The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (19 page)

             
“I did think you were nuts.” She laughed despite the situation, “You’ve always been crazy, but I really thought that you had finally lost it completely.”

             
“
I’m
crazy?” I asked, “This coming from the girl who did six shots of tequila in a row at Rachel’s party?”

             
“Hey, just because you’re a lightweight and you wouldn’t have been able to handle it doesn’t mean you have to bring me down, baby.”

             
We both laughed, so
unding more like ourselves than we had in days.

             
I turned the headlights on as night descended on us. Originally, we were going to sleep in the car but after trying the first time (and sitting up for the duration of the night picturing the monstrous face o
f another one of those things) we buckled and checked into a motel perched right behind an adult store and a tattoo parlor. It was a classy place, believe me...

             
I pulled off of the interstate as Alice fell into one of her grief-stricken dazes. I had seen
her laugh for the first time that day and I knew that she would recover from the horror she felt at killing her mom. I hadn’t been sure of that before. It would definitely take time but it would pass eventually.

             
I was able to force my own sadness away for
her sake. I knew that while I had found my parents senselessly murdered, my own feelings were nothing compared to Alice’s. She had killed her mother and still had no idea if her father was alive, dead or if something worse had happened to him. I couldn’t
imagine how terrifying that was.

             
The man who was sitting with his feet up on the check-in desk eyed us curiously as we checked in. We were too young to be traveling on our own and people everywhere reminded us of that by staring at us like we were attract
ions in a freak show. It had to have looked quite odd to see two teenagers who clearly hadn’t been sleeping or eating well traveling the country alone. The back stories
those people must have fabricated for us would have been truly entertaining to hear. In
one of her better moods, Alice and I created some of those fantastical scenarios ourselves to explain away the stares we got wherever we went. Alice imagined that they thought we were runaways, escaping the wrath of our parents who disapproved of our rela
tionship and the love child we had conceived. I went further than that, telling her that they thought we were escaping conviction after committing an unreported Bonnie and Clyde-like shootout with the police. I witnessed another one of her laughs that had
become so rare and my spirits were lifted.

             
We went to our room which was better than the last, at least. Alice went to take a shower as I carried our bags inside. Though we never stayed more than a night in one place, I still liked to have our bags inside
with us. It was a waste of energy to haul them to and from the room, but for the sake of consistency, we wanted the things we had brought from home with us at all times.

             
“I hope there’s a washing machine on this spacecraft.” Alice told me as she came out
, wrapped in a towel. “We’ve already worn almost all the clothes we bought.”

             
“Do you want to go shopping one last time?”

             
She flashed me a smile of recognition; she knew I was attempting to make her feel better, as I knew that she loved shopping as much a
s the next girl.

             
“Maybe.” She replied as she grabbed some clothes from her bag and went back into the bathroom to change.

             
“Well, we might as well, right?” I told her. “We won’t need money where we’re going. So we should just spend what we have.”

             
“That w
ould be fun. It’s our last chance to shop at American Eagle and Aeropostale. They won’t exist in a day or so.
Nothing
will exist in a day or so.”

             
She started talking about the dismal end of everything we knew only when she was feeling the sadness for her
mother and the fear for her father. I had learned not to try to reassure her. It wasn’t that she cut me off, demanding that I face reality and stop feeding her lies that everything was going to be alright. I just knew that I couldn’t convince her. Every ti
me I tried, I felt a lump in my throat that blocked the blurry words of reassurance I could barely see in my mind from coming out of my mouth. I knew as well as she did that we were leaving a dying planet. Those people that stared at us so quizzically woul
d all be dead within the space of twenty four hours.

             
“Do you feel guilty for leaving? Do you feel like we’re kind of...” She sat down on the bed and started to brush out her long, brown hair, “I don't know... betraying the human race a little bit?”

             
“I do
n’t know if it’s betraying the human race. If we were communicating with aliens, passing along top-secret military intel on the human race, then yeah. We’d be betraying them.”

             
“You know what I mean, Quinn.”

             
“I do. If we lived here, shouldn’t we die here?
That’s what you’re getting at. What makes us so special that we’re the ones who know that we have to leave? Why are we going to be the ones that get saved?”

             
“That is exactly what I was asking.”

             
“Do you remember what that guy, James said? He said, 'It do
esn’t matter why at this point. Nothing matters except the fact that we had the dream and they didn’t. We know and they don’t. That has to mean something.’ I believe him.”

             
“That guy seemed a little off to me. He seemed a little haunted. That doesn’t reall
y make any sense when I say it out loud. But he seemed like he had seen too many horrible things.”

             
“Don’t you think that’s how we seem?”

             
“Well, we’ve been through hell.”

             
“He's probably been through hell, too.”

             
“We all have. I just wonder what the whole
purpose of it is, that’s all. Why aren’t we just going to die with the rest of them?”

             
“And we’re back to square one.”

             
“Yeah. And we’re probably always going to stay there. We all either had this dream or know someone that did. Whether we had the dream o
r not, we all know what’s coming. What are the chances of us also having been able to get in contact with the people responsible for that spaceship and the people who know all about Pangea? I know that they all had the dream, which is strange. But don’t yo
u think that’s just so...” She searched for the right word.

             
“Lucky?” I filled in for her.

             
“Exactly! It just seems like a huge coincidence and generally, when something seems like a huge coincidence, it isn’t a coincidence at all.”

             
“So what is this, Alli
e?”

             
“I think it’s fate. I know you don’t believe in stuff like that. But I think we’re meant to go there. We’re meant to start life over. That’s what we’re going to have to do, isn’t it? We’re going to have to rebuild civilization on another planet.”
             

             
“I
guess so. You know what’s weird? I haven’t thought about what we’re going to do once we actually get to Pangea. I’ve only thought about getting there.”

             
“Well, we’re in a situation that is time-sensitive, right? I haven’t thought about it until right now,
either. We’ve been too focused on surviving that we haven’t looked at what is going to happen once we’re there. What if there isn’t enough food for however many people are on the flight? What if  it turns out people aren’t capable of living there? Maybe t
here won’t be oxygen. Maybe there will be people already there that try to kill us. Maybe the climate will be too intense for us.”

             
“Or maybe it will be everything that they’re saying it’s going to be. Maybe it will be the place where we start over, where
we have the life that we’ve always wanted.”

             
“We would have had that here, if it weren’t for the end of the world coming.”

             
“Who says we would have had it here, Allie? Our parents would have probably torn us apart in the end. They didn’t want us to be toge
ther.”

             
“We shouldn’t talk about them. We shouldn’t say anything mean about them now, Quinn. They’re dead and they were our parents and…”

             
“I’m not saying anything mean. I’m being truthful. I want to be optimistic about this. You know that I’m normally the
pessimist out of the two of us. I’m not being optimistic for your benefit or for mine. I’m seeing things in a positive way because I really think that once we’re there, everything is going to be okay for us. We’ll make a life there. Everything will be goo
d.”

             
“Or maybe we’ll create some sort of cosmic catastrophe by outrunning our fate.”

             
“You think our fate is to stay here and die?”

             
“I don’t know what our fate is. It might be to stay here and die. Then, if we leave, we’re messing with something that’s bi
gger than us and I don’t know what the consequences of that would be. Maybe our fate is to go to Pangea, start over there and live out the rest of our lives. I don’t see much bad coming from that and that’s exactly what scares me. There’s no way that we’re
going to get there and just live out the rest of our lives in peace. There’s no way that’s possible.’

             
“Why not?” I asked with a chuckle of disbelief. “Would that be so weird after we survived the apocalypse?”

             
“There are always things that we have to
overcome. What is the point of us living if we’re just going to be skating along with nothing to challenge us? No one ever lives a chaos-free life. There are different kinds of chaos, yeah. But everyone experiences it in one way or another. I think that if
we leave here and go to Pangea, we’ll be facing things that we have absolutely no idea how to handle. We’ll probably end up dying there, too.”

             
“Don’t say that, Allie. Look,” I reached out and held both of her hands, “we know that we'll die if we stay her
e. That is for sure. But we have a chance there.”

             
“A chance to die painfully instead of in a quick burst that we won’t even feel.”

             
“Who says that we’re going to die there?”

             
“I just don’t think that we’re going to go there and everything is going to okay
for everyone.
There will be things there that we have to deal with. It won’t be paradise.”

             
“I don’t think it will be paradise. We’ll be rebuilding civilization on a new planet. That’s going to be hard, to say the least. But it’s a chance to live, Allie.
That’s something that we don’t have here. I’ll tell you how I see it, from my logical, secular view: All living creatures have the instinct to stay alive, no matter what it takes. We will all fight for our lives because that’s our nature. This is our fight
. I think that fight will end once we’re there. But if it doesn’t, then we’ll keep fighting. That’s our
nature
, Allie.”

             
“That project you did on evolutionary psychology really stuck, didn’t it?” She narrowed her eyes at me and tried to suppress her smile.

             
“It did.”

             
“Do you want to know how I see it, from a faith-based point of view? The world is going to end and that is something that was guaranteed from the beginning. We’re running away from it. We’re escaping the end that was always intended for us. We
’re messing with fate.”

             
“But you said you didn’t know if our fate was to stay and die or to go there and start over.”

             
“I don’t. So either, we’re messing with something that was promised for us from day one and we’ll suffer the consequences for it, or God
has changed the game.” She got up to pull her lotion from the bag. I looked away from her, seriously contemplating everything she had just said, but especially the last part. We had always held completely differing views on the meaning of things. I was al
ways the logical one. She was always the faithful one. We were, in that respect, at least, fire and water. But I sat and thought about her words seriously, wondering if she was right. My brain told me that no, she was deluding herself. She was looking for
something Divine in an event that was being caused by people who were in power all over the world.