Pure (11 page)

The woman says, “By God, what a day. First all them whispers, now a Death Spree!” She sits down at the table and looks at Pressia’s creatures. She sees the picture and touches it lightly with one finger. Pressia wonders if she’ll ask about it. She wishes she’d thought to swipe it from the table before climbing into the cabinet. “You heard them new whispers. Didn’t you?”

“Can’t say that I’ve been out today.” He sits down across from the woman and looks at the gaping flesh.

“You didn’t hear?”

Her grandfather shakes his head and starts swabbing his instruments with alcohol. The room fills with its antiseptic tang.

“A Pure,” she says, lowering her voice. “A boy with no scars, no marks, no fusings. They say he was full-grown, this boy—tall and thin and with hair shorn close to his head.”

“Not possible,” her grandfather says. This is what Pressia’s thinking too. People like to make things up about Pures. It’s not the first time she’s heard this one. And nothing’s ever come of the other whispers.

“He was spotted in the Drylands,” the woman says. “And then he was gone.”

Pressia’s grandfather laughs, which turns into a cough. He turns his head and coughs until he’s gasping.

“You okay to be doing this?” she asks him. “You’ve got the weeping lungs?”

“I’m fine. It’s the throat fan. I collect too much dust and have to get it out.”

“It ain’t polite to laugh anyways,” she says.

Her grandfather starts stitching now. The woman winces.

“But how many times have we heard this one before?” he says.

“It’s different this time,” the woman says. “It’s not drunk Groupies. It was three different spotters. Each saw him and then reported. They say he didn’t see them, and they didn’t approach because they sensed he was holy.”

“It’s the whisper clutches. That’s all.”

They go quiet for a moment as her grandfather stitches the wound. The woman’s face becomes rigid, the gears locking up. Pressia’s grandfather blots the bleeding. He works quickly, daubing the wound with alcohol, then wraps it.

When he says, “All done,” the woman rolls her shirtsleeve down over the bandage. She hands him a small tin of meat and then pulls up a piece of fruit from her sack. It’s bright red but wears a thick skin almost like an orange. “It’s a beauty. Isn’t it?” She hands it to him, as payment.

“Nice doing business with you,” Pressia’s grandfather says.

The woman then pauses. “Believe what I told you or not. But listen, if there’s a Pure who got out, then you know what.”

“No,” he says. “What? You tell me.”

“If there’s a way out, it means there’s also a way in.” Pressia gets a sudden chill. Then the woman lifts her finger to her ear. “Hear that?” she says.

And now Pressia does hear something, the far-off chanting of a Death Spree. What if the woman isn’t crazy? Pressia wants this whisper about the Pure to be true. She knows that whispers can be useful. Sometimes they contain real information. But usually they’re fairy tales and lies. This is the worst kind of whisper, the kind that draws you in, gives you hope.

“If there’s a way out,” the woman says again, very slowly and calmly this time, “it means there’s also a way in.”

“We’ll never get in,” Pressia’s grandfather says impatiently.

“A Pure,” the woman says, “a Pure here among us!”

And this is when they all hear a truck rumbling in the alley. They’re still and quiet.

A dog outside barks viciously, a gunshot, and then no more barking. Pressia knows which dog it was. She recognized its bark—a dog that’s been beaten so much, it only knows how to cower or attack. She always felt sorry for it, and would sometimes feed it small bits of food—not from her hand, though, because it couldn’t be completely trusted.

She holds her breath. Everything grows quiet except for the low rumbling idle of the truck in the alley. In the morning, someone will be gone.

Her grandfather taps the floor—
shave and a haircut, two bits
—with his cane. Pressia isn’t ready to go. She doesn’t want to leave her grandfather. He moves quickly to his chair. He picks up the brick and holds it in one hand.

The woman holds her wound and moves to the window where she peeks out. “
OSR
,” she whispers, terrified.

Pressia’s grandfather gazes at Pressia, their eyes meeting through the small crack of the cabinet door. His breath is quick, his eyes wide. Lost. He looks lost.

Shot through with fear, Pressia wonders what will happen to him without her. Maybe
OSR
are coming for someone else, she thinks. Maybe the boy named Arturo or the twin girls who live in the lean-to. Not that she wants it to be the twin girls in the lean-to or Arturo. How can she wish the
OSR
on someone else?

She can’t move.

In the alleyway, she hears a muffled cry, boots scraping the pavement.
Not here,
she whispers to herself.
Please, not here!
She’s waiting for the rev of the truck’s engine, the pop of its clutch, but it’s still there, a constant rumbling in the alley.

Her grandfather taps the rubber stopper on his cane again—harder—
shave and a haircut, two bits!

She has to go. But before she does, she draws a circle, then two eyes and a smiling mouth with her finger in the ash collected on the cabinet door. She wants it to mean,
I’ll be back soon.
Will he see it and understand? What if she doesn’t come home soon? What if she is not fine and never will be again?

Pressia takes a deep breath and then she pushes the doll-head fist against the fake panel. It gives a little, then pops loose and clatters to the dusty barbershop floor. Light washes into the cabinet.

Pressia’s heart hammers in her chest. She looks around the shadowed hull of the barbershop. Most of the roof was blown off and now gives way to the dusky night sky. She feels unprotected coming from the tight embrace of the cabinets to this openness.

There’s only one chair left in the barbershop, a swivel chair with a foot pump that can make the seat higher or lower. The counter in front of this one chair is still perfectly intact, too. Three combs float in a dust-covered glass tube filled with old cloudy blue water like they’re suspended in time.

She moves quickly into the shadow of this wall and slides along it, passing the bank of shattered mirrors. She hears another rumbling truck. It’s strange that there is more than one. She squats down and holds her breath. She doesn’t move. She hears a radio playing in the truck, a tinny version of an old-fashioned song with a screaming electric guitar and pumping bass, one she doesn’t know. She has heard that when they take people, they tie their hands behind their backs and tape their mouths. But do they turn on the radio while they’re driving away? For some reason, this seems like the worst of it.

She crouches as low as she can. She tries not to breathe. Are they coming for her alone, one truck blocking the alley and another on the street running parallel? All the mirrors are broken except a handheld one that sits on that counter. She asked her grandfather about the handheld mirrors once, and he said they used them to show the customers the backs of their heads. She doesn’t know who would ever want to see the back of their head. Who would ever need to?

From this spot, she can see the Dome again, up on the hill due north. It’s an orb—shiny and bright, dotted with large black weapons, a glittering fortress, topped with a cross that shines even through the ash-choked air. She thinks about the Pure, the one who was supposedly spotted in the Drylands, tall and lean, with short hair. It has to be only a whisper. It can’t be true. Who would leave the Dome to come here and be hunted?

The truck is inching along. A searchlight floods the room. She doesn’t move.

The light hits a triangular shard and for a second there, staring up at her, are her own eyes, almond-shaped like her Japanese mother—
so beautiful, so young
. And her father’s freckles over the bridge of her nose. And then there is the burned crescent that half circles her left eye.

If she goes, what will happen to Freedle? Freedle is going to give out one day.

The searchlight slides on and then the truck rumbles past with
OSR
and a black claw painted on its side. Pressia stays completely still as the growling motor and the radio song fade into the night. The first truck is still in the alley. She hears shouting, but not her grandfather’s voice.

She peeks out through the large holes where the plate-glass windows used to be. It’s dark and cold. No one is on the street. She slides along the shadow of the wall again to the front door’s blasted hull. There sits a big strange rusted tube painted with pale red and blue spiral stripes. It’s shattered and warped. Her grandfather says it’s something that was attached to all barbershops, a symbol that once meant something. She walks out the door, staying close to the crumbled wall.

What was the plan? Hide. The huge old irrigation pipe that her grandfather once showed her is three blocks away. He thought she’d be safe there. But is anyplace safe now?

Bradwell, she thinks. The underground. She has the map to his place that he slipped in her pocket still folded there. He might be home, preparing for his next lesson in Shadow History. What if she shows up and says thank you for the gift, pretending it was meant as a kindness not a cruelty? Would he take her in? He owes her grandfather for stitching him up, but she’d never go there asking for a favor. Never. Still, she decides to try to make it all the way there. Fandra didn’t survive, but her brother did.

On the floor, next to the door, is a small charred bell. It surprises her. She picks it up but its clapper is missing and so it doesn’t make a sound. She could make something out of it, one day.

She holds the bell so tightly that its edge digs into the meat of her hand.

PARTRIDGE
HEARS
THE
SHEEP
before he sees them, rustling from dark brambles in the woods in front of him, errant bleating. One stutters in a way that reminds him of Vic Wellingsly laughing at him on the monorail car. But that was in another world. The sun’s gone down, and all warmth has been leached from the air. Partridge is on the outskirts of the city now, the hunkered char of its remains. He smells smoke from fires, hears distant voices, an occasional shout. A scuttle of wings rattles overhead.

He’s made it through the stretch of sandy dust fields where he drank all his water and twice thought he saw an eye in the earth, a singular blinking eye that was quickly lost in dust. A hallucination? He can’t be sure.

He’s skirting the edge of the woods. If the earth can be that alive, the woods are too dangerous. He assumes that’s where some of the wretches must live. He thinks of his mother, the saint, as his father used to call her, and the wretches she supposedly saved. If she’s still alive, are they?

A large oily black bird dips close to his head. He sees its sharp beak on a crooked hinge, its claws ratcheting open and closed, midair. Astonished, he watches it until it flies out of sight into the woods. He thinks of Lyda’s caged wire bird, and he’s filled with guilt and fear. Where is Lyda now? He can’t help but feel that she’s in danger, that her life has changed. Would they just ask her questions and then let her return to her normal life? She has nothing to tell, really. She knows he took the knife, but after that it will seem like she’s holding something back, that she knows more than she’s saying. Did anyone see them kiss? If so, that will make her look guilty. He remembers the kiss. It comes back to him again and again—sweet and soft. She smelled like flowers and honey.

Then the sheep emerge from the trees, hobbling along on dainty, mangled hooves. He squats in the brambles to watch them. He assumes they’re feral. They wander to a gutted seam in the earth pooled with rainwater. Their tongues are quick, almost sharp looking, some shining like razors. Their fur is beaded with water, matted in hunks. Their eyes rove out of sync, and their horns—sometimes too many horns to count, sometimes a row of horns, a spiked ridge down the beast’s back—are grotesque. Some horns grow like vines, spiraling one another, then veering off to one side. In one case, the horns have grown backward, like a mane, and have fused into the backbone so the head is locked in place.

As terrifying as the beasts seem, Partridge is thankful to know that the water is drinkable. He has a ragged cough—from breathing the barbed fibers? From the sandy ash? He’ll wait for the sheep to walk off and refill his bottles.

But the sheep aren’t feral. A shepherd with a stubbed arm and bowed legs tromps out of the woods, calling gruffly and wielding a sharp stick. His face is marred with burns, and one eye seems to have slid and settled into the bone of his cheek. His boots are heavy, coated in mud. He herds the sheep, brutally whacking and poking them, making guttural noises. The man accidentally drops the stick, bends to pick it up. His face—rippled with burns and welts—turns, and his eyes lock on Partridge. He grimaces. “You,” he says. “You thieving? Meat or wool?”

Partridge wraps his face with the scarf, pulls up the hood, and shakes his head. “I just need water.” He motions to the puddle.

“Drink that and your stomach will rot,” the man says. His teeth shine, dark pearls. “Come here. I got water.”

The sheep—their gray haunches—recede into the woods with the shepherd driving them. Partridge follows. The woods are blackened still, but there’s greenery bursting up in small clutches. Soon enough, they come to a lean-to and a pen of mesh and stakes. The man herds the sheep in. Some buck and he whips them on the snouts. They bleat. The pen is so small that the sheep are wedged in, clotting the space with wool.

“What’s that smell?” Partridge asks.

“Dung, piss, rot, sour wool. A little death. I got liquor,” he says, “homemade. It’ll cost you.”

“Just water,” Partridge says, his breath making the scarf damp. He pulls a bottle from his backpack and hands it to the man.

The man stares at the bottle for a moment and Partridge worries that there’s something about it that tips the shepherd off, but he then hobbles into the lean-to. Partridge sees inside of it for a moment, the warped door propped by mud. The pink sheen of skinned animals hanging from the walls. With their heads chopped off, he can’t identify them. Not that their heads would have necessarily helped him.