Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  Jemma, next to him, is still and stone. She has cried for Apple, most of the night, but now that’s done. Something about the grit in her jawline makes him think it will be a long time before she cries again.

  It was Jemma’s idea to set the gasplace on fire, with Apple in it—the biggest body fire they’ve ever seen.

  “That smoke is gonna draw anyone in ten miles,” Lady said.

  “Then the gods gonna see it, too,” Jemma said.

  “It’s gonna be really big,” Pico said, almost apologizing.

  “Can you think of anyone who should have bigger?” Jemma said, and smashed another chair. They piled the furniture and pallets up to their waists in the middle of the floor, doused it all with the sludgy remains of a gas barrel.

  The smoke is sooty and thick. It billows up toward the clouds and rubs them out, till all Pico can see is black. If the tires next to the gasplace catch, they’ll see it from the Holy Wood. It’s a sign that says: Someone’s alive in the Wilds.

  Pico keeps his eyes on the blanketed bundle in the center until it’s swathed in orange, until he’s sure it’s really on fire. The heat pulses against his face. It stings. It makes him feel clean. The flames burst higher, pooling against the ceiling as if someone poured them there. Pico turns away from the body fire.

  “Someone gonna come soon,” he says.

  “Then we better get the hell outta here,” Jemma says, turning without looking back as if it cost her nothing. He knows that’s not true. He wonders if hiding it will end up costing her more.

  The raft is already loaded at the river. Pico’s not ready to ride yet. He has no choice but to float his way to San Diego, at least for another day.

  The raft is too big without Apple sprawled next to him. But when he opens the case, the world seems to close around him like a cocoon. The puzzle insulates him from the absence of Apple, from the fatigue in his arms, from the pain and stiffness in his leg. Thinking always feels safer than being.

  The bicycle tent will just let him sit cross-legged if he hunches. He hunches anyway to see the papers. He spreads them carefully across his lap and onto the deck as the mossy water slips away noiselessly beyond the rear bicycle’s diamond frame.

  “I thought the storms was over,” Jemma says.

  “Yeah,” Lady says. They both move toward the end of the boat, talking over his head.

  “Not up there,” Jemma says. Pico lifts his head up to where her finger must be pointing. Angry clouds surround the mountains in the north, pushing them back into the ground. He can see the rain from here: long, gray streaks slanting into the slopes and the hills just below them. With the sun spraying down on the thunderclouds from the south, it’s an odd, beautiful sight.

  The handwritten letters step off the page for him now. Pico reads them almost as easily as he can read printed ones, but still—still, they make no sense. He knows what they are, but he doesn’t know what they mean. He imagines these Parents spending whole lifetimes, two or three Picos, to get to the point where they could write words like these.

  But yet—not everyone could understand the inside of the head, could they? He’s seen enough in his books to know that not everyone studied these things. Science, they called it. Not everyone is a scientist. So Pico tries to find the parts where they explain things to not-scientists.

  Those live on the edges, he finds, crammed into the white space on the edge of the paper in another hand and another pen. “Ask those bastards up in the mountains,” one furious scrawl says. Next to the letters “TLLP” is “The Long Life Project.” That one makes Pico squint, perplexed. One note gets repeated, over and over, underlined in red. “Why doesn’t it act like a virus?”

  He leafs through the pages absently but carefully. They’re already starting to tear under his hands. Only being in the case has preserved them this long.

  Pico speaks to the girls without turning his head, still watching the clouds. “They couldn’t see it. How can it kill you if you can’t see it?”

  “You couldn’t see the fection,” Lady says, her voice floating over his left shoulder.

  “No, but it came from something in that skyplane. It touched my cut. This comes from nowhere.”

  “You can’t see whatever makes you an idiot,” Lady says.

  “Don’t ever be nice to me,” Pico says.

  “She’s only nice when you’re knocked out,” Jemma says.

  The green rivulets off the back of the boat, the gray rain in the distance, the distant sound of seabirds—all make the papers feel heavy in his hand, his head heavy on his neck. “I’m going back to sleep,” he says. “Steer this thing without me?”

  “It only goes in a straight line,” Lady says.

  Pico curls up under the bikes, the papers barely making it back into the open case before he dozes off. And then he’s deep deep in sleep, rocked on the water like the oldest memories of himself in Nursery. He looks up and sees someone who isn’t his Mama, just some Middle on her shift.

  The Middle in his dream rocks harder and harder, angry that her shift is lasting through the night. The Children hate the night, fear it more than almost anything. She rocks and rocks and rocks until he fears for his little body. Her face contorts with fear, yelling in his ear now: “Wake up, Exile! Wake up, Peek! You gotta wake up!”

  Pico finds himself again on the boat, and when the girls finally shake him awake he’s lying on his right cheek, facing upstream. The green is gone, though. In its place is a furious wall of gray.

  “Flood!” he screams, and arms yank him through the tent into the middle of the boat. Jemma is staring down at him, terrified.

  “You gotta move,” she says. “We can’t carry you!”

  His legs are out of practice and they seem to be asleep. They flop woodenly on the deck. He tries to pull them under his hips but can’t. “Help me up,” he says, and sees the front of the flash flood almost on them. The rain may have fallen in the mountains, but the concrete river has pushed it here without slowing it down.

  She grabs both of his hands and yanks him up, and he’s standing unsteadily. But the boat is pitching now as the first rough water reaches them, and he can’t stand up without Jemma’s help.

  Lady jumps from the boat and lands safely on the sloped bank. The flat bench has already disappeared, ahead of the gray wall. She reaches her hands out for him. “Jump, Pico!”

  “You crazy?” he says.

  “You gotta jump, Peek,” Jemma says, her voice calm in his ear. “I’ll help you. But we gotta get off.”

  “The case!” He sees it gleam from under the bicycle frames.

  “No time! Jump!” Jemma says. And as he pushes against her to go back to the case, she throws him off the boat.

  This would have worked better if I’d jumped. He flies toward Lady. She reaches out her hand. He reaches out his. Then he splashes into the water just as the flood hits.

  The waves wash over him, push him down, and he struggles to the surface. The water is choked with mud and logs and everything the river has picked up on the way from the mountains. It roars around him in violent waves. Even when his head is above the water he can’t see the shore. The sound is even more disorienting. It fills his ears until all he can think of is the river.

  Pico is a good swimmer, all the Malibus are, but this would have been too much for him even if he were healthy. He flaps helplessly in the water, then decides to save his energy for thinking.

  The walls of the river have gotten steeper, almost vertical. Even if he could reach the shore, even if he had strength in his limbs, he couldn’t climb out. But the river ahead of him is clear, and he can float. He lies on his back and points his toes downstream so if he hits something, it won’t be with his head. He watches for a way out.

  The flash flood still rages around him, and he tries to calculate how long it can last. The concrete won’t slow it down, not without trees and grass on the bank. But it can’t keep on going to the ocean … can it?

  The river sweeps under
a bridge, and Pico thinks it must be slowing. He starts to watch for places where he can leave the water, and paddles closer to the edge with little flutters. The banks slope more gently again, and soon he’ll be able to get out and inch himself up the concrete to safety.

  Unless there’s a giant trailer in the river blocking his way. Which there is.

  The trailer is the kind that used to be pulled by a truck. It’s been there a long time, wrapped around the pillar of a bridge, creased at the fold like paper but not broken. Logs and machines and everything the river has carried are trapped under its wheels. Pico knows that if he hits that jam, the water will wash over him and he will die at the trailer before the flood does.

  Pico lunges toward the shore with everything he has, his body forgetting his pain and fatigue in the desperation just to live. His fingers cup together, tear through the water. Submerged reeds pull at his legs, and he scissors free. He reaches the bank but can’t hold on to anything. The current tumbles him along the bank and the rough concrete digs into his shoulder, his chin, his elbow, his chin. He falls back in again.

  A dark circle looms out of the cement, something with an edge that Pico can hold. It’s a drainage pipe built into the side of the river at the water’s edge. It comes at him almost too fast to grasp, but he does, with four fingers of his left hand, then his right. The metal digs into his knuckles, and he almost lets go. He stops to breathe and rest, then hoists himself painfully out of the current, the water sucking at his legs and threatening to pull him back into the river. At last he’s flat on his belly in the pipe, gasping like a fish. His hands are at his sides and he’s too tired to move them. Too tired to move at all.

  After, he’s not sure how long he was there. Minutes, certainly, though they feel like hours. When he’s strong enough, Pico rolls over onto his back and sits up. He curls in the mouth of the pipe, his head and feet climbing up the sides. The pipe, like the others that puncture the river all along its length, is four feet high. At one time it must have been meant to drain water from the streets near the water, to funnel the water down to the sea.

  Off his right side, the river still boils past right below the pipe. In a regular storm, this pipe would be pumping out water from the streets above, but since this storm was only in the mountains, the pipe is still dry. It will keep him safe until the storm passes, but there’s no getting out. Unless—unless the pipe tunnels under the riverbank to a street beyond the river. It had to start somewhere, right?

  Pico peers into the darkness, where the walls of the pipe disappear. If only he had a torch. Or his pack.

  Or the case. For a moment grief swallows him as the river failed to do—he feels it as a real sensation, wet and cold. So many secrets, so many clues, and they’ve sunk to the bottom of the river.

  A skritchety sound in the depths draws his eyes to the dark of the pipe again. A rat escaping from the flood, maybe, or a dog. He’s not scared of rats, but a dog would be trouble.

  The thing grows nearer, echoing off the metal until he’s not sure which sounds are footsteps and which are just their echoes.

  A human face emerges from the tunnel, white against the blackness. It’s a boy, smaller than he is, younger. “There’s no way out that way,” the boy says. He looks more frightened than Pico.

  He’s short enough that he can almost walk in the pipe without bending. His clothes are as wet as Pico’s. When he steps into the light, Pico starts. The eyes the light is shining upon are blue. He’s heard the stories, and he knows where the blue comes from. He’s looking at a cannibal.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE CANNIBAL

  They look like drowned puppies, puppies that just happen to be trying to kill one another. From outside the drainage pipe, they sounded like cats. Lady heard them while she ran down the riverbank and wasn’t surprised to find that it’s not cats but a tangle of boys rolling out of the pipe toward the river, throwing feeble punches at one another, and that one of the boys is Pico, trying to bite the ear off a cannibal.

  She’s not surprised because she believed, even when Pico floated away. Jemma looked grim and started to cross the river along a pipe, looking for their bikes. “You ain’t gonna look for them?” Lady said.

  “He’s gone,” Jemma said. “That was a waste.” Lady could tell she felt the loss of both Pico and Apple in that flood.

  “Not gone until I find his body,” Lady said, and ran down the riverbank, following the blue of the barrels of the raft. If she can still see those, she’s near his body. She caught up to the barrels at a huge jam in the river. That’s where she found this pipe.

  Lady dives into the pipe, grabs the little cannibal around the neck, and pins him against the side of the pipe. He struggles and spits until she pulls her knife. Pico scoots backward, deeper into the pipe.

  “You trying to eat my friend?” she says, jabbing the blade at him. He goes limp, and she begins to think the legends of the Palos warriors are just talk to keep everyone in line. He’s small, even for a kid. Eyes brilliant blue, unnerving blue. Hair, the pale yellow only the Palos have, shaved on the left side and long on the right. They’re supposed to have tattoos for kills, but his wrists are empty.

  “No no no,” he says, his teeth chattering. She notices that his skin is blue. Caught in the flood, too, no doubt.

  “Really?”

  “I—I think he was trying to eat me,” he says, and she has to look at the cannibal’s face to see if he’s trying to be funny. “He attacked me.”

  “I doubt that,” Lady says. “He’s been mostly dead all week.”

  “It’s true, I was,” Pico says from within the pipe.

  Pico is shivering, and so is the Palo. She wants to question the cannibal, but it can happen just as easily near a fire.

  * * *

  Gatherers are good with knots. By the time Lady is done with the little Palo, he’s lashed to a light pole while she builds a fire. She guesses that he doesn’t mind being tied, as long as he knows he’ll get warm. So she makes sure she builds it just far enough from him that he’ll take a long time to dry.

  On the other side of the fire, she lays out the contents of her pack to dry. No dry blankets or clothes, so Pico’s going to have to stay near the fire. When she’s done, she squats in front of Pico. “How you feeling, Exile?” she says. The name has lost all its sting, and Pico smiles at the mention.

  “Weak,” he says, and he’s not exaggerating.

  Lady speaks softly so that the Palo can’t hear, and Pico does the same. “You so weak, why’d you jump a Biter?” She likes that name better than Palo.

  “Got no choice,” Pico says. “He came out of the pipe and he couldn’t know how weak I was.”

  “You ain’t that strong anyway,” Lady says.

  “And I ain’t that strong anyway,” Pico says. “But what if there was more Palos around?”

  Lady freezes. What if there are more Palos around? What was the chance of a little Biter wandering around the Wild by himself? Jemma would have thought of that, would have put the camp in a spot that’s easier to defend. Hell, maybe even put them in a house nearby.

  Where was Jemma, anyway?

  Apple’s bowstring is wet, but it’ll still shoot. Lady picks up the bow and an arrow and holds both in her left hand. She crosses over to the cannibal, facing the darkness so that nothing takes her by surprise. She avoids looking into the fire. Can’t lose her night vision now.

  “Where your friends, Biter?” she asks. They’re facing the same direction, so they look almost like two buddies sharing a sidelong secret.

  “I don’t have any friends,” he says.

  She pokes him with her arrow. “I said, where your friends?”

  The Biter shakes his head. “I—I ran away.”

  “Why you do that?”

  “It’s hard to be one of the Chosen.”

  “Who are the Chosen?”

  “You call yourselves the Chosen? Someone feels good about themselves,” Pico says from the fire.
>
  “Why is it so hard to be a cannibal, Cannibal?” And Jemma steps out of the darkness, a bicycle under each hand and Pico’s pack over her shoulder. She’s soaking wet, too. There’s no weapon in her hand, but Lady knows her well enough to know that the Biter should be scared.

  “That’s not what we call ourselves—”

  “No one cares what you call yourself,” Lady says. “You the ones who butcher people. Why you so scared?”

  Jemma crosses into the firelight and drops the bikes. “Why’d you run away?” Jemma says.

  The boy breaks down. “I can’t be like them! They kill, and they—and they—”

  “We know,” Lady says.

  “But you can’t just stop being one,” the boy says, and Lady can see tears falling in the firelight. “You got to run. I had to run.”

  “You a long way from home,” Jemma says. “Why you so far away?”

  “Raiding trip,” the Biter says.

  “Who was you raiding?”

  “The Kingdom,” the boy says without hesitation.

  “They’re powerful, right? You got a big army?”

  “No, a raiding party. The Kingdom’s got people along the harbor—and the water is ours. It’s the Chosen’s, I mean. I ran when I got to the river. I saw this smoke along the river—”

  “Smoke, huh?” Lady says, sneaking a look at Jemma’s face. No reaction.

  “So I headed north. Until the flood.”

  “How many raiders?” Lady asks. If it’s too small, this kid’s absence is more likely to be noticed. She can tell Jemma is thinking the same thing.

  “Twenty-five. Well, twenty-four without me.”

  “Someone gonna miss you?”

  “Nah,” the cannibal says. “No one wanted me to come in the first place. They won’t come looking for me.”

  “You got a name, Palo?” Jemma says.

  “Tommy,” the kid says, and he seems grateful to be spoken to like a human. Jesucristo, he’s so small, like the kids she used to watch in Daycare.