The Shattered Genesis (Eternity) (41 page)

             
“Your girlfriend looks like she has had a bit of a rough time.” The woman informed me.

             
My thoughts snapped back to Alice, who remained motionless as she stared straight ahead. I wondered wha
t exactly she was looking for or if she was really looking for anything at all.

             
“We all have, right?” I replied with a noncommittal shrug, “Yeah, it’s crazy to say out loud, but there was this thing back home. I can’t describe to you exactly what it was.
I just know that it was evil. It sounds crazy…”

             
“It doesn’t,” The woman shook her head, “I’m the chatty one out of me and my sisters and I talked to a lot of people on the ship. We all had something after us. You and your girlfriend aren’t alone in that.
What was your otherworldly stalker like?”

             
I chuckled softly at the term. “Otherworldly stalker” was an accurate description.

             
Though the recollection was painful given the way it all turned out, I found myself spilling all of the details to this stranger.
I talked for a long time and she never interrupted me. She never gave any indication that she was disturbed, even when I finished our story with the very real, very grim end.

             
“That’s horrible,” She told me, but her voice betrayed no true sympathy, “I gue
ss her zoning off instead of helping you make camp is acceptable then. Poor thing…”

             
I didn’t know whether to be offended by her suggestion that Alice was essentially a useless companion or to ask myself if I had taken her statement the wrong way. I certai
nly didn’t believe that Alice not helping me make camp made her useless, though I had been slightly irritated at her as I was sweating and stressing over how to build a stupid tent.

             
“Baby!” I called to her. “It’s done!”

             
Alice jumped almost completely off
the ground.

             
“Sorry!” I shouted again.

             
She gave no acknowledgment of my apology. She just meandered back slowly, glancing over her shoulder every couple of seconds to view the trees again. When her face became clearer to me as she got closer, I could see
that her brows were wrinkled and her mouth was crooked in an expression of curiosity and bemusement.

             
“Thank you. It was nice talking to you.” I told the woman, who nodded and studied Alice with narrow eyes. After she walked away, I reached out to grasp A
lice’s hand.

             
“What is it, baby?” I put my finger under her chin to gently lift her head.

             
She glanced back over her shoulder, her eyes slowly scanning the trees.

             
“There’s something out there,” She told me, “I can feel it.”

             
She didn’t elaborate. She just
unzipped the tent and went inside.

             
“It’s really big in here!” She called out to me but I was looking into the darkness behind the tree-line now, looking for whatever it was that she claimed she felt. After a minute, I was able to convince myself that she
was still stressed from the events of the past weeks and as a result, was imagining things. There was nothing out there.

             
I followed her into the tent to see her sitting on the ground, opening her suitcase.

             
“I want to keep at least one shirt in my bag. I
don’t want to wear it.” She told me as she cradled a pink and black striped flannel to her chest. “I just want to keep it in my bag so that it will always smell like home.”

             
“That’s a good idea.” I replied as I opened the box of rations that we had gotten
at the same time
we retrieved our bags. “Well, at least the food on the ship was good because this is all kinds of crap. Look at this!”

             
Though the proportions were quite large, the food itself was basic. It was only meant to supply the necessary nutrient
s. It was just enough to survive.

             
“Just add water. Where are we supposed to get water?” I asked as I held up a can of what I supposed was powdered soup.

             
“Look a little harder, darling.” Alice told me as she rooted around in the box to pull out three
bottles of water. “Look, they gave us the bare minimum! One gallon a day each!”

             
“That was generous of them.” I replied bitterly. I was a typical guy; I underwent a Jekyll and Hyde transformation when I became hungry or thirsty. If I was in desperate need
of a drink or meal, I was also in desperate need of a straitjacket. A smart person would promptly avoid me at all costs.
             

             
“The extra bottle is for the stuff that needs water, I guess.” Alice told me. “So do you want some powdered soup? I’ll cook it for yo
u. It’ll be like I’m a housewife, right?”

             
“Are you being sarcastic?”

             
“Do you even need to ask?” She asked sarcastically. “I’m only kidding. But seriously, I will make it. Let me test my survival skills right here and right now.”

             
“You’re testing your sur
vival skills by following a simple direction?” I laughed slightly.

             
“I am. Don’t rain on my parade.”

             
“Sorry.” I watched her pour the packets of soup into two plastic bowls. She poured in a small amount of water and stirred the contents with a plastic spoo
n. “I guess the days of nice silverware and plates and bowls are over.”

             
“Do we really need them, though? I think fine china and silverware are the least of our worries.”

             
“I know. I was just making a statement.”

             
“Here you go. That was like magic. I turne
d powder into soup. Think about it this way…” She took a bite of the chunky green liquid in the bowl and frowned. “When we went away to college, we would have been eating Ramen every night. We probably would have been using Styrofoam bowls and plastic cups
and washing them every night because we couldn’t even afford paper plates. We’re basically living the exact way we would have been living at the end of the summer.”

             
“You’re trying really hard to stay positive, aren’t you?”

             
“Do I have any other choice?”

             
“No. I guess not.” I knew that I needed to get on that faux-optimism bandwagon quickly or she would break down into tears. She needed my assurance the same way I needed hers. “We’ll chill here for awhile until we get to explore. Then we’ll figure out a wa
y to get some wood and I’ll build you our house.”

             
Her face had fallen slightly after she had tried to remain upbeat. Her true feelings were beginning to leak through that mask of happiness. But at the mention of our house, I saw joy on her face that was g
enuine and familiar to me.

             
“Maybe we’ll learn to make pots out of clay and stuff.” She replied enthusiastically, “Then you can have your nice plates and bowls.”

             
“I don’t
need
plates and bowls!” I laughed again, “I was being dumb.”

             
“Surprise, surprise.”

             
I shook my head at her in jocular offense and then leaned forward to kiss her.

             
“This could all shape up to be really, really cool,” She told me and I knew that her proclamation was an optimistic thought in which she truly believed. “I mean, we’ll just ge
t to chill out for the rest of our lives. No one is going to expect us to work if we’re living on our own. We don't need money for anything. We’ll get up in the morning, decide that we don’t want to do anything, so we won’t do anything.”

             
“Is this proof th
at all people are lazy?” I asked.

             
“Pretty much,” She said through a fit of gleeful laughter, “I believe that, Quinn. I believe it’s
everyone’s dream to do nothing. Isn’t that why people started retiring early and moving to Florida and stuff? Why would you
work when you can just run around on the beach all day? Look at us. We hadn’t even started working for real and we were already fantasizing about the day we didn’t have to work at all anymore. It just so happens that our time to do nothing has come a lot
earlier than we planned.”

             
“That’s true. It’s weird to hear it put like that but you’re right. Do you remember how my dad used to talk about how lazy our generation was?”

             
“Oh, yeah,” Alice smiled as she rolled her eyes. “I remember those lectures. I just
wanted to be like, 'Fool, it’s your generation that got us into a crisis!’”

             
“And it’s their generation that didn't want to work, either. People were losing their jobs left and right and there were still people who didn’t appreciate having good ones. Do yo
u remember how your mom used to threaten to quit every week? And she was making a ridiculous amount of money!”

             
“I know. She annoyed me so much with that. Then I’d try to tell her about how she should consider herself lucky. And she was like, 'Allie, If yo
u knew what I had to do at my job…’ ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about…’”

             
Her impression of her mother was spot on.

             
“Laziness, dude,” She continued, “She was the prime example of it. That was one of her bad qualities, I will say.” Alice’s smile
faded as she looked off. “I would want her here even if she had
only
her bad qualities.”

             
“I know. I want my parents here, too. They
should
be here.”

             
“I know they should. But you know, I’ve been thinking lately that I’m going to see them again. One day,
when I die…”

             
“Which will be in a really long time…” I added.

             
“Which will be in a really long time,” She agreed, “I’ll see them again. It helps more than I thought it would.”

             
“I know it does.  You know that I have no religious beliefs. But I’ve been thin
king that a lot lately, too. And it is comforting.”

             
“It is. So we just need to live out our lives being as happy as we can be. Even though they didn’t approve of us and they probably never would have, they know that we need each other now. So we just need
to try to live normally even though God knows this situation isn’t normal.”

             
“You’re right.” I smiled at her, completely in agreement with what she had said. “You’re absolutely right.”

Violet

             
“Sick” does not begin to describe how I felt when I saw my f
ather and Maura together. I knew that they had a history, though the extent of their relationship remained a mystery to me. Now, with my mother so recently deceased, he was beginning to revisit his old bond with Maura. Besides the betrayal to my mom, the w
ay Maura fawned over him was enough to make me gag.

             
There were constant compliments on her end that only boosted his already out of proportion ego. She made excuses for what he had done to Brynna, saying that it was Brynna’s own fault. Had she not been so
cruel as to leave our mother behind, my dad wouldn’t have been so keen to sort her out.

             
“It was wrong,” She told me one morning over breakfast. I was staring off into the distance as the Pangean sun rose over the top of the ship and blanketed us with its
gentle light. “You said so yourself. I don’t believe in hitting any of you. But what she did was purely wrong, Violet. You know that it was, if we are being completely honest, almost evil! He was upset. He acted out in anger.”

             
“Maura, it’s not like this
is the first time it’s happened. He’s always been meaner to her than he is to us,” I insisted, “And since when does she ever listen to him? He tells her to stay away from James and James is gone now.”

             
“And that’s for the best! He had to assert his authori
ty there. She may be mature but she cannot
handle a relationship with a man his age. The poor girl can barely connect with anyone, let alone a man who comes with expectations and experience behind him.”