“Unholiest thing there is, People Machines. It’s what comes of an unholy union.”
“What’s that?”
“When a skin-and-bone woman gives in to her lust for a machine, the Devil lets form a terrible thing. A People Machine. All wires inside, no breath of life, no heart and soul. They don’t want nothing more than to be the only people on the face of this Earth. You can see them coming a mile away. Their eyes burn up the night. They ride in Contraptions powered on hellfire.” The Lady cast her crafty gaze through a chink in the boards. “They won’t find us out here in nature. They fear it. They need electricity to survive.”
The Girl licked a candy wrapper. “What’s a lectricity?”
“It’s the juice they feed on. It’s what they used to build the dragons.” Another bolt of lightning cracked the sky. The Lady nodded. “That’s it. Right there. They’re looking for us.” Thunder boomed back. “And that’s God saying we can’t be found.”
Even now, the Girl sometimes dreams of the city. She runs down cavernous streets, eternally dim in the shadows of the buildings, and the People Machines roll after her, beams shining from their searchlight eyes. Trails of lightning glisten in their wake, like the slime snails leave behind. The People Machines let loose an awful wail, louder than the tooting of the barge horns, louder than anything the Girl has ever heard. She can’t even hear herself screaming until she wakes up. But at least these dreams leave her feeling relieved, grateful, even, to awaken in her nest of pink insulation and rags. Sometimes the Girl dreams of impossible things, and then she almost can’t bear to open her eyes. She dreams of another pair of arms looped around her, lifting her up; of another hand holding hers, as the Lady’s did long ago; of the heavy warmth of another person sleeping nearby; of the smell of another neck, the sound of a laugh answering hers across the rolling dunes of garbage. Once she even dreamt of a face.
The Girl watches the dragons while she scavenges. She stands atop a heap of broken dishes and stares at them dipping through the far-off sky. They remind her of the vultures, of the flopping fish whose heads she smashes on the shore. They are too distant to see clearly, but they mesmerize her. It is hard for her to believe that the People Machines could create something so beautiful.
Not too long before the Lady lay down on that jangly, tattered mattress for the last time, sweating and clutching her forearm and grumbling about shooting stars only she could see—not long before that, the Lady gave the Girl a name. The morning of this naming, the Girl woke up alone in the HowFly to see the Lady tromping her way alone amongst the garbage hills. The Lady was bent forward, yammering, shaking her head, sometimes pausing to gesture at the sky or wipe her nose down the length of her sleeve. She only moved this way when she had been Called on a Mission. The Girl wrapped a checkered tablecloth around her shoulders, pulled on her too-big galoshes, and followed.
The Lady made her way down to the shore, twisting her head left and right, as if to shake water from her ear. The waves were strong for spring; some of the junk had gotten pulled out by the tide, and the Lady began marking the naked sand at the water’s edge with a stick. It took the Girl a minute to realize she was writing something there. The Lady had taught the Girl to read a little, really just to recognize words like POISON and DANGER and TOXIC. But the Girl had never seen a word like this. It unfurled upon the Island’s lip, a single breath. The Girl stood on an oil drum, frozen, as the word moved through the Lady’s arm into the stick into the dark wet sand. The Lady talked to herself, to God, in a low grumble all this while, with patches of humming here and there. Finally she threw her stick into the bay. She glanced up and saw the Girl watching her.
“God told me your name this morning,” the Lady hollered. “He said sorry for the holdup. Time ain’t the same up there.”
“What does it say?” the Girl asked.
“What do you think it says?”
The Girl’s mouth moved soundlessly. She tried to take in the whole word at a glance. It was impossible.
“Abracadabra?” she finally guessed. It was the longest word she knew.
The Lady jerked her head. “Close enough.”
Nowadays, the Girl tries to put the Lady back together in her mind. She remembers the Lady’s feet, the cracked black toes, the bristle on her chin, the tomatoey way she smelled. She remembers the tattoos: the skull and snakes, the wilted rose, the pillars of cloud and fire. The Girl still wears the puffy green coat with the flag sewn on one pocket, the coat the Lady never took off, even in summer. Little feathers poke out of the holes. The coat hides her knees, the sleeves her arms, even though she is a lady herself now, as much as she will ever be. She’s passed countless winters alone so far, countless sunburnt summers, and the Lady’s old, terrible prophecies of moon blood and brain aches have all come true scores of miserable times, and still the coat is too big. It will always be too big. Sometimes it makes her cry. The Girl is the last human in the world, and she has stopped growing.
* * *
The Girl floats on her back to watch the sky, that map of weather and time. Her ears are underwater. Her knees and breasts are four little islands just above the waves. She likes to look up on evenings like this, when the dusk is furred with gray. She feels like she’s inside of something, that space isn’t infinite but woolly and snug, intended just for her. She moves her arms through the water; it isn’t warm or cold, just there, a liquid as familiar as her own blood.
And then, in the sky, she sees it: a ballooning dome of white that she first takes for a plastic bag. But as it billows down, it’s much too big. It’s a sheet, but like no sheet she’s ever seen, unstained and filled with air—a cloud touched by gravity. A cloud with something attached.
The Girl flips over in the water and begins to swim to shore.
* * *
A strange girl is straddling Ripple. Her eyes are so blue it hurts to look at them; strands of blond hair halo her face in the pale gold of dawn. Not bad, but Ripple’s had dreams like this before. He smiles vaguely, lets his eyelids drift shut—and she presses the dull edge of a rusty pair of scissors against his throat. When she speaks, her voice is uncertain, with an uncanny accent like nothing he’s ever heard: “Human? Human? Say your name.”
“Don’t,” he groans. His skull feels swollen on the inside and he can’t move his left arm. Or rather, he probably could, but it doesn’t feel like it would be a good idea.
“Speak human-speak.” She presses the scissors harder against his voice box. “Talk like they do.”
“Fuuuck.” This is real, and he can’t breathe.
It takes all the energy he can muster to grab her bony wrist and wrench the scissors out of her hand. Ripple sits up woozily as the girl scrambles out of stabbing range. She’s about his age, eighteen or so—he can tell from her pointy, wild little face—but weirdly scrawny: less than five feet tall, in an enormous army jacket and not much else. She looks like a mouse magically transformed to human. Her big ears stick up through the uncombed strands of her stringy waist-length hair; her front teeth gnaw her lower lip.
“What am I doing here?”
“I saved you.” She sounds like she can’t believe it either.
Ripple is on a saggy mattress, outside. It smells awful, and he’s noticing now that in addition to the stabbing pain, something warm is trickling down his arm, warm and sort of viscous, but she’s still staring at him, not smiling, not blinking, afraid but respectful—like he’s some kind of god. Cuz I’m the Dunk, comes the thought, unbidden. Ripple’s eyes linger on hers. Who…how…why…Then he glances to his right. Lying beside him is a human skeleton.
“Corpsefucker! Gaah!” Ripple jumps up, somehow dropping the scissors in the process, but before he can pick them up again, a volt of mind-erasing Ow! shoots through his left arm. He clutches it to his chest. His sleeve is wet and kind of sticky. He doesn’t want to think about what’s underneath. “What the—”
“I brought you to the Lady. I saved you.”
“—the snu
ff is going on?” Ripple glances dizzily left and right. Flies zigzag through the air; his foot’s stuck in a coffee can. Flocks of gulls circle above, weeping. Dunes of garbage cover the ground in all directions and stretch, undulating, to the distant shore: a literal wasteland.
It’s barely light outside—early morning?—but Ripple can see the terrain well enough to recognize where he is: Quick Kills, on Hoover Island, the city’s now-defunct landfill. It was all in the edutainment special they had to watch for his Desperate Activism course: Something Really Should Be Done. Dumping stopped here like forty years ago, when the Enviro Czar complained the whole place was going to sink. Maybe it would have been better if it had. They said it was the biggest mess people ever made.
The mattress is the ghost of a mattress really, not much more than springs. On top of it is the picked-clean skeleton, half covered in a Ladonian flag. Meanwhile, the girl has scrabbled away, crouches behind a nearby splintered crate marked FRAGILE. She peeks out at him furtively above the slats.
“How did I get here?” Ripple kicks the coffee can off his foot; she lets out an “eep!” and ducks back into hiding. “What kind of sick game is this, anyway?”
“Did God send you? From the sky?”
“What?”
She tilts her head. Some yards away, he sees the white deflated folds of his parachute, snagged on trash, blowing in the wind.
“It deployed,” he murmurs in wonderment. The HowFly chutes don’t have a good reputation. Usually they don’t open at all, or if they do, it happens inside the vehicle, causing the crash. He feels nothing but grateful for a second—until he looks back and sees her scrutinizing him with new suspicion.
“Are you…human?” she asks. The words dislodge from her throat like foreign objects. She doesn’t get a lot of visitors, he’s guessing.
“Am I what?”
“Are you a man of flesh?”
That sounds like the sort of question a cannibal would ask. Ripple glances back at the bones. They’re old and dry, no meat left on them at all. “I’m not answering till I know what happened to this guy.”
“She’s the Lady. She’s good to sleep near when you’re sick.”
“How did she die?”
The girl frowns.
“I couldn’t save her,” she admits.
Ripple would feel sorry for asking, but hey, he’s not the one who left a skeleton lying around. He changes tack: “How long was I out for?”
“All night. Morning now.”
Ripple glances east. Sure enough, the sun is rising, slowly, above the glass towers of the city. The dragons hang almost motionless against the orange sky, twined together like two insects trapped in amber. They seem so far away.
“They don’t torch you? Out here on the landfill?”
The girl shakes her head. “Their cords don’t stretch that far.”
Ripple’s arm is still dripping and he’s pretty sure it’s not motor oil. Plus a few vultures have joined the gulls above, and one of them seems particularly interested in him. “Listen, is there anywhere we can go? Like, I dunno, a building or something? A shelter? Maybe with a first-aid kit and some flares?” No flicker of comprehension from the girl. “You know, someplace less fucked? Anywhere?”
“What is fucked?”
“This place—this whole place—is fucked.”
The girl looks around her. “Fucked,” she says with approval.
“Where do you live?” The girl hesitates. He adds: “Could we—go there?”
“Are you human?” she repeats.
“Why do you keep asking me that? What else would I be?”
“I need to know,” she pleads.
Ripple pats his pockets. His LookyGlass, his expired dormitory ID/keycard, his organ-recipient VIP med badge are all still in the flying car he crashed. And somehow he doesn’t think they would help much anyway.
“I have a heartbeat,” he offers.
“You do?”
“Want to check?”
The girl emerges from behind the crate, her forehead warily scrunched. She’s barefoot, he notices, and there’s a strip of duct tape in her hair.
“In there?” she asks, pointing at his chest. He nods, wonders what the alternative would be. She presses her ear against his shirt and they stand that way for several moments while above them the birds scream and swirl. Ba-bum. Ba-bum. Ripple should be scared, but weirdly, he finds himself thinking of that one time his mom tried to teach him to slow dance (“This is a life skill,” she told him at the time). He isn’t sure what to do with his arms.
“I guess technically, all animals have hearts,” he realizes out loud, but the girl shushes him. When she finally pulls away, tears are streaking lines of clean down her dirty face.
“I prayed and I prayed and you came,” she whispers.
Huh.
Ripple follows her across the Island. She scrambles over compacted bundles of yellowed newspaper, their headlines smeared—ALL IS NOT WELL—and the charred body of a busted HowScoot. The way she moves is kind of incredible—ducking and scampering, pulling herself over debris by her hands. She’s almost four-legged. And she’s definitely not dressed underneath that coat, not even a miniskirt. Maybe not anything at all. Ripple is so focused on the shadowy place where those spindly legs disappear under the army jacket that he doesn’t see the vulture swooping down until it’s too late.
“Hey. Hey—fem! Fem! Watch out!”
The girl turns. The vulture—it’s a big one too—descends almost lazily, its heavy black wings sending shivers through the air. Ripple clutches his bad arm, glances to and fro for a weapon—a telephone receiver? A soiled rug? When he looks back, the vulture is perched on the girl’s shoulder. He gapes as she strokes its wrinkled head. The vulture pecks her ear, and she giggles affectionately, as though it just whispered an inside joke.
“The hell?” murmurs Ripple.
“This is Cuyahoga.” The girl reaches into one pocket of her army jacket and removes from it the gray swinging tassel of a dead mouse. The vulture snaps its jaws, leaving only the tip of the tail. “She remembers you from my dream.”
* * *
The last day of taping, after the film crew packed up their cameras and spotlamps, the boom mic and the craft table, and left Ripple just the way they’d found him twelve years earlier—alone in his room, surrounded with his electronic and proactive toys, his bubbling wraparound Brine Shrimp Experience® and patented pain-response punching bag—he felt emptier than a soul-sucked husk. The room looked dimmer, grayer, not bright enough for shooting: they’d taken the light out with them. Defiant, he socked the punching bag (“Ow, my loins!”) and then, in the silence that followed, confronted the showless set with the same glare he’d use to face down an enemy. He was still an icon, even without anyone there to see it.
“Today,” he vowed, “the adventure begins.”
Now the adventure has definitely begun, and Ripple is less than stoked. The girl lives in a former horse trailer, it turns out, one she has bespangled with rusty wind chimes and what appear to be strings of burnt-out holiday lights shaped like chili peppers. Ripple can’t be too sure, because right now he’s keeping his eye on the bird. Cuyahoga is perched on the bald pate of a cracked phrenology head, staring at him and occasionally ruffling her feathers. Ripple, uneasily shirtless, shifts his weight on the girl’s saddle-blanket-and-foam-pad mattress, and takes another look at his arm. It’s tight in the greasy bandanna she used to wrap it. The blood’s stopped seeping through, but he doesn’t want to think about the nasty gash underneath, or the long shard of windshield glass the girl pulled out of it with her nimble fingers. On the outside of the bandage, the wound has left a pattern of brown misshapen blots like an archipelago of islands. Islands—islands of blood—islands like this one. Oh fuck, he’s never getting out of here.
“Hungry?”
The girl stands on the drawn-down ramp of the trailer, backlit by her campfire outside. She holds a steaming cauldron. On her hands, she wears t
wo soiled panda slippers in lieu of oven mitts. Ripple shudders.
“I’m good, thanks.”
“OK.” She joins him on the mattress. The cauldron thunks down on the metal floor before them; stew slops over the sides. At least, it looks like stew. It smells like fish and burned ketchup. The girl pulls the pandas off her hands and shoves the long sleeves of the army jacket up above her elbows. She digs a linty spork out of her hip pocket and tucks in.
“You sure you don’t have any communication with the city?” Ripple asks again, though he knows it’s hopeless. “No ThinkTank? No LookyGlass? No telegraph, no hog radio? We can’t tie a message to your vulture’s leg or something? There’s no way?”
The girl pats his knee. They’ve gone over this once already.
“I’m so screwed.” Ripple slumps back on the bed. “I never even joined swim team back in underschool. All us legacies went out for Power Jousting.”
The girl scoops up another sporkful of steaming dinner and pokes at his mouth with it. “Yum, yum.”
“Why not.” Ripple opens wide. The food is surprisingly good: baked beans, trout, what he really hopes is a noodle. “Mmm.” She feeds him another sporkful, then another, then another. “Hey, that’s your dinner. Save some for yourself.”
“You matter more.” She beams.
Ripple sizes her up. In the dim light of the campfire, her tangled, filthy hair almost looks high fashion, the result of a particularly intense encounter with a wind machine. And her face is cute in a feral sort of way; he noticed that before. She’s practically hot. With some bodywash and a makeover, she could be Toob-worthy—well, almost, considering her tendency to wipe her nose on her sleeve, which she’s doing right now.
“What did you mean, earlier?” he asks. “When you said you prayed for me?”
“The Lady said I was the last one. But I always hoped.”
“You thought you were the last person? On Earth?”
“The last human. At first I was scared you were one of the…others.” She wants to say more, maybe, but she trails off and licks the spork instead. “I should have practiced talking-out-loud. It’s hard to say everything.”
The Sky Is Yours Page 3