Chapter 5: World War III Blues

In the years since the accident Lily had developed a rocking, ground-eating stride. Step with the right leg. Bring the left around. Brief pressure on the heel, then right leg takes the weight. Simple enough.

Slow, though. Painful. After so many miles her right knee would begin to protest, and after a day’s march her entire body would be useless. She worried about the mountains.

Dust blew in almost solid walls. Lily remembered scavengers weeping blood as their skin sloughed off and tied a scarf over her mouth and nose, wishing she'd gotten a pair of goggles.

The air smelled like an old battery. Nothing broke the surface of the arid land except craters, piles of sandblasted stone that had once been homes, shards of white bones that had once been lives.

Time, like distance, was indeterminable. Lily walked until the light gave out or her legs did. She tried to conserve water. At night she dozed sitting up with the scattergun in her lap, too cold to sleep, too exhausted to move.

On the sixth night a glistening beetle the size of a human infant crawled out of a hole, shoving chunks of earth aside with scrabbling legs.

Thick feelers waved on its glittering head. When it shook its wings there was a sound like a fiddle being beaten to death.

Lily stomped down hard. There was a crack and a foul smell as the creature’s pale guts leaked onto the sand.

Licking her cracked lips, she pried the thick chitin up with her knife in search of more appetizing meat, but stopped as a low humming vibrated the ground under her feet. Sounded like an awful lot of wings.

She cut her losses and moved out, double-time.

Children’s stories featured giant beetles, but she’d thought they were made up – like Jack Straw, or King Leo of Baltimore. Cautionary tales. Mind your mother or the bugs will gobble you up. She laughed through her hunger and plodded on.

The next morning brought the closest thing to a sunrise she'd seen since entering the Waste. Her shadow marched in front of her as she walked, elongated and alien, but when Lily tilted her face to the sky there was no warmth.

Any color showed stark against the grey dust, so she saw the columns long before she reached them. They reminded her of the mud castles she'd made as a child, only ten feet tall and vaguely rust-red.

Long ago she'd been transfixed by travelers' tales of once-people warped by rads, with sagging grey skin and blind white eyes. Too easy to imagine long-fingered mutie hands raising clay spires as monuments. Dying them with blood, maybe.

She kicked one and her boot burst in with a shower of red dust. Completely hollow. Like her stomach.

Lily plopped down and laid the scattergun across her lap. She pressed on the uneven bone of her shin as if she too was made of clay, and watched the wind erase the uneven line of her footprints.

--

The figure started out as a black dot on the horizon, then lengthened and stretched into the shape of a man.

Lily sneezed away dust, cursing as she scrambled behind the spires and checked the scattergun’s breech for the comforting sight of red plastic. Her hands shook; she hadn’t meant to linger so long. It had brought her no rest.

She peered through a gap, holding her breath as the masked figure reached her accidental camp. Goggles and a tattered black cap concealed everything not hidden by his mask. He took a knee, colorless coat brushing the dirt, and Lily mouthed a curse.

His head snapped up as she stepped into the open, tucking the gun into her shoulder. “Show me your hands! Now!”

He raised his hands and kept raising them, tugging down the dust mask and goggles.

When she was too young to know better, Lily had carried an injured dog home. One ear up, one down. Soft. It had licked her hand while she wrapped up its little broken leg.

Johanna had promptly snapped its neck. If they took in a stray, she’d said, they’d never be rid of it. In exchange for their kindness it would’ve killed the chickens and dug up the garden. They'd eaten well that night, and Lily had promised through her tears to remember the lesson.

Sorry mama, she thought. You were right.

74 wasn't fazed by the weapon. He didn’t try to stand, just laced his fingers behind his head and waited.

Lily's arms ached, but she forced the muzzle up as it wavered. “You got on the ferry.”

He nodded. She almost pulled the trigger.

“That was an invitation,” she said, “to explain yourself. Only one you’re gonna get.”

74 cleared his throat. “There was a blockade. They were searching boats.”

Lily remembered her grenade arcing through the air, the river carrying them away. Her heart jerked. “If you led that motherfucker straight to me, I swear I’ll—”

“I lost him,” 74 interjected. “Four days ago.”

She exhaled. The muzzle dipped again but she didn’t bother picking it up. Too heavy. Too tired. “Get up and walk back the way you came. Before I shoot you.”

74 blinked a few times, rapidly. His arms dropped. He stayed on his knees.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.” He didn’t move.

The gun swung down to her side. Lily leaned on it, digging the muzzle into the powdery dirt.

Johanna, her mother, had also taught her to be smart. To use what she was given. He wouldn’t die if she shot him; she’d just waste a shell. There was no point driving him off now that he’d demonstrated just how well he could track her, and…well. It hadn’t been all that bad. Having somebody around.

But mostly Lily was tired. “Get up.”

There was an echoing nothingness behind 74’s eyes. He pushed himself up and stood straight, hands at his sides.

She hefted the scattergun and leveled it at his chest. He waited patiently to die.

“I have conditions,” she said, and something happened to his face. Hard to tell what. “We aren’t friends. Don’t slow me down. Don’t touch me. Understand?”

It happened again; an almost pained grimace. Was he trying to smile?

“And don’t make that face anymore,” Lily said, forgetting to care about the gun. It rested heavily in the crook of her arm. “It’s all or nothing, 74.”

He paused. “That’s not my name.”

“What is it, then,” Lily sighed.

“Michael.”

That’s what he’d been calling himself with the caravan. She couldn’t match his face to the name, to any name. “Whatever. Do you agree to my terms?”

74 held out his hand, then took it back. “Where are we going.”

Lily wasn’t quite as skilled at schooling her face into stillness. “I told you back in Freeport: I’m going all the way.”