A Cold Black Wave (16 page)

She lay there shaking, confused, crying and calling out for him in desperation, “Josh!  JOSH!”

She tried to balance herself as she stood and felt her entire body trembling with weakness, but she ran, and she ran as fast as she could as she followed the water downstream.  She watched the waters and kept calling to him even though she was so mortified she could barely breathe.

“Josh!”  She stumbled and fell to her hands but picked herself up and ran faster, crashing through bushes and climbing over knee-high rocks.  All she could do was keep running and calling for him but the water was moving so fast, it would have already carried him too far away for her to find.  Soon her body gave out and she went down to her knees and slumped forward, shaking and crying and crying into her hands.  She wept for want to keep going but her body wouldn’t respond.  He was gone.

She didn’t know
how long she had been lying there, nearly paralyzed with fever and weakness as her vision drifted with the clouds above.  She forced herself up on her elbows and became dizzy as she steadied herself and held her sickened stomach.  With every beat of her heart the disease attacked her immune system.  The sweat drained from her pores, dehydrating her already weakened body.  Her brain cooked from the 105 degree fever.  Her breathing was rapid as her drowning lungs desperately sucked in air.

She stood with much effort and swayed off balance, stumbling back to find Josh’s gun lying halfway in the tall grass and his pack sat undisturbed where he had left it.  The tent was gone, along with her rifle and pack.  The thermal wrap and blankets had been washed away.  All she had now was her parka, which got soaked on the inside, boots, and gloves to keep her warm.

She tried covering up with the parka but the matted wet interior gave her chills when it touched her skin.  She slid her gloves on as if going through the motions, hearing Josh’s words echo in her head: survive!  Night came surprisingly quick, but then again her sense of time had been turned upside down.  The clouds were ushering in the darkness earlier than usual too and the ashen color sky cast a pall over the world.  She had no choice but to fight on and believe he was alive somewhere, looking for her.  Her eyelids slid over her rolling eyes as she gazed at the sky.  Josh, where are you?

Leah wanted to keep walking downstream to search for him but she could barely take five steps without falling breathless.  She couldn’t leave the backpack and the gun either, but carrying those would be an impossible task.  The wind blew in from the east now and the sea of nearby grass rustled about her.  The forest beyond the stream cast deep, dark shadows that hid things unknown.  For the first time since they arrived she felt despair and hopelessness as the world closed in over her dimming vision.

She prayed, and she prayed so fervently all night that her mind retreated from the world around her and into a place of solitude.  Her repetitious entreaties to God eventually lulled her to sleep and she lay against the backpack all night.  The cold made her shiver and curl into a tight fetal position but there was little else she could do to warm herself.

There were nightmares and hallucinations.  The fever took a crimson hold on her in that bitter night and she woke more than once screaming and drenched in melting sweat.

When she woke early that morning before the sun had risen, she felt deathly ill and her body was stiff and sore.  Her forehead was blazing hot and she coughed up blood tinged mucus.  Her teeth clattered together and objects and visions came in and out of her field of view.  Her throat was so sore and dry that she couldn’t even swallow.  Then her heart jumped as she saw Josh walking on the other side of the stream and she waved for him.  “Over here!  Here!”  Then he was gone.

With shaking hands she unzipped his backpack and desperately searched everything, looking for something.  It was mainly food and ammunition.  There was an extra pair of boots, gloves and a long tube about a foot in length.  At the bottom was a thick string attached to a safety pin, and a diagram of a person aiming it skyward and pulling the string.

She situated it against her leg, pulled the safety pin and then the cord but nothing happened.  The next time she pulled so hard she ground her teeth together, and then the tube popped.  A fizzing, shimmering red ball of light shot into the candlelit sky and hung up there at about a hundred yards.

She watched it as it made a very slow descent, suspended in the sky for a good five minutes before it drifted south as the wind blew it out of view.  There was nothing else she could do now except pray that Josh was somehow still alive and saw the flare.  The thought that anyone else nearby could see it never crossed her mind, nor would it have mattered at this point.

For the next hour Leah rested her head and tried to calm herself with silent prayers to God, watching the horizon as the blazing ancient sun, that gaseous thing that illuminated creation out of the darkness, came into view and turned the horizon into a yellow hue until it crested and bathed the tips of the pine trees with golden light.  Leah cried, for everything, for her father, for her, for Josh, for nothing.  She was convinced that God had chosen her and had chosen Josh to be here and that there were no coincidences, for her faith made their purpose clear.

Now as her mortal body slipped away, she questioned everything in a pleading case for God to provide some sort of answer.  Faith had seemed easier before but now, dying here, alone, it made little sense that if they were the last humans alive, God would so easily forsake them.  What ate at her the most, what killed her soul over a thousand times, was the moment she ran back to the tent to pick up the book that had given her such faith in the first place.  Had she just followed Josh, and left it behind ...

Then something happened.  A simple resolution came to her, an intangible spark of thought that comes to someone and overtakes them with no discernable reason or point of origin, creating a chemical reaction that flowed through her blood like a shot of adrenaline, yet it wasn’t just that.  A resolve took over her body like in the souls of those who are possessed by an unseen force to climb deathly mountains where no man should live, and who did not see impossibility in their endeavor, but inevitability.  She stood and slid the backpack on and picked the rifle off the ground and began walking along the ridge down stream.  This is where Josh went, and she would find him if it would take the last of her breaths.

Every step for her was a chore as if she were walking on a sand-strewn moon with little oxygen.  Yet her legs defied her desire to lie down and rest, to let that sweet sleep of death finally come over her for the last time.  She had felt it there, that night as her life ebbed away into the cold twilight.  Death had not been a horrifying thing then, it was a siren, lulling her to the rocks with its promise of release from pain and suffering.  It is a sweet promise she had to battle all night and which still tried calling for her.

There were no thoughts, no emotion now.  She was on autopilot as her feet forced her body onward like some bedraggled zombie.  Time passed slowly and was untraceable as the sun crossed over her.  It may have been twenty minutes or five hours that she had walked in that state.

Her lungs had now filled so much with fluid that oxygen traveled thinly to her brain and she again became light headed and delirious.  Where so much resolve had been, the strict finite limitations of the human body replaced it.  The soul and the will could only carry a body so far on sheer ethereal force alone.  Her feet shuffled instead of stepped and she had to toss her pack aside just to keep from falling over.  Then the rifle was tossed and she tried calling out for Josh one more time but nothing audible sounded.  She collapsed.

When she opened her eyes, she saw a cabin or maybe a space ship or her old
 
room situated near the stream, nestled against an embankment with a dirt road running across it and surrounded by trees that shimmered with fluorescent light and prismatic rays.
 
Whatever it was disappeared under a blurring cloud of soot and spark as if
 
it were blasting off or exploding,
 
and then
 
the blackness overwhelmed her.
 
There along the ridge above the stream
 
the wind paid no notice to Leah, blowing
 
over the grass and through the trees and over her motionless body as if she had always been there.

There was pain.  Pain in death?  She felt it in her head and in her extremities.
 
Her arm moved, or so she thought as her deadweight body seemed unresponsive to her commands.
 
It was quiet, and warm.
 
There was
 
faint light shining
 
across wood slat walls that originated from the back corner of the room.
 
The air was stale, humid. As her vision returned she craned her head to see where she was.
 
The few windows in the room were completely sealed black.

It appeared to be a cabin, a very small one.
 
A cobwebbed fireplace was imbedded on the far side wall.
 
The light she noticed was emanating from a surprisingly minute object in the corner of the room, and next to it was Josh’s pack and rifle.
 
Leah tried to move and realized something was stuck in her arm and she put a hand to it.  A plastic wrap the size of a fist hung out of bandage attached to her skin.  It looked like it had liquid in it at some point but was empty now.

Leah peeled it back until it was removed and tossed it to the floor as a droplet of blood seeped from where a needle had been.  Her head pounded but the sickness that had ravaged her body seemed to have waned considerably.  She had energy and an appetite but remained incredibly weak.  There was no way of knowing how long she had been there, but she had a vague feeling it had been days.  Whatever had been administered to her must have fought off her sickness, for she felt far better than she remembered.

There was a single door behind her and to the right that was slightly ajar.
 
S
he heard footsteps on the floorboards in the adjacent room and the door swung open.

Someone stepped through with their head down in thought, but she could not seem him well and the light created a dark shadow on half of his features.
 
When he noticed Leah was awake he hastily pulled something down over his face before edging back into the darkened room.
 
Leah was terrified and slunk back against the wall, "Who-who are you?
 
Where am I?"

The figure came back into the room as he rubbed his hands nervously.  He stopped with his back to the light and appeared as a living shadow.
 
He was wearing some kind of tattered uniform that seemed to shift and move and play tricks with her eyes, or maybe she was still hallucinating.
 
He pulled something out of a sash that was attached to his hip, shook it and then held it out as an offer.
 
Leah didn’t say anything and didn’t move.  He took a step forward and tried offering it again as if she'd suddenly change her mind.
 
Finally he gave up and slid it over to her.

"Please, say something," she said.
 
"Anything.
 
Who are you?”

No answer.  Then the man went over to Josh’s pack and opened it, taking out an energy bar and studied it by the light.  Then he spun around and tried giving it to her, and this time Leah sat up a bit.  She was hungry, and at the same time realized she was feeling surprisingly better overall.  She nodded and he tossed the food over.

After a couple small bites she curiously looked down and picked up the small packet he had slid over.  It was difficult to see and she bent it towards the light which revealed a small symbol and the cryptic writing she had seen on the can Josh had shown her earlier.

Leah tore the top open and sniffed it.  It gave off an odd odor but it smelled good, a dense sweetness like a blooming flower in the middle of a humid summer.  She squeezed it and took a tiny taste, then ate the rest of it and sat back, eyeing the man who was still watching her with interest.

He cleared his throat, “Knicte bosh.  Vajo mak rhem.”  His voice was clear, deep, and his pronunciations came out sharp as knives.

“I-I don’t, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Knicte bosh.”  He said, touching his chest.

“Knicte...bosh?”

He nodded, “Knicte bosh, mak rhem?” he asked, motioning towards her.

“Um, I’m Leah.  Leah Mogens.”

“Lee-ah?  Mohens.”  He said, his accent warping the sound of her name.

She nodded.  Then he said, “Tei mak oos, eh...jaynke.  Nuhn, nuhn.”  He stepped near the door to the other room and pointed to it as he pushed it open.  Leah realized that he wanted her to see something, so she slowly swung her legs down and stood up.  Her head pounded like the pressure inside was ready to burst out of her temples and the room swayed a bit, but she gathered herself as best she could.  As she shuffled towards the door, Knicte backed away towards the tiny ball of light behind him to let her pass.  She kept a wary eye on her new friend and then peeked around the corner.