I caught the briefest glimpse of her—standing in that black coat in a patch of sunlight that made her pale hair glow, shouldering a machine gun.
I saw a muzzle flash—
Ducked as the windshield took fire, then popped up again, swerving just in time to avoid colliding with a tree.
As the back of the Chevy took heavy fire, I glimpsed the road in the distance and the blue Google with its trunk still open.
I broke out of the woods, stomped the brake pedal, and brought the Chevy to a screeching halt a few feet past Kara’s car.
The gunfire had stopped.
I grabbed the shotgun, opened the driver’s-side door.
Holding the shotgun at waist-level, I put a round of buckshot through the right rear tire. The Google sank a little. I shot out the left rear tire. While I could certainly outrun Kara on the last, rocky stretch of road, her car would’ve easily caught the truck on the smoother sections.
Kara emerged from the forest.
I didn’t hesitate—just put her in the ghost sights and fired three rounds. She dove behind a downed tree and I threw the shotgun into the truck, jumped in, and jammed the accelerator into the floorboard.
I flew down the road on ruined shocks, the truck feeling like it might rattle itself apart at any second.
I pushed the speed to 40 mph, barely able to see through the fractured windshield. My seat was covered in blood, and it felt like someone was shoving a red-hot poker through my back.
I kept checking the side mirror, half-expecting to see the Google bearing down, but there was only a trail of orange dust.
My adrenaline waned. Pain was coming on strong.
After several miles, I had to slow down because I didn’t trust myself to keep the truck on the road. I was having trouble seeing, I felt so lightheaded…
Didn’t know how much time had passed since Kara shot me, but I had been bleeding too long. Of that, I was certain. I needed to stop it or I was going to die.
I reached back and held my hand against the wound. Blood seeped through my fingers. I couldn’t drive and put pressure on the wound, but I had to keep driving. I had to get as far away from her as possible.
I was entering hypovolemic shock, which occurs after the human body loses twenty percent of its blood. My respiration rate was too fast and shallow, and I could feel my diastolic pressure plummeting toward dangerous levels.
I was suddenly cold, confusion setting in, and I tried to stay above it all, tried to use the power of my intellect to keep alert, alive, but a gray nothingness was creeping in around the edges of my vision.
* * *
—
A tone.
Blaring.
Sustained.
It called to me, faintly, in the depths of this grave darkness.
Lifting my head was the hardest physical act of my lifetime, and when I did, the noise ended.
I opened my eyes.
Light splintered in.
Crystal shimmering rays of it.
I tasted blood in my mouth. It was sheeting down my face. I was still sitting behind the steering wheel of the old Chevy. Just beyond the hood, I saw the enormous, rippled trunk of a cottonwood tree. I had crashed into it.
There were buildings nearby.
I saw the ruins of Mis Amigos.
There was someone standing beside my window, and I slowly turned my head, blinking against the bright winter sun.
He was eleven or twelve, and he was looking at me through the window, into what I imagined was one of the more disturbing scenes of his young life.
Me bleeding to death in the corpse-reeking cab of a bullet-ridden truck.
“？Necesitas ayuda?”
His voice came high and muffled through the glass.
“Sí,” I said. My voice sounded so weak. “Por favor.”
There were other people now in the street behind him, drifting toward this single-car accident in the middle of their quiet village.
And they couldn’t have known—no one could—that the dying man inside the Chevy had just fought a battle for the fate of our species.
A battle he had lost.
Our ability to read out this sequence of our own genome has the makings of a philosophical paradox. Can an intelligent being comprehend the instructions to make itself?
—John Sulston
It is January 11, and I’ve only seen the water today in ephemeral glimpses as a train of mist plows in from the sea. The wind is rattling the storm shutters and the rain sheets continuously down the windows. I just put another log in the woodstove.
I was planning to only be here a week, but I may stay longer. There’s an overlooked wildness about this place that speaks to me.
What I am.
What I’m becoming.
Mostly, I just sit by the kitchen window, watching the sea change. In my short time here, I’ve seen it at roiling gray and glittering stillness. Obscured as a storm slams into the continent （occurring today）， and as a shiny, black lacquer under the moon.
More than anyplace I’ve been, there is the feeling here that the sea is a presence, and a mercurial one—moody, fierce, serene.
And constantly evolving.
I think you and Ava would like it here. When the weather is good, there’s a short trail down the bluff to the beach, and the town is only a mile away.
I hope you’re safe. I hope you’re finding your way toward happiness again. I hope that, if we’re ever reunited, you will understand why I had to let you believe I was gone. It’s because I know your heart, Beth. You would put your own safety and freedom at hazard to find me.
I miss you madly, and I would give anything
I stopped writing. I looked up from the kitchen table, through the window, out to sea. Crossing out the last sentence, I put the pen to paper again.
I’m not being honest, Beth. I’m writing things the old Logan would write, driven by some vestigial nostalgia for my past life. If I can’t be honest with you, even when it’s painful, what’s the point?
Interacting with people has become a challenge. Imagine knowing what someone is trying to say long before they inelegantly manage to say it. Imagine being intensely aware of every microexpression that belies their words. Imagine a chasm between you and everyone else. Imagine not feeling human anymore. For me, now, speaking with a bright adult feels like what it used to feel like to hold a conversation with a ten-year-old. I know that sounds shitty, but it’s the truth.
I can recall every moment of our shared existence. I don’t just see you as the snapshot of who you were in our last moment together—our kitchen in Arlington, fixing your second coffee of the day, dash of milk, half a Splenda, and I walk over to kiss you goodbye on my way out the door, and you stop what you’re doing and look me in the eyes and kiss me like you mean it, no automatic thing, neither of us with any inkling that we will not see each other again.
I see you as the Beth you were that day in prison, twenty-five years old in your first suit, trying to hide your nerves. I see the Beth in her hospital bed, exhausted and elated, holding our daughter for the first time. I see you on the morning you heard your father had died. And on a Wednesday evening in October six and a half years ago that was utterly unremarkable expect for the fact that it was the most fun we ever had together—two bottles of wine and laughter and great conversation and a few tears—everything that is right about us.
All those moments are all equally real for me. All those moments of you. It breaks my heart that I can’t live them again. And maybe even more to know that, even if I could, I wouldn’t feel now what I felt then.