The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (26 page)

             
He smiled, too and replied, “You're absolutely right.”

             
The memory of the awful dream (was it a dream?) that I had been having grasped my jugular and
choked off my newly restored ability to breathe.

             
“Is it coming back?” He asked me. I could tell that he was forcing his voice to remain level.

             
I shook my head.

             
“I think I saw it happen. I saw the blast.” My voice was trembling slightly as I recanted the
details. “I saw my parents and I felt...” I shook my head, stopping myself. I could not bear to relive it all again. “I don't feel it anymore. But I felt it then. And it was so strong and so...”

             
Without thinking about it, I reached out to him and grasped
his arms before pulling them so that they were encasing me. Then I wrapped my own around his neck. That gesture showed more weakness than I could stand and immediately, I went to pull away. But his arms stayed locked around me as we laid back on the small
cot. I was beneath him with his body pressed to mine. The urge to push him away was rivaled by an equally strong urge to hold him close. The two desires fought valiantly but the latter won when I looked up into his eyes.

             
But I had to pull away. I had ne
ver needed a man before and I certainly did not need one now. I especially didn't need him. Since the moment we had met, he had purposely aggravated, insulted and angered me, all in an effort to put me in my place. The concern he was displaying just then w
as meant to manipulate me into feeling a strong level of affection for him. He was holding me and gazing at me so warmly because he wanted to engage in a physically intimate act of carnal eroticism. Then, after he had gotten what he wanted, I would never s
ee him again.

             
That was what Maura would tell me, if she was awake.

             
I had to pull away.

             
But I couldn't do it. In the event of that near-death experience I had suffered through, I had no choice but to show vulnerability, as my desire to survive far
superseded my need to remain unfazed by any passing terror, be it big or small. But I did have a choice in that moment and I needed to move away from him and force myself to face that horrible vision I had seen on my own. I faced everything on my own and I
couldn't afford any cowardice now.

             
Though I knew that I needed to pull away, I found myself holding his arms around me, my body shaking as those horrifying images played out clearly in front of my widened eyes.

             
I was still very afraid.

             
After planting a
gentle kiss on my forehead, he turned us both sideways so that he could lie behind me. I felt the scratchiness of his unshaven cheek as it rested against the side of my face. I
squeezed him tighter and whispered softly so no one could hear but him:

             
“Stay
with me.”

             
I felt his lips press softly to the side of my face now.

             
“I will.”

***

             
Forcing myself to remain conscious for the previous day and a half had taken its toll on me. I collapsed into another deep sleep despite my body's fight to remain awake.
I couldn't stand to see what I had seen again. As I drifted off, I prayed that my chilling nightmare would be kept at bay by James's strong, comforting presence.

             
The dream never reemerged. I can thank him for that because every time I began to see that da
rkness, I heard his voice telling me that everything was alright and it faded. Within an hour or so, I heard another male voice, this one amplified to a point that it jerked me out of my mercifully serene sleep.

             
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are level.”

             
I ru
bbed my eyes and turned over to look at James, who was still lying beside me on the cot.

             
“How was the take-off?”

             
He laughed softly.

             
“Terrifying, as I expected.”

             
“I figured as much.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why don't you try to sleep?”

             
“I can't. No
t now.”

             
“Your body is going to crash sooner or later. You might as well just sleep now while everyone else does the same.”

             
He smiled slightly and sat up. I was alarmed by his appearance now that I was studying him closely. His eyes were surrounded by
dark circles and their lids were starting to swell slightly. A day and a half ago, he had been toned and healthy but now, he was beginning to take on a sunken-in appearance that would have distressed any medical professional. I believed myself to be the mo
afflicted most detrimentally by our mad dash to the ship but the stress of the journey had taken the highest toll on him.

             
As though he had read my mind, he said softly, “You look as bad as I do.”

             
“Well, thank you so much for pointing that out.”

             
I wasn'
t angry at the suggestion that I was looking less than my already lackluster best. I just had no other retort. I was clearly feeling the effects of the sleepless days.

             
“Do you know where my glasses went?” I asked as I looked around for a bedside table whe
re he might have placed them. Instead of a table, though, I found that they were safely stowed in the breast-pocket of his button-up shirt.

             
“You might have to clean them. During the take-off, I was sweating so much that they're probably saturated.” He loo
ked at me and said in a deadpan, emotionless voice, “Sorry.”

             
I found myself covering my mouth as I chuckled softly. His mouth cracked into a small, crooked grin.

             
“You think I'm kidding but I couldn't be more serious.”

             
“That is so very gross.”

             
His smile
grew when he said. “I really am sorry, all joking aside. Let me see them.”

             
I handed them over and watched as he cleaned the lenses on the end of his shirt.

             
“You only slept for an hour.”

             
“I know.” I looked over at Penny, Maura, Violet and Elijah who wer
e still sleeping peacefully.

             
“Don't worry about them.” James said before breathing on the lenses and wiping them again.  “The doctors said that if anything was going to happen, it would have happened by now.”

             
I nodded and stood up, my legs feeling heavie
r than usual. Every step was like attempting to
stride quickly through waist-deep water. I almost felt like I was succumbing to some high fever as the malaise made itself known so strongly. I put my hand to my head and sat back down.

             
I was momentarily stu
nned to find myself on the verge of tears.

             
“Lay back down, sweetheart.” James told me but I shook my head. When I had moved my hands away, my eyes had traveled to the far end of the room, where I could hear someone sobbing. One of the doctors was covering
a middle-aged man with a sheet. A woman, presumably his wife, was standing beside him, crying into her hands.

             
“What am I going to tell the kids?” She asked no one in particular.

             
James and I stared at her, neither of us sure exactly how to proceed. I had
never been skilled at consoling people as outpourings of emotion made me literally squirm in discomfort. I looked at James finally to find his eyes were traveling through the huge, heavily-populated room.

             
“Ten other people.”

             
He was right; ten other peop
le were covered with sheets. Ten families were going to be grieving the loss of their loved ones before we had reached Pangea. Ten families were going to rue the day they had decided to come aboard the ship to escape the end of our world. It would have bee
n easier to just die together, they would say. That's what
I
would say, if I had lost anyone.

             
“They chose to come. They knew the risks.” I said softly to James.

             
He only nodded in response and grasped my shoulder.

             
“I want to go somewhere else, James. I
cannot bear to see this.”

             
He nodded again and followed me as I strode across the room. I reached out to grasp a nonexistent handle on the door only to jump back in surprise when it slid open on its own. As we walked past the sobbing woman, we averted our
eyes.

             
There was a loud humming in the hallway. Our way was illuminated only slightly by the dim overhead lights. We walked side by side, neither of us having the energy to keep up a quick pace or engage in conversation.

             
We climbed a flight of stairs and
walked past a door marked “Housing Compartment 3.” There must have been another room full of sleeping survivors on the floor we had just come up from. Finally, after several more flights of stairs and several more housing compartments, we reached a door th
at read “Atrium.” When James opened it for me, I was unprepared for the sight that was suddenly before my eyes.

             
It was
exactly
like a cruise ship. The floor was marble and the walls were painted a cheerful blue. There were two staircases leading to an upp
er level that looped around the entire circular room. At the far end of the vast, open space, there were several sofas arranged around one spectacular floor to ceiling window.

             
One thing that had always befuddled me was the fact that while gazing out of th
e window of a moving plane, I could never tell that we were going several hundred miles per hour. Now, we were hurtling through space at a rate two times the velocity of a simple airplane and yet we were gliding along almost effortlessly. As James and I st
ood looking out of that window, we could barely tell we were moving at all.

             
The nerd in me was awakened as we stared at the lights outside of the window. I suppose that space has weather as distinguishable as Earth's did but in space, the clouds are not
dingy and gray the way ours looked when rain is coming. Light purples and blues were the norm up there. The stars twinkled in the distance around us; we were still not close enough to touch them.

             
People were starting to emerge from their housing chambers
to explore. A collective gasp of several onlookers sounded behind us but James and I were scarcely aware of it. The view outside the window was something no man had yet seen and there we were, the first of the civilians on board to see it.

             
As people start
ed pushing to get a look out of the window (a child actually pushed through my legs to get in front of me, the little heathen) James grasped my hand and pulled me away. But as we
walked, we craned our necks to continue looking, hypnotized by the rare, myst
ifying beauty of that scene outside.

             
Large crowds always made me nervous and the atrium was slowly filling to the brim with people. Though the room was exceptionally large, the walls seemed to shrink, closing in on us and giving little time to escape. Luc
kily, we pushed through another door and found ourselves walking through a wide corridor. Tables adorned with potted plants and decorative vases were spaced evenly apart along both walls.

             
“Seems a bit strange, doesn't it?” I asked James after a moment as
we continued to stroll along with our hands clasped together.

             
“What?”

             
“This was a means to an end, correct?”

             
“Means to an end of what?” He stammered for a moment. “What are you even talking about right now, woman?”

             
I smiled and he did, too.

             
“You must
be exhausted because after two days of conversing, I know that if you were feeling your best, you would have picked up exactly what I was talking about the moment I said it. But since you don't seem to be grasping it, let me explain myself further.”