Ordinary Souls

by J. S. Bailey

  Miriam, sitting in the back seat behind Kerry, let out an exaggerated sigh. “I do not matter.”

  “Of course you matter. You’re a spokesperson for your era. You know that, right?”

  “Are you a ‘spokesperson’ for yours?” she spat. “You want history, raise us all. I am a fragment. You cannot see a picture from one fragment.”

  “One small fragment is more than we’ve had before.”

  “Your picture does not matter. Truth matters. Then is not the truth!”

  “Fine, then.” Kerry could tell that the man was growing cross. “Tell us the truth.”

  “You cannot see.”

  “It seems that Horton’s machine may have put some of Miss Miriam’s brain cells together in the wrong order, don’t you think?” Hugh said to Kerry.

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Well, I do. She’s an ungrateful little brat who thinks she’s entitled to give us a hard time just because she knows more than we do.”

  Miriam burst into peals of sardonic laughter that sent scores of goose bumps down Kerry’s arms. “A child can know more! Maybe you should become a child again so you will understand.”

  “Throwing insults around isn’t doing anything to improve my opinion of you,” Hugh growled.

  “Your opinion is like the vapor!”

  Kerry butted in before the atmosphere inside the transport continued to deteriorate. “Miriam, if you won’t tell us when you were born; can you at least tell us where you lived?”

  She hesitated. “It is beautiful.”

  “What else?”

  “It is the most beautiful place there has ever been, and ever will be.”

  “What was it called?”

  She shook her head.

  Kerry resisted the urge to groan. “Is there anything that you will tell us?”

  “I have told you all there is to tell.”

  “I doubt that very much,” Hugh said. “What was your home like?”

  “There was love. No tears. I was…very happy.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, it hardly seems fair that it got flattened in a bomb blast.”

  “It is not flattened,” she retorted. “It lives, as you and I.”

  “It lives in us?”

  “It lives like us. It will always live.”

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. The place where you lived has been gone for centuries. You see the desert around us? It used to be farmland, judging from ancient satellite imagery the government’s kept on file.”

  “And to dust we shall return,” she murmured.

  Hugh glanced over his shoulder. “What?”

  “Where are we going?”

  Kerry smirked. Miriam was just as sly to change the subject as Hugh generally was.

  “Ruins,” he said. “Kerry and I were there with a team about five years ago. We didn’t find much so we were assigned to a different project. But I remember there was a lot of ground we didn’t cover, so there could be a lot of artifacts still hidden out there.”

  “You are not supposed to go there?”

  “No. But that won’t matter, once we find something valuable we missed before. I know that if it’s valuable enough, we’ll be forgiven for breaching protocol.”

  “How will you know its value?”

  “Simple. You will tell us. Tell us enough, and we won’t get in trouble for having—ahem—borrowed the machine that brought you back.”

  Miriam sniffed. “Vapors. All is vapors.”

  “Enough with that.”

  “Then enough with you being a fool.”

  THEY arrived at the ruins without incident.

  A gap appeared in the land in front of them. Hugh put the transport in Park and shut off the engine.

  “I see no ruins,” Miriam said disapprovingly.

  Hugh laughed. “They’re down in the gorge. That’s the only reason they didn’t get flattened along with everything else.”

  “We are going to walk?”

  “We certainly aren’t going to fly.”

  “There’s a path,” Kerry said to her, silently cursing Hugh for his sarcasm. “We built it when we were here the last time. It’s kind of rocky. You should probably put something on your feet.”

  “Pain is vapors. I will be fine.” She unbuckled her seatbelt and hopped out of the vehicle.

  Kerry looked to Hugh with raised eyebrows.

  “If she wants the soles of her feet to turn into bloody confetti, it’s her problem,” the old man said. “Go grab the supplies. And make her carry something, too.”

  Kerry nodded and went outside to the trailer, where they had stored totes and cases full of food and equipment as well as the large pack containing their tent. He shouldered the latter, glancing around for Miriam, who seemed to have vanished like the fog on a sunny morning.

  “Miriam?” He came around the front of the transport and saw her standing at the edge of the gorge, staring straight down. “Get back from there. You’ll fall.”

  She turned her head slightly. “If I do?”

  “We would be very unhappy. Hugh would like you to help us carry some things.”

  “Very well.” She strode to the back of the trailer and picked up two of the totes. “Is this sufficient?”

  “Perfect,” Hugh said, joining them. “Try to take it easy on the way down.”

  The “way down” was a man-made route that zigged and zagged back and forth across one cliff face. As they carefully made their way closer and closer to the floor of the gorge, Kerry recalled how one of their team members had slipped in the loose stone five years before and fell fifteen feet to the next switchback, shattering one of his legs in the process. Kerry made a conscious effort to stay back from the edge. No need to return home in multiple pieces. Or dead.

  The bottom of the gorge was populated by stunted trees that reached their gnarled limbs to the sky as if shaking fists in anger at the one who had created them. Several ancient buildings nestled among the trees, lying in wait for their mysteries to be revealed.

  The steel-and-wood buildings still standing numbered five. A sixth was nothing more than a pile of collapsed rubble. Of the former, four were houses with sloping, shingled roofs and the other seemed to have been a workshop or garage of some sort, judging from the sagging bay doors that dominated the front wall. Every last artifact that had been discovered inside the buildings and out had been catalogued and sent back to the base for further study.

  Hugh had always assumed there was more they had overlooked.

  “This is what you came to see?” Miriam’s face bore a dubious expression. “Surely there are better places to look for your history.”

  “It’s one of the best-preserved ancient settlements on this side of the continent,” Kerry said. “We found all kinds of things out here five years ago. Furniture, utensils, a load of computer equipment and gadgets that wouldn’t work; you get the idea, I’m sure.”

  Miriam smiled. “What about skeletons?”

  “We found plenty of those, too. We think that they probably died of radiation poisoning after the blast. What we didn’t find were written records. No books. No scrolls. No nothing.”

  “Such a pity.”

  The sarcastic tone in her voice sent a wave of irritation through him. “Listen. It wasn’t my idea to bring you back. But the least you can do is act cheerful to be here. It would make Hugh a little less cantankerous if you did.”

  Hugh was striding over to the nearest dwelling with a visible spring in his step.

  “He looks happy enough already.”

  “True.”

  “What shall I do while you two are…busy?”

  “I don’t care if you wander around a bit, but keep yourself handy in case Hugh needs to ask you anything.”

  “Pff. Handy. I am not a tool to be used at will.”

  “I understand that. I really do.”

  “Good. I think that maybe you are the lesser fool.” And with that, she set the bags on the ground and wa
lked off in the opposite direction.

  AS it turned out, they did not need to ask Miriam any questions because they found nothing new to ask her about. Kerry and Hugh spent five hours sweeping the ground with metal detectors, finding nothing but a rusty bolt hidden under twelve inches of dirt.

  “I think Miriam was right,” Kerry said, wiping a bead of sweat from his brow. “This is turning out to be a waste.”

  “Come morning, we can move further on down the gorge and see if we missed anything down there the last time. There’s got to be something out here worthwhile.”

  Kerry was no longer so sure. Hugh’s obsession seemed to have blinded the man to the fact that little would be left out here to find.

  Miriam surprised the pair by offering to help them set up the tent. She still refused to eat when Kerry offered her dinner.

  “She’s probably trying to starve herself back to death,” Hugh remarked at one point when Miriam had wandered off to explore more of the gorge.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Kerry said, but for once he wondered if Hugh might be correct.

  THAT night, Kerry awoke hearing someone crying off in the distance. There was only one person it could be.

  He crept out of the tent gripping a flashlight and spotted Miriam sitting up on one of the trail switchbacks with her head in her hands.

  He ascended the trail and sat down beside her. “Is everything all right?”

  She shook her head.

  Kerry sighed and looked up at the stars, which twinkled like a million tiny diamonds lying on a vast swatch of black silk. “I think I know what the matter is. You want to go back. Not to where you lived before, but where you’ve been ever since.” He paused. “That was the beautiful, happy place, wasn’t it? It was never here at all.”

  Miriam continued to weep.

  “It wasn’t fair for me and Hugh to do this to you. I tried to convince him it was wrong.”

  “Yet you didn’t stop him.”

  “Miriam, I’m sorry. I guess in reality I was just as curious as he.” He tried to swallow an embarrassing knot that was forming in his throat. “Please forgive me.”

  “I forgive you. I cannot blame you for your curiosity. I only hope that you will begin to see.”

  They were both silent for some time. One certain question kept buzzing in the back of Kerry’s mind like a trapped insect.

  “There’s something I’d like to ask you,” he said at last. “I hope you won’t take it personally.”

  “You want to know how I died.” The statement was so blunt and would have sounded so absurd to any eavesdropper that Kerry nearly laughed.

  “Do you always read people’s minds?”

  “No, but I can read people’s hearts. Let me tell you something, Kerry. There are people who hate the truth. It is a poison to them. The only way to protect themselves from the poison is to eliminate those who bring it.”

  “That’s terrible!”

  She shrugged. “That is the way of things.”

  “If you were saying things people didn’t want to hear, why didn’t they just ignore you and move on?” Kerry had ignored plenty of so-called “preachers” whose peculiar views conflicted with his own. He’d never considered bashing them over the head to shut them up, though.

  “The fact that we existed at all was enough to drive them to murder. Better to silence us than to allow us to travel somewhere else with the truth.”

  “Why would you have anything to do with this ‘truth’ if you knew you would be killed for it?”

  “Only the flesh dies, Kerry. The flesh is vapor. When the vapor drifts away and is gone, only we remain.”

  “You’re talking about souls.”

  “Call it whatever you want, as long as you understand the meaning.”

  “I’ll try to understand it.” Kerry yawned. The lateness of the hour was beginning to wear away his alertness. Besides, her words had spooked him. He stood up and brushed off his pants. “I’m going to go back to bed. You should probably get some sleep, too.”

  “I will be down soon. I would like to stay here awhile longer. The stars—I never saw them like this before.”

  The statement struck Kerry as odd. How terrible must her old homeland have been if she had never seen a clear nighttime sky? Perhaps she had lived in one of the more populous cities in the far west; not in this wasteland at all.

  “Fine,” he said, “just be careful on the way down. I knew a man who broke his leg slipping off the trail just about right here.”

  “I will be careful. And thank you for caring about me.”

  “Goodnight, Miriam.”

  He clicked on the flashlight and saw her smiling. “Good night.”

  “WHERE is she? Where is she?”

  Hugh’s accusing cries startled Kerry awake. The sun had risen, and in the pale light of morning Kerry could see that the only occupants of the tent were he and Hugh.

  “She didn’t come back?”

  “Come back from where?”

  “The trail. She was sitting up there last night watching the stars. She may have fallen asleep there.” A horrifying thought dawned on him: the trail was only a few feet wide. If she had dozed off while stargazing there, so close to the edge…

  Kerry jumped up and ran out of the tent, praying to whatever powers ruled the universe that the young woman was fine.

  He halted at the bottom of the trail. Hugh stopped at his side and swore.

  A female figure lay unmoving on the first switchback above them. It was the same place where Kerry’s old comrade had fallen and broken his leg.

  “She’s dead!” Hugh roared, his face turning crimson. “You should have made her get down from there! Now we’ll have to put her in the machine and revive her all over again.”

  “She might not really be dead,” Kerry said, jogging up the first incline. He wished that he could believe his own words. “She could have knocked herself unconscious.”

  He knelt down where Miriam lay and brushed her tousled hair out of her face. Her skin was gray. Not a good sign. He leaned his ear close to her mouth to feel for a breath; then grabbed her wrist to check her pulse when he had detected none. Her flesh was cold.

  “She’s gone, isn’t she?” Hugh arrived, panting with exertion.

  Kerry dabbed at his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. “I had hoped…to get to know her better.”

  “And you can. Let me see her.” The old man nudged Kerry out of the way and placed his hand on Miriam’s neck. “That’s odd.”

  “What is?”

  “She’s smiling.”

  It was true. In the few hours that Kerry had known her, Miriam’s face had never looked so serene, like that of a sleeping infant cradled in its mother’s arms.

  KERRY’S muscles were burning by the time he and Hugh made it to the top of the cliff with Miriam’s body. Her head kept listing to one side at an unnatural angle, a sure sign of a broken neck.

  Kerry briefly contemplated breaking Hugh’s neck so the old man wouldn’t put the poor girl through another round of misery.

  “This is foolish, Hugh,” he said while the man unlocked the trailer doors. They had laid Miriam’s body on the ground. “Nobody should have to be brought back like this only to die a third time at some point. I say we should bury her like respectable men would.”

  “Are you saying I’m not respectable? She’ll be thanking us for this.”

  “Yes, just like she thanked us before.” Kerry crossed his arms. “You’re such a considerate human being.”

  Hugh shook a finger at him. “You watch it. Now help me put this lady back into the resuscitation chamber. She’s a bit heavier now that she’s got some meat on her.”

  Kerry shook his head. It was high time that his years of giving in to every one of Hugh’s whims came to an end. “No. If you want to bring her back again, you’re going to have to do it yourself. I won’t be held responsible.”

  Hugh’s face twisted into an ugly expression that Kerry had only seen him use wit
h unruly students at the base. “If you don’t help me, I’ll leave you out here with the rest of— A low rumbling noise in the distance cut him off.

  Kerry recognized the sound immediately. Air copters.

  Hugh swore. “And the cavalry comes at last.” He tugged on Miriam’s arms in an attempt to lift her; then let her body drop back into the sand. “Oh, forget about this. Get in the car.” He slammed the trailer doors shut.

  “I’m not going to leave her here like she’s a bag of waste!” Kerry shouted at him. Miriam had not been given a proper burial the first time. She did not deserve to receive the same treatment again.

  “Then stay here and be charged with murder! That’s what it will look like, and nobody is going to be able to prove otherwise.” Hugh marched toward the transport and got in.

  He was right. Being found here with a dead woman did not look good on his part. “Fine! I’ll go with you.”

  Kerry scrambled into his seat, giving Miriam one last look through the window. He hated to leave her here. But what else could he do?

  Only the flesh dies, Kerry. The flesh is vapor. Her words echoed through his thoughts. Maybe it meant that leaving a lifeless body behind wasn’t such a terrible thing to do, after all.

  The rumbling noise outside grew so loud that Kerry felt his internal organs vibrating.

  Hugh threw the transport into gear and pushed the accelerator to the floor. Kerry was thrown back into his seat.

  “You should have unhooked the trailer,” he said. “We might have been able to go faster.”

  Hugh appeared not to have heard him, lost in his own world where the only thoughts were those of escape.

  They had driven a scant tenth of a mile when the first law enforcement copter swooped over them. The transport’s engine died the same instant. They gradually drifted to a stop.

  “Engine jammers,” Hugh growled. “The bastards.”

  To Kerry’s surprise, Hugh opened the car door and ran. He wasn’t about to stop him.

  Kerry closed his eyes and took a deep breath while he waited for the inevitable. He would be arrested for theft and lose his job, that was certain. And was it worth it? Miriam had spoken of a truth, one that was worth dying for. Maybe once this whole mess was sorted out and behind him, he would seek out other adherents of the truth and learn it for himself.