WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (25 page)

    And then there’s nothing but the hum of the boat. For a long time, there’s nothing else, and it takes me a minute to realize she’s let me keep my hand on her. And she hasn’t even moved away a bit. It comes into me all at once, the overpowering urge to move my hand back and forth along her back. I feel the ripple of her shoulder muscle, tensed upon the wheel. My hand pushes in a bit, massaging in and out, waiting to see. And it’s all I can do to not care anymore—not care what kind of reaction I get from her. Because all I know is that I want her now. As the gray covers everything, thickening around us to the point I start to worry we’ll lose the other boat, I start to think this is my chance. Before I die. To make love to someone. But something drops in me when I think the word—
love.
That it’s like she told me. A word that can have any meaning you want dumped into it. Meaningless and different for every person. Just another belief. Gala’s words rifle through my head—
there is no such thing as belief
.
Just probability
. And I know that’s it—it’s just the probability. That I want to fuck her. And that’s it. No love. No anything else. Just her body and her lips and her legs and—

    The noise of a low rumble rises into a high-pitched motor whine, and then there’s a pop. So loud that I back my hand off Gala and look around to see if Garren fired his shotgun. For a split second I’m sure he’s killed Maze. Drawn us into the fog on purpose. For some sacrifice, because he’s really in league with the Nefandus, drawing us to their hive. But I can’t even see the other boat. It’s gone. And I realize the noise came from our own boat the moment Gala rises from the wheel and curses. The boat starts to slow, and then it dies, limp and bobbing in the fog-ridden sea. I know we must be somewhere just off-shore, somewhere close enough that the rocks Garren was talking about could strike our hull any moment. And then, with the thought of the sharks, and the hopelessness of our dead boat, I yell out for Maze.

    “We’re here,” she replies. And when I turn to her voice, like a phantom sliding in out of the gray, she’s there. Her and Garren appearing like ghosts from the abyss, their own engine shutting off to glide up against us.

    “Engine’s dead,” Gala says. “Looks like gas isn’t a problem anymore.”

    “Should we leave the fog?” Maze says. Nobody answers her, and I look at Garren, watching him try to figure it all out. Our next move. The boat, she says, let’s leave it. We have to go, it’ll be dark soon. And with her command, Garren holds out his hand.

    “Send it all over.”

    And just like that we move all of our supplies into Garren’s boat. Once we start moving again, unsure in which direction we’re going, the first clanks rattle in the last good engine.

    “And that’ll be the gas,” he says. “Ten minutes left maybe.”

    I huddle near Maze, just to be near her before it happens. Somehow it feels like we’ve been separated forever. And that the moment with Gala, the moment she let me touch her, was a million years ago. And then, we just watch the fog. Eyes in every direction. Waiting for a break. But there’s nothing. Just the last glowing streaks of the sun behind us to let us know which way is ocean and which way is shore. When Gala finally surrenders and tells us all it’s time to turn it around, and wait it out a bit farther from the reef, Maze shushes her quiet.

    “Listen.” 

    And then, just like that, Garren cuts the engine and we sit, listening to the steady wash of waves against surf.

    “All I hear is waves,” I say.

    “No—something else.”

    For a minute there’s nothing but more waves. The gray seems to grow darker and thicker, keeping us blind to everything but the slow-nudging swells that pull us in toward the beach. When I can’t take it anymore, and I feel like I need to say something, or someone needs to say something, because the images of the rocks below, cracking us apart and sending us down to the sharks, start to flood my mind, I hear it: the sound of footsteps. A steady marching chorus of them, barely audible, but as positively there behind the fog as the rocky cliffs are.

    “How the hell can they still be—” Garren starts, but it’s Gala this time who hushes him.

    “Quiet.”

    And then, for the first time, I see that there is some fear in Garren. It’s in his action—he picks up the shotgun, as if we’ll need it from all the way out here. He clings to it, as if the trauma of the massacre at camp has him spooked. But it’s there—fear in his jerky turns and darting eyes. For some reason, I feel exhilarated. Somehow closer to Maze than ever. Like this is the reason we left Acadia. This very situation, this very moment. To show her who really has courage. And finally Garren tells us. He’s turning her around. No one argues.

    He moves away from the edge of the boat where we huddle, peering out into the void of nothingness, waiting for the movement. Only nothing happens—just a quick series of clicking sounds, firing off and wheezing into nothing. Garren starts to curse, and the boat makes the same noise again. The same dying protest clicks out into the gray. And finally, the wheeze is gone. There’s nothing but a dead tapping.

    “Give it a minute,” he says. And then, we watch and wait.

When it’s clear after two more tries, and another twenty minutes, that the boat’s not going to start again, Gala tells us we should be ready. Ready for what? I have to ask her. And she tells me we’re either going into the ocean, because we’re being pulled into the shore, and we’ll smack into one of the million reefs, or we’ll gently wash up onto the smooth surface of a stretch of beach with a thousand Nefandus waiting for us. I ask her for the probability that there really is any smooth beach on this coast, even a thin slice of it. But she doesn’t say anything. And Garren, as if he somehow knows, like he’s been here before, says it: There is no smooth beach on this coast. None at all.

    “How do you know?” I ask him, my head filling with sharks.

    “Call it a hunch.”

    I want to tell him to fuck his hunch, that he’s a liar and he knows nothing. That he’s been manipulating us all along. Especially Maze. But I don’t say a word. Instead, I just sit down next to Gala. Ignoring everything else in the world. And when it becomes too tiring to keep watching the fog, I close my eyes. I think of touching her again, right here, where everyone will see it, just to do it. Just to see if I can. But a feeling of sickness comes over me, the heavier tug of the sea, the boat being sucked in harder, and there’s nothing I can do but wait quietly for something to change.

The first thing that changes is the touch. This time, it’s Maze’s arm. She glides her finger quickly along my forearm and then taps me.

    “Do you hear that?” she whispers. I try to listen, to come out of my own fog and return to the one we’re trapped in.

    When I finally do hear it, it sounds identical to the sounds from before. But then, occasionally, I hear something else. Voices drifting out. Garbled and incoherent, but there’s no mistaking it. The strange language. The red men near us, talking loudly. When I stand, almost in a panic, everyone else is still, listening. The boat rides a bit higher each time up the swells, longer, and for a moment I convince myself the engine’s on again. But it’s dead quiet in the fog, except for the surf and the marching Nefandus and the intermittent voices. And then, just when Maze has gone to the edge of the rail, to look down into the water, to see whatever might be there waiting for us, the scraping erupts. It starts like a thin whine underneath our feet, and then loudens, jerking the boat around until there’s a terrible shriek—metal ripping against rock, and the first thing I feel is the freezing water rushing over my feet.

    “Coming in fast!” Gala says. And then, just as she says it, as the boat starts to lean heavily to one side, I hear the commotion on the shore. Loud and clear, shouting voices that let us know the Nefandus can hear us cracking apart. My arms reach out, trying to grab something to steady myself, finding Maze. I hold onto her arm, but then my leg gets kicked. Garren slips, rolling right under me and knocking me over. I see his head slam into the rail of the boat and he bounces back choking. An awful noise starts to come from him as I tumble into Maze and the cold sea water washes over me so fast I can’t help but swallow it. And then, everything is salt and foam and suction, blinding me and keeping me from knowing where my hands are grasping. My head dips below the surface and I can’t help but open my eyes, expecting to see the shark, moving in fast, not wasting any time while we swim helplessly around the ripped hull, coming to dig its razors into my skin. But there’s nothing but brown darkness. When I kick my feet hard and surface I hear a scream. I can’t tell which of the girls it is. Then I see Gala. Help me, she yells. And it takes a moment for me to realize what’s happening—that with half the boat turned, she’s trying to flip it completely. I swim to her, kicking desperately, and the next thing I see is Maze’s head. Popping right up next to Gala, digging her own arms into the side of the boat. She looks all around, like she needs to find something, and when she spots me, she calls my name. There’s footing here, she yells to me, Help us. I manage to squeeze in beside her and plant my feet down on hard rock somewhere below. And there, just when I push down, a searing pain slices my leg open. I try to look through the foam but can’t see how bad it is. And then, for some reason, the pain goes away, and I know it wasn’t a shark—just the reef, just where Gala and Maze have planted their feet, I tell myself. I push with them, one giant and last effort, and the boat rises up. A little more, Gala says, and then the boat is turned over on its back. A flat husk, all of our supplies drifting to the bottom underneath it.

    Without a word, Gala rises up and flops onto the flat belly of the hull.

    “Watch the rip,” she says, and then her hand goes down. Maze rises up, and then together they pull me out. The first thing I see is the red. Streaking down and along my leg, soaking into my hair. I see the gnarled bit of muscle inside, pink and raw. And without a word, Gala rips off her shirt, her naked breasts open to the spindrift, and she ties it around my leg.

    “You’re fine, it’s nothing,” she says. But I hear how much her voice is shaking. And then, before she’s even done, and Maze looks dead next to me, lying face down on the metal, trying desperately to stay balanced so she doesn’t slide back off as the boat rocks and lurches away from the reef and back into deep water, Gala calls out.

    “Garren!”

    Instead of Garren a reply comes from the fog—the chants that I seem to know by heart somehow. The red voices. Somehow closer to us. I survey every direction, and after Gala calls again, I see something sticking up like a body from the water, a dark silhouette of a person against the fog. Just a few feet away. For a moment I think it’s the red walkers, wading in to take us—to make sure the sea doesn’t take the sacrifice before they can, but then I see a strange line running horizontal atop the shadow’s body. The dark outline of a shotgun being held up above his head.

    “There!” I shout.

    But when we’ve all spotted him, for some reason, he still doesn’t say a word. Over and over again Gala yells at him as we drift away. I think I hear something—a strange wheezing.

    “Fuck the shotgun, swim to us!” she yells. But he stays frozen like a statue, holding it up over his head. Not saying a word.

    Finally, to herself, in some kind of angry resignation, Gala curses and says she’ll do it herself.

    “No!” I tell her, and for some reason, I can’t stop myself. I grab on to her, pinning her body underneath of mine.

    “Get off,” she yells, fighting me. Then, Maze still lifeless, I watch Gala rise up, ready to jump into the ocean after the diminishing shadow—the mute body standing on the reef, clinging to the shotgun. It’s just as she jumps that the wave rolls us. The hull rises up and turns, and the air disappears again and I hold my breath. Everything goes cold in the wash of water and my hand grabs the shirt on my leg, gripping it in fear that I’ll be sliced open again on the rocks. By the time I get my head above water, all I see is the hull of the boat, somehow ten feet away from me now, turned on its side, its nose pointed high up.

    My feet dig around desperately for another foothold, but there’s nothing. The crippling fear that we’re still in deep water stops everything, and I yell for Maze. She calls back, telling me to swim. And then I see her, just her head, bobbing up and down into the fog, moving toward the boat. Before I can figure out if Gala is still with us, I throw everything I have into pumping my arms, begging myself to make it back to the boat in time. Everything feels heavy—my clothes and shoes trying to pull me down. I work quickly and it’s all I can do to keep air in my lungs and push hard toward the boat, every caution about the sea floor and sharks gone. I focus on the back of Maze’s head. And when I’ve finally caught up to her, where she’s clinging to the side of the boat, shivering, I cough and cough until I can’t even breathe. She starts to ask me if I’m okay, and then, when I just nod my head over and over again until she knows I’m alive, my first words come out.

    “Do you see them?” I ask.

    She calls their names, over and over, as loud as she can, shivering close against me, until finally there comes a noise. At first I think it’s the Nafandus, voicing their approach, giving us our last warning. But it’s Gala.

    “Where are you?” she yells.

    “Here!” we call together. It dawns on me that we’re trading our lives away to save her, the shouts a beacon to the Red Horns. But I can’t still myself to listen to anything over the crashing surf. Nothing but the steady call and reply until I see Gala’s form swimming in, at first like a dark speck in the fog, and then right in beside us.

    When her arms are there, gripping the side of the boat with us, she starts to breathe very fast and heavily. When she doesn’t answer Maze if she’s okay or not, she just starts cursing.

    “Fucking asshole. What the hell is he thinking.”