Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  “A ruling?” She grips Mother Hestra more tightly.

  “She is the judge in all matters.”

  She pulls back and searches Mother Hestra’s face. “What will she do to me? Punish me? Banish me?”

  “I’ll think of the right way to tell her. It will be okay,” she whispers. The forest makes its soft ticking noises all around them. “Hush now. Hush.”

  EL CAPITAN

  EYES

  EL CAPITAN SHOUTS AT HASTINGS to get in the car. Everyone else is running back to the car, but Hastings stands his ground, his weapons poised to fire. Jesus, what could possibly make the earth vibrate like this? Dusts, yes. But what kind? And how many would it take to rattle El Capitan so violently that he feels the vibrations deep in his own rib cage and Helmud’s ribs too—reverberating on his back? “Hastings!” he shouts again.

  “Leave him!” Bradwell says. “Get in the car.”

  “You can’t reason with Hastings, Cap!” Pressia shouts.

  She’s right. He’s probably programmed to be brave like this; he has no choice but to stand his ground and fight. El Capitan would love to be able to override his own instincts and emotions, mainly fear. Fear claws in his chest like a trapped animal.

  The dust and earth and sand whip around them. He stares at Pressia, her cheeks red from being stung by the ashen dirt in the air. He wants Bradwell to stop being so protective of Pressia. Why does he have to grab her hand like that? She can stand on her own two feet. She doesn’t need him.

  “Take cover!” Hastings shouts.

  “Fine!” El Capitan shouts.

  Pressia and Bradwell pile into the backseat together. El Capitan and Helmud get behind the wheel. They slam the doors, lock them, tighten the windows. The car teeters in the teacup trap. Helmud has buried his head behind El Capitan’s back.

  “Why won’t they show themselves?” Pressia says. “We know they’re there, underground. Why won’t they come up?”

  “They’re toying with us,” Bradwell says. “We just have to sit tight and see what we’re dealing with.”

  “We can’t stay in here!” Pressia says loudly over the howling winds and rumbling earth.

  “Hastings isn’t going to be able to hold them off by himself,” El Capitan says. Could he go out there and stand by Hastings? Does he have the guts? He checks the rifle’s ammo and thinks of his father—his psych discharge. Was it because he wasn’t tough enough—or was he considered crazy because he took big risks? What’s El Capitan’s legacy? He wishes he knew.

  “Even if the car holds up, they can wait us out. We’ll die of dehydration,” Bradwell says.

  “I won’t let that happen,” El Capitan says.

  “Let that happen?” Helmud whispers nervously into the back of El Capitan’s neck.

  Bradwell grabs the back of El Capitan’s seat and pulls himself forward. “If we go out there, they’ll devour us.”

  “Damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” El Capitan says. “I’d rather go out fighting them than hiding out like I’m weak!”

  “Are you calling me weak?” Bradwell says.

  “If you’re just going to sit in here and die, then yes. I’m calling you weak.”

  “Weak, weak,” Helmud says, as if confessing.

  “Listen here, Cap, you’re just some—”

  “Just some what?” El Capitan says. “Lowlife whose mommy and daddy weren’t professor types?”

  “That’s not—”

  “Look!” Pressia shouts, staring out the window.

  The ground shivers in small, coin-size spots, each quivering independently of the others until, one by one, eyes erupt from the ground. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. It’s as if something planted here has suddenly bloomed, but instead of flowers, there are eyes, each one beating back the dirt with jerking blinks. Wet, batting eyes, encrusted at the edges with dust and ash, they squint and shine like strange kinds of clams or oysters that have muscled up from sand in droves.

  Bradwell pushes off the driver’s seat and says, “Damn. These aren’t ordinary Dusts. What are they?”

  El Capitan has seen an eye or two before, out in the Drylands. They’re usually just the smallest vestige of a human—fused to the earth, lost forever. But Hastings, still trying to stand his ground, is startled by them, so much so that he staggers backward, knocking into the car, his weaponry clanging against the hood.

  Pressia reaches forward and grabs El Capitan’s arm on the back of the seat, surprising El Capitan so much that he almost jerks his arm away. He’s not used to people touching him like that. He’s an officer. He tries not to move at all. “They aren’t just eyes, are they?” Pressia says.

  His voice has gone rough in his throat. “No. I don’t think they are.”

  Pressia tightens her grip and El Capitan feels a flush in his cheeks. “What should we do?”

  “We should stick together,” he says.

  “Together,” Helmud says, drawing attention to the fact that they are forever stuck together. El Capitan hates his brother with a quick flash of anger.

  “What do you mean they aren’t only eyes?” Bradwell says.

  Pressia’s hand is still there. “That rumbling,” she says. “What if that’s their bodies beneath them—big ones?”

  “We should make a run for it before they start to rise up, if, in fact, that’s what they’re going to do,” Bradwell says.

  Pressia’s hand slips from El Capitan’s arm. “We don’t have a choice. This is only going to get worse.”

  Hastings rips off a round from one of his automatics. He’s aiming at the eyes themselves, which disappear underground as the bullets pop across the dirt, sending up thin trails of dust that spiral off in the wind.

  But the ground only starts rumbling louder than before, more violently

  “He shouldn’t have done that,” Pressia says.

  As if responding to the threat, dusty bulbous heads, cheekbones, gaping mouths, small rounded nubs for ears emerge from the earth. They draw up their shoulders and scrawny arms. Their bodies are so heavy with the earth, they seem like they’re pulling themselves up from tar. They climb up from the earth—torsos, haunches, legs.

  Human?

  They’re emaciated, their ribs slatted, their shoulders and backs bony. But some also seem to have been fatter. Their middles are draped in what seems like a mesh dirt fabric that used to be skin. Their eyes are still batting furiously, but the rest of their faces seem almost dead—slack and loose-jawed. They move as if their arms and legs are swollen and their joints are stiff.

  Hastings turns and fires, but unlike the Dusts closer to the Dome, they don’t break loose or rip apart. No. The bullets form dark holes. A bead of blood will appear but then coagulate, dark and scabbed, almost immediately.

  “Why aren’t they dying?” Pressia says.

  El Capitan instinctively turns the key, revving the engine. He pumps the gas.

  “What are you doing?” Bradwell shouts.

  “Getting us out of here.” El Capitan throws the car into reverse, but the tire is in too deep. The back wheels just churn up dirt and dust and rocks. He jams the car into drive, trying to urge the car out of the hole. “Come on! Come on!”

  Helmud is clawing his brother’s back, as if he could dig a hole and hide. Hastings keeps shooting.

  Pressia shouts, “It’s not working, Cap!”

  A heavy fist strikes the windshield. The face moves into view—the furiously beating eyelids, the hollow-looking dark pit of a mouth. Another Dust paws at the side windows.

  Hastings is trying to fend them off. Each bullet momentarily stuns them. He’s firing frantically now—not only at the ones by the car, but also at those who are surfacing around him.

  The car is quickly covered in hands, pounding and clawing. El Capitan can hear Hastings firing but can no longer see him. It’s their eyes that El Capitan can’t take—alive and crazed. It would be better if they were deadened eyes, laconic and glassy like those of zombies. He hasn’t th
ought of the word zombies for a long time. He used to download pirated movies that weren’t on the sanctioned list—terrifying ones. And after the Detonations, he saw those dead eyes, charred faces, and bodies walking—leaden, slow, and steady. He saw one of them grip the bark of a tree and when he pulled his hand away, the skin of his arm pulled loose, smoothly, like a long black glove.

  One of the Dusts bucks from the window, howling and spinning. One of its eyes is a bloody mess—just a socket. It falls to its knees. Why has this one fallen? Why now? The other Dusts are drawn to the writhing Dust—maybe by the scent of its blood or by its high-pitched human cry—and, on their heavy legs, they move in on it. The bleeding Dust is flipped to its back. Its one socket bleeding over into its good eye, which is blinking away the blood, the Dust stares up at the other ones and slowly spreads its arms wide in surrender.

  Hastings shouts, “Move! Now!”

  While the Dusts feed on the downed one, Bradwell and El Capitan get out of the car, but Pressia’s frozen. She’s staring at the Dusts feeding on their own kind.

  “Pressia!” Bradwell shouts, leaning back into the car, Fignan locked under one arm. “Let’s go! Now! Move!”

  But it’s as if she can’t hear him. She’s stuck on the horror of this image. El Capitan pushes past Bradwell and says, “Listen to me, Pressia. Can you hear me?”

  She nods.

  “Just close your eyes,” El Capitan tells her. “Just close them and turn your head and look at me.”

  She blinks and then closes her eyes.

  “And turn to me.”

  She turns her head and opens her eyes. For a second, El Capitan can’t speak. There’s something in the way she’s looking at him that makes him breathless. She’s looking to him with hope. She needs him.

  “Now just come on and don’t look back, okay?” She grips his arm and gets out of the car.

  Helmud’s skinny arm pops out over El Capitan’s shoulder. He has something in his fist. He opens it. And there is a . . . bird?

  Pressia takes it. “A swan,” she says. “Thank you, Helmud.”

  “Yeah, he’s quite the artist, right, Helmud?” El Capitan says, furious that his brother—his idiot brother—just stole this moment from him. He’s been back there whittling a swan? “Quite the gift giver.”

  They all start running, guns on their backs, downhill toward the amusement park.

  “Is she okay?” Bradwell asks El Capitan.

  “Fine!” he says.

  “Thank you for that back there,” Bradwell says.

  El Capitan refuses to answer. If he did, he’d be agreeing that Pressia is somehow Bradwell’s responsibility. And as far as El Capitan can tell, she isn’t.

  The ground is trembling so violently that El Capitan loses his balance and falls hard, scraping his palms. There, in front of his face, is an eye. It blinks so hard that he can hear it clicking. El Capitan gets up and keeps running.

  The amusement park looms in front of them. It’s wrapped in a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Through it, El Capitan can see some of the park: a great ship lying on its side, a giant clown head—Crazy John-Johns himself—his skull cracked but still poised on a neck made of a massive rusted spring, and the Ferris wheel that must have broken loose from its dock, rolled, and snagged on a set of guy wires. The bottom of the Ferris wheel and its multicolored cars have been lost in drifts of windswept dirt. All the colors are faded, but it’s still one of the most beautiful things El Capitan has seen in a long time. He thinks of how many times his mother had promised to take them. “Next year, when times aren’t so tight,” she’d say. Just before she was taken away to the asylum, she told him she’d take him to the amusement park when she got home again. He told her that it didn’t matter. “It’s just stupid Crazy John-Johns. Like I care about a stupid clown.” But now he wishes they had come, just once. Breathless and terrified, he can’t help but say to Helmud, “Will you look at that!”

  “Look at that,” Helmud says. Maybe it stirs a memory in Helmud too.

  “Which way?” Pressia shouts.

  “Go left!” Hastings shouts. “Follow me.” He’s strong and longlegged. He could go a lot faster, but he’s sticking by them, scanning the terrain at their feet and the horizon in all directions.

  “It was their eyes, wasn’t it?” Bradwell shouts. “That’s the most human thing about them. The part that’s vulnerable. If we can get at their eyes . . .”

  El Capitan thinks of the Beasts in the Rubble Fields and how you have to find that one exposed slip of living, breathing tissue, under what seems like an armored stone shell, and dig your knife in deep to kill it. The eyes, he thinks—of course. He whips his gun around front and fires at more eyes peering up in the distance.

  “No!” Pressia shouts. “It draws their attention!”

  El Capitan looks back over his shoulder, and Pressia’s right. A few of the Dusts have looked up from the devoured Dust and are looking in their direction now.

  Pressia pulls out her knife and, while running, jabs it into the center of an eye that suddenly appeared nearby. It bursts with blood that soaks the dirt. The ground heaves and then goes still. This quieter death doesn’t draw the other Dusts’ attention.

  “Here,” Bradwell says, holding out his hand. “Give me the knife. I’ll do it.”

  “No, I’ll do it,” El Capitan says.

  But Pressia sprints out in front of them. She pierces one eye and then the next, clearing a path with quick jabs.

  “Helmud!” El Capitan says, realizing his brother is armed. “Give me your whittling knife.”

  Helmud shakes his head. No, no, no.

  “Hand it over now!”

  No, no, no.

  El Capitan reaches over his shoulder and whaps his brother on the head, one side and then the other. “Give it!”

  No.

  “Maybe he wants to do it himself,” Bradwell says.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Crazy!” Helmud says.

  Pressia looks over; her knife is bloody. “Cap!” she says. Does she mean stop beating up Helmud? Does she want him to let Helmud try to kill some Dusts?

  It’s clear now that it’s a losing battle anyway Dusts pull themselves up from the ground on either side. The ones that devoured the bloodyeyed Dust are now filling in from behind. There are too many of them closing in. So why not let Helmud have at it? Helmud doesn’t have it in him anyway. He doesn’t have the muscularity, the timing. El Capitan would actually like to see Helmud fail. After he made that swan and gave it to Pressia, this’ll remind Helmud of his weakness, his dependency, and that he should stay in his place. “You ready, Helmud?”

  “Ready Helmud!” Helmud says.

  And so El Capitan spots a Dust close by. He lowers himself to the ground, tilting to his right. Helmud raises his whittling knife high in the air. He drives it down into the dirt, almost half a foot off the mark.

  “Not even close! Give me the goddamn knife!”

  Helmud shakes his head violently.

  El Capitan lets him try again. This time Helmud nails it. The eye pops with blood and disappears. El Capitan says, “This one, here.” Again Helmud hits the eye dead-on. El Capitan keeps going, letting Helmud get in shot after shot. As much as he hates Helmud for getting the hang of this, he’s suddenly proud of him too. El Capitan keeps them steady. Helmud drives in the knife. They make a good team, get in a rhythm, and move quickly Maybe Pressia will see what a good brother El Capitan is. Bradwell sticks by Pressia, and El Capitan moves in close to her too.

  Hastings is now behind them, the ground saturated with a dotted path, vibrating with the deaths of Dusts, quick convulsions.

  Pressia looks up. She understands now that there are too many of them. “It’s over,” she says. “We’re outnumbered.”

  They stop and turn slow circles as the Dusts move in.

  The chain-link fence surrounding the amusement park is only fifty yards away to their right. But would that be a safe haven? People are k
eeping watch from their lookout atop the roller coaster. It’s possible that they could be working with the Dusts or using them to draw in prey. They set up the teacup trap. Maybe this is all part of their plan.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” Pressia says.

  His heart twinges. Her gaze is so intense, it’s as if she’s trying to memorize his face. No one has ever looked at El Capitan like that.

  Hastings says, “Aim for the eyes and open fire.”

  “It’ll just call more of them in,” Pressia says, but then she shakes her head. “I guess it doesn’t matter if you’re killed by a hundred Dusts or a thousand.”

  “It’s all math at a certain point,” Bradwell says.

  “Do what you want. I’m going out shooting,” El Capitan says.

  “Shooting,” Helmud says.

  PRESSIA

  CRAZY JOHN-JOHNS

  AS EL CAPITAN, BRADWELL, and Hastings open fire, Pressia’s ears are ringing. Her vision blurs with sand and grit. She holds her knife tightly and is ready to keep fighting when she’s struck on the back so hard she falls forward, landing hard. Her knife flies from her grip. Her palm skids across the ground, burning.

  She can hear the Dust—its labored grunting.

  As she whips around to face it, she feels the binding that keeps the vials in place twist and unravel, loosened by the Dust’s sharp claw-strike across her back. Before she can pull the vials to her body, they tumble and roll in three different directions. She calls out, “Bradwell! Cap! Hastings!” The Dust lurches toward her. Hastings fires a shot, obliterating the Dust’s head, and it falls to the ground.

  In the distance, the dirt starts to convulse. The quivering earth lets loose a cloud of dust. A fine crack splinters the dirt, running jaggedly toward Bradwell. He’s oblivious. His head is up, his eyes scanning in every direction.

  El Capitan shouts, “Bradwell! Move!”

  The noise of the rumbling is so loud that Bradwell can’t hear. As Pressia scrambles away from the Dust, she wants to run to him, to pull him to safety. But the vials—she can’t abandon them. She reaches and grabs one vial, then the next.