Armageddon's Children (5 page)

At first, the strategy worked well. The measure of protection the compounds offered was undeniable. There was safety in numbers. A form of government could be established and order restored within their walls. Food and water could be better foraged for and more equitably distributed. A larger number of people meant more diversity of skills. When one compound filled up, those turned away established another, usually in a second sports complex. If there was none available, a convention center or even an office tower was substituted, although none of these ever worked quite as well.

The biggest problem with the compounds began to manifest after the first decade, when the once-men started to appear. No one seemed certain of their origin, although there were rumors of “demons” creating them from the soulless shells of misguided humans who had been subverted. Urban legends, these stories could never be confirmed. Some claimed to have seen these demons, though no one Owl had ever met. But there was no denying the existence of the once-men. Formed up into vast armies, they roamed the countryside, attacking and destroying the compounds, laying siege until resistance was either overcome or the compound surrendered in the false hope that mercy would be shown. When word spread of the slave pens and the uses to which the once-men were putting the captured humans, resistance stiffened. But the compounds were not fortresses in the sense that medieval castles had been. Once besieged, they turned into death traps from which the defenders could not escape. The once-men outnumbered the humans. They did not require clean water or good food. They did not fear plague or poisoning. Time and patience favored the attackers. One by one, the compounds fell.

This might have discouraged those hiding in the compounds if there had been anyplace else for them to go. But the mind-set of the compound occupants was such that the idea of surviving anywhere else was inconceivable. Outside the walls you risked death from a thousand different enemies. There were the Freaks. There were the feral humans living in the rubble of the old civilization. There were the armies of the once-men, prowling the countryside. There were things no one could describe, crawled up out of Hell and the mire. There was anarchy and wildness. The humans in the compounds could not imagine contending with these. Even the risk of an attack and siege by the once-men was preferable to attempting life on the outside where an entire world had gone mad.

Owl was one of the people who believed like this. She had been born in the Safeco Field compound, and for the first eight years of her life it was all she knew. She never went outside its walls, not even once. In part, it was because she was crippled at birth, deprived of the use of her legs for reasons that probably had something to do with the poor quality of the air or food or water her mother ingested during pregnancy. After her parents died from a strain of plague that swept the compound when she was nine, she was left orphaned and alone. A quiet and reclusive child, in part because of her disability, in part because of her nature, she had never had many friends. She began living with a family who needed someone to care for their baby. But then the baby died, and she was dismissed and left without a family once more.

She began working in the kitchens of the compound and sleeping in a back room on a cot. It was a dreary, unrewarding existence, but her choices were limited. In the compounds, everyone over the age of ten worked if they wanted to remain. If you did not contribute, you were put out. So she worked. But she was unhappy, and she began to question whether the life she was living was the best she could hope for. She began spending time on the walls, looking at the city, wondering what was out there.

Which was how, five years ago, she had met Hawk.

A growl sounded from the common room. Cheney, head lowered, ears flat, and hair bristling, faced the iron-plated door that opened onto the outer corridors of the underground city. He didn’t look like a fur ball now; he looked like a monster. His muzzle was drawn back to expose his huge teeth, and the sleepy eyes of a moment earlier had turned baleful. Owl rotated away from Squirrel and moved her chair back down the ramp and into the common room, where lamps powered by solar cells gave off a stronger light. Sparrow was already there, standing next to Cheney, gripping one of the prods. Sparrow was small, and the big dog, even crouched, stood shoulder-high to her. Owl maneuvered over to the door and waited, listening. Moments later, she heard the rapping sound—one sharp, one soft, two sharp. She waited until it was repeated, then reached up and released the locking bars and unlatched the door.

Fixit and Chalk pushed through, soaked to the skin and looking like drowned rats. Cheney quit growling and took himself out of his crouch. Sparrow lowered the prod.

“He fell in the storm sewer,” Chalk announced, gesturing at Fixit.

“Then he fell in trying to help me out,” Fixit finished.

“You were supposed to be on the roof,” Sparrow pointed out, her blue eyes intense. “The roof is up, not down, last I heard.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Fixit brushed the water from his curly red hair and shook himself like a dog. Both Cheney and Sparrow backed up. “You can’t do much with solar cells when it’s raining. We switched out the collectors from the catchment system, threw in the purification tablets, and were done. Then we decided to forage for stores. Found a big stash of bottled water two blocks south. Too much to haul without help.”

“It’ll take all of us and the wagon,” Chalk added. “But a good find, right, Owl?”

“Better than good,” Owl agreed.

He grinned, then looked around. “Where are the others, anyway? Aren’t they back yet?”

Owl shook her head. “Soon, I expect. You better get out of those clothes and dry off or you’ll end up like Squirrel.”

“I’d have to be pretty stupid to end up like Squirrel,” Chalk declared, and Fixit laughed.

“It’s not funny,” Sparrow snapped. She crossed to confront them, not as big as they were but a whole lot more unpredictable. “You think it’s funny that he’s sick?”

“Stop it, Sparrow,” Chalk said, turning away from her. “I didn’t mean anything. I want him to get well as much as you do. I was just teasing about how it happened.”

“Well, tease about something else,” Owl suggested gently. “What happened to Squirrel was an accident.”

Which was true, so far as it went. It had been an accident that he had cut himself on a piece of sharp metal and that the cut had become badly infected. But he had brought it on himself by trying to salvage a box of metal toy soldiers that Hawk had told him not to touch.

“Besides which, where do you get off calling anyone stupid?” Sparrow demanded.

Chalk was so fair with his pale skin and white-blond hair that he almost wasn’t there. Now he flushed with the rebuke and spun angrily back on Sparrow.

“Let it alone, Chalk,” Owl said, intervening quickly. “Just go change your clothes. You, too, Fixit. Sparrow, you go back into the bedroom and sit with Squirrel. Let me know if he needs anything.”

There were a few more pointed looks and some grumbling, but everyone did as asked. Owl was the mother, and you don’t argue with your mother. She hadn’t asked for the position, but there was no one else to fill it, and as the oldest female member of the tribe she was the logical choice. Most of them could barely remember their real mothers, but they knew what mothers were and wanted one. Hawk provided leadership and authority, but Owl gave them stability and reassurance. In a world where kids believed that adults had failed them in every important way, other kids were the best they could hope for.

Owl wheeled toward the kitchen, beginning to think about dinner. Cheney was back in place between the leather couch and the game table, eyes closed, flanks rising and fall slowly beneath the thick mass of his patchwork coat. Owl watched him for a moment, wondering if he was dreaming and if so what he dreamed about. Then she angled herself into the makeshift work space that served as the food preparation area and began rolling out prepackaged dough. Tonight she would serve them a special treat. Hawk would be bringing back apples, and she would make pie. They lacked electricity, but could generate sufficient heat to bake from the woodstove Fixit had built for her.

She thought about the boy for a minute. An enigma, he defied easy categorization. He was a talented craftsman and mechanic; he could build or repair almost anything. He had constructed the makeshift appliances in the kitchen and the generators and solar units that powered them. He had rebuilt her wheelchair to make it easier to maneuver and laid down the ramps that allowed her to reach all the rooms. The catchment systems on the roof were his. Using scrap and ingenuity, he had constructed all of the heavy security doors and reinforced window shutters that kept them safe. He claimed to have learned his skills from his father, who was a metalworker, but he never talked about his parents otherwise. He had come to them early, when he was not yet ten but already knew more than they did about making things.

Now, at fourteen, he was old and capable enough to be given responsibilities reserved for the older members of the tribe, but he had a problem. As he had proved repeatedly, he was unreliable. He was fine when he was working under someone’s supervision, but terrible when left on his own—prone to forget, to procrastinate, even to ignore. Sending him out by himself was impossible. The last time they had done so, he hadn’t come back for two days. An old broken-down machine had distracted him, and he had been trying to find a way to make it run again. He didn’t even know what it did, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was interesting.

His closest friend was Chalk, which made a sort of sense because they were polar opposites. Chalk was easygoing and incurious, uninterested in why anything worked, only that it did. He liked to draw and was very good at it—hence his name. But he was not a dreamer, as so many artists tended to be. He was practical and grounded in his life; his art was just another job. Fixit was something of a mystery to him, a boy of similar age and temperament who could make everything run smoothly but himself.

Inseparable, those two, Owl thought. Probably a good thing, since each boy had a steadying effect on the other and neither was much good alone.

She was midway through the piecrust assembly when Cheney scrambled to his feet and stood facing the iron-plated door once again. This time he did not growl, and his posture was alert and unthreatening. That meant Hawk was coming.

Her hands covered with pieces of dough, she called to Sparrow to open the door. Moments later Hawk and the others surged into the room, laughing and joking as they hauled in the boxes of apples and plums and deposited them in the kitchen where some could be separated out and the rest put into cold storage. Chalk and Fixit reemerged, Sparrow wandered out, and soon all of them were gathered in the common room exchanging information on the day’s events. Owl listened from the work space as she finished with the crust and began cutting up apples, watching the expressions on their faces, the excited gestures they made, and the repeated looks they exchanged, taking pleasure in their easy camaraderie.

This was her family, she thought, smiling. The best family she could imagine.

But when Panther started talking about the dead Lizard, the good feelings evaporated and she was reminded anew that she lived in a world where having a family primarily meant having safety in numbers and protection from evil. The word
family
was just a euphemism. The Ghosts, after all, were a tribe, and the tribe was always under siege.

She finished with the pie, adding cinnamon, sugar, and butter substitute, stuck the pie in the baking oven, and started making their dinner. Forty minutes later, she gathered them around the work space on their collection of chairs and stools and sat them down to eat. They did what she asked, she their surrogate mother, and they her surrogate children. So very different from her days in the compound, where she had been merely tolerated after her parents died.

Here, she believed, she was loved.

When dinner was over, Bear and River cleared the table, and Sparrow helped her with the dishes. They used a little water from the catchment system, just enough to get the job done. They were lucky they lived in a part of the world where there was still a reasonable amount of rainfall. In most places, there was no water at all. But you couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t be like that here one day. You really couldn’t be sure of anything now.

She had just finished cleaning up when Hawk wandered over to stand next to her. “Tiger says that Persia has the red spot,” he said quietly. His dark eyes held her own, troubled and conflicted. “He wants me to get him a few packs of pleneten. I agreed. I had to. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made the trade for the fruit.”

“She must be pretty sick. He needs the trade as badly as we do.” She folded her hands in her lap. “Will you try to get the pleneten from Tessa?”

He shrugged. “Where else would I get it?”

“We have some. We could give him that.”

“We need what we have.”

She exhaled softly. “Tessa may not be able to help. She puts herself in danger by doing so.”

“I know that.”

“When do you see her again?”

“Tomorrow night. I’ll ask, see what she can do.”

She nodded, studying his young face, thinking he was growing up, that his features were changed even from just six months ago. “We will help Persia even if Tessa can’t,” she said. “She’s only eleven.”

Hawk smiled suddenly, a wry twist of his mouth that reflected his amusement with what she had just said. “As opposed to fourteen or sixteen or eighteen, which is so much older?”

She smiled back. “You know what I mean.”

“I know you make good apple pie.”

“How many other apple pies have you tried besides mine?”

“Zero.” He paused. “Can we have our story now?”

She put away the dishes and rolled her wheelchair into the common room. Her appearance from the kitchen was their signal that story time was about to begin. The talking stopped at once, and everyone quickly gathered around. For all of them, it was the best time of the day, a chance to experience a magic ride to another place and time, to live in a world to which they had never been and someday secretly hoped to go. Each night, Owl told them a story of this world, inventing and reinventing its history and its lore. Sometimes she read from books, too. But she didn’t have many of those, and the children liked her made-up stories better anyway.