“Oh? Well, child, you are far from your destination, I’m afraid. Far from the Nameless City. Not particularly close to anywhere,” Robert Genner said, concluding with a nasty laugh at her predicament. “The staircase you are climbing leads to the Waste. It is not a place for a soft little girl.”
Yael noticed the tremors, constant tiny twitches that consumed the man’s autonomic nervous system, and shuddered with instinctual disgust.
“And for you, Eater-of-the-Dead?” Yael asked firmly, withdrawing her hand. “Now I understand why this plain is filled with bones. Clearly your kind is far from starving.”
“How could we not prosper? When the world above treats us with such benevolence, showering us with gifts of food so vast that all the ghouls of the world and more could be sustained. Why, you must love us, for why else would you kill each other with such regularity and then put the bodies, barely cold, in the ground, sealed inside wooden boxes?”
It took an effort not to strike at the creature. If she had been back at her home, Yael would have called for one of the zeppelins or a roaming Public Safety Officer to deal with the abomination. Yael was enraged to think of the creatures pillaging cemeteries from below while guards and walls sat futilely above, but she was in a different place now. She could not afford to pass judgment, not when she was in such obvious need herself.
“If you are so grateful to my kind, then help me,” Yael said, through gritted teeth, unable to look away from the saliva dribbling down Robert Genner’s chin. “How far is it to the surface? And is there a way to cross the Waste?”
Robert Genner froze as if she had pinned him with a light brighter than the meager glow of his feeble lantern. He smacked his lips wetly as he hesitated, searching for a way out of his own words. Fortunately for Yael, he was incapable of doing so.
“It is not far to the surface, no more than a few hours’ climb,” Robert Genner said, apparently oblivious to Yael wincing. “As for the Waste, there are many ways to cross it, provided you have wealth, advanced weaponry and weaponized rituals. There are other ways still, for those with tremendous stealth and guile, or merciless cruelty.”
“And for me?”
Yael didn’t like the way Robert Genner looked at her.
“Can’t see what you look like under all that,” he said, gesturing at her heavy clothes. “But your face is pretty enough. There are caravans that cross the Waste on occasion. You could... attach yourself to one of the groups. It would be safer.”
“If I understand your implication correctly, then I may have to demand restitution,” Yael said frankly, slipping her spray can from the bag on her belt into the palm of her hand, where it rested, cool and reassuring. “Have I understood you correctly?”
Robert Genner backed away, his arms crossed in front of his face as if he were accustomed to being hit. Yael felt a twinge of guilt, though she hadn’t touched him.
“No, no, you misunderstand! I meant only – or rather, I was describing, in general terms, a route taken by some, I certainly never meant to imply that you...”
“Fair enough,” Yael said, forcing herself to relax, making sure the spray can was pointed toward the ground. “Are there other ways across the Waste, Genner? I don’t want to stay here longer than I have to.”
“And I don’t want you to stay,” Robert Genner grumbled, rubbing his stubbly chin. “There might be a way. It is no safer than any other, mind you, and may even be worse, but it requires no special attributes, nor would it compromise your virtue. But it is not... safe.”
“I am tired of this, creature. Just tell me so that I might be on my way.”
“You see, Yael Kaufman, you are not the first girl – woman – I have encountered today. There is another, a blonde dressed in red with a dog. She was camped by the entrance when I came down here a few hours ago. She might still be there. Though, I must warn you,” Robert Genner said, with what looked like concern on his malformed face, “I think she may be mad.”
3. Some Girls Wander by Mistake
A landscape empty of desire, choked with sterility. Implied consent. Her eyes like a burned-out monitor. Waking in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar place, the gradual recognition of lost time, a private and individual mystery.
There was no one there.
Yael stood at the mouth of the cave that led to the spiral staircase, on the edge of the Waste, her hands on her knees and her calves burning with exhaustion. The last several hundred steps had been brutal. She had only climbed them through force of will. Stopping would have meant talking to the ghoul again. Going back was impossible. There was only up, only further to go. On some level Yael had known it would be that way from the moment she climbed out of the window of her parent’s house.
Standing beside a clumsily-built campfire that still smoldered, watching the sun climb through the polarized lenses of her gas mask, breathing heavily through the nanomesh filter, Yael couldn’t help but question herself.
She imagined her doubt as a burden that she shrugged off her shoulders, left to rot in the sand behind her as she headed toward the concrete and steel skeletons that towered over the Waste like nails in rotten wood. Yael pictured her fear as a second skin, dead cells molted into the wind, heavy with dust and poisonously sweet nanites.
The sand was as treacherous and unstable as any beach she had ever been on and her progress was slow. One dune gave way to another as the sun crested the near hills. Yael worried about how hot it might get if she didn’t get into the shade, but that didn’t turn out to be a problem. The next anonymous dune proved to be the last, crowned with a dense cluster of succulents that braved the constant wind. Beyond that, there were foothills and endless concrete rubble.
Her mask superimposed text across a reflective plastic film that coated the inside of the lenses. Each color detailed an environmental hazard: unexploded ordinance, active biological war compounds, residues of volatized toxic metals. Yael wandered through the wreckage and wondered what a city could do to inspire such hatred.
The first pieces of concrete she saw were peeking out of low mounds almost lost in dusty brown grasses. The broken fragments of walls were laid out in rows reminding her of tombstones, lines of them marching toward the angry skies. She had to pick her way carefully, avoiding metal exposed by years of wind, jagged sections of pipe that had once been underground, the crumpled remains of cars and machinery.
The wind battered her as she walked. Even with the mask the dust was so fine that it slowed her progress to a crawl and left her panting for air. The grass disappeared abruptly, there on one side of a low hill and then gone on the next, her galoshes sinking ankle deep into sand composed of multicolored bits of disintegrated glass. The poisoned soil was a silvery-grey color with an oily residue that stained the bottoms of her boots purple. Yael pushed on, following the pieces of asphalt that remained from an ancient road.
She saw nothing green in the Waste, only tufts of brown sawgrass and the scorched trunks of long-dead trees. Yael found herself scanning the horizon in a sort of desperation to see a living thing. In Roanoke, no more than one in three buildings was inhabitable from flooding or contamination. The rest had their windows boarded and were covered with graffiti, little more than a sign in English and the Visitor’s bizarre language warning the curious not to proceed. When she escaped her parent’s estate – a frequent event once she discovered a navigable culvert beneath the main wall – Yael spent much of her time with the local urchins, among rows of abandoned homes and office buildings, or in small and mysterious tunnels burrowed beneath the city. She was familiar with silence and desolation, but she had never experienced anything that compared with the Waste. Even the sky itself was wounded, reddish-purple clouds roiling and thrashing as if the atmosphere boiled. The air was utterly arid, the soil broken and parched.
Yael paused at a wall that was intact enough to put her back against and then crouched, waiting. Though nothing materialized, she was bothered by a persistent feeling of being watched. She was
used to that feeling, however, from her time spent in the cool of the tunnels or in the dust of the abandonments. When the living departed they left behind more than scattered and forgotten possessions. They left behind ghosts; memories ebbed in the places where they had lived, echoes of warmth and laughter, passion and cruelty. Yael had seen such ghosts before and was not afraid of them.
Yael wondered how long the Waste had been uninhabited, when it had been reduced to the rubble that she walked along. Whatever war or calamity had destroyed what must have been a great city, it was so ancient that even the small traces had been erased. There were no signs of violence, but there was little that was intact enough to bear those scars. Perhaps the broken towers in the distance, she thought, staring through polarized lenses. Maybe they would have something more to say to her.
She turned away reluctantly. The road she followed did not go in that direction.
The ghoul had told her to follow the road for several hours to find an encampment of sorts, a squatter’s village at the edge of the uninhabitable core of the Waste. There, he had insinuated with his foul voice, she could find a guide and a way across the desolate lands between her and the forgotten city of Kadath, if she had something to trade.
His glistening lips gave the word an indecent quality that sent shivers up her spine, trudging between the low walls that had once been houses, underneath a broken sky. Yael was still divided on the idea of seeking help. She knew she would need it, she was a practical girl. But she had no idea what she could offer in return that she would actually be willing to give.
She would trust in Tobi, in the shallow wound he had left in her arm and the destination he had provided her. Without that, Yael was little more than a runaway, and she knew enough of men in lawless places to be cautious. She still wasn’t sure how she would approach the encampment when she realized that she really was being followed.
It was the sound that gave him away – and from the sound, it was definitely a him – his footsteps echoed and reverberated off the miles of broken concrete. There was virtually no other sound to hide it in the desolation. Whoever he was, he was making an effort not to be heard, trying to time his footsteps with her own, but every time she had to change her stride or work her way around an obstacle, she could hear a stuttering footfall, out-of-sync with her own steps, before coming to a rapid halt.
Yael walked on further, trying to get a good look out of the corner of her eye, to figure out exactly how far she was from her pursuer, but the circular lenses of her mask cut off too much of her peripheral vision for her to judge. She would simply have to take a chance, and do what she had done many times before, when she realized she was being followed somewhere lonely.
Yael casually turned the first intact corner she could find, where her own ragged asphalt road intersected with another, even more decrepit, path winding through mounds of broken cement and rusting metal a few feet taller than herself. The moment she was sure she was out of sight, she broke into a sprint, running the length of the wall of debris. At the end of the wall, she turned right again, following a path that was hardly apparent. There was little cover, but with any luck her stalker would still be searching the original intersection for her, trying to decide whether she had turned or not, and she was moving fast. Yael had played soccer for years, for her school’s team or just for fun. She was inevitably the fastest girl on the field. It didn’t take long for her to round the rest of the pile of debris. She made a third right to arrive on the road where she had started, one block back, the lenses of her mask fogged with her breath.
There was a man there, staring at the ground where she had turned, his fingers pressed against the poisoned topsoil. He was thin, the kind of skinniness that went to the bone and spoke either of a lifetime of desperate poverty or the final stages of addiction. His clothes were too large for him and too warm for the weather. He was so caught up reading the ground she had walked that Yael managed to get within five feet before he noticed her approach. She held up a compact black can, a spray nozzle pointed in his direction.
“This isn’t mace. It’s a military-grade chemical deterrent and neurotoxin designed to inflict agony, blindness, and permanent neural damage. It violates the Geneva Conventions six different ways. You won’t be able to open your eyes or even stand for days, though you will probably to learn to speak again. And I’m not one bit afraid to use it. Think about that before you turn around and explain why you were following me.”
The man – boy, really – turned around slowly, looking famished and ridiculous in a fur cap complete with earmuffs. His clothing looked to have been cobbled together from bits of salvaged leather, crudely tanned hides and fragments of recycled cloth. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes were hollow, but his hands didn’t shake, so at the very least he wasn’t a ghoul.
“Please don’t spray me! You don’t need to do that. You won’t spray me, will you?”
“You followed me. Explain,” Yael demanded, shaking the can menacingly. “Now.”
“I was just... I was only... Are you really going to use that stuff on me? Because I don’t want to be blind.”
“Then answer the question.”
Sweat literally poured from his face on to the dirty rags and fur around his neck. His eyes darted from side to side frantically, seemingly more concerned with his surroundings than the weapon in front of him. A brownish tongue darted out to lick lips that had cracked open and bled in the sun.
“I was following you because you looked like you didn’t know where you were going. I thought maybe you would need a guide or something...”
Yael released the safety on the side of the can, the propellant hissing momentarily.
“Okay, okay!” The man put his hands up as if Yael were arresting him. “You’re small and alone. You looked like you were weak. There are wild dogs, big packs of them. They get vicious when they drink the water here. Smart, too. Thought they might get you, ‘cause it ain’t safe to travel through here alone. Figured I could go through your things once the dogs were done.”
“Not safe alone? Then you aren’t...”
Either the one behind her was quiet or Yael hadn’t been paying enough attention. He wrapped her in a bear hug, crushing her arms to her chest and forcing her to drop the can and her duffel. Her ribs bowed under the pressure. Someone grabbed her mask and tore it from her face, laughing as if he had done something funny. A short man with red hair whose face was covered in enormous freckles went scrambling to the ground after her bag. The man holding her was big and overwhelmingly strong. Her head barely reached the level of his chest and her wild kicks bounced harmlessly off his thighs. He laughed and then threw her to the ground, sending up a puff of multi-colored dust.
One of them grabbed her by her hair. Another started to tug at her windbreaker. They didn’t pay any attention to Yael’s hands scrambling around the pouch at the front of her belt.
The man who pulled her hair was tall and dark-skinned with no hair. His teeth were broken and yellow when he smiled at her. Then he saw what was in Yael’s hand and his smile grew less certain, confusion creeping across sun-ravaged features.
His confusion was understandable. The thing in Yael’s left hand looked a great deal like a pen. In her right hand, she held what appeared to be a car alarm remote. But looks aren’t everything.
It was not a pen. It was five inches of titanium with an industrial diamond tip. She sank it all the way through the man’s tattered work boot, piercing the sole and pinning him to the ground. He cried out, and the man struggling to tear the impervious fabric of her windbreaker paused, giving Yael a chance to roll over and kick him in the teeth. He lost his grip on the perfectly slick cloth and tumbled backward.
Yael scrambled to her feet, ignoring the dozen men around her and scanning the ground instead. Her mask had been thrown aside and lay just a few feet away. Yael sprinted, ducked a pair of outstretched arms and then tripped over someone’s leg, rolling when she hit the ground. She searched the ground frantically
for the mask, while one of pursuers again grabbed her hair, jerking her head backwards and making her eyes water. Yael’s fingers ran along nothing but the coarse sand. The man put his boot between her shoulders, pulling her head backwards so fiercely Yael thought her neck might snap.
Her fingers brushed against the mask. She grabbed it with her free hand, pressing it to her face while she pushed both buttons on the remote.
The can of chemical deterrent beeped twice, softly, where it lay on the sand. Then it exploded in a cloud of violet gas, causing Yael to cough even with the partial protection of the mask pressed across her face. The man behind her gave one final, agonizing tug, tearing a section of hair from her scalp, then he fell over backwards, consumed by coughing. Yael curled into a ball to minimize her exposure to the gas and quickly strapped her mask back on. She still spent a few moments coughing before she could manage to move. She stood up cautiously and surveyed the scene, glad the lenses of her mask had been designed to filter the blinding gas.
Most of the men around her had been caught by the cloud and were variously stumbling about, doubled over coughing or laying in their own vomit. The men who had struggled with the lock on her bag, also of Visitor design and therefore as invulnerable, had also collapsed in misery. One hacked out his lungs with eyes screwed shut while the other moaned and thrashed on the ground.
Yael sprinted through them, grabbed the handle of her bag, then sprinted off down the street, following her original path as fast as she could move. Her lungs were raw and her eyes watered from her minimal exposure to the gas. The best she could manage was a sort of half-jog, half-run, so that had to be fast enough.
She made it no more than a few blocks amongst the fractured roots of the dead city before she heard footsteps and angry voices from nearby. Yael realized that she hadn’t incapacitated all of the men with her gas canister. Whomever was left among her attackers would quickly run her down in her reduced state.
The Night Market Page 4