01. Labyrinth of Dreams (18 page)

There were bugs everywhere, but we got few bites of any kind. I guess if you don't have mammals around much you don't develop mosquitoes and things that drink blood, so the few bites we got were from ants or small spiders or something that just didn't like us or where we were sitting. I had this vision of black widows or tarantulas or something, but none of the bites seemed more than irritating.

The real question was how much exploring we were going to be able to do. Neither of us was in any decent shape, and the second day every muscle in our bodies ached. That more than anything was the real trap of this place for the overweight, out-of-condition folks from civilization. If you rested and relaxed the second day, you were back where you started from in terms of shaping up, but it was tough to force yourself to go anywhere or do anything when you hurt so bad and the basics of what you needed were so close at hand. So, out of necessity, we kind of pushed each other.

There were, in fact, at least four groves, the one up the "road" we figured was about where the motel would have been. We shifted up to that one partly because it was closer to the "company" site, and provided clear access to that huge meadow as well as better storm cover.

It's funny, though, how quickly you can adapt to something totally foreign if you don't have to worry about the basics. We had food, water, a very basic shelter with the trees, and each other to keep from going completely nuts. If you had to stash somebody, this was a good place to do it. You didn't even need weapons or fire to scare off the wild animals. There
were
no wild animals. As long as it stayed hot and humid, and deserted, there wasn't much need for clothes. Brandy still had her lighter, although her cigarettes were long gone, but we decided to conserve the lighter as much as possible in case we ever really needed a fire. We even abandoned the boots after a while; it seemed better to get the feet toughened.

After a while you no longer noticed the bites; you learned where was a good place to sleep and where wasn't, and what gave the best shelter when a storm came up; the heat and humidity seemed normal, and even crapping in the wild became second nature, although Brandy had more trouble with part of that than I did. Nothing around seemed poisonous, but a few stomach upsets taught us quickly what was ripe and what was not.

I had worn a cheap watch much of my life, but for some reason I hadn't put it on when we set out on that expedition. It was one of my many regrets; it would have been interesting at least to know what time it was, and what day.

"You know, I don't think anybody's comin' for us," Brandy said one afternoon. "It's been too long."

I nodded. "Yeah, I'm kinda getting to that point myself."

"I was thinkin' that the winters get real cold up here, I bet, no matter how hot it is now. We don't have the know-how to make stuff like clothes, even if there was something around with fur or if we ran into a whole mess of cotton plants. If we're gonna live, we got to move south. Real far south."

"Yeah, I know. I just haven't wanted to think about it much. I don't even know how far it is, but it seems like a hell of a long way. A thousand miles, maybe. If we walked ten miles a day, it'd take a hundred days if nothing else was wrong, and there won't be groves of trees around dripping with ripe stuff to eat, and there's pretty big mountains in the way, too. I don't remember the map much, but it seemed like the only flat land was from Bend—or where Bend
should
be—north, and that's the wrong way, babe."

"I know, I know. But if we stay around here much longer, we're gonna be too late to beat the snow. We took all the other risks. We risked goin' after Whitlock when we were warned off—even fired—and we snuck into that plant."

"Yeah, and it got us here." Still, she had a point. Stay here, and we had a potentially short lifespan. Move, and we either bought time or bought it quicker. I never liked being in the back with the meter running, and that was what staying was. We
had
to chance a move.

"All right," I told her, "we'll gather up what we can carry that might feed us for a couple of days before it goes bad, and we'll strike out west, toward that Bend valley. Once we're there, we'll see if we starve at that point or can go on. One day at a time."

"Yeah. One day at a time."

We rigged up some makeshift packs using the old clothes, but we really couldn't carry too much, and only the nuts weren't likely to quickly spoil. Still, we had to do
something,
and this was better than nothing.

We walked east along the streambed, past the grove we originally found and more or less into the wilderness. It was not easy going after a few hours; these were mountains, not little hills, and they were pretty much unspoiled except by weather and stream action. Some of the passages involved pretty narrow areas above the stream, and in some cases wading in the stream itself, trying to avoid slipping on the rocks or losing your balance. The worst part was that it was hard to tell how far we'd come. We might have covered ten miles, we might have covered one mile, for all we knew. By the end of the first day, though, we were in pretty rough country.

There was only danger in going on after dusk, so we found as level and as comfortable a spot as we could and settled in for the night. We were not fussy anymore, that was for sure. We snuggled up together in silence.

Finally I said, "What are you thinking about?"

"Just—thirikin'. Maybe thinkin' 'bout not thinkin'."

"Huh?"

"Somehow, some ways, we wound up with a whole world just to ourselves. Nobody else. No cars, no pollution, no slums or ghettos, no wars, no violence, no racism—
nothin'
but what we brought into it. Just Adam and Eve, more or less. I been findin' myself thinkin' funny the last few days."

"Huh? Funny?"

"Yeah. Right off, all I could think of was how everything was always against us. You know, the self-pity bit. All I wanted was back. Lately, though,' I can't figure what I want to go back to. I stopped thinkin' 'bout that world. It ain't
real
no more. It's evil. Corrupt. And it sure ain't done us no favors, honey."

"You're getting another one of those dreams. I can tell."

"Yeah, well, what's wrong with dreams if that's all you got? We were okay back there. Hell, honey, we were
good.
We did our jobs real good, and it got us nowhere. Nobody cared. Bein' good just didn't cut it. So, here we are, with a whole world to ourselves. I know the odds against us, so don't start lecturin' me, but we got to think like we're gonna make it. If we don't, we sure as hell won't. And what if we
do?"

"We survive. We try to do something with the rest of our lives."

"Yeah, but what? So we have a mess of kids, right? Can't hardly avoid it if we stay together. We got to forget that old world existed; make it a nightmare. The rules of this whole new world are what we say it is, the way we live and act and teach our kids. We got a big chance here if we just stop lookin' back and thinkin' the old stuff."

I kind of thought human nature would run its usual course regardless, but I let her dream. It was better than thinking about the first broken leg or worse injury. Even appendicitis would kill her—not me, mine's gone—and just handling our first toothache might be too much for our level of skill.

Still, we went on until in about two or three days we reached the end of the mountains and the start of the great, broad river valley. It was really a sight to see, from a grassy knoll a couple of thousand feet up a mountainside. You could even see why they named the town Bend, from the way that river looped, but, of course, there wasn't any city. There also weren't any trails, but we tried to figure a safe way down. The whole river basin looked rich, and there were all sorts of trees, bushes, and other growths all over the place. Whether anything down there was edible, though, I didn't know. Without our mysterious Johnny Appleseed, I didn't know if there'd
be
apples or other stuff in the wild.

We didn't, however, get the chance. It was the damndest thing I ever ran up against, including that crazy thing inside the warehouse. It was a wall, a solid wall, that just wasn't there, but was.

By that, I mean that you couldn't see anything, and the wind came right through, and all was natural and normal in every way except that you couldn't move down that mountain beyond a certain point. It felt like thick glass or extra-smooth plastic. There was no sound when you pounded on it, and when we tried to beat against it with sticks, there was also no effect. Pounding it with a stone produced only a dull thudding noise, but if you threw the stone at it, the stone sailed right on through.

Brandy was so frustrated she was close to tears, and she finally knelt down and beat against it. I went over to her, not quite knowing what to feel like. Clearly, whoever had put us here wanted us to stay here. It was a wall that blocked people, and nothing else. I looked at Brandy, but there wasn't anything really to say. We'd reached the limits of G.O.D.'s county, and we could not go beyond. Even here they were going to make sure we didn't violate the terms of our bail.

6.

Of Seasonings and Secrets

I don't know how long we'd been in that place; any semblance of time was shattered after we discovered the Wall and determined to our satisfaction that it went pretty well around the place. Long enough for Brandy to grow back a fair amount of hair, and me the fullest, thickest beard I ever had. Long enough for the both of us to become slimmer, trimmer, yet more weathered and worn on the outside. Brandy isn't built to be thin; she had a wide frame that was designed to be somewhat substantial. Still, she'd lost all her gut and much of the fat off her hips and thighs, and replaced them with hard muscle. It was a dramatic improvement, probably the best she'd ever looked or felt, although she was somewhat surprised that her breasts didn't shrink proportionately. I was delighted with that.

I, too, was as tight and as lean as in my Air Force training days, although my stomach showed the scars and stretch marks, as did hers, of past abuse. What was most startling, and next to Brandy's figure the most pleasing, to me was that, incredibly, I started to grow hair again where none had been for several years. It itched for a while, but then it started to come in, black speckled with gray (what the hell, it was
hair),
and Brandy really was impressed. My beard, as I mentioned, also came in very full and thick, something that also surprised me because the only other time I'd tried to grow one it had been thin and uneven and scraggly. The new combination was very much to Brandy's liking, which was a good thing since I had no way to shave the damned thing off. The fact that being outside all this time had turned my complexion quite dark brown was an added bonus.

There were negatives, though. Constant exposure had weathered and toughened the skin, which also aged it. Both of us certainly looked older than we were, and we were developing lines in our faces and skins. My vision was still pretty good, but Brandy's, which hadn't been that good when I met her, had deteriorated more. She was having a hard enough time that she no longer went to any lengths to conceal it. I had the distinct and uneasy feeling that she was going blind and she knew it.

We had our share of cuts and bruises and scrapes, and even developed some small scars from them, but we weren't ambitious enough anymore to try anything really dangerous, and if infection was possible here it sure didn't bother us. It kind of figured. If there were no animals or people on this world, then the local germs wouldn't know what to make of us.

The feared winter weather just didn't come. There were two temperature conditions within the Wall: hot and hotter; and two conditions of moisture: ninety-nine percent humidity and heavy rain. The storms varied in intensity and duration, but there was always one sometime in the afternoon and another in mid-evening. Although the days grew short, that didn't vary, and we realized that the Wall wasn't merely a barrier, it was a greenhouse. The streams began to run bitter cold, but the air temperature never cooled. We would occasionally go down to the Wall and look out at the mountains in the distance and see snow falling, and to touch the Wall it felt cold; yet just a few feet in, it was, if anything, hotter than earlier. At least,
I
could see the snow falling and describe it to her. She could see her immediate surroundings, although blurrily, but anything beyond a few yards was a total blur.

Interestingly, she adapted well to that, and insisted on keeping up our runs, our tree climbing, and the rest. She feared, however, even short separations. She liked to be near me, touching me, as much as possible, as if nothing but me was real.

Another casualty, though, was conversation. There didn't seem much point in reminiscing or discussing the past, and neither of us much cared anymore why there were at least three Martin Whitlocks of at least two sexes, or what that company did, or even how it sent us here. The Wall, and the unchanging sameness of the place we'd come to think of as the Garden, left little in the present to think about arid offered no future except more of the same, pays might go by with us saying very few words to each other, since the routine rarely varied and where we went now we'd been before, yet I had never felt closer to her nor she to me. We didn't care about anything else because there
wasn't
anything else. Because we lacked the knowledge and skills to turn this environment as our ancestors would have, and we lacked the necessity of doing so, having food and water and warmth and needing nothing else, our whole civilized veneer was being stripped from us. Thinking much only made things worse, so you got so you didn't think much, just acted out of habit arid did whatever your impulses told you when they spoke, within the limits of the environment we now took for granted. We realized that we were sinking into a kind of comfortable madness, a
bearable
madness, that, like animals in a cage, we were consciously being trapped by it.