by Jeff Sweat
The End came so fast, the Parents so unaware, that no one had time to write it in a book, Pico says. But that didn’t mean no one was writing about it. Whoever was on the skyplane must have been a Doctor or an Older or something like that, trying to figure out what caused the End. When she knew a little, she got on the skyplane to tell someone else. The plane fell out of the sky, and the secrets fell with her.
The first people who died lived in the mountains outside of San Diego. The End spread from there, and in weeks almost every Parent in San Diego was dead. Other places had it, too, spread by skyplanes and cars, but San Diego was first.
There are lots of words Pico doesn’t know, like “government” and “scientist,” and Lady knows even fewer when Pico reads them aloud. But one sentence catches them all. “‘The disease attacks the brain,’” Pico says.
“What’s the brain?” Lady says.
“I think it’s in your head.” They’re all silent then, and Lady guesses they’re thinking about the Malibu boy, Leong. He hurt his head, and he didn’t die.
“But how?” Lady says. “What does it do?”
“I don’t know. The people who wrote the papers didn’t know.”
“Is there more?”
“Yeah, but a lot of it’s numbers. I don’t know how to read numbers like that.”
“Sounds like we really do need to go to San Diego,” Lady says. For the first time, she’s looking forward, not back to the Holy Wood.
“Everyone’s dead there, though,” Jemma says.
“Everyone’s dead everywhere,” Lady says.
* * *
Lady’s eyes are the first open in the morning, and she counts the generations of bird’s nests on the overpass in the rising light. They’ve camped under the junction of two great roads, and ramps soar high above them, curving to connect the highway. The curves are so perfect, the pillars are so high, that her breath catches a bit. What is wrong with me? she thinks. I’m looking at Parents’ stuff like Jemma now.
Pico is next to her, but she can’t make herself look toward him in case he’s not moving.
When she does, he’s not, and she shudders until she places her palm over his mouth. Warm breath washes over her hand and then stops. Startled, her eyes jump to his face—to see his eyes staring at her.
“Stop it, you freak,” Pico says. “I’m still here.”
“Good,” she says, and gets up to find breakfast.
* * *
Talking about the End wakes Apple up from the sleep that seemed to be swallowing him. “What about the book?” Apple says. “The one the Half Holy gave us?”
Pico carries it in his pack, but he rarely opens it. He’s focused on the silver case.
“There’s not much in it,” Pico says. “Mostly pictures.” But he fishes the book out of his pack.
Apple follows the motion and Jemma follows him. Jemma seems tied to him by an invisible string for the past two days while Lady looks for medsen. The push and pull seem to tear at her so much that tendon lines emerge in her cheek, in her neck. They’re so tight he can almost read her thoughts along the lines.
“Go,” he tells her. “Let Lady watch us.”
“I can’t leave,” she says.
“You can’t stay here no more.” He wonders if she can see something that will happen if she leaves.
Apple asked her about it last night. “How’d you know bout the dogs?” he said.
“I—I didn’t.”
“I didn’t hear em. You was up and ready for em before they ever got close.”
“I guess I saw em.”
He knows that isn’t possible, not the way they were both too close to the fire, the way their eyes were on each other. “Not with your eyes, though.”
Jemma doesn’t answer, but by the droop of her shoulders, he can tell he’s right. “How do you see em?” he says. And she tells him about the Bowl, how she called for help from the gods and the haze showed her what to do. How she sees more and more visions in the haze and how they mostly seem to show her what is to come. He pulls her tight.
“You two,” he says gesturing at Pico’s blanket, “you two are a wonder. The way he understands the world. The way you … see it.”
Jemma shrugs.
“You gotta get him safe, Jemma,” he says. “You two need each other.”
“I’m doing what I can.”
“Do everything,” he says.
Right now he sees a thirst in Jemma’s face to do, to run, to fight, and he helps her act on it. “Look for some medsen,” he says. “Go.” And she leaves on the bike. Shortly after, Lady pushes them into the river for their long float to nowhere.
Apple feels the rough boards of the raft through his pants. That’s almost worse than the wound. His hip throbs where the bear gouged him, but he’s beyond pain. Everything hurts, everything aches, so he can tamp it down as long as he can focus on the puzzle.
They have the Half Holy’s book between them. Pico is right. There are only a few words in the book, usually small ones below the pictures. Pico reads them out loud, but none of them make sense. We’re too far gone from the Parents, Apple thinks.
Then Pico says, “‘The plague has puzzled sci—scientists, who say in its speed of death and contag’—I can’t say that word—‘that it acts unlike any other known disease.’”
“Diseases the same as fections? So are plagues?”
Pico nods.
A disease that surprised even the Parents, that was new and frightening to even the science people.
“Maybe it was made by the gods to punish the Parents,” Apple says.
Pico raises his eyebrows. Apple knows what he thinks about the gods. “Maybe it was made by someone,” he says.
“Like with magic?” Apple says. The Priestess says they used to have that kind of power, before the End.
“Or like cooking in a pot,” Pico says.
A splash, somewhere across the river. The clean sound of a heron ripping through the water for prey, not the flop of a fish. Apple feels every movement and sound in his skin, twice as big as he would have felt it before.
“You two are loco,” Lady says.
“Help us, then,” Pico says. “End ain’t gonna fix itself.”
Lady jumps in, throwing out ideas about fections and invisibles. They float down the river with the sound of their own words drowning out the ripples.
Then the truce Apple’s had with the body ends, and a lightning bolt shoots out from the point on his hip where the bear pierced his skin. He is dying, he is dying, and for a moment he almost wishes for the End. At least then he would feel the Betterment, his body knitting itself together one last time before it stopped.
“The Betterment,” he says out loud, and only when the others look at him does he realize it matters. “What kind of fection fixes you first?”
“Hush,” Lady says. “I hear someone.”
Apple hears it at the same time and wills himself to stand. He can’t. Still the voices continue: Jemma shouting, and someone shouting back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE LECTRICS
Jemma hacks through a park so thick that she immediately starts looking for higher ground. She wraps her arm around a tree to climb it—and then she sees something higher.
It’s a bare metal tower, held together by rusted girders, nothing else. It stretches above the trees so high that she can’t see the top through the leaves.
The tower beams crisscross like a basket weave. It’s no trick to inch up one angled beam and jump to the next beam cutting the other direction. At each turn the sides push closer together, until finally she can almost touch both sides at once. She hooks one arm over a girder and takes in the Wilds. She’s still in them, she can tell—everywhere to the south and west is a dirty gray, and two freeways rise up out of the gloom.
She should have recognized the tower. It’s one of the Lectric towers, strung with wires flowing south in a line of towers. Somehow the wires ran everything in the Parents’ wo
rld. Pico says it isn’t magic, but how else to explain what it used to do? Or why the magic doesn’t work anymore?
The wires are mostly still intact, except for hers: Some giant hand sliced one of them, and it tumbles into the greening below. It’s inches from her fingers.
They don’t work; they haven’t worked for tens or hundreds or thousands of years or however long the Parents have been gone. Yet something draws her to the wire. When she touches it she feels a shock, a hum, and then a flurry of blue hazy images. They’re the same kind of images the haze has been showing her, but when she touches the wire there are more. And they’re sharper. Complete.
Jemma removes her hand, and they disappear. She follows the Lectric wire from pole to pole until they disappear on the horizon. The visions, the blue haze, somehow they’re attracted to this wire. When she touches it, they must flow toward her like water through a straw. When she touches it, the visions are clearer, more numerous, than any she’s seen before.
She imagines the haze, focused and strengthened by miles and miles of wire. It’s like the antenna above the Holy Wood sign, designed to draw the signal of the god Teevee and share it with others. The more Lectrics, the sharper the haze comes into focus. This time it stays as long as she looks at it, and it slowly morphs into shapes: a boy with a faintly clinking bike hung with pots and fruit, a girl on a horse, a small boy in a pipe, cannibal after cannibal—
She gasps when her fingers burn and then again when something says Hello.
She touches the wire again, and the voice is gone, and so are the shapes. Are those shapes waiting for her along the Lectrics?
Someone is showing her the future, some god or angel. But can she believe it?
Jemma shakes her head, and the movement feels so violent it almost knocks her off her perch. She clutches the metal tighter and turns to the east. The houses meld together in a sloppy jumble of roof and tree, and it’s tough for her to pick anything out of the mess. But to the northeast, she sees a familiar white van, two of them, lined up outside of a low building. Those look like ambylances. Which makes that a hospital. Maybe with medsen.
Jemma starts to climb down the girders, when an impulse makes her grab the wire again. Could she see the hospital from here? She can’t see it with her eyes, but if she holds the wire and focuses, the Lectrics show her. In the haze she sees cars that look blown backward by a desert wind, a pile of bones crisscrossed haphazardly in the hospital. But the hospital is bare. No medsen here. Its empty shelves stand bleak in the haze.
She shimmies down the tower. Maybe the haze was wrong. Maybe there’s another hospital after this one, or houses where the Zithmax still rests.
“Wait,” the voice says. It’s the one that said “hello,” and just the fact that it’s still talking makes her slump against the tower.
“I don’t got time,” she says.
“Wait,” it says.
None of this makes sense, but Jemma doesn’t make sense to herself anymore. Why could she never accept life in the Holy Wood? Partly bravery, partly fear, partly love, partly because it couldn’t have been the life they deserved. But it was life. It was short and brutal, and she can’t stop the friends she loves from leaving it.
I shoulda rolled with Apple, she thinks. I shoulda rolled when we could. In that moment everything she ever wanted is wrapped up in his touch. Maybe the Holy Wood doesn’t know everything about living, but they know that: The touch is life.
You need to save him, Jemma. Not just to save him but to make it worth it. A little voice, small because it feels so disloyal, says: But if Pico could stop the End, would that make it worth it, too?
Did she want to live with Apple, or just want to live?
Then the voice cuts through the haze with the telltale buzz: “Looking for the Ice Cream Man?”
“Who’s the Ice Cream Man?” she says, out loud. And she remembers the name from something before, maybe something Apple said.
The voice says, “You better run if you’re going to catch him.”
For a startling moment she catches hold of a hazy image, of a boy on a jangling bike. And she can see that he’s about to cross the river, ahead of Lady, ahead of her. This isn’t a future. This is now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE ICE CREAM MAN
Pedaling after the Ice Cream Man is hard. The streets feel broken by a giant hammer, the pavement cratered. Cars rest deserted in the streets. Straight lines are impossible, and Jemma zigzags so tight that her right hip glances off a car. Never once does she slow down, just trusts her tires to hold the corners.
There are only two more blocks until the river—she can tell from the Lectric towers still flanking the water like onlookers. She slows down, not sure what she’ll see at the river. Is she afraid that the Ice Cream Man will be there? Or that he won’t?
When Jemma breaks through to the riverbank, she sees two things: Upstream, to her right, the low rectangle of the raft. Downstream? A boy on a jangling bike.
She rides downstream.
Closer she rides, and sees more details. The bike has three wheels, with a huge box slung between the wheels in the front. Tattered umbrella flying above, and so many things hanging from the box it’s stopped being square.
Closer still, and she makes out the outlines of things. Two frying pans. A hose. A hammer.
She’s so close now, she can see the boy’s smiling profile, his pants cut off into shorts. He looks like he’s thirteen. “Kid!” she says. “Ice Cream Man!” He turns, and she sees only half a mouth of teeth.
Then there’s a rustle in the bushes, a stick in her spokes, and the world tumbling with her as she flies through the air. Then there’s the pavement.
A smaller boy, maybe ten, emerges from the brush, bow and arrow in his hands, pink hair on his head, look of pure murder on his face. The haze couldn’t have shown her that? She picks up her bike and backs away quickly, but there’s nowhere to go.
“Ain’t no touchin the Ice Cream Man!” The arrow is nocked, the string is drawn.
Jemma steps back even farther, the bike wheeling back with her. “That’s—that’s the Ice Cream Man?”
“You an idiot?” he says. “You the one yelling his name.”
“Oh,” Jemma says. “Guess I was.”
The bow drops a little. She can see his arms shake.
“Hold still, idjit. I’m a crack good shot,” Pink Hair says. She moves anyway.
He lets the arrow fly and has another one on the string before she can charge him. Jemma thinks it’s flown wide but looks to her right in time to see her bike’s front tire hissing air from a finger-size hole.
“You shot … my bike?”
Jemma has forgotten the Ice Cream Man, but now he’s tinkling toward her in his box-on-a-bike. The box is covered in faded pictures of candy foods that once must have been violent pinks and reds and blues. But the pictures are hidden by a tapestry of hooks and hanging things: shovels and fishnets and shoes and pepper strings.
“Crack good shot, Alfie,” the Ice Cream Man says. “You aims for the wheel?”
“Yeah,” Alfie mutters, and from his tone Jemma wonders if he was actually aiming at her. Did he not want to kill her, or was he just not up for the job? Neither one of those thoughts brings any relief, with the next arrow even closer to her chest.
“You the Ice Cream Man, right?” Jemma says, throwing her hopes at the one who hasn’t tried to kill her yet. “I saw you—I think I’m sposed to ask your help.”
“You saws me? You saws the Ice Cream Man?” The eyes over the box sharpen.
“Just”—the truth is starting to feel deadly—“just from up the river. So I came running.”
“Just comes runnin. And guesst my name.”
“Just … came running.”
“First time sounds like you believes it,” the Ice Cream Man says. “Take the bag, Alfie. And her hatchet.”
He opens his mouth and a crack and a clang drown him out. It doesn’t hit Alfie, but she sees the Ice Cr
eam Man ducking behind his box and a pot flying through the air.
“Pinky! Drop the bow!” Lady says, holding the rifle to her shoulder.
“No,” he says. Brave or stupid. Probably stupid.
“I got a gun.”
“I gots a bow. On yer friend.” Or not so stupid.
“Box boy!” Lady says. “You in charge?”
“Yeah, I am,” the Ice Cream Man says, head poking around the box.
“You wanna get killed, or not killed?”
“Not kills, I guess.”
“Tell Pinky to take the arrow off his string, I put down my gun. We got a trade for you if you good.”
The Ice Cream Man sighs, waves at Alfie. “It good, Alfie. Just keep em close.” Alfie lowers his weapons. He looks mad, but Jemma thinks she sees some relief.
“Why’s your head pink?” Lady says to Alfie.
“Oh, this,” Alfie says, and touches his head. He slips off a wig, and underneath the wig is hair that’s dark like theirs but not. It gently waves and, like the Ice Cream Man’s, is streaked with blond.
“Matches my bike,” he says, and wheels one out of the bushes, pink with white tires and tassels streaming from the handlebars.
“So … who’re you, box boy?” Lady says.
“The Ice Cream Man. The trader of stuff, the finder of things, the drawer of the map.” And then she remembers the traders Apple said he met at the Downtowns, the ones who had left Ell Aye and traveled the world.
The Ice Cream Man isn’t the only Ice Cream Man, he says. His tribe is full of them, and boys and girls alike call themselves the Ice Cream Man because of their carts full of trade goods. They scavenge the Wilds for treasures. The kid, Alfie, acts as a scout.
“You took all the medsen,” Jemma says, making sense of everything she’s seen.
“The what?”
“Medsen.”
“Yeah. The meds.” The Ice Cream Man nods and grins. “You gets a lotta trades for that. Pigs. Loads of salt. Once I gots a baby.”
Jemma freezes. “To eat?”
“No, jest a baby. To grows.” He sees their look and stops.
“Why?”
“We dying,” Alfie says.