- Through the Deadlands, Part One: A Lethal Journey
- Through the Deadlands, Part II: The Mission of an Archer
By Rebecka Jones, Staff Writer
It’s over for us.
All those days scavenging for food and water in the city, the late nights spent making sure my sister and I were safe inside the barn, and the tiring journeys I took to find us a new home were all for nothing. We even pushed our bodies to the brink of unconsciousness as we ran away from the mob of radiotoxic zombies.
Now I’m standing before death. He’s not a shadow hiding beneath a cloak and holding a scythe, but a woman with ivory skin and jet-black hair falling past her shoulders, hooded chestnut eyes and pink lips downturned into a scowl, clothed in a frayed white tank top and dirtied cargo pants. Death is a human with defined arms pulling back a bowstring, fingers grazing the nock of an arrow that is pointed directly at my nose.
Wait…a human?
The heaviness in my chest vanishes as I look into the woman’s alluring eyes—no yellowness or throbbing veins in the whites of her eyes, no red patches on her glowing skin besides the marks of faded scars, and I detect no erratic movements from her body. She is still, upright, and fully prepared to kill me.
Maybe a zombie might’ve been the better way to go.
“Jayden?” My sister’s voice is a squeak behind me. I nearly jump at the reminder she is right here, about to face the same fate as I.
The woman seems to discover Sylvia’s presence, too. Moonlight fills her eyes, her lips parting and shoulders dropping ever so slightly. The arrow is suddenly pointed at my feet, but the bowstring is no longer drawn back as the woman lowers her arms. Her head tilts to the side, as if she were taking in our presence and coming to the same conclusion: other humans, other … survivors.
“Hi,” I blurt out because I have no idea what to say. What does one say when they find out they’re not the only humans still alive after spending forever alone on this wasteland that used to be called Earth? Maybe something more dignifying than a simple hi that sounded as if my vocal cords were broken, but that is what my mouth goes with. Now I want to throw myself back into the barn and let the zombies eat away at my pathetic brain.
The woman’s eyes find mine again. They narrow into slits as she takes a step closer. My heart starts pounding in my throat as she lifts her hand. I prepare for her to do something—slap me, punch me, stab the arrow into my eye—because I’m a fool. A fool for not protecting Sylvia well enough, for leaving her in an abandoned barn for days at a time when those horrible creatures could’ve attacked her as they did to us tonight, and for bringing her out into this forsaken, toxic forest where we are just as vulnerable.
However, the woman surprises me by pinching my chin between her thumb and pointer finger and moving my head left to right. Her fingers are warm and rough, but they send shivers through my entire body. Why I allow her to examine me as if I am a lamb to the slaughter, I have no idea. All I know is that I cannot afford to make another stupid move and ruin my chance of befriending another survivor…one who could help us find a home.
Sylvia, on the other hand, lets her curiosity win. I hear her feet shuffle as she steps out from behind me. “Who are you?”
The woman breaks contact with me, and my lungs can finally retrieve air again as her fingers fall away from my face. Of course, now my body is rigid as the woman approaches my sister, crouching down to her level. That isn’t very far, considering Sylvia has grown several feet in the last year or so. I remember when she wouldn’t grow past my belly button, but now she’s to my chin.
I clear my head from the memory, watching as the woman examines Sylvia next, though she doesn’t use the same tactics as she did on me. Rather, she just stares at the little girl, at her matted brown curls and fraying lavender sweater. Then her lips do something I didn’t think was possible after knowing this terrifying woman for two minutes: they turn upward, showing dimples on her rosy cheeks.
She then reaches into the top pocket of her cargo pants. My heart drops, and my feet move to insert myself between the two of them until the woman pulls out crinkled plastic. With the smile still planted on her face, she hands the unidentifiable object to my sister. The moonlight reflects off the plastic, revealing the Hershey’s logo. My breathing returns to normal.
“Chocolate?” Sylvia gasps, her fingers curling around the wrapper, pulling it off to uncover the brown bar underneath. “Where did you find this?”
Instead of responding, the woman stands up and lowers the top half of her body so that her torso is parallel to the ground and her bow and arrow are reaching for the stars. Is she…bowing? Sylvia widens her eyes, her joy transforming into a brief moment of confusion before she shrugs and bites into the chocolate bar, a little satisfied sigh escaping her.
I’m not so easily convinced, so I give the woman a look I hope is somewhat threatening and reiterate my sister’s first question. “Who are you?”
Those dark eyes find mine, her lips now pressed into a thin line. Don’t like me, got it. She also responds to me with silence, but this time she waves her arm towards her torso in a beckoning gesture before turning around and walking towards the shadows. The trees swallow her up, the only sign of her presence being the fading crackling of leaves as she walks further and further away from us.
I don’t know who this woman thinks she is, but I am not following her into the dark forest after she pointed an arrow at my face and gave my sister a suspicious bar of chocolate. I’m about to make my thoughts known to the dead trees until Sylvia starts following the woman’s path into the woods.
“Sylvia, what do you think—” I grab for my sister’s wrist, but she jumps to the side and causes me to almost stumble into decaying grass.
“If you think I’m not going to see what she’s up to,” my sister speaks through a mouthful of chocolate, some of it painted on her lips. “You’re wrong.”
“We don’t know her!” I keep my voice low so the woman can’t hear, but clear and flat enough for Sylvia to understand my distaste for her idea.
My sister narrows her eyes. “She’s the only other survivor out here besides us,” Sylvia explains to me slowly, like I’m not almost a decade older. “I trust her over the zombies at the barn.” With that, she turns away from me and heads for the trees. She doesn’t wait for me to object.
“If she turns out to be a maniac, you’re in big trouble,” I grumble, forcing my shaking legs into the shadows of the dead forest.
Maybe a maniacal killer doesn’t start a cozy fire for you and hand you a blanket to curl up in while she warms up canned soup for you, but the silence is starting to freak me out.
The woman still hasn’t said a word. She’s been heating up our food over the fire in complete silence. No introduction. No explanation of why she’s helping us. Not even a little grunt of acknowledgement that we’re there. At this point, I can’t tell if she’s just shy or doesn’t speak our language. She did look like someone from another country…perhaps somewhere in Asia.
The only sound in this dark clearing is the faint crackling of the fire and the bubbling liquid from boiling soup. I hear the wind whistling in my ear and my heart thumping against my ribcage. My sister is also watching the woman, her lips slightly parted, and her head tilted to the side. Her breaths escape her slowly now compared to when we ran into the woman, and her shoulders aren’t as tense.
I’m still on edge. I don’t know what to expect from this woman who nearly shot an arrow through my head and is now making us food. What’s next? Is she going to threaten to break my arm, then hand me a lollipop?
The silence becomes too loud, so I force myself to break it. I get up from the warmth of the blanket and walk up to the fire, the cold air pressing against my back. “It’s time you start answering our questions.” When the woman doesn’t break her gaze from the soup, I keep pressing. “For all I know, you could be planning to kill us while we sleep.”
I might’ve been laying it on a bit thick, but I don’t regret it after finally getting a reaction out of her. A sigh escapes her mouth as steam rises from the low temperature. She turns her gaze on me, those dark eyes wandering over my face. Her brows furrow, but the reflection in her eyes tells me she isn’t angry.
She suddenly raises a hand, tapping her throat with her index finger and shaking her head. My head is clouded with confusion for a moment before it clicks, and I feel like an idiot once more, a very…inconsiderate idiot.
“You can’t speak,” I answer in a hushed voice. When the woman nods, my chest fills with heaviness. I can’t stop my mind from wandering to how lonely that must be for her, especially being trapped in this horrible place. She’s all by herself trying to navigate from wasteland to wasteland, unable to communicate with anyone or even herself. She’s stuck in silence, all the thoughts kept inside her head.
“Wait, you can’t talk?” My sister’s voice breaks in, suddenly right beside me. Her eyes are two big orbs. “Are you mute?”
“Sylvia, that’s not how—” I begin, but the woman raises a hand. I shut up immediately when she waves the comment away, then she looks at my sister and nods.
I almost want to throttle my sister when she throws her arms around the woman’s middle and pulls her into a hug. A look of shock flashes across the woman’s wide eyes, but then she’s melting into the embrace, and I decide to remain quiet. This seems like a good moment for silence, less awkward than the silence from a few minutes ago.
“I’m so sorry.” Sylvia’s voice is muffled against the woman’s tank top, but I can still hear it shake and crack. “I wish you could talk. I bet you’d have a beautiful voice.”
A smile forms on the woman’s lips, and she pulls away from my sister. She puts her fingertips to her chin, then moves her hand forward and downward towards Sylvia. I don’t need to be an ASL expert to know that means thank you.
Sylvia and the woman seem to exchange a friendly gaze after that, so I figure I should express my sympathy as well. “I’m also sorry,” I say softly. “That must be hard for you.”
The woman turns to me and gives me a slight nod, which is all I can ask for at the moment. She seems to have found it easier to warm up to my sister than to me. Understandable. People never really warmed up to me easily; I guess I have that effect on everyone.
“Can we know your name?” my sister asks. “I’m Sylvia, and this is my brother Jayden.”
I’m not sure how we’re even supposed to communicate with this woman. If she can’t tell us her name, I don’t think we’re getting any answers about a safe place to stay. My chest aches at the thought. I had been searching all these months—even left my sister behind at the barn—to look for a home on this lonely, decaying earth. Actually coming across another survivor is more than an accomplishment—it’s our only hope of survival. But how can this woman help us if we can’t communicate?
The woman seems to read the look on my face because she grabs a fallen tree branch and uses it as a pencil on the dirt. She writes each letter delicately, tracing the curves of what seems to be an “m” and an “r” and the line of an “i”. When she finally steps away, my sister and I both inspect the word written in the black dirt, lit up by the crackling fire.
“Me…ray?” My sister attempts, her head tilted. A series of short gasps escape the woman’s mouth, and I look to see her slightly doubled over with her mouth open in a smile. Sylvia’s pink cheeks turn a shade of magenta. “What’s funny? Did I say it wrong?”
I stare at the letters again. I’d never seen a name so beautifully spelled. “Mirae.”
She looks at me and nods, the smile fading but the light in her eyes still bright. It may be no big deal to learn someone’s name, but it feels like a milestone for Sylvia and me, and especially for this woman. We’ve gone many months without seeing life out here, not counting the plants that have survived the explosion, so finally having another name to talk to is refreshing. I wonder if the same goes for her—if she had been searching for survivors all alone. Most of all, I wonder how important it must be for her to communicate with people who are trying to understand her. Did she ever have someone willing to be patient and learn how she communicates?
I know I want to try, so I throw out another question that’s been nagging me since Mirae brought us out here. “Do you know of a better place we can go? We were run out of our shelter by those things…” I trail off for a moment, remembering those bulging eyes full of hunger and bony fingers reaching out for me, and I shudder. “We’re hoping another survivor could help us. Maybe you’re looking for the same?”
Mirae’s eyes glaze over, as if she were deep in thought, trying to figure out a way to talk to us. Then she looks back to the dirt and begins writing—no, drawing—some sort of image. I notice a stick figure standing beside a large box with a circle coming out of the top. An arrow starts at the circle and goes upwards towards another circle surrounded by stars. After a long moment of me staring at the drawing, Mirae writes “grandfather” above the stick figure, then labels the box as “space station” and the circle with the stars as “Mars”.
“Hold on,” I start, the gears turning in my head. “Are you explaining that you have a grandfather who is at this space station, which seems to be sending these circular pods up to Mars?” The idea sounds ridiculous, but I don’t know how else to comprehend the picture. It would be impossible to have the technology to travel into space, especially after the nuclear explosion fried the wires and engines of every vehicle we’ve come by. Also, when did scientists figure out how to travel to Mars? I’d only heard from the news that they were sending rovers to space to see if the planet was inhabitable, but never that they began sending actual people to Mars. Something wasn’t adding up here.
Mirae nods, and I almost want to laugh. But she starts drawing another circle, this one which has curvy shapes inside it. She then draws an “X” over it and makes an arrow from it to Mars.
“That’s Earth!” Sylvia chimes in. “You put an ‘X’ on it because we can’t live here anymore, so we have to go to Mars.”
The idea still appalls me, but I can’t stop my heart from dropping to my stomach and filling me with queasiness. I know the explosion had destroyed most of the Earth and left it in a dark, toxic winter, but was there really no way to restore it so we could at least breathe the air again? Was it so bad that humanity had to colonize a planet it once thought was uninhabitable?
“How do you expect us to even use these pods and get to Mars?” I ask. “The explosion destroyed all the engines, so anything motorized won’t start.”
Mirae shakes her head. “Protected from blasts,” she writes in the dirt. Then she draws a bigger circle around the pod, labeling it “copper shield”.
“Copper protects the engine?” I question, to which Mirae nods. Her confirmation doesn’t ease the anxiety prickling in my veins. “Do you really believe going to Mars is our best option?” Mirae nods a third time, but I’m still not convinced. “How do we know if there are people already on Mars? This could all be fake.”
Mirae sighs and taps her chest. Sylvia raises an eyebrow. “You…?” The woman shakes her head and palms the left side of her chest. “Oh, your heart!” Sylvia exclaims.
“You just know with your heart,” I say with a loud breath, which earns me a look from Mirae. She looks at the dirt again and circles the stick figure. “I get it, you trust your grandfather. That’s completely reasonable, but I still don’t believe this. There has to be a safer place for people to go.”
“Jayden,” Sylvia starts, her round eyes narrowed in sincerity. “We’ve been searching for survivors for months, and now we’ve finally bumped into one. There might not be anybody else who could help us as she can, so Mirae is the only person we can trust right now.” She looks at the woman, and a heavy look fills my sister’s eyes. “I choose to go to an unknown place rather than stay here a second longer.”
“We need to find more oxygen tanks,” I blurt. “We’ve been exposed to the toxic air for too long. It’s messing with our senses.”
“No!” My sister shouts, and I freeze. “Those masks are useless! Mirae hasn’t been wearing one, and she isn’t a zombie.”
“We can’t trust her!” I counter. “She could be leading us to our deaths. You know better than to trust strangers, Sylvia.”
My sister huffs at me. “She’s not a stranger. She’s another survivor like us, trying to find a way out of here. I’ll follow her anywhere.”
I open my mouth to respond, but I quickly press my lips together because I know it’s hopeless. When Sylvia is set on something, arguing with her is like trying to move a boulder—it won’t budge. She’s been that way since the day she was born, always set on what toy she’s playing with or what food she won’t be eating. It may seem like simple stubbornness, but I know my sister has a reason for being that way—she truly believes in what she’s doing. She never does things half-heartedly.
If she really believes Mirae might be our only hope in getting out of here, even if that means finding a suspicious space station that is supposedly going to have odd-shaped space pods that are going to take us to a potentially inhabitable Mars, then I have no other choice but to trust her. Heck, there never was any other option besides wearing oxygen masks and traveling for days to find a shelter and pray I won’t run into another zombie.
If this mission to Mars is what will save us, then all those days I’ve spent journeying through decaying forests and collapsing cities were for nothing. I guess it’s better to live with that failure than to keep hoping for a better solution that may never come, even if I hate the thought of putting my trust in a woman who almost speared me the second we met.
With all the energy left in me, I sigh. “Fine, but how are we supposed to find this space station?”
Mirae points to something over my shoulder, and I turn and look past the colony of soot-infested trees and towards the dark peak rising above the haze. My throat tightens when I look at her again, then back to the landmark in the distance, confirming that she is pointing at what I think she’s pointing at.
“The mountain?” I rasp, nearly out of breath just by looking at it. “Is that where the space station is?”
Mirae shakes her head, then writes in the dirt. “Outlook.”
“You think we’ll see it from the mountain?” When she nods, I feel like I can’t breathe. This is really going to happen. I’ve gone through so many journeys trying to get to that mountain, yet I didn’t have the ability to climb it because of my oxygen tank and partly because I was afraid. Now we’re actually going, and I’m not wearing the mask…but I am still afraid.
I don’t even know if we’re going to survive the trek. What if the mountain is too rocky for us to climb and we fall? What if the haze gets to us and we are driven to insanity? Anything could happen, but that doesn’t stop us from rising up early the next morning and beginning our journey.
A journey that could cost us our lives.
