The Mountain and The City: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale (31 page)

He lifts his mask to run a hand over his neck, as if the words are cutting it.

“They tell me they found us some distance away, car ran into a ditch trying to kill each other, but I'd be lying if I said I remembered any of that. Either way it was the beginning of the end for my brother and I, relations never healed after that. I threw myself into being what mama expected of me, and Graham put all his energy into manipulating the group to make me look like an unfit leader. Two very different paths, and look where they both got us.”

“Why did you tell me this?”

“Your mother. When you say she talked to you, you mean?” He taps on the side of his head.

“I heard her inside.”

He nods. “Sometimes the best thing you can do for a person is stop helping them, let them figure it out on their own. It's possible she stopped talking to you because you didn't need to hear her anymore.”

I think about this a while, walking in quiet with only my feet making sound in the fallen leaves. The moon lights up the wood up in front of us. Beasts of all kinds talk in the night. It feels like a good day to have my last day, to give myself the death, but before I can do that I see there's one more thing I need to do. For Terence.

“Follow me,” I say, “there's something I need to show you.”

**

It's colder in here than I remember. I used to enjoy this, the feeling of being cut off from the dangers, the munies and the beasts and the sky full of bastard air. Even the total dark of this place, strong with the fear and the panic, gave me a sense of safety, like a blanket hiding me from the hungry teeth of the world.

Now it's the dark that feels like teeth.

We walk past the waxy, wet spikes hanging with leatherwings, down the metal stairs to where the ceiling goes taller, past the waterfall and the rushing water, to the yellow room and what it holds inside.

“By my count I could live one year four months on these, but they're not mine. The only reason I kept from the death for so long was because of what I took from you.”

“You didn't know.”

“I saw shadows. Shapes. Things that might have been real people, but I ran and hid and kept the supplies to live on. Now they're yours again.”

“With proper rationing this could get the group through the whole winter.”
Terence is quiet for a while.
“Now I have to go back to the base.”

I nod. He tries to convince me to come back with him, to the base and to Child, but I tell him no. At the mouth of the cavern he turns to me with one of the crates held in his arms.

“You think you're a munie, but you're not like them. There's something different about you, something inside keeping you on the right path. Whatever it is, you got it from those parents of yours. ”

I listen to Terence's foot sounds until they disappear into the wood and are replaced by the squeaks of leatherwings and the echoes of water drips. For the first time in days, I'm alone.

**

The trailer is destroyed. I'd forgotten that when I took Child to the cavern to hide her from the munies they'd followed the scent of real people, which I still was then, and they ripped apart the trailer looking for us.

I step over the fallen door and into the trailer, immediately picking up the scent of the munies, not recently but back when they'd taken their claws to it. The bed is pulled to pieces, the sink and counter in parts on the floor. Even the bottles of rubbing alcohol lay empty in the shower drain.

The record player is broken. The records shattered. I'll never put my ear in close and listen to the sounds of the real times again, have words whispered to me as I try to understand what they are. This is what life was for so many years, but now it seems so small to me, so small and quiet and sad.

A moan comes from the bed when I sit on it as if it's a living beast that doesn't want me near. Cruz's gun is in my lap. I feel how heavy it is on my leg, the cold metal touching my skin, until I lift it up and put its mouth to the side of my head.

The trailer is so small. Of all the things that have surprised me in the last few days, the most surprising is that I passed so many days here, so many years spent behind these weak walls. As I put my finger to the trigger, prepared to finally give myself the death, I realize something so strong that I feel the thought of it push the blood from my face all the way down to my feet.

It's not that the gun might not work, or that it may not have bullets in it, or that it might not give me the death all the way but instead give me terrible pain. It's that, as I was passing those years inside this place, hiding from the dangers of the world, I was never actually alive.

As my finger goes tight around the trigger my mouth pushes out all the air that's left in my lungs. Without my meaning them to, my eyes close. And then, against my eyelids, so clear it's as if cut into them with fire, I see a picture of her. The one that matters to me most.

**

I crawl into the nest, pulling the blankets in close around us. Child startles awake but I calm her, telling her to go back to sleep.

“Where go,” she asks, beautiful eyes half-open.

“Mother,” I say. “You can call me Mother.”

We'll stay here a while, then we'll move on. It's like I told Child, more than any other thing it's quiet that gives me the fear now. To keep moving. To make it harder for the death to find us. That's what life is.

ZERO

“Silvia?”

This book is confusing. It skips around too much, I can never figure out how to read it.

“Hey, did you hear what I said?”

I hold it up to my mother. “I think I lost my place again.”

“You can come back to that later. You should check out this wooly mammoth, it's pretty damn cool.” She moves closer on the bench. “Remember my friend Henry? He was part of the expedition that pulled a male mammoth out of the Alaskan ice. It still had the fur on it, and get this- he said as soon as the air hit it you could smell the thing like it was right next to you. It's amazing what can last given the right conditions. Ten thousand years in the ground and it still had body odor. Just like a boy, right?” She pokes me in the side.

“Why do they put “He” in upper-case when they talk about God?”

She clears her throat. “Some people do that for things they hold very important. You know you don't have to read that if you don't want to.”

“It was just a question.”

“Questions are good, but that book is more your father's territory. There's a time and a place.”

Like I haven't been here a million times.

“You know, it's his loss if he doesn't want to spend time with the greatest, weirdest little girl I know.”

A tall man with a big belly and gray hair hurries over to us. “Cait, I've been looking everywhere for you,” he says, breathing hard.

“I don't know why you did that, I've been here the entire time.”

“The link-up already started.”

She gets to her feet. “What? That's way ahead of schedule.”

He nods. “Phillip.”

“Jesus Christ, I've never known a project leader more intent on ruining everything he touches. Seven months of excavation and he can't wait two damn hours. You know what he's doing, right? He wants to run in guns blazing for the cameras.”

“You don't have to tell me.”

“You're right, I should be telling the council of antiquities. See if they like having the biggest dig since nineteen twenty-two screwed up by their golden boy.”

I pull on her arm. “Mom.”

She tells me to hold on and keeps talking to the man with the big belly. After a few seconds I pull on her arm again but she doesn't notice, so I walk away from her, and I take my dad's bible with me.

I used to like coming here. I liked the way mom's face got shiny as she talked about the things from the dirt. I used to have fun watching my mother and father argue about what year something happened, or which doctor was more important, or who should have won a no bell.

Now I just think there are too many people in museums.

By the time mom catches up to me I'm four rooms away and an old guy with a big, metal pin on his chest is asking me if I'm lost. He asks if I want to go to the front desk, so they can contact my parents. I ask him, “Can they call my dad?”

“It's okay, I have her.” My mom puts her hand on my shoulder, out of breath like the big belly guy.

“Doctor Wilkins, I didn't realize this was your daughter.”

“It's okay, Frank, I think she forgot for a minute, too.”

As the man walks away to bother more kids, my mother leans down. “Sil, what was that?”

I point to the ugly, blue thing hanging between the two stairs. “I wanted to see the big fish up close.”

She laughs. “The fish, huh? Well now I know you're lying, you have zero interest in science. I've never met a kid who doesn't even know what a bear is.”

“I don't see why I need to.”

“Because, you might grow up and decide to move to the countryside, or to a farm, and then you won't know anything about all the little beasts running around. Things come up, life shifts. If you're smart you'll be prepared for all the little surprises life sends your way.”

She looks at a clock on the wall. “So, what do you say we watch history being made?”

I nod.

“Good. I saved you a seat.”

**

As we pass the fake people in the glass, my mother points to one of them, a woman with no gold and not as nice clothes as the others.

“People don't realize how much equality there was between the sexes in ancient Egypt. Women could own property, free slaves. They could adopt. They could even divorce.” The smile goes away from her face. “You should know, it's not going well between your father and I.”

“But you said you would get back together.”

“We said we would try, and we did.”

“You don't love him?”

“That's a complex question.”

“You used to.”

“I know.” She touches my back. “People change.”

“If it's because of what happened, you can't blame dad for me being stupid.”

She stops and turns me to her. “Hey, hey, hey, don't you dare think that about yourself. With your genetics it's impossible for you to be stupid. Or at least so statistically unlikely that it would be just as impressive if you were.”

We turn down the hall to the place where not everyone is allowed.

“That was a joke,” she says, “you were supposed to laugh.”

“I didn't.”

“I see that, you have on your serious face.” She puts her hand on the square next to the door and it lets us in.

People with their faces covered so it looks like they don't have mouths sit at tables. They have things from the dirt in front of them, brushing them with tiny brushes, looking at them with big glasses and red lights. My mother can't help but tell me about the things from the dirt every time we come here. She points at the people in the drawings and says, “You see how they're crouched like that? We've never seen it in any of the artifacts before these. It almost makes them look like animals, but you can clearly make out that they're human.”

“Maybe they're both.”

She thinks about it. “Well, Gods and Goddesses were often depicted as part human and part animal. Horus the sky God had the head of a hawk, for instance. But these...” She looks closer at one of the crouched people. “There's something different about them.”

“They're definitely ancient Egyptian,” a person with no mouth says, “carbon-dating confirmed it.”

“No doubt, and we wouldn't have found the dig site otherwise. It doesn't mean they can't give me the creeps.” She catches me looking at her, smiles and pinches my nose.

Then someone shouts, “It's starting!” and all the people put down their things and hurry to a big screen on the wall showing the bright place with lots of sand. They save the seat up front for mom. She sits and pulls me onto her lap.

I don't see anything except machines and sand, and way far off there's a bird making circles in the sky.

“Isn't this exciting,” mom whispers. Everyone hears and looks at me and waits for my answer.

“I have to pee.”

The face of a man comes onto the screen. He has big, black eyebrows and gray hairs up his nose.

“Ah, Cait, I 'm glad to see you got around to joining us. Did we interrupt something?”

“You're the one who jumped the gun by two hours. Are you positive the ground is stabilized?”

“More than ever.”

“Don't be too sure of yourself, the rug can always get pulled out from under you.”