Lyda stares at her. She doesn’t understand. She puts her finger on the glass again and draws another question mark.
The redhead taps out T-e-l-l/h-i-m.
PARTRIDGE
DARTS
THE PRISONS, ASYLUMS, AND SANATORIUMS have all collapsed, one colossus after the next, like piles of wrought-iron bones scorched bare, and the houses in the gated communities are charred or obliterated completely. The plastic jungle gyms and pirate ships and mini castles turned out to be durable. Large indistinct blobs of color, they dot the blackened, nearly flattened terrain of dust and ash like warped sculptures, things Partridge has seen images of in his Art History class.
Art installations, that’s what Mr. Welch called them. And, in some strange way, they please Partridge now. He imagines Welch, who resembles in some ways a shrunken version of Glassings in World History. Welch would sometimes stand in front of the projector to explain something with the blur of colors on his reedy frame, his sunken chest, his shiny bald pate. He was one of the judges who picked Lyda’s bird. Partridge will probably never see Welch or Glassings or Lyda again. He’ll never see the bird. And Pressia?
Bradwell is out in front of Partridge, his hand resting on the hilt of a knife in his jacket. And Partridge has a hook and a butcher’s knife from Bradwell, as well as the old knife from the Domesticity Display, but still he feels vulnerable out here, slightly imbalanced. The coding is gaining its foothold in his body. Sometimes he feels it surge as it tries to take hold of his muscles, drill into his bones, fire through his synapses. It’s a feeling that he can’t describe—a thickening of blood coursing through his body, something foreign within him. He was immune to the behavioral coding because of the blue pills his mother fed him at the beach, but still the rest of the coding exists in the chemicals of his brain. Can he trust his own brain? Right now he feels foggy on details. “What’s this trustworthy woman like again?” Partridge asks.
“Hard to say,” Bradwell tells him.
“Haven’t you two met before?”
“Nope,” Bradwell says. “I know the rumors, though.”
“Rumors?”
“Yep. She’s our only shot,” Bradwell says. “That is, if we’re not killed by her protectors first.”
“Her protectors could kill us?”
“They wouldn’t be protectors if they didn’t protect her.”
“Shit,” Partridge says. “You’ve got me out here based on rumors?”
Bradwell spins around. “Let’s get this straight. You’ve got me out here, looking for Pressia, who you got out, too.”
“Sorry,” Partridge says.
Bradwell starts walking again. Partridge follows. “It’s not really rumors anyway. Myth is more accurate. Do you have a better idea?”
He knows that Partridge doesn’t have any better ideas. Partridge is a stranger here. He’s got nothing.
Sometimes Partridge imagines that this isn’t real, that, instead, it’s just some elaborate reenactment of destruction, not the actual destruction itself. He remembers once being in a museum on a class trip. There were miniature displays with live actors in various wings, talking about what things were like before the Return of Civility. Each display was dedicated to a theme: before the impressive prison system was built, before difficult children were properly medicated, when feminism didn’t encourage femininity, when the media was hostile to government instead of working toward a greater good, before people with dangerous ideas were properly identified, back when government had to ask permission to protect its good citizens from the evils of the world and from the evils among us, before the gates had gone up around neighborhoods with buzzer systems and friendly men at gatehouses who knew everyone by name.
In the heat of the day, there were battle reenactments on the museum’s wide lawn that showed the uprisings waged in certain cities against the Return of Civility and its legislation. With the military behind the government, the uprisings—usually political demonstrations that became violent—were easily tamped down. The government’s domestic militia, the Righteous Red Wave, came to save the day. The recorded sounds were deafening, Uzis and attack sirens pouring from speakers. The kids in his class bought bullhorns, very realistic hand grenades, and Righteous Red Wave iron-on emblems in the gift shop. He wanted a sticker that read THE RETURN OF CIVILITY—THE BEST KIND OF FREEDOM written over a rippling American flag, with the words REMAIN VIGILANT written beneath it. But his mother hadn’t given him money for the gift shop, no wonder.
Of course, he knows now that the museum was propaganda. Still, he could pretend for a moment that this is what the Meltlands could be, a museum, researched for authenticity. “You remember what it was like before the Detonations?” he asks Bradwell.
“I lived out here for a little while with my aunt and uncle.”
Partridge, whose mother had refused to leave the city, had only visited his friends’ houses there. He remembers the sound of the gates—the low hum of electricity, grating gears, loud clunks of metal. Even though the houses in the gated communities were crammed next to one another, each with only a small swathe of grass, coated in a velvety, chemical sheen, they seemed desolate. “Do you still have pictures of it in your head?” he asks Bradwell.
“Not ones I want.”
“Was this where you were at the end?”
Bradwell says, “I’d wandered away from the neighborhood. I was that kind of kid, always drifting away from where I was supposed to be.”
“Most kids were kept indoors, out of the public eye,” Partridge says. “I know I was.” Children said things. They couldn’t be trusted, and they repeated their parents like parrots. Partridge’s mother told him, “If someone asks you for my opinion on something, tell them you don’t know.” She didn’t leave him alone for long at a friend’s house. There was always the fear of a virus, too, something contractible. The environment was compromised. The water systems were suspect, often tainted, the food stores contaminated. There were recalls. If not for the Detonations, Partridge had been taught in the academy, they still would have needed the Dome. It proved prescient. The Detonations—could his father really have been in on it from the beginning? He rarely spoke of the Detonations in the Dome, but when he did, he accepted it as a natural disaster almost. More than once he’d heard him say, “An act of God. And God was merciful on us,” and “Thank you, Father, for we are blessed.”
Partridge remembers one time when he and his mother arrived at a friend’s house and the mother was gone. He wonders if the remains of that house exist somewhere nearby in this vast barren landscape. “Mrs. Fareling,” he says, remembering her name.
“What?” Bradwell says.
“Mrs. Fareling was my friend’s mother. We sometimes carpooled to things together. My mother liked her. She had a son my age, Tyndal. We showed up for a playdate at her house in a gated neighborhood, and she was gone. Another woman opened the door. ‘State worker,’ she said. She was there as interim care while Mr. Fareling looked for a replacement for his wife in the home.”
“What did your mother do?” Bradwell asks.
“She asked what happened and the woman said that Mrs. Fareling stopped attending FF meetings, then church functions.”
“Feminine Feminists,” Bradwell says.
“Did your mother belong?”
“Of course not. She wasn’t going to embrace conservative ideals. She thought it was bullshit, like saying, Aren’t we great the way we are! Pretty, feminine, nonthreatening.”
“My mom despised the movement too. She fought with my dad about it.” Partridge’s friends’ mothers were members of the FF. They always wore lipstick, which was pretty even though it sometimes gummed on their teeth.
“What happened to Mrs. Fareling?” Bradwell asks.
“I don’t know.” The woman said that rehab wasn’t always permanent. She offered counseling: Sometimes we can help when someone is affected by a sudden loss. His mother refused. Partridge can almost remember the feel of her hand grippin
g his upper arm as she marched him to the car, as if he’d been the one to do something wrong. “On the way home, she told me that they built the prisons and rehabilitation centers and sanatoriums tall for a reason. So everyone knew that the only difference is that you live under their roof or in their shadow.”
It’s dusk and the shadows are growing darker. Beasts could be anywhere. They skirt a few melted jungle gyms and over a ribbon of flattened chain-link fence.
“Your parents,” Partridge says to Bradwell, “how did they figure anything out if they said no to the Best and the Brightest in those Red Lobsters? They were on the outside.”
“Luck,” Bradwell says, “but I’m not sure if it’s good luck or bad luck, now, looking back. My dad won a grant to study rituals in a remote Japanese fishing village and a family gave him a video recording of a woman who had survived Hiroshima, but had become deformed. Her arm was seared to a pocket watch. She was hidden because there had been others like her, people who’d fused in strange ways to animals, to land, to each other, and they were taken away by the government and never seen again.”
“In the Dome, they like us to study ancient cultures. Cave wall drawings, shards of pottery, occasionally mummies. That kind of thing. Easier that way.”
“I guess so.” Bradwell looks at Partridge like he appreciates the admission. “Well, like a lot of historians, my father didn’t believe that the atomic bomb was the sole reason for the Japanese surrender. Leading up to the surrender, the Japanese showed no fear of loss of life and sacrifice. My parents wondered if it wasn’t the emperor’s fear of these abominations created by the bomb. The Japanese were very homogeneous, an island culture. And this may have been too much for the emperor—not that they would be destroyed, but deformed, mutated. The generals were forced to surrender, and all of the people who were merged by the bomb were taken away to be studied. Because of MacArthur’s censorship of the effects of the atomic bomb, the suppression of eye-witness accounts and oral histories, even scientific observations—what was basically a gag order on the Japanese—plus their own sense of shame… It all helped to hush up the true horrors, as well as the mutations.”
They’ve come to a section of gate that’s still standing. Bradwell climbs it first. Partridge follows. They both jump to the ground. Before them is just another stretch of charred remains and melted blobs of plastic.
“What about the United States?” Partridge asks.
“Do you really want to know? I’ve been told I’m too pedantic.”
“I want to know.”
“The US knew about the messy, unintended effects of the bomb, and very quietly developed new sciences—what became your father’s babies. Ones that would build up resistance to radioactivity in structures and allow them to control the effects of radiation. Instead of messy, unintended mergers, the US government wanted intentional mergers to create a superspecies.”
“Coding. I’ve gone through some. I wasn’t a ripe specimen for it, though.” He’s proud of this even though it’s not as if he stood up to anyone. It’s just a fact.
“Really?”
“Sedge was. I wasn’t,” Partridge says. “But how’d your parents get the info they needed?”
“One of the geneticists, Arthur Walrond, was a friend of my mother’s, of Silva Bernt’s. Walrond had a rowdy social life, drove a convertible, and had loose lips and a guilty conscience. One weekend he visited my parents, got drunk, and unburdened some secrets about the new sciences. It fit, of course, with my parents’ theories. He started feeding them information.” Bradwell stops and looks out across the charred remains of a gutted neighborhood. He rubs his head. He looks tired.
“What’s wrong?” Partridge asks.
“Nothing. I just remember how he convinced my parents to get me a dog. ‘He’s an only child in a family of workaholics. Get the poor boy a mutt!’ Walrond was doughy, short, duck-footed, but a fast talker with a sweet car, a lady’s man, weirdly enough. He didn’t have the necessary constitution for his life. He knew what they could do with the things he was working on. The government used the term unlimited potential, but he always added for destruction.
“He was sloppy. When the government found out he was leaking secrets, they gave him warning and enough time to kill himself before they showed up at his house to arrest him. And he obliged. An overdose.” Bradwell sighs. “I named the dog Art, after Arthur Walrond. I had to give it up after my parents died. My aunt was allergic. I loved that stupid dog.”
Bradwell stops and looks at Partridge. “Your father had my parents killed. He probably even gave the order. They were shot in their sleep before the Detonations, close range, silencers. I was sleeping in my bed. I woke up and found them.”
“Bradwell,” Partridge says. He reaches out, but Bradwell backs away.
“You know what I think sometimes, Partridge?” There are animal noises not far off, a yowl, a bird-like caw. “I think we were already dying of superdiseases. The sanatoriums were full. Prisons were being converted to house the infected. The water was already shot through with oil. And if not that, there was plenty of ammo, uprisings in the cities. There was the corn-fed grief, the unbearable weight of pie fillings. We were choking on pollutants, radiation. Dying one charred lung at a time. Left to our own devices, we were shooting ourselves with holes, burning alive. Without the Detonations, we’d have dwindled and finally clubbed each other to bright bloody death. So they speeded that up, right? That’s all.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“No,” Bradwell says. “When I’m feeling a little optimistic, I think we could have turned it around. There were a lot of people like my parents, fighting the good fight. They ran out of time.”
“I guess that passes for optimism.”
“It wasn’t bad to be raised by enemies of the state. I grew up jaded. After the Detonations, I knew not to go to the superstores like everyone else. I also knew that there wasn’t relief coming. That’s what everyone expected—army-issued water and blankets and urgent care. I had heard enough from my parents to know not to trust anyone. Better to go on the record as dead. And so I’m dead. Not a bad thing to be here.”
“It’s harder to die if you’re dead.”
“You know what’s always stuck with me, though?”
“What?”
“I found a note from Walrond in my parents’ things—a drunken scrawl. The thing is—they could save them all, but they won’t. It’s always bothered me. And then in this one article, someone’s asked Willux about the radiation resistance of the Dome. He says, ‘Radiation resistance has unlimited potential for us all.’ ”
“But it didn’t. Not for everyone.”
“Your father wanted near-total destruction so he could start new. Was he racing against those who were closer? Or those who were close to coming up with radiation resistance for all? Was he like the inventor of armor and then everyone got armor so he had to invent the crossbow—the escalation of weapon, defense, better weapon, better defense?”
“I don’t know. He’s a stranger to me now.” For a brief second, Partridge wishes his father dead. Evil, he thinks to himself. His father isn’t simply capable of evil. He has acted on it. Why? Partridge wonders. “I’m so sorry about your parents,” Partridge says. He takes in the stretches of destruction in every direction. He staggers a little, trying to absorb the loss. And then his foot catches, and he trips on something.
When he regains his footing, he reaches down and picks up a metal object with three spokes fanning out around a sharp tip, caked in the dirt and ash. Bradwell walks back to him and stares at the thing in his hand.
“Is that a dart?” Partridge says. “I remember the kind thrown at a target, but never one that big.”
“It’s a lawn dart,” Bradwell says.
Partridge hears the sound before he sees it—a whir that’s nearly a buzz. He shoves Bradwell out of the way. They both land hard, the wind knocked out of them, as another dart thuds into the ground behind him. Bradwell stagg
ers to his feet. “This way!” he says. They both start running toward a red-and-blue melt and squat down behind it.
The darts come quickly, whirring and thudding. Two darts wedge into the plastic on the other side. And then everything’s quiet.
Partridge looks around the melt and spots a dwelling propped up with bricks and walls supported by melts dragged from other yards. “A house,” he says. “A short fence in front of it.” Partridge remembers picket fences with little latches that swung open that penned trimmed dogs bouncing in the yards. But this fence is mostly sticks wedged into the ground, and on top of each stick something has been hung. He can’t tell at first what the strange things are, but then he sees a blackened rounded cage—a set of wide ribs, some of the bones cracked, gone. Two sticks down, there’s a broad skull. Human. Part of the skull is missing. Sitting in front of the house’s remains are two skulls, lit from within by candles, like jack-o’-lanterns. Halloween. Partridge remembers wearing a box made to look like a robot. The Meltlands were famous for holidays, the trees strung with ghosts and Santas teetering on roofs. He sees what seems to be a garden, overturned dirt with stakes, but it’s just more bones. These are splayed decoratively, hand bones spread to look like blooms. In another world, these things—picket fence, jack-o’-lanterns, gardens—meant home. Not anymore.
“What is it?” Bradwell asks.
“It’s not good. They’re proud of their kills.” Another dart thunks into the plastic. “And they’ve got good aim. Are these the protectors?”
“Could be,” Bradwell says. “If so, we surrender. We want to be captured and brought in. I won’t know if it’s them ’til I see ’em. And I need a better angle. I’m running to that melt there.” Bradwell points up ahead.
“Try not to get hit.”
“How many lawn darts can they have?”
“I don’t want to know what they use once they’re out of lawn darts, do you?” Partridge says, shaking his head.
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