Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  “Not yours to tells, Alfie.”

  Alfie shrugs. “We needs babies or we don’t get bigger. No more Ice Cream Men. So sometimes people gives us babies.”

  “Okay, Ice Cream Man,” Jemma says, and steps up to the cart. “You got some medsen in there or not?”

  “Yeah, I got some,” the Ice Cream Man says, and the half-toothed grin sets harder.

  “We looking for some Zithmax.”

  “Just fer you and your friend here?” The Ice Cream Man eyes them. “You don’t look so sick.”

  “We know someone,” Jemma says. If the Ice Cream Man knows that the boys are dying, they lose any leverage they might have had.

  “I bets your friend’s pretty sick, or he’d be standing there.”

  Jemma sees the situation slipping. “Look, you got some?”

  “Yeah, I do,” the Ice Cream Man says. “I just wanna knows how bad you wants it offa me.”

  “I could give you my ax,” Jemma says, feeling its loss from her waist even as she says it.

  “Like that?” He points at three of them dangling from his cart.

  “Hey, them’s your friends down there?” Alfie calls from the riverbank. He’s wandered over without either one of them seeing it, and must be standing over the ramp. “Two of thems? That bunch of mostly deads under the blankets?”

  They don’t answer.

  “The price just wents up,” Alfie says.

  “Okay, they’re dying,” Jemma says. “You gonna let someone die?”

  “People dies all the time,” the Ice Cream Man says.

  “Not these ones,” Jemma says.

  “Tell me again what you gots,” the Ice Cream Man says. The rifle is on Lady’s shoulder without Jemma seeing it lifted, but Jemma’s already jumping at Alfie, knocking the bow out of his hand. She picks it up and turns. The barrel of the One Gun is aimed at the Ice Cream Man’s chest.

  “This is what I got,” Lady says.

  Fear is there on his face, but not like Jemma expected—just a dusting across the brows. “If you trades, you knows the Ice Cream Man always carries an egg. Not for eats.” He holds up a metal egg, battered gray-green. It looks heavy, wrong, even from where Jemma is. There’s a ring at the end, and his finger is through it.

  “What’s that?”

  “Gift from the Parents,” he says. “You shoots, it falls off the pin into this box. And all your meds, all of the stuff you tries to steals from me, just … blows up. You know ‘blows up’?”

  “I can figure it out,” Jemma says drily.

  “But, good news,” says the Ice Cream Man. “I think you gots something for trades.” He looks straight down the barrel of the gun.

  The trade takes forever, with Jemma trying to make Lady and the Ice Cream Man put down their weapons at the same time. When they finally do, Lady takes out all the bullets. “You ain’t getting these till we leave,” she says.

  The Ice Cream Man digs through his box for several minutes, bringing out things that even Jemma hasn’t seen as a Gatherer: a set of socket wrenches, perfectly preserved bicycle tubes. Finally he pulls out a decaying plastic bag wrapped several times around a small flat object. He peels off the bag and fishes out two packets covered on one side by a metal paper, on the other with bubble shapes. Jemma knows the packages from Gathering, but it’s been months since she’s seen one.

  “This alls I got,” he says.

  “That’s enough,” she says.

  “Enough for one,” he says. It takes Jemma extra heartbeats to figure out what he means, and then her heart seems to seize in her chest. The space between heartbeats is filled with a brutal silence.

  “What’d you say?” Lady says.

  “Enough for one,” the Ice Cream Man says. “Zithmax don’t works so good no more. Takes more.”

  “But you told us you had—you told us—” Jemma fumbles over the words. To search for days, to get this message from the gods, and now this? Half a cure?

  “I got Zithmax,” the Ice Cream Man says. “You got Zithmax. Just figgered you’d rather have one dead friend than two.”

  “Puto!” Lady lunges for the gun on the top of the bicycle box and grabs it away. She digs for the bullets in her pockets and has one in the chamber before anyone else can react. The Ice Cream Man doesn’t budge.

  “Shoots,” he says. “I gots what I gots. Now you gots to deals.”

  Jemma hasn’t moved since he placed the packets in her hand, feels as if she can’t ever move. She pictures the two blankets down by the river. One of those blankets might never leave.

  “You want the trade or not?” the Ice Cream Man says.

  “Course we want it,” Jemma says, and saying so gives her power to move again.

  She walks away from the Ice Cream Man toward the river but stops at the top of the slant of the bank. Lady walks with her, stops with her. Jemma can’t look at the raft, or the boys next to it. She only sees the fading green of the water running away to the sea and feels the risk of running along with it.

  Lady wraps up her arm, nestles into her shoulder. The feel of Lady’s tangled hair against her skin gives Jemma something to grasp, and she comes back to that spot against her will. She doesn’t want to be here, deciding this. She wants to be anywhere, everywhere. Not here.

  “Could you pick for me?” Jemma says. Somehow if Lady chose, she could live with it.

  “No,” Lady says. “No, mija. It’s not for me.”

  “Give me reasons, then.” She knows she knows them, but she needs to hear them. They’ve escaped her somehow.

  “Pico’s sicker. It might not work,” Lady says. Jemma nods. “Apple might get better. But then what?”

  The reasons fly at Jemma now, too fast to grab them all. Pico is smart. Apple is strong. Apple has always been there. That’s not Pico’s fault. Apple will keep us safe. Pico offers a chance. Apple’s just for me. Pico is for everyone.

  Apple’s my love. Pico’s the answer. None of those are things any Child should expect to have. And still she can’t walk down to the water.

  “I don’t know the answer,” Jemma says.

  “Cuz all the answers’re wrong,” Lady says.

  That’s when she decides. “We never get to be happy,” she says. “We never get to want what we want.”

  Lady’s face is still, her whole body is still, as if she’s holding it in place so that no emotions will escape.

  “No one gets to be happy,” Jemma says. “But I will.”

  The raft is beached on a bench of concrete at the bottom, and next to it on the bench are the two blankets. She crouches in between them and reaches down.

  Pico looks dead already. Would if he weren’t still sweating. She checks his neck and feels a pulse, irregular but there.

  “He’s still with us,” Apple says, stirring next to her. She’s so grateful that he’s still there that she falls on him, sobbing without sound. She wraps her arms around him, but he can’t wrap back. He doesn’t ask her what’s wrong because, really, what isn’t?

  When she speaks, she speaks into his neck while he holds her. “I see things,” she says.

  “Like you saw the dogs,” Apple says.

  “Like that. Like lots of things.” Still he doesn’t look surprised. “Like this.” She holds up the Zithmax packet, clutched in her hand this whole time, too much of a treasure to ever let out of her sight.

  A look of wonder crosses over his face. He pulls her tighter. He would never admit that he’s scared to die, that he’s greedy to live, but it’s there.

  “The gods showed me how to trade for it, and when they showed me I thought it was cuz they wanted us to be together, to somehow beat the End. Why else would they show me?” She shakes the packet. “Only this, Apple, only this is not enough medsen for both those things.”

  “Ah,” he says.

  “So I…” Her voice trails off. She can’t say it. But she sits up and starts to open the first bubble on the first packet. She has to give the first bubbles from each packet at onc
e.

  “Tell me,” he says. “When you saw things, did you see us, together … after now?”

  “I dunno what you mean.”

  “We riding the river together, we exploring together? Or is it only you?”

  “Why you wanna know?”

  “I don’t,” he says. “I want you to know. Whether this world is supposed to have me in it.”

  “Just cuz I didn’t see it—”

  “But you didn’t.”

  He’s the boy who waited his whole life for her, until she discovered she had been looking for him. They found each other now. She owes him the rest of that life.

  “You gotta do it,” Apple says. “You know it. You gotta be smart. Pico, he might be able to fix things. That stops if you pick me.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I ain’t in your pictures. All this future you see don’t got me in it. Pico, though—Pico gives you the future.”

  “I wanna be with you,” she says, the sobs starting deep in her gut. This time they have an effect on him.

  “Don’t make me do this,” Apple says. “Don’t make me beg you not to save me. Cuz I want to stay.”

  “I’m not letting you go,” she says. “I’m too selfish for anything else.”

  “I know that,” he says, his face threatening to give way. “I know you, Jemma. But maybe you oughta really be selfish. Hold out for more than a few months with me.”

  He’s right. The selfish act, for her, is to bet on her own life.

  “That’s just a trick,” she says, sniffling.

  “You got a chance to do something that no one has done since the End,” Apple says. “For you, for Lady, for the whole Holy Wood. That part’s not selfish.”

  “Maybe,” she says.

  “You know,” he says.

  Apple looks up at her from under the blanket, and with that look, that Child’s look in an almost-grown body, she remembers: My first memory is of Apple. He must have been watching her in the Daycare, stepping in for a nanny. He handed her a bow and a practice arrow sharpened to a wooden point. Then, as now, she didn’t really know how to use it.

  She took the arrow in her hand and stabbed him in the thigh. He didn’t flinch.

  He doesn’t now, even when he sees the motion of her hand, the look in her eyes, but something must fail for him at that moment because he seems to collapse, asleep, and is breathing deep and regular in just seconds. As if he can’t stop it if he can’t see it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE MAP

  Jemma is standing up when Lady reaches the raft, shaking, holding out her hand. “Give Pico this,” Jemma says, with the Zithmax in her fingers.

  “You sure, mija?”

  “You gotta give it to him. I can’t.”

  “Jemma—”

  “Give it to him before I take it back.” The packet slams into her fingers, Jemma’s in such a hurry to get rid of it. Jemma disappears into the night along the riverbank.

  Lady wonders if she did right, by making Jemma make this decision on her own. But she would have always chosen this exact thing.

  Pico’s head seems to blend in with the blankets. Lady touches him on the temples. “Wake up, Peek,” she says, and thinks she’s never called him that before. They haven’t known each other long enough for a nickname that wasn’t mean. “Wake up. We got some medsen for you.”

  A slow blink from the blankets. She puts her hand under his neck, feels it swallow compulsively.

  The mouth is too dry and the pills stick to his tongue. When Lady pushes them down, Pico gags. Finally Lady crushes the pills into a swallow of water and pours it down Pico’s throat. He gasps at the wetness. This time, though, the medsen stays down.

  “Gods,” the Ice Cream Man says, sliding down the slope and seeing Pico’s face. “I shoulda tooks your ax, too.”

  The Ice Cream Man is back to a happy gap-toothed kid once he has the gun. He and Alfie don’t seem in a hurry to go anywhere. Since Jemma has disappeared, Lady decides to let them stay.

  They’re good dinner guests, though, because the ice cream cart contains such wonders: strange spiny fruits, delicate dried meat, candy from the Parents still sweet in its wrappers.

  And the stories.

  The Ice Cream Men live deep in the Wilds, but they constantly move as they pick the buildings around them clean. They call their group the Fleet. They keep chickens and goats but trade for fresh food. Right now, they live in a hotel with two hundred rooms.

  “Got so many beds, where your babies? You boys ain’t up for a good roll?” Lady says, and then she’s thinking about rolling. And then she touches the hairpin instinctively, and she doesn’t want to think about rolling anymore.

  The Ice Cream Man only smiles. “Takes two kids in a bed to makes some noise. When I gots there, all the ladies gone.”

  They return to the Fleet every week or two. Longer than that, and the Fleet could disappear. They used to have Ice Cream Men wandering around looking for the Fleet, so they started to leave maps for one another.

  “Maps? You got maps?” Lady says. She never thought of maps as important before because she had everything mapped in her mind in the little world at her front door. This world, though, is too big to keep only in your mind.

  They do, but the old ones are so fragile that they only pull them out when they’re desperate. The Ice Cream Man marvels at Pico’s plastic map, as clear as the day it was made, and then shows her his map.

  “This is the best thing I’m gonna makes in my life,” he says, leading her to his cart and lifting the lid. On it is a map written in neat pen strokes on the white bottom of the lid. She sees Downtown at the top, the mountains, the Palos peninsula, the lands below. It’s the entire world of the Ice Cream Men.

  “Pico and Jemma need to see this,” Lady says.

  At the bottom of the map, somewhere between Ell Aye and San Diego, along the ocean, are harsh bold lines, drawn again and again with pen to keep anyone from crossing. “What’s that?” Lady says.

  “Them’s the Dead Lands,” the Ice Cream Man says. “The Parents, they runed it fore the End. You gets sick you go in.”

  The map is a story of people, too. A group of warriors riding on horses like the Long Gone days, but the Ice Cream Man doesn’t bother to explain. Lady’s eyes are drawn to the low rise of the Palos, rough figures drawn with sharp blades and pale skin. “Them’s the Biters,” the Ice Cream Man says.

  “The what?” Lady says.

  “The Biters. You know, the ones … who eat people?”

  “Oh, you mean the Palos,” Lady says.

  “That don’t makes no sense,” Alfie says. “They eats people.”

  “Wait. You trade with em?” Lady says.

  The Ice Cream Man shrugs. “We trades so they leaves us alone. And cuz they useful.”

  “But they eat people,” she says. “You just said so.”

  “Only sometimes.”

  Lady feels cold, feels rage. They see the face of evil, and they just offer it a frying pan. She wants to cut them. Then she thinks: If we could get the Palos to leave us alone, wouldn’t we?

  The Ice Cream Man describes everything without judgment. Nothing is good or bad. They’re either useful or not useful. Dogs, useful. The people of the south, useful. Biters, useful.

  But the Biters are growing.

  “They’re not just in the Palos?” Lady says.

  “They never was,” he says. They live in pockets between here and the dark black lines. The Newports are Biters, really good with boats. And people seem to be flocking to the Biters, even the ones that aren’t white.

  “They gots a new leader,” the Ice Cream Man says. “They calls him Little Man—I guess cuz he growns like the Parents. And he brings them all together. The Newports and Palos never used to talk. Now they do. And they works with the Last Lifers.”

  “You seeing Last Lifers with the Biters?” Lady says. She remembers what Pico and Apple said about them.

  “Yeah,” the Ice Cre
am Man says. “Moves south, maybe one Biter likes he’s herding them.”

  “That seem weird to you?” Lady says.

  “Any times the Last Lifers don’t acts crazy, that’s weird,” the Ice Cream Man says.

  “Them Last Lifers have guns?”

  “They got guns, the Biters gots guns. They always gots lots of guns,” Alfie says.

  “You selling guns to the Palos?” Lady says.

  “We ain’t stupid. We sells to them, everyone gets mad,” Alfie says.

  “But they gots them,” the Ice Cream Man says. “More and more.”

  “Jesucristo,” Lady says. Think what happens when the Palos get ahold of a whole bunch of guns, when the Last Lifers are following them south? “You useful to em? That many guns, you gonna find out,” Lady says. And the Ice Cream Man doesn’t answer.

  Jemma’s voice comes from beyond the fire. Lady doesn’t know how long she’s been there, but she suspects for a long while. “What’s ice cream?”

  The Ice Cream Man smiles. “You seens ice?”

  The hunting parties have seen it before in the mountains, but Lady’s only seen it once, after a winter storm that froze all the oranges where they hung on the branch. They blackened and rotted, and for months the Holy Wood had to take their chances with the cans they found in the houses. One kid died from starvation, one from the contents of the bulging can she was unwise enough to try to eat.

  But that winter, Lady found ice. A puddle lay before her on the street, hard and cold and almost like a mirror. She poked it with a stick and the mirror crackled around the tip. When she put the puddle in her mouth, it melted and her tongue went numb from the cold. She craved that sensation all day, but the ice was gone as soon as the clouds peeled away.

  “I seen ice,” Lady says.

  “Thinks on ice, and thinks on honey and strawberries and milk. That’s what the stories says it taste like,” the Ice Cream Man says. “The stories says the Old Guys use to brings it to the Ice Cream Men.”

  “Who are they?” Jemma says. If she’s asking that now, then she must really want to know.

  “They Parents who still alive. They comes to the kids and helps and teaches.”

  “For real?”

  “For reals,” Alfie says. “But they gones now. Just tales now.”