Freda: Volume III in the New Eden series (26 page)

I drop the knife to the roof with a clatter, and with both hands I tear page after page from the book and rip them to tiny pieces, throwing the bits into the breeze which carries them beyond me and over the cliff.

Tynan howls and sprints across the open roof, but I keep tearing at the pages. When he’s nearly on top of me, I throw the book into the air and fall flat onto my stomach, bashing my chin on the hard surface. Tynan reaches for the book, trying to catch it, slipping and skidding in the muck.

He bashes into the railing. For a moment, it holds and he teeters over me. He grasps the book in his good hand as the railing gives way and tumbles over the cliff. He falls behind it, still holding the book with his good hand and reaching for me with the other. I kick at him and roll away from the edge. His body thuds on the rocks far below, and the ensuing silence echoes all across the mountaintop.

I crawl to the edge and look down. Tynan lies on his back at the bottom of the cliff, the book nearby. One leg twists under him unnaturally, and as I watch he slowly lifts one shaky hand in my direction. His mouth moves, and I imagine him whispering my name. I can’t hear anything, though.

“I’ll be right there,” I shout down before pushing myself back from the edge. When I’m several feet back, I stand and run to the door, leaping down the stairs three at a time and running out onto the concrete flat. I cautiously claw my way around the corner to the south side of the building, descending between boulders to a flat area below, at the bottom of the cliff.

When I see him, I know he won’t live long no matter what I do. He convulses in tiny, uneven breaths, and his face is as pale as the clouds starting to form in the morning sky. I scramble across sand-covered granite to kneel at his side. He doesn’t move his head, but his eyes turn to meet mine.

“Freda,” he whispers.

“I’m here,” I console as I take his hand in mine.

“I’m sorry.” It seems to take all his effort to rasp out those two words.

“I forgive you,” I answer. I am not sure what, exactly, he’s sorry for, but I’ll assume he means everything.

“No,” he gasps. “... can’t.”

“I can,” I say, and I try to put conviction into my words. I can’t help but remember all the bad things he did. He murdered Dane. He forced me to leave my friends and very nearly killed me, more than once. He’s led me to this place, where I will very likely die in time. But there was good in him, too. All the time we walked together, helping the refugees. He was gentle and generous with the children of Southshaw. He loved me deeply, I think.

His hand tries to squeeze mine, and his breath rasps quicker, harder.

I kneel over him, and I smile at him. “I can,” I repeat. I make the sign of the circled heart, tracing a circle with my thumb and forefinger of my right hand over my heart, and then I touch his forehead. “I have been and ever will be a First Wife of Southshaw,” I say, “and with no living Semper the duties of that office fall now to me.”

He seems at first not to comprehend. I make the sign of the circled heart on his chest, and I say, “Tynan, I absolve you of any and all your worldly sins, intentional or otherwise. As you leave this world and return to God, you can go in peace with the knowledge that your soul is pure.”

I don’t know if those are the right words, as I was never taught the rite of departure. But I’d heard it before, once, and those words feel right.

He frowns momentarily, breathes a word that sounds like “no,” then relaxes. And I know he’s gone.

CHAPTER 28

Even in the shade at the top of this mountain in the late autumn, perspiration soaks my shirt.

It was hard enough dragging Tynan’s body up and around to the back of the building, but then burying it exhausted me. It took the better part of the afternoon, and I know I buried him too shallow to save him from the scavengers for long. It just didn’t feel right leaving his body where he fell. So I brought him here, to the spot next to the white stone crossed with black, to the place where the Founders buried their hope.

And now he’s covered up, and I’m resting in the shade, and the radio hisses quietly nearby. The two ancient books—the one intact and all the remains of the other I could gather—sit next to the radio and its solar cell.

The Founders were monsters. They planned and waged a war that killed billions of people. I can’t even imagine. Billions! They didn’t like some people, so they decided they needed to cleanse the world. Purify the human race. The arrogance of the whole idea is staggering.

Yet they succeeded. They created Southshaw, and we survived, and I made it here, to Reunion Mountain. What if others also survived? What if they are out there, waiting for me to summon them with the radio? What if they are on their way here right now, for our reunion?

Or, what if they failed to survive, or if they never existed? What if there are other Tawtrukks out there, other Subterras?

The books beckon me, and the radio sings its quiet hissing. I could read what’s there, try to understand and follow the Founders’ instructions. Try to reunite with the others. If they exist.

Ignoring the searing pain constricting every part of me, I crawl over the dusty dirt to kneel next to the radio. I pick it up and hold it before me, the leathery rope following like a coiled tail. I do not know how to work it, but the book will tell me; the instructions were among the pages I salvaged from the mountaintop.

I want to know. What harm would there be in trying it, in following the final instructions of the Founders? After all, I am their creation, the result of their plan.

But I can’t. The radio feels poisonous in my hand. Its hissing even sounds poisonous. What the Founders did was so atrocious that I cannot complete their plan. If others are out there, we will find each other in whatever way God intends, if He wills it at all.

There are so many things I do not understand, but I know deep in my heart that I am doing the right thing now.

I grab the leathery rope and yank it out of the bottom of the radio with a snap, separating it from the solar cell. The radio stops its hissing, and the silence sounds divine. I hold the radio like a rock and bring it up over my head, then smash it down on the solar cell. The glass cracks with the sound of a dry stick breaking but does not shatter. I hit it again and again and again until the solar cell is in shards and my hand aches.

I find a protrusion of granite nearby and smash the radio down one last time, on a sharp part of the granite. The radio splits open, and I throw the pieces as far into the trees down the hill as I can.

I spend the next half hour gathering sticks and twigs, then lighting them into a crisp, little fire. The sun is sinking in the west again, and I ignore the hunger burning inside me. Maybe I’ll get lucky and a rabbit will hop out and jump onto Tynan’s knife, or break its neck on a rock. More likely, I will just have to get used to the feeling of hunger.

As the fire crackles and the sun descends toward the western ridge, I tear out each page of the two big books, crumple them, and drop them into the fire. The pages flare and burn, their glimmering ashes rising into the air and floating away on the afternoon breeze.

After the last page has burned and I’ve eaten every berry on the mountaintop, I settle down next to the fire and watch the sun setting. The pack of coyotes yips far off, preparing for their hunt. Stars begin appearing, one by one, in the indigo sky. And I close my eyes to drift into a peaceful sleep.

Something grabbing and shaking my elbow pulls me awake many hours later in darkness. As I slowly rise from unconsciousness, strange images fill my head. Rabbits asking to be killed and eaten, coyotes testing to see how good I’ll taste. Strange people poking me with radios.

“Freda. Freda, wake up.”

A man’s voice. I drag myself up out of the depths of sleep. But I’m so, so tired. For a moment I wonder if Tynan somehow turned out not to be dead after all.

“Is she alive?” A second man’s voice.

“Of course she’s alive. She’s just asleep.”

“Oh.”

I open my eyes to see two silhouettes leaning over me against the starry blackness above. My fire has burned down to a handful of glowing embers.

“Thank God we found you,” says the first voice, and I know it.

“Dane?”

“Are you all right?”

“Am I in Heaven?” It seems a reasonable question even though I wonder if I’m still half dreaming. Or, maybe, all dreaming. Or, perhaps I died in the night and Tynan was right that I would be reunited with Dane today. The gravelly rocks poking into my back and the aches entwining my muscles tell me I’m probably still alive.

“No,” Dane’s voice says. “Not Heaven. Just the top of a mountain.”

“Oh.”

“Where’s... what’s his name? The other one?”

I am confused. For a moment I think Dane is talking about the silhouette next to him. I lift myself up onto one elbow for a better look. “The other one? What other one?” I see them now. It is Dane. And with him, just behind, is Tom.

“The one who tried to—”

Realization hits me. Dane. Dane is here. Dane is talking to me. He’s alive. And he’s found me.

“Dane!” I shout, and I leap up and grab him in a tight hug. He feels so real, so
here
. He whoofs out a breath as I squeeze him, but after a moment he squeezes me back. And we just hold each other, tight like that, for a full minute, before either of us speaks again.

Finally, I allow him to pull back, and we try to look at each other in the starlight.

“You didn’t come here alone,” he finally says. “Where is... what’s his name?”

He means Tynan, of course.

An unexpected sadness fills me as I say it: “Tynan is dead.”

“Oh. Too bad,” Dane says, sarcasm spilling all over the words.

Tom butts in, pulling Dane back and waving something in front of me. “Hungry? This place is hopping with rabbits. It’s like one just jumped right onto my knife.”

The sun is almost rising when we’ve run out of rabbit to eat and stories to tell each other.

Dane, of course, knew as much about Prophecies as I did, so he knew we would look for the Iron Fleet and the mountain. We moved faster in our boat than they could over land, even on horses. It was Dane I saw, the rider on the ridge, when I looked back from the boat. And he saw us on the water, even saw where we landed on the far shore. But they had to go all the way over that bridge across the sky, which put them a whole day behind us. They tracked my trail from the water’s edge but couldn’t come straight up the mountain with their horses like I did.

“We arrived as quickly as we could,” Dane says with what sounds like regret.

“But you haven’t said why you’re alive,” I mumble through sleepy lips.

“If that offends you, I can leave,” he says.

“No! Don’t be silly. I mean... I thought...”

“Tynan hit me pretty hard, but he just dazed me a bit. So, when he set the room on fire, I wasn’t totally out. What really saved me, though, was the rainstorm. The fire was so hot on the one side of the room, more of the roof collapsed. That let in the rain—you remember how hard it rained that day, don’t you?—and I was able to escape. With the horses gone, I took a while to get back to the camp. Tom volunteered immediately to help me find you. So did some others, but they’d have slowed us down and I needed them to stay and help the refu... the pioneers.”

As the eastern sky begins to turn pink, Dane hops up from where he sits.

“Oh! Almost forgot,” he blurts, running up the hill to where they had tethered their horses. In a moment he’s back, carrying my knapsack.

“Managed to grab this on my way out.”

“And you carried it all this way?”

“I figured you might want to brush your hair.” His smile is genuine and playful, like the Dane I remember from our wedding day.

I open the bag, and there are all my things. The hairbrush and my little mirror. Honey, the only one of my three dolls I couldn’t bear to give away to the children. The embroidery of my home in Southshaw. The little prayer book with the story of Reverend Timothy.

Reverend Timothy, one of the Founders. I wonder if he knew what was in the box on this mountain. I wonder if he understood the plan. I wonder if he wanted to cleanse the world.

With a deep sigh, I turn away from Dane. I slip my way down the hill into the trees and find the ancient box where I left it. I set the prayer book inside, then clip the lid shut and slip the box back into its hole. Dane and Tom watch without question until I begin filling the hole with the dirt I’d dug out exactly one day earlier. Then, they both begin kicking dirt into the hole, helping me fill it. When we’ve patted the ground smooth, I find the white stone crossed with black and shove it into the soft soil, then stand to look out at the vast land around the mountain, the land that will be our future.

“Let’s go home,” I tell them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo courtesy of: Tiffany Talbott

Peter rarely uses his Electrical Engineering degree from Berkeley these days. Instead, he writes adventure fiction, short stories, and light verse when he’s not coaching or playing soccer, camping with his boys, or brewing beer. He has a day job as a corporate social responsibility executive, running the nation’s largest workplace charitable giving campaign. In his career, he’s worked on the B-2 bomber, the first PDA (Casio “Zoomer”), and the first smart phone (Nokia 9000). A Connecticut native, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, two sons, and two cats. He can be found on the Web at www.peterdudley.com and on Twitter at @dudleypj.

Semper
and
Forsada
begin the New Eden series. For details and to join Peter’s mailing list, visit his web site at www.peterdudley.com.