Burn (21 page)
And then she knows what she’s made.
Armor.
A second skin of metal.
It’s art, if anyone asks. But to her, it’s also protection and control. This is who she is—not someone who knits booties to soothe her nerves. She might feel a little shattered, but she’s also strong. She can’t rely solely on Partridge. She has to be able to defend herself. This is her protection.
She hides it in the back of her closet, behind fluffy maternity dresses.
I
t’s not just the city. From up high and circling, he can see that everything’s been newly torched. The Deadlands didn’t have much to burn, but El Capitan takes the airship in low enough to see a few blackened Dusts arch from the ground like dead fish rising to the surface of a pond, sucking air. The other Dusts are quiet, as if they’re afraid to lift their heads.
He cuts across the Meltlands, which are vacant. The plastic jungle gyms were already melted to blobs, but some of the houses that had been partially rebuilt have been ravaged again by fires. Tarps flutter in the battering winds. OSR headquarters and the surrounding woods where he and Helmud have hunted for years are still smoking, lost in great billowing gray clouds.
The outpost that was once a boarding school might be the worst off—the survivors’ tents are blackened and have collapsed in on themselves like clenched fists. The buildings’ stone still stands, but the fires have gutted the buildings themselves. He gets close enough to see that there are some people still there, dazed and searching for those they’ve lost. Only a few of them look up when they hear the droning engine. But they don’t take cover. They only stop and raise their faces to the noise. The little cottage where Pressia helped Bradwell regain his strength is still there, but its roof has caved in and the trees around it that had limbs that tethered them to the ground like roots are only charred stalks.
Here and there, even the smallest structures have burned or are still smoking—the huts of shepherds and pickers, lean-tos, the wood roofs of hand-built altars, the posts around graveyards. Smoke shivers to the sky, gusts, and swirls across the terrain in gray billowing sheets.
Shortly after they picked up Hastings, he walked into the cockpit to tell El Capitan to prepare for devastation. He told him the stories of the survivors who’d made it to Crazy John-Johns. El Capitan nodded. “One thing I know is devastation, Hastings. Don’t worry.”
“Worry,” Helmud had said, and he was right. Nothing could have prepared him for this. His homeland has always been burnt and charred but fighting its way back. And now it’s as if all of the life and energy and strength that it took to rebuild have been wiped away.
He sees a sloping field where the Dome worshippers, once upon a time, built a pyre of their own. Gone. All of it. That’s where he’ll bring down the airship.
He takes them lower and lower and finally shouts to the others, “Brace for landing!”
“Brace, brace!” Helmud shouts and grabs hold of El Capitan so hard that El Capitan has to pop his elbows out to have enough mobility to work the instruments.
“Ease up, Helmud.”
The airship glides then bobbles as it starts to descend. The ground is coming at El Capitan too quickly.
“Ease up!” Helmud shouts. “Ease up!”
El Capitan slows a little, but the engines sound weak. He doesn’t want to stall out. So he lets the buckies take on more air—too much. The airship drops. One landing prong hits, drags, gouging the earth, sending up a black plume of ash. The airship pops to its other leg and also skids. The airship tips forward on its two front legs, teetering for a moment with the nose hovering just above the ground before it rocks back onto all four prongs solidly.
El Capitan whistles a sigh. Helmud echoes it.
El Capitan hears the cabin door open. He’ll let the others hop out. He’s in no rush to see more. He takes his time shutting the engines down. He doesn’t know when he’ll fly again. He pats the wall of the cockpit.
“We’ll miss it, won’t we, Helmud?”
“Miss it,” Helmud says, as if he’s ready to move on. They follow the others out onto the ground, which is stiff with the cold. They don’t talk. What the hell could any of them say? The smoke is so thick that it rolls around them as dark as the fog of Ireland was white. His eyes burn and tear. He covers his mouth with his sleeve.
Pressia turns a circle, trying to take in the destruction through the waves of smoke. “Where are Wilda and the others? How are we ever going to find them now?”
Bradwell extends his broad wings and then wraps himself in them—only his face shows, his jaw jutting out. El Capitan’s legs feel like they might buckle, and Helmud feels suddenly so heavy on his back that he rests on one knee.
Hastings stands in a wide-legged stance, balancing his weight between his real leg and the prosthetic. Finally he says, “This summer, I bought books for the whole school year.”
At first, El Capitan doesn’t know why he’d say something like that now, but then Bradwell says, “I remember giving those lessons in Shadow History. I had it all down. I knew what I was doing and why.” And El Capitan gets it. Hastings and Bradwell are wondering what the hell happened to everything they once knew to be true.
Pressia says, “I made windup toys. Sometimes they’d flutter, but I could never get them to fly.”
El Capitan says, “I had this journal. I’d test berries on the recruits to see which ones were poisonous. I had a system. I drew pictures in it. I was good at that.”
“I was good,” Helmud says, as if that sums it up. Once, long ago, before the Detonations, they were all good. El Capitan feels a surge of anger like he’s never felt before. He punches the cold ground with his fists. He feels the desire for revenge pulsing through him.
Bradwell’s the first to say it. “Let’s take ’em down.”
El Capitan says, “The bacterium is a gift. We were given a
gift
.” He can feel the twinge of the thick tape holding in place the box protecting the bacterium.
“A gift,” Helmud says.
“No,” Pressia says. “We have to talk to Partridge. Something’s gone wrong. He wouldn’t do this. I know it.”
This time she has someone to back her up without hesitation. “Partridge wouldn’t ever let this happen,” Hastings says. “I know him. We were friends. Trust me.”
“You
were
friends,” El Capitan says. “I know power firsthand. I know what it can do to your head. You come out on the other side of it twisted.”
“Twisted,” Helmud says. He knows what El Capitan’s talking about. He bore the brunt of it.
Pressia says, “We have to try to get inside. Let’s stick to the plan.”
“That was never my plan,” Bradwell says.
“Well, it was mine,” Pressia says.
Bradwell walks to her. “Do you smell that in the air? Do you know what that smell is?”
She looks at El Capitan and Helmud, then Hastings. “Smoke.”
“No,” Bradwell says. “What’s riding in that smoke?”
“Don’t,” El Capitan says.
“Hair and flesh. That’s what’s burning, Pressia. How many times are you going to forgive? How many times are you going to fall into the trap of thinking we can reason with them? They’re murderers. Partridge is either too weak to stop them or he’s one of them. Either way…”
“You are your father’s son too, Bradwell,” Pressia tells him. “And your mother’s. They weren’t trying to kill Willux. They believed in the truth. It was their religion, right? You said that. They believed it would set people free. Don’t you believe?”
Bradwell closes his eyes and lets his wings catch in the wind and open a little on his back. “No,” he says. “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
Pressia tucks the doll head under her chin, covers her mouth with her hand. She says, “I can go it alone.”
“Let’s stick together for now,” El Capitan says. “At least until we know what we’re up against, until we get our bearings again.”
“What we’re up against,” Helmud says fearfully.
Pressia doesn’t look convinced.
El Capitan tries another angle. “There are people who need us here, Pressia. You want to help them, right? You want to find Wilda and the other kids. Don’t you?”
She looks at the face of the doll head. She tilts it so its eyes close. Is she afraid they’re dead? Is she afraid that it’s too late to get the cure to the Dome, find the children, save them?
“I can’t let you go into the Dome,” Bradwell says. “I can’t let you go.”
El Capitan looks at Pressia. He can tell that she’s surprised. She looks at Bradwell, then El Capitan and Hastings, then quickly away from all of them. Is Bradwell confessing something here—about love? El Capitan feels sick.
“Before we left,” Pressia says, “word had traveled that Cap had set up medical tents in the city. Once the outpost was burned, that would have been the most logical place to take the children.”
The medical tents are gone. That’s the truth, but El Capitan doesn’t say it. Maybe Pressia knows that or maybe she’s living on hope. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s start there.” But he knows he’s probably only bought a little time before she leaves them all to make her own way.
P
ressia’s already decided to leave them. When the time is right, she’ll slip off. It’s easier this way. No arguments. No fighting. She has to find Partridge. She has to know the truth.
When Bradwell asked her if she knew what that smell in the wind was, she wanted to spin around and slap him. She remembers the smell of burnt flesh and hair from the days the OSR was in power as well as from her early childhood—from the Detonations. She’d blotted the memories out for so long, but now she remembers the fires, worse than these because they were fueled by radiation—or was it that the blasts made everything susceptible to becoming tinder? The fire cyclones tore through everything, drove people to water—people half-dead already. Her grandfather held her to his chest and, one legged, he crawled through the wreckage. He helped her climb across a river clogged with the dead.
They passed over that river as they flew in. It was edged with ice, a white rim. Pressia remembered what it was like to almost drown in it—the cold darkness all around her, that feeling of being saved, lifted by unseen hands. Did Bradwell see the river outside of his own window—the place where they almost froze to death? Does he remember the feel of their skin touching? She does. She’ll never forget it. The flash of it still makes her skin hot.
And then Bradwell said that he couldn’t let her go? He only means that he won’t let her go. He’s telling her what she can and cannot do. He looked her way once, then later again. But she pretended not to notice. If he can’t forgive her, she has to harden her heart, doesn’t she? She has to steel herself. Meanwhile, she’s making her plan.
Of course, she can’t shake the question that pounds through her head—
Did Partridge do this?
It echoes with each step. She has to believe in Partridge. What else does she have to hope for? Pressia sees a stand of twisted, burnt trees in the distance. Has she ever seen them before? She knows she has. But now, they have been whittled to spokes of char. She feels older now. The dead trees, like monuments to the destruction, stand out to her as individual. Each has suffered on its own. Each has been stunned into being something it never was intended to be. Each is now part of the greater loss.
They walk through the trees toward the city, using what’s left for cover. The trees look like cacti. Stark. Isolated. The silt climbs up their trunks on the side of the prevailing wind. Spider-root systems turned vertical catch what the wind drags in—mostly junk and rot that’s wandered across these wastelands wanting rest, some place to stop, an end to it all. She stares through the low limbs, looking for any shift of a figure or flash of color. “Hastings,” she says every few minutes or so, “anything?”
His senses have been coded, but the smoke riding on the air limits his vision and sense of smell. “We have to keep moving,” he says.
“Are we being followed?” she asks.
“They’re weak,” he says, “and there aren’t many. We just need to keep going.”
More than once, they hear footsteps, the rattle of brush. Is it Special Forces? Are they being tracked? If it is soldiers, they don’t open fire.
And then, once in the open again, Pressia sees the swaths of blood in the dusty dirt. It’s the scene of a battle—the bloody tracks of bodies being dragged away. But whose bodies were dragged—mothers and their children or Special Forces? They pass a mound of debris caught against a berm. Maybe there was a highway here, maybe a holding pond for water. But the berm caught everything that didn’t blow over it. They pass a pickup truck with vacant headlights, a grocery cart, busted concrete slabs, iron rods, and dirt and ash and stuff so blown it’s beyond recognition. Somebody made the truck. Somebody drove it. Somebody pushed the cart and somebody laid the concrete. And there, under a slur of dried mud, a flattened ball. She can almost hear the child kicking it. It crushes her.
After a while, they come across another bloody mess—this time, the bodies of the survivors that haven’t been taken away. The dead litter the ground, their limbs akimbo, the gunshot wounds gaping and dark with dried blood.
They keep going.
Once in the city, Pressia glimpses the distant cross on top of the Dome. Somewhere in these alleys and rubbled streets, she’ll leave the others behind. But it’s hard to stay focused on the Dome. El Capitan was right; she’s growing desperate to find Wilda and the children. She can’t leave until she knows they’re safe. Closing in on the area where the medical tents once stood, they start calling for Wilda as they make their way.
The rain seems like a miracle at first, clearing the smoke, cooling the rubble, dousing anything that still smolders, but it doesn’t let up. It only gets worse, driving down on them as they search for Wilda and the children, calling and calling through the vacant streets. Their clothes and boots are soaked. Pressia’s hair sticks to her face. Bradwell fares better—his wings bead water.
