WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story)

by Turkot, Joseph

  Chapter 3

  When we hit the asphalt again, there are no signs of the bears. Neither of us talk, and we get right to following the roads back. Soon the fear of the bears fades, replaced by the gratitude that the staircase didn’t collapse on us coming down.

  The buildings seem to pass faster on the way home, and every ten minutes or so, smaller ones replace the monoliths surrounding the mirror building. I step carefully over the debris and between the thickest bits of overgrowth, walking step for step with Maze who only occasionally stops to fetch out the map and make sure we’re going the right way. Each time we get to a crossroad and she double-checks it again, I start to get scared that she’s going to discover that we’re lost. It’s like I can’t recognize anything that we’ve passed anymore. And I know that one wrong turn will keep us out here after sundown. But she gets the turns right every time, and I don’t mouth a word of paranoia or fear, bottling it all up and putting my trust in her and the faded paper. When I start to recognize the edge of the city—the low buildings that the Fathers were milling around near, the fence into the container yard, and the distant tree line past the field—a great sense of relief spreads through me. As if we’ve made it home even before we’ve climbed the fences.

  “No bears,” I say.

  “Let’s hope no wolves, either,” she says. But I can’t think of the wolves—my mind is already on the Fathers. The fact that they might be planning our punishment already. If they saw us out in the Deadlands—if they recognized my face somehow in the alley. And I start to think of my mother, and how she’ll go on and on about me missing service. All the confessions I will have to perform. Which Father will I get? With my luck, I know it will be Father Gold. As the paranoia starts to dilute the relief of returning home, it all bursts into terror with one solid look out into the field as we walk past the last row of containers.

  “Shit,” Maze says. She looks behind us suddenly, back to the city streets, as if they might offer us refuge. She doesn’t have to tell me why she’s startled—as clear as day, I can see the pack of wolves. They move quickly, cutting across the meadow, as if they’re just going from one side of the forest to the other. They have no idea we exist. But the tree line toward which they’re crossing puts them squarely by the stone road. The only way home.

  “What do we do?” I ask.

  “Keep our knives ready and make a lot of loud noises if they see us,” she says. And just like that, without another moment to let the fear build, or to plan our passage more patiently and carefully, she asks me for a boost. I want to warn her again—no Maze, we have to wait until we see them cross back to the other side of the field—but I bottle it up. It’s almost a little bit easier than it was on the roof of the world in the heart of the Deadlands when she went to the ledge. But even now, as she jumps off my back, the urge doesn’t subside. I want to resist, tell her it’s not safe yet, that we shouldn’t. Even though I know the wolves will probably never reappear, and we’ll waste the rest of the daylight if we wait. I think of the fact that she’s been out here more than twice. Somehow, I convince myself that it must mean that the wolves really aren’t out to kill us, since Maze is still alive and breathing. I follow her over the fence. My feet crash onto the gravel on the other side and we start our long walk, right into the wide open meadow, across the field and toward the stone road.

  By the time we reach the woods, there still hasn’t been another sign of the wolves. Then, in just another moment, we’re pushing through the first hanging vines and walking on the old stones. Maze keeps her eyes on all sides at once, the dense tree trunks, somehow alert to noises I can’t distinguish from the sounds our own feet make on the sticks and leaves that crunch with each step. It’s when we’re almost to the main road, the wide and smooth beach path that will take us home, that Maze tells me she sees them.

  “They’re watching us.”

  “What?” is all I manage to whisper.

  “They’re going to block us—push us away from the road to town. They want to get us out on the beach,” she says, almost between her teeth so that I have to struggle to make out her words. I look left, right where the beach path steers away toward Acadia, where we should make our turn and jog the last ten minutes to town, and there they are. Two wolves. Their eyes softly reflect the hanging red glow of the sun, enough to give them away in the shadow. And they don’t move one bit. Instead, they watch from the edge of the forest, thinking we don’t see them.

  “Maybe they’ll go away,” I say, hoping Maze will stay put. But then, she starts calling out. The craziest noises I’ve ever heard. Like some kind of monster gorilla or something. I wait, and see her edging bit by bit away from me, out toward the split in the road. I want to scream at her to get back, to stop, but I don’t. I just let her do it. Finally, when she realizes the wolves haven’t moved one bit, that they’re not afraid at all, she comes back to me.

  “Okay, they’re going to run us out to the beach,” she says, as if she’s somehow, through her wild beast calls, entered their minds, and now knows exactly what they’re planning.

  “How do you know that?” I ask, the quiver in my voice obvious now.

  “You remember I told you I’ve been to the Deadlands a lot?” she says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s just say the wolves come with that.” And then, without a word of instruction for me, she takes a step, and then another, until she’s out in the middle of the road. And the same as she predicted it, the wolves take their own steps to match hers, putting their hulking gray frames almost into the road now, blocking the way back to Acadia. And I realize that Maze is right—there’re only two choices now. We stand our ground and fight them, or we go back to the beach. And as I follow her out onto the road, she instructs me to do just the opposite of what my gut is yelling at me to do.

  “Do not run,” she says. “Run and you’re dead.”

  I freeze without questioning her logic, and all I do is try to keep the knife steady in my hands, wondering how the hell I’d even use it if the wolves suddenly decide to charge. And it crosses my head that even if I’m not supposed to run, I couldn’t avert the instinct to do so if they charged now.

  “What do we do if they come?” I ask quickly.

  “They are coming,” she says, and as she says it, one of the wolves takes a slow step toward us, without a snarl or a growl, and then the one next to it does the same. As if they’re trying to cut the distance before we run.

  “Don’t run. One more thing to try. Get your arms out like me,” she says. For the first time I take my eyes off of the wolves and see how she’s widened out, displaying her arms like long wings, one of which has the silver dagger of her knife as a talon. I mimic her, hoping she’s right and that it stops the advance of the wolves. But it doesn’t. And as if in slow motion, they just continue their movement directly toward us, walling us in toward the beach.

  “Walk back,” she says. And then, flicking my eyes rapidly from the wolves to her, I follow her steps so that I’m no farther from the wolves than she is. Together we walk back, and every few steps, the wolves take a quick few of their own and stop. Maze makes another call, a loud maniac cry this time, but the wolves reply with their own. One of them snarls a low threatening rumble. Maze shuts up and keeps going back. I follow, and it’s the same pattern—the wolves wait until we’re almost twenty feet away, but then they quickly shoot forward and gain the ground back.

  “They want us in the open,” Maze says.

  “We’ll be in the open if we keep going,” I warn her.

  “Can’t help that now,” she says as if everything will be alright. I watch the wolves’ glowing eyes flicker off as we retreat, and then back on as they launch up quickly to cover the lost ground. And then, one of them disappears. Right into the side of the forest.

  “What do we do?” I say, starting to panic.

  “You always say you’re as fast as me,” she says.

  “Maze…” I say as we take another few steps. Be
hind us I can hear the crashing of the surf. The edge of the wide open white sand.

  “Prove it.”

  “What?” I say in disbelief, the idea that she thinks we should try to outrun them all of the sudden hitting me like an insane death wish.

  “They hate the surf. If we make it even close to the water, we’re safe.”

  All I can think of is the impossibility of outrunning them. That there’s no way in hell I am going to make it all the way across the sinking sand without one of these creatures biting into my neck. Tearing my leg down first to trip me. The feeling of teeth piercing my skin and my muscles starts to play through my head, like preparation for an almost certain fate.

  “When the other one breaks out of the woods, that’s when we turn and go. Got it?” she says as we take our first steps that feel soft—the first part of the dunes. And then, in the blink of an eye, it feels like we’re almost halfway across the beach. And I start to know—she was all wrong. They never wanted to attack us. Because the one wolf we can still see is just watching us, staring from the trailhead before the dunes, right at the edge of the woods. Like he doesn’t want to step one paw on the sand or give chase at all. And that’s when it happens—from almost forty feet in the other direction, where the forest curves down closer to the hard sand, the other wolf launches onto the beach at full speed. In the same instant, the one at the trailhead bolts forward, the sight of his partner electrifying his body into lightning speed, his whole frame bucking in a line straight for us. Both of them kick up storms of sand, converging to overtake us at the same time, to maul us to death right in front of the beautiful waves and the tower.

  Maze doesn’t have to say a word—we turn together at that instant and run. And all I can do is watch the crashing waves—they seem to get no closer as I pummel the sand as hard as I can. One wave crashes and then starts to draw back into the ocean, leaving its curving footprint of foam. Then, even before the next roller starts to break, I hear the panting and the soft pockets of sand bursting behind me. I dig in hard and see Maze begin to take me on the right. And then, the only thing that drives through my brain, almost like a quiet whisper, is her challenge. To beat her. To prove to her that I’m faster. That I’m better at something than she is. As if this life and death struggle is all so I can prove to her why she should want me—raise the chances that she’ll fall for me by one tiny bit. So I burn my thigh out, and then the other, adrenaline lighting up every fiber of muscle, pulsing me toward salvation at the froth. My eyes rise just a bit to catch the rising tower, its soft glow high up, when I hear the growl. The sound that the wolves have started leaping instead of running because of how quickly their cries catch up to me. And then, I know I’ll get there. It’s as if I’m clairvoyant. It’s a calming feeling and it runs through me—the firm belief that I’ll make it—as I count the final steps it will take to break the water line. Seven more. My body pumps, each time I strike the ground forcing all the momentum to trigger my butt and thigh to react so that I spring forward in long bounds like a rabbit. And then, I’m in. The water wraps around me like a cold blanket but I keep pulling hard, finding ground for more high steps, rising over each wave until I’ve made it out as far as I can go and I fall in. And after I stumble, a big wave pressing me down into the grit of the sea floor, I dig my elbows into the turf and vault back up. My eyes are blurry and I rub them and look back up to the beach. I see one of the wolves a few feet from the surf but Maze is nowhere in sight. And neither is the other wolf. I quickly turn to my right, panicking, waiting for the scream, the snarl, any kind of clue about what happened to her. But then I see the other wolf, long ago curved away from the first wisps of sea foam and air, jogging back toward the dunes. But still no Maze…

  Like a volcano, water climbing high in a wide arc that pours heavy droplets onto my head, she bursts from the ocean next to me. Her long hair falls over her dripping body, and she rubs her eyes and looks at me. Before I can even breathe a sigh of relief that she hasn’t been eaten alive, she smiles and splashes water into my face.

  “I told you you weren’t faster than me,” she says, face lit with a stupid grin, as if the fact that we just nearly died, and that the wolves are still watching us from the beach, hasn’t had any bit of effect on her. But I can’t help it—part of me wants to join her mania. I look at the wolves, to make sure they won’t come into the water, and then, I look back at her. I disappear under the water and squat as low as I can, and then, I burst back up, thrusting my arms to volley a wall of sea at her head.

  “I beat you by a mile,” I say.

  “Beat who by a mile?”

  “A mile.”

  “You were close. I’ll give you that.”

  I realize the truth, that I have no idea if I beat her or not. And suddenly, I don’t care anymore. It’s ecstasy just to know we’re alive.

  “What do we do now?” I ask her, my body finally adjusting to the temperature, no longer shivering from the chill that first swept through me when I hit the water. It starts to dawn on me how far from being home safe we still are. And that it won’t be much easier to get there from our trapped position in the ocean. She ducks her head back underwater then swings it out, whipping her hair so that it almost slaps my face. She grabs it and pulls it back out of her eyes, twisting it and letting it flop on her neck. Then, she looks out at the beach to survey our fate. The wolves are walking away from us still, but they turn back every few steps and pause. Looking back to see if we’ll push our luck. And then, before they even get to the trailhead, she seems to know what they’re up to.

  “They’re going to wait us out,” she says. And just a moment later, I see that she’s right again. The wolves stop at the trailhead, looking down at the beach, just staring at us. One of them lies down, and then the other does too, so close that it looks like they’re cuddling up together. The gloom makes it impossible to see their eyes now, and it strikes me that it also means something else, something much scarier: it’s almost night.

  “For how long?” I ask, the exhilaration of the escape draining out of me at the prospect that it’s all been for nothing—just a delay in the inevitable promise of a mauling.

  “I don’t know. Maybe a few hours. Maybe till morning.”

  “Morning?” I can’t even begin to think through all the ramifications of not coming home for the night. What mother would say. What the Fathers would do. Because as far back as I can remember, from the time I was a little kid until now, I can’t remember anyone who wasn’t a Father that stayed away from Acadia overnight. Not even Maze, since she came, who of all people would be the one to pull something like that.

  “We just have to wait and see,” she says. And then, when I start to think of hypothermia, and how we’ll eventually have to crawl out of the water half-frozen, even if it means sitting in the spray of the surf all night in case the wolves charge back down at us, Maze wraps me in her arms. I think for a moment she’s doing it just to touch me—to feel that I’m really here with her, still alive after the near-death ordeal. But she’s just turning me, as usual, like a puppet, to see something that’s caught her interest. And when our backs are to the wolves, and we’re facing the flat line of the forever ocean, I look at the orange glow of the sunset and the long, unending line of the tower until it disappears out of sight. Up and up, hidden in places by strands of red clouds. But Maze has something particular she’s looking at. She throws her finger out and I see the soft glow—the spot where she thinks there’s a generator—a dying glimmer of light. I try to figure out how high up the glow must be—how many of the skyscrapers I stood on earlier it would take, one stacked on top of another, to climb that high.

  “That’s what the mirrors are pointing at,” she says. For a moment, we watch the tower together. At first I have to keep twisting my head back, uneasy without constantly checking to see where the wolves are. But they don’t move an inch, and finally I stare uninterrupted at the sunset as it fades into pink and finally dark gray, watching the glow on the to
wer fade to nothing. And then, the tower is just a dark incision, cutting the sky in half.

  I look away after a long time, as if I’m snapping out of a trance, but Maze is still looking at it. The last rays of sunlight illuminate the lines of her profile. I follow her dark eyebrows to the edge of her brow, and then where it curves in and swoops back out, down to her perfect nose, her perfect lips. They look wet even though she hasn’t dunked her head again. As if there is some permanent moisture and softness there. She softly brushes back a flapping strand of hair, placing it behind her shoulder. I feel like she might know I’m watching her now, studying the paralyzing beauty of her complexion, wanting to break our separation and to touch it, to taste it for myself—to lean in and kiss her on the cheek right now, while she’s not even looking. To say the hell with my fears, the ones that—just the same as make me overprotective of her—have steered me away from any kind of advance. That have seemed like warnings, and told me by way of instinct that anything I try will be met with utter and quick rejection, so it’s better to never attempt anything at all. But it kicks in that I nearly died, and that I might still die, because the wolves haven’t gone anywhere. And I’m already in an impossible and unknowable amount of trouble when I get back home. So breaking one more rule of scripture that neither of us believe in won’t make it any worse. And if I don’t do it now, I’ll die regretting it. Like a revelation, it slaps me—that there’s no good reason not to do it. To say the hell with it all. To kiss her.

  Feeling completely under her spell now, and knowing there’s no turning back, I let the adrenaline from what I’m about to do take control. It moves my body for me, and sneakily, I push myself through the water, so close that I think my feet might step on hers. And then, when I’m sure she must realize I’m not looking at the tower now, but at her, and that I’ve come in very close, she screams out.