Next Exit: Purgatory

by A. Maire Dinsmore

eye patch covering up her right eye, making him think immediately of pirates.

  Her words sunk in and he stupidly looked at his shoulder, where the veins were already bright blue and beginning to swell. He blinked at them and stupidly looked back at the rock as if it were about to explain itself.

  When he turned back to look at her she was gone.

  “Hey!” Alex shot to his feet and began searching around for her, running around the rocks while trying not to touch them. “Where did you go?” Screaming the words as panic built inside him, Alex wondered if she would be the last person he saw.

  When he rounded a rock and came face to face with the crudely-made arrow point of her drawn bow, he stopped screaming.

  “Shut up,” she hissed. “You’ve already brought the quaimire this far up hill, I don’t want it remembering why it came and braving the rock field any further than it already has.”

  Alex brought up both his hands and nodded mutely, showing his agreement to her demands though this did nothing to make her want to drop the arrow from his face.

  “How – How do I get the poison out?” he asked, frowning as he dropped his arms. The effort of having held them up for even that short amount of time had been an exertion and had already made him start to sweat.

  The girl sighed, lowering the bow as she shook her head at him. “How long have you been here?” she retorted seemingly ignoring his question for the moment, tucking the bow back into an unseen quiver beneath a backpack he’d not noticed before.

  “Today?” he replied with a shrug.

  She swore under her breath and reached in her back pocket. “Take this and come with me.”

  As soon as Alex had grabbed the offered knife from between her calloused fingers, she spun on her heel and began trekking up the hill.

  “I thought I was already dead,” he said as they walked, doing his best to keep up. By the set of her shoulders it was obvious that she didn’t want to talk, but Alex was at the point that he needed to concentrate on something or he was pretty sure he would pass out and she’d continue on her merry little way, likely without ever noticing she’d left him behind. “So I don’t understand how I can be poisoned.”

  She stopped walking so abruptly that he walked into her and poked himself in the eye with the end of her bow.

  “Did that hurt?” she asked as he rubbed his eye.

  “Yeah,” he said, hiding the pout with the palm of his hand.

  “You can still get hurt here. And you can still die. I don’t know about you but this place is a shithole compared to the place I left behind. So the general opinion is that what’s after this is even worse.” She stared at him pointedly for a moment and when he nodded that he got it, she turned and started walking again.

  When the pair crested the hill, Alex stopped to take in the sight that lay before him. They stood on top of a ridge that lead down into a valley in the middle of which was something he wasn’t expecting; a full city, though it was completely dark and seemed to be abandoned. The clouds he’d looked for earlier hung heavy on this side of the hill, low to the ground and the rumble of thunder quickened his fear without reason. He could see rain falling in the distance and the movement of large dark shapes along the ground and hurried to catch up to the girl, noting they were going in the opposite direction of the buildings in the valley.

  He didn’t know how long they walked before they started going downhill, Alex doing his best to copy her lithe and careful steps. He was having trouble lifting his arms now and it was throwing him off balance. He was grateful when they finally stopped, collapsing against the base of a cliff they’d come up against.

  For the first time she looked amused and Alex was too tired to be annoyed, he just watched her in miserable silence as she took off the backpack and the quiver of arrows, which turned out to be nothing more than an old tube meant for storing blueprints. She knelt down beside the back of the rock and Alex watched as she strapped the tube to the backpack and began stuffing it behind the rock.

  “Come on,” she said, gesturing him over.

  Alex dropped to his knees and crawled to her, squeezing his body into the crawlspace hidden behind the massive and awkwardly shaped boulder. The difference in size between them was obvious but he told himself as he struggled that she’d probably done this a million times and knew the tricks. Contorting his frame into the shapes needed to manage the space was agonizing and when Alex finally emerged in a large, open cave that was obviously her home, he dropped down onto the ground exhausted.

  A banked fire lay in the center of the floor and somewhere in the haze of exhaustion and pain his mind wondered where the smoke went out. The dimly lit cave became slightly brighter as she moved about and lit candles here and there and he struggled to stay awake, a battle that he quickly lost.

  A few minutes later he felt a tug on his shoulder and heard fabric ripping and opened his eyes to find her tearing off his shirt. His vision blurred and he stared up at her face, watching the low flicker of the flames and how they reflected off the slightly shiny patch. It reminded him of the shadowy figure and of the beast that had chased him to the poisonous rocks and he turned his face away.

  The girl noticed this and frowned, picking up the pot of salve she’d grabbed before removing the shirt from his wounds. She spread the red tinged paste along the cuts and down the swollen blue veins, wiping as much of the excess back into the container as she could. She then cleaned her hands off on his shirt, retrieved her knife and left him beside the fire.

  When he woke in what felt like hours later, the first thing Alex saw was her sitting on the other side of the room with her back against the cave wall watching him. He wondered if she’d slept at all. Instantly uncomfortable under her penetrating scrutiny, Alex turned his attention to his body and frowned at the ruin that was once his shirt. It hung from his neck in pathetic tatters, gaping open at the shoulders and smeared with dirt and blood. The cuts were still caked with the thick stuff she’d spread on them and though the swelling of his veins had gone down, whatever had apparently removed the poison hadn’t cured the cuts that now oozed puss through the dried red salve that had started to crack and flake off.

  Catching a whiff of the stench of the wounds, Alex gagged and turned his face away, a task he found difficult since both shoulders were in much the same state. He settled for lifting his chin slightly and breathing through his mouth, doing his best not to taste the scent of the infection. He did find, however, with a tentative test of his arms that he could use them now and he decided that this was a much better improvement than before.

  “Thank you,” he said suddenly, breaking the thick silence of the room and feeling uneasy at the sound of his voice in her cave. “For… helping me and everything.”

  When she didn’t answer he turned his head back to look at her, wondering if she’d fallen asleep. But she was just watching him.

  “So, what’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” he said, attempting a lighthearted tone and a pick up line that was nearly as old as time.

  A long, uncomfortable silence followed, long enough for Alex to regret the attempt at humor. “Punishment,” she finally answered, causing him to wince at his crass handling of what was probably a painful memory.

  “What’s your name?” Alex asked, his smile quickly fading as he dropped the jocular attitude and false bravado. He felt stupid just lying there in the middle of her floor, acting like a tough guy while she stared him down. It just highlighted for him the fact that he was so entirely out of place and vulnerable; a feeling that he did not like in the slightest bit of the sense.

  Her head tilted to one side as she considered the question. Her hair cascaded across her shoulder with the movement of her head, while he’d slept she had released the tight hold on her hair, and he got his first look at it. The strands now proved to be a light red in color, or at least that was what he imagined they would look like in decent light. Here in the dim light of the cave it was more of a
faded blonde. She scowled under his scrutiny and he blinked in response. “Lily,” she replied, standing up. “It’s time to go.”

  Alex stood and watched as she got her things from the day before, then followed her out of the cave. The red sky seemed unchanged from when he’d last seen it and he’d wondered how much time had passed since then. Lily took a moment to settle her quiver and backpack and a sharp, biting wind took Alex by surprise as he waited for her. The pain that it caused in his shoulders brought tears to his eyes but he gritted his teeth and turned to follow Lily down the hill with a grimace.

  It wasn’t long before Alex was convinced that the clothes he died in were not going to be sufficient here; the pants did nothing to protect him from the wind and his expensive and fashionable shoes had already split in several places on the sole, doing more damage to his feet than they did offer protection. Lily, on the other hand, seemed to flourish as he faltered. She leapt from rock to rock as he stumbled along and though she did little in the way of teaching him about surviving the environment; Alex did his best to keep most of his attention on her so he could learn as much as possible… even if by sheer accident.

  When they approached the darkened city, his hopes began to flare anew – perhaps he’d be able to find some department store that still