WIPE (A Post-Apocalyptic Story) (39 page)

            I watch Maze, hoping she’ll look at me, just one last time. Because I know that she’s bought it, every word of his, and that she’ll never look at me again. Not with a smile or her brightly shining eyes, and not at all, so that it will ease her acceptance of my death. And then she turns around, her back to us. For a moment no words come from her. And then she says it, my worst fear come to life:

            “You’re right. Wills, I’m sorry. He’s right.”

            She turns around, looks directly at me, and her eyes wobble, orange light shining on streaks of tears that line her cheeks. “I’m sorry. You won’t be able to keep it to yourself. I mean everything to you. And it’s—it would be impossible for you. If there’s anything I’ve ever known about you, it’s that you’ve wanted me. I’ve known all along. But you were too—you were different. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew. When I met Sid—” she says, but my loud wail interrupts her, terrifies her.

            “Do it!” I scream. “Kill me now!”

            “No—you’ll hear her out,” Wrist says calmly, pressing down against my struggling once more.

            “I do love you Wills, but it was never—never that kind of love. With Sid, there was something there. I know now that it was all manufactured, but it was his boldness, his desire to break further and further away from security and safety and comfort. To go into danger to seek the truth. And you—I’ve always known that—you’re smart, and I love that about you—but you only want safety. And it’s just for me that you’ve done all of this. So I’m sorry Wills—I’m so sorry, it’s all because of me, I know. I’ll never be able to live with this. It’s my fault, I wrote you that letter.”

            Overcome with the emotion that seals my fate, only causing anger in me now, she rushes forward. At the same time as I shout for her to
get the fuck away from me
, Wrist yells at her to stay back.

            “Are you ready now?” Wrist says. I feel the press of the knife.

            “No—she’ll do it herself. Maze—if you believe it—if you really believe what you’re saying to me, then do it yourself,” I roar at her, using up the last of my strength.

            “No—she won’t do it herself. It’s a pleasure I have reserved all for myself,” Wrist says. “I’ve never personally had a chance to kill one of the enemy, and I have always looked forward to this moment.”

            “Look at me!” I yell at her, but she’s turned away again, her sobs echoing down the tunnel. “
Look at me!
”

            “Do you want me to?” she says finally, turning her face, wiping away her tears.

            “Cut my heart out—take the knife and do it—come on, don’t you finally get scared—don’t you finally back down from the truth—do what you know has to happen, take the fucking knife and cut me open.”

            For a moment, Wrist releases the pressure from me but there is nothing left to fight against. There is no more Maze, and no more future. And then I think there is one thing—to try to steal the knife and kill them both. But it passes too quickly. That that would be a worse fate than my own death, and that despite that Maze has let me go, finally and forever from her heart, I still want her to be happy. And that as filled with anger as I am, I need to die for her to do it. Because Wrist’s story
is
true. I am the enemy. And I don’t want a race of me. But some fire comes into me one last time, just enough to yell at her to do it one more time, so forcefully that she starts shaking her head up and down.

            “Okay, okay, okay, give me it—give me the knife!” she yells at Wrist. And then, that quickly, he half-stands, pushing even harder with his knee into my back but rising enough so that I see him extend the blade. It hangs high above my eyes, glistening, waiting for Maze.

            “If you must—if you must so that we can move this all along more quickly, then do it. I guess maybe it is the final test. That you are the right specimen.”

            Maze steps fast toward him and takes the knife, as if she wants to get it over with as quickly as possible, before she can comprehend what she is about to do.

            “Go on!” I yell at her as she stands watching me with the knife pointed down, unable to strike.

            “There’s no other way?” she says weakly to Wrist, her eyes diverting from mine for just a moment.

            “Ask yourself. You already know,” he says, restraining his irritation and driving hard into my back.

            “Wills, close your eyes. Please,” she says.

            “I want to watch. I want to know it’s true,” I say. And all of me submits to it as her hand recoils just a bit, angles so that she can slice my throat. And then, she ducks close to me, and before she stabs the knife in, she slowly comes to my face and says that here is the kiss for the life I wanted. She presses so close that I do close my eyes for some reason, just as I feel the press of her lips against my forehead. And then, they’re open wide, and she swings the knife up.

I feel the weight release immediately, and then I twist around and see the skirmish. Maze’s knees straddle either side of Wrist’s chest, and his hands push forward into her face and neck. She pushes against the end of the knife where it’s stabbed into the bottom of Wrist’s chin, and then a loud shock sends her off of his body, and his arms start to twitch wildly on the ground.

            “Maze!” I yell as she rolls onto the ground, sparks flying from the open metal wound of Wrist’s neck onto her face. But then I turn from her as I hear the motion—the shifting weight of Wrist’s feet, and watch his hands go to his neck, the handle hanging underneath a shower of lightning spray. He grips it to pull it out just as I manage to heave the entirety of my weight into him, smacking him hard to the metal floor. And then, whatever strength he has left fails him as I rip his hands from their grip on the knife and push in deeper, twisting it into his skull, so that new and strange blue sparks fly, and his eyes bleed red and then begin to cave into his skull, melting backward, just as the roll of electricity funnels through the metal stem of the handle and reaches where my hands have started to pound into his open silver skeleton. A tremor of shock rolls through my whole body until I’m thrown off and blinded, and then, everything goes silent.

I listen for the music, and eventually, I hear it crackling through over the speakers. It stays on, but there’s no other sound. And nothing else is alive but me. I feel my heart beating and my hand goes to my neck, pressing deeply into the vein. I feel it. The pulse, still steady and strong. I’m alive. When I raise my neck, I see at first a thin gray stream of smoke rising from Wrist, and then, nearby, Maze’s body. Softly rising and falling. Breathing still. And I want to ask her, before I even know how badly she’s hurt, if she planned it all. Every word of it. But all that comes through my head is
I love you.
And before I can summon the strength to rise, to see what kind of new death awaits us here in the After Sky, I check Wrist again. Just a dead pile of wires. And my head goes back down and my eyes close, and I realize just how awful my body feels. Just a moment, I tell myself closing my eyes. No
—
get up.
Get
.
up
.

  Part 5

Chapter 21

As I rise from the floor, blue light bleeding into the orange, the zaps and smoke from Wrist’s body bring me closer—I hover over his body, anticipating his immortal rise, a sharp revolt against his mechanical death. But there’s no more life in any part of him. I press a finger down to his face, the side of his cheek, and push. His head turns but the eyes are gone. Nothing left in him at all.

            I hear her, a soft call of my name. And then when I turn, to see her body, back pressed against the blue-lit steel, and her dark hair and eyes directed all at me, a smile somehow curling on her lips, Maze says it again:
Wills.
I walk to her, recognizing now that adrenaline has masked some strange sensation caused by the shock of electricity Wrist gave me as his last effort—and then, I’m down next to her. She looks up at me, smiling more, her beauty paralyzing. And it’s her who asks me—
Are you okay?
I bend close and kiss her. It was all a lie, you know? I tell her yes, I knew—even as I know how much my own words are a lie: that I did believe she’d been convinced, that she’d lost all of whatever feeling she had grown for me.

            Before it even begins, I know that it is happening at last—that I will make love to her, take her now into my arms in this alien chapel above the ring of the world, cold and strange light shrouding our bodies as they prepare to pour into each other. I love you, she tells me. She says it first, and I kiss her. She starts to stand up but I push her down. Are you okay? I ask, hands on her shoulders, ready to pin her, just waiting for the confirmation. But all she asks is if I still love her. And I refuse the answer—like a sadist I can’t tell her anymore. All I can do is kiss her.

            My teeth bite into her lip, and when she softly moans, I feel the wetness of her tongue roll across my lip, and it’s too much—I push her down flat against the floor, and then my legs come across—one then the other—until I’m on top of her. For a moment my eyes return to Wrist. Dead as the steel floor. And the blue light beyond, some unknown waiting for us. A final verdict just a few feet away. But I won’t let her get up—I’ve decided that now. And whatever is coming will wait. The hunger is gone and the thirst is gone. There is nothing but the pulse of touch, the feeling that I believe her—that she isn’t lying at all this time. She really does love me. And my hands work firmly from her shoulders and then softly glide, running along her arms until they tie up with her fingers, pushing them back even as she tries to rise and thrust up into me.

            My mouth works toward her ear and I give it to her: I say I love you. And then, my left hand releases, finds her chin, and turns her mouth away from mine as she tries to kiss me. I push down again, her head flat on its side, so that the line of her neck is all I can see. Dark hair conceals her until I push it all away, and then, against her olive skin I press my face—at first it’s just the smell—to take in that she’s giving herself to me before it happens. I breathe in long and deep, and then I do it again, until I can’t control the urge, and I collapse the full weight of my body onto hers. My lips kiss up and down her neck, retreating from her ear each time I find myself there, and then down to the base of her neck, kissing across the rim of her chest. I push her hair back again, this time from her eyes, because I want to see her. I want to watch her look at me as I come back to her mouth. And she smiles again and I smile, a moment of shared happiness, a pause before instinct takes over again. Then, the carefulness is gone. That quickly everything is dark with my closed eyes and I taste her again—her lips and her mouth and her cheek.

            She pushes into my neck, arching her back, and I shove her back down flat. I can’t stop myself anymore. I kiss lower from the base of her neck, to her chest, and my hand runs over her stomach and then up, finding the place where my hands peel away her shirt. Softly, and then, with the pain of my teeth, hardness poking against my tongue, she moves her breast up, like she doesn’t want me to ease at all, but to commit more to the sin—to taste her where the Fathers would condemn me by greater degrees, where there can be no salvation.

            My right arm releases so that each of my fingers is free to realize the shape and warmth of my fantasy—I trace lightly and then press hard, from her face and down, and feel for a moment the soft heat of her mouth open around my finger, a gentle touch of her tongue, until each hand is locked to her breasts, and my face bound there, until I sit up, my butt down against the top of her thighs, and I grab her hands again as they try to run over my body. I push them away. She moans softly and says my name. I think of her ass and all the times I’ve seen it—wanted it—some animal desire forbidden to me.

            I command her to stand up. At first she’s confused, but I grab her hands and pull her up to her feet and pull her against me. And then, we’re face to face, standing, and I push into her, the most strength I can muster, until she’s squeezed of her breath, and then I turn her until we’re heading into the wall. With force I push her into the wall, and then, when her eyes roll up into her head for a moment, and then open wide again, and her mouth shoots forward, biting my lower lip, I throw her back again, slamming her, and then pushing in my body, making her feel every part, the full excitement, until she responds to my motion, a rhythmic heat vexing the steel, our legs tangling and opening. She repeats my name. That she loves me. So much. And then we’re spun around, and she throws me against the wall. Kissing down my neck to my stomach. I stop her, lift her up, and my hands find her ass. Finally it’s there—I relax my neck and look at the ceiling as she kisses me, my hands up and down the curve of her muscles, over her butt and then her thighs. All thought escapes me—there is nothing anymore.