Immobility (13 page)

Mahonri opened his eyes and rubbed his hands. “If you don’t like the flavor you get, we’ll open you another one,” he said. He pointed to the boxes. “We’ve got plenty.”

When he handed the packet over to Horkai, its contents had become a thick, gummy paste. It didn’t taste like anything. He ate it anyway, sitting in his wheelchair, spooning it into his mouth with his fingers, occasionally exchanging glances with Mahonri, trying to make sense of him.

*   *   *

AFTER DINNER, MAHONRI UNBUCKLED
his boots and began to talk. “I don’t get the chance very often,” he said. “Not to talk to anyone but myself, anyway. After a while it makes a person a little crazy. It’s nice to have someone else here.”

“I can understand that,” said Horkai.

“What did you do before?” asked Mahonri.

“This and that,” said Horkai evasively.

“I sold cars,” said Mahonri. “Lived in Murray but had a used lot over in West Valley City. Well, it wasn’t my lot exactly, but I worked there.”

“Where were you when it happened?”

“At home with my wife and child. We immediately went down to the basement and waited. But it didn’t do much good. A few hours later, they were covered with sores. A few days after that, they were dead.”

“But not you.”

“Not me,” he said. “Hardly seems fair, does it, but the Lord had work remaining for me here.”

“Watching over the records,” said Horkai.

“Yes,” said Mahonri. “I’m a keeper. As are you now. We are here to preserve things, to help humanity start over again, once it’s safe.”

“But how do you know things should start over?” asked Horkai. “Maybe it’s time for things to come to an end.”

“You have doubts, brother,” said Mahonri. “It is very difficult to have no doubts, to have faith instead. Faith is the more courageous path.”

“Is it?” said Horkai. “Is it really?”

Mahonri ignored him. “It is all written in the Scriptures,” said Mahonri, “if you know where to look. The wicked of the earth will be destroyed by war, death, pestilence, and disease, and only then will Christ return and live among us. And then, for a thousand years, there will be no war and the earth shall be changed so that it is again like unto the garden of Eden. There shall be no disease and there shall be an increase in understanding. Satan will have no power over the people, and the righteous shall reign. Has this happened yet? No? Then the world must needs continue until the Second Coming shall arrive.”

“You really believe that?”

“I do,” said Mahonri, and gave Horkai a steady look. “I know that something touched me and transfigured me so that I might survive where others died. The same is true for you as well, brother. Why would you be alive now were it not for the hand of God?”

Horkai shrugged. “It could be anything. It doesn’t have to mean something.”

“For instance,” said Mahonri.

“For instance, bad luck,” said Horkai. “What’s more terrible than living when everyone else around you dies?”

Mahonri fell silent, his face suddenly looking remarkably old. “It is a hard path,” he finally admitted. “But we would not have been chosen were we not worthy of it. What were you before?” he asked. “What has become of you to make you think this way?”

“I don’t know,” said Horkai, suddenly tired of lying. “I can’t remember much about my earlier life.”

“But surely you must have been pure in heart,” said Mahonri. “Were you not, you would have perished.”

“Stop talking like that,” said Horkai. “Stop talking like you’re quoting Scripture. You yourself said that we might have survived due to being infected by bacteria.”

Mahonri shook his head. “I did not say this,” he said. “Jonas wrote it speculatively in the commentary. I merely reported it. And who is to say that God does not operate through natural means? Even if it is a question of infection, could not God have had a hand in it? Could it not be God who infected us?”

They lapsed into silence.
The problem with faith,
thought Horkai,
is that there’s no arguing with it. Same problem,
he admitted to himself,
with lack of faith.

“Am I sure I can trust you?” asked Mahonri, half musing to himself. “Do you have sufficient faith to join us?”

“Let’s talk about it in the morning,” said Horkai.

17

HE DROPPED OFF ALMOST IMMEDIATELY,
falling into a deep sleep almost as soon as Mahonri lifted him off the wheelchair and put him in the cot. He woke up hours later in an utterly pitch-dark room, with no idea where he was. He was filled with panic that he was unconscious again, frozen, deep in storage, but muddled desperately through that to a memory of Mahonri sitting on the floor beside the cot as his eyes closed, reading the Scriptures to himself, half-aloud. Either he was still in Granite Mountain or he’d managed to escape into a dream again. In either case, he lay there, shivering in a cold sweat, his heart beating very fast, the blood pounding in his ears, until at last, little by little, he began to calm down.

He started trying to picture the room in his head, reached out to one side to touch the tin wall beside the bed, adjusting his image of the room accordingly. Mahonri must be here, he realized, lying somewhere beside his bed. He held his breath and listened, heard at last the muffled sound of the other man’s breathing.

What now?
he wondered.

It was the first time since he’d begun the journey that he’d had a chance to relax, slow down, think. He imagined Qatik and Qanik still hiding, huddled against the side of the mountain, waiting for him, slowly dying. Or perhaps quickly dying. Or perhaps already dead. What did he owe them exactly? They weren’t like him—were, if Mahonri was to be believed, almost another species. He couldn’t remember enough about who he was or what his life had been like before the Kollaps to know what he owed them, or owed Rasmus, or owed anyone, for that matter. Had he been, as Mahonri suggested, “pure in heart”? Was that why he’d been singled out, as it were, touched by the so-called finger of God? Not likely, he thought, remembering how he had almost strangled the technician who had awakened him—almost without meaning to, on impulse. No, the last thing he’d been was pure in heart, he was convinced of that.

But what was he now? Was it better that he couldn’t remember what he had been before?
A fixer,
Rasmus had called him, but what did that mean exactly? Someone called upon when nobody else could solve a problem and willing to proceed
by any means necessary.
Definitely not pure in heart.

But how did he know that Rasmus was telling the truth? Maybe he hadn’t been a fixer at all but simply an ordinary man living an ordinary life: a bank clerk or a high school teacher. Even Rasmus had couched everything he told him in doubt—
my father told me
and
if I get a few of the details wrong, it’s because I have them secondhand
—almost as if he expected from the first not to be believed.

He lay staring into the dark, seeing nothing. Whom should he listen to? Whom should he trust? Rasmus, with his hive? The whole structure seemed clearly a sort of mystification, a way of manipulating others for some purpose that Horkai himself couldn’t quite see. Was Rasmus the one doing the manipulating, or was he himself manipulated as well? And if so, by whom or what?

He took a deep breath. Too many questions, too few answers. What he did know was that from the beginning Rasmus had not been honest with him, was clearly holding something back. The little he’d been able to get out of the mules didn’t tell him much, just confirmed that something was wrong, that he hadn’t been told the truth and that maybe they hadn’t been either.

But why was Mahonri to be believed instead? A group of seven transfigured men, if they were still men, living deep in a hole within the side of a mountain, guarding what must be millions of records as well as the contemporary equivalent of the ark. And believing that they were acting out God’s will, having manipulated Christianity to fit changing conditions. Mahonri was obviously deranged. How could he be trusted? He’d been brainwashed, was clearly a little addled from so much time spent alone.
Finger of God,
Horkai thought.
Not fucking likely. More like the finger of the Devil. Or, even worse, no finger at all.

So whom did that leave for him to trust?

Nobody. Not even himself, since he had no idea who he really was.

What now?
he wondered, and stared up into the dark. Vague shapes were beginning to move across his vision now, vague flashes of light that stuttered back and forth, the result of the effort of his brain to see something when it was too dark to see anything at all.

What were his choices?

He could go off on his own, but without legs he wouldn’t get far. Plus there was the disease to consider, the reason he had been frozen in the first place. If that was in fact real and not one lie among many, then there was something to be said for sticking with the people who claimed they were trying to find a cure.

He could stay here with a group of religious fanatics whose only redeeming quality was that they seemed to be suffering from the same physical condition as he, and live largely in storage, allowing himself to be thawed one month out of every eight and participate in the reinstitution of the human race. Something he wasn’t exactly sure was a good idea.

Or, finally, he could do as Rasmus and his community had asked, collect a cylinder with red characters on it, whatever secret or special seed it contained, and bring it back.

The first two were dead ends and would get him nowhere. The last was a wild card: something might come of it or maybe nothing. But it wasn’t immediately a dead end. Would he ever get answers? Maybe. Would he ever know the whole truth? Probably not. But he had to try.

Which was why, almost without realizing, Horkai had pulled his dead leg toward him with both hands and was now forcing his hand into his boot, groping for his knife.

18

THE DARKNESS WAS CRACKLING
with light now, all of it imagined, his optic nerve helplessly convulsing over and over. He reached to the side and touched the wall, tried to imagine himself hovering near the ceiling and staring down at the room from above. There he was, on his cot, and there, behind him, against the other wall, the boxes of dried food. But where was Mahonri? He’d been asleep himself before Mahonri had even lain down. The man could be anywhere.

He rolled very carefully over onto his side, orienting himself as well as he could toward the sound of the man’s breathing. He lifted his head, then propped himself up on an elbow. The cot creaked underneath him and he froze, stayed there half-raised, listening. But the breathing didn’t seem to have changed.

He placed the knife on the cot just beside him, against his belly. Very slowly he reached out, waving his fingers through the air. They met no resistance. He extended his hand a little farther, did it again. Still nothing. And again, his hand a little more tentative this time, expecting to touch something. Still nothing. He leaned out and down a little, the cot creaking, and extended his arm farther, and this time, halfway along his arc, he brushed something.

It took him a moment to realize it was fabric, a moment more to decide it was the man’s tunic. He drew his hand back just a little, moved it back along its arc, stretching a few inches farther. This time he touched something soft and cloudlike that he thought at first was a blanket, then prodded it enough for it to be clear it was a pillow. He stretched farther, lifting his hand, very careful now, and brushed flesh.

He stopped, hesitated, but the breathing hadn’t changed. He moved his hand again, inch by inch, until he brushed flesh again and pulled back slightly, then moved it over again, just a little, just a little, until at last he felt the man’s breath against the palm of his hand.

He moved the hand down a little, near where he expected the throat to be. He held his hand like that, the muscles in his shoulder starting to tighten uncomfortably as he tried to fix in his mind exactly how far his hand was stretched, where it was exactly. And then, quickly, he drew the hand back long enough to grab the knife.

He lashed out, felt the blade cut, pass through something. Mahonri made a gagging sound and then screamed, his words lost in a fit of choking. Horkai stabbed into the dark again, connected with something, and Mahonri was flailing, striking at his hands, and the knife clattered away. Something struck the cot and overturned it with a bang, and he was trapped between the cot and the wall while, on the other side Mahonri was screaming in earnest, his body thrashing. Horkai pushed the cot into him and tried to clamber over it, but was struck down. And then suddenly he heard the sound of Mahonri up on his feet, stumbling, knocking into the boxes in the back of the room, no longer screaming now but groaning. He heard the slow sounds of the man’s footsteps and then something struck the upturned cot and the next thing he knew, something heavy and squirming was on top of him, crushing him, and he was trying to rein in his panic.
Oh fuck,
he thought and struck out once, then again. He groped around, trying to find the keeper’s throat, realized he had his hands wrapped around his thigh. He tried to squirm out from under, tried to squirm around, found a hand holding his head down against the floor, his skull beginning to ache.

Just a few inches from his face, the sound of labored breathing, the slight wind of breath, something warm leaking onto his face and neck. The breathing caught and stopped for an instant and then came again, with a sigh.
“Why?”
said Mahonri’s voice, little more than a whisper now, barely anything he could hear. And then, without another word, he collapsed.

*   *   *

IT FELT LIKE IT TOOK FOREVER
for him to work free of the body. Groping around in the dark, panting and slightly deranged, it took even longer for him to find the wheelchair where Mahonri had folded it up near the front of the shack. The dark was full of figures now, always just out of reach, and as he worked desperately, he felt them swirling around him, surrounding him, brushing their hands over his skin just as he had done to Mahonri. He gave a shiver of revulsion, shook his head. He was beginning to hear voices as well, very quiet, very distant, but still there, and he had started to wonder if Mahonri was really dead after all. Within that haze of panic, he felt like he was shaping the wheelchair out of nothingness, imagining it in the dark, and he was surprised when he finally had it unfolded. He managed to lift himself up into it and found that it held his weight, that it seemed real and he could begin to imagine he might one day be safe.