by Kali Wallace
Lucy knew she didn’t want to look inside. She knew it would be better to keep walking. But she splashed through the water to the car’s side, ignoring Belle’s curious glance, and leaned against the door to slide it open. The soft wood bent at the press of her shoulder and the rollers shrieked. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, and for that moment, but no longer, Lucy held her breath, a gasp caught tight and hot in her throat.
Round skulls and long bones and ribs in toppling arches littered the floor of the car, half-buried in thick black mud. Around them were scattered the smaller bones, fingers and feet and jaws in a chaotic mosaic of gray and white, barely visible in the darkness.
Belle leaned around Lucy’s side to peer into the car. If she was shocked, she hid it well. “What happened?”
Lucy swallowed around the ache in her throat and said, “I guess they got out before the quarantine. But it was too late. They were already sick.”
“They must have died really fast.”
“They did, toward the end,” Lucy said. She remembered feverish skin and hair dark with sweat, bloodshot eyes and rasping words. She closed her eyes, took a slow breath, opened them again.
Belle was too young to remember. There were few enough in the city who did, and fewer still willing to speak of it. Those final days were inevitably the first memories to go to traders: the crush of people at the station, billowing black smoke as the wharfs burned, parents shoving their children into overcrowded cars to send them away, screams and sobs as the doors slid shut, the shriek of train whistles and clammy chill of the fog, and the cold, gray silence that had settled over the city when they realized they were alone.
Thousands had fled by other routes. They broke through the barriers and trampled the fences and walked inland along cratered roads and abandoned tracks without knowing if there was anything to find across the interior. They pieced together rafts from burned and half-sunk boats to paddle into the ocean. The sea devoured the land acre by acre, and with the water came the traders, lurching and stinking like dead fish, trailing green and misshapen limbs, bloated with promises and hunger.
Lucy remembered. She was one of the few who did. She had been Belle’s age when the barriers went up, and she had never taken up a pen or charred bit of wood or pin pricked in her own blood to scribble away the memories.
“We should keep going,” Lucy said.
She slipped her hand into Belle’s and tugged her away. Overhead a sliver of moon and a few brief stars shone through the clouds. The train was short, only ten cars long, and they did not look inside any of the others. Beyond the engine, the tracks crossed damp, wave-rippled dunes dotted with clumps of grass, then abruptly disappeared into the black expanse of water. The waves tugged at the shore, rising and falling like exhausted breaths.
Lucy slowed her pace and listened.
There was the lap of the water, Belle’s quiet sniffles, the sucking squelch of their footsteps, and something else, a deep rumble, a noise Lucy felt in her chest and in her bones, so steady and low she thought at first she was imagining it. It was the sound of a train pulling away from the station, of the city’s crowded streets first thing in the morning, of a ferry chugging toward a dock. It had been years since she’d heard anything like it.
“What is that?” Belle asked.
Lucy squeezed her hand, a quick reassurance she didn’t expect Belle to believe. “Let’s find out.”
They walked along the edge of the ocean. To both sides the mist drifted around the bulky shadows of fallen buildings and abandoned boats. The sound grew louder, and as they crossed the dunes a building emerged from the fog, windowless and huge, half as long as a city block. The sea lapped at its sides; the building was half-drowned, one end sinking into the sand and surf. It was a factory, one of the hundreds that used to fill the land between the city and the sea. They had fallen silent years ago, the fish-packing plants and power stations, shipyards and one sprawling refinery, but this one was still running. The low hum ached in Lucy’s teeth.
The building had a wide door on one side, close to where the water lapped at its walls. Lucy leaned against the sharp metal edge, and the door slid open just a few inches before sticking in the mud. But it was enough for Lucy to slip through. Belle followed; her scarf caught on the rusted frame.
Lucy pressed her back against the shuddering metal wall. A heavy mist hung in the air, sickly sweet in odor, instantly slick on her skin. The building had one cavernous room, two stories high, illuminated by the diffuse green light of bulbs strung along the walls. A long machine snaked through the center of the factory: a twisting contraption of belts and spools, gears and pumps, pipes of every size meeting at valves and junctions. The machine was mostly metal, but there was wood worked into some components, carved stone and broken bricks in others, and flat belts of woven kelp and seaweed looped over pulleys. The whole thing shook and clanked; it ran, but poorly, and the building trembled.
At the seaward end of the building, there was a rusted metal vat partially submerged in seawater. Pipes fed into the top and at its base a single valve dripped steadily. A milky white fluid spread over the surface of the water like a pale, creeping mold.
“Serum,” Belle said.
She was squeezing Lucy’s hand so tight it hurt, but Lucy didn’t pull away, only nodded, not trusting herself to speak. The color, the smell of it was unmistakable. Small bottles and empty glass vials bobbed in the seawater, and with them were scraps of paper, the ink blotched and smudged, clumped together like dead leaves after rain.
Lucy took a few hesitant steps, her boots squelching through the thick mud that covered the floor. Seawater pooled in her footprints, shimmering and green. She stopped just short of the water’s edge. Her heart pounded painfully, and she fought the urge to turn and run.
There was a trader floating with the glass debris and bleeding pages.
Lucy watched for a few minutes, her hand twitching for her knife every time the waves lifted the creature, but it didn’t move. The trader was sunk low in the surf, long appendages of slimy, slippery green splayed around it, limp and lifeless. She hadn’t even known they could die.
Lucy tugged Belle away from the water and the dead creature. At the landward end of the factory, past the bulk of the machine, a towering pile of rubbish spilled through open doors. It was a collectors’ heap, the largest Lucy had ever seen, a teetering, haphazard pile of windowpanes with chipped white paint, rusted bicycle frames, clothing in moldering heaps, shoes with the laces trailing, deflated tires from automobiles, wooden crates with papered labels peeling from the sides.
“Who’s there?”
Lucy slipped and caught herself, set her foot down with a noisy splash. Her heart skipped and she pulled Belle closer to her. There was an old woman sitting on an empty collector’s cart beside the heap, her dark, damp clothes and ragged seaweed cloak blending well into the rubbish behind her. Her skin so gray and pale it was nearly translucent, her eyes milked over from years of serum addiction.
“I know you’re there,” the woman said. Her hands shook and her breath rattled in her chest. She said something in the collectors’ gurgling language, barely recognizable as words, then raised her voice and went on, “You can’t be here. They don’t let the warm ones come here.”
“What happened?” Lucy asked. Her throat felt so tight she struggled to breathe. “Where did they go?”
The old woman’s shoulders shook and milky tears trailed down her face. “You can’t be here.”
“I think it’s broken,” Belle said, barely a whisper. She pointed with her free hand. “Look.”
The machine was jammed. Jaws of welded scrap metal groaned but did not open and close, and debris spilled from the mouth, planks of wood with splintered ends, shattered shards of glass, a crushed plastic crate, parts of an engine tangled up in dark fabric, the detached door of an automobile.
There was something soft and white stuck between a wheel frame and a length of metal gutter. Lucy pried her hand free
of Belle’s grasp and stepped closer. She didn’t want to look, already knew what she would see: it was a hand, a collector’s hand with torn, milky-pink fingers.
The traders had never explained where the serum came from. Lucy remembered her father saying it tasted like the sea, salty and cool, like sunshine on sand and soft breezes, and she had believed him. But it had come from the city all along. The collectors picked the city apart piece by piece, and they brought it here. The traders bottled it up in little vials of murky white fluid, and brought it back.
Belle took a step closer, but Lucy pushed her away. The girl scowled and kicked at a broken crate, slanted a glare at the muttering old woman.
“Are they going to fix it?” she asked.
After a moment, Lucy said, “I don’t know if they can.”
But they would try. Lucy had no doubt. Perhaps not the traders, if they returned at all. But after another missed meeting, after another neighborhood went a few days without serum, others would leave the station and follow the tracks. They would come from the city and find the factory and fix the machine if they could, arrange a new system and ask a new price, and the serum would flow again. Lucy knew it with a cold, aching sense of inevitability. She could do it herself, with Esther’s help, with her knives and this rumbling machine. She could take over the trade and rule the rotting, drowning city, and feed serum to everybody who craved it until the last bright memory in the last clear mind faded away.
Lucy stepped over to the collectors’ heap and sorted through the junk until she found a long metal bar, almost too heavy to lift, and a garden hoe with most of its red handle intact. She shoved the hoe into Belle’s hands.
“Take this,” Lucy said, wavering with hesitation, with anger. She cleared her throat and raised her voice. “Help me break it.”
Belle started to say something, but she cut herself off. Her eyes were wide and dark, her skin tinted green in the factory light. She was so very young, and so wary, but Lucy didn’t let herself look away. Belle had never seen the streets filled with people and noise beneath the blinding reflection of glass windows on a hot summer’s day. She had never heard the racket of traffic and startled horns and the pulsing flow of crowds. She had never known anybody who did not live and fade and die by the memories they shed. She was too young to remember, but perhaps she understood.
“Help me break it,” Lucy said again.
She hefted the iron bar over her shoulder, high enough that she nearly overbalanced. She took three long strides toward the machine and swung at a mess of grinding gears and strained bands. The bar struck with a solid clang and pain burned in her hands, but she swung again and again until the gears came loose and the seaweed belts tore. The machine’s bolts and welds were rusted, weak, shaking and shedding flakes of iron with every blow. Lucy heard a shout and saw Belle jump onto the machine and scramble up high to hack at a tangled nest of tubes. The old woman was shouting too, unintelligible and babbling, but Lucy didn’t look to see what she was doing.
The machine shook violently and the noise was deafening, metal grinding against metal in groans and shrieks, but Lucy didn’t stop. Springs snapped and steam hissed, pipes cracked and belts whipped free, dozens of failures small and large. They hacked and pulled at the machine until pieces tumbled down, thundering on the floorboards and splashing in the mud, a rain of broken metal and wood and stone. Lucy’s arms burned and her throat was raw; she was shouting wordlessly, louder than she ever dared in the city’s silent streets. The serum-stink in the air stung her eyes and tears blurred her vision.
When she reached the end of the machine, her blood racing, her heart thudding, Lucy splashed through the cloudy seawater and jammed the iron bar into a cluster of gears. The fat metal teeth screeched and the machine quaked ominously.
Belle jumped down, ripping at seaweed belts as she fell, tumbled to her knees, and jumped up quickly. Lucy grabbed her hand, and they ran for the door. They raced away from the building and along the shore, slipping and skidding in the mud.
About halfway to the tracks, Lucy stopped and turned, bent over to catch her breath. Night was fading to a gray early morning, damp and bitterly cold. The noise within the windowless factory settled into sporadic clanks and crashes, and the seawater lapping at the outer walls calmed. The mist was clearing and high clouds raced inland across the stars.
Lucy brushed her damp hair back from her face, reached into her pocket to draw out the packet of pages. She looked at the memories in the predawn light. She wondered, not for the first time, why the traders craved the scribbled, ink-stained pages, the words smeared with tears and sweat.
Lucy tugged the end of Esther’s neat knot, let the string fall to the ground, and flung the memories toward the sea. They fluttered like dying moths onto the surf, the damp sand and salt grass.
A moment later, Belle hurled her own packet into the water. It splashed quietly, then sank. She pressed close to Lucy’s side, small and scared and no longer trying to hide it. She still held the hoe in one hand, its metal flat sunk in the mud.
In the distance, sparse ruins spotted the sea toward the horizon like the remains of a burned forest. Lucy had thought she might recognize something of the seaside, the colorful rooftops along the boardwalk or high curve of a roller coaster, the tall lampposts that had held banners and lights above the streets. But she didn’t even know where the shoreline had been before. She could not trust her sunlit memories of those summers long ago.
“People are going to be angry,” Belle said.
Lucy thought of Esther and Olaf waiting in their apartment, sleepless beneath their threadbare blankets, listening for her footsteps on the stairs.
She took Belle’s hand. “It will be okay,” she said.
They walked back to the tracks and turned toward the city. Dawn was coming in its slow, insidious way. They passed the train of skeletons and did not look inside. Lucy felt the cold in every muscle, and when she began to shiver she only walked faster, pulling Belle along behind her.
The red signal light came into view as the sun rose, and beyond it the station was a long shadow in the mist. The city was a row of broken teeth against the low, gray sky.
Copyright (C) 2012 by Kali Wallace
Art copyright (C) 2012 by Richard Anderson
