by Jeff Sweat
“That’s the name, right?”
“Timmy.”
“Right. Timmy.”
“Tim—okay, fine.”
The gate swings open.
Apple is curious what Pico makes of the Half Holy. Even the other Muscle stare as if this is the first time they’ve seen him. The Half Holy is dressed like the priests on the posters of Ell Aye, in a battered black suit with a raggedy black cloth tied around his neck in a bow. His hair is cut shorter than an Angeleno’s, parted neatly and held in place with some kind of grease. On his lip is a mustache, thinner than eyebrows with a blank space in the center. Apple knows it’s painted on somehow, but he’s never seen him without it.
The Half Holy never fit in the Holy Wood, just like his Mama. She arrived in the Holy Wood in the middle of the night from the Downtown or San Fernando or somewhere, heavy with baby. The Olders took her in because they always wanted babies, but something was different with this one. Apple thinks it’s because she came to the Holy Wood under the cloud of rape—whoever put the baby in her had forced her. All babies are the will of god, so a girl who says otherwise is dangerous.
They took her baby, but they shunned her. The baby didn’t escape his mother’s sin. He had a name once, but he was only ever called the Half Holy, because he only half belonged in the Holy Wood. At nine, he just disappeared.
Apple knew him and liked him, a Gatherer who spent all his time scouring the shops along the Holy Wood Road. When he disappeared, Apple thought he’d died like any other single Exile would. But the Half Holy showed up a year later, dressed in his suit, living in the Holy Motel.
Pico barely looks at the Half Holy, though. His eyes focus on the Motel itself. The gate takes them under a second floor, and once inside they find themselves completely enclosed by the rooms of the Motel. A narrow balcony circles the courtyard of the Motel, fringed with dozens of doors, most of them in disrepair. On the balcony are at least three goats, watching the visitors in placid silence.
In the center of the courtyard, there’s a patch of ground that once was asphalt but has given way to dirt. Winter vegetables, cabbage and peas, stand ready to be picked. A swimming pool is filled with enough water to last the Motel through the dry season.
“Incredible,” Pico says, and it is. That it was built by one kid.
“News from the Holy Wood?” the Half Holy says. That’s the payment for visiting him here—that and the parcel of dried meat, wrapped in an old shirt, that Blue has carried from the village. She tosses it to the Half Holy while Apple talks.
“You got what you need?” Apple says.
“Nuff,” the Half Holy says. Away from company, the Half Holy seems to be forgetting how to speak. Apple wonders how he survives here by himself, because no one ever has. He suspects the Downtown leave him gifts. They have a weakness for storefront prophets.
The Half Holy motions halfheartedly for them to follow him, and he leads them into what once must have been the Motel’s lobby. A long line of golden statues, of men with bare chests, covers a desk. Every vertical surface, including the glass, is covered with priests and priestesses in black and white. At some point the boy must have found posters in the Holy Wood Road stores and plastered them on the walls with glue. Light shines through the windows in muted shades of gray.
For the first time in his many visits there, Apple looks closely at the glowing pictures. These Parents somehow seem more graceful, more set in the Long Gone, than the other pictures he’s seen. No wonder the Half Holy modeled himself after them when his own people failed him.
“Whaddya want?” the Half Holy says, nowhere as graceful as his pictures.
“The Last Lifers,” Apple says.
“Whatabout?”
“You seen any? You seen any acting weird?”
“Like, smart?” Blue says.
The Half Holy falls silent. He has a sort of nest on his roof where he can defend the Motel from anyone smart enough to find their way in, and he can watch most of the streets without being seen. He seems to talk to anyone who passes through Ell Aye, when he wants to be seen. So if there is anything to be seen, he would have seen it.
“Gonna need more’n meat for that,” he says.
“Uh-uh,” Blue says.
“What happens if they getting smart, Watcher?” Apple says. “You don’t think they ain’t gonna see your nice little gate, wonder why there’s goat sounds in an old motel?”
“Got plenty a weapons,” the Half Holy says.
“You only got two hands, though,” Pico says.
Blue blasts out a laugh. Ko the Asshole joins her. “One of em for jerkin,” she says. Blue’s got a wicked knife, a wicked mouth. The Asshole sits a little too close to her, and she doesn’t seem to notice. Doesn’t seem to care. Apple thinks, not for the first time, that Ko has a thing for her.
The Half Holy ignores her and eyes Pico, his shorts. “You ain’t Muscle. Ain’t Holy Wood.”
“We got that in common, then,” Pico says.
“Need a drink,” the Half Holy says stubbornly. He’s heard the clink of the three vodka bottles in Apple’s pack. Drinking is usually forbidden in the Holy Wood, although the Gatherers find the Parents’ stashes and even trade illicit bottles for extra food or supplies. Or in this case, information.
“Not until we decide it’s worth something,” Apple says. “What you seen?”
“The Last Lifers, they formin up. Lots and lots.”
“We seen that,” Apple says.
“They moving like Muscle, all orgnized,” the Half Holy says. “They got guns.”
“Guns? More than one?” Apple knew they had at least one.
The Half Holy holds up one hand, all fingers out. Five guns that he’s seen, Apple thinks. And the Holy Wood just has the one.
“Where they getting em?” Sure, there have to be guns hidden in Ell Aye, but it would take the Last Lifers some serious brains to get them working again.
The boy in the black suit hesitates, almost checks the shadows behind him for listeners. “Ain’t seen it, but heared it,” he says. “They say Palos. Palos stirring em all up.”
Apple goes still, just like everyone else in the room. He hadn’t expected that. Maybe somewhere deep, he feared it. They lived in fear of the Palos, saw the smoking mountain every day from their borders, but the Palos almost never ventured into the Flat Lands near Angeleno territory. If the Half Holy is right, they’re at the door to the Holy Wood. Worse, they’re helping the Holy Wood’s closest enemy.
“Where they at?” Apple says.
“All goin south. I heard em say tarpits.”
Apple’s heard of the tarpits. Some of the Gatherers have gone there, but not with him. “You know where they are?”
The Half Holy shrugs. He’s probably never been more than a few blocks from the Holy Motel since he left the Holy Wood. Apple looks at Pico, who pauses for just a few moments before answering. “I know,” Pico says.
“What do they want? They gonna attack us?”
“Maybe. Probly.”
“We gotta—”
“Ain’t all. I heared them. They talkin—they talkin about endin the End.”
Pico’s head jerks sharply toward the Half Holy. All of them are listening to his words, but Pico is hanging on them. That’s the reason to live that Pico was talking about. It’s not just the guns that make them different. It’s hope. Apple feels the hope, too, before he pushes it away. That’s too much for him to think on right now.
“No one knows how to do that,” Pico says.
“No?” The Half Holy smiles, smug at the reaction he got. “Talk to other wanderers fer a bit. Get outta Ell Aye. End ain’t no big secret. Parents knew it, they jest couldn’t fix it.”
“You think the answer to the End is out there?”
“Jest told you that,” the Half Holy says.
“Sorta,” Pico says. “You kinda mumble.”
“Fine. Gonna show you,” the Half Holy says. He rummages through a pile of books and groove
d discs made out of shiny black plastic. Finally he pulls out a heavy book with a priestess on the cover, wearing the red and black makeup but almost nothing else.
“Someone brought me this,” he says. “Knew I liked pics of the priestesses. But something different bout this. It gots stuff bout the End. Stuff the Parents knew.”
He shows the book to Pico. Pico flips through until he reaches pages that were added. The paper is rougher, less shiny. Pico looks at them more slowly. His eyes go from side to side of the page. Apple watches his face bloom with carefully masked surprise.
Pico’s head lifts up. “I think we can part with that bottle of vodka,” he says.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE TARPITS
Pico studies the tar while they wait for Jamie to come back from the Last Lifers. They found the only place the Last Lifers could be hiding near the tarpits, in a pyramid-shaped hill surrounded by dense, dry brush in the middle of an old park. Something had seemed strange about the hill, so they headed right for it until Jamie pointed, quietly, at something they all missed if it was there earlier: a single column of smoke rising from the center of the hill, so faint you would miss it unless you were standing still yourself.
The hill is only about thirty feet tall, capped by a white wall maybe eight feet high and a crown of trees behind it. Just below the crest is a door cut into the hill—and someone standing in front of it with a spear. The Muscle had almost stumbled across the sentry but dropped back to wait in the thick brush around the pond at the south edge of the park while Jamie slipped away to see how many Last Lifers waited for them.
The sentry scares them, because it’s such a departure from Last Lifer ways. Taught by the Palos? Some of the Muscle sharpen their knives nervously. Pico looks at the pond.
He knew about the tarpits because the Angelenos sometimes scavenged the remains of animals there. He had expected them to look something like a parking lot, bubbling with blackness. Tar washes onto the beaches of the Malibus, and they patch boats and roofs with it. Sometimes they burn it in the winter for heat. It smokes and smells, but burns longer than wood.
Instead, it’s a pond with a greasy rainbow sheen. At the southwest corner of the pond, the water has evaporated—or the tar has pushed up—so there’s a thick, sticky glob of pitch on the sand. Animals would avoid that. But the water elsewhere looks like water, with a denser black under the surface. That’s the trap, he thinks. It don’t look like tar until you’re in it.
In the pond there’s a statue that startles them all: a giant creature that Pico has seen only in books, that he assumed wasn’t real: an elfant, with huge teeth horns and a hose that must be its nose. The elfant is up to its knees, and next to it a baby elfant sinks in to its waist. They seem panicked. Pico follows their eyes to another elfant in the middle of the pond, sinking to its eyes in the muck. Only the nose stays above water.
He’s heard about this place—tarpits that trapped the animals. The elfant statues are all swallowed up in the tar. A small tree half buried in tar. Pico can see where the branches have turned a deep brown-black from soaking up the tar for years. They’re probably more tar than wood.
Pico understands this place now, the pictures of bones on the signs, the giant statues of fantastical animals he could glimpse through the trees. The whole park is some sort of museem to animals that have died here, animals who died long before the humans came. Humans may be dying out, he thinks, but we’re only the latest. Life keeps looking for ways to kill us.
He hasn’t stopped thinking about what the Half Holy said. Did the Parents know what caused the End? Had they discovered a way to fix it, but it came too late? The answer could be in his backpack, but he doesn’t want to study it with the Muscle around.
When the Parents died, they left a million puzzles—a world that makes no sense, machines that can’t be started, a death that can’t be fixed. Pico wants nothing more than to unlock them all.
“La Brea,” Hector says, at his side.
“Huh?”
“Holy Wood for tar,” Hector says.
“In the Malibus, we just say tar.”
Just to the right of the glob of tar, bubbles of air push up through the black water like blisters the size of his hand. He waits for them to pop. They quiver but don’t quite break, surfaces shiny like a blackened rainbow. Impatient, Pico pokes one with a stick and startles when it pops—not because of the sound, since it’s noiseless, but because of the fumes. The bubble smells like gas from a Long Gone car. Maybe gas is made from the tar, or something like it.
Back along what used to be the street, past the flattened remains of a museem building, Pico sees a forest of lamp posts. Real trees are elbowing them aside, but Pico can imagine children lost among the glowing trunks. Pico wishes Jemma could see it—more than anyone, she seems to love the things the Parents left behind. He doesn’t have an eye for that kind of beauty, but still …
“That’s a lot of lights,” he says, and the others nod. Although the Muscle have seen many new sights today, this is the one that makes no sense.
Jamie is suddenly in their midst, returned without a sound. Pico thinks, I need to learn to move like that.
“It’s a whole Last Lifer village in there,” Jamie says. The Muscle tries to explain the hill, but it makes no sense to anyone, not even Pico, so he draws a map. It’s a building built under a hill. The center of the hill is actually an open courtyard where a much-tamer garden must have grown under huge panes of glass. The wall Pico thought he saw at the top of the hill actually acted like a cap for the garden, holding the glass in place, but the trees have burst through the glass now.
“They living inside a hill,” Blue says. “How we sposed to fight that?”
“Maybe we go back, get help?” Pico says. Just so someone says it.
“From Hyun? What he gonna do?” Ko says.
“Hyun’d just make sure we never gonna leave the Holy Wood again,” Apple says, “and someday these Last Lifers gonna march up to the Holy Wood with guns and numbers and smarts. We can’t say told you so then cuz we’d be dead.”
Jamie was able to get close enough to look down into the courtyard. Some of the Last Lifers seemed to be in there, others in the rooms of the museem located next to the courtyard, buried in the edges of the hill. Even if they could fire into the courtyard from above, all the Last Lifers would have to do is retreat into the rooms of the museem, out of sight and out of range. The fact that there’s only one door, and walls protected by earth, means they can’t storm the museem from the front entrance without heavy losses.
“How many you guess?” Apple says.
“I saw five inside, the two outside. Heard more. Could be a dozen.”
“Huh,” Apple says. The Last Lifers are ferocious and unpredictable, but most weren’t Muscle before they turned—they were Farmers, Cooks, Gatherers, Doctors. Six trained Muscle could possibly take them.
“And I saw at least three guns,” Jamie says. “There’s probly more.”
The Muscle deflate at this. Apple is silent. Pico watches his face work, calculating the odds. Finally he says, “We gotta go back.”
“We got this,” Ko the Asshole says. Pico has begun to realize that Ko needs almost no reason to fight, and the other Muscle know it, too, because they ignore him.
“We don’t got it,” Apple says. He doesn’t have to spell it out. There are twice as many Last Lifers, holed up in a fortress with only one door. The Muscle have bows and machetes. The Last Lifers have guns.
“We don’t got the weapons,” Hector says.
Pico smells the whiff of gas and tar. He looks around at the underbrush between them and the hill, at the sticky pitch and dark dark water. He remembers the clink of bottles in Apple’s pack. “No,” he says, wondering whether he should be saying it, “we got the weapons.”
* * *
Hyun shows up while Lady’s still helping in the fields, more puffy-red than usual. Apple’s got him real mad.
“Where’s Apple?” he
says. As if there were any other question he’d ask.
Lady knows, but she’s supposed to lie. She can lie better than Jemma, who told her about Apple’s mission this morning, after they’d already left. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” Lady had said.
“Apple told me yesterday. And if I told you, you woulda tried to go with em.”
“No, I woulda gone with em.” Sometimes she wishes she’d become a Muscle like Blue. She would like fighting, anything that fills her body with life.
“How much harder would it be to cover for em if we ain’t here?” Jemma said. So now here Lady is covering for Apple with Hyun.
“I saw him, middle of the morning,” she says to Hyun. “Hanging out near the stables.” The Animal Doctors have been gone all morning, so they can’t tell Hyun she’s wrong.
“Why’d he go there?” Hyun says.
“Maybe he likes goats,” she says. She pauses. “I hear you like goats.”
He’s so easy to make mad, it shouldn’t be fun to make him madder—but it is. He can’t even hit her. He may be a Head, but she’s a girl.
Hyun is back an hour later. “He’s not at the stables.”
“He wouldn’t still be there. You check the back?”
“The back of what?”
“The back of your butt.”
Hyun stomps away.
When Trina shows, an hour after that, Lady has to be more careful. “You seen Apple?”
“I—”
“Before you say it, he’s not at the stables. And wasn’t.”
“Oh.”
“He’s not helping fix the pump. Or with the Little Doctors. Or sleeping.”
“I seen him around since this morning. I just can’t remember where exactly.”
“Exactly, no. Or Hector, Jamie, or Blue.”
“No.”
“Or that Exile kid.”
“Defintly not the Exile.” Lady’s mad at Apple for taking Pico with him. She doesn’t know why.
“Look, Lady. You making my job hard.”