Page 26 of Fable for the End of the World

The car slows to a jagged halt.

“Sorry,” I mumble, staring vaguely out the cracked windshield. “I just...”

And then, almost unconsciously, I slump over, resting my forehead on the wheel. I squeeze my eyes shut until my vision pricks with stars.

Luka is silent. I can’t even hear him breathing.

“I just want it to stop,” I finish in a whisper.

“I know.”

I lift my head, slowly. My voice is hoarse. “Do you think she’s dead?”

“I don’t know.” Luka glances down at his rifle. “It wasn’t a very clean shot. I couldn’t see well.”

“Yeah. It’s dark.”

My words sound like they’re coming from the mouth of a stranger. Even my tongue feels numb. It reminds me of when Luka and I were little and we found huge bushels of pokeweed in the woods. The delicate white flowers and shiny black berries are poisonous, but the shoots and leaves are edible. We hadn’t eaten all day, so we’d tried to boil the leaves like Dad had taught us. But it tasted so sour that our tongues itched and stung for days.

The memory brings me back to myself, like a ghost possessing a body. I’m in the driver’s seat of the Wesselses’ car, who knows how many miles from home. Luka is sitting across from me. I’m three hours into my Gauntlet. An Angel almost killed me.

The Angel. Her face returns to me, so appallingly, unnaturally white. I’ve seen corpses that aren’t as pale.

Nothing I can envision is so white. Her hair, too blanched to be called blond. And her eyes. Black and unfathomably deep. Ashypnotic as a snake’s. The memory of them makes my heart leap and lodge in my throat.

“Let’s just hope she’s dead,” Luka says at last. “Good fucking riddance.”

The venom in his voice makes me shiver. It’s not hard to be afraid—whenever I close my eyes, I see her face and my stomach hollows and my blood turns to ice. But it’s harder to hate. I fish for anger, for the righteousness that Luka seems to feel. I can’t find it. I just feel a horrible, dragging heaviness, as if there’s water sucking at my feet.

Maybe this is why I’m weak. If I could hate her, maybe I would have done something—anything—instead of sitting there gaping, frozen with terror. If not for Luka, I would be dead. Everything is tangled up inside me, all of it so muddled and bleary, and when I get this way, there’s only one thought that cleaves through the murky depths. It’s a phrase that’s almost soothing in its brusque simplicity.

Mom was right.

“Still,” I say thickly, “we should get going again.”

“Yeah,” Luka says.

For the first time, I notice how tightly his fingers are clenched around the barrel of his gun. His knuckles are white, bone straining against skin.He’s sixteen, I think. A year younger than me. Sometimes it’s too easy to forget.

The cracks in the windshield are so bad that it’s impossible to keep driving. We come up with an inelegant solution, which involvesLuka standing on the hood and bashing the butt of his rifle against the glass until it shatters, while I watch from the road and wince.

“It’s not Dr. Wessels’s day,” I say, as Luka jumps down from the hood.

“Yeah, well, he should’ve known the risks. We’ll pay him back when this is over.”

I’m not sure how we’ll manage that when we barely make enough to feed ourselves most weeks. But then, I’m not sure if I’ll even be alive when this is over.One thing at a time.I walk over to help Luka brush the shards of glass off the seats.

We work in dutiful silence for a few moments, until I say quietly, “Thank you.”

We never say it to each other, not even for small things, like,Thanks for putting up the sandbags, orThanks for fixing the hole in the roof.And we certainly never say things like,Thanks for risking your life in the woods every day to hunt for our dinner, orThank you for being up to your elbows in deer guts so neither of us have to go into the red.Expressing gratitude so openly feels strange. Becausethank youimplies debt, and you never want to owe anybody anything, not even your own family.

Especially not your own family.

But part of it, too, is that I’ve always seen the things we do for each other as separate from the tangle of favors and dues, tallies and tabs. If we started keeping track of our respective balances, it would never end. Should Luka say,Thanks for letting me crawl into your bed when I was five and Mom and Dad wouldn’t stop fighting?Should I say,Thanks for punching Adrian Pietersen after he pinnedme down and tried to stick his hand up my shirt behind Mrs. Prinslew’s shop?

The silence is long, and it seems to stretch out between us, a physical thing—between our hands, nicked with tiny scratches from the glass, toiling at the same task. His hands are bigger, rough with calluses, and mine are smaller and softer, but the olive tone of our skin is the same.

At last, Luka says, “If only it’d been a better shot. Then we’d know for sure that she’s dead.”

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