Burn (37 page)
“Why did you tie up Bradwell? He’s on your side.”
“Is he? Seems he’s lost his way, taking up with you.”
El Capitan glances at Bradwell. He feels bad for getting him roped in. Bradwell shrugs his heavy wings—a kind of forgiveness. “But I’ve really changed,” El Capitan says.
“Have you ever paid for what you did?” Gorse says. “Have you?”
He doesn’t have to think about this long. The answer is no. He hasn’t really paid. He’s doled out a lot of death and is still alive. “What are you going to do with me?”
“With me?” Helmud whispers.
“Justice will be served,” Gorse says, and then he looks up at Frost, who has El Capitan and Helmud muscled to the floor. “Go ahead and gag both of ’em.”
“Gorse, wait!” El Capitan shouts. “I thought we were friends!”
“Now you know better.”
“But we found your sister!”
Gorse stands and points the rifle at El Capitan’s head. “Don’t ever talk about my sister again. Maybe she’s dead. Maybe she’s alive. But the fact is I thought she was dead all these years because of you. How many did you let die in Death Sprees? How many froze to death in your cages? How many did you hunt down and use for target practice? Did you keep count? Huh?”
El Capitan tries to fight the ropes again. If he can’t get loose, he’s a dead man. He and Helmud both. Gorse kicks El Capitan in the ribs. He folds in half. He wheezes on the ground, crunching around the pain, while Frost wraps a rag around his mouth, making it even harder to breathe.
Justice, El Capitan thinks. That’s right. “Kick me again,” he grunts into the rag. “Do it!” This is what he deserves. But he can hear Helmud’s squeals of protest suddenly muffled. El Capitan won’t let Helmud pay. He’ll fight for Helmud, for himself. It’s who he is. He’ll fight all the way.
“Blindfold?” Frost asks.
“No,” Gorse says. “I’d like him to see this.”
Frost yanks El Capitan to his feet. The two men, both with twisted faces and metal pocking their arms, as if they’d been at the same place during the Detonations and are lucky not to have been fused together, lift Bradwell up too. They walk back through the dented bank vault door into the crumbled remains of the bank lobby and up through a hole dug in the rubble—not easy to do with his hands tied behind his back, under his brother’s weight.
Above ground, the wind is cold and sharp. He drank too much; he feels sick. His head’s killing him, and he feels a little dizzy. He’s almost happy that Frost has such a strong hold on his upper arm; otherwise, he might fall over.
They’re surrounded by a dozen people or so, including a few clumps of Groupies. He tries to make out all of the faces to see if there are any friends among them.
Then he hears a voice he remembers well. “Greetings, El Capitan!” He sees the Dome worshipper who found Wilda out in a field when she was first delivered back from the Dome, Purified, as it were. He remembers the bulbous, braided scar running down one side of her face. Margit. She hates him.
Margit walks up close, fits her fingers under his gag, pulling it to the dip in his chin. “What say you?”
“Shit,” El Capitan says, shaking his head.
“Not happy to see the likes of me?”
“Last time I saw you you’d been hit by a spider, locked in. So, you didn’t blow up?”
“I was spared. By God.”
“A gift from the Dome, I’m guessing, to be spared like that.”
“And they’re not happy with us, El Capitan. They are not happy at all.”
“But they wanted their son to be returned to them and he was! What could they possibly want now?”
“They must want another sacrifice,” she says.
El Capitan nods slowly. “I’m guessing that it won’t be a self-sacrifice.”
“Me? No. I want to be here when we are called to join them in the heaven of the Dome. Not to be ash in the wind.”
“I see.” El Capitan knows what the biodiesel’s going to be used for now. Burning to death—not his preferred way to go. “But I’m asking you a kindness.”
“What’s that?”
“Spare my brother,” El Capitan says. “He’s an angel. He’s good. Spare my poor brother.” He can’t help the fact that there’s an ironic edge to his voice.
“Now how would we spare him and not you, foul man?”
“I guess you’d have to go light on me.” El Capitan raises his eyebrows. “You can’t let another good soul die, could you?”
Margit lifts her clenched fist and knuckle punches El Capitan in the head. It reminds him of his grandmother who would rap him on the head when he got underfoot. “Maybe that’ll be the best part—you knowing your sins caused your brother’s death.” Margit turns and says to Gorse, “We should beat them good and solid first then set the brother on his back afire so El Capitan gets to hear his cries.”
Gorse likes the idea. “Hell yes!” he says, mocking El Capitan from the night before. “Hell yes!”
And before El Capitan can spit out something else, Margit shoves the gag back into his mouth.
W
ithin a half hour, Partridge is standing next to Albertson at the entrance of the Personal Loss Archives. They knock and wait. It’s the middle of the night. Will anyone be on duty?
A woman’s pale face appears in the small rectangular window beside the door. She’s startled to see Partridge. He waves. She freezes for a moment and then holds up a ring of keys. She disappears. The locks are clicking open.
She opens the door wide. “Can I help you?” She’s a small woman with a sharp bob.
“I was hoping for a few minutes. There’s someone I want to look up,” Partridge says.
She glances behind her and then says, “It’s after hours. We don’t usually have visitors, but in
your
case,” she says, flustered. “Come in.”
“Thank you.”
“You know your father doesn’t have a box yet.”
“I’m not here for my father.”
Albertson says, “I’ll give you your privacy.” He looks at the clerk who nods quickly.
She locks the door. “Perhaps you know your way.”
“I do.”
“Okay then. I’ll check on you in a few minutes.”
As Partridge heads down the aisle, he feels a strange sense of calm. The last time he was here, he was a thief. He stole the contents of his mother’s box. His father knew he would. He was played.
This time, he’s aware of his father. In fact, at this moment, he feels closer to his father than at any of the memorial services—or is it that his father is closer to him? Closing in?
He finds the alphabetically correct aisle at the end of the room and heads down it. His heels hit the tile floor—quick, sharp knocks as if there’s someone at a front door in the cold, waiting to be let in. He’s afraid for a second that he won’t have the nerve to open his brother’s box—just like last time. But the feeling is fleeting. He will open the box, but he’ll never know if what’s inside of it is what his brother actually left behind or if it’s something his father planted in the box for Partridge to find. That’s the thought that slows his footsteps. He doesn’t want to have anything more to unravel about his father.
Leave me alone
, he wants to say to the old man.
He runs his eyes over the names on the fronts of the boxes as quickly as he can. Under the names, there are the lists of causes of death. He’s looking for Willux—Sedge Watson Willux. He walks past the Vs and into the Ws, and then he stops.
Weed.
Marta Weed. Victoro Weed. Arvin’s parents’ names. They were on his mother’s list. Partridge asked Arvin about his parents. He said they were fine, that they had colds, but that was it. They’re dead?
Their causes of death read, simply,
CONTAGION
.
And then there are two more names: Berta Weed, whose death is listed as
HEART ATTACK
, and Allesandra Weed, who has only one word written under her name:
INFANT
.
Partridge remembers the day of the field trip with Glassings’ World History class. It was Arvin who asked if they could open the boxes. He’d found an aunt—maybe Aunt Berta. His parents weren’t dead. Had his mother gotten pregnant again?
Partridge has the strange desire to open Arvin’s parents’ boxes. No one’s here. He’s alone.
No. These boxes are sacred.
He walks on a few steps and finds
SEDGE WATSON WILLUX
and next to it
ARIBELLE CORDING WILLUX
. He presses his fingertips to his mother’s name. His mind replays the moment of his brother and mother’s death—together—the kiss, the explosion, the blood spraying finely all around them.
He shakes his head. “No. Alive. I want to see her alive.” He closes his eyes and thinks of her on the beach, ankle-deep in the ocean foam lining the shore. Her hair is windblown. She’s looking out at the horizon. He whispers, “Look at me.” And she turns her head, and he can see her face. She brushes her hair back and looks at him with love. Real love. His throat aches.
He opens his eyes. His brother’s cause of death is still the same as it was the last time Partridge was here, the lie that he used to believe:
GUNSHOT WOUND, SELF-INFLICTED
. He hates his father for killing off his brother—twice. Once with a lie. Once by flipping a switch.
The last time he was here, he couldn’t bear to see his brother’s life reduced to the contents of a box. But now, he’ll take what he can get.
He pulls the small box from its slot, holds his breath, and opens it.
It’s empty.
He fits his hand inside and presses it to the bottom of the box—the way Sedge once taught him to dive to the bottom of the deep end of a swimming pool and press his hand flat. A quick sharp memory. Sedge taught him to swim.
He pushes the box back into its slot then quickly pulls the handle on his mother’s metal box.
Nothing, of course. It holds nothing at all. Was he expecting something? Does he still want something from his mother?
Yes, he does. He misses her with a sharp pang.
“Not much to steal this time, is there?”
He turns around and there’s the clerk. She pulls her cardigan in tight around her ribs and crosses her arms. Partridge must look guilty. He doesn’t know what to say.
“I was on duty the last time you were here. In fact,” she says, dipping toward him so that her bob swings forward, cupping her cheeks, “I was the one manning the cameras when you took your mother’s things.”
“You reported it to my father, I guess?”
“Oh, the chain of command is long and byzantine. I didn’t know why you were supposed to steal the things. I just knew that it was good if you did and that we should then let you go.”
“It was a pretty elaborate setup,” Partridge says. “I’ll give my old man that much.”
The clerk nods. “He tried it with Sedge too. A very similar plan. A few years before you showed up here.”
“What do you mean he tried it with Sedge?”
“Oh, Sedge was sent here on a field trip too—not with that teacher of yours. This was someone else. And he went to his mother’s box. And inside of it, there were bits and pieces, knickknacks, like the ones you found. But he didn’t steal them. He couldn’t. He looked around, and we were watching by way of surveillance cameras—me and another clerk in charge of reporting it but not stopping him. No, no. We knew he wanted to steal her things. We made sure he was quite alone. But there was something in him that wouldn’t let him take them.” The clerk smiles at the memory. “Not as much of a thief as you!”
So his father tested Sedge. But did his refusal to steal count as passing or failing?
“Sedge took a lot of time, though,” the clerk says. “He read a little birthday card—that one was for him, of course, with his name in it. He looked at the necklace with the bobble attached to it, and something else.”
“A music box?” Partridge says.
“Yes. It
was
a music box. And if you ask me, he realized something when he held those items. He felt something deeply. He was shaken by what he found. He knew something that he hadn’t known before.”
“Maybe he knew our mother might not be dead after all.”
“Is that it?”
Partridge nods.
“He went into Special Forces afterward. I heard that he was the first to volunteer to leave the Dome. He wanted to be
out there
.” The clerk runs her hand down a few of the handles. They each click, metal against metal. “Maybe he went looking for her. Not the way you did, but in his own way.”
He handed his body over to Special Forces. He became a fighting machine, a nearly speechless animal. He somehow maintained some part of himself, and in the end, he never turned on Partridge. He fought for him.
Partridge puts a hand over his eyes, bows his head. He starts crying. He imagines Sedge the moments after knowing what was in his mother’s personal archives box. Did his father also leave the hint that his mother might still be alive beyond the Dome? Had he felt like he wanted to scour the earth for her, the way Partridge had? “I miss him,” Partridge says.
“You think a person only exists in a body? No, no,” the clerk says. “Not any more than a person’s life can fit in a small metal box. He’s here,” the clerk says, and she waves her hand in the air as if it’s suddenly charged with electricity. “All of ’em,” she says. “They’re all around us! Everywhere!”
L
yda doesn’t have much time. Pressia, still dressed as a guard, is asleep on the far side of Lyda’s bed but could wake any moment.
Lyda gently opens her bedside table and pulls out her
Baby’s Own
baby book. She sees her writing.
I crave. I crave. I crave.
The words cover page after page. It’s all she’s ever written inside of it.
The margins are bare. She turns the book sideways and writes along the edge of the outer margin just what Pressia told her she’d write to Bradwell—a coded message:
Our lives aren’t accidents. This is the beginning, not an end. Do what you have to do.
And she draws a rough picture of a swan floating on a ripple. She may have sounded like she’d lost it last night, but she was still thinking clearly—about the next step and how to get there. She was wildly heartbroken, but there’s no wildness to it anymore. Now she feels a sharp relentless ache. She knows what must happen. Pressia might not be sure it’s time to take down the Dome, but Lyda is.