WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) by Turkot Joseph

Author:Turkot, Joseph [Turkot, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Planetside Press
Published: 2015-12-29T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 13

We motor on for another hour in silence. A few times I move close enough to Gala to feel the energy rolling off of her—something like anger and distance that tells me not to say anything. The sky darkens and lightens and the ocean stays the same. Eventually my eyes catch the strip of land off to the left—somehow less obscure and clear enough that I make out the green of a tree line on top of a high cliff. Behind it rises a large mountain, sloping gently like the back of a whale. The top of the mountain looks bare, like the trees have run out, and its clean rocky dome is a desert of sand. I ask Gala how far we have to go, and how much gas we have left. When she tells me another few hours, I know that everything Maze hinted at must be true. Where we are going. That we will probably have to walk back. And it’s confirmed by the next words out of her mouth.

“This is a one-way ride,” she says. The anger spills out of her for just a moment, and then, to distract me from noticing it maybe, she asks how I’m feeling. If I’m feeling any better at all. And I know she must be referring to Maze, but I ignore her and say my leg’s much better. She tells me to have something to eat from the supply bag.

“No way back?” I ask.

She doesn’t say a word and I know that it means we’re fucked. I try to do the math in my head—how fast and far we’re traveling, how long that would be by foot. And then my eyes drift from the smooth surface of the swells back to distant crags and the high cliff and the forest. The impossible terrain. No straight lines or easy flats. Something like a couple days. I ask her if I’m right. If we’re walking back. And then it comes out of her. All of what she’s been keeping in.

“He’s crazy and he’s a liar. And we’re stuck with him now.”

I want to ask why she didn’t turn back, why she’s going on. And part of me wishes we’d just go on forever—not turn back after testing the door. As if it will open, and we could just keep pushing forward, supplies or not. After all, it’s what Maze and I set out to do anyway—to get there at all costs. And it starts to make less and less sense to me that we’d turn back. To resupply, I remind myself. Because it’s too far and you never realized it. My eyes move to the supply bag in our boat. There’s another one in the other boat. Two small bags of life.

“How many days can we last?” I ask her.

“Enough to get home. Not much more,” she says. And then I know where part of her anger must be coming from—a big part of it. It’s that she’s starting to know he’s right.

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