Evolution (16 page)

"Why don't you just let him have it?" I ask as we
settle down to sleep.

"Bait," he answers sleepily.  "We can
eat again tomorrow."

"You're a genius," I murmur, tucked cozily into
his armpit.

"I know," he mumbles, and yawns.

I'm already drifting off, but the thought comes to me
suddenly.  "How come this is so much easier?  I mean, shouldn't
we be dying out here or something?"

"Don't say that," Apollon says.  "You're
gonna get us killed."

I laugh.  "It doesn't really work like that, you
know."

"When I'm dying, I'm gonna say 'I told you so.'"

"You better not."

"I will."

"You better not."

"Shut up and go to sleep.  I'm tired."

I yawn and snuggle into his shoulder.  I'm drifting
again.  "No dying," I mumble as sleep comes for me. 
"It's not allowed."

In the morning, Apollon's wrist is red and warm to touch.

"Crap," I say, holding it tight so he can't get
away while I rub it clean with snow.

"That's gonna do a lot of good."

"Shut up."

He does, for all of two seconds.  Then he says, "I
told you not to say it."

I glare at him.  "This has nothing to do with
anything I said.  It happened before I said it anyway, so it couldn't
possibly count."

"Sure it could."  He tosses his head to get a
strand of golden hair out of his blue eyes.  "It was OK until you
said it.  Now it's all messed up."

"It'll be fine," I insist.  "You're not
dying."

"Don't be so sure."

I narrow my eyes at him.

He grins.  "'A woman’s arms tried to shield the
head of a sleeping man from the jaws of the final beast.'"

"Oh my god."

"Stephen Crane," he offers.

"If I had a rabbit, I would whap you with it."

He pulls his arm away, climbing to his feet.  "And
I would bite you," he says.  "And then we'd both be dying, and
where would that leave us?"

As we kick snow over the fire, I give him a look, but not a
response.  We set off over the endless landscape.

Over the next few days, Apollon's arm gets puffy.  We
find a small, withered bunch of some plant that Apollon thinks will help—thank
god for Neveah’s training.  But there's not much of it.  The bite
doesn't get better, but it doesn't get worse, either.  We need to find
civilization and obtain some real medicine, but that's probably still a long
way off.  A couple more days, and we're needing to stop more often. 
Apollon is dragging, and he's beyond pale.  His face gets hot.  But
he insists on pushing on in short stretches.  We’re just coming to the end
of one of those stretches, skirting the edge of a frozen lake. He desperately
needs to stop to rest, but as we’re about to settle down, we hear the footsteps
smashing through the snow toward us.

I don’t need to look to know what it is, but my eyes fly to
the Sentry anyway.  The quick glance reveals no gun on its arm.  It’s
not ours.  That means it’s tracking us because we’re outside the
barrier.  Or because we’ve been marked as criminals from Outpost
Three.  Either way, it’s coming to kill us.

I haul Apollon by the arm, but he’s stumbling already. 
I pull him for all I’m worth.  He struggles against me.  Rage rises within
me.  If he means to sacrifice himself so I can flee, he’s got another
thing coming.  I whirl to face the Sentry, myself.  To pull its
crystal, even though everything inside me is telling me to run.

“The lake,” Apollon pants, tugging me in that direction. 
I realize his plan just in time and rearrange my course, liking his idea
better.  We stumble out onto the ice that we previously judged too thin to
walk on.  We make it about twenty paces before the Sentry catches
up.  It lurches toward us, the sound of metal echoed by the noise of the
ice cracking.

“Down!” Apollon says, and we hit the ground, laying flat and
spreading ourselves out.

The lake caves suddenly, the robot swallowed by its gaping
mouth.  Fangs of ice close in on it, shards pulling in to the undertow.

Apollon and I hang on to the crumbling edge, clamping our
eyes against the fate that awaits us.  Water swirls.  Ice cracks and
groans, moving beneath us.  We remain afloat on a large piece that
disconnects from the main body of the lake.  But we’re alive.  After
a long time of panting the panic away, we manage to crawl to safety.

We make camp at the lake’s edge.  Apollon is in bad
shape, and the excitement certainly did him no good.  When night falls, I
snatch sleep in small doses because I’m busy watching over him, worrying that
his grim prophesies could become real.  My fingers gently brush golden
hair away from his feverish forehead and I realize that tears are on my
cheeks.  I imagine what I will do if I lose him, but there is nothing
beyond that idea.  There is no going on without Apollon, who has become my
closest friend in all the world.

Late the following morning, Apollon drags himself up and
stubbornly pushes onward.  He’s shivering, and sweating, and walking in
more of a zigzag than a straight line.  We only stumble through the snow
for about an hour before he can’t go on any further.  We stop to build a
shelter, and nestled up against the trunk of our tree, where it is protected
from the worst of the weather, is a halfway decent patch of Apollon's medicinal
plant.  My friend looks relieved and thankful as his eyes fall upon it.

"You know, you really are quite lucky," he
murmurs, flopping down as I harvest the usable leaves.  "You would
have been very bored going on without me."

I roll my eyes at him, determined not to show how worried I
really am.  "I'm not going to let you die, plants or not. 
You're getting to the city if I have to haul you there by one ankle."

He laughs.  "I'd like to see that."

"I wouldn't."

We make a poultice of the leaves and he chews some more of
them.  He falls asleep and doesn't wake up until the sun is halfway
through the sky the next day.  But he's so much better.  And we have
some leaves to take with us, too.

"I told you that you weren't going to die," I
insist as we continue our journey.

"I'm sure I'll die eventually," he says. 
"Maybe fifty years from now.  But I'll remember to tell you I told
you so."

"Sure.  You do that.  But you know, I just
might die first."

We waltz on through the vast wilderness, always saving some
guts for bait every time we make a new kill.  The strategy works well, and
we eat meat regularly.  I'm beginning to feel confident with my
knife-throwing skills.  We make use of everything we can get, everything
we can do.  Slowly, we build up our insulation against the chill by
stuffing our coats with fur from animals we've hunted.  Every little bit
helps out here.  Neither of us have any idea how to tan the pelts, so we
haven't even tried.  But we scrape the fur off of each kill and pack it
inside our coats.  It's not the most comfortable, but it's helped. 
We can walk longer now before we need to build shelter.  We supplement our
hunting by foraging whatever we can, and we don't do bad.  Buoyed by
warmth, a decent supply of food, and the medicine, Apollon’s health continues
to improve.  Soon the infection seems to be entirely gone.  We only
shelter on the coldest days and somehow avoid having much trouble at all. 
It really does seem too easy.

Until the wolves.  We hear their yipping first, and stop
in our tracks.  We're both unsure what makes that noise.  We stand
back to back, unable to tell what direction it's coming from.  It seems to
be all around us.  Getting closer.

"Into the tree," Apollon says under his
breath.  We take to the nearest pine, scaling it halfway before we pause
to look down.  Beneath us, they stare silently at us, at least seven of
them.  Maybe more beyond the range of my vision.  Eerie canine
statues whose only movement is the dripping of saliva from their working jaws.

"What now?" I ask, hanging on to one side of the
trunk with both arms.  Apollon is across from me on the opposite
side.  We're both standing on small branches jutting from the main
trunk.  The tree is dead, brittle— one in a grey patch of desiccated
forest.  My branch feels crackly and tenuous beneath my feet.  I
can't imagine that Apollon, twice my size, feels even halfway secure.

"We wait," he says.  "They'll go away
eventually, right?"

So we hang on to the trunk for moments or hours.  I
lose all sense of time.  My limbs are going numb.  It's getting
colder, and the lack of movement doesn't help.  Still the wolves
wait.  Some of them simply lay down beneath the tree, conserving their
energy for when they will tear us apart.

Across from me, I hear the sound of Apollon's foot slipping
on the trunk.

"Don't fall!"

The wolves jump up and renew their focus on us.

"I'm not."  He's maneuvering.  "We
need to do something.  They have long attention spans."

"Any ideas?"

"They smelled our bait."  He must be
rummaging for the small bit of skin tucked into his coat.  "I'll just
give it to them.  Then maybe they'll leave us alone."

A moment later, the package thunks onto the ground below
us.  We watch the wolves tear into it.  They finish in a heartbeat,
and look up for the main course.

"Great," I say.  "That really put them
off."

"It was worth a try.  Any chance you can throw
your knife from up here?"

"Sure, if you really don't mind me being the first to
die.  I can barely hang on as it is.  I can't feel my fingers."

"Me either.  If only we had a fire."

The comment sinks into the silence.  We're both
thinking the same thing.  Fire.  But how can we use it?

Finally, Apollon says, "This is a Christmas tree,
right?"

"Oh hell no," I say.  "You can't set our
tree on fire.  We're kind of using it."

He hesitates.  "OK."  I hear him moving
amongst the branches.

"Apollon?"

A few grunts later, he says, "Yeah?"

"What are you doing?"

"I'm setting
that
tree on fire."

By ‘
that
 tree’ I can only assume he means the
one that is right next to
this
 tree on his side.

"You think that's a good idea?" I ask skeptically,
sounding a lot like him.

"I'd rather go down in a blaze of glory than as a wolf
snack."    

I consider.  "It doesn't sound very glorious to
me."

The snap of a breaking branch makes me jump. 
"Apollon?"  I’m afraid he's about to plummet to his demise and
blame me for it.

A few seconds later he says, "I'm OK.  Just needed
a branch to reach with."

I scowl and don't reply, suspecting that his pause was for
dramatic effect.

The next thing is the unmistakable crackle and snap of
fire.  The smell of burning pine blows into my face.  Below us, the
wolves whine.  I hear a whoosh as Apollon heaves his burning branch at the
neighboring tree.  It lodges into the side branches, teetering,
tipping.  There's a few seconds of disappointment, then a big
'whompfff'.  The flames lick upward, and for the briefest moment, it
is
kind of glorious.

The wolves scatter, then turn back to look.  Sniffing,
they dance and whine—curious then fearful.  The flaming tree burns
suddenly brighter, and that's it.  They run.

Apollon launches himself from his branch as our tree begins
to burn.  He rolls as he hits the snow, then quickly regains his
feet.  "Come on!"  He reaches out for me.

I jump into his arms.  Mostly.  He breaks my
fall.  We tumble to our knees, then he's dragging me by the arm and we're
up and running.  The fire, spreading to the next tree in either direction,
is not far behind us.

"Into the wind," Apollon yells, redirecting our
course.  We run with the wind smacking us in the face, hoping it will push
back the fire, but the wind is changeable today, and the fire sometimes makes
huge leaps behind us.  We remain just ahead of it, on the brink of
life.  There's no way we're going to make it.  My heart feels like
it's about to burst, my leg muscles burning from running against the piled
snow.  Brain jolting with every step.  We break through the tree line
into another open expanse.  A few yards in, we skid to a halt.

"Careful," Apollon says.  Beneath me, I can feel
the difference in our footing.  Ice.  We glance back where the fire
pushes the edge, threatening to melt the very ground we’re standing on. 
We move away from it, our steps slow and deliberate on ice that feels as if it
could break without the fire’s help.  Every inch is treacherous.  We
wobble gingerly onward, choosing each step as if it could be our last. 
The ice could swallow us at any time, but if we remain where we are, it most
certainly will.  The only thing to do is to get to the other side.

The sun has fallen and the wind is picking up.  Here
where there are no trees, we're painfully exposed to the devouring cold. 
We have to make it across and find shelter, but the tree line is so far
away.  Below us, the ice groans.  Apollon and I look at each other.

"I told you so," he says.

"You suck."

He chuckles, and I follow suit.  The fear of dying is
so much easier when you can laugh about it.

So we giggle our way slowly across the death course, daring
each other, heaving big sighs after every step until finally, nearly an hour
later, we emerge on the other side in what must be safety.

Half-frozen, my face stinging from exposure to the cold, I
collapse onto the bank of snow and look back the way we came.  Across the
expanse of ice, the fire rages on.  I toss Apollon a look.  "And
you
call
me
a pyromaniac."

He just smiles.

***

We walk onward for days and days, trekking southward with
the hopes that we'll eventually find the city.  According to the map we
once had, we can't possibly miss it so long as we're moving south.  A long
road bisects the wilderness, running east and west.  So long as we move to
the south, we will eventually find the road.  Then we'll have to guess
which direction to follow the road, but if we get lucky, we'll find our
destination.  And if we get luckier, we'll find our friends, too.

As time pushes onward, I’m worrying more about finding the
city than finding our friends.  I've lost track of exactly how many days
it has been, but it's probably something like a month from when we first
started out.  Anything could have happened to Outpost Three in a
month.  Is it even still there?  Panic rises at the thought, but I
push it away.

I glance across at Apollon as we walk.  The sun is
starting to move toward the horizon, and it's been a cold day.  If it
weren’t for the fur we’ve packed inside our coats, we’d really be feeling it
right now.