Ben Bedard - The World Without Flags

I am grateful for the run. I am grateful to be alive.

I run until the evening gets too dark and then I continue south and west on a road I find, running by the light of the moon. If I see lights, I tell myself, I will go back to the woods and hide. But there is no light, there are no pursuers, or if there are, they are not here. I continue running in the opalescent light.

In the calm of the road, when I don’t have to keep constant awareness of my surroundings or get knocked down by a branch or tripped up by a fallen tree, my thoughts find root in me. I begin to dream as I run. Images, faces, conversations, they brush by me or pass through me. Anxieties come fearfully , stopping my heart, and then blur by me. Nothing is constant.

I feel like I’m running out of my own life. Running straight into a strange land where I am newborn, empty of history, ambivalent as the night sky.

There is the rhythm of my feet. The pounding earth under me. Sometimes it is not I who moves, but the earth itself, rising up to hit my feet and then bouncing away from me. We are two beings caught together, I realize. We need each other.

I see them dead. Burned and left on a heap of other bodies. Eric and Pest both.

I see them alive. Sheltering together under the church.

“You can make it,” my father tells me. I turn to him as I run, but his face begins to break apart as if he was smoke and fog. My mother sings to me. I can feel Lucia’s hands in my hair, braiding them, speaking to me in a language I am only beginning to understand. My mother sings. I see Artemis climb from the wood pile where they burned her. Her hair is smoking, but she brushes the ashes off her dress and then bounds over to me and hugs me. I smell her burning hair. I see Eric, his face pressed into the corner, in his cell under the church. He is dark and covered with filth. Anxiety reaches out to me sometimes with its skeletal hands. The coldness tells me that if I don’t run, if I don’t reach them, they’ll die. They need my help. They need me.

But when my heart cries out in pain, I know it is I who need them.

I reach familiar roads. Houses I’ve seen before, as if in a dream. I see myself in the landscape now, hiding with Pest. I see myself hiding, slouching, pulling Eric along with me. I follow roads and paths without realizing what I’m doing. I’m too exhausted to realize what I am doing. I am just moving, just running, just putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes they are with me. Mostly I am alone, in a blurring world.

Then I feel a spinning emptiness. I’ve fallen.

I get up and the world sways.

Then I smell grass and I feel leaves in my hair.

My breathing seems so loud.

I think I am crying.

A noise awakens me, a rumbling roar, a sound I have not heard for many years. An engine. I blink awake into a cutting sunlight. My whole body throbs with exhaustion and pain. I sit up, groaning.

Below me, from the ridge where I collapsed the night before, I see Cairo and the broken asphalt road leading up to it. At first, I see nothing, and then I rub my eyes. Soldiers and trucks are moving toward the town. The roaring sound that woke me up is not just trucks. It’s a tank, rolling slowly up the hill toward the town, its diesel engine howling and grinding like a furious beast, its heavy steel tracks tearing up the earth as it moves toward the flimsy gate. The whole column moves slowly toward Cairo.

I stand up, blinking in the morning sun, shading my eyes, trying to see into the town, to the church. From this distance, I can’t see a thing.

Suddenly the world explodes with a boom so loud that I stumble back and fall on my backside in surprise. The tank just blew the steel gates inward with one shattering blast! Smoke curls up from the massive barrel of the tank. The soldiers cheer and I notice in the back, for the first time, an olive-colored jeep. A flag flutters from the back of the jeep: red and white stripes with one star in the corner: the flag of the Stars.

But that’s not what I’m interested in. In the jeep, I see three people. I recognize one of them from where I sit. It’s Randy. He’s come to destroy the town that he himself infected. I shudder when I realize that I am the only one who knows his plan, knows he is the one who has been spreading the Worm. He’s come for me. I stand up and peer into the town as the soldiers begin to run through the destroyed gates. I know they all think they are doing what’s best for everyone, eradicating the infected.

If Eric and Pest are still in that town, the Stars will treat them just like anyone else. Afterward, they will burn the town to the ground to be certain they have disinfected the whole place. Looking down at the tiny soldiers pouring into Cairo, I know they think they are protecting people. They don’t realize they’re puppets in Randy’s perverted scheme. I study the town, what little I can see of it through the trees, hoping to see some sign of Eric and Pest. I have to get to them. I have to find a way to get them free. I’ve got no resources, no guns, not even a flask of water.

I cross my arms and think furiously about what I need to do.

That’s when I feel cold steel pressed into my back.

“You move and you’ll be dead before you hit the ground.”

I freeze in place and instinctively raise my hands above my head.

“Turn around,” the voice commands.

If they kill me, no one will ever know that Randy was just using the war between the Stars and the Gearheads to get what he wanted. If they kill me, Eric will not survive. I feel like my heart has transformed to coal. Slowly I turn, keeping my hands high up in the air to keep him from shooting. When I see who it is, I gasp.

“Sydney!” I cry.

“Keep your hands up!” he growls. His eyes narrow at me and his grip on his pistol tightens.

I keep my hands up, but look behind him. “Is Boston here too?” I ask.

Sydney’s eyes flash darkly. “Nevermind where he is,” he says. Suddenly, there’s the crack and rattle of machine gun fire from the town. I wince, but Sydney keeps his eye focused on me. “We should’ve killed you when we had the chance. Now the whole town is infected because of you.”

“You don’t understand,” I say in a low, calm voice. I need to get through to him, but I can tell by the way he looks at me that I have very little chance of that.

“I think I do,” Sydney says. He jerks his gun at me. “Turn around. Put your hands behind your back.”

I don’t dare say anything, I’ve lied to him too much in the past. At first, when I turned around and saw Sydney, I thought I was lucky, but now I think I’m very unlucky. He hates me, and Boston probably does too. There’s no way he’s going to believe anything I say. He’s going to need more than words, he’s going to need some kind of evidence, some kind of proof of Randy’s crime. I let him tie my hands behind my back without struggling, fearing that if I say anything, he might just knock me out with his gun rather than listen. Or worse.

When I’m tied up, Sydney tugs at my arm and starts to lead me away down into the forest. I look back over my shoulder, my heart throbbing, hoping to see some sign in the streets of Cairo that Eric and Pest are alive. I can’t see anything through the trees.

Sydney shoves me forward. “Come on, move it.” We move forward into the shadow of the forest. I turn away from Cairo. My mind races. I have to think, have to focus on my problem. Eric needs me.

“This isn’t what you think,” I say to Sydney as we move through the forest.