WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (32 page)

            I try to remember what the intervals were before, but it sounds the same to me. The same steady drops.

            “Maybe it’s just a little louder. There must be another tunnel branching off this one. Maybe that’s where the noise is coming from. Where he went.”

            “No,” she says. Then, in the dark, she leads me, her hand grasping and tugging mine, down deeper into the tunnel. In the blackness she stops, leans and walks and then leans again, until we’re up against one of the walls.

            “It’s in the ceiling,” she says.

            I listen, and then, I know—she’s right. Water is dripping down from above us. Maze squats in the darkness.
            “What are you doing?” I say, moving my head as if my eyes could see. The black is so intense that it’s almost as if there’s a white light starting to appear inside my head. An electrical fog in my brain. Even though I can’t see a thing, I look up again, then down, at what I know must be the tunnel, still there though hidden. I want to see where the slow-moving creature walked past. How close we are to that spot. I almost thank god that it hadn’t been coming in our direction, or else I would be straining to see the thing approaching us in the darkness.

            “Checking if the ground is wet,” she says, standing back up against me.

            “So what now?” I ask. “Wait it out?” When she doesn’t reply, and I touch her more firmly to make sure she’s still there, I ask if we should head back. Try to walk all the way back to the stairs.

            “No—wait—let’s wait it out,” she says. “Better yet—let’s keep moving. They’ll come back on.”

            “What?” I let the insanity of her suggestion roll over me. “You saw what I saw didn’t you? Who or whatever is down here won’t be friendly.”

            “Maybe he’s the one who fixes the power,” she says softly. I know she’s mocking my fear, yet it almost makes sense. But I realize that it can’t be so innocent—that whoever or whatever is down here with us isn’t supposed to be here. That it’s trapped. Starving for food. And at the very least, not our friend.

            “Come on,” she says.

            “No, let’s stay here.” Our hands tighten and then disconnect.

            “Wills,” she says. “I’ll keep us in a straight line, don’t worry.”

All of my new bravery evaporates at the thought of the sound of our footsteps plundering deeper down into the tunnel. The noise that will surely attract the thing. When I tell her—that we’ll be announcing ourselves to it, she says that it won’t see us any more than we can see it.

            “How do you know that? How do you even know it’s even human?”

            She pauses to consider it, her hand brushing back against mine and then loosening again. Then, her body becomes distant, and I’m entirely alone in the world. Just the darkness and the dripping. I know she’s there, in front of me, and that the creature is down the tunnel, and that we’re underground, somewhere along the coast, in a metal tunnel that must have been constructed before the Wipe, before metal became sin. But all of it might as well not exist, and the moment of fear becomes nearly complete, and my feet start to go, in the wrong direction and back toward the stairs, thinking the noise of my retreat alone will cause her to follow me back and up and out of this place. But something new happens, dissolving the wall of panic—it’s her body. She’s found me again, pressed herself against me, and then her arms wrap around my body. She tells me she needs me with her, and then, for the first time, so impossible that I begin as it happens to wonder whether I’ve died, or I’m dreaming somewhere above on the forest floor, she kisses me. Through the darkness she finds my face, my lips, and then her mouth is opening and closing together with mine, a dance like fire in the dark.           

Before I can object, or clearly think at all, she pulls away, her hand sliding along my body, down my arm, and to my fingers, locking her own together with mine, and then pulling me. I go, unable to believe what’s happened, and as we walk, blindly through the dark, I realize it’s only for me to move, to obey her, that she’s kissed me. But I don’t care. It has to be that, I repeat in my head. Because I can’t imagine she’s suddenly fallen in love with me now. Not after everything else.

We carry on, pausing just once in a while to see if there’s a new change in the sounds. All I can hear are our own footsteps—our ratty shoes thudding against the smooth metal. The sign of our arrival to the cave beast of the darkness.

When the lights come back on, the first thing I realize is that the music is gone. I blink and blink, waiting for the shock of light to wear off. When I can finally see, enough just to make sure there’s nothing tracking us in front or behind, no sign of the figure, my mind returns to the music. No music, I tell Maze, but she tells me to listen to the static. It’s like it’s where the music used to be, replacing it. When I tune in, I hear it—a quiet hissing crackle, like the music was reduced to a whisper.

            “There’s something ahead,” Maze says. I look down trying to find anything different in the tunnel apart from the parallel orange lines of steel. I ask what it is, and she describes the two dark slits on either side of the tunnel—barely discernible. The tunnel has another way, she says.

            We start toward it. For some reason, I feel like we’re walking into an attack, and it starts to make less and less sense that something could be living down here. When the first drops of water appear on the floor, somehow right in the middle, without a source, like the center of the ceiling itself is leaking, I see the moving color. Just a small square of it on the right side of the wall ahead, distinct under the orange hue, changing its shades all on its own. When Maze sees it too, she rushes ahead.

            “It’s talking!” she says. And as if all the concern about the wandering tunnel dweller is gone, and the growing slits of the tunnel crossing ahead, we plant, mesmerized in front of a screen of moving, talking pictures.

            “It’s video,” she says. A word that everyone knows but isn’t supposed to talk about. The screen plays for us, then briefly flickers to black, and then continues playing. The images are strange, and the people moving in them change abruptly—first there’s a picture of a group of men in green uniforms, each of them holding something black, metal—and I realize they all have guns. There’s another quick picture of the sky, and before I can realize what’s happening, I see the flying metal cylinders—they loudly tear across the small square and then they’re gone, only to loop back into view but in smaller form. It’s only as I begin to pull myself out of the trance that the moving pictures produce that I am able to start listening and comprehending the voice coming from the screen. There is no mouth, just the wall itself, and it talks over top of the moving images.

            “What is this?” Maze asks as the pictures shift to a long rolling sidewalk. Creatures that look like human skeletons roll along on it, and then, as they get close to the edge of the screen and disappear, I realize that they’re all made of metal. Robots, Maze utters. The voice coming from the pictures breaks through in my head so that I’m acutely aware of every word now:

            “When the great nations no longer drew a cost in human lives to wage their wars, the smaller nations were slowly and totally absorbed. Ever-smarter drones in all their forms—denizens of the sea, sky, and land, masters of their respective terrain, piloted safely by AI or soldiers sheltered underground—completed all tasks, and slowly, the death toll of the biggest nations was reduced to almost nothing. It was when the great powers turned against each other—pitting their drones and nuclear arsenals against each other, that the Last War reduced human civilization almost entirely to rubble.”

The images on the screen suddenly change from proud majestic visions of a countryside to burning skyscrapers. Wave after wave of metallic skeletons walk into a pulsing light that obliterates them one by one—their metal bodies burst into dust and rise into the sky as smoke. The voice continues against changing images of destruction:

            “It was humanity’s endless hunger for power, resources, and wealth that brought it to its knees and final state of anarchy. But luckily, as it turned out, the utter annihilation was not so complete, and pockets of society survived. And they did not forget what their old world had become. They knew what the Wipe, as it came to be called, stood for: The great war of greed that caused the Wipe stood for the loss of God
.
And, from the ruins of the old world of metal and steel and electricity and warfare came a gentle, god-knowing race of people—the Fathers.”

            “Jesus Wills,” Maze says, watching town after town sweep by on the screen, all of them nearly identical in appearance to Acadia. The moving images portray trees and then huts and then people—robed white figures leading damaged and dying bodies through crumbling cement streets. Suddenly, the picture becomes a chapel, one that looks identical to Father Gold’s.

            “The Fathers realized that to put technology, and, so-called
progress
—a euphemism for greed—in front of God, had caused the Wipe. And that in allowing the Wipe to happen, God had mercifully given humanity one more chance for salvation. To right its most fundamental sin, and to position faith, once again, at the forefront of life,” the voice continued. The images of the Fathers turn into crumbling spines of high rise buildings.

            “It looks just like the Deadlands,” I say. When I check her face, she’s transfixed. Then I look again as the voice returns:

“Still today, so many decades later, the ruins of the past, the instruments of greed, primarily metal, which has constituted both money and technology, stand in their ruined form to remind us. As the great scripture teaches, it is only when the last bits of the old world flake away, and are forgotten completely, that will we know God has completely forgiven our sins.”

            And then, all at once, the video starts to flicker. Suddenly, it starts over. There are a few minutes we haven’t seen yet—images of the old world—a strange, calm looking shot of a city, all of the metal in perfect symmetry still, clean, unscathed by disuse and war. The voice starts into its story all over:

“The world was once a place where the devil had tricked man into thinking that two words were more important than God: Evolution and Progress
.
From these deceits sprang every event that led ultimately to the self-destruction of the old world, the world that existed before God’s great offering of repentance: the Wipe. Pay close attention and learn how the ultimate sin of the old world nearly cost humanity its chance at eternal salvation, and how the worst catastrophe in history is now understood to be God’s greatest gift to man.”

            “What horse shit this is,” she says. But neither of us can help but watch the whole thing over again, and all the time, it seems to make more and more sense—to fit more perfectly into what we’d already suspected. That the Wipe was some kind of great catastrophe, a world war of epic proportions, and that in the aftermath, the dogmatic tribes took over and somehow made it so that technology was the reason for the war, not the beliefs of the people themselves that handled the technology. It makes sense so much that I have to remind Maze about what Gala said. And then I tell her that Gala was right. That she had it all right from the beginning. Maze turns to me, the third viewing of the film spinning by in moving images. She waits for me to explain.

            “She said that the thing about belief is—well, that belief itself is the problem—not to believe in anything. It didn’t make sense. But she said something else—that it’s all probability. A chance. Maze—that’s what happened before the Wipe—everyone believed in things. No one knew they were dismissing probabilities, pretending they were absolutes.”

            “Wills, what the hell are you talking about?”

            “I mean, I think part of this video is right—the greed part. It has to be. Why else would everyone want to destroy everyone else? But the lie is here still. It’s
not
any better after the Wipe. The beliefs have changed, but people still believe in things.”

            “It still makes no sense. How could I not believe in something? It’s too abstract Wills. She wasn’t right.”

            “No—it’s not too abstract. Listen . . . you recognize that you believe in the Ark. The Fathers believe in God and the scriptures. I . . .” For a moment I almost slip, and tell her my most fundamental belief. That one day, somehow, we’ll be together. That she’ll love me like I love her. That being with me will be all that she needs. No more wild adventures. Just me. But I catch myself in time. “I believe that the dogma of the Fatherhood is bullshit. All of it, it’s just beliefs that drive actions. So in this video, the old world believed in evolution and progress, and the new world believes in God and faith. But nothing brings us to what Gala says—to the point that we know belief is utter bullshit. The very act of believing. That to hold firmly to any belief destroys our ability to really
know.
”

            “To know what?”

            “Know reality—that it’s all probabilities, quickly passing probabilities, and nothing can ever be anything more than that.”

            “I’m sorry Wills. That’s just new dogma. She was wrapped up in that because she lived on the edge of society for too long. The Resistance was resisting belief? Do you really think Garren died not believing that we were onto something here?”

            My head drops, believing now—the very act I’m rejecting—that she’s right. Nothing would ever happen without belief in place. No one would act. And none of what Gala said makes sense. And that after all, there must be a certain set of things to be believed in—things that can be proved are actually right to believe in.

            “If something is right to believe in, does that have anything to do with its truth?” I ask her.