We stood for several minutes, staring until our eyes watered. We couldn’t imagine tearing ourselves away. But then, our curiosity at what other wonders the rest of the ship held overtook us and we turned to leave.
“Do you think they have a Ben and Jerry’s stand? If they do, this would pretty much be the coolest ship ever.” Alice told me and we both burst into hysterics again.
After walking through a hallway lined with vases and flower pots, we walked into a large room with a ceiling made of glass. There were hundreds of tables on the hardwood floors. It looked like a dining room at a vacation resort; the tables were wooden and adorned with flowers in small crystal glasses. Running along the left wall was a buffet stand that was emptied and dark.
“Well, I guess it’s a good thing they were building this thing for uppity morons.” I told Alice, who beamed.
“Only the best for them, I suppose.” She agreed with a roll of her eyes. “Well, now it’s for us. I mean, look at this!” Her voice echoed around the room as she spun in a circle while walking. “Look up!”
I did, only to see the stars whizzing past us through the window overhead in an unthinkably fast blur.
“Do you have any idea how fast this thing is going?” I asked her. “I mean, how much money did they spend for this?”
“Not our problem, baby. Don’t think about it.”
“I know it’s not our problem. At least, not anymore. I mean, I have to admit that I find it kind of funny that they couldn’t escape even the apocalypse unless they were riding in style.”
“I know, right? If someone told me I had to fly in a rocket made from a Spot-A-Pot, I would have done it.”
“Oh, gross! That's so nasty, babe...” I said as I doubled over from laughing so hard.
“I knew you’d like that one.” She told me after walking back to grasp my hand again. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek.
When we left the dining hall, we walked through what looked like a large sitting room straight out of the Titanic. After that, we discovered a library. Then, we discovered what can only be described as a recreation room. Set up throughout the spacious area were televisions, several pool tables, and through a door in the back, a large swimming pool.
“That’s a lot of TVs.” I told her as we stared. “But definitely not enough for five-thousand people. ‘I want to watch Transformers!’ ‘I want to watch...' I stopped, screwing up my face as I tried to think. “God, what's a girl movie?”
“The Notebook, Runaway Bride, oh!” She snapped her fingers when she remembered another one. “Pretty Woman, Dirty Dancing, Flashdance...”
“Okay, okay...” I waved my hands to stop her. “Please stop. If you cut me right now, I'd bleed pink after listening to that.”
When she laughed that time, she fell back onto the couch and covered her face. When she recovered, she held up the tape that was in her hand.
“Fine, baby, I can fix that problem for you. Superbowl XLVI.”
“Shut the…” I walked forward and took the DVD from her hand when she outstretched it to me. “They have football, too? Allie, I now know for sure that everything is going to be okay.”
“Except for the fact that people are going to get knifed over movies, which is what you were insinuating earlier."
“I guess we’ll just all have to learn to share. Isn’t that what you used to tell your kids at work?”
“Yes. What, do you think I’m going to be a Preschool Teacher’s Aide here, too?”
“People will probably start acting like little kids over movies, so yeah. I hate to break it to you.”
“Never! I told you, I will never do that again. If anyone gets into a fight over whether to watch football or baseball, I am staying out of it. There’s nobody to tell me that I have to break it up. That’s something that I am not going to miss, I’m telling you.”
“What? Working?”
“Yup! Are you going to miss fixing cars on the weekends?”
“Hell no. Isn’t that why people are fascinated with the end of the world? They know that they don’t have any responsibilities except the most basic ones anymore.”
“I know I’m excited about it. I mean, yeah, we’re going to have problems. But I just have this feeling that everything is going to be alright. It’s not because we have football DVDs. It’s just…” She looked up at me. “I know it. The same way we’ve known everything else so far.”
I smiled and kissed her quickly.
“I know it, too. We deserve it at this point, don’t we?”
“Definitely. After what we just went through, we deserve to have it easy from now on.”
Consider us young, naïve, and entitled but we really did believe that everything was going to be easy from then on out. We were aboard the most amazing ship ever built in the old world, hurtling through space at a speed that had never been achieved by any craft in the history of man. Sure, we were going to land on a planet and start civilization over, but how hard could that be? We were living through an experience that most would have deemed impossible. The thrill of it all was enough to blind us to the harsh fact that things would never be easy for us again. There on the ship that day, we could not bring ourselves to acknowledges the challenges that we knew would have to be faced nor did we take the time to ponder the challenges we knew nothing of yet.
There was no guarantee that we would survive the first year on Pangea. I knew that those thoughts were the reality of the situation and I believe that Alice, in her heart, knew that as well. We just couldn't face that fact then because we had been through hell over the previous days. We needed hope. We needed to believe that things were going to get better. It was foolish and irresponsible to allow such a drawn out vacation from the harsh reality. We needed to remain grounded in it, stuck hard to firm ground in order to deal with the consequences of our escape.
Alice and I looked at each other after several minutes, our smiles faded and our laughter having abruptly died away. We knew then that our hope was premature and our view on the “paradise” we were sailing towards was unrealistic.
“I know that we can’t afford to let our guards down.” I told her quietly. “But we have to try to make the best of this, babe. We’re all we have now. We’re all that we’re ever going to have.”
She nodded as she reached up to wipe a stray tear from her eye.
“You sound like your dad.” She told me. “So reasonable and so… ‘This is how it is. This is how we make it work.’”
“Is that a good or a bad thing?”
After grasping my hands, she smiled slightly.
“He might not have liked me but I liked him. I always saw a lot of him in you. I see it even more now. If he were here, he’d be proud of you.”
Why she said all of that just then, I didn’t know. I didn’t believe it to be true. The carefree joy we had felt just mere moments earlier was replaced by a sadness so strong, it rattled my nerves. The mention of my father made tears emerge from my eyes. Alice, crying with me, reached up and wiped them away. She kissed me again gently.
“I love you, and you’re right. We’re going to make the best of this and we’re going to be alright. We survived the worst of it. We can survive what’s left. You’re right about that, Quinn. I love you.”
I looked up at her and put my hand on her face.
“I love you, too.”
XXX
The food was pretty decent. The cots were relatively comfortable. Even after a week and a half of watching the movies they had stored, we weren’t bored. We were able to talk to people from other countries and learn of how they had discovered that the world was ending.
With everyone, it had all started with the dream.
One man from France detailed seeing a creature very similar to the one we had seen. When we asked if he had killed it, he shook his head.
“I should have.” He said through his heavy accent. “I know it was somebody.”
“Did anyone you love go missing?” Alice pressed him
gently.
“Yes. My wife and my brother both went missing. I know that she was the one following me. I should have ended it for her but I could not.”
To think of that man’s wife tossing and turning in some unknown purgatory we couldn’t begin to picture clearly disturbed Alice so much that she stopped sleeping through the night.
Other people described being stalked (and in some cases, attacked) by giants clothed in fur and armor.
“Like a giant? Or a troll?” I pressed eagerly.
“If I had any idea what you were talking about, I would choose one or the other.” The strange woman from Maine answered. “But since I don’t know…”
It didn’t matter, so I didn’t explain it. How she didn’t know what a giant or a troll was, I didn’t know.
“I just know that those things were huge and they would have killed me if he hadn’t stopped them.” The woman beckoned to her husband.
“What did you do to stop them?” I asked, ready to file his answer away for future reference.
“I found my own beast, I guess. I beat the crap out of the thing. I’ve never done Karate or anything like that a day in my life. But I was like a cage-fighter, man. I’ll admit, it was kind of cool.”
I smiled slightly, remembering how it felt when I had ordered the cop to leave, only to see him turn and stride away as though I had simply bid him good evening.
Another person, who spoke a million miles a minute with words I had never heard used in conversation before, explained seeing some strange, child-like creature.
“It only had a circle with teeth in it. It wasn’t a mouth, per se.”
Weird…
All of that was fun for a week or so. Then, Alice and I began to grow restless as we awaited the day we could leave the ship. After exploring every part of it, we were ready for some open air. The walls were beginning to feel like they were closing in. Though the ship was large, we were beginning to feel like were closed inside of a shoebox.
One night, we all got a scare. Randomly, while everyone was in the cafeteria having dinner, the ship began to bob up and down only slightly. Nobody stopped talking; they were paying no attention to the vibrations that Alice and I felt beneath our feet. Then, there was a deafening bang and everyone in the room was thrown up into the air several feet, only to come smacking back to the ground. For a minute, our stomachs dropped and I knew in my heart that we were plummeting right out of the sky, falling into the infinite space below us. There was nothing that would catch us in the dark open space beneath us.
But then, just as the screams of terror and the shrill emergency sirens reached a deafening peak, it was over. I looked up to see a girl a little older than Alice and I clutching a sobbing little girl close to her. An older man, presumably her father, had his arm around her shoulder. She shook him off and stood back up with the child still attached to her chest. One of the other girls with her was being ushered to her feet by a pretty red-headed woman who I could only assume was her mother.
I had only seen fractured groups thus far. That was the first family where all of its members appeared to be in tact. They appeared to be doing alright. That made them the luckiest group in my opinion.
Alice and I were walking back to our room one night when the little girl I had seen came running around the corner, giggling as her older brother chased her. Behind them, the two girls were walking in silence, not looking at each other.
“I am sick of this ship.” The older of the two muttered as she stared straight ahead. The younger gave no response.
“Well, I guess we’re not the only ones who just want to freaking get to Pangea already.” Alice muttered to me as the door to our housing compartment slid open to let us in.
“Are we going to live here on the ship or are we going to rough it out in the wilderness?” I was trying to distract her from what I knew was a severe case of cabin fever. I was experiencing the very same thing.
“Definitely the wilderness.” She replied as we laid down on our beds that we had pushed together. “I’m sick of this ship, too. Once I’m off of it, I’ll probably never come back inside.”
“You’ll have to come inside to eat.”
“No, I won’t. We’ll learn to hunt and fish. We’ll live off the land. Isn’t that what you always said you wanted to do? Remember? Your parents were calling you like, every five minutes that day and you got all frustrated and said you wanted to go live on an island where there was no service. You said we would learn to hunt our own food and we’d live in a log cabin we built out of the trees there.”
“No.” I corrected her. “I changed my mind, remember? I said that I’d rather live in a house made out of palm leaves. It is way more authentic.”
“It might be more authentic but I would definitely prefer the log cabin. I like having doors and windows. I like kitchens.”
“Well, we wouldn’t have a stove.”
“That’s okay. We would cook on the fire and we’d eat in the kitchen. I can picture it; we’ll have oil lamps lit instead of having electricity.”
I realized then that we were no longer talking about the fantasy I had dreamed up while frustrated over always being wired in with everyone. We were talking about Pangea. I laid back, picturing what she was saying.
“We’ll catch our own food.” She continued. “We’ll cook it ourselves. We’ll make plates out of rocks and silverware out of bamboo shoots.”
“I’ll build us furniture out of trees. Maybe we’ll find some way to make paint and you can start painting again.”
“Yeah. We’ll find some way to make fabric and I’ll sew us curtains and blankets and cushions for our couches.” She laughed and covered her face. “This is so ridiculous.”
“No, it’s not.” I told her after propping my head up on my hand and turning to face her. “It’s nice. I like talking about this, believe it or not.”
“I barely believe it because I know how you are about feelings.”
“Hey, I am a sensitive guy.”
“Yeah, right. And Hitler liked to snuggle.”
“Did you just compare me to Hitler?” I asked as I tried to feign offense. “That's low.”
“No!” She exclaimed, picking up her pillow and whacking me in the face with it. “I was just kidding. You can be very sensitive sometimes. Like when I force you to watch any movie based on a Nicholas Sparks book. You think I don’t see the man-tears but I’ve seen them.”
“You’ve seen nothing!” I exclaimed in mock outrage before we both started laughing raucously again.
The people on the other side of Alice’s bed were scowling at us. They were a couple that had clearly been married for many years. Every time I looked over at them at night time, they were turned away from one another. I never saw them exchange a word of conversation, either. They spent a lot of time praying, speaking loudly enough to God for all of us to hear. One night, when I was feeling particularly grim, I wondered if one day, after spending every waking moment together for many years, Alice and I would become like them. My parents had been toying with the idea of getting divorced and they had been high school sweethearts, if people still even use that expression. Was that just marriage? It begins and it ends before death parts the two involved?
Alice and I were, for all intents and purposes, married now. We were on our own, living without the constant supervision of our parents. We were traveling on that journey together. Once we got to Pangea, because we were together and because we were all that either of us knew, we would be living together. We loved each other. Were we doomed to scowl at those in the midst of young love one day because they had exactly what we had lost?
Those were heavy thoughts for me at that age. But after everything, it was easy to travel down some deep cerebral path into the meaning of it all, into the past and the future. I believed that Alice and I would be together forever. She believed the same. As we talked about where we saw ourselves on Pangea, we believed in our longevity as a couple even more resolutely.
&nb
sp; We were going to build our log cabin, hunt our food, build our furniture, and make a life for ourselves. Some people would kill for that chance but we hadn’t needed to. We were forced into that life by some cruel trick of fate where every other option was incinerated.
It was thrilling. It was terrifying. It was the best and the worst of scenarios.
I never would have survived those days of uncertainty without her by my side.
With every last piece of me, with every precious moment of my life, I miss her. It has been fifty years now and I miss her with the same painful longing. I still picture waking up with her beautiful face just in front of my own. I wake up reaching out to touch it.
She dissolves away as my hand touches her skin.
Violet
“Look, Maura! Look at it!” Penny exclaimed excitedly as she pushed her way through the large crowd of people gathered around the window at the far end of the Atrium.
“I see, darling. That’s something, isn’t it?”
“Look at the stars! They’re still so far away.”
I looked over at Brynna to see her covering her mouth to hide a tiny smile that had emerged. Elijah nudged her with his elbow several times, practically bobbing up and down. He had always been the one obsessed with space and there he was, flying through it.
“Hold this.” He handed Brynna his water bottle. “I’m going to go stomp on children so I can get a better look.”
Brynna laughed now and I couldn’t help but join in.
“We were the first to see it, you know.” James told me as he leaned against one of the pillars by the wall.
“You two were the first people awake?” I looked between the two of them in disbelief.
“I believe so.” James replied. “Well, there was another woman up, but that’s a grim story for another time.”
“What happened?” I asked as my smile faded abruptly.
“It’s nothing.” James dispersed my need to know such a dark thing with an easygoing tone and a shrug of his shoulder. “You and your sister, you're two of a kind. You're fascinated with all things morbid.”
The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) Page 18