Well . . . no. It wouldn’t.
Looking back over the railing, Mariama hefted the rifle in both hands. The Arctic Warfare, its manufacturer had called it, a name that had made her laugh when she’d first learned it. But she’d liked the feel of it, the power of its .308 bullets. After practicing with it out on the firing range, she knew she could hit a human-size target at six hundred meters, and what that direct hit would do.
That was the most important thing: that the Arctic Warfare, designed for use on the tundra, would do just as much damage here in the rain forest.
* * *
DOWN BELOW, THE invaders worked, bringing seasoned logs from the colony’s wood supply and stacking them in the plaza.
As Mariama watched through the scope, two more came into view. They were already wearing stolen clothing, black pants made on one of Refugia’s old sewing machines and colorful T-shirts hoarded from the Last World.
That made eight. Could she kill all eight before any escaped?
Probably not. Malcolm could have, if he hadn’t chosen to sail away. The twins, too, probably, but they’d gone with Malcolm.
So many of Refugia’s best fighters missing, leaving Mariama as good as alone. Why had anyone thought that was a good idea?
Because they’d gotten soft. Because they’d told themselves lies.
There was nothing to do about it. In getting Sheila to safety up in this hide, Mariama hadn’t seen who else—if anyone—might have escaped. Even though she thought there must be dozens of others scattered around the forest, she had to assume the two of them were the only ones still free.
For about the hundredth time since they’d climbed the ladder up here, Mariama felt the familiar red anger flood through her. She wasn’t a great shot. Good, but not good enough. She tended to get impatient, and her aim grew sloppy. Her skills were best up close, hand-to-hand, with different weapons.
Six would probably be her maximum.
“Listen,” Sheila said. Mariama, focusing on the scene below, had nearly forgotten she was there, much less that they were in the middle of a conversation.
“They’re still people, some of them,” Sheila, the physician, the empathetic aid worker, said. “Still human.”
Mariama laughed. She knew this would offend Sheila, but at that moment it didn’t matter to her.
“And some of them aren’t, not anymore,” she said. “You saw that as well as I did.”
Again, Mariama saw Nick Albright falling, heard his last shout.
“And anyway,” she said, “who the hell cares if they’re human or not?”
* * *
IN THE PLAZA, the eight invaders had finished stacking the firewood. Mariama had long since understood what its purpose was going to be.
At the far end of the hide, Sheila had been watching a thief crawling on a slender branch perhaps ten feet away. Though Mariama could only glimpse the thieves down in the plaza as sudden twists of grainy darkness amid the dispersing fog, she knew they were there, too. She could smell them, the reek of abundance.
She watched as Sheila looked away from the thief and down at the plaza. Then she sat forward and, head tilted, took in the scene below with sharper attention. After a few moments, her eyes widened, and she raised her hands in front of her as if trying to ward off something assaulting her.
A thought. A realization.
She swung around, and now her face was so white that Mariama thought she might faint.
“It’s a pyre,” Sheila said. “They’re building a pyre.”
Mariama was quiet.
Red spots rose in Sheila’s cheeks. At that moment, something in her expression changed. Changed forever, Mariama thought.
Watching, she felt a mix of relief and sorrow. She’d always believed that the world should have room in it for people like Sheila: the empathetic ones, who valued sympathy and understanding as the highest attributes of humanity.
It should have, but it didn’t.
Sheila’s gesture with her arm was violent enough to startle the watching thief. It rose a few feet in the air before resuming its perch.
“Kill them,” she said in a flat tone Mariama had never heard from her before.
Mariama shook her head. “Not yet.”
Meaning, There’s still something I need to see.
Again Sheila understood.
And covered her eyes with the palms of her hands.
* * *
ONE OF THE slaves went around the club building and returned carrying a lit torch. Moving quickly enough to convince Mariama that he was human, he applied the flame to several spots at the base of the stack of wood.
Soon Mariama could see flames licking around the smaller chunks and fragments. It would take a while to fully ignite, to become hot enough, but not that long. The wood had been well prepared.
Then all eight headed away and out of sight. But Mariama knew they would be back.
No more than a minute had passed when the first two reemerged, carrying a body between them. Looking through the rifle’s sight, Mariama recognized who it was: Annette King, a teenager who’d been born in Refugia. Her face, a pale blur, stared up at the sky.
The two invaders tossed her on top of the pyre.
Seeing her, looking at that pale face, blank in death, and remembering the lively, sharp-witted young woman she’d been, Mariama understood something else. That though the majority of Refugia’s dead were likely going to be made up of the usual casualties of a disaster—the old, the frail, the youngest, all those who couldn’t move fast enough—they’d be far from the only ones.
They’d be joined by a less predictable cohort: the natives—those born here—as well as those who’d come when they were children. The ones who hadn’t seen the Fall, the apocalypse. The ones who didn’t grasp how important it was to run, who’d never learned that ten seconds might mean the difference between death and survival.
Thinking this over, Mariama must have made a sound, because Sheila, head down, hands pressed over her eyes, said, “Is it Jack?”
Mariama said, “No.”
“You’ll tell me when it is.”
Mariama didn’t reply.
Sheila said, “Mariama, you’ll tell me.”
“Yes.”
The second body was another native, a boy named Michael who’d been one of Jack’s friends. Mariama did not recognize the third, carried facedown, her clothes removed. She must have been one of the invaders.
The next, his gouged body nearly black with dried blood, was Nick Albright. Then a girl named Melanie Thomas, another Refugia native. Two others from among the invaders, and then three Fugians, including Spencer Browning, at eighty or so one of the colony’s oldest citizens.
This courtly old man’s desecrated corpse thrown, like all the others, with no care or delicacy atop the pile of sprawled, disorganized limbs and dead-eyed faces.
After that, the invaders did not return to the club. Instead they waited for the flames to spread, the pyre to grow hot enough.
So that was all.
No: not all. Seven Fugian deaths here, in this plaza, but already Mariama could see other columns of smoke rising over Refugia. Other pyres.
“They’re done,” she said. “No Jack.”
Sheila dropped her hands and raised her head. Her tear-stained face looked wild, almost feral, wide eyes and mouth open so her teeth showed.
“You’re sure?”
Mariama nodded.
But Sheila had also seen the smoke from the other pyres. Any glint of hope in her face was extinguished.
Then she blinked, seeming to regain focus. “They’re just standing there,” she said.
Mariama said, “Yes.”
“So kill them.”
Mariama lifted the rifle, placed the stand on the flat railing of the hide, and again bent over the telesc
opic sight. “This is going to be loud,” she said. “You might want to cover—”
“All of them,” Sheila said.
* * *
THE FIRST ONE in her sight had a thief rider.
Mariama had been sighting on the target’s head, the close-cropped graying hair revealing a lice-bitten scalp. But now she shifted her aim, just a fraction, so when she pulled the trigger she knew that the bullet would blast apart the target’s neck. Would kill the thief at the same time that it killed its slave.
The stock hammered against her shoulder, but she held the gun steady. Even as the sound of the shot echoed through the forest, she glimpsed a bloom of red, but already she was shifting to the next target. She noted that it was standing still, only its head turning toward where the first was falling to the ground. And then she pulled the trigger, and knew it was falling as well, even as she didn’t bother to watch.
If she’d had time, Mariama would have laughed. The thieves could overthrow human civilization, enslave whoever was left, even destroy Refugia and all who lived there, but they didn’t know and see all. These had never seen the effects of gunshots, so they didn’t know how to react.
Not even the hive mind was all-powerful.
The next one, a female, smaller, slighter of build, had taken only one step away from the first two when the bullet’s impact lifted her—it—half-off the ground. Mariama had missed the head shot on this one, but as it went down to the ground, writhing on its back, blood spouting from its chest, she knew that didn’t matter.
Three.
For the first time Mariama took her eye from the sight and looked at the scene as a whole. She could see flurries of movement—people running, a skein of thieves—at the periphery of her vision, but paid no attention to them.
Refocusing, she saw that two of the invaders remaining in the plaza still seemed stunned by the unexpected assault. But the other three were running, heading away from the pyre, the pile of bodies, and their own dead, toward the shelter of the buildings beyond the plaza.
Three human slaves. Mariama sent a thought their way.
You guys left it too long.
But, though her need to hurry made her aim sloppy, her reflexes and the speed of the big bullets gave her the time she needed, barely. It took five shots, not the three it should have, but in the end, all three targets were lying on the ground.
All the humans. Two were still, their spreading blood outlining them in black, while the third, the fast one she’d missed twice, was on his knees just in the doorway of the club. He held the stump of his blown-away right arm pinned beneath his left in an attempt to keep the bright red arterial blood from draining away.
A futile attempt. Even as Mariama swung the rifle away, she saw him topple sideways.
Two cartridges remaining in the clip, two slaves remaining as well. Slow ones, though seeking refuge at last. One was being ridden. But the other, a female, was something else. She was no more than fifteen or sixteen, clearly far too young to have been born in the Last World. A native, like Jack Gilliard and the others here. A born slave.
Mariama brought each down with a single shot.
Then, finally, her ammunition clip empty, the gun hot in her hands, the smell of burned powder suffusing the air, Mariama lifted her head. She placed the rifle carefully at her feet, flexed her cramped fingers, rolled her shoulders, and took a deep breath.
Sheila was still staring at the scene below. Now only one of the targets, the human bleeding near the club door, was moving, and he only feebly. Other than that, the plaza was still except for the flames dancing in the pyre and the smoke swirling upward.
Finally, Sheila turned her head. Her face was pale, harrowed, but there were no tears in her eyes, no disgust or revulsion or horror in her expression.
“All eight,” she said.
Mariama nodded.
“Not enough.”
“No.”
Sheila nodded. “But it’s a start.”
Finally, she had become part of the Next World. Finally, she understood.
* * *
A FEW MINUTES later, though, her mood changed. “You realize that we’re doomed if we stay out here,” she said. “You and me, and whoever else escaped.”
Mariama, bent over the food stores in the cache, didn’t bother to reply.
Sheila said, “If we have no access to the vaccine, our immunity will last about a week. Ten days at the outside.”
Mariama was quiet. Yes, she knew this. All Fugians would.
“After that, we’ll be completely vulnerable. They’ll be able to kill us or—”
“Enslave us,” Mariama said.
“Enslave us. Just like that.”
“Yes.”
Sheila said, “So what are you—we—going to do next?”
Mariama knew the answer to that question, the only answer, and thought Sheila did, too. But she chose not to reply directly.
Instead, she sighed and closed her eyes for a moment.
“I miss Malcolm,” she said.
* * *
MALCOLM SAT IN the full darkness. He was alive. He knew he must be, because he could feel the rough coral wall against the back of his neck and head, hear the dripping of water from somewhere close by, and smell a mix of odors: wet limestone, his own sweat, animal smells.
He could sense against his skin an occasional waft of fresher air from the small square window high on the far wall. A beam of sunlight had been coming through it when he first awoke, but by now it had become part of the general pitch-darkness.
His head throbbed, and there was a crust of dried blood where he’d been struck.
But otherwise he seemed intact, and by now he was alert enough to guess where he was: the fort’s slave quarters.
And he wasn’t alone. He could smell animals and hear the rustlings and shufflings, the occasional squeak and yelp, that showed that other cells were occupied as well.
He wondered if any of the others had survived. Were some being kept in quarters like this one? Had they escaped? Or had they all died on the steps?
If not, if somehow they’d survived, would they come back for him?
If they didn’t, how would he get out of here?
Fuck.
One thing was for sure. He wasn’t going to just give up and start acting like a model prisoner, not for those bugs and their lackeys. He was going to get the hell out of this hole.
He’d start soon. As soon as his mind was a little clearer.
But for now . . .
He’d just rest a little first.
* * *
AS HE DRIFTED into sleep, Malcolm realized that he was scratching his belly. But it didn’t occur to him to wonder why it itched, and by the time he awoke he’d forgotten he was even doing it at all.
TWENTY-NINE
THE BROTHER HAD rowed them back to the waiting ship. The short trip was carried out in silence, all of them lost in their own thoughts. Except, apparently, the strange, bright-eyed young woman sitting beside him on the boat, who seemed completely absorbed in staring into their faces, one after the other, when she wasn’t watching the sky or the flying fish launching themselves into the air all around them.
And still singing her strange, wordless song. Singing almost the whole way back to the ship.
“Hey,” Jason said, one of the times when she was quiet.
Even that single word felt strange. Everything about being here felt strange.
He tried again. “My name is Jason—”
But before he could go on, the leader, Shapiro, gray-faced with exhaustion, snapped a glance at him. “We’ll talk when we’re on board,” she said.
And that was that.
* * *
IN THE LEE of the ship, before climbing the ladder up to the deck, they washed themselves off in the channel. The crew members went fi
rst, in their clothes, the dried blood washing off them into the calm water, little fish rising to pick at the flakes of blood.
They went in one at a time, leaving the others to keep an eye on the two newcomers. Which meant mostly on Jason, as if he was likely to commandeer the rowboat and take it . . . where, exactly?
Then it was the girl’s turn. She was already the cleanest among them, having mostly avoided the bloodshed. But she went in anyway, stripping off her shift without any hesitation, then diving and wriggling in the water like a seal before climbing back on board and getting dressed again.
The wrap on her hand was soaked through, and the closer look he got of the infection beneath made Jason hope the ship had some medical miracle worker on board.
Finally, they let him wash, watching him closely the whole time. They’d already checked to make sure he wasn’t carrying a worm around with him, but they still looked like they thought he might transform into a last-stage host at any moment and try to tear them apart with his bare hands.
Even so, as he scrubbed at himself, staining the calm water around him, he couldn’t entirely blame them for their caution. Their fear. It would be hard to trust a grim-faced, filthy, half-naked man they’d just seen wielding a machete.
But then they brought him on board and—surrounded by wide-eyed crew members, many of them crying at the news they were hearing—immediately bound his hands in front of him. And though he still understood their reasoning, he felt a spark of anger flare inside him.
Then he quelled it. If his plan was going to succeed, if he was going to have a chance of seeing Chloe again, he was going to have to play the good soldier.
In contrast, his self-respect—and what these strange explorers thought of him—didn’t matter at all.
* * *
A MAN JASON assumed was the ship doctor took the girl off somewhere. Then Shapiro led Jason into a large room set near the stern belowdecks, clearly the ship’s mess. There she sat him behind a large rectangular wooden table and, without a word, left. The brother and sister—the man having acquired a handgun someplace—stood against the wall, watching him.
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