WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (33 page)

            “What?”

            “If I believe in something because it’s
right
to believe in it, like that the Fatherhood is a lie, does that have anything at all to do with whether or not the belief is true? Or is it the same as happiness—one version is just as good as the other?”

            “Let’s keep going,” she says.

            “Wait—I’m working this all out. It’s important. There’s a point to it.”

            “It’s more dogma.”

            “Listen—history, it keeps pushing on, right? So whatever is true at one moment is true for just as long as the truth holds up—until something better comes to replace it—new information about the world.”

            “So?”

            “So whatever truth is—it’s just a probability of truth, given its moment in history. So believing anything would be to sort of . . . to
fix
truth. And so believing in something is where people go astray. The perspective is too close to their single life span in history.”

            “Where is this all coming from? The video?”

            “Maze—who do you think made the video?” We both look back to the screen. And when I see her face, I know she hadn’t thought of it yet. But the thought begins to turn in her head—I see her trying to figure it out.

            “Someone who—after the Wipe—needed to shape new beliefs for people. So belief is just . . .” she says.

            “A way to control people?”

            “Exactly. But that doesn’t mean it has to be that. It just means it can be that. And I believe they’re up there,” she says, looking to the ceiling. A drop of water falls, and for the first time, we see it hit the ground. The noise of its splash is drowned by the audio, cycling through the same story of man’s punishment and redemption.

            “This is Noah’s Ark all over,” she says. And for some reason, I hadn’t thought of it. But she’s right. Humans have been punished for their sin and set back again to start over.

            “Only this one really happened,” I say.

            “I don’t know if it did—it’s just a story that it did. Like you said. To shape everyone’s perception of what happened.”

            Suddenly I’m ready to push on, somehow energized by the moving pictures of the old world.

            “What do you think’s up there?” she says.

            “I don’t know. Garren thought it was the After Sky, didn’t he? Except maybe it was only the richest people, whoever had the most power, that saved themselves from the ruined world below them.”

            “What if it’s nothing more than a power station? And we’re just walking along some underground cable system. And there’s nothing up there.”

            “Then why the tattoo? Why would you have access? And Garren? And your memories, your dreams. No—I think, somehow, you escaped from here.”

            “Escaped?”

            A new voice, thick with accent, talks. For a moment, I think the movie playing from the wall has malfunctioned, but then I realize it’s coming from our left. I look down, and freezing everything up inside of me I see a red body, somehow silently moved to within ten feet of us. The shadow we’d seen move past now standing in plain view.

            I can tell from the red that he’s one of the Nefandus, but for some reason, he doesn’t charge at us and rip our throats out or take us to a sacrifice. He just stands still, and after he speaks again, calmly, without a step in our direction, in our own language, my nerves begin to ease.

            “Don’t be alarmed,” he says. He takes another step toward us, and we see just how awkward his movements are. Ribs protrude, revealing his malnourishment, and then he begins to talk more. For the first few sentences I don’t comprehend a thing. Then it all starts to become clear. The red man isn’t a monster like the ones above. And he’s not speaking in the strange tongues they use in the forest.

            “Do you remember the skulls?” he says. The whites of his eyes dart quickly, running along the walls of the tunnel, up to the lights, then flickering quickly between both of us. As he waits for one of us to answer, or make a move, he licks his lips, watches the video screen, and then looks back at us, awaiting a reply. Something about the quickness, his twitches and strange skeletal frame, make me more nervous than if he’d been one of the mindless hunters holding a spear that had tracked us down on the beach.

            “Yes, we saw them,” Maze says.

            “I did that.”

            Maze bends her knees some, like we’ll have to run, or fight, at any moment. That this frail creature could be responsible for killing so many people seems impossible, but I follow her lead, leaning into her to form a wall, one red body against mine and hers. Shotgun high in the air. Ready to stand our ground to the last. And then the lights go off.

            “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

            I feel Maze steadily pull back, walking very slowly back down the tunnel. I stay right next to her, keeping a hand on her side to trace her steps.

            “They’re not real,” his voice comes through the darkness.

            “What?”

            “They’re hallucinations. I made them from a computer. They keep the others from getting inside.”

            “Inside the tunnel? Who?” says Maze.

            “My red brothers.”

            “No one can get in the tunnel without a tattoo,” I say, quickly realizing I shouldn’t have revealed that much.

            “Tattoo? The implant key?
You have one
?” he says. Something in his voice betrays his desperation, as if he’d been waiting forever for someone with the tattoo to appear.

            “But they’d need one, wouldn’t they?” Maze insists, ignoring his question.

            “That door’s been broken for as long as I have known about this place.”

            “Broken?”

            “It can be lifted up. The computer there is broken, and a key isn’t required. And they started to realize it—the big ones started coming down here. Following me. You see I abandoned my tribe and they want me dead.”

            “But we came in through it—it powered on and we came in.”

            “Maybe so—but that’s not the only way in. It takes no more than three hands to simply pull it apart. Or one hand of a Red Horn.”

            “How did you use a computer?” Maze says. My mind races through everything I’ve heard about them—the sin-metal producers of invisible information that lead people astray. So the myths go. Ubiquitous before the Wipe. Artificial minds that once could control the material world.

            “Come, I’ll show you.”

The lights flicker back on, and it’s right before my eyes go blind from the sudden light that I’m sure I notice the creature looking right at me, as if it had somehow been watching me through the pitch black.

            “Why aren’t you with them anymore? How do you speak the common language?” Maze asks.

            “I’d like to know why
you’re
here. And why the skulls didn’t frighten you off. So we have questions for each other, it seems.”

            Maze looks at me, and then beckons me to follow her back a bit to say something out of his earshot. I walk back with her, my eyes hesitantly willing to look away from him for just a moment, and as we go, he says, Go ahead, talk it over, I’m safe, I’m safe.

            “Wills,” she whispers. I can’t help but look back, and there he is, intently watching us, his eyes still flickering around nervously but always landing back on me. I almost think I see anger in his stare. “What do you think? Do we trust him?”

            “Something’s not right. I don’t trust anything he says. I don’t like how he’s staring at me.”

            “We have to see what information he has. But I need to know you’re ready to kill him—if and when it goes wrong—we have to both be ready.”

            “With this?” I raise the shotgun.

            “Beat him to death with it. I’ll use my hands. Strangle him. And maybe—” she pauses, her eyes wandering out to him for a moment. “Maybe he’s not lying.”

            “Okay,” I say. And not sure why I’ve agreed, when we could leave now, before the tunnel gets too deep and cold and wet, I follow her back to the man.

            “Do you have a name?” she says. We stop with about five feet of space in case his haggard body attempts to leap at us.

            “I guess I used to be called something. Wrist, I think.”

            “Wrist? Okay. Show us your computer,” she says. And then, we’re walking again, keeping our distance, but following the red body until the sound of the video is far behind us, and the dark slits are right alongside us, revealing two new pathways splitting off from the main tunnel.

We turn left and Maze leads the questioning. Wrist complies, promising to tell us everything we want to know as long as we answer his questions too. He says that there are in the Nefandus, just like in the Fatherhood, defectors—those who do not buy into the dogma. I ask if there is a Nafandus Resistance, like there is with those who reject the Fatherhood. Wrist describes that there is such a group, but unlike the Fathers, the Nefandus has its own special force that it uses to systematically hunt and destroy them, so nothing organized ever lasts. And then he digresses and tells us what’s led him here—a
map
. We tell him it was the same with us, and that we didn’t see tunnels branching off from the main one on ours.

            “You know electricity is forbidden by the Nefandus, too? There isn’t as big a difference as you’d think between your system and ours. Or the ones we’ve both rejected.”

            “But this place is—”

            “Yes, it’s filled with electricity, and metal, I know.”

            And then we come to it—the subject of the tower and the Ark. It’s Maze who presses for it—to know just what Wrist thinks about this place, and the tower, and possibility of an Ark.

            “I want to find out,” he says. “But I don’t know. I think you probably think something similar to me.”

            Maze explains crudely her idea—that the tower is the passage to the Ark, and that maybe people are still living there, high in the tower, some wealthy elite group that has dictated the misinformation to keep everyone below blind. That it must be in the tower that the real After Sky is.

            “I’ve answered everything of yours,” Wrist says as we stop in the new branch of the tunnel—identical to the old one except that the lights flicker more and there is no longer music playing. “Now answer mine—do you really have the key?”

            “The key?” I say.

            “It’s here,” says Maze. She extends her leg and lifts her pants high enough to show the tattoo.

            “That? It’s just a tattoo,” he says.

            “Look at the shape. It’s the tower coming out of the earth. It opened the door automatically.”

            “It triggered the door?” he says, and now it’s clear that some powerful emotion is overcoming him, and his voice quivers and he asks again. “You’re sure?”

            “Yes. I think—I think I came from here. Somehow.”

            “Oh yes! Finally we can find out—we can find out together!” he says. When I ask him what it all means, he tells us that he can only get so far. That past the flooded part of the tunnel, where things become dangerous, there is an elevator, he’s sure. Something that cannot be pried open, that requires a key.

            “I’ve tried everything, let me show you,” he says. And then, turning to a square cutout along the wall that I hadn’t noticed, he slides down the steel itself to reveal another video screen. In a moment it has flashing pictures on it, different from the ones before. Without a voice.

            “That’s the computer?” Maze asks.

            “Yes. And it links to all the computers. But it won’t let me see the ones above. And it won’t let me open the elevator.”

            “All the computers?” I ask.

            Wrist shows us a diagram on the screen. Without touching anything with his hands, the diagram moves, lighting up at intervals. Each one of the bright spots on it, he tells us, is a computer that’s on. None of it makes any sense to me, but I ask him how he’s controlling it.

            “It can read your mind,” he says. And then, he shows us a picture of the skulls. “It can project what you imagine.”

            “The skulls?”

            “Yes. Those are Nefandus skulls. Baby skulls. I’ve managed to single-handedly add to the lore of Nefandus dogma through this trick. You see, there is now a monster known as the Baby Eater in this forest. And none of them will come near the door anymore.”

            I manage to interrupt to ask how he’s survived down here. What he’s been eating. But he ignores me, operating the computer. When I ask again, and he remains silent, I nudge Maze. Because whatever fear I had before was reignited by his idea: The Baby Eater. And I wonder if he’s responsible for killing them, and the hallucination thing is all a lie. The idea that he’s been feeding on all the bodies down here enters my head. The screen produces new images on the diagram. Some of them are unlit spheres.

            “See these ones? The dark ones?” he says.

            “Yeah,” says Maze.

            “They’re all the ones above us—in the tower. Everything past the elevator is shut off from me.”

            “How could you have figured out how to work all of this?”

            “I’ll tell you—but first, I have to admit. I’ve come to a theory a bit different from yours,” he says. And for the first time he lets the computer screen go blank and turns to face us both. Something insane seems to creep into his face, his eyes, as he tells us.

            “I think that this is one of many towers—that they were actually—like schools for the Fatherhood. After the world was first destroyed, before it was safe to return to the above ground. This is where the seed was created, the dogma, before it was introduced into the world.”