Pure (18 page)

“You in there,” Helmud says.

“Shut up, Helmud.”

“Shut up.”

He’s not sure what’s got Ingership all heated up about this new recruit, Pressia Belze. Ingership wants this girl to be promoted to officer upon arrival. He wants El Capitan to await emergency orders for her, a mission, but meanwhile to bring her
into the fold
. El Capitan isn’t sure what this means exactly. He’s not sure how much he himself is supposed to know. Is he supposed to know, for example, that he’s really just a midlevel bureaucrat? Is he supposed to know that this militia—five thousand in three facilities each and another three thousand getting uneducated—no matter how big it gets, no matter how strong, will never be able to take down the Dome? The Dome is impenetrable, heavily armed. Does Ingership know that El Capitan has lost his fire? He’s given up on the idea that he might get to open fire on some of his Pure
brothers and sisters
one day. He’s still just trying to survive.

But surviving is what he’s known. He’s been a survivalist since his mother died when he was nine. He took care of his brother, living in a fort El Capitan built in the woods surrounding their old house. He got money however he could, dealing this and that, and he stockpiled guns and ammo, including things his father had left behind.

“Remember all our guns,” El Capitan says to Helmud, trudging into the woods now, headquarters looming at his back. Sometimes he feels deeply nostalgic for his guns.

“Guns,” Helmud says.

Before the Detonations, there were many survivalists living off the grid in those woods. One neighbor, an old man who’d been in a war or two, taught El Capitan how to hide his guns and ammo. El Capitan did everything Old Man Zander told him to. He bought 40
PVC
pipe with end caps, six inches in diameter, and some
PVC
solvent. He and Helmud disassembled their rifles in their house one afternoon in late winter. El Capitan remembers the driving sleet, the sound of it ticking against the windows. The two brothers rubbed the gun parts down with anti-rust oil, which gave the guns and their hands a waxy sheen. Helmud had gotten hold of the aluminized Mylar bag, cut it into smaller pieces, and wrapped the barreled actions, stocks, trigger assemblies, hand guards, magazines, scopes, mounts, and several thousand rounds of .223 along with silica gel desiccant packets. Those were El Capitan’s ideas. He’d seen them in boxes of his mother’s old high heels in her closet. Helmud fused the ends of the bags with an iron. They vacuum-packed the bags with the neighbor’s Shop-Vac.

They packed six small cans of 1,1,1-trichloroethane to degrease it later, plus cleaning rods, patches, Hoppe’s No. 9 Solvent, gun oil, grease, a set of reloading dies, and a well-worn owner’s manual. Then they wrapped it all in duct tape.

They filled the pipe with the bags of ammo and the rifle pieces and supplies. They sealed up the end caps and then Helmud said, “We should paint our initials on all this.”

“You think?” El Capitan said.

And so they did. El Capitan knows that they thought they might actually die before they got to dig it up, and if someone did find it, they’d be known in some small way. With a thick black permanent marker, Helmud wrote H. E. C., for Helmud Elmore Croll. As for
El Capitan
, that was a nickname his mother gave him before she left for the asylum. She said, “You’re in charge ’til I get back, El Capitan.” But she never came back. And so El Capitan wrote his initials, E. C. C.—El Capitan Croll—and let his baptismal name die forever.

Old Man Zander loaned them a posthole digger, and they dug deeper into a hole left from a felled oak. They buried the stuff straight up and down so it’d be harder to find by metal detectors. El Capitan drew up the map, numbering paces because Old Man Zander had suggested it, “just in case the landscape is blown clean of its markings.” El Capitan thought Old Man Zander was crazy, but he followed his orders. He never saw him again after the Detonations, never looked for him either.

After the Detonations, El Capitan thought Helmud would die on his back, and El Capitan wasn’t doing so well either. He was burned, blistered, bloody. He made it back to the woods near their house, though, and found the metal tip of a shovel, paced the steps out from memory. The map was long gone. He dug, holding the head of the shovel in his hands with his brother dying on his back.

When he found the guns, he thought about shooting Helmud in the head and then himself, ending it there. But El Capitan could feel his brother’s heartbeat through his own ribs, and there was something about it that wouldn’t let him pull the trigger.

The guns, that’s how they survived. Not so much from using them—though El Capitan had to kill people for survival’s sake those early months. Mainly he leveraged them to get a good position in the
OSR
. This was after Operation Search and Rescue became Operation Sacred Revolution, and they were looking for young fiery recruits with nothing to lose. Plus, joining the
OSR
meant that he and Helmud wouldn’t go hungry.

The woods here still look burned out, older trees toppled and blackened. Some trees withstood the blast, shorn of their limbs; others had boughs permanently bent down by the pressure of the Detonations, trees reaching for the earth instead of the sky, as if wanting to hold on. But the underbrush has regenerated, slowly fighting for the ash-covered sun. Stubble has inched up from the tree roots, strange new bushes that El Capitan can’t get used to. They have small berries that are poisonous, and their leaves are sometimes scaly. Once he found a low-lying bush nudging up from under a gutted maple, and its leaves were covered in downy fur. Not just fuzz, actual fur.

He walks from trap to trap, heading deeper into the woods. Each one has been tripped. Not a speck of blood. But the skins are there, and the bones, some of which have been snapped and sucked clean of their marrow. It makes no sense. But he’s more baffled than angry. He can’t think of any kind of creature who’d work this neatly, and it sets him on edge.

About twenty feet from his last trap, he hears something in the air, a deep bass hum. He stops. “You hear that?” he asks his brother, but it’s like talking to himself.

The hum grows softer as if it’s traveling away from him at a fast rate of speed. Is it an engine? It seems too clean to be an engine. It fades too fast.

He walks to his final trap, and there’s a wild hen of some sort—dead, plump, plucked clean. But it’s not in the trap. It lies there beside the trap, which has been tripped, but the hen shows no signs of having been killed by anything other than a farmer’s quick twist of the neck. It seems as if it’s lying there like a gift, set out for El Capitan. He nudges it with a bamboo stick. It jostles. He picks it up, and there, nestled under its body like some strange joke, are three eggs. Brown eggs. One is speckled.

He lifts the speckled egg, cradles it in his palm. It’s like someone out here wants to reach out to him somehow.

When was the last time he saw an egg and held it in his palm? Maybe it was before the Detonations when his mother was still in the house, buying eggs in Styrofoam cartons.

The hen and her eggs feel like a strange miracle, and he remembers what it was like pulling the
PVC
from the ground, like extracting a long white bone from the earth, and how the soil was still loose, soft and tender in his hands. He found a bit of his old handsaw. He wiped the mud away and sawed off the end caps. Everything slid out, just like they’d planned—except his brother was fused to his back. Helmud wouldn’t die. No, he’d be a weight El Capitan would have to shoulder forever.

But sometimes he remembers the sound of guns slipping down the inside of the
PVC
pipe, the weight of those Mylar bags, the heavy clicks as he assembled the rifles, one after the other, and he loves Helmud as much as he hates him. He feels like he wouldn’t have made it without him. The weight of his brother has made him stronger.

The hum returns, and El Capitan squats down as low as he can. He lies flat in the brush. His brother seems to be crying softly on his back. Sometimes Helmud cries for no reason.

“Shut up,” El Capitan whispers softly. “Shut up, Helmud. It’s okay. Shut up.”

He can see them then, strange creatures—both human and not human—shifting through the trees.

OUT
ON
THE
STREET
, Bradwell leads the way, taking long quick strides. Pressia is next, then Partridge. Bradwell never looks back at Partridge, but Pressia does, and Partridge wonders what she thinks of him. Is he just a pawn? Does she just want to get off the
OSR
list, whatever that is, and get help for her grandfather, like she said? If so, fair enough. She’ll help him, and he’ll help her if he can. Plus, he has proof that she’s got a good heart. She saved his life before she could have possibly known who he was or what he could do for her. He trusts her; that’s the bottom line.

And he knows that Bradwell hates him, resents the privilege of Partridge’s Dome life, and who can blame him? Partridge just hopes that Bradwell doesn’t hate him so much that he’ll let him get his head bashed by Groupies, as Bradwell put it. It would have been funny if it weren’t such a real possibility.

Bradwell stops to look up an alley to see if it’s clear.

The wind has gotten colder. Partridge pulls his coat in close to his ribs. “This is what winter feels like, right?” he says to Pressia.

“No,” she tells him. “Winter’s cold.”

“But this is cold,” he says.

“It’s not winter-cold.”

“I’d like to see all of this covered in snow,” he says.

“The snow is dark by the time it hits the ground, already stained.”

Bradwell doubles back. “They’re too close,” he says. Partridge doesn’t know who he’s talking about. “We’ll have to go underground. This way.”

“Underground?” Partridge asks.

Partridge doesn’t like going underground. Even in the basement of the academy library, it’s too easy for him to lose his bearings without the landmarks, the sun, moon, stars. Here, though, one of those fixed bearings is the Dome itself, which is brighter than everything else in the sky, its shining cross pointing directly at heaven, though, like Pressia, he’s not sure what he believes in.

“If he says underground is the best way to go, it is,” Pressia says.

Bradwell points to a square hole by a gutter. Its metal grate is long gone, probably stolen. He slips his legs in first and then drops down. Pressia slips in next. Her shoes clap loudly against cement. Partridge goes down last. It’s dark and damp. So many puddles, he can’t even try to sidestep them all. They have to just go splashing through. Every once in a while, he hears animals, their shadows scampering past, their various squeaks and chirrups.

“Seriously,” Partridge says, “why are we down here?”

“You heard the chanting, right?” Bradwell says.

“Yeah,” Partridge says. He can still hear it. “What’s so wrong with a wedding?”

Bradwell stops, turns, and squints at him. “A
wedding
?”

Partridge looks at Pressia. “You said…”

Pressia says to Bradwell, “I might have told him that the chants were from a wedding.”

“Why would you lie about something like that?” Bradwell looks at her, baffled.

“I don’t know. Maybe I wanted it to be true. Maybe I’m a type.” Then Pressia says to Partridge, “It’s not a wedding. It’s a kind of game, OSR’s definition of a sport.”

“Oh,” Partridge says, “that’s not so bad. We play sports in the Dome, too. I’ve been a halfback in a variation of what used to be called football.”

“This is a blood sport called a Death Spree, used by
OSR
to rid society of the weak. It’s really the only kind of sport around here, if you can call it a sport,” Bradwell says, walking quickly again. “They get points for killing people.”

“It’s better to just stay out of their way,” Pressia tells him, and then—she doesn’t know why, maybe just for effect—she says, “You’d be worth ten points.”

“Only ten?” Partridge asks.

“Actually,” Bradwell says over his shoulder, “ten’s a compliment.”

“Well,” Partridge says, “in that case, thanks. Thanks a lot.”

“If they knew you were a Pure, though, who knows what they’d do with you?” Pressia says.

They walk on for a while in silence. He thinks of what Bradwell said in the meat cooler:
And you’re gone. Just like that. And no one in the Dome cares? No one’s out looking for you?
They are looking for him. And they’ll question the academy boys who were with him last, maybe his teachers, anyone he might have confided in. Lyda. He can’t help but wonder what they’ve done with her.

And here it’s dank. The puddles are foul. The air is stale and still. Partridge doesn’t complain, but he’s surprised by how much it unnerves him and how relieved he is when, finally, Bradwell stops and says, “Lombard. It should be right up there. Ready?”

“Absolutely,” Partridge says.

“Wait,” Pressia says. “Don’t expect too much.”

Does he look that naive? “I’ll be fine.”

“Just don’t get your hopes up.” She looks at him in a way he can’t quite read. Does she feel sorry for him? Is she a little angry? Is she being protective?

“I don’t have my hopes up,” he says. But he knows that’s a lie. He wants to find something—if not his mother, then something that might lead to her. If he doesn’t find it, he’ll have nowhere to go from here. He’ll have escaped for no reason, without any way back. Bradwell told him to go back home to the Dome and his daddy. But that’s not possible, is it? Could he go back to Glassings’ lectures on World History? Could he and Lyda date, communicating with Arvin’s laser pen on the grass of the commons? Would he be put under and altered for good? Play the pincushion? Be bugged? Would he get a ticker inserted into his brain?

This opening has an old rusty ladder propped up to it, but Partridge jumps and grabs the cement lip overhead and pulls himself up like he did to get into the tunnels leading to the air-filtration system. That seems years ago.