WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (30 page)

    And at that, Maze looks around, starts to walk a little farther to look for some sign of bones.

    “Must have been dragged off by—” she starts, but the words fall dead out of her mouth. Something kills it and she can’t say anything else.

    “What?” I say, hobbling over a few boulders to reach where she’s left the main path. But she doesn’t have to tell me because I see it too. Another one. Just the same as the other. Definitely human and alone, without a body. Cleaned of flesh.
    “Let’s go,” she says. The sun beats through the canopy, making me sweat a bit, and in a few minutes it’s as if we’ve forgotten the skulls, until the next blotch of white appears ahead of us, off to the left this time.

    “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I chant. But we just keep walking until we’re right beside it. There are three of them, laid together, all the same as the others—white, cleaned of flesh.

    Maze slows down to a careful walk, holding the shotgun up, as if she expects something to jump out at any moment and try to rip our heads off. I slow down and get right beside her.

    “We should turn around,” I say. She doesn’t answer and I pray that she’s considering it, but then I know she’s not. She tells me this is just the way to the tunnel.

    “We don’t even know what to look for,” I say. I try to hide how scared I am until we see the next pile of skulls and then she knows. I stop completely.

    “No, Maze, we have to stop,” I tell her. I practically whisper the words and I think she doesn’t hear me because she just keeps walking. But then something does make her stop.

    “There it is—that’s got to be it,” she says. I muster the courage to get beside her, passing the small pile of skulls.    

    “Oh my god, they’re everywhere.”

    The white blotches are scattered in every direction. Small piles of skulls. Some of them very small, like children. Babies. But behind them all, there’s an arch. Something manmade underneath a ledge of giant tree roots. Rusting metal.

    “That has to be the door,” she says.

    “We can’t,” I say, but I know it’s useless. That there could be a lake of skulls, and she wouldn’t give a shit anymore. All she does, walking away from me, is ask where all the bones are. The bones that went with the heads. But she keeps going, the shotgun high over her head, like whatever has done this is about to come now. Add us to the piles. Clean our flesh away too, get rid of everything but the bare white. I try to keep my eyes just on her back, and avoid looking at them all. The empty sockets staring up at me, namelessly, from the piles. And then, when it feels too overwhelming, and I know we’re wasting our time because the arch of metal is too old and rusty and can’t possibly be a door, and I know it’s time to run, and whatever has done this probably is coming back, coming home to find us in its den, there’s a loud noise. Maze jumps back, and the noise abruptly stops.

    “What was that?” I say.

    “I don’t know,” she says, aiming the shotgun and turning in every direction, waiting for the monster. I search with her, and the white goes deep, impossibly deep in almost every direction except the way we came in. Endless piles. When the grating noise happens again and then stops, Maze yells out something. I can’t understand her, and I rush in, thinking the thing has come at last, rushing in to kill us.

    “It’s me!” she says. And then, she shows me just what she means. She puts her foot forward, just enough that the noise starts, and then pulls it back. The noise stops.

    “Oh my god,” I say, for a moment forgetting my swelling fear. She tries it with her other foot, and there’s no noise. Then she does it again, with the left foot. The noise starts, she pulls it back, and it stops.

    “The left ankle—the tattoo,” I say.

    “Are you ready?” she asks me.

    “What are you going to do?”

    “I’m going to open the door.”

    “Maze,” I say, stalling, as if we should stop and discuss it. But when she puts her foot forward and the noise starts, so loud I’m sure it’s summoning the skull collector from somewhere nearby in the forest, alerting it to our presence, as the door has done to a thousand other victims, she just keeps it there. The noise grows louder and then softer but rumbles on, and soon, as if under a great deal of strain, the arch of rusty metal in front of us starts to move—and behind it, there’s a clean shiny metal plate. Something shaped like a circle. A door within the first door. And then, all at once, it slides down and out of sight, revealing blackness. Before I can say a word, there’s the flickering of light—first blinking on and then off, and then again flickering, until it stays on. A room inside lit with what has to be electric light. An impossibility.

    “Are you sure?” I ask her once the noise has stopped.

    “Would you rather stay with the heads?” she says. I look around, all the skulls looking back at me, unable to tell their stories, and then back at her—at the slip of the lighted silver in the room behind the door. “You first,” she says.

    “No way.”

    “Take it,” she says, holding the shotgun out for me. And she smiles, like we have to make a joke of this, or else we’re already dead. And then, just like that, as she holds the smile, her eyes unblinking, I know I have to do it. She holds it out for another moment and then withdraws it again. “I thought you were still afraid,” she says, still smiling. “Just stay close, alright?”

    “No, give me it,” I say.

    “I was just kidding. I’ll go first.”

    “I know. But I’m not. Here,” and I just walk right up and take it out of her hands.

    “We’re really doing this?” she says, and I just walk right past her. Right into the silver and the flickering light. The first thing I see is a long spiraling staircase, straight down, deep into the earth.

    “From now on, each time I save your life, I get to kiss you,” I say. I don’t even look back to see if she’s following me. I expect her to disapprove, to say my name with that old tone, but she just laughs. And I hear her footsteps, and soon she’s right on the stairs behind me. All of them metal, impossibly clean and unrusted. Nothing like the Deadlands. A descent directly to hell, paved with the sin of steel.

    “What do I get?” she says.

    “If you save mine?”

    “Yeah.”

    “Not gonna happen. Never again.”

    “Why not?”

    “Cause I’m going to be the one collecting skulls now.”

    And somehow, it all feels like a dream again, despite the blood back there on the beach, the new friends we left for dead.

    “But if it does happen…” she says.

    I want to tell her something dirty, tell her something that will scare her. What she’ll really get from me if she saves my life again.

    “It’s a secret,” is all I can say, because I can’t think of anything clever anymore after I hear the noise. It’s so faint, but then I’m sure I hear it. Some old instrument that I can’t recall a name for, forbidden because it’s made of metal, floating up to us from somewhere deep down at the bottom of the staircase. I stop to try and see something down the center shaft of the staircase. I hang over the edge enough for Maze to say be careful. But there’s only more stairs, just smaller and smaller, all silver, until they’re too tiny and there’s nothing to be seen.

    “You hear that?” she says.

    “Yeah. What is it?”

    “Music.”

  Part 4

Chapter 17

The music is stranger than anything I’ve heard before—not the familiar softness of violin or guitar or flutes. Maze tells me she thinks that it’s some kind of metal instrument, because that’s the only way something could sound that bright. There used to be instruments made of metal, she reminds me, And this must be what they sound like. 

            The steps go down and down. We circle around endlessly, going deeper toward the sound. The music seems watery, bouncing off walls and rising up to us through the stairs, but all the time, as we descend, the melody becomes clearer. I think about the music’s source, and when I ask Maze if we should start going slower, to figure out a plan—in case there’s someone down there—she pauses and bends over the rail to look down. I look with her.

            The light is orange at the bottom, a strange artificial color I’ve never seen before. She tells me that it must mean there’s electricity here.

            “Electricity?” I say, as if it’s a new word to me.

            “This place is powered. It must be electricity from the tower. Remember the mirror?” she says.

            I think about how impossible that seems, but then I remember how the door moved all on its own and tell her she’s right. That electricity got us inside.

            “And I’ll bet the music is electricity, too, not a person,” she says. With a quick jerk, showing that she’s convinced herself of our safety, she starts fast down the stairs again.

            I follow her as quickly as I can, and by the time we reach the source of the light, broad and rectangular ceiling strips that burn bright orange, we are dumped from the stairs and into a long and flat hallway. Everything is just as clean as the stairs. Brightly reflective steel, unlike anything in the rusted Deadlands. And that’s when Maze sees it.

            “Look,” she says. The small black holes along the edges of the ceiling, almost concealed by the blinding light source. She walks toward one and stands on her toes, as if she could reach up and press her ear to it. She says that the noise is coming from there. I follow her, press closely, almost into her body, and listen. The sharp melody grows louder as I get closer. A pipeline of music from the tower.

            “But why would there be music coming from the tower?” I ask.

            “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not coming from the tower.”

            And then, without another word, she goes and I follow—walking right into the tunnel. The orange lights flicker briefly and the metal floor, shiny steel, cleaner than any I’ve ever seen, goes black just for an instant. But we keep moving, and soft claps sound with each footstep. The music rises and falls as we walk, playing softer and then louder in pieces. It isn’t more than five minutes into the tunnel when Maze tells me that the floor isn’t flat anymore. She’s noticed it changing.

            I pay attention, turning my mind away from thoughts of her, the music, this strange place, and I try to notice of the levelness of the ground. And she’s right. I feel it—just a bit, but we’re descending. Right down, even deeper into the ground. I try to comprehend as we walk just how far below the trees and grass we are now, and how each step sends us deeper. First the stairs taking us into the metal belly, and now each minute lowering us more.

It’s me who first notices the next change: the temperature. It comes sharply and goes away, like a quick draft. I look around the brightly lit orange corridor, the shining silver steel coating the walls and ceiling, darker gray in places to make smooth lines, and the checkered lines of the floor, but there’s no openings to be found. Nothing to suggest an inlet for wind. Still, I’m sure I felt it, and when I tell Maze it’s getting colder, she agrees. But she says it must have been a chill in me, and not wind. Your body adjusting to the cold, she says.  

            After another twenty minutes pass, and the silence-built fear starts to tackle me, tell me that we’re reaching soon a point of no return, it hits me that we have to talk. Because the tunnel is getting colder and lower into the ground, and will keep doing so, but we have nothing to eat, and we’re going to starve to death. Or die of thirst before then.

            I think of the hard steel, and how beautiful it is to look at, but how awfully hard it will be to sleep on if the tower is too far for one day’s walk, as it must be, from the memory I have of the map. And how the music, although so beautiful, has started to loop—enough times that I begin to notice repeats in the rises and falls, the same colorful patterns of melody unfolding the same as they did minutes ago. I touch her lightly on the shoulder, look into her beautiful dark eyes, and for a moment, almost forget what it is that’s the matter—what new fear I must address. I just think of our kiss—if a kiss could change anything. If her words describing her feelings for me are less accurate than her touch, and how much of her touch she’s given me now, and how much she’ll let me have. How far I can push her. For a moment, looking at her, I wonder if I should raise any objections at all, because being trapped down here with her is really the realization of my ideal—the only two things alive in the world, me and her—and everything else cold and dead steel from the distant past. And that no matter how hard the steel is, she will be soft and I will be soft for her. Us the only things alive to keep each other warm from the growing cold, just like it was on the beach. Our bodies each other’s. But then, when she becomes anxious as I daydream, looking at her, wondering what it is I want to say, I begin to voice my fears anyway:

            “What do we do?” I say.

            “What do you mean?” she asks.