To the Well-Organized Mind

Chapter Six

[Nia]

The mental deterioration caused by the Dementium feralis bacterium most closely mimics the degradation of Alzheimer's disease. Parts of the brain devoted to higher cognitive function (cerebellum) gradually decay and die. However, the brain stem, which handles more primitive functions, is largely unaffected. This leads to the telltale animalistic tendencies.

-from Gerald P. Anagnost's last published paper: A Life Apart: a Delve into the Neurology of Affected Humans

Furie and her infernal optimism may be forcing new luck on the Barrens: somehow, we make it through the flash flood plain without the clouds trying to drown us.

When we pass the hot springs, spitting steaming sulfur into the air, we have five days left to walk. I don't tell them this, though. I don't want the fools devouring our food or guzzling our water, even though I know for a fact we have five more days of traveling. It's not my knowledge that I doubt; it's the terrain and weather. Something could happen—it always does—to make our lives worse before we're out.

After all, we still have to pass through feral territory.

It makes me regret not trying harder to keep more people alive, so we could sacrifice them to the ferals and escape while they feast.

Looking at the six followers I have, I assess how fast they will be able to run. As if to spite me, Sarah and her daughter are both still here. I thought the girl would have faded away by now. Furie I know is going to make it the entire way to intentionally spite me. The others have fortunately remained nameless, though I have moment memories of them overlapping with the others who already succumbed: the man who told us we could eat his right arm if we ran out of food, the black-haired beauty who sobbed one night because she'd forgotten what she looked like, the man able to whistle every song we could remember, the excitement on Dee's sister's face when she realized she would be seeing her sister soon. More memories than I want, heading into feral country.

And, of course, my shadow. You can't lose your shadow except when there is no light. Where we are going may be the blackest depths of the mind yet.

I wish I had never stumbled onto him, that he had not opened his eyes to mine in that moment we both found ourselves alive.

But most of all, I wish all these people could be traded for Ridge.

*

A darkness wavers on the horizon. It could be a mirage like so many other days, but since we passed the hot springs, it isn't. Not this time. Before us rises the beginning of life. A veritable Garden of Eden we have to pass through to reach Paradise AKA Asis.

Asis: named (uncreatively) for the oasis that formed around a pool of fresh water, untainted by acid and only a little unclean. I'm talking Giardia, not E. coli. A couple of green thumbs are able to raise a flower garden, though most of the land is given to agriculture. And every person in Asis is taught how to garden and is required to help cultivate it.

Houses, built before the cataclysm, still stand. Survivors are assigned to houses—and to the work to maintain them. The headman of Asis is ever diligent about assigning out work. There is cleaning duty and guard duty and hunting duty and research duty and medical duty and suck up duty and cherry picking duty.

And fence duty. As rickety solid a fence as could be built and maintained.

Thus we survive, barely.

The land around fenced-in Asis is not completely barren or wasted. Or perhaps it should be put this way: the fence does not go around the entire oasis. Just the small "safe" part where humans live. The rest of the oasis is wild. There is enough life to make some in Asis skeptical that the Barrens are as vast or bad as they are. Just enough life, in fact, to summon animals. And ferals.