Flare (46 page)

Ash still walked forward into the light, knowing that there might be a thousand miles over scorched earth until he found Courtney, and ten thousand more until he found his destiny. It would take time to find the path that would truly help those under the flare, and to bring what he had found in the Salvation to the surface. He didn’t quite know what his path was, but it was a road that he had been bound by fate to pursue, and a destiny that the world both demanded and deserved.

/******/

Zeke watched the kids play in the moonlight, dirty in body and clothes, but clean in spirit. They were playing a game that was something like tag, but they were making up the rules as they went along and then stopping to argue every five minutes. One girl started to cry because she lost a point, but her tears were those of a child, and not the real and heavy tears of despair. She hadn’t heard of the dockyards, let alone Scox’s cage, and five minutes after her teammates came to comfort her she was laughing and playing again as if nothing had happened.

The kids were happy to have Courtney as their leader. Though she was too young to be seen as a maternal figure, they gravitated towards her and ran to her instinctively whenever they were in need of authority. They liked Zeke too, though not as much as Courtney. Some climbed on his large frame until he started to smile, but most respectfully kept their distance as if he was their school’s groundskeeper.

But Zeke liked that all the children exuded a broad, pure sense of happiness, with no ulterior motives, hidden agendas or suggested malice. They didn’t want to send him on a mission, nor did they want to gain dominion over anyone else. They wouldn’t grow into adults that would do this either, and Zeke began to understand Barabbas’s instincts of keeping these children ignorant of the harsh realities of this world. More than anything, Zeke wanted to protect these children from all that he’d seen in the past months. There was no wisdom to be accrued, no lesson to be learned, and no real value to seeing what Zeke had seen. The only value was in these kids, and Zeke wanted to keep them sheltered, with his life if need be. Though he didn’t think he could inflict violence on an intruder as Barabbas would have, Zeke knew that he’d sacrifice his life for these kids. He didn’t even know their names, but he’d gladly die nameless himself if it meant that they could live another day.

Zeke went down to the kitchen larder and smiled at his own thoughts. There wasn’t any need for grandiose promises of self-sacrifice, at least not yet. The school was protected by the riverbed, the rocky hill and the sun. Their only threat had been Legion’s army, and those men were now gone.

Zeke heard the children running into the room above and knew that Courtney was going to teach them math, or English, or perhaps history. This was their routine. She’d teach and he’d go into the kitchen and cook. During the day she’d go in the library to brush up on her subjects, and he’d wander the halls with his fox, looking for light cracks in the insulation.

He opened up a can of egg powder and poured it into a cooking pot, and then dipped a scoop into a barrel of water filled up by the last rainstorm. He poured the water over the eggs and they dissolved and then coagulated, cold and solid. He opened a can of green beans, chopped them up and threw them in the eggs and they stayed there, gray-blue and just as cold.

He loaded a makeshift stove with firewood and kindling, lit it and watched the embers take hold. He placed a lid over the pot, put the food on the stove and made sure that the excess smoke went up through the vent on the ceiling. He let the pot cook, but he knew the meal wouldn’t get that hot. The eggs would become warm, but they wouldn’t boil, and the kids would still taste some uncooked powder in every bite.

Zeke felt bad for giving the kids this food, day after day. It kept them alive, but they deserved a little better. He reached into the pantry to get something to cut the bland taste, and found an oversized bottle of steak sauce. It was a third full, probably enough for one more meal, maybe two.

This can’t go on forever.
One day we’ll run out of powdered eggs or water, and there will be problems.

/***/

“The land around the school isn’t the best place to forage,” said Courtney. “We’ve got a decent source of rain water, but that’s about it. No real plants grow here, and there are no caves with mushrooms or lichens or anything. But you know how I can really tell this place is desolate?”

Zeke squinted his eyes and listened to her intently.

“There are no animals here,” said Courtney. “When I was walking around with Ash and Heather, I always saw animals in the distance. I wondered how they survived, but I saw them, and I don’t see them here. Other than your fox, I haven’t seen one in this place.”

/***/

Zeke walked the grounds the next sunset while the kids were still sleeping. He saw Courtney walking as well at the far corner of the school, but it looked like she wanted to be left alone.

Zeke ambled over the land and realized that Courtney was right. The school itself protected the children phenomenally, but only because it gave no quarter to any potential invaders. When they ran out of powdered eggs the land would turn on those it protected, and they would die isolated and alone.

Zeke thought about what to do, and what their next move should be. He couldn’t think of anything, and became crestfallen. He remembered Brother Colm saying
Look around you, Ezekiel, and know that the world depends upon you, and you cannot fail
. Even Legion spoke of Zeke’s greatness, calling him
the charred one, the one who will help us through this
. Zeke had survived hallucination, gunfire and Hell itself in the dockyards, and he had survived all this to arrive in the Promised Land, a haven of uncorrupted children, perhaps the last on earth.

But now what? What could he do? What was his path? He wasn’t a warrior like Barabbas, or even a courier like Colm. He could survive, but he wasn’t at Courtney’s level, and he couldn’t pass on his skills like she could. He couldn’t protect these children, and he couldn’t teach them how to survive on their own. So what could he do?

I can wander.
My whole life, that’s all I’ve done. I’ve wandered.

Zeke smiled and realized that perhaps that’s what he was put on earth to do. To be a wanderer, and nothing more.

/***/

Courtney had told the children that they were leaving for a few weeks, perhaps longer, and then appointed the eldest among them to provide for the others. Though they had gotten used to her presence, she didn’t feel bad about leaving these kids. They had survived without her for months and would be able to do so for another few weeks. She knew their days here were numbered though, so she agreed to leave with Zeke, and together they would find somewhere else to live.

“Do you know where we’re going?” she asked.

Zeke shook his head
no
.

“Do you have an idea of what we’re looking for?”

Zeke looked at his fox, then back at Courtney. He nodded his head slightly, as if to say
I have an idea.

“Then let’s go,” said Courtney. “Our future begins now.”

/***/

Zeke, Courtney and the fox left minutes before nightfall and oriented themselves with the setting sun. They had found an old school bus in a protected garage that still worked, but decided to take the truck. The school’s garage also had quite a bit of fuel, and they loaded up their vehicle with canisters until they could drive for a month.

There was a road out of the schoolyard, and they took it. Zeke was surprised at how easily they left and was glad that no one had found this path.
This place was built for a community, not to be a fortress.
These children are lucky that Legion’s army took the hard way in, instead of entering from the front. 

They drove off the grounds until the path split into three directions, and Zeke saw that each of those paths eventually split again themselves.

“Where should we head towards?” asked Courtney, who was driving.

Zeke took the last bits of light from the dying sun and located the general direction of the dockyards. Zeke petted the fox, who was now sitting between them, and pointed towards the exact opposite direction from where Legion’s stronghold had once stood.

“I like it,” said Courtney with a smile. “If those dockyards gave us any truth, they told us how the world
shouldn’t
be. I think we’re off to a great start.”

/***/

They traveled for nights through desolation and saw little else but dead bodies now buried in sand, still refusing decomposition but slowly being reclaimed by the earth nonetheless. They passed around the edges of small towns, most of them empty and gutted. The larger towns still held people, but Zeke and Courtney instinctively passed them by, because the people therein weren’t friendly. They saw dried-up torsos strung up in trees and dismembered limbs dangling from rooftops. The men they saw from a distance tended to have a tribal look to them, some with paint on their faces, some with a distinctive type of dress, and some wearing the body parts of their victims.

Courtney became visibly unnerved each time she saw these men, because each group seemed to carry their own unique brand of wickedness.

“There are a hundred dockyards, all over the world,” she said at the fifth such town. “I can only imagine what’s happening in the larger cities.”

Zeke nodded in understanding and then pointed her to a road leading around the fifth town. They’d have to look out for roadblocks, but if they skirted around the area they might pass unnoticed. Courtney drove that way and it looked like they were going to be safe, but the thought of what happened in these places still disturbed Zeke.

Each of these gangs have their own corrupt customs
,
and each have their own myths that justify cruelty.

Zeke forced himself to realize that this was not their problem now, because it couldn’t be. Each town they passed yielded only one lasting truth: that entering it was not their path.

/***/

They saw what looked to be a distant storm two nights later, rumbling on the horizon and masking the bright and glowing moon.

“It doesn’t quite look like rain,” said Courtney.

Zeke agreed. The clouds they saw were clearly something else, something the size of a city. Zeke sensed that they could approach it and they did so, cautiously.

The clouds turned out to be insects—shiny grey insects with thick shells. They found dead ones on the ground, spread across the dirt like leaves. The fox jumped out of the truck, sniffed an insect on the ground, and then sniffed the cloud in the distance. She trotted towards the cloud and disappeared in the darkness.

Zeke picked up one of the dead grey creatures. Though the distant cloud was moving, breathing and refracting the moonlight as it pulsed, the insects near them were all dead. They had smooth faces and small eyes, and though their outer carapace was hard, they had no spikes on their shell, no sharp mandibles, and no stinger anywhere on their body.

The fox came back ten minutes later, prancing over the ground gently as she approached Zeke. She nuzzled Zeke’s leg and then danced in front of him in a circle. She then reached down and grabbed one of the insects in her jaws and ate it. She ate another, and then another. Zeke looked at Courtney for approval.

“Let’s wait to see how your fox tolerates them, and then only taste a little bit,” said Courtney. “They could be poisonous. But still, let’s gather a bag of them while we can and think about it tomorrow.”

/***/

The next day the fox wasn’t sick, and whined until Courtney brought the dead insects back out. When Courtney did so, the fox dug her long snout inwards and ate them like popcorn from a sack.

“We should try them,” said Courtney. “Make a fire though, because we can’t risk eating them raw. They might have something bad in their bodies, and the fire will denature it.”

They made a fire by the side of the road and cooked the insects in a pan that they had procured from the school. The insects’ grey shells darkened and sizzled, and their soft innards expanded outwards until they burst.

“I’ll tell you what Ash told me,” said Courtney. “‘
If you can live in the harsh sunlight, that strength allows the rest of you to become soft.
’ Do you get what he meant by that?”

Zeke did, but he still wanted to hear Courtney’s thoughts.

“These insects no longer need sharp bites or poisonous stingers to survive predation. We should still be careful, but we can probably eat most anything we find on the ground.”

Courtney skewered an insect from the pan with a fork, took a bite out of it and smiled.

“If we figure out a way to protect ourselves from the sun,” said Courtney, “the entire world could be a soft place for us.”

Courtney offered a cooked insect to the fox, but the creature preferred her meal raw.

/***/

They found an abandoned town two days later and siphoned gas from as many vehicles as they could. Courtney and Zeke continued to eat the insects, only now they were following the fox’s lead and eating their food uncooked. The shell was smooth, and to Zeke it felt more like eating a peanut than something that had once been alive. The bugs didn’t need to be trapped, hunted or killed, and instead fell dead wherever Zeke and Courtney went. The insects’ deaths weren’t unnatural or ghastly either. These creatures had simply fatted from the land and then reached the natural end of their life cycle. It was as if they were offering their flesh to Zeke and Courtney as the final act of their existence.