“Unexpected,” Kaja said.
“Come again?”
“I’m surprised. I wouldn’t have thought you’d care.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “It seems disrespectful not to, that’s all. You know I burnt Aunt P. Can’t hurt to hedge your bets, in case the faithful are right about this one thing.”
Kaja watched solemnly as I lit a match and tossed it on the corpses. She looked away when the fire caught in earnest, and said, “What you do, Nika? It’s not bravery. It’s butchery.”
If she expected that would hurt my feelings, she expected wrong. “The world needs people to be butchers, too,” I said. “Elsewise we’d all be eating beans for Sunday dinner. If the faithful weren’t handled, you better believe they’d be at our doors, raring to kill us.”
Any kind of bravado I’d put on with my words was undercut by the fact that just then, a horrible nausea seized me. I bent down and retched. It was the baby doing it to me, but Kaja didn’t know that. She looked confused as she strode over to me to pat me on the back.
After a moment, with her hand still rubbing circles between my shoulder blades, she said, “Guess the sight of them bodies got to you, after all.”
“Guess so,” I said.
We picked our way through Rubber. I counted familiar landmarks as we went: the ruins of a stone church; a busted van with Denny’s Discount Moving in yellow letters on the side, tangles of weeds growing from its open windows; a coffee shop with shattered windows and a sign out front saying cupcakes were on sale for a dollar each.
It was shaping up to be another hot day. I shucked off my jacket, leaving a T-shirt that I’d torn the sleeves off of. Kaja stared at me. My left arm had a gash from when a faithful had slashed me with a knife, my right arm had a healed-up bullet wound, and of course, there was my ear. It was this that Kaja pointed at. “How did that ever happen?”
“I never told you? It was a day or so outside Georgian City. I found a nice place to sleep, a turned-over train car. A pack of faithful jumped me. One of them got my earlobe right in his teeth.”
“Goddamn.”
“Exactly. The asshole swallowed it, too. Hope it tasted like shit on the way down. Anyway, I got away.”
“You know,” Kaja said, “those two back there? They’re the first faithful I ever saw.”
Now that was something. Faithful were a big part of me. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that my sister could live her life not ever seeing them. “Obvious ones, they was. They twitched more than they walked. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Some of them look near normal. You have to stalk them for a bit before you strike.”
Faithful lived aboveground, and they didn’t get the treatments people who lived in a proper settlement got. Being exposed to and unprotected from all the biochem shit still left in the atmosphere made them—sick, although that’s a word that hardly explains it. Not right in the head. Batshit crazy, if you want to be technical about it.
Kaja knew the science of it better than I did. But I’d paid some attention in school, particularly in history, where things sometimes got interestingly gory. New Creemore’s school had a library of old newspapers, yellow and crumbly and covered in plastic so they wouldn’t be smudged, the front pages loud with images almost boring in their sameness: bodies, covered and uncovered, in shopping malls, in football stadiums, in bus stations, in houses of Parliament. Once we’d watched a video: people spitting, screaming, convulsing in the seconds before their deaths. I don’t remember who started the fighting but soon enough every nation on Earth had a biochem agent stockpile.
The first faithful were people who didn’t die in biochem attacks. I reckon that when you survive something like that, you’re so shook up that you look for the why of it. So survivors banded together, and along the line they decided that they were special, they were holy, they were chosen. Their prophets—parsons—preached that everyone else, everyone who’d had the gall to protect themselves by hiding in a settlement, had to go.
That was in Nana’s time, but hatred’s something what gets passed on through generations like it’s genetic, like it’s brown eyes or black hair or the ability to curl your tongue.
“I do feel a little sorry for them,” Kaja said. “It’s not their fault.”
“It ain’t the fault of dogs when they get rabies, but when they do, you don’t pet them.”
“The faithful aren’t dogs.”
“No, but they’re not us, neither.” Kaja still looked troubled, so I added, softly, “It’s best not to consider the faithful, once they’re gone.”
She favored me with a small smile and nodded, and we moved on.
WHEN WE STOPPED TO EAT—soy bars and handfuls of blackberries from New Creemore’s underground greenhouse—I had to force myself to. The baby had made food seem urgently necessary and unappealing all at once. Kaja seemed surprised, since I’ve always had a healthy appetite, but she didn’t comment.
Nor did she comment when I said no to her offer of a swig of whiskey from a flask she’d brought with her. Or when we stopped to sleep in an abandoned motel on the edge of a crumbling road, and I spent the night up and wandering. Or when, in the morning, I promptly threw up the dregs of dinner. But her eyes remained on me, always assessing.
The harsh shape of Feversham appeared, far on the horizon and shimmering in the heat. It always was strange-looking. It wasn’t a real settlement, just a facility. Its sparse buildings were high enough to peek out from above its battlements, so from afar it looked like great sentinels were rising from its walls. “That’s it, then?” Kaja asked. “Alvaro says I could work there, if I wanted. Do something better with your brain, he says.”
“Why don’t you?”
She shrugged. “Could be I will. Once I’ve got a look at it.”
I couldn’t picture her packing up and leaving New Creemore, but I didn’t say that. As we approached, I began to hear a thrum of noise, like there were hundreds of people shouting at once. I’d never heard such a thing from Feversham, populated as it was with untalkative scientists.
Then, when Kaja and I came to where the north road split and led to Feversham’s gates, we were met with four bodies hanging from a tree.
Two men, two women. I recognized them all. Rangers from Feversham. One of the women I’d once got a bottle of homemade gin from; I’d happened on her injured and helped her home, and she’d paid me with the fruits of her still. Beneath them, there was a wooden sign on which a single word—MURDERERS—was painted.
“Fucking hell,” I said. I got out one of my knives to cut them down, but Kaja grabbed my arm.
“Don’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
“This is a warning. We’re at a crossroads. There are going to be travelers. Whoever’s done this has to know it’ll be seen. It’ll do us no good to give them the message that we’ve been here.”
She sounded shaken, but she was right. “Fair enough,” I said. “It’s a shame to just leave them here to rot in the sun. They were good rangers.”
“And they died like they lived. That one has a relatively new wound on her face, and that one’s arm’s broken. They went down fighting. I reckon, Nika, there’s no better death for rangers. You might even think of this—” Kaja motioned at the corpses, at the sign, “as the proper sort of grave for them.”
Kaja’s words did make me feel better about leaving, but still their bodies, bloated by the heat, surrounding by buzzing flies, made me uneasy. I looked at them again, let out a couple curses beneath my breath, then said, “We ought to get away from the road.”
We continued to Feversham obscured by a low hill, close enough to the road for me to check things out every few minutes. With my battered binoculars, I spied more trees, more bodies hanging from them. I couldn’t see the fine details of them, but I could tell not all of them were rangers. Some had on scrubs or long white jackets.
“What are you looking at?” Kaja asked.
“Nothing.”
But she plucked th
e binoculars from my hands and peered through them herself. When she trained them on a cluster of dangling corpses, she sucked in a breath. “Nika, is something like this—well, out of the ordinary, out here in the wild?”
“Very,” I said. Truly, I’d never seen anything like it. Faithful were never so organized. The most I’d ever seen together were the ones who banded into loose gangs, but even the largest gang hadn’t ever killed so many, and never in so showy a way. A sick feeling, one that had nothing to do with the baby, had begun to knot itself up in my belly. “Listen, Kaja, you can hide around here if you like. I’ll go check on Feversham and come back for you.”
“That’s what you believe I’d do, isn’t it?” she asked, her lower lip curling. “Cower here? We have to report on what’s happened to Feversham Station. We’re not there yet. Someone’s killing Feversham’s people. We have to find out more.”
“All right,” I said. “We’re not far.”
I led Kaja higher, approaching Feversham downhill from the back. The sounds from it grew louder. And raucous. Cheering, I realized. Feversham’s battlements were well in sight; no rangers patrolled them.
We got closer and closer until we hit Feversham’s back fortification. Something was clearly happening out front; the noise of it was painful in my bad ear. Leaning, I turned around to survey the scene behind us. Nothing but sun, sky, dirt. “Nice day,” I murmured.
“Now what?” Kaja whispered.
I nodded to the left. “That way. We’ll have to sneak around.”
I went first. We moved slowly, our backs pressed against the wall. We rounded one corner, then another, enough to give a partial view of what was going on.
A huge crowd was clustered around a haphazard platform set up in front of Feversham’s gates. Two men stood atop it: one grizzled, wearing a patched brown cloak around a faded jean-jacket; the other a younger man, clean-cut, obviously from Feversham, with his arms bound behind his back.
There were people behind the platform, lined up two by two. Half of them had their heads covered with burlap sacks, the other half—faithful—holding them at gunpoint. In front of the platform was a neat pile of bodies, stacked like bricks.
“Norman Johansson, botanist,” the cloaked man announced. Then, without another word, he drew out a knife and cut the younger man’s throat. As the man’s blood spewed and his legs crumpled, the crowd howled, I felt a dreadful rage rise up in me, and Kaja threw up on the ground.
I caught a glimpse of the cloaked man hurling Norman Johansson into the pile before I turned to attend to Kaja. “Hey, hey, easy,” I said.
“We’ve got to go home now,” she whispered. “Holy shit, Nika. That man’s a parson. He has to be. The faithful might’ve taken over Feversham entire.”
“I know.”
I guided Kaja back around a corner. I couldn’t put what I’d seen out of my head, in particular the people who’d been waiting, up next after poor Norman Johansson. I glanced back, and though I didn’t realize it, my hands fell upon my pistols.
Kaja saw. “There’s nothing you can do, Nika,” she said. “Not unless you’re keen to die. We need help from home and Georgian City and everywhere else it can come from.”
“I know,” I said, but still I didn’t move.
“Nika.”
It hurt to turn around, but I did it. But not a minute later, I rounded a corner, Kaja behind me, and collided with a small knot of faithful.
Quickly, in the second of confusion that afforded me an advantage, I counted. Four of them. One of them—an older woman—screamed and came at me. I lunged at her, connecting my elbow hard against her ribs, and heard a satisfying crack.
Then they rushed me. I managed to draw my left pistol and fire; I hit one in the chest, another in the groin. That one grabbed me around the middle, and I caught him in a hold around the neck, slamming my fingers hard into his windpipe. I growled as he gasped, and when his hands on me grew slack I threw him to the ground.
Another pulled at my arm, hauling me backward. I clawed at her, but managed only to scrape her face. She and I toppled to the ground, and my chin hit the earth so violently I knew it had split. The faithful rolled atop me, pinning me with strong legs. I twisted my head around; she had a hammer raised. I struggled, but before she could hit me, she let out a grunt of pain and rolled to the side.
I sprang up to see Kaja hitting her with her huge backpack, swinging it by one strap. She clenched her teeth and hit the faithful again. In the sunlight, for a swift second, she looked ferocious, but then she dropped the backpack and staggered, her mouth open with horror.
I saw to the faithful—only one was actually dead; as fast as I could, I shot the other three—while Kaja pried my rifle from me.
I rounded on her. “The hell are you doing?”
“Drop your pistols.”
“What?”
“Now,” she said. Her hands were trembling; the barrel of the rifle shook. “There’s no way we weren’t heard. I—I think I can help. Otherwise they’ll kill us the second they catch up to us. Please.”
I’d never seen her look so grave. I opened my hands and let my pistols fall to the ground. Kaja edged the rifle against my stomach. I lifted my arms in surrender, and, absurdly, though I knew Kaja didn’t intend to hurt me, I felt a brief surge of panic for the baby. Then a swarm of faithful rounded the corner. In the moment before they were on us, I whispered, “Hold it straighter, Kaja.”
The parson who’d been on the platform was in the lead. Up close, he had a white, windburnt face. His eyes were pale blue. His forearms were spattered with blood. Most of his teeth were gone, and the ones that remained were brown. “What’s the meaning of this?” he demanded.
Kaja hitched her chin up. “I found her in the midst of this,” she said, nodding at the dead faithful at her feet. “I couldn’t stop her in her madness, damned ranger what she is. But I surprised her. She’s our prisoner now.”
“Our prisoner,” the parson repeated. “But we haven’t met, little sister.”
“Nay,” Kaja said. Her voice sounded altogether different: confident, colored with a gentle twang. And somehow she was managing to make her eye twitch. “I like to keep to my own self. Simpler that way. But I’ve heard tell of what you’ve planned here at Feversham, and it’s like nothing else I’ve ever heard of chosen doing. I had to see it.”
Chosen. That’s how faithful referred to themselves. I was grateful that Kaja had spent so much of her life reading. I would never have remembered that.
“And who was it told you?” the parson asked, looking amused.
I saw a flicker of nervousness in Kaja’s eyes, but it appeared only I noticed. “I didn’t get his name,” Kaja said. “Old man. Blue and orange scarf. Had the plans for this place on him. This ranger here shot him. Been hunting her ever since.”
There were whispers. “Charlie,” a man behind the parson muttered.
The parson regarded Kaja for a long moment, then grinned. He seemed quite with it for a faithful; nonetheless, a stream of spittle escaped the corner of his mouth. “Seems we’re in your debt, little sister. I’m Parson Prince.”
“Kaja.”
“As for the prisoner here, there’s a place set up for her right around the corner. Nothing gets the troops riled up like a dead ranger.” He prodded my arm. “I got a beauty of a knife for you, darling.”
“No!” Kaja said.
“No?”
“I—I mean—” Kaja stammered. “She ain’t just a regular ranger. This is Nika Zawisza. She’s the best ranger what New Creemore has. She’s killed hundreds. Don’t you think, ah, there ought to be a bit more spectacle here?”
“New Creemore, is it? We’ll be there soon enough.” Prince’s smile widened. “Right you are, Sister Kaja. There’s a better use for her. In fact, I believe I recognize the bitch.” He reached out and turned my cheek with a blood-stained knuckle. When he saw my ear, he made a tsk. “Thought so.”
We’ll be there soon enough? I didn’t like th
e sound of that. “I thought your face looked familiar, too,” I said. “But it’s just that I’ve seen the ass-end of a shitting dog.”
Kaja shot me a look I could read well enough—shut up, Nika— but Parson Prince just laughed, delighted, and ordered me locked up.
FEVERSHAM DIDN’T HAVE CELLS, BUT it did have facilities that were used for experiments. I was stripped of all weapons and marched through the open gates and into a gleaming building. The room I was in couldn’t have been more than six by four, white, with nothing in it but a blanketless cot and a pot to piss in. The lights were out, but I had a square window up high. All through the day, I heard faint cheering.
I realized Parson Prince was familiar to me. I placed him after a few hours. He’d been there when my ear had been bit. A scumbag in a gang then; now, a parson with followers. An unlikely ascent, but sometimes shit rises up and floats.
The door of my little prison opened when it was full dark. The door rattled for a few minutes first, and I got to my feet, fists clenched, ready to pummel the person coming for me, but it was just Kaja.
I say just Kaja, but then, in shadow, she looked different. Her hair was pulled tight into a bun. She’d shed the excess layers of her clothes. My satchel was slung across her, and the stock of my rifle peeked out from above her shoulder, as though she were dressing up as me.
“Kaja?” I whispered. “How’d you get in?”
In response, she clicked on a flashlight and shone it at me. “Nika,” she said, sounding relieved. She held up a bent hairpin, then pulled me into a short hug. “Are you all right?”
“Starved, but fine. You?”
“I’m good.” She rummaged through my satchel and turned up a protein bar for me. I bit into it, but once I did I didn’t feel like eating.
“Feversham’s done for,” Kaja said. “The faithful have occupied it. They’ve killed nearly everyone, and more of them are coming. Word of what the parson’s done has got around. If you thought that demonstration we witnessed in front of the gates was bad—” She grimaced. Even in the dark, I could tell from her eyes that she’d seen things she couldn’t erase.
Hath No Fury Page 6