Pahnyakin Rising (9 page)

  She wiped a salty flood of tears on the left sleeve of her dirtied flannel over shirt and shook her head.  It took thirty minutes, but she finally believed Dodge.  She’d somehow ended up in her future.  But this could not be what would become of her home.

The sofa, on which her mother sat last night, in her timeline, was tattered and torn; white foam stuffing was exposed in at least six spots from what Dresden could see.  She tried to turn on the television, but the button on the side of the flat screen offered only a hollow click as she furiously pushed it.

“Doesn’t matter how many times you push it,” Dodge commented.  “None of that stuff works.  TVs, cell phones…They somehow wiped the power grid or something.  If you can get something to turn on, you won’t get anything but emptiness.  We switched to an old ham radio.  Not sure why that still worked, but oh well.”

The overhead ceiling fan was dangling above the center of the room; it could fall at any moment and crash to the floor in a mess like the frosted globe and light bulb smashed below.  Holes in the walls were just another reminder that something bad had happened here.  Part of her wished she knew what it was; the other part was thankful to not have the memories.  She clung to an afghan her mother made years before.  It smelled of mold and slightly of cat urine; her family never owned a cat.  According to Dodge, Dresden already rifled through her family’s belongings.  What she was holding onto now was what she once deemed unimportant, but she could not understand how she would come to that conclusion.  These things, every part of this house and everything in it, were pieces of a life that kept her safe and comfortable.  Now, especially, there was nothing there that was unimportant.

“Your parents were some of the first to go,” he told her.  Delivering the news left him feeling queasy.  He hid it well; Dresden’s blood boiled at how emotionless he was to what was occurring.  “We always thought it had something to do with the experiments, but…”

His voice trailed and he shook his head with an uncaring shrug. 

“They had Unies on your house, so you jumped from place to place for a few months before coming back for any of your stuff.”

She touched her fingers to the wounds on her face.  Her cheek was still on fire from his punch and her lip burned but had stopped bleeding.  She felt a shallow scratch across her chin and dragged her glance down to the tops of her hands where bruises already formed on her skin.  There was no point in examining the rest of her body; she could feel bruising on her back and thighs, on her knees and shins.  The pain in her ankle was dulled as she had plenty of other pain to feel.

“I’ve never hurt this much before,” she sniffled.

“Get used to it,” he snorted.  “You’re usually pretty beat up.”

“No,” she argued.  “You have to be wrong.”

“You’re the one who said you didn’t trust them.  Remember that?” he sighed.  “Well, you were right.”

“Why don’t I remember any of this if it’s already happened?”

“I guess it hasn’t happened to you.  Well, not to you-you.  Are you sure the last thing you remember from that night is the thing with the Gaia?”

She nodded.  “Yes.  Then it exploded, I woke up on the bridge,
you hit me
, and then I woke up here.”

“And that’s all?  That’s the last thing you remember?” 

It was more of an accusation than a question.

“The Gaia thing happened last night for me. How many times do I have to tell this story?”

He huffed.  “Honey, you’d better get used to it because these people are going to have you tell your side of the story eight thousand times just to try to catch you in the smallest lie.  Nothing you say is inconsequential here.  All eyes are on you.”

“Honey?” she asked. 

Dodge’s face fell blank and he stood from the couch with his back turned.  “Never mind.  Look, you need to make sure you can tell them
every
detail
every
time they ask.  And make sure there are never any changes.  They’re going to hold you to an impossible standard, and Shep wants nothing more than to get rid of you.”

“But why?  I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“These people,” he motioned to the cracked living room window, “out there are confused and scared.  At first, when you di—disappeared, the Pahnyakins accelerated their attacks on us.  Then they slowed down. We were patrolling outside of town last night, making sure we didn’t see any of them scouting Easton.  The last thing anyone expected to find out there was you.”

“Everyone is treating me like a criminal,” she said.  “Why do you believe me?”

He shrugged and stated softly,  “Because I know you better than I’ve ever known anyone else.” 

The girl stood and silently wandered through what was left of her home.  Trash littered the hallway floor and she picked up on scratching deep inside the walls.  Holes along the baseboard were gnawed through the plaster and she jumped when her theory was confirmed by a rat with the head the size of her small fist peeking out through one of the openings. 

Her bedroom was ransacked.  She instinctively reached to flip the light switch, but the room remained dark when she flipped it upward.  A browning half-eaten apple rested on her scratched nightstand; someone had recently been in the room.  She walked across her bedroom and peeked out the window.  Across the street, taking up a block, was the cage in which she was left to fight the Pahnyakin Uni.  She closed her eyes and retraced her blinded steps to the field to get an idea of where she was held: in what used to be the underground boiler room of the pottery factory.  Most of the crowd had dispersed.  A few clusters of people standing in groups of five or six stood along the outer border of the cage and gossiped as they watched her house.  Some pushed rusty grocery carts filled with clothes or wood up and down the streets that were growing weeds in deep cracks.  A child of nine or ten held his toddler sister’s hand as a muscular, lean German Rottweiler walked but only two feet from them.  The dog’s ears were raised and it appeared he never let down his guard around the children.  This was Easton.  It sure wasn’t the thriving town she imagined it would be.

“What about your mom and dad?” she called to Dodge.  “What do they think about this?”

She walked back to the living room.  He was standing with his shoulders relaxed and was staring at the filthy floor.

“They died the first night of the attacks,” he said in a short tone.   “So I don’t know what they think about any of this.”

“I’m sorry,” Dresden scowled.  She sighed and sat on the couch.  The cushion drooped under her weight and a cloud of dust rose in the stale air.  “Dodge, what happened here?”

“A few weeks after we hooked the monitors to the bridge, they attacked.  They took out a few small towns first.  It was genius, really, because a lot of people in the bigger cities had nowhere to go.”

He sat next to her.

“And then they started taking out cities.  Indianapolis…I don’t even know what happened to it.  We had a group come through a few months ago and tell us it was gone.  Chicago, New York…We had an old ham radio for a while and heard San Francisco was gone.  Then we heard clicking come through one day and haven’t picked up on another human yet.  Without you around, though, we didn’t know what Pahnyakins were saying.”

“Without me?  Dodge, I never could understand them.”

He shook his head.  “You figured it out.  I don’t know how, but you did.  It was just too late.”  He raised his brows and accusingly asked, “You don’t remember any of this?  You don’t remember cracking their code a few months after the first attacks on Easton?”

“No,” she responded with a sense of shame and embarrassment. 

“As far as anyone knows, you’re the only person in the world who knows what they’re saying.  Word got around, but when you were gone we lost a lot of our people.  I think we lost four hundred in the first two weeks.  It left us vulnerable and we’re still losing people every day.”

“I can’t help you,” she said.  “Dodge, I just put that monitor there last night.  I don’t know anything right now.”

“You must know something,” he argued urgently.  “You were the first person in the world to figure out how to kill them and nobody can take one down like you can.”

She motioned through the wall and to the arena across the street.  “But you killed that one with a knife.”

“That Uni was weak.  We’ve had it held in that building for months, even cut out its transmitters so it couldn’t call for help.  It was already dying.” 

He paused. 

“Dresden, everyone knows you’re back.  You have to take over again.  We need a leader.  Shepherd has no idea what he’s doing and he’s throwing good people to the Rising all the time.”

“The what?”

“The Rising,” he repeated, shaking his head as he bit his lip in frustration.  “Anything outside our fences is part of the Rising.  They’ve taken over the world.”

She glanced sideways and blurted out, “If they’re in control, what makes you think we even have a chance?”

He made a fist and slammed it on the arm of the couch.  “You.  You make me think we have a chance.”

“But why?”

“Because you’re the one who told us we could get through this.  You had a damn plan, Dresden, and then you went out and got yourself killed.”

“If I was killed, why is there even a question of who I am?  Are there clones now?”

He scrunched his brows.

“No.  There was one survivor.  Amos.  He came back to town with half of his intestines hanging out of his stomach.  He told us he saw you die, and we believed him.” 

He grimaced.  “Look, since you’ve been gone we’ve been fighting over food rations, the generators are going out at least twice a week, winter’s coming, and we have no hope.  If you don’t start remembering something real quick, we’re all gonna die and Shepherd is going to kill you.”

With such immense pressure upon her, Dresden was not only fearful of her own life, but she also feared for the lives of others.  She was not a leader, and if the people gathered around her home watched the same the Trial she remembered from an hour prior, they too would realize she was not the person they thought she was.  Dresden knew she could not help these people.  She couldn’t even help herself.

“I can’t help you.  I don’t even have my data.  Without recordings or—.”

He interrupted.  “We don’t have the materials or the time to experiment anymore.  Don’t you understand what I’m telling you?  There’s no more time for that.  You gave that stuff up a long time ago.”

“What happened to the data from the transmitter?” she asked. 

“Gone,” he shrugged.  “It’s all gone.”

She inhaled deeply and let out a tired sigh.  “That girl said you had some of my stuff.  Do you have anything else I can look at?  Maybe there’s something there I can examine as I’m trying to figure out how I ended up here.”

Dodge nodded.  “I left almost everything the way you had it.  I packed up a few of your clothes, but then I…Everything’s the way you left it.”

“Can you take me there?  Where is it?”

“My house,” he answered. 

“Your house?” she asked with a peculiar look of puzzlement on her face.  “Why is all of my stuff at
your
house?”

He frowned and sadness filled his eyes.  “You’re really not you, are you?”

“I guess not.”

“You don’t remember anything?”

“No,” she answered.

It was clear to her, by the disappointed look in Dodge’s glossy mossy eyes, that he wanted her to remember, needed her to.  If she truly traveled forward in time, there was no way she could.  Everything the entire community expected her to know was something she would have to learn for the first time. 



Although the exterior of Dodge’s house was just as Dresden remembered it from the day before-pristine olive plastic siding with a mahogany-overlapped wooden shingle roof-the interior was far from how she had always seen it.  Two bulging 33-gallon black trash bags were tied at the tops in tiny knots and were resting against the wall behind the burgundy front door.  Aluminum cans rattled from one as Dresden stubbed the toe of her boot on its bottom corner.  The beige carpet was stained with black oily size 11 shoe prints that led to the kitchen to the left of the small living room and down the hall to the back bedrooms.  Dozens of empty beer cans were stacked on the filthy brown laminate kitchen counters and spilled over to the kitchen and living room floor.  Had he looted a liquor store?  She recognized her senior picture on the wall across the room; surrounding it were framed photos she and Dodge posed for during childhood.  Photographs of both their parents were affixed to the peach-colored wall. 

“Dodge,” Dresden started in a low, unsettled tone.

He shook his head in bitter anger.  “Don’t you dare judge me.  You have no idea what it’s been like without you around.”

“You live here?  Like
this?
”

“Recently, yeah.  Look, I have to get out of this gear; I’m sweaty and dirty.  Most of your stuff is in the extra room.  On the right.”  He motioned down the hall.  “A lot of it is still in the bedroom.  I’ll be in the bathroom if you need me.  Don’t open the door for anyone, even if you know them.”