Jonesbridge

by M. E. Parker

  Above him, a sight he’d dreamed of his entire life, a bi-wing flying airplane, just like the ones in his grandfather’s books, sputtered across the sky ahead of a trail of popping black smoke.

  The propeller puttered, spinning sporadically, threatening to stop. The airplane carried two passengers, one in front of the other, the pilot and a man dropping piss whistles from saddlebags that draped over the fuselage.

  The world closed in on Myron as he watched. The sounds rumbled as the barren mountains acted as drumheads for a giant performance of the morning anthem. It drew nearer, thunderous echoes, pounding from the south and the east, the rattling boom of an overloader track in quick repetition, so close now he expected the wheels to roll right over him. He reached out his hand for Sindra and Coyote Man to pull him down. The ground beneath him shook after another zoomed across the sky, and again, rocking the ground.

  The chaos at the chapel ended suddenly with the explosions, as every man or woman left standing turned in the direction of the blasts in time to see the bi-wing airplane crash right into the Ironworks, now the tallest smokestack in Jonesbridge after Munitions #2 had gone down. The factory beneath the stack exploded into an orange ball of successive percussions until it disappeared completely into a puff of dust.

  “The E’sters are here!”

  “Run for the mines!” A stampede of slogs and ghosts alike took off down the hill in the opposite direction of the factories on their way to the mines.

  “The E’sters are—” another voice yelled, this time a ghost. His warning was cut short by the blast of a piss whistle ten feet away.

  Following another explosion, this one closer, Coyote Man managed to pull Myron down into the ravine.

  Myron tried to bring his hand to Sindra’s face as the fuzzy edges of the world closed in around her. He concentrated on a vision, the setting sun as it fell between two palm trees in Bora Bora, sand still warm from the day, with white, yellow, and blue birds riding the ocean breeze, whistling sounds all around him. But he could feel the blood leaving his body, his life slipping away the way his mom’s had, and in the cluster of faces around him now, he searched for his mother’s to lead him to the Great Above.

  Chapter 15

  “Open up in there.” The muffled calls, two of them, came from outside the front door. Shadows crawled across the counter when Myron’s mom shut the kitchen shutters.

  Myron knew what to do. He hurried to the potato bin, which stank of mildew and soil. The bin door snapped closed. His knees pushed up against his nose. He could hardly breathe. His mom claimed that a six-year-old boy could fit anywhere, as though he were a shirt that she could fold over mid-chest and place in a drawer.

  “Look,” the deepest of the voices called, tapping on the kitchen shutter, “We saw you go in the house. If I have to bust the door down, you better be dead. Now open up.”

  Myron eased open the potato bin door for a look into the kitchen to see his mom straighten her apron and march toward the front door. He’d seen that look on her face before, always just after he’d done something wrong, and once she had that look, the only way to change her expression was for Myron to do as he was told.

  A robe filled his view, his grandfather’s hairy legs, and then the door to the bin slammed shut to darkness, soil and spiders of all kinds. The front door clicked. Voices in the other room sounded as though they came from underneath a wet blanket. The men stomped through the house clanging and shouting. His mother started to cry. Myron breathed faster. His heart quickened. It felt like the time he fell into the mill pond before he knew how to swim, when his insides filled up with water, and his mother had to jump in, all her clothes on, and yank him out by his arms.

  The clamor grew closer until they reached the kitchen. “I told you,” his mother screamed. “They already came for him!”

  “Then you won’t mind if we have a look around.”

  “That’s not necessary,” Myron’s grandfather explained. “We are law-abiding citizens.”

  Myron figured his grandfather didn’t want them to go into the barn, that they might see all the stuff he worked on out there, gadgets and machines they would confiscate.

  “Well, then, as law-abiding citizens, you won’t have any problems.”

  Cabinet doors in the kitchen creaked open and closed. Drawers jerked in and out. The stomp of their shoes on the floor grew closer, echoing from the hallway and back to the kitchen again. Myron couldn’t hold back his tears when he heard his mother sob. The tears ran down his cheeks, but as cramped as he was, he couldn’t wipe them away. He could only sniff as they dripped off the end of his nose.

  Light stung Myron’s eyes when the potato bin door flung open. Two men in orange uniforms, the color of the Civility Administration, came into focus. “There you are,” the larger of the two men said.

  “I thought I smelled something,” the other one chimed in.

  “Don’t touch him. Don’t touch my baby, you animals.” Myron’s mom still wore her look of determination. She jumped in front of the cabinet door between Myron and the two men.

  “Ma’am, we have been through this with you on three occasions. The first time we came, we were quite cordial. Weren’t we?” He turned to his partner, swatting him on the chest. “Then, we came with the necessary paperwork. Now, we’re done. This is it.”

  “Mrs. Daw,” the larger of the two men read from a clipboard. He gave her a stern glare. “What would happen if you were, I don’t know, sitting around playing winky twiddle or some such—with your boy here—and an E’ster piss whistle shot right through your window? Boom! Everyone kaput.” He slammed his hand flat on the kitchen table.

  “Now, imagine that happening, which it does every day, and responsible people, such as yourself, did not take the necessary steps to protect their children,” the other man added.

  Myron heard their voices, but his mother’s body blocked his view. “Mom, I don’t want to go,” he yelled. He squirmed out of the potato pantry, parting his mother’s legs like a curtain, darting through them, right into the hands of the two men he hoped to escape.

  “Now we got you.”

  “No one can protect him like I can,” his mother screamed.

  “Exactly. Which is why the Superintendent of Civility has ordered that all children be taken into protective custody. All children. That means this little rat, too.”

  “To ensure the survival of our people, ma’am.”

  “By enslaving them?”

  “He’s got to be good for something. We all have to do our part.”

  The tall man clamped his hands around Myron’s wrists while his mom grabbed his legs. The pull from both ends made him feel like a piece of festival taffy. When his grandfather jumped in to help, Myron’s mom let go of his feet and grabbed the vegetable hatchet from the kitchen sink.

  “Nora, no,” Myron’s grandfather screamed. He reached out to stop her, but the hatchet had already hit its mark, buried in the man’s forehead as though it were a ripe turnip.

  “You’re not taking my baby. You hear me?”

  The grip around Myron’s wrists loosened. Myron fell to the floor with a thud, so frightened he had stopped crying, his tears frozen on his cheeks.

  “Run, Myron, run,” his mother urged.

  He did. He ran for an hour until he finally collapsed at the edge of the abandoned quarry. He wondered if his mother killed the man, and then his worries turned to what the other one might do, what his grandfather would do, and what might happen to them. The moment he caught his breath, Myron hopped up and ran back the way he came, crying the entire way, his stomach tight and his head spinning. When he topped the hill next to the family barn, he saw his grandfather tugging the bodies of the two orange shirts, stripped down to their skivvies and soaked in red, into the barn.

  Myron reached his grandfather just as the barn door swung shut. His grandfather knelt down beside the men, now powerless with the orange color of Civility having been stripped from their backs. “What does th
at say?” Myron asked as he watched his grandfather placing signs around their necks.

  “It says deserter. Dishonoring them is the only way. This is bad, Myron. Very bad. You’re too young to understand, but I have no choice.”

  Myron remembered seeing people along the road from Billingston with similar signs the year before. They were people who ran away from their responsibility, from the war, when they were supposed to fight. They’d been made examples of, his grandfather had told him. The whole scene made him sick. He wanted his mother.

  “Where’s mom?”

  “No, Myron. No,” his grandfather whispered with his head down. “You have to be strong. As strong as a boy your age can possibly be.”

  Myron rushed up to the porch before his grandfather could stop him. “Mom,” he yelled when he saw the blanket, hands sticking out from either side, a trail of blood leading from the kitchen to the porch. As much as he had wanted his mother to be hiding from him, like she did when they played search-and-find, she hadn’t come out when he called overs. That was their code word for when Myron got scared that he couldn’t find his mom, and she would jump out of hiding and give him a hug. He pulled back the blanket. He saw her there, not moving, not blinking, lifeless, the vegetable hatchet sticking out of the side of her head, and he was sure he would never want to play another game the rest of his life.

  His grandfather tugged the blanket over her body and hugged him.

  “Why didn’t you save her?” Myron cried.

  His grandfather’s jaw bulged. “It should be me under that blanket, Myron.”

  Later that day, after they buried Myron’s mother, his grandfather dragged the slain Civil Guards, now labeled as deserters, beside the road to Richterville. “This will buy us some time.”

  “What happens if they come back looking for me again?”

  His grandfather led him to the fresh grave where they’d buried his mom and grabbed a shovel. “This one will be yours, Myron.” He broke ground and tossed the shovelful of dirt aside.

  “What?” Myron watched as a second grave took shape next to his mother’s.

  “If they come back—you died with your mom.” His grandfather pointed to the second, smaller patch of raised, fresh earth.

  • • •

  “You have to save him,” Sindra yelled.

  Myron opened his eyes. His vision blurred. Voices and faces mixed into a collage of activity. “I’m an animal doctor. Does this look like a mule?” Lalana spat into her hands and rubbed the pendent around her neck with her moistened fingers before she closed her eyes and lowered her head.

  “What’s she doing? How will that help?” Sindra yelled.

  “She’s summoning her Custodian,” Errol whispered. “She always does that in medical emergencies.”

  Myron blinked in and out of consciousness, picturing Ortheo, the horned owl. Each species of animal once had its own spirit Custodian. When a type of animal vanished forever from the earth, so too did its Custodian. Now, as Myron understood it, there were so few animals that all the animals remaining had only one to share.

  Lalana leaned down, putting her finger on Myron’s neck. “He’s still with us. Barely. A mess of this donkey hide gelatin and a bit of mugwort leaf ought to slow the bleeding—for now. Don’t have much of either.”

  Several explosions pounded the ground just outside the ravine. Lalana pulled a burlap strip around Myron’s leg and tied it into a knot, her face crinkling with effort. She did the same with the other, right on top of the wound. The strips of burlap pinked immediately, but within a few seconds, the bleeding stopped.

  “I don’t know how long he’ll last with that metal cap in his leg—” Another blast in the distance stopped Lalana mid-sentence. “Struck a bleeder.”

  “Bunker,” Myron mumbled, unsure if he’d actually said the words or thought them. “Halfway up Iron’s Knob.”

  “That’ll be tricky.” Coyote Man scanned the ground for fallen ghosts and picked up an extra gun. He fiddled with it until the cylinder opened, checking for bullets just as an artillery shell whistled overhead, exploding midway up Iron’s Knob. One of the mules, still harnessed to a wagon, brayed as dirt and stones rained down on him. The mule kicked, extending its neck, trying to break free from the wagon, his distressed call sounding like the horn on a coal barge.

  Myron slipped in and out of awareness, but when they lifted him up out of the creek bed, rolling him like a log to a flat spot of earth, his pain brought the world into focus.

  “Get that wagon,” Lalana pointed to the mule.

  Errol calmed the mule and led him toward Myron. With the mule standing beside him, Myron could see blood oozing from a hole in its belly and the hide on his haunches scraped, droplets of blood glistening in the sunlight. Sindra hopped into the wagon and tossed the sharp pieces of wood and shin pines out, clearing a spot for Myron. Coyote Man lifted him into the wagon with what remained of the debris poking into his back.

  Lalana inspected the mule’s injuries, clicking her tongue several times, shaking her head as she rummaged through her medicine bag. “It’s all right, Surrey.” She held her hand beneath his nostrils and stroked his mane. “Surrey’s my best mule. Strong enough to outpull a steam cart at full throttle.” She knelt down and stared at the wound in his belly. “Come on, boy.” She climbed on the wagon and grabbed the reins.

  The cart rolled through a rut and continued up the hillside, switch-backing up Iron’s Knob. Myron rocked with the sway of the wagon. He gazed into the endless blue sky, dreaming of Sindra, unsure whether he was awake or asleep. When he noticed an unusual rock that resembled a giant gear, something Myron used as a landmark to get to the bunker, he knew they were getting close.

  Explosions rocked the ground around them. The wagon tilted. Surrey brayed and moaned. Myron rolled to the other side of the wagon and toppled out as it tipped completely. The wood and debris in the wagon cascaded over him, followed by Sindra and Errol who tumbled out ahead of the crashing wagon. Surrey plopped down, rolling to his side, braying.

  Hearing Surrey, his agony, reminded Myron of his own pain. Lying in the pile of wood, Myron couldn’t move. His chest tightened, his breathing grew labored.

  “Wildman, give me that pistol.” Lalana spat in her hands and rubbed the pendent around her neck. She grabbed Coyote Man’s gun, cocked the hammer, and fired one shot between Surrey’s eyes. “Best mule I’ve ever known. You deserved better than what you got.” She closed her eyes and turned around.

  Conducting a frantic search of the firebox material that came out of the wagon, Sindra found a long board that could function as a litter, sturdy enough to tie Myron to and get him the rest of the way to the bunker. At first, Sindra lifted the board up by Myron’s feet, the lighter end. His head swelled and he blacked out for a moment.

  “Turn that man around,” Lalana shouted.

  Sindra struggled to lift the other end, only able to do so with Coyote Man’s help. Now feet down, head up, Myron ascended Iron’s Knob on a board that felt as though it might splinter any moment, thumping off rocks as they took turns dragging it, until Coyote Man stopped and stomped his foot on the ground. “This is it.”

  A thin rectangular opening, a turret vent, spanned a rock face. Inside the rock was a reinforced concrete bunker from a war long past where soldiers protected their high ground, safe from everything but heavy ordinance. Sindra gave Myron’s litter one last tug and set it down, gazing down a narrow set of steps that led to a jumble of fabric and strange wooden pieces.

  Myron moaned, tugging at the restraints on the board, almost rolling off of it completely. “The airship. Is everything there?”

  “I don’t know,” Sindra said. Her eyes widened as she looked at all the pieces.

  “Be careful. It all has to fit together,” Myron whispered.

  “Listen to all that artillery. Even if, and that’s a big if, this thing takes flight, we’ll be a giant target floating through the air,” Coyote Man said. He, Errol and Sindra formed a
line on the stairs to shuttle all the pieces of Myron’s flying contraption out of the bunker.

  Myron conceded the added danger, but he’d rather fall out of the sky than wait for a horde of E’sters to storm the gate. “I have to build it.” He grew dizzy as he spoke. “Need help with it.”

  Seeing so many hands on the parts to his airship, all the activity around his creation that he’d fought for piece by piece gave Myron sudden nervous energy that faded as quickly as it arrived. He tried to speak, tried to lift his head, but gravity yanked it back to earth as if his head had been attached to a rope.

  Another shell zoomed above them, this one closer. The impact caused a rock slide on the cliff side of Iron’s Knob. Stones large and small thundered down, sliding through a cloud of dust that rose from the base of the hill.

  “Take cover.” Coyote Man motioned to the bunker.

  From inside the dust cloud, a gun shot rang through the air. A spray of dirt sprouted between Errol and Coyote Man. They all looked in the direction of the pistol report to see a man standing on the edge of the creek.

  As the figure came into view, Myron was shocked to see that it was the salvage administrator, standing there with a gun in his hand. Myron’s imagination carried him to the inevitable end, his airship being destroyed, Sindra being killed, his dreams washed away at the hands of a leader—an administrator—a traitor, already responsible for the deaths of hundreds of his fellow slogs. But Myron couldn’t move or talk, and the sun had transformed into a flat disk of yellow with everything around it dark. He’d lost so much blood. His leg burned and a sudden wave of cold air rushed through him as though the winter wind blew inside of him, and even the sounds around him slipped away.