Ruins

by Dan Wells

  She examined her map, scavenged from a high school library on her way out of Greenwich. She had transferred Morgan’s records to a data screen, purely in the interest of speed, but the battery wouldn’t last more than a few days, and as soon as she was out of Morgan’s reach, she’d sat down and painstakingly copied as much of the info as she could into a musty paper notebook. The map, too, she had heavily marked with pencil, denoting all the possible faction camps and her most likely routes to travel between them. Some were weeks away, either north along the Hudson or east through Connecticut and Rhode Island. One group had allegedly traveled all the way to Boston, fleeing the faction war almost completely. The Ivies, if Morgan’s scouts were correct, had retreated to the wilderness in between, making their home by a place called Candlewood Lake. Maybe twenty miles away, as the crow flies. Kira checked her supplies—a bedroll, a poncho, a handgun, a compass, and a knife. A bag of apples. Only what she could glean from the hospital without arousing suspicion. She’d look for more on the road.

  She filled her canteen in the reservoir. Time to go.

  The first leg of her journey ignored the highway and cut across the countryside, through a wooded stretch of land that the map said was more empty forest, but that turned out to be broken asphalt roads that wound through a loose collection of massive homes, each with its own fetid swimming pool, and most with their own tennis court. Kira kept to the trees when possible, just in case someone was following her, but when she reached the town of New Canaan, she turned north on Route 123 and made much better time. It was late enough in the year that most of the leaves had changed color, and foliage seemed to burn with bright yellows and oranges. Most of the leaves would fall soon, a callback to the old days when the winters were fierce and heavy, but the beeches kept theirs well into the spring. Kira wondered if they’d always been that way or if it was a new development, nature’s way of adapting to the new, winterless world the humans had created.

  She passed a golf course, the long, open greens overgrown by saplings. It always felt like such a waste when she saw that—old golf courses were some of the easiest fields to clear for farming. A good sign, she decided, that the Ivies were nowhere near.

  Kira camped for the night in a fire station; the giant bay doors were open and the trucks gone, making Kira wonder if the firefighters had succumbed to RM while out on a call. The disease didn’t normally kill that fast, but if they were already infected and working while sick . . . She hadn’t seen an infected adult in thirteen years, but she knew the disease was painful, and she couldn’t imagine the strength it would take to keep going in those final stages. She had to admire anyone who’d try to fight fires while dying of the plague. She rolled out her blanket in the barn-like cavern of the open station, protected from rain but smelling the cool night air, and fell asleep to dreams of fire and death. In the morning she felt like she hadn’t slept at all. She repacked her bedroll and started walking again.

  She followed Route 123 north until it ended, then traveled east on something called the Old Post Road. Her route seemed to weave back and forth between New York and Connecticut, and she couldn’t help but wonder how those ancient divisions had been decided, and what they meant for the people who’d lived there. There were no gates or walls, no clear delineations of where one state ended and another began. She didn’t even know what that division meant. It had been so obvious to the adults, and so meaningless to the post-Break children, that they’d never bothered to teach it in school.

  However the state relationship had worked, it was over now, the houses empty, the cars rusted and falling apart, the roads buckling and breaking as new plants and trees encroached relentlessly back into their ancient territory. Birds roosted in the upper windows of sagging houses, while deer and other animals stepped lightly through the overgrown lawns, nibbling the new young leaves that grew up between the ruins. In another hundred years, Kira thought, these houses would crumble and fall completely, and the forest would swallow them up, and the deer and the boars and the wolves would forget that there had ever been anyone here at all.

  The thought of wolves made her worry about Watchdogs—the bizarre talking hounds that ParaGen had made as scouts and companions for the Partial soldiers. There were none on Long Island, but she had been attacked by a feral pack of them on her trip to Chicago with Samm. He had assured her that they weren’t fully intelligent, at least not to a human level, but Kira couldn’t decide if that knowledge made her more or less nervous; more or less disturbed. She had no idea how widespread they were, but prayed she wouldn’t encounter any on her trip to Candlewood Lake.

  Eventually the Old Post Road ended as well, and she turned north on Route 35 toward the town of Ridgefield. The town wasn’t large by any means, but it was far more developed than the forest and scattered houses she’d been walking through since Greenwich, and the heightened visibility gave her pause. In all likelihood there was nobody here, nobody for miles—and if there were, it would probably be a scout or spotter for the Ivies, not a far-ranging agent of Dr. Morgan. Even so, the urban center scared her. Instead of trees and dirt on the edges of the road, there was simply more concrete, which meant the forest hadn’t regrown as heavily. The sight lines were longer and more open. An enemy would be able to see her from blocks away, instead of the few dozen feet allowed by the woods; she would be easier to ambush, or simply snipe from long range. She hesitated on the outskirts of the thinning forest, trying to convince herself she was being paranoid, but in the end she backtracked and cut through the trees and yards, pushing her way through dilapidated fences and dashing across each open street. The detour was barely an extra mile, maybe two, but she breathed easier when she finally passed the last shopping center and rejoined the narrow forest highway.

  Eventually 35 merged into Route 7, and Kira made her camp in a small house just outside the crossroads. The windows were all broken—most were, outside the maintained areas—but the roof was holding, and despite a few cat prints in the hallways, it didn’t seem to have become a den for any animals. Two human skeletons lay in the bedroom, their bony arms resting loosely around each other, the decayed remnants of a blanket clinging in tatters to their ribs. Two victims of RM. She cleared a space in the living room and fell asleep looking at the old, faded photos of the family on the wall.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The next day would take her to Candlewood, but the route passed through a city called Danbury—several times larger than the town that had scared her so much the day before, and right on the shores of Candlewood’s southern tip. If the Ivies were really there, they’d see her coming for sure.

  “That might not be a bad thing,” she mused to herself, falling into her old habit of thinking out loud. She’d spent a few months alone in Manhattan, the only living soul for miles in any direction, trying to track down an old ParaGen office; by the end she’d been carrying on entire conversations with herself, as if desperate for any kind of companionship. She felt silly doing it, but just as silly forcing herself to be quiet. When she got to the city she’d be quiet, but here in the wilderness, why not talk?

  The question was, how much of the city should she actually pass through? She munched on an apple in the early morning light, sitting not in the living room but out on the porch, away from the skeletons and their ghostly faces staring down from the photos. She had the map out, spread across her knee, but it wasn’t nearly as detailed as she wanted.

  “If the Ivies are there, and see me, that’s good,” she said, “because I want them to see me. That’s the whole reason I’m here.” She swallowed her bit of apple. “Unless, of course, they shoot me on sight. Which they probably won’t do, but what do I know? Do I want to take that chance? If they get close enough to link me, which they can’t do because I’m not on the link, they’ll think I’m human.” She took another bite of her apple. “But for all I know, thinking I’m human might make them more likely to shoot me, not less. I don’t know anything about them.” She swallowed her apple. “An
d what if Morgan really does have spies up here? What happens if they see me first? I think I need to stay hidden as long as possible. I need a more detailed map to plan this route.”

  She repacked her scant possessions and headed back to the crossroads, where one corner held a weathered gas station. The wide metal awning had collapsed over the pumps, and this and the scattered hulks of rusting cars gave her cover as she dashed across the parking lot. The entire front wall had been glass, now shattered and crunching under her feet; years of rain had blown in, wrinkling the magazines in the rack by the front and washing out their colors. Kira picked her way through the shelves looking for road maps, finding them at last in a rotating wire rack that had long since toppled to the floor. Many of the maps were damp, and some had been nibbled by rats, but she found a Connecticut road map that seemed to be in pretty good condition. She found a spot of metal shelving, clear of broken glass, and sat down to inspect her route.

  The highway she was on continued straight up to Danbury, where it widened and merged with Interstate 84, a massive multi-lane road that seemed to skirt the edge of Danbury and then curve up toward Candlewood Lake. “That will be the easiest route,” she said quietly, “but also the most obvious. If they’re watching anything, they’ll be watching that.” She searched through the city itself, following the major roads and looking for other options, and marked the two major hospitals with her pencil. All the post-Break settlements, human and Partial, tended to cluster around hospitals, and the Ivies might be the same. “Might be,” she reminded herself. Morgan’s records had reported them farther north, on or around the lake itself, and with lake and city so close together it was telling, she thought, that the scouts had placed them specifically at the lake. “Maybe they don’t like cities,” she mused. “I’m not a big fan, either, but I’m an outsider—if this is their home territory, they could secure the city and get a lot of defensive advantages the lake can’t offer. Unless they’re searching for advantages I’m not considering.” She looked closer at the lake, wondering what those advantages might be. Fresh water, certainly, and maybe the longer sight lines across the water. Any hunting or farming they wanted to do in the wilderness would be just as easy in the city; she had grown up doing the same in the dense urban areas of Long Island. It didn’t seem to make sense. She looked at her notes again: the Ivies were “strongly opposed to medical experimentation.” That was all the information she had. She stared at the map, still completely unsure how best to approach it.

  “Better to be safe,” she decided at last, and plotted a course that curved west, around the edge of the city, and approached the lake through the smaller, suburban area called New Fairfield. She would be staying off the roads almost the whole way, and she worked out enough of the details to guide herself by compass instead, landmark to landmark, starting with the western edge of a place called Bennett’s Pond. The forest was thicker there, with steeper hills than she’d passed through before, and she found herself tiring more quickly in the rougher terrain. She crossed I-84 around ten in the morning, a wooded stretch of road well west of the city, and then tramped across a narrow stream and through another thick, old-growth forest. By noon she had reached another wide pond, ringed by a series of golf courses long ago gone to seed. The western edge of the water was a low marsh filled with empty nests. Cold or not, the need to migrate south was too ingrained in the birds’ tiny minds, and the wetland was still and quiet. She saw a cluster of small, gleaming curves, surprised to find a clutch of eggs, but when she drew closer they were simply golf balls, yellowed and cracking in the sun.

  She kept heading north through the forest, skirting the invisible line between the states, until a cluster of homes signaled it was time to curve eastward again. More and more houses appeared as she drew closer to New Fairfield, the buildings fading and forlorn in the midst of the trees. Kira imagined them not as houses but as spirits of the houses that used to be here, persisting stubbornly, ethereally, long after the structures themselves had disappeared. She skirted the edge of Corner Pond, crossed a narrow road, and turned almost straight east. Her undeveloped forest was running out quickly.

  And then she saw a bright white mark in the trunk of a tree; a recent carving, maybe three days old at the most. The roman numeral four. IV.

  The Ivies.

  It made so much sense, and so abruptly, that she marveled she hadn’t thought of it before: the Ivies hadn’t named themselves for the plant, but for their old military designation. IV. The fourth division or regiment or some such segment of the Partial army. They were real, and they were here; this was either a border sign or a trail marker, and she couldn’t help but wonder if they used this same forested corridor to avoid the developed areas on either side. It was possible, maybe even likely, but why? What did a defensive army have to fear from the homes and open streets of a long-abandoned suburb?

  A sudden thought consumed her, and she crept closer to the mark to examine it. Dogs and other animals used smells to mark their territory, and the Partials’ link system was similar in a lot of ways. Could their data pheromones persist in the same way? It was possible that this sign was more than visual, that the mark merely pointed out where the real data could be found. She’d practiced with Samm to develop her own small connection to the link; if there was something there, she might be able to sense it. She walked up cautiously to the mark on the tree, breathing deeply as she went. She sensed nothing. When she reached it she touched the bark gently, feeling the edges of the three white lines: IV. They looked like they’d been hacked in with a hatchet, two quick chops per line to break through the bark and expose the white wood underneath. White except for an odd discoloration at the bottom of each letter, like something had dripped there, or been smeared on purpose.

  It was blood.

  Kira hesitated, glancing nervously at the forest around her. Nothing moved, not even wind in the leaves. She looked back at the bloody letters, wondering why the blood was there at all. Was it an accident? A warning? Was that the best way to make the link data persist long-term? She leaned in, steeling herself, taking a deep breath.

  DEATH PAIN BLOOD BETRAYAL—

  She staggered back, gasping for breath, rubbing her nose to get the smell out.

  DEATH BETRAYAL PAIN THEY’RE KILLING US—

  She tripped over a tree root, yelping as she fell, rolling to her feet and grabbing handfuls of dirt and leaves and grass as she came up. She ran through the forest, irrationally, helplessly terrified, clutching the ground cover to her face and sucking in the smell, trying desperately to drown the signal out.

  DEATH PAIN—

  DEATH

  And then it was gone. Kira collapsed to the ground, her heart still racing, her blood pounding in her ears. The link was designed as a combat tool, a fast, wordless way for the Partials to warn one another of danger and coordinate their movements on the battlefield. When one soldier died, he released a burst of death pheromones, warning his companions that something was wrong; Kira had sensed it before, but it was nothing like this. That had been data, in its truest form: an announcement of what had happened, and where. This was a frantic, overwhelming warning, a pheromonal scream. A normal death would produce nothing like it, and she didn’t even want to think about what could. Partials had been murdered here, probably tortured, perhaps solely for the purpose of creating that data. She’d had to walk right up to smell it, but her link connection was weak.

  Did the whole forest smell like that? Was this warning spread around the entire lake?

  In her mad race to escape, Kira had gotten disoriented, and she pulled out her compass with trembling hands. North was behind her, which meant she’d been running south; obviously not too far, as she hadn’t run into any houses. She looked up, trying to get her bearings. Do I keep running, or stay on track? She was too scared to speak out loud. The Ivies are “opposed to medical experimentation,” and if this is how they tell people to stay away, it looks like they’re a lot more opposed than I realized. And maybe
that’s not all they oppose. Morgan’s record focused on experimentation because that’s all she cares about—they don’t want to help with her work, and they’re too far away to interfere with it, so she forgets them and moves on. Never mind the details.

  She slowed her breathing, calming herself, forcing herself to think clearly. It was harder than it should have been, and she wondered how much of the warning pheromones were still in her nose, still filling her bloodstream with adrenaline. She closed her eyes, trying to focus. They still might be my allies, she told herself. They post these as warnings to Partials, to Morgan’s forces. Their community might be sympathetic to the humans, and almost certainly amenable to a plan that opposes Dr. Morgan. And if nothing else, they’re expiring. I can offer a possible solution to that. She thought again about the pain and fear it must have taken to produce that warning on the link, and shuddered. Is that really who I want to align myself with? All the things I was worried about Morgan doing—would they do the same?

  She shook her head. I might be misinterpreting everything, not just how they created the border marker but the fact that it’s a border marker at all. For all I know, one of the Ivies was ambushed by Morgan’s soldiers and carved that mark as a warning to his friends. I can’t judge them without more information.

  She checked her compass, set her jaw, and hiked east toward the lake.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Marcus sat as still as he could, trying not to pull against the handcuffs tied around his wrists to a metal bar behind him—he’d struggled a lot the first night, hoping to get out of them, and rubbed his skin raw in the process. Now any movement at all brought lances of pain so sharp they made him bite the inside of his cheek. Woolf, Galen, and Vinci were tied up next to him, sitting silently against a wall in the back room of an old supermarket, but none of them seemed to be in quite as much pain. Marcus wondered if they were better at masking it, or if they’d just been smarter about their wrists in the first place. Either way he felt stupid.