Wasteland (Wasteland - Trilogy) (21 page)

Caleb was furious—and flabbergasted.

“You would do that . . . after all the trouble you went through to track him down? Even after you tell me you—”

But Levi cut him off. “
Do I make myself clear?
”

Caleb nodded, uncomprehending. When Levi gave a signal his guards seized Caleb and started to drag him out. This time, he was reminded of the pain, which had returned worse than ever; he could not resist even if he wanted to.

In the main room, the guards dragged Caleb forward on his knees. He kept his face impassive, refusing to give them the satisfaction of knowing he was in agony. But he could not keep the blood from dripping from his shirt again, leaving a glistening red trail.

“Enjoying yourself?” one asked.

Caleb gritted his teeth as they yanked him around a bend. Ahead, he saw that the giant main door of the Source was open, revealing the tarry black sky.

The guards picked him up and threw him outside. Caleb landed hard on his hands and knees, scraping himself on gravel and broken glass.

His backpack and hat were thrown after him and landed nearby. Next to them fell pieces of his weapon. They had been ripped from each other and scattered, like a squirrel’s bones from a cat’s mouth.

Caleb was about to pick them up, when he sensed a guard standing above him.

“This is for the others,” he said.

He was holding the weapon all the guards wore, the plastic box with two wires at the end that crackled with blue fire. Caleb was trying to crawl away when the guard rammed it into the small of his back. He screamed as a bolt of white-hot electricity erupted through his spine and exploded in his brain, seeming to set everything in his body on fire. He dropped to the ground, immobilized.

Nearly unconscious, he heard the three guards walk away, chuckling. The door of the Source creaked and then slammed shut.

Caleb lay there, motionless. It was as if his entire body had been scorched from within. He felt blood from his wound seeping into the hot, baked earth beneath him. It was all he could do to open his eyes. Still, the physical pain was nothing compared to his emotional anguish.

All along, it was one person who destroyed his family.

It wasn’t the mutants after all. For months, he had blamed them; poisoned by his rage and hatred, he had worked obsessively to track them down and destroy them.

Mutants.

For the first time, Caleb was struck by the ugly word, one he had used a thousand times without thinking, and he winced. For they, the variants, were nothing but pawns, poor and pathetic; had it not been them, Levi could have found someone else desperate and hungry enough to do his bidding.

The variants weren’t responsible; it was his brother. The person who was in a real sense closest to him, his own flesh and blood, had set out to destroy him . . . and very nearly succeeded.

When Caleb thought of the months Levi must have taken to plan and carry out his campaign, his mind reeled. Levi’s revenge was no impulsive act done in the heat of anger. It was carried out with clear eyes and cold calculation.

If what Levi said was true, he had been brutally wronged in childhood. Still, Caleb couldn’t imagine lifting a hand or plotting against his own brother, especially a brother who was innocent of any wrongdoing.

Caleb’s only sin was the fact of his birth.

Levi waited until they had gone. Then he got up and retrieved the small dagger that had dropped to the floor.

After wiping the blade clean, he placed it back on his desk, next to the matching penholder and leather blotter. He discovered that he was trembling and breathing fast, nearly hyperventilating. He had waited years for this moment, this long-anticipated revenge on his younger brother; and his victory was all the sweeter in that he had won it by his wits alone.

Caleb’s days as the town’s savior were over. Prin would need a new hero. And that would be easy enough to arrange.

Levi knew he should be glad. Yet, strangely, he was not.

One thought continued to nag at him: Somebody must have told Caleb about the boy. That meant someone, like his parents so long ago, must have betrayed him, someone he had trusted and housed and fed.

Levi called together a meeting of his guards.

Now he leaned against the wall, watching as one by one, his guards were tied to a steam pipe against the wall and questioned. Assisting in the interrogation was a tool from the gardening and patio aisle, a black wand filled with fuel. When a button was pressed, a small flame blossomed out from the top. As the smell of butane mixed with and then was overpowered by the stink of charred flesh, the basement of the Source echoed with screams that no one could hear from the outside.

Levi watched not because he enjoyed it; in fact, the constant weeping and pleading wore on his nerves. He had to make sure his instructions were being followed; he could not be certain that his guards would do their job. The very one asking questions, after all, would soon be the one interrogated by his peers.

While a clumsy system, it had always served its purpose before. Yet after an hour, no one had confessed to anything. By now, Levi was tired of not only their tears and moans, but the glimpses of their squinched and sweating faces, only partly hidden by their hoods. They looked as pink and helpless as cornered mice. It sickened him.

Exasperated and impatient, Levi was about to begin the cycle of interrogation once more, when a guard, shaking, separated himself from the group.

“I hate to say it . . .” His voice was almost inaudible. “But when the stranger come down to the basement, there was someone who came out of the security room only a second before.” He swallowed hard. “It was your girl. And she was acting funny.”

Levi stared at him. He felt almost faint with anger: the gall of the guard to try saving himself with such a blatant lie! Yet the more he thought about it, the more it made a hideous kind of sense. If he had been betrayed, why shouldn’t the treachery be of the worst, most intimate kind? That was the story of his youth: Wasn’t his childhood trust paid back with cruelty and abandonment? So now, wasn’t it likely that he had been forsaken by the person who had always said she loved him?

Levi kept his voice calm, revealing nothing.

“You better be right.”

He ended the session.

Levi returned to his office, any sense of jubilation forgotten. Yet as he sat alone, brooding, he felt strangely content. Once again, the world had proven itself to be the way he had always known it to be: faithless and cold. It was reassuring.

He would search Michal’s room himself.

B
Y DAWN
, C
ALEB REACHED THE SCHOOL
.

He fell against the front door and leaned upon it, breathing hard. It had taken nearly everything he had to walk back. He was light-headed from blood loss and thirst, and exhausted from fighting. When he closed his eyes, he could still feel the lingering shock of the electrical current surging through his body.

He stumbled toward his schoolroom, and took two faltering steps over the threshold.

Then he saw her.

Esther looked thinner than ever, her face burned by the sun. His shock giving way to joy, he moved quickly to her. But he could only go so far before his legs buckled, and she had to catch him before he fell.

Caleb was almost unrecognizable: dusty and bloodied, shivering in the heat. He clung to her as if he was drowning, and she led him to his cot, where she eased him down. Then she fetched water to clean his wounds and for him to drink.

Esther’s own journey here had been as much a hardship. Escaping from the Valley of the Dead, she had eventually found discarded robes in an abandoned van. She put them on over her clothes, and they both protected her from the sun and shielded her identity. The irony was not lost on her: Now that she was Shunned, she was finally dressed like one of the people she had long disdained and who had exiled her. By the time she reached the school late that evening, she was not able to remove the robes fast enough.

To her disappointment and misery, the schoolroom had been empty.

Esther was never good at waiting. Unable to sleep, she paced up and down the room all night, glancing out the window and door, listening in vain for the sound of Caleb’s footsteps.

And now that she was alone with him, her relief was replaced by fury at the people who did this to him, as well as the need to cherish and make him well again. She had come here seeking his protection, but now she realized he needed hers just as badly.

“What happened?” she asked, once he had stopped drinking.

Caleb told her, haltingly. He spoke of seeing his child, the revelation of Levi’s kinship, and his terrible retribution for their parents’ neglect, hiring the mutants to carry out the dirty work he would not do himself. At last, when there was nothing more to say, he buried his face in his filthy hands.

And he cried.

Esther could not bear to see it. She alone understood that Caleb wore a tough exterior, a mask to protect what was important and precious inside; she knew this because it was what she did as well. For him to drop his guard meant that he no longer had the strength to fight off his despair, and she felt his pain as keenly as she felt her own.

She reached out and grabbed his hands.

They were icy cold and she wrapped her own hands around them, trying to give him her warmth and life, the way she knew variant shamans did to the dead. Her thumbs traced the ridges of blisters on his palms, the rough and bruised skin along his knuckles. Then she pressed her palms against his, and their fingers intertwined.

She raised her eyes to his face, at the stubble built up over days. Then she looked into his eyes and felt herself overwhelmed by his intense gaze, which mixed relief with gratitude and something more. As he caressed her hand, she lifted her fingertips to his face, tracing his cheek to his chin, then toward his lips.

“It’s going to be all right,” she whispered.

But something had shifted inside her, a strange new emotion moving into the other. Her desire to ease Caleb’s suffering had been joined with another desire, one even more powerful, like two streams meeting and converging in a riverbed, mingling in a current against which she had no strength.

She had never known this feeling before.

Her fingers found his lips, which moved together and pressed against her fingertips, so softly she could hardly feel it. Then he kissed them again, this time harder; and at the pressure, she felt her body tremble.

“Caleb,” she said, his name meaning everything she could not say.

Then their lips were on each other’s, at first brushing there, like a question. Each applied more pressure, first quickly, then lingeringly. Esther closed her eyes, feeling only his mouth, his hands clasped in hers.

It was the first time she had ever kissed anyone. And it was different from how she imagined it would be, better, more dizzying.

Esther knew Caleb had been partnered, so he had kissed another, done more than kiss. And he was older than her, by more than a year. Yet she yearned to be closer to him and so she parted her lips, sending him a signal, indicating he could do the same. She was not certain but thought he understood, the way you did when someone opened a door, then walked away, saying it was safe to enter, you were allowed.

His tongue was softer than she expected, and warmer, and smooth. It filled her mouth, exploring, and she let it. Then she responded, pushing her own tongue to meet his, and each teased the other a little. It was the most delicate and intimate thing she could imagine, comparable to nothing.

Then the kiss ended. And as the two pulled away from one another and smiled bashfully, Esther suddenly felt so much older, years and years older, than she had only a few moments before.

As for Caleb, he was stunned by the tenderness he felt toward Esther. It was the first time he had touched anyone since his partner’s death, the first time he had allowed himself to open up and care for anyone.

He put his hand on Esther’s head and caressed her jagged hair. Esther must have cut it herself, he thought. It even resembled her, in a way: sharp in appearance but delicate to the touch.

“Tell me what happened,” he said.

Unemotionally, she told him the facts of her Shunning, her journey south, and what she had encountered. She was now a fugitive in her own town; if she were discovered, it would mean certain death for her and anyone who harbored her. When she finished, Caleb knew they were on their own. They were deprived of the people they loved, the places they knew, protected by just each other and the brick and broken glass of the school.

“What do we do now?” she asked him.

“Stay here,” he said.

“For how long?”

“Forever.”

Yet, even as they huddled together, they could hear something happening outside. Without speaking, Caleb got to his feet, followed by Esther. Holding hands, they approached the window and stood there, looking out at the street with a new feeling of dread. For in the distance, they could hear a sound that neither of them could place. Then, they recognized what it was; and the realization sent a deep chill through them both.