Long Dark Dusk

by J. P. Smythe

  “I don’t like it,” Rex says. Her voice is small.

  “It’s only rain,” I say. I know about rain. I know that every so often, rain comes and it floods the ground, which can’t absorb the water fast enough. The storm goes within hours, and when it’s gone it’s almost like it was never there; the sun boils the water off before it can do any good. There are mechanisms in the city that catch the water to use another time, but out here it just evaporates away.

  I open my mouth, let the rain come in, drink it up. It’s good. It’s cold and it’s wet and it tastes better than the sea; I feel better than I did—despite what’s happening to us—better than I have in days.

  The clouds keep getting closer. Rex asks if we should stop to find shelter, but I can see something in the distance: a gray dot, a speck on the horizon that must be the city. If it’s not, I don’t know what it is. Another city, maybe. Somewhere else that could be safe. I point it out.

  She nods. She listens to me. And just like that, it’s agreed: We keep going.

  There’s no sun, no moon, just a strange half-light formed by streaks of silver lightning as the sky boils above us. It’s terrifying the first time that it happens—the noise a stretched growl as brutal as gunshots, and then that light, those bolts. They’re like scars running from the sky to the earth, but they come and then fade, as violent as anything I’ve ever seen. I’m sure we both scream that first time, but I can’t hear her doing it and she can’t hear me. That’s how loud the noise is. It echoes around the beach, bouncing off the rocks, making the ground feel as though it’s rumbling, ready to tear apart, to swallow us whole.

  Then more rain comes, warm and heavy. I think of the first time that I stood underneath that shower in the secret part of Australia; how it felt unnatural, almost unsettling, the sound of it beating around me, slapping onto my skin. And now, the same feeling—of something bigger than me that thrills and excites and scares me all at the same time. This storm is heavier than even the shower, I think, water driving down from the sky. I wish I knew how it was made, where it came from. I try and look up but it’s too strong; water stings my face and fills my eyes. Rex panics, shouting my name, reaching for me. “It’s okay,” I tell her. As we trudge along the beach I take her hand, squeeze it tightly, slippery as it is from the water smashing down our arms, meeting at the middle between us.

  It will be all right.

  The bolts—lightning, I whisper the name, lightning and thunder hand in hand, like Rex and me—keep darting down in the distance and the sky sounds like anger, like the grizzled rage of somebody screaming in attack. Every so often it heaves a noise up, guttural and pained, and the rain seems to pick up pace. The rain pours down in waves so heavy that we can’t see a thing in front of us, but we keep going, sometimes losing the coastline, wandering into the sea and only realizing we’re wading when the water sluices over our shoes, that’s how wet we are; then it relents, as though it’s breathing or giving us a chance to set ourselves right before it begins again.

  Every time a bolt comes, Rex jumps; every time the thunder rolls, she squeezes my hand tighter. She’s got the gun strapped to her, and I hear the sound of the wind whipping it around. We don’t talk, we just move.

  We walk for hours, on and on, and it feels like we’re getting nowhere. There are inlets dug out from the cliffs, the remains of walls that have slumped, that offer nearly enough shelter—we huddle in them for a few minutes until the chill of our wet clothes drying makes us shiver so hard that our jaws hurt. It’s warmer in the water we discover, and we walk through that for periods. It’s not like we can get any more wet than we already are. We keep going and it’s so dark we can’t see where we’re headed; but as long as we keep the water on one side, it’s the only way we can go. If we go long enough, we’ll get to the city.

  Everything hurts, but that’s always the way it is. I’m coming to accept that I’m simply never going to be comfortable.

  I wonder if I need this feeling, this burn.

  The storm rages harder, faster, brighter. There are flashes of white in the distance and shapes behind them, silhouetted. Details are hard to make out because it’s so dark everywhere else. It’s like staring into a light, at the shapes and colors that are left when you look away.

  The lightning comes faster and it holds, digs its feet in. The sky isn’t black like it should be at night, but a dusky half-light that doesn’t fade when the lightning does. In the distance—as the rain lashes, as we struggle—I see a cliff on the horizon: a jutting monument, taller than anything I’ve ever seen and sticking out into the sea. It’s in our way. We won’t be able to pass it. We’ll have to go back or over, have to find another way around. We’ll lose more time. The lightning flashes again, throwing parts of the cliff into being, almost, and—

  It’s not lightning, not natural.

  It’s the wall that runs around Washington. This is it from the outside—not clean and polished and protected, but beaten by the wind and the sea and the nearly ceaseless heat of the sun, covered in dirt and plants and vines and sand.

  I feel for a second like I’ve come home, and the swell that comes with that—of comfort, of a strange, brief kind of peace.

  But then I realize that’s wrong. This is just a place that I once lived.

  And now it’s a place where I’ve got work to do.

  We get closer, as close as we can. Rex is amazed by the Wall because it’s like nothing she’s ever seen. She didn’t see it when we first landed here. She was unconscious, taken away, healed, and then her mind was purged and rebuilt. She never saw the city. She hasn’t seen the streets, the cars, the people. What’s beyond that wall is going to be a lot for her to take in. I know that all too well.

  Mechanical birds circle above, even in the storm, their lights shining down on the rubble at the base. We can see marks where it’s been attacked, or maybe where the landscape has worn the metal and stone away. It resembles the rocks and beaches we’ve walked past on our way here. Chunks have been taken out and the bricks have collapsed in places—enough that you can see that the wall is old and weathering badly. It’ll need work to stop it from collapsing in on itself; they haven’t taken care of it on the outside. They’ve worried about what’s inside, what’s visible. Ziegler told me that they—we, people, humans—always leave worrying about things we can’t see until it’s too late, until the very last minute, and then we have to repair problems and calamities. We should have been trying to stop them from happening in the first place but we don’t. That’s human nature, he said; that’s the problem with us. We don’t worry about the future, we’re always too concerned with living in the now.

  We watch the birds’ lights as they circle, shining down at the base of the Wall. They shine on what looks like trash or rocks, until we get close enough to see that they’re not—they’re tents. Rocks are arranged into shelters, into caves. Fires burn inside them. There are people here. Some of them notice us and they stop and they stare. They raise their hands into the air and signal through the rain—picking up torches to wave—to get our attention, to show us that they’re there.

  “Who are they?” Rex shouts through the pelt of the storm. She has her hand ready to pull the gun and her knife primed, prepared for battle. She doesn’t trust them. I’m not sure that she’s wrong. “What do they want?”

  I stare, trying to make out their faces, trying to figure out what the waving means.

  I’m sure they are smiling.

  “They don’t look dangerous,” I tell her.

  “So why are they here? Why not inside?”

  “They’re exiled,” I say. Ziegler told me about them. Some people didn’t want the city, didn’t want the control over their lives that living there demanded, so they left. And now they’re calling to us.

  It should be a death sentence: forcing people from the cities, making them live outside of what we know. No prisons or camps to hold them, exiling them into a broiling wasteland where there’s barely food, barely she
lter. There’s no hope out here; that’s the punishment. Exile is a death penalty delivered slowly and surely. An inevitability. It’s cruel and it’s what happened to our ancestors: sent onto Australia, given a chance to survive—a chance that, it was assumed, would be squandered. Out of sight and out of mind.

  But we survived. And these people have survived. They’re thriving. The woman who was waving to us rushes up as we get closer. She takes my hand. Her hair is long, threaded together into chaotic knots, and she smiles with a warmth that I haven’t seen in a very, very long time.

  “You’re wet,” she says. Her accent is so loose that the words are a long slip out of her mouth. She reaches for Rex’s hand and then sees the knife. “And you’ve been in the wars.” This little chortle comes from her, halfway between a cough and a laugh. “You want some food?”

  “Yes,” Rex says, before I even have a chance to consider her offer. She follows the woman back toward their camp, toward the fires in their makeshift caves, the smell of cooking food drifting toward us on the warm damp breeze.

  They have chairs made from driftwood. Tents of stretched fabric sewn together in patchwork. They welcome us in, ask us where we’ve come from. There are four of them, and more outside.

  “We don’t see many strangers here,” says the woman who greeted us. “I’m Fiona. This is Mark. Mark!” A man rushes in holding a net and a spear of some sort. Rex flinches and then relaxes. He’s got soft eyes, soft features. Rex and I are very good at spotting the ones who’ll hurt us. “Get the girls some food,” Fiona says. “They’re needing it.” She picks up a kettle that’s been warming on the fire and she pours whatever’s inside into cups, passes them to us, tells Rex to watch herself because it’s hot and harder to manage with only one hand.

  The smell of the food hits me. I don’t wait for it to cool. I gulp it because I know the scent, know what it’s going to taste like, what it will remind me of. It’s a stew of some sort and it tastes just like we used to make on the ship. My mother used to make it, and then Agatha, Bess, so many other people. It scalds the roof of my mouth, my tongue, my throat. I don’t care.

  “Like I asked, where you from?” Fiona says. Another woman, much younger, sits down across from us, her back against a rock. She doesn’t take her eyes off me. She’s suspicious, and who can blame her? “We don’t judge. Some of us, we’re exiled, sure. Some of us, we’re here of our own choice. Whichever is your story, we won’t question you. But we need to know. That’s the deal. We’re accepting of anything as long as we’re all on the same level.”

  “We’re from Australia,” Rex says. Fiona takes a second, sizing that up, unsure of what to make of it. Then she laughs, and she rocks backward.

  “Darling, you’re not. I know an Aussie when I see one, and you’re not one. She sank a long time before you were born. I should know, shouldn’t I?” Her accent. That’s why I don’t recognize it. She’s not from here.

  “You’re talking about the country,” I say. Her head tilts to one side.

  “I was there until the day we were forced off—stayed well past everybody else, past the evacs, all that. What other Australia would I be talking about?” she asks.

  “Up there,” Rex says. She looks up at the sky and Fiona’s gaze follows. “The spaceship.”

  “I see,” Fiona says. “I reckon that’s a story I’d like to hear one day.” She stands up and cranes her neck to see down the beach. “After you’re fed, eh?” I stand up and look as well. There’s a group of people down at the beach where the Wall meets the sea, circling around, digging its own trench underneath the surface. The rain has mostly stopped now, the lightning abated. The sky’s gone back to its own color. The water crashes and slams into the Wall; to watch it from here, it’s like seeing the action slowed down, stretched out—the drawing back of the wave, then its push forward. A slam, a collision, and the dark water exploding across the stone.

  Mark, the man Fiona sent out, wades into the water as deep as he can. He jabs his spear down under the waves, trying to find something. A few jabs, over and over, and then he cheers and wades back. He holds his spear aloft, the trophy on the end: a giant wriggling fish. No, it has tentacles—it’s a squid. I’ve seen one of them—a giant one, hanging in the ceiling of the museum. This is much smaller, but it looks strong enough. The others have to help Mark restrain it as it tries to wrap its tentacles around his arm, to haul itself away from him, away from land, back into the sea. They all pull on it. But Mark grabs the tentacles, bunches them together, and walks up the beach, holding it proudly as it dangles and writhes in his grip.

  In the darkness I can see Mark in silhouette, the clothes he’s wearing clinging to his ribs, showing every single bone. His shoulder blades jut out from his back like fins as he raises the squid above his head then slams it down, hard, into the rocks at his feet. Up and down, over and over, slam, slam, until it’s nearly motionless. He brings it close to his face, plunges one hand in, and pulls something out of it. Guts. Then he washes it in the water and comes up the beach, thinking it’s dead, but it convulses to life again. Despite everything he did to it, there’s more in it. So he slams it against the rocks again. And then again, for good measure. Back to the sea to wash it one more time, and then the weak cheers as he presents it, brings it up the beach toward us. Finally triumphant. “You ever eaten squid?” Fiona asks.

  They drape the creature on the hot rocks, and we listen as it sizzles and pops. The air fills with the salty smell of this thing that’s going to taste so much better than it looks.

  “So where are you going, then?” Fiona asks later, mouth full of squid. It’s cut into chunks and they’re chewy, but they’re so tasty, so savory. Salt and herbs on them. The flavor comes out the more you chew; there’s something very satisfying about that.

  “We’re going into the city,” Rex says. She’s more confident now that we’re eating. She’s speaking for us, as if we’re a unit. We’re going.

  “You think it’s that easy?”

  “She was in there before,” Rex says, gesturing at me. “She came from there and then we were in Pine City. Assholes there.” She spears a tentacle with her knife, raises the end to her mouth, drapes it onto her tongue, and bites. “But now we’re going back. There’s a little girl who needs us.” Fiona looks over at me and smiles. I’m smiling as well, I realize. The old lady nods and stands up. She bends backward and we hear the bones in her crick and crack as she stretches herself out.

  “There’s a way in. We don’t use it, not much, only for supplies. Things we can’t get hold of out here.” She warms her hands by the fire, wipes them on the furs on her legs. “It’s not easy, but it’s all we’ve got.”

  “What do we have to do?” I ask.

  “For what?”

  “To get passage.” They’ll want something. Everybody wants something.

  “You say ‘thank you,’ and you come bring us some supplies if you’re ever passing this way again. Otherwise? It’s your way in as much as it’s ours.”

  Or it’s a trap, I think. “Why do you live out here? Why not in there?” Fiona shrugs. The girl sitting against the rock throws something into the fire, which fizzes and sparks.

  “Why would we?” she asks. “Why live somewhere where they’re not learning from mistakes? We live here because it’s free. The drones leave us alone and the police never come out here. We do what we want to do and we have a good life. It’s not living in fancy towers, sure, but it’s ours. It’s actually ours, you know?” She pushes herself to standing, plucks the final bit of squid, and pops it into her mouth. “How many people in there can say that?”

  Fiona walks us down the beach, past all the people making their lives here. She indicates a couple as we go by—a man whittling something from wood and then passing it to a little kid, watching as she clutches the figurine close to her chest, grateful.

  “It’s better here than in there,” Fiona reiterates. And I agree with her. Something about this little encampment reminds me of the
nicer parts of Australia, the parts where sometimes I felt safe. The arboretum. The berth that I shared with my mother. The secret part of the ship that I discovered. I can even hear laughter, somewhere. I think about what it’s like inside the city. It might be safe and clean, but there are so many rules about where you can live, what you can do, even whether or not you can have children. Here, everything’s free. I can’t remember hearing laughter in the city, not like this—the sound caught in the air, carried through it like smoke. Here, kids play. Not just one or two—with their parents standing around like outside Dave’s apartment—but a gaggle of them. They run in circles. Fiona touches their heads as they go and they laugh. They plow into the sea and we follow them; even in the dark—in the final sputters of the storm as it passes, in the light from the fires and the birds and the strange gray-brown of the post-storm sky—they’re happy.

  We keep walking until the sea is lapping at our feet and Fiona nudges us to the edge of the Wall, where it meets the sand and the water. There’s a rope here leading away into the darkness. She picks it up.

  “You follow this, don’t let go,” she tells us. “This goes around. Bit rough out there after the storm, I won’t lie, so just try and keep your head above the water, okay? Just keep going until it ends, you’ll be right as rain.”

  “There must be another way,” Rex says.

  “Well there’s the guards at the gates,” Fiona says. “You can try going through them, if you want. They won’t take too kindly to you, I’m guessing. More than likely they’re already looking out for you.”

  “It’ll be fine,” I say to Rex, and I reach over to put my hand on her arm. I squeeze it, trying to reassure her. We weren’t friends. We have history. But now we’re together. We’re we. She’s scared. I think that she’s likely never been underwater.

  But she has. Of course she has. After I stabbed her, when she fell. She would have landed in the Pit then, flooding as it was. She would have nearly drowned there.