Sigue El Sol

The land was scorched. Red skies walled every horizon. Only the hardiest of plants survived out here, and there, face down, lay the sun etched body of a young woman. There was a limit to how long she could have been there given the unforgiving climate, but in her current position with great copper clouds scraping the sky and ground she lay closing in, it would only take a couple hours for death to be certain, if not by dehydration, then radiation

From the dust a tall figure emerged. Anyone else would have thought this lump of meat to be another carcass but these were his lands, he knew them well and she was not of them, in fact she was the first human he’d seen for some time.

How did she get here? he wondered, Is she too far gone?

He stubbed his boot into her side overturning her like a rock, as he did she let out a faint groan. He picked her up by the hips, tossed her over his shoulder and faded into the sands that crossed the storming steppe.

~

‘Alba! Where are you going?’

‘Not now’ she hurled, barely looking back

‘The gathering is starting, aren't you coming?’

She ignored the boy, continuing against the crowd.

The streets were filling up fast, air full of an unusual positivity, makeshift horns and drums pelted through the favelas, bright flags and streamers hanging from precarious structures of sheet metal and wood. ’Como la marea subimos’ the crowds chanted, the face of the name they called could be seen on the posters and flyers around.

The boy pushed through to catch up.

‘The meeting’s this way, Sander is going to address us’

‘Alba!’

He grabbed her wrist, she turned and stung him with the words

‘He’s not coming.’

They came to a halt. A eyot in a river of painted faces parting to either side. He looked at her, confused. He knew Alba had a fierce bite when pushed but never had he been on the wrong end, nor seen such distance in her eyes, like a soldiers whose witnessed the unimaginable, glimpsed beneath the veil, leaving the person they were on the other side.

‘What do you mean?’ He asked, shaking his head in disbelief.

She paused, words knotting in her head.

‘I’m sorry’

He wouldn’t understand the truth she thought, and final goodbyes are too hard, so she made it easy for them both and pushed off through the crowd saying nothing more.

What the boy didn’t know, is that 15 minutes earlier, Alba had witnessed the murder of Sander, in fact she was almost complicit in it, but the unwavering fist of the Guachimán persecutors wouldn’t care to make such distinctions as almost, and she’d seen many men hung or worse for much less.

They were in the furthest city north before the Red Zone; the edge of existence before no existence. A major trade point with borders tightly controlled by the military government. The population was sold to be the last stand for humanity, humanity being overly misconstrued in these times. They were the last survivors, under the boot of the Guachiman and their regime.

She ran up to the top of her favela overlooking the black bay below. She looked out, as she had a thousand times before, to the electrical storm gathering over the breast of the great mass, oil well candles flickering in the smog. It pained her to see the rare joy in the city's faces knowing that a storm would soon arrive to extinguish their cries. The colours of the city streets would run black as the oil fields in the distance once again.

She searched for necessities in the tin walled room that was her home, but more a room, one shared with her father, a thieving man, who was always out, mostly on the oil fields, much to Alba’s delight, as he too ruled with fists. With work just as scarce as oil, the lucky few didn’t dare refuse the opportunity to earn, even if that meant working indefinitely and risking limbs.

She grabbed her tatty rucksack, stuffed in a few things from the few things she owned and a stash of coins, stamped with the same face found on the posters. Pulling the drawstrings tight she looked up to the stained polished metal they used as a mirror, she paused, unsure of whom she was looking at, and with her recently acquired knowledge, unsure of just about everything.

She ran her fingers along her collar bone to her neck where a heart-shaped locket hung, a deep bronze that parted, letting light through like Moroccan window decor, inscribed within the words ‘Sigue El Sol’. She looked herself dead in the eye, paler than her usually golden self, blood still on her hands, and knew she had to go.

She hurried down, through the narrow gaps and empty gangways, to the stained palafitos near the water's edge. Her laces and bag tight, ready to run if needed. She was like a gazelle on alert, no movement going unnoticed. At the docks she paid all she had to the prearranged smuggler to get her on the boat parting at any moment. From the service entrance she could see Gauchiman clustering. Dogs getting agitated, barking, and the uniformed men pointing around. She began to sweat. It was only a matter of time before everyone knew what she and now they knew. The frenzy was beginning.

Tucked away in a lifeboat, Alba watched as the port grew smaller, the black sea now melded with the black night. The cheers that echoed through the bay now too far away to hear, or perhaps they had been silenced by the news breaking. She snugged down under the cover, mourning a myriad of things. But at this moment, mostly herself, for she had new eyes, and she knew she’d never be the same.

As they approached the borders that contained her whole existence, Alba recalled all the stories she’d been told growing up, of beyond the borders she’d come close to, but never crossed, for the history of her region scribed that everything in the Red Zone was completely lost to The Red Wave. All that existed between her and there were torched lands and the Untouchables that inhabited them; red fleshed beings, flayed by The Wave and bound to shadows. Many in her city believed them not human, others barely and most not real at all.

In the ways of a child she had always wanted to see the folktales true for herself, and now she had no choice. Truth became her compass, and in the hands of a human, like all before her, it was prone to be unreliable when direction is needed most, letting you walk miles down the wrong path before saying so. But if that was the nature of such compass, then walk she would.

~

Alba opened her eyes to find herself in just her wrap and propped up in a stone bath of clay surrounded by rocks. After a moment of haze she jolted, eyes wide and reached for her neck to find it bare, she tried to get up out of the thick silky mixture but was met by the gentle touch of a rough handed stranger pressing down on her shoulders.

‘You must stay’ his deep voice softly ordered.

Adrenaline pulls her to the other side of the small pool, looking up and around the strange cave for an escape route. Candles cleaved the dark, leaving black halos above the coves they sit in, on the wall hangs a led suit, nearly the length of the ceiling.

The stranger knelt down beside, shadows over his face. Could he be an Untouchable? she thought to herself, way out here on his own.

After a moment the stranger points to a pile of her clothes and possessions, signing to his neck, drawing a necklace with his hand where one would be. Alba waded to the edge, not daring to let him out of her peripheral vision, and saw her locket sat atop her neatly folded, now clean clothes.

Light from a hole in the top of the cave fractals through catching half of the stranger's long brown face, browner than the sandy walls, with black straight hair to his shoulders, black like the alcoves that holds the darkness around them, and occasionally catching light like glass.

He doesn’t look like one she thought. At least not how they’re said to have looked.

Raising his hands in surrender he holds out a prepared root

‘Take it, it will help with the sickness’

All though his speech was broken, she’d been on his continent long enough to make out his tongue, that’s if she is still where she thought she was. The voice in her head tells her not to take it, for her short existence on this planet has been laced with lies, especially lying men, but her belly is in pain, and the man spoke with a gentle tone albeit broken, and after all he could have left her to char like the lands she crossed. She took the root with a cautious touch and chewed with great effort, it tasting of earth, nutty and bitter.

He points into the clay bath

‘This helps also, soon you can get out’

He turns, standing tall, and places down a bucket of water, nods and leaves into the same blackness he came from.

At first she doesn’t move, watching the dark arches with stillness. After a moment of what appeared to be relaxation, she reached for her necklace and scoured the room again for routes and tools, something that had become common practise, an act vital to her survival for so long; so now habitual.

Placing her hands on the side of the pool, Alba straightend her arms slowly lifting herself out. She stands, her malnourished frame painted in a colour of the earth from neck down. The table at the side is covered in herbs and a mixing bowl. She splashed her face with water from the bucket, after a minute of attempting to wipe clean with handfuls she grabbed the bucket, a hand either side and doused herself like the men on the ships downing fermented liquids, getting more on themselves than not.

Drying her hair with a rough cloth she thought of the mess that brought her here and how simple it was before knowing, a knowing that’s both burden and relief. She missed the simplicity, the drawing in the bay, but mostly she missed Abiezer, who was almost the only soul kind to her all her years, teaching her to draw, write, think. He was a 2nd generationer, a rarity as most succumbed to the rads long before his age.

Death was near him when she left their city in a hurry, so she didn’t get to thank him, for it was him who told her of the world that exists outside their own, it was he who was responsible for the journey she was on, and by now the rads will have taken him.

She held the locket he gifted in her hands tightly, a tear streamed down her face, catching some remaining clay and adding to the streaks down her body. It belonged to his daughter whom Alba in his later years had become a sort of surrogate, like a living memory in front of him, to amend his errors. Both were happy to oblige.

She hears his voice, telling her to follow the sun, as he always did. She thought of all those trapped in the mirrored maze that once held her. Now she held herself, and still being here, she had a job to finish.

Re-armed and clothed, Alba pulled the same courage that had got her this far together and made her way into the black.