by Jim Miesner
Emmanuel picked up the canteen and brought it to his nose before his head jerked to the side and he chucked it away from him. “Oh, God.”
Marlena walked up, brought the canteen to her nose and took a whiff. She couldn’t help to turn her head as she grimaced.
“What is it?” Daniel asked. “What’s wrong with it?”
“You need microbes to digest food,” Jenny said and began to tear up. “All kinds of animals do it, elephants, pandas, koalas, hippos.”
“What is it?” John asked.
“Poop,” Marlena said.
Daniel stifled a smirk. “What?”
“She shit in my water,” Sam yelled.
Emmanuel kneeled down next to her and rubbed her back as she gagged. “You’ll be okay.”
“Don’t touch me,” she said and pushed him away. “It will not be okay. I ingested fecal…” There was another pause as she coughed and spat on the ground. “Material. My body. I won’t... I can’t... I can’t.”
“You’re going to be okay,” Emmanuel said.
There was no smile on his face but Sam couldn’t help feeling like he was hiding one beyond the surface.
She shook her head and hacked. “Feces… in my mouth.”
“I’m sorry,” Jenny said. “I read-”
“I’m not a damn elephant, Jenny! What the hell were you thinking? I’m dead. Do you understand that? I’m as good as dead and there's nothing you can do!”
Sam turned her head and gagged again. When she looked back Jenny no longer stood there, and she heard footsteps fly past her. They picked up speed as Jenny let out gentle sobs and then bigger footsteps followed behind her. When she managed to turn, she saw Marlena jogging after Jenny.
Sam didn’t care, she had sacrificed everything for her, taken this girl as far as she could take her and soon, she would need to live without her. Whether she started now or in a couple of days didn’t matter. She had to focus on herself right now. There were toxic microbes in her gut. A gut designed to be a very delicate ecosystem. There was no telling how this introduction would affect her. Somehow it had already affected her artificial nausea reflex. If it had failed what did that mean for all the other artificial systems in her body?
Most likely it was only a matter of time before everything the Coven had put inside her failed. Which meant Jenny’s little experiment would still likely end in an agonizing death. Maybe this was what happened to Rachel on some level, and the others had just never realized it.
It was several minutes before Sam stopped alternating between gagging and spitting on the ground. During one session she found the nose plugs laying in the dirt. Picking them up, she rolled them in her palm before letting them fall out again. Marlena returned with Jenny not long after as John’s spatula scraped against the pan and he divvied up the eggs.
“Anyone still hungry?” he asked.
Sam listened to her gut gurgle in response and pulled her knees to her chest hoping to stop it, but it didn’t work. Every now and then Jenny took the occasional glance in her direction, but Sam didn’t return it, she wasn’t in the mood to talk. She looked out on the horizon instead as the three pillars of smoke turned into four. Daniel seemed to be the only other one to notice the change.
“Why are they doing this?” asked Daniel as he stared out at the new plume growing in the distance.
Emmanuel put his hand on his shoulder. “It’s going to be okay, Daniel.”
“They’re mad at us, aren’t they?”
“No. They’re afraid of us. When people fear things, sometimes they do bad things to other people.”
“Why don’t we just show them we’re not scary?”
“It doesn’t work that way, Daniel.”
“Why not?”
Emmanuel glanced at Sam then back to Daniel and rubbed the top of his head. “Finish your eggs, we got to head out soon.” He grabbed another canteen, got up, walked over to Sam and handed it to her. “This will help a little with the hunger.”
She nodded and took it before he moved away and picked up the wool bedding around the camp, putting it back into the bags. Sam opened the canteen and held it to her nose. It smelled metallic but she couldn’t get the other smell out of her brain.
“Don’t worry, that one’s mine, it isn’t contaminated. At least it better not be.”
Emmanuel smiled, but Sam didn’t return it.
“What will you do?” she asked.
“What?”
“They destroyed everything you had. What will you do?"
Emmanuel shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t say. All I know is we can’t go home again.”
“You could have gone with the others we met. They probably have food there.”
“We already made a promise to you and Jenny.”
“So, break it.”
“Is that common practice in the Coven?”
Sam opened the canteen and took a sip. “People everywhere break their word all the time.”
He smiled. “The Coven can take everything we have, but they can’t touch what makes us who we are in here.” Emmanuel pointed to his chest. “Our word is our bond, and at the end of the day it's all that matters.”
Sam took another swig. “Nice speech.”
“Thanks. My father used to tell me that. He should have run for Covenant Council.”
“He couldn't. The council is appointed,” Sam said then half smiled before she looked at the ground. “Thank you.”
“It’s just water.”
“Not that. If it wasn’t for you, we’d never have made it this far. We’d probably both be dead.”
Emmanuel nodded. “I was the guy who didn’t want you at first. Remember? You should thank Kelly.”
“He isn’t here. You are.”
She took one last sip and handed the canteen back to Emmanuel. She swished the water around her mouth. There was no taste. He raised the canteen to his lips before he paused, opened his mouth and then closed it.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing… I was just going to ask if you washed your mouth after you drank the poo-.”
Sam slugged him hard in the arm and he flinched, but then smiled when he saw the smile on her face. She couldn’t help it. One way or another she would die out here, with or without Jenny’s experiment.
They packed up the camp after breakfast rather quickly. More dune buggies roared through the desert as they did, more refugees in a desert that was already almost impossible to survive in. Sam glanced at Jenny twice but found her looking away now. When they got into the buggies, Jenny climbed up with John instead. The wind whipped her hair around and John rifled through a bag next to him before he handed her something.
“Storm’s rolling in,” Emmanuel said and handed Sam a pair of dark goggles and a large brown scarf.
“What about Penny and the other sheep?”
“Malcolm? They’ll both be fine. It’s just a little sand.”
She looked back at the others while sand pelted her bare skin, then put on the goggles and scarf. She noticed it was the first time since she had been out of the Covenant that she couldn’t see the horizon. Everything around them looked the same once they got only a few hundred feet from the rock. It was all one big brown haze. She found herself even missing the columns of smoke on the horizon that gave them some sign of where they were.
The sheep crouched down in the cart and huddled in close to her. Penny bleated. Sam sighed as the animal cuddled with her. She scratched the top of her head and under her chin and then Malcolm’s as he baaed too. It made sense her artificial nausea system failed, but Emmanuel’s reminder that the headaches and other symptoms had disappeared made little sense. Was it possible she was changing? If she was, what did it mean? Was that why the Covenant was after them? She pulled up her sleeves. The veins were still there but she swore they looked thinner now. Pushing the thought away, she looked out into the brown haze. She wasn’t going to get her hopes up t
hat there was any kind of life ahead beyond today.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Sand was coming from every which way. It somehow got into her mouth even with the scarf wrapped tightly against her face. They plodded along at a snail’s pace, only able to see a few feet in front of them. She continued to rub the top of Penny’s head as she bleated and huddled close against her on the floor of the wagon.
Marlena, Daniel, John, and Jenny were only a few feet away but already almost invisible in the dark cloud of sand that swirled around them. They were like apparitions from another world and she wondered how long they could keep this up. Emmanuel had said it was only an hour to their destination at first but it felt like they had been at this ten times longer than that. Sam wouldn’t have been surprised if the storm lifted only to see the same valley they had camped in, only a couple of hundred yards off.
If only they could just go faster but they couldn’t afford to lose each other in this. Emmanuel was careful and patient to a fault, and out here that was probably why they had survived so long. He had a lot of other great qualities, too. In another place or another life, Sam thought he could have been something. She wondered what life would have been like if they had met before the world fell apart. She and Emmanuel walking together in a park filled with trees, laughing with each other, back in the days when people ate frozen bovine secretions and threw multicolored discs for fun.
She broke back into reality and realized there was nothing behind her. Even squinting through her goggles, there was no sign of anyone behind them as Emmanuel kept pushing forward.
“Emmanuel!” she yelled, but he didn’t even flinch.
She leaned in closer, pulled her scarf from her mouth and yelled again as sand hit the back of her throat and made her cough. She wiped her tongue on the back of the scarf before standing up on the edge of the cart and leaning into him.
“Emmanuel!” she yelled again.
He finally glanced back toward her and let off the gas. He yelled something muffled back at her but it was impossible to make out over the engine and the wind as it screeched around them, pelting sand against the side of their heads. She pointed back behind them and he nodded before he turned, going even slower than he had before. Their tracks were gone in their wake and Sam wondered how he could know they were even going in the right direction. A hair off and they could easily get off course. Then Marlena’s empty buggy appeared and Emmanuel hit the brakes. They must have been traveling faster than they appeared because Sam had to grab the crossbar to keep from falling out as they jerked to a stop.
“Marlena,” Emmanuel screamed through his muffled scarf. “Daniel!”
He pulled forward a few feet and stopped again when they saw the outline of a second buggy flipped on its side.
Sam jumped off the cart and her feet sank into the sand as she struggled to run. The buggy came more into view and so did two figures as they dug their hands into the sand. It was Marlena and Daniel. Sam ran to their side and saw they were digging John out from under the vehicle. He had a nasty gash on his head, with his legs pinned under the vehicle and he didn’t seem to be moving.
“Where’s Jenny?” she yelled.
“Can’t find her,” yelled Marlena.
“We got to find her,” Sam yelled and pushed out into the storm
Marlena reached out and yelled something at her, but there was no time to listen. Jenny was out there alone.
In only a few steps the buggies and everyone disappeared around her. She was all alone in the brown squall. She walked back along what she thought had been the trail they had been traveling. There was no way to tell and to be honest it was hard to tell if she was even traveling in a straight line as the wind caught her scarf and it fluttered behind her. Why did she have to be an idiot? Jenny was the child, not her. If she hadn’t acted so stubbornly, she would have been in the cart with her. Now she was out here, in this storm alone.
“Jenny,” she screamed through the winds. “Jenny?”
A hand reached out and touched her shoulder and she turned to see Emmanuel standing beside her. “Do you see her?” he asked.
Sam shook her head and Emmanuel handed her a rope. “Grab this!” he yelled.
“Why?”
“So, we don’t lose each other!”
Sam nodded.
“I’ll tie this to the buggy. Wait for me.” Then he was gone again as the rope seemed to hang in the air behind him on its own.
Sam didn’t have time to wait though, she took a breath and pushed forward along the trail until her foot found something hard. She bent down and felt a large boulder. It must have been what John hit that toppled him. It hadn’t been far off the trail and the others had by luck managed to avoid it. Then her foot kicked something buried in the sand and she pulled it out. It was Jenny’s shoe.
“Jenny!” she screamed again.
She counted her steps as she went. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty.
“Jenny!” she yelled.
She swore she heard a voice, but it was almost inaudible. Could it be a trick of the wind?
“Jenny. Over here!”
“Miss. Sam?”
Sam walked toward the sound until the rope jerked her back. She looked down at it in her hand and then let it go.
“Jenny!”
“Miss. Sam!”
On the tenth step from the rope she called out her name again. “Jenny!”
“Miss. Sam!”
It was louder now. At the twentieth step, she saw the faint outline of what looked like a cactus, with footprints leading up to it and rapidly disappearing.
“Jenny!”
The cactus twisted around and froze before it ran toward her and jumped into her arms. Sam hugged her tight as Jenny squeezed her back.
“I’m sorry,” Jenny said.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.”
She pulled her face away to get a good look at her and smiled at the strangeness of the moment. Her apocalyptic reflection stared back at her in Jenny’s dark goggles. The only part of Sam’s body that was visible was a wisp of hair that had peeked out from the folds of the scarf.
“Follow me,” Sam yelled.
She tried to turn exactly around, but as she did, she realized she had lost track of the direction she had come from. Her footprints were gone. She had followed the rope to a point before she let go. Had she turned when she heard Jenny’s voice? She had been so excited that she wasn’t sure. She had just run toward it. No, she had turned a hair to the right, and then when they hugged had they shifted? She picked a point and walked toward it as she counted again. After she reached twenty, she slowed and felt in the sand with her foot for the rope.
“Why are we stopping?”
“I left a rope. It’s a guide.”
Sam got on her hands and knees and felt in the sand hoping to find the course fibers just below the surface but there was nothing there. Either it had blown away, or maybe she had just gone in the wrong direction altogether. Maybe it had blown thirty feet away on the surface or maybe it was buried a foot deeper than she thought. She dug deeper hoping her hands would find it, but there was still nothing.
“What’s that?” Jenny asked.
That was when she saw the rope hovering taut in the air, its ends disappearing into the sandstorm in opposite directions as it moved toward them like the hand of a clock. Where the end had been another rope had been knotted to it, extending the length. She grabbed the knot and shook it. A few seconds later a figure appeared, winding the rope around their arm as they guided themselves back toward her. It was Emmanuel.
Each of their hands followed along the rope until the silhouette of the overturned buggy appeared. They found the end of it tied to one of the axles. The other two buggies were parked at angles to form a triangle that buffeted the wind somewhat. In the middle of them, all was a huge white instant tent. It looked like a giant puffball and seemed like it could fly off at any second but stayed remarkably still.
Sam moved her han
ds over the surface looking for an entrance that didn’t seem to exist until Emmanuel touched her shoulder, and moved toward the other side. He had Jenny by the hand. Sam only took her eyes off them for a second and within that moment they were gone. She reached the spot they had been at expecting a flap, but there was nothing. Her eyes looked and looked as she pushed her hands along the tent for a seam, anything. Suddenly the dust storm disappeared all around as she fell into Emmanuel.
He caught her and helped her to her feet. The inside of the tent felt even larger than it did outside, though with five people and two sheep there wasn’t much room. John laid his head on Marlena’s lap as she wrapped a bandage around it. Malcolm and Penny lay in the middle and Jenny and Daniel sat along one side of the wall, leaving a little room for Sam and Emmanuel. Sam pulled down her scarf and goggles. She could still feel some sand somehow blow across her cheek even through the hidden entrance.
“Are you okay, Jenny?” Marlena asked.
Jenny nodded.
“What about John?” Sam asked.
John groaned and his eyes fluttered.
“I think he’s going to be okay,” said Marlena.
“How far do you think we are?” Sam asked.
Emmanuel flipped his hand back and forth in the air. “We have to be close, but it’s hard to say. This storm might be a good thing though. It wiped out any trace of us and they can't follow us in it.”
Marlena, John, Jenny, and Daniel all shifted to give just enough room for Sam and Emmanuel to sit. At one point, Daniel tried to bring out some cards for a game, but the wind didn’t cooperate. Now and then the top of the tent would get lower and they took turns pushing up the center, letting the sand slide back off, some of it slipping back through the hidden seam.
Despite everything it didn’t feel like they were stuck in a dust storm in the middle of the desert. They talked and joked, each of them smiled as they recounted their bad luck and made fun of John’s driving. Sam was almost sad to see it end twenty minutes later as the shrieking winds quieted and one by one each of them cocked their heads and looked up.
“Storm’s dying,” John said. His head still in Marlena’s lap.