WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (19 page)

            The questions I had before multiply forever, but I ask none of them. Because it’s all I can do to just comprehend the lines on her ankle, and I have to take my eyes away from the tattoo, her beautiful skin, and put them back on her face. Behind her, in my periphery, I see that the three of them have paused, looking back at us, wondering what we’re doing stopping. If we’re about to run for it. Garren calls out to us. Neither of us hear him and neither of us look away. And there’s no question from my lips, because somehow I know she’s not hiding anything this time—she really doesn’t have any answers. Not for this one. Not even a theory. Just that she’s somehow bound up in the thing itself.

            A heavy feeling floods through me, seems to flow into me right from her eyes, that the great slice in the sky might have nothing at all to do with the Ark, or something that would erase the ignorance from the world. In the wake of the Nefandus, it might very well be something more terrible and evil than we could ever imagine out there, cutting up from the sea. Some kind of darkness we should have never sought out at all. But looking one more time, as she pushes her pants down, I see the tower in black ink on her skin. There’s no mistaking it, and I know now—there was never a choice for her as to her fate. And maybe too, never one for me and mine. Not since the day she first stepped foot in Acadia.

            Another shout comes from behind, this one impatient and angry, accompanied by the sound of heavy footfalls. It’s Rafe, running over to see what’s holding us. And as all the confluence of meaning and startling realizations boil away in a moment’s eternity of her eyes, locked tightly to mine, she says it—the words that give me an instant tremble.

            “
I did hear you
.”

            She says it fast, without looking away. And I know somehow what she means—that she heard me tell her I love her as she lay about to die. But before I can reply, beg if it means there’s hope for us, Rafe wraps me up in his arms, locking me in a barrel against his chest and pulling me away, telling Maze to follow. I try to twist back and look at her, to see if she’ll say anything more. To see if she’ll return it. But there’s nothing but her dark hair, and her face pointing down, her eyes fixed on her legs, on her ankle. And no more words come from any of us until we’ve marched all the way back to the corpse-riddled camp of the Resistance. It isn’t long before Garren calls the survivors together, declaring that he has something very important to say.

  Part 3

Chapter 11

As the forest and the rocky coast start to reveal their color under morning sunlight, we reach the edge of Resistance camp. Salt air coats my tongue and I see the place. A ruin. Things in my head shift away from the vision of dead bodies, replacing them with a dream of Maze. Like I am going to fit the puzzle together now. Some deep part of myself beats the refrain:
Forget all her words. Look at the actions. Nothing else.

    I gather it all up into myself—the absolute truth about my history with Maze. Always clear, yet only now can I see it—the separation between what I believe and what I’ve been shown by her. As if my projections about her feelings for me have somehow always painted the wrong perception—a perception that she wants me like I want her. The knowledge of my self-delusion beats anger into me as I fall behind everyone else and watch her go, watch her arms and then her legs, thinking of the tattoo, and why she bothered to tell me she’d heard what I said. That I love her. As if it meant something to her. And by the time we’re right in the center of Resistance camp, circling round the dying fire and the strange lines of blood-streaked sand, and the red-skinned corpses, I decide: the first chance I get, I’ll tell her exactly how I feel. Again. But somehow I’ll be clearer this time. More direct. And it won’t happen while we’re under the knife of the enemy. She’ll have to answer.

What’s left of the Resistance walks out from the hut houses surrounding us, tired bodies crawling into the dawn light, a cool fog enveloping everything, doing its best to hide the slaughter that’s just passed through like a storm. Somehow I can still smell death in the air, a strange scent mixed with the salt, and the faces look worn, tired from caring for the dead and dying, some of which I know, besides the red skeletons strewn about, must still be hiding inside their homes. At once, Garren calls out to everyone. I sit down, too exhausted to stand any longer, finding a log that’s far enough away from everyone that I’ll stay invisible. But Maze walks right up to the place where Garren prepares some speech, next to everyone else. And filled with anger and the returning throb in my leg, and with the crash of fading adrenaline, I just close my eyes and listen, head cupped in my hands.

    “How many are dead?” he asks the small crowd.

    “Six,” says someone. “The rest are wounded—dying.”

    “Christopher, and Doss?” Garren asks.

    There’s a pause that must mean the ones he’s asked for are dead. When he says nothing further, it’s all I can think to imagine that they must have been the doctors—the Resistance’s only hope to stem the number of dead from increasing. But I don’t ask anyone, and no one is near me. I am removed from everything, my eyes open again, plied to Maze, who is fixed on Garren’s every move. I can’t help but feel that something strange is coming on. I think about him—how he must have snuck in, looked at Maze’s tattoo as she slept. How much he must really know—how much she must really know. And then, the horrible bug that has so long possessed Maze but never me begins to come for me, to gnaw at the back of my mind. The reaching, the longing to draw up some terrible conspiracy to make sense of this. The Fathers in the Deadlands, the Nefandus raid, Sid, the tattoo, Garren’s secret beliefs about the tower. Suddenly it feels like Garren drew us to him all along, or at least Maze—and Sid, the Resistance, are all just part of his ploy to get her. Because she’s valuable to him somehow. She fits what he wants. But then—before I can devolve into pointless thoughts of desperation, of needing her, of telling her all of my feelings in isolation—my mind conjures up the Ark. And for all the strength of my memory, I can never remember Maze telling me how she knows about the Ark. How she even came to the idea that it could exist at all. The foolish part of me always assumed she just thought it up herself. Some genuine creation from her own imagination—the overactive work of her own desperation—her need to make sense of the Fatherhood, of the world and the history so obviously and intentionally shrouded by the dogma of the Fathers. And at last, right before Garren finally opens his mouth, the fact that his great healers must be dead settling over him enough that he can speak again, I imagine the After Sky. For some reason, I hear it—the part of the scripture that I’ve listened to every week since I was first old enough to attend Father Gold’s sermons:
And in the After Sky, once the toil has been done with here on the Earth, the great knowledge of God will be revealed—in death, the mystery of faith will be known, and all of history, and of future, shall be known, then, and forever after. For this, unity with God in the After Sky, we pray.

    At first I don’t even hear Garren speaking. It’s like the idea of the Fatherhood’s afterlife, some eternal heaven after death for souls, something I’ve always dismissed as bullshit,
known
as bullshit on an intuitive level, is really the Ark. Or that the two are connected. As if metal, or the whole of technology, brought people to a real, living After Sky. Insight flashes through me: that the Fatherhood explains—with their myths, stories, and lies—the same world that used to be explained by truth—before the Wipe, explained by technology and science. Those great sources of sin. Replacements of God. False idols.

    At once my mind goes through a list of things I remember, all of the supposed truths of the Fatherhood. I try to correlate them to potential truths about the way humans really used to be. Back when human intellect was genuine, unclouded by holy texts, as Maze has always said it was before the Wipe. It’s too much for me to put together, and the flooding ideas collapse and roll away from each other only to reform and reconfigure until I feel sick. Like there’s too much conspiracy after all, and there’s nothing I can do about any of it. It’s only when I hear the last bits of Garren’s speech that all my frenzied sense-making halts in an instant, my head lashing back to present attention:

    “...two boats. Gala and I, and the two refugees, will go. She—” says Garren, and then he pauses and turns to Maze, to let the camp know that he is speaking of her now, “has confessed knowledge that will help us understand why the Nefandus have come into our land. If they are coming again. I must make the trip. We’ll be back in a day’s time. Rafe, you’re in command here.”

    For a moment, I watch Rafe mumble, try to protest. He says something about how he should go, and that it should be someone else left behind in charge. I think I hear him say Gala’s name, but Garren silences him quickly. Someone asks Garren what he knows, but he refuses any information. His words are brusque and quick, and then, the last question he answers is about the departure time.

    “Tomorrow. First light.” And with that, he instructs that someone attend to our wounds, to the best of the camp’s ability to do so, and that the red bodies be taken into the forest or thrown into the sea. Anywhere but in sight.    

    “And our own dead?” asks Rafe as Garren begins to walk away.

    “Bury them, if you like.”

I stay on the log, my mind bent upon the proposal—a trip in a boat, somewhere out into the ocean, just Maze, me, Gala and Garren. I want to chase him down and ask him myself, figure out why, because nothing about leaving, heading into the sea, makes any sense. But his fatigue, his wounds, have worn him down, and he refused even his own men. Gave no real information. And I know it has to do with Maze, and that he’ll tell me nothing.

    I let him go and watch Maze talk to Gala and Rafe about something I can’t hear. A boy, as young as me, walks over and asks where I’ve been hurt. I finally remember my own pain, and roll up my pants. I see the dark bruise running up from my ankle, the tears of scabs, their ooze running sideways, already crusting my hair into mats. Stay here, he says, and then he’s gone and back again with a jar of thick paste. He rubs it down my leg slowly. It tingles until a cool numbness empties all feeling.

    “It’s a very good plant,” he says as he rubs. His hand feels good. That someone’s touching me, taking care of me. And when I look for Maze, she’s gone. So is Rafe. And then, as soon as the boy is done, smiling once and walking away, Gala walks right up to me. At first I think she’s going to walk right by, but she tells the boy where there are other wounded, waiting for the balm, and then she just sits on the ground right next to me.

    “What is it? Do you know?” she says, her voice easy and soft.

    “About tomorrow?” I say. But I know that’s what she’s asking about already. That she needs information, whatever I have. I think for a moment that she’s the only skeptic here. Maybe the best thing we have on our side, and I have to open up to her.

    “Yeah. What’s she put into his head?”

    I put my head into my hands and look down, away from her, deciding what I can say. How much of what I know, the little I know, I should reveal.

    “I really don’t know. He said something about the Nefandus,” I tell her, hoping it’s

enough to deflect her. But her voice cuts away all softness, becomes a razor.

    “That’s bullshit. He’s lying,” she says. I look at her. “So are you.”

    Then, the strangest thing happens before I realize it’s happening—it’s her hand, traveling along my shoulder, soft, and then her eyes lock to mine. Like she knows I need to be touched. How good it felt when the boy stroked my leg. Her fingers drop away and rest on my knee, but she continues to bore through me. I have to look down at the dirt again, and all I know is the feeling of her hand resting on my leg.

    “The Fatherhood is bullshit. That’s why we left,” I say, digging, trying to let her know with the tone of my voice that that’s all she’s going to get from me.

    “I can see what she does to you,” she says, the steel voice dropping into softness again, “But if you cover—if you lie for her now—we’re going to die tomorrow. All of us. I know—I’ve always known—that he has some of it in him too. No one else here sees it, but I do.”

    I wait for her to elaborate, but she doesn’t have to. I want to deny her, but something about her is too skeptical, too sharp for me to evade. Like she sees everything inside me. That somehow she’s always known Garren was concealing his real beliefs, that he’s just like Maze. A closet conspiracy theorist biding his time. And more than anything else, I remember—that feeling I’ve had since I first met her—that she can read people in two seconds, and that she’s already read all of me with her eyes and her fingers. And all of Maze. But that it must be Garren she has trouble seeing. Some dark history between them. And without a forethought to stop me from saying it, and without knowing even why I do it, I ask her.