Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  Yes, oh gods, she does. “It smells like shit!” she hisses. Shit and something else, blood and death and something wrong. And as the darkness through the door resolves, she sees dim shapes moving, clothes rustling. Something waking up. Something they woke.

  Jemma is bounding down the steps before she knows it, trusting the railing that slides under her hand in the blackness. She barely hears Apple behind her, both of them knowing the only thing that matters is speed.

  Death whispers past them—really there or not? It doesn’t matter. At any moment a knife will pierce her back; she can feel it between her shoulder blades. But then she hears the shouts, hears the voice of the Last Lifers, and knows a quick knife is more than she could hope for.

  They burst through the greasy white room and into the street.

  “Home?” Jemma says, attempting to sound casual.

  “It’s probably dinnertime,” Apple says as calmly as he can for someone running for his life.

  When they reach the underpass, though, Apple steers her away from it, even though the voices pour out of the Stack into the streets.

  “That way’s home!” she says.

  “Look in the shadows,” Apple says. And then Jemma looks at the underpass the way Apple does and sees an elbow and then an arm and then an ax.

  Then she sees something more, a sharp flash from the overpass of the 101, a long tube of something, and Jemma screams. “Gun!” A gun? How did the Last Lifers get a gun? And they dive behind a low wall before something loud bites into the bricks, like an unseen chisel.

  The Last Lifers are coming at them from the south and the east. They’re blocking the way home. That means that, for now, home is to the north and west.

  “With me,” she says, and she pulls Apple to the north side of the street, the uphill side, as they push west. She looks over her shoulder at one of the Last Lifers and she knows the scowl under the blood and the grime, knows it from her own village.

  “Andy!” she pants to Apple. “That’s Andy!”

  “That was Andy, then.” And that’s why the Last Lifers are so terrible. They’re not demons like the Palos, they’re brothers and sisters. Andy once gave her blackberries that he found bursting through a car overwhelmed by bramble. Now he has a spear raised toward her, and if Jemma stopped to greet him, he would bury it in her guts and twist. That and worse before she dies.

  There are more behind Andy, still visible in the thickening dark. Seven Last Lifers at least, more than you’d ever find together at once. They don’t usually get that big because they kill one another off. They run in packs like coyotes, but coyotes don’t tear one another’s hearts out. These animals do. They’ll idly attack one another if they don’t have other prey.

  Jemma knows where to go now, remembering a Gather with Lady and a Muscle long gone, looking for a Long Gone store of medsen. They stumbled upon another way home, and—and here it is, so fast that they almost run past it. She tacks hard to the right, almost losing Apple and maybe losing the Last Lifers, through a long narrow alley and then up a flight of stairs.

  At the top, the stairs are flanked by walls, and they crouch behind one. Apple pulls back his bow and looks down the steps. She can’t see over the wall as she ducks, only watches him unleash an arrow and hears a scream below. Six. Apple notches a new arrow, but he must have missed because he quickly fires another before there’s a gurgle, closer than before. There’s a quiet as the Last Lifers regroup.

  “I never seen you work before,” she says. “It’s nice to look at.”

  “It’s nice to be looked at,” he says, with a little smile. “But you a better kisser than the other Muscle.”

  “Now what?”

  “The rest gonna charge at once,” Apple says.

  “How you know?” she asks.

  “They used up all their strategy down on the street,” he says. “Now all they got left is crazy.”

  Ahead of them in the dark, away from the staircase, is a tangle of streets, narrow and twisting even in the Parents’ time but now choked by brush. If she barely knows her way, she has to hope the Last Lifers, maddened as they are by the End, will know even less. She twists left and right, hoping that the circles they’re running will take them north to the next underpass through the 101.

  Behind them they hear the screams of the Last Lifers, closer than they should be.

  The street drops them back down the hill, and they pull up at the bottom, lungs burning, the underpass not where it should be. They’re in a sort of glade, a place where the Parents used to park their cars, and there are still a few of them, overgrown until they’re just ivy-covered mounds. But there is no 101. “That’s not right,” Jemma says. Beyond the glade is a street, and they race to it, hoping to get their bearings.

  Jemma spies the letters then as she sees all of it at once—the first of the Last Lifers pouring off the hill, the 101 farther than she thought, too far to reach now, and the forbidden gate in front of them. They’re at the Bowl, one of the Gathering places of the Parents. It’s the place all the stories warn about, and they’re going to have to enter it if they want to live. She can only hope that whatever force has guided the Last Lifers, maybe the evil in the Bowl will be enough to throw it back.

  She can’t move, even though she knows she must. Apple pulls her shoulders toward him, looks at her with clear eyes. “Time to meet our ghosts,” he says. Somehow his gentleness makes her feet budge where the Last Lifers couldn’t, and they’re past the gate and into the terror that seems to close in on them.

  None of the Holy Wood have ever entered the Bowl, even though they can see it from their ridge. It’s not that they don’t dare, although they certainly do not. It’s that every taboo, every confusing, conflicting legend, agrees on this: Stay out of the Bowl.

  It should smell, she thinks. She thought it would smell, of death and worse. But even as she wonders how long the smell lasts, she does sniff something, the scent of the pines that line their path. Then she thinks it’s far more beautiful than she could have imagined, with ponderosas thick and green, and pine needles up to her ankles—

  But then a final turn and it opens up before her and it’s worse. It is a bowl. She sees immediately how it gets its name, like a giant scoop from the hillside. Seats climb the walls of the Bowl; at the bottom is a platform and a kind of shelter like a clamshell. She couldn’t have even thought of how the Parents used it—religion, games?—except the old stories said they used to sing here. The Holy Wood Bowl, they called it.

  It doesn’t matter, though, because now the Parents use it in another way. Everywhere she looks are bodies: draped over chairs, tossed roughly into walkways, piled seven deep, tangled arm over leg over head, the Bowl filled with them. The bodies are bigger than they are. There’s no flesh on them anymore. Jemma feels horror rising in her throat, but also a sort of awe. This is the place where the future came to its End.

  “We found the Parents,” Apple says.

  There is nowhere to hide among the bones and smiling skulls. They climb midway up the Bowl before they hear the shrieks of the Last Lifers. Jemma looks around, panicked, for some kind of hole. “Help me,” she whispers, to whatever god will hear.

  Crunches of bones at the bottom, the crackling cries growing louder. “Help us,” she says, the fear rising. “Show us where to hide.”

  And—and something does. There’s a buzz in her ears, like the beginning of a headache. It’s like her head can’t quite grab on to the sound, and the disconnect hurts her head. The sound recedes. In the silence, a blue haze floats down over the Bowl, like scattered ash at first, then brighter and brighter like stars.

  She worries that the Last Lifers will see it, but even Apple doesn’t seem to notice it. The haze swirls in clouds around her, until it takes the form of Children.

  It’s showing me the Last Lifers about to attack, she realizes. Not in perfect images—the edges of the Last Lifers are blurry, as if the haze doesn’t know how to draw bodies. The features are sketched out in
dots. She saw a painting once, in a grand Long Gone house under a giant banyan tree. It was of a girl, a dancer made of little dabs of paint. When Jemma looked at it up close, she saw only the dots and an impression of the shape. When she stepped back, she saw the girl.

  The haze looks like that kind of painting—vague and blurry if she looks right at it, but falling into shape if she looks at it out of the corner of her eye.

  The Last Lifer shapes in the haze come toward her. When she looks back up the hill, this time, she sees a passageway under the bones. One of the benches has been dug out by a coyote—a burrow in the bones. It’s invisible to her real eyes, but the haze shows her a way in. In the haze, the Last Lifer figures seem to walk right past it without noticing.

  Jemma hesitates. Is it safe? Then she thinks, You asked for help from the gods. It’d be rude not to take it. She leads Apple straight to where the burrow should be. She moves two skulls, and it’s there. Under a long bench, under the bodies, there is a pocket big enough to hold them both. Jemma crawls under, followed by Apple.

  “Did you see that?” she says, but Apple looks at her blankly. She shakes her head, but a loud bone crack below stops her next sentence. Apple slides up behind her as she lies down on her side, staring out into the bones. The smell of ancient death settles upon them.

  She whispers quietly to ward off the panic that threatens to smother her under the bones. “This ain’t what I planned today,” she says.

  The Parents used to bury their dead, but when the End came, they died so quickly that there was no one left to bury them. All the Children could do was drag their Parents into the Bowl and leave them there to rot. Now they burn their dead the day they die.

  Now, she thinks, we’re all orphans.

  The Last Lifers are supposed to be afraid of the dark, because the gap between worlds is narrow then. They’re supposed to be afraid of deaths and ghosts and anything that can steal their souls quicker. But these Last Lifers move as if ghosts aren’t real, smashing through the Bowl, angry and sure.

  She can hear their calls as they divide and scale the sides of the Bowl. They sound wild, like lions or bears, but neither. A bear never talked or thought or loved like they did, so in those cries are everything lost and abandoned. Jemma finds something strange pushing aside the fear: sadness for Andy, the ten-year-old who loved the Long Gone cars, the thirteen-year-old who dove off the Bear Wall first.

  She breathes hard and sharp, and Apple mistakes it for panic. He wraps his arm around her waist, threads his leg between hers, until their hips and shoulders and breath match and her head nestles under his chin. For the first time since they ran down the Stack, she feels a flash of calm. When she was seven she hid from the Olders and the others looked for her. Apple found her under a table, crying. Instead of pulling her out, he put his finger to his lips and climbed under.

  Jemma is aware of every place where Apple’s skin touches hers. Her skin seems to heat on contact and spread until all those places are linked and on fire, as if he’s touching her everywhere. He feels it, too, because he rubs against her, presses his fingers wide across her belly. We can’t be feeling this here, among all this death, with people hunting us, she thinks. And yet, why not? Isn’t it all part of surviving?

  She can see windows of the sky through the lattice of bones before her, but can’t see down any deeper into the Bowl. Someone is two rows down, stomping the skeletons as if they’re dry wood. The cracks shoot through the still air.

  Footsteps fall in their row, and she can’t help shaking until Apple’s stillness draws the shivers out of her. Three people, just like in the haze. The feet crunch closer, closer, closer, in front of her eyes, and then they’re past. She doesn’t breathe.

  Then they fade away.

  The buzz comes back, and then the haze does, suddenly, as if it’s just popping in for something it forgot to tell her. In the dots of the haze she can see Andy’s face, those empty eyes. The haze can’t quite draw his features, but she recognizes the pain in him. Is it real? Is Andy coming back for them?

  “I think they’re gone,” Apple says, starting to move.

  “Wait,” she says.

  They wait long moments, listening for the sounds. Maybe Apple was right. But a smaller set of footsteps start again. Toward them.

  She feels Apple tense to reach for his machete, but he can’t swing it properly while he’s wrapped around Jemma. Her fingers reach for her hatchet but they’re not quite there and she doesn’t know if she could bear to swing it, and then a foot smashes away the bones in her face and it’s Andy’s face but not, Andy lost in eyes rimmed with coal, reaching in to tear them apart.

  “Andy,” Apple says calmly, probably seeing that Andy doesn’t have room to swing his spear under the bench. “It’s us. Your friends.”

  Andy hesitates for a moment, life flashing across his eyes before flickering out, and Jemma swings the hatchet, buries it deep into his skull. He collapses without a whimper, with a face as clear and confused as a baby.

  Jemma pulls out the hatchet, wipes it off. Carefully. But her hands shake so much that she’s worried she’ll cut herself. Andy. Andy. Andy.

  They huddle close together in silence, hoping that no one heard Andy fall. Jemma shivers so hard she’s afraid the bones will rattle signals to the Last Lifers, and Apple pulls her closer to calm her. “We ain’t meant for this,” he whispers.

  “You almost seventeen,” she says. “How you keep living?”

  “You gotta remember what it’s like to be alive.”

  They listen for the crashes as the Last Lifers move to the top of the Bowl. If they knew Andy, if they remembered him, the Last Lifers don’t look for him. Just when she’s shaking with cold and exhaustion, Apple pushes with his thigh. Out.

  They make their way down through the Bowl, the only Children to visit the Parents.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE OLDERS

  On top of everything else, there are goats in the koi ponds.

  Trina is almost seventeen, but she doesn’t have to worry about floating off the earth anytime soon. As the Oldest, the leader of the Holy Wood, she’s tethered to this life through an endless string of annoyances.

  The Little Doctors started throwing scissors at one another in the middle of trying to patch up the leg of a Farmer. They fight all the time. The Farmer lost the leg and now, if he lives, he can only work in the Daycare. Jemma threw a fit last night, and now Trina has to fix it. The goats are eating all the plants in the koi ponds.

  And then Zee—she was wrong, it’s not the goats on top of everything else.

  Trina doesn’t believe in grief, but she’s setting some of it aside for Zee. She talked Zee into becoming a Mama. She was the only person who thought Zee would be a good one.

  Before she became an Older, Trina was the head Farmer while Zee was head Gatherer. They were the rare Children who did their jobs thoroughly because they liked doing things right.

  They used to wonder if they came from the same Dad, but no one kept track of the Dads. Then they would hear the identical tones in each other’s voices when they yelled at a Middle and thought that they were right.

  After she heard about Zee, after she lit the fires to burn her body, she pulled out a bottle of whiskey, a gift from Zee, and drank it until her forehead was numb.

  Now she’s walking down the main street, taking the pulse of the village around her. Nothing feels different from yesterday, before Zee. Grief doesn’t live in the village; that’s the good news. It just lives in the few people too slow to run away from it.

  The life in the street, though, it has a way of rubbing off. Everyone seems to be running, to be shrieking. Two five-year-olds kiss on the ground. A line of kids leave the Daycare, from shortest to tallest, and every one of them is singing. A different song. As much as she hates it sometimes … for Trina, this is the center of the world.

  She sees every age group out there. The Angelenos have all the kids marked off in neat bunches by age, each with their
own roles. The babies go to a year and do nothing. The Toddlers go to four and terrorize the Holy Wood. Nino goes to six, and that’s when kids start to learn how to work in the kitchens and fields. The Middles go to nine; they start watching the Toddlers in Daycare and teaching them the stories. By Tweens, they have found a trade. The Teens start at thirteen and get ready to become Mamas and Dads. At fifteen, they stop naming you. You make a baby or you don’t, and you End.

  Never leave the Holy Wood empty, they say.

  The memory of her talk with Jemma is rawer than it should be. “You fifteen now,” Trina had said.

  “You talking to me about that now?” Ah, that bitch. Did she think she wanted to be here talking about Mamas when she’s talked her friend to that death? “You ain’t had to do this. The Oldest don’t got to make no baby,” Jemma said.

  “I couldn’t,” Trina said, remembering the clumsy hands on her from all the boys they sent her way, the pain in her stomach when what would have been a little girl died and all her hope did, too.

  “If I roll with someone,” Jemma said, “it’ll be cuz I wanna be with him.” And Trina flinched and remembered the boy she liked, who died before she even tried to become a Mama.

  Trina almost likes Jemma. But right now she needs her to just say yes. She has enough pendejas to deal with today.

  The rest of the Olders are already at the Older House when she gets there.

  When Trina enters the front room, Mira is draped across the big chair the Olders use for ceremonies. “Jesucristo, Mira, get off the throne,” she says, and Mira lazily swings her feet to the ground. The rest of her doesn’t move.

  The Olders aren’t really the oldest in the village. Just five hags who can’t have babies and like to mess with people, she thinks. This is who leads the Holy Wood. It’s supposed be an honor to be an Older, but everyone looks down on them a bit because they couldn’t make babies. Olders might have power, but the Mamas get all the honor.

  Trina’s in charge of all the Olders as the Oldest, but “in charge” just means someone willing to do all the work. Mira is the actual oldest girl in the Holy Wood, grown unmoored in the way all the seventeen-year-olds tend to be. Trina almost wants her to go. In-sook milks her spot as an Older for everything—the first meat, the best Gathers, sparkly rings. Lupe is still young and wants to fix things like the Carpenter she used to be.