by Dan Wells
“Refugee area is downstairs,” said the first soldier. “Try not to eat much; we don’t have a lot left.”
“Don’t worry,” said Marcus, “I won’t be staying long. I don’t suppose I could talk to Senator Tovar?”
The soldiers looked at one another, then the first looked back at Marcus. “Mr. Mkele likes to debrief anyone new anyway. You can talk to him first.” They led Marcus down through the airport, leaving the surface almost immediately in favor of the vast subterranean tunnels crisscrossing the entire complex. Marcus was surprised to find an entire refugee camp in the basements; he was apparently not the first person to think of retreating here.
“Do the Partials not know you’re here?” asked Marcus. “They’d kill to get their hands on this place.”
“They’ve sent a couple of patrols,” said the soldier. “So far we’ve been able to make ourselves more trouble than we’re worth.”
“That’s not going to last long,” said Marcus.
“They’re getting attacked on the flanks by Delarosa,” he said, “and by another Partial faction. That’s keeping their main force too busy to bother with us.”
Marcus nodded. “That’s exactly why I’m here.”
The soldier led him to a small office and knocked on the door. Marcus recognized Mkele’s voice when he told them to come in. The soldier pushed the door open. “New refugee. He says he wants to talk to the Senate.”
Mkele looked up, and Marcus felt a twang of mischievous pride at the surprise in the security expert’s eyes. “Marcus Valencio?” Surprising a man who prided himself on knowing things was an impressive feat indeed.
The pride was followed almost instantly by a wave of despair. Seeing Mkele not in control was somehow the most disturbing sign of just how much things had fallen apart.
“Hi,” said Marcus, stepping in. “I’ve got a . . . request. A proposal, I suppose.”
Mkele glanced at the soldier, his eyes uncertain, then looked back at Marcus and gestured to a chair. “Have a seat.” The soldier left, closing the door, and Marcus took a deep breath to calm his nerves.
“We need to go to the mainland,” said Marcus.
Mkele’s eyes widened, and Marcus had the same feeling of uncomfortable triumph knowing that he’d surprised the man again. After a quick moment Mkele nodded, as if he understood. “You want to look for Kira Walker.”
“I wouldn’t mind finding her,” said Marcus, “but she’s not the goal. We need to send a group north to a city called White Plains, to talk to the Partials who are attacking Dr. Morgan.”
Mkele didn’t respond.
“I don’t know for sure which faction is there,” said Marcus, “but I know that they oppose Dr. Morgan’s. A group of them raided the hospital Kira was trapped in a few months back, which is how we were able to get her out while they killed each other. Now they’re attacking Morgan’s forces again—they followed them all the way across the sound, which is a good indication they’re trying to stop this invasion.”
“And you think that will make them our friends.”
“A equals B equals . . . look, Ariel had a much better idiom for it, I don’t remember. But yes, we have a common enemy, so we might be able to get some help.”
Mkele watched him a moment longer, then spoke slowly. “I admit that we have had similar thoughts, but we didn’t know how or where to contact them. Are you sure about White Plains?”
“Very sure,” said Marcus. “Samm told us all about it—they have a nuclear reactor that powers the whole region, so they stay there to maintain it. If we can make it up there, which is an admittedly difficult proposition, they might be willing to work with us to end the occupation and perhaps find some of the answers we’re looking for before it’s too late. It’s worth a shot.”
“Shots are exactly what you’ll end up with,” said Mkele. “This is a blind mission into hostile territory with no guarantee of safety. If you go, you’ll be killed.”
“That’s why I’m coming to you,” said Marcus. “I’m not Kira—I’m not ready to lead something like this, I just came up with the idea.”
“So that when someone inevitably dies, it will be me instead of you,” said Mkele.
“Ideally no one will die at all,” said Marcus, “but you can plan your missions how you like. I recommend you live at least long enough to succeed.”
Mkele tapped his fingers on the desk, a surprisingly mundane gesture that seemed to humanize the severe man in Marcus’s eyes. “A year ago I would have chastised you for recklessness,” said Mkele. “Today, as it happens, we’re willing to try almost anything. I had a unit of soldiers already preparing for a mission on the mainland, and now that you’ve given us a clear goal, we can pull the trigger. It also happens that we have need of a medic, and of someone with experience behind Partial lines.”
“And I suppose you’re looking for a man to volunteer.”
“This is the Defense Grid,” said Mkele. “We don’t wait for volunteers. You leave in the morning.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Kira and her companions were on their way to Denver.
They’d left the data center at first light, wrapping Afa’s injured leg as tightly as they could before helping him to slog through two miles of filthy floodwater. The rowboat was right where they’d left it, and they paddled back to their horses in silence, Samm rowing with long, powerful strokes while Heron and Kira watched the overhanging trees for signs of attack. A lone dog stood on a bridge to watch them float by, but it didn’t talk or even bark, and Kira couldn’t tell if it was a Watchdog or simply a feral animal.
The horses were unhurt but terrified, and it took Samm and Heron several minutes to calm them down enough to be saddled. Kira rewrapped Afa’s wound with dry bandages, and together they boosted him up onto Oddjob’s back, where he swayed and grimaced in pain at the change of pressure on his shredded thigh muscle. Kira bit her lip, angry that they had to take Afa even farther from home—not angry at him, or at anyone really, just angry. Angry that life is hard, she thought. Nandita raised me better than this. “If you have the strength to whine, you have the strength to do something about it.”
They were almost halfway from Long Island to Denver already, and it would be two full months out of their way to take Afa back home; two months they didn’t have. They couldn’t leave him, obviously, so they had to take him, hard journey or not. Besides, Kira thought, if there’s another computer system at the lab site in Denver, we’ll need Afa to access it. He’s the only one who can.
We just have to make sure he survives.
When they were all mounted and ready, Kira led them not to the freeway but to a large hospital on the other side. “St. Bernard’s,” she said, reading the weathered sign at the mouth of the parking lot.
“Should we look for antibiotics in the pharmacy?” asked Heron. “Or in barrels hanging from the collars of giant shaggy dogs?”
“As long as the dogs don’t talk,” said Kira, “I don’t much care.” The talking dogs still freaked her out, and she’d dreamed about them again last night—of herself living with them, wild and feral, unaccepted in both human and Partial society. She knew it was unfair of her to hate them. They couldn’t help being what they were any more than she could. She pushed the thought aside and entered the hospital, showing Samm how to sort the meds they needed while Heron watched Afa and the horses. They filled an entire satchel with antibiotics and painkillers, and mounted up to ride west.
Into the toxic wasteland.
The fastest way out of town was a railroad track, which cut across the river highway in a straight line south-southwest, high on an elevated beam that kept them well above the worst of the flooding. They followed it for miles, past rail yards and schoolyards and old, sagging houses, past flooded churches and fallen buildings and across an overflowing river. The train tracks were straight and the way was mostly dry, but it was rocky and slow going for the horses, and they hadn’t even made it to the freeway when it grew too da
rk to travel. They took shelter in a crumbling public library, letting the horses graze on the tall, marshy grasses outside before leading them carefully up the access ramp to the dry floor inside. Kira checked Afa’s bandages, shot him full of painkillers, and cleaned his wound while he slept. Heron caught frogs and lizards in the bog outside and roasted them on a fire made of old chairs and magazines. The books in the library were old, rotted, and there was no one left in the world to read them, but Kira made sure that none of them went into the fire. It seemed wrong.
In the morning they found that they were just a short walk to Interstate 80, the same massive road they’d been following since Manhattan, but nearly a hundred miles farther west than where they’d left it at the eastern edge of Chicago. They got back on it, finding it higher and dryer than the railroad and much easier for the horses to walk on. The followed it all day, the city sprawling out endlessly on every side: building after building, street after street, ruin after ruin. Subcities came and went—Mokena, New Lenox, Joliet, Rockdale—their meaningless borders blurred together into a single, unbroken metropolis. When night fell again they reached the edge of Minooka, and the road curved south around it, and Kira looked out for the first time on open grassland stretching far into the west. The horizon was flat and formless, an ocean of dirt and grass and marshland. They slept in a giant warehouse, in what Kira assumed was an old break room for cross-country truckers, and listened as a rainstorm drummed furiously on the broad metal roof. Afa’s wound was no better than the previous night, but at least it was no worse. Kira curled up on her bedroll and read by the light of the moon, a thriller novel she’d picked up in the library. Sure this guy’s being chased by demons, she thought, but at least he has a warm shower in the morning.
She fell asleep with her nose in the book, and woke up wrapped snugly in a blanket. Samm was staring out the window as the sun rose over the cityscape, and glanced at her a moment before turning back to watch the sky grow light.
Kira sat up, stretching her back and shoulders and popping a stiff joint in her neck. “Good morning,” she said. “Thanks for the blanket.”
“Good morning,” said Samm. His eyes were locked on the window. “You’re welcome.”
Kira stood, pausing to hang her blanket on a row of nearby chairs before squatting down to open her pack. Heron and Afa were asleep, so she kept her voice down. “What sounds good for breakfast this morning? I have beef jerky, an indistinguishably different flavor of beef jerky, and . . . peanuts. All pre-Break, picked up at that place we stopped in Pennsylvania.” She looked again in her bag. “We’re running low on food.”
“We should forage through the city before setting out,” said Samm. “We’re not far from the toxic waste, and I don’t know if we can trust anything we find there.”
“We passed a grocery store last night,” said Kira, grabbing all three of her food selections and placing them on the table next to Samm. She sat on the far side and opened the peanuts. “We can head back there before we move on, but for now, dig in.”
Samm looked down at the food, selected a bag of jerky at random, and tore it open. He sniffed it carefully before pulling out a piece of black, twisted meat as solid as rawhide. “What do you have to do to meat to make it stay good for twelve years?”
“Define ‘good,’” said Kira. “You’ll be sucking on that thing all day before it’s soft enough to eat.”
He tore off a strip, long and whip-thin and almost hilariously fibrous. “We’ll have to boil it,” he said, dropping the strips back into the bag. “Still, though—edible food that’s almost as old as we are. That cow might actually have been as old as we are, and he died before that tree was even born.” He pointed at a twenty-foot poplar sprouting up through the cracks in the buckled asphalt parking lot. “And yet we can eat it. We don’t have anything in the world today that can preserve food like that. We might never have it again.”
“I don’t know if we want to,” said Kira. “Give me some fresh Riverhead jerky any day.”
“It’s just . . .” Samm paused. “One thing after another. Cars that won’t run. Planes that will never fly again. Computer systems we can barely use, let alone re-create. It’s like . . . time is flowing backward. We’re caveman archeologists in the ruins of the future.”
Kira said nothing, chewing on the soft peanuts as the sun peeked over the mountainous city beyond. She swallowed and spoke. “I’m sorry, Samm.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Not the caveman thing,” she said, “or the jerky or . . . I’m sorry for getting mad at you. I’m sorry for saying things that made you mad at me.”
He watched the sun, saying nothing, and Kira tried and failed to read him on the link. “I’m sorry too,” he said. “I don’t know how to fix it.”
“We’re in a war,” said Kira. “We’re not even in a war we can win—humans and Partials are killing each other, and themselves, and everything they can get their sights on, because it’s the only way they know to solve problems. ‘If we don’t fight, we’ll die.’ What we need to face is that we’ll still die even if we do fight, and we don’t want to face that because it’s too frightening. It’s easier to fall back into the same old patterns of hate and retribution, because at least then we’re doing something.”
“I don’t hate you,” said Samm, “but I used to. When you first captured me, when I first woke up and saw you and realized that everyone in my unit was dead. You were there, so I hated you more than I even knew I could. I’m sorry for that, too.”
“It’s okay,” said Kira. “I’m not exactly innocent either.” She smiled. “All we need to do now is send each human and each Partial on a deadly cross-country trip together, so they can learn to trust and understand each other.”
“I’m glad there’s such a simple solution,” said Samm. He didn’t smile, but Kira thought she felt a whiff of one on the link. She ate another handful of peanuts.
“That’s what you really want, isn’t it?” Samm asked.
Kira looked at him, curious.
“A united world,” he said, still looking out the window. “A world where Partials and humans live together in peace.” He glanced at her from the side of his eye.
Kira nodded, chewing her peanuts thoughtfully before swallowing. It was exactly what she wanted—what she’d wanted ever since . . . Ever since she’d learned what she truly was. A Partial raised as a human, connected to both groups without really being a part of either one. “Sometimes I think—” and then stopped. Sometimes I think it’s the only way I’ll ever be accepted. I don’t belong to either group, not anymore, but if both groups joined, I wouldn’t be the weirdo anymore. I’d just be one of the crowd. She sighed, too self-conscious to say it out loud. “Sometimes I think it’s the only way to save everyone,” she said softly. “To bring them all together.”
“That’s going to be a lot harder than just curing our diseases,” said Samm.
“I know,” she said. “We’ll find the ParaGen labs, we’ll find their plans and formulas, we’ll cure RM and the expiration date and everything else, and then it still won’t matter because our people are never going to trust each other.”
“Someday they’ll have to,” said Samm. “When it comes down to trust or extinction, to trust or oblivion, they’ll see that they’ll have to and they’ll do it.”
“That’s one of the things I like about you, Samm,” said Kira. “You’re a hopeless optimist.”
For the first few days the road was straight and flat, almost disturbingly so. Farms crept by on either side, reclaimed by grassland and herds of wild horses and cattle, but each new sight seemed the same as the last, a single farm repeated ad infinitum, until Kira began to feel that they were making no progress at all. Occasionally the Illinois River on the south swerved close enough to be seen from the road, and Kira began to track their progress this way. They traveled slowly, keeping the horses fed and watered and Afa well supplied with medicines. His wound was healing poorly, and Kira did wha
t she could to keep his spirits up.
Three days outside of Chicago they came to an island city at the conflux of two rivers; they crossed the Rock River into a town called Moline, finding it swampy but navigable, but the river on the other side stopped her cold. It was the Mississippi, and the bridges were gone.
“Not good,” said Kira, surveying the wide river. She’d heard of the Mississippi, more than a mile wide in parts. Here it was narrower, though its widest gaps looked to be at least half a mile if not more. Much too far for the horses to swim, especially with Afa. “You think this was the war, or just wear and tear since then?”
“Hard to say,” said Samm.
Heron snorted. “Does it matter?”
Kira watched the water roll by and sighed. “I suppose not. What do we do?”
“We’re not getting Afa across without a bridge,” said Samm, “plus we’d soak the radio, and I don’t trust its claim of ‘water resistance.’ I say we follow the riverbank until we find a bridge intact.”
“North or south?” asked Heron. “This time the question actually does matter.”
“According to our map we’re still slightly north of Denver,” said Kira. “We’ll go south.” They turned their horses around, Kira whispering encouragements to Bobo and patting him softly on the neck. The riverbank itself was impassable, not just along the shoreline but several yards back from it, nearly a full quarter mile in some places. The ground was either too steep or too swampy or too dense with trees, and more often than not all three. They followed a narrow highway as far as they could, though more than once they found that it had wandered too close to the river and sloughed off, washing away into the relentless flood of water. When that road turned away they moved to a different one, though the story was similar there and occasionally worse. The first bridge they found looked across to the biggest city since Chicago, but this bridge was destroyed, just like the last one. The second day they found themselves trapped where the road had been completely washed away, surrounded on one side by the river and the other by a lake, and were forced to backtrack several miles. Here the wetlands stretched well over a mile from bank to bank, probably more than two, though Kira couldn’t help but wonder how much of her estimate was accurate and how much was helpless frustration. It was beautiful, alive with birds and flowers and fireflies turning lazy circles over the marsh, but it was also insurmountable. They found a new road, prayed that it would take them to a bridge, and followed it south.