Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  Last Lifer after Last Lifer makes their way down the bank single file. Not five or six. A hundred or more, lit with the half gold of morning. They’re all armed, some with guns, most with lances or machetes, and in between are splashes of blond that mean the Palos. None of them look toward the morning sun, toward Jemma. It takes them minutes to pass.

  When she finally dares to climb back up the bank, she’s shaking. Apple had told her this was happening. Even Pilar’s vision did. But now she’s seen it.

  “They are at war,” she says.

  “Yeah, but with who?” Pico says. And they move slowly away from the southbound army.

  Pico is riding in a wagon. Tommy fixed it up, a rusting pile of red under a tarp in the garage. Lady pushed for her to untie him—“No one else is gonna be able to fix a ride for Pico,” she said. Jemma resisted, but Lady was right.

  The wagon trails Jemma’s bike by a thin orange rope. She’s the only one strong enough to pull Pico, as light as he is. Her legs burn early. Pico nests in the middle of a pile of books, although he doesn’t look at them while Tommy is there. He’s facing backward, supposedly to watch their rear, but she knows he doesn’t want to let the Palo out of his sight.

  Tommy walks while the rest of them ride, tied by a rope on his waist to Lady’s bike. Because of the drag on Jemma, he can keep up even with his short legs.

  After lunch Jemma starts looking for places to rest—Pico looks tired from baking in the sun, and she’s straining to pull the wagon. They move at less than walking speed. Pico better heal soon, she thinks. I can’t haul him to San Diego.

  A wall of green looms in front of them—a Long Gone park overgrown into a wilderness, nestled against a crumbling highway.

  It’s the kind of park where they used to hit balls with metal sticks, where trees crowd grassy greens, where mansions cluster close like gossiping Tweens. It’s the place now where animals live thick and dense. Even in the Holy Wood, they could count on these parks for game when everything else failed.

  To their right is a thicket of white carts, almost like cars but smaller and with open sides. Jemma has seen them in the parks before, always next to the sticks. Half of them are toppled and falling apart. One of them is driven by a skeleton dressed in a rotting sweater.

  “One last game of sticks before the End…,” Lady says.

  “These carts are all over the Palos,” Tommy says.

  “You fix em up?” Jemma says, thinking about how Lady told him he repaired the guns.

  “Nah, they’re useless,” Tommy says.

  “I don’t know bout that,” Pico says. “Nothin’s completely dead.”

  “These are.”

  There’s a stiffening in Pico’s shoulders, and Jemma sees the challenge in his face. He nods toward the carts, and Jemma tows him closer so that he can look. “Leave me here,” Pico says.

  “We ain’t leaving you here, Peek,” Lady says.

  “Check out the park and come back for me,” Pico says, already trying to lift up the hood of the closest cart.

  Tommy tugs on the end of his rope, and Lady jerks him back. “Not you, Cannibal,” she says. “Unless you wanna give Pico another chance to kill you.”

  They leave their bikes with Pico, along with a hatchet and a stick that will let him pole around the carts in his wagon. They move into a long meadow surrounded by sycamores. Scars of game paths cross the meadow, as if this were under heavy use. Lady takes the cannibal’s rope while Lady pulls out Apple’s bow.

  “This don’t look like deer country,” Lady says, and when Jemma looks closer, she sees she’s right. Deer eat nuts and leaves and buds and flowers, but they don’t usually touch grass. This grass looks as if it were mowed, and the parts that aren’t are trampled flat. Droppings as big as plates cover the grass.

  Lady nudges her, then points up the meadow to the creature walking right through the middle of it.

  It’s bigger than any deer, almost as big as the bear, with longer legs. Black and white, with heavy horns and heavy boobs that swing between its hindquarters. She’s never seen it before, but she recognizes it from the brightly colored picture in the ABC book.

  “C is for cow,” Jemma says, before realizing the Palo is there.

  “You can read?” he says, but she ignores it. Lady lifts her bow.

  The cow turns sideways and it’s almost like shooting a car, it’s such a big target. Even Jemma could hit it. But something is strange about it. “That’s someone’s cow, Lady,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Someone wrote on its butt.” Behind the black-and-white cow, she sees more cows walking toward them: red, brown, all black. As if someone were herding them.

  “They ain’t here,” Lady says. Her arrow flies right into the cow’s heart, but cows are bigger than deer and maybe even horses, and it doesn’t fall. It bellows in panic. It staggers and bleats and still it doesn’t fall, until Lady puts a second arrow in its heart and a third in its neck.

  “What did you do?” the Palo says, at the end of his rope. He’s breathing hard. Anyone in a mile could have heard the cow.

  They creep through the meadow toward the cow, as if they expect it to spring back to life. When they reach its flank, somehow still twitching in the sun, they see the letter burned into the hide.

  Tommy pokes at the letter with his feet. “K is for Kingdom,” he says.

  Jemma thinks, just for a flash: He knows his ABCs, too.

  “I’m eating it either way,” Lady says. Jemma nods, because they really could use the meat.

  They tie the cannibal’s rope to a tree next to them. Jemma slits the cow’s throat in the thick neck—so much more powerful than a deer, she thinks—and drains the blood while Lady carves a line from tail to chest. Even though they weren’t Hunters in their village, they helped butcher the animals that the Hunters brought home.

  “They got extra stomachs!” Jemma says as they pull out the guts.

  “Jesucristo, what is this thing?”

  Their arms are deep in the cow when they hear the sound of hooves. They’ve heard horses before in the Wild, so they’re not alarmed, just curious.

  Then a horse bursts into the meadow, twenty yards away—and there’s a girl on her. Children don’t ride horses, Jemma thinks. The horse pulls up in front of them, stamping its feet, but all Jemma really sees is the rider. Her skin is about the same color as the Angelenos’, and her hair flows backward in long, thin braids tied so close to her head that her scalp shows between rows. She carries rope in a coil at her waist. Just as Jemma knew she would.

  “I seen her before,” Jemma says.

  “You seen her? How?” Lady says.

  “In a sorta dream.”

  The rider speaks, her voice formal, as if the Parents were still talking. “Trespassers, you have killed a cow in the forest of the King,” she says, “and the penalty is death. You’d better run.”

  Six other riders, in black wide-brimmed hats, emerge from the brush. “I didn’t see this part,” Jemma says.

  They run.

  Tommy runs until a rope jerks him short, a rope anchored by heavy balls at the ends so they can be thrown by the riders. A rider scoops him up and Jemma sees his blond hair flopping over the back of a saddle.

  Jemma with her long legs and Lady with her stubborn speed make it farther. They bound toward the trees, and more hooves pound closer.

  Jemma feels something wrap around her neck, cutting off her breath with coarse, ropy squeezes. Something punches her in her chest. Then something whips around her legs, tying her together and pitching her forward on arms she has suddenly forgotten how to use.

  Lady runs past her but turns back when she sees Jemma fall. Jemma curses her friend’s loyalty right now. “Go! Get help!” she shouts, before remembering that the only help is Pico, lame Pico. Then a rope spins through the air, three arms of rope with heavy balls at each end. It catches Lady around the ankles, and she hits the ground so hard Jemma worries that her neck will break.


  The two of them are trussed on the ground, just feet apart. Hooves approach, and Jemma can just see them from the corner of her eye: brown, with just a brush of white across the toe.

  Jemma wants to bite her tongue, to appear brave. But being brave doesn’t keep you alive. She opens her mouth and screams and screams.

  The rider dismounts, steps between them. Jemma sees the rider’s face, not unkind, staring at her. “Honey, you have to shut up,” the rider says. “We have work to do.”

  Jemma just keeps screaming.

  “Okay,” the rider says, shrugging her shoulders. And hits Jemma in the head with the butt of a whip.

  * * *

  By the time Pico hears the cow and the screams and hobbles toward the meadow, he’s too late. He sees the riders, and his friends and his enemy slung over the horses’ backs like blankets.

  The only weapons he has are the hatchet and his stick. All he has is Lady’s bike. Even with those, he’s too small and still too sick to do any damage. The riders head out of the park, and his mind is already out there with them.

  You can’t save em like this. If you charge in, you all gonna die.

  * * *

  The girl finds herself in blackness, flying as much as falling. With no walls, no landmarks, she can’t tell if she’s even moving. There’s no fear, because there’s no bottom.

  Her left hand scrapes against the wall and there’s a trail of blue sparks. Not sparks. Stars. The blue flares and fills the blackness with light, and then it’s gone again.

  She reaches out with both hands, and her fingers brush the sides, trailing fire. She slows. The sparks grow brighter. It’s the haze, but different somehow. Where the haze was in her world before, trying to assume the shapes she would recognize, she seems to be in its world. The sparks start flowing past her, as if she could ride it like a river.

  She’s inside the haze. Is she trapped inside a Lectric?

  No, she’s in a nothing, with no true walls or sides. It’s a place in between. She becomes aware of outlines in the haze, alerting her to presences. People. They’re people. She can see their shapes. They’re near her but they don’t know she’s there.

  Except for one, a boy. He looks familiar. He’s watching her. The Palo? He shouldn’t be inside the haze, but he is. He doesn’t try to talk, he just watches. She shivers, and the motion sends tremors through the haze.

  The glows is brighter in front of her, and she pushes toward it. There’s a box floating in the air, a little smaller than a Teevee screen. It looks almost like a picture frame, but inside of it, there’s a man.

  A man.

  Not a kid, not a ghost, a real man. What the Ice Cream Men called the Old Guys. He can’t be real. But he’s more sharply defined than anything else she’s ever seen in the haze. She pokes her head through the frame.

  He’s seated at a table and looks up, startled. “That computer doesn’t work,” he says.

  “What?” another voice says.

  “That computer hasn’t worked in ten years,” he says to someone off to his side. “Something’s wrong.” She can’t quite focus on his face, but he has hair on it. His face looks wrinkled, but somehow still youthful, as if someone had overlaid a child’s face over one of the Long Gone Parents.

  “A compo what?”

  “It’s still talking to me,” the Old Guy says.

  “I ain’t an it,” she says.

  “You’re not a glitch, are you?” he says.

  “No, I’m—” She remembers that she has a question for him. “Do you know the End?”

  Some sort of realization passes over his face, even as it goes in and out of focus. She’s losing her hold on the room. “Where are you?” he says.

  “I—I need to go back. This is in-between.”

  “This is real,” he says. “Who are you?”

  “I’m—I’m Jemma,” she says. And the knowing is enough to drag her back into the day.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THE RIDERS

  Lady can’t think of a less comfortable way to travel. Her arms are tied behind her, her ankles are tied together, and all of her is tied to the back of a horse that, as far she knows, learned how to walk from an earthquake.

  The riders aren’t there for them. They’re there for the cows. Lady has to hang on while they roust the cows out of pockets of green.

  “What you doing?” Lady asks the rider, who’s only a long muscled leg in Lady’s eyes. She doesn’t answer at first, but even riders must get tired of not talking.

  “We’re pulling the cows out,” the rider says, after minutes of silence. Lady heard someone call her Tashia. “They’ve been grazing for the past few months in the Wilds. These went wider than usual. Springtime is when we bring them home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Oh, honey, you do not want to find out where home is,” Tashia says. “Because that’s where someone is going to have to kill you.”

  By the time the riders are done, there are maybe thirty cows. One drags the dead cow on a triangle-shaped litter behind her horse. The cows blink at Lady with a calm curiosity, as if she’s just another creature from the wood.

  The roundup—that’s what Tashia calls it—is bigger than just those cows. As they ride out of the park, they’re joined by individual riders and groups of five, six cows at a time. They come from alleyways, from front lawns where they graze on close-cropped Parents’ grass, from parking lots where the vegetation has run wild. All of them have the K.

  The cows swell in numbers, from the dozens in the park to twice that. They drive down the main street, under the red and blue of a gasplace awning, black hides brushing against the pumps. Past cars, past Parents in cars, past orderly rows of palms, past libraries and hospitals and abandoned stores. Even hanging from Tashia’s horse, Lady can see new herds pushing in from the dead ends and the parking lots.

  Some of the animals have horns, and when their horns toss near Lady she jerks her head back. The hooves clatter on the pavement, the cattle moan, and it all builds in volume until Lady can no longer hear Tashia’s halfhearted responses to her questions. It’s the most noise she’s ever heard outside of a thunderstorm.

  These streets were never intended for cows, Lady thinks, with the tiniest of thrills, pushed down by her pain. This mess of smelly, noisy life whirling down the pavement was only intended for machines. The Parents never planned this, and yet we are here, in the middle of cows, slung on the back of a horse.

  If only I could get off the horse.

  Jemma is still unconscious, a little blood on her temple. Their heads jostle close together, and Lady can see that she’s still breathing. The cannibal is awake and seems to not notice the fact that he’s strapped to the back of a horse. He chats up his rider, asking him about the herd and the roundup and their weapons, the ropes that tangled their feet.

  “Bolas,” the rider says. “For the cows.”

  That word means “balls” in the Holy Wood, and Lady can see why. Each rope is actually three ropes tied together, heavy stone balls at each end. The riders fling them at runaway cows, the balls whirling through the air until they wrap the legs and the cows trip and fall the way Lady did. But how did the riders discover those?

  “We only killed a cow,” Lady says to Tashia, after a while longer.

  “You killed one of our cows,” Tashia says.

  “So?”

  “So, honey, you’d have been better off killing one of our kids.”

  There’s nothing in her voice to give Lady any hope. But the moment Lady felt that rope bite into her arms, she stopped hoping anyway. Still, she has to keep talking, and there’s so much to know that it’s easier than she thought.

  “What’s a king?” Lady says. “Is that like a Kingdom?”

  “You never heard of a king?”

  In the ABC book Pico and Jemma showed her, a king starts with K. But she doesn’t know what they do.

  “He’s in charge of the Round Table and the Knights.”

  �
��So—furniture in the night?”

  “No, Knights. Warriors. They meet at the Round Table.”

  Lady’s confusion must come through in her silence, because Tashia laughs. “Poor kid. You’ll meet them soon enough.”

  Lady feels some tension in the way Tashia talks about the Table, and she pokes at the weak spot. “The Knights better than the riders?”

  “No, those idiots aren’t better than us. We’re the cowboys. Cowboys make this Kingdom. The Knights just take—” But Tashia stops herself, looks over her shoulder warily. Lady can’t tell if she’s eyeing her or the other riders.

  “Can a cowboy be a … a Knight?”

  “You have to win a fight with another Knight in order to become a Knight. But … why would you want to?” The question is for herself, not for Lady.

  Ahead Lady sees something she never thought she would see here: a mountain, covered with snow. It’s smaller than she imagined, but undeniably a mountain, pushing up from the ground like the beak of a giant. Snow has dusted the mountains in the distance, but never so close. She’s drawn to it with a sort of hunger that feels like home.

  “What the hell is that?” she says.

  “End of the line, honey,” Tashia says. “Home.”

  The road opens up to their right into a giant plaza, and the cows wheel toward it, making temporary lines in the herd like spokes. The cowboys ride along the left flank to move the slower cows onward.

  At first Lady thinks she’s in an old mall, the trading place of the Parents. But this is different. A concrete track mounted on columns passes overhead. The thing on it is like the baby of a train and a skyplane, sleek with metal sides that drop down on each side of the single rail. It’s maybe twenty feet long, the first car in a train that’s mostly missing. It’s a relic of the Parents, some imagined tomorrow the Children will never see. And it’s towed by four cows.

  The cows tug against wooden yokes tied to thick ropes that angle up to the front of the train. Where there must have been glass, the windows are covered with wooden slats, and cabbages show through. The drivers sit at the front of the little train in a sort of nest. That window is completely gone, and the drivers’ nest juts out like a lower jaw. With its faded red paint and the ribs where the windows are missing, the whole thing looks like a boiled and cracked crawdad.