Participants:
| Scene Title | Mine Eyes Have Seen |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | At the start of a long day of driving, Glory and Silas find a common ground. |
| Date | July 4, 2021 |
It’s sickeningly early.
The rumble of Frizzell’s engine is hypnotic, as are the path headlights track on the road out of the Appalachians. Silas has only been at this for fifteen minutes before his eyelids start to feel heavy again. It’s dark in the bus, most everyone has gone back to sleep for the early stretch of the morning, before the sun comes up and ruins any hope of an extra hour of rest.
The mountains block the blue glow of sunrise, the trees swallow up the sky. It’s dark, it’s lonely, and it’s exhausting. It takes a moment for Silas to realize he’d started to nod off, hands on the wheel and back straightening in a jolt as he comes back to, opening the driver’s side window a sliver to let some cool morning air in.
One passenger aboard Frizzell isn’t getting any more sleep this morning. Glory rises up from her bench, leaving her duffel bag tucked under her seat, and climbs forward up the aisle, a firm grip on the seat-backs as she does to keep her balance.
Frizzell
Somewhere in the Appalachian Foothills
Pennsylvania
July 4th
6:04 am
“Permission to come aboard?” Glory jokes, settling down in the unoccupied bench diagonal from the driver’s seat.
"Permission granted," Silas says back. His voice is low and a bit rough — it's an early, early morning — but there's a warmth there, too, an acknowledgement of the joke.
He's glad to have someone to talk to — might help keep him awake — and his curiosity is piqued because it's one of the faces on this little expedition he doesn't recognize. "Don't believe we've been properly introduced; I'm Silas," he says, his eyes only occasionally flickering to the rearview mirror.
“Glory,” she replies after a moment of hesitation. “Salvager, mostly. Got more rust under my fingernails than good sense,” she admits with a lopsided smile. Silas had seen her around the campfire the night before, checking food and berries people had brought in. Apparently she has some sort of ability to sense toxins. Or that’s what the Convoy rumor is, at least.
“Looked like you were about to take a nap there,” Glory admits, catching Silas’ attention in the large rear-view mirror. “Figured I’d come and, uh, keep you company. Talking helps on long drives.”
"Glory," Silas echoes, raising his eyebrows, lips curling up into a smile of his own. "Not a word you hear often, these days," he muses. "Well. Pleased to meetcha, Glory. And… thanks. It's appreciated," he admits, glancing into the mirror with a rueful smile.
"I'm not used to getting up quite this early, and it's been a long time since I've steered something with wheels on it," he admits with a chuckle, eyes returning to the road ahead; talking does seem to help.
"So. What do you think Alaska's gonna be like?"
“Cold?” Glory’s response is flat, matter-of-fact. “I don’t know, I’ve never been. Up and down the coast back east? Sure, more predictable. This?” She motions out the windshield. “This is terrifying. The unknown always is. Just… standing there on a precipice, teetering, taking a leap of—” Glory stops, looking from out the windshield to Silas.
“Leap of faith.” Glory asserts. It isn’t a question, but it feels like she’s constructing one. “Why’re you out here?” She wonders. “Driving a bus into a wasteland? Seems like a lot.”
"It is a lot," Silas admits. "Doesn't get less scary, either, not really. I've gone traveling before, and that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you're leaving known waters behind, sailing off into the blank parts of the map marked here be dragons… it's always there. But…"
Here Silas trails off; he's silent for a long moment, his eyes on the road as he gathers his words.
"The Flood," he finally says. "It shattered the world. Used to be you could cross the continent as easy as hopping on an airplane, but now? It's all here be dragons, pretty much from coast to coast. The whole world, split into tiny little kingdoms clinging desperately to the rocks, everyone just… trying not to be swept away by the tide," Silas says softly.
"Sometimes it felt like life was… circling the drain. Running down. Digging up what we needed to survive, and all the while knowing that someday the scraps would run out. But then!" he exclaims, his voice still low so as not to wake the others, but animated. "Then — a reprieve. A chance to draw a breath. And visitors from Alaska! So it seemed to me… why not take a chance? Blaze a trail through the blank space in the middle of the map, and see who might follow. Maybe, just maybe… do something that might help reconnect the world. That might start building a foundation for something new, instead of just… surviving to circle the drain another day."
He glances into the rearview, eyes finding Glory. "So… what do you think? Am I making any sense, or are you now worrying that you've got Don Quixote for a driver on this trip?" he asks; his tone is light, but his eyes are serious.
Glory furrows her brows, quiet for a moment. She doesn’t directly answer Silas’ question, instead referring back to his personal experiences to relate her own. “Never seen any dragons,” she says with a furrow of her brow, “figure they all got slain.” There’s a hint of a smile there, if rueful.
“I get the feeling of wanting to take a chance, though. Kinda’ why I’m here.” Glory admits with a small shrug, losing her focus to the glow of tail lights ahead. “My… mom and dad died when I was really young. Got raised by their friends. Never really got to know the world before it was over,” she admits with a shrug. “Hard to say what I missed, or what there even is to miss. Never even flew on a plane before it all came crashing down.”
Glory looks away from the tail-lights to Silas, finally brave enough to ask the question: “Who’s Don Quixote?”
Silas smiles at her talk of the dragons being slain; it's a good thing Eve hadn't been here for that one. The smile fades as she talks about her parents, though; his eyes watch her in the rearview for a moment, and he nods in sympathy. "Flood took a lot of people who didn't deserve it," he says quietly; he imagines she's heard I'm sorry often enough, though, so he says nothing more for a moment, his eyes finding the road ahead once again.
When she asks her question, though, he lets out a huff of breath that's not quite enough to be a chuckle, glancing back to the rearview mirror with a faint smile. "Don Quixote was a story, and also the title character of the story," he says. "I've never actually read that one, but it got a lot of adaptations. I remember seeing a movie version of it once," Silas admits with a chuckle.
"The original story was written centuries ago. Eve — this version of her, at least — likes to give me trouble about my age, but I think even she'd admit that Don Quixote's older than me," he says, grinning. "A little bit, at least."
"The story's about an old man who just… loses his mind one day, and decides he's gonna set off to be a knight — to roam the land and fight evils, wherever they might be. Problem is he's too caught up in his own world, so he runs across some windmills and thinks they're 'evil giants' and tries to fight them. Stuff like that. An old fool on a horse, jousting at windmills… sounds absurd, doesn't it?" he chuckles.
"But there was a dignity to him. Crazy as he might be, he didn't give up on it…"
Silas shakes his head, eyes going back to the road. "There was a song, I remember. To dream, the impossible dream; to fight, the unbeatable foe. To bear, the unbearable sorrow; to rush, where the brave dare not go…" he half-sings quietly, then chuckles. "I don't remember all of it, and I've not got the voice for it. Spades might, though, if you catch him in a good mood; I think there was a Broadway adaptation or somesuch."
Glory is distracted by the story, relaxes into it, allows herself to forget herself for a little while. “I don’t think you’re a… Don Quixote,” she decides. “You know what’s out there. You’ve seen it. Understand it.” She looks down at the floor, brows furrowed. “There were people back home, though, that fit the bill.” She snorts softly, shaking her head.
“This one time, I was—I don’t know, ten. I was playing around on some old machinery,” Glory says with a distant look in her eyes. “My dad was at work, he—he worked a lot of long days. But my dad’s friend, Conroy, he’d come by and check on me. He’d invent all these different dangers I was skirting around by playing where I shouldn’t. Ghost stories, things to frighten kids, y’know?”
Glory looks up at Silas in the rear-view mirror. “I don’t know if that’s quite the same but, he had a big imagination.” She smiles, briefly, then looks back down to the floor. “So, all this? Your Don Quixote adventure… is just because?”
Silas is silent for a moment, considering that.
"Once, I lived through something terrible. Saw a bunch of people die who didn't deserve it, made it out with some others… but then Death came back around for us anyway. And when I saw Death lookin' me in the eyes, comin' for all of us… I decided right then and there that if I was goin' down… I was gonna go down swingin'." He lets out a faint chuckle. "But then… we survived. Shoulda died there. Didn't. Figured since I was livin' in overtime, might as well make the most of it. Not just for me, but for everyone who woulda wanted to be here and couldn't. For everyone who never got the chance."
"So I guess… yeah. Just because I'm still here… I do the best I can," he says. "If that makes any sense at all."
Glory laughs so hard it surprises her. “Yeah I—I sympathize. Kinda’ feels like we’re all living in the overtime right now, yeah?” She smirks, then the expression fades as she thinks about the real weight of it all. “But I—I like that sentiment. Living for the people who would’ve wanted to, but couldn’t.” Her brows furrow together, eyes trace patterns in the floor.
“Guess we’re both in this for the long haul, then.” Glory says, shaking herself out of a moment of nostalgia. “I ah—” She motions toward the back of the bus, “was thinking I might try and get some more sleep. You seem, y’know, more awake now.”
Silas pauses for a moment, then laughs. "You know what? I think I am," he says, glancing into the rearview mirror with a smile. "Thanks, Glory. Feel free to swing by and chat anytime."
Glory dips her head down with an appreciative smile and a nod, and as she slips out of her seat reaches up to offer a wave visible only in the rear-view mirror. It distracts from her expression, from the growing look of sadness in her eyes.
And the ever-expanding sense of dread.