by Joe Hart
She inches backward, sliding down until she’s sure she can stand without being seen. She hurries away, hunched low despite the pain that radiates from her stomach. The land dips and rises before falling away to a narrow, rocky valley. On its far side, the house she spotted before comes into view. Its strange shape is due to the fact that most of the roof has caved in and one wall is entirely gone. Rotted boards protrude from the wreck like broken teeth into a weed-choked yard.
In the distance, engines rev and slowly fade away until there is only the sound of the plains and the smell of smoke.
The house is even worse than it appeared from a distance. She approaches it at a slow limp, throwing looks back in the direction of the road every few steps. She’s visible here, but the convoy has moved on. Each step is becoming a laborious event. The ground doesn’t feel solid, instead her feet seem to sink into it and stick each time she tries to move.
The house stinks of mold and the musk of an animal. She pulls herself inside through the gaping hole left by the collapsed wall. She is in a wide room held up by interspersed wooden beams traveling from floor to ceiling. A chair, its cushions black and bloated with moisture, sits across the room. All manner of nature coats the floor and walls—dried moss along the baseboards, dark mold crawling across the ceiling, old nests of unknown creatures.
The stairway to the second floor is collapsed, and the door leading off the large kitchen won’t budge no matter how hard she pushes against it. She slides down to sit on the floor, the exertion overwhelming.
Her temples beat in time with her heart, face dry and swollen with heat. Even as she sits it feels like she’s still moving, still walking on the rolling plains.
Eyes barely open, she stares across the kitchen at another door she didn’t notice before. It is open a crack that is pure darkness.
Zoey hauls herself to her feet and crosses the buckled flooring, pushing the door open. Broken stairs descend into a basement. Water drips metronomically. No way for her to get down.
She moves back along a row of buckled cabinets, their doors hanging weakly off like broken wings, and stops beside a grimy window. The yard outside is a mass of twisted bramble, dried and withered. To one side there is a path leading away that might’ve once been a road of some kind. The thought of leaving the house to continue on is too daunting, and Zoey settles to the floor again. This time she knows she won’t be getting back up.
“This is it,” she whispers to the empty house. “Good effort, Zoey, good try.” She closes her eyes to slits and stares at the warped wood of the kitchen. What would Meeka say to her now? Her friend’s voice has been silent for a long time. But she already knows. Meeka would call her weak and pathetic. Brought down by something as common as a fever. She can almost hear the disgust in her words, but it makes her smile.
“Soon,” she says, reclining farther on the floor. “You can tell me what you think soon.” The warmth of the fever surrounds her like a blanket. It isn’t that unpleasant. She’s sure there are worse ways to die. She knows so. Her only regret is not being able to help the other women escape the ARC. She was their only hope, their one chance. But what could she really do? What was her plan? She is one small, insignificant woman in the wide world. NOA has guards, weapons, and, most importantly, control. What had she hoped to accomplish? It is a miracle she made it this far.
She settles into a more comfortable position. Yes, she will go to sleep thinking of her regret. That is penance for failing them all. Failing herself. Failing her parents, whom she will never meet. She sighs. She really would have liked to know her last name.
As she rolls to her side and tucks an arm beneath her head, her eyes come level with a gap in the closest cabinet door. Something silver glints in the darkness, far back, like distant starshine. She nearly dismisses it but out of curiosity, tugs the door all the way open, letting the failing light invade the space.
A gray, rusty can sits at the back of the cupboard on its side.
Zoey stares at it for a long while, unmoving. When the can doesn’t disappear, she pulls herself up and snags it from its hiding place.
“Corned beef and hash,” she reads from the water-stained label. The top of the can has a steel ring flattened against it and she struggles for a long moment to get her fingernail beneath it before prying it up.
The can pops and a smell comes out that makes her want to weep as hunger resurges in her stomach. She yanks on the tab and the top comes completely off. Congealed fat covers a brown and gray mash. She pokes a finger into it and finds it’s moist. Hesitantly she brings the finger to her mouth and tastes it.
Salty, starchy. So good.
Zoey scrapes a handful free of the can and shoves it in her mouth. Her taste buds explode with flavor. It is a little mealy and there are some chewy grits that smash between her teeth, but it is by far the best thing she’s ever tasted.
She feasts, gobbling down the entire can in minutes. She scrapes the bottom with the tips of her fingers, licking the rim of the last remnants before setting the can aside. Her stomach is bloated, gurgling, wonderfully full. She drinks several long swallows of river water from her bottle but stops before all the taste of the corned beef and hash is washed away. She savors it, running her tongue around her mouth and across her teeth.
The daylight continues to fade and she drifts with it, her head light and floating with the meal and fever. Wind pushes gently against the house’s eaves, creating a mournful tune that she closes her eyes to, and falls asleep as darkness eats the world up from the east.
Zoey . . .
She wakes to her name being whispered, sometime in the early morning hours. The wind has died and all is quiet in the house, outside on the moonlit plains. Her body is something insubstantial, it merely surrounds her in an aura of heat. But it isn’t the raging fever that woke her.
She listens, hearing nothing for minutes that seem to stretch into hours. But there is something here. She can feel it.
She sits up, her stomach a mass of glowing embers around the wound. Spangles of light lace her vision, and she blinks them away. Her mouth is dry, so dry, and everything in the room sways. She tries to steady herself but realizes she’s still sitting on the floor—the movement is all in her head.
Zoey . . .
She flinches. The voice.
She knows that voice, but it’s impossible.
She stares into the shadow-clotted corner of the kitchen. There is something there, something watching her. Even as her heated brain tries to refute it, she knows, and a scream tries to escape her throat.
Assistant Carter’s bloodied face slides from the shadow, and grins.
24
“No!” Zoey yells.
She scrambles to her feet, shoes sliding on the floor, kicking up dust and debris. She stumbles from the room, throwing a horrified glance at the corner, and he is there, still smiling his dead smile and bleeding from where she shot him. He reaches for her and begins to follow, detaching himself from the darkness.
Zoey pelts toward the open air outside, tripping once over an animal’s nest. She leaps to the ground and falls hard to her side, pain erupting from her wound. But the terror overrides all else. There is only the need to flee, to get away from the grinning abomination that shouldn’t be there.
She runs.
The sky is a hammered plate of steel barely lit by the first strands of daylight, the ground ruddy and uneven. To the left the horizon is aglow with the same alien orange light as the day before, and the smell of smoke is thicker. Fire. There is fire that way. She doesn’t care. She will gladly run into an inferno if only to escape the thing chasing her.
Zoey runs until she collapses near a long cut in the land that is pooled with shadows. She gasps for breath and manages to gaze back through bleary eyes at the direction she’s come.
The house is hidden behind a low rise, and nothing pursues her across the plains. Her pulse hammers in the base of her skull, each beat a detonation of pain. She sags against the roug
h ground, grit biting into her hands and face as she lies down.
He wasn’t there, couldn’t have been. She imagined it, hallucinated. She’d killed him, watched him bleed out and die. Or was that all a dream? Was everything a dream? Is she still in the box, locked in the darkness? Was everything that had happened an imagining of her broken mind gibbering to itself as she wastes away in complete isolation?
Zoey sticks her tongue out and touches it to the dirt. Tastes it, feels it between her teeth.
Slowly she rises, the world a blurred fog at the edges of her vision. She stumbles on into the beginning of a new day.
The fire consumes the land with a hunger unknown to her before. She stands watching it from a rock outcropping that protrudes from the hillside like a dying tongue. The fire might be over a mile away but she feels its heat over the din of her fever. It is a dry, cruel warmth that speaks of obduration in its purest form. There is nothing that can stand against it.
She is in awe. Never has she seen something so powerful in all her life. Everything pales in comparison. The tongues of flame leap and snap at the air as if they would like nothing more than to devour it as they do the land. Atop the fire is the smoke, a solid wall of churning white and gray that twists up until it blots out the sky.
She saw the first suggestions of fire an hour before noon, the acerbic sting of its scent trying to choke her until she was forced to cover her mouth with her shirt collar. Until then the plod of her movement had been static; one foot after the other, try not to fall, don’t look back for fear of seeing him again through her deteriorating vision.
Zoey blinks, each one longer than the last. To sit here and fall asleep—how nice would that be? She is more akin to the fire now than to anything else. Her body glows with heat. She could embrace it when it rushes up the rise she sits on, walk down to it and meet it halfway.
She coughs again and the pain in her stomach echoes with each convulsion.
With a last glance at the sea of flames, she trundles away in the opposite direction, head hanging down, studying the ground that will soon be ash.
The white forms rise high above the ground, high enough for her to see them long before she reaches the field atop the rise, where they grow like feral trees stripped bare of any bark. They are strange in a way she can’t describe, their giant, steel columns rising up hundreds of feet, blunt heads holding three massive blades pointing in opposite directions.
There are dozens of them stretched out in a long, staggering line.
The blades on one situated in the center of the field turn in a lazy circle, emitting a short, rusty shriek with each revolution.
It hurts to look up at them for too long, so she makes her way around the field, giving them a wide berth. She imagines the towers uprooting themselves to lurch after her, blades turning much faster like whirring teeth. Zoey throws quick looks at them as she passes, making sure that they haven’t moved each time. At one point she thinks she sees a figure standing on one of the structure’s tops, but when she looks again it is gone. She tells herself that it’s too far away for her to see what she thought she saw, too far away to make out the maniacal grin and blood drenching the front of its suit.
In the late afternoon she finds a field of flowers. She crossed four different highways in the hours after leaving the field of white giants, scuttling over their broad expanses with hurried looks in all directions. Twisted signs peeled of their paint dotted the roadsides like stolid sentries. What would they have told her years ago? What secrets did they keep now that time had erased their messages? Before fleeing the openness of the highways, she caught herself staring at one of the stripped signs and noticed the sun had dropped much closer to the horizon since she’d last looked.
Past the intersecting roads, over the next rise cluttered by cracked rock, and through a stand of high bramble, all of it a delirious shade of yellow now.
But the flowers—the flowers are blue.
They send lances of pain through her eyes, but she can’t stop looking at them. Her vision is a corridor that she peers down, all else watery and fog-hewn shapes. But the flowers are sharply contrasted compared to the rest of the world. The field is full of them, their blooms like miniature bells, all tolling a scent she drinks in. Beyond the field, the monstrous shadows rising from the ground are more prominent, their edges taking on definition that eluded her before. The mountains are reflected in thunderheads that cluster above them, angling down to fill their valleys. The flowers contrast against the storm in a cerulean of dreams.
It is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.
She lies down to die amongst the flowers.
She’s lucky, she thinks. To have a place such as this to lie down in, to pass from. How many others in this world would have given anything to find such a place of peace, of beauty? But before she can truly appreciate this final gift, she thinks of the other women—of Lily, Terra, and even Sherell, Penny, and Rita. She thinks of Lee.
“I’m sorry,” she says. At least she thinks she’s speaking aloud. Now it is hard to tell.
The faraway sound of thunder coming down from the mountains falls across the plains, and it is gentle, something to fall asleep to.
Zoey closes her eyes.
A whistle snaps them open again.
She gazes up, expecting the blue flowers but they are gone. In their place are wicked loops of dead thistles and thorns. They bite through her shirt and pants and how did she not feel it before? Zoey forces herself up when the whistle comes again. It isn’t mechanical but comes from human lips, that she’s sure of. Again the thunder grumbles, sliding over the peaks to the west.
A loud bark meets her ears.
Her vision is still tainted yellow and her heartbeat is in her hands and feet. She stands up in the thicket that tugs at her clothes, urging her to lie back down, but she pushes through.
The whistle again. Closer.
Long scratches appear on her bare arms. She moves through the last of the dead bramble that was once blue flowers and steps into a clearing before a tree-studded foothill.
A man sits on a log with his back to her. Long, gray hair hangs down between his shoulder blades. A large black dog runs to and fro, ears laid back, tail whipping, as it rushes after a stick the man tosses into the tall grass. When the dog doesn’t reappear immediately, the man whistles and it comes back, dropping the recovered stick at his feet. He pets its head, smoothing down the long, pointed ears.
Every instinct within her is screaming to hide, to dive back into the thicket and lie down. It was comfortable there, even with the thorns, and she should not trust this man for that is what he is—a man.
But there is something in the calm way he strokes the dog’s head, how he seems to be communicating without words. Even his whistle is soft and patient.
Zoey tries to take a step forward, but the horizon slews and she loses her footing. She catches herself on her knees. “Help me,” she says, but her words aren’t even a whisper. She swallows, grimacing at the pain, and tries again. “Help.”
The dog’s ears prick up and it looks in her direction. The mane of gray hair twists before she falls forward and the world tips again.
Years later a hand grasps her shoulder and rolls her onto her back. The figure is outlined against the approaching storm above, gray hair blending with the swelling clouds. She cannot see his face. Wetness brushes her cheek and she jerks to the side, seeing only a dark mass several feet away in the grass.
“Get back, give her some air.” The voice is the grinding of rocks. The man stoops lower and Zoey blinks, trying to focus on his face, but it is lost to her. “Where did you come from?”
She tries to tell him as the clouds behind his head swirl and begin to rotate, faster and faster. She licks her cracked and ragged lips.
“Are you God?”
He is a long time answering, and now the sky is a cyclone bearing down on them, much lower than before.
“Not even close,” he rumbles.
/> Arms scoop her up from the ground, and at the same time the sky comes down to meet her in a collision of white that fades to a deep and soulless black.
25
Time loses cohesion.
There is no way to judge its passage, so she can only label different periods when she drifts into consciousness. There is moving, stopped, day, and night. All else is a muddled wash of dreams that have no true form. Figures move in and out of the light, a smile full of bloody teeth, the warm touch of fingers brushing her own, Lee’s voice murmuring something she can’t understand, Simon’s eyes soft and sorrowful, the feel of Zipper’s feathers, pain in luminous flashes of red.
At one point it is day and they are stopped and she smells something bitter before it touches her lips. Zoey turns her face away, grimacing.
“Drink this now, it’s not too hot. There you go, little sips.” The liquid is lukewarm and acidic and tastes of the earth. She lets the brew slide down her throat until there is no more. “Good, good,” the voice says.
Night and moving again.
Harsh breathing and the pain in her side is tremendous.
The whup of a helicopter, close. Some type of light blooming her vision red beyond her eyelids. Then stillness and the noise fading. She moans something but can’t form the words. There is nothing but the pain radiating from her stomach and the jolt of movement again.
“Hush now, we’re almost there. You hold on. Don’t you die after all this way.”
The dog woofs and the voice scolds it.
Dreams again that pour fear into her like ice water. She is in the black box, unable to move while a crawling sensation covers her body. It is as if her nerves have been exposed to the air. She tries to struggle but her control is gone. She is stuck lying on the biting nubs of the floor while her skin crawls.
But then there is light through a strange, shifting gap. She isn’t in the box after all. There is some type of room beyond. The gap closes and reopens again, flickers of movement around the narrow tunnel of sight. She is in the operating room on the fifth level. The equipment is huddled around her, machines and lights everywhere. The gap closes again, and a dark inkling begins to grow in the back of her mind. There is something horrifyingly familiar about the way the scuttling sensation moves across her body, how it sounds. When she can see the room again, her very soul quivers with revulsion.