The Hauntings of Playing God (The Great De-Evolution) (19 page)

39

Gault is already halfway across the room when Morgan opens her eyes. She doesn’t know how long it has taken the mad scientist to move all the way from the end of quadrant 3 to where he is now at quadrant 1, but his look is the same as all the other Blocks that have come for her in her sleep: he doesn’t smile or frown, he doesn’t blink.

The eyes say everything:
My dear lady,
I am coming to kill you. When I get my hands around your lovely neck, you will know what it’s like to be helpless. You’re going to wish you were already dead.

Is this her punishment for taking someone else’s life? Maybe it doesn’t make any difference why she sends a Block to the incinerator; any death is wrong even if it’s to help everyone else. She is only trying to ease everyone’s suffering. Why can’t they see that? As Gault’s feet shuffle across the room, she thinks maybe it doesn’t matter if killing someone will ease the lives of ten other people or a thousand; if something is wrong, nothing will make it right. She’s just a normal person, why did she think she was qualified to pass judgment on who should live and who should die?

Gault’s feet grind against the concrete floor as they make their
tortoise-like
progress in her direction.

My lady,
he is thinking
. I’ll show you how to kill someone properly. I’m going to laugh as you wither away. When you cry for me to put you out of your misery, I’m going to stand over you and applaud.

She is used to the routine of being paralyzed in her sleep, knows there is nothing her body can do except lie there, and yet her mind screams for her to get up and flee for safety.

Gault is amused by this idea. She can tell what he is thinking:
It’s funny, really. I always thought I was meant to destroy the world, not act as the angel of vengeance on someone else taking the very lives I had planned on taking.
Our world certainly is ironic, my dear.

His feet inch closer. Gault offers her a smile.

You may think you can die with dignity. You can’t, though. Maybe you think you won’t be conscious of your misery because your body will go into shock. This is not true. I promise you that you’ll suffer. That, my lady, is a guarantee.

He’s another foot closer. His hand inches toward Morgan, as if he can’t wait to strangle her.

She is conscious that this is only a dream. She understands that in real life she is not a Block, knows Gault is lying on his bed. However, this knowledge doesn’t help keep the terror away. Whatever happens in her nightmare will happen in real life. To date, that has only meant screaming herself awake, clawing at her blanket, and crying onto her pillow. But if Gault strangles her to death in her nightmare, Morgan will die, right in her own bed, from suffocation. If he lets battery acid trickle down the back of her throat, Morgan’s kidneys and liver will shut down before her heart does the same. This is true. She has seen all too many times how her body reacts to her dreams to doubt it. No matter what happens, when he finally imposes his judgment upon her, Morgan will never wake up.

His feet shuffle forward.

If only she could make her tongue listen to her and form words, she would plead, “Please understand. I’m only trying to take care of all of you the best I can. This is a situation I never wanted to be in. Surely you can see how all of you would have suffered if I tried to take care of everyone. I can only do so much. Why can’t you see that?”

But no words will come out. She can’t even crawl away. Her body is motionless as her mind screams to run.

Gault inches closer. He is almost close enough to extend his arm and take hold of her. His eyes glitter. They tell of all the horrid things he will do to her once he is at her side.

You will beg me to let you die. You may not believe in hell right now, but you will.

Morgan wants to push this evil away, wants to squeeze her eyes shut so it will all disappear. Not even her eyes obey her. She tries to squeeze them shut, but no matter how hard she tries, she can see him approaching. Each time he shuffles forward, his clothes, too baggy for his slender frame, drift about as if being carried in a current of water.

With her eyes still closed, she wakes up. She is conscious, even with her eyelids squeezing shut as hard as she can, that the nightmare is over. Gault will be back in his bed. She relaxes. When her eyelids flutter open, it’s just as she thought it would be: the mad scientist is across the room on his cot, back in the area that used to be quadrant 3.

If the glass is half full, at least she only has dreams in which she screams or makes a fist or closes her eyes. If she has a nightmare in which she claws her face off, she would awaken with blood running down her face and skin stuck between her fingernails. If she has a nightmare in which she bites off her tongue, she would wake up unable to form half the alphabet, the bloody stump of her tongue laying on the pillow next to her face.

If Gault did starve her, would her organs shut down from not receiving enough nourishment? If a Block beats her with his fists, will Morgan die with her eyes swollen shut and her nose broken? If a Block slits her throat, will she choke to death on her own blood?

With a sigh, she rolls out of bed and begins her day. The clock says it’s four in the morning, but it’s better to start moving than to stay in bed and think about never waking up again.

40

How can it rain so much? She is sure, given time, Miami and the entire East Coast will be under water. If there were still kids around, it wouldn’t be long before they had to abandon the places she once thought of as beach towns. Pittsburgh, Charlotte, and Atlanta would be the new places to lie out on the sand and watch the waves. That is what the endless rain tells her.

Even on the days when the previous storm has passed, she looks outside to see nothing but flooded roads. Not even the weeds and bushes that have covered every part of the sidewalks and streets are visible anymore until the water begins to recede and their green tops begin to poke from the water’s surface. Will New York and Baltimore and Washington DC, and everywhere all the way down to Miami, become lost cities under the water? When the next creatures with higher intelligence appear on earth, will they notice the tops of skyscrapers poking out of the ocean and, upon exploring them, discover that an entire system of roads and tunnels exists beneath the water as well? Is that how Japan’s underwater ruins came into existence? Will our great cities come to the same end?

“Awful weather for running.”

Morgan looks down at the Block in front of her. Erin was her Block who liked running ultra marathons.

She tells Morgan, “The winter cold and the summer heat never bothered me, but running in the wind and rain really sucked.”

“I can imagine.”

It has been a long time since Erin ran one of her marathons. As the Great De-evolution progressed, they were one of the first forms of recreation to fade away. It takes long stretches of wilderness to put the runner’s heart at peace—no one in their right mind would run on a treadmill for a hundred miles—but it was this same wilderness, much of it having been returned to the animals, which kept the runners indoors.

People thought it was odd at first when one of the runners in her marathon started the race but never showed up at the finish line. It wasn’t until this happened a second and then a third time that people realized wolves and wild dogs were dragging runners off the trails and eating them.

Erin’s running shoes had to be put away. The only thing she has now are the memories of when her feet used to carry her for miles and miles, never more at peace with herself than when passing by long stretches of farmland and forest.

“It’s okay,” Erin says. “The memories of those days will never fade away.”

Erin’s eyes have a permanent grace about them that makes it look as though everything happening in the world is slightly amusing to her, is all part of a plan that, while unknown to her, is always fun to watch unfold.

She handled the changes that came about during the Great De-evolution a lot better than most people. It was easy, back in those days, for people to panic as the first parts of their culture began to disappear. Everyone still had long lives ahead of them, but it didn’t feel that way sometimes.

Erin has always seemed a little younger than the other bodies around her, a little more carefree. Maybe that is what a sense of freedom in the wilderness does for you. Elaine had once predicted that Erin would be the last remaining Block because of how youthful she seemed to be. Morgan refrained from guessing which Block might last the longest because it seemed rude to all the others. This, of course, had just brought about another round of groans from her friend.

After finishing caring for Erin, Morgan pats her runner on the arm and moves to the next bed. For the rest of the night, she finds herself thinking about one thing she has lost over the years that she wishes she could get back, her equivalent to the yearning Erin will always have for running. She thinks of the park, from back when she used to live with her parents, and how it was always packed with fields of flowers. She thinks of staying up at night with her friends and seeing all the stars littering the night sky.

But that isn’t the first thing that pops into her head. Her very first vision is of the Grand Canyon. There is nothing more beautiful in the world. When one of her Blocks says life is only what you see, she thinks of the hidden power in that vast gash of land. When one of them says the world is ruled by mathematics and science, she thinks of the pure chaos in those rocks.

She will never get back there, she knows that. But are the memories of that place really enough to keep her going each day? Is the memory of red rock merging with yellow sky and orange sun really enough to give her peace of mind? Just knowing it’s out there, just knowing she had been there once, a long time ago. Is that enough?

“Trust me, it is,” Erin calls out, but Morgan puts her head down and closes her eyes without replying.

41

It’s easy to imagine all the things she might have done through her lifetime if the Great De-evolution had never happened. Backpacking across Europe. Falling in love. Having her heart broken and then finding a way to trust again before eventually falling hopelessly in love a second time. Perhaps children. Maybe even living much of her life on a different continent. These things are the essence of daydreaming, and she is not immune to all the what-ifs. It would be a fair bet to guess all of the other caretakers also had these same hopes and dreams. Probably, she thinks, everyone who lived through the Great De-evolution lived an entire life of would-have-beens, could-have-beens, should-have-beens.

Not so easy is imagining what her life would be like at her current age if the Blocks had never spelled mankind’s exit. When she was young, she never imagined herself as an extremely old woman. Married—she imagined that. Living in the French or Italian countryside—she imagined that, too. She even pictured what it would be like to become a grandmother. That wasn’t easy, but she started by envisioning her own grandmother and how happy she had been to have guests, or how she never seemed to notice all the times Morgan was a bratty girl, the way all little kids can be brats when they have to visit relatives instead of getting to play with their friends.

But her own grandmother died at the age of seventy-six, when Morgan was only twelve. Morgan has exceeded that life by seventeen years. And no part of those seventeen years or any of the ones preceding them involved visits from out of town relatives. She tries to envision her grandmother being much older, removes the expectation of any more guests. This is how she tries to imagine what her life would be like now, if she didn’t have a gymnasium of Blocks to care for.

What she comes away with is an old woman standing around looking out the window, waiting for something, anything, to happen. Maybe, if the Great De-evolution had never occurred, she would be in an old age home, surrounded by other senior citizens. She would get a chance to be the one being cared for by younger, healthier men and women. And in her own way, she would be treated as though she were a Block by those caretakers who were too young to realize they would be feeble one day as well.

The idea of being cared for instead of doing the caring is so foreign to her that it’s easier to imagine the Blocks becoming normal people, and imagining herself as one of the workers at the old-age home, where she still provides them with care, than it is for her to take herself out of her current role altogether. Her entire adult life has been spent watching after people who cannot provide for themselves; the idea that she might be the one being cared for is absurd.

To help imagine that fantasy, she had closed her eyes and controlled her breathing. Instead of allowing herself to be transported to a different outlook, however, she simply found herself thinking about her current predicament, only with her eyes shut.

In reading about the benefits of meditation, she saw it required that all thoughts must be quieted. But when she tried this, she found herself thinking about not thinking. And before long, she was thinking about how much time she had left to think about not thinking before she got back to her Blocks. She never came close to actually quieting her mind and letting her consciousness go silent.

Such is the process of her thinking about being cared for by a paid staff of professionals. The idea comes into her mind, but almost immediately she is the caretaker again. It’s an exercise in futility.

The same happens when she tries to place herself, in her current age, back in the house she grew up in as a child. This was before she and her parents moved south. She would be the only person living there. Hell, she would be the only person living in the entire country. She would wake up whenever she wanted because she would have nothing to do with her time. All day she would walk from room to noiseless room. Or sit in front of the TV watching shows she doesn’t understand because the people are young and loud and no one she knew acted like that when she was their age. Music would make her restless. She would pace from window to window, looking for something to happen. Nothing ever would.

She would begin to fidget. Noises, both in her home and in the surrounding neighborhood, would make her nervous. So used to being alone, she would actually begin to dread the possibility of meeting someone else. This is partly why she would keep her blinds closed, even during the day. The other reason is that the sun would annoy her with the world it puts on display—so much life out there, even though mankind is no longer around! It’s inevitable that she would long for death. Maybe even encourage it to take her from this neurotic existence.

That is what wishful thinking does to her.

Back in the gymnasium, her Blocks all around her, she realizes the people she cares for are doing more than simply giving her bodies to talk to. They keep her alive just as much as she keeps them alive. Without them, she would have nothing to do with her time. Her days would have no itinerary, no need, no urgency. She wakes with the sole focus of ensuring she can keep as many people alive and healthy as she can manage. Without them, her body would quickly get used to lying in bed all day, doing nothing.

She knows how common it is for a widower to pass away soon after their partner dies. Without someone to love, to take care of, to have as a companion, they quickly fade to nothing. Such is her case with her Blocks. If she could have picked someone else to grow old with, she would have chosen a good-looking movie star. He would tell her all about what it was like to film her favorite scenes, and she would gladly listen all day.

But instead she was given an assortment of Blocks, and she accepts this because she knows they are all she has. Without them pushing her each day, her back would give her a reason to stay in bed. Her arthritis would seem crippling. Her ankles would realize they are degenerative and refuse to let her move around all day. But because she has this need, this drive to keep her moving, keep her busy, her back remains relatively quiet, her ankles relent with minimal groans, her arthritis takes the day off.

The Blocks are keeping her alive as much as she is keeping them alive. Repeating this mantra at night, after her chores are done, even keeps the nightmares away every once in a while. Not every night, but sometimes. That is all she can ask.