WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (11 page)

            And then it happens. Finally, before I spill my guts and give her all the horrible details of my yearning, she says something I never could have expected.

            “There’s someone else.”

            I get dizzy because it doesn’t make sense. She’s lived with us for years. In Acadia. No connection to the outside world. My mind races through the names and faces of all of my friends, damning each one of them silently as I try to determine whom she loves. But as I think of them, I become less convinced. They all despise her. They are each opposites of her personality—she a wayward insurrectionist, they stalwart faith addicts. There can be no match in Acadia. The weight of her words forces me to try for more.

            “What do you mean?”

            “It’s not all from the map—my theories, the ones you hate. I haven’t told you everything. I wasn’t sure how you’d handle it.”

            And just like that, she’s pacing away from me again, fast and strong and fearless, up another narrow slit of rock with jutting sides just close enough together that with our hands we can hoist ourselves high up again over the coast. I summon every bit of my strength to stay close on her heels, so close that I won’t miss another word. And I follow and I wait. Wait for any more from her. But that’s all she offers me.

            “Well? Are you going to tell me?” I say. And just like that, despite the corded beauty of her thighs, and her long hair flying with each stride, I feel all the anger in the world directed at her. My voice is changed even, and I repeat myself. Accuse her of not trusting me with everything. And it dawns on me—the one person she does trust, tell all of her secrets to, all of her conspiracies without fear of judgment—that person isn’t me. I’m only good enough for part of the truth.

            “I’ve been other places,” she says.

            “What other places? You said that building in the Deadlands was the farthest you’ve ever been,” I say, my voice a flame.

    “It is—in that direction. But this way, where we’re going...there are other ships. They don’t pass by Acadia’s shore. But they stop for scrap and supplies.”

            “And you met a scrapper?” I ask, frozen in disbelief. She starts to pull ahead of me. Everything in me is yelling for me to turn back. To run back. As fast as I can. To damn her and her insanity forever. To curse her all the way back to confession at the chapel, and to give in at last to the mind opium of the Fatherhood. To resolve all my afflictions in the blessings of the Fathers. To find a girl in Acadia whom I can live with at home and forget I ever knew her. But all in one instant I know—they will each be compared to her. Every girl I ever consider, for the rest of my life. She’s burned too deeply into me. None will match up. She’s the only person I’ve ever known who’s different.

            Finally, she slows down at the top of a high plateau where the tree line hugs close again, mixing pine into the salt air again. Her hair whips back at me with a strong gust as I reach her, and her eyes feed darkly and deeply on mine.

            “I started coming out here two years ago. Farther every time. I asked you to try the coast, remember? You said you’d never do it,” she says.

            “I didn’t want to get in trouble. I didn’t want you to…you never said you actually went,” I say.

            “And I didn’t try to change that about you.”

            “What happened?”

            “One time I found the scrap yard. And then I went there each time, to explore more of the washed up, rusting junk. All kinds of strange stuff from the old world.”

            My mind slips into the fantasy of what we’ll find there for a moment—I see hunks of rotting metal, ancient boats with gaping tears, smashed electronic equipment. And before the vision transports me from the bluff atop which the wind slaps us, I push her to continue her explanation.

            “And you met someone?” I say, my voice thin against the wind and surf.

            “One time there was a boat in the water. Anchored offshore. Someone came up. I told him about the Ark, and he told me about the Resistance.”

            “Resistance?”

            “To the Fatherhood, to all of it. They were searching for answers, and I told them I was too. And I started to snoop around more at home. He believed it all and I told him I’d find more.”

            The fact that there is a resistance—some counter movement attempting to thwart the Fatherhood—doesn’t even bring me the shock of happiness that it should, because I know she’s avoiding the main point. The man she met. Someone else. I don’t even have to ask. She says his name.

            “Sid started meeting me once a month to learn what I was finding and tell it to the rest of them back at his camp.”

            Sid.

           
The name slices through me. And what he must mean to her. And then I figure it out.

            “He’s going to be there, isn’t he?” I say. “You timed everything.”

            “I told you in the letter that you didn’t have to come,” she says, reacting to the flames in my voice.

            “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I say.

            “I didn’t think you’d react like this—I thought you’d be happy,” she says.

            And then I do it, just as she takes a step back, anger finally filling her and matching the intensity of my own. As I see her eyes narrow, I know she must see me as a child now, someone she shouldn’t have brought along.

            “I lied,” I say. “I don’t like you. It’s more than that…”

            The look of disgust slides off of her face, and something closer to sympathy replaces it. It’s as if she had no clue. Like somehow, after all the subliminal hints I thought were clear as day, she never knew how I felt.

            “I’m sorry, Wills,” is all she can say after a long silence. She moves to take a step closer but I close off. Everything about the beautiful coast dissolves in darkness. But then, she takes a few more steps in and hugs me. I can’t get away, so I just let her do it.   

            After another pause, she releases me, stands back and stares at me.

            “It won’t work,” she says. “I love him.”

            Her gaze is soft, the dark outline of her eyes and hair somehow more lovely than I’ve ever known them to be. “If you want to go back, I’ll take you. I’ll still get there in time.”

            I stop and seriously consider it. The reason I left, as much as I hate the Fatherhood and want to destroy everything it stands for, is bound up in her, in my delusion—my hopes that she will completely and totally fall in love with me through this adventure. And I know there is no way I can go on without somehow obliterating every shred of hope that she will be mine. And when the thought weighs on my brain enough, I know the impossibility of it. The torture it will be to continue going. Every minute, knowing it will never be now. And then, when I’m resolved to nod my head, and tell her I can make it home on my own, I imagine her going alone. And then with Sid. And how being home, the pain will still be the same, but it will be an unknown pain. How I will just wonder about her. But I’ll never know what happened. Never see her again in my life.

            Some distant part inside me thinks going home will allow the feelings to fade. That not seeing her will take me to a place where I can forget. But a shadow spikes so large and scary in the thought—that I’ll never again know if she’s okay.

            “Why?” I say, my last piece of hope. “Why did you ask me at all?” My voice trembles, but I don’t care anymore about keeping the new toughness. Let her see all of me as I am.

            She looks as shocked as I feel. The expression warps into exasperation, and then back to calmness.

            “Because you get it. Of anyone I’ve ever known in Acadia, you’re the only one who gets it. That it’s all a lie. Everything we’ve been raised to believe. And because I didn’t know how you felt. You’re my friend Wills—we’ve always been friends.”

            I wrap my head around the grandness of the towers I have built in my mind—as tall as the one out in the ocean stretching all the way up into space. The towers and the walls I’ve built to conceal how I’ve felt. And part of me thinks it’s true—maybe she really didn’t know. I always worked so hard to make sure she didn’t know how I felt. And now, when she finally does, it’s too late. She’s met someone.

            “Fuck it,” I say.

            She waits for me to say something more. When I don’t, she asks me what I’m going to do.

            “Let’s go,” I say.

            She watches me, her eyes reviewing for any hesitation. But I walk right past her and start along the trail over the high edge of shore bluffs. And then, the next thing I know, I think of nothing but the next step. The gray stone at my feet and the wind beating in from the shore. There is nothing left for me in Acadia, and there is nothing left for me in Maze. There is only the tower. I try to think of it and nothing else. And with every few steps, I glance out to the sea. I watch the dark silver rise of the thing, a monster beckoning me to my death. To come to it over impossible waves, the ones that beat foam and lightning upon the jagged rocks below. A place to find my death. A good death. Something in the name of fearlessness and truth. It’s all enough of a distraction to keep me going until we at last, after a sad eternity, we reach the edges of the scrap yard.

Chapter 8

An ersatz reef—rusted metal lattices of scaffolding and ancient hulls—stretches out to meet the battering ram of the sea. But it’s both of our eyes that drop down to the basin of the ruined yard, cordoned neatly behind a wall of gray-black granite rising against the surf, to see the red. At first, I think they are aliens. Long sticks, probing and ducking down, lithe and wiry and quick, each of them holding long poles in their hands. Blood skeletons.

            The poles are weapons, I realize, as they carry them under the shine of the sun, reflections of forbidden metal glinting, delineating pointed spikes on their tips. Some of the poles seem to have metal blades running all the way down along the wood. But it’s the red my eyes keep coming back to—a swarm of it—all the stringy, taut muscles on the nearly naked bodies somehow covered entirely in deep red. As if the skin itself has been drenched in cranberry dye. They walk fast through the piled junk in the scrap yard, stopping and staring in each direction at times as if searching for something.

            “What the hell are they?” I ask softly, as if they might hear me all the way from our perch atop of the last bluff overlooking the junk bowl below us.

            “I’ve never seen them before,” Maze says. She motions for me to follow her, her eyes catching mine just for an instant to make sure I’m with her, and we retreat to a ridge of shrubs not nearly high enough to conceal us. Poking through the long arms of the foliage, Maze takes in something startling enough for her to make a soft moan of disgust. Instantly I press in against her, and then I raise my head to see.

            When I’m clear, just high enough above the leaves to make out the red forms again, moving in chaotic unison, I see the disturbance. There, in the middle of the throng, is a line of bigger red walkers. But there is something terribly wrong with these ones—as if by some experiment of mutilation, antlers have been fastened to splay skyward from their heads and their shoulders. As if somehow horns were ripped from an animal and implanted right into their bodies. Sharp against the red. And they’re so much bigger than the skinny ones. The smaller red walkers jerk their eyes in every direction like squirrels, to scavenge or to spy or to spot lurkers like us I can’t tell. But the antler men don’t move their heads at all. They walk slowly and deliberately, almost dumbly, in a direct line. Still, none of them seem to look up at us. That’s when Maze pulls me so hard on my arm, tugging me down, that my skin feels like it’s on fire for a second. When I look at her to see what’s wrong, her eyes are facing away again, but this time, directly down at the dirt. She huddles as close to the soil as possible and motions for me to do the same, all without a word of explanation.

By the time I’m squatting as low as I can, and nothing has happened but the dull marching sounds below us and the occasional sound of scrap metal being picked up or thrown about, I ask her what happened.

            “I think one of them saw me,” she says. I mouth the word
fuck
, and every part of my body wants me to double-check, make sure that she’s wrong, that we’re too far away to be seen, that they’re not looking up. But I don’t. I keep my head low, and Maze does too, and we wait. And just about at the time when I think enough minutes have passed, and the main volume of the throng is passing away, there comes the sound of clunking on the side of us. Somewhere by the edge of the forest. And then, looking toward the sound, just as Maze does too, I see where the green bushes are marred by something else—it’s a human face, deeply hued in hard red. The eyes are like lights, stark white against the unnatural color. Close up I can tell it really is a man and not an alien, threadbare clothing covering his carved, skinny frame. Long lines of muscle cut sideways across his abdomen and chest and his arms look like lanky strips of veined meat—all of it frozen still. As the moment of shock that we’ve been discovered rolls through me, the man steps forward. He comes slowly and meticulously, just like the wolves. And then, I realize, we have a shot—because he’s alone, and he’s the only one I’ve seen without a spear. Maze starts to move.

            “Grab something,” she whispers, and I follow her lead and pick up the biggest rock I can see. My other hand clenches the handle of my knife. It’s at the moment Maze winds up her arm and launches her rock that the call comes—guttural and demonic, the red being erupts in noise, calling for the attention of the others. But it’s too late—Maze’s rock splits the man’s face open, and a new red—shiny and bright—runs in streaks against the dark red. The call turns to a yelp and then into a furious cry, and all at once, the stringy body launches forward, taller than both of us and transforming itself into a bullet in one long sprinting jump. Maze yells at me to run, to follow her back along the path and toward the lower bluffs of the shoreline, but I can’t move. Paralyzed by fear. The rock slips from my fingers, hits the ground at my feet, and then, in one crushing flash of pain and sound and red, my chest feels the hard compression of a boulder crushing into it, the man’s fist, and I fall backwards. Rough spikes on the granite floor stab into my back, mirroring the pain in the front of my chest, and I look straight up into the lines of a red nose and cheek. But the thing that pierces me—lets me know I’m about to die—are the white eyes. Bright and vibrant against the red skin, yet entirely expressionless. Eyes of the dead. The man plants his chest squarely on top of me so I can’t wiggle at all with what little strength I have left, and then he cocks his arm back for a final blow. And as it happens, as if in slow motion, he speaks—garbled and syrupy words that drip blood on me: