WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (5 page)

            “You were right,” is all I can say, and then I have to look away. When my eyes are back on the beautiful landscape of the broken city, I can’t see anything at all. All I see is the throbbing afterglow of the glare. White flashing as if my eyes have been cooked. When it starts to fade, and I can see some of the roads and buildings come into focus again, Maze tells me it’s time to go home. Suddenly, as if we’ve flipped personalities, I want to tell her that we can’t go home yet. The fact that suddenly this all might be real—that one of her crackpot theories actually has a grain of truth to it—emboldens me. As if it’s no longer a choice between two false views of the world—the Fatherhood’s story about God and history that renewed order in the post-Wipe world, and Maze’s unending obsession with some far-reaching conspiracy that stretches back to the times before the Wipe. Now it feels as if there is a shred of reality to cling to, some avenue to find the real story behind the Wipe, the civilization that led up to it, and the people that once walked the fading streets below.

            “Why do you think it would move and then stop like that?” I ask.

            “I think it must be lining up with the tower,” she says. “Pointing the sun to the generator.”

            I remember the bright spot—the small glow she pointed out from the beach—and right away I turn to see the tower. Where it should be, all the way out there. Instead of its dark gray line running straight up through the sky, there is a wall of clouds—pristine white and enough to completely obscure it.

            “Maybe we can wait until the clouds pass,” I tell her. “Maybe we can see the top of the tower from here.”

            I try to remember the few times—the days when it was so clear that I thought I saw the top of the tower. Each time Maze told me it was an illusion, that I wasn’t seeing the top of the tower. That the tower didn’t have a top to see. That it went all the way off the planet. When I told her that was her worst conspiracy crap yet, she’d stopped correcting me, and I kept my feelings about the tower having a top to myself. And when I reflected about having seen the top, by the next day, my memory had me convinced that I’d seen an illusion instead—some haze induced by the atmosphere at that altitude. Yet here, the highest we’ve ever been, it seems like the perfect opportunity to see how high the thing really goes.

            “There is no top,” she says, heading along the roof, close to the edge, and then stepping perilously onto the ledge to look down.

            “Maze!” I say, my knee-jerk reaction to tell her to get back almost slipping from my lips. Then, almost like the stabbing pain of a knife piercing my heart, I reel in my emotions. Let her be, I tell myself. Her words float through my head again:
You worry about me too much.
So I just wait, and then I walk up to the edge right next to her without issuing a word of caution. Without saying the thoughts screaming through my head that want me to tell her to move back before she drops a million feet onto the rusty spikes of motor and grease below.

            “Look,” she says as I get next to her.

            “What is it?” I ask.

            “Right there,” she says pointing, right down at a winding road that stands out among all the straight and crosshatched bands of asphalt.

            “I can’t see anything.”

            “Animals moving,” she says. And then, when I find just where she’s looking, I see them. Brownish black, but so far away I can’t tell if they’re wolves or not.

            “Who knew there were bears out here, too,” she says.

            “Bears?” I try my best to keep the fear tucked inside.

            “The things we don’t know are so close to Acadia’s fences, huh?” she says, as if the idea that we have to walk back seven miles with the knowledge that there will be bears hunting us now doesn’t mix a single drop of fear into her blood. And suddenly, as much as I wanted to stay and wait out the clouds only a minute before, I want to leave immediately. Because as I study the shapes in the distance, trying to discern if they’re really bears, I’m convinced that—whatever they are—they’re heading in the direction of the roads we have to take back.

            “Should we start back?” I ask.

            “If we don’t, we’ll be stuck out here after dark,” she says. And then, she hops off the ledge and I follow her back down the long creaking staircase, all the time looking out the windows until they stop, and then the rest of the way imagining the bears—wondering how fast they can move and if they’re quick enough to intercept us where we come out onto the street.

Chapter 3

When we hit the asphalt again, there are no signs of the bears. Neither of us talk, and we get right to following the roads back. Soon the fear of the bears fades, replaced by the gratitude that the staircase didn’t collapse on us coming down.

            The buildings seem to pass faster on the way home, and every ten minutes or so, smaller ones replace the monoliths surrounding the mirror building. I step carefully over the debris and between the thickest bits of overgrowth, walking step for step with Maze who only occasionally stops to fetch out the map and make sure we’re going the right way. Each time we get to a crossroad and she double-checks it again, I start to get scared that she’s going to discover that we’re lost. It’s like I can’t recognize anything that we’ve passed anymore. And I know that one wrong turn will keep us out here after sundown. But she gets the turns right every time, and I don’t mouth a word of paranoia or fear, bottling it all up and putting my trust in her and the faded paper. When I start to recognize the edge of the city—the low buildings that the Fathers were milling around near, the fence into the container yard, and the distant tree line past the field—a great sense of relief spreads through me. As if we’ve made it home even before we’ve climbed the fences.

            “No bears,” I say.

            “Let’s hope no wolves, either,” she says. But I can’t think of the wolves—my mind is already on the Fathers. The fact that they might be planning our punishment already. If they saw us out in the Deadlands—if they recognized my face somehow in the alley. And I start to think of my mother, and how she’ll go on and on about me missing service. All the confessions I will have to perform. Which Father will I get? With my luck, I know it will be Father Gold. As the paranoia starts to dilute the relief of returning home, it all bursts into terror with one solid look out into the field as we walk past the last row of containers.

            “Shit,” Maze says. She looks behind us suddenly, back to the city streets, as if they might offer us refuge. She doesn’t have to tell me why she’s startled—as clear as day, I can see the pack of wolves. They move quickly, cutting across the meadow, as if they’re just going from one side of the forest to the other. They have no idea we exist. But the tree line toward which they’re crossing puts them squarely by the stone road. The only way home.

            “What do we do?” I ask.

            “Keep our knives ready and make a lot of loud noises if they see us,” she says. And just like that, without another moment to let the fear build, or to plan our passage more patiently and carefully, she asks me for a boost. I want to warn her again—
no Maze, we have to wait until we see them cross back to the other side of the field—
but I bottle it up. It’s almost a little bit easier than it was on the roof of the world in the heart of the Deadlands when she went to the ledge. But even now, as she jumps off my back, the urge doesn’t subside. I want to resist, tell her it’s not safe yet, that we shouldn’t. Even though I know the wolves will probably never reappear, and we’ll waste the rest of the daylight if we wait. I think of the fact that she’s been out here more than twice. Somehow, I convince myself that it must mean that the wolves really aren’t out to kill us, since Maze is still alive and breathing. I follow her over the fence. My feet crash onto the gravel on the other side and we start our long walk, right into the wide open meadow, across the field and toward the stone road.

By the time we reach the woods, there still hasn’t been another sign of the wolves. Then, in just another moment, we’re pushing through the first hanging vines and walking on the old stones. Maze keeps her eyes on all sides at once, the dense tree trunks, somehow alert to noises I can’t distinguish from the sounds our own feet make on the sticks and leaves that crunch with each step. It’s when we’re almost to the main road, the wide and smooth beach path that will take us home, that Maze tells me she sees them.

            “They’re watching us.”

            “What?” is all I manage to whisper.

            “They’re going to block us—push us away from the road to town. They want to get us out on the beach,” she says, almost between her teeth so that I have to struggle to make out her words. I look left, right where the beach path steers away toward Acadia, where we should make our turn and jog the last ten minutes to town, and there they are. Two wolves. Their eyes softly reflect the hanging red glow of the sun, enough to give them away in the shadow. And they don’t move one bit. Instead, they watch from the edge of the forest, thinking we don’t see them.
            “Maybe they’ll go away,” I say, hoping Maze will stay put. But then, she starts calling out. The craziest noises I’ve ever heard. Like some kind of monster gorilla or something. I wait, and see her edging bit by bit away from me, out toward the split in the road. I want to scream at her to get back, to stop, but I don’t. I just let her do it. Finally, when she realizes the wolves haven’t moved one bit, that they’re not afraid at all, she comes back to me.

            “Okay, they’re going to run us out to the beach,” she says, as if she’s somehow, through her wild beast calls, entered their minds, and now knows exactly what they’re planning.

            “How do you know that?” I ask, the quiver in my voice obvious now.

            “You remember I told you I’ve been to the Deadlands a lot?” she says.

            “Yeah.”

            “Let’s just say the wolves come with that.” And then, without a word of instruction for me, she takes a step, and then another, until she’s out in the middle of the road. And the same as she predicted it, the wolves take their own steps to match hers, putting their hulking gray frames almost into the road now, blocking the way back to Acadia. And I realize that Maze is right—there’re only two choices now. We stand our ground and fight them, or we go back to the beach. And as I follow her out onto the road, she instructs me to do just the opposite of what my gut is yelling at me to do.

            “
Do not run
,” she says. “Run and you’re dead.”

            I freeze without questioning her logic, and all I do is try to keep the knife steady in my hands, wondering how the hell I’d even use it if the wolves suddenly decide to charge. And it crosses my head that even if I’m not supposed to run, I couldn’t avert the instinct to do so if they charged now.

            “What do we do if they come?” I ask quickly.

            “They
are
coming,” she says, and as she says it, one of the wolves takes a slow step toward us, without a snarl or a growl, and then the one next to it does the same. As if they’re trying to cut the distance before we run.

            “Don’t run. One more thing to try. Get your arms out like me,” she says. For the first time I take my eyes off of the wolves and see how she’s widened out, displaying her arms like long wings, one of which has the silver dagger of her knife as a talon. I mimic her, hoping she’s right and that it stops the advance of the wolves. But it doesn’t. And as if in slow motion, they just continue their movement directly toward us, walling us in toward the beach.

    “Walk back,” she says. And then, flicking my eyes rapidly from the wolves to her, I follow her steps so that I’m no farther from the wolves than she is. Together we walk back, and every few steps, the wolves take a quick few of their own and stop. Maze makes another call, a loud maniac cry this time, but the wolves reply with their own. One of them snarls a low threatening rumble. Maze shuts up and keeps going back. I follow, and it’s the same pattern—the wolves wait until we’re almost twenty feet away, but then they quickly shoot forward and gain the ground back.

            “They want us in the open,” Maze says.

            “We’ll
be
in the open if we keep going,” I warn her.

            “Can’t help that now,” she says as if everything will be alright. I watch the wolves’ glowing eyes flicker off as we retreat, and then back on as they launch up quickly to cover the lost ground. And then, one of them disappears. Right into the side of the forest.

            “What do we do?” I say, starting to panic.

            “You always say you’re as fast as me,” she says.

            “
Maze…
” I say as we take another few steps. Behind us I can hear the crashing of the surf. The edge of the wide open white sand.

            “Prove it.”

            “What?” I say in disbelief, the idea that she thinks we should try to outrun them all of the sudden hitting me like an insane death wish.

            “They hate the surf. If we make it even close to the water, we’re safe.”

            All I can think of is the impossibility of outrunning them. That there’s no way in hell I am going to make it all the way across the sinking sand without one of these creatures biting into my neck. Tearing my leg down first to trip me. The feeling of teeth piercing my skin and my muscles starts to play through my head, like preparation for an almost certain fate.

            “When the other one breaks out of the woods, that’s when we turn and go. Got it?” she says as we take our first steps that feel soft—the first part of the dunes. And then, in the blink of an eye, it feels like we’re almost halfway across the beach. And I start to know—she was all wrong. They never wanted to attack us. Because the one wolf we can still see is just watching us, staring from the trailhead before the dunes, right at the edge of the woods. Like he doesn’t want to step one paw on the sand or give chase at all. And that’s when it happens—from almost forty feet in the other direction, where the forest curves down closer to the hard sand, the other wolf launches onto the beach at full speed. In the same instant, the one at the trailhead bolts forward, the sight of his partner electrifying his body into lightning speed, his whole frame bucking in a line straight for us. Both of them kick up storms of sand, converging to overtake us at the same time, to maul us to death right in front of the beautiful waves and the tower.