He dips under a hook. There’s the footlocker.
Helmud starts clicking again, calling to the small caged animal.
“Shut up, Helmud!” El Capitan says.
Helmud bucks, trying to get at the caged beast, which kicks El Capitan off balance. He falls to one knee. “Damn it, Helmud. What the hell?”
But then he feels a sharp stone in his knee. He stands.
And there on the ground is a piece of jewelry. It’s a broken bird with a blue gem for an eye threaded on a gold chain. Will this mean anything to Pressia? He hopes so.
He picks up the necklace and puts it in his pocket. He then runs to the crawl space that Pressia had indicated on her map. There aren’t as many weapons as she’d let on. Maybe that means Bradwell and the Pure are heavily armed. He reaches in and runs his fingers along the sharp blade of a knife. He grabs what must be a stun gun. He picks them up and puts them in his jacket. He takes one last deep breath—the cooked meat—and then goes.
PARTRIDGE
TWENTY
YOU WERE GOING TO GIVE ME to them, like I’m your property,” Partridge says. He and Bradwell are sitting on pallets side by side on the floor of a small room, and, like the basement they were in before, there’s a strange collection of things lining the walls, which makes the room feel even smaller than it is. It’s as if the mothers have stripped everything of any possible value from the Meltlands and are hoarding it.
“I wasn’t going to give you to them. I was going to trade you in. It’s completely different.”
“In both scenarios, I’m theirs.”
“But I backed them off that idea, didn’t I?” Bradwell takes off his jacket. The wound on the meat of his shoulder is swollen but it’s stopped bleeding. He balls up the jacket, making a pillow, and lies down on his side.
“Yeah, they’re going to settle for a piece of me. That’s great. A memento. What the hell?”
“You owe Pressia your life.”
“I didn’t know you’d take that so literally. It’s an expression where I come from.”
“That’s a luxury you can afford in the Dome. Not here. Things are life and death. Daily.”
“I’m going to fight,” Partridge says. “It’s an instinct. I can’t help it. No one’s going to take a piece of me without a fight.”
“I wouldn’t suggest it with this crowd, but you do what you have to do.” Bradwell punches his jacket as if plumping a pillow and closes his eyes; in a matter of minutes, he’s breathing heavily, fast asleep.
Partridge tries to sleep too. He curls up on his pallet, closes his eyes, but can only seem to concentrate on Bradwell’s erratic snoring. Partridge figures that Bradwell’s learned how to sleep in the worst of circumstances. Partridge, on the other hand, has always woken at the slightest noise—one of the teachers on dorm patrol, someone out after hours on the lawns, the ticking of the air-filtration system.
He dips into sleep, lightly, then drifts to the surface of wakefulness again—Bradwell, Pressia, the meat locker, here and now, the dead old woman, the Death Spree, the mothers. He sees Lyda in his mind, her face in the near darkness of the Domesticity Display, her voice counting one, two, three. On the dance floor, she kisses him, soft on the mouth, and he kisses her back. She pulls away, but this time, she looks at him as if taking him in, as if she knows it will be the last she sees of him, then turns and runs off. He twists on the pallet. He’s awake for a moment. Where is she now? And then his mind feels blanketed with sleep, and he dreams he’s a baby. His mother holds him in her arms as her wings carry them through the cold, dark air. The feathers rustle, her wings buffeting—or are they Bradwell’s birds? And is it dark because it’s night or because the air is filled with smoke?
And there’s the voice in the dark air, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen… Lyda counting in the darkened Domesticity Display, now full of smoke. But still he runs his finger down the blade. And Lyda says, “Twenty.”
PRESSIA
EARTH
PRESSIA TRIES TO KEEP WATCH for a shift of landscape, an arching rise of dark dusty sand, funnels, ripples. The car is half hidden by the felled billboard. The keys are in the ignition. She still feels the effects of the ether, which makes her feel heavy. She dozes, then wakes with a start.
She grips the gun tightly with her one good hand. She wonders if, because her sight and hearing are dimmer, her sense of smell is already keener. The scent of rot is part of the landscape. She thinks of the pale moist eggs from Ingership’s dinner, the oysters. She feels sick again and quickly closes her eyes to regain some sense of balance in her head.
With her eyes shut, the image that appears in her head is of Bradwell and Partridge eating dinner at a large dining room table. Such things are possible now that she’s seen Ingership’s farmhouse, but not really, not ever, not for them. She imagines Bradwell’s face, his eyes, his mouth. He looks at her. He’s about to say something.
She opens her eyes. It’s almost dawn. A hint of pale light is edging up in the east.
She hears something hiss—the movement of sand? If a Dust appears, she’ll kill it. She has to. Is it wrong to kill something that wants to kill you?
In her cloudy vision, she sees a few bits of exploded tires, the skeleton of a delivery van rusting deep brown, and way off in the distance, when the wind dies for a moment and the ash settles, she sees the rumple where the horizon meets the gray skin of sky. Somewhere back there is the farmhouse, Ingership and his wife, her skin hidden in a stocking.
She looks for El Capitan’s shape to emerge from the fallen cityscape behind her. Her doll-head fist, already blackened by ash, stares at her, expectantly, as if it needs something from her. She used to talk to it when she was little, and she was sure that the doll understood her. There’s no one here to see the doll head. Not even the Dome, the benevolent eye of God. God is God. She tries to imagine the crypt again, the beautiful statue behind the cracked Plexiglas. “Saint Wi,” she whispers, as if it’s the beginning of a prayer. And what does she want to pray for? She wants to think of one of her grandfather’s stories now—not the boy shot dead, not the driver eaten by Dusts, not the Dusts that may eat her.
And then there it is, a story. There was an Italian festival every summer, her grandfather told her. There were teacups so big you could sit in them and spin, and games you could play and possibly win a goldfish in a plastic bag filled with water. The fish looked magnified when they circled the bloated plastic bags, larger and then smaller and then larger again.
The ground swirls under the backhand of the wind, and Pressia doesn’t like it. She blinks instinctively, trying to clear her vision, but this only makes it cloudier. The swirl and the wind seem to be at odds with each other. And then Pressia sees a pair of eyes. Her gasp is caught in her throat. She pushes the button on the door handle to make the window buzz down. Nothing happens. She has to turn on the car itself. She grabs hold of the keys. She twists the keys back and forth. There are only some hollow clicks. She pushes the key hard and the engine comes to life, everything shivering with energy. The Dust is still roiling and churning. She pushes the button. The window retracts. The ashen wind whips in. She lifts the gun and cocks it. Her hands are shaking. She hesitates, then tries to take aim.
The Dust drops to the earth. Gone again, but not far.
Pressia is frozen. The ash whirls in the car. She’s poised to shoot, but she’s never fired a gun before. She isn’t an officer. She’s just a sixteen-year-old girl. Even if she could give the Dome what they want, what would happen to Partridge? What would happen to El Capitan and Helmud? And her grandfather? She imagines him in the hospital bed, his smile, the blurred blades of the small fan lodged in his throat. Was there a stitch of worry in his eyes? Was he warning her?
What happens here when you’re no longer of use? She knows the answer to this question.
She whispers, “Forgive me,” because she feels sure that she’s already failed her grandfather. She sees Saint Wi in her head, her delicate features. This is
her prayer. “Forgive me.”
And that’s the moment when she feels the sharp tug on the gun. She pulls back, refusing to let go. The arms appear next. They’re strong, earthen, not human, clawed. They grab her shoulders and start to pull her from the car. She tries to hold on to the gun, but she’s no longer in position to shoot it. She uses the butt of the rifle to pound the Dust’s chest.
She knows that the car is her best protection. She needs to stay inside of it. But the arms keep pulling her forward. She reaches back and jams the doll-head fist through the steering wheel, but in the process the gun is ripped loose.
The Dust’s arms pull her close to its body. Here she smells the rot—it’s sharp and mixed with the smell of rust. The Dust wrestles her loose from the steering wheel, pulling her upper body through the window. She braces her legs.
But then she looks up, over the Dust’s shoulder. A ridge of sand behind this Dust defines itself into a spine with slats of ribs built into that spine.
The Dust is too strong. Her legs give. She and the Dust fly forward. It loses its grip. She lunges for the gun, picks it up from the ground, turns over on her stomach, and shoots. The Dust falls to the ground in small pieces.
The spiny ridge moves in then. She gets to her feet and takes aim but it slides underneath her, like a shark beneath a canoe. She turns and sees the ground heave like water churned by a storm. More Dusts are stirring, rising.
One Dust to her left is the size of a wolf. Another shoots up like a geyser, twenty feet high. She turns and fires, turns again and fires, not stopping to assess the damage. She’s walking backward, trying to get to the car, seal herself inside it.
Where is El Capitan? Has he followed the wrong buckle in the ground?
Another wolf-size Dust lunges and then tackles her, crushing her body across the hard-packed earth. There is no muzzle and yet she feels its hot breath on her neck, her face. She punches it with the butt of the gun, in what she thinks may be ribs. The Dust lets out a grunt.
She scrambles away.
The spiny ridge swirls up Pressia’s body, kicking the gun from her hand and pressing the air from her lungs. The gun skids to the feet of the wolven Dust.
Then she hears a shout. El Capitan?
The spiny ridge rears. A knife spins through the air and slices it. It goes slack and falls to the ground. The knife, a meat cleaver, thuds into the ground.
There is El Capitan. “I made a trip to the butcher’s,” he says.
There are Dusts everywhere now. Helmud jerking on his back, El Capitan slashes at three twisted pillars of sand with another knife and kills all three of them swiftly—slicing into their bodies. Whatever life was left in them hisses out, and the leftover ash and dirt rain across the Deadlands’ floor.
Pressia shoots Dusts as quickly as she can. El Capitan is shouting to her, but with her muffled ears and the blasts, she can’t make out his words.
Another Dust is on her quickly, pinning her down. It tightens its grip around her chest. She knees and punches its trunk, but it has her in a choke hold. Her neck muscles tensing against the hold, she drops the gun and tries to wrench herself loose. She can’t breathe. El Capitan is there, suddenly. He grabs the Dust by the throat. He has a stun gun, presses it to what seems to be the head, pulls the trigger. The Dust falls.
Pressia gasps for air.
El Capitan grabs her hand and presses something small and hard into it. “Take it.”
She can’t speak.
“Maybe it’s worth something.”
Another Dust is upon them now. El Capitan grabs the rifle and fires. A nearby Dust hisses away.
She looks at the pendant necklace. She recognizes it immediately. It means Bradwell brought Partridge back to the butcher shop after she was lost. They may still be together.
But why is it broken? What happened to the other half?
She looks up. The Dusts are swarming. Pressia feels something grab her waist. She kicks as hard as she can. With each blow, there’s a spray of dust and ash. She claws and jabs but still feels herself being slowly pulled down by the hungry earth itself. She tries to pull herself forward and sees an army of Dusts looming in the distance. Will this Dust pull her underground and feed on her? The dread of suffocation rises in her. She doesn’t want to be buried alive.
The world around her stutters in her vision. It skips and jitters. She keeps fighting but she’s been poisoned, put under, beaten. She’s weak and hungry and thirsty. Her vision, already clouded, gathers darkly.
From her side, she shouts El Capitan’s name. He calls back to her, and through the dirt kicked up by her struggle, she can see El Capitan, fighting Dusts, with Helmud on his back. He’s still on his feet, but more Dusts are moving in. He’s near the car. She can see the black shine. Dusts throw El Capitan into the side of the car. He falls to the ground. They will die out here.
She whirls her arms, pounds her boots into the Dust’s body. She clenches her eyes shut and thinks of the swan’s blue eye. A world gone blue, and now the throb in her ears and the pulse in her neck are blue and El Capitan is blue, the car, the Dusts. She turns toward the gray hills, blue now, and she looks for her mother’s face, her father’s face. She’s aware that it’s crazy. They’re gone. But still her mind wants some comfort before she dies. Home. Where is home?
The earth is pulling her in. She feels the deep growl of Dusts rumbling through her body. She opens her eyes and the Deadlands are even more dead—ash, death, and dull sand.
She keeps fighting, her fist clenched on the pendant, punching, but it does no damage. She’s exhausted. The envelope with her instructions and the tracking device are gone. The picture of her grandfather—she thinks of it now in her mind’s eye. It’s gone too, and it’s as if it never existed. Where is he? What happened to Freedle? Will she ever see them again? Are El Capitan and Helmud dead now? Is it possible that they made it to the car?
She turns toward a drumming sound to see what she’s sure will be her final sight. Pounding footsteps. A blur of ash, but then the shine of a child’s face, a child being held by her mother. It’s as if they are a lost vision of her very own mother and Pressia herself as a little girl, as if her mother has not been blown to bits through a plate-glass window.
“Pressia,” her mother says. “Grab hold!”
There is a hand.
And then a pinhole is all that’s left of her vision, and then that too is black.
PRESSIA
SACRIFICE
PRESSIA WAKES UP, her cheek set on something hard. Her head throbs. She sees a tire, its tread worn thin. But it isn’t the tire of the long black car. She’s in a room and the tire is miniature. It’s connected to a motor with blades. A lawn mower? She wonders if she’s dreaming, if this is some kind of afterlife. A basement devoted to lawn care? That’s an afterlife?
She tries to sit up.
There are voices all around her, whispering. One speaks up nearby. “Wait.” It’s a woman’s voice. “Take your time.”
She rests again, lying on her side. She remembers the Dusts. El Capitan shooting his gun. The mother and child. She closes her eyes. “El Capitan and Helmud,” she says.
“The two men in the car? Friends of yours?”
“Are they dead?”
“We were there for you, not them. Their life or death is of no consequence to us.”
“Where am I?” She looks around and sees faces—women, children, a rotation as if she’s in one of the teacup rides that her grandfather told her about. Their children are fused to their mothers’ bodies. She stares at one and then the next.
“You’re here. With Our Good Mother.”
Mother? She doesn’t have a mother. The room is cold and damp. She shivers. Bodies shift around her, and beyond the bodies, there are stacked boxes, melted toys, a row of distorted metal mailboxes, a half-melted tricycle.
Pressia pushes herself up. A woman takes Pressia’s elbow and helps her sit upright on her knees. The woman holds a blond child of maybe two or
three, one arm fused to the child’s head, protectively. “This is Our Good Mother,” the woman says, pointing straight ahead. “Bow to her.”
Pressia looks up and sees a woman seated on a plain wooden chair, reinforced with plastic rope. She has a simple face, small and delicate, a mosaic of glass. There’s only one light hitting her, and it makes the glass shimmer. Her pale skin has almost completely grown over the pearls around her neck. They look like a strand of perfectly shaped tumors. She’s wearing a thin, almost gauzy shirt. Through it, Pressia sees the outline of a giant metal cross embedded in her stomach, chest, even up into the center of her throat, pushing back her shoulders. It forces her to sit erectly. She wears a long skirt and is armed with a simple cast-iron fire poker. It lies across her knees.
Pressia lowers her head, bowing, and stays that way, waiting for Our Good Mother to tell her when it’s enough. At Our Good Mother’s feet, there are Bradwell’s weapons neatly arranged. This means he may be here. He’s tied up in all of this somehow. Does this mean that after she disappeared, he tried to look for her? What about Partridge? Her heart starts beating hard in her chest. She’s briefly flooded with hope until she realizes that this arrangement of weapons also means that Bradwell has been disarmed, maybe even shot and killed.
Did they leave the necklace for her to find? Are they gone?
The necklace. Where is it now?
The blood has rushed to Pressia’s head, and she feels dizzy. Still, she doesn’t move. She waits for the woman with the fire poker to say something, and finally she does. “Rise up.” Pressia lifts her head. “You want to know,” Our Good Mother continues, “as they all do, why a cross? Was I a nun? Devout? Fused in prayer? How?”
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