Ruins

by Dan Wells

  “We could move the wagon,” Marcus suggested.

  “The Wagon Has Priority,” said Yoon, in a tone of voice that gave each word the weight of law, if not an outright religious commandment. “And trust me—you don’t want to build a fire even remotely close to it. Let’s try over here.” She walked ten paces east of the wagon, maybe twenty-five feet, and knelt down to start digging.

  Marcus knelt next to her, keeping his voice even lower than usual. “So what’s in the wagon?”

  “Secrets.”

  “Well, yeah,” said Marcus, “but are you going to tell me what they are?”

  Yoon kept digging. “Nope.”

  “You do realize that we’re on the same side,” said Marcus, readjusting his grip on the rabbits. They were soft and furry, and cuddly enough to creep him out when he remembered they were dead.

  “The Wagon Has Priority,” Yoon repeated. “When Delarosa tells you, she’ll tell you, and she’ll probably tell you tonight, so stop worrying. Until that happens, however, I am a soldier and I will keep my commanding officer’s secrets.”

  “Your commanding officer is a convicted criminal,” said Marcus.

  “So am I, remember? We all have our baggage.” Yoon paused in her digging and looked up at him. “Delarosa does what nobody else is willing to do,” she said. “It’s kind of her thing. Last year that made her a criminal; now she might be the only hope for the human race.”

  Marcus thought about this, leaning closer. “Have you really been that effective? Everything we’ve heard suggests you’re a thorn in their side, causing just enough trouble to keep the army off balance but not strong enough to gain any serious ground. Do you really think you can fight them off?”

  “Not yet,” said Yoon. “But eventually, yes. After.”

  “After what?”

  Yoon smirked. “The Wagon Has Priority.”

  “Good,” said Marcus, nodding. “I was hoping you’d say that again. Cryptic answers are the best.”

  Yoon finished the hole—a narrow pit, like a posthole, about eight inches across and at least twice that deep. She moved over a few inches and dug a similar hole, keeping the piles of displaced dirt close at hand, and when the second hole was finished she knocked a tunnel between them, connecting them at the base. McArthur brought her a collection of twigs and sticks and bark, and the panther, alarmingly, brought a dead cat held lightly in its jaws. It left the thing at Marcus’s feet, eyed him mysteriously, and padded back into the twilight.

  Yoon could barely suppress her laughter. Marcus stared at the mauled cat in shock. “You taught it to bring food back for you?”

  “That’s a dog behavior,” she said, struggling to keep her laugh quiet. “When cats bring dead animals it’s because they think you’re helpless, and they’re trying to teach you. I had a cat in East Meadow that left dead mice on my porch all the time.” She grinned and patted his head. “Poor widdle Marcus, too helpless to hunt his own kitties.”

  “I don’t know if I can eat my own kitties, either.”

  “I know exactly how you feel,” Yoon confided. “But meat is meat, and as little as cats have, two rabbits weren’t enough anyway. I’ll keep an eye on Mackey while she cooks, and let you know which bits are which.”

  “I’ve never felt a more conflicted sense of gratitude,” said Marcus.

  Yoon packed the first hole with sticks—the biggest at the bottom, the smallest, toothpick-size fragments at the top—and pulled out a match. “The moment of truth.” She shielded it with her hand, struck it, and dropped it on the wood. It caught almost immediately, the fire spreading slowly from the twigs to the bark to the thicker sticks below, and the second hole acting as a chimney to suck in air to the bottom of the blaze. In moments the fire was burning hot and steady, completely smokeless, and well below the rim of earth that kept the flames hidden. “One match,” said Yoon proudly. “Bow before my greatness.”

  “Just help me skin these,” said another woman, and took the rabbits from Marcus’s hands. She started on one and Yoon on the other, keeping the blood and fur and organs buried deep in a third hole nearby. The broken cat lay on the ground beside them, waiting for its turn. Marcus was a surgeon, or at least he’d been in training to become one before the whole world had gone crazy, and blood had never bothered him before, but somehow two bunnies and a kitty was too much. He wandered back toward Woolf and the others, already deep in whispered conversation with Delarosa.

  “That’s why we need your help,” Woolf was saying. “We can recruit the smaller Partial factions and put up a meaningful resistance, but we can’t do it alone. You and your guerrillas have the expertise we need to get through Morgan’s lines and find the pockets of resistance on the other side.”

  “You’ve done fairly well yourselves,” said Delarosa, but shot a quick glance at Marcus. “Most of the time.”

  “One little vine,” said Marcus.

  “The more people we have, the faster we can work,” said Woolf. “We don’t know for sure how many Partial factions there are, but either way we need your extra manpower. Time is running out.”

  “You’ve heard the rumors?” asked Delarosa.

  Woolf shook his head, and Marcus leaned in closer. “We’ve been pretty out of touch,” said Marcus. “Is Dr. Morgan escalating the invasion?”

  “Not the Partials,” said Delarosa. “Something new. Some of the outlying farms have mentioned it, and we’ve heard it from the Partials as well when we gather intel.” She looked at Woolf. “There’s some kind of . . . thing.”

  “That sentence wasn’t as helpful as you probably intended it to be,” said Marcus.

  “What kind of thing?” asked Woolf.

  “I don’t even know what to call it,” said Delarosa, shooting a glare at Marcus. He could tell he was stepping over the line, but mouthing off was an instinct when he got nervous. He resolved to rein it back in. Delarosa grimaced, like she was struggling to find the right words. “A monster? A . . . creature? None of it makes sense, but the stories are remarkably similar: a man-shaped . . . thing, eight or nine feet tall, and the color of a new bruise. It walks into villages, settlements, anywhere there’s people, and warns them.”

  “Warns them of what?” asked Woolf.

  “Snow,” said Delarosa.

  Marcus nodded slowly, trying to form a response that wouldn’t get him smacked. Woolf was apparently thinking the same thing, though his tone was diplomatic: “And you believe these stories?”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” said Delarosa. “I won’t deny that it sounds completely insane—more like a folktale than real news.” She shook her head. “But the reports, like I said, are too similar to discount. Either an island full of war-torn refugees got together to play a giant practical joke on us, or something’s really going on.”

  “An island full of Partials,” said Marcus. “Maybe they’re spreading these rumors for some reason of their own.”

  “The Partials are just as confused as we are,” said Delarosa. “The thing’s appeared to them as well, and I believe their stories more than anyone’s. If they knew our agents were humans, they would have just captured them instead of spreading the same insane story.”

  “Trimble didn’t have any creatures like that,” said Vinci. “I don’t think Morgan did either.”

  Delarosa shot him a sharp look. “How do you know that?”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute,” said Woolf. “When you say he’s warning about snow, what do you mean?”

  “Winter hardly seems like the kind of thing to warn someone about,” said Marcus. “Maybe the giant monster wants us to put on a sweater?”

  It was Woolf’s turn to look at Marcus, but instead of derision, his eyes were full of sadness. Marcus frowned at this, wondering what he should feel guilty for, and realized that Delarosa had the same odd expression. “What am I missing?”

  “We haven’t had a real winter in thirty years,” said Woolf. “Maybe that’s what it means.”

  �
��A real winter?” asked Marcus.

  Delarosa nodded. “With snow.”

  Marcus had heard of snow, but he’d never actually seen it in person. “It never snows this far south.”

  “We’re on Long Island,” said Delarosa. “It used to snow here all the time—‘this far south’ used to mean places like Florida or Mexico. But the climate shifted, and by the time of the Break even Canada was too warm for a real snowstorm.”

  “It happened after the war,” said Woolf. “Not the Isolation War, but the one before it, when we lost the Middle East. It was a side effect of the weapons they used to destroy it.” His face was solemn. “The planet’s cold zones grew warm, the warm zones grew hot, and the hot zones grew intolerable. They told us it was permanent.”

  “Nothing’s permanent in geologic terms,” said Marcus.

  “Permanent from the human perspective,” said Delarosa. “Nothing that’s measured in geologic time could reverse itself in thirty years.”

  “Then it’s got to mean something else,” said Marcus. “Why would a giant red monster show up to warn us about a weather pattern we haven’t seen in decades?”

  “Why would a giant red monster show up at all?” asked Delarosa. “I told you, it makes no sense, and I’m not saying it means one thing or another or anything at all. It’s crazy.” She shrugged. “But it’s there.”

  “Where has the thing been seen?” asked Vinci.

  “South, but slowly moving north,” said Delarosa.

  “Is that why you’re moving north as well?” asked Woolf.

  “That’s for other reasons,” said Delarosa, gesturing toward the mysterious wagon. “We’re going north because we’re going to end the war.”

  Marcus cocked his head in surprise. “You’re going to help us recruit the other Partials?”

  “Better,” said Delarosa. “We’re going to destroy them.”

  Marcus eyed the wagon again. “It’s full of guns?”

  “Guns wouldn’t do it,” said Galen. “It’s got to be bombs.”

  “Only one,” said Delarosa.

  Woolf’s face went white. “No.”

  Delarosa looked at him sternly. “It’s the only way to win. They outnumber us ten to one at least, and their combat capabilities outclass us by much more than that. If we’re going to survive this war, we need to even the odds, and this is the only way to make that happen.”

  “You want to let the rest of us in on this?” asked Marcus.

  “It’s a nuclear warhead,” said Woolf. “She’s going to blow them up.”

  “That is a very bad idea,” said Vinci.

  Marcus was suddenly intensely aware of Delarosa’s guerrillas, surrounding them with weapons close at hand. If this became a fight, they didn’t stand a chance, not even with Vinci.

  “I don’t see how you’re going to stop me,” said Delarosa.

  “Those are—” Vinci stopped before giving himself away. “No matter which side of the war they’re on, I can’t let you—”

  “You can’t let me?” asked Delarosa sharply. The tension in the camp grew even heavier than before, and Marcus felt the pressure like a stone weight on his lungs. Delarosa looked at Woolf with fire in her eyes. “I asked before who he was,” she hissed. “Tell me now.”

  “I’m a Partial,” said Vinci calmly. “I’m an enemy to Dr. Morgan and an ally to these men. I came here to be your ally as well, but I cannot allow you to do this.”

  The guerrillas’ guns seemed to fly into their hands, and Marcus and his companions found themselves at the center of a circle of aimed and ready rifles. Even Yoon had drawn a bead on them, her face grim, her rabbit-skinning knife still dripping with blood. Delarosa’s voice was a controlled tornado of fury.

  “You brought a Partial into my camp?”

  “He’s on our side,” snarled Woolf. “Not every Partial is an enemy.”

  “Of course they are,” said Delarosa. “They’re not even capable of making their own decisions—that chemical link they have enforces obedience.”

  “I’ve sworn on my honor to help,” said Vinci.

  “Until a Partial officer shows up and commands you to spill all our secrets,” said Delarosa. She looked at Woolf, and Marcus was shocked to see tears forming in the corners of her eyes. “They’re biologically incapable of disobedience, damn it, and we can’t risk this plan by consorting with the enemy!”

  “You can’t risk this plan at all,” said Woolf. “There’s nowhere you could nuke the Partials that wouldn’t decimate the human population with them—we’re too close.”

  “Not to mention all the Partials who’d die,” said Marcus. “But I’m guessing that part of your evil plan is nonnegotiable.”

  “Tie him up,” said Delarosa.

  “Don’t touch him,” said Woolf.

  “We’re taking him prisoner no matter what you do,” said Delarosa. “The only choice you can make is whether we take you prisoner, too.”

  The camp fell silent, each group staring tensely at the other. Finally Marcus stepped forward. “If you insist on going through me to get him, it’s your call. But I warn you, I will probably cry when you hurt me, and you’ll feel bad about it later.”

  Vinci looked at him. “That’s your defiant speech?”

  “Get used to it,” said Marcus. “There’s a lot more useless heroics where that came from.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Kira stood in the hallway outside Dr. Morgan’s office, her hand poised above the doorknob. If she explained her plan, the scientist would go for it; they would capture a human, extract the virus, and test it for anti-expiration properties. Kira was certain they would find some; in a world where nothing seemed to make sense, this did. The secrets she’d spent years uncovering, the plan she’d traveled halfway across the world to reveal, the unsolvable secrets buried inside every human and Partial and viral RM spore—they all pointed to this answer, this complex, hidden, brilliant interaction of biology and politics and human nature. Working together was the answer: Partials could cure humans, and now humans could cure Partials. She was sure of it. All she had to do was prove it, and Morgan could help her do that.

  But was that as far as it would go?

  Dr. Vale had enslaved Partials to help keep his tiny band of humans alive, and Morgan was more than capable of doing the same thing in reverse. Kira thought about the Partials in the Preserve, eternally sedated, tended like a human garden and harvested like gaunt, skeletal herbs. Unwilling victims, forever on the precipice of death. Morgan would do the same to humans—her records of early experiments already told horror stories of humans kept in cages, starving and naked, subjected to horrible tortures, all in the name of saving the Partials. She had the power to make it happen again, and Kira was about to give her the reason. It didn’t have to be that way—it didn’t have to be one side ravaging the other—but it would be. It always had been, and this new revelation was only going to make it worse. The situation wouldn’t change.

  Unless Kira changed it herself.

  But how?

  The hospital corridor was empty; there were a handful of Partial soldiers Morgan had pressed into service as lab assistants, but they were in other parts of the complex today. The building was powered, but the rooms and halls were hollow and abandoned, devoid of life and sound and movement. No one would see Kira standing here, locked in indecision . . . she could turn around and leave if she wanted to. She could probably leave the whole complex without even being seen or raising an alarm, as Morgan had lost all interest in keeping her here. She was a failed experiment; a shattered dream.

  I could go, she thought, but where? What was left to do in a world this ruined? What answers could she even try to look for, what hope could she possibly find? She had an answer here, practically in the palm of her hand, and she had the means to take it and mold it and make it a reality. The implications were terrible, and the fallout would be catastrophic, but if she was right, civilization would survive—humans and Partials, enslaved and im
moral and unconscionably compromised, but alive. Things would be bad, but they would get better; maybe not for generations, but someday.

  Is that enough? thought Kira. Is survival really all that matters? If I tell Morgan, and Morgan enslaves the human race to save the Partials, they’ll live—but they’ll live in hell. How can I make that decision? If I have the chance to save even one life, and I don’t do it, am I a killer? If I have the chance to save the entire world and I let it die, how much worse am I? Yet I would be responsible for the greatest oppression ever forced upon the human species. Every person I saved would curse my name, from now until the end of time.

  I can’t think of any other way, but I can’t bring myself to go through with it.

  Her hand hovered over the doorknob, an inch and a half from making her decision. The heat from her palm was warming it, hot blood pumping through her veins, radiating out in an aura of vitality. If she left now, that heat would remain, a ghostly afterimage of her presence, here and gone in an instant. Another few months for the Partials, another few years for the humans. The rain would fall, the plants would grow, the animals would eat and kill and die and grow again, and the ghost of sentient life would fade away, an insignificant blip in the memory of the Earth. Someday, a million years away, maybe a billion, when another species evolved or awoke or descended from the stars, would they even know that anybody had been here?

  There might be buildings, or plastic residue, or something to say that we existed, but nothing to say why. Nothing to say what made us worth remembering.

  I could go, she thought again. I could find Samm, or Xochi or Isolde or Madison. I could see Arwen one last time. I could find Marcus.

  Marcus.

  He wanted to marry me, and I wanted him. What changed? I guess I did. I had to find out what I was, and what I meant, and now I know that I’m nothing. Just another girl who can’t save the world.