Third Wave: Bones of Eden

by Zaide Bishop

  Not everyone had survived. They found the broken bodies of Kilo, X-Ray and Love. There was no time or energy for a proper farewell. They left them where they found them and let their tears fall silently as they trudged back to the makeshift camp.

  Despite their losses, many more of the Kai had been found alive. William carried Romeo, whose ankle was twisted and sooty-black with bruising. Dog, Mike, Bravo and Nab returned with a dead duck they had found with a broken wing and an armload of oranges and coconuts. Vaca was stuck in a tree; Able and Sierra both had broken fingers that had to be splinted and placed in slings.

  By the time Sugar returned, desolate and haunted, only six of the tribe were still missing, including Charlie.

  They gathered in the building, huddled around their struggling fire as darkness fell again. There was not much food to go around, but water was the much more pressing concern. The coconut milk was rationed with painfully precise measurements, but even with the oranges, it did little to wet the palate.

  Tango sat with her arm around Xícara, who rested against her, dizzy and too tired. His injury from the earthquake had left him off balance, and while he hadn’t been hurt in the tsunami, he’d stumbled several times since then and one fall had resulted in an ugly cut to his palm.

  The air was putrid and thick with misery. Sugar had refused to eat or drink. Under the mud, he was sickeningly pallid.

  “We need to move in the morning,” Fox said. “There’s no food or water here. We have to go inland.”

  “We have to go east,” Zebra insisted. “And find Fifteen and her people.”

  “Inland, then east,” Fox corrected. “The point is, we can’t stay here any longer.”

  “We’re not going anywhere until we find Charlie,” Sugar said, curling and uncurling his fist, watching his own fingers move. “I’m not leaving until I know what happened to her.”

  “You said you found her tracks,” Tango said. The look in his eyes worried her. She didn’t know how to comfort him, and it seemed no one else did either. “Beyond the reach of the flood. We’ll go there first, pick up her trail. She’ll be looking for food and water too. She won’t have gone far with a baby.”

  Fox nodded. “Tango is right. We can do both.”

  India frowned, looking over those she had treated throughout the day. “It will be slow. Some of us can’t move quickly or easily. Every mile with fatigue and dehydration, we risk more injuries.”

  “But we can’t stay here.” Fox dragged his finger along the wall, leaving a smear in the grime.

  “We’ll be okay,” Tango promised India. “We’ll help each other.”

  Sugar nodded. “Okay. We go after Charlie.”

  Tango exchanged a concerned look with Xícara. Somehow, it didn’t seem like their leader had the best interest of the group at heart.

  * * *

  Charlie had made good distance, but hunger and necessity were winning out. It was a gnawing ache. It had started as discomfort, but slowly it was becoming a living thing, coiled inside her, biting and squirming. She needed food and more freshwater if she was going to keep making milk.

  She was forging her trail on the higher ground, avoiding the thick, pungent swathe of ruin from the tsunami as much as possible. However, the landscape dipped in places, and there was no choice but to pick through the debris. She saw a few living animals, but she couldn’t hunt with her daughter in her arms. To run, climb or throw a spear, she would need both hands—even just making a weapon, despite the excess of materials, would require her to have free hands. On top of that, the world was full of dangers, not just predators, but rusty metal and broken things.

  Charlie was going to have to leave the baby behind.

  She was in a suburb now, with crumbling houses and overgrown yards. The lush green of the feral gardens made her uneasy. These places were too well colonized. Snakes, rats, possums, ants—plenty of creatures who would make a meal of an undefended infant.

  She kept walking up the middle of the broad avenue, the median a nest of dead weeds as tall as she was. The cracked bitumen was hot enough to make her feet sting, and she saw a blacksnake vanishing into the dry growth. Her belly growled, but she couldn’t put the baby down here, not even to pounce on easy food. The hot ground would blister her soft skin.

  Up ahead, she saw a huge gray box in a sea of bitumen. A three-story-tall billboard boasted “Suncoast Mall” and “400 specialty stores,” but much of the sign had cracked and lay in plastic spears as long as Charlie in the car park below.

  She made her way past the odd parked car baking in the sun, their slick surfaces hot enough to cook on, to the gaping maw of the entrance.

  The immense glass doors were shattered, and inside, the mall was dusty and haunted by the ghosts of the world before. Skylights illuminated the space in a fusty beige. Small birds took to wing, swallows that had made vast mud colonies along the ceiling and pigeons that had nested on every high, horizontal place. Fake plants had turned gray with time, and a huge plastic fir tree was decorated in red and gold, tinsel and metallic spheres, golden plastic birds and deer.

  There were no obvious signs of anything alive but for the birds. Charlie made her way up metal stairs, peering into the gloomy stores, smelling mice and seeing the endless treasure of the world before: clothes, pots, pans, knives, frightening dolls with alarming proportions, faceless mannequins and dead electronics.

  She stopped by a glass-paneled door with “Hauser and Associates” written in gold. The glass was unbroken here. She pushed it open. It was a little darker inside, but oddly pristine.

  There were several large wooden filing cabinets against the wall.

  Carefully, Charlie laid the baby on the desk and opened a drawer. Papers, brittle with age, but unstained. She tore them up, making a bed, then laid the baby inside. The little creature was tired, already only half awake. It had been an exhausting night and day for both of them.

  “Be safe, baby,” she whispered. “I’ll come back for you.”

  But darkness fell, and she did not return.

  * * *

  The world was the color of dawn on the ocean. Shimmering and surreal, not entirely solid in the ways it should have been. India sat up, and as she looked around, the sky became the earth, and she was standing on a perfect, flawless mirror. She could see the soles of her own feet and a flock of ravens spiraling overhead.

  “India.”

  She turned and saw Juliet. Not as she had last seen her—torn open, a morass of organs and gore—but whole and glowing with health. She held a bundle of leather in her arms that jerked and twitched, sheltering life within.

  “Juliet,” India said. “Don’t you know you’re dead?”

  “Of course. But you need to find Soul.”

  “Who is Soul?” India asked, but Juliet was gone. India spun around only to find they were now side by side. Juliet held out the leather bundle, and India peeled back the layers to find a baby—squash-faced and bloody with afterbirth. It squalled angrily, pumping a bloody, purple fist into the air.

  “It looks just like Sugar.” She glanced up at Juliet in surprise. “This is Charlie’s baby.”

  “Don’t wait, India.”

  Juliet and the baby were gone.

  “Wait!” She turned around, but she was alone with the perfect dawn sky. “Juliet, wait! I don’t know the way! You didn’t tell me the way!”

  * * *

  India sat up with a gasp to find Tare blinking sleepily beside her. Around the camp, the others roused in alarm, woken by the clacking of the bones and fishing lures in her hair.

  “Just a dream,” Tare murmured, settling again, one arm around her waist.

  “No.” She pushed him away and scrambled to her feet, scooping up a water bottle and one of the spears.

  “Where are you going?” Sugar hissed. �
�It’s too dark. We need to stay put until morning.”

  “No, Juliet told me I have to find Soul.”

  Tare groaned and sat up. “India, Juliet is dead.”

  “And the dead do not lie,” India retorted. She started off up the cracked pavement.

  “India, where are you going? India! Oh, for the love of...” He scrambled for his things, then said to someone else, “No. Stay. I’ll keep her safe. If we’re not back by morning, keep moving. We’ll catch up.”

  She felt a small wave of gratitude. She had not been entirely certain he would trust her—not in the middle of the night, not after all they’d been through when he was tired and sore and the air was thick with such desperate hopelessness.

  He fell into step behind her, then yawned. “So, where are we going?”

  “To find Soul.”

  “That’s not Juliet’s mutant dog, is it? Because that’s dead too.”

  “No.”

  The moon scudded between clouds, periodically making the cracks in the road treacherous. Sometimes India would see the glittering of eyes watching them from doorways, windows and down drains. Sometimes the eyes were vast, as if skulking creatures the size of cars were hiding all around them, simply too still to be noticed. Mostly they were small and seemed to be slinking away at their approach.

  “Remember when we came here the first time?” Tare asked. “Not ‘here’ here, but to the mainland?”

  “I remember I was swept out into the channel and you saved me,” she said.

  She saw his teeth flash as he grinned. “Yeah. I was thinking about the car, though. When we had sex for the first time.”

  She smiled, despite herself. “I thought we’d die on the mainland. I didn’t think I had anything to lose.”

  “Well, you sure surprised me... So I’ll ask again, who is Soul?”

  “Charlie’s baby.”

  He paused, then nodded. “Okay. But what about Charlie?”

  “Juliet didn’t mention her.”

  “That doesn’t bode well.”

  “We may still find them both. One thing at a time.”

  “One thing at a time,” he agreed quietly.

  They both heard the sound at the same time. A squalling cry, like a seabird, quieter than it should have been. Not distant, but muffled somehow.

  “Do you hear her?” India demanded.

  Tare nodded. “This way.”

  They threaded through the streets, taking shortcuts through overgrown yards and down alleyways, still blocked with rusting Dumpsters. The crying was coming from deep inside an old shopping mall. Once it had been a place of many windows, and now it was a place of broken glass. They picked their way through the shards, feeling their way up a musty, dark stairwell and into an office with the words “Hauser and Associates” embossed on the door.

  Seeds had taken root, then died in the carpet. The crusty bodies of dead bugs crunched underfoot, and the crying of the infant was close, but still oddly muffled.

  Tare felt his way across the room while India waited for her eyes to adjust to the dim moonlight filtering in through the skylights behind them.

  “There,” she said. “On your left.”

  Tare stopped with his hand on a filing cabinet, then slowly opened the second drawer. She was there and squalling in protest, packed in a nest of ripped, musty paper.

  He scooped her up. “She’s cold.”

  India padded to his side, looking down on the tiny, scrunched face that was already familiar to her.

  “She looks like Sugar,” India echoed her earlier words.

  Tare snorted. “A bit. Also kind of like a dried piece of mango. Come on, she needs food, and I know just where to get it.”

  India raised an eyebrow. “You do?”

  “Sure. I don’t think Raven will mind sharing, do you?”

  * * *

  Fox was frustrated, and Sugar would not stop crying. The remainder of the tribe had moved from the apartment block to the mall some three miles east to wait, but there was no sign of Charlie, and they hadn’t progressed any further. The dawn had come and passed into morning, but still the tribe was stationary and with not enough food or clean water to go around. Whiskey had taken the tribe’s second daughter to breast. She was hungry, and Fox was certain she was smaller than Raven had been. Or perhaps Raven had just grown faster than he realized. Either way, the new baby seemed close to starving, and he wondered if Charlie had been able to feed her at all before leaving her.

  “Sugar, we have to move,” Fox urged. “There isn’t clean water here. Whiskey needs more to drink if she’s going to keep making milk, and we have to think about your daughter too now. Not to mention everyone else.”

  “I’m not going without her.” Sugar wiped away tears, but his cheeks were instantly wet with more. “She hid Soul, she must still be alive. We have to wait for her.”

  “We can’t,” Fox pushed. “We have to go. Charlie is a fine tracker. She knows which way we are going. She will catch up.”

  “No!” Sugar got up, fists clenched, and went at Fox like he would punch him. Fox retreated a few steps, but then Sugar just sank down again, face in his filthy hands, sobbing once more. He had barely touched the baby. He did not seem to want it. He only wanted his mate, and while Fox understood his distress, it was irrational. Dangerous.

  Dog waved for Fox to join him, out of Sugar’s hearing. He sighed, clambering over to join his brother, looking across the barren car park and, a few hundred meters down the slope, the brown stinking sea of mud left by the tsunami.

  “We’re going to have to leave him,” Dog said softly.

  Fox knew that, but that didn’t make it any easier. “He’ll die here alone.”

  “We’ll die with him if we stay. We need water. We need to be away from all this mud and rot, or people’s injuries are going to get septic. I don’t want to do it either, but he’s not giving us a lot of choice.”

  Fox looked back at Sugar, then to Whiskey and the babies. “If there was another way...”

  Dog looked hopeful. “Do you have a plan?”

  Fox sighed. “No.” A drawn-out silence. “Fine. It’s going to be enough of a struggle helping the wounded. You’re right. If he wants to stay...”

  He would die. Maybe Charlie would catch up, maybe she wouldn’t, but if she was moving she would be going east, going to Zebra’s mystery tribe. Fox doubted she would abandon her baby like that if she were well, though. Sometimes, staying alive meant ugly sacrifices.

  Just like the one he was about to make.

  “We’re moving.” He raised his voice to address the rest of the tribe. “We have to keep going east. To the river, to see if there really are other people there. I think Charlie will go that way too, but even if she doesn’t, we can’t stay here.”

  “No!” Sugar rose to his feet again, face flushed with anger. “We wait here for Charlie.”

  “Wait if you want, Sugar. I am taking Whiskey, the babies and anyone else who wants to come.”

  “You can’t take Soul, she’s mine!”

  “And how will you feed her without Whiskey?” Dog demanded, rising to Fox’s side. “Are you going to let her starve to death?”

  Sugar’s eyes looked wild, confused. “I’m the tribe leader. Me. Do you understand? We stay.”

  Fox shook his head. “I’m sorry, Sugar.”

  He went to Whiskey and helped her to her feet, taking Raven. He turned to find Sugar right beside him and braced for an attack, but Sugar froze—unwilling to strike him while he held the baby. India took Soul, and Tare handed Whiskey a spear.

  One by one, the remains of the tribe got to their feet, Zebra supported by Tango and Maria carrying Romeo.

  “You said you would help me find her.” Sugar was desolate.

 
“We found Soul,” Fox said softly. “But the coconut milk has run out. It’s time to move on.”

  “We’ll leave her a note,” Dog said. He scooped up a handful of mud and turned to the flat, cream expanse of the wall. He smeared the words “Tribe East” on the plasterwork in two-foot-high letters. “See? She will come after us.”

  Sugar shook his head. “What if she is hurt? What if she can’t follow? What if she dies here, alone, because I didn’t stay?”

  “Then she will be glad her baby didn’t die too,” Whiskey said and began to walk. One by one, they fell in behind her. One by one, they left Sugar behind. Fox was the last, Raven now asleep with her head on his shoulder, her bottom bare on his arm.

  Sugar sat on the ground, head in his hands, shoulders trembling.

  “Come, brother.” Fox offered him a hand.

  After a long pause, Sugar accepted, and together they followed their kin.

  Far across the ocean to the south, black storm clouds rolled inland, turning the air white with bullet rain.

  Chapter Five

  It was raining so hard, Charlie almost couldn’t find the mall again. Even the monolithic structure had vanished in the pelting rain, and she ran along the avenue, a green tarp held over her head, two bottles of water thumping painfully against her bruised hip.

  She had spread the tarp when the rain started, drinking greedily the water that pooled there, before filling two scavenged water bottles and heading back toward her baby. She had found a bird’s nest and eaten the fledglings raw and whole, then found a whole garden of mint gone to seed and eaten great handfuls of the stuff. She had gathered as much as she could carry in plastic bags, which were strapped to her back on belts, along with spears made from clothing racks and butcher’s knives harvested from the abandoned mall. Hunting knives and a coil of wire were strapped around her waist too.

  She was almost full. Certainly the water had helped. She was still badly wounded, but armed and with these supplies, she would be okay. Her breasts were full and heavy again. She would feed the baby and go east.