Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalipse

"There’s writing on it," said Lehi. "It says, Dear Lord heal my girl Jenny please I pray."

Deaver set down his handful on the sill. Then he took one, turned it over, found the writing. "Forgive my adultery I will sin no more."

Lehi read another. "Bring my boy safe from the plains O Lord God."

Each message was scratched with a nail or a piece of glass, the letters crudely formed.

"They used to say prayers all day in the temple, and people would bring in names and they’d say the temple prayers for them," said Rain. "Nobody prays here now, but they still bring the names. On metal so they’ll last."

"We shouldn’t read these," said Lehi. "We should put them back."

There were hundreds, maybe thousand of those metal prayers down there. People must come here all the time, Deaver realized. The Mormons must have a regular traffic coming here and leaving these things behind. But nobody told me.

"Did you know about this?"

Rain nodded.

"You brought them here, didn’t you."

"Some of them. Over the years."

"You knew what was down there."

She didn’t answer.

"She told you not to come," said Lehi. "You knew about this too?"

"I knew people came, I didn’t know what they did."

And suddenly the magnitude of it struck him. Lehi and Rain had both known. All the Mormons knew, then. They all knew, and he had asked again and again, and no one had told him. Not even his friends.

"Why’d you let me come out here?"

"Tried to stop you," said Rain.

"Why didn’t you tell me this?"

She looked him in the eye. "Deaver, you would’ve thought I was givin you the run around. And you would have laughed at this, if I told you. I thought it was better if you saw it. Then maybe you wouldn’t go tellin people how dumb the Mormons are."

"You think I would?" He held up another metal prayer and read it aloud. "Come quickly, Lord Jesus, before I die." He shook it at her. "You think I’d laugh at these people?"

"You laugh at everything, Deaver."

Deaver looked at Lehi. This was something Lehi had never said before. Deaver would never laugh at something that was really important. And this was really important to them, to them both.

"This is yours," Deaver said. "All this stuff is yours."

"I never left a prayer here," said Lehi.

But when he said yours he didn’t mean just them, just Lehi and Rain. He meant all of them, all the people of the Mormon Sea, all the ones who had known about it but never told him even though he asked again and again. All the people who belonged here. "I came to find something here for me, and you knew all the time it was only your stuff down there."

Lehi and Rain looked at each other, then back at Deaver.

"It isn’t ours," said Rain.

"I never been here before," said Lehi.

"It’s your stuff." He sat down in the water and began taking off the underwater gear.

"Don’t be mad," said Lehi. "I didn’t know."

You knew more than you told me. All the time I thought we were friends, but it wasn’t true. You two had this place in common with all the other people, but not with me. Everybody but me.

Lehi carefully took the metal sheets to the stairway and dropped them. They sank once, to drift down and take their place on the pile of supplications.

Lehi rowed them through the skyscrapers to the east of the old city, and then Rain started the motor and they skimmed along the surface of the lake. The Lake Patrol didn’t see them, but Deaver knew now that it didn’t matter much if they did. The Lake Patrol was mostly Mormons. They undoubtedly knew about the traffic here, and let it happen as long as it was discreet. Probably the only people they stopped were the people who weren’t in on it.

All the way back to Magna to return the underwater gear, Deaver sat in the front of the boat, not talking to the others. Where Deaver sat, the bow of the boat seemed to curve under him. The faster they went, the less the boat seemed to touch the water. Just skimming over the surface, never really touching deep; making a few waves, but the water always smoothed out again.

Those two people in the back of the boat, he felt kind of sorry for them. They still lived in the drowned city, they belonged down there, and the fact they couldn’t go there broke their hearts. But not Deaver. His city wasn’t even built yet. His city was tomorrow.

He’d driven a salvage truck and lived in a closet long enough. Maybe he’d go south into the New Soil Lands. Maybe qualify on a piece of land. Own something, plant in the soil, maybe he’d come to belong there. As for this place, well, he never had belonged here, just like all the foster homes and schools along the way, just one more stop for a year or two or three, he knew that all along. Never did make any friends here, but that’s how he wanted it. Wouldn’t be right to make friends, cause he’d just move on and disappoint them. Didn’t see no good in doing that to people.

The People of Sand and Slag by Paolo Bacigalupi