What Tomorrow May Bring

by Tony Bertauski

  As I head down the hallway, I keep expecting to hear guns start firing again, the sound of more fighting somewhere far out in another part of the tarp city, but I don’t. I don’t hear anything but the rain. Then I’m reminded of what happened as I walk through the next room. On the ground are long streaks of dried blood, and wooden boxes that have been broken to bits. Two people are attempting to clean the room up as I walk past. I glance at them and look away. I don’t want anyone to question me. I just need to see Russell.

  When I get to the infirmary, I see Russell sitting up on a bed. His skin looks normal pale again, and his eyes are open. It’s like whatever they’ve been giving him is working already. He doesn’t see me and I run up to him. I put my good arm out and wrap it around him as hard as I can. He coughs a little bit and smiles wide, recognizing that it’s me. He puts his arms around me and squeezes me tight, drawing me in. Then he pushes me away but keeps his hands on my shoulders, watching my face with his smile, and his face looks alive again. I don’t know what to say—I want to ask him how he got out of there, and tell him about the body I saw being eaten that I thought was him. I look around at the thought, expecting to still see the blood soaked bed somewhere, the half-eaten corpse lying there. But everything is cleaned up. It’s like nothing happened in this room. Someone is wandering around near two beds at the back, both of which have new bodies in them. They both look like they’re unconscious.

  “I hear you did good,” he says, watching me, unable to take the smile off his face. I nod and tell him I kicked ass. But that it was nothing special, in mock humility. And then I ask him how he’s feeling. He tells me that they say his leg infection is back, and that he’s got a cold, but that’s about it. Nothing that should prevent us from leaving for Leadville. My jaw drops and I step back, escaping his hands. I can’t believe he still wants to go. I expected it when he was delirious, but now he looks half fine. And he still wants to go. He must not have talked to Dusty or Dusty’s dad yet. He must not realize what this place is like yet.

  Before I can tell him how angry I am that he’s suggested leaving safety, Dusty’s dad walks into the room followed by the woman who was there when I woke up.

  “There you are,” says Dusty’s dad. I nod and look at the woman, thinking she’s gone and gotten me into trouble, as if I owe them good behavior for having treated me. My old defenses rear up, and I look questioningly at Russell, as if we’ll have to snap into action, because they might want to start with us. But they continue to talk and I realize that they don’t want any trouble, just to see that I’m alright. I tell them I feel fine. Dusty’s dad tells me it’s the pain medicine, and he says I shouldn’t be out of bed. I ignore him. The woman puts her arm around Dusty’s dad, and I figure it out that they’re together. I wonder if it’s Dusty’s real mom because she looks nothing like him. He looks just like his father though. Russell speaks up and asks how the rain is. He says he wants to go check on our canoe.

  “What do you want with that canoe?” Dusty’s dad asks, alarmed that Russell is worried about it. Russell tells him we have to get going soon, hit the water and start south for Leadville. Dusty’s dad tells him we’re a long ways from Leadville, and we’d be pushing east as much as south now. And there’s a great current drawing in that direction, pushing things way too far east. He says we’ll be swept up in the waterspouts on the Great Plains sea. It’s a never-ending gale there, he says. Russell doesn’t seem to care, or at least he doesn’t respond with a counter to that point. He just looks antsy, like he’s rejuvenated enough that he’s feeling his old motto roar back to life, and now that we’re sitting in some infirmary unit, he’s wasting precious daylight hours.

  “We plan on doing a little trading here, and then we’re getting on our way,” Russell says. The woman leans forward and puts her arm on Russell, like she’s going to calm him down from the ridiculousness of his mission. She says he should just relax for tonight. He shouldn’t go worrying about anything too much for now, while he’s recovering. There’ve been a couple deaths, she says, and the whole place isn’t likely to be interested in trading at a time like this. We’ll rest tonight, and then we’ll be on our way, Russell says. And he’s dead serious. I see the flicker of the fire in the other room through the tarp, a lighter blue against the blue, and I think Russell’s gone mad. He just doesn’t know there’s hot water here. And fire. And food. And good people. And Dusty.

  Dusty walks in from the other end of the room toward us. He’s still got his rifle with him, and his face is lit with joy to see us—but I notice he’s looking more to me than anyone else. He tries not to let it show, but he keeps glancing back to me. For a moment, I forget Russell’s insanity and melt at the sight of his face. I can’t bring myself to want to leave Dusty for some reason. There’s something magnetic about him that I’ve never felt before in all my life. I worry that my feelings for Russell are getting screwed up, but I push the thought out of my head. I can’t deal with it. The pain medicine has me too cozy inside right now.

  Dusty is so filled with excitement that he tells us everything that happened after I passed out. He first recounts everything we did before that too, making sure Russell hears every detail of my heroic attacks against the face eaters. Dusty says that after I was shot and he sat me down, he ran into another room that was packed with them, but there were a group of tarp dwellers too, and there was a short gunfight. And they all went down, the last of the face eaters. One of them they kept alive to try to question, he says, but it wouldn’t say anything that could be understood. The man was foaming at the mouth, and it’s true what folks have been saying, Dusty says. The face eaters have taken a great big supply of the drug. What’s the drug? I ask. He tells us it’s a stimulant they take, something to keep the hunger off their minds, but that it really ends up making the hunger worse, and makes them keep going long after they should be dead. And sometimes, it stops their hearts straightaway, but most of the time it just makes them more crazy than they already are.

  I think about the one that was blown apart but still crawled toward me on the floor. It had to have been on the drug. The thought scares me. And Dusty then says they’re banding together more and more, making their assaults in unison for some reason. He can’t explain, and his dad hangs his head like he’s right, and there really is no explanation. Then the woman just looks at us and says they must want our flesh all the more now. All the more. And that’s all she says and then she walks right out of the infirmary and leaves us all alone. It felt like she was holding something back and I wonder if Russell felt it too but I can’t ask right now.

  “What happened to you?” I ask Russell, still not having heard a word from him about what happened in the infirmary.

  “He’s a hero too,” says Dusty’s dad. I look dumbfounded, unsure of what he means. Then he goes on to tell me what happened. He says after the gunshots got closer, Russell shot right up out of bed, high fever no matter, and went to the rear shelf looking for a gun to help defend. And that’s when one of them burst into the room. I was there too, with my gun, but it was Russell that took him down, this face eater. It was crazed. One of the deranged ones. High on the speed. Russell just took up one of them chairs there, and I never saw a head explode from a chair before. But this man’s did. He looks at Russell and grins, and Russell looks down, showing no happiness at the reminiscence of what he did. He looks distracted all together, like he’s thinking of Leadville, and somehow, he’s seriously considering taking us out into that boat again. His face shows a puzzle, like he’s figuring out what’s so wrong about all this.

  “Look, Tan and I need a minute alone. Is that alright?” Russell finally says after Dusty’s dad finishes up his story about him killing the face eater and then apparently running around like a madman trying to find me. Yea, sure, says Dusty’s dad. And Dusty just smiles at me, like he’s sure he’ll see me later, and then he turns. I watch him go, his rifle hanging down from his side, out the door toward his father. Marvolo appears in the hallway
and Dusty shouts in excitement at the sight of his friend. Their voices fade as Russell pulls me close to him. He’s serious now, and he makes sure I’m looking right at him.

  “We can’t stay here Tanner. I don’t know what it is yet, but something’s not right,” he says. And all of the sudden, all the beauty I know in him vanishes with those ugly words because I’m scared to death to leave. And I know he’s somehow lost his senses, and he’s still sick, and the defense against the face eaters was a fluke, because he isn’t thinking right. I don’t tell him that I felt something odd about that woman too, like she had a secret, and instead I tell him we have to stay here, and that there’s fire, food, hot water, clothes, and good people. And there’s no reason to move anywhere. He looks upset with me and says, No reason to move? He tells me what Dusty’s dad told him: the face eaters are coming from the west, heading east, and there’s been more and more. More together, operating like a team almost. He says that west of here is a death trap. And if we stay, the attack we had will only come again, but it’ll be worse, and one of us won’t survive next time. I stop and think about what he’s said. I know he’s partially right, and the face eaters are coming from the west, and that we did get attacked on our first day here, and that Dusty’s dad did say things are getting worse. And I realize I’ve never seen face eaters that are high on drugs, and it’s much more terrifying than the old cannibals I’ve come to expect since Rapid City. But still, with all of that, the alternative is the open brown nothing. The cold rain and the endless ocean. The swells that I know are waiting for us. Some of them a quarter-mile long. I tell Russell this, but I don’t just tell him. I plead with him. I explain how hard it was on the boat alone, how we almost died. How Poseidon spared us, and if we fuck with him again we’re going to die. How our canoe is screwed, how we don’t have anything to trade anyway even if we wanted to get enough supplies to move south. And how do we even navigate to get there? Then I hit him where it hurts: Do you remember when you were crying? How bad it was? Look at what’s happened since then. We’ve been saved. Even if a hundred face eaters come tonight, at least we’re on land. And we’ve got guns. And people to help us.

  It’s like he doesn’t hear any of my reasons, but he’s also lost the will of his own to fight for his decision to move out. We’re at a stalemate, and he rocks back a little bit and puts his hands on his head. Then I realize it’s not that he’s starting to give up on Leadville, it’s that his headache is back. I move up to him and start to rub his back, his arm, and ask if he’s okay. He says he’s fine. If we go anywhere, I’m not going until you’re better, I tell him. He doesn’t say anything to this. I remind him I can’t do it alone again. I tell him he almost killed me, both of us. Then he compromises with me, and I feel my spirit soar as high as it’s been since my hot shower. He says we’ll wait a couple days and feel things out around here. See if his hunch is right. But then, we’ve got to make a decision. And as far as he can see it, he says, Leadville is the only real option. He reminds me that it’s the highest elevation city in the country, something I’ve heard a thousand times so it doesn’t even mean anything anymore. He reminds me of the whole town being above the water line. He says that it might not be raining there. Even Cap’n Wallace believed that, he says. I don’t let him get away with all that this time though. I tell him we’ve found a piece of the veneer right here in Utah. It’s alive and well, I tell him. In Dusty and his dad, in that woman, and Marvolo. He doesn’t say anything, and he breathes in real deep and lets out a long sigh, like he’s upset by something but won’t say what. I wonder for a second if he’s psychic, and he’s upset by my new feelings for Dusty. But I know that’s not it, because he finally says, We think we have. We think we’ve found a piece of it. But we don’t know what this place is all about yet, do we? And then he reminds me about what happened in Rochester. I don’t want to think about it. I hate thinking about what happened in Rochester. But he spells it out for me, because he’s afraid I’m seeing all the bright colors of this place, and not the thing that’s producing them.

  Russell starts out by saying that the plan of these people, as far as everything he’s gathered, is to float a barge west to the Sierra Nevada mountains. He asks me if I remember the barge in Rochester. I don’t nod, because I don’t want to remember it. But he goes on anyway, like it’s something we need to remember right now.

  After the Sea Queen Marie sunk, and we had floated on a whale boat for a week, we were picked up by a small gas powered motor boat. They lifted us out of the water and asked where we came from. There were two of them, a man and a woman. They didn’t hesitate to save us.

  Both of them were about Russell’s age, and with smiles on their faces they told us about how lucky we were. They just happened to spot us, and had they not, we would have floated on to god knows what terrible hump of raised land in the West. The West, where the face eaters are everywhere, they had said. They took us on that boat and we drove for a long time, in a direct line over blank water, to an enormous steel barge that was raised high above the water. It looked like a big stinking pile of shit just floating there. But it was a tent city pile of shit, and all the tents were high off the water. They said it used to be an aircraft carrier, and Russell told me that meant planes used to land on it. Now it just floated aimlessly, but the people on it could head out on their small boats and gather up supplies and food from even as far north as Canada. But up there the rain has turned to snow, they said. So they’d stopped getting supplies from the north, and even the south. Snow and ice in the north, and strong currents in the south. Once we were hoisted onto the carrier, everything looked like a dream. There was a long line of white plastic that had turned a dirty shade of brown, tied high around poles to form a long triangular tunnel. Underneath were bags and bags of supplies, a lot of it food. What Russell and I couldn’t understand was why so much it smelled rotten, like it had gone bad. We couldn’t understand why all the food would go bad with as many people as there were living on the carrier. The ones who took us in had told us on the way that there were just over a thousand people.

  Once we got off the motor boat and started exploring, it became clear that there weren’t that many people. It was more like a ghost town. We went through the stinking piles, looking at wasted food, and that’s when Russell started to say that things didn’t seem right. But there were pockets of the tent packed with people, and fresh supplies, and they were happy to give us what we needed—shelter and food and warmth. They even told us we didn’t have to pay them back. Russell grew more and more wary because he said no one gives you something for nothing. Not in this world. We slept the first night under the triangle, and I couldn’t even tell we were on water, the barge was so quiet and still. The man who rescued us came over once in the middle of the night and asked if we were hungry. I felt like he was almost catering to us. It was all too good to be true after the Sea Queen. Russell told me he thought the man had been watching us sleep, and made up the food excuse once we startled awake. I fell under the spell of that place in the first two days, but Russell never eased up, and never let me know he disapproved of my feelings. He started walking the edges of the barge endlessly, watching where the motor boats came in at, how they hoisted themselves up to the carrier surface, studying where the drivers went. Where they put their keys.

  I kept telling him everything was alright, and that he’d grown too skeptical and cold toward people. The world wasn’t as bad as he’d grown to think it was. I was still in the afterglow of our Sea Queen family and thought it wasn’t strange for people to be good-natured. And after the loss, I felt like the carrier could be the replacement family we needed. But it was only the next night that we heard the scream.

  Russell reminds me about the sound of the scream. I say I remember it and he doesn’t have to remind me about it. It came in the middle of the dead night. Russell got up and walked over to the edge of the tent and peered out into the rain. The cry was coming from somewhere far away on the other side of the carrier.
Where are you going? I asked. He didn’t respond, just told me to wait a second. I told him hell no and followed after him. We didn’t have our knives yet.

  We walked through wet darkness for about ten minutes until we reached the edge of a steel tower, some high building built right into the carrier floor with a couple doors at the base. Russell kept looking around, like someone was going to see us sneaking around, but no one was out there but us. I didn’t think that was strange because it was the middle of the night.

  He looked into a few of the windows on the tower and didn’t see anything, and neither did I, so we went inside. I wanted to know what the hell we were doing, why we were nosing around when they were treating us so good. All he said was because something isn’t right. And we have to make sure it’s all wrong here so that we can steal a boat and take off tomorrow. I followed him through a dark hallway to where a thin line of light shone, and then we heard the screaming again but it was very loud, right near us. We’d found the source of the painful noise. It was a room with a large glass window. The strangest part was, it was all frosted over with ice. Like a giant freezer. And then Russell crept up to it and pushed his face against the glass and I can still remember his breath hitting the iced glass and melting a small spot of it. He looked in through the spot. I pushed against him to see too. There was a long tube coming out of someone’s body. The body was jacked into some kind of pump and it was making a small noise. And what the screams had been, he knew right away: the person had woken up when they should have been dead. That’s what Russell said afterward. But either way, it was red, the tube. It was a line of their blood, Russell says. And that was a freezer. I remember all the barrels in there, lined in a row, neatly stacked, iced over, one after the next. Frozen blood. All of it stored for whoever the hell is really running this ship, Russell said in the triangle tarp after we got back. We both stayed awake all night. He talked about what probably happened to the rest of the bodies after the blood was gone. They don’t waste one bit of a body. They’re in this for the long haul. Professional, clean living face eaters.