Deviants (The Dust Chronicles)

by Maureen McGowan

  At least six blocks of concrete lie scattered around the man, attached to him by chains that also bind his arms to his body, yet he moved so quickly. His Deviance must be speed and I assume the Shredders used the chains and concrete to slow him down.

  Laughing, one of the Shredders breaks off a long chunk of chain, as if he’s snapping a thread, and binds the man’s ankles and knees together. Even if he could get back to his feet, there’s no chance of his running now, and he grunts loudly as he strains against the chains. He can’t break them.

  “Get up!” one of the Shredders yells, the sound grating my ears. “I want to see your face while we skin you alive.”

  Shock grips my mind. I had no idea Shredders could talk. His voice is horrible, loud, and scratchy, but I understand the words. Grunting and laughing, the other Shredders pull the man up and drag him to a girder that’s jutting up from the ground not far from this building’s entrance. They bind him to the girder and one of them plunges a knife into the man’s thigh. Blood spreads on his dusty gray slacks as another Shredder draws the point of his knife down the man’s cheek, leaving a thin trail of blood in its wake.

  A pounding noise comes from farther back, and I look up to see Comps, seven of them all in their heavy black armor and face-obstructing filter masks, half-running half-marching in tandem. Their equipment and guns bounce with each step—thump, thump, thump, thump.

  My body seizes. Even if this man was expunged, surely the Comps are here to save him. But even as that thought flashes through my mind, I realize I’m wrong. The Comps broadcast torture in the Hub, and it’s more likely they’ve come to drag the show back into camera range.

  At least I hope there are no cameras out here. A shiver runs through me but I ignore that fear and brace for the battle. As badly as I want to see these Shredders taken down and the man saved, I hope the scene won’t be too brutal.

  A few of the Shredders look back toward the approaching wall of Comps, but they barely react and turn back to tearing the clothes off their victim and making small slices in his skin with their knives. One of the Shredders has a necklace that clatters as he moves. I realize in horror that it’s made of teeth—human teeth.

  I swallow bile and close my eyes, but I can’t leave them closed. Not seeing this scene won’t make it go away, and it feels safer to know what’s going on and at least be prepared if we’re spotted.

  The Comps stop in unison.

  The one in the middle, clearly the captain, steps forward. “Give us our chains.”

  “No.” The big Shredder with the tooth necklace pushes the Comp captain’s chest. “Finders keepers.”

  Confusion slams through me. I don’t know what’s more surprising: that Shredders can talk with what seems like intelligence, or that they seem to have been working with the Comps all along.

  “We slowed him down for you. The chains are ours,” the captain says and the other six Comps draw their guns—the biggest guns I’ve ever seen—and point them at the Shredders.

  The main Shredder laughs and it’s about the most chilling sound I’ve ever heard, like metal on metal but deeper.

  “Your fault he took off.” The Shredder spreads his legs wider. “This one should’ve been hobbled from the start.”

  The Comp captain lifts two fingers, and then twists them around in some kind of signal.

  Bang.

  One of the Comps shoots a Shredder, and the blast sends the monster flying back and onto the dust. There’s a gaping hole in what used to be his chest, but very little blood.

  The other Shredders look up for a second then get back to poking their knives into the Deviant man, just enough to draw blood. They laugh when he screams.

  The captain points his gun at the Shredder with the tooth necklace. “We’re taking the chains.”

  The necklaced monster lifts his knife to the Comp’s throat, which seems pointless given his armor. The Comp at the other end of the line shoots the Shredder. He falls, his macabre necklace swinging up to the side then landing on what used to be his ribs.

  I’ve never seen anyone shot. Never seen a real gun used. Inside Haven they only use shockers, and even then only rarely. Even in my worst nightmares I never imagined guns could do the kind of damage that’s been brought upon this Shredder, blasting away half of his torso.

  The captain raises his hand, flicks his wrist, and the Comps open fire. Raising my hands, I cover my ears against the sound as Shredders fall in broken heaps onto the dust. The Deviant man passes out from the pain, or the loss of blood that stains the dust at his feet. He slumps, held upright by the chains.

  My breaths come too quickly; I can’t pull oxygen deep enough to reach my lungs. Every part of me wants to tear off the mask so I can draw in more air. I press my arms into the concrete to prevent my hands from doing what every part of me, except logic, thinks is a great idea. One of Burn’s arms lands across my back. The heavy weight is comforting and helps me slow my breathing.

  The Comps gather their chains, winding them up and stashing them into bags strapped on their backs. When the last chain is pulled from around the man’s chest, he drops from the girder and collapses into a heap on the ground.

  One of the Comps bends to pick the man up, but the captain shakes his head sharply. “Leave him. Another pack of Shredders will find him soon enough.”

  The Comps return to formation. The captain lifts his fist, twists it abruptly, and on that command, the group of seven spins on a dime. They march in a slight V shape, the captain at the apex, back toward Haven.

  The Deviant man isn’t moving. Is he alive?

  When the Comps dip down below the crest of a dune, Burn leaps to his feet, runs to the girder he used to climb up, and slides down it like a pole to the ground. When he reaches the man, he turns up to me. “Get down here. More Shredders will come. We’ve got to get moving.”

  I stand and will my leg muscles to function, drawing a deep breath to force back my fear. The injured man will slow us down but there’s no way we can leave him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MY ASSUMPTION THAT we’re saving the man is quickly quashed. Burn forces the stranger’s nose into the dust, and I tug on his arm, trying to pull him away. The man looks up at me, his mouth and nose coated in dust. I don’t recognize him and I’m glad.

  Fear tightens my throat. The man’s eyes are crazed, his lips twisted in a tortured grimace. He’s drowning on dust, going crazy in his attempt to escape Burn. The poor man barely escaped being skinned by the Shredders.

  I pound my fist on Burn’s arm. “Don’t kill him.”

  “Get off me.” Burn pushes me away. “We can’t waste time.”

  Burn can so easily overpower me, there’s no point in fighting. I back away and sit, leaning against one of the girders of the skeleton building.

  Just as I started to trust Burn, just as I started to believe that underneath he could be an actual human being, he does something like this. Acting like he’s about to save a man then killing him. Maybe this is more humane. Perhaps it is better if he drowns on dust, rather than being left for another pack of Shredders who won’t take kindly to finding him surrounded by pieces of their dead friends.

  But I can’t watch Burn kill this man, so I look up to the sky. It’s so high. And so blue. If this is what they were trying to emulate when they painted the inside of the dome, they fell a few hundred miles short. I push the sleeves on my shirt as far as they’ll go, and the heat from the monster-sized sun light strikes my skin. The warmth is comforting and makes me smell different. Kind of salty but something else, too—almost sweet—and it reminds me a bit of the smells that came out of that shop called a bakery. I almost forget that Burn’s killing a man not twenty feet away.

  “That’s enough,” Burn says gruffly.

  I gasp. The man’s still alive. And even stranger, Burn’s now pulling the struggling man away from the dust. The man wants more. His arms battle for the ground as Burn holds him back.

  I run over. “Let him d
ie if he wants to.”

  Burn turns toward me. “What?” He wraps his arms around the shorter and much older man’s chest and holds him as he flails, reaching toward the dust at his feet.

  “Why else would he want to inhale the dust?” I ask. “First you force it on him, then you take it away.”

  “Hey, buddy.” Burn squeezes the man and lifts his feet from the ground. “You’ve had enough. Calm down.”

  The man relaxes in Burn’s arms and Burn lets his feet touch down.

  “Here.” Burn takes one arm off the man and reaches down for his broken mask. He takes a long piece of cloth from one of the pockets inside his long coat and stretches it across the broken filter. “Might be hard to breathe through, but it should keep out the dust.”

  He puts the mask over the man’s messy gray hair. He’s calmed down enough now for Burn to release him completely.

  “What’s going on?” I’m not sure when or if I’ve ever been so confused. I had just come to grips with the idea that Burn was killing the man in an act of mercy. Perhaps Burn was testing him to see if he’d turn into a Shredder?

  “Thanks, kid.” The man claps Burn on the arm then bends over, his hands on his thighs, and the pace of his breathing slows to a more normal rate. He straightens. “I’m Gage. From Haven.” He gasps for breath between each short sentence. “Exed today. What are you…kids doing…Outside?”

  “I’m Burn.” He points to me. “This is Glory. All her fault.”

  “What?” I stomp over and punch him in the arm. “You drag me and my brother away without a word about where we’re going, or why, and it’s my fault we’re Outside?”

  Burn glares at me. “If it weren’t for your stunt, we’d be safely in the tunnels, probably beyond the wall by now. But you can’t follow simple directions, and here we are. In danger of being torn apart by Shredders or—” He stops and shakes his head. Based on the look on his face, I don’t even want to ask him what he’d planned to say after the or.

  “Then I guess I owe you a thank you, little lady.” Gage lifts his mask a few inches, smiles at me, and then fastens it back into place. Burn grunts.

  “I still don’t understand.” I shake my head. Gage puts what’s left of his torn clothes back on, and his cuts have stopped bleeding. Some are scabbing over, but it seems too quick for that. It’s hard to be certain when there’s so much blood.

  “Your cuts.” I have so many questions I can’t even form full sentences to express them.

  Burn looks off into the distance. “We’ve got to move.” He turns to Gage. “I assume you’re fast?”

  “Very.” Gage runs his fingers over one of the worst cuts on his chest and doesn’t even wince. “At least before I got cut.”

  Burn pulls a huge knife out. “Once the pain goes, you’ll be good as new.”

  I tug on Burn’s arm. “I don’t understand.” Is part of Gage’s Deviance fast healing?

  “I’ll explain later. We need to find somewhere to hide until dark. Then we’ll head for the wall.” Burn turns and, holding his knife at the ready, heads through the open ground level of the building we just hid in. “Stay close.”

  “Why is the sun falling?” I ask. The lower half of the sky is pink and orange and more beautiful than anything I’ve ever imagined. “Where is it going?”

  Burn, sitting next to me on a raised concrete slab, doesn’t answer. I nudge him with my leg, not wanting to take my eyes off the sky for a moment. The sun has turned into a fiery orange ball and the colors of the sky keep changing. If it weren’t so spectacular, I’d think the world was ending.

  Gage is across from us, sleeping. I turn to shake Burn.

  He grunts. “I was sleeping. You should be, too.”

  “Won’t the sun set the world on fire?”

  Burn’s shoulders and chest shake.

  “Are you laughing at me?” Trying not to care, I turn back to the view.

  He puts a hand on my shoulder. “It’s called a sunset. Happens every day.”

  “But how?” Yes, every day in Haven, the sun gets softer and goes out, to be replaced by the bluer and dimmer moon light at night, but I’ve never seen or even imagined anything like this.

  Burn pulls his legs up and leans forward, putting his arms over his shins. “The sun is a star.”

  “Stars are tiny pricks of LED lights on the night sky.” My father explained them to me and told me how there were more of them when he was a kid. They’re growing sparse, especially over the part of Haven we live in, no longer replaced as they burn out.

  “Real stars.” Burn takes off his mask and turns toward me.

  “Your mask.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Burn says. “Take yours off if you like. There’s no wind tonight and no dust up here.” He runs his hand over the surface we’re hiding on until dark. I have no idea what this building was BTD. Now it’s just a ruin, and it strikes me as a miracle that anything is still upright with all that’s been salvaged to build inside Haven—not to mention that wall. We’re higher this time, at least three stories up from the ground and much closer to the wall. I wonder if Drake’s already out of the tunnels on the other side. I can’t let myself think that the Comps or Shredders found him.

  Gage’s wounds started to bleed again after the climb. Remembering his deranged expression when he was breathing in dust, I run my hand over the filter that covers my mouth.

  Burn reaches over to take off my mask. The air feels great on my face, cooling and comforting, evaporating sweat as the heat from the sun wanes. Without the dark plastic distorting the colors, the sky is even more spectacular. The soft yellow light it casts warms the tone of Burn’s skin and softens his hard edges.

  He’s studying me, too, which makes me uncomfortable. Smoothing my hands over my hair, trapped by the mask all day, I focus on the sunset.

  “They didn’t teach you about the stars or planets in school?” Burn asks.

  “School?”

  “GT.”

  “Yes, but I never imagined anything like this.” They did teach us something about the planets and stars when they were explaining what made the dust come, but I’m beginning to realize that much of what we learned was based on what Management wanted us to know, rather than the truth.

  “Stars are balls of fire, millions of miles away.” Burn’s voice is deep but the gentlest I’ve heard it. “The sun is the closest star to earth, so it looks bigger. It heats our planet and provides light.”

  “And the moon does that at night,” I say to show him I’m not quite as ignorant as he thinks.

  He shakes his head. “The moon’s light comes from the sun. It’s just bouncing off.”

  I furrow my brow but don’t question him. This doesn’t make sense, but even if Burn’s lying or making this up as he goes, he clearly knows more about Outside than I do.

  “Was it a star that struck the earth? Is that how the planet caught on fire?”

  He stretches out his long legs. “No. Asteroids. Lots of them. They’re more like huge rocks.”

  “Then how did the fires start?”

  “Volcanoes. Earthquakes.”

  “Oh, right.” That’s what we learned in GT. “The asteroids hit so hard they shifted bits of the earth, right?”

  He nods.

  “Then the atmosphere filled with ash and dust, changing the climate, blocking air travel, jamming communications—then the dust fell.” This is what we learned, and Burn doesn’t correct me. “What was in the dust? Why did it change us?”

  He shakes his head. “Don’t know. I’m not sure anyone does. Something came on the asteroids, I guess. Or out of the volcanoes…” It’s the first time I’ve heard him unsure. He leans back. “Doesn’t matter.”

  And he’s right. It doesn’t matter. It’s not like we can turn back time, take away the dust, and make the Shredders go away—make either of us a Normal.

  “What’s happening to the sun?” It’s no longer round—it’s cut off at the bottom and the orange color has intensified.


  “Don’t worry.” He leans and nudges me with his shoulder. “Nothing’s happening to it. We’re turning away from the sun for the night, that’s all.”

  Once again I’m confused, but that doesn’t matter. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Yes.” His voice is huskier than normal, and I look over to find him staring at me. When our eyes meet, he turns back to the sunset.

  “Where’s my brother?”

  He shifts, bends one of his legs, and grabs his shin as he turns to me. “There’s a door in the wall. We’ll go through it after dark.”

  “And Drake’s on the other side?” My chest collapses under the fear of not knowing if he’s safe, under the guilt of not taking better care of him, under the shame that I’ve let anything but finding him invade my thoughts.

  “Hector will keep him safe,” Burn says. “Don’t worry.”

  My father’s name brings on more fear, but curiosity pushes it aside. “What’s it like on the other side of the wall?”

  “Not that different than this, at first. But farther away there are fewer ruins, less dust.”

  “Less dust?”

  “The wall traps the dust. Holds it in close to Haven. It blows around in here and drifts up the wall.” He rubs his chin. “Some claim they bring more dust in on purpose, but I’ve never seen them do it.” He shrugs. “This is only the fourth time I’ve been aboveground in the hot zone.”

  “The hot zone?”

  “This Shredder-infested space around Haven.”

  “How do the Shredders bring dust in?”

  “Not the Shredders. Management.”

  “But…” Implications flit through my mind like sparks from a bad electrical plug. Management purposefully brings in more dust? I have so many questions I don’t know which to ask first. “When we first saw Gage, it looked like the Comps were working with the Shredders.”

  “They were.”

  I was certain there’d be some other explanation. “But the Comps killed the Shredders.”