El Capitan slows a little, but the engines sound weak. He doesn’t want to stall out. So he lets the buckies take on more air—too much. The airship drops. One landing prong hits, drags, gouging the earth, sending up a black plume of ash. The airship pops to its other leg and also skids. The airship tips forward on its two front legs, teetering for a moment with the nose hovering just above the ground before it rocks back onto all four prongs solidly.
El Capitan whistles a sigh. Helmud echoes it.
El Capitan hears the cabin door open. He’ll let the others hop out. He’s in no rush to see more. He takes his time shutting the engines down. He doesn’t know when he’ll fly again. He pats the wall of the cockpit.
“We’ll miss it, won’t we, Helmud?”
“Miss it,” Helmud says, as if he’s ready to move on. They follow the others out onto the ground, which is stiff with the cold. They don’t talk. What the hell could any of them say? The smoke is so thick that it rolls around them as dark as the fog of Ireland was white. His eyes burn and tear. He covers his mouth with his sleeve.
Pressia turns a circle, trying to take in the destruction through the waves of smoke. “Where are Wilda and the others? How are we ever going to find them now?”
Bradwell extends his broad wings and then wraps himself in them—only his face shows, his jaw jutting out. El Capitan’s legs feel like they might buckle, and Helmud feels suddenly so heavy on his back that he rests on one knee.
Hastings stands in a wide-legged stance, balancing his weight between his real leg and the prosthetic. Finally he says, “This summer, I bought books for the whole school year.”
At first, El Capitan doesn’t know why he’d say something like that now, but then Bradwell says, “I remember giving those lessons in Shadow History. I had it all down. I knew what I was doing and why.” And El Capitan gets it. Hastings and Bradwell are wondering what the hell happened to everything they once knew to be true.
Pressia says, “I made windup toys. Sometimes they’d flutter, but I could never get them to fly.”
El Capitan says, “I had this journal. I’d test berries on the recruits to see which ones were poisonous. I had a system. I drew pictures in it. I was good at that.”
“I was good,” Helmud says, as if that sums it up. Once, long ago, before the Detonations, they were all good. El Capitan feels a surge of anger like he’s never felt before. He punches the cold ground with his fists. He feels the desire for revenge pulsing through him.
Bradwell’s the first to say it. “Let’s take ’em down.”
El Capitan says, “The bacterium is a gift. We were given a gift.” He can feel the twinge of the thick tape holding in place the box protecting the bacterium.
“A gift,” Helmud says.
“No,” Pressia says. “We have to talk to Partridge. Something’s gone wrong. He wouldn’t do this. I know it.”
This time she has someone to back her up without hesitation. “Partridge wouldn’t ever let this happen,” Hastings says. “I know him. We were friends. Trust me.”
“You were friends,” El Capitan says. “I know power firsthand. I know what it can do to your head. You come out on the other side of it twisted.”
“Twisted,” Helmud says. He knows what El Capitan’s talking about. He bore the brunt of it.
Pressia says, “We have to try to get inside. Let’s stick to the plan.”
“That was never my plan,” Bradwell says.
“Well, it was mine,” Pressia says.
Bradwell walks to her. “Do you smell that in the air? Do you know what that smell is?”
She looks at El Capitan and Helmud, then Hastings. “Smoke.”
“No,” Bradwell says. “What’s riding in that smoke?”
“Don’t,” El Capitan says.
“Hair and flesh. That’s what’s burning, Pressia. How many times are you going to forgive? How many times are you going to fall into the trap of thinking we can reason with them? They’re murderers. Partridge is either too weak to stop them or he’s one of them. Either way…”
“You are your father’s son too, Bradwell,” Pressia tells him. “And your mother’s. They weren’t trying to kill Willux. They believed in the truth. It was their religion, right? You said that. They believed it would set people free. Don’t you believe?”
Bradwell closes his eyes and lets his wings catch in the wind and open a little on his back. “No,” he says. “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
Pressia tucks the doll head under her chin, covers her mouth with her hand. She says, “I can go it alone.”
“Let’s stick together for now,” El Capitan says. “At least until we know what we’re up against, until we get our bearings again.”
“What we’re up against,” Helmud says fearfully.
Pressia doesn’t look convinced.
El Capitan tries another angle. “There are people who need us here, Pressia. You want to help them, right? You want to find Wilda and the other kids. Don’t you?”
She looks at the face of the doll head. She tilts it so its eyes close. Is she afraid they’re dead? Is she afraid that it’s too late to get the cure to the Dome, find the children, save them?
“I can’t let you go into the Dome,” Bradwell says. “I can’t let you go.”
El Capitan looks at Pressia. He can tell that she’s surprised. She looks at Bradwell, then El Capitan and Hastings, then quickly away from all of them. Is Bradwell confessing something here—about love? El Capitan feels sick.
“Before we left,” Pressia says, “word had traveled that Cap had set up medical tents in the city. Once the outpost was burned, that would have been the most logical place to take the children.”
The medical tents are gone. That’s the truth, but El Capitan doesn’t say it. Maybe Pressia knows that or maybe she’s living on hope. “Okay,” he says. “Let’s start there.” But he knows he’s probably only bought a little time before she leaves them all to make her own way.
PRESSIA
CALLING, CALLING
Pressia’s already decided to leave them. When the time is right, she’ll slip off. It’s easier this way. No arguments. No fighting. She has to find Partridge. She has to know the truth.
When Bradwell asked her if she knew what that smell in the wind was, she wanted to spin around and slap him. She remembers the smell of burnt flesh and hair from the days the OSR was in power as well as from her early childhood—from the Detonations. She’d blotted the memories out for so long, but now she remembers the fires, worse than these because they were fueled by radiation—or was it that the blasts made everything susceptible to becoming tinder? The fire cyclones tore through everything, drove people to water—people half-dead already. Her grandfather held her to his chest and, one legged, he crawled through the wreckage. He helped her climb across a river clogged with the dead.
They passed over that river as they flew in. It was edged with ice, a white rim. Pressia remembered what it was like to almost drown in it—the cold darkness all around her, that feeling of being saved, lifted by unseen hands. Did Bradwell see the river outside of his own window—the place where they almost froze to death? Does he remember the feel of their skin touching? She does. She’ll never forget it. The flash of it still makes her skin hot.
And then Bradwell said that he couldn’t let her go? He only means that he won’t let her go. He’s telling her what she can and cannot do. He looked her way once, then later again. But she pretended not to notice. If he can’t forgive her, she has to harden her heart, doesn’t she? She has to steel herself. Meanwhile, she’s making her plan.
Of course, she can’t shake the question that pounds through her head—Did Partridge do this? It echoes with each step. She has to believe in Partridge. What else does she have to hope for? Pressia sees a stand of twisted, burnt trees in the distance. Has she ever seen them before? She knows she has. But now, they have been whittled to spokes of char. She feels older now. The dead trees, like monuments to
the destruction, stand out to her as individual. Each has suffered on its own. Each has been stunned into being something it never was intended to be. Each is now part of the greater loss.
They walk through the trees toward the city, using what’s left for cover. The trees look like cacti. Stark. Isolated. The silt climbs up their trunks on the side of the prevailing wind. Spider-root systems turned vertical catch what the wind drags in—mostly junk and rot that’s wandered across these wastelands wanting rest, some place to stop, an end to it all. She stares through the low limbs, looking for any shift of a figure or flash of color. “Hastings,” she says every few minutes or so, “anything?”
His senses have been coded, but the smoke riding on the air limits his vision and sense of smell. “We have to keep moving,” he says.
“Are we being followed?” she asks.
“They’re weak,” he says, “and there aren’t many. We just need to keep going.”
More than once, they hear footsteps, the rattle of brush. Is it Special Forces? Are they being tracked? If it is soldiers, they don’t open fire.
And then, once in the open again, Pressia sees the swaths of blood in the dusty dirt. It’s the scene of a battle—the bloody tracks of bodies being dragged away. But whose bodies were dragged—mothers and their children or Special Forces? They pass a mound of debris caught against a berm. Maybe there was a highway here, maybe a holding pond for water. But the berm caught everything that didn’t blow over it. They pass a pickup truck with vacant headlights, a grocery cart, busted concrete slabs, iron rods, and dirt and ash and stuff so blown it’s beyond recognition. Somebody made the truck. Somebody drove it. Somebody pushed the cart and somebody laid the concrete. And there, under a slur of dried mud, a flattened ball. She can almost hear the child kicking it. It crushes her.
After a while, they come across another bloody mess—this time, the bodies of the survivors that haven’t been taken away. The dead litter the ground, their limbs akimbo, the gunshot wounds gaping and dark with dried blood.
They keep going.
Once in the city, Pressia glimpses the distant cross on top of the Dome. Somewhere in these alleys and rubbled streets, she’ll leave the others behind. But it’s hard to stay focused on the Dome. El Capitan was right; she’s growing desperate to find Wilda and the children. She can’t leave until she knows they’re safe. Closing in on the area where the medical tents once stood, they start calling for Wilda as they make their way.
The rain seems like a miracle at first, clearing the smoke, cooling the rubble, dousing anything that still smolders, but it doesn’t let up. It only gets worse, driving down on them as they search for Wilda and the children, calling and calling through the vacant streets. Their clothes and boots are soaked. Pressia’s hair sticks to her face. Bradwell fares better—his wings bead water.
The pyre to dispose of the dead has gone out, and even if it stops raining, it will be a long time before they can get the wood dry enough to start it up again.
They find a group of survivors digging a mass grave, bodies piled nearby. At least now the ground is no longer frozen and gives a little.
Deeper into the city, they start to hear the cries of new orphans and parents calling for their children. The fresh burns and welts and blisters cover the old scars—a layer of fresh pain on old pain. Pressia is more protective of what’s in her backpack than ever. The vial and the formula can make them whole again, can’t it?
“Wilda!” Pressia keeps shouting, her voice joining the chorus of voices calling for the lost. “Wilda!”
Hastings stays close to them so that it’s clear he’s not a threat—maybe even a prisoner. Pressia asks survivors if they’ve seen the children. “They might have looked like they were shaking. They might have been carried in on people’s backs.”
The survivors give only blank stares and shrugs.
But then Pressia sees a man she recognizes from the outpost. He has a spray of metal on his arms and a gear lodged in his jaw.
“Excuse me,” she says.
He looks up.
“We’re looking for children who were being taken care of in the main building at the outpost. They were sickly. They shook and would have probably been with nurses. You were at the outpost. You know who I mean.”
“Gone,” the man says, the gear in his jaw clicking.
“What do you mean—gone?” Pressia steps closer. “Are they dead?” She feels a swell of dread.
“They carried children out on their backs and kept going. Who knows where? Who cares where? There’s nowhere to go. They were everywhere. They wanted to kill us all. I beat one to death with a rock.” The man looks down at his hands, crusted with metal, his fingers curled like he’s holding the rock at this moment. His eyes flash wide. “And it was a kid. It was just this kid. A dead boy. A bloody, dead boy.” He looks up at Pressia. “Like my own son. That was the thing. He looked like my own son—if my son had been born right and lived.”
Did Partridge do this?
“I’m sorry,” Pressia says. “I’m so sorry.”
The man looks at her clearly, as if he’s just woken up. “They were going to take them to the city—those shaking children on their backs, those pale shaking children. The city. For help. But I saw the smoke coming up from the city too, so who knows where they went? Who knows?” He shuffles on.
Hastings, with his enhanced hearing, is good at locating people moaning from the remains of fallen lean-tos and searching for people trapped inside. They stop and dig, finding bodies—some living, some dead from smoke inhalation. El Capitan works with survivors, tending wounds, making splints. As Pressia digs, pulling up the stones and rocks, she still calls for Wilda. It’s become a song, a prayer. Her voice is rough and worn.
Wilda. She shouts it so many times that it doesn’t sound like a name anymore—just two sounds locked together and echoed again and again.
They keep going, passing people who are barely hanging on. She sees a Groupie sitting on rubble—three women she vaguely recognizes. One is so badly burned she won’t make it. What will happen to the others she’s fused to? They won’t survive the death. One holds a wet rag to the victim’s lips. The third stares off.
Pressia, Bradwell, El Capitan, and Hastings help carry the dead to the mass grave. They lean into the cold wind, sweating from the work, hands starting to go numb. Sometimes one of them will walk to the edges just to recover. They breathe heavily. Sometimes they cry. But then they come back. Ready to keep going.
The Dome worshippers are broken. It’s not that they no longer believe in the Dome. It’s that the grief has swept through them. They’re vacant.
One man with a crooked leg and a face tainted with coppery flecks tells them that the dead include Special Forces. “Them bodies over there—we stripped the weapons from their ligaments. Got some of ’em to work even. But we keep the bodies covered. Can’t bear the sight.”
There are three lumps wrapped in a single dark sheet, splotched with dried blood. Pressia understands why they wouldn’t want to look at the enemy’s dead eyes staring at them.
“Young ones they’re sending down now,” the man goes on to say, “like they run out of the ones old enough to be soldiers and sent in their little brothers.”
Pressia imagines arms bulked with weapons too big for their thin frames to hold.
“Careful,” the man says. “Some still out there. Not many, but they got good eyes too.”
Pressia keeps calling for Wilda as they move through the Black Market stalls that have all been burned to nothing, the tarps, carts, and lean-tos. All the wares are charred past recognition, heaped in piles. Survivors pick through them.
Pressia hears whimpering. She walks to a pile of rocks—what used to be a homemade house—and starts digging.
“Someone’s alive here!” she shouts, and the others gather. They don’t step on the pile of rubble—too much weight. But they take the rocks from her as she lifts them up. “I hear a voice!” she says.
&
nbsp; El Capitan and Helmud’s faces are smeared with ash. Bradwell’s face is flushed by the cold. Hastings hasn’t cried—maybe he’s programmed not to—but his face looks lost and broken.
She’s dug closer to the moan. Is she going to pull a final stone away and see Wilda? She wraps her hand around a rock, jimmies it until it gives and she can pull it loose.
And there’s a woman’s face, pale with blue lips—she gasps and then her eyes go glassy. She’s dead, but then there’s whimpering. Could this woman be one of the children’s nurses?
Pressia says, “Wilda! Wilda!” even though she knows it can’t be Wilda—can it?
El Capitan says, “Pressia,” like a warning. Maybe he knows that her heart is set on finding the girl.
And then she pulls away enough stones to see a small gray dog—it looks up at her wide-eyed, shaking. The woman protected the dog, pulling it in tight to her body. Pressia reaches down and grips the dog under its bony ribs.
She lifts the dog, rubs its ears, and as soon as she’s climbed down the rubble, the dog twists from her arms and jumps to the ground, darting off.
Her arms are empty. Her heart feels like it might heave from her chest. She sits down on the dirt.
Bradwell walks over to her. “Are you ready now?”
“What?”
“Have you seen enough?”
She feels dizzy and sick. “If I go in and find Partridge and try to figure out what’s going on in there, and I can get to the labs and start them working on the cure while you all keep looking… You just keep…looking…for Wilda and…” She feels breathless, like her throat is starting to constrict. She puts her hand on her chest.
Bradwell holds his head with both hands. “Pressia, after all we’ve seen, after all these dead bodies and destruction, you want to go in and try to figure out what’s going on? I think we know what’s going on! Partridge needs to be stopped. He’s worse than his father—whether he’s too weak to keep this from happening or ordered it himself.”
She shakes her head. “We have to try to talk to him. We have to try to help the children.”
Burn (The Pure Trilogy) Page 17