The Second Wave (12 page)

The manchado was easy to handle. The flashes
of light disquieted her, but she quickly adapted to John’s commands
and proved to be a light-footed, secure guide through the
undergrowth. As he rode on, the cries he heard became louder,
definitely sounding like a cow in distress now.

He reached the animal just as the
thunderstorm stopped as quickly and abruptly as it had begun not an
hour ago. The clouds vanished, the moon now shone clearly, showing
John one solitary, surprisingly small ox next to a tree. It didn’t
move, just kept on crying out. John had to circle it once to find
out why: one of its enormous horns was pinned to the trunk of the
tree, haplessly stuck in a knothole. Even if it wanted to run away,
it couldn’t.

The first thing he did was fasten the rope
he’d brought with him around the ox’s thick, furry neck, so it
couldn’t run away once it was free. He needn’t have worried,
though. Now that the storm and the thunder was over, the animal was
calm and obedient, all previous hassle seemingly forgotten. It
munched on a handful of grass, while John chipped away the wood
around the horn with his dagger, as simply pulling it out didn’t
work.

When he was done, he tied the other end of
the rope to his saddle and lead the ox out of the forest. It was a
miracle the animal had made it this far into the woods at all with
its massive horns and its stubby legs.

At the stables, he saw that Peter was already
there, too, handing a couple of small cows over to protector Niman
and another man. They all seemed relieved on seeing the ox.

“Nice work, man!” Niman gave an impressed
whistle as he walked up to John. “We feared he might be long gone
by now.”

John handed him the rope. He leaned down to
pat the animal’s back reassuringly, then told them in few words
what had happened.

“Aw, poor you,” Niman addressed the ox. “Come
on, Leroy. Your wives are waiting.”

John raised an eyebrow at Peter, but Peter
merely shrugged.

“We’re still missing two calves,” he said.
“Help me?”

They rode back into the forest together.

* * * *

The wee hours of the morning approached,
tinting the world a lighter shade of gray as the moon began to
fade.

“I think I heard the calves on my way back,
but I couldn’t check it out with the cows in tow,” Peter said.

He and John were riding side by side, not in
any hurry now that the downpour had stopped and chances were good
that the cattle was just standing around somewhere grazing, waiting
to get picked up. They were both too absorbed in the task and each
other’s company to make haste now.

“I want to show you something I found.” Peter
beamed. “It is on the way. Do you know why they picked this reality
out of the many they found?”

John shook his head.

“One of the main reasons was that this Earth
has never been inhabited by humans. We’re the first people on this
planet. At least that is what everybody thought, but I believe I
found something.”

He picked up speed, obviously keen to get to
whatever he wanted to show John. They ventured deeper into the
forest than John had previously. The trees were closer to each
other now, the undergrowth thicker. No paths at all the horses
could trod along; they had to make their own way, and did so with
increasingly more effort. After a while, they came across a brook,
a mere trickle to be accurate, but that wasn’t what Peter wanted to
show him, and that wasn’t what made John’s eyes widen in
astonishment.

The brook led to a small clearing, albeit not
a natural one. No trees or shrubbery grew there. The moonlight fell
unhindered onto the remains of a building that took up all the
space. Once a vast structure John assumed by the size and layout of
it. The ruins were now overgrown and corroded, but still
impressive. Sleek curves and erect walls spoke of grace and a long
lost greatness. It was impossible to see if it was one building or
part of a bigger structure, a city perhaps, or a housing complex,
or something else entirely. The ruins were tall, but the trees were
taller, thus obscuring the clearing and the remains in it from view
completely.

Something was wrong with it, though, John
thought. He had lived in remnants and skeleton cities long enough
to know ancient buildings when he saw them. This wasn’t ancient. It
was incredibly old, but the building material was completely
strange, far more advanced than anything John had ever seen on
Earth. The surface was glistening from the wet, it was smoother
than concrete, although to the touch it felt like concrete; it
shimmered like metal, but was much warmer than any metal John had
ever known.

Peter dismounted. He walked up to the
building and climbed on a jutty, to get a better look. “This
stretches out far into the forest!” he told John, excitement in his
voice. “It could be a temple of some kind. Look at those markings!
Incredible, isn’t it?!”

No, John decided, it wasn’t a temple. If it
was, there would have been holy engravings or hieroglyphs
somewhere. But the markings Peter pointed out now, which stretched
across a whole side of the inner wall, looked more like
graffiti.

John tied their horses loosely together to
prevent them from walking away, then he followed Peter. He was
right, he saw on closer inspection—the markings looked indeed like
graffiti. They were definitely painted on the walls: words, simple
drawings, short phrases, or what John assumed were phrases; there
seemed no higher meaning or informational value to the writings. He
climbed through something that must have been a door at some point,
to look at the inside of the structure. It looked oddly familiar.
He’d seen structures like this before, even if it was hard to tell
in this light; he’d have to come back and take a closer look during
the day.

“Have you got any idea what it is?” asked
Peter. He leaped over a gap and walked up a decayed staircase to
stand beside John.

“I think I might have. See those tracks in
the middle? Two different sets that run parallel to one another but
don’t meet. I bet there used to be an aisle in the middle.”

“Do you recognize it?”

“Not specifically. But I’ve seen this sort of
layout before in Shanghai. I think it’s a subway station.”

Peter gave a wolf whistle that echoed back
from the walls. Their further exploration was cut short then by a
menacing growl which came, by way of an answer to Peter’s whistle
no doubt, from an opening in the ground that probably led to
another, deeper level of what once indeed had been a subway
station.

“We should go now, Peter. It appears we are
in something’s territory.”

“The other reason they chose this planet,”
Peter lectured him, “was the complete absence of larger
wildlife.”

“And seeing that they weren’t entirely spot
on with their first assumption, the second one is probably
debatable as well.”

“Point taken,” Peter granted. “It sounded
like something large.”

“Large and irritated.”

They quickly made their way back to the
horses.

Up and down the forest they sought, but only
found the calves when dawn was already breaking. Two tiny animals
with shaggy, brown fur; asleep, curled up against one another under
a shrub Peter and John had passed by twice before without seeing
them. When they finally made it out of the woods, the two men were
half-frozen, drenched to the skin. They were laughing at an
anecdote Peter narrated, from when he grew up on his mother’s farm.
The first beams of sunlight were a welcome sight as they stepped
out of the shadows of the trees. It immediately felt warmer.

“You know, Ian, I may be freezing and starved
and utterly exhausted,” Peter laughed, riding the high of finding a
lost city and the missing cattle in one night, “but I haven’t had
this much fun since, well…” Within the blink of an eye his mood
turned around completely. A solemn look crept back into his eyes.
He was going to say since a week before Duncan’s death, but the
words never left his lips. An awkward silence settled between
them.

John watched as two farmers took the calves
and led them into the cote. The door was now back in its hinges;
the repairs at the chicken pen had begun. The thousand individual
puddles had merged and now looked like one giant lake; the sunlight
glistened on its surface, giving it the appearance of depth.

Without thinking twice about it, John rode up
to Peter and extended his hand, “My name is John.”

Peter didn’t reply to that, but he took the
offered hand.

As soon as they were in the house they put on
a change of clothes. Peter was hanging their things up to dry,
while John kindled a flame in the stove and put a kettle on to boil
water for tea. The kitchen was only equipped with the bare
essentials, but Peter had brought a box of black tea with him from
Earth.

There was no use getting back to sleep
now—the sun was quickly climbing over the horizon. Peter had given
John a hard time about going to this morning’s orientation speech
by the village mayor. So as he waited for Peter to re-emerge from
the bathroom dry and clean, John leafed through the information
brochure that lay on the counter.
Personalized information
package
//
House #23
it said on the first page. John
skipped the entry about Peter’s (and Duncan’s) new workplace at the
Geo & Bio Lab
//
Building #J16
, and went straight
to the general information on the colony.

He was surprised to find a school and a
kindergarten on the map of the compounds, along with a library and
an open-for-all canteen.

“Sally says they have a marvellous chef in
that canteen,” Peter announced when he strolled into the kitchen
and saw John with the menu-plan for the first week. “A
twelve-year-old culinary wunderkind. I believe we’re all supposed
to eat there until we can harvest our own crops.”

John remembered seeing large barren fields
when they arrived at the village the first time. It would be a
while until the first harvest.

“Why is the name of the program
Second
Wave?” John was curious. “Was there a first one?”

Peter got two mugs from the cupboard. “I
don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe it’s just a name. I’m sure they’d
have told us if there was another colony nearby.”

He waited until John had poured them the tea,
then drew up two chairs next to the stove to sit by the fire. They
were both in need of warmth, on the inside as well as the
outside.

“Thank you for still talking to me,” John
confessed after a comfortable silence. He was surprised to realize
that he meant it. For the first time in a long time he was glad
someone knew his real name. Peter may not know about what he did,
or, more specifically, what he had done, but John felt like one
layer of his carefully constructed lies had been lifted; it was a
little easier to breathe now.

“Tabula rasa, remember?” Peter replied.
“Besides, after all that’s happened, I am still grateful to
you.”

“How can you hold feelings of gratitude to
the person who lied to you about almost everything and then left
you without even saying goodbye?”

“Put like that it does indeed sound rather
pathetic.” Peter smiled. “I loved you, John. And, yes, you broke my
heart. But if it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have spent a month
at my sister’s, crying my eyes out. I wouldn’t have met her
flatmate and my future husband, who was then just leaving to move
to Finland forever.”

John’s gaze flickered to the ring on Peter’s
hand. After a year he was still wearing it to honor his marriage
vow. He couldn’t help but be impressed by that kind of
devotion.

“He never made it to Finland, of course.
Today, I think everything happened the way it was supposed to
happen. It had reason. At least for me,” Peter added solemnly. Then
his mood lifted. “So. You lied to me about
almost
everything?”

“Don’t go there, Peter,” warned John. A
warning that wasn’t just meant for the other man. There were things
John didn’t want to ponder again, feelings he didn’t want to
revisit. It was better that way for both of them. He needed to stay
detached, or else… he needed to stay detached.

“Fair enough. But you do know what tabula
rasa means, don’t you?”

John shrugged. He didn’t know what it meant
for Peter.

“It means no more lies from now on. Or you
can walk out of that door right now and never come back.” He meant
it, John could tell from his voice. “I’m too tired for games.”

John nodded. “No more lies.” He wasn’t sure,
though, if that wasn’t a lie in itself. After all these years, he
wasn’t sure where the truth ended and the lies began anymore, and
he wasn’t sure if he cared enough to change that. Lies worked. Lies
helped him to stay alive.

His gaze flickered across the room, and he
wondered briefly what he was staying alive for in the first place
these days.

* * * *

In the small waiting area of the hospital sat
Dr. Paige and Captain Eleven in uncomfortable, wooden chairs around
a low table with information brochures. They watched Mayor
Rochester pace up and down, a cup of by now cold coffee in his
hand.

“My team is looking for her right now, Heath.
They’ll contact me as soon as they find something. Please. Sit
down!”

“How is that even possible?” he asked for at
least the tenth time since he’d been called out to the
hospital.

“I am so sorry,” Paige uttered, for at least
the fifteenth time since she’d found Eugenia Gust’s bed empty on
her last round. “I didn’t think she’d run away.”

Rochester calmed down enough to pat the
doctor on the shoulder. “Nobody thought that.”

“I did,” Eleven pointed out.