Jonesbridge

by M. E. Parker

  When Errol returned after another check to see if they had a window of escape, he crouched beside the stable door, a look of panic on his face. “Sindra,” he whispered. “Hide.” He pushed her toward a bin full of hay. “Hurry.”

  Sindra burrowed into the hay. Errol covered her feet and any other visible parts as voices sounded from just outside the stable, followed by footsteps and commotion so close to Sindra that she thought they might walk right over her.

  “Mule Man,” a ghost yelled at Errol. “The Superintendent needs all these mules hitched up to wagons. That donkey, too.” He marched around the area where Lalana kept her supplies, motioning for a group of guards to join him. “Superintendent is mandating firebox material requisition. Take Mule Man and the witch here with you.” He pointed to Lalana. “Nobody gets out of this one, gimps, old folks, nobody.

  Sindra kept still, holding her breath. Errol hopped passed her to the wall where the tack hung for rigging the wagons. He glanced at her as she peered through strands of hay that blended with her hair, making the top of her head part of the haystack. She waited without moving until the tail of the last mule disappeared from sight. Relieved that Errol and Lalana had left with the ghosts, certain that they would have either gotten her caught, drowned in the canal, or swept away in the drainage tunnel, Sindra emerged from the hay as hungry as she had ever been in her life.

  She had seen the mules and horses eating hay. If they ate it, and it made them strong beasts of burden, then she convinced herself that she could it eat, too. Still hidden behind the stable door, she squatted beside the haystack and shoved a handful of hay into her mouth. It pricked her cheeks as she chewed. It had no flavor, and she had a hard time swallowing it. The dry strands wound up into a ball in her mouth as she chewed and chewed, shoving more in and swallowing hard.

  The silence in Old Town, after such an active night, reminded Sindra that a better opportunity may never come again. She tucked three candles, a flint rock, and a blanket into a saddle bag and slung it over her shoulder. From corner to corner, keeping in the shadows on the rare sunny day, Sindra made her way through an empty Old Town to an equally vacant Jonesbridge. All the factories, except for munitions #2, sat idle and silent. In the distance, she saw teams, entire shifts, amassing in domicile quadrangles preparing for something she’d never witnessed in Jonesbridge.

  With the streets quiet, Sindra ran for the salvage factory keeping low and watchful, invisible, the way she had learned to travel on the rails. When she reached the hatch beside the building, she stepped down onto the ladder, but this time she waited for the flush of drainage from the munitions factory, trying to avoid almost drowning the way she and Myron had. The water rushed beneath her, filled the tunnel below, rising partway up the ladder and then receded. Sindra dropped down and crawled, snaked and groped her way to the canal outtake where she saw hundreds of slogs gathering near the supply depot gates, heads to the sky in wonder at the clear blue heavens, unsure of what they should do next without the protection of the thick smoke overhead.

  Chapter 13

  The sight of the chapel filled Sindra with hope. She approached it with caution and darted for the tunnel hatch near the bell tower. The grate creaked when she inched it open, and digging through the soil, she unearthed Sindra’s star, still there, where Myron had buried it for safekeeping.

  She hadn’t slept last night, her belly groaned for food, and fatigue threatened to overwhelm her. She’d run the entire way through the empty compound, jogged through the shin pines, dodging boulders as though wings had sprouted on her back. Now she had nowhere left to run, no way over the Gorge and no plan. She exhaled and rubbed the star, wiping it clean of dirt.

  Sometimes at night, amidst the snoring and grumbling of the rail-walkers, Sindra would lie on her back and gaze at the stars. Out on the rails, in the Nethers, unobstructed by smoke and haze, the stars filled the sky like sprinkles of magnesium dust. For a while she wondered what stars were, how far away they were and how big, but after a time she no longer cared to know. They were real, and they existed somewhere outside the confines of the earth where people could never destroy them. The star Myron had given her was as real as any other because it reminded her, the way real stars did, that the world could never destroy her spirit. Possessing it again, holding it, with the weight of it in her pocket, buoyed her enough to keep going.

  With the sky so clear, she headed into the open to soak it all in, the sunlight, the mountains, the dormant factories in the valley. She turned her head straight up, into an endless expanse that—without the smoke and ash to keep her in—she feared she would fall right up into the blue. She spun around, forgetting for a moment where she was when a hand clapped over her mouth from behind. A strong, furry arm yanked her backward toward the chapel, dragging her feet through the dirt.

  “Shh,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Don’t move.”

  The odor of his hand made her queasy. It smelled like dead animal, waste, and sulfur all mixed together, and she noticed that when he spoke into her ear that his breath smelled the same. She elbowed him in the ribs. He did not flinch.

  “Where’s Myron?” Coyote Man removed his hand from her mouth.

  “What?” Sindra whispered. “He’s gone.”

  “What do you mean gone? How’d you get here if he didn’t bring you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He wouldn’t go over the Gorge without you. Stupid kid. Probably got himself captured.”

  “Myron isn’t stupid.” Dread built inside her that she had ever doubted Myron. Sindra jerked free of his grasp. Coyote Man yanked her back.

  “All men ensnared by the lure of a woman turn stupid, whether they start off that way or not.” He held a finger to his lips. “Quiet. There’s a lookout up on Iron’s Knob. Can’t get to Myron’s flying machine from here.” He led Sindra down into the creek bed. “Keep low and follow me.” He held Sindra by the forearm. His grasp felt like an iron clamp around her arm.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Someplace they don’t know about. Keep quiet.”

  When they reached a stony outcropping, Coyote Man climbed over the bank and waited, motionless. Realizing that now was a risky time to make an escape, Sindra crawled up beside him for a peek. Thirty feet away a ghost holding a pistol sat on a rock.

  Coyote Man inched down into the creek bed and adjusted his coyote skins so that the snout and head came up over his head like a hood. He climbed up out of the creek and crawled toward the ghost keeping cover in the rocks.

  The ghost fidgeted with the gun, examining it, looking down the barrel and drawing with it in the dirt. He paced and threw rocks at bigger rocks until a flash of fur bashed him over the head with a petrified log. Coyote Man picked up the gun, studied it and tucked it into a bag before he hoisted the ghost up over his shoulder.

  “What are you going to do with him?”

  “Insurance.” Coyote Man hiked toward a knoll a few hundred feet away. “This one’s awfully close to my cave.”

  Sindra followed him through a bramble bush and into a field of shin pines, watching the ghost’s head bobble against Coyote Man’s back as they walked.

  “Careful. Out here, we’re like mice on a salt flat to a hawk.”

  They crossed over to the other side of the knoll and stopped beside a rusted metal contraption, greenish, halfway protruding from the side of the hill. It had doors with handles and windows. Sindra navigated the rocky embankment and hopped down beside it. “What is that thing?”

  “Not sure, but it says here that it’s an oldsmobile. Guess that’s what it is.” He pointed to a raised metal word just beneath the trunk and flopped the ghost down beside it. “It’s my calaboose now. One thing, though,” he said, pulling the pistol out of his bag. “This isn’t an ordinary civil guard—this one has license to kill.”

  “Look at all that metal,” Sindra said, examining the oldsmobile, her natural salvage instincts taking over. When Coyote Man popped open the
trunk, Sindra put her foot on a rock and climbed up inside, hoping to get a look, wondering if it had a real combustion engine. She gave the rear panel of the trunk a kick until a rusted hole formed.

  The front of the oldsmobile was dark and surrounded by earth, but light from the hole behind her lit the space up enough to see a centuries-old mausoleum. Seated behind a steering wheel was a skeleton with a leather hat and a pair of boots in the floorboard, and between the shells of the two seats, Sindra noticed several unrecognizable relics of the past.

  She pulled herself all the way in and sat down in the empty seat, as though she were a passenger in a time machine driven by a stylish skeleton, ready to ride away to a long-dead world, a place she could hardly wait to show Myron.

  “Get out of there. He’s waking up.” Coyote Man reached in and tugged on Sindra’s smock. As soon as she stepped out, he rolled the ghost into the trunk and slammed the lid.

  “You’re just going to leave him in there?”

  “That depends.”

  “Let me out,” a muffled voice called from inside. The ghost pleaded and banged on the inside of the trunk. “Let me out. Whatever you want. Just let me out of here.” The voice underneath the green metal sounded young and scared. Not at all the monster Sindra expected.

  Coyote Man slapped the trunk. “Not yet.”

  Still unsure of her plan to find Myron, Sindra followed Coyote Man to his cave. “We’ll rest here as long as we can, but they’ll be back. I’ll keep first watch.” He pointed to the cot.

  Exhausted to the point of almost passing out, Sindra could hardly keep her eyes open, but when the odor of the cot struck her, she stretched out on the ground instead and fell asleep within seconds. She dreamt of flying through the air on Myron’s airship, only it was the shirker coop, and she plummeted forever into the Gorge, never landing.

  She awoke to Coyote Man standing over her, nudging her with his foot. “Get up. Your turn.” He plopped down on his cot. “There’s a cluster of boulders out that way.” He pointed to the south. “A good view from there. Get back and let me know if you see anyone coming.”

  Sindra struggled to her feet and headed outside. She had seen a few wild people. They lived on the edges, not unlike the rail-walkers, but here in Jonesbridge, such a person as Coyote Man seemed impossible. His ways were strange. He spoke with an inflection in his voice, words with familiar sounds contorted, winder instead of window. Statements trailed away and then up again like a question.

  As she kept her vigil, eying all directions, surprised by how much and how far she could see, a cockroach scurried out into the open across her foot. She took aim, trapped it under her cupped hand and scooped it up. She studied the roach for a moment, upside down on her palm, its legs twitching. Her stomach growled. She closed her eyes and threw it into her mouth, chewing quickly before it moved too much on her tongue. She was relieved that she had rid her body of the black whisper before it worked its dark magic, but what she couldn’t feed the life inside her, it would steal from her body.

  She had no idea how long she’d kept watch, but the sun had moved halfway across the sky and her thoat burned for water. Her current thirst and hunger could not match the misery of her four-day stint in the shirker coop. That had left a mark on her soul. Without help, she would have died, and she thought of the guard trapped in Coyote Man’s make-shift jail. He’d been there a while now. The ghosts had raped her. They’d treated her like property. They’d beaten her and tricked her, but the man in the back of the oldsmobile, an anxious kid like her, would die of thirst the way she almost did in the coop, if she didn’t do something. She didn’t remember seeing this ghost’s face, smiling and watching, waiting to drop his pants for a turn, and Errol said that the preacherman he knew told him that good turns have a way of coming around again.

  She hurried back to the cave and filled her canteen with water to give him enough to outlast whatever Coyote Man planned to do with him. By the water filter, she spotted three strips of coyote jerky. She bit a chunk off the end. Sinewy and dry, it tasted like the leather strap they used to absorb the pain during the branding tattoo procedure, but it was food, and she would eat anything that would keep the baby inside her growing.

  Trekking through the brambles, Sindra spotted the rump of the green oldsmobile jutting out of the side of the ravine like a wart. She had seen these contraptions before, but never one that hadn’t completely rusted into a metal skeleton, except for in a museum they came across in an abandoned town on the rails, but that one was much more sleek, faster looking than the one in the ravine, as though it might have flown right out of the museum.

  Thoughts of machines like this one kept her awake some nights with visions of a world much different than hers, where calculating computers, so smart they could solve problems, sometimes started their own wars. Sindra had heard all sorts of tales about history, of mechanical people that did the bidding of their creator, and ships that tried to sail to the stars but fell short. Legend told that after a jagged magnetic flash in the sky halted the rhythms of the machines, the Zealots buried the machine carcasses in the ice shelf at the bottom of the world to appease the Great Above. That sounded crazy, yet she couldn’t help but imagine what sort of gizmos a real contraptionist could make from a salvage pit like that.

  “You still alive in there,” Sindra whispered, placing her ear down on the cold metal.

  Inside the trunk was silent. She groped for the latch, jiggled it, and pried the lid up. He was alive, shivering, his chest rising and falling as he took in faint sips of air. She placed the extra coyote skin on him. His head jerked back as his eye hinged open. His chattering teeth sounded like a tiny jackhammer.

  “Here you are.” Sindra put the water to his mouth, letting a stream trickle onto the cracks in his lips. When his mouth opened, she poured more in. “Here’s a bite of goat fox.” She sat one of the jerky strips and the water beside him and shut the trunk lid.

  “No, please. You gotta let me out of here. I won’t tell them where you are. Just let me out of here.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Wait,” he called. “I know you—Sindra, right?”

  She cracked open the trunk lid a little to hear him better. “You better not know me the way I—”

  “No, I mean, I know what they do to you. It’s wrong. I know it’s wrong. And you’re such, well—” His cheeks turned a shade of pink.

  “Go on,” Sindra said, skeptical of his sincerity and shut the trunk again.

  “Look, I would stop them if I could. Believe me. But I’m powerless. Just like you. I do my job. I live in the domiciles. You’re lucky to be in Industry. At least you get to make things.”

  Sindra had never considered herself lucky, never, until she met Myron. “I don’t care if you do know it’s wrong, you still owe me for watching those devils ravage me like a roadside carpie.”

  “They conscripted me from a small militia commune. I had a sister and a mother. I’d die before anyone did that to them. Come on. That wild man’s going to kill me.”

  Sindra thought for a minute. If Myron had gone to Jonesbridge for her and hadn’t returned, that meant he got caught. “Where’s the other fugitive?”

  “Another guard’s going to relieve me of duty out here soon. More are coming.”

  “Where’s the other fugitive? Tall, black hair.”

  After a few moments he responded. “They took him to the coop.”

  The lasting image of an eerily empty Jonesbridge made the thought of the coop even more dire. No smoke, no factories, no people, which meant no one like Errol, no one at all with water or blankets. Sindra leaned over and threw up, morning sickness or anxiety, she couldn’t tell which. Both sensations turned her stomach upside down.

  “Look, that wild man has your gun. There’s no getting it back. But I might let you out of here—for a price.” The ghost in the trunk did seem to have what the old-timers called apology in his voice. Anyone could muster the proper words to say sorry, but some
one who meant it had a tension in the voice, almost like a taut guitar string.

  “What? Anything.”

  “If I let you out of there, the first thing you do is go to the coop and let Myron out.”

  “I can’t go back until the next guard relieves me. They’ll kill me.”

  “Stay here and the wild man will kill you with your own gun, or you can die in this trunk. Besides, the whole compound is empty. Shouldn’t be too hard. You owe me.”

  “Okay. I promise. I’ll do it. Just open this up. I can’t take closed-in places.”

  Sindra tripped the trunk latch.

  “Th-thanks.” The ghost climbed out, keeping an eye on her.

  As he turned away in the direction of the compound, Sindra grabbed him by the collar on his orange shirt and whipped him around to face her. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do?” When he didn’t answer, she slapped him across the face, a blow hard enough to make her hand sting. “First thing?”

  “Shirker coop.”

  She held him facing her until he said it again.

  “Straight there to let him out.”

  Sindra leaned against the car to catch her breath. “Tell him to meet me at the chapel.”

  In his hurry to escape the trunk, the ghost left the canteen of water Sindra had brought him. She tucked it into the saddle bag with the candles and headed up to the top of the knoll, which gave her a panoramic view of the valley. She witnessed waves of tiny gray figures pouring out of the compound, scores of her fellow slogs spreading out into the countryside, some behind the mule-drawn carts, others in large groups, painting the barren landscape slog-smock gray. It looked like hundreds, maybe a thousand.

  Unexpected noises greeted her as she neared the chapel, voices, the sounds of saws and heavy hammers. She crept into the shadow of the creek bank and followed the steep embankment to the bend where countless feet shuffled through the brush. Sindra got a handhold in the soft bank and pulled up until she could see the chapel. Slogs, ghosts, foremen, at least a hundred, in, around, and all over the chapel ripped it apart board by board and pulled up or cut every shin pine sprig that dared to pierce the soil.