Fragments

by Dan Wells

  PART 3

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Kira and her companions lost most of their gear in the river: Samm’s rifle, Afa’s radio, and almost all their food. Afa held on to his backpack, but the documents inside were soaked and useless, the paper disintegrating and the ink running hopelessly. His screen, thankfully, survived the trip, but the Tokamin to power it had washed away. Kira knew that this was potentially the most devastating loss, but it wasn’t the one that made her saddest. That was Heron’s horse, Dug, who’d broken both front legs in the crash. He’d survived, but all he could do was scream in pain and fear, his breath frantic and his mouth flecked in foam. Samm had ended his misery with a bullet.

  They kept moving as soon as they recovered enough to do so, Samm and Heron and Kira taking turns on Buddy and Bobo while Afa, still wounded and nearly delirious, had to be tied into Oddjob’s saddle to keep from falling off. Kira was convinced that his leg was infected, and they raided every pharmacy they passed, trying to replace their lost meds. As they traveled Kira was surprised at her ability to keep up with the others, matching not only the horses’ pace, but their stamina as well. She had always known she was strong, and chalked it up to a lifetime of bitter survival—she had to work for everything she got, and that had made her physically fit—but she realized now that it was more than that. She could match the Partials stride for stride, mile for mile. It was a boon, but it disturbed her to learn it. Another piece of evidence that deep down inside, she was profoundly inhuman.

  Their path took them north a few miles, back up past the river to Highway 34, and on this they struck out west. The land there was more of what they’d passed on the east side of the river, flat prairies as far as the eye could see, dotted here and there by stands of trees or dark lines of scrub and underbrush, marking a gully or a ditch or an old homestead. Kira thought it was pretty, especially when the sun began to set and the entire scene, both earth and sky, lit up in fierce reds and yellows and oranges. She looked at Samm, the beauty of the scene too much not to share with somebody, but his eyes were dark, and his face morose. She angled toward him and caught his attention with a nod.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What? Nothing.”

  “Samm.”

  He looked at her, then out at the glowing sunset. “It’s just . . . this.”

  Kira followed his gaze. “It’s gorgeous.”

  “It is,” said Samm. “But it’s also . . . I was stationed here, or I guess I just traveled through here, during the revolution. It was . . .” He stopped again, as if the memory was painful. “You know how back home, in the east, everything’s so broken, and run-down, and the buildings are all in ruins and overgrown with kudzu and weeds and everything looks . . . old? We’re surrounded, every minute of our lives, by the evidence of what we’ve done, what we’ve destroyed. But out here . . .” He paused again. “Look around. There’s not a house for miles, just a flat road that’s still in pretty good condition. It’s as if the war never happened.”

  “So you miss the reminders of destruction?” asked Kira.

  “It’s not that,” said Samm, “it’s just . . . I used to think the world was worse for what we’ve done, both our species, but out here I don’t think the world even cares who we are. Or were. We came and went, and life goes on, and the land that was always here before us will still be here after we’re dead and gone. Birds will still fly. Rain will still fall. The world didn’t end, it just . . . reset.”

  Kira fell silent, thinking about his words. They seemed so pure, in a way, so unexpected from the Samm she thought she knew. He was a soldier, a fighter, a stoic wall, and yet here was a softer side, an almost poetic side, that she’d never known was there. She cast a long look at him as they rode: He looked eighteen, as all Partial infantry did, but he’d been alive for nineteen years. He’d been eighteen years old for nineteen years. But he’d started life as an eighteen-year-old, so did that make him . . . thirty-seven? The thought twisted her brain into knots, trying to figure out how old he really was inside. How he thought of himself, and how he thought of her.

  There was that thought again, and she growled, shaking her head as if she could flick the thought away like water flying from her hair. What does Samm think of me? What do I think of Samm? She told herself it didn’t matter, that they had more important things to worry about, but her heart didn’t seem to care. She told herself there was no point trying to decipher their relationship, because she didn’t even know what she wanted the relationship to be and therefore had no frame of reference. Her heart ignored all her reasoning. Her mind worked furiously on its own, thinking about who Samm was, about what he was, about where he came from and what he wanted and how Kira, the girl who kept risking his life, might fit into it. He talked about the world renewing itself, and all she could think about was being in that world together. It was the same talk she’d had with Marcus a hundred times, and she’d always yearned for something more. With Samm, though . . .

  No. That’s not why I’m here. That’s not what I’m doing. Thinking about a future with Samm is a meaningless exercise when he’s just going to die in a year because of the Partial expiration date. Find the answers. Solve the problem. You don’t get a life until you make one worth living.

  She rode on and watched the sun sink, watched the red sky turn pink, and then blue, and then the richest dark purple she’d ever seen. She watched the stars come out and shine until they seemed to light up the entire prairie. They camped in an open field, roasting rabbits Heron caught with a snare, and Kira closed her eyes and pretended that the world had never ended at all, that it was just beginning, that when she woke up in the morning the entire world would be like this spot: healed and whole, unscarred by human interference or Partial rebellion or any sign of civilization. She fell asleep and dreamed of darkness.

  The next day they saw their first poisoned tree.

  The wind was changing, the strong easterly winds off the Great Lakes slowly replaced, more and more each mile they traveled, by southern winds up from the Gulf of Mexico. It hadn’t gotten bad yet, but this twisted, stunted, stark-white tree was the first sign that the easy days were behind them. They were heading into the toxic wasteland.

  The second day she smelled it—just a whiff, as a short tendril of wind brought it past her nose—the sour, almost metallic smell of the poisoned air, like a mix of sulfur and smoke and ozone. Just a hint and it was gone. The day after that she woke up to the smell, and it lasted most of the day, and here and there more bleached-white trees stood like haunting skeletons in the scattered groves by the side of the road. The grass that clung to the lees of the fence posts was paler now, more scraggly and desperate, and each day it grew worse. The next city they reached was a lonely place called Ottumwa, and in it they found the streets and walls and roofs all streaked with chemical residue, as if the runoff from the rain itself was stringent and deadly. A river cut through the center of town, not nearly as big as the Mississippi, but by extension, not blessed with impressive bridges. They had all fallen, whether to ancient sabotage or relentless weather Kira couldn’t say. The water, at least, looked fresh, running down from the north where the land was cleaner. They stopped there for a few hours, scouring the ramshackle stores and restaurants for any meds they could find, and any cans of food that looked like they might still be good. Heron was a capable hunter, but now that they’d entered the wasteland it would likely no longer be safe to eat anything she caught. Kira checked Afa’s wound again, no worse yet no better than it had been since the shipwreck, and murmured soothing reassurances in his ear.

  “We’re going to cross the river now,” she said softly, dribbling some of the last of their fresh water over the bullet hole in his leg. “We’re going to swim, but it’s nothing like the last one. It will be easy.”

  “We’ll ruin the radio,” said Afa, his eyes half-focused through the blend of pain and painkillers. “We can’t get it wet or we’ll ruin it.”

  “We’ve already lo
st the radio,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “We can find a new one.”

  “We will,” she said calmly, slathering the wound in Neosporin. “After we cross the river.”

  “I don’t want to cross the river, we’ll crash our boat again.” And so they went, round in circles while Kira wrapped his wound in tight bandages and then covered it with plastic bags and duct tape, doing everything she could to keep it waterproof. She finished and walked to Samm.

  “He’s not even aware of where we are,” she said. “We have no business taking him any farther—we have no right to do it.”

  “We can’t just leave him—”

  “I know we can’t just leave him,” she snapped, then softened her voice and looked away. “I know we’re doing everything we can for him, I just don’t like it. When ‘everything we can do to help him’ involves ‘dragging him through a poisoned wasteland,’ there’s something intensely wrong with the decisions that got us here.”

  “What would you have done differently?”

  Kira shot him a quick glare, annoyed by his relentless practicality, but she shook her head and conceded defeat. “Nothing, I guess, except maybe not getting attacked in the data center. And it’s not like we had any control over that. I don’t like having to put him through this now any more than I liked having to bring him in the first place, but we can’t do this without him, and he can’t survive without us. I just . . .” She looked at Samm, searching his face for some kind of sympathy. “I just feel bad for him. Do you?”

  “I do,” he said, nodding. “I can’t help it.”

  Kira smirked and looked across the river. “You’d think they would have built their super-soldiers without any feelings at all, to make them better at . . . killing, I guess. War.”

  “They actually did the exact opposite,” said Samm. Kira looked at him quizzically. “You didn’t know?” he asked. “It was one of the earliest design laws that led ParaGen to create military-grade BioSynths. Afa has a copy of the UN resolution in his backpack, though I doubt you can read it at this point. They’d had some problems with automated drone soldiers and vehicles making decisions of . . . questionable morality in the field, and the only companies from there that could get contracts for autonomous military units were biotechnology firms that could create weapons with a human emotional response.”

  Kira nodded. “I guess that makes sense. I mean, I’ve always felt completely human, emotionally, so . . .” She shrugged, not knowing how to finish her thought. She paused, then frowned and looked back at him. “If you—we—were designed to know right from wrong and whatever, it seems like that would make us less likely to cross the line in battle.”

  “They taught us right from wrong, and then put us into an incredibly wrong situation,” said Samm. “The rebellion was the most human of all our actions, I think. You have to understand—think about your own life, as the best example. You’re completely driven, at every moment, to do what’s right—you see people in trouble and you have to help them. You had to help me, even though everyone, including you, thought I was the irredeemable enemy. We weren’t just designed with a conscience, Kira, we were designed with an overactive one, a heightened sense of empathy that would kick in to save lives and right wrongs and help the downtrodden. And then we became the downtrodden, and how else were we supposed to react?”

  Kira nodded again, but as the implications dawned on her, she turned to stare at him in shock. “They gave you an acute empathy response, and then they sent you into war?”

  Samm looked away, staring across the river. “Not really any different from having humans fight. Which was, I suppose, the point.”

  Heron walked up and dropped a pack of supplies on the ground between them. “This is the last of it—canned chicken and tuna, freeze-dried vegetables, and a new water purifier. It was still sealed, and the filter looks pristine.”

  “Perfect,” said Samm. “Time to go.”

  They shoved their packs into plastic garbage bags from the grocery store, double and triple thick for maximum protection, and used more duct tape to seal it all as tightly as they could. They lifted Afa back into Oddjob’s saddle, tied him down, and loaded their gear onto Buddy and Bobo’s backs. The water was cold, but relatively slow, and the crossing was blessedly uneventful. The grass on the far shore was green and healthy, nourished by the clean river, but barely twenty feet up the bank they found more yellow, sickly weeds. The buildings on this side were as scoured by the chemicals as the buildings behind them. Kira checked Afa’s waterproofed wrapping, determined that it was still sealed, and decided to leave it for now.

  The clouds were gathering, and Kira worried about rain. They made it a couple of hours out of town, still on Highway 34, when the first drop fell.

  It hissed against the pavement.

  It was Kira’s turn to walk, and she bent down to feel the heat coming off the asphalt. There was none. It was getting toward evening, and the overcast day had kept the ground relatively cool. Another drop fell and hissed, as if burning at the contact. “It’s not hot,” she said, straightening up. “The hiss isn’t from steam.”

  Another drop fell, then another.

  “It’s not steam,” said Heron, “it’s acid.”

  A raindrop landed on Oddjob, and she whinnied in pain. More drops were falling now, and Kira felt a sharp burn on her arm. The drop of rain had left a small red mark, and the pain only increased as she looked at it. She shook her head and looked at the sky. “Those clouds came from the south, didn’t they?”

  “Run!” shouted Samm, and grabbed Oddjob’s reins. Afa was screaming in pain and terror and clutching his sodden backpack. Kira looked around for her jacket, but she had taken it off to cross the river—it, along with everything they owned, was still sealed in the plastics bags and loaded on the horses. She grabbed Bobo and raced after Samm, pulling the horse behind her and trying to maintain control of him as the acid rained down and scaled his head and flanks. Heron ran past with Buddy in tow, and Kira followed as quickly as she could. The rain was heavier now, and Kira felt the acid on her arms and face, itchy and raw after only seconds. She reached back with her free hand and pulled loose her ponytail, shaking her long hair free until it formed a kind of hood protecting her ears and shoulders. She pulled some in front of her face, as well, terrified that she would get some of the scalding rain in her eyes, and fumbled forward through the limited visibility.

  Samm had seen a farmhouse a ways off the road, and he was trying to force his way past the barbed-wire fence on the edge of the field while Oddjob tugged madly on the reins, screaming to escape the painful downpour. Heron reached them and pushed him aside, handing him the reins of her own horse; Kira saw that she’d done the same with her hair as Kira had, but Samm had no such luxury, and his face was streaked with long red welts. His eyes were bloodshot and puffy. Heron pulled out a knife in each hand and cut the wires in a vicious flurry, snapping all four and opening a hole in the fence. Kira rushed through the opening with Bobo, grabbing Buddy’s reins as she passed. Heron followed with Oddjob and Afa, and Samm caught up with Kira and tried to grab Buddy’s reins.

  “Let me help!” he shouted. “You can’t control them both!”

  The horses were bucking madly, but Kira kept an iron grip on the reins and pushed Samm away with her foot. “Get yourself out of the rain! You’ll go blind!”

  “I’m not leaving you out here!”

  “Get that house open so we can get inside!” she shouted, pushing him again, and after a moment he turned and sprinted toward the building, stumbling in the fallow field. Kira gritted her teeth, wondering how he could even see, and pulled the horses as hard as she could, using the leverage of one to keep the other in line, and hoping her shoulders would survive the strain. After a short struggle they seemed to realize that she was urging them to run, and in the open field they let loose, tucking their heads and galloping at top speed for the farmhouse, jerking Kira off her feet and dragging her forward. The
slack in the reins pulled her toward Buddy’s pounding hooves, and she let go and tumbled to a stop in the churning poison mud. The horses raced toward the house, neck and neck, and Kira surged to her feet and followed, realizing as she ran that she was yelling, half pain and half war cry.

  Kira reached the house just as Samm and Heron were catching the horses, and she stumbled through the door in agony. The front room held a couch and an easy chair, each with a skeleton still staring at an old TV on the wall. Every inch of Kira’s body seemed scalded by the acid, and she looked down to see that it had already eaten a hole in her shirt. She pulled the shirt off in a flurry, seeing half a dozen more holes in the back, and threw it across the room; Samm and Heron were inside now as well, slamming the door behind them to keep the horses from escaping back into the rain. The horses were terrified, still bucking and squealing and destroying everything in the room—the TV, the furniture, even the skeletons were trampled madly underfoot. Kira tried to reach Afa, still tied to Oddjob’s saddle, but she couldn’t get close. Heron crept around the perimeter of the room with Samm in tow, his face red and his eyes squeezed shut, dashing forward when the horses left an opening, and rearing back when they came too close. When she reached Kira, Kira too grabbed Samm and pulled him through the back door into the kitchen, away from the flying hooves. Kira could hear the sizzle of acid on their clothes and ripped Samm’s shirt away from his chest; it parted like wet paper, already half consumed by the acid, and she threw it aside. Heron was stripping as well, and the pile of clothes smoked in the corner as the acid consumed them. Their skin was mottled with throbbing red sores. Samm’s eyes were still shut tight, and he fumbled helplessly with his belt; Kira helped undo them, then pulled off her own. Soon all three of them stood in their underwear, gasping for breath, trying to think what to do next as the horses railed madly in the living room.