The Effort

by Claire Holroyde

Weber braced his weight. He wasn’t one for moral inaction, but he had no way of knowing if the man in the red jacket meant to harm them. These were different times; many horrible actions were justified. Weber closed his eyes, but there was no sickening thud to interrupt his silent prayers. When he looked back, the man in the red jacket was tumbling down the embankment. He must have jumped to safety at the last second.

  “Good that we didn’t hit him,” Weber said in a long exhale.

  The stranger grunted and mentioned all the damage a deer had already done to his fender. They were silent for the rest of the trip.

  * * *

  THE CLOSING OF the driver’s-side door woke him. Weber bolted upright, but he was strapped in by a seat belt. It was already twilight and the drizzle had stopped. Weber watched the stranger’s shadowed figure through the windshield as he approached a ten-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with three rows of curled razor wire that looked like widow’s lace against the sky.

  A section of the fence slid back when the stranger pushed with his meaty arms and shoulders. He got back behind the wheel and eased the truck through the gate with its headlights off.

  “Was this a prison?” Weber asked.

  “No. It’s home. That wire is to keep people out, not in.”

  Weber didn’t blame the man for turning off the truck’s engine and taking the keys with him when he stepped out to close the gate.

  They drove down a long and narrow dirt road. When the underbrush cleared, Weber heard the crunch of tires on gravel. There was a building forty yards ahead, like a modern-day fortress with high concrete walls. Weber saw a large satellite dish on its roof, outlined against rose- and lavender-colored clouds. A metal garage door was the only interruption in the wall facing them.

  “Here’s where I get lazy,” the stranger admitted.

  He reached up and pressed something behind his rearview mirror. The garage door lifted and folded along segments as it retreated into the wall.

  “How…” Weber started. “How were you so ready?”

  “It’s funny,” the man said, looking more sober.

  He stepped lightly on the gas.

  “I was ready for every other reason under the sun. Terrorist attack, currency collapse, Ebola outbreak…but a fucking comet? I mean, ya gotta be kidding me.”

  Weber nodded and gave a tired laugh. Depending on how you looked at it, UD3 was either the least funny situation in an infinite amount of other possibilities—or it was hilarious.

  The truck came to a stop as the garage door extended back into place. Weber unfastened his seat belt in the absolute darkness.

  “Just wait,” the stranger whispered.

  Overhead lights flicked on.

  “Jesus,” Weber breathed.

  “No, not Jesus. More like energy from solar panels,” the man said, sounding pleased.

  With the granola bar and a few hours’ sleep, Weber was able to walk without help. He shuffled along slowly after his host. The other man reached the door and flicked on a small flashlight mounted on the end of his rifle.

  “I don’t use lights where there are windows,” he muttered. “It could attract them.”

  He shut off the overhead lights and opened the door. Weber tried to follow the flashlight’s thin beam pointing down the gun barrel. It was a surreal view, like one of those first-person-shooter videogames he had seen in the crew lounge on his ship. The stranger crossed the first room and stood to the side of its only window. He picked up his lightweight binoculars and scanned the darkness outside. Weber stole a moment to look around. The room had no furniture but was cluttered with piles of objects: collections of electronics, clothes, and weapons. The soles of Weber’s boots skidded on grime.

  The men crossed two more rooms before reaching a windowless kitchen with a wooden table and chairs. The stranger helped Weber into a chair and flicked on the overhead lights. They both blinked rapidly in the dazzling light. Electricity. How could Weber have been so ignorant to its everyday miracles?

  The stranger pulled out his jingling keychain and unlocked the door to his basement larder. Gun and flashlight in hand, he disappeared down a flight of stairs. Weber looked around the kitchen. He saw a cast iron stove on legs with its thick exhaust pipe reaching to the ceiling. The walls above and below the cabinets were bare.

  When the man returned, he had two cans clutched to his chest with one hand. The other held his gun with his trigger finger ready. Weber made no sudden moves. His stomach groaned like a kettledrum.

  “I know,” the other man promised. “It’s coming.”

  He let go of his gun and let it sway from its strap. There was a can opener lying on the kitchen counter beside an old dog collar. Weber would have used his teeth on the metal like the starving animal he was. The thought of food was almost unbearable. He needed a distraction.

  “Do you have a dog?” Weber asked, making fists with trembling hands.

  Soon as he asked, he wished he didn’t. People ate their pets, and they trapped and ate all the wild animals they could find.

  “I had a dog. Now I don’t.”

  Weber’s silence must have betrayed his thoughts.

  “I didn’t eat him,” the other man snapped as he took off his gloves. “He died two years ago. He’s buried in the back. In one of his holes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The other man shook his head, like he was shaking free of the thought, and emptied baked beans into a bowl.

  “Got a feeling you won’t mind it cold,” he said, carrying the bowl and a spoon to the table.

  Weber took the bowl from the stranger’s hands and tipped it up to his open mouth.

  “Easy,” the man said gently. “Eat slow as you can. Easy! You’re gonna—”

  Choke. Weber hacked until tears ran down his reddened face. As soon as he could breathe, he spooned up the remaining beans and sauce. Metal scraped against ceramic. Weber’s host was already opening the second can. He took a seat at the table as he poured out the contents. Weber’s eyes watered again as he finished his second helping but this time because of overwhelming gratitude. How could he ever repay the man beside him? He wiped up the streaks of sauce with his finger and licked it.

  “You’re the first person I’ve talked to,” the stranger admitted. “You know, after I lost contact.”

  Weber cleared his throat. If talking was what this man needed, then Weber would happily sing for his supper. He asked questions and listened to answers. The other man used to be some sort of cybersecurity expert, where a constant state of paranoia might be a competitive advantage. Back on Healy, Weber and the rest of the crew used “Before the comet” to describe familiar life before that August, but this man used “Before I lost contact.” He must have been a recluse who only spoke to other humans through satellite via emails, blog posts, money transfers, and live chats.

  “Didn’t you get lonely?” Weber asked.

  “I connected with people all the time.”

  “But never face-to-face.”

  The man shrugged. “I never fit in with people. I preferred Jax.”

  “Who?”

  “My dog. Jax was his name.”

  The corner of Weber’s lips turned up. “I thought no one cares about names anymore.”

  The other man considered the words given back to him.

  “Andrew,” he said, holding out his hand.

  Weber’s hand was filthy, but Andrew took hold of it. He wasn’t the type who liked to be touched, so he forced his grip and held on.

  “Are you a Christian, Andrew?”

  He pulled away from Weber’s hand. “Nah, just doing my bit for the Coast Guard. My old man woulda wanted it that way.”

  The stranger’s eyes suddenly stopped on Weber with a fixed stare.

  “You won’t find your family,” he said sadly. “I know that’s not what you wanna hear. And it’s not something I’m supposed to say. But it’s the truth.”

  Weber lowered his blue-denim eyes.

  “We
ll, I said it,” the other man continued. “But, come morning, when you take leave, you can forget I said it. If need be.”

  He got up and fed split logs and tinder into the stove. There was enough water in the large kettle for Weber to soak a washcloth and rub away the dirt and sweat from a fruitless search. As soon as the water turned gray, the other man refilled the kettle from a well pump and set it to warm again.

  That night, Weber slept with a full belly under a stranger’s roof. He dreamed of his wife and children. He dreamed of eagles coasting in the breeze. He dreamed of children in the future, born into an unknown age that would be whatever they made of it.

  In the morning, Weber remembered his dreams and forgot the truth.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Two Knocks in Year 4 AC

  The Second Dark Ages

  Pedra Branca do Amapari, Brazil

  THERE WAS A knock on Zhen’s bedroom door after Sunday prayer. As expected, Gustavo was standing in the second-floor hallway with a canvas bag slung around one shoulder. Many voices echoed below from the townsfolk of Pedra Branca do Amapari as they either chatted by the wooden pews or took their conversations outside the church to stretch their legs.

  Gustavo usually attended both the prayer and the townhall that followed shortly after. However, the next rainy season was nearly upon them. Each was announced with a sudden blast of wind, followed by steady downpours that could last as long as a quarter of the solar calendar. Travel was difficult in all the flooding for friends and enemies alike. Gustavo had to return to Wayãpi lands while the dirt road connecting the town was still passable on foot.

  “Ned will be ready soon,” Gustavo muttered.

  He shared a little smile with Zhen. Ned was a favorite with the townsfolk. The grannies waved for him to bend down so they could kiss his cheeks. The men clapped him on the shoulder. Women blushed and their children reached up to be lifted high in the air. Ned didn’t understand most of what they all said in Portuguese, but he would smile and nod. When it came time to hold hands in group prayer, his large hands were warm and strong.

  Gustavo’s gaze wandered over Zhen’s shoulder to the interior of the bedroom, so she stepped aside and invited him in to wait for their local celebrity. Gustavo hesitated at the threshold. Five months ago, he had done the same before deciding to cram into his old bedroom across the hall with Ned so that Zhen could have this larger bedroom with several windows. It once belonged to a Canadian priest, a man who raised Gustavo like a son. Father St. John was traveling abroad when the imminent impact of comet UD3 caused so much panic that major airlines suspended flights. No one knew what became of him, along with so many others stranded far from home.

  Zhen opened the top drawer of a wooden dresser, where she had carefully placed the priest’s personal effects for safekeeping, but Gustavo didn’t want to take his things with him, and looking at framed photos “hurt too much.” Instead, Gustavo walked up to the stacked shelves of books against the far wall. His fingertips glanced rows of leather spines and tapped three gaps where books were missing. Gustavo must have memorized the priest’s library, because he named the missing poets.

  Zhen pointed to an armchair and a table by the window. Two books rested on the small round table. They were the same collection of poetry, but one was in the poet’s native English and the other was translated to Portuguese. Zhen had been comparing them line by line as the chants of “Ave Maria” floated up from the church below.

  “You’ll help Ned with Portuguese?” Gustavo asked.

  “We’re helping each other.”

  It was true in every sense of the word. Despite a difference in age, gender, race, nationality, personality, and all the rest of it, Ned was Zhen’s closest companion; all the family she had left.

  “You’ll give our love to Dewei?” Zhen asked of Gustavo. “And tell him we said goodbye?”

  Gustavo nodded with his head hung low. For a time, the four of them were family, living in the Wayãpi village of Aramirã. They borrowed axes from the other villagers and built a house on stilts with wooden plank walls and a thatch roof. Gustavo had immediately swapped his clothes for a loincloth, called a tanga. Dewei and Ned did the same after a week of hauling planks and sweating through their clothes. The humidity is killing me, Ned said to Zhen. And I feel completely overdressed. Like a grizzly bear walking around in a full tuxedo. It took months for Zhen to walk around with only a square of cotton fabric tied around her waist like a sarong, and she regretted all that time spent hot and uncomfortable.

  Nearly as soon as their house was fully built, Gustavo married his brother’s widow and moved into his own house. That left the three of them to hang their hammocks in one of four corners and then try to earn their place in the village. Ned and Dewei didn’t hunt with the Wayãpi men. They were too clumsy in the forest and scared away game; they couldn’t shoot an arrow straight and couldn’t keep up with the chase without tripping on the underbrush. Instead, they helped burn, clear, and till small plots for gardens.

  As for Zhen, she joined the other women in their endless chores. They bathed before dawn, before the men, so as not to be “lazy women” according to the Wayãpi men. They tended gardens, prepared cassava, and ground it into a flour that was kneaded into flat bread that they dried on their thatched rooves. The women also tended fires, gutted animals and fish, and roasted the flesh. They even brewed caxiri beer with cassava and their saliva for village drinking sprees. Women worked all waking hours while holding and nursing babies or keeping the toddlers safe from scorpions, fire ants, large trees with shamanistic power, and the Amapari River, where the great anaconda, Owner-of-the-Water, lurked.

  Dewei soon married a young Wayãpi girl and asked Ned to help him build a house of his own. Both he and Gustavo lived with their new families, but they managed to stay present for Zhen and Ned. The four of them had saved each other from death and witnessed the narrow escape of their planet together; that wasn’t something one should forget.

  Zhen and Ned continued to live together. Instead of the linear timeline of the modern world they once knew, nature followed a cycle. There was birth and death, sunrise and sunset. There was the fireside under a night sky pregnant with stars and the glow of the Milky Way. There was the pain of rotting teeth, peeling sunburns on Ned’s freckled back, and wounds on the hardened soles of their feet, but there was also the fullness from warm flat bread and the weightlessness of resting in a netted hammock. There was the dry season, and then the soggy, miserable rainy season, and then the dry again. Three years of this cycle passed in the Wayãpi village before the first raid.

  Forty-one Wayãpi were killed, two girls went missing, and a quarter of the village’s gardens were ripped up as a band of invading Brazilians quickly stole all the food they could carry and retreated back on the single road leading out of tribal lands to the frontier town of Pedra Branca do Amapari. One hundred and eight Wayãpi died from an illness that spread like wildfire within days. Wayãpi had no immunity to the diseases of large populations.

  The second raid on the village of Aramirã occurred six months later and was even more deadly. Gustavo had stepped into the role of chief, like his father and twin brother before their deaths. He ordered all the dead bodies, Wayãpi and Brazilian, to be burned. Despite these measures, there was another outbreak.

  Gustavo insisted that the raiders weren’t the townsfolk from Pedra Branca. They had to be complete strangers migrating from the southeastern cities of Macapá and Santana by the mouth of the Amazon River. The townsfolk of Pedra Branca had lived separately but peacefully beside the Wayãpi for decades, Gustavo argued. They knew one another, and people couldn’t take a machete to the face of someone they knew. (Zhen and Ned confided in each other that they had their doubts. People could and did do this.)

  Gustavo had sworn to himself that he would never leave his people once he returned to them, but they were in grave danger from the outside world—again. After the third raid on the village, he decided to journey to the town wh
ere he had lived the majority of his life to see what had become of it and what could be done about the raiders who had to be coming through their roads.

  Ned and Zhen couldn’t let Gustavo head off into danger alone, but Dewei chose to remain behind in the village. His wife had given birth recently. Dewei had already left two children behind in China for a top-secret mission that took him on a one-way flight to South America. When life gives you a chance at redemption, you seize it and hold tight.

  “There Zhen is!” Ned called out from the second-floor hallway. “Hiding in her room during prayer again.”

  He smiled with two rows of teeth bright against his bushy, dark beard. Ned enjoyed what he called “giving Zhen shit for skipping out on church.” Zhen reminded Ned, yet again, that she wasn’t hiding. She was from China; Communism was the only religion allowed. With that, Zhen tried to change the subject like she always did when guarding her atheism from her lovable, pushy friend.

  “Thank you for letting us stay in your home,” Zhen said to Gustavo as they descended the stairs of the parish together.

  But Gustavo shook his head.

  “My home was always with the Wayãpi. This town is the path where I was called. It was where Father St. John was called as well. A mission isn’t the same as a home.”

  But they could be the same. The Effort was both Zhen’s mission and her home. It was where her abilities reached such heights that they shocked her.

  Gustavo had already said most of his goodbyes, but more than a hundred townsfolk still gathered in the street outside the parish to send him off. There wasn’t an easy affection between them, for Gustavo wasn’t like Ned, but there was respect and true appreciation for all he had done to give them back their community.

  The parish was on the far side of the town, less than a mile from the dirt road leading to Wayãpi lands. Zhen, Gustavo, and Ned walked shoulder to shoulder down the empty paved street. Before the comet, the town had been evenly split between rural farmland on the perimeter and buildings clustered around the main road and inside a bend in the Amapari River. Four and a half years after the deflection, or in the middle of 4 AC, as Ned referred to his new calendar abbreviation for “after comet,” the municipal buildings, shops, and houses were nearly all abandoned. Many inhabitants had been killed in raids, and many more had become farmers on the edges of town.