by J. P. Smythe
We stare at the ground as we walk because looking up means looking into the glare of the sun. The heat is bearable, but only just. It’s getting hotter and hotter with every minute.
“Keep going,” Rex says, though I wasn’t in any danger of stopping. Stopping means giving up—and if we give up here, we’re dead. There’s no question of that.
For the rest of that first day, we see nothing. We keep walking along broken roads, along the shattered sections of what Ziegler told me is called a freeway. Sometimes the road disappears, swallowed into the ground; then you see it reappear a ways off, so you get back onto it. We reason it must lead somewhere. That’s what a road does.
So we walk.
We don’t talk, not really.
We drink the water, trying to be sparing with it, but it’s hard.
We prop each other up when we stumble and we rest when we feel like we might fall.
Then, when night starts to come, we find trees, a group of them, so dry and skeletal they seem like they must be dead, but I can’t be sure; I don’t know how they’re still standing if they’re no longer alive. As we sleep next to them, propped up against the trunks, I move closer to Jonah, huddling close to him to try and protect both of us against the cold wind that kicks in during the night; but he moves away from me, a subtle shift of his body over to one side, an arching of his back. I wonder if I am actually cold, or just cold compared to how hot the daytime is, how brutal.
We’re drenched in sweat when we wake up, the sky just getting light, the heat of the day not yet set in. I have no idea how the body makes that much sweat when it’s so water deprived, but it does and it has; Jonah is so soaked through it’s as though he’s sick. His clothes are wet, and he pulls at them, yanking them off. He stands there, red where the sun has charred his skin, the rest of him pale. I remember the welts that run all the way down his back, like the rungs of some awful ladder. I prop myself up and watch him as he drapes his clothes on the dead branches of nearby trees. The scars bend and twist with his muscles as he stretches to get to the higher branches. I look at Rex, sleeping through this. Face soft. Her hand seems to be holding the space where the other once was. She looks so still and so tranquil.
I don’t have scars like they do. I want to feel mine, because I think that could be calming; to run a finger down them, to understand where they start and where they end, to know that they are finite. But like Gibson told me, the worst scars run deeper than skin.
“Chan,” Jonah says. He’s standing in front of me now, his clothes wafting in the breeze behind him. The sun frames him, shining in my eyes from the horizon, and I have to squint to see him, shield my eyes with my hand. “You did the right thing,” he says. I’ve heard that before from him, but I can’t quite remember when.
“What?” I ask.
“Bringing me with you.” I don’t know if he means here and now—out of Pine City and into this wasteland—or to Earth from Australia. He’s somebody that I’m not sure has come out of this better. Back there, he was safe. Here, I think he’ll be on the run now. We’re all on the run. I wouldn’t blame him if—
Then Rex is up and on her feet. “Talking,” she says, not looking at either of us but explaining what we’ve done wrong, either because it woke her or because we’re wasting precious energy. The metal plug from her missing hand—where they attached the augments to her bone, her nerves—looks sore. There’s red around it, like it’s infected. It’s not the neatest augment job anyway, but I suspect she doesn’t care about that. She picks up the water bottle she was carrying last and drains it. “We’re leaving,” she says.
“Jonah’s clothes are drying,” I say, but she doesn’t care. She starts to walk, the sun on the left of us; Jonah doesn’t even ask if we’re going with her. He scrambles to his trousers and top—barely minutes in the warmth—and he pulls them on, grimacing against the dampness of them, but starting to walk all the same.
We see something in front of us, in the distance. The haze coming off the ground makes it seem as though it’s not really there. We’ve been fooled already by pools of water that didn’t exist, that disappeared as soon as we were close enough to understand that our own eyes were lying to us. This time we see tents—fabric stretched across poles jutting from the ground. Rex, walking at the front of us, stops and raises her arm into the air to halt us. She’s still and silent, and we follow suit.
We watch. There are people there as well. Their shapes move around. Rex crouches. They aren’t looking for us and there’s nobody watching this direction.
“They might be dangerous,” I whisper. I think about the stories that Ziegler told me, about those who were outcast from the cities. Criminals, or people who simply didn’t fit in. Not good people, he insinuated. “We should go around.” Rex glares at me—a look I recognize, that still chills me—and throws me her empty water pack. Her re-breather is almost empty. Our skin, our lips, are cracking in the heat.
She’s right, I know that. I know. But Ziegler told me that the people who live out here, outside of the cities, only do so because they don’t have any other choice. They’re not allowed in the cities.
“Wait,” Rex says to us. Jonah reaches over and wraps his fingers around my hand, clasping it. He pulls me toward him. I try and remember if I’ve ever seen him this unsettled before, this scared. But I can’t. Not even when we knew we were leaving Australia.
Rex creeps forward. We watch her go; she moves so slowly a trail in the dust behind her is the only indication of her movement. Minutes later she’s behind the tent. The sun makes it hard to watch and hard to stay still. Sweat runs off my forehead down my neck to the small of my back, making me itch.
Jonah’s grip on my hand grows tighter as Rex stands and walks up to the camp. We lose sight of her behind their tents and temporary fabric structures, but the sound of voices carries in the air. She says something. They say something. I hear a man’s voice, then another man’s voice—another, then another. They get louder. Rex stays quiet and measured.
Jonah’s fingers are almost too tight on mine.
Silence, for a moment. A moment that lasts altogether too long.
Something’s wrong.
I let go of Jonah and I run, and it’s only as I’m at full speed that I hear Rex scream—but not in pain. It’s fury, and it’s a sound I’ve definitely heard before.
I get tangled up in the tent fabric as I try to get through, and something behind me—a pole—comes loose, clattering, bringing down more fabric. It takes me a second to see what’s happening, but the blood is a giveaway. Rex is covered in it, her hand clutching a curved weapon with a wooden handle. She’s swiping at someone, or several people. One of them—a man, naked, his skin leathered and awful—clutches at his throat, blood coursing out from between his fingers. Another man is holding his groin, weeping. Another looks fine, until I step forward and I see that he’s not quite whole anymore—his shoulder is divided by a sharp line from his neck, threatening to peel away from the rest of his body.
Rex kills the fourth and last while I watch: two smacks of the blade into the neck before the head comes off the body. Watching her fight, every memory comes back. The last of the wall around her comes tumbling down. She is a dervish—dangerous and, in her own way, quite incredible.
Jonah rushes to us and sees the blood; he falls to his knees, starts to retch. He’s not ready for this. It’s too soon for him.
“They started it,” Rex says. “I asked them to share, but they . . .” She nods to the one who’s holding his groin.
Behind him there’s a barrel and around it, the floor is wet. There are a few tins of food sitting against the barrel’s side. Rex pulls the lid off the barrel, reaches in and raises her hand to her mouth. She drinks, and she smiles at me.
She beckons me over to drink with her.
We take some fabric to make our own tents. When it’s time to stop walking for the day—a slower day, bellies full from eating the tinned food—we drape it on bushes and dry shr
ubs and lie underneath it, as if it will give us protection. Jonah wakes us with screaming and moaning. Rex stands up and walks away from us until she’s out of range of the noise; I watch her lie down underneath the stars, flat on her back.
I want him to feel better. I feel calm with him, but worried. He’s not himself, not yet. He will be, I tell myself, eventually. It’ll take some time.
But I wonder if he’ll thank me when he is. I stroke his head to try and calm him, half hoping he’ll wake and look up at me and show that he remembers me, but he doesn’t even stir under my touch.
Midway through the following day, we come to an abandoned town. A row of houses on either side of the road, a few other streets coming off that.
WELCOME TO STAUNTON.
We pass what used to be shops, before they were abandoned. There’s evidence of fire in the buildings; on one side of the road stand the jagged remnants of a forest, the stumps of charred trees and blazed-out brush on the ground. Far off in the distance, I can just make out a large depression in the ground. Maybe it was once a lake or something like that: Now it’s dry, cracked, running off in the distance, the ground like dried-up old skin. Jonah lags behind Rex and me. He slept all night—unlike me—but is so tired and weary it’s as if he barely shut his eyes. He doesn’t say much of anything. Instead he shuffles, trips over his own feet. Leaving the prison, us freeing him, it’s exhausted him. I don’t say it aloud, but I want to find a house for him—a bed where he can sleep again. Even if it’s just for a few hours.
I don’t have to suggest this, though. Rex is the first to turn off the road as we pass a house: big windows, wooden slats across them to keep the light and heat out. Nothing like the houses in Washington—it’s more like something you see in a holo of what life used to be like on this planet. Rex walks to the front door and doesn’t even try the handle. She kicks the wood away and it shatters, brittle and dry. The inside of the house reeks like rot. It’s worst in the kitchen, where Rex scavenges for food, opening cupboards. Insects scurry out across the floor, over and under our feet, completely unconcerned by our presence. There are lizards on the walls that stare at us then dash away when we get closer until they’re all clustered in the furthest reaches of the room.
Rex finds a can of fruit with a faded label and smashes it on the counter, tearing the metal apart. She considers the contents but dismisses it, throwing the can aside; as it lands, it spills out a green mulchy paste.
“Useless,” she says. Her voice sounds much more like it did on the ship than even a week ago: graveled and harsh, coming from somewhere deep in her throat. It could be the heat, the dryness of being out in the world; it could be her remembering more of who she is.
“We should stay here awhile,” I say, looking at Jonah, then Rex. She doesn’t make eye contact but nods. So I lead Jonah upstairs, opening doors.
There’s a body in the first room I enter. The remains of one, anyway. I shut the door as fast as I opened it.
In the next room, there’s an empty bed. On the blanket, a picture of a man in a dark outfit and a mask. Poses like he’s fighting somebody. I lead Jonah to the bed, pull back the covers, and I lay him down.
“Stay here,” I say. “We’ll just be downstairs.”
“I missed you,” he says. Out of nowhere. His hand finds mine again. “When I couldn’t find you.”
“I’ve been here,” I tell him.
“Not now. Before. When we landed.” He lies back, shuts his eyes. He’s remembering. I sit by his legs, our fingers entwined. I swear something feels different in his touch. “What they put us through. Do you know? Did you have it happen to you?”
“I did,” I say.
“I kept thinking: Chan will save us. But you weren’t there. And then . . . Then I forgot.”
“I was trying to find you.”
“I know. But that’s what you do, isn’t it? You save us. That’s why you’re so good.” His speech slurs. He’s drifting. “That’s what makes you who you are.” I lie down next to him as his words fade away. “You want to save everybody, but you can’t. Have to let us save you once in a while. But that’s why you’re special.”
“I’m not special,” I whisper. “I was lucky. My family made me lucky.” My mother. Agatha. You, I don’t say.
We lie in the silence for a while; his even breathing is so soothing I feel like I could sleep as well. But I don’t. There’s work to be done.
In the kitchen, Rex breaks open another door. There are stairs behind it that lead downward. She goes down them into the pitch-black. I follow her. I don’t want her to be alone. It’s immediately cool as we head down. I keep my hand on the rail, hear her feet on the steps below me.
“Wait,” I say. “Our eyes will adjust.” We spent years of our lives—from birth—in a place that was badly lit. The light from upstairs is enough, and I start being able to make out shapes: racks, rows and rows of shelves with circular shapes on them. She reaches for one, and she passes it to me. It’s heavy. I go back up the stairs into the brightness coming through the huge glass windows along one wall of the house. CABERNET SAUVIGNON, it says. It’s full of liquid. I break it open and pour it out. It’s a thick red color, like blood almost. Wine. Ziegler drinks this. I’ve seen him—bottles of it like trophies in a rack on his kitchen counter. Dusty. Better with age, he told me. I’m betting these are older than anything he’s got.
By the time I get back down, Rex has smashed the neck from another bottle, and I hear the sound of her lapping at the liquid as she pours it out. I wait, expecting her to say that it’s bad; that it couldn’t possibly survive this long under these conditions. But she doesn’t. Instead she hands me the bottle and I run my fingers over the shattered glass, feeling for where it could cut me. I pour it into my hands, lift it to my mouth, and I drink. It’s ridiculously sweet; it’s not pleasant, but it’s wet. And right now that’s enough.
I can see the outline of her glugging from yet another of the bottles, raising the shattered glass to her mouth and taking it straight down. I hear it spilling over her, spattering onto the floor. She laughs. I’ve never heard her laugh before.
We’ve been here a long time. Everything swims in my head. It feels like I’ve been punched, kicked, hit in the gut, hit in the head. She’s in worse shape than I am. She drank more. She slurs her words, while I’m sure mine are fine—sure that I’m making sense. I talk slowly when I talk. But we’re mostly silent.
“You could have killed me,” she says, and her words are quiet and slow, and measured. “I remember that.” They broke her for months, but it wasn’t enough to destroy Rex. “You were going to kill me.”
“I was,” I say.
“Did I wrong you?”
“You were a murderer,” I tell her. “You would have killed me and everybody I loved. You took Mae.” I realize I’m shouting at her, my voice angry.
“Mae,” she says. “The little girl.”
“You took her from me. You scared her. You could have ruined everything for her.” She nods while I’m talking. It looks like she’s falling asleep, her head lolling as she listens, her eyes shut. “You were a bad person.”
“You weren’t better. You hurt me.”
“It’s not the same,” I tell her. “You gave me no choice. I had to stop you.”
“Maybe.” Then she’s quiet for the longest time. I can feel the room starting to spin. I can’t see it spinning, though. Perhaps that’s better. She doesn’t say anything else until I’m on my back, trying to focus on staying perfectly still, feeling everything—today, the last few months, years maybe—drifting away from me. “But I was stopping you, as well,” she says.
I can hear birds, real birds, twittering in the trees—those that survived the catastrophes that changed the planet. I used to dream of animals—of cats and dogs and cows and birds—all the things that some on the ship remembered through their own parents, their parents’ parents. The noises that those animals would make when they saw you or when you stroked them. Some k
ids’ song about a farmer and the noises that the animals made. All we had to tell us what the animals looked like was drawings from books or that people had made themselves.
Now most of the animals are gone. The birds that survived aren’t much to look at. They have patches of feathers on their bodies, they’re tired-looking, and they don’t go anywhere near the cities—they wouldn’t have a chance with the air conditioners being as they are. Birds stay wild, unseen, away from people. Their survival instinct must have kicked in: Running and hiding was the only way for them to save themselves.
All through the night I wake—to use the bathroom, which is a proper bathroom, and maybe it was once beautiful, though now the floor tiles are cracked and the paint faded; to get a drink, to try to find water before giving up, having more of the wine, as sickeningly sweet and now wrong-tasting as it is; to the sounds of Rex making this noise that’s halfway between a sob and a growl; to just revel in this house, in being somewhere that is safer than maybe anywhere else I’ve ever lived, that’s a dream of some sort—and I hear the birds in the far-off, twittering at each other, chatting. I listen to them until I drift off to sleep again. It’s almost tranquil, the sound of life.
In the morning, I wake to birdsongs again but now it feels different, more forceful. The chirrups have turned into beeps that sound generated and fake and are growing louder and louder. I don’t know how long we slept for, but it’s light out. I run to the windows at the back of the house; they line almost the entire wall. In the distance, I see specks of dust—motes—moving. That’s them. They’re coming. I don’t know if it’s for us or something else entirely, but we can’t risk it. They’re heading this way, and fast.
I shout Jonah’s name, Rex’s name. They don’t reply.