“Hey, just because you’re a lightweight and you wouldn’t have been able to handle it doesn’t mean you have to bring me down, baby.”
We both laughed, sounding more like ourselves than we had in days.
I turned the headlights on as night descended on us. Originally, we were going to sleep in the car but after trying the first time (and sitting up for the duration of the night picturing the monstrous face of another one of those things) we buckled and checked into a motel perched right behind an adult store and a tattoo parlor. It was a classy place, believe me...
I pulled off of the interstate as Alice fell into one of her grief-stricken dazes. I had seen her laugh for the first time that day and I knew that she would recover from the horror she felt at killing her mom. I hadn’t been sure of that before. It would definitely take time but it would pass eventually.
I was able to force my own sadness away for her sake. I knew that while I had found my parents senselessly murdered, my own feelings were nothing compared to Alice’s. She had killed her mother and still had no idea if her father was alive, dead or if something worse had happened to him. I couldn’t imagine how terrifying that was.
The man who was sitting with his feet up on the check-in desk eyed us curiously as we checked in. We were too young to be traveling on our own and people everywhere reminded us of that by staring at us like we were attractions in a freak show. It had to have looked quite odd to see two teenagers who clearly hadn’t been sleeping or eating well traveling the country alone. The back stories those people must have fabricated for us would have been truly entertaining to hear. In one of her better moods, Alice and I created some of those fantastical scenarios ourselves to explain away the stares we got wherever we went. Alice imagined that they thought we were runaways, escaping the wrath of our parents who disapproved of our relationship and the love child we had conceived. I went further than that, telling her that they thought we were escaping conviction after committing an unreported Bonnie and Clyde-like shootout with the police. I witnessed another one of her laughs that had become so rare and my spirits were lifted.
We went to our room which was better than the last, at least. Alice went to take a shower as I carried our bags inside. Though we never stayed more than a night in one place, I still liked to have our bags inside with us. It was a waste of energy to haul them to and from the room, but for the sake of consistency, we wanted the things we had brought from home with us at all times.
“I hope there’s a washing machine on this spacecraft.” Alice told me as she came out, wrapped in a towel. “We’ve already worn almost all the clothes we bought.”
“Do you want to go shopping one last time?”
She flashed me a smile of recognition; she knew I was attempting to make her feel better, as I knew that she loved shopping as much as the next girl.
“Maybe.” She replied as she grabbed some clothes from her bag and went back into the bathroom to change.
“Well, we might as well, right?” I told her. “We won’t need money where we’re going. So we should just spend what we have.”
“That would be fun. It’s our last chance to shop at American Eagle and Aeropostale. They won’t exist in a day or so. Nothing will exist in a day or so.”
She started talking about the dismal end of everything we knew only when she was feeling the sadness for her mother and the fear for her father. I had learned not to try to reassure her. It wasn’t that she cut me off, demanding that I face reality and stop feeding her lies that everything was going to be alright. I just knew that I couldn’t convince her. Every time I tried, I felt a lump in my throat that blocked the blurry words of reassurance I could barely see in my mind from coming out of my mouth. I knew as well as she did that we were leaving a dying planet. Those people that stared at us so quizzically would all be dead within the space of twenty four hours.
“Do you feel guilty for leaving? Do you feel like we’re kind of...” She sat down on the bed and started to brush out her long, brown hair, “I don't know... betraying the human race a little bit?”
“I don’t know if it’s betraying the human race. If we were communicating with aliens, passing along top-secret military intel on the human race, then yeah. We’d be betraying them.”
“You know what I mean, Quinn.”
“I do. If we lived here, shouldn’t we die here? That’s what you’re getting at. What makes us so special that we’re the ones who know that we have to leave? Why are we going to be the ones that get saved?”
“That is exactly what I was asking.”
“Do you remember what that guy, James said? He said, 'It doesn’t matter why at this point. Nothing matters except the fact that we had the dream and they didn’t. We know and they don’t. That has to mean something.’ I believe him.”
“That guy seemed a little off to me. He seemed a little haunted. That doesn’t really make any sense when I say it out loud. But he seemed like he had seen too many horrible things.”
“Don’t you think that’s how we seem?”
“Well, we’ve been through hell.”
“He's probably been through hell, too.”
“We all have. I just wonder what the whole purpose of it is, that’s all. Why aren’t we just going to die with the rest of them?”
“And we’re back to square one.”
“Yeah. And we’re probably always going to stay there. We all either had this dream or know someone that did. Whether we had the dream or not, we all know what’s coming. What are the chances of us also having been able to get in contact with the people responsible for that spaceship and the people who know all about Pangea? I know that they all had the dream, which is strange. But don’t you think that’s just so...” She searched for the right word.
“Lucky?” I filled in for her.
“Exactly! It just seems like a huge coincidence and generally, when something seems like a huge coincidence, it isn’t a coincidence at all.”
“So what is this, Allie?”
“I think it’s fate. I know you don’t believe in stuff like that. But I think we’re meant to go there. We’re meant to start life over. That’s what we’re going to have to do, isn’t it? We’re going to have to rebuild civilization on another planet.”
“I guess so. You know what’s weird? I haven’t thought about what we’re going to do once we actually get to Pangea. I’ve only thought about getting there.”
“Well, we’re in a situation that is time-sensitive, right? I haven’t thought about it until right now, either. We’ve been too focused on surviving that we haven’t looked at what is going to happen once we’re there. What if there isn’t enough food for however many people are on the flight? What if it turns out people aren’t capable of living there? Maybe there won’t be oxygen. Maybe there will be people already there that try to kill us. Maybe the climate will be too intense for us.”
“Or maybe it will be everything that they’re saying it’s going to be. Maybe it will be the place where we start over, where we have the life that we’ve always wanted.”
“We would have had that here, if it weren’t for the end of the world coming.”
“Who says we would have had it here, Allie? Our parents would have probably torn us apart in the end. They didn’t want us to be together.”
“We shouldn’t talk about them. We shouldn’t say anything mean about them now, Quinn. They’re dead and they were our parents and…”
“I’m not saying anything mean. I’m being truthful. I want to be optimistic about this. You know that I’m normally the pessimist out of the two of us. I’m not being optimistic for your benefit or for mine. I’m seeing things in a positive way because I really think that once we’re there, everything is going to be okay for us. We’ll make a life there. Everything will be good.”
“Or maybe we’ll create some sort of cosmic catastrophe by outrunning our fate.”
“You think our fate is to stay here and die?”
“I
don’t know what our fate is. It might be to stay here and die. Then, if we leave, we’re messing with something that’s bigger than us and I don’t know what the consequences of that would be. Maybe our fate is to go to Pangea, start over there and live out the rest of our lives. I don’t see much bad coming from that and that’s exactly what scares me. There’s no way that we’re going to get there and just live out the rest of our lives in peace. There’s no way that’s possible.’
“Why not?” I asked with a chuckle of disbelief. “Would that be so weird after we survived the apocalypse?”
“There are always things that we have to overcome. What is the point of us living if we’re just going to be skating along with nothing to challenge us? No one ever lives a chaos-free life. There are different kinds of chaos, yeah. But everyone experiences it in one way or another. I think that if we leave here and go to Pangea, we’ll be facing things that we have absolutely no idea how to handle. We’ll probably end up dying there, too.”
“Don’t say that, Allie. Look,” I reached out and held both of her hands, “we know that we'll die if we stay here. That is for sure. But we have a chance there.”
“A chance to die painfully instead of in a quick burst that we won’t even feel.”
“Who says that we’re going to die there?”
“I just don’t think that we’re going to go there and everything is going to okay for everyone. There will be things there that we have to deal with. It won’t be paradise.”
“I don’t think it will be paradise. We’ll be rebuilding civilization on a new planet. That’s going to be hard, to say the least. But it’s a chance to live, Allie. That’s something that we don’t have here. I’ll tell you how I see it, from my logical, secular view: All living creatures have the instinct to stay alive, no matter what it takes. We will all fight for our lives because that’s our nature. This is our fight. I think that fight will end once we’re there. But if it doesn’t, then we’ll keep fighting. That’s our nature, Allie.”
“That project you did on evolutionary psychology really stuck, didn’t it?” She narrowed her eyes at me and tried to suppress her smile.
“It did.”
“Do you want to know how I see it, from a faith-based point of view? The world is going to end and that is something that was guaranteed from the beginning. We’re running away from it. We’re escaping the end that was always intended for us. We’re messing with fate.”
“But you said you didn’t know if our fate was to stay and die or to go there and start over.”
“I don’t. So either, we’re messing with something that was promised for us from day one and we’ll suffer the consequences for it, or God has changed the game.” She got up to pull her lotion from the bag. I looked away from her, seriously contemplating everything she had just said, but especially the last part. We had always held completely differing views on the meaning of things. I was always the logical one. She was always the faithful one. We were, in that respect, at least, fire and water. But I sat and thought about her words seriously, wondering if she was right. My brain told me that no, she was deluding herself. She was looking for something Divine in an event that was being caused by people who were in power all over the world.
“Maybe there’s a different God on Pangea.” I told her after awhile. I was trying to make light of the situation but a part of me meant it as well.
When she turned to reply, I saw only complete seriousness in her eyes.
“There’s only one God, Quinn. It doesn’t matter where we go. There’s only one God.”
XXX
We departed the motel at three AM. We had no time to waste anymore. Alice slept and I drove, lost in my thoughts. It was really happening. We were really leaving Earth. We were journeying to a planet we hadn’t even known about a year before, though many in the group we had met told us that the people in power had known for decades. Pangea had always been their Plan A in the event of a worldwide, catastrophic event.
I wondered what it would look like. I had played a lot of space video games and like every other person in the world, had seen Star Wars. The planets were always vastly different from our own and sometimes, those differences resulted in grave problems for the characters in the fictitious stories. Alice had suggested that we could go there and find that there was no oxygen. As I pictured walking out of the spaceship, ready to take my first breath of Pangean air only to find nothing but hollow, dry emptiness, I shuddered. Suffocating certainly wouldn’t be as quick as being blown apart by a massive bomb.
We weren’t even sure that it was a bomb. For all we knew, the sun was going to explode. Conspiracy theorists had long suspected that one day, all of the energy the sun harnessed would fire at us, incinerating everything in its path. Some would argue that it was the only consequence of our irresponsibility with the environment. In other words, it would serve us right, as we had done everything in our power since the Industrial Revolution to harm the planet we lived on.
“Mother Nature will fight back.” My father had told me once, as we watched harrowing footage of Hurricane Katrina.
I was young at the time and yet still able to understand the horror that was occurring down south.
“But Dad,” I countered, “the people down there don’t deserve to die!”
“Of course not.” He had replied as he clicked off the television. “But we will all pay the price for what we’ve done to God’s creation.”
I didn’t believe that babble for a second, even then. I was still young enough to believe most of what my parents told me but I had never grasped at faith the way they had. Even when I was required to take Sunday school classes and attend church with them, I didn’t buy any of it. I guess one could chalk that up to precociousness.
The scientists who were instrumental in our escape had no definitive answer, either. One even told me that all his life he had believed in his field of work, never looking to any higher power for answers, as he felt he already had them through mathematics, algorithms, and high probability hypotheses.
“But I know that whatever is coming is bound to make a believer out of me.” He had told me after taking a long drag on the cigarette he was holding with a shaking hand. “We’re escaping it, yeah. But we never would have known this was coming if it weren’t for having the dream. That means something.”
It means something. It means something. That was all anyone could say. I remained unconvinced that whatever would cause the destruction of our world wasn’t just an earthly occurrence. If it was a nuclear war that was about to break out and kill everyone, then it was the result of selfish and imprudent acts by our worlds’ many governments. If it was the sun exploding, it was because we were too foolish to protect the land we had inherited.
Faith is a dangerous thing. My grandmother had told me that and I didn’t quite understand what she meant. But now, as everyone grasped at some reasoning, some explanation for the coming events, I understood. Alice was even susceptible to it, though she had always been more of a believer than I was.
Just as I was swearing to myself that I would never look for any divine reasoning in what was about to happen, the horrible face of that creature that had killed our parents popped into my mind like a petty taunt from beyond. I shuddered again, contemplating waking Alice so she would distract me by talking about anything else. I looked down to turn the volume up slightly on the radio. That ridiculous song about roses and their thorns was playing sadly on. Gross...
My foot slammed the brake pedal before I had even looked up. Instantly, every sense was on high alert. I could smell the slowly rotting McDonalds leftovers that were in the trash bag on the backseat. The darkness around me was suddenly intensified, but somehow, I could see for miles in every direction. My eyes possessed a light that could see through shadows. I knew from the last time that had happened that only one thing was waiting in the vast expanse of darkened space on every side of us; a Watcher, as Alice had begun to call them.
I reached over
to shake her awake but she grasped my hand before I could touch her. Looking over at her quickly, I found that she was already sitting up, staring out into the darkness ahead of us with widened eyes. Just like me, she was already on edge, ready to fight. But I also saw in her face an expectation that startled me; she knew that the Watcher lurking somewhere near was the last of our parents. She knew it was her father.
“They’re suffering.” She whispered.
“What?! Allie, what the hell are you talking about?”
“When they’re trapped in those things… When they’re consumed by them…” She whispered as she reached down and put the car in park. “Quinn, they’re still in there. They’re trapped in there.”
She was talking nonsense. The grief had finally gone to her head and the fear I knew that she felt didn’t help her mental state reach its status of feigned sanity.
“What are you talking… Wait!” She had jumped out of the car after opening the glove compartment and pushing the button to release the trunk. We kept the shotgun back there, loaded and ready to go.
“What are you doing?”
“You had your dream. I had mine.” She answered brusquely, still speaking softly even though there was nothing but that thing around to hear us.
“Alice, you’re being crazy right now!” I told her as I followed her up the road. “We’re in the middle of the desert, okay?! We can’t do this now!”
She kept walking, not acknowledging a single word I had said.
We heard the throaty shrieking before we had even seen it. I ran forward to push her down, but she had already fired the gun. The creature had charged right at her from straight ahead but it had shocked her when it screamed and the bullet missed, veering off too far to the left. She ducked down and it jumped right over her, running towards me now on all fours.
“Sh…” I muttered before turning and sprinting to the car. I jumped up onto the hood, ran over the top and back down the bottom before jumping onto the pavement and running back around, trying to confuse it. My diversionary tactic seemed to be working; the creature stomped and snarled in frustration, practically tripping over its feet in its attempt to follow me.
The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) Page 12