WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (6 page)

            Maze doesn’t have to say a word—we turn together at that instant and run. And all I can do is watch the crashing waves—they seem to get no closer as I pummel the sand as hard as I can. One wave crashes and then starts to draw back into the ocean, leaving its curving footprint of foam. Then, even before the next roller starts to break, I hear the panting and the soft pockets of sand bursting behind me. I dig in hard and see Maze begin to take me on the right. And then, the only thing that drives through my brain, almost like a quiet whisper, is her challenge. To beat her. To prove to her that I’m faster. That I’m better at something than she is. As if this life and death struggle is all so I can prove to her why she should want me—raise the chances that she’ll fall for me by one tiny bit. So I burn my thigh out, and then the other, adrenaline lighting up every fiber of muscle, pulsing me toward salvation at the froth. My eyes rise just a bit to catch the rising tower, its soft glow high up, when I hear the growl. The sound that the wolves have started leaping instead of running because of how quickly their cries catch up to me. And then, I know I’ll get there. It’s as if I’m clairvoyant. It’s a calming feeling and it runs through me—the firm belief that I’ll make it—as I count the final steps it will take to break the water line. Seven more. My body pumps, each time I strike the ground forcing all the momentum to trigger my butt and thigh to react so that I spring forward in long bounds like a rabbit. And then, I’m in. The water wraps around me like a cold blanket but I keep pulling hard, finding ground for more high steps, rising over each wave until I’ve made it out as far as I can go and I fall in. And after I stumble, a big wave pressing me down into the grit of the sea floor, I dig my elbows into the turf and vault back up. My eyes are blurry and I rub them and look back up to the beach. I see one of the wolves a few feet from the surf but Maze is nowhere in sight. And neither is the other wolf. I quickly turn to my right, panicking, waiting for the scream, the snarl, any kind of clue about what happened to her. But then I see the other wolf, long ago curved away from the first wisps of sea foam and air, jogging back toward the dunes. But still no Maze…

            Like a volcano, water climbing high in a wide arc that pours heavy droplets onto my head, she bursts from the ocean next to me. Her long hair falls over her dripping body, and she rubs her eyes and looks at me. Before I can even breathe a sigh of relief that she hasn’t been eaten alive, she smiles and splashes water into my face.

            “I told you you weren’t faster than me,” she says, face lit with a stupid grin, as if the fact that we just nearly died, and that the wolves are still watching us from the beach, hasn’t had any bit of effect on her. But I can’t help it—part of me wants to join her mania. I look at the wolves, to make sure they won’t come into the water, and then, I look back at her. I disappear under the water and squat as low as I can, and then, I burst back up, thrusting my arms to volley a wall of sea at her head.

            “I beat you by a mile,” I say.

            “Beat
who
by a mile?”

            “A mile.”

            “You were close. I’ll give you that.”

            I realize the truth, that I have no idea if I beat her or not. And suddenly, I don’t care anymore. It’s ecstasy just to know we’re alive.

            “What do we do now?” I ask her, my body finally adjusting to the temperature, no longer shivering from the chill that first swept through me when I hit the water. It starts to dawn on me how far from being home safe we still are. And that it won’t be much easier to get there from our trapped position in the ocean. She ducks her head back underwater then swings it out, whipping her hair so that it almost slaps my face. She grabs it and pulls it back out of her eyes, twisting it and letting it flop on her neck. Then, she looks out at the beach to survey our fate. The wolves are walking away from us still, but they turn back every few steps and pause. Looking back to see if we’ll push our luck. And then, before they even get to the trailhead, she seems to know what they’re up to.

            “They’re going to wait us out,” she says. And just a moment later, I see that she’s right again. The wolves stop at the trailhead, looking down at the beach, just staring at us. One of them lies down, and then the other does too, so close that it looks like they’re cuddling up together. The gloom makes it impossible to see their eyes now, and it strikes me that it also means something else, something much scarier: it’s almost night.

            “For how long?” I ask, the exhilaration of the escape draining out of me at the prospect that it’s all been for nothing—just a delay in the inevitable promise of a mauling.

            “I don’t know. Maybe a few hours. Maybe till morning.”

            “Morning?” I can’t even begin to think through all the ramifications of not coming home for the night. What mother would say. What the Fathers would do. Because as far back as I can remember, from the time I was a little kid until now, I can’t remember anyone who wasn’t a Father that stayed away from Acadia overnight. Not even Maze, since she came, who of all people would be the one to pull something like that.

            “We just have to wait and see,” she says. And then, when I start to think of hypothermia, and how we’ll eventually have to crawl out of the water half-frozen, even if it means sitting in the spray of the surf all night in case the wolves charge back down at us, Maze wraps me in her arms. I think for a moment she’s doing it just to touch me—to feel that I’m really here with her, still alive after the near-death ordeal. But she’s just turning me, as usual, like a puppet, to see something that’s caught her interest. And when our backs are to the wolves, and we’re facing the flat line of the forever ocean, I look at the orange glow of the sunset and the long, unending line of the tower until it disappears out of sight. Up and up, hidden in places by strands of red clouds. But Maze has something particular she’s looking at. She throws her finger out and I see the soft glow—the spot where she thinks there’s a generator—a dying glimmer of light. I try to figure out how high up the glow must be—how many of the skyscrapers I stood on earlier it would take, one stacked on top of another, to climb that high.

            “That’s what the mirrors are pointing at,” she says. For a moment, we watch the tower together. At first I have to keep twisting my head back, uneasy without constantly checking to see where the wolves are. But they don’t move an inch, and finally I stare uninterrupted at the sunset as it fades into pink and finally dark gray, watching the glow on the tower fade to nothing. And then, the tower is just a dark incision, cutting the sky in half.

            I look away after a long time, as if I’m snapping out of a trance, but Maze is still looking at it. The last rays of sunlight illuminate the lines of her profile. I follow her dark eyebrows  to the edge of her brow, and then where it curves in and swoops back out, down to her perfect nose, her perfect lips. They look wet even though she hasn’t dunked her head again. As if there is some permanent moisture and softness there. She softly brushes back a flapping strand of hair, placing it behind her shoulder. I feel like she might know I’m watching her now, studying the paralyzing beauty of her complexion, wanting to break our separation and to touch it, to taste it for myself—to lean in and kiss her on the cheek right now, while she’s not even looking. To say the hell with my fears, the ones that—just the same as make me overprotective of her—have steered me away from any kind of advance. That have seemed like warnings, and told me by way of instinct that anything I try will be met with utter and quick rejection, so it’s better to never attempt anything at all. But it kicks in that I nearly died, and that I might still die, because the wolves haven’t gone anywhere. And I’m already in an impossible and unknowable amount of trouble when I get back home. So breaking one more rule of scripture that neither of us believe in won’t make it any worse. And if I don’t do it now, I’ll die regretting it. Like a revelation, it slaps me—that there’s no good reason not to do it. To say the hell with it all. To kiss her.

            Feeling completely under her spell now, and knowing there’s no turning back, I let the adrenaline from what I’m about to do take control. It moves my body for me, and sneakily, I push myself through the water, so close that I think my feet might step on hers. And then, when I’m sure she must realize I’m not looking at the tower now, but at her, and that I’ve come in very close, she screams out.

            “Shit!” she says. Her body wriggles, and then she jerks her head down. At first I think I’m caught—she knows what I was going to do, and it’s scared the hell out of her. That I’ve violated some sacred invisible line governing our friendship that I was supposed to know about, despite the fact that neither of us have ever mentioned it. But then, when she curses again, and it’s directed toward the ocean, toward her feet, I think she’s been bitten by something.

            “What?” I say, my imagined confidence and sexy tone wrinkled by quick-returning fear, ruining the voice I had planned to use after the kiss, to tell her how strongly I really feel about her, and that it doesn’t matter what she thinks about it, because I can’t stop my feelings. Because each passing day I realize my attraction only grows stronger. Reminds me that I’m living my own conspiracy.

            “The map,” she says. And then I know, as she raises her hand from the water, finished digging and grasping the soggy crumpled mess. It had nothing to do with me.

            “It’s ruined,” she says.

            “Shit. Well we know where the mirror is now, right?” I say, even though I already forget the way. And I would never be able to get us back there by memory. I try to hide my disappointment—not in the destruction of the map, but the lost moment, my chance to finally reveal my feelings. And as she starts to tell me about how pissed she is, and that turns into a plan for what we’ll do when we get back to Acadia—what we should say to the Fathers and all—I feel every shred of my confidence slip away again. My mind works back into its usual mode of defense and protection with each passing minute she talks, and any chance I had to tell her how I feel, fleeting and powerful as it was, is gone.

Eventually, when the water begins to numb our bodies, we wade in and lie on the darkened beach. Everything is quiet and motionless except the waves and the wind, and an occasional call of some night bird, or the flopping branches of trees by the edge of the dunes. Finally I start to fall asleep on the hard sand, despite the gnawing urge to squirm closer to Maze. So that the chill wind blowing from the sea is a little easier to take, and so that I can share some of the warmth I know is radiating from her body. I sit up enough to look at the spot where the wolves are, sleepily trying to register their silhouettes from the trailhead. It’s almost impossible, but then, finally, I see them. The only reason I catch them at all is because they both stand up, as if they might walk back down the beach and try to catch us again. But they don’t. They just turn and head back into the woods.

            It runs through my head that we can go back soon if their leaving means what I think it does: that they’ve given up at last and are heading home to the fields near the Deadlands. But when I turn to Maze to get her opinion, she’s already asleep. Her eyes are closed and I watch her breathing, hoping she doesn’t wake to see me staring. It sweeps through me how dangerous it would have been if we’d both fallen asleep, side by side, like sitting ducks for the hungry wolves. They would have just stalked down quietly, making no noise at all on the softer sand, until they could bite down, right on top of us. But still, we’re so close to the edge of the waves that occasionally a bit of spray falls on my legs. They would never get that close to the water, Maze had said. And for some reason, I don’t wake her up to tell her that they left. It’s almost like I know she would want to risk the trail during the dark. Try to sneak back into town when everyone is sleeping. So instead of waking her up and going through the terror of a black forest and the fear that the wolves are just lying in wait beyond the edges of the path, I lie back down and decide to try to sleep too.

            The wind rolls in and the lapping waves start to lull me into dream space. Every few minutes, a strong gust blows over me, tunneling up my pants and burrowing under my shirt. I tuck the shirt in to seal off the wind channel along my body, but it still bites so much that I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep at all. That I’m going to be stuck here all night, left to face the wrath of tomorrow—mother and the Fatherhood—on no rest. After another few gusts, I finally get the courage to pull my body closer to Maze. At first I think she’ll wake up, but she doesn’t, and I’m practically nestled right up next to her—as close as possible without accidentally touching her. I look up at the wide stretch of stars, the distant edge of the black forest, and then the moon-reflecting sea. And as crazy and scary as it is to be stranded overnight on the beach with Maze, there’s something beautiful about it too. Like there’s magic here, lying together with her. Just us, separate from civilization—heading into the consequences together, come hell or high water. Closing my eyes for the hundredth time, and twisting so that her body takes the brunt of the sea wind, I fall asleep.

Chapter 4

Maze wakes me up at dawn, before there’s even light on the beach. It takes me a few minutes to get all of my limbs warmed up enough to cooperate. But then, without any talk about how we’re going to handle what’s coming when we get home, we move out. Over the beach we walk in tired silence, and then up onto the trail. Once we’re surrounded by the forest again, and we pass the inconspicuous spot of woods that leads to the Deadlands, Maze says we have to ditch the knives now.

            “They’re long gone,” she says of the wolves.

            “Where’d you have these stashed anyway?” I ask her.

            “I’ll show you.”