Mayfly Series, Book 1

by Jeff Sweat

  The giant towers over the others, his chest stretches outward in a muscled V. He smashes a club made of a piano leg into another Biter as if he didn’t know the Biter was there.

  It’s his face, though: There’s hair on it. Not the wispy things on the boys’ lips, but so much it covers everything but the nose and the eyes and the teeth set in a snarl.

  “Little Man!” she shouts.

  Little Man. Is he the Biter who Tommy said lived to nineteen? Is that the size the Parents always got when they lived so long?

  Little Man roars, not like an animal but like a kid who lost a toy, and swings the piano club. She ducks, and the club glances off her calf. If it were direct, something would have broken. She can’t beat him. When he lifts the club again she darts under his arms, running to her right along the fence toward the main battle. She cuts between a squad of Last Lifers and the fence, and Little Man is too big to squeeze between and follow.

  She’s free of him, on the other side of the Last Lifers. But the Last Lifers are still there. And Lady isn’t.

  * * *

  The golf cart is ready. After they took the skyplane gas barrels to the Mono station, they loaded it up with food and fuel and weapons. Pico thinks, Are we really going into a battle?

  The engine comes to life in a putter, not a roar like the mocycle. The Kingdom would hear it on a quiet day, but not tonight, when the Children are shouting and there’s a soul-deadening scream coming from the southeast wall. The night will swallow it up.

  Pico drives so that Grease will be able to shoot. The crowds get thicker as they near the wall, and they pass buckets and bullets and arrows traveling hand to hand to the defenders. The gate is in front of them.

  Grease hesitates, and for the first time Pico sees how much of his heart is still here. It’s the first time Grease sees it, too. “Peek,” Grease begins, and it’s the sound of him changing his mind, of him abandoning the quest. His throat catches, but the next sounds are of guns going off one right after another.

  “They got lots of guns,” Pico says, knowing it from his reading. “We gotta go.”

  “I know,” Grease says. The fighting is happening a hundred yards from the main gate, so there will be time for the cart to slip out and to close the gate up again. The guards, three girls and a boy, step in front of the cart. “What’s this thing?”

  “Weapons, for the battle,” Grease says. “King’s orders.”

  Everyone’s so used to Grease that if he rolled a giant teacup through the door, the guards probably wouldn’t have noticed. Even so, they don’t open the gate. “You can’t go out with the Angeleno kid,” one says.

  “It’s the King’s orders.”

  They open the gate.

  “Stop.” A blocky shadow, all arms and head, steps away from the wall. “No one leaves.” It’s one of the Knights, John. Othello’s friend. Grease flinches. They could have talked their way past anyone, but John lacks imagination.

  “You heard the guns out there,” Grease says. “It’s the King’s orders.”

  “The King isn’t down here. Maybe recovering from that punch of yours,” John says, and there’s something ugly in his face. Has he turned against the King? “Only the Knights leave.”

  “You gonna tell the King he doesn’t get his weapon?”

  John says, “The King isn’t—” And then he stops. Two of the girl guards have their swords at his neck, and one covers the boy guard. That girl is Tashia’s little sister, Pico realizes. Dozens of girls surround the cart, carrying swords and clubs and bricks.

  “Why?” he starts to say, and looks behind him. Tashia and her cowboys are mounted on horses behind them.

  “I’m going to be so tired of saving all your asses tonight,” she says.

  * * *

  At first Lady finds herself separated from Jemma when Little Man comes for Jemma, then she finds herself in a thicket of Biter spears. One grazes her neck. She runs a Biter through the stomach. The Biter drops on the ground, clutching her stomach, and suddenly they all fall away in a curtain.

  Not because of her.

  A Last Lifer, almost as big as Little Man, blocks her path. He waves off the Biters, who retreat. Some kind of commander, then.

  She sees something in the way he stands, even though his face is dark with the Terminal’s fires at his back. She says a quick prayer that she’s wrong, but when he turns his cheekbone the fire catches a fresh scar that runs from his cheek to the edge of his mouth in a disaster of a smile, a scar given to him by a jagged bottle. That scar—she almost wishes he didn’t have it, because it’s what she sees when she closes her eyes at night.

  Li.

  He carries two machetes. His eyes are lined with charcoal like all the other Last Lifers, but she can see past the black lining to a deeper blackness. He wants her dead.

  “Figures,” she says, working her fear into a sneer. “You always was a Last Lifer. Finally found people almost as dead as you.”

  “You never shut up. Just like that night.” He swings the left machete lazily, and even so it comes so close to her ear that she feels a puff of air. He’s fast, too.

  “I was just bummed that your little Li wasn’t as big as the rest of you.” Make him angry, she thinks. But he’s always angry. Lady jabs at him, and he retaliates with both machetes. She manages to block them, but one slides along her blade and cuts her thumb. He presses on her with a flurry of machete blades, each hand windmilling toward her. A machete strikes her sword dead-on, and sparks fill the space between them.

  He’s so strong. The wildness of his attacks shows her something, though. As big as he is, he’s never had to learn how to fight—not the way the Biters or the Kingdom have. He slices as hard as he can and trusts his speed and strength to do the work. Worse—for him—he follows each blow with a look that says, See what I can do. I bet he flexes in front of a mirror, she thinks.

  “Why you here?” she says. She wants him to talk to slow him down—but she really does need to know, in case they survive this. He’s part of the story of how the Last Lifers joined the Biters, and she has to know it.

  “The Holy Wood kicked me out cuz of you. All afraid of how strong I was,” Li says, pausing between blows, circling her.

  “No. It’s cuz you only half human,” Lady says.

  “The Last Lifers made me their leader. I made em make me their leader. I killed anyone in the first Last Lifer den who wouldn’t do what I said, and then we killed other groups who didn’t do what I said, until dozens of Last Lifers followed me. Then Little Man gave us guns and promised us long lives.”

  A way to keep growing without the End. Can Little Man really give them that? “You believe that?”

  “I don’t believe nothin. But the Biters is on our side now.”

  “You just their favorite dog,” Lady says. The sneer is real now. “I hope I’m there when they eat you.”

  Li lunges at her, tackles her down to the dirt, and then she’s staring at his shoulder the way she did that night, afraid now as then that she’ll never crawl out from under his body. She feels him rubbing against her, hands tearing her clothes. Not again. She’d rather die.

  Only of course she wouldn’t. Dying would give the puto what he wants. And he’s dropped a machete and she still has her hairpin.

  Better. She has a sword.

  Lady wrests her right hand from under his body, grabs the sword, and hacks at him blindly. From his scream she knows she cut something on the back of his leg, hopefully deep. He rolls off her and she scrambles away.

  When they both regain their feet, she can see the blood pouring down his calf. If she’d landed her blow an inch higher, he’d be hamstrung. While she’s circling him, Lady scans the crowd for Jemma. But Jemma is surrounded by Biters, visible only by the rise and fall of her sword.

  So is Lady, still. Even if she beats Li somehow, the Biters will kill her. Not this puto, though. He won’t be the one.

  Li jumps at her again, machete flashing wild. She parries the blo
ws, barely, and each one feels as if it will drive her into the earth. Her muscles threaten to give out, but she holds on until his arms drop, triumphant. Ha! his face says.

  Until she stabs him in the chest.

  The blade doesn’t hit his heart. She can tell, because he can still scream with the blade stuck below his collarbone. Lady pulls it out and sees the blood running down that chest and the pain tearing through that ugly grin. More screaming, high and petulant. She thinks: I will never get sick of that sound.

  Under the scream, Lady almost misses the hoofbeats.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  THE THUNDER GUN

  Lady is jerked through the air, away from Li, by a hand in her armpit. Then she’s struggling to climb on a horse behind Tashia, settling into the saddle behind her.

  “Puta! I had him!” Lady says, pounding Tashia’s back in anger.

  “Yeah? Who had all the Biters right behind him?” Tashia says.

  “I was gonna kill him,” Lady says.

  “Wait. Li?” Tashia says. She has heard about Li from their talks, and she understands.

  “He got away now. Somewhere away from the wall.” Lady’s shaking almost too hard to hold on to the horse.

  Bolas whistle through the air. The Biters nearest them go down. More cowboys burst through the attackers, their horses herding the army like runaway cattle. Most of the cowboys are girls, who don’t usually fight for the Kingdom, but these have machetes and swing them with glee.

  The cowboys scatter the invaders for a moment, and Lady thinks they might hold. But the Biters are seasoned, fearless, and they jab at the horses with their spears. The horse next to Lady collapses, a spear in its side, and its rider disappears into a furious pile of Biters. Screams, shouts, and then Lady has to look away.

  Hooves, more of them, and this time from the right. The Knights are coming, the King is coming, and Lady thinks: We will win this. Because, she realizes, no one fights like the Knights of the Kingdom. They ride in formation, sweeping aside or trampling every Last Lifer and Biter in their way.

  The Knights carry lances made by Grease from skyplane struts, featherweight lances that will never break. They wear vests, helmets, and shields, the kind that used to protect police from bullets, and nothing the Biters have can penetrate them. An arrow shatters on the King’s clear shield.

  Almost as if on cue, the last of the Biters loses nerve, and they run away from the fence. The Knights bunch together and gallop after them, closing the distance between them in seconds.

  That’s when thunder and flame rip open the night.

  * * *

  “Don’t know what you think you gonna do with those,” Pico says as Grease unlatches the guns from the side of the cart.

  “Guns are easy to shoot,” Grease says. “That’s what makes them scary.” Grease holds on to the side of the cart behind Pico and watches Pico as he drives. Grease thought he was happy in the Kingdom. Somehow, though, being outside the wall with Pico makes him happier than when he discovered how to make the engines go. Is it freedom? For the first time, freedom to be what he wants?

  They drive toward the clamor. The cart has no lights, so they travel only by the light coming from the Kingdom, passing through splashes of yellow-white and back into darkness. As they reach the southeast corner of the Kingdom wall, the battle hits them with a blast of sound.

  That’s probably why the Biters who are clustered at the edge never see them coming until the golf cart of the apokalips is upon them. Two of the Biters are dead before the others can even see where the gun is. Pico swerves right and drives in a circle around the edge of the battle, while Grease fires from his spot at the door on the inside of the circle. Another one goes down.

  Only one Biter has a gun, and she probably can’t get a lock on the cart. Between the new moon and the gray-green paint, it slips through the night; the battle covers up the sound. She can only fire back at the muzzle flashes. Grease shoots the Biter next to her and then her. There’s only one left, and that one can’t shoot them.

  The shots coming out of the night are too much for the Biters, and they start to edge away from the wall and into the darkness, where Grease keeps picking them off.

  There is one knot of Biters left, rallying around a giant. Little Man, Pico thinks. And he seems to be fighting Jemma.

  * * *

  The thunder gun is unlike any gun Lady’s ever seen, black with gills like a fish. A big Palo—who would’ve seemed bigger if she hadn’t seen Little Man or Li—is firing it with one hand.

  Each trigger pull unleashes a stream of fire and a rat-a-tat that she’s never heard in this world. Worse, every burst cuts down horses and boys and girls, and there’s nothing to do but—

  “Get out,” she says in Tashia’s ear.

  “Not while that thing’s there,” Tashia says, and spurs her horse toward the gun.

  The gunner looks bored, as if he only cares about death when it’s harder. While most Biters let their hair flop down over their eyes, he pulls his into a topknot.

  “We never gonna get close enough,” Lady says.

  “Honey, close is for Knights,” Tashia says. Lady sees the bola in her hands.

  Lady ducks behind Tashia’s back so Tashia has room to throw, feels the muscles ripple under Tashia’s skin as she twirls the rope. They release. Tashia’s arm points at the gunner for a second, and then the ropes shimmy through the air.

  The bola wraps around the Biter, locks the arm to his chest. The gun falls to the ground. Tashia is still galloping at full speed toward the gunner. “I’ll get it!” Lady says, and launches herself off the left side of the horse. She didn’t mean to do it, but when her feet land on the Biter’s shoulder with a crunch, it feels good anyway.

  The cannibal slows her down, but she’s moving too fast when she hits the ground for her feet to catch up with her, and she tumbles to a stop. She manages somehow not to roll on the sword on her hand.

  Lady overshoots the gun by about ten feet. As she lunges toward it the Biter shakes off the bola and dives at the gun, too. He hits the ground and reaches. His fingers close on the stock.

  Lady slices them off with her sword.

  The Biter rolls away, screaming and cradling his hand. Lady calmly picks up the gun and points it at him. She should hold one of these more often.

  “Not so big without this, are you, puto?” she says.

  * * *

  Jemma feels the Biters drop away, as if they’ve lost focus. The Last Lifers are running away from the battle. When were the Last Lifers ever afraid? she wonders.

  There’s a roar along the fence. Little Man, again. She had hoped the knights had killed him, but he’s found new prey. She sees the giant, a foot and a half taller than everyone else, swinging his piano club high in the air.

  Below him is a Knight, fighting without a lance and losing. The Knight blocks the club with his sword, but the blow seems to drive him into the ground. The next attack from Little Man knocks his riot helmet off, and the Knight spins toward Jemma. It’s the King.

  No one could stand long against Little Man, she thinks, but the King seems to prove her wrong. He dodges the next blow. Little Man twirls after the miss, a flurry of limbs and piano club threatening to fall under its own mass. Little Man is slower, and the King is under his outstretched arms and slicing toward his shoulder. Blood spurts out from the joint. For the first time Little Man yells in pain, not just in anger.

  Jemma watches Little Man, watches the way the other Biters act around him. They give him room, lots of room. Clearly they know his strength, and they don’t want to be accidentally crushed. But when he’s hurt, no one comes to his aid. Shouldn’t they, if he’s their leader?

  Maybe he’s turned them all away from him, from the purges Tommy said he made. Maybe they secretly hope he dies. Or maybe that’s the way all Biters treat their fellow soldiers.

  The King slashes against Little Man’s legs, and the look of shock on Little Man’s face reminds her so much of a baby. Tomm
y said he wasn’t smart, that he was propped up by their council. But she sees no signs of intelligence in his eyes, no signs at all. How did he talk the Biters into joining them if this is who he is? What wasn’t Tommy telling her about Little Man?

  The tide turns against the King. One moment he is hacking against the piano club, carving off chips of wood as Little Man blocks the blows. Then Little Man rages, and the club rises again and again, and the King shrinks before him—just one more speck to be beaten into the ground.

  She charges in with her sword, and the King doesn’t register surprise as much as resigned gladness. Together they battle Little Man, slashing at him whenever they get an opening. Little Man falls back.

  But he’s still too strong, and they’re weakening from the strain of the battle. Jemma’s left arm is numb. It’s only moving because she wills it to move.

  The end comes too fast to track. Her sword is gone, somewhere behind her, and her hands are stinging. Little Man knocks the King down. He knocks the King’s sword out of his hand. The King could cower, but he doesn’t, so she stands up straight, too.

  Little Man looms over them. She can see the scowl on his face turn to a smile—and then the golf cart of the apokalips runs over him.

  The cart flies in from her right, hitting Little Man with the hardened spiked-steel grille, sending him flying through the air, and then, when he lands, running him over. Thump. Thump.

  The cart stops and backs up. There’s a beeping sound in reverse. Beep. Beep. Thump.

  Little Man’s body is pinned under the wheels. The driver’s door opens, and Pico steps out over Little Man’s legs. He looks a little puzzled and a lot pleased. “The golf cart of the apokalips!” he says.

  “Is he dead?” Jemma says.

  The King steps behind the cart with his dagger drawn, and returns a moment later, cleaning the dagger. “If he wasn’t, he is,” the King says. He looks around at the three of them.

  “You killed Little Man,” Pico says.

  “I think you did,” he says.