Burn (13 page)
She sees the beam of his flashlight, but in this dense fog, it’s only lighting the mist. “Cap!” Maybe he can follow her voice.
An arm—long and thin—reaches out and cuffs her elbow. She screams and tries to pull free. The arm is mottled with scars from thick hurried stitches running along its veins. She pulls away but her arm is wrenched so hard that pain shoots up into her shoulder. Still, she manages to stay on her feet.
She hears strange guttural sounds—a call, a response. A few more ahead of her and then behind. “Cap!” she shouts. “Here!”
The light keeps gliding past her. The cries echo around them in all directions. How many are there? What did they do to the children? Where’s Bradwell?
A hand grabs her other arm. This time she yanks the arm toward her and a face suddenly appears—a thick jaw with an underbite, gaunt cheeks covered in thin burnt skin. It widens its mouth, showing its yellowed teeth, and the skin stretches—taut and shiny and damp from the wet air. Its mouth snaps. Its eyes are blind and roving. It wants her in the fog because here she’s nearly as blind as it is.
She imagines the teeth gouging her flesh and muscle. She tries to pull her arm free, but others appear out of the thick fog and grab her. Their grips are too strong. How many? Five, six? She can’t tell. They force her to the ground. She writhes and kicks, but still they pin her on her back. She can feel the sharp outline of the metal box holding the vial and formula. The ground is cold and wet. She manages to cry out for El Capitan. “Cap! Cap!” Is he here?
“Pressia!” he shouts. She turns in the direction of his voice and sees only his flashlight falling and bouncing, and then it goes out.
She whispers his name as two faces loom above her. There’s darkened blood on their skin, splotches of it—from the thorns or from the wild dogs or… “Where are the children?” Pressia says.
They don’t seem to understand her. One reaches out and touches her forehead. It runs its cold, bony hand down her face. She twists away but the hand follows. She clamps her lips, and one secures her head with an incredibly strong grip, pressing one side of her face into the dirt. But the creatures have a strange calm about them. They’re moving slowly. She’s hoping to find their weakness, or hoping for a distraction.
They start humming now—tuneless and dull. One touches her hair softly. This chills her.
Maybe they don’t want to kill her.
Maybe they want her.
And now she starts to fight with everything she’s got. She throws her legs in the air and kicks one of the creatures in the chest. She rolls away from the other. Its fingernails claw her arm. Her shoulder is wrenched. She gets to her feet. Not being able to see clearly makes her dizzy, disoriented. Her heart is pounding. The fog has a heartbeat—it’s her own, hammering.
She pulls out her knife and holds the blade in front of her. The fog thins when there’s a breeze, and she can see them—if only for an instant at a time—shifting around her, four of them. They can’t see the knife, of course, but they seem to react to her energy. They’re misshapen with uneven limbs and staggered gaits. Their scars are Detonation marks and burns and thick ropy keloids, but also scars from stitches. She knows stitches. Her grandfather, the mortician, the flesh-tailor, was known for his tidy work. These stitches were rushed and messy. The scars run around their shoulders, down some of their arms and chests.
They sniff at her—smelling her fear, the small blade of her confidence. Are more being drawn in? Kelly’s
dead and bred
—there’s an animalism to them. Were they bred to be vicious carnivores? To be insatiably blood hungry? They’re mostly bare but for some mossy kind of homemade coats to keep them warm. She can see now that the one female has turned away from the others as if she’s drawn to something far-off.
Pressia takes a few steps backward. The pain in her shoulder intensifies with each step. They know she’s moving. They step toward her quickly then stop—do they sense the knife? Is it the fog—is it that the moisture in the air connects them all, like some kind of web?
“Cap! Helmud!” Pressia calls out. “Damn it! Where are you?”
And then she hears a dim echo. “Damn it! Where are you?”
Helmud—at least he’s alive, but his voice sounds choked. Was this what the female creature was smelling in the air? More prey?
Pressia lunges at the creatures grunting brutishly, then turns and starts running as quickly as she can without being able to see well. She puts the knife back in her belt and holds her good hand out in front of her. Each time she feels a tree, she grabs it and pulls herself around it. She can hear them behind her. Their panting seems low to the ground. Are they on all fours?
“Helmud! Call to me!”
“Call to me! Call to me!” Helmud says.
She’s getting closer. “Keep calling!”
“Calling,” Helmud cries.
Then she hears the growling. She takes out the knife again. The fog ripples enough that she can see one of the creatures has El Capitan and Helmud shoved to the ground. His clawed hands are on El Capitan’s throat.
But the creature must sense Pressia—the vibration through thickened air?
The fog has a heartbeat.
This time she moves decisively, running at the creature with her knife. He jumps off of El Capitan and Helmud, and, his eyes glazed over, he has enough of his senses intact to dodge her attack. And then, in one quick snatch, he grabs her wrist with such force she drops the knife. She has nothing.
El Capitan gasps for breath and manages to stand up. Helmud gasps too—though maybe he’s only an echo.
The other four creatures have been drawn close and start to circle.
El Capitan says, his voice raw, “Thank you.”
“For what?” Pressia says, gripping her arm to her ribs. “We’re about to be eaten.”
“True.”
“Eaten!” Helmud shouts as loudly as he can. “Eaten!”
The creatures shout back at him in yawps and caws. They keep circling, some on all fours, others upright. The curtain of fog sometimes parts, revealing a thick thigh with stitches across it, a bit of moss on a back, the glisten of eye whites.
El Capitan says, “I want you to know something.”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t do what Bradwell’s done. I would have forgiven you right away.”
She looks at him, wide-eyed, trying to make out his expression through the fog.
“If you were the person standing there with me,” he says, “I’d always, always stay.”
This is what Pressia wants to believe in—the kind of love that stays, no matter what. It’s a declaration that’s come out of the wrong mouth. As if El Capitan knows what she’s thinking, he says, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to feel the same way about me. I just needed to say it.”
“I understand, yes,” Pressia says. Yes, yes, yes, she wants to say, because he’s made it better. He’s made her feel a little forgiven.
“I’m glad about the fog,” he says. “This way we don’t have to see each other get killed.”
“Killed?” Helmud whispers.
The creatures start to growl, low and deep. She feels like crying, not because she’s afraid—which she is—but because El Capitan deserves to be loved the way he loves her. It’s wrong to die without that. Unfair. She wants to tell him that she loves him. Why not? They’re going to die, but she can’t say it unless it’s true. Really true.
“You’re good,” she says instead. “You really are full of goodness, Cap. Helmud too.”
“Ah,” he says. “I get it.” His voice cracks. She’s afraid she’s only made it worse.
The creatures dare to move in more closely. They reach out and claw at them. They rip Pressia’s pants, her coat. One cuts Helmud’s cheek. The blood spills down his neck. El Capitan punches one, but the others howl and snap at the air near his face.
When there’s a small break in the fog, Pressia has enough aim to kick one with her boots, but it’s up again quickly, unfazed.
Pressia feels an arm around one leg and then the other, and she falls hard. El Capitan is tackled next. They fight and kick and claw back, but it’s little use. The creatures’ faces cut in and out of the fog—the scars, the teeth, the blind eyes.
“I don’t want to die like this!” Pressia shouts, and then she thinks of Bradwell. She doesn’t want to die unforgiven.
“I don’t want to die!” Helmud cries.
“Pressia!” El Capitan shouts, trying to crawl toward her. “Pressia!”
But it’s no use. The creatures were bred to be strong and heartless. Pressia remembers the mutilated wild dog. That’s how she’ll look—she knows it—in a matter of minutes.
And then she hears Bradwell’s voice. “Back off! Get off them!” He’s fighting one of the creatures, but then the others jerk their heads toward the noise. They start to run toward the agitation of molecules, the fresh heartbeat. She sees Fignan’s row of lights blinking in the fog.
“Run!” Bradwell shouts. “Get to the ship! I’ll be there!”
“You won’t make it!” Pressia says.
El Capitan starts running. “Trust him!” he shouts, taking off toward the ship. “I’m going to cut it loose so we’re ready to take off. Come on!”
“No!” Pressia shouts. Her fear makes some of the creatures turn toward her.
Then she hears Bradwell fighting hard. His wings are wide and beating the air. Fignan lets out a shrill alarm she’s never heard before. “Go!” Bradwell shouts. “Pressia, go!”
“I’m not leaving you!”
His pulsing wings are creating a breeze that cuts the fog, creating more curtains that lift and rise. She can see more of the creatures and kicks the nearest one, on all fours, in the stomach. It lets out a moan but then quickly springs to its feet. Bradwell’s wings keep pushing the fog—rippling, rippling. And suddenly, the creature seems lost and truly blind. Another one holds out its hands and pats the air.
“Keep beating your wings!” Pressia shouts breathlessly. “They need the constant fog to sense where they are and where we are.”
Bradwell beats his wings harder, the fog gusting now all around them. His wings—she’s never seen them fully spread, massive and strong. She wants to tell him that this is how he was meant to be—as wrong as it was for her to do this to him, as wrong as it feels, he is this person in this moment, and there’s nothing more beautiful.
The creatures run off in search of the fog that makes sense of their world, retreating into the trees.
Bradwell stops beating his wings. They fold in tightly on his back. And then it’s just the two of them, staring at each other through the thinning mist.
L
yda and Partridge haven’t eaten or slept well in days—not since the man threw himself in front of the train. The suicide numbers are rising. Partridge pushed for the meeting with Foresteed because he wants clearer data, more statistics, a plan to put an end to what’s now, clearly, an epidemic.
They find themselves in Foresteed’s office, which is glutted with memorabilia devoted to the past and the Dome.
“I’ve never been in here before,” Partridge whispers. Lyda hasn’t either, of course. Foresteed’s assistant offered them a seat while they’re waiting, but they can’t help walking around, taking it all in. Righteous Red Wave recruitment posters are framed on the walls—young men with firmly set jaws stand shoulder to shoulder, a smoldering city in the background:
JOIN NOW! BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE…
In the mix, there’s a framed trifold flyer celebrating the opening of the Righteous Red Wave Museum. Lyda skims the text, remembering dimly her own childhood.
Inside the museum, live actors perform plays set during the troubling times when criminals with dangerous ideas roamed our streets, when feminism didn’t properly encourage femininity, when the media regularly sabotaged the government in its great efforts at reformation, when the government didn’t have the ability to fully protect good, hardworking citizens from harmful, dangerous citizens, and much, much more! Join us on the lawn for historic reenactments in full surround sound! Cheer on Righteous Red Wave soldiers as they defeat protestors and criminals and other evil elements! Prepare to be awed by our growing prison system, our rehabilitation centers, our asylums for the diseased… Bring your students to this educational opportunity! Families, spend time together bonding over the dark recent past and our hopeful bright future! Shop in our patriotic Righteous Red Wave gift shop. Admission for children under 12 is free.
Lyda is chilled.
Partridge walks up beside her. “I went as a kid. Did you?”
She shakes her head. “My father wouldn’t let me. I think he had some hidden ideas of his own about the Righteous Red Wave. It might be why he’s no longer with us.”
Lyda moves to a glass cabinet protecting leather-bound editions of
The
Academy Handbook for Girls
,
The
Academy Handbook for Boys
, and
The New Eden: Prepare Your Heart, Mind, and Body
—a book given to every household in the Dome. It details guidelines for the timing of the return to living on the outside, as well as lists of character traits that should be cultivated and praised—loyalty, devotion, purity of heart. Lyda remembers her family’s copy, prominently displayed on the mantel for any guest to see.
In another display case, there are old uniforms and newspaper clippings about the plans for the Dome’s construction. One includes a picture of Partridge’s father at a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“I wonder if Foresteed was ever married,” Lyda says. “Did he have a family? Did they not make it in?”
“I don’t know,” Partridge says. “I didn’t know him back then.”
“He misses it,” Lyda says. “The asylums, the battles, the prisons. He misses the oppression of the masses.”
“He’s sick in the head,” Partridge adds.
Lyda walks to Foresteed’s desk, leans over it. There’s a stack of parent authorization forms for enhancements—the signatures of parents scrawled across them as if they have a choice—and then she sees a file with her name on the tab. Suddenly, everything feels more personal, setting her on edge. She lifts the folder ever so slightly. It’s her psychological evaluation from the rehabilitation center. “What?” she whispers.