A Cold Black Wave (10 page)

There was a deafening shot and Leah tossed the rifle out of her hands the second she heard the report.  Her hands were halfway up to the sky in fear as if she were about to surrender herself to the rifle.  Leah turned like that towards Josh with a shocked, knowing grimace across her face.

“Christ what the hell was that?”  Josh yelled.

“Sorry!”  She exclaimed as delicately as possible.

“No, it’s my fault.  I assumed that everyone understood that you have to continue holding the gun after you squeeze the trigger.”

“Can I try again?”  She asked in an apologetic tone.

“Not now.  We need to set up camp in a couple’a hours, and now that we know there might be hostiles in the area I don’t want to go around announcing where we are over and over again.”

She stood up and
 
grabbed her calves,
 
"Ah!
 
My legs are cramping."

"It's from the snowshoes.
 
They used to call it
mal de raquette.
 
Lameness of the feet."

"I didn't say it was my feet."

"Same difference.  Come on.  It’ll be easier if you follow my tracks."

“You mean the big clown feet you’re leaving behind?  How could I not follow them ... look Josh, I don’t think I can go another couple of hours, let alone twenty minutes.  Can’t we just call it a day?”

He looked at her, not disapprovingly, but in that she was probably right.  He was wiped.  His wounds were throbbing and burning, and his body was shaking from exhaustion.

“Give me twenty minutes.  Can you do that?”

“Sure,” she sighed resignedly.

“Let’s go this way,” he said as he led them on, keeping close to the gully.  At exactly twenty minutes Josh decided it was enough.  He found a spot at the edge of the gully next to an old, massive sequoia that had collapsed many years ago and had found a home among the lowly bottom dwelling plants that it had held dominion over its entire life.

Josh wanted to make sure their campsite was as protected as possible, and the sequoia would provide cover while the gully would make a difficult and noisy time for anyone traversing the steep, crumbling slope to get to them.  The circumference of the fallen sequoia’s trunk was so large that even on its side they could stand next to it and still not see over the top.

Leah fell to the ground and cried in pain, clutching her left calf muscle as she suffered an excruciating cramp.  Josh threw his pack down and slid down next to her, straightened the leg out and pulled the top of her boot back to stretch the muscle.  The pain quickly disappeared.  “Here, keep it stretched.  Massage it out.”

“I already knew that, but thanks for coming to my rescue,” she said.

Josh caught her stare, the suddenness of her beauty catching him off guard again.  He was always so focused on their surroundings and lost in a labyrinth of thoughts that Leah, as a person, he simply did not see.  She was a tool to be used to ensure their survival as that was how he was taught.  When he was that close to her and she looked at him in a way he had never been looked at before, as a person, an individual and not part of a system, emotions surfaced that the Academy had so long tried to repress.

He let go of her leg like it were burning coal and walked away. “Ok, uh, need to set up camp.”

“Right,” Leah sighed.  “Of course.  So can I take these stupid shoes off?”

“Yeah, just keep your boots on.”

She rolled her eyes. “No I’m going to walk around barefoot.”

He secured the thermal wrap he took from the shuttle and formed the thick material into a lean-to tent that was angled down from the midpoint of the sequoia.  It was enough to sleep them both but not very comfortably.  The thermal wrap was meant for non-insulated interiors, not as a single barrier between their captured body heat and the freezing cold, but it would maintain a bearable temperature.

The distant winter sun had crept low and the forest transformed into a black unknown enveloping them, th
e night bringing with it a biting
frost
that crawled beneath the skin
.  Josh dragged their packs to just outside of the tent and used them along with some rocks to weigh down the edges of the wrap and keep it from flapping up with any gust of wind.  They sat cross-legged inside, silent and miserable from the cold and huddled like turtles in their coats.

“There was a lot more thermal wrap back there you know,” Leah quipped.

“Only brought what was practical.”

“I like my concept of practical better.”

They sat together in awkward silence as they tried to warm up, the confined space uncomfortable for both of them.
 
Finally Leah asked somberly, "What do we do, if-if we don't find anything?"

Josh wished he had the answer to that.  He took a deep breath, “We will.  At least we know we're not alone now.
 
Just gotta hope they're not all hell bent on killing us."

She watched for his reaction as she spoke to him, looking for some sign of reflection on his part.  She said curiously, "Something keeps bothering me.
 
Why only two?
 
Why'd they only send pairs of us
 
out like that?
 
I mean, what did they expect would happen?  Seems like if they wanted us to survive they’d have sent everyone together, not in separate shuttles."

He picked at the ground, he knew the answer but wasn’t quite ready to spell it out to her, not that she probably needed it.  He figured she just wanted him to say that there was only one possible outcome when a man and a woman are stranded on an alien planet, the last of their species.  That was one thing the Academy tried to drill out of the students, the emotional aspect of procreation.  It would be a duty, just a part of their mission, but Josh felt something different for Leah that made that seem ... disrespectful.

Leah perceived his nervousness as his eyes shifted and shot a glance at her as he spoke.

“Probably the same expectations they had when they set off in the Westbound, right?  Odds don’t really matter when it’s the only option you got.”

“To survive?  You keep talking about that but there’s more to life than just staying alive.  You make it sound like it’s another obstacle to overcome.  Life is about what you do when you’re alive.  Do you think everyone is supposed to live their life trying not to die?  A little depressing don’t you think?”

“Maybe that was an option once but not anymore.  Not for us.  If we died on the Westbound before the virus came, life would just move on, people move on, the human race moves on.  Big deal.  Here?  We have the expectations of billions of dead people on our shoulders.  God forbid they find out we died.  Wouldn’t want to disappoint them.”

Leah tried prying into him some more, “You’re hard to figure out.  On one hand you’re strict and all about the academy and your destiny, and how important this mission is, and then on the other you don’t seem to care either way if we failed.  Like you’re going through the motions but don’t really believe in it.”

She was right and he wanted to tell her she was, but there was no easy way to go about explaining that he no longer feared death, and at times have invited it in order to rescue him from the suffering of life.  What he could do was explain the experience of the Academy.  “Almost my entire life was spent in the Academy, Leah.  It becomes a part of you, like seeing some horrifying image.  You can’t ever shake it.”

“Why do you fight it then?  Doesn’t this somehow fulfill some meaning in your life, to finally do what you’re meant to do?  I’d think-”

“Because,” he interrupted angrily.  “I never wanted it!  I never had a choice.  The only choice I had was to resist them but that only made my existence even more miserable.  The Academy was a prison to me.  It wasn’t until I was older when I realized what they were doing.  I’d had enough.  But by then I was already scarred.  I was already trained to fight, to survive, to ...” He shook his head in thought. “All that psychomoral bullshit about feelings, and psychological strain, and what is good and what is evil ... that was for the civvies to worry about, for people like you and your father to figure out and rationalize and do whatever you do to make yourselves feel better.  When it comes to surviving there is no room for any of that.  You either survive, or you don’t.  There’s no rules, no time outs, no exceptions, no second chances, no good or evil.  In order to survive you have to be able to sacrifice everything you hold dear in your life.”

Josh was alive with emotion, dread, and sincerity.  It was a burden that weighed on a conscious the academy was unable to kill in him.

Leah carefully moved closer to him. “You still think you’re fighting for a lost cause?  For you and me?”

Yes, he thought.  The human race was a pile of worthless garbage that deserved what they got.  He sighed and cast his eyes away, unable to betray his real emotions.  “No.  I haven’t given up on us yet.”  He continued, “But don’t worry, we’ll do something to fuck it all up eventually.  It’s just how we are.  It’s in our blood.”

Leah shook her head and pulled a lock of hair back over her ear, “I don’t believe that.  People want to do good and help each other.”

“Is that so?”  He started, ready to obliterate her innocent beliefs with enough historical data about the utter depravity of man to cause her a week of sleepless, horror-filled nights.  Then he caught that look in her eye, that spark of life that was so void in those who were in the Academy, and stopped himself short for fear of snuffing that precious flame out.  It was better she didn’t know the vile things men have done to each other.

Even though the majority of students had been considered children at the Academy, they felt it necessary to ingrain in the students the true history of earth and the banality of man.  Josh himself had many nightmares over the horrifying images and stories that were told.

This education, as they explained, was necessary in developing in the students a sense of historic “growth” the human race went through since the beginning of time.  This growth, which the Academy called it, was predicated on violence and death.  It was good for the students to understand why such violence occurred throughout time, and how mankind learned from it and evolved into a civilized race.

The senselessness of women and children being shot, raped, burned, or cannibalized deeply scarred Josh’s perception of a just God.  Throughout the course of history, many nameless and innocent people have succumbed to these travesties and have long been forgotten by the world as if they had never existed.  No awards, statues, or songs were ever passed down to remember their lives.  The only lesson that the Academy managed to impart on the students was that might and power superseded all else.

“Yes,” she said with complete sincerity.  “That is so.  We wouldn’t be here otherwise, now would we?  If my dad just thought the way you did then he never would have saved my life.”

“You’re forgetting everything that has led up to this.  We didn’t need to be here!  Never mind.  I don’t want to talk about it.”

They didn’t say anything for the rest of the night as Leah decided not to push him further.  Besides, he had pulled his thermal blanket over his head and turned from her to make sure she got the point.  She followed suit and it didn’t take long until they both passed out from exhaustion and slept through the night in their infinitesimal corner of creation.  Two hearts beating against the crushing weight of the universe.

Josh was the first to wake.  He was sweating under the rising heat of the tent as it acted like a greenhouse.  Sunlight refracted off dew drops that had formed on the thermal wrap just above his head and the morning heat was beginning to cook them. He was already packing his gear by the time Leah roused.
 
Her hair was tussled and knotted when she looked up at Josh with puffy eyes as he folded his thermal blanket next to her.

"Morning," he said.
 
She groaned and pulled the blanket over her face.