A Cold Black Wave

by Scott, Timothy H.

  One morning, a small grey speckled bird with blue tipped wings fluttered by and landed on a branch not far from her. It twitched its feathers and let out a staccato whistling noise that changed pitch throughout the song. In awe, she unconsciously drifted closer to it, and the bird seemed just as curious, its small head and beady black eyes cocked to the side as it watched her. Finally it jutted its wings out twice and took off somewhere into the forest in search of some unfortunate grub or tree beetle.

  The natural world was her playground and ignited her inner being like a consuming fire. Josh had been taught everything there was to know about earth, but her time on the Westbound limited her exposure to what earth had been like. He too, despite his education, was deprived of the real thing as she and every other child of their generation had been.

  She felt reborn here, the shuttle the womb and she the infant. Moments of fascination, however, were tempered with pangs of loneliness and longing for familiarity, even if that familiarity was somewhere distant and aboard a drifting metal sarcophagus. She had no one to share her joy with.

  A brief wind gusted through the rows of hemlock spires and clumps of snow sloughed off from high branches and fell about her with a soft thud. An inexplicable cold and empty feeling washed over her as the forest suddenly felt alien and unwelcoming. She trekked back to the shuttle and knocked the snow off her shoes as she stepped inside like she always did, except this time a coherent voice met her from the darkness, “Hey.”

  “Oh, you scared me!” Leah hurried inside to close the door and examine him, pulling off her gloves and parka as she entered. “How are you? Are you feeling better?”

  “I feel like death,” he croaked. “I could use some water.”

  “Sure, sure, hold on.” She gave him a water bottle that sat on the floor next to him, which she had been reusing by filling it with snow and allowing it to melt inside the warm shuttle. He sucked it down and as he did, Leah turned on more lanterns. Josh was sitting up and had grown a thick black beard speckled with strands of strawberry blonde. He appeared livelier, his eyes regaining their focused cognizance as he watched Leah and responded to her, yet he had lost considerable weight on a body that was used to being in top physical condition. His usually erect body and filled out shirts now slumped in defeat, and his shirt hung looser.

  “I’m uh, I could use something to eat too,” he said, his voice weak.

  “That’s good!” She exclaimed as she opened a meal called, “Eggs and Toast” which resembled neither.

  “What’s good?”

  “An appetite. You’ve barely eaten for days now, but I suppose that makes up for me overfeeding you before, right?” She asked with a playful smile.

  Josh rubbed his head and gingerly touched his bandages, “Days? How many have I ...?”

  “Four,” she said, preparing his meal over a heater. “Whatever that thing shot you with was nasty. Those needles must have had something on them or in them, who knows.” After she felt the food was brought to sufficient temperature she took it and sat down next to him.

  “Here, eat it slowly. You don’t want to get sick again.”

  “Thanks.”

  Leah watched him eat with an innocent gleam in her eyes, and he noticed her staring and asked with a mouthful of food, “What?”

  She cleared her throat and took on a serious look, embarrassed at having been caught. “Oh. Sorry, I’m-”

  “Thank you. For taking care of me. I made a big mistake out there and nearly got us killed. I should have turned back when I had the chance.”

  “There was nothing you could do, don’t blame yourself.”

  He briefly looked up from his food to say something but instead returned to his eating. He could blame himself and he would. His curiosity got the best of him, and he knowingly wandered, alone, into a military outpost of which he knew not the strength or disposition of its occupants.

  This poor decision so early in their arrival here cast doubt on himself and in an area of expertise that, while acquired by means so undesirable to him that it caused his very soul to cry out for deliverance from the Academy, Josh felt was the one thing he could do right in the world.

  “We’re alive, right? At least we can say that much. Just try not to piss off any more robots and we’ll be fine,” she said trying to lighten the mood. He pushed the rest of his food away and hung his head between his legs.

  Leah worried over him with genuine concern and after a moment put a hesitant hand on his back. “Josh. I thought about what you said the other day. About leaving. You’re right, I wasn’t thinking. You were shot and, just pissing me off and I was scared so, and I’m still scared but I want to help. I need to help and feel useful, and I know I can’t even do a fraction of what you can but ...”

  He looked up and with tired eyes said, “You seem to know a lot more than you’re telling me. How do you know how to clean and dress a wound? If you weren’t at the academy, what were you doing all those years?”

  That simple question brought back a sudden flood of memories and her brow furrowed in thought before nodding, as if to assure herself to speak about it. “I helped my family mostly. My father. My mother, she died when I was six so he’s all I had really. I’m all he had. He didn’t want me in the academy so he found a way to get me out, through the council.”

  “He was a politician,” he said in a way that made the profession seem virulent.

  “After my mom died he went to a dark place, he didn’t speak much and cried a lot but he tried to hide it from me. He held in so much pain, I could see it in his eyes, the way he spoke about work, himself ...I didn’t know what to do except be there for him. I’m not sure why, but, it wasn’t long after he started teaching me things. I didn’t mind because we were spending so much time together so I didn’t care or even question it. I just liked being with him.”

  “Like how to take care of gunshot wounds and blood infections, normal kid stuff?”

  She cast her eyes down and played with a thread that hung from the top of her boot. “He helped me learn that as it was a prerequisite for joining the Greenyard. It wasn’t heart surgery or anything, just basic stuff I guess.”

  “The Greenyard,” he said condescendingly, not particularly towards her, but what he knew of the massive agricultural complex aboard the Westbound. He had been told those with mental or physical disabilities were assigned to Greenyard work, as it was so automated that little innate ability was required to be employed there. In reality, this story was just another part of the Academy, indoctrinating the students to believe there was only one place for them, and to be anywhere else, had they even the choice, would be below them.

  “Why do you say it like that?”

  “Nothing, nevermind.”

  “Well, when I was nine my dad started bringing me there to let me see what the natural world once looked like. I fell in love with it! So, he helped me get a job there and I worked my way up until I was certified. Learning basic medical skills were required because of all the tools and machinery that were used there. You could lose a finger or get punctured on the harvesters.”

  “So you had to know how to take care of yourself, or someone you worked with until they got medical attention? I’ll buy that.”

  She went cross-legged and continued talking excitedly and gestured with her hands as she described her world, “I pretended to be on earth when I walked through the yard because in certain places, you felt surrounded by the foliage because it spread so far in every direction you couldn’t see the walls holding it all in. I never looked up so I wouldn’t have to see the artificial dome and the lights, which would just remind me that I was still on a ship. I started with an acre, then two. I had just been promoted to five acres when ... when I got the call from my dad and uh ...my first thought was I had to tell him because he’d be so proud of me ...” she stopped and put a hand to her mouth, her lip quivering. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said as he watched her emotions come out so easily
and effortlessly, an attribute Josh knew little about and envied in a curious way.

  “We’ve been out here almost a thousand years and it seems like yesterday this all happened.” After she wiped her eyes she continued, “It happened so fast because I had just seen him and I remember he was feeling ill but looking back now,” she shook her head, “he must have been hiding it for a week, maybe longer. I got the call almost as soon as I had left Jan’s office. Everyone was about to watch a speech by the President but I already didn’t plan to watch it. When I spoke to dad he sounded so afraid and told me to hurry back, so I did and I thought the worst and all these things went through my mind. With him in particular. I only heard him like that once before, when my mother died. When I finally saw him he looked, he looked ...”

  “Like he was already dead?”

  She tried to stay strong and just nodded, rubbing away her tears.

  “He uh, he took me by the hand and we left our house and by then I knew something terrible was happening. He led me out and then that’s when the alarms started going off, and I-I asked him what was going on, where he was taking me. He didn’t say anything, just kept running and pulling me and telling me to keep up. I was scared and I tried to get him to stop because I had no idea what was happening. Then there was an explosion and it knocked us down. The air was filled with smoke and I couldn’t see, but I felt him taking me by the hand again and then we were in this hangar that I never saw before. Then I saw the shuttles and uh, that’s when I realized we were leaving the Westbound and I panicked because where else would we go? What else is there but the Westbound, you know?

  “I never even considered that he wasn’t coming with me. I couldn’t imagine it, so, I just figured because he was on the council they got some special treatment which is why we were going on these shuttles. Then we stopped at the door to one of them, and he held me, he just hugged me and told me, told me that he loved me and that God would always take care of me.”

  She broke down and wept, trying to keep herself together as she retraced those final moments in detail for the first time since they had left. Josh patiently waited.

  Leah wiped her face and sniffled. “He gave me my book, the book I treasure more than anything now, and ... my whole body just, it just shook and I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think. He opened the door and that’s when he was attacked from behind. He must’ve been so weak but he, he fought the man and yelled for me to get inside and I did. I just panicked and ran inside and hid. All I could hear were his screams, he ...” she hid her face and cried bitterly.

  Josh didn’t know what to say, and tried, but then stopped himself when he realized his words would mean nothing for her. Instead, he put his hand on her leg and ran it gently back and forth, unsure if that was even the right thing to do. She was so heartbroken and lost at that moment, and the feeling was familiar to him and he thought he should be doing something more. He knew that nothing could be done. There are no words or deeds that can match the void in the heart created from death. There is only time and acceptance, neither of which completely erases the pain.

  Instead, she leaned softly next to him to be closer and her tears dripped off her cheeks and onto his forearm. He let her cry and just held her and brushed her hair back. He had never touched a girl like this before in his life, and here in this bleak place a warm sense of relief came from the catharsis they were now both experiencing.

  Finally Leah’s cries subsided. She sat back and peeked at him while she tried to dry her face, worried what he might think of her. “I’m sorry. I probably look horrible right now.”

  She looked beautiful, a stark realization that took him by surprise all at once and in that moment turned slow and capturing, like a thousand pictures being taken within every passing second. The cold resolutions of survival and the calculations against empathy had shattered in a thousand refracted pieces that left only the image of her wet, melancholy eyes, devoid of malice and left vulnerable to him.

  He stammered as he slid away from her. “Look, uh, I didn’t, I mean I really, I haven’t treated you that great, and I’m really sorry about your father.”

  She nodded slightly, still running her fingers under her eyes.

  He continued, “I am, it’s just ... the academy, Leah, you have no idea what they did to us. I regret being who I am sometimes because this isn’t me; it’s what the academy wanted us to be. We were raised from a young age to believe only one thing mattered, that we had a destiny to fulfill. A glorious rediscovery of mankind, building upon the virginal land of a new world.”

  “Why couldn’t you leave?”

  “Nobody leaves the academy unless you lose your mind or one of your classmates kills you in a scenario.”

  “Scenario?”

  Josh turned melancholy. “We were often put into scenarios which were based on realistic situations we may encounter. See, back on earth, they tried to govern the rules of war and balance the brutality with the civility. The Academy no longer had a need for that because if we don’t survive, all of mankind disappears forever. So, we were allowed to kill in these scenarios. It heightened the senses, calloused the heart ... forced those who would tremble at the idea of killing someone to tap into their primal bloodlust in order to survive.”

  Leah could see his mind retreat from his very pupils as he spoke and she inched closer to him, “Josh? Did you kill someone?”

  He didn’t respond to her question almost as if he hadn’t heard it, his train of thought rapidly flipping through vivid memories of his life at the Academy. “I’ve said enough, I think.” Then he continued after some thought, “Just didn’t think it would be like this, just me and ...”

  “Some dumb Greenyard girl?” She said with crooked smile.

  He smirked, “Yeah! Something like that. You saved my life. That amounts to something.”

  “You saved mine,” she said softly with coy adoration. They shared a brief moment as their eyes watched each other but then Leah, feeling butterflies said quickly, “You blew that thing away pretty good! I chopped its head off by the way.”

  “You did what?” Josh asked unbelievingly. “Where’d you put it?”

  “It’s still out there, he’s all yours captain.”

  “I wish I could but we need to get going. We do,” he added emphatically after seeing the surprised look on her face.

  “Seriously Josh, in your condition? You barely have the energy to stand. Listen to the doctor.”

  “You’re a doctor?”

  “Well, no, but it sounded good. Please. At least give yourself until the morning. You need to eat. A lot. You look like a skeleton.”

  He sighed. He knew she was right and didn’t fight her, “Ok.” He paused in thought. His mind ran through percentages and probabilities against his own general consciousness of his body’s capabilities and decided they could stay awhile longer. He did need the rest and even though tomorrow would be excruciatingly difficult for him, it was the best course of action. “Ok. We leave first thing in the morning though. We’ll go through the packing tonight. There’s not much we can take so we have to make it count, plus I need to see what you can carry without toppling over.”

  “Hey!” She punched his arm lightly, “I’m tougher than you think.”

  He had sobered up from his unexpected emotional detour and replied with his usual deadpan concern, “I hope so.”

  Chapter 8

  The next morning they ate a large breakfast and hauled their packs out and set them next to the shuttle. Again the day was beautiful and cold, but not unbearably so. It wouldn’t take long for them to heat up under their thick clothing as the sun beat down on them. Josh spent time double checking their packs and doing inventory in the supply room to ensure nothing critical was left behind.

  In Josh’s weakened state, it would be impossible for them to carry much more than food and water. They would strike out blindly now with no idea how long they would be traveling or what they would possibly run into. The entire morning he didn�
��t say more than a few words as the prospect of their survival rested front and center on his mind.

  Had they landed somewhere a little warmer, somewhere they were not under immediate threat, Josh would have started building a permanent camp around the shuttle. This was the intent of the shuttle’s design, and the mission, to establish a self-sufficient colony wherever they landed. Reducing their available supplies to two backpacks was risky, and significantly decreased their odds of survival, but it was better than the odds of facing another machine in the dead of winter and cornered inside the shuttle. Josh hoped they could forage on the way or make contact with someone or something that wasn’t trying to kill them.

  “You need to wear these where we’re going,” he said, handing her a pair of snowshoes. She held the strange footwear up to examine them before sitting down on the edge of the shuttle to try and fit them on. After fumbling with the straps for awhile he finally came over to help her, “Here, like this.”