WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (15 page)

            “Wait till Garren finds out,” is all Logs says, stepping away finally. “The devil knows most of us hated that boy, but you’ll pay just the same.”

            “Who’s Garren?” Maze asks.

            “The man who runs this world. And when he finds the girl that killed Sid comes marching in, expecting something—well, I just don’t know what he’ll do,” Rafe says.

            “How do we know they ain’t with the Fathers? Come from Acadia, didn’t you say?” Logs says, turning around. “I say there’s no way we trust a word out of their mouths. Not about Sid, and not about the Nefandus.”

            “Would I carry this?” Maze says, raising the knife from her pocket. She flips it in the air and everyone jumps back, but then she catches it again by the metal blade.

            “I suppose you wouldn’t. And you sure don’t have red ink all over your skin, do you? No wonder Sid kept going back there.”

            “Where did it happen? How long ago?” asks Gala.

            “At the scrap yard this morning,” Maze says.

            “From Acadia to the scrap yard, and then you made it here?” Rafe says, astonishment wrapping his face.

            “Straight from the temple of god himself,” she says.

            “You know what, she’ll be an upgrade from that twit,” Rafe says.

            “I’ll say she’s already that. I
like
looking at her,” Logs says. And he gives one more smile, and then turns and heads back to the fire.

            “Come on, follow me,” says Rafe.

            “Listen, we’re going to the tower,” Maze says, refusing to follow. I watch her, unsure of what our move is now—how we’re going to get out of this.

            “The tower?” Gala says, amused. “I guess Sid sold you on that too.”

            “On what?” Maze says.

            “The tower. No one’s going out there. And there’s nothing there, anyway.”

            “That’s bullshit,” Maze says.

            “I’ll let Garren waste his breath on you. Maybe you’ll start to come around.”

            With another stern glance from Rafe, and a strong wave of his arm, we finally move, following them toward the fire pit.

As we pass the group, all eyes turn toward us. The song they’re all singing stops dead, and from a cloud of fire smoke come jeers and calls. As if Logs has already filled them in. Someone says “There’re the ones that got Sid killed.” Some of the others say that Sid did it to himself, leaving when he wasn’t supposed to, going south when there was no need—doing it alone for a whore.
Alone.
The word slips through my head and bangs around—I hadn’t thought of the idea of sex. That Maze must not be a virgin anymore. She and Sid must have been alone too many times for it not to have happened. I see him again, as he was when I first met him—the tall, strong body—an improvement over mine in every way. Then I imagine them close to the rocky shore, on the sand, making love to each other. How many times? How long did they really know each other? I start to do calculations in my head, totally ignoring the taunts now. Maybe a year. But the next thing I know, we’re being led inside a small building and told to sit at chairs and wait.

            “Garren will be along soon,” Rafe says. And then, he leaves. Gala stays behind, standing at the door, watching us. Her arm is still around her weapon, and her eyes don’t move from us.

“So he filled your head with all that nonsense about the Ark?” she finally asks, a smirk creasing her face.

            “You don’t believe it?” Maze says.

            “No one does.”

            “Where do you think he got it from?”

            Gala’s smirk opens into a smile but she ignores the question.

            “So what do you believe then?” I say. “That you’re doing god’s will out here?” I say, trying to interject because something in me senses Maze collapsing. I feel brave at my sarcasm.

            “Believe?” she says. Her smile disappears. “You were raised by Fathers?”

            I nod my head.

            “Well here’s what no one ever told you—belief is a lie,” she says. “Do you know why we’re called the Resistance?”

            When I twist my head, she tells me why.

            “We resist belief. The dogma of the Fatherhood. The dogma of the Nefandus. And that shit Sid got his head wrapped around. That’s dogma too, just a different kind. It’s what most of the world is since the Wipe. When you believe something, you’re blind.”

            “Everything is belief,” Maze says quickly.

            “The hell it is. What I’ve told you are probable facts. Plain and simple. Listen, I don’t know what Garren is going to do with you, but you’ll do better if you unhook yourself from all that tower and Ark talk. There’s too much romance in it. Something that you should recognize all the more, coming from the Fatherhood. It’s the same as the After Sky, or any other sedative.”

            “Sedative?” I ask.

            “A mind killer. Something that’s no longer active and pliable. Like the red zombies you saw. It doesn’t matter what you’re stuck on. For them, it’s the devil. For the Fathers, it’s God.”

            “But what about the Wipe?” I ask.

            “What about it?” she says.

            “The Fathers say it was the hubris of man,” I say. She laughs a little and takes a cigarette from her pocket.

            “That’s something they partly got right. But everything that’s true is only partly right. Do you want to know what the Wipe was?” she asks.

            “Yes.”

            “The dogma line they use to subjugate. The means of their subjugation. Do you know for what end?”

            “No.”

            “Profit.”

            “Profit?”

            I watch her smile vanish, wondering how she could think it’s all so simple, how she can seem like it’s so obviously certain despite everything she’s just said about belief. I wait to see if she’ll catch herself in her own hypocrisy. All she does is light her cigarette and take a long pull. 

            I start to notice just how pretty she is. She’s older than Maze, but her hair is still soft and beautiful and gold. Her light blue eyes flick away from me and I look at her skin. It’s weathered, but still tight with youth.

            “There used to be machines—just like people. And some were like birds. Some like other animals. And before—before all this—people fought using them instead of their own bodies. It reduced casualties, so it goes. Machines fighting each other. Problem was, too much control was lost. More and more of it until there’s little for real human hands to do. And that’s how things go south real fast.”

            “You’re saying machines caused the Wipe?” I ask. I take a quick look at Maze, and her head is hanging down toward her feet. I almost ask if she’s okay, but I hold back. I know it’s something else—a different kind of pain. She’s starting to believe Gala.  

            “What’s the best way to deal with an enemy world power that runs on machines, machines that run on electricity?” Gala says between puffs. “You wipe it all out—
all of it
. Military, government, economy. It happened automatically. The old world was a house of cards.” She pauses and looks out through the door. “Garren’s here. You can thank me for the history lesson later.”

A white beard is the first thing I see. Inside the bushy hair is an old face wearing a warm expression. Everything else about him looks the same—his clothes are the same worn camouflage as Gala and the rest wear. He takes his time surveying us in silence, the warmth fading for a moment, but then a smile returns. He touches Gala on the arm.  

            “I’ll talk to them alone, thanks Gala,” he says, his voice deep and calm. As much as I presume to find anger in his tone, there’s only the same warmth as his face. And then, she walks out with one last drag on her smoke, eyeing us one more time—a look of sympathy, as if we’re going to be sentenced to death. And just like that, she’s gone. It’s just Garren and us. He lights his own cigarette and holds out the pack.  Maze says no thanks and then he takes a seat across from us in a chair of his own. The legs scrape across the floor as he pulls in close.

            “My boys didn’t hurt you, young lady, did they?” he says to Maze. Her head falls to the ground again. I’ve never seen her so dejected. I want to prod her, make her recognize Garren. Just get her to say anything.  

            “What’s your name?” Garren says to me, quickly dismissing her when it’s clear she’s not going to talk.

            “Wills.”

            “And hers?”

            “Maze,” she says, finally looking up.

            “Both of you look so very filled with anxiety. I can’t begin to imagine why. You didn’t let Gala intimidate you?” He pauses to take a drag. He keeps smoking and waits for some kind of reaction, keeping his eyes glued to Maze.

            “Well, are you going to talk or am I going to have to pull your teeth out like the rest of them?” he says.

            Maze jerks up at that, eyeing him to check if he’s serious. It suddenly dawns on me that besides taking the antler, they haven’t stripped us of our knives. My eyes roam over Garren and I don’t see a single weapon, not even a knife dangling from his belt like the others had. We could kill him, their leader, right now. The thought slides around in my head, and I wonder if it’s passing through Maze’s too. It must be. I think about it so much that I start to look at her for cues, something to let me know when to jump. But suddenly there’s a deep laugh. It dies out just as quickly as it starts and Garren dangles his cigarette from his mouth.

            “Now that I have your eyes, can we talk?” he says.

            “We want to go to the tower. Either you help us, or you don’t,” she says.

            “If I don’t?” Garren says.

            “Then we need to go. Before sundown,” she says. I watch her now, her eyes on fire with the same ideas that must never have belonged to Sid at all. That had to have been burning inside her long before she ever met him.

            “I’m going to let you just walk out of here, you suppose? After—as far as I can tell—you have our blood on your hands?” The jovial smirk on Garren’s face disappears, and he squints through the haze of smoke. I cough, then just wait for something to happen. The tension starts to mount when no one says anything, and I know it’s going to happen. When she still doesn’t say anything, and the anxiety is palpable, beating in my chest, I start to wonder if she’s going to explode now. To make the attack and kill the old man right here, surrounded by his lackeys.

            “What other choice do you have?” Maze says. The shock of how fearless she’s become washes over me. What Sid’s death—and Gala’s story—must be doing inside her.

            “You feel the need to believe in something, don’t you?” Garren asks. “Believe in the tower, the Ark, something that will keep you going.”

            “How do you know what I believe?” she says.

            “Because you were his girl. The one he kept talking about. The one who filled him up with those wayward ideas.”

            At once it jolts through me that my suspicions are confirmed. The rest of them think that it was Sid who corrupted her—planted the ideas in her head. But it really was the other way around and the only one here who knows it is Garren.

            Maze stares back at him, not once dropping again.

            “So what if I told you…” he begins, turning to me for a second, approving of my presence somehow, and then looking back at Maze, “that it’s
not
bullshit. That what Gala probably told you, that I’m sure Rafe and everyone else told you, is the real bullshit.”

            “Why?” Maze asks. “Why keep it from all of them?”

            “Because it’s suicidal missions like you’re trying to pull off—stuff that will get my whole camp killed in no time—that will start up if I let on that there’s even one shred of truth to it.”

            “So let us go then. What do you care if we live or die trying to do it?”

            “Because as much of a pain in the ass as that boy was—and that’s not to say I don’t lament the way he went—I invested in him. Spent resources on him like everyone else here that I work to keep alive. And as far as I can tell, you’re responsible for his death. Not for the Nefandus attacking, but for getting him mixed up in his head so much that he kept breaking rules, chasing after you to the scrap yard when he wasn’t told to go. Risk I didn’t want to take.”

            “So what do you want?” she says.

            “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you one chance. Prove it to me. Prove to me that it’s
not
all bullshit and false hope, like the rest of the dogma tribes that fill this world now. Not just another incarnation of the empty pseudoscience that pervades this primal world.”

            Maze patiently waits, but there’s no more. Garren stands and finishes his cigarette and puts it out. I watch Maze turn to me suddenly and her face lights up.

            “What did we see in the Deadlands?” she says.

            I try to think of what she’s trying to get me to say but I can’t figure it out.

            “On top of—”

            “The mirror,” I say.

            “What mirror?” asks Garren, sparked at once.

            “It sends sunlight to the tower. Powering something up there.”

            “Impossible.”

            “I saw it,” I say. “It moved, pointed right at the tower, right at the bright point near the top.”

            “Moved?” says Garren.

            “There was a map, a relic—something one of the Fathers found. Locked in a safe,” she says.

            “So you broke into a Father’s safe and took a map that led you to a mirror in the city?” Garren says.

            “On top of one of the tallest buildings,” I say.

            “Okay then, that’s good enough for me. You’ll take me there tomorrow. If it’s true—if there’s a working machine—a mirror sending light to the tower—you’re free to go. Better yet, I’ll help you get there,” Garren says, sitting upright. “And Wills, you’ll stay here and tell Gala everything she wants to know about Acadia. We have a deal?”