“Because we want to,” she says. “Because it’s a risk we decided we wanted to take. Something worth the potential reward. That’s all. Don’t think it’s because you sound innocent or like you’re telling us the full truth about things. And don’t think there won’t be guns on you for a while. Until we separate the fact from fiction about your story. But, just the same, that’s how most of us came in here. I think you’ll do alright here. Pikes Peak is just about the best place on Earth to live as far as I can see it. You there?” Her voice drones on, telling me to wake up, and talk back, but I don’t have the power anymore. And I can’t keep my eyes on the wheel or the black night either. Instead I have to lay down on the floor of the wheelhouse and close my eyes for just a minute.
Chapter 32
When I wake up, the young man from the cutter is standing right next to me. He’s looking down in the darkness, watching me, and then I realize he’s talking and that I fell asleep. It snaps into logic what I’m seeing: he’s boarded the ship.
“You okay?” his words become clear. I dart back into the corner and look all around for my guns. They’re nowhere around. He’s taken them. He asks me again if I’m okay, and then he tells me he’s just going to turn the boat for a moment, keep her lined up with the cutter. I watch him, deciding if I have enough alertness to pummel him through the glass. But then, as quickly as I finally begin to see clearly, after rubbing my eyes, he’s watching me again.
“You’re going to be okay,” he tells me. “Calm down.” But I can’t calm myself. Right away my thoughts race away to the downstairs—where Voley is sitting in the dark and alone and thinks I’ve abandoned him. I listen through the night wind and rain trying to hear his voice, but there’s nothing.
“You fell asleep and started to lose us. And the sea is picking up a bit. We didn’t know what happened and didn’t want you to roll,” he tells me. I stand up and watch his eyes dart back and forth from me and then out to the dots of light that must be the cutter on the black ocean. He continues to explain and I drift in and out through a headache, wondering how long I can stay still.
“Jen told us you’d be beaten up. That you might hardly be alive,” he says. And then he smiles and hands me something. When I look closely at it I realize it’s a candy bar. Snickers. “I don’t think anyone guessed you’d look this bad. But you’re going to live.”
And then, like he trusts me completely, he turns his back. Completely away from me and then looks out to the sea and doesn’t look back. Like a mad man. But then, just when the urge to attack him rushes through me again, because I know he wouldn’t see it coming now, I go blank. I quiet down inside. Everything disappears. And I can’t do a thing. It’s like I’m done. Done fighting. And this is it. And instead of doing anything about the man who’s boarded the ship and taken it over, I open the candy bar and smell it. The chocolate smell is overpowering. I haven’t had something like this in a year. And then, I just tell him I have to check on my dog. And like that, without anything more than a nod, he lets me go. I walk out into the darkness, across the deck, over the lines of rain that strike down and splash back up at me, taking a giant bite of the candy bar, and then another, until I reach the hatch and realize there might not be enough left for Voley. And then, I sneak down and find him. Still there. Still okay. And he licks me and I let him have the rest of the candy and then I lay down next to him and fall back to sleep.
Chapter 33
When I get up, the light of the sun is pouring down through the open hatch of the deck. Men’s voices are shouting, calling out commands. Something about anchoring and something about the girl. Right away I jerk up to see the dim light revealing dead bodies all around me. I look at their faces and they all look like they’re alive still. Just taking a short nap, and ready to spring up at any moment. And then I stand up and get a better view. I see their open eyes, hollow and empty. Cold and plastic skin and dead-looking like they really are. I remember the younger one coming aboard, taking over the wheel in the night. And then when I scramble for one of the machine guns, instincts taking over again, I hear the call.
“Hey!” comes the voice. It sounds familiar. And then, the light coming down through the hatch cuts out, just where someone would stand to look down. “We’re docked.”
Somehow I drag my body to the bottom of the steps and look up, expecting a barrel of a gun pointed in my face. But there’s nothing but a black silhouette standing still and watching me. Then, when I start to rise, his hand comes out. I take it and he pulls me up. What I see puts me into shock.
A long wooden road of dock stretches all the way to an enormous slope of smooth mud and gray rock. But then, there’s something else. Something incomprehensible. The ridges along the mountain in front of me look green. I ask him if those are trees. They are trees, he tells me, helping me along the deck. And there by the dock, standing on a plank of metal acting as a bridge, is the old man from the cutter.
“We made it,” he says. And as I’m pushed along, his hand slaps me gently on the back. Like he knows who I am and what I’ve done. Everything seems awfully unreal. And then he says to the other man to get the equipment off the ship. The younger man starts to ask me where it is, but I just hang my head and play along, trying to seem sicker than I am, and the old man instructs him to just search and find it himself.
“It’s not a big ship,” the old man says. And then I hear the footsteps run off. That’s when I stop, before getting onto the plank. Even as I see the tarp covered houses in the distance made of some kind of aluminum and wood, some kind of forested city of pine shrouded in a light mist, I tell him I need to go back.
“What for?” he asks me, alarmed. And I tell him that I can’t get off without my friend. And then, when I try to go, his arms lifts off me and he lets me leave.
I make my way back onto the ship, and right away I see the younger one searching down in the fore hatch. Pulling out one thing after the next—one of the bags I recognize as filled with some of Russell’s clothes. I walk over to him and silently grab the bag and then head back down into the dark. And there I sit and wait next to Voley.
“Oh my god,” comes the man’s voice when he follows me down and sees the bodies. I tell him I need a bolt cutter. If you want your equipment, get me a bolt cutter. When he doesn’t answer me, too busy shining the light in his hand over the blood-soaked wooden floor, my attitude roars to life. “Get me a fucking bolt cutter,” I say. And right away I want to draw the words back, afraid that now he’ll know the truth about me. That I’m a raging face eater. Out of control. Long ago slipped from the last layers of the veneers, no longer worthy of entry into Leadville. Someone who once could have gotten in. Not any longer though. But all he does in response is tell me, Yeah, a bolt cutter. I’ll get your dog out. And like that he’s gone. By the time he comes back and cuts through the bolt, Voley is clawing at the floor. But then we’re together. And I hug him like I’m hugging all of them—Russell and Dusty and Ernest. They’re all bound up in him, the last trace that any of them existed, or that any of my story is real. And I decide I’m going to keep on squeezing him forever. Finally Voley jerks free because it’s way too tight, and together, because he won’t move more than a foot from my side, we head back out into the light.
Voley walks right past the old man without a growl, and something clicks inside me. That it means something good. As if since Voley isn’t barking, this is not a bad place. A sign that we finally did make it to Leadville. But it isn’t until we walk all the way over the dock, onto the dirt, where there’s a sign, that it sinks in for real.
Pikes Peak Visitor City
Formerly: Leadville
And then, I walk the trail with Voley. Through a misty path dripping with water and surrounded by the strangest pine trees I’ve ever seen. Each time I look back, I see the old man following me. Giving me just enough distance. I wonder what they’ve done with the machine guns. What I’m walking into. What will happen once they figure out I’ve lied. But I keep walking
, open to whatever the world wants to throw at me next. And once the trees start to thin out, and the path widens into the beginning of buildings, I see a whole bunch of people standing around. Half of them are in rain suits, and the other half are in rubber gear. Some are even wearing what look like plain clothes, short-sleeves even, and hanging under the rattling metal eaves of houses. There along a stretch of open mud street is a smaller group of people. Two of them come up to me. One is a young girl. She almost looks like she’s my age. The other woman is older. And then, just like that, the old man is there from behind. Surrounding me.
They’re all so close to me that I want to scream and make a run for it, or fight each and every one of them. But Voley doesn’t growl. And I look everywhere, trying to assess the threat, but no one seems to want to do anything but watch me. Some look out from the misshapen windows. I think I see little kids even, and then I’m sure, because I hear a voice talking about how skinny they look. And then, the hood comes down from the woman in front of me. She stares at me, her bangs dripping water into her eyes as a smile crosses her face. She holds out her hand, and suddenly, everyone starts to clap. I feel delirious but I shake her hand.
“What a miracle,” she says. And then, she introduces herself. She calls herself Jen and asks me my name. I don’t say anything because I can’t make the words. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how this is possible. And when she tells me we need to get in out of the rain, and she starts to lead me into one of the nearby houses, she tells me that I can’t begin to know how big a deal what I’ve done is. And that after losing her husband, this is somehow going to make his sacrifice worth it. Getting the equipment. But none of it makes sense to me. I push it out because it’s all a lie. And I’ve done nothing for her. She just doesn’t know it yet. None of them do.
By the time we get to a plastic table and sit down, she tells me she’s going to get me fixed up right away. And you’ll probably want to sleep for a week, she tells me, But then you have to tell us your story. She says both of you, referring to Voley who wanders out to sniff at all the people, some of them petting him, and then he comes back to me. But something isn’t right. It rises up in me, very sharply, and my mind whips back to the ship. Something worse than the fact that they won’t find the equipment. That it’s gone, buried in Plane Floe somewhere a couple hundred miles away. It’s the pieces of the bodies I carved out. They were in the bags. The ones the man is looking through on the ship right now. He’ll find them and then they’ll all know. He’ll figure me out and tell them all, and then the words rush back into my head—we don’t let them in. She had told me that over the radio, the same woman who smiles at me now from across the table. And I know they’ll kill me. I start to rifle through my options, but there doesn’t seem to be any fight left. There are fifteen people at least just in the house, all of them crowding in, looking for a glimpse of my face, my beaten up body, the words to come from my pale lips. Proof that I’m really alive. And the only thing that could shock me back into reality happens so quickly that I could have never imagined it coming in a million years.
“Oh my god,” she says. And then, like she’s seen me again for the first time, Jen moves in against the table. She pushes the hood of my rain suit all the way off. Then she backs up and screams. A loud, quick scream, and I know—they’ve figured out that I’m a monster. I stand up quickly and back away so that the chair spills over and Voley barks. He barks again and louder this time, and I try to push my way all the way into a corner to prepare for the onslaught. I expect we can take down at least a few of them with us before they kill us. But they never charge in, and the screaming woman calms down and just stares at me. And then, it happens. The most impossible thing imaginable. She says, very slowly, and very cautiously, my name.
“Tanner, do you remember me?”
I watch her, trying to study the lines on her face, her eyes, trying to figure out how she could know my name. I try to remember if I said it over the radio, but I’m convinced I didn’t. And it hits me like a ton of bricks—it starts with her nose, something about the end of her nose. The way her nostrils flare out. And past the wrinkles and the worn lines of her age, I see a young smiling figure over me, watching me run around her legs. It all makes sense as she opens her arms and presses in to hug me.
“Jennifer?” I say. But she’s already crying. And I know it has to be her. I can’t control it either and start to wrap myself up in her arms, and I feel the tears of the old life I used to know, with Russell, and the safety of Philadelphia. All of the history that I barely remember starts to flood back into me like an impossible charge of electricity. And then, once we’ve released each other to the amazement of everyone else, I watch her wipe away her tears. She asks first.
“You left with Russell two years before we did…Russell?”
I can’t answer her. And even as I want to ask her too, about Delly, and her two kids, the ones that followed me around everywhere and tried to emulate me, I can’t get out a word. But I don’t have to. She says it all on her own: Delly was on the plane.
I feel a knot seize my gut. It numbs everything in me. The tears and the emotions dry up that fast. And then, she holds her gaze and asks me sincerely if I saw him, if he was still in the plane. And I just look at her and hold my head and shake it no. Finally the words crawl out of my throat.
“No. He wasn’t in the plane,” I say. And then, by the door, the young man appears, the one who took over the wheel during the night. He looks in at the scene in bewilderment. But something is too important and he can’t wait for us to finish. And I’m sure he has found out about the pieces of body in the bag back on the ship, and that’s why he’s rushed back to town. To tell everyone what I am and that they have to kill me or set me back out into the rain sea. But he just watches Jennifer and me, wondering what the hell’s going on. And then, she finally tells him. This is Tanner, she tells him. He looks dumbfounded, like he doesn’t get it. But I figure it out—long before he does. I realize that the man standing at the door, the one who climbed on board and kept the ship going for me, following the cutter all the way to Leadville, is her son. The one who used to chase after me through the abandoned and flooded pharmacies and supermarkets all those years ago. She has to explain it to him, but still he doesn’t seem to remember. Like he was too young, and then, he finally interrupts her.
“Sorry,” he says, looking at me nervously and forcing a fake smile because he doesn’t remember me. And then he says it. “We can’t find it.”
He turns away and looks at his mother. “The thing is loaded with bodies. Cut up and not cut up. I’m going to need some help.” And then, his glance carves back across the room to me, as if he expects me to run back out there and help him find the equipment too. But instead Jennifer tells him to quiet down. And then, just like that, she steps outside into the rain. One of the men nearby comes over to me and hands me a cup of water. I tell him thanks and take a sip and then offer the rest to Voley. And as he starts to ask me questions, about if I’m ready to take a hot bath and get cleaned up and then take some rest, I can’t do anything but ignore him. All I can do is watch the door. Waiting for the private conversation outside to end. To get the verdict about my fate. And then, so loud that I can hear her from inside, and everyone else can too, I hear Jennifer say, “She’ll help you after she rests if you can’t find it. And she doesn’t have to explain anything until then either. That ship’s not going anywhere.” And just like that, she comes back inside, smile still stretched across her face.
“Bring in something hot,” she says to one of the men standing around. He goes off, and then she turns to me.
“Give us some space,” she says, and somehow, they all listen to her. Everyone leaves the room and funnels back out into the rain. “You let me know when you’re done eating, and I’ll get you cleaned up, okay? We have a doctor here,” she says. And then, she just leans in as a bowl comes into the room that smells so good my stomach starts to tie itself in knots. She hugs m
e again, and all over again, she starts to cry. Like she can’t believe who I am. And then, the funniest thing in the world happens. She just leaves me be. Voley and I, all alone, in some stranger’s house. With a steaming bowl of soup. I take a few quick glances out the windows, but no one’s even staring in at us anymore. They’re all down at the dock, scouring the ship, trying to find the damned equipment. Trying to figure out how a girl came to be riding a face eater ship.
I take the wooden spoon and hunch myself over the table. A cool gust of wind blows through the room. I blow again and watch the steam spin away, the sight and smell of it melting all the pain and aches in my body. Voley whines because he wants his share. I tell him to hold on, and then, calmly, after I taste it, a flavor that explodes so hard upon my tongue that I could die and be happy that this was the end, I scoop out another spoonful and blow on it until it’s cool. I lower the spoon down to Voley. And once he’s lapped it all up, I grab his jaw weakly and point his dark eyes at mine.
“Everything stays between us, okay?” I whisper. His tongue falls out and licks up at his nose in anticipation of another bite. I know—he’s already over it. With one taste of the soup, it’s behind him. And then, just like that, I let go and look out the window at the rolling gray sky. I know that somewhere out there is the stretch of blue. And over my head I hear the rain still falling down. Even here in Leadville. Still falling down.
The Blue (Book 3) Page 24