            “I don’t know. Just this feeling,” she says, the complete mystery of her flaring up in just those six words. Like a magnet, unable to resist, I touch her arm. Just for a moment. As if to get her attention. But I fumble for words. And then, looking away as fast as I can, I bury my head into the bag, distracting myself.

            I discover why it’s so heavy—there’s water in sealed glass jars and bags of grains and nuts and seeds. I know they’re all stolen from the Chapel pantry so I don’t need to ask. I just study it all and ask her if this will even keep us alive a week.

            “Longer,” she says. “We’ll ration what we have until we find more.”

More
. The idea is strange. That there could be nourishment outside of Acadia. And then, just like that, after a little more conversation about the supplies, we start walking. The walk turns into a hike very quickly, and just about all talk dies off as she leads the way through the tricky lanes of pine. Soon our shoes start to clap on gray and black granite emerging from the pine needles that lace the soil. The dirt wears away completely and we’re hopping from rock to rock, long and angular jags that bear us upward, some tiring ledge, beyond which I already hear the faint crash of the surf.

            As we climb, my thoughts become clearer. I discover in my mind the ultimate failure of our expedition—long before we’ve even come close to accomplishing anything. And before it’s even known whether or not there is complete truth to our hunch about the tower, the idea gnaws at me: even if it’s all true, the Ark and everything, whom do we expose it to? It strikes me that I know no greater authority in the world than the Fatherhood. And how can we expose the lies of the Fatherhood to the Fatherhood and expect anything at all to happen? I raise the point at once with Maze, feeling sufficiently confident she won’t think it’s just a cop-out to head home.

            She stops altogether on the rocks, the sea wind now blowing back her hair, pushing strands so close to me that I feel the question’s potency diminishing. And all the powers of my scrutiny, I realize now, that would normally aid our insane trek, will be dulled by her ever presence. Just to see her weakens me. The thought—the
possibility
that she could be mine—destroys me. But then, just like that, in one quick instant, and to the sound of a thundering crash of ocean below, she turns to me and gives the most elegant solution imaginable.

            “The Fathers,” she says. “They’ll be more appalled than anyone else. Just think—they’ve dedicated their lives to the false dogmas. Through them it will spread like fire.”

            I let the idea resonate to see if it continues to make sense. I start to have my doubts, wondering if anyone’s mind can be changed when it is dependent upon faith. The very word—the idea that belief should be possible without a shred of evidence, seems to run contrary to Maze’s rationale. Because even if we find some tangible proof to take back with us—even if we carry the Ark itself home with us—I don’t know if it will be enough to change the irrational to rational. It’s like they’d just find a way to fit it into their dogma. Adjust and absorb the upheaval. But for now, I watch the wide open space of the blue water emerge, and the flying birds that swoop down to peck at the small eddying pools of water that wash around near the granite basin of rocks below. The sight fills me up only for a moment before Maze finds a narrow path through the last bits of brush and tangle and then we’re stepping down boulders, one by one, carefully and then in hops as we grow more confident, until we’re close enough to the water that some of the stone is dark and slimy, and everything smells of salt.

            “The water comes up high,” I say, watching the rolling surf break and crash and then suck back out to sea, like the raging foam is angry that it can’t reach us. Maze doesn’t respond, and the fear that we’ll be swallowed by a surge doesn’t even seem to enter her mind. It’s as if she’s become playful, taking riskier hops than me, dropping five and six feet down from one boulder to the next, and then springing up two or three adjacent edges to regain the lost ground. The whole time I fall farther and farther behind until she has to call out to me to hurry up. I watch her—her legs like nails fastened into the ground, until her thighs spring her, coiled rips of muscle, and she jumps.

            Finally I catch up to her, and by the time I’m there, she’s been sitting for a few minutes on an overhang. I sit next to her and follow her gaze out to the sea and the tower—its thick line cutting the sky in half. It’s as far as it has always been—the same impossibility despite the realness of our insane escape. And when I look at her, and I know she’s only waiting for me to catch my breath, I say it. For the life of me, I don’t know why. I feel the rejection already, as if it’s palpable, before the last words slip from my mouth. And it’s not even anything in her face, or her reaction at all, but just a horrible, wrenching gut feeling that if she’d felt the same way I did, she would have let me know by now. Because she’s not like me. She doesn’t fear anything.

            “I like you a lot,” I say.

            I wait in tangible silence for a movement, a reaction of any kind. I grope at the silence with my thoughts, wondering if I should start explaining myself, or just be patient and wait for an answer of some kind. But she doesn’t say anything at all, and she doesn’t look at me. Her eyes are stuck on the horizon, as if she’s digging into the tower, peering through its metal husk, divining whatever might be on the inside. Some giant staircase maybe, leading all the way into space, to some long railway through dead air that reaches the orbit of the Ark. And I think maybe she’s daydreaming, and she didn’t hear me. The surf is crashing after all, and my voice is weak with anticipation. So I say it again.

            “Maze, I really like you,” I say, strongly so she has to reply this time. Finally she turns to me, but the moment our eyes meet, she looks away. The normal smile, the stare she usually holds, flits away, back to the waves.

            “You’re my friend,” she says. The word pierces me. It’s the vaguest reply possible. Something so uncertain it almost forces me to ask for more information. But somehow the murkiness is so clear it paralyzes me. Just what my gut predicted.