by Jeff Sweat
They all hear the same thing: silence. The Last Lifers are completely gone, and Biters are running after them. The fall of Little Man, the loss of their gun, the failure of the Last Lifers to hold the line with the Biters—all that must have caused the Biters to lose their nerve.
“Did we…?” the King says. Jemma nods.
“This was a pretty good first day in the Kingdom,” she says.
“You might have saved the Kingdom. I owe you … I owe you everything.”
Tashia trots up, with Lady behind her on the saddle. A look passes between Tashia and the King. Longing, anger, sadness. “Tashia,” he says, opening a door.
“King,” Tashia says, shutting it. Jemma sees the beginning of a war that will go on long after they leave. Because they are leaving.
“Oh,” Jemma says, “we ain’t going back inside the Kingdom. I ain’t gonna be your weapon. We gonna find out about the End, and when we do, we’ll come back to you and tell you what we know.”
“I’m going with them,” Grease says. “I have to know.”
To her surprise, the King doesn’t answer right away, and when he does, it’s not with anger. “You did save my life,” he says. “And Grease has earned the right to do anything he wants.”
“We can make it look like an escape,” Jemma says. There’s hope for this King yet.
“That would help,” the King says.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
THE DEAD LANDS
Grease tells Lady this isn’t fast. His mocycle was faster. So were the cars and trains and skyplanes. But for Lady, whose only experience with speed was that minute on the rollertrain, the golf cart moves as if it has wings.
It took them days to get to the Kingdom. Now the cart flies down the 5 road, at least when the road is clear. When there are abandoned cars, the cart is skinny enough to sneak by. And so it is that in just an hour, they leave the living lands.
It happens gradually, in that first mile. But then Lady sees that everything has become black and brown and rust—rotten tree trunks, leaves just clinging, pine needles red as if they’re lit on fire.
What made the ground so sick that it still kills? Lady resists the urge to hold her breath. The land is quiet, too. Even in the middle of the city, birds chirp, squirrels chase one another across the Lectrics. Not here.
She remembers the talk with the Ice Cream Men. Jemma was in grief, Pico unconscious. But she remembers the black line scrawled on the map. “These are the Dead Lands,” she says.
Don’t drink the water, the Ice Cream Man had said. Don’t eat anything but what you carry. As Lady looks on the waste of the Dead Lands, she wonders why anyone would ever. This whole place is a warning.
They should be quiet, too; that’s what the Dead Lands are telling them. Something in Lady doesn’t want to listen to the land, though. She speaks loudly, she sings, she laughs. We are the happiest people in the Dead Lands, she thinks.
Still, the death wears on them. Funny to live in an entire dead world, where the Parents’ bodies still litter the street, and have death mean anything at all. Life still goes on in the rest of the world, though. In this place, you have no hope. The Ice Cream Man was right—before it made you sick, it would make you crazy.
The singing starts to feel forced. They leave the houses, into what must have been a wide plain shouldering up to steep hills.
“Hey! Boobies!” Pico says. It’s so unlike a Pico thing to say, and his voice is so bright, that it takes her a moment to realize he’s pointing at them.
These are definitely boobs: a huge pair of buildings, half spheres each maybe a hundred feet tall and two hundred feet wide … with a structure shaped like nipples on the tops. She’s not sure why the Parents built anything in that shape, but she can tell from the lack of windows that they weren’t made for living in.
Lady looks at the boys. Grease is barely reacting, and Pico is wearing a goofy smile. “You’re a boy, after all, Exile,” Lady says.
“I’m sprised as you,” he says.
The Boobs are right up against the ocean. “The ocean,” she says, trying to keep the wonder out of her voice. It fills the horizon.
“You never seen the ocean?” Pico says.
“We only seen it from the hills.”
“Me neither,” Grease says.
“Could we go to it?” Lady says. She and Jemma used to talk about going to the ocean when they were young Gatherers, when the ocean was just a shimmering crescent at the end of Ell Aye. Lady feels a pull in her stomach that’s almost what she used to feel around boys.
“Nope. Still Dead Lands,” Pico says.
Lady looks closer at the Boobs and sees a crack down one of them, as if someone hit it with a giant hatchet.
“What is this place?” Jemma asks.
Grease points at huge Lectric towers running to the Boobs. “This thing made Lectrics, a lot of them. These must have been really strong,” he says.
“So…”
“So maybe whatever was so strong on the inside broke out when the Parents died. Like, no one knew how to control something so strong.”
They’ve drawn closer to the Boobs, and Pico has them pause so he can read the sign. “Nu-clear Power Fa-cility,” he says. “I think you’re right. It made enough Lectrics to feed cities. And then it all went bad.”
Lady looks at the two of them: Grease with his understanding of machines, Pico with his understanding of words. If anyone could bring the world back, they could. With Jemma to help them ask the right questions.
The land beyond the Boobs is barren. The plants have gone, and there’s no concrete or houses to hold down the dust. It piles up against fences and stumps, threatening to overwhelm them. It’s as if no one has ever lived there. She’s never known land where no Parents lived.
A wind hits them from the ocean on their right, and she imagines it filled with the poison that killed the Dead Lands, ready to sting her eyes and fill her lungs. She doesn’t have to imagine it for long, though; soon so much dust chokes the air that without the cloth she pulls over her face, she’d be choking.
Off the 5 she sees a lump. Multiple lumps, in a field of rocks. “Stop the cart,” she says, and climbs out. They walk toward the lump. Half buried in the dust, she sees that her mind wasn’t lying about the shape. Bodies of Children, recently dead.
Pico squats, looks at them closely. “They don’t smell that much, so I’m guessing a day or two.”
“That wasn’t done by a human,” Lady says.
“That’s the Dead Lands,” Grease says. On their skin Lady sees big blisters and scabs, as if someone attempted to rub off their faces. What were they escaping? What were they hoping for in the gray of the Dead Lands?
The wind rises, the dust along with it, and what’s left of the daylight is swallowed up. Lady looks south and sees a brown cloud roaring toward them, as tall as one of the towers of Downtown. “Get to the cart!” she shouts, and runs toward it.
The cart is only a hundred feet away, but the cloud hits them with thirty feet to go. Lady stumbles, panicked, because the cart suddenly disappears. The dust is everywhere, stinging her eyes, filling her nostrils. She spreads her hands wide, blind.
Lady doesn’t stop moving, afraid that if she stops she’ll forget which way was forward. She leans into the momentum, trusting her body to follow the line it had been taking.
A rock snares her foot. She catches herself, takes one, two steps more, and something bangs her left hand. The front plate of the golf cart. If she’d been even one foot farther past its nose, she’d have wandered off into the storm.
“Here!” she screams into the wind. “The cart’s here!” Pico and Grease were to her left, Jemma right behind her, but they could be in any direction now.
She holds on to the cart and stretches out her fingers, hoping to catch anyone who comes by. No one does. No touch, no sound, but then—the cart rocks as if someone is climbing into it. Again even harder, feeling like two made it on this time.
“We’re on, Lady!” Pico
says.
“We held hands,” Grease says. Lady should have thought of that, having them all hold hands so they could find the cart faster and lose each other less easily. But they made it.
“Let’s try to block the sand,” Lady says. They pull blankets over the sides of the cart to keep out as much dust as possible, and inside the blankets it feels like a fragile cave.
And in that cave Lady realizes: Jemma’s not here. She’s out in the poison.
* * *
Jemma is only five feet behind Lady when Lady disappeared in the dust, so she keeps running as Lady did. She expects to smash into the cart, but it doesn’t come.
She’s taken at least thirty steps. The cart would have taken only fifteen. She missed it. She’s lost. She gulps in the storm and dust fills her lungs. And then she reminds herself that she can see.
At first she can’t remember how to call up the haze, rattled as she is by the dust. Flecks of blue appear but get swept away with the wind. Then she breathes twice through the bandana, getting some almost clean air through the cloth, and she feels the haze connecting to her.
She still can’t see anything—because she’s pointed the wrong way. “Here!” Lady says, and Jemma spins toward her. The haze lights up. Outlining the frame is a coat of blue haze, glowing softly through the dust. So are her three friends, already in the cart.
Jemma steps forward confidently, now that the cart is in sight. She forgets that the haze can see people and metal pretty well, but it doesn’t pick up everything. She lays her foot down, too hard, on a rock the haze didn’t show her. It rolls under her and she pitches forward, twisting through the air.
A pain shoots through the back of her head where it strikes the ground. It feels like another rock. The haze blinks out. So does she.
* * *
The light wakes Jemma, so bright it’s split in two. Her head is half buried in dust, and she lifts it slightly. Her vision blurs, which is the only way to explain what she sees next. Behind the split suns, she sees a figure, a tall one. It has large green eyes that mean it’s something new, because when it lifts them up there are regular people eyes on a face that isn’t regular at all. The skin is pink, lined with lines that don’t belong on skin. The hair is … gray? That can’t be. No one is gray.
The face leans over her, its green bug eyes and regular human eyes both looking at her. It would be concern, maybe, if it were human. And then the very human eyes, blue and crinkly around the corners, widen.
“You,” it says.
Hers might widen, too, if she could keep them open. Because now she understands. “You’re … old?” Then the face is gone.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
THE OLD GUYS
She’s not completely unconscious in the next hours, but she wishes she were. She feels bouncing roads, lights that make her puke, soft bandages, firm hands, Pico’s touch, not all in that order. She’s going somewhere, but when she tries to understand where, she starts to lose her who again, so she stops.
She is Jemma, and apparently she is alive. She’s alive enough to feel thankful for that, until she passes out again.
When she wakes up Grease has made the golf cart bigger, louder, bouncier. “We’re safe, Jemma,” Lady says, whispering in her ear over and over. “You won’t believe it.”
“Try me,” Jemma says, and is gone.
Lights, more lights. Does this world ever run out of lights? Running along the ceiling in long yellow strips. She feels as if she’s flying along a road to the sun.
Then there is white and softness and a relief she hasn’t felt since before Apple, and more strange gray faces and her friends, all of them. Then sleep.
* * *
How long she sleeps she doesn’t know, but she goes under longer each time. When she opens her eyes Pico is there, then Grease, then the gray face, then Lady. Almost always it’s Lady. Even when she’s not there, Jemma dreams she’s there.
None of the dreams have the haze.
“Where are we, Lady?” she says. Maybe it’s a dream.
“Exactly where we wanted,” Lady says.
The last waking comes after long black hours, and when it comes, she’s truly awake. The kind of room she sees in the old hospitals, but this one seems to still work. A machine pumps with sucking sounds, and numbers flicker across a screen. The lights are overhead. Everywhere, Lectrics.
We’re somewhere where the End didn’t happen.
Lady stirs in the corner. She’s been there the whole time.
“You really awake?” Lady says. “Cuz mija, I’m sick of your lazy ass.”
“I … I guess?”
Lady presses a button. When it doesn’t work fast enough, she yells, “Hey! Dummies! Get in here!”
Pico and Grease skid into the room, their faces unsure. When they see Jemma, they light up. Pico tackles her with a hug. “Didn’t know you was a hugger, Peek,” she says, coughing.
“I didn’t know you was going to live,” he says. “So…”
Grease hangs back. “Hey, Grease,” she says, and hugs him, too.
“There’s a lot to tell you,” Lady says.
“You—you just won’t believe it,” Grease says.
“So many answers,” Pico says, most excited of all.
“I only want one for now. Two. Where we at? And how’d we get here?”
“The Old Guys,” Pico says. “And James brought us.”
“None of that makes any sense,” Jemma says.
“It’d be easier if I show you,” says a gravelly voice behind her. Standing in the doorway, for who knows how long, is the gray hair she saw that night in front of the lights. It’s shaggy, parted to the side, but what really interests her is the face below. Because it can’t exist.
“You—you’re alive. You can’t be,” she says, shocked. It’s the face of a Parent. But more than that—his was the face she saw in the well during her dream.
“This is James,” Lady says. “He found us in the storm.”
“We met,” Jemma says.
“You called me,” James says. “It’s a genuine pleasure to meet you in real life.” He talks funny, she thinks. The words, the tone, they’re all a little wrong, dug up from whatever hole he’s been hiding in.
“So … you really was in my dream?” Jemma says.
“It wasn’t a dream. I was sitting next to a computer that hadn’t worked in ten years, and it turned on and there you were, talking to us through the screen.”
As James steps closer, she wonders if she’s right about his age. He’s covered with spots that she’s never seen on a person before, deep brown stains larger than freckles. There are a few of the lines she knows are called wrinkles.
But the face—it reminds her of a Tween, somehow, a smoothness under the spots. She’s seen pictures of the Parents, of the really old ones, and they’re gnarled like logs. There’s something of the child in him.
“Where we at?”
“Let’s show you.”
“Can she move?” Lady says.
“She’s been able to move for days. It’s her brain that wasn’t ready,” James says. “Have you had multiple concussions lately, Jemma?”
“I don’t know what that—”
“Have you been hit in the head?”
She holds up three fingers.
“I wish we had a CAT scanner,” he says. “It’s probably nothing, though.” There’s something in those words that makes her look twice, some kind of edge, but his face doesn’t give anything away.
He helps her up, and her legs feel steady, but he motions to her to sit. “This is a wheelchair,” James says.
“We have wheels,” Jemma says, all acid on the tongue.
“I’m sorry,” James says, in a distracted voice that seems part of him. “I never know what anyone knows anymore.”
They roll down a long concrete hallway, and she can tell that they’re underground—moisture on the walls, mustiness in the air. Lectrics dot the walls every ten feet, but some of them are fadin
g.
“How’d you find us?” she says, realizing her third question.
“I saw you coming from our lookout on the top of the mountain. We don’t get a lot of visitors, as you might expect, so any moving motor vehicle is particularly interesting. I saw the storm coming, and thought I could guide you in.”
“He’s got Lectrics to see in the dark,” Grease says. “They look like bug eyes.”
“Sometimes I just need a reason to get off the mountain,” James says.
“Last time,” Jemma says, growing impatient. “Where we at?”
They reach heavy double doors, metal painted with paint that doesn’t flake. “A place designed to outlast the end of the world,” James says, pulling a lever. “In a way, I guess it did.” The doors rumble open and the outside pours in.
It’s her first daylight in days, and her eyes stream. The outlines of the place start to emerge, though. Four concrete buildings like the one she just left form a square. They’re half buried in the earth, so the square seems to sit at the bottom of a shallow bowl. The bowl is covered with short and even grass, almost like carpet, as if it’s cut by some kind of machine. Deep dirt trails slice through the grass. The people who live here rarely walk anywhere else but here.
Lady wheels her forward to some trees in the middle of the courtyard. Beyond them, in a gap between two buildings, she can see the shimmer of the ocean.
They sit in chairs under the trees. For the first time she realizes they’re not alone in the courtyard. Other gray-hairs are there, too, tending to the gardens. Legends walking the earth—but, by the appearance of things, hugging the edge of the courtyard as if something dangerous lies in the middle. James notices Jemma watching them.
“You’ll have to excuse them. They get frightened around Children,” James says. To him, Children means something different, something optional. For them, though, Children are all that is left. “The last few years haven’t been kind to them.”
“The last few years ain’t been kind to the Children, either,” Pico says drily.
“No. No, they haven’t.”
“Are you a Parent?” Jemma says.
“No, I’m not a Parent. I’m just old enough to be one.”