by RJ Plant
“How old are you, Madison?” Kaitlyn asked.
“Sixteen,” she said.
“And you go out that far on your own?” Sully asked. “Fuckin’ dangerous.”
“Needs must,” I said. “Speaking of thieves, Madison, you were trying to steal from Kait here when I found you.”
Madison whirled around with an anger cultivated by a life spent trying to survive.
I raised my voice as she started to protest: “My point wasn’t necessarily that you’re a looter and thief. More that you could have gotten yourself killed.”
“You wouldn’t have killed me,” she said.
“I held back because you were holding something valuable,” I said. “Something we didn’t want to lose.”
“You didn’t shoot me because I’m a girl.”
“I didn’t shoot you because I was distracted.”
“That’s hardcore,” Madison said.
“Glad you approve.”
She started moving again and we followed.
“Can you teach me that? The way you threw me down?”
“You help us, and I’ll teach you anything you want,” I said.
We walked up to a tunnel made from a hollowed-out bus painted black and packed into place with dirt and concrete.
“This is the only way into town,” Madison said.
Everything from the driver’s seat forward had been removed, along with all but two seats—the first one behind the driver and the last in the passenger row.
“Why were those seats left in?” I asked.
“When I was younger, two guards always kept watch here day and night.”
“And now?” Kaitlyn asked.
“It’s getting dark,” Madison said with a shrug. “People stopped moving around during the night outside the town.”
“What happens at night?” Kaitlyn asked.
“If you stay here long enough, you might find out. I’ve heard some people say it’s starving animals attacking. Heard others say it’s starving people. Anyway, we’d find bodies the next day when we were … scavenging. Torn to shit.”
“Probably just a cougar,” I said.
“Well, whatever it is, it keeps out the nighttime riffraff,” Madison said, leaving it at that.
I dropped back to walk with Sully.
“All right, Sully?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know, kid. This … this ain’t my home anymore. I don’t know what to think.”
“What did you expect after nearly thirty years?” I asked. “And a war.”
“Hell, I don’t know.” He shook his head again. “It just would have been nice, y’know? The real thing actually matching what I remember.”
“You’re not upset with the aesthetics of the settlement,” I said, prodding.
“I thought I’d have known where to start looking,” he said. “For Jean, I mean. I knew the city, knew the area. I was just so fuckin’ sure I could find a starting point.”
“Least we’ve got ourselves a guide.”
“Kid don’t know anything. She just wants your lady-friend’s help.”
“We’ll see. Don’t give up yet, Sully.” I clasped him on the back, inwardly preening at my ability to give a heartfelt pep talk.
I pushed my way to the front as we stepped out of the tunnel-bus. The settlement was as loud and as full of life as the other side had been deserted. Instead of street lamps there were strings of lights nailed to the buildings, running off the engines from the scavenged cars. What had looked so dense and closed off from the outside was spacious and welcoming on the inside.
The buildings were made mostly of wood, a few bricks here and there, a lot of fabric but not much glass. I saw a donut shop in the distance. Which made me notice my incredible hunger.
Every five feet introduced a new smell. Motor oil from makeshift generators, cooking oil, burning wood from communal fire pits where people sat cooking skinned rats over open flames.
Maybe I wasn’t that hungry after all.
People were gathered on the street corners and in front of buildings. One middle-aged woman leaned out of her window on the ground floor, chatting up a younger guy who was blushing at her words. Dozens of conversations permeated the air with varying degrees of emotion and enthusiasm, from excitement to exhaustion, happy to pensive, familial to not so friendly.
As Madison led us farther into the town, the space became tighter, now a coveted thing where there wasn’t much left.
“We’re close now,” she said.
We climbed a fire escape, metallic and noisy, into a second-floor window that let out into a hall. Then we climbed up two more flights of stairs and set off down another hall. Madison stopped in front of a door marked with a fading “404.”
“This is it,” she said, but made no move to go in.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I just—”
“It’s all right, Madison,” Kaitlyn said. She put a hand on Madison’s shoulder and smiled. “Take me to your father. Let me see what I can do.”
“Yeah,” Madison said, nodding. “Yeah, okay.” She pulled out a key from her dingy trench coat and unlocked the door. After a couple of deep breaths, she led us into the flat.
The space was packed with all kinds of stuff, torn and rotting books, old newspaper clippings, pre-War football memorabilia, clothing, stuffed animals.
“Dad’s this way,” Madison said to Kaitlyn, reaching out but stopping short of taking her hand.
When I started to follow, Madison turned to me, her face going bright red.
“You don’t all have to be in there,” she said.
“Not all of us. But if Kaitlyn goes …” I said, shrugging.
Madison seemed to have a few moments of internal deliberation, then nodded. She led us down the hall to a door on the right. She knocked. A muffled sound came from inside the room and Madison went in, motioning for us to stay in the doorway.
“I brought some people over,” Madison said to the figure on the bed. “They’re going to help you.”
“They tell you that?” said the voice. “You’re a fool for believing them.”
“Yeah, well, I get it from you,” she said.
The gruff voice made a harsh sound that I determined to be a laugh.
“A damned fool, then. But you’re a good kid, Maddie,” the man said to her, then louder, “Well, what are you standing around for? You going to help me or not?”
Kaitlyn took a step forward. I stopped her and went in first.
“We aren’t doing this for free,” I said, looking down through the dark at a white-haired figure who looked a little closer to grandparent age than parent.
And a little closer to a corpse. His face was sallow and withered, leathery, with skin that sagged as though it was too much work to do anything more than hang onto the bone. His emaciated frame rattled with a cough before he replied.
“You’d be stupid to,” he said. “What’s your price?”
“They’re looking for Jean Sullivan,” Madison said quietly.
For a moment I thought the old man would die right there, of shock, of a heart attack, of who the fuck knew what.
“Who are you?” he finally demanded.
“That depends on you. I can be the man who brought your savior,” I said. “Or I can be someone much, much worse.”
*****
1 November 2042, Boston Settlement, Former U.S. Territory
I stood alone outside on the fire escape with not much to do and nowhere to go. I flexed my left arm a few times, then tested out its range of motion, still a little surprised it had been broken earlier.
“Howahya, kid?” Sully said as he awkwardly squeezed through the open window. He took a thin wooden case from the breast pocket of the blazer he wore under a worn leather duster. The blazer matched his trousers—the same navy and white pinstripe he always wore in all my years of Felix knowing him—but the brown duster pushed the wardrobe somewhere just short of an e
yesore.
“You talk to me like you would to Felix,” I said, as he offered me the wooden case. I took a feg and sniffed it, then touched my tongue to the end of it.
“The fuck are you doing, kid?” Sully asked. “You smoke it, not eat it.”
“I know what to do with it,” I said a little irritably. “Just trying to see what the appeal is.”
I blew the loosed tobacco off my tongue, then took Sully’s proffered matches.
“Anyway, I don’t mean to,” he said. “You look the same, sound the same, so I treat you the same. You never really explained your … situation.”
“Maybe I will one day when we have several hours, a little quiet, and a lot of whiskey,” I said. “Which sure as shite does not describe the current situation.”
We stood in silence for a while, then Sully said, “Look, kid, I’m sorry the lab fell through and all.”
“Eh, what can you do? You didn’t know it was a bust. And if you did, I don’t want to know about it.”
“Yeah, all right.” He clapped me on the back. “I’m going to head up, get some shut-eye.”
I waved him off and sat, flicking the finished feg to the ground below as I hung my legs through the bars of the fire escape and let them dangle like so much dead weight. I felt exhausted.
“Hey, weirdo.” I jerked upright as Madison’s voice from very close beside me.
I must have fallen asleep. Madison was squatting beside me, leaning over to talk right into my ear.
“Do you know what personal space is?” I asked.
“Yeah, ’course I do. I just wasn’t sure if you were dead and I thought poking you would be a bad idea, seeing as what happened earlier today and all.”
When I turned to look at her, she fell back so she was sitting instead of squatting. She crossed her legs in front of her, a hand resting on each knee.
“Was there something … you needed?” I asked.
“Not really, I guess,” she said. “I don’t think your girl in there is going to be able to help my dad, y’know?”
“Then why’d you ask?”
“I guess I just thought …” she said. She cleared her throat, then started again. “I guess I just hoped she could do something. That something could be done.”
“She’ll do what she can,” I said.
“Yeah. I believe she will.”
“Tell me, does your old man really know anything about Jean Sullivan?”
I thought she wasn’t going to respond. She picked at her scarf, then brought it closer to her face, wrapped it a little tighter against the chill.
“If he says he knows something, he knows something,” she finally said.
“And do you know something?”
“I know we don’t talk about her. No one does. She’s persona non-grata,” she said, more like she was just repeating words she’d heard without actually understanding them. She pointed up in the general direction of her flat and added, “And if that’s her dad, then he’s persona non-grata too.”
“Why?”
“Fuck, I don’t know. I just know the way things are around here and that’s the way they are.”
“Oh, well, all right, then,” I said. “There’s no need to get all worked up, like.”
“I’m not getting worked up,” she said.
“Oh, no, yeah, I can see that.”
She caught herself before she fell into the trap.
“You’re a dick,” she mumbled. “I’m not worked up.”
“Ah, I’m just taking the piss. Lighten up.”
“That’s gross,” she said.
“It means I’m messing about … just joking with you.”
“Oh.”
“Come on, then, let’s get inside before we freeze,” I said.
She jumped up to go in and I found myself envying her energy. At least a bit of rest should help.
*****
2 November 2042, Boston Settlement, Former U.S. Territory
“We’re wasting time here, Conor,” Brinly said. “It might have been worth the side trip for the lab, but that didn’t exactly work out. We need to move.”
“It wasn’t just about the lab,” I said to her, then looked over at Sully.
“I’m not going anywhere until I get information,” he said. “You might as well handle your business.”
“You said you wanted help, protection,” I said.
“I do. But you told me from the start, your priority was this job you’re working now. You give me your word you’ll come back within the week and I’ll shack up here. Keep off the streets, out of sight, until you get back. Should be safe enough,” he said, then added, “But a week is all I can promise. All I’m willing to.”
I looked at him, watched him for a minute. I kind of felt responsible for him. We didn’t know these people. Would he really be safe here? Would he really stay put?
Not that I thought a bedridden geriatric and an adolescent girl could do too much damage.
Still …
“You’re sure Bernard will be at the Birmingham base?” I asked Brinly.
“That’s GDI’s HQ, so yes, he should be,” she said. “But I’m less sure the longer we wait.”
Kaitlyn was with Madison and her father—Bill, he’d said his name was—trying to figure out a diagnosis to see if she could treat him. Bill’s terms were that he’d give Sully information, but only after he started getting better.
Which meant that things would get ugly for Bill if he didn’t get better. It wouldn’t be the illness that killed him.
Brinly sat on a busted recliner while I paced the room. Sully looked more at home, leaning to watch us through a cutout in the wall, allowing him to see into the main room from the kitchen. It must have been the barman in him.
“Look, just leave Sully here with Kaitlyn,” Brinly said. “She helps the father, Sully gets his information. We can meet up with them later.”
“I don’t feel comfortable leaving anyone behind.”
“She’s got a point, kid,” Sully said. “What I saw back there after you jumped out of that building? Seems you’re dealing with some pretty serious shit. Besides, I might be old, but I can look after Kaitlyn so long as we don’t make too many public appearances. Or, y’know, any.”
I pulled up all the memories and any information I could find on Sully from Felix. There wasn’t a lot there, more feelings than information. Felix felt safe enough around him, trusted him in that he had no reason not to, felt Sully was reliable if a bit of a hard-ass.
I knew Brinly was right though. We needed to get to Bernard. Not just Bernard, but his whole skeevy little sub-op, anyone tied to Kazic. And we were running out of time. The BSL-4 lab here was a dead end, and since that’s what we’d really come for, Sully would have to wait.
I went to Bill’s room and called for Kaitlyn to come out.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Brinly and I are going after Bernard,” I said. “I need you and Sully to stay here, lie low. So low you don’t leave this flat.”
“Conor, we don’t even know these people,” she said.
“Bill can’t even move and Madison’s only concern is him. You’ve got the upper hand here. Do whatever it takes to get him better. Sully says he can look after you as long as neither of you go walkabout and I believe him.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Head to Birmingham,” I said. “We’ve got to wipe GDI’s info on Kazic and get to Bernard before he leaves.”
Kaitlyn chewed at the inside corner of her bottom lip. “Thought you weren’t going after Bernard,” she said.
“Changed my mind,” I said, knowing it was true, but unable to recall when I’d decided I was disillusioned enough with life to become suicidal. The thought that this is what Rian had wanted all along sat heavily on me. I pulled my remaining pistol out of my shoulder holster and pressed it into Kaitlyn’s hand.
She took the gun and then shook her head.
“You need this,” she
said.
“I have others,” I said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of my trusty duffel.
“If Bill doesn’t get better?”
“Just keep up appearances until we get back.”
“When will that be?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Hopefully not too long. I’ll contact you as soon as I can.”
Kaitlyn chewed at her lip some more. “Good luck,” she said.
When she opened the door to go back into Bill’s room, I saw Madison silhouetted in the early morning light coming through the bedside window. Her features were mostly hidden in shadow, but I could see her face was turned to me. Then Kaitlyn shut the door.
“Keep her safe, Sully,” I said once I was back into the main room. “I’m trusting you on this.”
I opened the duffel and pulled out one of the LAR-15s, handing it to Sully, along with five full extra magazines.
“On my life,” he said, taking the rifle and ammo. “Just remember, kid, I’m only waiting one week.”
I nodded, grabbed my duffel.
“Let’s go,” I said to Brinly.
21
2 November 2042, Smoky Mountains, Free State of Tennessee, Former
U.S. Territory
“We need to land soon,” Brinly said into the headset. “Fuel up and find breathers.”
“Where did you have in mind?”
“There’s a little town in the mountains not far from here. I know someone there who can get us fuel, but it’ll take a while. We can set down there and take a roller the rest of the way.”
The view from the helicopter would have been great, might have been once, but now it showed how bad things had gotten. Little settlements popped up here and there, spread apart by miles, all of it awash in gray and brown and black. In some areas, tall trees listed to one side, trying to make an escape.
Brinly took us up over a mountain range, and I could see the town nestled in a high valley. She wasn’t kidding when she said it was small. I counted four buildings, an airship drop area, and a helipad about half a mile from the center of the town.