A Cold Black Wave

by Scott, Timothy H.

  She admired his ability to attach them both with relative ease, watching him work with that fiery resolve that impressed her. Even at the Greenyard people never worked with such intensity and singularity as Josh did. When he was finished he caught her staring again and quickly turned away, his mind too weighted down by their imminent departure to consider her intentions.

  “So where are we going, anyway?” She asked, sticking both legs out in front of her to examine her new shoes.

  He tightened the straps on his pack, “South. It’s the only way out of this valley without taking us through these mountains.” The mountains were indeed steep and ominous, covered in deep snow that would be impossible for them to cross in their current state.

  “Then what? How far are we going?”

  He hoisted his heavy pack onto his shoulders and winced from a sharp pain in his stomach and waited for it to pass before answering, “I don’t know. We need to get to the foothills at least, out of this snow. Let’s get going.” He looked at her pack, “Need help with that?”

  “No,” she said, putting on her own pack which was roughly half the size of his but just as heavy for her. “Lead the way captain.”

  He was about to ask why she kept calling him that but decided it didn’t matter, instead thinking it as some name of endearment she developed towards him. He liked to think of it that way.

  They hiked for an hour without saying a word, focused entirely on their environment and the burden of their trek. Tromping through the thick snow with heavy packs, even with the snowshoes, was laborious for both of them and especially for Josh whose body shivered in bouts of lingering illness.

  Finally it was Josh who found an alcove under silvery quartz and granite outcropping that leaked water from somewhere far above. He set his pack down and sat on a helmet shaped rock to rest. Leah followed suit, also exhausted and thankful he was the first to decide on resting.

  They shared a water bottle and caught their breath as the morning sun pierced through the swaying trees and lit patches of earth near their feet and along the glistening quartz rock. It was serene there with the soft running water chasing itself down the craggy rocks and dripping at intervals onto the forest floor. They lost themselves in similar thoughts, accepting the moment and drifting into their own long-held dream of living on earth when it was still vibrant and alive. It was hard to imagine anything else.

  “You okay?” Josh finally asked as he readied his pack.

  “I was waiting for you.”

  As they traveled further the forest began to thin, swathes of shade giving way to pockets of sunlight that broke through the trees. The gully Josh had run into days ago had found its way back into their path, except this time they could follow alongside it instead of having to cross over. The nightmare of his encounter with the machine felt almost unreal to him now, just a hypnagogic aberration he experienced during his feverish nights. He nervously watched for movement on the other side of the gully.

  Their next break came after forty minutes of hiking, then the next at thirty as the strength in their bodies waned. The midday sun hovered above and a cold front moved in that rapidly chilled the air yet they found the inside of their parka moist with sweat.

  Leah stopped and scooped up a handful of wet snow and clumped it together, "Hey!"

  Josh turned, "Wh-?” The ball of ice smacked him square in the nose. He stood there, stunned maybe, or trying to hold back his anger at her for being so childish. Then he slowly bent over and padded a baseball-sized lump of snow and cupped it in his right hand.

  "No!" She put her hands up, "Don't you dare!" She tried ducking away and squealed just before it exploded against the side of her head. Wet ice stuck to her hair and dripped freezing down her neck and under her parka. She laughed as her body tensed from the cold ice, and reached down her coat to retrieve the melting snow before it slid further but not before another snowball pelted her. Josh stood there with a smirk on his face and she tried running at him with a handful of snow, but with the snowshoes and the heavy pack it was just a comic, slow-motion gait.

  "Sure, come on," he taunted as she slowly made her way to him, "I don’t got all day!" Wobbling a few feet away she cocked her arm back and pretended to throw and he ducked, then she dove into him and they both collapsed to the snow as she laughed and rubbed a handful into his face.

  "Ow! Ow! Stop!" He yelled, rolling away as he held his stomach.

  She shot up, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean-"

  With his hand hidden under his leg, he grabbed a ball of snow and pressed it in her face like a pie. She fell back laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe and Josh couldn’t hold back the huge smile on his face. But as she sat up, a report crackled through the air and was so shockingly loud they both immediately flattened to the snow to take cover. Josh scanned their surroundings from their position, "What the fuck was that?”

  She shook her head in wild-eyed terror.

  “You okay?” He asked, his eyes searching her for a sign of blood.

  "I-I think so. I don't feel anything, maybe I'm in shock."

  Then he noticed something and she saw the worry on his face. “Christ, Leah, don’t move.”

  “What?” Her face drained of color. Did Josh see someone?

  They both had slung their rifles over their shoulder and connected the base of the barrel to a small clip that sat alongside their backpack, preventing them from having to hold the strap the entire time to keep the gun from sliding off. Now as she lay face down the barrel of her gun was pointed directly at Josh. A metal buckle on one of her dangling straps had lodged itself between the trigger and any sudden movement would put pressure on it and fire a bullet into his head.

  “I’m going to roll away, don’t move a muscle. Got it?”

  “What?” She unconsciously shifted her weight and the buckle pressed ever more against the trigger, a hair’s width away from firing it.

  “Stop!” He cried as he tried to roll away. The gun fired again and she cried out in horror and dropped her face, unable to look.

  The gunshot echo disappeared and left a calm silence in its wake. She remained frozen, terrified of what she would see if she looked up.

  “Ok, you're fine, sit up.” He sighed in frustration, suddenly next to her. “Next time use the safety." He flipped it on for her.

  "Sorry," she whimpered. She had never handled a gun before and didn't even know guns had a safety.

  “Ok,” he decided. “Give me the gun.”

  “Here, take it, I don’t ever want one again.”

  “Wrong answer. You need to learn how to use it. This is a crash course and you got one shot. No pressure, right?”

  “Um, sure,” she said as she pulled the strap over her head to hand the rifle over.

  “See this? This is the trigger. Do not pull it when you fire. Squeeze it. Slow steady pressure. You slam down on it and it’s going to screw your aim up. Which brings me to the next part. Stick it against your shoulder like this,” he pressed the butt end against the inside of his shoulder. “Grip with both hands and aim down the barrel. Now you do it.”

  He handed it to her, double checking the safety just in case, and then prodded her to follow instructions, “Go ahead. It’s safe, it won’t fire. Bring it up ... yep, just like that. See that little thing at the end of the barrel? That’s your sight. Aim down the barrel and as you do, make sure the sight at the end of the barrel lines up directly in the notch here. If you don’t line those up correctly you might as well be firing from the hip.”

  “The hip? Why would-”

  “Here,” he took the gun back again and held it in both hands at hip-level. “See? You shoot like this and you aren’t hittin’ anything. Hey,” he cautioned. “Pay attention. This is the first thing you’ll do if you panic so I’m tellin’ you right now, don’t. Take the time to aim.”

  He handed it back to her, “Aim for that pinecone up there, sitting on that rock. See it?” She nodded. “Kneel like this with one knee down
and the other up, and rest your right elbow on your knee to steady yourself. If you ever have to lay down to steady your aim you can use anything, a rock, a dead body, whatever is handy to rest it on.”

  She glanced at him like he was crazy. Rest it on a dead body? She’d be lucky enough to not faint from shock if she was that close to a corpse. The last thing she’d be thinking of is how to properly rest a rifle on top of someone’s dead face.

  Unsure of herself handling what felt like a rocket launcher apt to fire at any moment, she did as he instructed.

  “Take your time, don’t rush it.” He said, eager to teach her something and confident in his ability to instruct her. “And one final thing. Once you have the sights aligned, slowly breathe out right before you squeeze the trigger. Got it? Exhale, squeeze.”

  “Those old movies made it look a lot easier. Sure I gotta do all this?”

  He reiterated calmly, “Exhale. Squeeze. Forget the movies.”

  She got into position and rested her elbow, holding the rifle straight and taking time to align the sights as he had instructed. Her body seemed to pulse every second and dance the sight around, or maybe her hands were shaking at anticipation of the report but it became more difficult to keep it steady with each passing moment.

  “Well are you-”

  “Hey!” She said as she shot a glance at him. “I was about to fire and you screwed me all up.”

  “We don’t got all day!”

  “Give me a break I want to get this right.” She wiped her forehead and shook her right arm out and repositioned herself. This time she lined up the sights and didn’t wait, exhaling and slowly squeezing the-

  There was a deafening shot and Leah tossed the rifle out of her hands the second she heard the report. Her hands were halfway up to the sky in fear as if she were about to surrender herself to the rifle. Leah turned like that towards Josh with a shocked, knowing grimace across her face.

  “Christ what the hell was that?” Josh yelled.

  “Sorry!” She exclaimed as delicately as possible.

  “No, it’s my fault. I assumed that everyone understood that you have to continue holding the gun after you squeeze the trigger.”

  “Can I try again?” She asked in an apologetic tone.

  “Not now. We need to set up camp in a couple’a hours, and now that we know there might be hostiles in the area I don’t want to go around announcing where we are over and over again.”

  She stood up and grabbed her calves, "Ah! My legs are cramping."

  "It's from the snowshoes. They used to call it mal de raquette. Lameness of the feet."

  "I didn't say it was my feet."

  "Same difference. Come on. It’ll be easier if you follow my tracks."

  “You mean the big clown feet you’re leaving behind? How could I not follow them ... look Josh, I don’t think I can go another couple of hours, let alone twenty minutes. Can’t we just call it a day?”

  He looked at her, not disapprovingly, but in that she was probably right. He was wiped. His wounds were throbbing and burning, and his body was shaking from exhaustion.

  “Give me twenty minutes. Can you do that?”

  “Sure,” she sighed resignedly.

  “Let’s go this way,” he said as he led them on, keeping close to the gully. At exactly twenty minutes Josh decided it was enough. He found a spot at the edge of the gully next to an old, massive sequoia that had collapsed many years ago and had found a home among the lowly bottom dwelling plants that it had held dominion over its entire life.

  Josh wanted to make sure their campsite was as protected as possible, and the sequoia would provide cover while the gully would make a difficult and noisy time for anyone traversing the steep, crumbling slope to get to them. The circumference of the fallen sequoia’s trunk was so large that even on its side they could stand next to it and still not see over the top.

  Leah fell to the ground and cried in pain, clutching her left calf muscle as she suffered an excruciating cramp. Josh threw his pack down and slid down next to her, straightened the leg out and pulled the top of her boot back to stretch the muscle. The pain quickly disappeared. “Here, keep it stretched. Massage it out.”

  “I already knew that, but thanks for coming to my rescue,” she said.

  Josh caught her stare, the suddenness of her beauty catching him off guard again. He was always so focused on their surroundings and lost in a labyrinth of thoughts that Leah, as a person, he simply did not see. She was a tool to be used to ensure their survival as that was how he was taught. When he was that close to her and she looked at him in a way he had never been looked at before, as a person, an individual and not part of a system, emotions surfaced that the Academy had so long tried to repress.

  He let go of her leg like it were burning coal and walked away. “Ok, uh, need to set up camp.”

  “Right,” Leah sighed. “Of course. So can I take these stupid shoes off?”

  “Yeah, just keep your boots on.”

  She rolled her eyes. “No I’m going to walk around barefoot.”

  He secured the thermal wrap he took from the shuttle and formed the thick material into a lean-to tent that was angled down from the midpoint of the sequoia. It was enough to sleep them both but not very comfortably. The thermal wrap was meant for non-insulated interiors, not as a single barrier between their captured body heat and the freezing cold, but it would maintain a bearable temperature.

  The distant winter sun had crept low and the forest transformed into a black unknown enveloping them, the night bringing with it a biting frost that crawled beneath the skin. Josh dragged their packs to just outside of the tent and used them along with some rocks to weigh down the edges of the wrap and keep it from flapping up with any gust of wind. They sat cross-legged inside, silent and miserable from the cold and huddled like turtles in their coats.

  “There was a lot more thermal wrap back there you know,” Leah quipped.

  “Only brought what was practical.”

  “I like my concept of practical better.”

  They sat together in awkward silence as they tried to warm up, the confined space uncomfortable for both of them. Finally Leah asked somberly, "What do we do, if-if we don't find anything?"

  Josh wished he had the answer to that. He took a deep breath, “We will. At least we know we're not alone now. Just gotta hope they're not all hell bent on killing us."

  She watched for his reaction as she spoke to him, looking for some sign of reflection on his part. She said curiously, "Something keeps bothering me. Why only two? Why'd they only send pairs of us out like that? I mean, what did they expect would happen? Seems like if they wanted us to survive they’d have sent everyone together, not in separate shuttles."

  He picked at the ground, he knew the answer but wasn’t quite ready to spell it out to her, not that she probably needed it. He figured she just wanted him to say that there was only one possible outcome when a man and a woman are stranded on an alien planet, the last of their species. That was one thing the Academy tried to drill out of the students, the emotional aspect of procreation. It would be a duty, just a part of their mission, but Josh felt something different for Leah that made that seem ... disrespectful.

  Leah perceived his nervousness as his eyes shifted and shot a glance at her as he spoke.

  “Probably the same expectations they had when they set off in the Westbound, right? Odds don’t really matter when it’s the only option you got.”

  “To survive? You keep talking about that but there’s more to life than just staying alive. You make it sound like it’s another obstacle to overcome. Life is about what you do when you’re alive. Do you think everyone is supposed to live their life trying not to die? A little depressing don’t you think?”

  “Maybe that was an option once but not anymore. Not for us. If we died on the Westbound before the virus came, life would just move on, people move on, the human race moves on. Big deal. Here? We have the expectations of billions of dead p
eople on our shoulders. God forbid they find out we died. Wouldn’t want to disappoint them.”

  Leah tried prying into him some more, “You’re hard to figure out. On one hand you’re strict and all about the academy and your destiny, and how important this mission is, and then on the other you don’t seem to care either way if we failed. Like you’re going through the motions but don’t really believe in it.”

  She was right and he wanted to tell her she was, but there was no easy way to go about explaining that he no longer feared death, and at times have invited it in order to rescue him from the suffering of life. What he could do was explain the experience of the Academy. “Almost my entire life was spent in the Academy, Leah. It becomes a part of you, like seeing some horrifying image. You can’t ever shake it.”