Heat was lost more quickly in water. He knew that from the time he spent swimming at the beach. Even though they weren’t swimming now, they were drenched to the skin, their clothes so saturated that their jackets felt as if they were weighing them down. He could feel Kendra’s teeth chattering against his chest as he held her. She tried to hold him steady as best she could against the shivers that convulsed through him. Something soon—someplace dry—someplace—
There, suddenly, off on the horizon: a grassy knoll, a rock glistening against the rain. They pulled each other forward, feeling no cold or pain, just the awful hunger of hoping against hope.
A cave. Small, yes, no more than four feet high and only about eight feet deep and wide. Large enough to crawl into. And inside, amazingly dry, its mouth turned from the storm’s onslaught. They tore off their wet clothes and tossed them in a heap after finding some dry blankets deep inside their packs. Wrapping themselves tightly inside them, anchored to each other, they slept.
He did not dream that night. She did. Her dreams usually came out in a jumble, never linear. But this dream was a memory replayed, just as if it was one of those films they described in that book she liked. What was it called? Great Cinema of the 20th Century. What was harder to believe: that such a miraculous, perfect record of existence like film had once been real, or that so many beautiful people had all been alive at the same time? Harder still to believe—that their generation was descended from people who had looked like that.
She had been looking at that book when Alex came in to see her. She was home alone. Her parents were out, weren’t they? Where? It didn’t matter. None of it mattered, because Alex was there and had come in as he always did now, sulky and shuffling and without knocking, and talking before she even had a chance to look up.
“You better say something, Kendra,” he said, almost wheedling. “Everybody’s starting to think it’s me.”
She peeked at him and thought for the first time that he looked a bit freakish. His face was at that awkward midpoint between boyhood and manhood, a shadow of beard cropping up across his pudgy cheeks just underneath the finest reddish mountain range of pimples. His black hair lumped up in thick curls, probably because he had come right from bed to talk to her. She pictured him tossing in his bed, imagining her face on his ceiling, rushing out to find her. How romantic. It was the middle of the night, and she hadn’t been sleeping much. She remembered that very well.
“Since when do you care what people think?” she asked without lowering the book. “Oh—I’m sorry. I had you confused with a vertebrate. You only care what people think. That’s why you’ve told everyone about us going up to the woods.”
His indignant face popped over the edge of all the pretty ones in her book. “I never, not once—”
“Don’t you shit me, Alex.”
“Kendra—”
“So just go off and tell your little friends about this.” She shooed him with a brush of her fingers. “I’m sure they’ll believe you.”
“Kendra, why are you doing this?”
She lowered the book. “I’m not ‘doing’ anything.”
“That’s the point!”
“So you do it.” She shooed him again. “You’re good at getting people to believe anything. Get them to believe this.”
“Kendra, they think it’s me. They think I’m the one. You’ve gotta tell them the truth.”
“I don’t have to tell anyone anything. And I don’t care what people think. The people who matter know everything anyway.”
“Jesus Christ, Kendra!”
“Lord’s name, Alex. Careful.”
“They—I mean, my parents—they want us to—”
“And to that I’m saying no. Because you’re a useless little loudmouth prick of ten-second endurance.”
“I swear I didn’t tell them about the cabin. I didn’t tell them anything.”
“Save it. What, were you afraid they thought you killed me or something? Like I couldn’t snap your skinny ass in two.”
He suddenly and unexpectedly dropped to his knees before her. “Please, Kendra. I’m begging you.”
She laughed. “You’re pathetic. You’re sixteen and act like you’re five.”
“For God’s sake, Kendra.”
“Get. Out. Now.”
“I swear I’ll do something if you don’t tell them. I swear I will.”
She sat up and looked at him nose to nose. “You don’t have the guts.”
Half crying, half moaning, he ran from the house. She went to the door to close it on him and the empty night. Then she sat back down on the couch and read about old movie stars to try to stifle the waves of nausea flickering through her. She knew she’d have to talk to her mother—and most likely Grace. One thing at a time. Get through the night first. She gave the small curve of her belly another careful touch and looked at photos of a beautiful man named Cary Grant.
She thought he looked like an angel.
Kendra muttered to herself when she awoke, then wondered how she hadn’t woken John. Still half inside her dream, it took a while to recognize him, but she was glad to see that it was him and not anyone else. Before they had fallen asleep in the cave, Kendra suggested that they sleep with their heads facing the opening. Any other way seemed like sleeping in a tomb. She was glad she had. The sun was on her face.
John was sleeping so soundly. She slipped out of the blankets, stretched once outside the cave, then ducked back in to gather their filthy, wet clothes and spread them on warm rocks in the sun. Even if the clothes didn’t get completely dry, they would probably feel more comfortable walking back to camp in them instead of being stark naked. It was a warm morning, warmer than any so far since they’d been out here, the air still humid from the night’s storm. Her flesh goose-bumped a bit, but she was comfortable.
She remembered the first time she’d been naked in the woods. She stretched again, this time examining herself as she did. So different from what she’d been then, still long and lean, but not nearly as awkward, toned from all her years in the Defense Forces. Had she left when her four years were up, as her mother suggested, she might’ve developed the larger breasts—her one admitted physical disappointment—common in her family. She milled around, considering what to do. She frisked her underwear but realized it was still too wet to wear. Instead she ducked back into the cave and took both of their sidearms to make sure the rain hadn’t damaged them. She grinned as she neatly snatched John’s from beside his head. Then she found a warm place to sit in the dewy grass and began to dismantle them on an oilcloth she had taken from her pack and tried to keep the dream from her mind.
The tattoo on the inside of her left forearm, close to the wrist, caught her eye. The ink was starting to become greenish and a bit blurry already, but it was still clearly an ichthys, the only tattoo she had and the only one she’d thought she’d ever need. She’d gotten it after finishing her Novice year. Most kids got some sort of tattoo after that hellish first year. She traced its two intersecting arcs with the tips of her fingers until she completed its entire profile. She hated when people called it a Jesus fish. It always seemed to cheapen its historic importance to the early Christians as an identifying mark in hostile times. Alex called it that, stupid idiot spiteful Alex, who still came to her in dreams.
She’d finished dismantling her pistol when she saw something—a dull, reddish glint—at one corner just inside the cave’s mouth. She decided to dig it up.
It took a while. She crouched in the corner and slowly worked the object out of the hard-packed earth. As she exposed more and more of it, she could see it was curved and smooth, though pitted from having lain in the ground for however long. After wedging her nails, then her fingers, under an edge, she yanked it free.
It was a bowl. It wasn’t any bowl that she recognized. Not a fruit bowl or a soup bowl or some piece of crockery. And stranger, it wasn’t made of ceramic, definitely not clay. Nor was it carved from wood. And it wasn’t metal. She couldn
’t understand how it had been forged.
“What’ve you got there?” John asked as he poked his head from the cave. Like her, he was still naked. He sat cross-legged next to her and kissed her on the cheek.
“A bowl, I think.” She handed it to him. “I mean, I know it’s a bowl, but I can’t figure out what the heck it’s made of.” She ran her fingertips across its curvature.
John ran his own fingers across its pockmarked but still smooth edge. “This looks like it had some kind of a cover to it. See that ridge all around? Like something fit into it.”
“Yeah. Looks like. But what is it?”
He shook his head as if remembering something and laughed. “You know what I think this is?” He pointed at it, grinning. “Plastic.”
She gave him an incredulous look. “What’s plastic?”
“I read about it. On Earth-of-old, they made everything out of this stuff, from bottles to spaceships. It was cheap, easily made by their advanced technology, and very durable. Dad used to say he wished he could get ahold of some of it. Let’s see, there was polystyrene, PVC, nylon, synthetic rubber—”
“Listen to you,” she said with a snorting laugh. Then she ran her hand against the curve. “You’re telling me you think this thing is made of that stuff?”
“Gotta be. It sure isn’t any material we use.”
“Okay, Johnny. So humor someone who’s spent more of her life outside the Archives than you have. How’d it get all the way out here?”
His hand slid along its muddy interior and cleaned it out as best he could. “Good question. Best guess is that it’s probably been here since the Arrival.”
“I thought they didn’t have anything like this in the cargo containers—just basic tools, weapons, crop seeds—”
“That’s what I thought too.” He looked off into the distance. “But we also thought that everyone had stayed together to build the city. That no one lived beyond the perimeter. If this guy we’re following isn’t a mirage on both our parts, then that’s clearly not the case.”
“Now you think this guy’s a Remnant? Just because of this?”
“I don’t know, Ken. I think he’s connected to this bowl somehow, whoever he is.”
She took the bowl from his hands and rubbed its weather-beaten edge. “Doesn’t look like he’s eaten out of it anytime recently.”
John laughed. “Maybe he left it in a storm along with the rest of his supplies . . . like some other people we know.”
“Cute. So what’s the plan here?”
“Salvage what we can from the campsite and then keep following this general direction.”
She looked at the soaked ground all around her. “It’s a pretty remote shot we’ll find our friend.”
“I’m open to suggestions, babe.”
The campsite had not held out as well as they had hoped. Although they had done their best to secure their gear, the storm had exacted a serious toll. A full two-thirds of their food stores were ruined and a third of their ammunition. Their tent was too waterlogged and torn to salvage. Their spare uniforms and many of their clothes were infested with aphids. They set them apart from the clean ones and burned them as soon as they were dry enough.
They then strung up what they hoped could be dried and saved—their boots and their leather jackets, sleeping bags, some sweaters, underwear—but it was clear they would be living off the land much earlier than they had anticipated.
They warmed themselves in the sun, wearing mostly-dry underwear and watching their clothes flap in the afternoon breeze. Lying there, Kendra told John she was reminded of doing something similar as a kid after falling down exhausted from playing hide-and-seek through her mother’s clotheslines. They passed a flask between them and a canteen of clean water and grumbled about their losses—especially their tobacco. But they also tried to look at the bright side. Their cooking supplies were still in good shape. They still had their knives and carbines and sidearms. And they both seemed none the worse after the freezing storm. The only odd thing seemed to be a faraway look that had grown up in Kendra’s eyes. John wondered if it had been the bowl. It couldn’t be the supplies. Knowing her, she probably had already planned a way to maximize their reserves.
He tossed a twig at her. “Penny for your thoughts, kiddo.”
“Hmm?” Her bright eyes were still on the clothes snapping in the breeze. “What’s that?”
“Nothing. Just something my mother used to say when we were daydreaming. So what’re you thinking about?”
“The Nephilim.”
“The what?”
CHAPTER 10
It wasn’t the first time he had ever heard the Nephilim connected with Kendra. But it was the first time she had ever mentioned them to him—and very likely, to anyone else.
After John had carried Kendra down from the mountain six years earlier, something in their society had changed. In a ritualistic city of routine rhythms and limited expectations of surprise, everyone in New Philadelphia suddenly had something novel to talk about. What had happened to Kendra? Had she run away? How had she gotten way up there in the mountains? And more troubling to the rumormongers, no one—not Jacob Weiss, not her parents, not Kendra herself—would say a word to anyone about exactly what had happened or how it had been possible for a young girl to survive more than three days and nights in the woods. The generalities that came out of the Council—that she had gotten lost and that apart from a few minor injuries she was fine—did not sate a public looking for a feast of facts. And because gossip filled a vacuum about as well as anything else human beings had yet to devise, people began to speculate—and speculations became facts. The fine citizens of New Philadelphia—God’s chosen people—became prisoners of the iron bars of gossip and found relief in the hint of scandal.
Then six weeks later the news hit. Kendra was pregnant. Just fourteen years old. Unmarried. Hadn’t even spent time in the service yet. A minor in all of the ways that counted. On Earth-of-old, maybe it might not have been much of a scandal. The Remnants always said the last days had been decadent. But in New Philadelphia it was a shock beyond imagining. On occasion people married while still in the service, at sixteen or seventeen, with their parents’ permission, and began having children soon enough, but no one had ever been pregnant that young and unmarried to boot. Once Kendra’s condition became known, the city would talk about nothing else, despite all the admonishments from many Remnants to “judge not.”
And the questions kept coming. If Kendra had been going up to the mountains to lie with Alexander Raymond Jr. in half-ruined Remnant huts, why didn’t she marry him now in the sight of God? Why the delay? Why not give that blessing of a child the gift of married parents? That talk stopped as a new word began being bandied about: Nephilim.
About seven or eight weeks after Kendra had been found, Gordon Lee sidled over to John in the mess hall at the barracks. Whenever Lee saw him, usually without Sofie, he’d hang on John, an arm around his shoulder or a hand gripping the crook of his elbow, as if they were somehow bonded because they had both been romantically involved with the same girl.
“So, rumor has it that you were the one who brought Miss McQueen down from the mountain.”
“Not much of a rumor,” John replied through a chunk of roll dipped in gravy, “if I filed a report with the Council saying just that.”
“Then you’re the man who can settle a bet between me and a few of the other engineers.”
“Doubt it.”
“Here’s what we’re thinking. One, this story about her and the Nephilim is just her looking for attention—as if she hasn’t had enough already. Two, it’s actually true—but none of us buys that one. Three—and don’t tell Sofie this—she was knocking boots with old man Weiss and they cooked up this cover story. She does seem like a minxy little thing.”
For his curiosity, Lee got a punch in the mouth and two knocked-out molars. John’s right hook earned him a month of KP duty. He had never enjoyed a punch more.
&n
bsp; Six years later, Kendra and John marched side by side as they came upon another wooded area. An abrupt transition separated the prairie land they had been hiking through from the very dense forest they were about to enter. Kendra joked how it almost seemed as if somebody had decided to drop a fully mature wilderness right here, just for giggles. As they located a point of entry, John wondered if he should’ve pressed her harder about mentioning the Nephilim earlier.
He knew what she must’ve thought: that the creature that had kept her prisoner in the mountains for three days was not a rogue Hostile as their Orangemen had suggested at the next beachside meeting. A man couldn’t kill an angel, fallen or otherwise, even if that man was Jake Weiss. But you could kill a Nephilim, the beings described in Genesis and Numbers. Many biblical scholars believed that the Nephilim were simply ancient warriors, the giant-sized children of Seth who had rebelled against God. But others, including a number of the more creative gossips around New Philadelphia, looked at the line from Genesis—“the sons of heaven had intercourse with the daughters of man, who bore them sons”—and other religious texts to conclude that the Nephilim were in fact the hybrid offspring of fallen angels and human women. Somehow Kendra had come to believe that the gossips had been right.
“John, look at this,” Kendra called from just up ahead, stirring him from his thoughts. He wanted to hold her face between his hands and kiss her. As he climbed the ridge of the small hill she had hiked a moment before, he planned to do just that. But what the sunlight dappling through the tree branches revealed stopped him cold. Kendra was already running down toward it. He chased after her. When he got to the bottom of the hill, he followed her over the little stream she had just crossed, then stood with her under the tree that had drawn her attention, each of them grinning like mad at each other.
She gave him a cockeyed salute. “So I figure I’m on the right track, Captain, sir.”
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