Freda: Volume III in the New Eden series (13 page)

CHAPTER 14

Garrett has been holding Kitta’s hand for three straight days. He doesn’t even let it go when he starts ticking off the days on his fingers.

“Thursday,” he says at last. “I think today is Thursday. At about fifteen miles a day, that’s...”

“Far enough to get out of the snow,” Kitta says.

“Far enough to get to a town,” he says with a sly grin.

Kitta chirps, “What? A town?”

Tynan, who has been walking with me the past three days instead of lurking outside the ring of children clamoring for stories, asks “You heard this from
her
?”

“If by
her
you mean Lupay, then yes,” replies Garrett. He doesn’t hide his contempt for Tynan.

I wish they would be kind to each other, but civility will suffice. Over time, they’ll warm up, I’m sure of it. Garrett hasn’t seen how helpful Tynan has been these past three nights as I’ve walked among the campsites, comforting children and wrapping blisters and mending clothes. Tynan is still reluctant to get close to the Tawtrukkers and is afraid of the Subterrans, but his constant nearness and his eagerness to carry my supplies has kept me going. He is a good man, and he has a deep faith. He’s trying.

“Has she seen this town?” Skepticism drips from Tynan’s words.

“Yes, she and Patrick—”

“Are there people there?”

It’s the question we’ve all been wondering, and I’ve been wondering the most. Are there other people who survived after the War, who lived in places like Southshaw? We thought all the land west of the mountains was obliterated and uninhabitable, but the more we descend the more lush and beautiful it becomes. The phrase
other tribes
pushes its way into my thoughts.

“No. It’s just ruins,” Garrett replies curtly. “The leaders have found a way around, but some of us are going in to see.”

“Go ahead,” Tynan says. “Freda and I will stay away.”

Tynan cares for me, but caring for and speaking for are two different things.

“What if I want to go?” The idea of seeing an ancient town both frightens and excites me. An ancient town! Where our ancestors lived. And where they died in the War. No one knows what we might find there. Even the Subterran historian wouldn’t know, I bet. I’d like to ask him, but he returned with Fobrasse, and all his knowledge is lost now, like Micktuk’s books.

“We should stay away from all the ancient things,” Tynan says to me. “We shouldn’t become tainted with all the things that made God cleanse the Earth with war in the first place.” He’s not arguing with me; he’s just stating a fact, like
it’s Thursday
, or
water runs downhill
.

Without waiting for any argument, he turns away and blends into the gray crowd that shambles along the road. I didn’t mean to offend him. Part of me wants to chase after him and ask him not to be angry, but how would that look to Garrett and Kitta? They already think I’m spending too much time with him, and Kitta has suggested several times that I might want to go spend time with my husband instead. It’s not like that. She should realize that my connection with Tynan is around our shared faith and our desire to help the people. It has nothing to do with how handsome he is or that he wished Dane hadn’t selected me in the Wifing, or anything like that. Besides, Dane hasn’t come looking for me, either.

After Tynan is out of hearing, Garrett whispers, “Goodbye. Don’t hurry back.”

I pretend not to hear.

Half a mile ahead, the road splits. Nearly everyone keeps to the right, on the broad path carved through the hill. Although nature has reclaimed much of this ancient road, occasional patches of hard, black flatness show where it ran. A few people—mostly Tawtrukk teenagers and a few of the men—bear left toward the ruins.

Bushes clog the way and trees block my view, but it’s clear that people shaped that hillside long ago. We push through a copse, following the broken path trampled by the few that went before us, until a huge, dark shape looms ahead.

Kitta speaks first. “It’s... a house, or something.”

“No,” Garrett replies. “Too big to be just a house. It’s half as big as the Sikwaa lodge.”

“I never saw that,” Kitta says.

I remember it. A monstrous building, five levels tall and longer than three of Southshaw’s biggest barns. We escaped the inferno of the Sikwaa valley through Subterra’s tunnels hidden underneath.

“This is different,” Garrett says. “No windows.”

I see what he means. The building has flat, brick walls like a gigantic, square oven. Ivy covers it to at least twice my height, but the rest is unadorned. It’s blackened and dirty.

Garrett runs his fingers through the ivy as we pass along its side. “I wonder if there’s a door,” he says.

“What do you think it was for?”

“No idea.”

We walk the length of the building; when we turn the corner, the land opens to a wide flatness similar to the Runway in Southshaw. Scrappy tufts of grass, runty wildflowers, and small scrub dot an expanse of cracked and crumbled concrete. Like the building, the concrete’s dusty gray is streaked with black.

“Fire,” Garrett concludes after a moment. “This place burned.”

“In the war?” Kitta’s voice is filled with fear and wonder.

“Maybe.”

The scene is so strange I can’t take it all in at once. On the other side of this concrete meadow squats a short building a hundred yards wide. One part gapes with empty spaces that might once have been giant windows. The roof has caved in and plants have invaded through these windows, crawling back into the darkness.The rest of the long building is obscured by its collapsed porch roof, the rubble compacted with centuries of drifted leaves and growth.

Here and there on the concrete, hulks of twisted, rusted metal sit partially covered by ivy, with saplings and ferns rising from inside. Nearer to us. a box big as a wagon lies tumbled with a long, broken, metal pole sticking out of one end. The metal of its frame is little more than rust, but its sides are flat and smooth and faded to the color of sour milk.

Kitta breathes, “This is so different from what I expected.”

Garrett draws her close and asks, “What did you expect?”

“I don’t know. Utter desolation. Scorched and molten, smoking and black. The whole earth looking like the crust of a terribly burned pie, I guess.”

“I know what you mean,” Garrett says. “Everything glowing with Radiation. Too hot to touch. No plants, no—”

He stops as a fox crawls from inside one of the rusted metal lumps in the middle of the concrete meadow. It pauses and stares at us a moment, then trots off toward the woods.

“Like that. I didn’t expect to see that.”

“No one knows what to expect,” I say. But that’s not entirely true.

Do not fear the Radiation, for the westward highway was cleansed not with bombs but with biology.

I know what to expect, at least more than they do, because someone wrote it down. Already much of what I read in Prophecies has faded from my memory, but some of it is still so clear I can even remember the sound of Dane’s voice as he read the words aloud to me in that frozen night.

Perhaps now, after seeing this, he’ll start trusting his faith a little more.

A sudden screech, a child’s scream, rips apart the quiet day.

“Come on, this way,” Garrett says as he leaps forward and begins running around the corner of the huge, brick building.

Kitta and I follow as a yell for help follows the scream. We push through a tangle of saplings and ivy and turn the corner to see three boys, all about twelve years old, stumbling out of the building through a door overgrown with a curtain of ivy. They stagger out, all three now yelling for help.

Garrett reaches them first and helps the smallest one up, who was the first out. “What’s happened? Are you all right?”

As Kitta looks to the others—all of them are Tawtrukk children—Garrett interrogates the little one. His round face is smeared with dirt and gray streaks, and his narrow, brown eyes dart around in fear.

“Calm down, Sid. Just calm down, okay? What’s happened?”

“It fell over. It just fell over. No one touched it, I swear.”

“What fell over? Calm down. Sid!” Garrett grabs the boy’s shoulders and holds him steady so he doesn’t bolt like a terrified cat.

“The door. At least, that’s what we thought it was. Jander wanted to open it, but I told him no, don’t, but he went over there anyway and when he got near it just fell on him. I wasn’t even anywhere near it. I swear!”

“What door?” Garrett gets close into the boy’s face. “Where is Jander now?”

“In there. He’s in there. We just wanted to see.”

One of the bigger boys says, “We didn’t mean nothing. We just wanted to look. We weren’t gonna take nothing or anything like that.”

Garrett lets go of the little one and turns to the other, who shares the same brown skin and round face of the little one. They may be brothers. “Show me.”

As the boy turns back to the doorway, Kitta says, “Garrett, be careful.”

After the boy disappears through the ivy curtain, I follow. It’s not dark inside like I expected. The floor is covered with rubble from the collapsed ceiling, and great holes in the roof high above let in plenty of sunlight. It’s hard to tell what this room looked like three centuries ago. The ceiling had been high, twice as high as a normal ceiling. We enter into a wide, open area that looks like it held no furniture or fireplaces or anything. Like the open area of a barn. Halfway across, a long counter splits the room into two halves. It’s made of a hard wood that seems to have weathered the centuries with grace. Near the left end, a gap breaks the counter from the wall.

“That way,” the boy says.

Garrett moves swiftly across the rubble to the gap, and I follow him through. Kitta has remained outside with the other two boys. Garrett calls out, “Jaden!”

Behind the counter, strange remains of things I don’t recognize clutter the floor. The collapsed ceiling and years of gathered leaves obscure them, but it’s clear that there are rotting wooden tables, and some kind of strange chairs. I don’t have time to wonder what kind of work or worship people did here as we follow the boy through another door still standing in the middle of a mostly collapsed wall.

I stop short as I step through. A metal slab six feet long and three wide lies on what looks at first like a pile of rubble but which I see after a moment is actually the body of a boy. His feet stick out from under the slab, unmoving.

“Oh, God,” Garrett groans. He leaps to the slab and crouches, then lifts with a heavy grunt. He struggles, then with a roar lifts the edge of the slab and flips it over. It slams to the floor, stirring a cloud of dust and debris into the air and echoing with a mighty boom. Garrett kneels next to the boy.

“Jaden! Jaden, are you okay?”

The boy doesn’t move, doesn’t respond. As I come around to the other side, Garrett looks at me with sadness spreading over his face. He shakes his head.

The boy lies face down, and a large, black puddle soaks the dust and ash next to his head. He does not seem to be breathing.

Garrett says, “It must have hit his head when it fell.”

I don’t know this Tawtrukk boy, but my heart aches.

“We have to get him back to his parents,” Garrett says.

The metal slab lies next to him, and as the dust clears I see it was indeed a door, with a round handle like a wheel right in its middle. As Garrett slips his hands under the boy’s body, I look through the opening it had guarded. Beyond is a dark room, and although I can see very little it’s clear that the walls and ceiling of this room have stood strong through the centuries. The smell of a doused campfire drifts from the room, and great piles of dirt and ash, as tall as I am, loom in the dark.

Garrett lifts the boy with a grunt. “He’s still breathing,” he says. “I have to hurry.”

I should follow him out, but I can’t help myself. Stepping through the doorway into the dimness beyond, I peer at the enormous piles that are the color of the sky on a stormy day. A stick pokes out from the pile closest to me. As I stare, I slowly realize with horror that it’s not a stick. It’s a bone. Just below this bone, a half-buried human skull leers at me with sunken, empty holes where eyes should be.

I stumble back, through and away from the doorway. I don’t know what this place was, or what happened here. I don’t want to know. I turn and scramble away, following Garrett out into the fresh air.

Garrett has laid the boy Jaden on the ground, and Kitta is examining the bloody spot on his head. She glances up at me and says, “It’s bad, but he might be okay. Freda! You look like you’ve seen the Devil.”

I feel like my head is filled with hummingbirds and my legs are made of marsh reeds. As I lean against a tree to stop the world from trembling, I whisper, “Perhaps I did.”

She half stands, but I wave her back to the hurt boy.

“I’ll be fine,” I rasp, but I know I’ll never forget that skull staring at me, its empty eyes condemning my presence there.

Garrett grabs the biggest boy. “Can you carry him back to his parents?”