by K. M. Walton
“It’s already hard.”
Michael Ulmer’s head cocked to one side, unmoved. “Life’s hard for everyone.”
“What do you want?” she said.
The boy shrugged. “I want you to admit the truth. If only to me. And maybe, you know, showing some tenderness wouldn’t hurt.” She felt his hands on her shoulders, massaging. Hard. She pulled away again, which irritated him. She actually wanted to kick him in the crotch, but couldn’t afford to make him angry. Not yet. Not until she found out exactly how much he knew. Or who else he might have told.
“Really, Michael, you’re just flat wrong,” she said. “Your imagination is g—”
The boy’s hand slipped up her neck and squeezed a fistful of hair, yanking her backward. Cassie almost cried out, but held it in. No one else on the walkway noticed. A part of her was relieved about that.
“Don’t lie to me again, okay?” Michael said, releasing his grip. “Next time, you’ll be very sorry.”
Cassie crossed her arms, hoping he couldn’t see her trembling. “Fine,” she said. Fine. Stay calm. Her eyes followed the procession of fluorescent bars across the ceiling. “I was four when we made that ad,” she said. “I hardly remember anything.”
But that wasn’t true either. She remembered another little girl, one who looked just like her, wearing the same pink dress. Practically a twin. That little girl was crying and wouldn’t stop. She had been afraid of the cameras, gliding toward her in the dark like mechanical dinosaurs. She had struggled to do the countdown, and the bright light effect frightened her even more. Crew workers were hustling that girl into the arms of her embarrassed parents as Cassie, the replacement, was guided onto the soundstage.
“I bet your mom and dad remember a lot,” Michael said. “Maybe we should visit your condo and you could introduce me.”
Cassie shook her head. “My mom’s at work. And my dad’s sick.” This was partly true. Her father was sick, but her mother was at home, seven months pregnant. Maybe that piece of information would help. Maybe it would make Michael Ulmer a bit more sympathetic. But she didn’t want to trust him with it yet.
“I bet they’d be interested in what I could start telling people,” the boy told her.
Cassie flung her arms wide. “They’re not even political. They thought they were getting their daughter a modeling job. They thought it was for a damned toy commercial.”
“Hm,” Michael Ulmer said. “Shoulda read the fine print.”
Cassie shook her head. “That flash of white on my face? They told us it was going to be the Toys ‘R’ Us giraffe, opening up a big vault full of dolls and bikes and action figures under a glowing Christmas tree.” She huffed out a bitter laugh. “Wanna know what I remember? Being pissed there weren’t any toys.”
“Instead you got incinerated,” Michael said, clapping his hands together. “And the rest of the country got scared into voting for a psychopath.”
Cassie shook her head. “People love blaming someone else for what they do to themselves.”
“Like you are now?”
“For the ten-thousandth time: I was a little kid. I had no idea what the ad was about. The election, the attacks overseas. I’d never even heard of Chet Stillman, and my parents… They were the first people disgusted by that commercial. We’d have never done it, if we’d known.”
“But you did,” Michael said. “Blame your mom and dad if you want. Maybe that’ll get you some mercy. But it’ll just shift more blame on them.”
Cassie stared at her feet. The moving walkway ended, and the two teenagers pushed through a double-doorway that emerged onto a glass and steel gantry that extended over Covington Square, one of the community’s busiest thoroughfares. This area was known as The Vista, one of the highest points open to the public. The corridor swarmed with onlookers watching the monsoon draw near, but Cassie had never felt more alone.
She and Michael Ulmer stared through the glass at the industrial facilities jutting from the desert in front of them, sprawling octopus limbs of armored gray boxes, clinging to the red rock of the canyon. Sentry towers and radio beacons blinked against the churning sky. In the distance, giant egg-shaped air and water purification domes faded into the wall of rain rolling toward them from the hills. Covington Square and The Street glowed beneath webbed steel-and-glass cake lids—like fallen, fading suns.
This was Joshua Tree Colony, or at least part of it. The flagship model for other survivor shelters around the world.
“On a clear day, I bet you can see so much from up here,” Michael said. “Empty cities. Skyscraper skeletons. A giant toxic graveyard.” He turned to her. “Funny, right?” he said. “The man you helped elect unleashed the very thing he scared us about in that ad. Nuclear fucking war.”
“Wow. Ironic,” Cassie said, rolling her eyes as she leaned back against the glass. “You know, I never thought of it that way.”
• • •
Most of Joshua Tree was embedded underground, a vertical fortress penetrating deep into the Mojave wasteland. This survivor city was now home to more than forty thousand people—and growing. The tidal-wave plumes of rock ash and clay erupting from the excavation exhausts on the north end of the complex were a testament to the construction underway belowground. The colonists had endured for almost a decade, although the early years had been painful, ugly, dark. The addition of surface spaces a few years ago, like The Street and Covington Square, finally provided some sunlight to the survivors, even if fresh air was still impossible. The vapors outside were about as safe for humans to inhale as the atmosphere of Venus. And the air was far from the deadliest thing beyond the colony walls.
The complex’s lights drizzled away like wet paint as the toxic raindrops ran down the glass. Cassie stared at her own reflection as the boy pressed his body against her back, his hands sliding around to stroke her hips, his breath dampening her neck.
“Is it money you want?” she said. “Because we don’t have any.”
“You know what I want, Daisy,” he said. “Don’t be dumb.”
His hands squeezed her thighs, and his fingers began probing the warm skin between the frayed spots in her faded, too-tight jeans. Cassie’s skin crawled—but the practical side of her brain wouldn’t shut off. She really had needed those new jeans. The ones she wore were not only disintegrating after all these years, but they were so small they pinched a red crease around her midsection that was usually still there when she woke up and squeezed back into them. New textiles were desperately hard to come by in the Republic. If this creep hadn’t slowed her down in the hall after school, she might currently be in possession of a pair that were as blue and crisp as the ones he was wearing.
Cassie pushed the boy’s groping hands away. “There are people around,” she said.
“I don’t care,” he answered.
Gunfire crackled from the sentinel pillars staked high above the colony, startling them both. Cassie used it as an excuse to pull free.
Comet-trail muzzle flashes perforated the mist. A cloud of red-eyed gunship drones wafted from atop the central radio tower like it was a wasp nest hit by a slingshot. The drones plunged low over The Vista and scattered into the storm to patrol the colony’s perimeter.
“Stragglers,” Cassie said, pushing away from the boy. “They’re already here.”
• • •
Down in Covington Square, hundreds of faces stood silently staring up at the drone footage being broadcast on a bank of giant TV screens.
A scattering of dark, humanoid shapes flitted in front of the cameras and disappeared into the curtains of rain. These were the stragglers—other humans who had survived the fallout and nuclear winter. If you could call it surviving. If you could call them humans.
Most survivors who weren’t given sanctuary in the Republic’s early shelters perished quickly after the attacks, but the stragglers had endured s
omehow. They stayed hidden most of the time, but swarmed the colony during storms, looking for materials, food, anything they could rip away. In clear weather, they were easy for the sentinel towers to pick off, so they usually kept their distance. But during monsoons, they always attacked in full force. The whole colony would go on alert, but as the news broadcasts kept reassuring viewers, Joshua Tree was a fortress they had never penetrated.
The flickering screens reflected in Michael’s eyes. “They never show us any close-up images. Just these blurry figures. I guess it keeps our guard up, but why don’t they just give us one good, long look at them?”
“Probably because it’s easy to see remnants of who they used to be. Teachers, accountants, bank tellers, waitresses,” Cassie said. “I’ve seen some up close, when I was training with the drone pilot program. It isn’t…something you can forget.”
“Is it true that they…that they’re…?” he asked, unable to say it. Instead he held something invisible in front of his face and gnashed his teeth on it. “I heard if you kill one, the other stragglers fall on it and start eating.”
“I’ve never seen that, exactly,” Cassie said. “But I have seen three or four drag a wounded one away. And it wasn’t for medical attention.”
“How do you know?”
She shrugged. “Because they each ran off with a different piece.”
Michael shook his head. “Animals. They deserve what they get.”
“Whatever makes us feel better, right?” Cassie said. “All I can think is, if my father hadn’t worked construction, building underground parking garages in the Old Days, and if my mom hadn’t had that job at the Santa Monica water treatment plant, we might be outside with them.”
“That’s how you got picked for the colony?” Michael said. “I just assumed you were rich or something. Hollywood and all that.”
Cassie started walking again, afraid someone in the crowd might overhear. “We got five hundred dollars for that ad. My parents donated it to Dashner’s campaign when they realized what it was for.” She scanned Michael’s crisp new jeans again, his pristine white shirt, his perfect tennis shoes. “So, um…rich? Is that how you got in?”
The boy halted. “My parents both served. Dad was a lieutenant in the Seventy-Ninth Infantry Brigade, one of the first units to rise up against your boy Stillman. They rebelled before anyone. Even before the incineration of Tehran and the pre-strikes against Moscow and Riyadh and…” He swallowed, and rubbed at his eyes. “My mother was a corporal, an aircraft technician. Both of them were stationed at Edwards.”
“Edwards…” Cassie said. Edwards Air Force Base was where the man they still called President Dashner had given his life, along with the rest of his cabinet and most of his military advisors and soldiers. He had survived the first wave of Stillman’s attack on the base after the civil war erupted, but no one at Edwards made it past the second onslaught—the one that rained tactical warheads.
“Yeah, Edwards…” the boy said, nudging Cassie forward again. “Mom and Dad stayed behind. They were fighting. I was running. Loaded in with a caravan of other military brats headed away from the base to Santa Barbara. I saw the flashes out the back window of the bus. Been bouncing around ever since. They sent me here with about a dozen other orphans from Sequoia Colony.” He tugged at his white T-shirt. “They gave us this crap when we came in. Because most of us arrived with nothing.”
“That where you got the braces, too?”
Michael Ulmer’s lips pursed shut instinctively. “Yeah,” he said. “We each got a physical when we got here.”
Cassie lowered her head. “My dad’s got cancer. In his thyroid. Like a lot of the early builders. We’ve been hoping to get him in to see a doctor for a while. But it probably won’t happen. You’re lucky.”
Michael pushed her forward through the crowd. “Yeah, lucky me,” he said.
• • •
Cassie’s eyes lingered on every face she passed, but she kept moving. They neared a maintenance corridor that led away from the square.
“I know what you’re thinking, but don’t try it,” the boy said. “It’s the law to report any suspected Stillman partisans. I’m actually taking a risk protecting you.”
“Protecting me?” Cassie said.
“Don’t kid yourself,” he snapped. “This colony would banish you in a heartbeat if they found out. You know that, right?”
Cassie was quiet. “I know,” she said, finally. “But if you told anyone…it wouldn’t just be me who suffers. They’d send my mom and dad out, too.”
Michael Ulmer yawned.
Cassie was glad she hadn’t told him about her mother’s pregnancy. There would be no sympathy to be found in Michael Ulmer. “You’d just let a whole family die?” she asked. “That doesn’t bother you?”
“Did it bother you when they did that to the Koslows?”
Cassie’s throat closed up. She pushed forward into the darkness of the corridor.
“You didn’t speak up about them, did you?” Michael said, hurrying after her. “You let the Republic put a whole family on trial for being part of the Daisy ad. Their daughter was your age. You could have saved her by coming forward. What was her name again…?” He snapped his fingers, trying to remember.
Sophia, Cassie thought. The name was never far from her mind.
She had known Sophia Koslow—or met her, at least. Sophia had been the original little girl hired for the ad. The Republic’s Loyalty Commission had recovered the Koslow family’s pay sheets from the agency in Los Angeles that produced the commercial for Stillman’s campaign. What those documents didn’t show was that an understudy, whose documents had never been discovered, had replaced Sophia. Now the Republic believed the case of the Daisy girl was closed.
“She actually looked a lot like you,” Michael said. “But here you were the whole time, hiding in Joshua Tree while the Koslows and their daughter went on trial in Yosemite. I bet you were glad they didn’t straight-up shoot them, like all those other Stillman loyalists. But maybe that would have been more merciful, you know? Banishing them in that old junker, watching them race shadows into the desert while the world—or what’s left of it—watched them disappear… Seems kind of cruel, right?” He smiled, his fingers tracing Cassie’s arm. “I wonder what became of her.”
“I didn’t make the leaders do that,” Cassie said, straining hard to tolerate his touch. “I didn’t make them kick out that family any more than I made them vote for a maniac who started a world freaking war. I didn’t make half the country rebel against him, and I didn’t make him drop warheads on his own military bases. I didn’t do any of that, Michael. I was a kid. Like you.”
“And yet it couldn’t have happened without you,” the boy said. “Why else would everyone still hate that little Daisy girl so much?”
Cassie shook her head. “When people can’t live with their own guilt, sometimes the only escape is to destroy the innocent.” They weren’t her words. That’s what her father said to make her stop crying as they watched the Koslows’ guilty verdict come in.
“Why are you doing this, Michael?” she asked. “Threatening me. Us. My family…?”
Michael Ulmer clenched his fists. “I’m not threatening you. I’m looking out for myself—for what I deserve. I’m making sure this miserable life is a little bit better for me, which no one else is going to do. Tell me, Daisy, you ever think about the gender ratios in the Republic?”
Cassie shook her head.
“Of course not,” Michael said. His voice echoed against the concrete walls. “Six guys for every girl. Across the colonies. Here in Joshua Tree, it’s eight-to-one. I know my chances. Finding a girl? Being in love? Having my own family? The odds are zero for me. Would you or any of your friends choose me if you didn’t have to?”
Cassie didn’t answer. Michael grabbed her wrist, pulling her close enough to taste
his breath. “That’s why I’m not waiting anymore,” he said. “I want you. Tonight. Now. And every night I feel like it. Or else, so help me, I’ll tell the colony exactly who you are, and you and your parents can all go join the Koslows. Or whatever’s left of them.”
Cassie closed her eyes. There was no other choice. “Then we should find somewhere to be alone,” she said. “Really alone.”
“Finally,” the boy sighed.
• • •
Cassie led Michael to a freight elevator that descended into one of the colony’s hydroponic farmscapes. They crept across a metal catwalk dangling over vast vertical fields of kale and tomatoes. The plants sprouted from white sheets of plastic that draped down into an infinite mist. Michael ran his hand along her back as they walked.
“So where exactly are you taking me?” he asked.
“Storage unit,” Cassie said. “My family shares the one we’re going to. It’s in an older part of the colony. There aren’t a lot of other places to go if you want to be alone.”
“Tell me about it,” Michael said. “I live in a room with six other dudes.”
“And you didn’t, um, tell them about me. Right?” Cassie said.
Michael bit his lip. “Not yet. Not as long as things go…nicely.”
Nicely. Cassie tried not to show a reaction.
“I know I caught you by surprise, but—this is kind of romantic, right?” he said. “Honestly, until I figured out you were the girl in the ad, I thought I’d just be Johnny Jerkoff my whole life.”
“Hey, this is romantic,” she said.
The boy frowned. “I mean, everybody dreams about their first time. I just never thought it would be with a girl as pretty as you.”
“I never thought it would be with a boy who was blackmailing me.”
Cassie walked a few more steps before she realized Michael had stopped. “Or maybe that’s not you,” she said. “Maybe we could turn back n—”
Michael lunged forward and swung his fist into the side of Cassie’s head. She sprawled across the metal walkway, one leg dangling over the bottomless plane of leaves. She looked up, dazed, as his twin silhouettes coalesced in her field of vision. “Don’t ever say that again,” he said.