Pure

by Julianna Baggott

  “Why me?”

  “This I don’t know. I have a very high level of clearance. But not all. Do you know something about this boy? Some connection?”

  Pressia’s stomach cramps again. She isn’t sure whether she should try to lie or not. She realizes that her expression might have already given her away. She’s a terrible liar. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, that’s disappointing,” Ingership says. Disappointing that she isn’t connected or that she may be withholding information? She doesn’t know which one he means.

  “But you think his mother is really alive?” Pressia is flooded with hope. She could help save Partridge’s mother. He was right after all.

  “Very much alive, we think.”

  “Who is we?” Pressia says. “You keep saying we.”

  “I mean the Dome, of course. We. And that definition can include you too, Pressia.” He taps his fingers on the table. “We’ll have to get you prepared, of course. We have the materials here to do so. Of course, this will be civilized. My wife is preparing the ether.” He leans into Pressia. “Can you smell it?”

  Pressia sniffs the air and notices a sickening sweetness. She gives a shallow nod, suddenly too nauseous to offer much more. She feels hot in her stomach and chest. The heat flares to her arms and legs. Ether? “Something’s not right,” she says. She’s dizzy now. She can’t help but think of the boy in the woods. It isn’t logical but she wonders if she deserves this as retribution for letting him die. Is this what happens to those who witness a murder and do nothing?

  “Do you feel it?” Ingership asks. “Do you feel it throughout your body?”

  Pressia looks at Ingership. His face is blurred.

  “I wanted you to have this pleasure before your real mission begins. A small gift. An offering.”

  Is Ingership’s wife preparing ether to put Pressia under? She has the strange card in her pocket—white with a stripe, of fresh blood? “The food?” Pressia says weakly, not sure what the gift has been.

  “We don’t have much time then. I feel it too.” He rubs his arms, a quick rough motion. “One more picture.” This time he reaches into the outer pocket of his jacket, just above his hip. He slides the picture to Pressia.

  Pressia has to squint to focus. It’s her grandfather. He’s lying in a bed with a white blanket. He has some kind of breathing apparatus cupped to his nose, and she can see the fan in his throat, a smudged blur of motion in the shadow of his jaw. He’s smiling at the camera. His face is peaceful and looks younger than she’s seen it in as long as she can remember.

  “They’re taking good care of him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “The Dome, of course!”

  “The Dome?” Is it possible? She sees a bouquet of flowers in a vase on a bedside table. Real flowers? Scented? Her heart lifts. Her grandfather is breathing. The fan in his throat is pulling in clear air.

  “But of course, he’s an insurance policy to ensure you’re motivated to do your job. Do you understand?”

  “My grandfather,” Pressia says. If she doesn’t do as she’s told, someone will kill him. She runs her hand over the doll-head fist hidden under the table. She feels another wave of dizziness. She thinks of her home. Freedle. If her grandfather is gone, where is Freedle?

  “But you will be protected on your mission. Special Forces will always be on hand. Unseen, but not far off.”

  “Special Forces?”

  “Yes, you saw them already. Did you not? They’ve already reported to the Dome that you and El Capitan have seen them. Incredible specimens. More animal than human but perfectly controlled.”

  “In the woods, those superhuman creatures… from the Dome? Special Forces…” The foods that she’s eaten are the antiquities that he’s been tinkering with, and now Pressia knows what he meant when he said they are still not quite perfected. So close, as Ingership put it. So close. They’ve poisoned her.

  Pressia slips her hand under the lip of her plate, grabbing the handle of her dinner knife. She has to get out of here. She stands up, hiding the knife behind her thigh. Everything wheels around her for a moment and then sways. She tries to make out the letters of her own name on the manila envelope. It must contain her orders.

  “Darling!” Ingership calls to his wife. “We’re feeling the effects! Our guest…”

  Pressia’s stomach lurches. She looks around the room and then at Ingership’s face. The real flesh of it is sunken. His wife appears, shimmering in her second skin except that her mouth is covered by a green mask. She’s wearing pale green latex gloves over her gloved hands. And then the floor seems to shift under Pressia’s feet.

  Ingership reaches for her. She pulls out the knife, points it at his stomach. “Let me out of here,” she says. Maybe she can wound him enough to make it to the door.

  “This isn’t polite behavior, Pressia!” Ingership says. “It’s not one bit polite!”

  She lunges at him but loses her balance, and as he reaches for her, she slices his arm. Blood rises quickly, a red mark on his shirt.

  She runs for the door, drops the knife so she can grab the knob with her good hand, but it only clicks. It won’t turn. She feels sick and dizzy. She falls to her knees and vomits. She rolls to her side, clutching the doll to her chest. Ingership appears above Pressia’s head, and she stares up into his face, lit by the cut glass of the brilliant ceiling-bolted light fixture behind him. What was that kind of light called? What was it?

  “I invited you to try all of the food,” Ingership says. “But I didn’t promise you could keep it. Tell me it wasn’t worth it! Tell me!”

  His military cap is gone, and now Pressia sees the strange puckering of skin where it meets the metal. He teeters, his arm bleeding, then staggers and for a moment Pressia fears that Ingership is going to come crashing down on her. But he reaches for his wife, clamps his hands on the stocking of skinny upper arms. “Get me to the bucket! I’m burning, darling. I can feel it in my limbs now. I’m burning bright! Burning!”

  And then Pressia remembers the word. “Chandelier,” she says. A beautiful word. How could she have forgotten it? When she sees her grandfather again, she’ll whisper the word in his ear.

  Chandelier, chandelier, chandelier.

  EL CAPITAN

  CAP

  EL CAPITAN HAS BEEN LEANING AGAINST one of the heavy curved edges of the broken water tower, keeping an eye out for Dusts for so long it’s now dark. Sometimes he hears ripples in the sand. He tries to shoot them but there isn’t enough light and they’re too fleeting to hit. The blasts seem to scare them off.

  He’s hungry and cold. His feet are swollen from pacing with his brother on his back. Helmud is asleep and deadweight. He kicks into a snore and El Capitan leans forward and then slams back, ramming Helmud into the hardened shell of the water tower. Helmud lets out a huff of air, a moan, and then whimpers until El Capitan tells him to shut up.

  How long has Pressia been gone? He can’t tell. He’d call in, but the walkie-talkie is dead.

  When El Capitan finally sees the black car, the plume of dust trailing behind it, he’s angry more than relieved. The car snakes across the Deadlands slowly. The motion must have a purpose. Is the driver moving erratically because he’s afraid of some Dust rising up? Hard to say.

  Finally the car comes to a stop. It’s covered in dark sand. There’s crusted mud on the tires. They’ve been somewhere fertile? El Capitan stands up and for some reason, Helmud starts whimpering again. “Knock it off, Helmud,” El Capitan says, jerking Helmud around on his back. Helmud’s neck makes a popping noise, but he’s not dead. His neck does that sometimes.

  The driver doesn’t roll down the window. El Capitan walks up and simply opens the back door. No sign of Ingership, which isn’t surprising. Ingership’s visits are always quick. Pressia is leaning against the far window, legs crossed, a hand covering her eyes. Under the dim light in the car’s ceiling, she looks shrunken and bruised. El Capitan climbs in, giving the door a hard
slam. On the seat between them sits a manila envelope with Pressia’s name on it, the seal torn open. It looks like it’s been battered and wrung.

  “We’re going back to base, right?” El Capitan asks the driver.

  “Depends,” the driver says. “I follow the orders that Belze gives me now.”

  “What? Belze?”

  “Ingership says so.”

  El Capitan has put in all these years, and Pressia Belze takes over? After one dinner? “Ingership told you to follow Pressia’s commands over mine? Jesus!”

  “Jesus,” Helmud echoes.

  “That’s right, sir.”

  He scoots up to the front seat and lowers his voice. “She looks like hell,” El Capitan says.

  “Well, she’s not dead,” the driver says.

  El Capitan sits back. “Pressia,” he says softly.

  Pressia turns and squints at him. Her eyes are red-rimmed and bleary.

  “You okay?”

  Pressia nods. “Ingership lives in a tent like olden-day Arabs.”

  “Is that right?” El Capitan says.

  “Right?” Helmud says.

  Pressia looks out the window, lifts her doll-head fist ever so slightly, and rocks it back and forth, like the shaking of a head. Is the doll speaking for her? She looks at El Capitan as if to ask him whether he understood the gesture. He guesses that she doesn’t trust the driver, doesn’t want him to overhear anything.

  El Capitan nods then tests. “Did you have fun, live a little high on the hog?”

  “It was lovely,” Pressia says, and then again she wags her doll head. El Capitan gets it. Something’s happened. Something bad.

  “Are these your orders?” He touches the envelope.

  “Yes.”

  “Do I have a role?”

  “They want you to assist me.”

  The driver says, “I need your orders, Belze. Where to?”

  “I don’t like your tone,” El Capitan says. He thinks of punching the driver in the head but decides not to. He doesn’t want to upset Pressia.

  “You don’t have to like my tone,” the driver says.

  Pressia lifts the end of the envelope, dumping its contents: a single sheet with a list of orders, a photograph of an old man resting peacefully in a hospital bed, and there’s a small handheld device. El Capitan hasn’t seen a working computer in ages, only dead ones. Black screens, melted plastic, a few keyboards, and parts lodged in skin. “The blip,” she says to El Capitan. “We have to find that blip. Male, eighteen years of age.”

  El Capitan picks up the handheld. He’s so used to his walkie-talkie that it seems foreign. It’s sleek with a shiny, almost oily screen. The screen displays terrain as if from an aerial view. And it does, in fact, include one small blue blip. The blip pulses, moving across the screen. El Capitan touches the blue dot, and the screen suddenly blooms before him into a close-up of the area around the blue flashing dot. There are words written on the screen—24TH STREET, CHENEY AVE., BANK OF COMMERCE AND TRADE. Didn’t his mother refer to the bank as the C&T? Was that his mother’s bank? He remembers lollipops in a jar with a rubber-sealed cap and a maze-like line of people hemmed in by velvet ropes. But the streets are not what they once were. The screen shows the truth, a demolished city, overlaid with a map of the old city. “I know where this is,” he says. “This blue blip here.”

  “Yes,” Pressia says.

  He scans the screen for a market that’s started up recently nearby. It’s not there. “This isn’t up to date.”

  “Not completely.”

  “You know this blip?” El Capitan asks.

  “It’s a Pure. He broke out of the Dome through the air-filtration system.”

  El Capitan wants to kill a Pure. It’s a simple desire as ordinary and forceful as hunger. “And what are we going to do with the Pure? Target practice?”

  “We’ll use him to lead us to his mother.” Pressia squints at the horizon. “In the end, we will hand the Pure and his mother over to Ingership.”

  “And he’s going to kill them publicly?”

  “He’s going to give them back.”

  “Give them back?”

  “Yes.”

  To the Dome. El Capitan realizes that Ingership has been working with the Dome. It’s as if he’s known it without admitting it to himself. Of course, he thinks. This means that OSR doesn’t even really exist. El Capitan remembers what it was like looking for the guns he’d buried, his brother dying on his back, how his blood pounded desperately through his body as he looked for landmarks. The world had been stripped, obliterated. His mother already dead, buried in the cemetery outside of an asylum. No bearings. He survived that, he quickly reminds himself. He says, “I’m glad to see that Ingership has earned your allegiance and trust.”

  “Absolutely,” Pressia says, still looking out the window. El Capitan keeps his eyes on Pressia’s doll head, which rises now, just an inch off the seat, and twists back and forth. She then turns and looks El Capitan in the eyes. “He has your allegiance and trust too, I hope?”

  Is the driver listening and reporting? It doesn’t matter. El Capitan can’t respond. He can’t even nod. This isn’t the way he’s going to go down. There’s a fire in his chest. Helmud is restless, as if El Capitan’s angry heat has spread to him through their shared blood. He’s back there fiddling his fingers like an old lady nervously knitting baby booties.

  “Where to?” the driver says.

  Pressia shouts, “We’ll tell you when we tell you!” El Capitan is proud of her, relieved to see some blood in her cheeks.

  He looks at the handheld again. “You have a plan?”

  She nods the doll head, and then says, for effect, “We’ll follow the blip.”

  El Capitan puts his finger on the photograph and pulls it across the seat. “Someone you know?”

  “My grandfather.”

  “Nice setup he’s got there.”

  “Yes.”

  So, they have Pressia’s grandfather, their hostage. This is the way they play it. El Capitan picks up the single sheet of orders. He skims it. They’re to locate the Pure, gain trust, follow him to the target, his mother, hand the target over to Special Forces, which will arrive when called via walkie-talkie. “Special Forces?”

  “The creatures who stole from your traps.”

  El Capitan tries to take this all in. He keeps reading. They are to protect the dwelling and all objects within it—at all costs—especially pills, capsules, vials. Anything that appears to be medicinal. Belze is in command. El Capitan is to aid and assist. He feels sick and trapped, like the recruits out in the pens. His fists are clenched. His chest feels clenched too.

  “You know where we’re going?”

  She nods.

  “I’m only going to follow orders if you really know what your mission is.”

  “As Ingership says, ‘The Dome is good. It watches over us like the benevolent eye of God. It’s asking something of me and you. And we will serve.’ ”

  El Capitan can’t help it. He laughs. “I’ve looked at it wrong all these years. Huh. That was stupid of me, right? The Dome isn’t evil at all. We always thought they were the enemy and we’d have to fight them one day. Didn’t we, Helmud?”

  Helmud doesn’t say a word. Pressia looks straight out the windshield. “No, we won’t fight,” she says. But El Capitan keeps an eye on Pressia’s doll head. She lifts its knuckled head and lets it fall. Yes. They will fight. Pressia punches the leather seat.

  “Okay,” El Capitan says. One thing is clear, he’s got to get rid of the driver. “Why don’t you get the wind in your face a little?” He’s never quite heard himself speak in a tone like this, gently, calmly. “You need to make sure you’ve got your legs under you. Take a little walk.”

  Pressia looks at him a minute then nods. She gets out of the car, leaning on the door for support, struggling a minute to stand upright. She holds her head with her good hand, as if she’s dizzy. Then she shuts the door. El Capitan watches
her turn the corner of the fallen water tower.

  “What the hell?” the driver says, swiveling in his seat.

  Helmud is agitated. He starts rocking on El Capitan’s back. “Hell, hell, hell,” he whispers. It’s a warning. El Capitan knows it. Helmud is trying to tell the driver to ease up. But he doesn’t. “Belze has a mission. You interfering with that mission? I should turn you in. Ingership will—”

  El Capitan reaches around and punches the driver in the throat. The driver’s head slams into his window. El Capitan gets out of the car, weighted by Helmud, and in a few quick strides, he opens the driver’s door, pulls the driver out by the lapels of his suit. They stagger. El Capitan head-butts him, and throws him to the ground in the glow of the headlights. Helmud’s forehead smacks the back of El Capitan’s skull. El Capitan kicks the driver in the ribs, walks around the driver’s curled body, and kicks him in the kidneys. He slips his hand around the gun in his belt, thinks of shooting him, but decides to let him fend for himself out here in the Deadlands.

  The driver writhes on the ground and coughs a spray of blood, which flecks the sand. El Capitan pats the hood of the car. He remembers his motorbike, how it was almost like flying. He gets in the driver’s seat, rubs the dash, grips the wheel with both hands. He used to know all there was to know about flying planes, and he knows he’ll never get to. But maybe this will feel like it, just a little.

  He buzzes the window down and whistles through his teeth. “Pressia?”

  Pressia reappears, looking a little stronger.

  “Get in the passenger seat. The driver’s feeling a little incapacitated. I’m driving.”

  Pressia gets in the car and shuts the door. She doesn’t ask any questions. The air inside the car’s cavity seems electric. El Capitan hits the gas, puts it in reverse, drives backward, and then puts the car in drive. He pulls the wheel to avoid the driver. The tires spin and then catch, and the car jolts forward with a guttural rumble that he feels in his ribs, leaving a swirl of dust that twists in its wake where a Dust quickly forms. El Capitan sees it through the rearview mirror, lit by his taillights. And as if nearly animal and drawn by the driver’s blood, the Dust lunges at the driver’s body, which is lost in a frenzy of sand, kicking his cap across the Deadlands.