Destination Unknown (12 page)

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Authors: Katherine Applegate

Tags: #Fantasy & Magic, #Science Fiction, #End of the world, #Juvenile Fiction, #Science Fiction; Fantasy; Magic, #Space travelers, #General, #Space flight

BOOK: Destination Unknown
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“I’m talking to Ms. Lefkowitz-Blake,” 2Face grated.
“No you’re not,” Yago said flatly. “You’re talking to air.”
D-Caf giggled, then stifled the sound with his hand, looked at Yago for approval, giggled again.
Yago pushed past D-Caf and came right up to 2Face. “And, by the way, I wouldn’t push your luck, wax girl. You and the freak-show Madonna and Baby
Yikes would maybe fit in better with Jobs and the Monkey boy’s crew, you know what I’m saying? They already have that . . . that whatever he is, that Billy the Weird. You don’t like the way things are, you can go, too. You can hook up with Jobs’s freak show.”
2Face fought to keep from showing the fear she suddenly felt. The threat was clear. Unmistakable. There were two classes of people: the normal and the not. And she was in the latter group.
She faded back from the torches, back from the clique around Wylson. She looked for her father. He was slogging along, head down. He wouldn’t understand. Would he?
2Face stopped and turned to search the darkness for Jobs’s group: If she was going to be exiled, maybe it was better to go voluntarily. She didn’t want to be driven out like a leper.
She saw faint light, maybe the torches of the other group. Maybe not. A mile of darkness separated them. A mile of worms, maybe, and the alien Riders.
Besides, Jobs had asked her to take care of Edward. Where was he, anyway? She had to do that. Had to live up to her responsibilities. She couldn’t run away. Why should she?
She touched her face. The burn had been
horribly painful. The recovery had taken forever. But she’d understood it as an atonement for her sin. And after a while she’d come to see the disfigurement as a useful device for confronting, shocking, disturbing people.
She had abandoned her birth name, Essence, and taken the name 2Face. She had chosen not to hide her face. She thought of herself as an anthropologist studying the strange, inconsistent, hypocritical reactions of the people she met. Here is ugliness, look at it. Let me see your reaction.
But that was back in the world. That was back in a world where physical ugliness was all-but-erased by cosmetic surgery and DNA manipulation. Her split face, ugly and beautiful, had been a statement. And, she had always known, it was temporary — once the healing was complete the surgeries would begin. Twenty-eight square inches of 2Face’s own skin had already been grown in culture at the hospital, ready for transplantation.
That world was gone. This was a simpler world. A more primitive world. “Unique” was no longer a virtue. Here people were powerless, and being powerless, were afraid.
No. She was not going to be pushed out. She was Essence Hwang. She had a scar. But she was not a
freak. Not like Tamara and the baby.
They
were freaks. If anyone was going to be exiled it would be them, not her.
2Face threaded her way through the tired, footsore, hungry survivors in search of her father. He at least would stand by her. That was one. And Edward. Two. Who else?
CHAPTER TWENTY
“THIS IS AN AWFUL LOT OF TROUBLE FOR OUR ALIENS TO GO TO.”
 
The sun rose, small, distant, and weak. A winter sun. No longer a Bonnard sun.
Jobs called a halt and laid Billy Weir down. He was getting mightily sick of carrying the boy. They had taken shifts, but there were only the three of them, Mo’Steel, his mother, and Jobs. Violet, with her hand still leaking blood, was in no condition to carry anything.
They stood on a rise, not a hill so much as a low plateau overlooking a long, shallow valley. The river had slowed and now meandered toward a green, unhealthy-looking bay dotted with wooden ships that might almost have been the
Nina, Pinta,
and
Santa Maria
.
There was a village directly ahead. Strange, ungainly buildings, some little more than rough
lean-tos, others patched plaster houses with steep, dormered roofs. Jobs saw a brick bridge, arched, with a square tower. The perspective seemed odd; the relative sizes of buildings were wrong.
Within the village, people, all in costume, or what seemed costume to a modern eye. Men wore tunics and feathered caps, some wore crimson tights and brocaded jackets. The women wore white linen head wraps and voluminous peasant dresses and aprons.
There were pigs running in the dirt street, gaunt dogs, and chickens.
The people were busily engaged in a series of odd activities. One man in a close-fitting felt cap was facedown on a wooden table, stretching his arms to the left and right. Another man wearing only one shoe appeared to be trying to crawl through a sort of transparent globe. A man was shearing a sheep while beside him a man tried to shear a pig. A man armed with a curved knife was slamming his head against a brick wall.
It was ritualized, unnatural, not for a moment to be confused with anything real. The people were identifiably human, but behaving more like automatons. A man waded into the river waving a large fan and with his mouth open as if he was shouting. But
no sound came forth. Another was perched on a steep roof and shot a crossbow at what looked like a tumbling stack of pies.
This unsettling, strange tableau extended into the distance, melding into a less-detailed vision of a crowded city. But dominating it all, overwhelming all with its sheer size was a massive building. It was round, built like a wedding cake but one that might have been carved out of a single mountain of yellowed rock. It was seven layers of arches, each set back from the lower one, so that the whole thing might in time have risen to a point.
But the structure was imperfect, asymmetrical. The top few layers of this stone cake had been slashed and within the gash, a sort of tower-within-a-tower, more arches, more layers.
Jobs turned to Violet. She held her disfigured hand up at shoulder level, trying to help the blood to clot. She was an incongrous sight in her tattered feminine finery, stained with blood. Her hair, once piled high, hung down unevenly, a fallen soufflé. She was dirty, like all of them, in pain, hungry, scared. And yet, Jobs thought, she had a determined dignity that he admired. And the truth was, her knowledge of art was proving at least as useful as his own technological facility.
Violet stared at the scene, awed, rapt, eyes shining. “I know this,” she said. “I’ve seen this!”
Mo’Steel was salivating. “I see piggies down there. Where there are piggies there is bacon. And chickens. That means eggs. I am seeing bacon and eggs. I am seeing about a dozen eggs and maybe a pound of bacon, all hot, all hot from the pan.”
Jobs was hungry, too. But to him the tableau was just creepy, impossible, absurd. Unnatural. “Talk to us, Miss Blake,” Jobs said.
“I’m trying to remember,” she said. She frowned and shook her head. “I forget what it’s called. The style, I mean.”
“I don’t care,” Mo’Steel said. “Question is: Are we going to get us some bacon and eggs?”
“It’s like a video loop,” Jobs said. “Each of those people keeps doing the same thing over again.”
Miss Blake nodded. “It’s an allegory, or a series of allegories. It’s the kind of thing that would have meant more to a person of that era. Each of those people is demonstrating a fable or a saying of some sort. I don’t recall the specifics. And of course there’s the Tower of Babel, that’s obvious.”
Jobs blinked. He was exceedingly tired and maybe stupid. “The what?”
“The Tower of Babel. You know, Old Testament? Man builds a tower to reach up to heaven?”
“Jobs is a heathen,” Mo’Steel explained. “If it isn’t from either a technical manual or a poetry book, my boy here don’t know it.”
Olga Gonzalez said, “They’re cooking fish. See? Not in the tower, down in the village.”
“The Tower of Babel?” Jobs repeated.
“There has to be food, that’s the point,” Mo’Steel said.
“Brueghel!” Violet Blake exclaimed suddenly.
“A bagel?”
“It’s a Brueghel. Fifteen hundred something. Sixteenth century, anyway,” Violet said. “Look at the detail.”
“Can we eat the pigs and the fish?” Mo’Steel wondered.
“Where are the others? Where is the main group?” Olga wondered. “I wonder if . . . oh, look. There they are.”
Jobs followed the direction of her gaze. Perhaps half a mile away, a small, vulnerable-looking knot of people in shabby modern dress stood gaping down at the same scene from a different angle. They were closer to the river, just at the edge of the village.
“This is an awful lot of trouble for our aliens to go to,” Jobs said. “I mean, did they do this with the whole planet? This all extends out to the horizon.” He glanced at Billy Weir. He had formed the suspicion, the hope maybe, that Billy Weir had some profound knowledge he simply couldn’t share with them. Certainly he possessed some sort of incredible power.
Unless that had all been a dream. Jobs could no longer be sure. He was exhausted.
“You slept for five-hundred years and you’re tired?” he muttered under his breath.
“I guess we had better see if we can find food down there,” Olga said.
Jobs had opened his mouth to agree when it happened.
A beam of brilliant green light, no more than two inches in diameter, blazed from the village. It drew a line at an angle to the ground. It seemed to originate from the small, crenelated tower at the end of the bridge.
“Laser,” Jobs said. He frowned.
The tower blew apart.
Bricks flew everywhere. The half-dozen peasants closest to the tower were thrown through the air, tumbling, landing in the river, on the roof of a house, smashing into walls.
“What was that?” Violet cried.
With a shocking concussion, far larger than the first, the village exploded upward.
It was like a bomb going off. Buildings were flattened. Livestock was tossed carelessly, twirling.
The concussion was a hot wind in their faces, an oven blast.
“Look out!” Olga cried.
Twenty feet behind where they stood, a second beam of green light shone straight up out of the ground.
The first laser had been followed by two explosions.
“Run!” Jobs yelled.
They bolted, racing away from the beam, racing the only direction open: downhill toward the village.
The first, smaller explosion caught them, ruffled their hair, and rang bells in their ears.
The second explosion hit Jobs like a mule’s kick in the back.
He flew forward, landed on his face, rolled in the sparse grass, rolled down the slope.
Violet Blake landed almost on top of him.
Jobs wiped dirt from his eyes and blinked. He was deaf to everything but a roaring sound in his ears. His head throbbed. He felt a sharp pain in his back.
All at once a hurricane was blowing. Olga Gonzalez was just standing up and the wind picked her up like she was an empty paper cup. The wind rolled her across the ground, faster and faster toward the ruined village.
Jobs snatched at grass, at rocks, roots, anything, but the wind had him, too. He was sliding backward, clawing, unable to hold on.
The wind got beneath him, lifted him up. He somersaulted backward and for a moment was airborne, flying.
He bellowed and flailed and slammed hard into a ruined brick wall down in the village.
Couldn’t breathe, air sucked out of his lungs, grabbing at the bricks but they were coming free, each one he grabbed, falling, slipping. Then, a solid purchase.
He hugged the half wall and dug his fingernails into the mortar. He could see right into the village from here, right into all that was left of it.
He stared in horror as the wind picked up pigs and sheep, wood and stone, men and women, and sucked them all down into a ragged hole in the ground.
It was a whirlwind. A tornado. Irresistible.
Where was Mo? Where were Violet and Olga and Billy?
He had caught a hallucinatory flash of Mo’Steel running at mad speed, running with the hurricane at his back, propelling him. Then, nothing.
Jobs felt his lungs gasping, drawing futilely on thin air. He could not fill his lungs. No air.
No air!
He crept up the wall, climbed on battered knees and bloody hands, gasping for breath, up till he could look down in the crater left by the explosion. Already he suspected, already his brain was putting it together.
The crater was a hole, fifty feet across, a ragged, gaping gash.
And in the hole, down through the hole in the ground, Jobs saw stars. Black space and the bright pinpoints of stars.
“Not a planet,” Jobs whispered. “A ship!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“THAT WAS ENOUGH OF A RUSH.”
 
Mo’Steel saw his mother lifted by the wind and hurled with shocking force toward the hole.
He jumped up to grab her but the wind hit him like a train. He did a Road Runner, milling his legs as fast as he could, but it was the wind that was in charge. His feet barely touched the ground, sufficed only to keep him more or less upright.

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