WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (23 page)

    “It goes underground,” I finally say, pulling back.

    “It—he thinks it symbolizes the tunnel. That the tunnel is the way out,” she says. Quickly, she checks again on the fight, but it seems to be over now, only soft whispers reaching us from the other boat. Mostly Gala’s voice.

    “That’s where we’re going?” I ask.

    She nods and I tell her what Gala thinks. That it’s all bullshit—and that the tower is just a solid metal pole, some kind of ancient antenna from the pre-Wipe world. Some benign structure of the ancient computers. Maze doesn’t reply, as if she’s considered the same thing herself.

    “Wills—he told me he had the same dreams I did.”

    “What dreams?”

    “You know I’ve never had any proof for the Ark. Never found anything. Just my suspicions about the tower—that it was built after the Wipe, after the old world died. And the mirror confirmed that for me—that the tower’s alive. But I never knew how to justify what I believed about the Ark. That there was a record somewhere, about what the world was really like before everything fell apart. It only came in my dreams. That was all.”

   I let what she’s said—that the tower is
alive
, sink in. Finally, I ask her again.

    “He’s had a dream about the Ark too? The same thing?” 

    “Yeah—only he doesn’t think they’re dreams.”

    “What?” I say, making my own jumps ahead of where she’s leading me. Trying to fit things together before she comes out and makes it plain.

    “He thinks they’re memories.”

    I let the implication wash over me and settle—what it would mean. That she’s from there. That he’s from there. Orphan—the word goes through my head over and over. The emptiness of Maze’s past, the void of her history, just like the world before the Wipe. All void except for the dream. And finally, after an eternity of silence, her watching me for the thing to make sense all on its own, I say it. I ask if she thinks it could really be true. That he—that they both—were once somewhere near the Ark. Up somewhere in the tower.

    “Nothing else makes sense, does it?” she says. And then she tells me that Garren never told anyone about his dreams, how he kept them to himself, but searched, used the Resistance secretly to accumulate evidence—enough that he could act. And how finding her—finding Maze—is enough. Suddenly the argument in the other boat makes sense—that Gala’s not really mad about Garren concealing the truth about the tattoos. Or his secret beliefs in the great conspiracy of the world—it must be that she’s realizing the whole thing was a front—that the Resistance was serving as a means for him to follow his gut instincts, to collect enough evidence to put a boat out onto the water and go. And that it took a massacre to finally make him admit it.

    “But it can’t be—how would you have gotten out? How would you end up in the Fatherhood and him in the Resistance? Why would you be anywhere right now but still in the tower?”

    “In a few hours, we’ll start to find out,” she says. Her eyes go back to the map and she tells me where we are in relation to the symbol where the tunnel starts on the coast. A long way south of it, just barely on the map.

    “So he lied to all of them—this isn’t a reconnaissance mission. We’re not going back to the camp,” I say.

    “We are. We didn’t bring enough supplies to make it all the way out to the tower, even if the tunnel is real.”

    My mind turns to darker things.

    “Or weapons,” I tell her.

    “The plan is to check if there really is a door. If we can somehow open it.”

    “Unless she’s changed his mind,” I say, looking back to the other boat.

    “She can’t.” And Maze doesn’t explain why, or say anything else, and we sit in long silence, listening to the whispers and the occasional slapping of the swells against the hull. I watch her profile, reminding myself of my love for her, and cursing myself for having been stupid enough to think I could find Gala attractive when Maze is so close. But cold and crushing comes into my head her words—exactly what she said to me. We’re friends, and that’s all there ever will be. And for just a moment, I hate myself for feeling this way, for even knowing her at all.

    “Let’s just hope we have enough gas to make it there,” she says finally.

    “We didn’t bring enough?” I ask, and right away my mind jumps to what would happen if we ran out of gas on the water. I look all around, and although the map shows that we are along the coast, I can only make out the faintest line of land, a cresting and falling bump of dark gray.

    “It took this long to figure out the dimensions of the map—to know just how far away the place actually is. And now that he’s got the idea—four more hours—he’s not so sure.”

    I realize that either way it means we’ll have to walk back. Lug the boats on land. All to see if there’s a door. But I don’t mention a word of my anxiety, or even dwell on it anymore. My mind rests on new words—new proclamations of love—things I can do and say to make her change her mind. However long it takes, I realize, it’s all that’s left of me. And a surge of exhilaration lights through me. The stakes—the feeling that we could die at any time, that in all likelihood there’s a good chance we
are
going to die soon, but that before we do we’re going to learn a great deal more than anyone else has ever known about the world. That before us lie the secrets of history. My eyes trace up the tower to where its rise is so thin that I can hardly make out any line at all until haze blurs its thinness to nothing. I imagine inside that there are stairs like the skyscrapers in the Deadlands had, and how long it will take to climb them, if we made it all the way out through the tunnel. And before I can imagine the tunnel—some structure that seems more impossible than the tower itself, a pathway armored somehow from a billion crushing tons of water, waiting to collapse in on itself, I hear a shout. This time it’s Garren. Loud enough that I hear the words. It’s the choice that rests behind what he says that makes me shudder.

    “
Then you go back…
”

    Gala has no reply for him and she jumps, stomping, back into the boat with me and Maze. Then, after an awkward wait, Maze rises when Gala says a single word:
Go
. And like that, everyone’s back where they belong, and the rumble starts up again, droning engines racing in tandem, somewhere far out to the right of the rocky coast, and much too far left of the tower itself. And somewhere deep below us, so deep the image barely forms, I can see leaking, the walls of some buckling metal tunnel.

Chapter 13

We motor on for another hour in silence. A few times I move close enough to Gala to feel the energy rolling off of her—something like anger and distance that tells me not to say anything. The sky darkens and lightens and the ocean stays the same. Eventually my eyes catch the strip of land off to the left—somehow less obscure and clear enough that I make out the green of a tree line on top of a high cliff. Behind it rises a large mountain, sloping gently like the back of a whale. The top of the mountain looks bare, like the trees have run out, and its clean rocky dome is a desert of sand. I ask Gala how far we have to go, and how much gas we have left. When she tells me another few hours, I know that everything Maze hinted at must be true. Where we are going. That we will probably have to walk back. And it’s confirmed by the next words out of her mouth.

    “This is a one-way ride,” she says. The anger spills out of her for just a moment, and then, to distract me from noticing it maybe, she asks how I’m feeling. If I’m feeling any better at all. And I know she must be referring to Maze, but I ignore her and say my leg’s much better. She tells me to have something to eat from the supply bag.

    “No way back?” I ask.

    She doesn’t say a word and I know that it means we’re fucked. I try to do the math in my head—how fast and far we’re traveling, how long that would be by foot. And then my eyes drift from the smooth surface of the swells back to distant crags and the high cliff and the forest. The impossible terrain. No straight lines or easy flats. Something like a couple days. I ask her if I’m right. If we’re walking back. And then it comes out of her. All of what she’s been keeping in.

    “He’s crazy and he’s a liar. And we’re stuck with him now.”

    I want to ask why she didn’t turn back, why she’s going on. And part of me wishes we’d just go on forever—not turn back after testing the door. As if it will open, and we could just keep pushing forward, supplies or not. After all, it’s what Maze and I set out to do anyway—to get there at all costs. And it starts to make less and less sense to me that we’d turn back. To resupply, I remind myself. Because it’s too far and you never realized it. My eyes move to the supply bag in our boat. There’s another one in the other boat. Two small bags of life. 

    “How many days can we last?” I ask her.

    “Enough to get home. Not much more,” she says. And then I know where part of her anger must be coming from—a big part of it. It’s that she’s starting to know he’s right. And Maze is right. And Sid was right. There is something out there—something old and something that wants us to believe a certain way. A certain way about our past and our future.

    I look across the water to Maze and see her next to Garren. Their eyes are fixed on the tower and they’re still talking. Endlessly talking. The old anxiety floods me, and I say to hell with it. I ask Gala what I’m dying to know:

    “What did you fight about?” 

    For a long while I think she won’t answer me. And then, just like that, she leaves the front and sits right next to me—almost putting herself into me, so that we’re very close. Her eyes look pretty with the sun lighting them, and all at once, I remember how much I can be attracted to her. The rage of rejection makes me want to touch her again, immediately. Her face. Her legs.

    “You were right. She has the tattoo, and he thinks it means the way in. Into a tunnel. Something under the water that leads to the tower.”

    I tell her that Maze told me as much, and then I tell her what else I know—about Garren’s theories on the Fathers, and how the After Sky is a physical place, something real. How he told Maze the Fathers are growing corrupt, realizing the value of their artifact findings, allowing them to disrupt their rigid adherence to the dogmas. To whatever real system might be controlling them.

    “I can’t believe there could be anything left in the world that orchestrated. Nothing that elaborate. And I still don’t know if I believe it—this tunnel, any of it. All he has is a map, and now he’s got a girl and a slaughter back home to rationalize his madness.”

    “You don’t believe anything, remember?” I say. My hand taps her lightly on the arm, a test to see how she’ll react.

    “It’s the practical use of the word,” she says. “I’m using it practically.” And then she says nothing at all. She looks at me for a moment, giving me a quick smile, so fast that I’m not sure if it’s really a smile or a smirk of disappointment.  

    “You’ll believe it when you see it I guess. That’s how it was for me. When I saw the mirror move, point to the tower.”

    Both our heads reel around to look at the tower. Its needle rises clearly into nothingness. I imagine it all leading up to some habitat, the private home of the After Sky. Somehow sending down signals, commands to the Fatherhood. It seems stupid to consider it could really be how the Fatherhood is governed. But there’s too much evidence for me to dismiss it as a solid metal pole the way she does. I ask her if she still thinks that’s all it is now. A metal rod, nothing more. Finally, she says she doesn’t know anymore. And then her hand comes into mine. Just touching it gently, enough for me to be sure now that she wants me. The feeling fills me up. I wonder if it’s the same rage in her—the same kind of anger that she feels, only hers is from Garren, and that it’s the reason she’s touching me. Like the touching will make things as clear for her as I think it will for me.

    “I loved him. More than you love her, or think you love her,” she says, pulling back her hand.

    I want to erupt, to tell her she can’t know how I’ve felt for all this time. But I don’t because I sense what she’s getting at—that hers was reciprocated—that at one point in time, he at least loved her back.

    “He came from outside, didn’t he?” I ask. She looks at me, confused, like she’s forgotten what she told me before about how the Resistance members came together. “You said some are born Resistance, and some come from outside. Find their way into it.”

    She just nods yes. And I start to imagine how similar they are—Garren and Maze. That despite how much older he is, they’re destined to fall for each other. Both of them orphans. Both of them with the same tattoo. Refugees from the same haunting memory.

    “Do you know why he couldn’t be with me anymore?” she says, her legs opening and squaring toward me. I can’t help but look down to them, just long enough so that she sees me doing it—the curving muscle of her thigh and up to her ass, spread right before me. I look up to see her staring back at me, knowing just what’s running through my mind.

    “Because of the dreams, he said. Do you believe that shit?”

    “The dreams?”

    “She must have had them too. Am I right?”

    Right away my mind falls from lust and into what Maze told me—the unknown reason behind her knowledge of the Ark—that somehow, there was something from before she came to Acadia, some distant memory left amongst the million missing ones.

    I nod yes and I wonder if she would mind if I just looked at her body. This close, and just stopped paying attention and looked her up and down, held my stare, forgot everything else to gorge my desire. Then she gives me the opportunity. She eyes Garren’s boat and leans back, just enough to put the boat back at the right angle, revealing her stomach as her shirt rises up. Flat and tanned, a hint of her muscle. Then, like she’s done it on purpose, and the boat’s path didn’t need correction, she looks back at me.