by Jeff Sweat
“Thanks,” Pico says, and he holds her eyes as if he were carrying something fragile.
“I’m gonna go build a boat,” Jemma says, and turns away.
They break apart the crates in the warehouse into large squares. There are hammers and nails and enough rotting rope that they can weave everything into an unwieldy but floating mass.
They finish the raft in the final breaths of light. The raft is made of twelve of the barrels in all, in six rows of two, with planks as a deck, forming a rectangle about six feet wide and ten feet long. It’s blocky and awkward but should handle the shallow river. With the lazy current in front of them, it doesn’t need to be seaworthy.
Pico has pored over the contents of the silver case for the past two hours, and when Jemma turns away from the raft she sees him holding up a sheaf of papers in the firelight. Jemma takes the last of the mussels, throwing some to Lady and Apple. “Papers, that’s it?” Lady says, cracking open the cold mussels. “I expected treasure. Holy weed, maybe.”
“Papers,” Pico says, not bothering to look up. “But … papers.”
“What do they say?” Apple asks.
“I don’t know,” Pico says, and Jemma can’t tell if it’s exhaustion or defeat creeping into his voice. “The writing—it’s weird.”
He holds up the yellowed paper for Jemma to see. Instead of the blocky letters like the Holy Wood sign, the lines curve and fold over one another. She can barely tell where the words end. Nothing looks like a letter.
“Can you read it?”
“No,” Pico says. “But this letter is an A, and this is an M. Unless they used different letters that I haven’t seen, I should be able to figure out what the other letters are. If I have enough time.”
* * *
Jemma flops down between the fire and Apple. He hasn’t said much since they built the raft, but she reminds herself: He just got attacked by a bear. She leans into his left shoulder and he flinches. And he broke his collarbone.
“Sorry,” she says. “I’m good at finding the spots that hurt.”
“It all hurts,” Apple says. He starts to kiss her, but something doesn’t make her want to kiss. “What?” he says when she pulls back.
Just Pico dying. “Nah,” she says.
“I ain’t going anywhere,” he says.
“It’s just that Pico … It just sucks that—” Tears come, surprising her, and she shakes them loose. “No point being sad.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “I think being sad made the Parents the Parents.”
“They lived forever,” she says. “How could they be sad?”
“All that living meant they was always seeing someone die,” Apple says. “There’s no living without losing. Being sad just means you loved.”
“In that case,” she says, leaning into him and kissing him, “I’m gonna be real real sad when you go.” The thought hits her with a panic. She will.
Desperation and fear and longing pile into one and she’s kissing him and he’s driving back against her, tracing her shoulder blades with his good arm. She recognizes the thirsty feeling of never wanting to let go.
There are people next to them, next to the fire, and she doesn’t care. They can’t see us. We’re invisible because we made a place all our own.
Her mouth leaves his for a moment and traces a line along his jaw: sharpness of bone, the last remnants of baby fat. As if she can feel him becoming a man under her lips. Her tongue reaches his ear and he gasps inward. It’s then she remembers that she needs to breathe, that she’s holding her chest still as if it would keep the bubble they’re in from breaking.
Apple is breathing enough for both. She feels his lungs, labored and ragged, under her chest. He lets go for a minute, panting.
“Sorry,” he says, “I gotta—” And then she sees the sweat on his skin, his eyes strange in the firelight.
“Apple,” she says, but before he can say anything, she hears the buzz. It’s almost inaudible now that she’s gotten better at seeing the visions, but she likes the warning. The haze swirls out of the night and four-legged shapes appear in the middle of the blue. Even with the crude outlines, she can see them licking their chops.
She leaps to her feet and pulls her hatchet from her belt. She nods at Apple, who gets to his feet less certainly and picks up his machete.
“What is it?” he says.
She motions out at the night where the haze tells her they would be. They don’t come for a long time. But at the skritching of claws on pavement, she knows she was right.
Dogs.
So when the dog slams out of the blackness farther from the river, a blur of blacker black and fangs, she isn’t surprised, but she’s still not ready for it because it’s heavier than she is, and it smashes her into the ground inches from the fire. She feels the heat of the flames next to her ear even as she flails against the dog. It has tan marks around its eye. She strikes again and again with the hatchet and nothing lands, and then Apple’s machete cuts into its neck and the dog crumples.
Jemma throws off the dog, grabs a stick, and lights it in the fire. Apple holds his machete grimly. With a hatchet in one hand and the torch in the other, she looks into the darkness on the opposite side.
The fire won’t scare the dogs like it would a coyote. Nothing does. The dogs are larger than the coyotes, stronger, and they hunt the parts of the city where the humans are rare. Sometimes they even break into the Holy Wood and attack the little kids. She’s seen pictures of them in Parents’ houses and know they lived with the families. It’s as if the Parents’ friends had come back to haunt them.
The rest of the pack emerges from the darkness, all colors and sizes. They look almost casual, as if attack is the furthest thing from their minds, but Jemma knows it will start any second. When they attack, they pile on Apple first, maybe because he doesn’t have the torch, maybe because his left arm hangs useless. He hacks his way out from under two of them, and she brings down another with the hatchet.
“Get behind us,” she says, yelling to Pico and Lady.
“Like this?” Lady says at her ear as if she’s telling a joke, and then the gun is firing, once, twice, and the dogs are falling and running.
“You gotta remember we got this thing,” Lady says, running her fingers along the gun.
There are five dogs on the ground, none of them moving. Lady nudges the big black form by the fire with her toe. “Kinda wish we’d been attacked by pigs. Taste better.”
Apple hasn’t moved from his spot near the fire. He stands, machete at his side, and slowly looks up. He looks as if the fight has drained everything from his face.
“Apple?” she says.
Then he collapses, falling hard on his side on the pavement. It’s the bad side, and he doesn’t even whimper. Jemma scrambles toward him. He feels flushed and feverish, like—like Pico. She checks his back for wounds. They seem to be healing as they should. But he reaches to his right hip, and she tugs at his waist. There’s a scratch from the bear that she didn’t see, only an inch long but deep into the skin. In the firelight it looks as if it’s bubbling.
“I didn’t even feel it till now,” Apple says, and then he’s gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE RAFT
The letters come to Pico during the night, looping around him in lazy spirals. Sometimes a C will come into view, sometimes an M, but the rest spool out in liquid threads, never taking shape.
He tries to talk to them, to ask why they won’t come clear, and all he feels is a fevered shake in his jaw. He wrestles free of the ropy words, but they settle on him, tight and familiar as an old coat. One winds around his leg, and he wonders why it’s pulling at his calf, why it’s carving a line through his skin. Another settles on his shoulder—
They put it on a skyplane. They guarded it with a locked case. It holds secrets that strange letters can’t keep silent. Look for the letters you know first.
The letters uncoil and climb his leg, straight for his heart
. Learn the letters and you stop the climb. The C wraps around his neck, squeezes. Pico tears it off. Opens his eyes, then opens the case.
* * *
“There is no ‘back,’” Apple says. He’s so tired he can barely argue anymore.
They’ve spent most of the morning trying to figure out how to fight the boys’ fections. Apple knows there’s no hope. Pico knows there’s no hope. But Jemma and Lady, both, think there’s a way to go back.
“The Angelenos got medsen,” Lady says. “I know they got Zithmax. I Gathered it myself.” Zithmax was a medsen the Parents used to have. It was the only thing that could beat a fection like that.
“The Holy Wood?” Pico says. “I steal the One Gun, and they gonna give me Zithmax?”
“Fine,” Lady says.
“The San Fernando and the Downtown,” Jemma says. “They’re even closer than the Holy Wood. They can help.”
“They won’t,” Apple says.
“Maybe they give us the medsen,” Lady says. But they all know that’s not true. No one will give them anything. They don’t have anything to trade other than the One Gun, which would get them killed by the other Angelenos. That’s the difference between being with people and being on your own. You get sick, you get injured, and there’s no help.
“I been through this before. Been an Exile,” Pico says. “Only thing that saved me was you.”
“Plus, the Last Lifers are out there,” Apple says.
“You killed em,” Jemma says.
“We killed some,” Apple says. “That Last Lifer came from the San Fernandos. They could be coming from all over Ell Aye—and going to the Palos. We go backward, we’re likely to cross their path.”
“We could find the Zithmax ourselves,” Lady says reluctantly. “We Gatherers.”
“I wanna keep going to San Diego,” Pico says. “I’m finally starting to understand stuff.”
Jemma looks at Apple, silently trying to convince him to go back. This time, though, he can’t give her what she wants. This way, there’s a tiny piece of hope, fragile as a spiderweb, but hope. “It’s only forward for me,” he says.
* * *
The river would be more beautiful, Lady thinks, if it weren’t for the kids dying on the boat.
They are on the raft at first light, looking for a break in the Wilds. Before they can find the Zithmax—it starts with a Z, Lady thinks—they have to find a spot where there are stores and houses. It’s called the Wilds because it’s been abandoned since long before their Mamas’ Mamas’ Mama, because so much of it—the warehouses and the parking lots—are unlivable. It’s known for the beasts that live there, not the people. But there will be houses. There should be houses.
Mist floats up from the surface of the water in a slender band. The tendrils start a foot from the water and end two feet higher, so their bodies cut through the cloud while their heads float above it. Above the fog, the world is cold.
But Pico—Pico is lying down in the midst of the mist, shivering more than he should be from the moisture, and when Lady feels his body it seems as if he’s carrying the fire with them. Apple doesn’t shiver, just lies quietly on the deck, his eyes tracking the waterline.
“San Diego,” Pico says, under the fog.
“What?” Lady says. She leans under the fog blanket and it shreds at that moment, as if a giant is tearing a dandelion puff with gentle breaths. There were tendrils of white, and now there’s only mossy river glistening under the sun.
“The papers say San Diego,” Pico says.
“You figured out their words?”
“I’m starting to,” he says. “Some of the letters look like ours.”
He settles back into his study. Lady takes another look at their craft. Two of the bikes are lashed to the raft and to each other to make a triangle, with the other bikes forming a back wall. If it gets hot or rainy, they can throw a blanket over the frames to make a tiny shelter for whoever needs it most.
The river is so choked with brush on either side that branches graze the sides of the drums with a scratchy hiss. They guide the raft into a groove carved into the bottom of the concrete. In the center the river is deeper, and their short poles just touch the bottom. By summer, she thinks, the groove will be an emerald line surrounded by blinding white banks.
The water is so still that she can feel Pico’s shakes through the deck of the boat. But the pages keep turning. He’s there with his stupid case, muttering and tapping the paper, his head still racing even as the poison climbs.
Lady has only begun to believe that this journey could matter. If Pico dies, none of this matters. She watches for an opening in the bank that looks promising, balancing on the edge of hope.
Maybe she can find Zithmax, even in the middle of the Wilds. No way the Exile gets to out-stubborn her.
They find the one place where green breaks up the warehouse walls along the eastern shore, and Lady steps out lightly onto the bank, bicycle over her shoulder. Lady leaves the gun with Apple, since Jemma can’t seem to shoot it straight.
Jemma pushes the raft into the water and floats slowly away with her sick cargo. Since she can move so much faster on bike, Lady will meet them a few miles downstream when she’s done looking for the Zithmax.
* * *
They’re in the wrong kind of place for medsen, Lady can tell almost immediately. There are houses in front of her to the east, but not the big ones. The bigger the house, the more the Parents needed medsen.
Lady smashes away the weak wood in the front door of the third house, the first to look good. She scans the tiny front room and kitchen quickly. Other than a vine tearing through a duct in the floor, it looks untouched—but it’s not.
When she enters the bathroom, she pushes aside strips of wallpaper that carpet the floor like autumn leaves. The medsen cabinet is empty, just a moldering box of bandaids covered with pictures of a puppet frog. Lady sees a word written in the dust of the window behind her, so clear the window hasn’t had a chance to film over the writing. She never could have read it before Pico showed her the ABC book.
“Hi,” it says. Smiley face.
Gatherers already knew how to read, she realizes, even though she didn’t call it that. The Parents had medsens for reasons she can’t imagine. They had to understand the shapes of the letters on the medsen to know which would heal.
That’s why she almost checks over her shoulder when she sees the words. It could have been written by some kind of Gatherer. It could have been written today.
There are soon at least six homes that no longer have a working front door, thanks to Lady and her anger at Li, her fear for Pico and Apple. But mostly she’s racing the unseen Gatherers who have found everything before she did.
The other Gatherers seem not to care for food as much, so she gleans cans from the kitchens. She gleans tidbits about the mystery Gatherers, too. Strange bicycle tracks in soft dirt, heavy and rolling three wide. Two sets of footprints on a dusty floor. Every house put back to bed like a nanny with her Daycare brats.
The latches are newly oiled and locked. They want to keep the houses for themselves. These aren’t Angelenos. Lady stops, feeling cold. She doesn’t know who lives in the Wilds.
She’s always been the last person to worry. The Holy Wood swaddled her perfectly and kept her from harm. But now, cut free from her people, she seems to worry all the time: About Apple, who seems to have shrunken in size in days. About Jemma, who carries weight on her that she can’t release. Mostly, she’s surprised to find, about the Exile. Because he holds their fates, yeah. Also because he’s turned out to be a decent sort of runty know-it-all.
She finds them under an overpass downriver, breaking night. Jemma’s face is tight and red, as if she’s been thinking about crying.
“Any better?” Lady says.
Jemma shakes her head. “Anyone get better?”
Lady collapses in a pile on the ground with a grunt. She peels off her pack, reaches in, and tosses Jemma a can. “Peaches.”
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“No bulges,” Jemma says, twisting the can in her hand.
“A whole cubberd full of em. Carried what I can.”
Jemma doesn’t say anything while she opens the can but speaks after the wheel cuts through the last thread of metal holding the lid with a tink. “You didn’t go for peaches.”
Lady lies back. Stars jut out of the clear night sky, wrapped by clouds on the north and south. She can’t look Jemma in the eye. She can’t even look at the piles of blankets by the fire. She keeps eye contact with the stars instead and tells Jemma that the good stuff is gone.
“We can look tomorrow,” Jemma says, quiet.
“Yeah.” Lady is just as quiet.
Jemma carries a can to Apple. Lady scootches toward Pico on her butt and peels back the blanket. His hair is doused with sweat. His eyes, when they open, look as if they’re staring out from under the surface of the river.
The peaches don’t look like peaches anymore, and Lady wouldn’t know them if she hadn’t seen the picture. She fishes out a browning mushy lump with her fingers and holds them over Pico’s mouth. “Food for you, Exile,” she says. The words are harsh, but her tone isn’t. His mouth is open, and Lady lets a few drops of peach juice fall between his teeth. She can imagine the way the drops feel, sliding cool over a cracked throat, the way they’d make you want to swallow even when you didn’t think you could.
Pico does swallow; she can see his throat move. “Good,” he says, and opens for more. Lady gives him the whole lump. He chews, and the chewing seems to wake him up. He doesn’t stop looking like he’s dying, but he stops looking like he’s dead.
“No medsen today,” Lady says.
Pico shrugs. “That’s too bad. Cuz I figured out my papers.”
“Really?” Lady says.