Pure (19 page)

Aboveground, there was a row of houses here once, but now they’re toppled, rubble, husks. A streetlight pole lies on the ground like a tree that was struck by lightning, fried and fallen next to the skeletons of two cars, stripped down to nothing. On the corner, he sees the steeple of the church that Bradwell had talked about. The church collapsed and the steeple fell into it. It sticks out now, tilted to one side, no longer pointing to heaven like the Dome.

“Here we are,” Bradwell says flatly. “Lombard.” Partridge is pretty sure there’s something kind of happy in his tone or at least smug.

A breeze whips up ashy dust, but Partridge doesn’t cover his face. He walks down the street a few paces. He feels lost. He runs his eyes over the remains. What does he expect to find? Some remnant of the past? The vacuum cleaner? The telephone? A hint of domesticity? His mother sitting in a lawn chair, reading a book, waiting for him with fresh lemonade?

Pressia touches his arm. “I’m sorry.”

He looks at her. “I need
Ten Fifty-four
Lombard Street,” he says. He kicks into some kind of autopilot. “Ten Fifty-four.”

“What, are you kidding?” Bradwell laughs. “There is no
Ten Fifty-four
Lombard Street because there is no
Lombard Street
. Don’t you see that? It’s gone!”

“I need Ten Fifty-four Lombard Street,” Partridge says again. “You don’t understand!”

“I do understand,” Bradwell says. “You come here to this bombed-out place to mix with all these deformed
wretches
, and you think you deserve to find your mother, just like that. You think it’s your right and privilege, because you’ve suffered for what? Fifteen minutes?”

Partridge keeps his eyes steady, but he’s breathing hard. “I’m going to find Ten Fifty-four Lombard Street. That’s what I came here to do.” He walks down the dark street.

He hears Pressia say, “Bradwell.”

“Hear that?” Bradwell says. The Death Spree chants are still going on. Partridge can’t judge how close or far off they are. Their voices seem to echo through the city. “You don’t have much time!” It must be close to dawn.

Pressia catches up to Partridge.

He stops. He’s found a house that lost its second story. Tarp has been tied to the old windows. He hears faint singing.

“We have to hurry,” Pressia tells him.

“There’s someone in there,” he says.

“Seriously,” she says, “we don’t have much time.”

He whips his backpack off his shoulders, unzips it, and pulls out a plastic pouch with a photograph inside.

“What’s that?” Pressia asks.

“A picture of my mother,” he says. “I’m going to see if this person remembers her.” He walks up to the doorway, which no longer has a door but instead has some plywood propped against it from the inside.

“Don’t,” Pressia tells him. “You never know what kind you’re going to come up against.”

“I have to,” he says.

She shakes her head. “Wrap up then.”

He winds the scarf around his face, pulls up the hood, hiding everything but his eyes.

The singing is louder now, an off-kilter tune from a rattled, high-pitched voice, more like warbling than singing.

He taps on the plywood.

The singing stops. There’s a rattle of what sounds like pans. Then nothing.

“Hello?” Partridge calls out. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I have a question.”

No response.

“I was hoping you might be able to help me,” he says.

“C’mon,” Pressia tells him. “Let’s go.”

“No,” he whispers, even though the chant sounds closer now than before. “Leave if you want to. This is all I’ve got. My only chance.”

“Okay,” Pressia says. “Hurry.”

“I’m looking for someone,” he calls. It’s quiet a moment. He glances back at Bradwell who snaps his fingers, telling them to hurry up. Partridge tries again. “I really need your help,” he says. “It’s important. I’m looking for my mother.”

There’s another rattle inside, and then an old voice says, “State your name!”

“Partridge,” he says, leaning toward the tarp-covered window. “Partridge Willux.”

“Willux?” she says. It seems his name always gets a reaction.

“We lived at Ten Fifty-four Lombard,” he says urgently. “I have a photograph.”

An arm appears now from behind the tarp, a claw-like hand, metallic and rusty.

Partridge is afraid to give up the photograph. It’s the only one he has. But he does.

The fingers pinch it, and the hand disappears.

It’s dawn, he realizes. The sun is edging up the horizon.

The tarp is lifted then, very slowly, revealing an old woman’s face—pale and covered in bits of glass. She hands the photograph back to Partridge without a word, but her eyes are distant, strange. Her face looks haunted.

“Did you know her?” Partridge asks.

The old woman glances up and down the street. She sees Bradwell, standing in the shadows, and she steps back, lowering the tarp a bit. The old woman’s eyes lock onto Partridge’s. “I want to see your face,” she says.

Partridge looks at Pressia. She shakes her head no.

“I’ll tell you something,” she says. “But I have to see your face first.”

“Why?” Pressia says, stepping closer. “Just give him the information. It’s important to him.”

She shakes her head. “I have to see his face.”

Partridge pulls the scarf down.

The woman looks at him and nods. “What I thought.”

“What do you mean?” Partridge asks.

The woman shakes her head.

“You told me you’d give me information if I showed you my face. I held up my end.”

“You look like her,” the old woman says.

“Like my mother?” he asks.

She nods. The chanting is getting louder. Pressia pulls on Partridge’s sleeve. “We’ve got to go.”

“Is she alive?” Partridge asks.

The old woman shrugs.

Bradwell whistles through his teeth. There’s no more time to waste. Partridge can hear the footfalls of the Death Spree, that chuffing sound of boots on the streets, their voices rising and falling in unison. The air is vibrating.

“Did you see her after the Detonations?” Partridge asks.

The old woman closes her eyes, and she whispers something under her breath.

Pressia pulls on Partridge’s jacket. “We have to go! Now!”

“What did you say?” Partridge shouts at the old woman. “Did you see her or not? Did she live through it?”

Finally, the old woman lifts her head and says, “He broke her heart.” And then she closes her eyes and starts singing loudly—shrill, anguished notes, as if she’s trying to drown out everything around her.

PRESSIA
IS
RUNNING
AS
FAST
AS
SHE
CAN
. Bradwell is up ahead, his shirt rustling with wings, and Partridge is sprinting beside her, jacket flapping. She knows he can move more quickly than he is—special training at the academy even though he wasn’t
a ripe specimen
—but she takes it as a good sign that he’s staying right with her. Maybe he’s realized how much he needs her. The chants are an echo, roaring down the alleys, sometimes shot through with a high-pitched cry.

“Back down underground?” Pressia shouts to Bradwell.

“No!” he says. “They’re tunneling down there, too.”

Pressia looks over her shoulder and sees the leader of this team. He’s shirtless, his arms and chest smeared red with blood over metal. The skin on his face is puckered and shiny. One of his arms is curled up close to his chest—withered there—but his other arm is fiercely muscular. He has shards of glass wrapped in tape around his knuckles. He might be an
OSR
soldier she’s seen patrolling, but she’d never recognize him as he is.

He’s the head of the wedge. The others fan out behind him in a loose formation. In the back there’s a designated whip who will decide when it’s time to fan out the back of the wedge and form a tightening circle around a victim. Pressia once saw a woman and her baby attacked in a Death Spree. Pressia had hidden herself in an old overturned mailbox that had been popped open and gutted long ago. She remembers now the way they lifted the mother’s body over their heads after they’d beaten her to death, how the baby was tossed around like a ball.

Pressia’s foot catches on a curb and she falls hard, skidding along the cement. Her palm burns, the doll head aches. She sees Partridge’s boots stop in front of her and turn, the damp cuffs of his pants. She tries to scramble up, but she makes the mistake of looking behind her once more, and the red blood and glinting bodies of the Death Spree terrify her. She loses her footing again.

“This way!” Bradwell shouts up ahead. He doesn’t know she’s down. He hops over a low crumbled stone wall near the collapsed steeple.

She sees them closing in. The leader has his eyes fixed on her.

And then her body is hoisted up, and there’s wind in her face. The sock fitted over her doll-head fist snags on something on the ground and it’s gone. She’s moving through the air, the doll-head fist exposed, and she can hear Partridge saying, “It’s okay. We’re close. We’re almost there.”

She doesn’t want to be rescued by the Pure. “No,” she says, “I’m fine. Let go of me!”

He doesn’t answer, just grips her tighter, and she knows that if he did let her down, she’d get taken up by the Death Spree, but still, she punches his ribs with her doll-head fist. “I mean it. Let me down!” In her panicked vision, she sees Bradwell lift a piece of old cast-iron gate that’s been laid over an opening that leads to a set of stairs. She closes her eyes as Partridge holds her tight and jumps down the stairs.

As soon as his feet hit the ground, she shoves him, and he sets her down. With the sock that hid the doll-head fist gone, she feels naked. She pulls the sweater sleeve over it as tightly as she can, and sits down. Her knees to her chest, she hides the doll head in her lap. It’s so dark she can barely see anything.

“Sorry,” Partridge says. “I had to pick you up. I had to or—”

“Don’t apologize,” she says, rubbing her ribs where he gripped her so tightly. “You saved me. Don’t make me feel like I have to forgive you for it.” That’s the best she can do.

They all sit on the floor, Pressia between Partridge and Bradwell, their backs pressed against the cold wall. They huddle in a corner away from the stairs, and no one moves. She can’t believe that Partridge picked her up like that. When was the last time someone carried her? She remembers her father wrapping her in a coat, carrying her in his arms. She misses him now, the feeling of being safe and warm.

The room is small and damp. Slowly her eyes adjust, and that’s when she finally sees that they’re not really alone. Dug into the opposite wall, there’s a stone figure—a statue of a girl, sitting on top of a long narrow cement box like a casket behind a wall of Plexiglas, splintered but still intact. An engraved placard is fixed to the wall, but it’s too far away to read. She has long hair, pulled back loosely from her face, and is wearing a simple full-length dress. Her perfect dainty hands are folded in her lap. She seems alone, cut off from the world. There’s something deeply sorrowful about her eyes, as if she’s lost people she loves but, too, she’s expectant, as if holding her breath, waiting.

The chants are getting louder, the feet pounding closer. Pressia pulls her sweater sleeve more tightly over her doll-head fist. Partridge sees her do it. Maybe he wants to ask her what she’s hiding. This is no time to ask. The Death Spree is overhead now. The feet are pounding so loudly all around them that a bit of the ceiling crumbles.

This is where people come to pray. Bradwell was right. On the lip of the cement casing, beside the Plexiglas, Pressia sees the pooled wax of old candles, the drippings that have melted down the wall onto the tiled floor. Pressia looks at the statue of the girl again. The girl sits on her own casket, a long box that reminds Pressia of the cabinets where she sleeps, or used to sleep. Pressia wonders if she’ll ever make it back to the back room of the barbershop to her grandfather. Is he waiting for her still, the brick in his lap?

The footfalls grow thunderous. The ceiling rattles. Plaster, loose stones, clods of dirt fall to the floor. Suddenly Pressia is afraid that the ceiling is going to cave in. They all cover their heads. Partridge has put the photograph back in the plastic pouch. It sits on top of his bag, which he’s hunched over protectively.

“We’re going to be buried alive!” Pressia shouts.

“Which would be ironic,” Bradwell says. “To be buried alive, in a crypt.”

“Not funny,” she tells him.

“I wasn’t trying to be funny,” he says.

“I’d rather not die,” Partridge says. “Not now that I know my mother survived…”

Pressia looks up at him through the raining dirt. Is that what he thinks? How is he so sure? All the old woman said was that someone broke his mother’s heart. It meant nothing to Pressia. She holds her breath for a moment, willing the pounding feet to stop, but they don’t. She grips her knees tightly and squeezes her eyes shut.

A crowd starts cheering. There are loud whoops, war cries.

“They got somebody,” Pressia says.

“Good,” Bradwell says. “That will appease them. They’ll move on more quickly now, carry the body to the field.”

“Good?” Partridge asks. “How can it be good?”

“Good doesn’t mean what you think it means,” Bradwell says.

The chanting heads off into the distance.

Pressia looks at the stone coffin. “Is there a dead person in there?” she asks.

“A sarcophagus,” Bradwell says.

“A what?” Partridge asks.

“Sarcophagus,” Bradwell repeats. “In other words, yes. A dead person or part of one.”

“We’re in a tomb, aren’t we?” Partridge says.

Bradwell nods. “A crypt.”

Partridge is still holding the photograph in its plastic pouch.

Pressia holds out her hand. “Can I see it?”

He hands it to her.

“What?” Bradwell says. “I can’t look at it but she can?”

Partridge smiles and shrugs. The photo is of a little boy about eight years old, standing on the beach—Partridge. He’s holding his mother’s hand and a bucket. It’s windy, and the ocean is foamy around their ankles. She’s beautiful, his mother is—lightly freckled with a gorgeous smile—and the old woman was right. He does look like her, the same lit-up face. Mothers, she thinks, they’ll always be foreign, a land I’ll never visit. “What’s her name?”