Circles in the Dust (6 page)

chapter 6

David regained consciousness after what felt like an eternity of darkness, broken only by shadowy dreams and nameless emotions. He cracked his eyes, peeked out at the world, and slammed them shut again. It was still morning and the sun still shone bright. He rolled onto his side and instantly regretted it as the world spun and nausea grabbed hold of him. A painful beat pounded incessantly against the walls of his skull and he was so cold it hurt. Chills racked his feeble body despite his thick wool coat; though hanging open and soaked through, it was bound to disappoint. He focused on the darkness behind his eyes and lay there, willing the cold and the pain and the nausea to leave him alone. He was going to die. This was how it would end, lying crumpled and broken on the damp bank of a small river in the middle of an empty forest at the center of a vacant world.

             
“Hello?” came a voice drifting through the trees.

             
Even my mind has snapped and abandoned me, David thought. He heard the word, but how? There was no one to speak beside himself. Perhaps his words had circled the world to return to him, as there were no other words to crowd the Earthly airwaves. Travel had distorted his words on their journey it would seem, raised them to a higher pitch, softened them, stripped the desperation from their tone. Made them… feminine?

             
“Is anyone there?” his echo questioned. He thought for a moment about responding, wishing to have one last conversation. Even if it was with himself. He was forming a response when it struck him just what he would be doing, and he realized the last thing he wanted was to spend his final moments of life without the company of his own sanity, even if it meant he would never utter another word. As the last human being, he felt a sense of duty to uphold the honor of his race, to go out with pride. As much as could be expected. He also wanted to be fully aware of his condition as it all ended; he would not lie his way to death’s door.

             
“Hellooo…?”

             
His subconscious was beginning to get on his nerves. He couldn’t remember being so calm when calling out for someone the first time; his voice must have found peace on its quest, somewhere in the Orient perhaps. He heard a rustling from the forest in front of his face. He imagined a deer walking through the brush, antlers tall, pointed, proud; he wished he could have one last taste of meat before it all ended; he imagined he would never taste anything again. He was retreating from the world, returning to the safety of his mind, though his thoughts would eventually flicker, dim, and be snuffed out.

             
“Hello?” his voice resounded more forcefully, sounding closer and louder than it had before. David finally re-opened his eyes, frustrated at having his benediction soiled for the last time. He was forming the words he would hurl at himself, some phrase that would get him to shut up and leave himself alone. The sun singed his eyes and forced him to squint while he prepared his offensive, when something happened that stopped the words dead in his throat. His narrow vision had fallen on a group of trees huddled together, their trunks bathed in each other’s shadows. As his gaze rested on that spot, the saplings clustered around the stand of trees began to tremble and then were thrust aside, and out stepped a girl.

             
His subconscious really was feminine. She was tall and thin, though her long gray coat, which seemed to be held together by a menagerie of patches and generous amounts of dirt, tried its hardest to hide her frame. Dirty blonde hair spilled down to her hips, clinging to her in the damp morning, framing her pale face. Her face carried a concerned look as she pushed through the trees, deepening further as her eyes came to rest on him. David watched, frozen, as she advanced toward him, suddenly unable to hear her voice, unable to move, to breathe. He felt like he was underwater, his vision blurring and this girl’s words coming to him muted and alien.

             
She stopped a few feet from him, crouching down and looking at him as though he were some kind of interesting specimen she had been searching for. David was in utter shock, wondering if perhaps he had been wrong, if there were a heaven after all, where the landscape was the same but one was granted a lovely girl for company. He would have chopped off his dearest limb for this to happen. Maybe he already had and had bled to death.

             
He had to be dead. This was simply impossible. He had scoured the land for days at a time without pausing to eat or sleep, spent over a year in a focused hunt for any other warm body to reassure him he was not the only one left in the world. He had even said a few prayers despite his unbelief in a god who would let his children annihilate each other without intervention. Nothing. Now, on his deathbed and glad to be there, someone shows up and finds him? He opened his eyes wider, raising his head to see her better. He blinked several times, his mouth hanging open, wanting to say something but unable to even fully comprehend the reality of this. She inched closer, her words suddenly becoming decipherable, breaking through his confusion.

             
“Are you okay…?” she asked, one hand reaching out to him, the other held back by her hip. Maybe she was real; he was sure he had never said that, at least not recently. He tried to convert his thoughts to words but achieved only a raspy grumble, causing her to retreat and pull a pistol from its holster.

             
David pushed himself up on his elbows, which took all of his strength, and reached his hand out to her. She eyed it warily.

“Are you all right?” Her voice sounded tight and worried, her eyes continuing to dart away from him back into the trees.

David wanted to reach out and touch her, to know that she was real, but she backed away as he tried to crawl closer and closer. He sat up and managed to fall into a sitting position, arms spread out behind him for support. His head spun but he refused to lose consciousness. She watched while he struggled. He locked his eyes on hers and concentrated on forming words.

“Ah—” he managed before descending into a coughing fit, his throat like leather. He raised his hand and pointed at the river, losing his balance and falling over in the process. She watched him, face twisted in confusion, while he repeated the gesture from the ground.

“Water?” she finally asked. He nodded his head vigorously, stopping himself when black spots threatened his vision. She cocked her head for a moment, narrowing her eyes as she looked at him. He wondered if she were thinking about shooting him. Apparently deciding otherwise, she let her weapon fall to her side momentarily as she twisted around. He saw that she had a large hiker’s pack on her back. She pulled a large steel bottle from it and held it to her lips, gulping down what was left before walking over to the river to fill it. David watched her until she passed him to kneel by the water’s edge, giving him a wide berth. When she reappeared she held the bottle to him at arm’s length.

As if he could put up any kind of a fight.

He grabbed the bottle and pressed it to his lips, sucking in the cool liquid. He choked and had to stop after downing half its contents, gasping for breath and slamming the bottle on the ground with a hollow thud. Breathing hard, he looked over at the girl who was standing in the same place as before, her small, sleek weapon still aimed at his chest, eyes wide, mouth drawn tight. He took another draught from the bottle and leaned back on splayed hands.

“I—” he began, not knowing what to say. He had searched so long for another human being, and now that he had a beautiful girl in front of him he could not think of a single thing to say. His mind stuttered, still recovering from its near death minutes earlier. “Hello,” he finally managed.

“You can talk,” she replied.

“Yes,” David said, still flabbergasted.

“Are you all right?”

             
“I don’t know.” David paused and thought for a moment. “Am I dead?”

             
“What?” she said.

             
“I mean, are you… an angel, or something?”

             
The girl laughed and shook her head. “That’s very flattering but I think you’re alive.”

             
“Hmm.” David looked down. Returning her gaze, he went on. “I thought I was the only one left.”

             
“Only what?” the girl questioned.

             
“Person. I haven’t seen anyone else for…” He had to think about how long it had been; time had lost all meaning for him, “… almost two years now, I think.”

             
“Really?” She said this as if it weren’t really surprising. He looked up at her, curiosity building behind the thin wall of patience in his mind, threatening to bull over his better judgment. “There’s no one else out here?”

             
“Where did you come from…?” he almost whispered, wondering aloud. His voice began to rise. “I thought I was about to be the end of the human race. I was lying there, thinking this was the end, but apparently I was wrong,” he said, as much to himself as to her.

             
“I suppose you w-”

             
“Where did you come from?” he interrupted. The dam was breaking.

             
“Where did I come from?” she repeated. “I was just out here like you, looking for other people.”

             
“So you live out here somewhere…?” he prodded, gesturing at the woods.

             
“Not exactly.” She hesitated. “I came out here on my way to the city. I thought maybe I could find some other survivors there, or maybe further on. I heard there might be some on the other side. There weren’t though. At least not any that I could find.”

             
David’s mind was reeling. His thoughts whirled in a cloud of confusion, though there was some relief in knowing that he wasn’t the only one left after all. There was a girl standing in front of him, a beautiful, blonde girl, on the same quest as he, looking for people, chasing down something she heard.

Something she heard.

“There are others?” he blurted out.

“I haven’t found anyone but you actually.”

“But, I mean, someone told you there might be others out here. So wherever you came from, there are more people?” His eyes were wide and his mouth had curved itself into a manic grin.

“Well, there’s a few of us, yeah,” she said haltingly, taking a step back.

Joy bloomed in David’s chest, sending warmth coursing through his veins. There were others. He wasn’t alone. Suddenly his near fatal depression seemed silly. There was a group of people out there; he could find them, live with them, start a new life with them. He didn’t have to be alone anymore. He looked back at her to say something else and realized that she had continued to back away from him. Why was she doing that? Didn’t she know how long he had wandered like a ghost through this god-forsaken place, waiting to die, wanting his pointless existence to end? Now he had found her, or she had found him, and his life had a purpose again. He realized in an instant that he had to go with her, had to find these other people. He couldn’t go back to being alone.

First he had to say something to keep her here. “I just can’t believe it,” was all that came out.

She nodded, looking down at him. Her stomach rumbled and her empty hand flew to it.

“Are you hungry?” he asked, knowing the answer. “I have food at my camp.”

“No, that’s all right,” the girl began before her stomach resumed its howls. “I have food,” she said, indicating her bag, though David had no intention of taking no for an answer.

“Let me feed you. You saved me. If you hadn’t found me here, I was just going to lie there until I…” David trailed off. It was harder to think of death now.

At the end of another gastral chorus, the girl relented with a mumbled, “All right.” Though as she explained, “I didn’t really do anything though.”

“But you did,” David responded with enthusiasm. He tried to stand and faltered as the world spun, catching himself on his hands and knees, slowly rising, the girl rigid in her place a few feet away, watching him, her gun still held with an iron grip.

“Don’t try anything though,” she said when he was finally on his feet, eying him from head to toe.

“Yeah, right.” He chuckled, standing up cautiously. He was bubbly with excitement, fatigue forgotten. He looked down at himself, worried for the first time in yeas what he looked like, and was shocked to see how thin he had become, standing there like an old skeleton. He wrapped his coat around his thin frame, reminded with a damp slap by his collar that he had been lying on the very wet ground, trying to hide himself from this girl who looked as if she actually ate, rather than wandered in a starved daze all day. It had been so long, a lifetime, it felt, since he had seen a member of the opposite sex.

He started off into the woods in the direction of his cabin, looking back after a second to see if the girl was actually following him. She looked down at her stomach, looked back toward the forest the way she had come, and hesitantly followed in his tracks.