by J. P. Smythe
Jonah’s room is empty. He’s gone.
Their names again, this time screamed, as I run down the stairs into the basement. Rex is splayed on the floor. I reach for her, shake her. She rolls over and vomits onto the floor, onto my feet. I pull her upright and grab her face, my hands on either side of her head, and I stare into her eyes.
“The birds are coming,” I say, “and I can’t find Jonah. We have to do something.” She shakes her head and she makes that growling sound she’s so fond of. “Okay?”
“I need water,” she says, but so do I, and we don’t have any, not now.
“Get up,” I say. I order her, and she responds to that. She nods. I scramble back up the stairs into the kitchen and I scream Jonah’s name once more but there’s no reply.
Rex follows me up the stairs without missing a step, all of a sudden acting like she’s not feeling the effects of everything we drank last night. She drags open the windows, stands outside in the blazing morning sun, stares up at the advancing cloud of birds. I grab her by the arm—I reach for her hand, but it’s not there, because I forgot (from the way that she flinches, she didn’t)—and I pull her back into the house, away from the windows. I don’t know how far they can see, but I don’t want them to spot us. They’ll be scouring the landscape, following the roads, looking for us that way. And there’s no way we’re fast enough to outrun them, not in the state we’re in, not with so little cover out here in the wilderness. “We need to find anything that can help us.” I start to turn out drawers and cupboards, throwing cutlery around to find things that we can use as weapons.
“We have to leave,” she says.
“Not until we find Jonah,” I say. But she’s right, I know she’s right. We can’t stay here. I shout his name again but she hushes me.
“They’ll hear you,” she says, and she’s right about that as well.
We go through the downstairs of the house, as quiet as we can be. We know they can hear a long distance, and out here there’s barely any other noise. We open doors, cupboards, wardrobes, cabinets, looking for weapons. There’s nothing. Then we pry open a door into another dark, windowless room on the ground floor. There’s something in the middle of it, under a tarp. I pull it off, trying to be quiet and failing, but praying that the noise isn’t significant. Underneath I see fabric, metal, thick rubber wheels; everything a deep, heavy black, polished to a sheen.
“It’s a bike,” I whisper. Rex doesn’t know what that is, but I’ve seen them in the city—going around the streets, people perched on the back. The noise that they make, like a roar of some long-extinct animal. “It moves. It’s like . . .” I don’t know how to explain it to her. “Just trust me. It moves and it’s fast. Much faster than we are. Maybe as fast as the birds.”
“Do you know how it works?”
“No.” I look at the handlebars. People hold those. But the ones I’ve seen are automated, just like the cars. This one is older. The computer system here looks like it’s hacked in, an afterthought. It doesn’t wake up when I touch it.
“Then it’s useless.”
“No,” I say, “it’s not. I can try.” There’s a key hanging from the handles at the front, and a hole. I slide it in and turn it. The bike coughs, as if it’s choking on something. I turn it again. The battery meter whizzes up. It’s held a supply of power, even after all this time. Smoke billows into the back of the room, and Rex grins.
“Can you drive it?” she says.
“No,” I say.
“Can we learn?”
“We can,” I tell her. I look around, trying to find a way out of this room. On the walls, illuminated in the glare of the bike’s light, are animal heads—stuffed and mounted on wooden boards, their teeth bared as if they’re all vicious, all about to attack. In the middle of them is a kind of rack, mounted midway up the wall. Inside it, something black, long, metal.
“What is that?” Rex asks.
“It’s a gun,” I say.
They banned them when the cities began burning, when the planet got too hot, when the riots started. That’s what always happens—the museum told me, Ziegler told me. People live in a state of stasis for long enough, then it gets hot, and they explode. But this time it was on a scale that nobody had seen before. So to help keep the peace, guns were banned. Lots of things were banned in those early days. But of course people found a way to keep them. Alala’s got one hidden away in her home that she thinks nobody knows about (we all know). It’s power, in a strange way—something so dangerous, so deadly.
“I’ve never held one,” I say. “I don’t know how they work.” But I’ve seen statues of people in the museum. Men from some war that happened centuries ago clutching them with one part to their shoulders, pressed up against them, staring along the thick metal barrels. And their fingers on the triggers—aimed and primed.
I reach up and pull it down from the rack. It’s heavier than I thought it would be. I feel the weight of it, spy down its length like the people in the museum diorama. I put Rex in the sights.
“They needed bullets,” I say. “Things that they shoot.”
“Like arrows.”
“Like arrows but smaller, metal, pointed. Have a look.” We both turn out the drawers, throwing things onto the ground. Suddenly we’re less concerned about the noise. We know that they’ll find us, we’re the only things out here.
It’s inevitable.
“These?” Rex asks, and she yanks a small gray box up into the air, props it on her stump, and brings it into the light. They look like the bullets from the museum, sort of. Must be right.
“That’s them,” I say, “Get as many as you can. Put them in the bag on the side of the bike.” I leave her to go back into the main part of the house. The birds are nearly here. They know where we are. I shout Jonah’s name one last time, desperate now because we have to go. If we stay here we’re done for, and—
I see him, then, through the windows at the back of the house. He is walking toward the birds, his hands in the air, raising them slowly, giving himself up.
No. I don’t know what they’ll do to him, why he would want to go, why he doesn’t want to stay here, to learn more about who he is. To stay with me.
I open the door to shout at him, to plead with him. I want to tell him to stop because we can get away—the three of us, we can be safe. But then I see how close the birds are, and as I open my mouth to say the words I’m not sure that I quite believe it.
He turns and looks at me. He doesn’t smile—doesn’t do anything—just looks at me, right into my eyes. And even as far away as he is, I can see into them. I can see them, green and clear. Unblinking as he stares at me, and I stare at him. He knows me. In that moment, I can tell. He remembers me perfectly.
The birds surround him, scan him, circle him. He falls to his knees and he holds his hands up. I realize that he’s not running from me—back to them, back to the lie—he’s buying us time.
The birds descend and I shut the curtains because I don’t want to watch them drag him away. We can’t waste the gift he’s given us.
I rush back to Rex. She doesn’t ask if I found him.
“Ready?” I ask. I want to ask her to come with me, to fight them, to rescue him, but I know there’s no point.
And for some reason, I’m not even sure it’s what he would want.
Rex raises her amputated forearm to show me. She’s strapped something to the stump—a hunting knife with a serrated edge on the blade, huge and unwieldy, fastened with thick gray tape to her skin. The tape is wound around and around, bulky and clumsy, but it holds the knife fast. It’s threatening and, somehow, it’s perfectly right.
“Ready,” she says.
There’s a moment, just a brief moment, where it feels like I’m going to fall off this thing—where the sheer rush of it moving forward feels as though it could push me backward, send me tumbling to the ground that’s already far behind us. But I hold on, my hands on the grips that sit at the front, feeling the vibra
tions of it running up my arms, through my chest, into every single part of my body.
Rex hangs onto me as we tear down the road. The bike does most of the work for me, accelerating, steering along the road. I’m just a passenger, but that’s fine. The screen at the front lights up, shows us the route ahead.
“Where would you like to go?” the tinny voice of the bike asks. This one is definitely older than the Gaia voice, much more robotic. The battery is mostly full, the voice tells me, and the roads ahead are clear of traffic. “Where would you like to go?” it asks again.
“Washington,” I say.
“Should I avoid toll roads?”
“I don’t care. Just drive.”
So it does. The bike swerves to avoid the holes and cracks in the road. All I do is hold the handlebars, and Rex holds me. The sun is to one side of us, the streets, the burned-down forest, the dried-up lake on the other. Rex clings to me. I can feel the gun slung around her body, pressing against my back; as we judder on the road, it digs into me. Her good hand clutches my waist. She doesn’t say anything; I know she’s looking for the birds, and I know that they’ll find us. But we’re fast, and Jonah has given us time.
I can’t think about him now. Not yet.
I watch the road. We pass land that was once used for farming or living but now lies sweltering and wrecked under the heat of the sun. I think about how I’ll probably have to head back into the wilderness when I’ve got Mae. I wonder where we’ll go, what sort of life we’ll lead. I’ll need to start something new, for both of our sakes, something safe. I wonder if Rex will want to come, if I will even want her to.
I don’t notice Rex nudging me, and it isn’t until she leans closer to my ear and shouts that she gets my attention. She points behind us, into the distance. I turn my head quickly to glance at what she’s seen.
The birds are coming. They scream over the fractured bones of the trees that occasionally jut out from the land. I can see them framed against the clear, crisp, blue-white of the sky, swooping and swirling. The formation they make in the air is almost like the flow of water, tumbling and whirling. Jonah’s sacrifice has taken some of them out of the equation and kept the rest of them far away, but not nearly far enough.
“Can we go faster?” Rex shouts, and I turn the handlebar, but the computer voice cuts in. It can’t calculate the path if it goes any faster, it says. The ground on either side of the road is ripped up and torn everywhere, cracked and scarred like Rex’s chest, Jonah’s back. It is impractical to ride on it. But the birds can find us out here, no matter which way we go. Maybe we’ll outpace them, I think; so we’ll stick with the road until we’re somewhere that we can hide. I’ve seen them when they want somebody. I think about them in that block in the city, breaking through the windows, smashing through the doors. They’re relentless—and that was only a few of them. I wonder what they’ll do to us now given how fast we’re running from them.
There must be something we can do.
“Give me the gun,” I shout back to Rex. I let go of the handlebars, trusting the computer to keep us straight and balanced. Rex pushes it into my hand and drops the bullets over my shoulder and into my lap. I fiddle with the catches and find a hatch that flips open. I flick the bullets into the only hole I find (which seems like the right hole) and I point the gun into the sky.
I pull the trigger. I don’t know what I’m expecting. Not this. The gun almost kicks against me and I nearly lose my seat, have to grab the handlebar again, wrapping my arm almost around it. The noise is insane even over the sound of the bike, so loud and so angry. Rex grabs me, holds tighter, stops me from falling. She needs me. We can’t escape without each other.
“You take it,” I say. She ignores me. I turn around, craning my neck, and I look at her.
She’s terrified. I’ve seen her scared, angry, desperate to save herself, but I’ve never seen her like this before. On Australia she acted as though she didn’t care if she lived or died. Agatha called it a death wish—because death was inevitable and Rex acted as though she didn’t care when it came. But here, now, I can tell that she doesn’t want to die.
And neither do I.
“Take the gun and shoot them,” I say, channeling my mother’s voice, her commanding tone, as best I can. “If you don’t, they will catch us.” I want to explain to her what they’ll do, but she hasn’t seen it for herself. She doesn’t know. “They will kill you,” I say. Nothing. She’s frozen. “And if they don’t? They’ll try what they did to you at Pine City, only worse. They’ll take away who you are, and this time they’ll make it stick.”
She snatches the gun from me and rests the barrel on her knife-arm, then turns on the seat and bends backward as far as she can. She aims up toward the birds.
“Just like firing an arrow,” I shout, “think about them moving, where they’re going, what we’re doing.”
“I know,” she says. She pulls the trigger. I grab the handles to steady us, squeezing down hard, instinct kicking in. I try to compensate for the kick of the gun; the computer squeaks, slams a word up onto the screen, a voice that I can barely hear over the sound of the ringing in my ears.
“Override,” it says.
“No!” I scream. We lurch left to right. “Just faster!” But it’s in my control all of a sudden, and we wobble on the road then veer slightly. I wrestle with holding the handlebars steady, trying to steady the bike.
“Again,” I hear Rex say, and she pulls the trigger once more. In the sky behind us, something explodes. I swear that I hear Rex laugh.
“Take over!” I scream at the bike, but it doesn’t listen. I don’t know the right command. It’s old, and it doesn’t understand me, or maybe it just won’t. Maybe it’s broken, unable to listen, to take orders. I clutch the grips, tell myself to hold them tight, tell myself that we’ll be fine. The road is pretty much a straight line. As long as I don’t move, the bike won’t move either.
Then Rex shifts her weight, swinging around so that she’s facing the birds, riding backward. I almost lose it. “Stop moving!” I shout. I hear her plant her knife into the seat, to hold herself tight. I turn to look at it, to see how close the blade is to me, and I accidentally squeeze the handlebars tighter—or turn them, or something. We go faster still. Rex screams, a noise of absolute pleasure, and I look back at her in the mirrors, just a glance.
She’s aiming at the sky and she squeezes the trigger. Behind us, one of the birds collapses on itself, tumbling, colliding with the others around it. They explode, smoke and flames. The other birds swoop and churn around the falling debris, making a new formation—spreading themselves out, making the group harder to hit.
I swear that they’re getting faster.
“Again!” I shout. Rex aims and fires, but they’re ready for it this time. They roll and dive, carving through the sky, leaving empty spaces where they were only moments before. They’re changing their tactics and edging closer to us.
I squeeze the grips again. Faster, faster. I need to see what the bike can do. The road is speeding by so fast that it’s just a gray blur in front of us, around us, behind us. On either side the landscape is endless desert, peeling off into whatever’s in the distance—trees, the remains of towns, places that I’ve never been and I’ll never go. Everything blurs into color and noise.
“They’re getting closer!” Rex takes more shots, single bullets that ring out. In the mirror at the side of the handlebar, I watch as birds spark and tumble to the earth or (when she really nails a shot) burst in the sky, a cloud of bright orange flame for a second before the debris falls onto the road in the distance behind us.
The bike shakes. I look at the road, trying to focus on it. I can tell it’s in terrible condition, cracked and riddled with holes, worse than anywhere we’ve been yet. I don’t know what to do. I slow us down, then move the handlebars a little; the bike tilts according to my direction, swerving on the road around the cracks. They’re getting bigger; I can make out one giant one, running ri
ght down the middle of the road. I’ve got to pick a side, stick to it. I have no choice.
In the distance, I see where the crack ends in a crevice, a split in the earth that drives sideways through the road itself, driving it upward into what looks almost like a pursed lip. I think about turning off, going onto the dirt, but it’s too late. The lip comes, closer and closer, an upward curve.
“Hold on!” I scream, and I feel her reach back, fumbling, clutching onto my shirt.
The bike roars to the lip. We go up it and I see the front wheel leave the ground, and I shut my eyes for what feels like an eternity; but when I open them we’re still in the air. Below us the crack yawns—so dark that I can’t see its bottom. There’s just blackness down there. An abyss. For a second, we’re flying; there’s nothing below us, nothing holding us down.
We’re weightless.
Only for a second.
Then we slam onto the road on the other side of the crevice and I struggle to keep the bike steady. We skid to the side—off the road and onto the soil and dusty remains of what was once maybe fields. The bike seems to slip out from underneath us, and then Rex is gone—thrown off, rolling along behind us in a cloud of dust kicked up around her. I tumble after, helpless. I watch the bike spiral away, flipping, plowing into the dirt, smoke coming from its vents.
I shout Rex’s name but she doesn’t reply. It hurts to move, to push myself to my knees, hurts still more to get to standing. My clothes are ripped, shredded around the knees. My hands are torn up and bleeding, so I press them to my belly to try to get the blood off, to see how bad the damage is. I run—hobble—toward where Rex is lying, curled up.
My ears are ringing. I forgot about the birds for a moment. It’s only as the ringing fades that I hear them, their tiny engines whirring in the sky, a buzz that’s closer than it has been. I look up and they’re in a new formation pretty much right above us.
“Get up,” I say to Rex. I nudge her with my foot. She could be dead, I know. “Get up.” She doesn’t. She stays perfectly still, and I can’t even see the rise and fall of her chest. Her eyes are open. Your eyes are only open like that when you’re gone. I’ve seen it before. I’ve closed too many eyes myself.