Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  Jemma stirs and says to Pico, “If you want to find your books, we gotta get there in the light.”

  “We looking for books?” Lady asks.

  “Looking for the answers. Pico thinks they’ll be in the library.” And Lady realizes Jemma hasn’t told her everything. Anything, really.

  “Something caused the End,” Pico says. “If the Parents knew what, it could be in their library. That building.”

  “So … we trying to stop the End?” Lady says, the look on her face not even close to belief.

  “To understand it. Maybe to stop it,” Pico says.

  “Then why didn’t you tell me about it first?” That’s the question that’s been hurting ever since she saw Pico and Apple by the lake. Not that Jemma was trying to drag her away. That Jemma was never going to tell her she was leaving.

  “You wouldn’t a wanted to go. But you’d a gone anyway,” Jemma says.

  Lady takes in a deep breath, shaking it all away. She looks around at this strange place. She knows that when she closes her eyes tonight, she will see the silver petals twisting over one another and wish that she could lie below them until the light is gone. How could all this have been at the feet of the Holy Wood and none of them known it? Because we stayed where we’re sposed to, she thinks.

  “Where’s the tower from here, anyway?”

  Jemma points behind Lady, and, rising over the south wall, she can see its tip. She hadn’t noticed the whole time they were in the garden. But then, Jemma is the one who looks at the sky, and because of her everything has gone wrong.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE LIBRARY

  The Library Tower is only blocks away, but, it turns out, this isn’t the library. The real library is a building across the street, capped by a blue pyramid set with a golden sun. Lady laughs at Pico getting it wrong.

  The door to the library sits inside a darkened archway. It’s heavy steel, propped open by rust and debris. Game trails crisscross the deep dust on the floor, as if they were still in the hills. Unlike the other Parents’ buildings, which smell of dust and death, this one smells like life—messy and earthy and green. When they enter the light coming from their left, they can see why: The library opens into a giant atrium flooded with sunlight and carpeted in plants.

  At the top of the room is a great glass ceiling, mostly gone, which let the light and the rain and the seeds in until now; a forest is growing where there was once only stone. Jade pillars thicker than pines run from floor to ceiling, covered with creeping fig until just a little of their stone peeks out from under the vine. Steps drop down and down toward the back of the atrium, each one tangled deeper into the library woods. Groundwater has broken into the building, and a thin waterfall drops over the lip of the lower floors.

  “Nature wants this building back,” Apple says.

  Pico sees the nature, but more than that he sees the intentions buried under the vines: the grand pillars, the airy ceiling, the sweeping stairs. This place was meant to be a temple, a church, as much as the Zervatory. Beyond the greenery Pico smells the dust of books, can almost sense the memories of the Long Gone, the big thinks buried here. This is Pico’s temple.

  “Books!” Pico says, and points to low-ceilinged rooms branching off from each level of the atrium. Compared to the expanse of the atrium, they look like caves. “There’s so many!”

  They rest their bicycles carefully against a green pillar and make their way down the steps to the first level. Pico lays down the silver case, which has banged his butt since they left the metal building. Jemma still carries the gun and her pack. There’s a sign for the level, but Pico has to puzzle it out. “Bus eye ness?”

  “I thought you could read,” Lady says.

  “Not good enough,” he says, his face screwed up. “Not the right words. I don’t understand any of this.”

  Pico pushes deeper into the dark of the shelves, and a loud shrieking drives him back. He can’t place the sound until he sees the mask: a grown raccoon. It bursts out of its den in a bottom shelf and screeches at them, teeth bared.

  “Stupid raccoon,” Lady says, and throws a book at it.

  The next level has more for Pico. The light filters into the cave, but less than the level above. “Science,” he says.

  “What’s that?” Jemma asks.

  “How stuff works. How all of the Parents’ stuff works,” Pico says. He grabs a book with streetlights on the cover, glowing. He’s never seen them lit before.

  “Do you realize? Do you realize what’s in these books?” he says, close to shouting. Everything is connecting in his head—cars, Lectrics, guns. “This is all the Parents’ stuff, in this building. Just one of these books is more than all the stuff we know. Than all the Children know. But with all of em … you could—you could make everything run again.”

  The others watch him as he flips through the pages, maybe awed, until Apple says: “If you had enough time.” Apple understands what time means.

  “If I had enough time.” Pico is quieter now. The pages blur together, and a few shapes jump out. He looks up, and the excitement is gone. “I don’t understand any of this. Like, maybe a few words. It’s gonna take a long time.”

  “Get reading, book boy,” Lady says.

  “I think I’m starting to hate you,” he says, and retreats into the shelves.

  What did he expect? That he could unlock the Parents’ mysteries in the first five minutes, that they would be laid out for him to discover like Chris Mass?

  Because when he disappears into the stacks, the sheer weight of the books threatens to overwhelm him—they soar over his head, fill every part of his vision. The dust floating off them threatens to choke him. But as he passes through, he catches pieces of words, pictures of machines, and starts to understand what he’s looking at. The books subside into orderly piles.

  Pico thumbs through a book on Teevee. From the words he does understand, from the pictures, it looks as if it’s just another Lectric. Magical, yes, this stuff that made the world run, but not a god. His mind should be reeling from that, but he found the gods hard to swallow in the first place. If they had so much power, they shouldn’t have let the world End.

  “Pico! You got something?”

  Pico looks at Apple and realizes he’s nowhere near to an answer. “What do you guys got?” he says.

  “Since we can’t read,” Lady says, “not a whole lot.”

  “Look for pictures of people dying, maybe?” Pico says.

  “I kind of wish I could read,” Jemma says. She’s running her hand along a plastic map of Ell Aye.

  “Start with the things you know, and see what words’re next to em,” Pico says. “It’s a start.”

  Jemma points at the map, which is bigger than just the Holy Wood or even Downtown. It has bumps the shapes of the Holy Wood Hills and Malibu, but the ocean seems to go along its edge for hundreds of miles. Jemma points at a thick red line. “Is that the 101?” she says.

  “Think so. Keep going,” Pico says. As he goes back into the stacks, he sees her tracing the line south.

  Still he finds nothing, and the enormity of trying to understand what happened to the Parents settles on his shoulders. There are too many words here.

  At the lowest, darkest level, Pico has almost given up. He can barely read the spines in the dark. When he finds something that looks promising, he has to take it out to the atrium to see the pages. And none of it is right. “Everything here is old,” he says.

  “Well, yeah—” Jemma starts, but Lady cuts her off.

  “Cuz everyone is dead,” Lady says.

  “No,” Pico says, “it was all written a long time before the Parents died. Books must have taken a long time. So if everyone died fast, they couldn’t write about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” Pico says, “the answers ain’t here.”

  * * *

  What do they do now? They’re the first people maybe since the Parents to enter the library,
or at least the first to understand it. Apple had started to believe they would find answers there, if they searched hard enough. They have the books and they have the Exile, and no one’s had anyone like him in generations.

  Still, there’s nothing out here for them. Could he convince Jemma and Lady to go back to the Holy Wood, give up, become Mamas, try to live their last years the way they’re meant to be lived? He’s about to say that, but he stops himself. They can’t go back, after all they’ve done. But it’s more than that. Apple doesn’t want them to go back. He decided to live for Jemma, and now, selfishly, he wants to know what that’s like. He’s ashamed to think that way, but there is Jemma. That’s what he wants.

  “Maybe—” But he doesn’t know how to finish the sentence. They’ve failed. The last of the light to make its way to the depths is fading, and they’ve lost the day. They need to find shelter before dark, tend to their wounds. Tend to the things that matter.

  They move toward the door of the atrium when Lady pauses, holds her hands up. “You hear that?”

  They drop even quieter than they were before and strain to catch any noise. There’s nothing, but then, wait—was that a snuffle? Like someone clearing her nose? Apple is completely still but doesn’t hear anything. They hold for almost a minute until a shared glance gets them walking quietly toward the door. None of them even seem to be breathing, they’re walking so quietly.

  Pico said to look for dying people, and all of them see the pictures at once on a large folded square of paper, yellow and crumbling: bodies lying on a street, unburied and unburned.

  Pico is already reading the words. “‘San Diego Falls While Disease Spreads,’” he whispers, puzzled. “What’s San Diego?”

  “I think it’s a place,” Jemma says.

  “How do you know that?” Apple says, a little in wonder.

  “I saw those letters on the map.”

  “Can you show it to me?” Pico says.

  Apple claps his hands over both their mouths. He hasn’t forgotten why they were whispering. It’s so quiet that Apple can hear the pulse in his ear. Then something else, the pad of footsteps. They’re soft, but they carry weight. He can almost feel a tremor through the metal of the shelf under his hand.

  Whatever it is stops, and this time Apple can hear it sniff, take a few steps, and sniff again. It’s between them and the door. And it’s hunting them.

  They’re still frozen in place when he spies the first flash of brown fur between the shelves, the grizzled tips catching the dying light from the atrium. The creature moves into the row next to them, and even before he sees its hump Apple can tell it’s a bear, one of the big brown ones. You can scare the black bears off sometimes. Not the brown ones.

  The shelf next to them is filled with thick books, which must be the only reason the bear hasn’t seen them, although surely their scent must be all around it. Apple fingers his machete but knows it’s too short to help on a bear that big. He can’t draw his bow with his collarbone separated or broken.

  He looks to his right at the others and nods at them while placing his hands flat against the shelf, flexing. He pantomimes and they place their hands against the shelf, too.

  Apple holds up his hand, three fingers showing. The fingers flex, ready to count down.

  The heavy head of the bear comes into sight. It starts to turn toward him—

  Three, two. One.

  They push the shelf, and there’s a roar of recognition from the bear, and the shelf rocks but doesn’t move, and they’re attacking the shelf with their shoulders, slamming into it again and again. Apple is using his good shoulder, but still the pain jags through his collarbone. A paw swipes through the bottom shelf, just missing Jemma’s legs, and then the shelf topples, hitting the bear in a cloud of ancient books and pinning it between the floor and the next shelf.

  “Get the paper!” Pico says, but when Apple lifts it, it crumbles in his hand and falls away, the black letters floating to the floor. He feels its loss like a punch in the stomach, but he’s running with all of them toward the door and away from the roaring pile of books.

  Pico slows at a desk near the entrance of the atrium to scoop the papers into his arm. “You crazy?” Lady says. “Get on!” She can see Pico can’t climb all those steps. She hoists Pico onto her back, his hands holding tight over her pack, and starts taking the stairs two at a time.

  There are hundreds of steps. They didn’t notice them on the way down, but now they stretch endlessly to the top, each flight jogging to the left before going up. Halfway up Lady has slowed down so much she’s barely walking, and Pico is slipping. “Trade,” Jemma says, and slips off the rifle.

  Pico climbs awkwardly onto her back, holding tight around her neck. “Why didn’t you use the gun, Jemma?” Lady says.

  Apple’s thoughts sharpen, as they always do during a fight. Lady now has the gun, but she’s shot it only once. What else do they have? His bow, as long as he doesn’t need to draw it. His machete, if he’s way too close. “Get ready to shoot, Lady,” Apple says. It’s good she has the gun. Lady’s the highest up the stairs and will have the most time to react.

  On the second-to-last landing, the bear’s roar seems to split the atrium in half. He looks down and sees that lightning brown bulk, bolting up the stairs. It’ll be on them in seconds.

  Lady aims, pulls the trigger. Apple hears the shot but can’t see where it lands, just a louder roar. Lady scrambles to the top of the stairs and fires again while they climb. Apple grabs Jemma with his good arm and tows her and Pico up the steps. Jemma’s legs waver, she pitches forward, but Apple keeps pulling. They tumble over the lip of the stairs.

  The bikes on the landing are no help, not with Pico’s leg. “Next level!” Apple shouts, but his voice gets lost in another shot. Lady is standing her ground, and the bear seems to have slowed, wary of this stinging bang.

  The next steps lead to a short hallway and then a huge rotunda, bigger than the one at the Zervatory. They hear nothing for a moment, thinking that maybe the bullets really hit. It’s long enough for Apple to steal a glance at the ceiling, a bold yellow sun set in a blue sky, but then the bear stalks into the rotunda, as if it knows it’s trapped them. As it probably has.

  They back up just as slowly, and Apple feels a breeze at his neck. A doorway or something, behind him. One more step and he can see the door itself, a heavy steel grating that should shut out the bear, if it will move.

  He speaks evenly. “Jemma, get ready to shut the—”

  Lady lifts the gun, and the bear closes the gap in a breath. Lady fires, but the bear’s paw darts and knocks the gun to the floor with a clatter. The bear jerks at the boom of the gun, momentarily rocked back on its heels, then lurches forward.

  Apple grips his bow at the end with one hand and swings it like a whip. It whistles through the air and cracks the bear across the snout. It won’t hurt the bear but might startle it into thinking it’s been hurt. Apple remembers Jemma and the lion, and he’s making himself as tall as he can, screaming at the bear with everything he has.

  It rises, tall, so tall, taller than any of the Children. Apple sees the others pushing on the doors and the bear bats the bow away but the bear is two steps and a bite away from his Jemma and he remembers the machete and how it’s only good up close but he can get close. He rips the machete free from its sheath and steps into the bear, under its chin, finds himself swallowed up and suffocated in the fur. How soft is death? he wonders. Claws tear at him, at his back and arms and everywhere, and death isn’t soft anymore. He drives his blade upward toward the throat.

  He misses it. He knows it. It sank somewhere in the fatty shoulder. But the bear howls, falls away, and in that pause Apple stumbles backward and Jemma and Lady slam the doors. They slide a metal bolt in place moments before the bear slams into the door. It shudders, holds, they stumble backward, and Jemma falls on the floor.

  “Ow ow ow,” Pico says, muffled beneath her. Jemma rolls off and he’s lying on the floor under
her pack. Apple can’t feel his back. The bear is biting and swiping at the holes in the grating, but it’s outside the door. And they’re inside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE BOOK AND THE BEAR

  It takes checking every door in their new room, barricading two of the doors, and ignoring the bear pacing outside the grating before they can take stock of where they are. Ignoring is not quite possible, when they can hear every grunt and growl of the bear, and it stops to clang the bars every few minutes.

  As soon as they’re safe, Jemma examines Apple. He has deep cuts crisscrossing his back and shoulder in rows of four. They have only their drinking water and Gatherers’ field medsen. He needs the Little Doctors, and she tells him so.

  “You seen their hands?” he says. “If the bear don’t got fections, those kids defintly do.”

  She realizes they haven’t been alone since they rescued him. Her hands brush across his skin, and she wants to brush it more, but everyone can see them. It’s not even close to private enough.

  “You could have Ended,” she says. He shrugs, as if to say: Soon enough.

  This part of the library feels older—the materials and the curves are richer, and the ceiling rests on sturdy wooden beams. And unlike the other sections, it seems to have been made for small children—the posters on the wall are brighter, the books have pictures on them.

  “Kids could read?” Jemma says.

  “You could read, Jemma,” Pico says.

  Jemma picks up a book, opens it. Inside the letters are bunched so close that they seem to be leaning on one another for support.

  “Not like that,” Pico says, and moves to a nearby shelf. The books there are thinner, with colors that peek through the dust and age. He thumbs through them until he finds a book thinner than his pinkie. On its cover are some animals and familiar shapes of letters. “Look, a bear!” Lady says brightly.

  “It’s a code,” Pico says. “You just gotta figure out what letters go with what sounds. But it’s mostly sounds and words you already know. The Parents called em the ABCs.”