by Terri Kouba
The next time I saw Marla, two months later, she had lost over ten pounds. The lines on her face were deep, but not as sunken as her eyes. Knowing that she had created that weapon of destruction, now that it had been used, had eaten away at her and she was less than she was before.
Marla and I passed each other in the hall. I saw her trembling fingers lightly touching the wall, following it down the corridor. Before she could raise her head I ducked into the first room I came upon and quickly closed the door behind me. I actually braced it with my foot, in case she had seen me and attempted to follow.
My father had told me that she had become obsessed with finding a way to kill the Slicers. She had ceased all of her efforts in building the new underground eco-system and had, in fact, stopped maintaining the existing systems, which is why we had to restart the weather system three times in the last two weeks.
When my father brought her food, she would eat it only during a pause in her work, not even noticing that the fats had congealed on top of her soup. She started sleeping in her lab, wasn’t changing her clothes, wasn’t showering. She became erratic, shouting at people, talking to ghosts. People started whispering about her, avoiding her.
This was my first time out of the caverns in over a month and I would have never come up except I could hear the urgency in father’s voice when he called.
As I walked through the hallways my eyes avoided the windows. Real sunlight held no favor with me after seeing the manufactured sunlight in the caverns but what my eyes really avoided was what flew in the sunlight, their flashing silver wings a precursor of their menace.
I stood there, my foot pressed against the door, literally trembling from dread that she had seen me and would try to open the door. Blood froze in my veins when I heard the animalistic scream. It was like the dusk scream of the cougars downstairs, or the early morning scream of the peacocks in the eastern ecosystem. It was visceral and base and my ears closed of their own volition.
A voice inside my head said that she had seen me and my avoidance had broken her. Then I heard a thump and the door budged against my foot. I pressed against it harder, resisting the force. The door handle turned and shook and I heard a sigh as a heavy weight slid to the floor.
It was then that I saw a trickle of blood flow into the room underneath the door. I flung the door open and Marla slumped into the room, unconscious. Sarah stood white-faced against the wall, the knife in her hand dripping blood onto the floor. I looked again at Marla and saw her clothes covered in blood. I pulled her shirt away and saw her lifeblood pumping out of a three-inch gash in her belly.
I am ashamed to admit that I closed my eyes. This is exactly the reason why I didn’t want to come upstairs, why I didn’t want to leave the safety of the caverns. Life up here was terrible, full of blood and torn flesh and death. Life down there was idyllic, free of fear, full of wonder.
I cursed my father for wrenching my peaceful life from me and throwing me once again into this hell on earth. I hope now in the afterlife he has forgiven me for those first thoughts. It was a terrible thing to do but seeing Marla dying, her head in my lap, reminded me of how terrible my life had once been.
Marla’s guard came around the corner and skidded when he saw her on the floor.
“Get a doctor, quick,” I shouted to him.
“Which one?” he asked.
“All of them. Quick. Quick.” I removed my outer shirt, rolled it up and pushed it firmly against Marla’s wound.
I looked up at Sarah. “Put the knife down. Sit down,” I told her sternly.
She looked down at the bloody knife in her hand as if seeing it for the first time. It slid out of hand and clanged against the floor. She slumped against the wall and slid to the floor.
“What have I done?” she whispered. She looked at me with glazed eyes.
I looked away, thinking that I could have just as easily done this to Marla. Marla embodied everything I wanted to forget. I wanted to live the rest of my life safe in the caverns beneath the earth. Marla was directly threatening that dream.
The next few hours were a blur of doctors carrying Marla away to surgery, followed by incessant questions by Derrick, Kendra, Robert and especially my father. I was sure my father, he who knew me best, could see that while I did not wield the knife this time, it certainly could have been me who stabbed Marla. The more I hid my eyes to hide my secret the more he mistrusted my words.
When we were alone later that night, in my room upstairs, Dr. Martin came to deliver the news; Marla would live. She had lost a lot of blood – because I barred the door I secretly told myself – but they were able to repair the nicks on her stomach and intestine. She would be back to normal again a month or so.
A horrid thought flitted across my mind; if I had waited to open the door, if I had hid in the room until everyone was gone, Marla would have bled to death and I would be able to spend the rest of my life in the splendor of the cavernous gardens. Instead of blaming Sarah for harming Marla, I blamed myself for saving Marla’s life. I fled to the bathroom and vomited.
I sat in a sweat-soaked chill, my head resting against the toilet seat. I hadn’t killed her, but I had wanted her dead. Marla, the woman who built Plato’s Cave and rescued us from the Slicers, the woman who gave us Eigengrau fields impervious to the Slicer’s sharp blades, the one who gave us orange groves and clear streams and lilac bushes.
I had wanted people dead before. I had killed people before, with my own hands. But never before had I wished death upon one who had given me so much.
I knew why my stomach rebelled. Even without all that she had created, I had come to love Marla like a sister. We had laughed together at my father’s terrible jokes, we had caused a small lab explosion when we were experimenting with recombinant DNA on different metals. After my father, she had become the most precious thing to me, even more precious than my distant children. And I had wished her dead.
My body convulsed and I slipped to the floor, my body involuntarily flopping around, sweat streaming from my pores. I hit my head against the base of the toilet and darkness enveloped me. When I awoke my father was kneeling at my side, patting a wet cloth against the dried blood on my forehead.
I had been such a fool. I didn’t want Marla dead. Because Marla spent all of her time upside, out of the caverns, I let myself be convinced that she and the Slicers were one and the same. I can laugh at my foolishness now but then I was horrified. I had prided myself on my scientific mind, my rational thought, my logical solutions. To realize that I had let my thoughts get twisted into such emotional knots was shocking.
That was when I saw it for what it was; the true face of fear. The fear I felt when I saw the Slicers kill my brother was a visceral reaction. The fear I felt when I had nightmares of the Slicers attacking my children in their beds was a concern for their well-being. The fear that turned my belly to ice when I was raped the first time, the fear when the marauders descended upon our convoy the first time, the fear that freezes my blood when I hear the flapping of thin strands of metal, all those fears were illusory compared to what fear really looks like.
Real fear is what drives a person to do the reprehensible in order to keep the other fears at bay. I was willing to kill she whom I loved, just to keep my world in the safe, peaceful state that I had come to know in the last month in the caverns.
I looked at my father and saw on his face that he knew. I buried my face in his shoulder and cried harder than I had cried since I was a newly-motherless child.
I had faced fear, the real fear, and I had failed. I had barred the door against Marla and everything she represented. In the end I opened the door, but I tell you, my children, it was a closer call than it should have been. I know you will never look at me the same, that you will wonder how could someone you love have come so close to almost killing the venerated Marla, but all I can say, my children, is that I hope you never have to face fear, real fear, for it tests you in ways you cannot imagine. Nor
would I want you to be tested.