WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (12 page)

            “
Your sin for Baal.
”

            For a moment, it’s as if I’ve heard the words before. Like they’ve been in some line of scripture I’ve heard Father Gold say a million times but never bothered to understand. When the fist lands, the last thing I know is the sound of Maze’s scream. Somehow I know it’s far enough away that she’s not screaming about what’s happening to me. And as black numbness allays all of my pain, the closing note of my consciousness is that I cannot help her.

Shouting wakes me, joined with a spider-webbing pain that throttles my neck and brain. The shouts sound like someone is dying. A man. The awful noise turns to a sobbing scream, and then a soft, decaying whine. Finally it dwindles to nothing, and I open my eyes but there is nothing except blue. I’m still on my back, and the memory of losing Maze returns to me—the memory of dying at the hands of one of the red men. But then, it’s the reality that I’m alive that fills me, and I twist my eyes in the direction of the horrible death wail to see a man standing over another man. And it hits me—the one still standing is not red. His body is covered in brown and gray clothing, some kind of a suit, but his skin is tan—not the menacing red of the marchers. And on the ground, at his feet, I see the contrast—bright blood red against dark skin red. It’s one of them, bleeding out, already dead. The questions start up when I realize I can’t move—
How badly am I hurt? How long was I unconscious? Is he going to kill me next?

            By the time my lower body cooperates enough so that I can begin to jostle over the ground, loosening the bumps of rock that are lodged into the muscles of my back, I see the standing man turn toward me. His face is wreathed in a light gold beard, and his long hair, just a bit darker gold, hangs between his eyes, half-concealing a watery blue gaze. His uniform, tightly drawn over enormous muscle, is ripped in places and streaked in others with blood stains. And then, his eyes, resting too long on mine for me to believe he’ll think I’m dead and leave me be, draw tightly into slits. As if he’s studying everything about me now. He moves in, towering over me, his arms big enough to destroy me in a single blow. But down comes just his hand and nothing else, together with a deep voice.

            “Get up,” he says. “There’ll be more.” And just like that, almost out of fear, I reach up to take his hand. A firm grip closes and in one tiny gesture he swings me to my feet. And then, I look up at him, half a foot taller than me. I want to utter the words:
What happened? Where’s Maze?
But nothing comes out. He rushes away into the brush and then into trees that run parallel to the shoreline. I pause, deciding whether or not to follow, listening for the sounds of more red men, or the sound of Maze, but I hear nothing. I almost turn back, but then I hear loud calls—the same guttural blasts that I heard before. A gathering cry. I stop to pick my knife from the ground and run into the shadow of forest after him, each step rocking my chest with sharp pain.

When he stops, it isn’t to look at me, or even to speak a word, but to listen. His head bends, as if he’s reaching with his ears, and then, when he’s satisfied we don’t have to keep moving as of yet, he digs into a bag fixed to his belt.

            “Do you have a weapon?” he asks, his hand raising with his own silver blade. I show him mine, he nods, and then he looks off into the woods again, toward the sounds of the red men. When I can tell he doesn’t plan on moving anywhere, and the thought that Maze is out there somewhere—maybe dead or dying—strikes up like acid in my gut, I start moving to the edge of our hiding spot.

            “Where are you going?” he says. “We have to let them pass.”

            I look back at him, his patchwork clothes, rough stitches holding them together in angled shades of gray and brown. All of him looks dirty and worn by the sea. I want to ask him who he is, and why he saved me, and what the red men are, but all I can think about is Maze. That I have to go find her or she’ll die. And for the life of me I can’t stop myself from heading back toward the scrap yard without saying another word to him.

            “You’ll be killed,” he says.

            “My friend’s still out there,” I say, turning around just long enough to catch his blue eyes. Our stares hold for a moment, and he reels back as if I’ve said something very important to him.

            “You weren’t alone?” he says, almost startled. Through the trees, somewhere down below us, the sound of rocks moving, people walking, reminds us that the red men are still here. But the noises don’t change the stunned expression on his face. He moves suddenly, as if now he’s alarmed too, and for all the world he wouldn’t continue to sit and wait here. I think that maybe he’s what a Saint really is, because I’ve never seen one—and maybe the Fatherhood sends them out into the world, to ward off these devils that stalk the lands, but somehow he seems already far too intelligent to be a Saint. And he’s holding metal, so he must not care about the sovereignty of the Fathers or the Will of God. Suddenly, as he steps forward to me, awaiting my answer, I figure it all out. Just that quickly it comes over me.

            I step back quickly. A volcano of hatred rises in me, swells my heart so that I can’t breathe. My arms tense, but then my legs feel frozen in place. In the next moment I want to launch at him, the man who saved me, even though I know from his massive frame how quickly he would destroy me. I don’t answer him, and instead I look down, letting the truth spill over me.

            The Resistance.
 

            And then, with new anger and impatience, he asks me for the third time who was with me. Instead of telling him though, I say what I have to, watching his eyes for the confirmation.

            “Sid...” the name rolls out of my mouth.

            He narrows his eyes, watching me with great apprehension. The knife in his hands droops down to his side, like all his effort is now bent on figuring out how I could possibly know his name. And then he replies to his own name with another.

            “Maze! She was with you,” he says. I nod. The nod is all it takes, and suddenly, it’s as if he’s forgotten all about me. He runs past, right into the forest, and then he’s gone.

I chase after him, and in just a moment, sea wind slaps me and I see the wide basin again, the junk columns below, and the last few red men, marching away toward the edge of rocky coast, out of view. Ahead, I see Sid’s back. He hops from stone to stone, working his way down and frantically searching for Maze. I try to remember the last few bits before I lost consciousness—the only thing that comes is her scream. And then, ahead of me, Sid disappears. He’s so fast that he’s descended the granite stairs of the rocky shore to the point where I don’t see him anymore. I look around, clenching my knife, hoping no more of the red monsters are lingering behind. There’s no sound but the long screech of a hawk twisting overhead, and I pause, recognizing the spot where I was knocked out: blood lines, dried now, cake the gray and black granite at my feet. I look down over the edge of the trail, into the scrap yard. There’s no one left. Just the brown rotting metal, the skeletons of hulls and wire frames and other odd technologies from before the Wipe.

            “Maze!” I call out, risking the noise. And all I hear, over and over again in my head, is her scream. The reminder that I couldn’t do anything. And then, as if in response to her name, Sid rises from the slope of the shoreline, sweat gleaming on his forehead, his dark blonde hair sticking and half covering his eyes.

            “You see her?” he asks. I just shake my head and look back into the scrap yard, searching for any sign of her. Any movement at all. I think back to the Deadlands, and how she hid upstairs. She’s hiding, I tell myself. That’s all. Somewhere in the rocks on the ridge, or somewhere down there, among the rust.

            “I heard her scream before it jumped on me,” I say. He walks up from behind, right next to me. Then, I feel his hand on my shoulder. Not a gentle touch, but a hard clasp of anger and frustration. I turn and look up at his tanned face. His eyes are desperate, weakening.

            “Where did she scream? Where did you see her last?” he asks.

            But I don’t have anything new to tell him because I don’t remember where she screamed or where I saw her last. Just a noise somewhere on the rocks. That’s all I can say.
Somewhere on the rocks.

And then, with just a quick glance at the shoreline, its beating surf spray the only thing I can see from our height, whitecaps fringing the lowlands of trash, Sid tells me:
They took her
.

            “We have to get her then!” I say, and all at once, the death wish fills me up. I’m ready to descend into the yard and follow the way the red men left. Because if they have Maze, it’s the only thing left for me in the world to do. I don’t even stop to think if they’ve taken her dead or alive, or why they would take her, or even what they are. My legs bounce me up and over the last few layers of granite until small steps of rock descend down toward the flattened fences that once enclosed the junk yard.

            “You can’t follow them,” he says. I turn and see that he hasn’t moved a muscle, waiting back there for something. But there is a strange glistening on his cheeks. And from my lower position, he looks smaller. Tears that make him look tiny. I want to ask him why not—why can’t we follow them, if they’ve taken her? But I don’t. I know somehow already what his answer will be.
There are too many of them. They’re too powerful. They’ll just kill us. Take us. Do whatever it is they are going to do with her.

           
But somehow I don’t care for rational thought any longer, or any kind of Earth without Maze. So I turn away from his show of weakness, filled with the fury of adrenaline and my knife, and I just go down faster. Quick and over the rocks as if they’re a staircase, like I’m a lightning bolt. And before long, I reach flat ground and walk through a rip in the browned tangle of fence.

All around me are the strange ruins of an unknown past. Pipes are piled up, mixed in with wires and frames, some of them long and square, filled with deteriorating bolts and the scars of time. And then, as I go on, I see the hulls of old boats. They are so rotted that long gaping holes dot their lengths, and I know none of them could ever float again. I walk the roads of the junk yard, winding and twisting around the debris until I’m sure I searched everywhere twice. I reach the wide path that wraps back around to the coastline. Stacked cages tower around me, wrapped in mossy rope, piles two times my height, banging their broken-hinged gates in the wind. The surf and the rattle of the brittle metal prevent me from hearing the footsteps, and it isn’t until they are right upon me that I realize someone’s come up from behind. I twist, startled just for a moment, until I see that it’s Sid. And I know, almost in anguish as much as relief, that he loves her. That although it took him longer to make the decision than it did for me, he’s coming. I tell him that there’s nothing down here and that they went this way, pointing to the trail the red men left on, another granite rise that meets the far bluffs of the shoreline.

            “It’s no use,” he says, and he stops, just for a moment, as if that’s all it will take for it to sink in, for me to change my mind. But then he keeps on walking, away from the way the red men left. And when I look out through the junk, to where he’s headed now, I see the boat. His boat. And I know he’s not coming. He’s giving up.

            He pauses one more moment, as if he’ll offer to take me with him, like he’ll bring me to safety, but there comes no offer. He just waits for a second, looking at me, checking if I’ll acknowledge him at all or just keep going to my death. Like I’m more of a curiosity to him now. And then, when I turn away from him, back to the last wall of iron and wire, I hear his footsteps begin, then grow faint, moving out toward the junk coast. The boat that will take him back to his Resistance. Despite the knowledge that I’m going to die, and the sureness of it settling in now, I can’t help but feel some strange victory, some measure of fantasy that tells me I’ve won. In the contest of love, by some measure of fate, I’ve proved truest to her. And I know it has to be a mistake to think I’ve won—just my ignorance of what the red things really are, how futile my pursuit must be for someone as strong as him to abandon it, to cry at the thought of it. And when we’re moving in our separate directions, me back up onto the high coast, and him down to the surf where his boat is, I hear the whistle. It’s quick, and then it comes again. I turn quickly, scanning the ridges from where we climbed down, and then the rest of the rim above, the forested circumference of rock ledge that looks down at the scrap yard. But I can’t trace the noise. When I look to Sid, it’s like he hasn’t heard anything, and his head is hanging down as he continues on toward the shore. But then the whistle comes louder, and it becomes a cry, a voice I know. I look up for the skyward source, and then I see a hand. Quick, rising in alarm, and then a body with it, rising over a hedge of bramble above. And all at once, by the darkness of the lines, raven hair and olive skin, I know it’s Maze. I scream to her.

            “Are you okay?”

            And then it hits me—she’s not signaling to let me know she’s found me again, or that she’s alright, but to warn me about something. Just when I recognize what’s happening, there comes the claps of someone running. I turn and see Sid, charging back toward me from the end of the scrap yard. When I look back to Maze, she thrusts her hand out, like she’s tapping at the air, and I turn around to see what she’s pointing at. My eyes pass Sid and I see—red skin and antlers.

            The antlered giant just stands there, as if raised to our presence by some kind of invisible wire we’ve tripped. His enormous frame standing cold and still in the corner of the yard. I think for a moment he’s dead, because he doesn’t move, like his antlers are blended into the pipes and wires of the junk piles and he’s just there on display. But then, as clear as the blue above, I see the reaction. The antlers twist around, and the red shoulders, wide and deeply cut, square toward me.