Bradwell sprints. The darts come at him. He lets out a shout. He staggers, gripping his left elbow. He’s been hit in the shoulder. He keeps running and throws himself behind the next melt.
Partridge takes off after him before Bradwell can tell him not to. He sprints and slides to a stop beside Bradwell, whose jacket sleeve is already bloody. Partridge reaches for the dart lodged in Bradwell’s arm.
“Don’t!” Bradwell says, rolling away.
“You’ve got to get it out,” Partridge says. “What are you, afraid of a little pain?” He holds his arm down at the elbow. “I’ll do it fast.”
“Wait, wait,” Bradwell says. “Do it on the count of three.”
“Okay.” Partridge leans on Bradwell’s arm, pinning it to the ground, then wraps his hand around the dart. It’s in deep. “One, two—” And he pulls it out, ripping some of the jacket too.
“Shit!” Bradwell cries. The wound gushes blood. “Why didn’t you count to three?”
Paybacks, Partridge thinks, an impulse to get back at Bradwell for holding him in such contempt, for punching him when Pressia was first missing. He kind of hates Bradwell, but maybe only because Bradwell hated Partridge first. “We’ve got to wrap it up,” Partridge says.
“Damn it!” Bradwell says, gripping his elbow to his ribs.
“Take off your jacket.” Partridge helps Bradwell shrug it off. Partridge uses the small rip to tear the sleeve off and wraps the sleeve around the muscle of shoulder, tying it tight. “I wish I’d gotten a good look at them,” Partridge says.
“Ah, you know what? I think you’ve got your chance.” Bradwell points right in front of him.
And there is a set of eyes, low to the ground. A child is peeking out from behind the leg of a larger creature, wearing battle gear—metal chest plates made of mower blades, a helmet. A long braid curls over one shoulder. She’s armed with weapons only recognizable in their parts—a bike chain, a drill, a chain saw.
“That’s not bad,” Partridge says. “Only one of her and a child. Two of us.”
“Wait,” Bradwell says.
Others drift in silently behind her. They’re women too, and most of them also have children, either being held or standing next to them. More weapons—kitchen knives, two-pronged grill forks, skewers, weed whackers. Their faces are mottled with glass, chips of tile, bits of mirrors, metal, shards of flagstone, the sheen of plastic. Many of them have jewelry fused into their wrists and necks and earlobes. They must pick at the skin to keep it from growing over the jewelry, which is outlined in small dark red-crusted scabs.
“Have we been found? Was this the group you were hoping for?” Partridge asks.
“Yep,” Bradwell says. “I think so.”
“I think they’re housewives,” Partridge whispers.
“With their kids,” Bradwell says.
“Why haven’t the kids grown?”
“They can’t. They’re stunted by their mother’s bodies.”
Partridge has a hard time believing that the people who once lived in these homes were capable of survival. They were always followers who lacked the courage of their convictions. And those who were courageous, Mrs. Fareling, perhaps, disappeared. Are these the mothers and children of the gated communities, the ones who once delighted in plasticware? “Are we about to be beaten to death by a car pool?”
As the crowd moves closer, Partridge sees that the children are not just with their mothers. They’re attached. The first woman they saw walks with an uneven gait. The child who’d seemed to be holding on to her leg is actually fused there. Legless, the boy has only one arm, and his torso and head protrude from her upper thigh. Another woman has eyes peering out from a bulbous baby head that sits like a goiter on her neck.
Their faces are angular and grim. Their bodies are slightly hunched as if ready to lunge.
Partridge pulls the scarf tight to make sure his unmarked face is hidden.
“Too late for that now,” Bradwell says. “Just put your hands up and smile.”
Still on their knees, they both hold their hands over their heads.
Bradwell says, “We surrender. We’re here to see Your Good Mother. We need her help.”
A woman with a hip-fused child steps up, pushing a knife-armored stroller up to Partridge’s face. Another woman holding a long sharp pair of hedge clippers walks up to Bradwell and kicks him in the chest with incredible force. The hedge-clipper woman holds the blades in front of Bradwell’s face, opening and closing the blades, glinting, sharp. The clipper has been fused to one of her hands, but the other hand pumps the blades. And then she puts her bare foot on Bradwell’s sternum, opens the clippers wide, and holds them over his throat.
Partridge feels his arm jerk backward. He pulls out the meat hook and spins around, swinging over the head of a stunted child. The little girl’s mother’s hand is fused into the center of her daughter’s back. He stumbles forward with the miss. The woman quickly puts a knee into his gut, uppercuts his chin, and holds a kitchen knife to his heart.
Her daughter laughs.
Partridge knows these women and their fused children are tactical and violent. They are soldiers. With his strength coding he could overtake half a dozen of them at once, but now he can see that there are more than a hundred. Their shadows shift. Other women move in quickly and strip them of their knives, the meat hook, their newly acquired lawn darts.
The woman with the kitchen knife grabs Partridge’s arm with a grip that feels like it’s embedded with rows of sharp teeth cutting into his skin. She pulls him to his feet with great strength. He looks at his pale arm, now smeared with blood, then glimpses her palm, which is shiny with shards of a mirror. She pulls an old dark pillowcase from her belt. Another woman, behind him, wrenches his arms and binds them so tightly that his elbows nearly touch behind his back. He glances at Bradwell, who’s on his feet too now, also being bound.
The last thing Partridge sees before the pillowcase is thrown over his head is a gold cross and its thin chain embedded in a scalded chest.
And then there’s darkness, his own moist breath muffled inside of the dark hood.
He thinks of the ocean. Did his mother wrap him in a blanket on the beach once? Did he hear the wind-rippled cloth batting his ears, tamping the constant roar of the ocean? What has happened to the ocean now? He’s seen images of it, grayscale. It’s turbulent and roiling. But grayscale will never capture the ocean. Neither will a static image. He closes his eyes and pretends that his head is in a blanket and the ocean isn’t far off and his mother is near. He hopes he doesn’t die.
A child cries out with the keening of a gull.
PRESSIA
ARABS
HALF OF INGERSHIP’S BONY FACE is fitted with a metal plate and a flexible hinge where a knot of jaw should be. It was fixed by someone who knew what they were doing, a pro. Not just a flesh-tailor like Pressia’s grandfather. No. This was handled by someone with real skills and instruments. The hinge allows Ingership to speak, chew, and swallow. Even so, his words come out stiff and labored. The metal tucks into the skin under his chin, and extends upward so far that it’s impossible to see where the metal ends and the skin covering his skull begins because he’s wearing a military cap. The other side of his head is clean-shaven, pink. The thought of his head scares Pressia because it brings to her mind the gunshot, the jolt, the stutter of the boy’s skull against the ground. She isn’t a killer, but she let him get shot. He was going to die, yes. He asked El Capitan to do it. It was merciful. But this doesn’t help. She’s culpable.
Pressia is sitting across from Ingership in the backseat of a miraculously shiny black sedan. The sun is directly overhead. The orders indicated that El Capitan was to march Pressia Belze three miles to an old water tower, felled, its bulbous top cracked and blackened, where the car would be waiting. And when they arrived, the car was already there, looking so pristine it was otherworldly. The back window buzzed down, revealing Ingership’s face. “Get in,” he said.
Instead Ingership said, “Get out.”
“Who? Me?” El Capitan asked.
“Me?” Helmud said.
Ingership nodded. “You’ll wait here. The driver will bring her back.”
Pressia didn’t want El Capitan to go. She didn’t want to be alone with Ingership. Something about his mechanized speech and eerie calm unsettled her.
El Capitan opened the door, got out, slammed it, and then knocked on the window.
“Hit the button,” Ingership said.
Pressia pressed a button on the interior handle and felt the electric vibration in her fingertip. The window disappeared down into the door.
“How long will you be gone?” El Capitan asked. Pressia could see his finger rubbing against the trigger.
“Wait for her,” Ingership said, and told the driver to go.
The car jerked forward, spitting dust, and they were jettisoned forward. Aside from the ride in the OSR truck with her hands bound and mouth taped shut, Pressia hadn’t been in a car for as long as she could remember. Did she even remember the sensation somewhere deep in her memory? She feared sliding out of the seat somehow. The wind was pouring in the window and with it the ash.
“Shut the window!” Ingership said, loudly.
Pressia pressed the button in the other direction, and up it went.
Now it’s raining a little, and the sedan is so polished that the rain beads up and glides. Pressia wants to know where the car came from. It’s sleek, untarnished. Did it survive in some kind of ultra-reinforced garage?
The driver keeps an eye on her through the rearview mirror. He’s a meaty man, fat hands gripping the wheel. He has dark skin except where the burns are a deep, raw pink. They’re drifting on the barren remains of a dilapidated highway. The road is mostly cleared of debris but still it’s slow going. The landscape is desolate. They’ve long since passed the Meltlands, the burned-out prisons, rehabilitation centers, and sanatoriums. The road has given way to weeds and a set of ruts. Gauging the sun, Pressia knows they’re heading northeast. Occasionally there are the decapitated posts of billboards, the melted shards of chain restaurants and gas stations and motels, the gutted bellies of eighteen-wheelers and oil-scorched trucks left on the roadside like the blackened ribs of dead whale carcasses. Every once in a while you see that someone has dragged the remains of things from the rubble and arranged a message, like: HELL IS WHERE THE HEART IS or, more pointedly, DAMNED.
And then the landscape grows bare. The Deadlands. They remind Pressia that she’s lucky. Out here, all that’s left is the scorched earth that might just stretch on forever in every direction. There is no road. Some small arid brush is the only vegetation.
But the Deadlands are ever so slightly alive. Occasionally, something will ripple under the surface, roaming Dusts, a creature that’s become part of the earth itself.
The Deadlands set all of them on edge. The car is silently restless, as if the air is suddenly pressurized. A Dust rears up—large and bear-like but made of dirt and ash. The driver swerves, missing it.
Ingership sits up stiffly. He’s made it clear that he has no intentions of talking about anything important, not yet at least. “You’ve never been out past the city, have you?” he asks, which strikes Pressia as nervous, idle conversation.
“No.”
“It’s best that El Capitan isn’t with us. He really isn’t ready. Don’t tell him what you see out here. He’ll only sulk,” Ingership says. “You’ll like it, Belze. I think you’ll appreciate what we’ve done with the place. Do you eat oysters?”
“Oysters?” Pressia asks. “Like from the sea?”
“I hope you like them. They’re on the menu.”
“How did you get them?” Pressia asks.
“I’ve got connections,” Ingership says. “Oysters on the half shell. They’re an acquired taste.”
Acquired taste? Pressia isn’t sure what the term means, but she loves it. A taste is something that you can acquire? She’d love to simply be fed anything regularly enough to acquire a taste. She would love to acquire one taste and then another and another until she has a full collection of tastes. But no. She reminds herself that she can’t trust these people at all. The outlands—is it where they’ll beat information out of her?
They drive for more than an hour in silence. Dusts slip in front of the car, slithering like snakes. The driver runs them over, the creatures crunching under the tires. Pressia has no idea how long they’ll continue on. All night? For days? How far do the Deadlands stretch? Do they have an end? If you head off in any direction, you will eventually come to them. No one has ever made it through them and back again. Not that Pressia knows, at least. She’s heard that the Dusts there are worse than in the Rubble Fields. They’re quicker, hungrier. They live on little and aren’t weighted by stone. If Ingership takes Pressia to the outlands to beat information out of her, will she be left in the Deadlands to die?
Finally, up ahead, there’s a rise on the horizon—a hill? As they get closer, Pressia can tell that it has vegetation, some greenery, in fact. When the car makes it to the hill, it bears right, hugging a curve. The earth holds the hard memory of a road again. Once around the curve, Pressia looks down into a valley—farmlands surrounded by more Deadlands. There are lush fields, not exactly windswept wheat, but something darker, heavier, dotted with what seem to be small yellow flowers, rows of barren staked stalks, and other greenery heavy with unidentifiable purplish fruit. Among the rows, there are recruits in green uniforms. Some are rolling small plastic tank-holds and spraying down the vegetation. Others seem to be collecting samples. They limp and trudge, their marred skins exposed in the dim sun.
There are grazing fields of bulky animals that are shaggier than cows, with longer snouts, hornless. They teeter slowly on hooves out near a stand of greenhouses. The road twists along, leading to a yellow A-frame house and, a bit off the road, a red barn built up and painted brightly as if nothing had ever gone wrong. It’s so astonishing that she can barely believe it.
Pressia remembers this kind of thing from Bradwell’s clippings and, distantly, from her own memory.
Her grandfather knew farmers when he was a kid. “Agriculture is relatively new if you think of the entire Homo sapiens experience,” he’d told her. “If we can reestablish that—creating more food than we need—we will reestablish our way of life.” But the earth is scorched and hostile, the seeds mutated, the sunlight still blotted by dust and soot. People do better with small gardens tended in windows, from seeds of vegetation that didn’t kill them. They can keep an eye on them, take them in at night so they don’t get stolen. And they prefer the hybrid animals that they catch. The burden of feeding an animal, keeping it alive, is too much to ask of most people who are just trying to stay alive themselves. Each generation of animal has its own genetic distortions. One might make you sick, but his brother might not. Better to see a hybrid animal alive—see for yourself if it’s really healthy—before eating it.
“This much food,” Pressia says. “How is there enough sun?”
“There’s been some tinkering in the coding. How much sun does a plant need? Can we alter that need? The greenhouses use mechanics, reflective surfaces to pinpoint light, conserve and shuttle it to the plants’ leaves.”
“Fresh water?”
“Same idea.”
“What are these crops exactly?”
“Hybrids.”
“Do you know how many people you could feed with all of this food?” Pressia means it as a statement of awe, but Ingership takes it as a valid question
.
“If it were all edible, we could expand to serve one-eighth of the population.”
“You can’t eat it?”
“We have a few successes. Meager really. Mutations that pop up. Not usually our planned attempts.”
“One-eighth of the population would eat it whether it was edible or not,” Pressia says.
“Oh, no, not one-eighth of the wretches. This would be one-eighth of those in the Dome, to subsidize their dietary needs and eventually sustain them when they return to us,” Ingership says.
The Dome? But Ingership is OSR. He’s El Capitan’s superior. OSR plans to overtake the Dome one day. They’re building an army. “What about OSR?” Pressia manages.
Ingership looks at Pressia and smiles on one side of his face. “All will become clear.”
“Does El Capitan know about this?”
“He knows without knowing he knows. How about you tell him that I live out here in a tent… like Arabs in the olden days in the deserts?” She can’t tell if he’s joking or not.
“Arabs,” Pressia echoes, as if she’s taken over the role of Helmud now. She thinks of her parents’ wedding reception, her grandfather’s description of the white tents and white tablecloths and white cake.
“Tent. Got it? That’s an order.” Ingership’s voice is suddenly rigid, as if not only his face but his voice box too is partly metallic.
“Got it,” Pressia says quickly.
It’s quiet for a few minutes, and then Ingership says, “In my spare time, I tinker with antiquities. I’m trying to reclaim foods that have been lost. Still not quite perfected. So close.” And then Ingership sighs deeply. “A little bit of old-fashioned civility here in the wilds.”
Old-fashioned civility? Pressia couldn’t even begin to understand what that might mean. “Where do you get the oysters?” she asks.
“Ah,” Ingership says with a wink. “Little secret. Gotta keep something up my sleeve!” Pressia doesn’t understand why he’d keep anything up his sleeves.
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