Robert Liparulo - The 13 th tribe

He turned toward her. Her eyes looked into his, calming, understanding, sharing his burden.

His lips paused before touching hers, and only their breath kissed. To them, it was more intimate than full contact. It had started with their first kiss. Unsure eighteen-year-olds, wanting it, but frightened of feelings they’d never before felt so strongly. Neither had moved to close the paper-thin gap between their lips. After what had seemed like an eternity of tasting each other’s essence but nothing more, she had giggled. Spell broken, he went in, pressing his lips to hers. During their most tender moments, this was how they kissed. Now their lips touched, barely, and she parted from him, returning to her throne.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“Right back in your face.” Another youthful praxis they’d held on to. He scanned the grounds. “It scares me,” he said, “how fast it comes rushing back. The anger, frustration…”

“You did the right thing,” she said, “getting away, bringing us here.”

“What else could I do? I fell apart.” He offered her a thin smile. “I couldn’t even drive, for crying out loud.”

A hint of the concern that had defined her appearance in the bad old days touched her eyes. She parted her lips, then closed them. He knew she wanted to assure him that it wasn’t his fault, that he’d crumbled for good reason. But she knew him better than that: Regardless of the circumstances, he took responsibility for his own behavior. He never blamed outside causes, because it wasn’t what happened to you that made you the person you were, it was how you responded to those things.

But he had blamed outside causes-God, the world-and he hadn’t handled himself very well.

“A lot of people would have just kept sliding away,” Beth said. “You took steps to get better. That’s who you are, Jag. You fall-sometimes hard-but you always get up.”

“I wasn’t sure I could this time. I’m still not sure.”

“You’re up,” she said. “Maybe on wobbly legs, but you’re up. Don’t think you aren’t.”

“Like I said-” He raised his glass. “To you.” He took a swig and stood up. He stumbled into the railing, and Beth reached for him.

“Jag?”

“It’s these wobbly legs,” he said, casting a sideways glance at her. He made his knees go out and in.

She smiled and stood, pressing her side to his and wrapping her arm around him.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I got you.”

Nevaeh was in her favorite time and place: almost midnight in the corridor of skulls. She loved the way it was now, lighted only by candles. She imagined this was the way it looked when the skulls were originally stacked, before someone had added the electric lights.

The candles were spaced twenty feet apart on the stone-wall side of the corridor. The limestone above each one bore the blackened smoke stains of thousands of previous flames. Their flickering made the skulls appear to move, as though they were snapping their attention back and forth, watching for visitors or chatting with one another.

She strolled past the closed doors. Ben’s… her own… the kids’… heading toward the far end a hundred meters away. Screeeeech-click: feeling the texture of fleshless foreheads. She imagined the sights each set of now-gone eyes had witnessed, the torrent of memories each brain had stored and the emotions they sparked. A mother’s kiss. A father’s wink of approval. A spouse’s embrace. Childbirth. Love. Loss. Grief. At the time important, monumental-now gone, smoothed into insignificance by death.

She stopped at a skull that appeared more agitated than the rest, jerking around in the light of a sputtering flame. She slipped her finger into the skull’s eye socket and traced its rough edge.

“Who were you?” she whispered to it. “Did I know you? Did we laugh together? Fight?” She leaned over to glare into the sockets. “What sights do you see now? Angels and gold… demons and fire… eternal nothingness? Are you basking in heaven or burning in hell?” She hooked her finger around the ridge of bone between the sockets and pulled. It cracked. She withdrew her finger and pushed the bulging septum back into place. It gave off a chalky, dusty odor, like everything else down here, dust and earth.

A sound reached her-the scuff of a shoe on stone-and she spun toward it. The corridor appeared empty, then a shadow shifted in the gloom between the light of two candles. It was too far away for her to make out the shape, if indeed it was anything more than a trick of the flames. She reached behind her and touched the butt of the ever-present pistol nestled into her waistband at the small of her back. She stepped forward. The shadow moved, solidified into a human silhouette.

“Who-?” she said, then it moved away from her, into the radiance of a candle. “Creed?”

His eyes were wide, frightened.

“What are you doing?”

He ran, flashing through the cones of light toward the end of the corridor. A duffel bag bounced against his side.

Nevaeh bolted after him. “Creed! Stop!”

As she approached Sebastian’s room, she saw a dim light glowing inside. She glanced in as she passed: a desk lamp was on, and Sebastian lay sprawled on the floor. Picking up speed, she pulled out the gun. She had no hope of killing Creed with it, but they’d learned a long time ago that they were indeed human: Their muscles tore, their blood flowed, their organs failed-for a while. And they could hurt. Over time, each of them had felt more physical pain from lacerations, gunshots, and broken bones than entire armies combined. But only by severing the head from the body could they end their immortality; God had at least spared the world the horror of animated headless bodies and bodiless heads. Sometimes Nevaeh found that infinitely comical, at other times eternally sad.

But shooting Creed would stop him long enough to deal with him-either locking him up until he came to his senses or eliminating him altogether. That was something they’d have to vote on as a tribe.

She fired, intentionally wide-a warning shot. A skull shattered behind Creed. Bits of it pinged off the opposite wall. Other skulls tumbled to the floor.

Creed zagged left, then right, continuing toward the dark end, almost there.

Nevaeh stopped and braced herself, steadying the gun in two hands. Creed darted through the last of the light, and she fired twice. He sailed into the shadows, throwing back a guttural scream. She heard him tumble. She shot into the darkness, low, where she thought he’d fallen. The bullets sparked on the stone floor.

Staying close to the wall, she walked quickly, ready to shoot again. She imagined him lying there, bleeding, but capable of lifting his own firearm, waiting for the chance to put a couple slugs into her.

Doors crashed opened behind her.

“What is it?” Ben yelled.

“Shots,” Phin said.

Other voices joined in-Elias’s, the children’s.

“Stay back!” Nevaeh yelled. She stopped in the semi-gloom between two candles and squatted, squinting toward the blackness, expecting starbursts from Creed’s weapon. She yelled, “It’s Creed! He’s running

… did something to Sebastian.”

Footsteps pounded behind her. Without looking, she knew it was Elias and Phin; neither knew the meaning of caution.

She fired at nothing she could see, hoping to hit Creed again or at least draw his fire, giving her a target. Elias and Phin tromped to a stop beside her. They raised handguns and began blasting away at the darkness. The noise was deafening, a long series of explosions like grenades igniting each other. Shell casings tinked over the floor, ejected from Phin’s semiauto. Nevaeh held her pistol, ready to shoot at Creed’s return fire, but it never came.