Jornada del Muerto: Prisoner Days (11 page)

They are all gone, all dead. And I must
somehow survive.

I don’t understand what curse has given me
life when the others have perished. I don’t understand why I must
go on day after day when everything has changed. I don’t know
understand why it has to be me.

I laid here shivering and contemplating
suicide.

George woke. Without saying a word, he
nodded his head to me. He understood how I felt. He patted my back
and rolled over. His breathing evened as he’d fallen back to sleep.
He trusted me to work through my angst, my sadness, my grief on my
own.

His trust is oddly comforting.

Tomorrow will come. Tomorrow, we will
continue the fires, keep the gates electrified, and hope the wasps
will retreat. Tomorrow, we will continue our preparations for our
journey. Tomorrow, we will clean our animal-skin clothing.
Tomorrow, we will continue our battle against the wasps.

But this morning, I will grieve my loss.

11/20/2056

I spoke out loud today for the first time
since we killed the women. It’s been four days.

The day after we killed the women, George
and I barely moved. We stayed in our cell, slept, ate, peed, and
tended the horses. That’s about all the energy we could muster.

We lost another mare the next day. And one
the following day. The stallion and mare left are young, barely
yearlings, and still alive. We’ve stopped predicting if they will
survive or not. We keep feeding them salted oats, hay, and lots of
water. We continue to burn their droppings. For all they’ve been
through, they seem to be regaining their strength.

We’ve spent the last couple of days killing
wasps. They haven’t let up around the Pen. They come from somewhere
to surround the Pen fence. They howl, scream, and taunt us.

This has been a good chance to practice our
wasp-kill techniques. Fire works the best. And luckily the Pen had
propane tanks in storage. George has engineered two propane flame
throwers from spare piping and whatever else. They work great. And
we’ve used them non-stop.

There are so many of them. For every one we
kill, many more take their places at the fence. We’ve killed at
least a thousand wasps, and they keep coming.

I’m beginning to wonder if this onslaught of
wasps is designed to get us to use all of our resources. And we are
digging deep. We’ve broken into areas of the prison that we haven’t
seen in years.

We are also becoming skilled at killing the
wasps quickly and effectively. Twice a day, I hold a ceremony to
send on the souls of the wasps. We have relieved a lot of
suffering. Every soul blessed me on its journey to the beyond.

Every soul had found peace. Every soul,
except mine.

Even George seems to accept what is
happening better than I. At idle times, I wonder what’s wrong with
me. I’ve never felt this kind of longing and remorse. I’ve always
accepted what happened and moved from there.

But I can’t seem to shake the sorrow brought
on by killing the women.

I don’t know what I thought would happen.
Honestly, I didn’t think. That’s the truth of it. As always, I
acted on what was in front of me. I saw the situation with the
livestock and the women and wanted to help. My efforts to help
these poor creatures has changed the course of our lives, quite
possibly forever.

We’ve lost the Pen, our home. We’ve opened
our eyes to the capacities of the wasps. We made ourselves more
vulnerable. After years of living in relative peace, we’ve called
to our aggressors, almost begged them, to come pillage our
home.

We won’t be able to hold the Pen forever.
The wasps will take over when we leave. It’s an ideal home for
wasps. There’s a lot of space. They can live here quite comfortably
for decades.

We’ve lived quite comfortably these last ten
years. Yes, it’s been hard work. George and I don’t mind hard work.
These walls of this prison have been our home, our safe place, our
pueblo.

When we leave, we’ll never be able to
return.

Most men can hardly wait for the moment they
never have to return to the Pen. I feel so much sorrow -- for the
loss of everything -- the past, the present, and even the loss of
the prophecy.

The prophecy has stood like a pillar in my
life. Everything that had happened to me and around me has had its
roots in the prophecy. For almost 600 years, every Tewa male
descendant could the recite the prophecy by heart.

The prophecy was always something that was
something that might happen, could happen, would happen SOMEDAY.
Someday is here. Today, tomorrow, the next day, should we survive,
we will live the someday.

In a few days, we will begin the journey
described in the last two sentences the prophecy. If we survive,
we’ll have done something no one in my tribe has ever done. We will
have lived beyond the prophecy!

The idea of living beyond the prophecy is
very unnerving to me. I’m not sure why this never occurred to me
before. For all that I’ve been through, for all I’ve witnessed,
I’ve lived with a kind of denial. I continue to refuse to admit, to
myself mostly, on the deepest level, that the past is over.

I read this journal and realize how foolish
I have been. I’ve been able to write and say : I am the last living
human being, but I haven’t realized what that really meant.

There is no other life for me than fighting
the wasps. None. And in the end, now that they are procreating,
they will take over the earth.

And some day, the last human being will
die.

I imagine this must be what Neanderthal man
felt. Watching humankind communicate out loud, seeing their greater
mobility, and predatory nature, Neanderthal man must have known his
days were numbered. They couldn’t assimilate with the growing
hoard. They could only die with dignity.

I have lived with the purpose of the
prophecy. But why bother? The wasps will win. Why not die here, at
the Pen, with the dignity we can muster?

I looked over at George. He was awake again
and listening. Noticing my look, he smiled at me. His teeth
remained impossibly white against his dark skin. He laughed and
patted my back as if to say that I think too much. He doesn’t seem
to feel any of the angst I feel. As far as he was concerned,
killing wasps was like everything else in his life -- just
something to do to fill the space between birth and death.

Being a shaman is different. On the one
hand, I know, really know, that I’m not in control of my life. I
see the forces moving around people -- souls, angels, spirit
guides. I watch them interact on the world. I know how little
control any one human being has on events in their life. I know
this is true for me.

And still, I long for control. I’ve used my
shaman abilities to argue with the noble spirit guides. I strive to
interact in people’s lives through blessings, gifts, and prayers.
And I’m good at it! The guards used to swear that my blessings, and
curses, always came true.

Like a petulant child, I want to scream,
kick my legs, and cry. I don’t want the world to change. I don’t
want to be the last human alive. And I want to use all of my skill
to make sure that George can have the happily ever after he
deserves, that I can have the peace I so long for.

Killing those women was the straw that broke
my camel back. I know there’s no going back. The prophecy is
unfolding.

The prophecy says:

“
There will be a moment, a
single moment, when the last shaman must do something so loathsome
that even he will realize the world has irrevocably changed. And in
his grief, he will save the humankind.”

My “single moment” was when I killed the
women.

I’m weeping now. My free will? What free
will? My entire life was scripted hundreds of years ago. I never
had a choice. Everything was written.

I’ve journeyed to the spirit world these
last days. I’ve lingered by the pool while the spirit guides
surrounded me. We gathered for comfort at the pool by the stream
under the Honey Locust. I have nothing to say, nothing to ask. They
have nothing to give. As they keep watch, my soul grieved my
loss.

I know that someday soon, I will put on my
animal-skin clothing, gather my weapons, load the vehicle, and we
will leave this life. I doubt I’ll be sad. George will smile and
start the vehicle. At 80 miles an hour, we will drive past the
prophecy to our destiny.

But today, I lingered by the stream and
pool. I wished for control. I wished I was stronger. I wished I had
died along with my people. I wished I’d enjoyed my life more. I
wished...

My father used to say, “A wish in one hand
and shit in the other, bet you know which fills up faster” or “You
can’t spend your days wishing for a life you’ll never have.” He was
right.

It is time to stop moping and start
doing.

11/21/2056

We aren’t going to be able to drive out of
the Pen like we had planned. If we drive out of here, the wasps
will follow. Unlike the movie zombies, the wasps are vicious. What
they lack in speed, they make up in sheer determination for
violence and destruction of anything in their path.

We’ve killed thousands of them, and many
thousands of them still surround the Pen. The sheer volume of
bodies makes it nearly impossible to get through them, let alone
get away. If we leave our fortress, we will take this battle on the
road, where we are more vulnerable.

One thing has become clear -- as long as the
fences hold, we are safe inside the Pen. Many wasps have impaled
themselves on the electric fencing. The heat of the electric fence
causes their flesh to sear onto the steel. Still alive, they flail
and scream at the top of their lungs with rage. We go out every
couple of hours and use the flame thrower to burn off the hundred
or more stuck wasps. The moment the fence is clear, the next set of
wasps hurl themselves against the fence.

The wasps are not investigating other ways
into the Pen. They followed us from the ranch to the fences, so
that’s where they attack. I believe the original wasps to be from a
single tribe of wasps. However, it doesn’t seem like any one wasp
is in charge. And they don’t act like honeybees or ants. These
wasps work for the good of the collective. No, these wasps move
like a single unit but work only for their own personal gain. We
now believe the commotion and noise from the original tribe of
wasps has drawn wasps from all over New Mexico.

After killing thousands of wasps, and
sending their spirits on, they continue to come en masse. They’ve
surrounded the entire Pen’s fences. Between the electronic fences
and our flame throwers, we’ve killed two, maybe three thousand in
the last week.

And a sea of wasps remains.

How many wasps can there possibly be? They
ate their way through half of the population. Is it possible that
there are 4.8 billion wasps? If they are breathing, have they added
to their numbers?

All I know is that no matter how many wasps
we kill, no matter how many souls are released, there are still
thousands surrounding the Pen.

We need another way out of the Pen. Right
after the Great Human Transition, I found a map of the Pen in the
Warden’s office. The Pen was a large campus spread out over 127,000
acres. There were six separate prison facilities and an
administration building. I went through the Pen prison by prison,
area by area, until the wasps were killed and all of the bodies
were destroyed. It took me almost three years. George helped me
seal each prison by concreting closed every door and sealing all
the windows with metal bars from the cells. George and I live in
the Old Main. Everything else is sealed closed.

According to the Warden’s map, our area of
the Pen is connected to some old supply tunnels. One of the first
things I did was secure our area. I checked the tunnels for
activity and sealed them off all those years ago.