“After I’m done, like always, Halpern. You know that.”
Halpern looks around, embarrassed, and picks at a scab on his cheek.
Pressia sees the footlocker now for the first time. It’s pushed up against a wall. She wonders if that’s where the food is kept.
Pressia notices the girls in the audience. One has exposed wires in her neck. Another has a hand twisted solid with the handle of a bike, the metal sawed off and poking up from her wrist like a protruding bone. She’s surprised that they don’t hide these things. One could wear a scarf, the other a sock like Pressia does. But their expressions are tough, self-possessed, proud almost.
“For those of you new to the meeting,” the guy with the birds in his back says, glancing at Pressia, “I’m one of the dead.” This means he’s listed among those dead from the Detonations. OSR isn’t looking for him. It’s a good thing, all in all. “My parents were both professors who died before the Detonations. They had dangerous ideas. I have the remains of a book they were working on together, which is where I get a lot of my information. After they died, I was sent to live with an aunt and uncle. That’s where I was living when the Detonations hit. They didn’t survive. I’ve made it myself since I was just about nine years old. My name is Bradwell and this is Shadow History.”
Bradwell. She remembers hearing whispers about him now, some conspiracy theorist, evangelizing out by the Rubble Fields. She heard that he challenged a lot of the ideas about the Detonations and the Dome, especially those who worship the Dome, having confused it with a deity, a benevolent but distant god. Even though she wasn’t a Dome worshipper, she immediately hated the idea of him. Why have conspiracy theories? It’s over. Done. Here we are. Why spin your wheels?
As he launches into his talk, pacing with his hands in his pockets, she starts to hate the reality of him, too. He’s cocky and paranoid. He spouts off his theories about the Dome officials, stating that he has proof that they caused total destruction so that they could wipe out all but a fraction of the world’s population while they were Dome-protected, that the Dome was designed for this purpose—not as a prototype for a viral outbreak, environmental disaster, or attack from other nations. They wanted only the elite to survive in the Dome while they waited for the earth to renew itself, at which point they’d return. A clean slate. “Did you ever wonder why we’re not experiencing a full nuclear winter? Well, because it was orchestrated to avoid one. They used a cocktail of bombs—the Low Orbiting Focused Enhanced Radiation Neutron System satellites known as LoFERNS, and the High Orbiting Focused Enhanced Radiation Neutron System satellites, or HiFERNS, with electromagnetic pulse—EMP—magnification.” He discusses the difference between atomic and nuclear bombs that were also used in the cocktails, and pulses designed to knock out all communications. “And how did Dusts come about? The bombs disrupted molecular structures. The cocktails included the distribution of nanotechnology to help to speed up the recovery of the earth—nanotechnology that promotes the self-assembly of molecules. The nanotechnology, speeded up by DNA, which is an informational material but also excellent at the self-assembly of cells, made our fusing stronger. And the nanotechnology that hit the humans trapped in rubble or scorched land helped them to regenerate. Even though they couldn’t completely free themselves, the human cells of the Dusts grew powerful and learned to survive.”
He explains one conspiracy after the next, linking them so quickly Pressia can barely understand him. But she isn’t sure that she’s even supposed to understand the theories. The talk isn’t designed for newcomers. This is a group of those already converted. They nod along, like this was a bedtime story, and they have it memorized so they can pass it on to others. Pressia recites the Message in her head: We know you are here, our brothers and sisters. We will, one day, emerge from the Dome to join you in peace. For now, we watch from afar, benevolently. And then the old cross, the one her father called an Irish cross. It may not be word from the benevolent eye of God, as so many have thought of the Dome, but it’s certainly not the Message of an evil force. Their sin is that of surviving. She can’t blame them for that. She’s guilty of the same.
It dawns on her that if she’s heard of Bradwell, OSR has to know that he exists. Panic pricks across her skin. It’s dangerous for her to be here at all. Bradwell is almost eighteen and even though he’s listed among the dead, he has to be a prime target for OSR. As he talks, a few things are clear. He hates OSR, which he sees as feeble, weakened by their own greed and evil, incapable of taking down the Dome or effecting any real change. “Just another corrupt tyrant,” he says. He especially despises that there’s no transparency. The names of the highest-ranking officials in OSR are unknown. They let the grunts do their dirty work in the streets.
If anyone heard him talking this way, he’d be shot—probably publicly. They all would be considered enemies of OSR, punishable by death. She wants to go, but how? The ladder to the trapdoor in the ceiling is folded up. She’d have to make a scene. She’d have to explain herself. But what’s worse? What if there’s a raid and she’s stuck down here with these people?
At the same time, she desperately wants to know what’s in the footlocker. The guy named Halpern obviously wants to get into it. It must hold valuables. Where’s the food? Mainly she wants Bradwell to stop speaking. He’s talking about the things no one ever speaks of, the Detonations and their effects—the updrafts and downdrafts uprooting houses, the cyclones of fire, the reptilian skin of the dying, bodies turned to char, the oily black rain, the pyres to burn the dead, those who died days later, starting with a nosebleed and later decaying from within. She tries to will him to shut up in her mind. Please stop! Stop! Now!
He starts to glance at her as he speaks, and moves closer to her side of the room. He squints like he’s tough, but as he gets angrier—talking about how the political movement called the Return of Civility, overseen by the national military arm called the Righteous Red Wave, was all part of the lead-up to the Detonations, the rule of everything in the name of fear, the massive prisons, sanatoriums for the sick, asylums for dissidents, their remains sprawling in every direction once you left the gated suburbs—his eyes are teary. He’d never cry, she can tell that about him, but he’s complicated. At one point he says, “It was sick, all of it.” And then he pokes a sarcastic dimple in his cheek and says, “You know God loves you because you’re rich!”
Is this what it was like back then, really? Her father was an accountant. Her mother had taken her to Disney. They lived in the suburbs. They had a little yard. Her grandfather has drawn her pictures of it all. Her parents weren’t professors who had dangerous ideas. So what side were they on? She steps back again toward the ladder.
“We have to remember what we don’t want to,” he tells them. “We have to pass down our stories. My parents were already gone, shot to death in their beds. I was told it was intruders, but I knew better, even then.”
And now Bradwell speaks as if he’s talking to her alone, like she’s the only person in the room. His eyes hook on to hers and hold her there. It’s a strange feeling, like being tethered to the earth—not a fleck of ash at all. He tells his story—his I Remember.
After his parents were shot, he was shipped to live with his aunt and uncle in the suburbs. His uncle had been promised three spots in the Dome, had been told a route to take into the Dome when the alarm sounded, a private route that wound around the barricades. He had tickets even. He’d paid good money for them. They stocked the car with bottled water and cash.
It happened on a Saturday afternoon. Bradwell had walked far from home. He wandered a lot those days. He doesn’t remember much—only the bright flash, the heat coursing through his body, like his blood was on fire. The shadow of the birds rising up behind him… And so that is, in fact, what she saw two years ago when he was being stitched up on the table. Ruffling beneath his shirt, they are wings.
Bradwell’s body was burned and blistered, raw. The birds’ beaks felt like daggers.
Bradwell stayed with his aunt in the garage, which was scalded, rickety, but strangely intact—lined with charred boxes, the fake Christmas tree, the shovels, and tools. His uncle was nearly dead, but he tried to explain to his wife how to get him free. He said things about bolt cutters and a hanging pulley that they could rig to the ceiling. But who could his wife go to for help? Everyone was either gone or dead or dying or trapped. She tried to feed her husband, but he refused to eat.
Bradwell found a dead cat on the charred lawn, put it in a box, and tried to bring it back to life, uselessly. His aunt was hoarse and winded—a little insane by then, most likely. She was dazed, weak, tending to her own burns and wounds, watching her husband slowly die.
Bradwell stops talking for a moment, looks down at the floor and then back at Pressia. He says, “And then one day, he begged her. He whispered, ‘Turn on the engine. Turn it on.’ ”
The room is silent and still.
Bradwell says, “She held the keys in her hand and shouted at me to get out of the garage. And I did.”
Pressia feels light-headed. She puts her hand on the cement wall to steady herself. She looks up at Bradwell. Why is he telling them this story? It’s sick. I Remember is supposed to be a way of giving people gifts, small sweet memories, the kind Pressia likes to collect, needs to believe in. Why this? What good does this do anyone? She glances around the room at the others. They don’t seem angry, like she does. Their faces are, if anything, calm. Some have their eyes closed as if they want to picture it all in their minds. This is the last thing that Pressia wants, but she does see it all—the flock of birds, the dead cat, the man trapped under the car.
Bradwell goes on, “She turned the key. For a few moments, the motor chugged. When she didn’t come out to get me, I went in. I saw the blood and my uncle’s waxy blue face. My aunt curled in the corner of the garage. I packed up the bottled water and put cash in a bag and taped it to my stomach. And I went back home, to my parents’ house, burned to char, and found the footlocker they’d hidden in a protected room. I dragged the footlocker with me back into the dark world and learned how to survive.”
His dark eyes flit across the crowd. He says, “We each have a story. They did this to us. There was no outside aggressor. They wanted an apocalypse. They wanted the end. And they made it happen. It was orchestrated—who got in, who didn’t. There was a master list. We weren’t on it. We were left here to die. They want to erase us, the past, but we can’t let them.”
That’s the end. No one claps. Bradwell simply turns around and pops the lock on the footlocker.
Silently, they form a line and, one by one, with reverence, they go up to take a look inside. Some reach into the footlocker and pull out papers—some colored, some black and white. Pressia can’t tell what they are. She wants to see what’s in the locker, but her heart’s pounding in her chest. She has to get out. She sees Gorse talking to people in the corner. It’s great that he’s alive, but she doesn’t want to find out what happened to Fandra. Pressia has to get out of here. She walks to the back of the room and pulls on the rickety ladder. It unfolds from the ceiling. She starts to climb up. But there’s Bradwell at the bottom. “You didn’t come for the meeting, did you?”
“Of course I did.”
“You had no idea what it was about.”
“I have to go,” Pressia says. “It’s later than I thought. I made this promise and—”
“If you knew about the meeting, then what’s in the footlocker?”
She says, “Papers. You know.”
He pinches the frayed cuff of her pants and gives a little tug. “Come and look.”
She gazes up at the trapdoor.
“The latch locks automatically, both ways, once it’s shut,” he says. “You have to wait for Halpern to unlock it anyway. He’s got the only key.” He holds out his hand, offering help, but she ignores it and steps down on her own.
“I don’t have much time,” she says.
“That’s fine.”
There’s no longer a line. Everyone is holding the papers and talking about them in small groups, Gorse among them. He looks at her. She nods, and he nods back. She has to talk to him. He’s standing by the footlocker. She wants to see inside it. She walks up to him.
“Pressia,” he says.
Bradwell is behind her. “You two know each other?”
“We did,” Gorse says.
“You disappeared and you’re still alive,” Pressia says. She can’t hide her amazement.
“Pressia,” he says. “Don’t tell anyone about me. Don’t.”
“I won’t,” she says. “What about—”
He cuts her off. “No,” he says, and she understands Fandra is, in fact, dead. She’s thought that Fandra was dead ever since they disappeared, but she didn’t realize how hopeful she’d become since seeing Gorse that maybe she was alive, that maybe Pressia would see her again.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
He shakes his head and changes the subject. “The footlocker,” he says. “Go have a look.”
She steps toward the locker, people on either side of her, shoulder-to-shoulder. She feels shaken. She peers inside. It’s filled with ash-smeared folders. One labeled MAPS. Another labeled MANUSCRIPT. The top folder is opened and inside there are pieces of magazines and newspapers and packages. Pressia doesn’t reach in. She can’t touch them at first. She kneels down and grips the edge of the footlocker. There are images of people so happy they’ve lost weight that they’ve wrapped their stomachs with measuring tapes; dogs in sunglasses and party hats; and cars with huge red bows on their roofs. There are smiling bumblebees, “money-back guarantees,” little furry boxes with jewelry in them. The pictures have some wear and tear. Some have burn holes, blackened edges. Some are fogged gray with ash. But still they’re beautiful. This is what it was like, Pressia thinks. Not all that stuff Bradwell has just told them. This was it. These are pictures. Proof. Real.
She reaches down and touches one. A picture of people wearing glasses with colored lenses in movie theaters. They watch the screens, laughing, and eat from small colorful cardboard bins.
Bradwell says, “It was called 3-D. They watched the flat movie screens but with the glasses on, the world jumped out at them from the screen, like real life.” He picks up the picture and hands it to her.
When she holds it, her hands start to shake. “I just don’t remember it in detail like this. It’s amazing. I mean.” She looks at him. “Why do you say all that other stuff when you’ve got these pictures right here? I mean, look at these.”
“Because what I said was the truth. Shadow History. This isn’t.”
She shakes her head. “You can say what you want. I know what it was like. I have it in my head. It was more like this. I’m sure of it.”
Bradwell laughs.
“Don’t laugh at me!”
“I know your type.”
“What?” Pressia says. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“You’re the type who wants it all back the way it once was, the Before. You can’t look back like that. You probably even love the idea of the Dome. All cushy and sweet.”
It feels like he’s scolding her. “I’m not looking back. You’re the histor
y teacher!”
“I only look back so we don’t make the same mistakes again.”
“As if we’ll ever have the luxury,” she says. “Or is that what you’re planning with your little lessons? A way to infiltrate OSR, bring down the Dome?” She shoves the picture at his chest and walks to Halpern. “Unlock the trapdoor,” she says.
Halpern looks at her. “What? Does it lock?”
She looks over at Bradwell. “You think that’s funny?”
“I didn’t want you to go,” Bradwell says. “Is that so wrong?”
She walks quickly to the ladder, and Bradwell does too.
He says, “Here, take this.” He holds out a little piece of folded paper.
“What is it?”
“Have you already turned sixteen?”
“Not yet.”
“This is where you can find me,” he says. “Take it. You might need it.”
“What? In case I need a few more lectures?” she says. “And where’s the food anyway?”
“Halpern!” Bradwell calls out. “Where’s the food?”
“Forget it,” Pressia says. She pulls the ladder down.
But as she puts her foot on the first rung, he reaches up and slips the piece of folded paper into her pocket. “It can’t hurt.”
“You know, you’re just a type too,” she says.
“What kind?”
She doesn’t know what to say. She’s never met anyone like him. The birds on his back seem restless. Their wings shiver under his shirt. His eyes are brooding, intense. She says, “You’re a smart boy. You can figure that out.”
As she climbs the ladder, he says, “You just said something nice about me. Are you aware of that? That was a compliment. You’re sweet-talking me, aren’t you?”
This only makes her angrier. “I hope I never see you again,” she says. “Is that sweet enough for you?” She climbs high enough to give the trapdoor a shove. It flies open and cracks against the wood. Everyone in the room below stops and stares up at her.
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