Long Dark Dusk

by J. P. Smythe

  And I wonder, in that moment, why we close the eyes of our dead. When did we decide that the dead shouldn’t face whatever comes next with their eyes open? When did we decide that they should be put into the dark, shut away, blocked out from everything after them?

  The birds swirl. They make a spiral in the sky, round and round, and they start to descend. I hear the sound of a whip lashing out and I shut my eyes.

  The sound of the gun going off is louder than it was when we were on the bike. Here, without the rush of the air as we sped along the road, it’s the most colossal noise. A few of the birds are caught in the blast, and we’re showered with sparks and chunks of metal as they fall to the ground.

  The rest of the birds disperse. For a second, they look almost like the shape of a star: different points going off in every direction. Rex coughs, breathing hard and heavy. She’s bleeding, I see—some wound on her chest, a spot of it coming through the fabric of her top.

  “Let’s go,” she says. She keeps the gun trained on the birds. They don’t fly away but they don’t come any closer, either. I help her to her feet and we run to the bike, half dragging one another as we go. The birds stay back. They didn’t get close enough to take us, but we were lucky. If Rex hadn’t woken up . . .

  “Get it started,” she says. We climb on, just as we were before, and I tell the bike to start, to put us back on the road.

  “Operating at fifty-percent efficiency,” it tells me, but I don’t know what that means.

  “Just go,” I say. Rex keeps the gun aimed back at where we came from. It’s the longest time before she stops, puts the gun down, turns back around toward me; I hear her sigh, feel the weight of her head as it rests on the back of my neck.

  We stop to stretch our legs. Halfway to the city, the bike’s screen tells us; but the battery is more gone than that. It wore itself down when I was in control, or when it was putting itself right after the crash. Either way, it’s running lower than it should, I think. We’re both aching, and neither of us says very much. We stand in the desert, we look at the horizon, and we stare. As the sun starts to set off in the distance, I know what I’m looking for. The shaking line in my vision that could be—should be—the sea.

  TWELVE

  “What happens when we get there?” Rex asks me. We’ve stopped again because it’s getting dark. The light on the front of the bike flickers; something’s broken inside it. It’s too hard to see and we can’t keep going down this broken road without seeing where we’re going. So we’ll sleep. That’s the easiest thing to do.

  In the last light of the sun, we found the trickling remains of a river. When we arrived, we sat and drank until we felt bloated and sick, our faces pressed down into the dying river. It was salty but not too bad; the water warm and bitter, not unlike the taste of blood. But we didn’t care. And then we lay back and pined for food, listening as our bellies rumbled. Neither of us said a word, not about the water, not about each other. Rex didn’t even complain about her wound, about the pain she must be in.

  Only now, moments from sleep, does she finally want to talk.

  “Once we get there we find Ziegler,” I tell her. “He’s somebody I know. He helped me when I first got here.”

  “You trust him?”

  “As much as I trust anybody,” I say. I don’t tell her how we left things when I last saw him. I think about how pleased he’ll be, me bringing more evidence of my story about Australia. The woman who tried to kill me, her name carved into her chest, her arm gone—everything that I told him, true. Rex is proof. We watch the moon rise in the sky, pinks and deep blues giving way to blackness—the stars creeping in, poking through, forcing their way.

  “I want to know who I was,” she says.

  “I’ve told you. I knew you as Rex, and—”

  “No. Those are things that I did. Not who I was. Who I am.” I turn and look at her. Staring up at the sky just as I have been doing, looking at the same stars.

  “On Australia, those things are the same,” I say.

  “Where is Australia now?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. What would it look like from here—a speck? Or would we be able to see it floating around like it was when we left it? Somehow static up there, unmoving, unchanged. “I don’t know if you’re the same person. I didn’t know you when we were up there.”

  “You tried to kill me.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “It is one of the things that I remember the strongest.”

  I sigh. “I don’t know if I’m the same person. But I know that I still feel the same, inside me. That’s what matters. If you feel different . . .” I shut my eyes and turn away from her. “I can’t forget who I was.”

  She is quiet for the longest time. “What if I want to?” I don’t know what happened to Rex—when she born; as she got older (either born a Low or inducted at some early age); fighting to survive harder than I had to fight, not having the protection of somebody who wanted nothing more than for her to survive; being constantly threatened—not only by her enemies but by those that she ate with, slept with, fought with.

  I don’t have an answer. During our final days on Australia, everybody looked to me for answers as if I was going to be able to solve every single problem we had. And I knew nothing—I was a few steps ahead of everybody else, but it was just luck, or because I knew Agatha, or because I was out there doing what I could. It wasn’t like I understood the great secrets of life. Everyone treated me like I was older, wiser than I am. But I wasn’t. I’m seventeen years old. Eighteen now, maybe. I don’t know the date, not exactly. Time’s gone too fast.

  Rex doesn’t say anything more. At some point we sleep. It’s cold and I can hear her teeth grinding in the darkness, in the silence of this place. I shut my eyes and I think about Jonah. I wonder where he is now. If I’ll ever see him again.

  Starving hungry, mouths dry, we wake at the same time—at the sound of beating wings. As the sun starts to come up in the distance, a thick orange glow hangs in the sky like fire. Rex sits up looking around her—frantic, desperate. Then she smiles.

  “Look,” she whispers. There are real birds all around us—scrappy looking, patches in their feathers, strange colors, pecked scars from fighting and surviving. “Food.” She reaches for the gun and I realize that I didn’t even think twice about leaving it with her last night while we slept; I just trusted that she wouldn’t use it on me. It didn’t even cross my mind that she might.

  She takes aim at the birds. There’s a thin whine as she turns it on, as the targeting starts to work. “Hold still,” she says, though I don’t know if she means me or the birds.

  She pulls the trigger. One of them pretty much explodes with the force of the bullet that’s been shot into it; the others scatter, leaping up from the ground to take flight, crowing as they go.

  “Food,” Rex repeats. She scrambles to her feet and runs to the bird, picking up the remains and examining them. It’s dripping with blood, split nearly in two—one part dangles from the other. It’s big, though. Big enough for both of us. I don’t know what it’ll taste like. I can’t even imagine. She lifts it to her mouth and sniffs it. She’s about to eat it raw and bloody when I stop her.

  “Wait!” I shout. “You have to cook it.” She tilts her head at me, questioning. “It will make you sick. You’re not used to it. You have to cook it. We need a fire.”

  She growls and throws it at me. It lands at my feet, skidding in the dirt. “Fine then. You get it ready.”

  In the city, birds are served without feathers. I figure that’s where I should start, so I pluck them from its body, carefully at first then rushing it as the hunger takes over. I watch as Rex picks up sticks from the scrub and small rocks. She assembles them in a delicate pile, a tent of twigs and dried-up grasses, and then she kneels next to it. She takes a rock and strikes it against another, but she can’t get a spark. Nothing happens. Again and again she tries and gets angrier, more frustrated with herself.


  The last of the feathers come out, but they take effort. Some are set tight and the skin around them is hard and leathery. Blood flows over my hands as I squeeze the bird to get enough purchase.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to it. It can’t hear me. I wonder if it even knew what was happening to it as it died.

  Rex throws one of the rocks away, pitching it far into the distance. We don’t hear the thud of it landing, but it scatters some of the birds that settled down again, forgetting what she did, trusting us again. She picks up another stone and changes tack, this time striking it with her knife—hammering the sharp edge onto the stone at an angle. It isn’t long before she gets a spark, then she dives to the ground, blowing into the small pile of tinder that she’s made. The fire takes. It burns so quickly it’s like there was fuel there.

  I walk to the fire and sit down opposite her. I take a stick from the ground and drape the carcass over it, and then hold it out over the flames. The blood drips from the creature, sizzling on the fire, making it smoke. The skin of the bird starts to change color almost immediately.

  Rex’s mouth hangs wide, a slight trail of drool on her lip, and I don’t blame her.

  We eat every single piece of the bird. Everything. Rex doesn’t care: It’s all meat. She plucks the head from the body, charred almost to black, and she uses her knife to scoop the brain out of its skull, eating it right off the blade, a lump of deep purple and red that slips into her mouth with an ooze of liquids. She sucks the eyeballs from the head after that. Every bit is food.

  She gives me most of the meat from the body. The bits that I recognize. It all tastes the same to her—or she acts like it does—eating as a means of survival rather than anything else. It’s amazing, the energy that I feel after eating it. It’s like the last couple of days haven’t happened. I feel so much stronger. We stand up, stomachs aching, crying for more food and hurting because they’re unused to being full at the same time, and we walk to the bike, start it. We get on the road again, driving slower, letting the bike’s computer take control.

  “Economy mode,” it tells us, and we get to watch the scenery some more. The engine cuts every so often, letting us cruise. We enjoy this part: the wind in our faces, brushing through our hair, across our heads. Later I feel Rex slumped against me, sleeping as we go; I hold on, eyes wide, trying to concentrate on the landscape we’re passing through.

  We pass nothing and we see nothing; the broken tarmac looks the same as it does everywhere else along this road.

  I think, for a moment, that I could get used to being here. I could live out in this place if I had only a little more—shelter from the sun, food, and water. I could bear the heat. I could dig a hole, like the downstairs room of that house outside Pine City where it stays cool, and I could live there.

  And Mae. She’s there in the fantasy: playing in the stream, eating the birds with me.

  I see it when we crest a hill, almost to the city: the sudden endless blue that somehow meets the sky, almost as if they’re one and the same. I have the view to myself for a moment. I try to take it all in, try to understand what it is. I’ve never seen it before: two not-quite-different colors colliding, then the green along the shore—grass and trees like they have in the city but sprawling, untamed. The sea glistens under the sun. I want to drink it, swim in it, lie in it and float, let myself drift.

  “Rex,” I say. “Wake up. Look at this.” I feel her move, her arms unwrapping from my body. I hear her gasp, softly as anything, when she sees it.

  “What is that?” she asks.

  “That’s the ocean,” I say. The bike keeps going, slower and slower, trying to get us there. It won’t quite make it, but we can see it—we can see where we want to be.

  The bike gives up just as we reach the first blades of grass from the dirt. The wind is stronger here and the air doesn’t feel quite as hot. And it tastes different—there’s salt on it; it’s wet enough that if it catches you right, it’s refreshing. I can’t quite tell how big it is, not really, because there’s not much to give it scale—just the stretch of ground that goes off, changes, slips underneath the sea. The sea stretches on and on. I say good-bye to the bike as we walk off because it feels right. I thank it. It did a lot for us.

  The road is less damaged here than it was farther inland, cracked and then settled back into place. You can see plants growing through the cracks, small green shoots coming up through the little potholes and crevices. As we continue, the sand on the sides turns completely to green scrub: plants and grasses and shrubs. There are no trees, just bushes. The ground alongside the road is softer, not as dry.

  Rex steps off the road and onto the plants and she takes off her shoes.

  “I never had the arboretum,” she says, “not until the end. I used to watch you all in there, on the grass, in the stream. I would wonder what it felt like.”

  “You could have gone in,” I say.

  “They would not have had me. I would have had to fight my way in.”

  “We might have to fight when we get to Washington.”

  “Then why are we going?”

  “For Mae,” I reply.

  “She’s in danger,” Rex says. Not a question, more an assumption.

  “She’s been taken. I want to find her and get her back.”

  “You want to rescue her.”

  “Yes.” I watch Rex’s face. She doesn’t look at me. She presses her hand to her side.

  “I had a daughter,” she says, out of nowhere. “When I was very young. I had a daughter.” She presses her belly, fingers on a scar I assumed was from violence, from conflict, but now it’s so clear to me. It’s deeper than the rest. Older. The only scar that really seems as if it’s always been a part of her.

  “Where is she?” I ask, but I already know.

  “Dead.” She doesn’t pause. The word spat out, full of fury. The Lows were like that. They didn’t try and save each other. Individuals survived as part of the unit. I wonder what happened—if the child was taken from her, if she tried to save it. If she even had the chance. “You want to be Mae’s mother,” she says.

  “I just want to make sure she’s safe.” I think about Agatha taking care of me, teaching me everything I needed to know when my own mother was gone. How lucky I was, even if I couldn’t see it at first. She wasn’t a replacement for my own mother. She was something else to me. A guardian and a friend.

  “What if you can’t keep her safe?” Rex asks.

  “I will,” I say. “I promised her.”

  Rex doesn’t take her hand off her scar. I wonder what she’s thinking of—if she can remember her own daughter’s face as a newborn, if she can remember the sound that she made as she cried.

  The sea is astonishing. When we reach it we stare and we watch the waves as they roll in, crashing over each other, slamming into the rocks that litter the shoreline like jagged teeth. The water churns, and it’s beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.

  We almost run when the grass at the sides of the road gets thicker, growing in and over the ruined road itself; we can see sand, sharp cliff tops, chunks where the earth has fallen down into the sea, chunks of earth lying on their sides—exposed and waiting. We find a path down, a steep slope. I skid and run down it, Rex right behind me—jumping as much as we can, landing on our feet, staying steady. And then we get to the bottom where the sand meets the sea, the water lapping up against it. Our feet sink into the sand—overwhelming them, soaking us—but we keep going. We wade out into the sea itself, feeling the cool water on our legs, our bodies. We drink the water, cupping it to our mouths. It’s salty—disgusting, revolting, and it makes me gag—but it’s water, and my body takes it until it refuses, and I retch it all back up. Rex laughs. She drinks it as well, but less than I do, and doesn’t reject it. And then she submerges herself for a moment, ducking down before springing up, throwing water everywhere. Feeling the blood that caked her, the sand in every line of our skin, the film of sweat: Everything comes off, comes cl
ean.

  In that moment, I remember what it feels like to be free and happy and hopeful.

  We walk south, toward Washington, following the shoreline. This wasn’t always the shore. Once the land went on for miles and miles before it fell off into the water. Then the sea rose and the land eroded and chunks of it were swept away. There are still signs of that: the ruins of buildings clinging to the cliff edges, the signs that say WELCOME where roads once led into towns, the tree stumps that might have been forests jutting from the cliffs. It’s rocky in some places, impenetrable in others. We’re forced out of the sea to walk along the land for stretches before heading back down, letting ourselves get wet again, trudging in our damp clothes as they dry in the blazing heat. We’re hungry again, needing more food, feeling our skin getting hot and dry. Hoods pulled close, burns on our heads from where the sun has found its way through, where the skin is peeled and painful. We talk about fish, which we can see bobbing around, swirling by our feet, coming to the surface. Can we shoot them? I can’t remember having ever eaten a fish, but I know that they’re edible. In the city, I’ve seen them eaten raw. That seems like something we could do.

  I say this to Rex, and she grins, a manic look on her face. She holds the gun above her head, primed to shoot, and she wades out into the water. She stands very still—perfectly still—waiting for the fish to swarm her, to gather around her inquisitively before she betrays them.

  Toward the end of the day, as the sun starts to set, the sky goes black. Night is coming, but then more than that: a darker kind of dusk formed by clouds, strong and gray, swarming in from across the sea. We stand and watch them as they cluster. They move fast and the wind that carries them blows against us. It’s warm and strong enough to push us back a step or two, to make us struggle against it. My hair whips into my face so I tie it back.