Burn (42 page)
Peekins is explaining things to the old man. “You’ve been through an operation, and you’ve been in a kind of coma, but you’re going to be okay.”
Beckley says, “He’s here but he’s gone.”
Partridge stares at the floor. He’s not finished here. He walks out of the room and down the halls. He’s running even though he feels dizzy. With one hand along the wall, he pushes off of it as he makes a turn.
Iralene and Beckley are following him. “What’s going on, Partridge?” Beckley shouts. “Where are you going?”
“Partridge!” Iralene calls.
They know where he’s going. He keeps running jaggedly down the halls until he comes to the high-security chamber—the one that’s all locked up and waiting for Partridge to figure out some code, some password.
Partridge stares at the door, breathless, as Beckley and Iralene catch up. “What you got in there? What have you left for me?” He’s speaking to his father directly. He’s
everywhere
; he’s inside of him.
“Maybe you don’t want to know,” Iralene says.
“Maybe you can’t know,” Beckley says.
Partridge turns around and shoves Beckley. “Pressia’s grandfather doesn’t remember her. I brought back her grandfather—but part of him is still dead. You try to hand that over to Pressia as a gift! You try it.”
“Easy now,” Beckley says, raising his hands.
“What if her father’s in there? Hideki Imanaka is the person my father most hated in the world. My father loved his little relics. He’d have kept a relic of Imanaka if he could. And he could do anything just about, right?”
Beckley walks up to the heavy metal door.
“I’ve done everything I could to make progress. I need this to be Pressia’s father. I need this.”
“We’ve tried a lot of combinations, Partridge,” Beckley says. “We can’t get it open.”
“Blow it up.”
“Your father made sure that this wasn’t about a show of force,” Iralene says. “It was about a secret. Something that maybe only the two of you would know.”
Partridge runs his hands through his hair. “My father and I didn’t share secrets! We didn’t share anything.” Not even love, Partridge thinks. His father didn’t even love him. That’s what Partridge said to him before he killed him.
You’ll never understand love.
Does his father want love?
Partridge looks at Beckley. His hands still hold the memory of compressing Odwald Belze’s ribs. They’re shaking, like his father’s once did. It’s like the old man won’t ever leave him. It feels for a brief moment like his father got his way, that he transferred his brain into Partridge’s skull and is inside of him forever. He hates his father more than ever, and he knows what his father wants now—what he’s demanding.
“I have to know what’s in there, Beckley.” He grips the sleeve of Beckley’s lab coat. “I have to tell him I love him.”
“What?”
Partridge knows that his father wants it to come from Partridge’s own mouth. “There’s a speaker,” Partridge whispers, his back turned to the sealed door. “He wants me to say it.”
“You sure that’s it?” Beckley sounds unconvinced, but he doesn’t know Willux like Partridge does.
Iralene puts her hand on the cold metal of the door.
“The room inside the war room was filled with old pictures, love letters—written to each of us. All the things he never said. Because he never said them, he never heard them back. I know what he wants. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.” Partridge knows it because his father is inside of him—a haunting from within. That’s what he can’t tell Beckley.
“Say it,” Iralene whispers.
Partridge turns toward the door. He walks up to the small speaker. He clamps his mouth shut and shakes his head. He won’t say it. He can’t. He wants to say,
Leave me alone
. Is this what happens to all murderers? His body is a prison. Partridge slams his fists on the wall over his head.
Partridge tries to think of someone else. He can fake it. But his father is there in his head—his curled, blackened hands, his hissing breaths. A wretch in the end. And then, he’s not sure where it comes from, but he says, “A wretch like me.” There’s a song about being a wretch, about the grace of God. He wants to tell his father we’re all wretches. We all need saving. He puts his mouth to the speaker. “I love you,” he says. “You’re my father. I always loved you. I had no choice but to love you.”
Somewhere inside of his father’s elaborate locks, his words meet some criteria. Was it just his words? Was it the ache in his voice that activated something? He’ll never know.
The clicking begins. The door finally gives. Its seal is broken. Cold seeps from the chilled room. Fog rolls into the hallway.
Partridge puts his hand on the door and slowly pushes it open.
An overhead light flickers to life, illuminating four small capsules.
Partridge walks up and sees infants in each of the capsules. They lie on their sides. They have tubes in their mouths. Their skins are all lightly crystallized and tinged blue, the way Jarv Hollenback’s was when Partridge first saw him down here. The room also has one table in the corner with a metal box sitting on top of it.
“Four little babies,” Iralene says, walking into the room and leaning in close to one of them.
“My God,” Beckley says as he steps through the door. “My God.”
Partridge doesn’t understand. He looks at Beckley who blanches and backs away.
Beckley grips the doorframe and looks at Partridge, wide-eyed. “Jesus, Partridge. Don’t you know?”
Partridge shakes his head and looks at Iralene. He watches the realization wash over her face too. He looks at the capsules again. This time he searches the edges of them for nameplates. He finds a small silver tag on the front of each capsule with initials:
RCW
,
SWW
,
ACW
,
ELW
.
RCW
—his initials: Ripkard, his real name; Crick, his middle name; and Willux.
SWW
—his brother’s initials: Sedge Watson Willux.
He grips this second capsule, and then moves quickly to the third nameplate:
ACW
. Aribelle Cording Willux, his mother.
He says, “No, no,” as his eyes dart to the final nameplate:
ELW
. His father. Ellery Lawton Willux.
Could this be his family—rebuilt?
He thinks of the premature babies behind the bank of windows in the nursery. Clones—made from the genetic coding of Pures and wretches.
Is he looking at his mother and father—as infants? Is he looking at Sedge and himself? Is this what his father has given him? His family, returned?
One of his knees buckles. He grabs the edge of a capsule and walks to the metal box on the lone table. He stares at it for a moment. His ears are rushed with blood. His eyes blur. He blinks, and the box clicks back into focus.
He has to open the lid.
“Don’t,” Iralene says. “Leave it.”
But he can’t. He pushes the lid off with his thumbs. It clatters against the table.
Inside, there are medical instructions—a schedule for aging the specimens so that they will eventually have the correct age differences to be a family again. ACW and ELW have to be brought out and aged for twenty-five years, and then SWW can be brought out. Partridge’s mother and father had Sedge when they were twenty-five years old. RCW can be brought out two years later.
And then…what did his father have in mind? They would be a family? A normal family? Reunited and whole?
Maybe his father didn’t regret killing his wife and his oldest son because they were still alive.
Partridge walks back to the capsules—the tiny infants. What will he do with them? This is his inheritance.
Beckley’s radio squawks. Has Partridge’s sister set her plan in motion? Are the survivors invading? Is this the beginning of another bloody war? He says, “Iralene, tell me something in this world matters. Tell me something is sacred.”
“You matter,” she whispers. But this isn’t what he needed to hear.
Beckley walks back into the room. “Lyda and Pressia have been found.”
“Do you think it’s started?” Partridge asks.
“A group has formed not far from the Dome,” Beckley says. “According to reports, they seem to be moving.”
Iralene and Beckley step into the hall, and for a moment, it’s only Partridge and the infants. His father thought he was doing the right thing too. But now Partridge knows he isn’t his father. His father will always be foreign to him. Partridge is going to try to save the Dome, not because of what it stands for or what it aspires to be but because each person matters. He can try to save lives.
Iralene tries again. “Home is sacred, Partridge.”
“We have to bring Lyda and Pressia into the war room. Odwald Belze too.”
“Family is sacred,” Iralene whispers. “A home filled with family.”
He walks into the hall. The lights in the room flicker out. The door automatically closes. The only noise is the sound of the locks clicking into place.
O
ur lives aren’t accidents. This is the beginning, not an end. Do what you have to do.
Bradwell reads it over and over, aloud, his fingers pinching the edges of the small strip of paper. His hands are shaking so badly that the hand-drawn swan looks like it’s shivering. “How the hell are we going to take it down with no bacterium?” Bradwell says.
“Hell if I know,” El Capitan says.
“Hell!” Helmud says angrily.
Outside, the people have started buzzing with noise—there have been a few shouts and unclear chants.
From his bed, El Capitan finds a view of the gathering crowds through the blackened bookshelves and the crumbling wall.
“What’s going on out there?” Bradwell says.
“No idea,” El Capitan says.
But then, the crowd parts, and Our Good Mother, flanked on all sides by mothers, is striding toward the remains of the elementary school. She’s bundled in fur except for the bare skin on her bicep where the baby’s mouth is lodged, and he knows that she’s coming to find El Capitan and Bradwell, and once she’s in the room, he’ll be able to see the baby’s small pursed lips.
The baby scares him most of all.
“She’s here,” El Capitan says.
“Who?”
“Our Good Mother. I feel like I’m about to get in trouble,” El Capitan says. “I hope she’s not armed.”
“She’s always armed,” Bradwell says.
“Always,” Helmud says.
El Capitan pulls a thin sheet up over himself, as if this will serve as some kind of protection. “I hate it when the mothers call us Deaths.”
“I hate it when Our Good Mother calls us at all.”
The tarp flap set up between two bookcases is pulled back. Our Good Mother walks through it followed by three other mothers who then stand by the doorway.
“Leave us alone for a moment,” she says. “Guard the door.” They glare at El Capitan and Bradwell, then leave reluctantly.
“I don’t think you’ve ever paid us a visit before,” Bradwell says. “What’s the occasion?”
“Don’t take a tone with me, Death. I’m here out of the goodness of my heart.” She looks at El Capitan, his face mottled with bruises. “So they finally got their revenge.”
“Maybe not all of it,” El Capitan says.
“All of it,” Helmud says, disagreeing.
“Well, you can’t blame them,” she says.
El Capitan doesn’t respond. He blames himself, and the feeling is new and strange. He doesn’t like it.
“Why are you here?” Bradwell says.
“I’m here because you need me,” Our Good Mother says.
“Really?” Bradwell says. “Because I feel like we’ve gotten a pretty good show of people here. We might be set.” El Capitan knows Bradwell doesn’t want to be indebted to Our Good Mother. She has brutal ways of settling debts.
“Please—you’re disorganized, unarmed, and weak. And I think you’re missing something very precious to you. Am I right?”
Bradwell opens his mouth to say something, but El Capitan cuts him off. “What’s that? What have you got?”
“We’ve been trailing you—just keeping tabs. And you left something behind. You know what it is,” she says coyly.
“You’re missing my point,” El Capitan says. “I’m not convinced that
you
know what it is.”
“I know it’s small. I know it’s powerful. I know it’s essential to your plan. I know that if one of you starts off for the Dome alone, or even if you go together, you’ll likely be killed in the process. Have you noticed the shiny new guns that are now on top of the Dome’s roof—a wreath of weaponry?”
“What?” Bradwell says. “New guns?”
“They’re preparing for war,” Our Good Mother says. “Are you?”
Bradwell’s massive wings unfurl and twitch.
“This will be a massacre either way. Why don’t we help you take down the Dome and make it a fair fight?” Our Good Mother says.
El Capitan shakes his head. “I can’t go in fighting,” he says. “I won’t. That’s not who I am anymore—not ever again.”
“This doesn’t have to be an act of aggression,” Bradwell says. “We don’t have to be attacking them. We’re attacking the Dome itself. We could be setting them free.”
“You’re hoping to approach with your small special delivery, correct?” Our Good Mother begins. “We have to be prepared for the possibility that Pressia has let it slip—or had news of your
weapon
beaten out of her. They might know a good bit, in fact. If we surround the Dome and come all at once, they won’t know which one has this special delivery. It could be any of us. Where to start shooting? How to begin the massacre? We all arrive and circle in tight. We live as a mass; maybe we will die as a mass. But at least we are all together. To kill the right one, they’ll have to kill us all.”
“They’ll start mowing us down with machine guns,” Bradwell says. “They won’t care who they shoot.”
“Only those who want to circle will circle,” Our Good Mother says. “No one will be forced.”
“If Partridge is truly in charge,” El Capitan says, “he won’t have the stomach to kill all of us.”
“And if he’s not really in charge?” Bradwell says.
