Chapter 14 Chapter 12 Failure

"It's impossible! You're mistaken! There's a malfunction! That's impossible!" I stared into the distance, distraught at first in disbelief, then immediately in horror. Yesterday morning, I ate the last of my moldy Tweedy biscuits for breakfast.Yesterday afternoon I found the pair of peaks and turned north again.Melanie had given all the information, and she assured that it was the last piece of terrain that could be found.This news made me ecstatic, almost hysterical.Last night, I drank the last drop of water, and that was the fourth day. I have only hazy memories of this morning: blinding sun, hopeless hope.Time is running out, I have searched for the last landmark of the skyline, and the fear is growing.I couldn't see it fitting anywhere, and along that long flat line was the mesa with two blunt peaks rising like sentinels at either end.Such a thing would take up place, with mountains facing east and north rising up and down, and I don't see how flat mesas would obscure anything between them.

At noon—the sun was still in the east, it seemed to me—I stopped to rest.I feel so weak and it scares me.Every muscle in my body started to ache, but not from walking.I can feel the pain of straining and the pain of sleeping on the ground, which is different from this new pain.My body was on the verge of dying, the pain was caused by my muscles fighting the torture.I know I can't last much longer. I turned my back to the east so that for a few moments the sun would not be on my face. That's when I saw it, the long, flat line of the mesa, clearly connected to the peak.There it is, so far to the west, a mirage hovers over the desert like floating clouds, and the mountains shimmer above the unreal landscape, and every step we take is going in the opposite direction.The last marker is farther west than we have traveled all the way.

"Impossible." I said softly again. Melanie was frozen in my mind, not thinking, blank, desperately struggling to reject this new insight.I waited for her, my eyes scanning the undeniably familiar shapes, until I fell to my knees in the agony of her acceptance.Her violent, silent sense of failure echoed in my head, adding another layer of sadness to my pain.My breathing became rapid -- a sob without sound or tears.The sun climbed up my back, and its heat deeply soaked every strand of my black hair. As I regained my self-control, the shadow became a small circle beneath my body.It took a lot of effort to get back on my feet.Pointy little grit stuck in the skin of my legs and I didn't rub them off.Filled with rage, I gazed for a long time at the mesa, looming in the western sky and laughing at me.

Finally, not really sure why I was doing this, I started moving forward.All I know is this: I am going, no one else.Melanie was so small in my mind—the pain wrapped herself in like a membrane, and there was no help from her. I dragged my heavy steps, stepping slowly on the soft sand, making a creaking sound. "He's just a deceiving old monster after all," I muttered to myself.A strange fear surged in my heart, and a hoarse cough came from my throat.The low, hoarse coughing kept coming, but I didn't realize I was laughing until the moment I felt like weeping. "There's never been anything here!" I gasped, my body shaking hysterically.I staggered forward, as if drunk, leaving a string of crooked footprints behind me.

No.Melanie came out of her grief and defended the beliefs she still held that I misunderstood, or something like that, my fault. I laughed at her loudly now, but the laughter was sucked away by the scorching wind. Wait, wait, she thought, trying to draw my attention away from the joke, you don't think I mean, you think maybe they tried too? I was taken aback by the horror of her surprise, and froze with a half-smile.Before I could take another breath, all the dark humor was gone.My eyes instinctively scanned the empty desert, looking for some evidence that I wasn't the first person to waste my life like this.The desert plain was vast and endless, but I couldn't stop frantically searching for the wreckage.

No, of course not.Melanie was already consoling herself, Jared was too smart, he would never come out unprepared like us, he would never put Jamie in danger. I'm sure you're right, I told her, I hope to believe it as much as she does, and I'm sure no one in the entire universe could be that stupid.Besides, he probably never came to see it, he probably didn't figure it out at all, and hopefully you didn't either. I didn't stop on my feet, I hardly realized I was walking.In the face of the vast distances ahead, that hardly meant much.And even if I were miraculously transported to the foot of the mesas, what next?I'm absolutely sure there's nothing there, no one will be waiting for us at the mesa.

"We're going to die," I said.I'm amazed that there isn't a hint of fear in my anxious voice, it's just a simple fact like everything else.The sun is hot, the desert is dry, and we will die. Yes.She's calmed down now too, which makes death more acceptable than all our efforts to be guided by madness. "Doesn't that bother you?" She thought for a while before answering. At least I died trying, and I won.I would never betray them, I would never hurt them, I went out of my way to find them.I try to keep my promises and I die for them. I counted myself nineteen steps before I could answer.Nineteen slow, futile steps crunched across the desert.

"So why did I die?" I wondered, the tingle returning to my dehydrated tear ducts. "So, I guess it's because I'm lost, right? Is that the reason?" I counted thirty-four crunches before she answered my question. No, she thought tepidly, I don't think so.I think okay, I think maybe you're dying to be human.I can almost see the smile on her face as she thinks that, and she hears the silly double meaning of the phrase, that after you've abandoned those planets and hosts, you've finally found a place and a body for which you sacrificed.I think you've found your home, wanderer.

Ten crunches. I no longer have the strength to open my mouth.Well, too bad I didn't get to stay longer. I'm not sure about her answer.Maybe she was trying to make me feel better.Give me some comfort and thank you for dragging her here to die.She won, and she never disappeared. I started to stagger.My muscles screamed at me for forgiveness, as if there was something I could do to ease their pain.I guess I would have stopped there, but Melanie was stronger than me as usual. I can feel her now, not just in my head, but in my extremities.My steps got bigger and bigger, and the road I walked became straighter.By sheer force of will she dragged my half-dead skeleton toward an impossible goal.

There is an unexpected joy in the midst of pointless struggle.She can feel my body just as I can feel her.Now it's our bodies, and my cowardice gives her the upper hand.She took great pride in being able to move our arms and legs forward freely, no matter how futile.It was a perfect pleasure, just because she could do it again.Even the agony of our slowly dying death is blurred in comparison. what do you think is thereAs we were heading towards the finish line she asked me, what will you see when we die? nothing.The word is hollow, it is blunt, it is firm, and there is a reason we call it ultimate death.

Souls don't believe in an afterlife? We have so much life that it becomes too greedy to expect more.Every time we leave one host, we die a little bit, and then we are reborn in another host.When I die here, that will be the end. Then there was a long pause, and our feet moved slower and slower. how about you?I finally asked, do you still believe there is more reincarnation, even after all this?My mind raced through her memories of the end of the human world. It seems that some things are impossible to die. With their faces so close and so clear in our hearts, our love for Jared and Jamie does feel like an eternity.At that moment, I wondered if death was powerful enough to dissolve something so important, so intense.Perhaps such a love would exist with her, in some fairy-tale place at the gates of heaven, and not with me. Would it be a relief to be free from it?I'm not sure, it feels like it's a part of me now. We lasted only a few hours, and even Melanie's formidable willpower couldn't ask for more from our fading bodies, and we were barely visible.We can't find the oxygen in the dry air, we breathe it in and breathe it straight out, the pain making a jerky, weak sound out of our lips. You've never been through anything this bad, I weakly tease her as I stumble towards a dry tree trunk.It stands erect, a few inches taller than a low bush.We want to get to this thin shade before we go down. Yes, she agreed, it was never this bad. We have arrived at our destination.Dead trees cast cobwebs of shade over us, and our legs drop beneath us.We crawled forward, never wanting the sun in our faces again.We turned our heads to one side, looking for the hot air.We stared at the dust just inches from our noses and listened to our gasps. After a while, we didn't know whether it was long or short, and we closed our eyes.The inside of our eyelids is red and bright, and we can no longer feel the faint net of shade, and maybe it doesn't cover us either. How long?I ask her. I don't know, I've never died before. One hour?or longer? My guess is not going anywhere. Where do wild dogs go when you need them? Maybe we'll be lucky enough to escape something like a beast with claws. She began to talk incoherently, her voice getting quieter. That was our last conversation.Concentrating is so hard, not being able to form words is more of a pain than we thought it should be.All the muscles in our body spasm and twitch wantonly in their resistance to death. We didn't resist, we let it go, we waited, fragments of memory slipped in and out at random.When we were sane, we hummed lullabies in our heads.It was the same tune we used to comfort Jamie, humming it when the ground was too hard, or it was too cold, or too scared to sleep.I felt his head against our shoulders, his back under our arms.Just then, as if our heads were resting on a broader shoulder, a new lullaby soothes us. Our eyelids turn black, but not with death.Night fell and it made us sad.Without the heat of the day, we'd likely last longer. It was dark, and there was silence in an eternal space, and then a voice came. It barely woke us up, and we're not sure if it was our imagination.That could be a wild dog after all, do we want that? we do not know.We lose our train of thought and forget our voice. Something shook us, tugged at our numb arms, tugged at our bodies.We can't form the language to hope this is over now, but that's our hope.We waited for our teeth to bite in, and not only that, the tug turned into a push, and we felt our faces turn to face the sky. Something splashed on our faces—wet, cool, incredible.It dripped slowly onto our eyes, washing away the fine sand on top.We blinked and squeezed out the drops. We don't mind the sand in our eyes, our jaws arch in eager search, our mouths open and close like newly hatched birds with blindness and pathetic weakness. We think we hear a sigh. That's when the water went into our mouths and we gulped and choked.The water disappears as we cough, and our feeble hands reach out to grab it.A flat thing thumped hard on our backs until we could breathe.Our hands have been holding tight to the air, looking for water. This time we must have heard a sigh. Something pressed against our chapped lips and the water came in again.We guzzled, this time being careful not to suck it down the pipe again.Not that we care if we get choked, but we don't want the water to be taken away again. We drank until our bellies stretched out and started to ache.The current dwindled, then stopped, and we protested hoarsely and loudly.Another rim pressed against our lips and we gulped furiously until it was empty too. One more sip our stomachs were about to explode, and we blinked, trying to adjust our eyesight to see if we could find more.It was too dark for us to see a single star.Then we blinked again, realizing that the darkness was much closer to the sky, and a figure darker than night stood beside us. Like a knife's edge, the light penetrates our eyes.We groaned in pain, our hands flew up over our closed eyes.Even behind our eyelids, the light is too bright.The light fades, and we feel the exhalation of the next sigh in our faces. We carefully opened our eyes, even less visible than before.Whoever was facing us sat motionless and said nothing.We begin to feel the tension of the moment, but it feels distant, outside of our bodies.It's hard to care about anything other than the water in our bellies and where to find more.We struggled to focus and see who saved us. After a few minutes of blinking and squinting, the first thing we could make out was the thick whiteness hanging from a swarthy face like millions of pale spines in the night.When we grasp that it's the beard—like Santa Claus, we scramble—our memory fills in the other fragments.It all came together: the big nose with exposed nostrils, the broad cheekbones, the bushy white eyebrows, the eyes sunken into the wrinkled skin.Even though we can only see traces of each feature, we know that the light will reveal them. "Uncle Jeb," we said hoarsely in surprise, "you found us." Uncle Jeb was squatting next to us, and stood up when we said his name. "Now, well," he said, his deep, husky voice bringing countless memories to life, "now, well, it's a mess."