Pure (46 page)

Sedge closes his eyes. “No,” he whispers, “the story you told me. The swan.”

“She’s real,” Partridge says. “She’s here.”

His mother takes a bottle of pills in her metal pincer and shoves them at Partridge. “Tell your father that he can have whatever he wants. He can have the pills. He can take me. Just not this. Not this.” Her watery eyes skitter over Sedge’s body.

Partridge takes the bottle and nearly falls backward. His brother is going to die. He’s going to watch it happen. There’s nothing he can do.

“Sedge!” his mother calls. Sedge’s eyes catch hers and lock on. It’s as if he truly sees her now, as if he recognizes her. His mother says, “Sedge, my baby!” And for a moment, Partridge thinks that maybe she can save him. There is hope in her voice.

Sedge smiles and then closes his eyes.

Partridge watches his mother as she bends over Sedge’s body. She is giving him the kind of kiss on the forehead that she gave to both of them every night as children at bedtime.

And then, triggered by the flip of a distant switch, Sedge’s head explodes, and, with it, Partridge watches his mother’s face shatter.

The blood is a spray, a fine mist that fills the air.

Partridge hears nothing. He sees nothing but the bloody mist. He tries to reach for them, loses his footing, and then falls. He stands again. He turns a slow circle. His mother and his brother are dead.

Pressia is screaming. He can see her open mouth, her eyes wide with terror, the doll-head fist clasped to her chest. Bradwell is holding her up.

Partridge hears nothing.

Lyda is at his side. She has him by the arm. Her lips are moving.

El Capitan reaches for his shoulders. Partridge balls his fist and takes a swing. El Capitan dodges it, which sets Partridge off balance. He catches himself on a rock. Lyda is saying his name—he can read her lips.
Partridge, Partridge
. He stands. He yells her name, “Lyda!” But he can’t hear his own voice.

El Capitan is speaking to him too. He’s saying something loudly. Partridge sees the veins in his neck straining. Helmud closes his eyes, his lips muttering El Capitan’s echo.

And then Partridge sees Pressia again. He locks onto Pressia’s eyes. Pressia is bugged—eyes and ears. The Dome is watching; his father is there. Partridge marches straight for Pressia, who is still screaming. He holds on to the flesh of her upper arms.

She closes her eyes.

“Open your eyes!” he shouts and the noise of his own voice floods his ears. “Open your goddamn eyes!”

Pressia looks at Partridge, and Partridge stares past his sister. He stares through the lenses of her eyes, into his father’s eyes in the Dome. “I know you’re there! I’m going to come for you, and I’ll kill you for this! If I could, I’d rip out the part of you inside of me. I’d rip you clean out.”

He stares up at the sky. His body starts to shake. He lets go of Pressia’s arms. He looks again, and there is his sister’s face. She stares at him, her face streaked with dirt and tears. It’s his sister.

The bloody mist is gone.

ONCE
FREE
OF
PARTRIDGE
, Pressia runs to her mother’s body. Her jaw is gone. Her face is covered in blood, but one of her eyes is clear. The eye blinks. She’s still alive. Pressia puts her hands on her mother’s bloody chest; three of the six small squares are pulsing. Should she pump her heart? “She’s alive!” she screams. “She’s alive!”

Bradwell kneels beside her and says, “She’s dying, Pressia. It’s over. She won’t survive.”

Partridge is in the woods, deep in the woods. She can hear his choked sobs.

Her mother stares up at her.

El Capitan’s voice says, “She’s suffering. She could linger.”

Her mother struggles to breathe. Her eye blinks furiously.

Pressia stands up. Bradwell does too. She turns to El Capitan.

He says, “Can you offer her mercy? Can you do it?”

Pressia looks at El Capitan and then at her mother, who starts to seize. Her bloody head is thudding against the dirt and rocks. “Give me a gun.”

El Capitan hands it to her. She raises the gun, takes aim at her mother, draws in a breath, lets it halfway out, and then she closes her eyes. She pulls the trigger. She feels the blast run through her body.

Pressia is frozen. She stares. Her mother’s face is gone. The three small, pulsing squares flicker and then stop.

“She’s at peace,” El Capitan says.

She gives the gun to El Capitan. She doesn’t look back. She knows what she wants to remember. She starts to walk downhill.

“Let’s move!” Bradwell shouts. “There’s one more soldier out there somewhere!”

Leaves. Vines. The unfixed earth shifting underfoot.

I’m here, Pressia thinks. I’m in the next moment and the next. But who is she? Pressia Belze? Emi Imanaka? Is she someone’s granddaughter or daughter? An orphan, a bastard child, a girl with a doll-head fist, a soldier?

She is rushing downhill, everyone jostling around her. In her mind’s eye, her mother’s face comes loose again, scatters, splintered bone, their heads—her mother’s and Sedge’s heads—so full of blood. Then it’s everywhere—a film of blood on nettles, grass shoots, thorny weeds.

But they’re all moving downhill now. Running wildly.

She wants to bury the bodies.

But, no.

There’s one soldier still loose. He’ll be coming after them.

Her grandfather was a mortician. He could have fixed them up nicely. He could turn a head to conceal a cracked skull. He could re-create a nose from a piece of bone. He could stretch the skin. He could make eyelids and stitch them closed. There used to be coffins with silk linings. Now he’s dead and gone too.

Pressia is downhill. There will be no burial. They will be eaten by feral beasts. The burial is their own shroud of blood.

There’s the car half covered in brush and vines, which El Capitan pulls off and throws to the ground. Partridge, Lyda, and Bradwell stand by Pressia, breathless. Bradwell has made a bandage by ripping cloth from his pant leg. It’s wrapped around his shoulder. The blood is dark. His shirt is gone. He’s bare-chested. Partridge has offered his jacket, but Bradwell says he’s burning up. The birds flutter, their bright beaks in deep, their masked eyes darting. She wanted to see them and now here they are—the gray fan of wings, the paler chests, their shining eyes, and their dainty claws, a bright red. She wishes she knew what kind of birds they are. She imagines him as a little boy, running through a flock. They lift and there’s the blinding light. And the birds are with him forever. He offers her his hand.

“No,” she says. She has to walk on her own.

She grips the barbershop bell hidden in her jacket pocket. She will never give the bell to her mother, proof of an old life. She won’t tell her all of the stories she’s saved. There wasn’t time. She didn’t even have the chance to tell her mother she loved her.

The girl in white is now streaked in red. Lyda. Partridge has her by his side. She holds him up more than he does her. He’s saying, “But they wanted my mother alive. They wanted to interrogate her. It doesn’t make sense.” He’s holding the bottle of pills tightly in his clenched fist.

Pressia is still the Dome’s eyes and ears. They see everything she sees, hear everything she hears. But she doesn’t understand what’s happened. Do they? Is this what they’d wanted all along?

“Let’s go,” El Capitan says.

“Go,” Helmud says.

Everyone climbs into the car. Partridge and Lyda are in the backseat. Pressia and Bradwell are in the front with El Capitan at the wheel. Helmud is gazing out at nothing. He’s shaking.

El Capitan shoves the car in reverse. “Where to?”

“Pressia has to get free,” Bradwell says. “Whoever did this to her has to undo it.”

They back out into the Deadlands and now head south, around the hills.

“The farmhouse,” Pressia says. “We need to be on the other side of this hill.”

“How can a farmhouse exist out here?” Partridge asks. His voice is weary.

Pressia thinks of Ingership’s wife, how she told her in the kitchen that she wouldn’t put her in harm’s way.

“They had oysters, eggs, and lemonade, these automatic rubberized seals to keep out dust, a beautiful chandelier in the dining room, and crops being sprayed down by field hands,” she says, trying to explain, but as she does, she wonders if she’s gone crazy. She sees her mother’s face, the kiss she gives to her elder son. Pulling the trigger, her mother is dead. And it happens all over again, slowly, in Pressia’s mind. Pressia curls forward, closes her eyes and opens them and closes them. Each time she opens them, there is the doll head staring at her. This was how her mother knew it was her. These clicking eyes and plastic lashes, the small nostrils and the hole in the center of the lips.

The Dusts rise up again, fewer here, as the land starts to give way to grass that roots it. Still the Dusts edge up and circle. El Capitan rams one and the others back away.

Bradwell shouts that he sees something. “Not a Dust. Special Forces.”

They hug the side of the hill. And the soldier leaps from a jutting rock, landing with a thud on the roof of the car. Pressia looks up and sees the two dents made by his boots.

Bradwell grabs the rifle from the floorboards near El Capitan’s feet, cocks it, points it straight up, and shoots, ripping a hole into the metal, shearing it wide open. The shot clips the soldier’s leg. He thuds against the roof but holds on.

El Capitan tries to shake him loose, turning the wheel hard left, then hard right, but it doesn’t work. The soldier appears at the passenger window, kicks it with his one good leg, splintering the glass. He reaches in and grabs Partridge by the throat, but Partridge has a meat hook and his own unusual speed. He reaches around the soldier’s broad chest and hooks him between the shoulder blades.

The soldier lets out a guttural moan, loosens his grip, letting Partridge drop into his seat. The soldier still keeps his hold on the car. With his free hand he claws his back, trying to reach the hook. Bradwell rolls down the window, climbs halfway out of the car, cocks the gun again, but before he has time to fire, the soldier sees him, dives at him, pulling him from the car. They land with a thud on the ground and roll to a stop.

Pressia wants to scream—not Bradwell. She can’t lose anyone else. She won’t allow it. No more dying. She reaches for the handle. The door is locked. “Unlock it!” she screams.

“No!” El Capitan says. “You can’t help him! It’s too dangerous!”

She pounds the doll head on the door. “Let me out!”

Partridge reaches over the seat, grabs her arms, and pulls her back. “Pressia, don’t!”

Lyda says, “Use the gun. Take aim.”

Pressia grabs the gun and shoves her upper body out the window.

El Capitan turns the car around to give her a better line of fire. “Be ready when they separate. You might only get one chance.”

The soldier is trying to stagger up, but his leg is stripped of muscle. He’s also writhing against the pain from the hook still lodged in his back. He’s got Bradwell by the throat, but Bradwell kicks the soldier’s wound, elbows him in the gut, and scrambles to his feet.

Drawn to the soldier’s blood, a Dust circles the ground around them like a vulture but from below. Plumes of ash rise, making it hard to see. Bradwell kicks the soldier’s stomach. But the soldier grabs Bradwell and throws him. Bradwell lands hard, face-to-face with a Dust. He inches backward. The soldier pauses and seems to be assessing his leg wound.

Bradwell grabs the meat hook, wrestles it from the soldier’s back. Once it’s loose, Bradwell flies backward, landing hard.

Pressia takes her breath, lets it out halfway, and shoots.

The soldier spins and falls to the ground.

Bradwell gets to his feet, and, in one swift motion—the birds on his back a frantic blur of wings—he cuts the Dust clean through with the meat hook. He’s beautiful, Pressia thinks—his wounded shoulders, as if he’s been violently knighted, his tough jaw, his flashing eyes.

El Capitan pulls the car up to Bradwell, pops the lock, but Pressia’s already pulled herself out of the window. She grabs Bradwell and helps him to the car. She opens the door. They both slide in. She slams it behind them then stares at Bradwell. She reaches up and touches a cut on his bottom lip. “Don’t die,” she says. “Promise me that.”

“I promise that I’ll try not to,” he says.

El Capitan puts the car in gear and revs the engine.

She looks out the back window. A few more Dusts rush to circle the soldier. One rises and flares its back like a cobra. The soldier is quickly swallowed by the earth, gone.

Bradwell reaches up and lets his hand glide down her hair. She wraps her arms around him and listens to the pounding of his heart with her eyes shut tight. She imagines staying like this forever, letting everything else melt away.

Soon enough, Bradwell says, “We’re here,” and she lifts her head as they turn a corner and there are the rows of crops, then the long driveway that leads to the front porch steps of the yellow farmhouse. For a moment, she imagines they’re on their way home.

But as they draw closer, she sees something small rippling from one of the windows—it almost looks like a small flag—a hand towel with a blood-red stripe down the middle. She reaches into her pocket and there’s the card that Ingership’s wife gave her in the kitchen, the sign. What does it mean?
You must help save me.
Isn’t that what the woman said?

HIS
MOTHER
ISN’T
DEAD
. Sedge isn’t dead. In Partridge’s mind, they can’t be. There’s been a mistake, something he can sort out later. There were mistakes at the academy sometimes too, mostly errors in perception, human errors. His father is to blame. His father is human. This is a human error.

Or maybe it’s a test. His father planted the blueprints, gave Partridge the photograph, hoping or maybe even knowing that Partridge would use the information. Maybe from that moment on, the bright flash of the picture being taken, all of this has been part of a plan to gauge Partridge’s mental and physical strength; at the end everyone will emerge from their hidden spots, just out of his view, like an elaborate prank or surprise birthday party. It’s an explanation that keeps his mother and Sedge alive. But even as he tries to hold on to this precarious feat of logic, he also knows that it isn’t right. Another part of his brain keeps telling him that they’re dead, gone.