WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (37 page)

            “I think I’ve got it,” he says, no doubt traceable in his voice that he has ever thought we’d suffer the same fate racking my brain for a day.

We walk toward his voice, and then, like he can see in the dark, he takes Maze from me and draws her somewhere. The light blinds me so harshly that I can’t open my eyes for what seems half an hour. I test by opening my eyelids every minute, and eventually, the sting is gone, and I begin to take in the shape of the elevator. And there are Maze and Wrist, framed by the elevator, waiting for me to come in. Come on, he tells me. And in a stupor, I stumble inside. Then, bathed in the bright orange, the door closes us into a tiny square. One more moment passes without a sound, and then a quick whirring reverberates through the walls and I sense movement. At first there is a gentle thrust. Then, like a great engine has started, launching us upward, it feels as if I’m being pulled toward the ground. Eventually, nauseated by the light and the movement, I drop to my knees and wrap my arms around myself. I close my eyes but everything seems to spin still. Waiting for the motion to stop, but finding it never does, I start to look at them. And Maze is smiling. And it’s like from the dead she’s risen. And Wrist too is smiling. Both of them mad that we’ve found it, that we’re shooting up toward the sky, along the line that slices through everything—the thing we’ve watched for so long from the beach, now propelling us up through its belly. She reaches her hand out, and it comes into me, some new life, that here in the brightness of her face, seeing every detail, I’m falling in love with her all over again. And with the fear that this thing will fall back down, killing us in an instant, I know I must take my kiss in full light. To keep my eyes open and watch her as I do it. But she doesn’t move away, or leave to a corner of the elevator like I think she will—she throws her arms around me and kisses me back. And Wrist makes some sound that I can barely hear—something at first that I think is a Father, chastising us and telling us to stop, to no longer break the sacred vow of separation, but no: he’s laughing. Either at us or our luck, I don’t know. But Maze kisses me, and I kiss her, and it feels as if the journey has already ended. Or that it can end right now, because there could be no better fate for us at the top of the tower. I want to push it further but for some reason I can’t—I want to tell her I love her, and know that she’ll tell me she loves me too. And that finally she understands it, what I’d expected her to suddenly realize for so long. But the words cannot escape my lips, even when I pull away and smile back at her. She coughs drily, and then the lights go out. For a moment, I feel the entire tower shudder, like we’ve been rocked free from our security, and we’re dropping into the freefall I’d known would happen. But then, the darkness that replaced the bright orange light is replaced again by the light of day—a blazing sky wraps around us clearly in all directions, and as I twist and twist, taking in every angle, I know: this is the sky. Something overpowering about it sends me back down to my knees, as if I feel we’ll fall right off, because there is no edge. Wrist reaches out to touch the wall, and he says it’s still metal. But it’s impossible, Maze says. And she touches it too, and so do I. It’s cold metal, but completely invisible. And below us, growing smaller and smaller, is the great outline like we’d seen on the map, the coastline where it runs into the ocean. But everything is bursting with color this time. Alive in greens and browns and grays, rising and falling in waves and spikes, all of it reaching and stopping at the blue and white motion of waves, the enormous and never ending ocean. My eyes raise and I see that even the roof is clear, and that the elevator is entirely invisible, so that I can see the clouds above racing down toward us. And in the distance, I can’t help but yell at the tiny cities. The Deadlands, but so many of them that I could have never imagined. Do you see them all? I yell at Maze. But she’s crying. I turn to see her tears and I kiss her cheek and look again. The ancient ruins of our species, says Wrist. The relic of what we once were.

In stunned silence, we watch the world recede into tiny lines until everything turns to white. We’re in the clouds, Maze says. And then, almost as soon as we’re completely covered, we emerge again from them. Looking down, everything looks as if it’s been carpeted in fluffy white snow. The lines of the coast and ocean all but disappear underneath when Wrist tells us to look up—and there, with midday below us, there is a bright speckled strip of stars emerging. As if we’ve been rocketed between two worlds, and just as quickly, Maze rushes into me and directs my eyes level again to take in the curve of the planet. You see it? she says. Yes, I tell her, and I take her hand. The Earth is showing itself for what it is, Wrist says. One big, spinning ball.

The shape of the curved Earth rounds and rounds, and the dark half above us grows complete, until below is nothing but a blue and green marvel, spotted and banded in white.

            “No wonder we never saw the top,” she says. I kiss her again, and she stares out at the blanket of stars. And then, like I can’t stop, I continue to kiss her face, still wet from her tears, and she just lets me, watching out the whole time, amazed like Wrist. I feel as if I’ll never be able to stop, and that my hands want to run over her whole body now, even if Wrist is here, so that our love can quicken and deepen. And when I decide that I will, and my hand grazes over her shoulder and turns her into me, and kisses her again, and my other arms run down her side to where it curves back at her hip, the elevator whir begins to soften. And then, she pulls away. I almost scold myself, but I know—it’s not because of me. We’ve stopped.

Chapter 20

The door opens the same as it did in the tunnel so many miles below, and in front of us is the same hallway. As if we’d gone nowhere but through an illusion, another video like on the wall when we’d first entered the tunnel. But when I ask Wrist if it’s all an illusion, and we’ve gone nowhere, he assures me that we have moved. That we’re now about to go where no one from the surface has gone in hundreds of years. He steps out first, into the bright orange light again, sharply lit metal rails running on either side along reflective walls and ceiling and floor. And as Maze goes, and I go behind her, she whispers something to herself.

            “What is it?” I ask her.

            “I feel like—” she says softly again.

            “What do you feel?” I say. For a moment, I think I see Wrist turn around and look at her, like he’s taken notice too, but then he keeps walking, ignoring us.

            “Like I’ve been here before,” she says. And for the first time since her rapture of smiles, a look of fear crosses her face. “It’s, I don’t know why I didn’t feel it down below. It’s like my dream. There’s a metal hole. Something I fall through. And—this is it.”

            I remember the theory—that she’s come from this place. That we’re now walking through the After Sky and she remembers being here before. But none of it makes sense, and all of it threatens to rip her away from me so much that I ignore her feeling, instead of prying deeper, and speed up to get nearer to Wrist. And when I ask him what will happen next, and he responds that he doesn’t know, but that he hopes we’ll find a computer terminal to access, the music starts. This time it’s slower, somehow more ancient than the music below. Still the metal sounds shrilly cut the hallway with strange old melodies, but now they feel sadder somehow, like some kind of horrible fate has already come to pass.

            “There it is,” says Wrist, something strange in his voice, like overhearing Maze’s admission has hastened our mission. Neither of us see anything and tell him so, but he insists that we speed up and follow him because he sees a computer terminal. And then, sure enough, but somehow too far away that I can believe he’d seen it from where he initially claimed, there is another inlay on the wall—a computer. At once Wrist activates it, using nothing other than his mind it seems, because his hands rest at his sides. And then, the old diagram appears again, this time fully lit where there had been dark squares before. And then, a door opens in the steel hallway, something close enough that I see the new light, blue light, a strong and odd mixture against the orange, pouring out. Here’s where we’ll find out, he says. Come on. And then, he rushes ahead, almost inside the new room, blue light casting his face in a strange hue atop his Nefandus red skin. But there is no longer a smile on his face, or any of the happiness from before. And something so alarming about him, that I can’t tell if it’s just the strange combination of colors or not, makes me firmly press Maze’s shoulder and draw her back to me. And both of us stop, ten feet away from Wrist, without a word. Maze looks at me, wondering what it is that’s come into me. And Wrist, even more so, seems angry, and tells us to come, and not waste time, because there’s water in the room. And when he steps back, out from the blue, toward us, for some reason I can’t explain, I tug on Maze and pull her back away from him.

            “He didn’t see that computer,” I tell her softly, hoping he won’t hear me.

            “What?” she says, her eyes showing confusion, but enough concern to flicker back and forth from me to him—enough to know exactly my fear and to study Wrist to see if she can find any sign for alarm too.

            “He couldn’t have—something isn’t right,” I tell her.

            “Wills, there’s water. Come on, we need water,” she says, seeming to reach a conclusion quickly, deciding that I must be growing delirious from the dark journey or the dehydration.

            I barely get the words out: “He’s been here before.”

            “You’re panicking, Wills,” Wrist says, stepping a bit closer, his skin losing the blue light and becoming orange red again. But my feet step back, just like they did from the wolves in the forest, and I draw Maze back with me. She no longer tries to stop me—and I don’t know if she’s picked it up too now, or if she’s feeling as if we’re back in the forest and a wolf is approaching us, but she steps back with me. “Come, come on,” Wrist presses. And then he steps forward again, this time twice and more quickly. And a third time he says it, but in his voice there is a sudden and strange change to calmness. As if he hadn’t realized how flooded with emotion he’d become.

            “How do we know you are what you claim?” I ask him.

            “Would I bring you here, all this way, to turn on you? But why? That makes no sense,” Wrist says. And he stands still now, evening out his tone, speaking carefully, slowly. 

            “Why not? We don’t know what you know. We know what you’ve told us,” I say.

            “Had I wanted to turn on you—I could have done it in the dark, no? Or in the elevator?”

            “I don’t think so,” I say. And then, Maze says something, like a chess move has become clear in her head.

            “Go inside the blue room. Come back and tell us what you find there,” she says.

            “If you wish,” he says, and at once he turns, almost alleviating my fears that he would comply so quickly, toward the room. But then Maze plays her card:

            “And bring your hand back wet.”

            “What?”

            “Bring it back wet,” she says.

            The water. I see it in my head. His lie. And it’s plain on his face now, just under the blue light, as he pulls away from the blue room. His feet slowly move toward us.

            “You know—you should trust me.
You
should trust me,” Wrist says. And for some strange reason, he is only talking to Maze now.

            “What do you mean I should trust you? I do. And you’ve said there’s water in there. So show us—prove it. Dip your hand in it and bring it back for us to see,” she says. But Wrist moves away instead from the blue room, again toward us slowly, and his eyes don’t move from her.

            “No—that’s not what I mean. There is no water. You have to realize something Maze—
you—
you should trust me.” And then, Wrist looks with all the malevolence of a spear-wielding Nefandus at me. But none of the dogmatic fervor is there in his face. There is only the look of accusation, as if I’ve committed some terrible crime. “He is the one you cannot trust.”

            Maze looks at me, and then back to Wrist.

            “If you bring this to violence, you won’t even realize what you have helped to do. Do you want that? Do you want to know what you’ve done to change history forever?”

            “He’s insane,” I say, and I ball my fists, wishing that as in the woods, when the wolves approached, I had my knife—that we both had our knives, and that there would be a beach to turn and run to. For a moment I wonder what will happen if we turn and run—if Maze would have enough strength to make it with me back to the elevator—if it would open and close in time to get us inside—if we could escape and leave the lunatic here, find our way back through the darkness, over several days, and climb the high wall to drop into the water again—to eat the fish and suck the water from their muscles and make it back out into the forest. Along the beach to the gravelly path where it winds up into the forest, all the way back to the Resistance. Because they would believe us now—I’m sure—even with Gala and Garren gone, they would believe us. But I’m frozen as Wrist draws from his pocket a long knife of his own, glistening orange under the ceiling lights. And there is no noise or voices, just the sad moaning of some old instrument, between crackling hisses through the walls. I flick my eyes to Maze and back, waiting for her to decide what to do, like I always do. But she doesn’t move, and for a moment, even though Wrist is coming toward us, I think maybe he has convinced her. That somehow, after a lifetime of friendship, that
I
am the one not to trust. But as absurdly as the thought enters my head, it leaves when she commands him to stop.

            “Or we’ll kill you,” she follows it. And her fists go out too.