Pure (17 page)

“So that’s why you wanted to come here—to find your mother, the
saint
?” Bradwell says.

Partridge ignores Bradwell’s tone. “Once I saw her things, I started to doubt everything I’ve ever been told. I was told she was dead, so I doubted that too,” he says.

“And what if she is dead?” Bradwell asks.

“I’m used to that idea,” Partridge says, stoically.

“We’re used to the idea too,” Bradwell says. “Most people here have plenty of people they’ve lost.”

Bradwell doesn’t know Pressia’s story of loss, but he knows she has one. Every survivor has one. Partridge doesn’t know anything about her or what she’s lost either, and she doesn’t feel like acknowledging it now. “Partridge needs to find Lombard Street. That’s where they lived. He can at least start there,” she tells Bradwell. “He needs the old map of the city.”

“Why should I help him?” he says.

“Maybe he can help us in return,” she says.

“We don’t need his help.”

Partridge doesn’t say a word. Bradwell looks at the two of them. Pressia leans toward Bradwell. “Maybe you don’t, but I do,” she says.

“What do you need him for?”

“Leverage.
OSR
. Maybe I could get off the list. And my grandfather is sick. He’s all I’ve got. Without any help, I’m sure…” She suddenly feels sick, like saying aloud her fears—that her grandfather will die, that she’ll be shipped to the
OSR
and because of her lost hand, she’ll be of no use—will make them undeniably true. Her mouth is dry. She almost can’t say it. But then the words tumble out. “We won’t make it.”

Bradwell kicks the footlocker. The birds, startled but with nowhere to go, beat madly under the shirt on his back. He looks at Pressia. He’s giving in, she can tell. He might even be giving in for her sake.

She doesn’t want his sympathy. She hates pity. She says quickly, “We just need a map. We can make it.”

Bradwell shakes his head.

“We’ll be fine,” Pressia says.

“You might make it, but he won’t. He hasn’t adapted to this environment. It’d be a waste of a perfectly good Pure to let him go out and get his head bashed by Groupies.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Partridge says.

“What’s the street?” Bradwell says.

“Lombard,” Partridge says. “Ten Fifty-four Lombard.”

“If the street exists, I’ll get you to it. Then maybe you should go home, back to the Dome and Daddy.”

Partridge is pissed. He leans forward. “I don’t need any—”

Pressia cuts in, “We’ll take the map. If you can get us to Lombard, that would be great.”

Bradwell looks at Partridge, giving him a chance to finish. But Partridge must know that Pressia’s right. They should take whatever help they can get.

“Yeah,” Partridge says. “Lombard would be great. We won’t ask for any more than that.”

“Okay,” Bradwell says. “It’s not easy, you know. If the street didn’t have any big important buildings on it, then it’ll be lost to us. And if it was anywhere close to the middle of the city, it’ll just be part of the Rubble Fields. I can’t guarantee anything.” Bradwell squats down and opens the footlocker. After a few moments of careful sorting, he comes up with an old map of the city. It’s tattered; the seams have worn through to a soft fray.

“Lombard Street,” he says. He opens the map on the floor. Partridge and Pressia kneel beside him. He runs his finger along the grid at one side, then puts a finger on section 2E.

“Do you see it?” she asks, and suddenly, she hopes the house is still standing. She hopes, beyond all reason, that it’s the way it once was: big houses in a tidy row with white stone steps and fancy gates, windows with curtains that open to beautiful rooms, bikes locked to front gates, people walking dogs, people pushing strollers. She doesn’t know why she even lets herself have this kind of hope. Maybe it has something to do with the Pure, as if his hopefulness is contagious.

Bradwell’s finger stops on an intersection. “Are you always this lucky?” he says to Partridge.

“What? Where is it?”

“I know exactly where Lombard is.” He gets up, walks out of the meat locker into the larger room. He kneels next to the toppled wall and pulls a few bricks away, exposing a hole filled with weapons—hooks, knives, cleavers. He pulls some out and brings them back into the cooler. He gives Partridge and Pressia each a knife. Pressia likes the weight of it, although she doesn’t want to think of what it’s been used for here in the butcher shop—and by Bradwell too.

“Just in case,” he says, and he slips a knife and a hook onto loops stitched inside his own jacket. He then holds up a gun. “I found a bunch of these stun guns too. At first I thought they were some kind of bike pump. Instead of bullets, they’ve got a cartridge that delivers a stunning blow if held to the head of a cow or pig. Good for hand-to-hand combat. Good if you’re attacked by Groupies.”

“Can I see it?” Partridge asks.

Bradwell hands it to him, and Partridge holds it lightly, like it’s a small animal.

“The first time I used it was on Groupies,” Bradwell says. “I pulled the gun from my waistband, and, within the dense tangle of bodies, I found the back of a skull. I pulled the trigger and the head went limp. The Groupies must have felt the sudden shock of death throughout their shared cells. They reared and spun a slow circle, like they were trying to release themselves from the dead one. Its head was lolling and flopping, and I ran off.”

“I don’t know if I’d be able to do that,” Pressia says, looking at the knife in her hands.

“Life or death,” Partridge says. “I think you would.”

“Maybe I don’t know how to process a cow,” Bradwell says, “but I know these weapons as well as any butcher ever did—as a means of survival.”

Pressia puts the knife into the rope of her belt. She’d rather use the knife to cut wires and make her small windup toys than kill anything. “Where are we going exactly?”

“The church,” Bradwell says. “Part of it still exists. A crypt.” He stops, stares at one of the walls of the meat locker as if he’s looking through it. “That’s where I go sometimes.”

“To pray?” Pressia says. “You believe in God?”

“No,” he says. “It’s just a good safe place. Tight walls, sound structure.”

Pressia doesn’t know what she thinks about God. All she knows is that people around here have pretty much given up on the idea of religion and faith, although there are some who still worship in their own ways, and some who’ve confused the Dome with a version of heaven. “I’ve heard whispers of people who meet and burn candles and write things down. Do they meet there?”

“I think they do,” Bradwell says, folding up the map. “There’s evidence of it—wax, small offerings.”

“I’ve never thought that there was anything I could hope to get by praying for it,” Pressia says.

Bradwell grabs his coat off a metal rail overhead. “That’s probably what they pray for. Hope.”

THE
FABRIC
OF
THE
AWNING
IS
WORN
AWAY
. All that’s left are the aluminum spokes, bolted to the old asylum. El Capitan looks up through the awning’s charred metal spines at the gray sky.
Pressia Belze
—the name is heavy. Why is Ingership suddenly obsessed with some survivor named Pressia Belze? El Capitan doesn’t like the name—the way it draws itself out, a buzz in the mouth. He gave up looking for her. It’s not his job to be out on the streets, so he came home an hour ago and sent the men back out. Now he wonders if he’ll pay for that decision. Could those idiots really find the girl without him? He doubts it.

He shouts into the walkie-talkie. “Did you get her? Over.”

The radio goes silent.

“Do you read me? Over.”

There’s nothing.

“Dead again,” El Capitan says.

And then El Capitan’s brother, Helmud, mutters, “Dead again.”

Helmud is only seventeen, two years younger than El Capitan, and he’s always been the smaller of the two. El Capitan and Helmud were ten and eight, respectively, when the Detonations hit. Helmud is fused to El Capitan’s back. The visual effect is that of a permanent piggyback ride. Helmud has his own upper body, but the rest feeds into his brother—the lumpy bone and muscle of his thighs forming a thick band across El Capitan’s lower back. They’d been riding a motorized dirt bike when the whitest white and the hot wind blasted them down—Helmud on the back of the dirt bike holding on to his older brother. El Capitan had rebuilt the engine himself. Now Helmud’s skinny arms are draped around his brother’s thick neck.

The walkie-talkie crackles to life. El Capitan can hear the truck’s radio and growling gears, as if it’s climbing a hill. Finally the officer’s voice pops through the noise. “No. But we will. Trust me. Over.”

Trust me, El Capitan thinks. He shoves the walkie-talkie into his holster. He glances back at his brother. “Like I ever trusted anybody. Not even you.”

“Not even you,” Helmud whispers back.

The truth is he’s always had to trust Helmud. For so long, they’ve only had each other. They never had a father, really, and when El Capitan was nine, their mother died of a virulent influenza in an asylum like the one he stands in front of now.

El Capitan shouts into the walkie-talkie, “If you don’t get her, Ingership will have our asses. Don’t mess this up. Over.”

It’s late. The moon is lost in a gray haze. El Capitan thinks about going in to see if Vedra is still working in the kitchen. He likes the way she looks through the steam of the dishwasher. He could order her to make him a sandwich. He’s the highest-ranking official on the ground here at headquarters, after all. But he knows how it will go with Vedra. They’ll talk as she cuts the meat, her hands raw from all that work, so much of her scarred skin showing, her brightly seared flesh. She’ll talk to him with that soft voice, and eventually her eyes will slide to his brother’s face, which is always there, always gazing blankly over his shoulder. He hates the way people can’t help but look at Helmud while El Capitan is speaking, a stupid puppet bobbing behind his back, and a rage will rise up inside El Capitan—so quick and sharp he could snap. Sometimes, at night, while listening to his brother’s deep breaths, he imagines rolling to his back—smothering his brother once and for all. If Helmud died, he would too, though. He knows that. They are both too large to have one die and the other live, too entwined. Sometimes it seems so inevitable, he can barely stand the waiting.

Instead of seeing Vedra in the kitchen’s steam, he decides to head to the woods—what’s left of it, what’s growing back—to check his traps. Two days in a row, his traps have been picked clean. He caught something all right, but then something else came along and ate it.

Once he’s walked behind headquarters, there are forts made of planks of wood, shears of metal on a barren dirt field, a wall built out of stones. On top of it, there’s barbed wire. Beyond that, there are wrecked buildings. One had a row of columns, and two of the columns remain with nothing behind them but a sooty sky. He loves the sky more than anything. He’d wanted to be in the air force, once upon a time, as a kid. He used to know everything there was about flying; he had library books and an old flight simulation video where he logged hours upon hours of practice. He knew nothing about his own father except that he’d been in the air force, a fighter pilot, kicked out of the military on a psych discharge. “Crazy as hell,” his mother used to say about him. “We’re lucky he’s gone.” Gone where? El Capitan never knew. But he knew he was like his father in some ways—he wanted to be in the sky and he was crazy. The closest he ever got to flying was riding that motorized dirt bike, catching air after hitting a jump. He doesn’t like thinking about that now.

He’s no pilot, but he is an officer. He’s in charge of sorting out fresh recruits. He decides which ones can be trained and which ones can’t. He sends some of them to the de-education outposts to get them stripped down a little, mentally, to make them a little more willing to take orders and not stir things up. And he picks off the weak ones, keeping a few in a holding pen on the grounds. He sends reports directly to Ingership via Ingership’s own personal messengers.

Sometimes Ingership sends El Capitan things to feed the weakest recruits—twisted ears of corn, pale tomatoes with innards more dust than pulp, a certain kind of unlabeled meat. He then reports to Ingership which foods make them sick, which don’t. Where do the foods come from? He doesn’t ask questions. El Capitan tests things on the weak recruits for his own purposes too—berries he finds in the woods, morels, leaves that could be basil or mint but never are. Sometimes the weak recruits get sick. Occasionally they die. Every once in a while, they’re just fine, and so El Capitan collects those foods and shares them with Helmud.

Sometimes Ingership orders El Capitan to play The Game, letting one of the weak recruits loose so El Capitan can hunt the recruit down like a sick deer. It’s a mercy really, that’s what El Capitan tells himself. Why have them suffer in a pen? Better to get it over with. It’s the way he’d want it, really. The Game reminds El Capitan of when he hunted squirrels as a kid in the woods near his house, but, then again, not really. Nothing’s like it used to be. It’s been a while since Ingership has ordered him to play The Game, and El Capitan hopes that Ingership has forgotten about it and won’t ever ask again. Ingership has become unpredictable recently. In fact, just yesterday he organized his own team for a Death Spree that he decided to spring on everyone without warning.

As El Capitan makes his way toward the woods, he passes the caged pen—twenty feet by twenty feet, enclosed by chain link, with a cement floor. Recruits are huddled together in one corner of the pen. They moan and shudder until they hear his footsteps; then one of them hushes then another, and they quiet down quickly. He can see their strange twisted limbs, the glint of various metals, the shine of glass. They’re barely human when you get right down to it, he reminds himself, but still he looks away when he passes by.

“There but for the grace of God, Helmud. That could be you in there,” he says.