“Was that me?” he asked again, but before she could answer, he straightened, surprised.
“Check out her eyes!” he called. “Got us a collaborator, here! Pretty little peacekeeper girl.” Mahlia tried to bolt again, but he yanked her back and pulled her into a tight embrace, twisting her arm so hard it almost dislocated.
“Not so fast,” he whispered in her ear. His voice had gone cold, dripping with new menace. Before, she’d been a toy to him; now she was something less. “I got plans for you, castoff.”
Castoff. His words ran through the rest of the soldier boys like an electric current. Peacekeeper. Castoff. Mahlia knew how this would go. First there would be screaming and then there would be blood and then at the end, if she was lucky, she would be dead.
She fumbled for her knife, but with her good hand twisted behind her back, it was pointless. Seeming to sense her intention, the soldier pulled out her knife. Brought it up to her neck.
“What you doing here, collaborator?”
Mahlia felt sick. Already, a part of her mind was preparing for what was about to happen. It was going to be just like when the Army of God got hold of her. Different army, same story. They were all the same, in the end.
“What’s a peacekeeper girl doing way out here?” he asked. “This town protecting you?” Mahlia didn’t answer. She struggled to twist loose, but the soldier was bigger and stronger. “Why don’t you answer? Huh? Someone get your tongue? Or you just stubborn?” A pause then. “Castoff think she’s too good to talk to us?” The knife came up to her cheek, touched her lips. “Here. Lemme get that tongue out.”
With a wrench of panic, Mahlia almost tore free.
“Hold her, boys!”
Hands seized her, pinning her arms, gripping her head, forcing her to stare at the soldier who loomed over her. Dirty fingers forced her mouth open. Mahlia tried to bite them.
“Wooo!” the soldier shouted gleefully. “Castoff’s got some spirit!” But he didn’t let up. He pinched her cheeks until her mouth opened. Slid the blade inside. Mahlia tasted steel against her teeth.
“Didn’t know there were collaborators hiding out here,” the soldier said. “Thought we cleaned you all out.”
“Lay off her, Soa.”
At the new voice, the soldier glanced over his shoulder.
“Just getting answers, Lieutenant.”
A new shadow rose out of the darkness. Angular, hollow-cheeked. Tall and skeletal. Pale as death. A pink scar split the man’s nose, ragged. Gray eyes and wide pupils.
“What answers are you getting?”
“She won’t say.”
“Then we don’t have answers, do we, Private?”
“I ain’t started cutting, yet.”
“So you’re starting with her tongue?”
“Gotta start somewhere.”
There was a pause. For a second Mahlia thought there would be violence between them, but then the lieutenant just laughed. He laughed and Soa grinned, and she didn’t know if it was all a joke, or if they were going to start cutting, or if it was a game, or if this was just the beginning of the cat and mouse that would still end with her blood in the dirt.
The lieutenant shone a tiny hand-cranked LED light in her eyes. Bright and painful. She squinted. He lowered the light a little and leaned close to study her with his gray bloodshot eyes. She guessed he might be in his late twenties. Experienced. Twice as old as some of his troops. A real Fates-playing old war dog.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
Soa was nodding. “Castoff, right?”
Mahlia summoned her voice. “I ain’t Chinese. I’m Drowned Cities.”
The lieutenant pinched her cheeks between clawed fingers. Turned her head this way and that while his troops kept her from struggling.
“Half,” he said. “For sure, you’re half. And you’re the right age, all right. Some peacekeeper nailed your old lady, left you behind.” He cocked his head. “Don’t got much use for collaborators.”
His gaze went to the village. “Don’t got much use for places that keep collaborators, either. Someone needs a lesson.”
“Leave her alone!”
At the voice, Mahlia’s knees almost buckled with relief. Doctor Mahfouz was pushing between the soldier boys. Familiar salt-and-pepper beard, broken eyeglasses tied together with bits of kudzu fiber that he had woven himself. Short and slender in comparison to some of the soldier boys. Nut-brown skin and gentle eyes and pure determination as he forced past the soldier boys, ignoring the danger he was in. It was as if he didn’t even notice that he was surrounded by boys with guns and scars and a hunger for violence.
But they noticed him, all right. One of them grabbed him. “Slow down, doctor man. Traitors ain’t your business. You get back to doctoring.”
Doctor Mahfouz didn’t even slow. He just turned to the lieutenant, speaking with absolute authority.
“Lieutenant Sayle, that girl is my assistant, she is no traitor, and if you want your soldier to live, I need her help. Now leave her alone. We deal in healing and peace, here. If you want our best efforts, you will do the same. Those are my rules, in my house. We don’t deal in bloodshed here.”
The lieutenant’s gaze went from Doctor Mahfouz to Mahlia.
“That right?” he asked her. “You know doctoring? Got some Chinese medicine up your sleeve? Peacekeeper fix-me-ups?”
Mahlia opened her mouth but didn’t know how to answer. Anything she said would encourage him. She closed it, just waiting to see what would happen, knowing she didn’t have any influence. It was up to this Lieutenant Sayle and whatever decision he’d already made. She was alive or she was dead. Whatever she said to this UPF lieutenant wasn’t going to change a thing.
The lieutenant smirked. He waved her through with a mock bow.
“Doctor-girl, huh? All right. Pull my sergeant back from the Fates, and we’ll see how you do.”
Mahlia let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. She shook off soldiers’ hands and made her way to Mahfouz, but as she passed the lieutenant, he jerked her close.
“If my sergeant dies,” he said, “I let Soa start cutting. He starts with that leftover hand of yours, then he does your feet, then he just keeps going, till you’re nothing but a worm in the dirt. Got it?”
Mahlia stared straight ahead, waiting to be let free. Careful not to say anything at all. He shook her. “You got me, castoff?”
Mahlia kept her gaze forward, nodded once. “I got you.”
“Good.” He let her go and turned to the rest of his troops. “What are you all staring at?” he bellowed. “Get back on perimeter! Gomez, up above! Pinky, you too! Alil, Paulie, Snipe, Boots… patrol. Van. Santos. Roo. Gutty. Yep. Timmons. Stork. Reggie. Scout the town. See if we got any more castoffs. Maybe we got a whole nest of China rats we don’t know about.”
The troops saluted and scattered, rattling weapons and ammo, boots stamping across the grasses, acid bottles bouncing, machetes gleaming as they were drawn. Doctor Mahfouz swept an arm around Mahlia’s shoulders, drawing her through the activity.
“I’ll need your hand and eyes.” He waved ahead. “It’s not impossible, but there is work.”
He led her into his open surgery, and Mahlia gasped. Blood ran all across the cracked concrete of the building’s open lower floor.
No wonder the soldier boys were crazy. Four bodies lay before her and blood ran from them in a river. Two looked already dead for sure; another had a leg ripped open, tourniqueted, but he looked so pale she doubted he would last long, even if he wasn’t actually dead already.
Only one young man remained. His chest was covered with crimson sopping rags, but he was conscious.
Heavy fighting, for sure. But none of their wounds looked like explosions or gunfire. One of the dead ones looked like he’d been nearly snapped in half. The other had his neck torn and snapped.
The conscious boy’s eyes followed her as Mahlia knelt beside him. She peeled away the bloody rags, guessing
what she would see, and more afraid because of it.
Four massive, deep parallel gashes cleaved across his chest, tearing his clothes and shearing deep through brown flesh. The white cage of his ribs showed amid the red. Mahlia held her hand over the torn flesh, unwillingly measuring the size of the claw that had dealt the blow.
Mahlia felt sick. It all made sense.
She knew why these soldier boys had come. She knew what they sought, and she knew, too, that if they found it, Mouse would surely die.
8
“OUR FRIENDS TELL US they encountered a wild boar,” Doctor Mahfouz said.
It was a stupid lie. No boar could do that. Only a monster. Only a half-man. And Mouse was trapped with that creature, and if Mahlia didn’t get him free, he was going to die, and if she didn’t get free of these soldiers and find some way to get the meds from Doctor Mahfouz—
“Mahlia!”
She startled from her mesmerized staring at the soldier’s wounds. Mahfouz repeated himself. “I have my tools boiling. If you’ll wash your hands, I’ll need you for the cleaning and stitching.”
Mahlia hurried to the boiling water, feeling numb. The soldiers were everywhere. She snuck glances at them, studying her enemies as she cleaned herself.
They were a raggedy bunch. The kind her father used to scoff at, all beat-up equipment and missing teeth and acid-burned faces, but their guns had bullets and their blades gleamed with razor edges, and they were everywhere. Walking the perimeter, pillaging the doctor’s squat, stalking out on patrol. They lit campfires and hauled ancient plastic jugs filled with water from the basement pool next door, and stacked looted piles of everything from rice to dead chickens on the dirty concrete. It looked like they were shaking down the entire village.
A tall black-skinned boy with piercing eyes directed a squad of three in gathering wood and starting a bonfire. Kill scars slashed his bicep, nine enemies ticked off, the way the doctor checked off his medicine inventory.
Mahlia started to count kill scars on the other soldiers but gave up. There were too many; they must have had more than two hundred kills. Even the youngest of them, the little licebiters who were only allowed to carry hydrochlor and machetes, had kills. And the oldest, like the lieutenant and the wounded soldier boy with his ribs opened up, had more than a dozen.
“What we want to do with this?” a soldier called out. Mahlia looked up at the slurred voice. A machete cut had cleaved the soldier’s jaw and scarred his face all the way up to the eye. But what drew Mahlia’s gaze was his prize, a goat he was leading into their midst.
With a start, Mahlia realized it was Gabby, the doctor’s goat. “You can’t—” Mahlia started to object, before she shut herself up.
Lieutenant Sayle had been conferring with his sergeants, but now he looked up, a pale cadaverous mantis turning attention to its prey.
“Looks like dinner.”
He returned to marking off quadrants on a moldy map, uninterested in what he had ordered, or whom it affected.
The soldier boy looped Gabby’s rope around her legs, trussed them, and abruptly shoved her over. It was a casual shove, almost bored. The goat fell with a thud and whuff of surprise, as powerless as a sack of dropped rice.
Lieutenant Sayle was back to talking with his sergeants, his words blending with the rest of the soldiers’ activities. “Flush it up against the coast, sweep south.” The details of their hunt. “A-6, push along this ridge; it’s still above tide line. This river cut might give it protection…”
Mahlia watched, powerless, as the soldier boy knelt beside Gabby, lifted his machete, and hacked into her neck. Gabby bleated once in panic and then the blade sank in and the goat lost her voice. The boy started sawing across. Blood spilled out. Mahlia looked away.
No one else noticed, or cared. It was just something they did. Taking other people’s livestock. Other people’s lives. She watched the soldiers, hating them. They were different in so many ways, white and black, yellow and brown, skinny, short, tall, small, but they were all the same. Didn’t matter if they wore finger-bone necklaces, or baby teeth on bracelets, or tattoos on their chests to ward off bullets. In the end, they were all mangled with battle scars and their eyes were all dead.
Mahlia finished washing her hands in boiled water and rinsed in alcohol, fighting to ignore Gabby’s dismemberment.
It’s what they do, she reminded herself. Don’t fight things you can’t fight. She needed to think like Sun Tzu. Make her own plans for how to get the meds she needed and escape back to Mouse.
Mahlia focused on Sayle, listening to him plan. “B-6, Hi-Lo Platoon, Potomac…” None of the names meant anything to Mahlia except that soldiers were out there—lots of them—and they wanted that half-man, and Mouse’s life wasn’t worth rust. If they found the half-man before Mahlia could return, the monster would believe she had betrayed it, and Mouse would die, and she was stuck here, fixing up someone who would just as soon chop off her last hand.
Mahlia finished washing, grabbed boiled forceps and scalpels and needles from their battered cook pot, and shoved through the ring of watching soldiers to the last living victim, wishing there were some way to tell the doctor what was happening to Mouse.
“Ease back,” she ordered as she pushed through. The soldiers shifted a little but didn’t move away.
The doctor looked up. “Your comrade needs air and he needs your dirt away from his wounds. Either you listen to the girl, or your friend will not survive.”
“He dies, you die,” one of them muttered.
Mahlia couldn’t tell if it was Soa or one of the others, but the wounded boy reacted to the challenge. “You heard them,” he grunted. “Get back. Let the doctors do their thing.”
Mahlia knelt down and began swabbing out the wound, plucking bits of fabric from torn brown flesh, inspecting to see if his broken ribs looked as if they had damaged his internal organs.
The boy didn’t flinch as she probed. The only evidence of his pain was that sometimes his breath would hold as she dug deep. He stared straight ahead with a fixed expression of contempt. She squeezed blood out of her rag, swabbed the wounds again.
What a fool she had been. Of course the monster had been hunted. There’d been boot and dog prints all over that place. The creature hadn’t come from nowhere. It had come out of the Drowned Cities, and the soldiers had followed. In hindsight, it made perfect sense.
“Don’t look like a pig did this,” she said.
The wounded soldier boy’s gaze focused on her for the first time. Gold-flecked green eyes, glinting violence. A face sculpted by war. Hard. “If I say it was pig, it was pig.”
Mahlia dropped her eyes. It wasn’t worth fighting over. Boys like this had seen too much blood to care one way or the other if they spilled a little more. Antagonizing them was stupid.
“Problem, Sergeant Ocho?”
The voice was soft, but it made Mahlia’s skin scrawl. The lieutenant was looking at them. Pale skin, pale hair, gray empty eyes. She’d thought he looked like a corpse at first because he was so pale, and then like an insect, because of his long, thin body and limbs. But suddenly Mahlia knew what he was: coywolv. Pure blood and rust coywolv. A predator. Deadly and smart.
Sayle’s gray eyes lingered on her. “Anything I need to be aware of?”
Ocho glanced at Mahlia dismissively. “Nothing here, Lieutenant.”
“You let me know.”
“Nah. Castoff knows her place.”
Lieutenant Sayle went back to his moldy maps and his murmured instructions to the other soldier boys, and Mahlia let out her breath. She went back to work, wishing she dared hurry.
As she plucked out leaves and debris from the wounds, she couldn’t help thinking of the meds just overhead, up in the doctor’s squat. The soldiers hadn’t found them—yet. The doctor kept them hidden in oiled leather wrappings, tucked inside hollowed-out books. Just more books among the many. But they were there. The antibiotics that could buy Mouse’s freedom from the dy
ing half-man. If she could just get to the damn things.
The doctor joined her with a needle and catgut. His eyes were bad, even with his jury-rigged eyeglasses. He had to lean close to study the wound.
“The damage isn’t as bad as it could be,” he said. “His ribs did a good job of protecting him.”
Mahlia pointed at one of the wounds. “This is the only one that’s bleeding hard.”
“Hmm.” The doctor squinted. “Laceration to a neurovascular bundle. We’ll cauterize this first,” he said, “then stitch up the wounds.”
Their patient suddenly asked, “Can you even see, old man?”
Mahlia looked up at him, trying to remember his name. Ocho. A sergeant. “I can,” she said. “And I’m the one doing the stitching.”
“Blood and rust! Stumpy’s going to stitch?”
“Watch your mouth,” Mahlia said, “or I’ll stitch your guts shut.”
The doctor sucked in his breath, but the patient just smirked. “Castoff’s got some bark in her.”
“No bark. Just a needle.”
Mahlia set the point and pushed it in with her good left fingers. The doctor’s hand met the needle on the other side and drew the catgut through. He handed it back to her. Between the two of them, they nearly made a whole doctor. They worked the thread through again.
“We don’t have any sulfa here,” the doctor said. “You will need to keep this wound clean and dry.”
Ocho was looking into space again. “Yeah. I know.”
From the survey of his body, it looked like he did know. His dark skin was ripped and scarred in dozens of places. He was missing part of an ear, and there was a puckered scar in his cheek, as if he’d been stabbed or burned. A small circular hole, now closed.
The soldier caught the direction of Mahlia’s gaze. “Army of God,” he said. “Sniper.” He opened his mouth, showing her the other side of the wound. His pink tongue was also torn.
“Came right through. Got my tongue, on the side. Came out my mouth. Didn’t chip a tooth.” He bared them, showing her. “Not a one. Fates got me close.”
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