The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (29 page)

             
“Except for the fact that people are going to get knifed over
movies, which is what you were insinuating earlier."

             
“I guess we’ll just all have to learn to share. Isn’t that what you used to tell your kids at work?”

             
“Yes. What, do you think I’m going to be a Preschool Teacher’s Aide here, too?”

             
“People will probab
ly start acting like little kids over movies, so yeah. I hate to break it to you.”

             
“Never! I told you, I will never do that again. If anyone gets into a fight over whether to watch football or baseball, I am staying out of it. There’s nobody to tell me th
at I have to break it up. That’s something that I am not going to miss, I’m telling you.”

             
“What? Working?”

             
“Yup! Are you going to miss fixing cars on the weekends?”

             
“Hell no. Isn’t that why people are fascinated with the end of the world? They know that
they don’t have any responsibilities except the most basic ones anymore.”

             
“I know I’m excited about it. I mean, yeah, we’re going to have problems. But I just have this feeling that everything is going to be alright. It’s not because we have football DVD
s. It’s just…” She looked up at me. “I know it. The same way we’ve known everything else so far.”

             
I smiled and kissed her quickly.

             
“I know it, too. We deserve it at this point, don’t we?”

             
“Definitely. After what we just went through, we deserve to have
it easy from now on.”

             
Consider us young, naïve, and entitled but we really did believe that everything was going to be easy from then on out. We were aboard the most amazing ship ever built in the old world, hurtling through space at a speed that had neve
r been achieved by any craft in the history of man. Sure, we were going to land on a planet and start civilization over, but how hard could that be? We were living through an experience that most would have deemed impossible. The thrill of it all was enoug
h to blind us to the harsh fact that things would never be easy for us again. There on the ship that day, we could not bring ourselves to acknowledges the challenges that we knew would have to be faced nor did we  take the time to ponder the challenges we
knew nothing of yet.

             
There was no guarantee that we would survive the first year on Pangea. I knew that those thoughts were the reality of the situation and I believe that Alice, in her heart, knew that as well. We just couldn't face that fact then becau
se we had been through hell over the previous days. We needed  hope. We needed to believe that things were going to get better. It was foolish and irresponsible to allow such a drawn out vacation from the harsh reality. We needed to remain grounded in it,
stuck hard to firm ground in order to deal with the consequences of our escape.

             
Alice and I looked at each other after several minutes, our smiles faded and our laughter having abruptly died away. We knew then that our hope was premature and our view on
the “paradise” we were sailing towards was unrealistic.

             
“I know that we can’t afford to let our guards down.” I told her quietly. “But we have to try to make the best of this, babe. We’re all we have now. We’re all that we’re ever going to have.”

             
She nod
ded as she reached up to wipe a stray tear from her eye.

             
“You sound like your dad.” She told me. “So reasonable and so… ‘This is how it is. This is how we make it work.’”

             
“Is that a good or a bad thing?”

             
After grasping my hands, she smiled slightly.

             
“He might not have liked me but I liked him. I always saw a lot of him in you. I see it even more now. If he were here, he’d be proud of you.”

             
Why she said all of that just then, I didn’t know. I didn’t believe it to be true. The carefree joy we had felt
just mere moments earlier was replaced by a sadness so strong, it rattled my nerves. The mention of my father made tears emerge from my eyes. Alice, crying with me, reached up and wiped them away. She kissed me again gently.

             
“I love you, and you’re right.
We’re going to make the best of this and we’re going to be alright. We survived the worst of it. We can survive what’s left. You’re right about that, Quinn. I love you.”

             
I looked up at her and put my hand on her face.

             
“I love you, too.”

XXX

             
The food w
as pretty decent. The cots were relatively comfortable. Even after a week and a half of watching the movies they had stored, we weren’t bored. We were able to talk to people from other countries and learn of how they had discovered that the world was endin
g.

             
With everyone, it had all started with the dream.

             
One man from France detailed seeing a creature very similar to the one we had seen. When we asked if he had killed it, he shook his head.
             

             
“I should have.” He said through his heavy accent. “I know it
was somebody.”

             
“Did anyone you love go missing?” Alice pressed him gently.

             
“Yes. My wife and my brother both went missing. I know that she was the one following me. I should have ended it for her but I could not.”

             
To think of that man’s wife tossing an
d turning in some unknown purgatory we couldn’t begin to picture clearly disturbed Alice so much that she stopped sleeping through the night.

             
Other people described being stalked (and in some cases, attacked) by giants clothed in fur and armor.

             
“Like a g
iant? Or a troll?” I pressed eagerly.

             
“If I had any idea what you were talking about, I would choose one or the other.” The strange woman from Maine answered. “But since I don’t know…”

             
It didn’t matter, so I didn’t explain it. How she didn’t know what a
giant or a troll was, I didn’t know.

             
“I just know that those things were huge and they would have killed me if he hadn’t stopped them.” The woman beckoned to her husband.
             

             
“What did you do to stop them?” I asked, ready to file his answer away for future
reference.

             
“I found my own beast, I guess. I beat the crap out of the thing. I’ve never done Karate or anything like that a day in my life. But I was like a cage-fighter, man. I’ll admit, it was kind of cool.”

             
I smiled slightly, remembering how it felt w
hen I had ordered the cop to leave, only to see him turn and stride away as though I had simply bid him good evening.

             
Another person, who spoke a million miles a minute with words I had never heard used in conversation before, explained seeing some
strange, child-like creature.

             
“It only had a circle with teeth in it. It wasn’t a mouth, per se.”

             
Weird…

             
All of that was fun for a week or so. Then, Alice and I began to grow restless as we awaited the day we could leave the ship. After exploring every
part of it, we were ready for some open air. The walls were beginning to feel like they were closing in. Though the ship was large, we were beginning to feel like were closed inside of a shoebox.

             
One night, we all got a scare. Randomly, while everyone was
in the cafeteria having dinner, the ship began to bob up and down only slightly. Nobody stopped talking; they were paying no attention to the vibrations that Alice and I felt beneath our feet. Then, there was a deafening bang and everyone in the room was
thrown up into the air several feet, only to come smacking back to the ground. For a minute, our stomachs dropped and I knew in my heart that we were plummeting right out of the sky, falling into the infinite space below us. There was nothing that would ca
tch us in the dark open space beneath us.

             
But then, just as the screams of terror and the shrill emergency sirens reached a deafening peak, it was over. I looked up to see a girl a little older than Alice and I clutching a sobbing little girl close to
her
. An older man, presumably her father, had his arm around her shoulder. She shook him off and stood back up with the child still attached to her chest. One of the other girls with her was being ushered to her feet by a pretty red-headed woman who I could o
nly assume was her mother.

             
I had only seen fractured groups thus far. That was the first family where all of its members appeared to be in tact. They appeared to be doing alright. That made them the luckiest group in my opinion.

             
Alice and I were walking
back to our room one night when the little girl I had seen came running around the corner, giggling as her older brother chased her. Behind them, the two girls were walking in silence, not looking at each other.

             
“I am sick of this ship.” The older of the
two muttered as she stared straight ahead. The younger gave no response.

             
“Well, I guess we’re not the only ones who just want to freaking get to Pangea already.” Alice muttered to me as the door to our housing compartment slid open to let us in.

             
“Are we
going to live here on the ship or are we going to rough it out in the wilderness?” I was trying to distract her from what I knew was a severe case of cabin fever. I was experiencing the very same thing.

             
“Definitely the wilderness.” She replied as we laid
down on our beds that we had pushed together. “I’m sick of this ship, too. Once I’m off of it, I’ll probably never come back inside.”

             
“You’ll have to come inside to eat.”

             
“No, I won’t. We’ll learn to hunt and fish. We’ll live off the land. Isn’t that wha
t you always said you wanted to do? Remember? Your parents were calling you like, every five minutes that day and you got all frustrated and said you wanted to go live on an island where there was no service. You said we would learn to hunt our own food an
d we’d live in a log cabin we built out of the trees there.”

             
“No.” I corrected her. “I changed my mind, remember? I said that I’d rather live in a house made out of palm leaves. It is way more authentic.”

             
“It might be more authentic but I would definitel
y prefer the log cabin. I like having doors and windows. I like kitchens.”

             
“Well, we wouldn’t have a stove.”

             
“That’s okay. We would cook on the fire and we’d eat in the kitchen. I can picture it; we’ll have oil lamps lit instead of having electricity.”

             
I realized then that we were no longer talking about the fantasy I had dreamed up while frustrated over always being wired in with everyone. We were talking about Pangea. I laid back, picturing what she was saying.

             
“We’ll catch our own food.” She continue
d. “We’ll cook it ourselves. We’ll make plates out of rocks and silverware out of bamboo shoots.”

             
“I’ll build us furniture out of trees. Maybe we’ll find some way to make paint and you can start painting again.”

             
“Yeah. We’ll find some way to make fabric
and I’ll sew us curtains and blankets and cushions for our couches.” She laughed and covered her face. “This is so ridiculous.”

             
“No, it’s not.” I told her after propping my head up on my hand and turning to face her. “It’s nice. I like talking about this,
believe it or not.”

             
“I barely believe it because I know how you are about feelings.”

             
“Hey, I am a sensitive guy.”