Fragments (37 page)

“Just that easy, huh?” asked Kira.

“Unless the barge is tied down with metal chains,” said Samm, “yes. The hard part’s
going to be getting it back out again laden with horses without foundering against
those buildings.”

“I’m assuming we’re the first people to try to dock a boat at that end of Main Street,”
said Heron. “I don’t think they designed the city with ‘barge maneuverability’ in
mind.”

“We’ll just use poles to push ourselves away,” said Kira. “Against the pounding, bridge-destroying
current of the mighty Mississippi River.”

“Just that easy?” asked Samm. Kira looked up and saw that he was smiling—a tentative
smile, as if he was trying it out. She smiled back.

“Yeah,” she said. “Just that easy.”

It wasn’t. Samm could barely reach the barge with the hose tied off on the light post,
and even after they moved it, he found the current almost too strong to work with
as he dove for the docking ropes—not one, as they’d hoped, but five. He tied off the
hose and spent nearly half an hour under the water, hacking on the series of ropes
and coming up only briefly for air. Kira couldn’t see him well, but he had lost most
of his color and was shivering against the cold. Each time he dove back down she found
herself holding her breath in sympathy, seeing how long she could last, and each time
he seemed to stay down longer, dragging the time out impossibly, until at last she
was certain he had drowned. With a sudden lurch the barge shifted, the cut ties making
it less stable, and still Samm didn’t come up. Kira counted to ten. Nothing. She waded
in, counting to ten again, to twenty, and soon Heron was swimming with her, using
the taut garden hose for balance as it stretched toward the breaking point. The barge
moved again, spinning and slamming into the buildings downstream, and Samm erupted
from the river, gasping desperately for breath. Kira caught him, holding his head
above water as gulped down air.

“Got it,” he said, his teeth clacking together. “Let’s pull it in.”

“We need to warm you up first,” said Kira, “You could get hypothermia.”

“This hose is going to snap if we wait any longer,” said Heron.

“He could die,” insisted Kira.

“I’ll be fine,” Samm said, shivering. “I’m a Partial.”

“Back to the shallows,” said Heron, “or it’s all for nothing.”

They worked their back along the hose, Kira watching Samm and praying he didn’t shiver
himself into a seizure. When they reached land shallow enough to stand on, she rubbed
his back and chest, a quick furious burst of movement that probably soothed her conscience
more than it did his condition. She felt a small thrill to be touching him—to feel
the firm contours of his muscled chest—which seemed so enormously out of place she
dropped her hands almost instantly, recoiling at the incongruity. She was a medic,
not a schoolgirl; she could touch a man’s chest without going all gooey. He was still
shaking, his teeth chattering with the cold, and she rubbed him again, working her
hands up and down his pecs and sternum to force some warmth back into his body. A
moment later the three of them seized the rope and started dragging the barge up the
flooded street. Afa watched listlessly from the shore, almost too doped on painkillers
to stand. The barge drifted toward them slowly, and when they gained about twenty
feet of slack, Kira untied the hose and waded back to the next secure point, tying
it off and then starting over. The barge scraped along the houses, catching on one
of them so firmly Heron had to swim out and dislodge it with a plank of driftwood.
After more than two hours they’d moved the barge close enough to shore for the horses
to board it. It was barely three hundred feet.

They tied it off again, snapping the hose and almost losing it; Samm wrapped the trailing
end around his arm and grabbed a brick wall with his other, straining red-faced at
the pain as Kira and Heron scrambled to secure the barge more firmly. A heavy wooden
door ripped from a nearby frame served as a steep boarding plank, and they walked
the horses up one by one, Kira leading them with soft words while Samm and Heron guided
them from the sides to keep them in line. Samm was still shivering, and his horse
Buddy seemed more spooked in response, shuffling and backtracking so nervously that
the door cracked. They coaxed him onto the barge before it broke completely, and then
had to find a new one to get Oddjob on board at the end. Afa came last, his face slack,
his massive arms wrapped around his backpack like an overstuffed life preserver.

“I can’t leave my backpack,” he said. “I can’t leave my backpack.”

“We won’t,” said Kira. “Just sit here, and don’t move, and you’ll be safe.”

Heron cut the lines and hurried to her place on the leading edge of the boat, reaching
it just in time to pick up a board and push off against the row of buildings the current
tried to carry them into. Samm was on the same side, his hands and arms still pale
from the cold. Kira stood in the center, trying to soothe the horses; they whinnied
in agitation at the instability of the barge, dipping and shifting exactly the way
ground shouldn’t, and became even more spooked as the barge slammed into the small
hardware store.

“Watch the buildings!” cried Kira, trying to keep Bobo from rearing up and breaking
away from her.

“Go to hell!” Heron shot back, her teeth tightly clenched as she tried to keep the
unwieldy barge, now firmly caught in the river’s sweeping current, from slamming into
the building again. The river pulled them both into the buildings and out into the
center, not quickly but powerfully; it was not a white-water river, but Kira was realizing
that even a lazy river, when it got this big, had an immense amount of strength. Samm
joined Heron at the back, and together they managed to keep the trailing edge of the
barge from clipping the last building in the line, and suddenly they were out: free
of the sunken city, free of the debris that cluttered the shores, free of the limited
stability the buildings had granted. The barge spun slowly in the water, and the horses
chomped and snapped in fear. Samm ran to help Kira control them, but Heron walked
the edge, trying to keep herself at whatever part of the barge was the front.

“Sandbar,” she called out, kneeling to grip the side for balance, and the barge shook
with sudden impact, sending Kira reeling for balance. Afa fell on his side, closing
his eyes and clutching his backpack tightly. Samm and Kira separated, each taking
two horses by the reins and leading them a few steps away from each other. The sandbar
spun them in the opposite direction as they bounced away from it, and for a moment
they straightened out. Kira found solid footing, readjusting her grip on the horses,
and Heron called out again, more urgently this time: “Fallen bridge!”

“What?” shouted Kira.

“Just hold on to something,” said Heron, and suddenly the barge slammed into an outcropping
of twisted steel supports, just barely visible above the water but solid and deadly
below the surface. The horses screamed, and the barge screamed with them, metal scraping
against metal. The barge tipped dangerously, then rocked back the other way as it
rolled around the fallen bridge. Kira fought to keep control of her horses.

“We need to steer,” she called.

“Yes, we do,” said Samm, “but I don’t think that’s an option at this point.”

“Here’s another one,” called Heron, and Kira held on tight as the boat rocked and
splashed and shook. They were in the middle of the river now, the current faster and
deeper, and Kira saw with dismay that it seemed to be carrying them straight through
the path of debris from the bridge. They bobbed like a cork on the surface, thrown
back and forth from stone to stone, steel to steel. A particularly bad hit brought
a loud crack, and Kira looked around wildly to see if anything had broken. Heron scrambled
across the floor and looked up angrily. “We’re taking on water.”

“That’s awesome,” said Kira. “Throw it back out!”

Heron glared at her, but found a discarded board and tried to stop up the hole—a crack
in the side wall, thankfully, not the floor, or Kira thought they might have gone
down almost immediately. The board didn’t seem to help, and Heron gave up, trying
to use it instead as a rudder. The barge ignored her and went where the river wanted
it. They shook with another impact, then another, and Kira cried out as the floor
rippled beneath her feet.
Floors aren’t supposed to do that.

“The floor rippled,” she said.

Samm held his two horses tightly, though they looked ready to tear him in half. “Rippled
or buckled?”

“I think it was just—” Kira cried out as the barge hit another obstacle, and the metal
floor groaned in protest at some unexpected movement.

“Buckled,” said Heron, bracing her board against the floor for stability. “This is
not going to end well.”

“How poorly are we talking,” asked Kira, “assuming it at least ends with us on that
side of the river?”

“Poorly,” said Heron. “We lose some gear, maybe most of it. A horse if we’re unlucky,
Afa if we are.”

“We won’t lose Afa,” said Samm. “I’ll pull him to shore myself if I have to.”

“You’ll have to,” said Heron. “This rust bucket is falling apart around us, and the
river is doing everything it can to speed that along.”

“Try to steer us closer to the side,” said Kira.

Heron looked at her with wide, incredulous eyes.

“What in the hell do you think I’ve been trying for the last five minutes?”

“You’re not trying it now,” Kira snarled.

“You’d better hope you can swim,” said Heron, shooting her an icy glare as she leapt
back to the edge, “because Samm’s saving Afa and I’m not saving you.” She stuck the
board back into the water, correcting the spin but failing to guide the boat in any
particular direction. They almost hit a promontory on the far side, but the same current
that had pulled them away from the east shore was now working to keep them from the
west one, and even when they finally cleared the debris field, their barge was creaking
and sinking and caught in a powerful current. The river turned south with water already
lapping around Kira’s feet, and she looked down the river to see that it was rounding
a wide U-shaped bend before turning back east again.

“Keep steady on that rudder,” she called to Heron. “The river’s turning hard enough
that we might get thrown onto the bank up there.”

“That’s not a bank, it’s a dock,” said Samm. “Getting thrown onto it will hurt.”

“Just . . . save Afa,” said Kira, keeping her eyes on the shore. The river moved surprisingly
slowly for something so powerful, and it seemed to take them forever to round the
bend. She worried they wouldn’t build up enough momentum to get across at all, but
slowly the west shore grew closer, their leaking barge turning just slightly wider
than the river was.
We’re going to make ground,
she thought.
Right in the middle of that city.
She could see it now, buildings and docks rising out of the overgrown riverbank,
masked with trees and tall marsh reeds. The placement of the city seemed almost perfectly
designed to catch things as the river carried them around the bend, and Kira briefly
wondered if it had been built there for that exact purpose. Her thoughts turned more
urgent as the shore drew closer, and the hope of landing became a certainty of crashing
into the riverside wharf looming up to meet them. It was flooded, like most of the
riverside cities, and Kira guessed their trajectory would carry them straight into
a tangle of boats, logs, and other debris caught in a cluster of old stores and buildings.
“Can we take another impact?” she asked.

“No, we can’t,” said Heron, standing up and throwing her rudder over the side. “Save
what you can.” She grabbed Dug’s reins from Kira’s hand and seemed to be readying
the horse to jump over the side. Samm looked at the impending crash, then dropped
both sets of reins and ran to Afa. The horses pranced back skittishly, and the sudden
shift in weight caused the damaged barge to warp, knocking Kira off her feet and sending
Oddjob completely over the side. Kira clung to Bobo’s reins, trying to stand, when
the barge slammed into the mass of debris and crumpled like a foil model. Kira went
down, and the river swallowed her.

W
ater lapped against the sides of their boat as the soldiers pushed away from the dock.
Marcus clung to the railing of what used to be a luxury yacht, retrofitted by the
Grid soldiers and filled with a tank of the cleanest gas they could make. There were
ten of them, including Marcus and Senator Woolf—though all the men here called him
Commander Woolf, and Marcus could tell he was much more in his element here as a soldier
than he was as a politician. They were setting out from the extreme southwest corner
of Long Island, from an industrial wharf ominously labeled Gravesend Bay. Marcus tried
not to think about the implication.

Their plan was simple. There were potentially some unfriendly Partials in Manhattan,
but everything they’d learned from Samm suggested that Manhattan was about as far
south as they ever ventured, being too busy securing their fragmented outposts in
New York and Connecticut. Commander Woolf had charted a course across the Lower New
York Bay, miles away from any watchmen on Manhattan, skirting the southern shores
of Staten Island to the mouth of the Arthur Kill canal. From there they would travel
north through the ruins of New Jersey, ideally staying well out of view to anyone
watching Manhattan, all the way to the Tappan Zee Bridge and across into White Plains.
If Morgan’s Partials saw them, they were dead; if the other faction of Partials saw
them at a bad time, or in the wrong light, or they were just in a killing mood, they
were dead. The Grid soldiers were armed to the teeth, but Marcus knew that wouldn’t
matter if they met a platoon of Partials who didn’t fancy a chat. Which was precisely
why they were going so far out of their way not to encounter any.