WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (31 page)

            “It’s getting deeper, colder. It’s just one way, and it’ll get worse. Do we just keep going?”

            “Yeah,” she says, like the thought of every problem hasn’t even once passed her mind—or it’s that they all have long ago, and she’s dismissed them as part of the cost of our insane trek already.

            “It’s going to get colder and we don’t have food or water. We don’t know if this is going toward the tower even. And if it is, how long it will take to get there.”

            “We do know it’s going to the tower. You saw the map the same as I did. The tattoo let us in. This is it, Wills. It all makes sense now. Are you losing it on me now?”

            “No—it’s just, won’t we starve to death? We have to have a turn-around point is all I’m saying. At some point. If things don’t ever change.”

            My words pause her. She looks around and I know she’s considering my view. I wait and listen to the same notes I’ve heard again and again now—the slow, meandering shifts of forbidden metal instruments, fed to us through electricity and the small holes lining the ceiling lights, showering us in the strange orange world, a single metal blood vein somewhere deep beneath the earth. Finally, Maze puts out her fist.

            “What are you doing?”

            “Rock, paper, scissors,” she says.

            “What?”

            “Just do it.”

            I go along with her and throw out the scissors. Her hand is flat and she loses.

            “So you get to eat me—I mean—if it comes to that. If we’re starving.” A smile spreads across her face.

            “Jesus Maze,” I say, unable to prevent a nervous laugh.

            “But seriously, do you think we’d have better luck finding food up there?” she says. “Out in the field of skulls?”

            “There’d be mushrooms—plants I mean. We could find food. And water’s more important anyway, right? We’d definitely have water.”

            “Do you know how far from home we are? If we turn back now, we have to go all the way along the coast. The Nefandus are everywhere here. And besides that, what is home now? It’s the Fatherhood sending me away? It’s the Resistance, after we tell them their leaders are dead and try to convince them that we’re not responsible for it?”

            “So this is it?” I say. “Go on until we die? This is how our story closes?”

            “You knew this was an all-in, didn’t you? I made it clear in my letter, didn’t I?” she says. I allow her words to make their full impression on me, looking away from her orange-hued face, to the perfect symmetry of the impossible metal cavity that stretches identically and forever away into nothingness, all of it coated in the warm and fuzzy background hiss, invaded in fragments by the wavering lines of melody. The metal melodies, their mystery our last purpose.

            I weigh what she’s said. And I know—she’s right. This was a choice to die, first and foremost, in any number of ways. And I couldn’t have been more blinded to it, more willfully ignorant than I was. All of it because of her—because of how I felt about her.

            “Okay, you’re right. It’s always been a suicide mission. But what was it all for then?”

            “It’s not a suicide mission. I think we’re almost there,” she says, her amazing optimism cutting me away and showing how different our minds work. And then, with a look down the descending hallway, and a look back the way we came, she turns and smiles at me. “We’ll turn around—I mean, if it stays like this for another day. Okay?”

            It hits me that maybe, stopping to think about her words, part of her would rather die above ground. And we’re not so different. Because she realizes that at least we have a fighting chance to find water, to feed ourselves, to hide. To live on together up there.

            “Okay, deal. One day deeper to see what we can find.”

Just like that, it’s decided, and we walk on. Steady footsteps that somehow start to match up with the rhythm of the music. The cold grows and the decline in the floor starts to increase. I ask Maze if she notices it, and she nods, but we don’t stop and she doesn’t say anything. It’s only after another hour of walking that I ask if we can sit for a moment. And it’s just when we sit down, backs against the cold steel of one side of the hall, brightly lit under the strange alien light, that blackness comes again. Just a second, a quick flicker like before, but really a moment longer, enough so that I can comprehend how total the darkness is.

            “Shit,” I say. “What the hell is doing that?”

            As if in response to my fear, the lights flicker again, just as quickly off and then on, followed by three successive flickers. Each darkness comes with a quick cut in the music, total and utter silence to match the black. When the orange light comes on after the last flicker, there’s something wrong—and then I realize what it is: it’s as if the light is dimmer, weaker somehow.

            “It’s darker,” she says. “I think it’s losing power. The lights.” And then, as quickly as the whole interruption happened, the full brightness returns.

            My eyes fix down the hallway, straining to see anything different than usual. But it’s all just the same—the same reflection of silver and orange under the strips of light, the same holes dotting the ceiling as far as I can make out, putting out the softly crackling music.

            “I think—maybe we should turn around now—did you see how dark it was?” I say. “What if it goes out and doesn’t come back on, and we’re too far down?”

            She looks with me, up and down the hallway. No way to tell that we’re moving at all except for the slight rise of the floor in one direction and the drop in the other. She stands up, looks down at me, lowers her hand to drag me to my feet. I think for a moment she’s agreeing, ready to pull me back toward the stairs, to the forest, to the Acadian gates. But as I reach for her hand, it disappears. The music cuts out, and I grasp at nothing.

            “Maze,” I say, unable to see anything. The light stays off this time, and I reach out quickly and madly until I touch some part of her—her leg. I grope up until I find and squeeze her hand and then I stand up against her.

            “Do you hear that?” she says. I just follow her body up until I am hugging tightly against her. But in the total blank and dark space, without the music and the electric sheen of metal lines, some noise does break the silence. It comes and goes steadily until at last, shakily, the lights come back on, followed by a crackle, and then the music.

            “It sounded like water dripping,” I say. She agrees with me and then asks if I think it will keep happening—the power continue to turn on and off as we go deeper into the tunnel. Her words tell me she’s afraid now too. Like she’d thought there’d be no more of the unexpected, and we’d just go right down and along the tunnel until we reached some great staircase going up again, from underneath the middle of the ocean and into the sky until we reached the top of the tower. And there would be the Ark, just waiting for us.

            “Probably,” I say, hoping it’s enough to tip her in favor of going back now. Before we’re trapped in the total darkness. “What about the dripping?”

            She looks down the hallway, as if there will be some vision to explain the drip. And I know it’s still happening, somewhere close enough that we should see it, but there’s nothing else to be heard now over the whine of the music.

            “Just a leak somewhere,” she says. “We should keep going.” And then, she loosens from me and starts walking. I watch her go for a moment, her head going this way and that, searching for a source for the drops.

After ten minutes without another flicker at all, the power constant again, a thought of the Fatherhood spills into my head. It’s Father Gold as always:

            “And God knows every accumulation of sin. Sin builds upon sin, such that a man who touches metal once is condemned, but a man who does it twice is doubly condemned. Only true repentance can restore the first man, and, following that, only a repentance twice as true can restore the second. Both have separately fallen away from God, but their distance from him is not the same.”

            I say it out loud as I think it because I want to ask her about it.

            “What do you think he meant—twice as true?” I say. “How could one person ask for forgiveness truthfully, and another twice as truthfully? I mean, how can something be twice as true?”

            “I think he must mean that truth is a quantity,” she says. “It’s funny you bring that up—I’ve heard it so many times too, but never thought about it. But it’s exactly what’s happening now—we’re walking on metal. Each step piles on an additional sin, doesn’t it? We’re going to need a lot of truth to get out of this one.”

            “And the music is coming from metal and electricity, isn’t it? So each note we hear adds on more sin,” I play along.

            “But seriously, you’re right—what does that mean? If he was right, if truth is a quantity, then there must be amounts of truth in everything.”

            “That’s what you’ve always been after, isn’t it?” I say. “The most amount of truth you can find?”

            “It’s exactly what
we’re
after. And it’s going to be down this tunnel somewhere.”

            “But what do we do with it?” I say, coming back again to the idea that discovering the truth, just for ourselves, means nothing unless we can do something with it.

            “We make the whole world repent for its lies. For trying to cover up the history of what humanity really was. Everything before the Wipe, gone, like it never existed or mattered. Replaced by their dogma. That’s the only real sin.”

            “They’re happy though, don’t you think?” I say. “Even if it is all lies, and has nothing of truth in it. People live their lives happily in Acadia, don’t they? So what’s the difference in the end? Is there any? Happiness in truth, or happiness in lies, is still the same thing.”

            “Wills...” she says. Her voice drops to tell me she doesn’t like the suggestion. That in the end, if it all amounts to happiness—if that’s all that matters—then what we’re doing
is
pointless. Wasting our lives for a different version of the very same thing—a ridiculous and dangerous method that at best will yield the same result.

            “Here’s why it matters,” she says. I prepare myself for something new, the way she creates something instantly whenever there’s been a successful deflection of her idea. “Because I don’t think that is happiness. Not really. The Fathers, the people we know in Acadia. They seem happy. But have you ever seen anyone who looked like they felt alive? Like this feels now?”

            I think about everything we’ve done since we left Acadia, and how she’s right—that even before we left, life was moving along like episodes of sameness—the same lack of variety as the repeating melody all around us—some dullness that every once in a while gave way to an adventure with Maze. Some trip away, only for an hour sometimes, that was worth months of living in dull happiness in Acadia. But something hits me: without her, I wouldn’t know the difference. It’s only because she’s different, and she showed me the contrast in the first place—between someone who looks happy and someone who looks alive—that I know at all what she means and how right she is. 

            We walk together and I want to touch her again. I almost wish the lights would turn off again, so I can feel afraid, so it will be okay to grab her. I tell her she’s right, that maybe it’s not happiness they have there after all, but some kind of comfort and safety that seems like it. And then, when we walk on and on, the music throbbing through me, I do it. Fuck that the lights aren’t off, and that it’s glaring light everywhere, artificial enough to make me feel ugly. I grab her, spin her around, despite my shakiness. She looks at me like I’ve seen a ghost. And as she continues to look, now not at me but behind me, I say her name.
Maze.
And then, just like I did before, I pull her, by her shoulders, right into me. She turns her cheek but something overcomes me—I grab the back of her head and force her mouth into mine. Force my lips into hers. The pressure is warm and soft but she doesn’t fight me off.

            “Wills,” she says.

            “I don’t want to know any more how you feel. Fuck—just let me kiss you,” I say. And then, she doesn’t move, but just stares at me, not sure if what I’m doing is wrong, if she should stop it. I pull her head into me again and pull her lower lip into my mouth. I feel the wetness and the adrenaline of life filling me up, and I wonder if it’s because she thinks we’re going to die now, together, that she’s submitting to me. Finally, before she ends it, I pull back first, away from her. I almost see a longing in her, like she hadn’t wanted me to stop, but to touch the rest of her, begin to feel her like I’d started to do with Gala. And it’s not that I don’t want to do it—it’s the shape that stops me—I see it moving in the distance behind her, way down the tunnel. A moving shadow. I tell her to look, and we watch it pass across the tunnel—moving horizontally, impossible given that the tunnel only goes in one direction. And then, the shape—clearly a body, lumbering slowly, as if a crippled person, a doppelganger of Garren hobbling along the beach—disappears.

            “Someone’s down here with us,” I say.

            “What the hell was that?” she says. And then the lights flicker, the music stops, and the dripping starts again.

            I put my arm around her and pull her into my side. I raise the shotgun up with my other hand, ready to strike. And then, I’m overcome with an urge to shout—to call out
who’s there?
As if she feels its presence too, Maze tells me to be quiet and listen for it. To not attract it to us in the dark.

            “Damn, what the hell is it?” I ask after minutes of nothing but steady dripping.

            “The dripping is faster, isn’t it?”