Lightning Child

by Hakok, R. A.

  When the pain subsides I try again, this time making my explorations gentler. I seem to be lying on a narrow metal ledge; if I brush away the snow I can feel the small, ridged diamonds of tread plate just beneath the surface. When I stretch a little farther my fingers close around metal. The upright of a guardrail? I wriggle towards it. The movement causes fresh agony from my side, making my head swim, but inch by inch I haul myself upright.

  I take a couple of shallow breaths then shuffle along the ledge, one hand gripping the rail, the other clutched to my ribs. After a few steps the walkway ends at what feels like a narrow metal door. I grope around until my fingers brush something that might be a handle. It sticks a little as I press down then turns. I lean my shoulder into it and stumble inside, pull it closed behind me.

  I reach into the pocket of my parka for the flashlight. I hesitate a moment then give the handle a couple of slow turns, just enough to get the bulb glowing. It shows me a small cabin, a cushioned seat mounted on a thick pedestal, a footrest at its base. Beyond a narrow windscreen, the glass dark with snow. I brave a few more turns of the windup. The bulb grows brighter, revealing a control panel, busy with levers, switches, dials. Engine Start, Brake Power, Throttle, Dynamic Grade. A plate riveted above says GM Electro-Motive Division and underneath La Grange, Illinois.

  Cass said she was bringing me to the railway line. I must be in the cab of a locomotive.

  I lean against the seat and gently unzip my parka. Each movement sends fresh bursts of pain down my side, but all things considered I’m in way better shape than I should be, considering I’ve just been shot.

  Twice.

  I remove a mitten and feel along my ribs on the side I was hit. When I hold my fingers up to the flashlight I expect them to come away sticky with blood, but somehow they’re dry. My spine feels cold, damp, but I’m beginning to think that might just be snowmelt.

  She was right behind me. How could she have missed?

  She couldn’t have, not from that range.

  She must have shoved me off the ledge, then fired Hicks’ pistol up into the air to convince Vince she’d done as she promised. Just my luck I found a freight train to break my fall.

  But why would she spare me?

  I think on that for a while, but can’t come up with a reason, other than the desire any human might have not to end the life of another.

  Except she’s not…

  I hush the voice before it can get going. Whatever her reasons, I can’t be here when the sun comes up. I look down at my boots. Without snowshoes I won’t be going very far, though. My first thought is to try and make it back up to the junkyard, steal back the ones Vince stole from me. It doesn’t take me long to realize that dog’s not for hunting. I don’t think I fell that far, but I doubt I have it in me to climb back up, not with my ribs the way they are. Vince and the others can see in the dark, too, and if they’re anything like Mags and the kid are now they won’t be much for sleeping. If one of them spots me I’ll be done for.

  I wind the flashlight and look around the tiny cab. A newspaper, yellow with age, lies folded beneath the windshield, the headline proclaiming the end of days. An old thermos on its side next to it. I move the beam along. A drop-down seat, a sidewall heater bolted to the wall, what looks like a locker between them. I squat in front of it, wincing at the protest from my busted ribs, and slide the latch. Inside there’s a pair of work gloves and a large metal flashlight, the end furred where the batteries have leaked. Next to it a single spiral-bound volume, thick with dog-eared pages. I reach in and lift it out. Across the front, printed in large letters under a GM logo: Locomotive Engineers Manual. I consider it for kindling, but it’s way too small and poorly ventilated in here for a fire, and cracking the door would defeat the purpose. I’m sorely tempted nonetheless. I might be out of the wind, but there’s little to the cab’s walls. It’s like an icebox in here.

  I take the items out, one by one, set them aside. In the darkness behind the beam finds an old hinge-top toolbox, the metal dented and scarred. My side hollers again as I reach for the handle. I slide it towards me as gently as I can, unsnap the catches and shine the flashlight inside. A motley collection of tools: screwdrivers, wrenches, a claw hammer. A socket set on a rust-spackled rail, half of the sockets missing. Underneath, a large roll of silver duct tape, a rattle-can of WD-40.

  I sit back on my heels, considering. I look over at the heater again. A length of hose runs from the underside, back towards the control panel. I reach over and work the end free. The rubber’s old, but when I flex it it doesn’t split.

  I reach into the toolbox, pull out one of the wrenches, hold it up for size.

  It might just work.

  *

  HE JERKS FROM SLEEP, eyes wide like saucers, blinking in his surroundings. In every direction unfamiliar metal, stretching and twisting and spiraling off into grainy shadow. He reaches for the mattress, clutching the musty fabric, waiting, heart pounding, for the memories to come back. One by one they return, slow at first, disjointed, then all in a rush.

  He lies there for a while, letting his breathing slow, then he sits up, shuffles himself over to the edge. It is quiet now, only the occasional wheezing gasp from the air purifiers to punctuate the silence. It was louder earlier, with all the machines running. Way louder. The roar from the old diesel generator had been deafening. He had fled to his perch and covered his ears with his hands, but it had done little good; there was no escaping it. The noise was a physical thing, a vibration he could feel in his chest, his teeth. The girl said she was sorry but they needed to clear the flooding. He watched as inch by inch the waters dropped, until at last beneath the oil-slicked surface you could make out the huge springs on which the silo rests. Once the pumps had done their work the girl shut the machine down, but it had taken a while for his ears to stop ringing.

  The hatch had creaked open shortly after. A voice had called down, asking if anything was wrong. It was the boy with the curly hair. He had sounded nervous. The girl had shouted back that she needed a few hours with the generator off, so she could tend to whatever had worked its way loose. He should go back up, use the time to get some sleep.

  He hears her now, working on it. He rests his chin on the guardrail and for a few minutes just stares out into the darkness, listening.

  He hears another sound, different, and he lifts his head. At first he thinks it is the girl, starting the machines up again. But he knows the noises they make – the shrill whine of the starter; the way the generator coughs before it catches; the labored whine from the bilge pumps. That wasn’t one of them.

  He tilts his head, trying to determine where it’s coming from. His ears are no longer ringing, but the sounds in this place are difficult and he’s not used to them yet. He’s pretty sure it’s not something the girl is doing; he doesn’t think it even came from down there. He looks up towards the hatch. It’s not one of the others either; they have yet to stir. It seemed almost like it came from within the walls. He picks himself up and scrabbles along the gangway. When he reaches the end he presses one ear to the metal and waits, holding his breath.

  Again, louder this time. A muffled crump, like an explosion, from somewhere on the other side of the curving wall, followed immediately by another, then a third. He feels a tickle in his nose, like he might sneeze, and when he looks up he sees a fine rain of dust, filtering through the grille above his head.

  He looks down. Beneath him the girl is still at work on one of the machines; she hasn’t heard it yet. He scampers back across the gangway and climbs the stairs, padding lightly up the worn tread plate, until he reaches the ladder that leads to the hatch. He clambers up the rungs and pushes the hatch up, poking his head through. He doesn’t like being up here, where the others are, but he’s pretty sure they are sleeping now.

  He stops, listening.

  Another sound: faint, intermittent, the ringing chime of metal striking metal. But uneven, not mechanical. And coming from somewhere else, somewhere
…

  He scurries back down the ladder and rejoins the stair, his hand skimming the railing as he descends. He continues, round and round, all the way to the bottom. He jumps off the last step, splashing through the last six inches of groundwater the pumps have yet to clear. On either side of him huge springs, each several feet in diameter. Even compressed by the weight of concrete and steel above the coiled steel is higher than he is tall.

  The girl has her back to him. She stands ankle deep in floodwater, working on one of the dampers, leaning her weight into a wrench. She turns at his approach, swings the wrench on to her shoulder. She wipes her forehead with the back of her hand and looks down.

  He points to his ear and then up, up. She looks at him for a moment, her brow furrowing. She cocks her head to one side and closes her eyes. She stays like that for a moment and then her expression changes. The wrench slips from her hands. She’s already at the stair before it hits the water.

  He catches up to her at the console. Her hands move over the switches, then she reaches underneath, transfers something to the pocket of her overalls. She takes off again, bounding up the steps, taking them two at a time. The machines that scrub the silo’s air draw one final wheezing breath, exhale, then fall silent.

  He follows on her heels, dropping to a crouch so he can keep up. At the dorms some of the others have emerged from their cells. They stand on the landing, looking up, their faces anxious. Others peek out from behind the narrow cell doors, blinking sleep from their eyes. They can hear it now too. The boy with the curly hair hurries across the gangway like he means to confront her, but she just shouts at him to get out of the way and he freezes, lets her pass.

  By the time they reach the upper levels she’s already several turns of the stair ahead of him. She continues up into the shaft without pausing. The sound is louder now; it echoes down towards them, reverberating through the long drop of darkness above.

  He reaches the gangway at the top of the stair, hurries along the narrow passageway, into the shower room beyond. At last he finds her, standing by the inner door. Sweat glistens her shoulders, but her breathing is calm, regular. She pauses a moment, listening, but there is only the same, persistent clanging. She takes hold of the handle. The wheel grumbles through a rotation, reaching the end of its travel with a heavy clunk. She pulls the door back and steps into the chamber.

  The clanging grows louder.

  He follows her into the airlock. At the outer door she pauses, as though steeling herself. She reaches up and slides the hatch back, leaning forward so she can see through the narrow slot.

  The clanging stops.

  Something in her face changes and she steps away from the door. She closes her eyes, one hand clenching into a fist at her side. After a long moment she takes a deep breath and returns to the slot, gesturing at whoever’s on the other side of the door to back up.

  He tugs at the leg of her overalls.

  ‘What is it?’

  She closes the hatch and squats down in front of him.

  ‘The man who was at Mount Weather, he’s found us. I have to go outside to talk to him.’

  Her eyes flick over his shoulder.

  ‘I need you to go back in there and stay out of sight. Whatever happens you don’t come out. Okay?’

  He is frightened now, but he nods anyway.

  She reaches into the pocket of her overalls, pulls out the handgun she collected from the console. She pulls back the slide, checks something above the grip, then tucks it into the back of her waistband. She turns to the outer door, spins the handle until the locks click, then pushes it back. A flurry of windblown snow swirls through the opening and then she steps through, pulling it closed behind her.

  *

  I STOP ON A BLUFF overlooking a place the map says might be Calvander. My right boot has worked itself loose again; it’ll need tending to before I can go any further.

  I lower myself into the snow and set to. The mittens make for clumsy work. I have to pull them off to remove the tape that’s frayed, but once that’s done it’s a quick job to rebind the boot at toe and heel. The other one still seems solid. I add a couple of strips anyway, then lean back to admire my handiwork.

  Not the prettiest, but with a little luck these repairs will see me back to Fearrington. It was Cass gave me the idea, or rather those tennis rackets she had jury-rigged into snowshoes. They looked like nine parts hope, one part Hail Mary, but they seemed to do the trick all the same. I figured with what was available to me in the locomotive’s cab I should be able to come up with something similar. Didn’t need to be anything fancy; whatever I could throw together only needed to get me back to the bunker.

  The rubber pipe I pulled from the sidewall heater, that would do for the base. I cut it into two lengths, both about as long as my leg, then bent each back on itself and taped the ends together until I had a pair of teardrop-shaped loops that looked about the right size. A couple of the smaller wrenches across the midsection of each, the ends bound in place, to give it some structure; a place for my boots to sit. Then a shedload more tape, wrapped tight around the frame I had constructed, and my makeshift snowshoes were starting to take shape. I considered working up bindings, just like the ones Cass had on hers, but in the end I figured there was no need for anything so fancy. They only needed to last me one trip; it’d be far easier just to stretch the tape over my boots before I set out.

  When I was done I propped my newly constructed footwear against the door and reached for the newspaper. I might not be able to use it for a fire, but the paper would at least provide some extra insulation to get me through the night. I began tearing pages from it, crumpling them up and stuffing them inside my parka. When I couldn’t fit anymore I pulled the zipper up as far as it would go, tightened the drawstrings on my hood, hugged my knees to my chest and sat there to wait for the dawn.

  I return the remains of the tape to my pocket and get to my feet, wincing at the pain from my busted ribs. I set out before the first gray smear of dawn had begun to trouble the horizon, but with my side the way it is and the stops I’ve been making to fix my footwear I certainly haven’t been setting any snowshoeing records. If I can hold to this pace, though, I reckon I can be back at Fearrington before the afternoon’s out.

  I lift a snowshoe high to clear a drift. Underneath my parka Hicks’ pistol shifts in its holster. It was sitting on the roof of the locomotive when I stepped outside; Cass must have tossed it down after she was done emptying it. My backpack’s gone, however, which means the only ammunition I have left for it is what’s tucked into the gun belt’s loops, less than a dozen shells all told.

  My ribs ache with every breath. I have no food, not even a canteen. And when I get back to the bunker I’ll have to come clean to the Juvies: admit to the lies I told about our food and break the news that we’ll be leaving again, not even a week after we arrived.

  But it doesn’t matter, any of it.

  Behind the mask I feel the corners of my mouth pull upwards into a smile.

  I can scarcely believe my luck.

  I don’t have to go back to The Greenbrier. I don’t have to convince Gilbey to give me any of her medicine, and I don’t have to trade Starkly’s inmates for it. Mags and the kid, they don’t need it.

  They never have.

  I think back to the newspaper reports I used to collect, when I was out scavenging with Marv. Among them was an interview with a scientist, one of those tasked with studying the virus, in the hope of coming up with a cure. The world had come to know ferro as a weapon, she said, something that had been designed to kill. But what she’d seen didn’t support that theory; the way it worked was just too complicated for that to be its purpose. She reckoned those that had become infected, it was like the virus meant to rebuild them, on the inside, to replace their internal wiring with its own.

  Problem was the circuits the virus meant us to have were way faster, and our bodies had never been designed for that kind of speed. Most people who got infected s
imply didn’t survive. Those few that did became something else, a transformation you’d be hard pressed to consider an improvement.

  Except it didn’t have to go that way - Vince and Cass and the others from the junkyard are the proof of it. If the virus got interrupted before it overwhelmed you, before you turned, there’s a chance you could become something else.

  Something better.

  Faster.

  Stronger.

  Getting Mags and the kid back to Eden and into the scanner, it must have done that for them. I don’t understand how exactly, but that doesn’t matter now. Once the Juvies understand they’ll stop being afraid. We can all return to Mount Weather together.

  I pick up the pace, ignoring the protests from my side. There’s already several weeks’ worth of rations in the airlock; it won’t take long to add enough to that for the journey back. We can be on the road within a couple of days, and safely back inside the mountain long before the storms arrive.

  *

  THE HANDLE COMPLETES ITS ROTATION and comes to a jerky halt. He stares at the metal door, undecided. The man with the gray eyes is dangerous, he knows that; the girl shouldn’t be out there alone with him. He hesitates a moment longer and then steps into the airlock, crossing quickly to the outer door. The slot is too high, so he drags a box of cans over from the stacks that line the wall and steps onto it. He has to go up on tiptoe, but now he can see.

  The girl is standing in front of the door, her back to him. A little way beyond the dangerous man waits, his arms held out from his sides. He’s holding something in one hand. The glass is thick, rimed with ice, so it’s hard to tell, but it doesn’t look like a gun. At his side is a boy he also recognizes, from that night inside the mountain. He stares at the girl through strands of lank brown hair. His nose looks funny, like what the girl did to it, it didn’t set straight. A lazy grin plays across his lips. Three others kneel in the snow in front of him, their heads down, their hands behind their backs. The two on either side he knows immediately; it’s the boy with the dark skin and the other one, the one who goes outside with him to guard the silo. There’s a third figure between them, a bag over his head. The plastic blurs his features, but he thinks he recognizes him. It’s one of the two large boys from the first place inside the mountain they visited, the place that had the machine, the one that fixed him. He can’t tell which of them it might be, however, because those boys were difficult to tell apart.