false beliefs

The girl lapsed into slumber and stayed under it for nearly the entirety of the next day. The clerk woke her up to dispense the meds and give her things to eat and drink, then bade her lay back down and she was out like a light.

The old woman took to wandering the aisles of the store. Picking things up, subjecting them to a variety of sensory tests. None of them seemed to meet her specifications, for she threw them into the middle of the aisle and moved on. Sometimes she would loudly start complaining to a clerk who was not actually there. One or two laps around the floor's perimeter and she would stop at the pharmacy, give instructions to the empty counter, and then sit in one of the chairs waiting for her prescription to be ready.

Eli followed her around at first, picking things up and re-shelving them with a custodian's care. When he would try to speak to her, she would ignore him, even when he made a decision to become whatever figment of her imagination on which she had chosen to heap her limitless abuses. He offered her some more food when he thought she needed it and she threw it away like she had before, calling him a filthy pig fucker and calling his mother other things.

The clerk was up on the rooftop, doing something to the solar panels. Eli found him there, taking a break, a Lucky Strike lit in his mouth as he rested in the shadow of one of the big solar panels, his back leaning up against the pivoting joint. The glare of full daylight made the shade a stark black, and with his eyes dazzled by the light, Eli could only see the silhouette and the occasional brightening of the fire on the end of the cigarette in time with the clerk's silent breath.

She won't eat.

Well that is just a shame.

You've got pills down there she can take.

That's true.

Why did you help the girl if you won't help the old woman?

A few reasons. Some of them are good, others aren't, I don't think.

Well which ones are good?

The girl's problems will go away if she keeps with those pills and the inhaler and the drops. They'll be gone. If I give that old woman two hundred pills or two thousand, those pills will run out some time, and the problem will still be there when the pills are gone. Do you see?

I do. But isn't a little time... can't you? For the girl? Doesn't she deserve just a little time?

He exhaled a thick cloud of blue smoke, the voice dusky with it. The other reason is that I don't really believe people are ever crazy. If you see what I mean. Just like I don't believe you really believe in God. I keep thinking, how can these people really not have their heads on straight? They must be faking it, I think to myself. I know this belief to be false, you understand, but it doesn't change the fact I believe it. I know that there are people who really are certifiably nuts. Sometimes, I think I am one.

Sometimes? When don't you?

When people roll on in uninvited and I'm suddenly reminded how much less sense they make than I do most of the time. Getting back to the matter at hand though, the girl relies too much on her. Soon she'll be dead anyway – particularly if she won't eat. That's the sane part of her exerting some degree of control. That's the only mercy she has for that little girl, and she's of course being a cunt about it.

Don't say that word.

The red dot waved off to the side as he took it one hand that gestured in apology. Sorry. You're right, of course. It's easy to forget... well.

What are you? How did you get here?

I am what I have always been and what I will always be, and I got here from the same direction you did.

How long ago?

I haven't been counting.

How many summers?

There is no summer here. It was summer four months ago and it's summer today and it'll be summer tomorrow. Every day is summer.

I don't aim to stay here forever, but...

The two of them are leaving as soon as the girl is well enough to travel again. I can't feed or care for them any more than I already have, and the old woman is dangerous. I shouldn't even be up here with her down there.

That girl is going to follow that woman straight to ruin.

The girl has a choice in that, doesn't she?

They're kin.

And?

And she can't walk out on her own flesh and you know it! You can't act like you don't.

I said she had a choice, not that she had a good one or an easy one. I need to let her make it.

You're letting her die.

Probably. Smoke?

---

The clerk was disappointed when the woman accepted a slice of pizza. It was two days after the night of their arrival, and the girl's temperature had gone down to an acceptable level, her eye was without mucus, and her cough had disappeared. She ate when the old woman was not around, attacking the food as might a wolf in winter not yet gone to ground.

They sat beneath the collapsed drive-thru and the clerk watched her eat. When she looked up at him, she found the expression on his face was sad.

You don't need to follow her. You should be in charge.

She did not look at him.

Momma told me I should lissen ta her if...

I respect that. But she doesn't have her wits any more. She can't even drive that car properly. At least get her to let you do that. And if she won't let you eat, you just grab the food from her. The two of you surviving isn't up to her anymore.

She won't like it.

That's too bad. She can have her opinion, just don't let her have anything else. Is that all right?

I caint.

He sighed and rolled his eyes. Fingers drumming across the surface of the pressure tube kiosk on which he leaned, and he clearly unaware of it. After a moment he looked back at her. I know. I just don't know what it will take to divorce you of this catastrophic course.

Was it like she says, before all of this?

You ought to be old enough to remember something.

I remember Sesame Street. On TV.

Hm. I am getting old.

She says it'll all come back on and there'll be... po-lice and hospittles and I dunno what all. Says we can find it west where there's still that stuff. We got the paper.

She drew out the rumpled paper and showed him.

We're goin' there. Gramma says they got work and school...

He slowly handed it back to her, and she could not tell what his face said.

You shouldn't go there.

I caint take care of her. Nobody'll help out here. You caint even help her, I know it.

No. There really isn't anything I can do for her.

We're goin' there.

Then I guess I'm going to teach you how to drive stick. It's been a good life I've lived, I suppose – one without regrets. Shame to end it now anyway. Come on.

---

Eli helped them load a large plastic pallet of bottled drinking water into the trunk of the hatchback, along with lots of ice dumped into some pots and pans that, according to the stickers, had been on sale for twenty thousand hillaries each. The clerk wondered if Howard might have been able to do something about the car's air conditioning had he been around, but said nothing about it.

They had gas for maybe a hundred miles – maybe enough to ride around the great crack in the ground and perhaps find some way around to the highway again. The girl's grasp of manual transmission would suffice, he'd decided – and in any case they couldn't sit around wasting gas in second gear.

The old woman sat in the car grousing endlessly. Unaware that she'd been placed in the passenger's seat. She accepted food from the girl without complaint of any kind and through her mouthfuls of food she crabbed further. The girl reached up with one of her inhumanly thin hands and patted the old woman's hair down. The crone did not notice it, and kept on about Clinton, the fucker, and now his frosty bitch of a wife's face on the money and everything.

The clerk didn't seem as if he cared to say goodbye, and so wandered back to the collapsed drive-thru and sat in its shade, seeming to stare off at the canyon and the cracked road curving around it that was soon lost to the predatory expansion of the desert. Eli leaned down and looked into the rolled down window at the girl. Her face dark with the coming of tears. He saw some of the weight that had been on him. Remembered it. Realized with the deepest guilt he'd ever felt that what came to his mind after the grief was the relief at being somehow free of it.

You gotta hold on for her.

She looked at him. One little drop rolling down her cheek. It's so hard.

I know it is. But you'll do it. You've got to. It's the only thing that matters.

He reached in and took her hand and held it. She squeezed back for a little while, and then he stepped away as she shakily got the car turned around and up to speed. He watched the car speed along the road, the sun glinting sharp off of it, kicking up the snaking trail of dust in its wake. The two occupants shrinking until they were swallowed by the looming mountains mountains off in the distance that had no terminus, and the rumbling sound of the engine faded until it was only a telltale murmur in the man's expectant ears.

---

He whispered into the small mic dangling next to his throat as the car thundered away. The words bouncing up invisible through the air, reaching the keen internal ear of the immobile facsimile perched upon the rooftop. Its head did not perk up, as per his earlier instruction.

Escort vehicle to maximum operant range. Signal blue. Defend. Signal red. Prioritize subject Fox. Disregard subject George. Disengage when payload depleted. Signal white. Execute.

Silently it beat its wings and glided down into the canyon, cruising just beneath the rim until it was far out beyond the sight of any who might glimpse it from the store. Borne aloft by the wind and its cold loyalty, it rested its unfeeling eye upon the single speck crawling in its toil across the dessicated face of the long-dead earth, trailing dust behind it that soon settled back from whence it had been kicked up into the windless air.

He leaned back against the brick wall and removed the ear bud.

I am just all kinds of a fucking idiot lately.