Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  “I wish I knew where—”

  “I don’t care where they are,” Trina says, her voice crackling with anger. “Apple’s smart. He’ll be fine. But Heather wants to rip the shit out of the Muscle, and Hyun is gonna help, and all your pendejo friends are out there handing her the only reason she needs. I don’t care about em, but I bet the Holy Wood is a helluva lot safer with an army. Got it, mija?”

  That rattles Lady, and she searches for Jemma. When Lady finds her, with the sun low in the sky, Jemma’s standing in the closest backyard to the lake. From there she can see the Bear Wall and all its approaches. If Apple—or anyone else—returns, she’ll see them first.

  If Apple returns. Lady can see that’s what Jemma’s been thinking, over and over.

  If Apple returns.

  “He said he’d be back by now,” Jemma says, sounding small.

  Lady doesn’t feel like answering, because any answer would be meaningless.

  “I hate this,” Jemma says. “We girls. We meant for sploring and Gathering and fighting and—and whatever the hell we want. Waiting’s for pendejos.”

  That’s how Lady feels. That’s why she wouldn’t want what Jemma has, what Jemma is feeling. Only that’s not true. She’d like to know what Jemma’s feeling first, then decide for herself.

  Heather finds them there, watching for the Muscle and not particularly trying to hide it. It’s almost dark now. If Apple and his Muscle hadn’t slipped back in before, they certainly can’t with the gates shut.

  If Lady thought Trina was scary, it’s because she’s never really talked to Heather and her staff-wielding Hermanas. Three of them, the biggest, follow her here. They lean against the wall of the house while Heather strides across the lawn.

  “Where the hell is Apple, puta?” she says to Jemma.

  Lady knows Jemma is scared, but she doesn’t flinch. “He ain’t with you?” Jemma says.

  Heather doesn’t smile. “No, he ain’t with me.”

  “Oh,” Jemma says. “Thought he was with you.”

  “You tough, ain’tcha?” Heather says. She bellies up to Jemma, and although she’s inches shorter, the three Hermanas at her back make up for it. “I hope you got your rolling in with Apple. Cuz tomorrow, at the Waking, you gonna be on your back with someone else.”

  She starts to walk away, the Hermanas folding around her like a coat.

  “Hey, mija,” Lady says. She doesn’t dare say “puta,” although that’s what she means. Even “mija” is too familiar for an Older. “Why you hate boys so much?”

  “Not all boys,” Heather says. “Not all.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE LAST LIFERS

  Even with Pico’s help, Apple doesn’t like this. They should be coming in here with an army, stamping out the Last Lifers like they would a hornets’ nest. But going in as light as they are—these hornets will sting.

  The Muscle have never fought a war. They’ve defended Gatherers from bears and wild dogs, they’ve clashed briefly with San Fernandos and Last Lifers. But they haven’t experienced anything like this.

  “We gotta attack at night,” he said as they prepared for the fight, realizing they need every edge they can get. Night will throw the Last Lifers off balance.

  “So much for that,” Shiloh the Archer said. They were all thinking the same thing: No sneaking back into camp now. The absence of six Muscle when Hyun is supposed to have them locked down will be impossible to miss.

  “I’m gonna be cool, I’m too old,” Apple says. “What they gonna do—Exile me? The rest of you ain’t gonna be so lucky. You should go back.”

  “Screw you, pendeja,” Hector says.

  Apple waits at the pond with Pico, kneeling by the edge. Three of the Muscle slip through the bush toward the north side of the hill, loaded with Pico’s tricks. Blue and Ko the Asshole stake out spots on each side of the big southern sidewalk leading up to the museem.

  Apple knows that without the Exile, they would be home by now, beaten by this search. Part of him wishes they could be home. He’s not too far gone to be past fear, and he wants his Muscle to outlive him. Mostly, though, Jemma told him to come back.

  The sunset is their cue, and now it’s his and Pico’s turn. Apple fingers his knife and worn flint. The Parents seemed to be able to wish fire down from the sky, but like everything else they do, the Children have to work harder for it. He scrapes the flint down the back of his knife as he has hundreds of times before, and a thick cloud of sparks showers into the nest of bark shavings at his feet.

  They catch. He blows, feeding the fire with kindling the size of his finger. He shields the blaze with his body, not just from the wind, but from the Last Lifers. They can’t see the flames until it’s too late to do anything about it.

  Pico holds out a sturdy branch, wrapped in cloth and coated in tar. They tried just dipping the stick in tar, but it didn’t stay on the wood. The cloth smolders for a few seconds over the fire, then lights. Pico swishes the branch with a few experimental strokes—whoosh, whoosh—and the flame stays lit.

  The surface of the water gleams ominously in the flame. Pico raises his eyebrows, and Apple nods. Pico thrusts the torch into the thick tar at the edge of the pond. Apple holds his breath.

  Nothing happens. The tar refuses to light. The torch threatens to flicker out.

  “Don’t it burn?” Apple whispers.

  “It should,” Pico says, and holds the torch near the clumps of tar. Still nothing.

  Small as it is, the torch seems to glow huge to Apple. How long before the Last Lifers see them?

  “It needs to be hotter to catch fire,” Pico says decisively.

  “Ain’t that what the fire is for?” Apple says. It’s all so backward. Does he hear movement? Shouts?

  Pico moves the torch two feet to the right, where bubbles break through the pitch. He holds the torch above them until a bubble bursts. And a jet of flame shoots into the air.

  “The gas,” Pico says. “It burns quicker.”

  Apple grabs two other torches, all ready to burn. He lights them and reaches for the bubbles. Instead of waiting for one to burst, he pops it. More flame. He pops another. This time, the tar next to it starts to catch, a low orange flame. He blows on it as best as he can from the shore, and it picks up.

  The sky lights up next to him. Pico has lit the dead tree in the pond on fire. Stuck as it was in the tar, it must have soaked up the oil until it was flammable. “Like a big candle,” Pico says.

  The tree burns bright and hot, and with Apple’s attempts to light the tar, they now have what Pico wanted: a burning lake. A burning, smoky lake.

  The heat starts to push them from the edge of the shore. “Now they’re gonna notice,” Pico says. That’s what they hope, at least. Apple shoulders his pack, makes sure Pico is right behind him, and charges off into the brush around the western edge of the pond toward the north slope of the hill.

  The sky turns orange at their backs. They’ve only made it fifty feet before Apple hears a stifled scream. That’d be the sentry, meeting Blue for the first time. She probably used a knife—less chancy than a bow.

  They scramble up the slope, hearing noises from inside the hill. No screams, just the strange laughs and shrieks only the Last Lifers seem to make. That’s good. Right now he doesn’t need them frightened. He needs them to stay.

  Apple glimpses the white wall above the courtyard, already illuminated by the hell glow of the burning lake. The corner to his right, at the northeast corner of the courtyard, has collapsed, twisting the wall until it appears ready to fall into the courtyard. He marks where his Muscle are—on the west and east walls, next to carvings of strange long-toothed lions.

  The night is split by a flaming arc from the east. That’d be Shiloh the Archer. The center of the courtyard catches fire. Shiloh was looking for dry brush, and he found it. Another burning arrow, this one streaking from Jaime in the west into the room under Shiloh’s feet. It catches something wood, but the fire starts slower
there. If it fills the room, though, it will push the Last Lifers outside and toward the street.

  Now the screams begin.

  The arrows are coated in tar. Pico’s idea. So are these. Apple pulls the vodka bottles out of his pack. They’re partially filled with tar—so they’ll stick to their targets, Pico says—and stuffed with a wick made from a shirt. Jamie has another torch wrapped in tar jammed into the ground, already lit so that they only have to light a fire once. Apple lights the first wick, waits for it to catch, and throws.

  The bottle drops into the only bare patch in the courtyard, at its dead center. Pico has told him how it might work, but none of them are prepared for how well it does. The bottle erupts in a flash and a boom, and the floor of the courtyard is covered with a carpet of flame.

  More arrows fly. Pico throws a litro, cut in half and filled with tar, into the flames below. They flare again, so bright that their imprint lingers in Apple’s eyes. He hears more shouts, more screams, no more laughs. If the Last Lifers can move, if they still have the instinct to save themselves, they’re running toward the exit.

  Apple spots a eucalyptus tree. They’re filled with oil. Apple saw a row of them explode, one after the other, in a swamp fire. The second bottle goes there.

  It doesn’t blow right away, but flames spread from the bottle before he can blink. The entire tree is coated in fire, and it’s brushing the other trees with its touch. A bang from below sends a wall of heat their way. Any longer, and they won’t be able to stand near the wall. But there’s not much of a need.

  “To the front!” he says, and he sees Shiloh the Archer running toward the top of the south slope. Pico and Jamie are with him, and they catch Hector as they run along the western wall.

  The Last Lifers are streaming out of the hill, as Pico predicted, as Apple looks down from the top of the hill to the entrance. Five, six of them—the rest must be dead or trapped inside—belt noisily out of the doorway, where Ko and Blue wait for them. The first Last Lifers go down, from silent arrows. They look the same as the Holy Wood, just fewer clothes and more black around the eye. And more dead.

  The runners behind them see what’s happening, though, and they’re the ones with the guns. There’s a statue of two fanged lions, and one of the Last Lifers drops to her knees behind it. She rests her rifle on the pedestal of the statue. Apple hears a crack, quieter than he would have thought, then another and another, and this time he hears a cry. Ko. Blue. It has to be one of them.

  The guns fire so fast. This has happened in the seconds since Apple arrived at the front of the building, in the time before Apple can pull an arrow out of his quiver and draw a bow. The gunner waves to the other Last Lifers to move forward, and Apple puts an arrow in her neck.

  The other Last Lifers aren’t as deliberate as the gunner, especially when arrows start raining down from the top of the hill. They fire their guns, but it’s clear they can’t really focus on the source of the arrows or decide which is the most important. Apple hears a bullet slam into the wall behind him and turns to see one of the lions with a hole in its chest.

  Shiloh the Archer gets to work on them. In moments three are down, and the only Last Lifer left is a boy, jumping over a low wall and leaping into the brush. The fire by the lake is roaring now, pushing into the park. He’ll have to swing north if he wants to escape it.

  “Get the guns!” Apple motions to Shiloh and Jamie. “Check our wounded!” Without being told, Hector and Pico follow Apple down the west slope into the park.

  Ashes and smoke fill the air. They wanted confusion, and they succeeded. Apple pauses for a moment to get his bearings amid the press of the branches and the burning air, but Hector pushes past to track.

  They barely need to track. The boy ahead is crashing through the brush so loudly that they can hear him from fifty yards away. Hector lopes after him silently and smoothly, his feet finding a trail where Apple can’t see any. Forty yards, thirty yards. If they can catch the boy before he reaches the street—

  Then there is no sound in front of them and still they run and Hector is on his toes, windmilling to keep from falling into something that Apple can’t see, and they’re all skidding at the edge of a pit that yawns deep into the earth, a foot away from their deaths.

  “The boy?” Apple says after he’s sure they’ve all stopped.

  Hector points down.

  The pit looks a hundred feet deep at first, but as Apple looks closer he realizes it’s just the tar, sucking down all the light. The red glow of the sky brushes the edge of the pit. It’s perfectly square and lined with rotting timbers.

  “The Parents dug this. For tar or for bones,” Pico says. Bones. How strange the Parents were.

  There’s a thick splash in the southwest corner of the pit, out of the fire’s light. Apple kneels near the edge and waits for his eyes to adjust to the light. There. A head, barely jutting out of the water, whites around the eyes the only things letting you know it’s alive. Arms reach out of the muck, try to find a grip on the timbered walls, strain, and then release without a sound. It looks as if there’s water on top, just like in the pond, but Apple bets the boy’s legs are trapped in tar.

  “Stuck, huh?” Apple says, not unkindly. The head doesn’t answer.

  “We can help you out,” Apple says. “I just need you to talk. You want that?”

  The head nods, slightly. Hector fishes a rope out of his pack, ties a loop, and lowers it to the shape. The arms go through the loop, cinch it tight, and they begin to pull. It’s harder than he thinks, as if invisible hands are pulling on the other end. There’s an elastic feel to each pull, a sense of almost releasing, then snapping back. One more, and then the shape is free from the muck.

  Once the boy is free and almost to the top of the pit, a drastic change takes place; he comes to life. Instead of dead weight on the rope, they have a thrashing, fighting bundle striking at everything, bouncing off the wooden walls. A caterwaul like a lion’s splits the night.

  “Drop him,” Apple says, and they let the rope slide back through their fingers until the boy splashes back into the tar. For a moment they’re not sure if the boy is still alive, but they hear a panicked sob of a breath below.

  “Wanna try it again?” Apple says. “We can get you out. If we don’t, you never leaving. You starve, you drown. Or worse, your friends come looking for you.” If the Last Lifers come back, find this boy, they would tear him to bits. There’s something about Last Lifers that sniffs out weakness and attacks it. It’s like a chicken coop—you’re fine unless you get a bare patch in your feathers. Then everyone pecks.

  The boy knows it, too. Apple thinks he sees him nod, then hears what he thought he’d never hear: the voice of a Last Lifer. “Help me,” it says.

  It’s not a boy, he realizes once they’ve hauled up the Last Lifer, tied her to a tree, and cleaned enough of her face that they can see her lips move. It’s a young girl of twelve or thirteen. Too young, normally, to join the Last Lifers.

  “Where you from?” he says. He doesn’t want to ask her name.

  “San Fernando,” she says, and her voice sounds strangled, as if the throat has been closed for months.

  “That’s a long way,” he says. Over the mountain to join up with other Last Lifers? Usually they just stay where they turn.

  She shrugs. “Everyone comes when the Palos call,” she says.

  “Why you gathering? Why you trying to fight?”

  “For … our place in the world.”

  “But you left your peoples.”

  “You left us,” she says. Is that how all the Last Lifers see it? Apple wonders. Rather than them leaving their tribe behind when they go crazy, they feel as if their tribe left them?

  “Where’d you get your guns?”

  “Found some broken ones. Gave em to the Palos. They … traded?”—as if she’s not sure of the word—“They traded us for fixed ones.”

  “What do the Palos want with you?” he says.

  “To … gi
ve us our place.”

  “What do they really want?”

  The girl looks blank. Maybe the Last Lifers believe the Palos.

  “Did they offer you anything? Besides guns?”

  “Yeah. Little Man says we gon live forever. He showed us someone who got old.” Dreamily.

  Little Man. He’s never heard the name, not even in whispers from the traders. “Who’s Little Man?”

  “The one who says we gon live forever.” Then she falls silent.

  Apple decides to let her rest, and walks away from her toward the pit. The sky still glows. He thinks the fire will be burning a long, long time. He has to decide what to do with the girl. He wants to keep his word. She’s just a Tween. But if the Last Lifers are gathering an army, then he’s helping add to it. She’s young still. Maybe he can take her to the Holy Wood, and they can bring her back from the Last Life.

  He turns back to the tree. The Last Lifer girl has an arrow in her throat.

  Near the edge of the pit, three of his Muscle have returned. Shiloh carries two guns. Jamie carries another. And Ko the Asshole holds a bow upright, the string still thrumming.

  “What did you do?” Apple says. “We needed her. She was a Tween.”

  “They killed Blue,” Ko says, his jaw so tight he can barely speak. He realizes that he almost never saw Ko without Blue somewhere next to him, that Ko’s eyes always followed her. Turns out Ko did care for someone, after all.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE HARSH

  The Hermanas have the crowd at the gate whipped up and ugly long before Apple returns. Any hope Trina had of bringing the rogue Muscle in quietly is gone.

  Somehow Heather knew the Muscle had slipped out, even before the Squawk ended. And she’s been building a case against them. “They searching for weapons to fight the Olders, just like Pablo,” she shouts as Trina moves into the crowd.

  “Apple is nothing like Pablo,” Trina says, trying to keep her voice calm.

  “He’s acting like Pablo,” Heather says. When Trina looks around the gates, she realizes she’s lost the crowd. The Hermanas must have spent the rest of the day whispering to the village of rebellion.