by Chuck Wendig
Everything about her is sharp-angled and severe. Jawline like an ax-blade. Cheekbones like bullets. Eyes big and bright, blazing with the craziness of youth (she’s only a year older than Lane, after all).
The two of them take the elevator down into the city center—what Lane has named Boxelder Circle—and above them, the reconstructed flotilla rises like broken teeth. It’s slapdash, haphazard, ugly as a shaved shuck rat, but it’ll do. The ships of the Sleeping Dogs were able to pull the buildings upright. Men and women died anchoring the structures back together with chains thrice as thick as Lane’s own (admittedly lanky) body. Most of the city had crumbled or was worthless to them, and some of the Saranyu never fell (or fell too slowly to be of value, buoyed as they were by giant balloons). But from the wreckage remained enough of value. And now those broken teeth composed their city.
The elevator door opens. They ripped out the mechanical man that once controlled it—now it’s moved with cables and pulleys, hand-cranked by men, not machines. Been a lot of anti-machine sentiment recently, and anything that even looked like a mechanical in the crashed Saranyu was dragged out into the light and crushed with boots, sticks, stones.
Luna and Lane step out of the box.
It’s then that Lane sees five men lined up in the circle, kneeling.
Burlap sacks over their heads, bound loosely at the neck with wire.
Luna hoots and cackles. “We took a few prisoners, boss.”
Jeezum Crow.
All around stand Sleeping Dogs, many with their wolf and dog masks pushed up over their heads, sweaty faces staring out. Transmitting hatred toward the kneeling men. More are gathering, too, curious to see.
“Wh-what do we do with them?” Lane hisses to Luna so that nobody else can hear.
“We make an example of them,” Luna says, then winks.
She pulls out a sonic pistol.
Lane steps in her way. “Luna. Luna. Wait. Hold up. What do you mean, make an example of them?”
“C’mon. C’mon.” She gives him a look, like, You’re joking, right? But he presses her with a stare, and so she sighs and says, “The boys and girls of the Dogs like a little justice now and again. We got five traitors to the Heartland here, boss. Two Babysitters. Two facility workers. And the facility boss, man named Hale. These ain’t Empyrean. They’re Heartland folk who chose a different side. And so they need to be made to understand what happens to folk like that.”
The gathering crowd is starting to murmur now. And people are closing in on the five kneeling men. They’re not touching them yet, but already Lane can smell the bloodlust in the air. Anger, carried on the wind like a vibration, like a frequency everyone can hear and none can resist.
They’re Heartlanders, he thinks.
“You want to hurt them,” he says, nodding, starting to accept that.
“We gotta kill ’em,” she says, smiling.
“Luna—”
“I can do it if you want. But the Dogs wanna follow you, not me. And you don’t want them following me more than they follow you. You’re the top of the pops, the big boss with the red pepper sauce.” She spins the sonic pistol around, tilts the grip toward him. “They wanna see you do it.”
He takes the pistol.
The grip is warm in his hand. And yet it sends chills up his arm.
The men and women gathered—hell, even a few kids hanging around, nestled in between the knees or at the hips of parents or guardians—see him take the pistol. And they start to chant.
May-or.
May-or.
May-or.
MAY-OR!
Grungy, dust-caked faces stare on.
Dark eyes watch.
Mouths open, some in happiness, others in anger. All yelling for him.
Every part of him feels tethered to a cable, and it’s trying desperately to yank him back from this. Reel him in. He wants to turn and toss the gun to Luna, or better yet, find a way to give these five clemency. He wishes Killian followed him down. Then he wishes Rigo were here—Rigo, who had to leave the city. Rigo who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stay, who felt out of place, who one night just packed his things and left. Gods, it’d be nice to see him now. Rigo would know what was right and what was wrong.
Lane always found the line between those two things blurry.
His mind strays. Looking for justifications. Excuses. Reasons. And they aren’t far out of reach. The Empyrean has ruined the Heartland. And it has done so with the help of Heartlanders. Men like these who are complicit in the ruination. Who, even when given other options, choose to fight for the bigger side, the meaner dog. Who leaned into the shadow of the bully instead of stepping out into the light.
And that pisses Lane off.
His jaw sets tight, teeth grinding against teeth.
Cael with the Blight. Rigo without his foot. Gwennie gone. Lane’s own father dead. His mother on the side of Old Scratch.
He can do this.
Maybe he wants to do this.
He steps up. The chants grow loud. Luna is behind him, the small of her hand on his back, urging him to get on with it. He looks at her. The madness dances in her gaze like twisters. That scares him. What do his own eyes look like? It scares him enough to look at the pistol, set the dial back. Reduce the severity just a notch.
Enough to kill. But not enough to knock their brains and hearts out of their bodies. Enough to shock the system, but not enough to spill blood.
He knows the crowd wants blood. But the people will have to settle for just shy.
Should I say something?
He thinks he should, but he can’t conjure words. Not sure he could force them past his mouth even if he did manage to figure out what to say.
Lane raises the pistol, fires it into the chest of the first man.
The body tumbles back. The body shuddering, heels juddering against the cracked earth. Crying out from behind the hood. The others begin to wail. Their howls reach Lane’s ears, but he can barely hear them beyond the rushing of the blood behind everything, and part of him thinks, Do it slow, make it count, let them savor it, but then that strikes him as cruel and needless—and his people are already enjoying it, whooping and hooting, fists pumping in the air. This isn’t torture. Right? This is justice and mercy shaking hands.
He shoots the other four in quick succession.
They all drop. Some on their backs. Others on their sides.
Twisting, writhing, dying. Not dying quickly, though, oh no, dying slowly because he didn’t set the dial high enough, did he? This isn’t mercy. This is torture. Lord and Lady, no, no, no. He sets the dial up higher, and the crowd is raging now, bigger, larger, a storm of dust and rage—
He points the pistol at the first man again. Time to end it, really end it, pull the trigger and be a leader—
But then the voice reaches his ears again, a cry that isn’t like the others, a cry of a woman, not a man, a cry he recognizes—
No, no, that’s not possible. No.
Everything seems to go slow, sideways.
The pistol falls from his hand, lands in the dust.
The balls of his feet carry him forward just far enough to drop down onto his own knees, reaching for the hood of the first one to fall. Pulling the hood off. The burlap obscuring the sun for just a moment—a shadow falling, but then light once more.
Lane’s own mother stares up at him. Face twisting in pain. Eyes bulging. Mouth ringed with froth. He screams for a doctor. Someone, please, a doctor.
“Mom!”
YOUNG HOBOS IN LOVE
THE HOBO BOY IS IN LOVE.
Or like. Or lust. Something.
It’s a crush. The girl is his age, maybe a hair older. She’s a sneering, pouty, surly creature. Dirt-cheeked and sharp-teethed. She’s got the vibe of an animal trapped in a cage, an animal gone feral—you stick a hand through the metal and you’ll pull back four fingers instead of five. And yet, she’s a rock in his shoe; he can’t quit thinking about her.
He watches
her scamper up a building, her short-cropped black hair like a bundle of unkempt grackle feathers. She uses a rust-eaten drainpipe to clamber up, then disappears. Two minutes later, she comes back down again.
Eating a strawberry.
A fat, plump, red-as-arterial-blood strawberry.
She eats it quickly, palming it and biting it in one go, then spitting the green top into her hand. A hand that goes into her pocket before wiping a red smear on the patchwork, moth-eaten denim that covers her legs.
The girl pauses for just a moment.
She turns. And matches eyes with him.
She sees him seeing her.
Panic seizes him in a closing fist. Air out of his lungs. Eyes bulging. He knows he should duck, move, look away, something, anything, but he can’t. His feet—the good one and the other one—stand fixed to the ground. He knows his mouth is open, catching flies, but he can’t quite manage to close it.
She winks at him.
And then she turns and hurries off.
The Fringe, they call it.
The edge of the Heartland. Ringed by the Boundary. The fence posts are gleaming steel spires, each topped with a shining sphere. It looks like you could just walk between them, leaving the corn and entering the thick jungle beyond. But if you did, the wall would activate. A sonic barrier would screech like a hundred thousand crows, shrieking into existence in the same time it takes for lightning to strike—and you would be sheared in half.
Most folks know what will happen. And yet, sometimes, people still walk through that fence anyway. Suicide with a dash of lottery-like uncertainty. Maybe this time I’ll walk in and the fence won’t get me. And then I’ll be free.
That’s what they think.
That’s what they hope.
Then—the sonic screams. The invisible fence, a fence of sound, rises.
Slice.
The town that sits only a half mile from the Boundary, here in the Fringe, has taken on a senseless, hopeless atmosphere—a feeling that death hangs in the air, an invisible cloud, an unshakable fear. It’s a rat’s nest of a town, the buildings all leaning up against one another like sluggish Pheen addicts. Tin roofs dented, corroded. Stone walls cracked and crumbling. The plasto-sheen has long been perforated by Hiram’s Golden Prolific, and for a while, apparently, folks with sickle knives and Queeny’s Quietdown kept the corn culled. They’ve long given up that fight. The corn intrudes. Pokes up through the street. Through floorboards. Lone stalks serving as advance scouts, bending toward those who walk past, twitching, swiping, thirsty for blood.
The town is Cloverdale, but nobody actually calls it that.
They call it Curtains.
And in the town of Curtains, the people are as ragtag and rotten as the buildings. A sad, rough group of Blighted, hobos, and the infirm. Hollow eyes and black tumors. Missing teeth and missing fingers.
Curtains is the Heartland’s gutter. It’s where all the slurry runs. Where all the pollen blows, the trash drops, the piss trickles.
The hobo boy saw his first suicide yesterday.
He’d heard that you could go near the fence and find things. Things that people had left behind before they decided to walk through the tall posts. Sometimes, they said, if you were really brave, you could find the halves of the bodies that fell on the Heartland side of the sonic barrier, and sometimes those halves had trinkets or treasures in the pockets that you could trade back at the town Mercado for a bit of food, water, or treats.
The hobo boy is hungry. He misses food.
So he goes into the corn and hobbles the half mile out of town toward the wall. The corn is tall, but soon he sees that the metal posts are taller—they rise high in the sky, tall as ten of him stacked, feet on shoulders.
The corn cuts him in the few places his skin is exposed. The rest of him is bound up with rags. He limps out of the corn—it dies quickly toward the Boundary—and staggers close to the fence. He listens, expecting it to hum or buzz or make some kind of noise, but it’s dead silent. Only thing he hears is the wind through the corn. Hissing, as if to hush him.
Then he sees. There, on the ground. Stuck in the leaf-curl of a stunted stalk: a single ace note. Corner bent. A streak of mud across it—
No. Not mud. Blood.
Jeezum Crow in King Hell.
But it’ll do. It’ll buy him something at the Mercado.
Something he can give to the hobo girl.
He stoops, winces through the pain, and reaches down for the ace note—
Then he stops.
A man stands no more than twenty feet away. Bushy, bird’s nest beard. Hollow, haunted eyes set over a nose that looks broken and rebroken.
He’s less than a foot from the fence.
He turns to the hobo boy and offers a small wave.
The bottom of his palm—down to the wrist—is fringed with little squirming pea-shoots. Green as wet moss. He realizes what he’s done and quickly hides the hand behind his back.
He sniffs.
The hobo boy says: “Wait.”
But the man steps through the fence and the sonic wall screams.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
But how can he not? He’s back in town, and he keeps feeling his face for more flecks of blood. Not his. The man’s. He felt the faint mist as the invisible barrier split the Blighted hobo. He’s been wiping at his face ever since.
He hides in a small alley, holds up the ace note again to look at it. He wants to think about this, not that. Think about what he’ll buy for the girl. At first he thought food of some kind: somebody’s rations. But rations have been cut down or cut off for people. Food isn’t easy to come by anymore, though some supplies have trickled out of and away from the wreckage of the Saranyu flotilla. Pegasus City. Besides, the girl has access to strawberries or something, right?
So, maybe something else then. A trinket. A piece of jewelry. That might be nice. Isn’t that what boys do for girls? Give them jewelry?
A scuff of a heel behind him.
He turns, expecting to see the girl standing there. Because how perfect would that be? She’d appear. See him with the ace note. Probably steal it.
But it’s not her.
It’s another boy. Knotty like rope. Freckled face. Upper lip with a soft, deep cleft that shows yellow teeth.
“Hey, fatfuck,” Cleft Lip says. “I see you found my ace note.”
“What?” the hobo boy says. “No, no, this is mine—” He moves to try to tuck it back under his shirt, but Cleft Lip catches his wrist.
“Yeah, yeah, I lost it. I can tell you it’s mine because I can describe it. It’s an ace of hearts. Bent corner.”
Of course he can say that because he just saw the damn thing.
“No, I found it—”
“It’s mine, ain’t that right, Cashew?”
“Right as rain,” says a sloppy, lisping voice. The hobo boy turns, sees a girl enter the alley on the other side. She’s got broad shoulders. Thick. Fat, even. Built like a dang motorvator. Hands as big as a hog’s head. Half her face is a sludgy avalanche of loose skin. It covers one eye, a nostril, part of her mouth. A line of drool slicks her chin before she licks it away.
The hobo boy feels for her—the way she looks, what she must go through. Whatever it was, it lent her a kind of meanness, a dark spark ready to catch fire. He stands, tries to step away from the two of them, but the alley is narrow and he doesn’t have anywhere to go.
The big girl steps in and—
He staggers against the wall as she clubs him in the face with a fist. He tastes blood and hears a ringing deep in his ear.
“What’s that there?” Cleft Lip says. “Lookie at that. Got something more valuable than an ace note, Cash. Got hisself a fakey foot.”
“I need it,” the boy says. “Please.”
The girl—Cashew—steps in close.
Cleft Lip hems him in on the other side, clucking his tongue.
“That’ll go big at the Mercado. Always
some poor dirt-farmer needs a new leg.” Cleft Lip leers. “You either take it off and give it here, or we’re gonna have to knock you sideways and take it ourselves. It’s your bag, dumpling.”
“You can have the ace note—”
“I know we can have it,” Cashew says with her mush-mouth. “We’ll have that and the leg and anything else we want to take from you.”
Cleft Lip grabs his crotch. “Maybe I’ll use your mouth as a toilet.”
“Please, no, don’t.”
“Maybe I won’t have to use you as a piss-hole if you gimme that leg.”
The boy closes his eyes, knows how this is going to go, but he’s not like that man at the fence. He won’t just step through into oblivion.
He runs.
Or tries to.
Truth is, he can’t run for squat. The fake leg strapped to his knee makes him slow like a shovel-struck dog. By the time he’s lurching forward, desperately trying not to fall, his two attackers already have their hands on his shoulders and they slam him up against the wall.
Cleft Lip hits him in the cheek. He sees stars. Tries to fall down to the ground, cover himself up, but the big girl won’t let him. She props him up as Cleft Lip beats him and kicks at him. The hits land with dull thuds, and each meaty slap sends his brain rattling ’round his skull. Before long his head hangs forward, twin streams of blood pouring from his nose.
The punches have stopped, and the boy’s leg jiggle-juggles as Cleft Lip works at the leather straps holding the fake leg to the thigh.
He tries to plead but finds his words caught behind his blood-slick lips. He throws a fist of his own, but Cleft Lip just leans back and avoids it same way you might avoid a tree branch or a buzzing horsefly.
Cashew laughs. This hee-haw jackass laugh. Haw haw haw—
Then the laugh cuts short.
Grrrrrk!
The hobo boy looks up. Blinks, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing. Cashew’s face has gone red as beet juice. Her one visible eye strains at its sockets, ready to pop as a wormy, sluglike tongue licks at the air.