by Dan Wells
“Take your pick.”
Kira struggled to her feet, panting with the exertion. “You’re wrong. We came here with a job to do. If we don’t do it, Afa will have died for nothing. All of us will have. And we’ll take the whole planet with us.”
“Come on,” said Samm, but the girls ignored him. Heron reached Kira’s side before Kira even realized she was moving, and her fist slammed into Kira’s chin like a sledgehammer. Kira staggered back, already bracing herself to pounce back and attack before her mind had fully processed the punch, but before they could go any further Samm shoved himself between them. “Stop it.”
“She’s out of her mind,” said Heron. “We had a chance if we’d gone back east after Chicago—we could have gone to Dr. Morgan, we could have even gone to Trimble. Anything would have given us a better chance than this. What’re you looking for, Kira?” she asked, looking at Kira over Samm’s shoulder. “What is this about? Is this even about saving our race? Or the humans? Or is this whole insane expedition all just so you can figure out what the hell you are? You selfish little bitch.”
Kira was speechless. She wanted nothing more than to bash Heron’s head against the ground, but Samm kept himself solidly between them. He faced Heron solemnly, keeping Kira back with his arm.
“Why’d you come with us?” asked Samm.
“You said you trusted her!” Heron snarled. “You told me to come, so I came.”
“You haven’t done what you’re told since the day I met you,” said Samm. “You do what you want, when you want, and if anyone gets in the way, you take them out. You could have stopped us at any time. You could have incapacitated me and kidnapped Kira and brought her to Morgan and done everything exactly the way you wanted, but you didn’t. Tell me why.”
Heron looked at him fiercely, then scowled at Kira. “Because I actually believed her. She talked about researching everything ParaGen had done to find some sort of cure, and for some stupid reason I thought she meant it.”
“I did,” said Kira, thought the fight had gone out of her voice. She felt drained and empty, as hollow as the fiberglass shed they were hiding in.
“And you,” Heron spat, looking at Samm. “I can’t believe you’re still siding with her. I thought you were smarter than this—I thought I could trust you. That’s what I get for believing in something, I guess.”
Heron’s words were clearly meant to cut Samm deeply, and it broke Kira’s heart to hear them, knowing how they must make him feel. But if they did affect him, he didn’t show it. Instead, he held up a hand to silence Heron and turned to Kira, his eyes dark with fatigue. “You say you did mean it. Do you still?”
Kira was reeling from Heron’s accusations, and felt even more empty as she searched for an answer. Was she really doing this—putting them through all this hell, starving her friends and torturing the horses and killing Afa—just for her own selfish reasons? She didn’t know what to say, and they stood in tense silence for what felt like an eternity.
“Intentions are all I have left,” she said at last. “We’re going to go there, and whatever we find, it’ll be more than we have now. At least there’s a chance. At least . . .” She trailed off. She had run out of words.
“You’re out of your mind,” Heron said again, but stopped when Kira turned away and sat, collapsing in a heap as her legs buckled. She lay down on the floor of the shed and wished she could cry.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Haru Sato slunk through the warren of tunnels under JFK, keeping far from the other soldiers when he could, and nodding to them passively when the tight hallways made it impossible to keep his distance. He kept his weather-beaten hat pulled low over his face, avoiding eye contact, hoping no one would talk to him or ask where he was going. If they found out he’d fled his unit, he’d be arrested—or worse. It was not a good time to be a traitor.
Mr. Mkele’s office was in the middle of a long hall, what looked like it used to be a shipping office, now converted to the last, dying nerve center of human civilization. Morgan’s forces had taken East Meadow, had rounded up every other human they could find on the island; in a matter of days, they would come for this hideout and the human world would end. Their time as the dominant species was over. And what pitiful resistance they could mount was managed out of this failing office.
Well, thought Haru, this office and Delarosa’s roving base camp. And Delarosa’s more dangerous than we ever knew.
A single soldier stood guard in front of the closed office door, his uniform wrinkled and dirty. There was no time for pleasantries anymore. Haru glanced up and down the hall, seeing it relatively empty; most of the remaining Grid soldiers were upstairs on defense, or out in the wilderness attacking Morgan’s flanks. For the moment, Haru and the guard were alone. Haru glanced around again, set his resolve, and walked toward him.
“Mr. Mkele is busy at the moment,” said the guard.
“Let me ask you a question,” said Haru, stepping in close. At the last minute he turned to the right and lifted his arm, like he was pointing at something, and as the guard turned his head to follow, Haru slammed his knee into the man’s gut, bringing his left arm behind to catch the rifle slung over the man’s shoulder. The guard reached for it, still doubled over and too shocked to breath, but Haru maneuvered him swiftly into place for another knee, in the face this time, and the man collapsed. Haru opened the door, shoved the unconscious man through it, and stepped in after him. Mkele leapt to his feet, but Haru had already locked the door tightly.
“Don’t call out,” he said. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
“Just my guards.”
“I went AWOL last night,” said Haru. “I couldn’t risk him raising an alarm.” He laid the man gently in the corner. “Just give me five minutes.”
Mkele’s office was full of papers—not cluttered, as if he simply failed to throw anything away, but full, and from the looks of it very efficiently organized. This was a man who used his office not for show or for storage, but for long hours of work and study. Mkele was sitting behind his desk with a map of Long Island spread out before him, marked here and there with the sites of Partial attacks, Grid counterattacks, and—Haru couldn’t help but notice—some of Haru’s own allegedly secret activities with Delarosa and her warriors. I guess I’m not as good at keeping secrets as I thought. Maybe he already knows.
No, thought Haru. If he knew what Delarosa was planning, he wouldn’t be nearly this calm.
“You’re turning yourself in,” said Mkele.
“If you want to look at it that way,” said Haru. “I’m delivering intel, and if some of that intel reflects poorly on me, I’m prepared to face the consequences.”
“It must be very important intel.”
“What did you do before?” Haru asked. “Before the Break?”
Mkele stared at him a moment, as if deciding how to answer, then gestured at the map before him. “This.”
“Intelligence?”
“Mapmaking,” said Mkele. He smiled faintly. “In the wake of apocalypse, we must find new areas of endeavor.”
Haru nodded. “Were you familiar with the Last Fleet? I don’t know its real name, I was seven when it happened. The fleet that sailed into New York Harbor and got bombed to hell and back by the Partial air force. They call it the Last Fleet because it was our last chance to defend ourselves against the Partials, and when it was gone, the war was over.”
“I know it,” said Mkele. His face was calm—intent without appearing nervous. Haru pressed forward.
“Do you know why the Partials destroyed it?”
“We were at war.”
“That’s why they attacked it,” said Haru. “Do you know why they attacked it with such overwhelming force that they sank every ship in the fleet and killed every sailor onboard? They’d never done that with any other attack or counterattack in the war. I’ve heard the stories a thousand times from the older guys in the Defense Grid—how the Partials who had typically been much more in
terested in pacification and occupation, suddenly decided to obliterate an entire fleet. They say it was a message, the Partials’ way of saying, ‘Stop fighting now or we’ll make you regret it.’ That always seemed pretty reasonable to me, so I didn’t question it. Yesterday I learned the truth.”
“From who?”
“From Marisol Delarosa,” said Haru. “She’d started requesting strange equipment, stuff that didn’t fit any of her known methods, so I followed her.”
“What kind of equipment?”
“Scuba gear,” said Haru. “Acetylene torches. Stuff that didn’t make sense from one drop to the next, but they all started adding up to the same thing.”
“Underwater salvage,” said Mkele, nodding. “I assume this means she’s been exploring the Last Fleet?”
“The Last Fleet wasn’t destroyed as a message,” said Haru. “It was carrying a nuclear missile.”
Mkele’s face tensed immediately, and Haru continued. “It was the US government’s ‘final solution,�� to land a nuke on the Partial headquarters in White Plains and knock out the majority of their military operation in one move, even at the expense of one of the most densely populated areas in the entire country. They needed to sail in close to bypass the Partials’ missile defense systems; it was a suicide mission even before the Partials figured out what they were doing. Some old man in Delarosa’s team was a navy chaplain before the Break, and he started talking about the same final solution. That’s what gave her the idea. He knew all kinds of things once she started asking the right questions. The missile was on an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer called The Sullivan.” He leaned forward. “I tried to warn you by radio, but my unit sided with her. I can’t stop her alone, so I came as fast as I could. If nothing goes wrong with their operation, they’ll have the warhead in hand by tonight.”
Mkele whispered, “God have mercy.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
They saw the mountains first—massive peaks that rose up from the plains of the Midwest like the wall at the edge of the world. The tops were white with snow, even in the summer. They reached the outskirts of the city soon after, a suburb called Bennett, washed pale by the acidic rainfall, the streets stained a sulfurous yellow and the brown plants dry and brittle. The dead plains lapped at the edge of the city like an ocean of poison grass, and no birds perched on the eaves or the power lines. The cities Kira had grown up with, even the massive ones like Chicago and New York, had stood like monuments in an overgrown cemetery, marking the site of death but covered with vines and moss and the signs of new life. Denver, in contrast, was a mausoleum, lifeless and bare.
The travelers had distributed their gear between the horses, Kira leading Bobo while Samm led Oddjob; the mare seemed morose without Afa strapped onto her back, and Kira wondered if even the animals’ diet of canned vegetables and instant oatmeal—the only clean food they could find in the toxic wasteland—was starting to take its toll. If they’d lost Afa back in Chicago, or sent him back on his own, they could have loosed the horses and spared them the horrors of the journey completely, but to loose them in the middle of the poison plains would have been the height of cruelty, and Kira wouldn’t hear of it. They had lost Afa, but she would save his horse if it meant her own life.
Except I know that isn’t true, she thought. If it really comes down to it, I’ll save myself. It made her feel guilty and nauseous to think of it, and she did her best to think of something else.
The city they passed through was, if anything, bigger than Chicago. The suburb of Bennett stretched west into the suburb of Nieveen, then Lawrence, then Watkins and Watkins Farm, and on and on in an endless sea of housing developments and shopping malls and parking lots. Lonely wind rustled through the piles of brittle leaves and broken glass that clustered in the gutters and collected against the walls of crumbling buildings. Heron ranged far ahead, scouting their path more out of habit than necessity, doubling back at regular intervals to report that they were coming up on first one airport, then another, then a golf course. There was nothing meaningful to report; nothing to see but the bleached bones and rusted metal frames of the millions of people and buildings destroyed in the Break. Samm found another road map in a broken-down gas station, folding it out on the hood of an empty car. The roads coiled together on the page like a cluster of nerves.
“According to Afa’s records,” said Kira, “the ParaGen complex was here, tucked up against the mountains.” She pointed to the western edge of the city, in an area called Arvada. She read the name off the map. “Rocky Flats Memorial Preserve. Why would they build an industrial facility on a preserve?”
Samm pinpointed their current location and measured out the distance. “That’s forty miles away. How big is this city?”
“Forty miles across,” said Heron. “We’re walking from one end to the other. It’s at least twice that north to south, so be grateful we came the way we did.”
Kira looked at the sky, estimating the position of the sun. “It’s already . . . three in the afternoon? Three thirty? We’re not making it forty miles by nightfall.”
“Not even tomorrow by nightfall if the horses don’t perk up,” said Heron. “I tell you, we need to just leave them and move on.”
“We’re not leaving them,” said Kira.
“Guilt won’t bring Afa back,” said Heron.
“And callousness won’t make the distance any shorter,” said Samm, folding the map. “Let’s keep walking.”
Kira had held a vain hope that the toxic wasteland would be better here, shielded in some way by the mountains or the skyscrapers or some foible in the weather patterns, but the city proved to be somehow more dangerous than the land they had already crossed. Acid runoff collected in potholes and dips in the road, forming caustic lakes where drainage grates were too clogged with garbage to let the slurry escape. Truck beds open to the weather had formed miniature salt pans, evaporating the poison particles out of the rainfall in an ongoing cycle until they were filled with crystalline masses that kicked up in the wind and burned the travelers’ eyes and throats; they wrapped their faces with spare clothing and peered cautiously through their eye slits, always on the watch for danger. Some of the chemicals that saturated the city were flammable, and fires smoldered here and there as they passed, sometimes reigniting in the heat, all the time feeding the poisons in the air with a never-ending stream of smoke and ash.
They stopped for the night in what looked like it used to be a luxury hotel; the rich green carpet in the lobby was bleached at the edges and covered with windblown dust. They led the horses through a wide double door and made camp in a former five-star restaurant, sealing the way behind them to keep out as much of the toxic wind as possible. Samm built the horses a corral from old hardwood tables, and they fed them from a massive store of canned apple pie filling they found in the kitchen. Kira ate canned tuna mixed with canned beef bouillon to hide the flavor; if she never saw another can of tuna again in her life, she’d count herself lucky. They didn’t bother setting watch, collapsing on the deep pile carpet without even untying their bedrolls.
Kira rose the next morning to find Heron already gone, presumably scouting ahead, if she hadn’t already abandoned them completely. They hadn’t talked much after the fight, and while Heron seemed resigned to go with them to Denver in the end, she had not been her usual self since.
Samm was searching boxes stacked along the wall next to the kitchen for anything they could take with them. “Most of the cans have gone bad,” he said, tossing Kira a bloated metal can of tomato paste. “Hotels are always crappy anyway—they use too much fresh food, and most of the canned stuff is bulk.”
Kira nodded to the five-gallon can of tomato sauce on the table beside him. “You don’t want to haul that thirty miles today?”
“Believe it or not,” he said. He paused in his work, turning to face her. “I’m sorry about Afa.”
“So am I.”
“What I mean to say,” said Samm, “is that I’m
sorry I was so . . . pretentious. In the beginning.”
“You were never pretentious.”
“Arrogant, then,” said Samm. “Partial society is so regimented, we always know who we report to and who reports to us—who we’re above and who we’re below. I didn’t treat him like an equal because . . . I guess I’m just not accustomed to the concept.”
Kira laughed hollowly, collapsing in a nearby chair. “Okay, that actually does sound kind of pretentious.”
“You’re making it very hard for me to apologize.”
“I know,” said Kira, looking down at the floor. “I know, and I’m sorry, and I didn’t mean to. You’ve been more than helpful, and Afa wasn’t exactly the easiest person to take seriously.”
“What’s done is done,” said Samm, and continued to work on the food supplies. Kira watched him, not because it was interesting but because it cost too much effort to look away.
“You think we’ll find what we’re looking for?” she asked.
Samm continued to search for usable cans of food. “Don’t tell me you’re starting to pay attention to Heron.”
“I used to think there must have been a plan,” said Kira. “That even though I didn’t know how RM and expiration and whatever I am all fit together, they still did, somehow. But if there was any plan, I can’t help but think it went wrong a long time before now..”
“Don’t say that,” said Samm, setting down the cans and walking over to where she was still sitting. “We won’t know until we get to ParaGen. No point in doubting yourself now. For the record, I never have.”
Kira smiled, in spite of everything. She had begun to wonder if Heron was right, if this was more about her own frustration about her entire existence being an accident or an evil plot or an outright lie than it was about saving the races. And yet, Samm didn’t. She found herself again at a loss for words. He reached a hand toward her cheek.