Pure (32 page)

And now the driver is gone. No looking back. El Capitan and Helmud are all she has. He’s driving fast through the Deadlands closer to the city. Dusts occasionally appear in the headlights, and he plows through them. Their bodies spray into ash, dirt, and rocks.

She pulls the tracking device from her envelope. The blip is moving through part of the Rubble Fields in a perfectly straight line and with too much speed to be moving on the uneven terrain. She remembers Bradwell telling her that he catches the rat-like beasts by waiting at the ends of the small pipes that remain intact under the rubble, pipes only big enough for vermin. So Bradwell and Partridge must have found a chip, connected it to one of the rat-like creatures, and set it loose.

“We have to go to Bradwell’s place, near the Rubble Fields,” Pressia says. “That’s the last place I saw the Pure.”

“You know him?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Why would I?”

“Huh.” He glances at Pressia as if he’s now forced to rethink his assumptions.

“Huh,” Helmud says, and he glances at her too. Now she can see Helmud twisting his fingers anxiously. El Capitan jerks his shoulders and mutters, “Knock it off.”

“Knock it off,” Helmud says back.

“You can’t kill the Pure when we find him,” Pressia says. “They aren’t all bad. The Pure, this one we’re looking for, he’s good actually. He’s got a heart. He’s looking for his mother. I can relate to that.”

“Me too,” El Capitan says, and the gentleness of his voice—sad and lonesome—surprises her.

“Me too,” Helmud says.

“We can’t drive through town in this car,” El Capitan says. “It’ll draw too much attention.”

“I know where Bradwell’s place is,” Pressia says. “I’ll go.”

“You’re in no shape to make the trip on foot,” El Capitan says. “Plus, one of us has to stay with the car. I don’t want this beautiful piece of machinery destroyed by Dusts.”

“Fine,” Pressia says. “I’ll draw you a map.”

“I know a spot where we can keep the car out of sight,” he says.

After a while, he pulls up to a billboard that’s fallen but now stands propped on the stand that used to hold it upright. It serves as a lean-to garage. He parks the car.

Nearby, there’s a collapsed roof that once stood over a row of gas pumps. They huddle beside it, hoping to find a break from the dusty wind. There’s a fallen emblem of a
B
and a
P
, locked in a green circle. It once meant something. She’s not sure what.

Pressia finds a metal spoke in the dirt that may have once belonged to a motorcycle. She was never good at drawing, but she could take apart her grandfather’s watch and put it back together, fix Freedle’s internal mechanisms, and make the small menagerie—the caterpillar, the turtle, the row of butterflies—because she was accurate and precise. She hopes that attention to detail pays off.

In ashen dirt lit by the headlights, she starts scratching a map, first an aerial view of the city. She points to the edge of the Rubble Fields, the location of Bradwell’s butcher shop, marked with an
X
.

When El Capitan says he’s got it, she starts on the second one—the butcher shop’s interior, including the cooler where he’s most likely to find things they’ve left behind and the extra weapons. She has to trust him, but she’s not sure she does. He’s hateful, really. But through all of his violence and cruelty, she sees someone who wants to be good. He didn’t really want to play The Game, after all. In a different world, could he be a better person? Maybe they all could be. Maybe, in the end, that’s the greatest gift the Dome can offer: When you live in a place with enough safety and comfort, you can pretend you’d always make the best decision, even in the face of desperation. The awful way he treats Helmud could be seen as hiding his love for his brother, something he can’t show. Helmud is all El Capitan has and there’s something deeply loyal about El Capitan—erratic and hot-tempered, but loyal. And that’s worth something. She wonders how he lost his parents and if he thinks of them as much as Pressia thinks of her own parents and grandfather. But El Capitan is also vicious. And this is something that Pressia lacks. Did El Capitan know that by leaving the driver in the Deadlands he’d be eaten alive by the Dusts? Pressia isn’t sure. She tells herself that there’s a chance that the driver survived. But this is willful. She knows it’s probably not true.

El Capitan stands up. “Let’s go,” he says. “I got it.”

“Got it,” Helmud says.

He pulls the rifle off his back and hands it to her. “Stay in the car, no matter what. Shoot anything that moves.”

“Will do,” she says, though she’s not sure that she could. She gets into the driver’s seat, shuts the door.

“If you need to take off, go ahead,” he says. “The keys are right there in the ignition. I’ll be fine.”

“Fine,” Helmud says.

“I can’t drive.”

“Better to have the keys than not to.” He rests his hand on the hood. “Be careful.” El Capitan has clearly fallen in love with the car.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Pressia tells him. She feels she owes him. Who else would have helped her like this? She wouldn’t have made it without him. “You got me this far.”

He shakes his head. “Take care of yourself, okay?” He looks toward the grim skyline of the demolished city. “I’m following this buckle,” he says. “I know this one. It’ll take me close to the Rubble Fields. And I’ll use it to find my way back.”

Pressia watches him go, but her vision is shrouded. This stretch of Deadlands is made of ash. Dust ferrets and twists across the flat terrain. It’s scarred with lots of asphalt clotting the earth, proof that a highway once ran through here. The last thing she sees is Helmud. He turns and waves his long thin arm. And then, within moments, El Capitan and Helmud fade into the murky vaporous distance. She has to cut the headlights. All goes dark.

EL
CAPITAN
SLIDES
DOWN
THE
RAMP
from the stunning pen, past the vats and shelves and railed ceiling. He reaches up and grabs a hook. “Jesus,” he says to Helmud, “this place is perfect.”

“Perfect,” Helmud says.

“We could’ve survived on our own here, Helmud. Do you know that?”

“Know that?”

“This Bradwell is a lucky shit,” El Capitan mutters.

“Lucky shit,” Helmud says.

They’d gotten here quicker than El Capitan thought. The streets were quiet. The few people he came across quickly ran from him, dipping back into dim doorways or running down alleys. If they didn’t recognize Helmud and him specifically, they saw the uniform, which is usually enough.

He is still moving as fast as he can. He admits that he loves that damn car. One of the reasons he beat up the driver was that he wanted to gun the engine through the Deadlands. So yes, he wants to get back to it, but also he wants it to keep Pressia safe. If he comes back and she’s gone or only parts of her remain, he isn’t sure he can take it. There’s something about the girl. She’s good-hearted. He hasn’t met someone like that in a long time—or is it that he just stopped looking?

It’s strange to have someone out there, waiting for him. There are stories, legendary ones, of lovers who died for each other during the Detonations. People who, like El Capitan, knew it might be coming. They’d made escape plans, had holdout supplies and meeting places. The meeting places, though, didn’t work for these lovers. One would wait for the other. Maybe, according to the plans, you were only supposed to wait so long—half an hour, forty minutes—and then move on to safer ground. But these lovers always waited too long. They waited forever. They waited until the skies turned to red ash. He heard someone sing a song about lovers like this once and never forgot it. It was strange. The guy was just standing there on the street singing.

bq.
bq.
Standing on the station platform

nothing comes here anymore.

Watch the trails of vapor rise

and settle on the floor.

I see my ascending lover

glance at her watch and smile.

She knows that I’ve been waiting

for a lifetime and a while.

And then the wind it lifts her

and she breezes out of here.

I’m stuck with windblown ash

that fastens to my tears.

Ash and water, ash and water makes the perfect stone.

I’ll stand right here and wait forever ’til I’ve turned to stone.

El Capitan had been younger, on patrol, when he heard the song. One of the other soldiers said, “Jesus, shoot him already.” But El Capitan said, “No. Just let him sing.” He never forgot the song.

He walks into the cooler and, sure enough, there’s one of the rat-like animals in a cage, just as Pressia’s map promised. He thinks of stealing it. It’s plump. The smell of charred meat is strong. He hears Helmud start to make clicking noises as if he’s calling to the animal. “Mmmm,” Helmud moans.

“Yes, yes. Mmmm. But we can’t get distracted.”

The problem is that El Capitan doesn’t know what he’s looking for. Something out of place? Not easy to do when you’ve never been somewhere before. There are the two unstuffed armchairs, the footlocker, the metal walls, the railings, and hooks. There’s a metal bucket of burned cloth, the charred remains of a backpack, and a small metal box. He picks up the box, opens it; it makes a strange plinking noise then goes dead. He shoves it in his pocket, just in case it’s important.

He dips under a hook. There’s the footlocker.

Helmud starts clicking again, calling to the small caged animal.

“Shut up, Helmud!” El Capitan says.

Helmud bucks, trying to get at the caged beast, which kicks El Capitan off balance. He falls to one knee. “Damn it, Helmud. What the hell?”

But then he feels a sharp stone in his knee. He stands.

And there on the ground is a piece of jewelry. It’s a broken bird with a blue gem for an eye threaded on a gold chain. Will this mean anything to Pressia? He hopes so.

He picks up the necklace and puts it in his pocket. He then runs to the crawl space that Pressia had indicated on her map. There aren’t as many weapons as she’d let on. Maybe that means Bradwell and the Pure are heavily armed. He reaches in and runs his fingers along the sharp blade of a knife. He grabs what must be a stun gun. He picks them up and puts them in his jacket. He takes one last deep breath—the cooked meat—and then goes.

YOU
WERE
GOING
TO
GIVE
ME to them, like I’m your property,” Partridge says. He and Bradwell are sitting on pallets side by side on the floor of a small room, and, like the basement they were in before, there’s a strange collection of things lining the walls, which makes the room feel even smaller than it is. It’s as if the mothers have stripped everything of any possible value from the Meltlands and are hoarding it.

“I wasn’t going to give you to them. I was going to trade you in. It’s completely different.”

“In both scenarios, I’m theirs.”

“But I backed them off that idea, didn’t I?” Bradwell takes off his jacket. The wound on the meat of his shoulder is swollen but it’s stopped bleeding. He balls up the jacket, making a pillow, and lies down on his side.

“Yeah, they’re going to settle for a piece of me. That’s great. A memento. What the hell?”

“You owe Pressia your life.”

“I didn’t know you’d take that so literally. It’s an expression where I come from.”

“That’s a luxury you can afford in the Dome. Not here. Things are life and death. Daily.”

“I’m going to fight,” Partridge says. “It’s an instinct. I can’t help it. No one’s going to take a piece of me without a fight.”

“I wouldn’t suggest it with this crowd, but you do what you have to do.” Bradwell punches his jacket as if plumping a pillow and closes his eyes; in a matter of minutes, he’s breathing heavily, fast asleep.

Partridge tries to sleep too. He curls up on his pallet, closes his eyes, but can only seem to concentrate on Bradwell’s erratic snoring. Partridge figures that Bradwell’s learned how to sleep in the worst of circumstances. Partridge, on the other hand, has always woken at the slightest noise—one of the teachers on dorm patrol, someone out after hours on the lawns, the ticking of the air-filtration system.

He dips into sleep, lightly, then drifts to the surface of wakefulness again—Bradwell, Pressia, the meat locker, here and now, the dead old woman, the Death Spree, the mothers. He sees Lyda in his mind, her face in the near darkness of the Domesticity Display, her voice counting
one, two, three
. On the dance floor, she kisses him, soft on the mouth, and he kisses her back. She pulls away, but this time, she looks at him as if taking him in, as if she knows it will be the last she sees of him, then turns and runs off. He twists on the pallet. He’s awake for a moment. Where is she now? And then his mind feels blanketed with sleep, and he dreams he’s a baby. His mother holds him in her arms as her wings carry them through the cold, dark air. The feathers rustle, her wings buffeting—or are they Bradwell’s birds? And is it dark because it’s night or because the air is filled with smoke?

And there’s the voice in the dark air,
sixteen, seventeen, eighteen
… Lyda counting in the darkened Domesticity Display, now full of smoke. But still he runs his finger down the blade. And Lyda says, “Twenty.”

PRESSIA
TRIES
TO
KEEP
WATCH
for a shift of landscape, an arching rise of dark dusty sand, funnels, ripples. The car is half hidden by the felled billboard. The keys are in the ignition. She still feels the effects of the ether, which makes her feel heavy. She dozes, then wakes with a start.

She grips the gun tightly with her one good hand. She wonders if, because her sight and hearing are dimmer, her sense of smell is already keener. The scent of rot is part of the landscape. She thinks of the pale moist eggs from Ingership’s dinner, the oysters. She feels sick again and quickly closes her eyes to regain some sense of balance in her head.