by Rajan Khanna
“There’s that word again. ‘We.’ I don’t remember lighting any fires.”
I just stare at her.
She shrugs. “Besides, that’s the Ben Gold way, isn’t it? Get what you want and god help anyone or anything around you?”
“Fuck you, Claudia.” It lands hard, hits me right in the space that Tess had bloodied.
“No, fuck you. You think your life has no value? Fine. Mine does. You used to know that.”
She’s right. She’s saved me so many times, at the library and many times before. I should be begging her forgiveness. Instead, I say, “Leave me alone, Claudia.”
She nods, her eyes cold. “I will. Next place I put down, you can go.”
“Go where?”
“I don’t care. Any place other than here.”
“You’re kicking me off?”
She bends down and lowers her face to mine. “I won’t be dragged into your death wish.” She straightens up again. “You’re on your own.”
She stalks out, her head hanging low, the tension visible in her shoulders. That sensitive part inside can feel the anger and the frustration in her, and it tells me to get up and apologize. Explain.
Instead my hand finds the jar. For a moment, I’m seized with the urge to slam it against the wall, but thankfully my better instincts kick in just in time. That would be a waste of booze, so I swallow it down instead. It’s the only way I see myself sleeping, after all.
* * *
I dream of Miranda. Alive. That first time we met. So real that I can feel the gnawing of the hunger in my belly, the hollow feeling, like skin stretched over a skeletal frame. Around me only ashes and dust, and no food. Just the crumbling buildings of Old Monterey.
Then the howls. The screams. Loud and insistent. A Feral hunting pack that sends me running back to the Cherub.
Then that collision. Like a bolt from the Blue. Such a slight thing, Miranda was, but when she slammed into me, I felt it jar my bones, and we both went down in a tangle of limbs and guns.
I feel it in the dream. Laid low.
She stands up and brushes herself off. She looks like she did then, barely covered, skin peeking through—her neck and the top of her face, her arms. In real life I was horrified by the lack of protection, but now I can’t help but smile. I see the smattering of freckles on her face. I want to reach out and touch her.
“Well?” she asks. “Are you going to get me out of here or what?”
It’s not what she said. But I lead her to the Cherub’s ladder and help her up.
I follow and we’re both on board, in the cargo hold, where I first kissed her (though that was later, too). I reach for her hand. “I’ve missed you.”
She smiles, and nods. “Me, too.”
“I thought I’d found my place,” I say. “Now it’s all wrong.”
“You don’t have anyone to protect you,” she says. “From yourself.”
She steps in and raises up her head and kisses me. Her lips are warm and I press myself into her and wrap my arms around her. I pull her close. I am filled with such a feeling of warmth and home, here on the Cherub with Miranda.
“Stay with me,” I say. “Let’s fly away. Somewhere. Anywhere.”
She nods. “I just have a few friends to bring with me.”
I nod, too. Suddenly I’m at the controls of the Cherub. Miranda comes up behind me. I turn, smiling, then stop when I see who’s with her. Three Ferals stand next to her. I shrink back. “Get them off my ship,” I say.
“Ben,” she says. She moves forward and grabs my hand. It’s warm. And I clutch at it. But my eyes don’t leave the Ferals. “They deserve to be saved.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out a handful of dried meat, offers it to me. “What do you say?”
I want them gone, and the fear rises up in me, but there’s also that feeling of hunger. I stare at the food.
With her other hand, Miranda pulls one of the Ferals closer. “Besides,” she says. “It’s his home, too.”
I look at the man whose hand she’s holding. See the gray hair. The serious expression. Recognize my father.
* * *
I wake up in a haze, my mouth dry, my head spinning. Names are caught up in the swirl—Sergei, Malik, Miranda. Their faces, filled with accusing looks. I try to shake them, but they dog me. Then they’re joined by another. The one from my dream. A lean face, graying hair, a couple of days’ worth of beard, dark brown eyes that seem almost black. Something wolflike in his look. Eli Gold. My father.
No.
I sit up, run a hand through the sweaty tangle of my hair. The ghostly memories remain. My father, turning to me with a smile as we pick through the bones of an old mansion. He holds out a book. The Maltese Falcon. By Dashiell Hammett. I look back at him, and he’s still smiling. “I think you’re going to like this.”
Another time, a few years later, another foraging trip. A whoop as he returns to the Cherub with his bag of haul. “You know what I have, Ben?”
“What?” I asked.
He pulls out a square base with a circular pad on it. I shake my head at him.
“It’s a music player. Records.” He grins and pulls out a round, black disc. “My father used to have one.” For a moment he’s lost in his own memories. Then he snaps back to me. “C’mon. Let’s go hook it up.”
“You can get that thing to work?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says, his smile disappearing, and an assessing look coming over his face. “And soon, you will, too.” And he did. That night, as the Cherub flew over the Rockies, he pulled out one of the records he had taken from the house, that same boyish smile on his face as he placed it on the player. “David Bowie,” he said. “One of my favorites.”
Then some voice from another world sang about changes, and my father leaned back in his chair, head tilted back, resting on one arm, one leg hitched up on the seat. He floated in that song like a ship in flight, buoyant and free.
That perfect image is washed away by another one, the Cherub ripping apart into fiery debris above me. My father’s ship. That same chair. That same record player. All those songs and moments.
My father’s ship.
My ship.
That transition happened slowly. I’d take the controls of the Cherub more often. I’d be the one covering him when we went down to the ground. His hands would shake sometimes when he was trying to navigate through a storm. He’d have trouble getting through doors. His aim wasn’t what it used to be.
Dad was getting old.
You don’t see it often in the Sick. Old people. You have to be very skilled or very lucky. Tess, one of the oldest people I ever knew, was both. Sergei was about my father’s age, had lasted that long in a world that constantly tries to kill you. In Sergei’s case it was through a general hardiness and strength of character. With my dad, it was because he was good at getting us through another day. He wasn’t overly smart or an exceptional shot or even a master forager, though he was good at all of those things, but he put it all together and figured out how to get us through.
Dad was a thinking man. I’d seen other foragers buy information off of people in zep hangouts. Dad never had to.
I remember exactly how it happened. We’d found a bookstore, on the second floor of a shopping center. Dad thought it was worth checking out. Also we’d been running low on reading material and I think Dad had reread the same August Wilson play three times already. Many of the books were trashed by the time we got there, swollen and blurred by water getting in, or just deteriorated over time. But we found a few shelves of decent material. I got caught up piecing through the fiction section. I picked up Frankenstein and a copy of Hamlet, which I had read before but which I felt like revisiting.
After tucking them both carefully away, I found Dad in the magazine section. He often liked to find magazines or newspapers, something local. He had a few rolled up and tucked into his coat. He was also carrying a copy of Death of a Salesman. “That all you taking?” I asked.
&nbs
p; He nodded. “This place is mostly cleared out. Not much to choose from. But I have enough to keep me occupied for a few days at least.”
When we were back in the air, I set a leisurely course and then flipped open Frankenstein. Dad pored over his magazines. He was still doing that when I fell asleep. The next morning, while I ate some mushy fruit and some tough, salted meat, Dad slapped down a magazine in front of me, the cover bent back. “There,” he said. “Our destination.”
I pulled the magazine toward me. The picture captivated me immediately. A large structure on the top of a hill. Rounded domes. Minarets. Like a fantasy castle. Something from another age, before the Clean. It was . . . magnificent. I’d seen some grand churches and synagogues, but this was another beast. I stared at it, captivated.
“Where?” I asked.
He raised his eyebrows, an expression on his face that meant it wouldn’t be that easy. I scanned the page and saw the location. “Utah?” I looked at the picture again. “But it had to have been cleared out by now.”
Dad tapped the magazine article with one gloved finger.
No choice, then, but to read the article. The place was a Hindu temple. I didn’t know much about what that meant, just that it was a religion from the Clean.
I’m sure someone, somewhere still practices it now. Religion is one of those things that clung on after the Sick pissed down on everyone. If anything, the Bug made it stronger wherever it held on. I always thought that was weird as a kid—the world was so fucked up, why would you think there was a god or gods running the show—but I guess people sometimes need to feel like there’s something bigger than themselves in hard times. Besides, I’m a hypocrite anyway, because while I don’t believe in God, I still have a healthy respect for Judaism and the Torah, so I get it in a way.
I think.
But this temple, it was out in the middle of nowhere. Or not quite nowhere, but it was surrounded by farmland. A couple of houses. A couple of roads.
The temple had become a target in the community. Some people didn’t like those who worshipped there because of the way they looked or the religion they practiced, or something like that. The temple had experienced break-ins. Theft. People defacing the walls. So the community, the Hindus, took up a collection and with some donations from near and far they were able to install a state-of-the-art security system—high-tech, very hard to crack. I knew that was what Dad had seen. What set this place apart. The average forager doesn’t have the skills to crack the kind of security that place had. Your average forager can barely access Clean tech beyond maybe getting it powered up again.
But I had Mal. Smiling, cocky, proud Mal. So many times we anchored the Cherub at a trading post or a zep rest spot and I would see him there, surrounded by a crowd of foragers or pirates, telling stories of his travels. My father told me to ignore him, but I couldn’t. Mal was around my age, he was colorful and confident, and I just couldn’t look away.
The first time I met him, he was holding court, talking about the daring heist that he pulled off—how he broke into a secure medical storage and got out with a crate full of supplies through a mob of Ferals. I was standing nearby, looking at some barter, listening in. I thought it was the biggest load of shit I’d heard in a while.
Eventually, I couldn’t hold back. He was talking about holding off the Ferals single-handedly when I rounded the corner and spoke up. “What kind of weapon were you using?”
He turned to me, surprised at the interruption, and there was a quick moment of him sizing me up. Then, never taking his eyes off of me, he pulled loose the gun at his hip, a large automatic. “This beauty,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked. “Twelve rounds?”
“Fifteen.” He turned to face me more squarely.
“Well, then,” I said. “Even with the position you claim to have had, you wouldn’t have been able to take out all of those Ferals before having to reload.”
He looked annoyed for a second, and then a smile stretched across his face. Which irked me. “Ah,” he said. “You’re assuming each Feral took one bullet.”
I nodded. That was if he was a great shot. Usually it took more than that when facing a pack.
His smile widened. “I like to use one bullet for each two Ferals.”
I almost called bullshit right there, but something in his eyes, some twinkle, some dare, some fuck-you-to-the-world made me like him instead.
So we went on like that. He would challenge me on how I got my barter out of the last forage. I’d challenge him on his tales of daring heroism. Then he started testing me.
At first it started with shooting, after I’d challenged him on some of his stories, which always seemed to feature trick shots and almost-magical gunplay. “I swear—the bullet went through the left eye of the first pirate and then through the right eye of the second.” Or, “I shot him right in the heart.”
“While running,” I’d say. “Over your shoulder.”
And he would get this serious look and say, “Benjamin, why would I lie to you?”
So, on a few occasions, we had someone set up a target. Or targets. And we would shoot at them. It quickly became apparent that I was at least as good as him with a pistol (if not better), so his stories moved on to other things. Most often locks.
Even the dumbest forager can break a couple of windows or batter a door down, but most of that brute work has already been done (and sometimes by Ferals). Any forager worth their haul can pick a mechanical lock. It’s not too hard, and the tools are easy to come by. But electronic locks are another thing entirely.
That was Mal’s specialty. It was why we tapped him for the police warehouse job. So soon his stories were all about locks. I thought it was just more boasting—until the Idaho job. Dad and I clued into it, arrived to find the electronic locks still working. We cut the power, but the locks wouldn’t disengage.
Mal flew in a few weeks later and made off with the whole haul.
“How’d you do it?” I asked, as Mal passed around quality booze to all of his associates. “We cut the power. We still couldn’t get in.”
He smiled, his cheeks already flushed from the alcohol. “There was a separate power supply for the locks,” he said. “Long-term batteries, still working. You cut the main power, but that didn’t go to the locks.”
“Teach me,” I said.
He waved his head from side to side. “Bring me something next time. Something good. And maybe I will.”
So I did. I brought him my best barter for weeks afterward, skimping on food and sometimes ammunition, hiding the whole transaction from my father. In return, Mal showed me what he knew about locks. Of course, Mal being Mal, he didn’t just teach me. He’d test me. He would give me a quick lesson and then make me race him with a practice try.
He always won.
But those moments spent trying to beat him wired that knowledge into me. I was never going to be as good as him, but I learned things my father never knew.
The memory brings up feelings of shame. This hot, dark feeling, like ink boiling in my soul. Because after spending all of this time around Mal, I started having thoughts. Thoughts of going off on my own, or at least with Mal, of leaving my father.
At least with Mal I was practically an equal.
Dad loved me, I knew that, but he would never see me that way. It didn’t matter that he was getting older and slower, or that I was a better pilot than him by then. He would never see me as anything other than his son. His little boy.
It drove me crazy.
So, yeah, I was fantasizing about going off with Mal. Running our own ship. Letting Dad do his own thing. I’d keep in touch. See him in between jobs or journeys. But I felt more alive when I was with Mal or on my own.
It was almost sacrilege. But the truth is I felt it so strongly that I had to fight it. Had to push it down. Stomp on it. When my father would call me to come take the controls of the Cherub, I had to force myself to stand up and walk out to do it.
So
by the time my father learned about the Hindu temple, I already knew about electronic locks. When I looked up at him over the magazine, he said, “Grab what you can. We go tomorrow.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The temple complex spread across the hilltop like a strange series of growths, only instead of unsightly it was ornate, a pale jewel among its rough surroundings. Grass covered the hill, and a road, now overgrown, curved down to a larger road that passed a couple of nearby farms and disappeared off into the distance.
There, like a marvel, its surface faded with dirt and weather, but no less spectacular, stood the temple. It had two levels, the lower surrounded by a series of arches and pillars. A large staircase led up the main entrance to the second level, which was crowned with pointed domes. Several of the spires had crumbled or fallen away, and one or two of the domes were collapsed, but it was otherwise intact. Part of the reason for that were the large metal shutters that covered the windows on both levels. They weren’t fooling around when they installed security here.
I was surprised that it hadn’t been bombed out. Foragers sometimes resorted to brute force when subtlety was beyond them. It jeopardized the score, of course, but sometimes a partly broken haul is better than nothing. Later, I would see scorch marks where smaller explosives had been used, but they hadn’t made a crack.
I wondered at that. Zeps would see this kind of place for sure, if they were looking. But if Dad was right, the security might very well hold.
Thing is, Dad was often right.
We dropped the Cherub right down to the ground and lowered the ramp. The hill had enough space, and with all the buildings around, the shape of the ship might not stick out to anyone in the air. Ships with bigger crews would have probably dropped a few people down, sent someone else off with the ship, accessible but not a sitting duck. But it was just Dad and me.
The first thing we did was check to see if it still had juice. Most systems didn’t survive the Sick, but in the case of the Hindu temple, the power was still on, as a result of tenacious solar cells that were still drinking up sunlight. The lights were on, and the lock held firm.