WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (24 page)

    “You know what he thinks? What he really thinks about those dreams?”

    “What?” I ask. But somehow, before she tells me, I’ve already got it figured out. I know exactly what she’s going to tell me. And all I want to do is kiss her. But it’s the sun that stops me. The sun that will expose me, and let Maze see me do it. And just like that, I tell myself I will do it when it’s dark. Kiss her when it’s dark. Run my hands over her body. Up her thigh, along her chest. Her face and her lips. Like she’ll teach me how to make love, match my reality with what I’ve imagined so many times in my mind.

    “That they are the memories they forgot to erase.”

    I wait in silence, realizing that my hunch was right. That she’s just putting words to some dark feeling that started in my gut when I heard the first story about the Ark come out of Maze’s mouth years ago, when she couldn’t explain why she believed it was true. When she shifts her weight, and her arm moves back to touch me, gets close but moves away, I ask her.

   
“Who are
they?
”

    “Whoever gave him the tattoo. That’s what I think now,” she says.

    “Does he think that—he came from the After Sky?” I manage to say, despite how absurd it sounds to me. Because for the life of me, as much as I’ve known the dogmas of the Fatherhood to be utter bullshit, I can’t really wrap my head around the idea of heaven being a real place, and not the imaginary and eternal coexistence with God as the Fathers always told it in their sermons—as the scriptures wrote it to be.

    “I don’t know. I don’t think I can go that far. Just that there is some place that he came from, and that it destroyed his memories. Just about all of them before he formed his new life in the Resistance. Do you know what they’re talking about over there?” she asks.

    “What?”

    “They’re comparing. What they remember. Trying to fit the puzzle together. Like they’re from the same place, both ejected, destined to be part of the same conspiracy.”

    “It doesn’t make sense though—why let anyone leave? Why take memories and then risk it and let them leave? Why not kill them?” I say, fighting the possibility that he and her could have a connection that close, a history tied that tightly.

    “You’re asking more than I can answer in any meaningfully way,” she says. And then, just like that, like she’s sick of the talk, of the speculation and the concealment we’ve both had to deal with, her hand glides along the top of my leg. It runs down to my knee and then back up, electrifying my whole body. I can’t help but stare at her blankly, wanting nothing more than to feel her body, to taste her. And as if in answer to my longing, that I shouldn’t act on it, she tells me how she feels.

    “I like you, Wills.” Her eyes offer me a warm smile. I can’t help it. I reach out and touch her hand where it runs along my leg. The connection feels overwhelming and I almost jerk my body forward, forgetting my plan to wait until we have the cover of darkness. But then there’s a shout. It’s Maze’s voice. We whip apart and turn, and at first I think she’s looking right at us, accusing us of doing something wrong, but then I see it’s behind us she’s pointing. To the shoreline. Gala and I turn to see it. There, along the coast, incredibly close to us now, there’s a living band of red, moving up and down, a wobbling blot of color along the high gray cliff. A never-ending army of them. I squint my eyes, trying to see if they’ve spotted us, or if there are Red Horns with them.

    “What’s it mean?” I finally say, turning back, looking to Garren as if he’ll know exactly what’s happening on this distant shore. And as he waits, unable to give me an answer, I know he’s never been this far from home. I can tell from his eyes—he’s played it safe for a long time. And maybe even he isn’t as courageous as Maze. As willing to plunge into the dark and strange places that will certainly kill us. It’s Gala who answers me.

    “It means something’s got the Nefandus startled. Startled everywhere,” she says.

    “Something big,” Garren says.    

    “Big what?” I say, looking back at the small red movement on the coast. I can hardly tell how far back it goes or how far forward, like it’s a never-ending line. “What do you mean big? How do you know that?”

    “Because they never move like this. They’re not even supposed to come into these lands.”

    All at once I want to press Gala, get her to tell me everything she knows about the Nefandus—their history, who’s behind them, how much the Resistance has interacted with them. But there’s no time for any of it, because Garren calls my name.

    “Wills,” he says. I turn around. Maze is looking at me too, no longer smiling. I look at Garren, at her, and then wait for something.

    “Do you still believe in prayer?”

    I want to spit at him, but I just shake my head no. “Not since I was six years old.”

    “Because at this point, it’s about all we can do. Pray we don’t run out of gas and have to put in on that shore.”

    The urge comes into me—the clearest thought—I want to kill him. And maybe he’s lied about how much gas we have, or miscalculated the distance, and he’s being serious, but I know that’s not the reason I want to strangle him. It’s his connection to Maze, and the way his voice sounds when he talks to me. As if he’s not only closing into her, but using his words, his mockery, to distance her from me. To show her how small I really am.

    The thought of sex with Gala roars through my head. And suddenly, an insane thought crosses my head. That I should have done it last night. Killed him. While he was sleeping.

Chapter 14

It only takes less than an hour for me to be certain that the worst has started happening. It comes with a few engine sputters that wake me up. I pull the jacket from over my face and find that the sun is almost halfway down in the sky, covered by a thick spread of clouds, and by the time I sit up, our engine goes completely quiet. Nothing but waves and the drone of the other boat somewhere close.

    My eyes quickly survey the situation: Gala is at the wheel, leaning back, looking to Garren. In another moment I hear his boat’s engine turn off too as they slide in next to us. A cold gust blows over us, and I realize that she turned it off on purpose. Before I can figure out why, I remember the red line of men walking on the coast. When I twist around to see the shore, to check, there’s nothing but fog. A low bank of gray that rolls out toward us, concealing any of the reef rocks that would drive us under, and the long walk of the red men on the cliff. Nothing but gray.

    They start to talk and it becomes clear what’s happened: the engine clunking is the first sign that we’re going to run out of gas. I hear her make him admit it—that we won’t reach the right spot along the coast. And then, he turns around without a word. I watch him dig into his supply bag, Maze watching him too, and he pulls out his shotgun. There’s ammo enough to keep them off us for a bit, he says. If they’re still running the coast.

    “We can’t even see the fucking coast,” Gala says, voice calm.

    “Not now. We wait out the fog. We wait a little bit,” he says.

    “Because the dark will be better?” she says.

    “I don’t know.”

    “Of course you don’t. You didn’t think any of this through.”

    “How far off are we?” Maze asks.

    She huddles up with Garren on the map, and after a minute, he decides that we’re about an hour from the right spot. Gala just grunts and turns to peer into the fog. I look at it with her, as if that fast something could have changed. I ask Garren what other weapons there are. He says there are knives, but that we shouldn’t need them. Maze digs around anyway and finds them, handing me one. The silver metal grazes my skin as she hangs out over the open water to hand it to me.

    “Oh shit!” she says, reeling back quickly into her boat like something knocked her away.

    “What?” I shout as Garren moves to her, looking for the problem. Gala stands up and walks to the edge of the boat.

    “I saw something,” Maze says. And then she kneels and dips her knife into the water. I walk to her, almost pressing into her body, and I follow her eyes into the water. There’s a quick slip of gray, a dark and massive shadow gliding by, and then it’s gone.

    “I thought it might be a dolphin,” she says.

    Then the word rolls from Garren’s mouth, like it means nothing at all to him: “Shark.”

    “God that scared the hell out of me,” Maze says, finding the edge of the other side of the boat as we huddle and look into the water.

    “She won’t bother us,” Garren says. “Not at all.”

    Somehow it doesn’t really register to me that there are sharks swimming here, in water that’s connected to the beaches I’ve swum in back in Acadia. That they could have been there too, maybe. That they really exist at all, like I’ve seen them in books. The large triangle knives for teeth, the empty black beads for eyes. I turn to Maze and she’s still frozen, spooked. I want to comfort her, to protect her, but I turn away. Reminding myself that I’m letting go of her. That unless she’s in actual danger, I have to stop giving a shit. I think of Gala, and how it’s growing dark, and whether or not I’ll have a chance to touch her. To run my hands along her legs, and up to her mouth. To feel her hair and her lips and let her do what I know she wants to do with me. All of it evaporates in an instant as she speaks, finally breaking us from the distraction and back to the real problem.

    “The way I see it, we have a few hours of sunlight left. And this fog’s got to break real soon. How much longer can we go now that they’re sputtering?” Gala asks.

    “Another ten, fifteen minutes maybe? I don’t know,” he answers, and then all is silent. The next noise I hear is Garren walking back to his seat and clicking noises coming from his shotgun. I feel the knife in my hand and look out at the fog. At the forest behind it and the high cliff that I know is there. But how do I really know it’s behind the fog at all? It’s not faith, I remind myself. You’ve seen it earlier. It’s just a probability, that’s all. What about the red army we saw? Another probability. No way to know.

    I run through all the things that are facing us—the fog, the failing sunlight, the supplies, the weapons, the red men, the door, the tattoos, the long walk back to Resistance camp. Suddenly, as my head throbs just a little bit, none of it makes too much sense. That even if there is a conspiracy, it’s not worth all of this to expose it. Not when I had a perfectly safe life back at home, predictable and comfortable. I didn’t want for anything, did I?
You wanted her
, I remind myself. The horrible truth of why I left hits me again, just when I don’t need to think of it any more. That I’m in this mess chasing after something that I discovered, in only a day, that I can never have. Part of me wants to rage against a god, or something that might have designed the horrible irony, but I can’t. There’s nothing to rage against. It’s me. And it’s back to Gala that my mind turns, finding some kind of hope. Some kind of desire to push on. Like I can make things for her now. That she can be a replacement.

When an hour passes and the fog hasn’t lifted, it’s Gala who makes the call. We go in slow and steady, she says. Right into the thick of it. Garren argues that it will be better to wait it out on the water, even if until morning, but she won’t relent.

    “We’ll turn back if it stays thick,” she says. “There’s already a bit of an opening there.”

    We all look at it—the same small crack in the fog that hasn’t changed for the past half-hour. A thin shadow of the high cliff between the gray and nothing more.

    “I don’t like it. We won’t see any of the reef if we get too close,” Garren argues.

    “He’s right,” Maze says, and when I look at her, watching the face that defends Garren, I see fear wrapping her. And I know right away—she’s thinking about if we go in, if the boat sinks. She’s seen what’s waiting for us in the water. And for some sadistic reason that I can’t understand, I snap at Garren.

    “You got us into this, didn’t you? You thought everything through? You stay the fuck out here, and we’ll go,” I say.

            It dawns on me that they’re the ones with the tattoos, the maps, and the gun, and that I don’t even know if Gala would follow along with such a crazy threat, but I hold my ground, staring him down. And before Gala can object to my rashness, the craziest thing happens. He agrees with me.

    “You know what? You’re right,” he says. And then he pauses, holding his stare for another moment, and then he drifts back to the fog, the glare of the sun behind him lighting the tops of his shoulder as it breaks through the clouds. “We don’t know when we’ll catch another break. And we don’t know where the hell we’ll drift, do we? So let’s go in. Just a bit. Enough to see if it widens out and we can see the coast.”

    Gala replies by turning the engine back on. It clunks and almost dies, but then steadies, and we steer quickly away from their boat. I think by how she turns she means to splash them a little, but I don’t look back to find out. Not once. Not even to see Maze’s reaction to the outburst, my outburst, that her defense of Garren triggered. And then, we’re roaring ahead, straight into the bit of clear between the fog castles that rise up and diffuse into everything.

Chapter 15

I watch the dense fog close in a bit, grow thinner, and then start to drift apart again. Gala’s hair flaps back at me, and I take a quick turn to see Garren and Maze. To see what kind of expressions they’re wearing. But there’s nothing on either of their faces now—just blank wandering eyes, waiting for some sign that we’ll see the coast again.

    As fear rises up in me, and I realize the gap in the fog isn’t going anywhere, I move up and touch Gala’s shoulder. And then, just like that, I let it rest there. She turns and smiles at me for a second, and then her eyes go quickly back.

    “What do you think?” I ask her. “Are we getting in?”

    “We’ll know soon.”