Pure (6 page)

“I don’t like owing favors,” the boy told him.

“Too bad,” her grandfather said. “That’s what I need.”

The boy then left in a hurry, and when he turned the corner he ran into Pressia standing there. She pitched backward and he grabbed her arm to steady her. He was gripping her arm with the doll-head fist. He noticed it and said, “Sorry.” For bumping into her or because of her deformity? She pulled her arm away from him. “I’m fine,” she told him. But she was embarrassed because he probably knew she’d been spying on him.

Here he is now, the boy who doesn’t like to be indebted but owes her grandfather. The boy with birds in his back.

He starts the meeting. “There’s a new person with us.” He points to Pressia. Everyone turns and looks at her. Like everyone else, they have scars, burns, large red knotted tissue, almost rope-like. One of the faces is connected to a jawline that holds a drape of twisted skin, so textured it almost seems like bark on a tree. She only recognizes one face—Gorse, who disappeared a few years ago with his little sister Fandra. Pressia looks around for Fandra, who had fine golden hair and a shriveled left arm. They used to joke that they were perfect for each other—Fandra had a good right hand and Pressia had the left. But she doesn’t see her. Gorse catches her eye and looks away. The sight of him makes Pressia giddy. The network of the underground—maybe it not only exists but actually works. She knows now that at least one has survived, and all the people in the room look older than she is. Is this the underground? Is the boy with the birds in his back the head of it?

And what do they see when they look at her? She tucks her head to her chest, turning the crescent-shaped scar away from view, and she pulls her sweater sleeve down over the doll head. She nods at the group, hoping they’ll look away soon.

“What’s your name?” the boy with the birds in his back asks.

“Pressia,” she says and then immediately regrets it. She wishes she’d used a fake name. She doesn’t know who these people are. This is a mistake. She knows it now, clearly. She wants to go, but feels trapped.

“Pressia,” he says under his breath, as if he’s practicing it. “Okay,” he says to the group, “let’s get started.”

Another boy in the crowd raises his hand. His face is partially disintegrated from infections where the metal on his cheek, something that once was chrome but is now rust-mottled, meets the puckered skin. There’s a ridge of angry festered skin. If he doesn’t get antibiotic ointment, he could die of it. She’s seen people die of simple infections like this. The medicine is sometimes sold at certain stalls in the market but not always, and it’s expensive. “When are you going to let us look in the footlocker?” he asks.

“After I’m done, like always, Halpern. You know that.”

Halpern looks around, embarrassed, and picks at a scab on his cheek.

Pressia sees the footlocker now for the first time. It’s pushed up against a wall. She wonders if that’s where the food is kept.

Pressia notices the girls in the audience. One has exposed wires in her neck. Another has a hand twisted solid with the handle of a bike, the metal sawed off and poking up from her wrist like a protruding bone. She’s surprised that they don’t hide these things. One could wear a scarf, the other a sock like Pressia does. But their expressions are tough, self-possessed, proud almost.

“For those of you new to the meeting,” the guy with the birds in his back says, glancing at Pressia, “I’m one of the dead.” This means he’s listed among those dead from the Detonations.
OSR
isn’t looking for him. It’s a good thing, all in all. “My parents were both professors who died before the Detonations. They had dangerous ideas. I have the remains of a book they were working on together, which is where I get a lot of my information. After they died, I was sent to live with an aunt and uncle. That’s where I was living when the Detonations hit. They didn’t survive. I’ve made it myself since I was just about nine years old. My name is Bradwell and this is Shadow History.”

Bradwell. She remembers hearing whispers about him now, some conspiracy theorist, evangelizing out by the Rubble Fields. She heard that he challenged a lot of the ideas about the Detonations and the Dome, especially those who worship the Dome, having confused it with a deity, a benevolent but distant god. Even though she wasn’t a Dome worshipper, she immediately hated the idea of him. Why have conspiracy theories? It’s over. Done. Here we are. Why spin your wheels?

As he launches into his talk, pacing with his hands in his pockets, she starts to hate the reality of him, too. He’s cocky and paranoid. He spouts off his theories about the Dome officials, stating that he has proof that they caused total destruction so that they could wipe out all but a fraction of the world’s population while they were Dome-protected, that the Dome was designed for this purpose—not as a prototype for a viral outbreak, environmental disaster, or attack from other nations. They wanted only the elite to survive in the Dome while they waited for the earth to renew itself, at which point they’d return. A clean slate. “Did you ever wonder why we’re not experiencing a full nuclear winter? Well, because it was orchestrated to avoid one. They used a cocktail of bombs—the Low Orbiting Focused Enhanced Radiation Neutron System satellites known as LoFERNS, and the High Orbiting Focused Enhanced Radiation Neutron System satellites, or HiFERNS, with electromagnetic pulse—EMP—magnification.” He discusses the difference between atomic and nuclear bombs that were also used in the cocktails, and pulses designed to knock out all communications. “And how did Dusts come about? The bombs disrupted molecular structures. The cocktails included the distribution of nanotechnology to help to speed up the recovery of the earth—nanotechnology that promotes the self-assembly of molecules. The nanotechnology, speeded up by
DNA
, which is an informational material but also excellent at the self-assembly of cells, made our fusing stronger. And the nanotechnology that hit the humans trapped in rubble or scorched land helped them to regenerate. Even though they couldn’t completely free themselves, the human cells of the Dusts grew powerful and learned to survive.”

He explains one conspiracy after the next, linking them so quickly Pressia can barely understand him. But she isn’t sure that she’s even supposed to understand the theories. The talk isn’t designed for newcomers. This is a group of those already converted. They nod along, like this was a bedtime story, and they have it memorized so they can pass it on to others. Pressia recites the Message in her head:
We know you are here, our brothers and sisters. We will, one day, emerge from the Dome to join you in peace. For now, we watch from afar, benevolently.
And then the old cross, the one her father called an Irish cross. It may not be word from the benevolent eye of God, as so many have thought of the Dome, but it’s certainly not the Message of an evil force. Their sin is that of surviving. She can’t blame them for that. She’s guilty of the same.

It dawns on her that if she’s heard of Bradwell,
OSR
has to know that he exists. Panic pricks across her skin. It’s dangerous for her to be here at all. Bradwell is almost eighteen and even though he’s listed among the dead, he has to be a prime target for
OSR
. As he talks, a few things are clear. He hates
OSR
, which he sees as feeble, weakened by their own greed and evil, incapable of taking down the Dome or effecting any real change. “Just another corrupt tyrant,” he says. He especially despises that there’s no transparency. The names of the highest-ranking officials in
OSR
are unknown. They let the grunts do their dirty work in the streets.

If anyone heard him talking this way, he’d be shot—probably publicly. They all would be considered enemies of
OSR
, punishable by death. She wants to go, but how? The ladder to the trapdoor in the ceiling is folded up. She’d have to make a scene. She’d have to explain herself. But what’s worse? What if there’s a raid and she’s stuck down here with these people?

At the same time, she desperately wants to know what’s in the footlocker. The guy named Halpern obviously wants to get into it. It must hold valuables. Where’s the food? Mainly she wants Bradwell to stop speaking. He’s talking about the things no one ever speaks of, the Detonations and their effects—the updrafts and downdrafts uprooting houses, the cyclones of fire, the reptilian skin of the dying, bodies turned to char, the oily black rain, the pyres to burn the dead, those who died days later, starting with a nosebleed and later decaying from within. She tries to will him to shut up in her mind.
Please stop! Stop! Now!

He starts to glance at her as he speaks, and moves closer to her side of the room. He squints like he’s tough, but as he gets angrier—talking about how the political movement called the Return of Civility, overseen by the national military arm called the Righteous Red Wave, was all part of the lead-up to the Detonations, the rule of everything in the name of fear, the massive prisons, sanatoriums for the sick, asylums for dissidents, their remains sprawling in every direction once you left the gated suburbs—his eyes are teary. He’d never cry, she can tell that about him, but he’s complicated. At one point he says, “It was sick, all of it.” And then he pokes a sarcastic dimple in his cheek and says, “You know God loves you because you’re rich!”

Is this what it was like back then, really? Her father was an accountant. Her mother had taken her to Disney. They lived in the suburbs. They had a little yard. Her grandfather has drawn her pictures of it all. Her parents weren’t professors who had dangerous ideas. So what side were they on? She steps back again toward the ladder.

“We have to remember what we don’t want to,” he tells them. “We have to pass down our stories. My parents were already gone, shot to death in their beds. I was told it was intruders, but I knew better, even then.”

And now Bradwell speaks as if he’s talking to her alone, like she’s the only person in the room. His eyes hook on to hers and hold her there. It’s a strange feeling, like being tethered to the earth—not a fleck of ash at all. He tells his story—his I Remember.

After his parents were shot, he was shipped to live with his aunt and uncle in the suburbs. His uncle had been promised three spots in the Dome, had been told a route to take into the Dome when the alarm sounded, a private route that wound around the barricades. He had tickets even. He’d paid good money for them. They stocked the car with bottled water and cash.

It happened on a Saturday afternoon. Bradwell had walked far from home. He wandered a lot those days. He doesn’t remember much—only the bright flash, the heat coursing through his body, like his blood was on fire. The shadow of the birds rising up behind him… And so that is, in fact, what she saw two years ago when he was being stitched up on the table. Ruffling beneath his shirt, they are wings.

Bradwell’s body was burned and blistered, raw. The birds’ beaks felt like daggers.

He made it back to his aunt and uncle’s house, amid smoldering fires and air thick with ash, people crying from rubble. Others wandered, blood-covered, their skin melted away. His uncle had been working on the car, making sure it was in tiptop shape for the special route around the barricades. He was under the car when the Detonations went off, fused with the engine. It lodged in his chest. His aunt was burned, suffering, and afraid of Bradwell’s body, his birds. But she said, “Don’t leave us.” The smell of death, burned hair and skin—it was everywhere. The sky was gray, clotted with ash. “There was sun but the sky was so clouded with dust, day looked like dusk”—that’s what Bradwell said. Does Pressia remember this simple thing? She wants to. After sun on sun on sun, it was dusk, day after day.

Bradwell stayed with his aunt in the garage, which was scalded, rickety, but strangely intact—lined with charred boxes, the fake Christmas tree, the shovels, and tools. His uncle was nearly dead, but he tried to explain to his wife how to get him free. He said things about bolt cutters and a hanging pulley that they could rig to the ceiling. But who could his wife go to for help? Everyone was either gone or dead or dying or trapped. She tried to feed her husband, but he refused to eat.

Bradwell found a dead cat on the charred lawn, put it in a box, and tried to bring it back to life, uselessly. His aunt was hoarse and winded—a little insane by then, most likely. She was dazed, weak, tending to her own burns and wounds, watching her husband slowly die.

Bradwell stops talking for a moment, looks down at the floor and then back at Pressia. He says, “And then one day, he begged her. He whispered, ‘Turn on the engine. Turn it on.’ ”

The room is silent and still.

Bradwell says, “She held the keys in her hand and shouted at me to get out of the garage. And I did.”

Pressia feels light-headed. She puts her hand on the cement wall to steady herself. She looks up at Bradwell. Why is he telling them this story? It’s sick. I Remember is supposed to be a way of giving people gifts, small sweet memories, the kind Pressia likes to collect, needs to believe in. Why this? What good does this do anyone? She glances around the room at the others. They don’t seem angry, like she does. Their faces are, if anything, calm. Some have their eyes closed as if they want to picture it all in their minds. This is the last thing that Pressia wants, but she does see it all—the flock of birds, the dead cat, the man trapped under the car.

Bradwell goes on, “She turned the key. For a few moments, the motor chugged. When she didn’t come out to get me, I went in. I saw the blood and my uncle’s waxy blue face. My aunt curled in the corner of the garage. I packed up the bottled water and put cash in a bag and taped it to my stomach. And I went back home, to my parents’ house, burned to char, and found the footlocker they’d hidden in a protected room. I dragged the footlocker with me back into the dark world and learned how to survive.”

His dark eyes flit across the crowd. He says, “We each have a story. They did this to us. There was no outside aggressor. They wanted an apocalypse. They wanted the end. And they made it happen. It was orchestrated—who got in, who didn’t. There was a master list. We weren’t on it. We were left here to die. They want to erase us, the past,
but we can’t let them.
”