by Rose Francis
He shook his head. “Building's brick, so most of it wouldn't burn. And the surrounding area is sand, rocky tracts, astroturf or parking lot.”
“Okay,” Christine said. “Now I know we're all dangerously high, if we're contemplating this.” The bird fluttered behind her, its head cocked to the side, and repeated her words in David’s voice. She ignored it and looked at Tyson again.
“In an insane world, maybe the sane thing would be to burn down a school.”
“I assume you didn't enjoy your education.”
“I was a model student,” he said with an impish grin. “Didn't mean I didn't want to burn the fucking place to cinders.”
“But between the smoke and the blaze, we should be able to sneak away—provided we leave through the exit on the far side.”
They set to work. Ilsa had the least experience starting fires, but she was also the one who was moving slowest. Christine and Tyson worked on lining up desks so that a fire in the central hall would spread down each subsequent hall.
Striking the pry ends of their two remaining staves together, Ilsa managed to get a spark to light the carpet. She squealed in delight.
Tyson and Christine happened to be on the main hall, and both started walking towards Ilsa. When he saw the small fire, he said, “That's probably a signal we've kindled enough.”
“You think that'll do it?” Christine asked, still huffing from the exertion of working so heavily in a clouded building.
On the wall behind them were two flags, the school’s flag and a different, more ancient flag. Tyson removed the school's flag from the wall and dipped it against the little flames at Ilsa's feet. The tassels on the fringe of the flag caught, and he held the flag underneath the cyphered flag, which lit quickly.
He handed Ilsa the burning scrap for a moment so he could hoist his duffle, then took it back from her. He marched back to his hallway and laid the flag against a stack of desks. They started to burn. The fire moved to the middle hallway. Tyson walked the flag to the far hall, where Christine had done much of the fire planning. He let the flag light her pile of kindling and wooden chairs. When it caught light, he joined the others at the end of the center hall. The desks there were already catching from Ilsa's carpet fire, but still he made sure he stoked the flames.
Christine led the way down the hall. Tyson trailed, raising the burning flag over his head, so it caught the low-hanging ceiling as they went and licked at the walls. When they reached the exit, he threw the burning flag into the nearest classroom, and left it. They paused a moment.
“He would have been there, about,” she said, pointing at seven o’clock. “Which means we could head in that direction, towards that building,” she pointed in the direction of a short office beside a much larger bank, “While keeping the fire between us.”
“But,” Ilsa said, and nudged her hand from one to midnight, “he's moving closer, so he'll be nearer to the school behind us.” They could see a sign for a dentist's office where her hand was now pointing.
“We should move,” Tyson said, “or he'll be all the way here.”
They moved quickly, cutting across a small grassy field that seemed far enough from the fire that it wouldn't catch.
The office was heavily fortified, with bars on the front windows and a metal door. “Shit,” Christine said.
“It's the nitrous inside,” Tyson said. “It's like the cloud, but clean. Junkies would break into dentist offices and take the nitrous.”
“We'll try the back,” Ilsa said, and led them around. There was a thigh-high brown fence around the back. The latch was rusted shut, so they couldn't open it. Tyson stepped over it without much trouble. and Christine got one foot up and was able to hop the rest of the way.
“Um, a little help,” Ilsa said.
“Hold up,” Tyson said. “Let's see if I can get inside back here. If I can, I can open the front door. If I can't, we'll just have to lift her back over when we leave anyway.”
Tyson slipped quietly up to the backdoor. Christine sensed Ilsa's worry and stayed back with her. She offered the girl her hand. Ilsa barely took it.
“In,” Tyson whispered. “Meet us out front.”
Ilsa started to walk. Christine hesitated, not sure whether to go in the back or hop back over to be with Ilsa. She didn't wait, and let go of Christine's hand, leaving her alone in the back.
* * *
Ilsa moved fast. She didn't like being out in the open alone. She tried to look through the barred windows, but couldn't see anything. She knocked on the door.
Still nothing. She turned around. The night was brighter, for the burning school. She stared at the door they’d exited, now engulfed in flames. She swore she saw the shadows move and coalesce into the shape of a man. And that man walked across the field towards her. His footsteps burned, and smoldering ash flickered off him like he was a fire himself. No features were illuminated by the light; he remained a silhouette. It was the man-catcher; it had to be. And suddenly she felt herself floating towards him, and as she did, she noticed a single detail on his face. A mouth that started to twist into a grin, although there wasn't a mouth—there was just a hole in the shape of a mouth, in the shadow through which she saw the fire burning.
The door opened abruptly, and Tyson touched her shoulder, which made her start. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Inside was a maze without light.”
“The,” she said, whirling back towards the school. There was no man walking through the field towards them, and the burnt-in footprints were gone, too. “Fucking Hal,” she said, and pushed past him.
“It's not the light,” Christine said, “it's his eyes. His night vision is fucked. Don't know if that's age, or the Hal, or crap genes...” She was hastily building something on the floor. Ilsa recognized it almost immediately, even in the low light.
“Rat trap?” Ilsa asked.
“Same principle as the rat traps. I'm just setting it to catch a much bigger rat.” It was built around one of their staffs. She led Ilsa into the back and set the device against the fence, right where she and Tyson had come over. It was hasty work, but it made Ilsa feel better.
“We should rest,” she said, leading Ilsa inside by the hand. “We'll want to sneak come the morning, and get as much distance as we can.” Tyson nodded.
Ilsa wanted to sleep on the waiting room couch. But she knew that in the morning it would be visible through the front windows, so she took up a spot on the floor and left the cushions where they were.
* * *
Setting fire to the school had taken more out of them than they realized. The sun was coming up when Christine's eyes opened. Then she heard it, the snap of breaking wood, and what she thought was a man swearing under his breath.
“Tyson,” she whispered, kicking in his direction. He held up his hand, which meant not only had he heard it, too, but he was awake and aware. He rolled onto his toes and started towards the door. Before he was close enough to try to barricade it with his body, it opened into him, and the shortened barrels from a sawed-off shotgun pushed through the opening.
Tyson could neither move out of the way or move to take the full brunt of the shotgun blast, though because of where he stood, he took the majority of the pellets. The rest hit Christine. She doubled over and rolled onto the floor.
“Birdshot,” the stranger said, walking into the room. He was wearing an expensive-looking mask, with a hooded sweatshirt draped over it. “Wanted alive. Baby and mother specifically.”
Tyson and Christine lay on the ground, moaning, and he addressed Ilsa. “Pack your things quickly and I won't kill them.”
“How, how?” Tyson stammered.
“Did I find you? Burning flag. Amateur move. Told me which door you exited. Trampled grass told me which direction you went. Too easy.”
“Wouldn't be so certain,” Tyson said.
“Why's that?”
“Gave us both barrels,” he said, finding his feet, “and you haven't reloaded.”
“Shit,” the man-catcher said. He reached into his pocket for more shells, but his hand was jittering enough that he dropped them. He let the shotgun fall out of his hand and went for a dagger on his hip.
Tyson was fast, and had hold of his arm before he could thrust with it. Christine quickly grabbed the other. “Stop fighting,” Tyson said. “This doesn't need to end with blood.”
Then the man-catcher went limp in his arms. Tyson stood up. The other man's blood was all over him, his knife embedded to the hilt. “Fuck,” he said.
Christine brought him wipes from the exam room behind them. “Thanks,” he said, and started to wipe himself down. “Not a bad place to get shot,” Tyson added, looking at the sterile room.
“The chest?” Christine deadpanned.
“We can clean the wounds, limit the chance of an infection. It's going to hurt like hell. But it'll be easier with that.” He gestured back to the dentist's chair, which had straps, and a torturous-looking device designed to secure the head in place.
“But before we do that, we should look through his gear,” Christine said.
“Can we, can we move him first?” Ilsa asked.
“Shit, yeah,” Tyson said. He grabbed the body by the legs, started to pull, and dragged the body out the back. She heard a metal hinge squeak, then a loud thump as the body fell into a dumpster behind the clinic. “Sorry,” he said, panting. “I'm so used to scavenging bodies it's second nature to ignore the corpse. Wasn't much in his pockets, which is smart. Shit in pockets can catch and tear and fall out, or just clank and make noise.”
He knelt beside Christine, who dumped out the man-catcher's pack. Christine pushed all of the various items that weren't air-related towards him.
“It's a couple of days of supplies, three if we stretch out the air like we should. That's counting a tank apiece for surgery.”
“Surgery?” Ilsa asked.
Tyson nodded in the direction of the exam room. “I don't know about you,” he said to Christine, “but I don't want you fucked up when you're cleaning my gunshot wound.”
“Yeah,” she nodded. Then she noticed the odd shape of the man-catcher's mask. “You didn't think to grab his…” then she saw the mask dangling already from Tyson's hand.
“Figured it would probably have a better seal than the shitty ones Coronetto used.”
He handed it to Ilsa. “What about his ship? Can we-” Ilsa's hands and voice trembled.
“No clue how long he's been following us,” Tyson said, shaking his head. “It could be anywhere or nowhere.”
Then he took off his shirt, walked into the exam room, and sat down in the chair. Christine popped one of their new cannisters into her tank and followed him. Ilsa assisted. It was slow-going.
“Hard not to want to remove them,” Tyson said. “It's like I've got a hundred little bug eggs under my skin, just waiting to hatch their way out. Fuck,” he said, “now I'm hallucinating that.”
“Serves you right,” Christine said.
“For not taking the whole load of shot?” he asked.
“For putting that thought in our heads.” Ilsa heaved. “And I'm not going to be any better off, when I'm not dipping into our cannisters.”
“Well, just hurry with the alcohol. We want to get out of here as soon as we can. We still have to make port before these tanks run dry.”
When Tyson's wounds were clean, he offered to prepare breakfast, if Christine wanted Ilsa to clean her wounds instead of him. The Hal hit her harder after being on clean air. She saw the shot in her arm and stomach as boils the size of her middle finger and thumb joined, swelling with massive, terrifying insects before they burst all over Ilsa, one at a time. It was all she could do not to shriek as the insects buzzed around them.
“I hate you,” Christine said to Tyson as she left the exam room.
“You'll hate me less when you taste breakfast.”
“If I can keep it down, without thinking about the putrid shit the flies crawled out of my arm were covered in.”
“And there goes my appetite,” he said.
“Which probably puts us even.”
They ate breakfast, pressed insect hardtack from man-catcher's bag.
They packed up their supplies, as well as the man-catcher's, and were about to leave.
“We should take his gun,” Ilsa said. “He's got at least another couple shells.”
“The gun seems like a good idea,” Tyson said, “but to most folks, it's a status symbol. Most Middle Level folks can afford a gun or a few shells, but not both. It paints a target on you—one that ain't going to wash off if you ditch it later.”
“He's right,” Christine said. “I've seen it myself. Hardly nobody but Pocas can afford to fill a gun, so much so most folks just assume one's empty until they're proved otherwise. A gun screams ‘rube with more dollars than sense’.”
* * *
They walked for several more days, each night sheltering as best they could in nearby buildings. On the third night, they were caught out without a building to shelter in, so they laid fallen branches over the stump of a dead tree.
The next day, they saw it: a thin twig sticking out of the ground to grasp at the sky along the horizon.
“That's the port,” Tyson said.
“It's shorter than I thought it would be,” Ilsa said.
“Women always complain about that,” he said, and Ilsa badly stifled a laugh. “The scavenger ports don't break the cloud anymore. Made it too easy for the Pocas to raid them. Around the same time they stopped using names, too. Most people just call it the port, and know they mean the nearest. The far-ranging scavengers use numbers. That's 39-106. It's lattitude and longitude.”
“How are you so fucking sober right now?” Christine asked.
“You look like a giant rabbit,” he said through an idiot's grin. “But Hals always made me super focused. Dopey, and more than a little self-conscious, at least until I got the whole way toasted, but focused.”
“Ah!” Ilsa cried out, stumbling onto her knee.
“You okay?” Christine asked, kneeling beside her.
“Cunt, cunt, cunt, yaah!” she screamed.
“Yeah, well I think you're a triple-cunt, too.”
“Contractions,” Ilsa said. She grimaced. “And I think I peed myself.”
“That's not pee,” Tyson said. “That's a whole heaping womb’s worth of fluid.”
“For real?” Christine asked. Ilsa didn't have the strength to do anything besides nod. “Fuck. Fuck fuck!” Christine yelled.
Ilsa took a deep breath and smiled. “Aren't I supposed to be the one freaked out?” she asked.
“You're calm because you're calm on a Hal. But we were so fucking close.”
“Maybe we can still make it,” Tyson said. “You can walk through the first few hours of contractions.”
“That first contraction dropped her,” Christine said. “What if next time she fell?”
“We could find a carpet. And drag her?”
“And doing that we would get there sometime next Tuesday,” Christine said. “We need to get her inside someplace.”
“But I don't want to have my baby 'someplace',” Ilsa whimpered.
“It'll be okay,” Christine said, stroking her cheek. “Can you get up?”
“If the two of you can help me,” she said, and put out her arms. They pulled her to her feet with a little rocking.
They walked another handful of hours, before spotting a building. “It looks like there's a little shack ahead,” Tyson said. “And I don't even think it's an outhouse.”
“That's a bonus,” Christine muttered.
They made it another twenty feet before Ilsa stumbled and curled into herself. “Shit,” she said. “I can't go further,” she said, and Christine helped her down to her knees.
“Isn't there any way for us to get her there?” Christine asked, pointing to the shack, nearer, but still hours away.
“Unless you think the two of us can carry her that dis
tance—without disturbing the baby.”
“Damnit,” she sighed, kneeling down beside Ilsa.
A flock of birds startled her, racing from a tree behind them to cloud the sky. They cried and shrieked, and Christine heard David, Sanjay, and Sharon yelping with laughter as they rushed overhead. A few feathers dropped and she ducked, dodging the razor-sharp quills. They flew into the bushes near Tyson.
He pulled a dead rat from his pack, and began cutting the meat off it. She wondered whether it was to distract himself, or comfort her and Ilsa. Then, his eyes darted to the brush. She glanced at him, but he was ignoring the birds, muttering something about rabbits. Maybe the birds were after rabbits. They must be Poca-birds, if they were eating rabbit rather than rat.
“Be careful,” Christine muttered. “Poca-birds. Are tracking us.” She wondered how David had become a Poca, but then again, this explained where he’d gone off to. That made sense of all the discrepancies in numbers.
One of the Poca-birds swooped lower, and she saw David’s reproving face nestled in the feathers. He opened his mouth to speak, and a groaning screech like the sound of two girders scraping together came out.
Christine, insulted, was about to retort, but couldn’t get her mouth to form the right sounds. She let out a noise that was blue and orange, colours that didn’t exist apart from at sunset. The David-Poca-bird went quiet.
“Scraps and bones,” it sang suddenly. “Razor thrones. Rags and moans. Flesh and groans.”
Christine opened her mouth again to ask what that meant, but a few red and violet drops fell out, and nothing more. She looked down at Ilsa and nearly screamed.
The corpse of the rat they’d hewn up for meat lay before her, a baby writhing inside. It shifted, and Christine saw that she’d carved Ilsa up instead. Her cracked ribs revealed the bluish baby. The baby gurgled and looked at her, its face a mix of rat and bird, snout and beak, with human blended horribly underneath.
Christine looked down at her own arms and then back at the David-Poca-bird, reproving her. Scraps and bones. Unless, of course, she could become a bird, join them.
A feather started to push its way out from under her skin. Then Ilsa cried out again, and it wasn’t a rat’s cry or a bird’s screech. It was just Ilsa’s voice, and love made the world turn a soft, fragile pink for just a moment.