Chapter 7: Day of the Locusts, Pt. 1

There was no time in the Wasteland.

There was walking, there were meals, there were half-awake intervals spent keeping watch, but there were no months. No seasons. They had been on the dust-choked flats forever. They had been climbing forever. Lily felt they should have long since died or reached the ceiling of the world.

Instead they snared lean rabbits and brought down sickly birds with the crossbow. They filled canteens with grey snow and filtered the melt through their dust-cloths, cleaned their weapons and made fires and took turns sleeping in the tent, which could’ve held both of them.

They saw the city three days before they reached its outskirts, following the road wearily down into a valley ringed by half-visible peaks, impossibly giant and distant. Its crumbling skyline was a mirage. Wind screamed through the gaping mouths of broken windows.

The boulevards had been wide and pleasant, lined with trees and garden boxes. Now dust gathered inside bombed-out storefronts and piles of trash lingered in the gutters.

They ate a cold supper in a dead park. Off to the left a big rusted sign with an arrow pointed at a set of stairs that marched down into the earth. A mound of rubble sealed off the bottom.

Lily stared at it while Michael rigged the tent between two petrified trees. Then she forced herself to stare at him instead, watching him tie a very professional hitch.

His hair had grown out, escaping from under the frayed hem of his watch cap in determined curls. It was an absurd waste for him to have hair like that.

Michael finished the last neat bowline before taking off his coat and folding it into a neat bundle. He stood and stretched like some cat, taking his awful time with it.

Lily moved into a crouch, pretending to tie her bootlace, studying him.

There.

His eyes darted sideways, his weight shifted onto the left foot. She slid backward in the sand to dodge his first attack, but her weakened leg buckled and she went down awkwardly, cursing.

“We’ll start again.” Michael extended his hand.

Lily tackled him wildly. He overbalanced and went down, lying flat on his back like she’d killed him. He almost looked pleased.

“Got you,” she said breathlessly, thumping him on the chest.

There was a brief scuffle. Lily lost him. She turned in a circle, blood singing in her ears, immediately on the offensive like they’d practiced.

He presented himself. She ducked under his arm and struck him between ribs and hip, satisfying even though he let her land the punch.

“Closed fist,” he chided. “You’re not taking this seriously.”

He put his back to her and picked up his coat.

“Hey!”

She tried to get the jump on him, but he threw the coat at her and knocked her sprawling. This time Lily fell correctly. She rolled, grabbing a little handful of sand; just in case.

"You fight dirty,” she complained.

Michael was on his way to her, almost-smiling, when Lily heard a crack like thin ice on a cold morning.

Before she could call out, the earth vanished with a sharp snap and she plummeted into the dark, landing hard.

Something crunched.

A hole of daylight gaped above her. Michael was a dim shape silhouetted against the iron sky. Her lungs felt like wet burlap sacks.

"Lily!" The shock of impact made her imagine fear in his voice.

She couldn’t remember him ever saying her name before, so it must be bad. What had snapped? Her legs? Please, no. But her toes moved, and then the rest, without the sharp, brutal pain of a broken bone.

Above her it was all glass panels, covered by dirt, weakened by cataclysm and time. Michael leaned head and shoulders over the hole she’d come down through, cracks webbing out under his hands and knees. "I'm coming down.”

Lily waved him back. "No! I'm fine, stay there!"

Another sharp snap froze him in place.

"We'll both get stuck." She struggled to sit. "Wait. I'll find a way."

Something crumbled beneath her and Lily stopped moving too, straining her eyes. Two waist-high platforms divided by rusting tracks wound off into the familiar twin voids of tunnel mouths.

Her memory filled in the close-packed bodies and crude shelters of the Undermarket, home to Delphi’s casteless waste. The smell of fear and sickness. Years passing in the dark like a fever dream while above them ran the clean and efficient Coalition machine, the engine of progress.

This was not Delphi. She would never see Delphi again.

Lily’s breath rushed out in a hiss as her eyes adjusted. Beneath the dust of centuries lay hundreds of brittle skeletons still clutching bags and parcels, shrouded in scraps of clothing. The ancient dead.

"Chems," Lily whispered. She sat up, holding her chest. Nothing broken. "Michael, toss me the lantern?"

He hesitated, but slid backwards out of sight. A moment later he returned, crawling on his stomach, and dropped her pack down to her. It pulverized a few skulls as it landed. The scattergun was there too.

Lily tried not to imagine the people crowding into this tunnel, the push and press of sweating, terrified bodies.

She turned on the lantern.

They’d surged towards the exit, and all the way up the stairs their bones lay in a frantic jumble.

Some of the skeletons were very small. Lily skirted the little skulls and miniature bones as she picked her way to the foot of the stairs, stepping over a larger skeleton curled around an infant-sized bundle of rags. A curl of brittle hair was still attached to the paper-thin scalp.

"I'm going up," she called over her shoulder, holding the lantern higher.

It was no use. The walkway was thick with bones, most of them lying in a jumbled heap at the foot of a massive steel door. They'd died clawing at it. Lily saw the faint marks of their desperate fingers.

"It's blocked," she shouted. "I'm going down the tracks to the next station!"

"It's not safe!”

Lily waved the scattergun at him. It was empty, but she didn't mention that. No point. This was the only option.

Shaking the lantern until it brightened, she clipped it to her belt to free both hands for the weapon's reassuring weight.

Faded markings stained the tunnel walls, abstract images and unreadable words glaring out of the past. One half-eroded poster showed a stylized sun with an angry face beneath a scrawl of yellow letters.

Further down, a woman with white teeth, straight hair, and smooth skin posed in her underclothes, holding a small glass bottle. Despite the storied excesses of the world Before she was gaunt. Still smiling. Surrounded by white flowers.

Lily rounded a bend and came face to face with a floor-to-ceiling mass of congealed red mud, like the hollow spires they'd passed on the surface. It blocked the entire tunnel. Sighing, she clubbed it with the scattergun, clearing a path.

Something was rattling now, echoing from the curved walls. She had time to reflect on the familiarity of it before a gleaming, chittering mass appeared in the hole she’d created, rushing, swarming.

Bugs. Beetles. Legs, wings, pincers, bodies—

Lily dropped, whipping her coat up over her head as they poured over her, clumsy and fast. Like the Undermarket rats. Little feet, biting teeth…she curled tighter and fought to breathe.

They were on her, all over her, blind and stupid with hunger. Searing pain tore through her forearm — one of them had her. Another got its legs snagged in her scarf.

Finally it let go. The scratching died away. She had bitten into her tongue to keep from screaming and her mouth tasted like an old coin.

The lantern had rolled away. Its clever accordian side was dented and the light inside flickered, but it showed her the oozing puncture well enough. She touched it with a fingertip and artillery burst behind her eyes.

She was going to die down in the dark, clawing toward the surface. Like the rest of them. And he would come down looking for her and find her body instead.

Lily pushed herself up with the scattergun and promptly collapsed, her scream echoing down the tunnel. With unsteady hands she rolled up the leg of her trousers and saw another bite in her calf, likewise swollen and oozing.

“On your feet,” she muttered blearily, clawing her way back up. Slumping against the wall. “Die on your feet.”

The lantern dimmed.

Lily forced her way through the remains of the hive with shaking hands, expecting all the time to hear them coming back, wings hissing, pincers clicking…

A new platform. Walls scorched. Corpses in charred clumps. An explosion had bowed the steel doors, leaving a narrow gap.

She squeezed through into the metro proper, falling to all fours and vomiting in front of a caged shop. Behind the bars swollen things that had been books rotted on sagging shelves. Her arm was too big and too hot. Her leg was nerveless.

The lantern flickered.

Fallen stone obstructed the stairs to the surface. A dry sob worked its way up from Lily's throat as she smashed the butt of her gun against the blockage.

The lantern died.

She beat at the rubble until a sliver of light pierced the tomb-blackness. Cool air trickled in as Lily widened the gap one stone at a time with hands she couldn’t feel. Sweat rolled down her face and stung her eyes. Someone was making a terrible sound.

The world drained away like sand in an hourglass. She crawled out from a sandblasted pile that reared up like the head of a great beast and staggered in a slow circle, seeking the lightest patch of sky. West. She had to go west. Always.

The sun was a faint red smear across the horizon by the time Lily limped back to the camp, stumbling doggedly over the blistered earth.

Michael waited over the hole, immobile as a statue. When he heard her coming his head snapped up; he was at her side in an instant, clasping her upper arms. “Are you all right? Lily?"

She tried to pull away from him, tried to pull out her canteen, but her nerveless fingers couldn't grasp it. Everything went prickly.

“M’fine,” she slurred. “Good."

Michael touched her cheek, then her forehead. She wanted to tell him not to do that, but her tongue wouldn’t fit in her mouth and he was rolling up her sleeve, wide-eyed.

Lily couldn’t tug her sleeve back down. It was too heavy. She was too heavy.

Her knees buckled. He caught her and lowered her to the ground, and she leaned on him gratefully. Much easier to breathe, down there.

Michael was talking. She tried to focus on him. Both of him. All three of him.

"…to the tent," one of his heads was saying. The middle one.

He pulled three canteens out of three packs and pressed them into her hand, where they became one canteen, as heavy as ten.

Her head fell into the crook of his arm as he helped her drink, and then he scooped her up easily and stood.

"No," Lily murmured.

He carried her into the tent anyway and laid her down. Were her legs gone? She tried to ask if she still had them, but he was digging through her things. Their things.

“Is it just your arm?”

She nodded, then shook her head. The leg of her pants was soaked through. He saw it and wiped his face and looked, for a moment, almost human. Frightened, maybe.

The medkit snapped open. Water they couldn't afford to waste darkened a cloth.

A blade glinted in Michael's hand and she recoiled, shaking her head. The knife. The knife—

He made a quick incision in her arm above the bite. Thick, sluggish blood flowed out and Lily screamed, sounds and words.

"I'm sorry," Michael said, as the pain faded to a dull roar. “Almost done.”

A damp cloth touched her face. Then there was nothing.