Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  First page is a fruit. “Apple,” Jemma blurts out.

  “That looks nothing like me,” Apple says. Jemma had almost forgotten it was a fruit. Apples only grow in the hills where it gets cold enough. Traders from the San Fernandos bring them to the Holy Wood once every few years. She still remembers the crispness, the delight at that first explosion of juice.

  “So you know the A makes that sound, or at least one of its sounds,” Pico says.

  “And ‘bear’?” Jemma says, involuntarily checking to make sure their bear is okay. It seems to have bored of them, and right as she looks to the door, it collapses to the ground in a humph, its huge back pressed up against the grating.

  “The letter is B, sounds like the word ‘bee,’” Pico says.

  “Like the bug?” Lady says. “Oh, that’s another B.”

  They flip through the pages—car, donkey, mouse. When the book is done, Jemma draws the book into her lap and folds her hands over it, not wanting to let it go. This rectangle, full of a child’s paintings—it’s the key to the world the Parents abandoned.

  Pico hobbles closer to the grating. “The bear’s bleeding,” he says. The edges of its fur are tinged with blood, dark red blotting out the brown.

  “Maybe it’ll die,” Lady says.

  “I hope not,” Jemma says before realizing that’s how she feels. “How long do these things live, Pico?”

  “Forty years, I read.”

  “So this … is the oldest thing in the Holy Wood.” She’s awed by it. It was old enough that it could have lived when her Mama did, when her Mama’s Mama lived. She touches her fingers to her lips, and says, “Salud, viejo. Live a long life.”

  “It ain’t supposed to be here, you know,” Pico says.

  “In a library? Yeah,” Lady says.

  “No, at all. I read that kind of bear, a grizzly, got wiped out around here. Whatever happened to the Parents, the animals got a chance to come back.”

  Jemma inches toward the bear’s fur, spilling through the cracks. It’s lush and rank all at once, and her hand slips toward it. Then she’s petting it with two fingers, as if any more of her hand would make it notice. It twitches its ear as if flicking away a fly, grumbles, and settles closer to the floor. What has it seen? What does it remember? More than they ever will.

  “We need both your hands,” Apple says, pulling her away from the beast with his tone as much as the hand on her waist.

  “If it don’t get bored enough to leave, we better hope it dies,” Lady says. “We gotta get home, and it’s blocking us.”

  “It’s blocking the gun, too,” Jemma says.

  “Yeah, we’re gonna need that, too, if we wanna go home,” Lady says. No one responds to that.

  They debate whether or not to start a fire, and with what. “We surrounded by kindling,” Lady says, arms open to the books filling the room.

  “You want to burn em?” Pico can’t hide his horror.

  “Get over it, Exile! You the only person in the world who can read!” Lady says.

  He relents when they pick only the books that have more than one copy, and even he smiles when a fire is flickering—on the tile, far away from the bookshelves—and gives him enough light to read.

  Jemma hands out rations—fruit and dried meat. But Lady doesn’t really eat. Jemma notices that her jaw muscles stay tense even after she’s done chewing, as if they’re wrestling with unfamiliar, violent sounds. “When we going home?” she says.

  “Home?” Apple says.

  “Yeah, Apple, home,” Lady says.

  Jemma doesn’t speak at first. She thought Lady would never want to go back. Not after what happened. Maybe even she misunderstood how deep Lady’s love for the Holy Wood went.

  “Jemma, you said just a couple of days,” Lady says.

  Jemma stands up and walks to the heavy book she saw before, one she decided not to burn, because it’s full of maps. It starts with an A. “I was thinking … I was thinking we could go to the map of the words.”

  “San Diego?” Pico says.

  “Yeah, that place. Maybe whatever killed the Parents started there.”

  “If it started there,” Pico says, “then maybe we can tell what caused it.”

  “The place on the paper? Is that even real?” Lady says.

  “I saw it, Lady.” And Jemma’s fingers race through the A book, not sure where she’ll find it, but knowing it has to be there. And then she finds the same map, flatter and brighter and smaller, but with San Diego and Holy Wood both marked. She can’t explain it to Lady, not even to Apple, but somehow the haze sparked when she saw those words. It wants her to go to San Diego.

  “How far is that, Jemma? Do you know? Days? Weeks? And you know that the first thing after Ell Aye is the Wilds?” The Wilds are the lands south of Ell Aye. No one has lived there for a hundred years—just dogs and pigs and the occasional Gatherer. “You know how to get through that?”

  “I don’t,” Jemma says, small. Then she speaks a little louder. “But I want to. I want to look for a cure.”

  “Cure? There’s no cure. It’s not a disease. It’s life.”

  “Answers, then,” Apple says.

  Lady wheels to him, then back to Jemma. “I see why you want it, Apple. I even see the Exile, cuz he’s got nobody. But Jemma and me—”

  She grabs the A book from Jemma and stabs at the map with her finger, nails punching through the ancient streets. “San Diego ain’t real,” she says. “Our home is real, and it’s not days from here, it’s hours.”

  Home. Even if Jemma could return the gun, even if they would take her back, even if they would spare Apple, was there a home anymore in the Holy Wood? She looks at Lady, sees the curly-haired little girl she snuggled with on a mattress for warmth, who punched her for a mango. Lady looks back into her eyes and knows: Home is no more real for her than San Diego.

  “You ain’t never going back,” Lady says.

  “We can’t.”

  “I can,” Lady says, determined. As if she’s not talking about going home anymore. As if she’s trying to get back the life that was stolen from her.

  Lady packs. The briefest of hugs, a couple of tears, and Lady is belly down on the windowsill, sliding backward into the night. Jemma watches her land safely and turns away from the window before the real crying begins. Apple holds her tight, but her ribs ache from sobs that she doesn’t bother to hide.

  “Why would she go back?” Pico says. “It ain’t safe for her there.”

  “Lady loved the Holy Wood, and she lost it,” Apple says. “She wants to be a Mama. She wants it all to be safe and normal.”

  “She didn’t lose it. Li took it from her,” Jemma says. “Li—and the Priestess and the Olders. There ain’t no more normal.”

  “She seems like the kind who’s always gonna be okay,” Pico says, awkwardly patting Jemma’s shoulder.

  “Shut up, Exile,” Jemma says, and the echo of Lady makes the sobs come harder.

  When she curls inside Apple’s body on the slick tile, it’s all comfort, no desire. He’s the only thing keeping her from melting into the floor in exhaustion.

  “Maybe I was wrong,” he says into her ear. “Maybe I wanted to live so much that … maybe I was wrong to take you out of the Holy Wood.”

  No. It might have started as a way to keep him alive, but she’s the one who grabbed on to the mystery of the End, who even now can’t face the prospect of early death. She needs him to want to hang on to life as badly as she does. “No,” she says. “I took you out of there. Don’t ever forget it.”

  Sleep seems far away, and she waits hour by hour, wondering if Lady has made it to the 101. Finally she drops into sleep as if she were falling into a well. She hears a scratching at the edge of her mind, as if the haze is trying to break in and tell her something, but she’s too tired to see it.

  Her eyes fly open, and she fights for breath as if it’s the first one in minutes. Apple sits cross-legged across from her, smiling toward that window,
the window where the scrabbling must have really started. Through that window pops Lady’s bushy hair and her out-of-breath face.

  Jemma jumps up and pulls Lady from the sill roughly, clutching her to her chest. “Mija!” she says.

  “Jesucristo, girl, I’ve been gone half a night,” Lady says, pushing her away. “I made it to the skyplane and just realized—it’s dark out there, and there’s a rapist in the Holy Wood that you saved me from, and the only thing I really loved in that whole place was you. So … you all suck.”

  They hug again, this time Lady not fighting her.

  “You came back,” Pico says, his smile the widest Jemma has seen it. He reaches toward them.

  “You hug me, Exile, and I’ll kick you in the nuts,” Lady says.

  He hugs her anyway and she doesn’t kick him. Jemma nestles into Apple’s arms, holds Lady’s hands, and they all sleep puddled around the book fire, even after they learn that bears snore.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE WILD

  The bear is gone when they wake, the only sign that it was there a clean patch on the floor where its fur mopped up the dust. Blood, too, but just a few drops. Lady’s relieved it’s gone, scared it lurks around the corner, but Jemma looks sad to see it go.

  They argue about the route out of Ell Aye in the library. The shortest way to San Diego, it seems, is the road marked with a 5. But that takes them through the Wilds, a place of warehouses, homes, and train tracks that had turned to jungle when the Parents disappeared. There are no sure sources of food there, and traders from the Downtown peoples said it was ruled by packs of wild dogs and pigs that would rip your throat.

  But Lady points out a line of blue on the map, heading almost straight south to the sea as if it were drawn into being, not born from the earth. That was the Ell Aye River, which the Holy Wood shares at its source with the San Fernando. The water is clean, filled with frogs and birds. They can follow it and then turn to the east before they reach Palo territory.

  The first stop when they leave, after scouting the library for signs of the bear, is a broken storefront just south of the library. Behind the window is a long wooden bar, some bottles still intact.

  Pico’s steps this morning are uneven and forced. When Lady peeled back the bandage, she had to freeze her face so that Pico didn’t see what she saw: swollen flesh, red streaking out from the edges and past his knee. The wound was living and angry. They should have searched harder for medsen. Apple’s aren’t as bad, yet, but red lines the edges of the cuts.

  The library could have waited.

  Pico hoists himself onto the bar, exhaling sharply at the effort. Jemma twists open a dusty bottle of vodka, and Lady places her skinning knife on the counter. Jemma splashes it with alcohol, running her fingers wet with vodka along the knife’s edge. It smells burning and clean. She pours it on Pico’s leg, inches from each edge of the wound.

  “You want to do this or me?” Lady says. They’ll need to slice open the fections with crisscross cuts, release whatever poison bubbles inside him. They haven’t told him that.

  “You can,” Jemma says, moving to Pico’s head.

  “Um, thanks,” Lady says.

  “Do what?” Pico asks, his voice still calm.

  “Save your leg,” Lady says. “You’ll thank me later.” And then, low: “A lot later.”

  He screams less than she would have thought, but they wait the day in the bar to let him rest.

  They reach the river the next day after a breathless rush through the streets, an eye out for Downtown scouts and on Pico’s seeping bandage. The river looks different. In the Holy Wood it’s filled with trees and brush that give cover to the animals. Here it’s a mossy cement ditch, with only bursts of grass breaking the banks. Even the water looks smaller. Lady starts to doubt her course, then spots a fishy, silvery glint. There is life, even here.

  When the Parents encased the river in concrete, they built in flattened edges, half as wide as a street. It would have been a tight fit for a car, but it’s perfect for bicycles. They don’t waste time looking at the river, just turn right and head toward the sun. It’s already past noon.

  Their bicycles pass silently beneath a bridge that soars overhead, sliding from a bluff down toward the city. Lady wonders what it would have been like to ride toward those towers when they were full of life, not decay and fear.

  The map says this goes all the way to the sea where the ships float still, bigger than a village. Pico had told her about a ghost ship that moved past the Malibus, so slow and so big it took a week to clear Point Dume. On the deck they could see skeletons of the Parents on reclining chairs, as if they were just resting and taking in the sights of the orphans below.

  There’s no sign of the sea here. Just concrete.

  “Where the people at?” Pico says. “There should be people fishing it.”

  “No one lives here,” Jemma says. “It’s too hard and empty.”

  Pico gestures at the river walls, surrounded by Long Gone warehouses, but no houses. “Rivers mean life. But it’s almost as if the Parents turned their backs on this part.”

  “Maybe Ell Aye was dying even before the End,” Apple says.

  This path won’t be as easy as a road, as much as it looks like one. Debris blocks the path in ropy drifts that stretch as far as they can see. Every time they bump over them, Lady hears Pico or Apple groan. Rains or quakes, take your pick, have pushed parts of the path into the river, forcing them to skirt the holes. Once the entire path crumbles away.

  Apple points out the remnants of once-living moss on the bank, only a few feet below them. “Rains was high this year. Lotta flooding.”

  “That’s why the Parents walled em off, I guess,” Jemma says.

  Apple settles into a rhythm. The collarbone can’t be healing, but he seems to ignore it. But the gasps of Pico’s pedaling grow into constant noise as they ride down the path. By late afternoon, each stifled cry seems to cut into her until she doesn’t feel sorry as much as annoyed. She wants to punch Pico. Jemma looks as if she feels the same way—so it must really be bad.

  A colony of freshwater mussels gives them an excuse to halt. Lady has seen these along the water upstream where they fished. “Let’s grab some of these things for supper,” Lady says.

  “It’s not suppertime,” Pico says.

  “You think you could make it till supper?” Lady says, curling her lip.

  “I could try,” Pico says.

  “And then you’d be useless tomorrow,” Apple says. “Besides, there’s food here.”

  By the time Jemma has a bag full of shellfish, Lady has a fire going where the path intersects with an industrial street that touches the river. Pico lies flat on his back, sweating even though he’s found shade.

  They roast the mussels until they pop and eat them until they feel as if they’re popping themselves. Even Pico perks up.

  Apple stands watch while they rest. The girls lie down next to Pico, one on each side. The late-spring afternoon is growing cold, and his body is somehow warm.

  “We got some things to talk about,” Pico says.

  “About how you can’t walk?” Lady says. Someone had to say it first.

  “About how I’m gonna die,” Pico says.

  Not even a flutter passes her eyelids, and she sees Jemma go equally still. “That’s not true, Pico,” Jemma says.

  “I got a red line running up my leg, and every step I take is moving it that much closer to my heart,” Pico says. “We in the Wilds without medsen. What else is gonna happen?”

  “The gods,” Lady says.

  Pico just smiles at Lady. “So … I’m gonna die.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Jemma asks.

  “Someone braver than me would tell you to leave me behind to die,” Pico says. “But I kinda like the idea of living. So … I guess we just focus on the not-walking part.”

  An old bed frame has washed to shore, rusted nearly through. A family of coots drifts by, chasing the fin
of a carp. Both Jemma and Lady see it at the same time.

  “Let’s float,” Lady says.

  * * *

  Boats are in low supply for a river, Jemma thinks. Lady finds rotting planks within sight of their camp, but they’re so soaked with water they barely break the surface. With people on them, they’ll scrape the bottom.

  The three leave Pico at camp, armed with the One Gun and his books. They spread into the low warehouses, fighting through a thicket of collapsing garage doors. There are skeletons here, not many, but so far from Children that no one ever moved them. The bodies sprawl on the floor in overalls emptied like a water skin.

  “Look!” she hears Apple shout from outside the building. He’s in a passage between the warehouse and an outbuilding, next to a stack of blue barrels. They’re plastic, filled with water that reeks of chemicals, and completely intact. It’s as if the Parents filled them yesterday.

  The barrels are meant to be lifted by grown Parents with machines, not Children. By the time the kids have pushed them over and unscrewed their lids, they shake and sweat. Even Apple looks worn. No, Apple especially looks worn. But the liquid smells evil, and they roll their first two barrels away without a rest. Apple stays behind to dump out more.

  Pico is hammering the silver case with a rock when they get back to camp. Jemma forgot it while they rode, because Pico’s groan drowned out its light thuds against the bike. But Pico hadn’t.

  “I need your hatchet,” he says to Jemma.

  “Why?”

  “Cuz … it’s sharper than a rock?”

  “Don’t ding my hatchet,” she says, slipping it from her waist.

  “Okay,” he says, and swings. The hatchet glances off and hits the rock. Sparks fly.

  “Pico!” she says, and then she turns away.

  “He better be dying,” she says to Lady.

  “It’d be faster if we shoot him,” Lady says.

  After they bring back the second set of barrels, Pico has stopped chopping at the case. His skin is gray, covered with a sheen, and his head hangs down. How can he push so hard when he needs to hold every bit of energy he can muster? Jemma feels something tug at her chest. She pushes the barrel into place and pulls the hatchet out of Pico’s hands. “Here,” she says. She swings once at the case, and it sinks between the case and the clasp, and she’s there in the Bowl watching the hatchet fall into the furrow between Andy’s surprised eyes. “Here,” she repeats, her voice suddenly gruff, “here.”