But they’re all moving downhill now. Running wildly.
She wants to bury the bodies.
But, no.
There’s one soldier still loose. He’ll be coming after them.
Her grandfather was a mortician. He could have fixed them up nicely. He could turn a head to conceal a cracked skull. He could re-create a nose from a piece of bone. He could stretch the skin. He could make eyelids and stitch them closed. There used to be coffins with silk linings. Now he’s dead and gone too.
Pressia is downhill. There will be no burial. They will be eaten by feral beasts. The burial is their own shroud of blood.
There’s the car half covered in brush and vines, which El Capitan pulls off and throws to the ground. Partridge, Lyda, and Bradwell stand by Pressia, breathless. Bradwell has made a bandage by ripping cloth from his pant leg. It’s wrapped around his shoulder. The blood is dark. His shirt is gone. He’s bare-chested. Partridge has offered his jacket, but Bradwell says he’s burning up. The birds flutter, their bright beaks in deep, their masked eyes darting. She wanted to see them and now here they are—the gray fan of wings, the paler chests, their shining eyes, and their dainty claws, a bright red. She wishes she knew what kind of birds they are. She imagines him as a little boy, running through a flock. They lift and there’s the blinding light. And the birds are with him forever. He offers her his hand.
“No,” she says. She has to walk on her own.
She grips the barbershop bell hidden in her jacket pocket. She will never give the bell to her mother, proof of an old life. She won’t tell her all of the stories she’s saved. There wasn’t time. She didn’t even have the chance to tell her mother she loved her.
The girl in white is now streaked in red. Lyda. Partridge has her by his side. She holds him up more than he does her. He’s saying, “But they wanted my mother alive. They wanted to interrogate her. It doesn’t make sense.” He’s holding the bottle of pills tightly in his clenched fist.
Pressia is still the Dome’s eyes and ears. They see everything she sees, hear everything she hears. But she doesn’t understand what’s happened. Do they? Is this what they’d wanted all along?
“Let’s go,” El Capitan says.
“Go,” Helmud says.
Everyone climbs into the car. Partridge and Lyda are in the backseat. Pressia and Bradwell are in the front with El Capitan at the wheel. Helmud is gazing out at nothing. He’s shaking.
El Capitan shoves the car in reverse. “Where to?”
“Pressia has to get free,” Bradwell says. “Whoever did this to her has to undo it.”
They back out into the Deadlands and now head south, around the hills.
“The farmhouse,” Pressia says. “We need to be on the other side of this hill.”
“How can a farmhouse exist out here?” Partridge asks. His voice is weary.
Pressia thinks of Ingership’s wife, how she told her in the kitchen that she wouldn’t put her in harm’s way.
“They had oysters, eggs, and lemonade, these automatic rubberized seals to keep out dust, a beautiful chandelier in the dining room, and crops being sprayed down by field hands,” she says, trying to explain, but as she does, she wonders if she’s gone crazy. She sees her mother’s face, the kiss she gives to her elder son. Pulling the trigger, her mother is dead. And it happens all over again, slowly, in Pressia’s mind. Pressia curls forward, closes her eyes and opens them and closes them. Each time she opens them, there is the doll head staring at her. This was how her mother knew it was her. These clicking eyes and plastic lashes, the small nostrils and the hole in the center of the lips.
The Dusts rise up again, fewer here, as the land starts to give way to grass that roots it. Still the Dusts edge up and circle. El Capitan rams one and the others back away.
Bradwell shouts that he sees something. “Not a Dust. Special Forces.”
They hug the side of the hill. And the soldier leaps from a jutting rock, landing with a thud on the roof of the car. Pressia looks up and sees the two dents made by his boots.
Bradwell grabs the rifle from the floorboards near El Capitan’s feet, cocks it, points it straight up, and shoots, ripping a hole into the metal, shearing it wide open. The shot clips the soldier’s leg. He thuds against the roof but holds on.
El Capitan tries to shake him loose, turning the wheel hard left, then hard right, but it doesn’t work. The soldier appears at the passenger window, kicks it with his one good leg, splintering the glass. He reaches in and grabs Partridge by the throat, but Partridge has a meat hook and his own unusual speed. He reaches around the soldier’s broad chest and hooks him between the shoulder blades.
The soldier lets out a guttural moan, loosens his grip, letting Partridge drop into his seat. The soldier still keeps his hold on the car. With his free hand he claws his back, trying to reach the hook. Bradwell rolls down the window, climbs halfway out of the car, cocks the gun again, but before he has time to fire, the soldier sees him, dives at him, pulling him from the car. They land with a thud on the ground and roll to a stop.
Pressia wants to scream—not Bradwell. She can’t lose anyone else. She won’t allow it. No more dying. She reaches for the handle. The door is locked. “Unlock it!” she screams.
“No!” El Capitan says. “You can’t help him! It’s too dangerous!”
She pounds the doll head on the door. “Let me out!”
Partridge reaches over the seat, grabs her arms, and pulls her back. “Pressia, don’t!”
Lyda says, “Use the gun. Take aim.”
Pressia grabs the gun and shoves her upper body out the window.
El Capitan turns the car around to give her a better line of fire. “Be ready when they separate. You might only get one chance.”
The soldier is trying to stagger up, but his leg is stripped of muscle. He’s also writhing against the pain from the hook still lodged in his back. He’s got Bradwell by the throat, but Bradwell kicks the soldier’s wound, elbows him in the gut, and scrambles to his feet.
Drawn to the soldier’s blood, a Dust circles the ground around them like a vulture but from below. Plumes of ash rise, making it hard to see. Bradwell kicks the soldier’s stomach. But the soldier grabs Bradwell and throws him. Bradwell lands hard, face-to-face with a Dust. He inches backward. The soldier pauses and seems to be assessing his leg wound.
Bradwell grabs the meat hook, wrestles it from the soldier’s back. Once it’s loose, Bradwell flies backward, landing hard.
Pressia takes her breath, lets it out halfway, and shoots.
The soldier spins and falls to the ground.
Bradwell gets to his feet, and, in one swift motion—the birds on his back a frantic blur of wings—he cuts the Dust clean through with the meat hook. He’s beautiful, Pressia thinks—his wounded shoulders, as if he’s been violently knighted, his tough jaw, his flashing eyes.
El Capitan pulls the car up to Bradwell, pops the lock, but Pressia’s already pulled herself out of the window. She grabs Bradwell and helps him to the car. She opens the door. They both slide in. She slams it behind them then stares at Bradwell. She reaches up and touches a cut on his bottom lip. “Don’t die,” she says. “Promise me that.”
“I promise that I’ll try not to,” he says.
El Capitan puts the car in gear and revs the engine.
She looks out the back window. A few more Dusts rush to circle the soldier. One rises and flares its back like a cobra. The soldier is quickly swallowed by the earth, gone.
Bradwell reaches up and lets his hand glide down her hair. She wraps her arms around him and listens to the pounding of his heart with her eyes shut tight. She imagines staying like this forever, letting everything else melt away.
Soon enough, Bradwell says, “We’re here,” and she lifts her head as they turn a corner and there are the rows of crops, then the long driveway that leads to the front porch steps of the yellow farmhouse. For a moment, she imagines they’re on their way home.
&
nbsp; But as they draw closer, she sees something small rippling from one of the windows—it almost looks like a small flag—a hand towel with a blood-red stripe down the middle. She reaches into her pocket and there’s the card that Ingership’s wife gave her in the kitchen, the sign. What does it mean? You must help save me. Isn’t that what the woman said?
PARTRIDGE
PACT
HIS MOTHER ISN’T DEAD. Sedge isn’t dead. In Partridge’s mind, they can’t be. There’s been a mistake, something he can sort out later. There were mistakes at the academy sometimes too, mostly errors in perception, human errors. His father is to blame. His father is human. This is a human error.
Or maybe it’s a test. His father planted the blueprints, gave Partridge the photograph, hoping or maybe even knowing that Partridge would use the information. Maybe from that moment on, the bright flash of the picture being taken, all of this has been part of a plan to gauge Partridge’s mental and physical strength; at the end everyone will emerge from their hidden spots, just out of his view, like an elaborate prank or surprise birthday party. It’s an explanation that keeps his mother and Sedge alive. But even as he tries to hold on to this precarious feat of logic, he also knows that it isn’t right. Another part of his brain keeps telling him that they’re dead, gone.
The gauze wrapped around his left hand hides the tip of his missing pinky, but he starts to feel an ache as if it’s there still, throbbing, when Pressia starts talking about the farmhouse. He doesn’t believe her. How could he? A farmhouse out here? An automatic system to seal off the windows and doors to cut down on ash? A chandelier in the dining room? All of it surrounded by fields with workers spraying pesticides?
Any oyster at all—poisonous or not—would be a miracle of science. But there are labs in the Dome that are devoted to reinstating the natural production of food. The farmhouse has to be a product of the Dome. The two worlds are linked in ways he never could have imagined. The car that he’s sitting in is proof. It had to come from the Dome. Where else?
When Pressia tries to describe it, Lyda says, “I saw the tire marks at the Dome. There’s a loading dock. Trucks must move in and out.”
Are they already testing the transition out of the Dome, back home to their rightful paradise, the New Eden? Partridge wonders. Blessed. In the Dome, they were blessed. Partridge remembers his mother’s voice—a new order of slaves. His mother’s voice is like a small slip of fabric that rustles lightly in his mind, and then he feels a swarm in his chest, sick with rage. She’s injured, but Sedge is with her, and Caruso is tending to her, just like he did the last time she was almost left for dead. Human error. No, dead. Both of them, and Caruso will never come aboveground. He’s the only one left. He’ll die there one day—probably one day soon now that Partridge’s father knows where the bunker is.
Mrs. Fareling—he thinks of her and Tyndal. He never got to tell his mother the message—that they survived. Thank you. There are so many things he didn’t get to say, too many to count.
After Pressia says that they’re getting close, Lyda turns to Partridge and whispers, “There’s something someone wanted me to tell you.”
“Who?”
“Just a girl I met while I was in the rehabilitation center,” Lyda says, and she seems embarrassed to mention that she was there, but, of course, she was. That’s where someone shaved her head. Partridge wants to ask her how much she’s endured because of him. He wishes he could take it all back. But she doesn’t want to talk about it now. He can tell. What she has to say is important. “She told me to tell you that there are many like her who want to overthrow the Dome. That’s all she could say. Do you understand?”
“Sleeper cells,” he mutters. Lyda is in deep. She’s not just a hostage. She’s a messenger. Does she know that she’s working for his mother’s side now? He wants to tell her everything his mother said about him being the leader, but he can’t. His mind is too jumbled. “Yes,” he manages to say. “I understand.”
They now turn the final cutback. El Capitan pulls the car behind a stand of low bushy orchard trees, planted so close together their limbs are entwined. And there it is—a yellow farmhouse just as Pressia described it, and the dark lush rows of vegetation in a valley, an island farm, the Deadlands stretching in every direction around it like a sea of ash. There’s a red barn with white trim and greenhouses. It disturbs him, the way it suddenly appears as if it’s been ripped up from some other place and time, and screwed into the ground. There are no OSR soldiers working in the fields, but there are two ladders leaning against the face of the house, buckets poised on rungs, and two long poles on the ground. “Was someone scrubbing the house?” Partridge says.
Lyda says, “The thing that looks like a small flag in the window. It’s a sign. I’ve seen it before.”
“For the resistance,” Bradwell says. “My parents had a real flag like that, folded in a drawer. It dates way back.”
“Ingership’s wife,” Pressia says. “She’s in trouble, I think.”
“How did this house get here?” Partridge whispers.
“It’s like a house in a magazine,” Pressia says. “But sick, diseased on the inside.”
“It’s not like any old-fashioned Arabs in white tents,” El Capitan says.
Pressia says to Partridge, “Bradwell needs your jacket.” The heat of the battle has worn off, and Bradwell has started to shake. Partridge can see Bradwell’s shoulders rattling. He takes off his jacket, which used to be Bradwell’s anyway, and hands it to him over the seat. Bradwell puts it on. “Thanks,” he says, but his voice sounds almost hollow—or is it that Partridge’s hearing is off ? He can’t trust anything anymore—not what he sees or hears, not houses that appear out of nowhere, not misty blood or his sister’s eyes.
“We can give Ingership the medications in exchange for getting all of this stuff out of your head,” Partridge says. He’s the only one who knows the truth—the medicine is a decoy, meant to buy time.
“What about Ingership’s wife?” Pressia says. “Can we help her?”
“Isn’t she the one who put you under?” Bradwell says.
“I don’t know,” Pressia says.
Fat birds, almost chicken-like, waddle across the road. They’re grotesque, with two-clawed legs pitching them around awkwardly. They don’t have feathers. Instead they seem to be covered in scales, as if the scaly skin that covers their legs has grown to cover their entire bodies. Their wings are bony things that edge up and down awkwardly at their sides.
“You didn’t see those in the magazines,” Bradwell says.
Partridge thinks of his father, diseased on the inside like this house. “When we walk up, hold the pills close to your head,” he says to Pressia.
“No,” Bradwell says, reaching over the seat and putting his hand on Partridge’s chest. “That’s too much.”
“What?” Partridge says. “This is how he operates. He’d blow her up but not the pills.” His father’s a killer. He closes his eyes for a moment, as if trying to clear his vision. But he knows that his father didn’t flip any switch until he saw that the pill bottle was in Partridge’s fist, far enough away. “It’s for her protection.”
“He’s right,” Pressia says to Bradwell.
Partridge imagines his father watching on, knowing every word, every gesture. His father must be in communication with Ingership inside the house because, just now, two young soldiers in OSR uniforms walk out onto the porch. They’re wretches, but well armed. They move to the edge of the porch and stand like sentries.
El Capitan squints through the windshield. “You know what pisses me off ? These are my goddamn recruits. They can’t even handle a weapon right. Works to our advantage, I guess.”
“Pisses me off,” Helmud whispers, his voice a rough whisper.
Bradwell says, “Okay, ready?”
Partridge wants to say more. He wants them to make a pact, here in the car, before they go in. But he’s not sure what he’d have them swear to.
/> El Capitan says, “Hey, I forgot this.” He tugs something from his jacket pocket and holds it up. “This belong to anyone?”
It’s their mother’s handmade music box, blackened from smoke.
“Take it,” Pressia says.
“No,” Partridge says. “You can have it.”
“It plays a tune that only you two really know,” Pressia says. “It’s yours now.”
Partridge takes it, rubs it with his thumb. The gritty soot smears. “Thanks.” He feels like he’s holding something essential, some part of his mother that he can keep forever.
“Are we ready?” Pressia says.
Everyone nods.
El Capitan puts the car in drive and guns it toward the house. The recruits don’t shoot. Instead, they run and bang on the door. El Capitan slams on the brakes a little late, ramming the porch steps. Struck by the grille, they buckle and splinter.
They all get out of the car. El Capitan has his rifle. Partridge and Lyda have knives and meat hooks. Bradwell holds a knife. Pressia holds the bottle of pills clenched in her hand, raised to her head, her knuckles pressed against her temple.
“Where’s Ingership?” El Capitan shouts.
The recruits exchange a nervous glance but don’t say anything. They’re thin and, even with their seared skin, they look freshly beaten. Bruises and welts run across their exposed arms and face.
Just then an upper window slides open, one on the opposite side of the house from the red-stained hand towel. Ingership leans out, his arms stiff and chin high. The metallic plates on his face shine. He smiles. “You’re here!” His voice is cheery, but he looks like he’s been in a fight. On the exposed skin of his left cheek, there’s a row of scratch marks. “Have any trouble finding the place?”
El Capitan cocks the rifle and fires. The shot sends a shock through Partridge’s body. He sees the explosion again in his mind’s eye—his brother, his mother, the air filled with a fine spray of their blood.
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