by Christine Warren, Marjorie Liu, Caitlin Kittredge, Jenna Maclaine
Secret histories, whispered a small voice in her mind.
Maggie went into the house and shut the door.
Her grandfather had been a junk man, but only because he had trouble throwing things away. Maggie had a similar problem, but she drew the line at dirty toothbrushes, used floss, underwear past its prime (though nowadays, with cloth at a premium, you would have had to go without it, if you got too picky), and other items that tended to accumulate mold or germs, or were just plain unsightly to behold. Her grandfather, bless him, had not been so discerning, and after he died, it had taken Maggie three years to clean out the house. The problem was twofold: Some things, no matter how disgusting, had sentimental value; and as for the things that could be tossed, there was no good place to put them, so they had to be burned, buried, or stored elsewhere.
The kitchen was clean, though. So was her bedroom. And now there was a much wider path that led through the house to the stairs, and even to the musty couch in the living room, which was only half-covered in books and old newspapers, and glossy magazines with pictures of places, things, and people that Maggie would never have believed or imagined had she not seen them for herself, on the page.
She fixed breakfast for Trace. Eggs were something she had plenty of—animals thrived under her care, unlike plants—and she had made a small business for herself on the side creating odd little toys for children, as well as fixing machinery, whenever she could. Enough to trade for butter and meat, and for some much-needed gardening help from several local teens whom Maggie had taught to read.
She went into the cellar to cut some ham for them both—a special treat—and by the time she returned to the kitchen, Trace was already there, boots off, washing her hands under the pump in the sink. Maggie was grateful that the crow had remained outside.
The old woman was quiet while she ate, and Maggie could not help but notice how her gaze roved from the door to the windows, and flicked back to her, again and again, as though—like the damn bird—she was taking her measure.
“What?” Maggie finally asked, sorely tempted to lick her plate.
Trace looked down at her own plate, pushed her thumb against a small shred of egg her fork could not pick up, and placed it in her mouth.
“Rumors. Rumors about men.” Uneasiness filled the old woman’s eyes. “A gang of men who travel from Enclave to Enclave, stealing women, sometimes men. Just a handful, here and there.”
“They take only people?”
“What food they can carry—but the living seem to take priority. And ’fore you ask, I don’t know where they go with ’em, if they go far at all.”
Maggie had read stories about this kind of thing in her books, and in magazines, too—stories about wars where lives were worth more in slavery and in death than in freedom. “You think the man who came here this morning is one of them?”
Trace watched her carefully, tugging the shark teeth hanging around her neck. “Been told they ride motorcycles. Old-time muscle machines. A friend of a friend saw ’em from a distance, out west ’round Oklahoma. He knows what a motorcycle looks like.”
And now so did Maggie. Chills rushed through her. She could certainly believe that Irdu might be a kidnapper, and a thief. Though he had not, in the end, hurt her. Or stolen her belongings. He had kept his word, in a rough manner.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Maggie said. “I’ve been trying to figure it ever since he left. Motorcycles take fuel. Only the government has access to that, and most solar cells aren’t good enough to power a vehicle. Not so that it moves faster than a horse or bicycle, anyway.”
“You trust what you saw, and I trust what I was told,” replied the old woman solemnly. “ ’Sides, you’re forgetting something. There is gasoline available. Lots of it.”
“No,” Maggie replied automatically. But as Trace’s meaning became clear, the very thing that Maggie had been trying not to consider reared its ugly, horrifying head. “You’re crazy.”
“It’s been long enough.”
“There are still bones there.”
“Viruses don’t live in bones,” Trace replied. “I don’t think.”
Maggie suddenly felt ill. “The government would have opened up the cities if it was safe.”
“There’s barely a government at all. And after almost twenty years of farting around and letting the forests grow in, and the infrastructure crumble, it would be easier, and cheaper, for ’em to start over somewhere else.” Trace leaned forward, drumming her knuckles on the table. “There’s gas there, Maggie. Gas in the old cities. Who knows what else?”
Maggie hardly heard the old woman. She had been only a child, but she had lost her parents to the hanta-bola pox, and most everyone knew what that was like: to lose someone, maybe everyone, and not in a good, clean way, but in the virus way, which had been spread by breathing and by touch—the virus penetrating into cells, removing skin with neat efficiency, coring people like apples until they flushed their guts and blood. No cure. No time. Death occurred in two days. And almost everyone had started dying at once.
Murder, survivors said. Terrorists.
But the scale of the crime still baffled, and haunted. Not just America had suffered, but everyone everywhere. Maggie still had old newspapers from those days, before they quit printing. Europe, Asia, South America, Africa—no one had been spared. And for folks who had survived, there was still famine and lawlessness, and other diseases, to contend with.
The idea that men had returned to the city forests, slipping through the lockdown barricades to make homes among the dead—possibly catching the disease, only to spread it, again—was horrifying.
The idea that one of those men had kissed her …
“No one’s doing anything?” she asked, wondering how much time she had before her breakfast reappeared upon the floor.
“No one is admitting anything,” replied Trace. “Duck their heads like turtles in a shell. Just you wait. It’ll happen here, too. No one wants to be responsible for causing a panic.”
“We should warn someone anyway.”
“No.” Trace shook her head, fingering her necklace. “Folks don’t believe the bad news until it hits ’em. And once it does, they’ll be looking to spread blame.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Maggie protested. “What’s right—”
“What’s right isn’t the same as what’s real,” interrupted the old woman tersely. “Even if you warn ’em, it’ll change nothing.”
Maggie didn’t say anything else but gritted her teeth and began to clear the table. Trace caught her wrist. “I just want you to be prepared, that’s all. But I guess you are now.”
The young woman nodded carefully, ill with unease. “More than one motorcycle, you said?”
“Listen for thunder and lions growling.” Trace smiled grimly. “You hear that on a clear day—any day—you head for the hills.”
But that, Maggie later discovered, was easier said than done.
THREE
The crow hung around for two weeks after Trace left. The old woman had a timetable, a set route of junkyards and Enclaves that needed someone who could haul away all those undesirable fixings that no one knew what to do with. Fools, Maggie’s grandfather had once said. A thing, even an old rundown thing, always had a purpose to it. And if a person waited long enough, they would eventually find out what that was.
If the crow had a purpose, he refused to share it with Maggie. Instead, she found herself working long hours in the workshop with that bird perched on chairs and shelves, or the edge of her cold flowerpot furnace, watching her, watching the meadow, watching the things she put together. She’d been bothered at first—a lot—but by the end of the first week, she had gotten used to the bird’s company, and by the end of the second, she had to admit that she would miss his sharp little face if he ever decided to take off and find more interesting company.
And she needed a friend now.
It was another clear blue morning when she packed her nylon backpac
k and headed into town. She rode her new bicycle—Trace’s surprise, hauled all the way up from Mississippi. It was a clever little thing the color of a robin’s egg, which generated its own electricity every time she pedaled. Not a motorcycle, but almost as fine, and Maggie could kick down the stands attached to its tires and ride it in place inside her workshop to charge her old reclaimed batteries. She had done so every morning and evening to make enough juice to hook up her granddaddy’s music box with its silver mirrored discs. She couldn’t play many songs, not for long, but it was something special to sit and savor voices that had not been heard for almost twenty years: Gladys Knight, Glen Campbell, Sting, and Vince Gill. She had never heard anything so pretty.
Maggie this morning had toys to trade: puppets made of metal and leather scrap, with wire strings attached to the arms and legs; and whirly-gig fans built from carefully cut fragments of tin sheeting that whistled like ghosts in the wind. She could feel them poking her spine as she rode her bicycle, but it was a good discomfort. She had made something; little somethings that might not be food or clothing but that would still be important to someone, somewhere.
The crow came with her into town. He flew above her head, chasing the breeze, silent as her own shadow while she pedaled down the old paved road and over the rolling hills still naked from winter. She passed farms, and was barked at in a friendly manner by both sheep dogs and small children, as she tried to enjoy the early sunlight and the scent of spring.
She tried, too, not to think about Trace alone on the long road, where men might be prowling. And she tried not to think about the motorcycle man and his frightening eyes and dangerous touch. But that was impossible.
Out on her bicycle, alone, all she could think of was that encounter. Night had become insufferable; her dreams, full of thunder and chrome, and faces, pale and wild as lightning, that passed through her mind: men, smiling; men, heads thrown back to pray to the night; men, with mouths filled only with darkness.
You waste more than you realize, Maggie would hear whispered in the shadows, and then she’d bury her head under the covers, trying not to listen as other voices murmured—voices she had drummed away as a child, and hidden deep. She had forgotten what it was like to hear things that others could not—nonsensical sounds, incomprehensible chattering, soft as the wind and the new buds of leaves bursting from the branches of the trees.
She had known when her parents died. Screamed and screamed, clawing at herself. Her granddaddy had been forced to tie her down. Trace had been there, too—the old woman sitting with her, two days straight. Maggie remembered, when she let herself. She could still feel the aching pull of her parents slipping away—and Trace, holding her back, keeping her from joining them.
She remembered what it felt like to die, and not be dead, and how Trace had breathed for her, breathed heat into her mouth, into her body, and made things better.
Or maybe that was her imagination. Holding both truths and lies, like the history she had spun for the world—a secret malleable thing, much of it fantasy—where humankind had traveled once in cars and planes, while in millennia past, flown upon the backs of dragons like storybooks claimed. Or the sphinx, somewhere in the world now stone, moving its slow thighs, in the words of Yeats, gazing upon the world with pitiless eyes.
Sunlight burned. By the time Maggie reached the old highway, she was not the only one on the road. Bicycles were everywhere, along with horse-drawn wagons and small buggies. She recognized all the faces. Folks were bundled up in patched pants and old ragged coats, or hand-knit sweaters fraying at the edges. Refugees had been assigned to different Enclaves by the government, or come to Olo on their own and been accepted by the town council. Maggie remembered playing with the new children her age, some of whom had not been able to speak English at the time.
Having familiar people around soothed Maggie’s nerves, just a little—though the closer she got to town, the more her heart ached and her belly hurt.
Dread, she named it. The same kind that she had felt climbing the stairs to her granddaddy’s bedroom, listening to his silence—after a week of constant coughing and fever—even after she had called his name, and knowing, knowing, what she would find. Knowing, and going to him anyway.
Just as she was going to town today.
Farmland began making way for clusters of homes, and Maggie heard a lone fiddle playing a mournful tune somewhere out of sight. Ahead, the crow landed on the road in front of her, and began cawing, urgently. He had never made a sound, not one that she had heard, but his voice was strident, and he hopped up and down, his wings flapping and his feathers ruffled until he was almost twice his normal size. Maggie stared into his glittering eyes, and her vision blurred so badly that she almost turned her bike over.
One of the men riding nearby aimed for the crow and tried to run it down—Otis Farlowe, his bicycle basket brimming with potatoes. The bird squawked impatiently and flew out of the way.
“I remember when my dad used to shoot those things,” grumbled the middle-aged farmer, slowing his bike to ride alongside Maggie. “Now we got no bullets to waste.”
She nodded, tight-lipped, and glanced up at the sky to search for the crow. He was nowhere in sight.
The road curved around a residential street filled with homes that had been white twenty years ago, but now were gray and battered; though the yards were neat, with not a thing out of place, and the children playing outside looked bright-eyed and freshly scrubbed. She tried to smile at them, but her stomach felt sick. All she could do was stare at the pavement directly ahead of her front tire, and stay upright.
Because of that, it took Maggie a moment to realize Otis had been talking to her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “what was that?”
Otis smiled, tugging down the brim of his ancient cap. “Head in the clouds, Maggie. World is gonna pass you by.”
And then he pointed up the road. “I was saying that something seems to be going on in town.”
Maggie looked. Main Street was in the distance, a narrow strip of brick buildings and wood-slate awnings covering sidewalks loaded with wares. This time of year, after a long winter, the pickings were limited to nonperishables traded from other Enclaves; or potatoes, cabbages, and jars of preserved fruits and vegetables. Most of the shops in town belonged to the Amish, who had done well during the outbreak—and done even better, afterwards. Partially because they knew how to survive without the old modern fixings, but mostly because they helped each other out.
Maggie could see many of them now, the women clothed in simple dresses and black shawls, while the men stood about in their work clothes: dark trousers, and dark blue and purple shirts, sleeves rolled up to their elbows. Wide-brimmed hats covered their heads. They, and others, stood at the side of the road, watching a man who watched them, in turn.
Just one man, sitting on a motorcycle.
Maggie stopped pedaling, stopped steering, stopped breathing. All she could see was that man. For a moment she thought it was Irdu, but then she saw that a blue flame had been painted against the side of the motorcycle, which made her look more closely at the man. His hair was also long and dark, but he wore faded black jeans instead of leather, and he had a dark feather knotted into a thin braid that hung past his thin face. Other feathers fluttered against his back, forming a long, draping cape, black as ink. Silver flashed at his throat. He wore no shirt, and his skin was so blindingly white, he would have appeared sickly had his body not rippled with lean, hard muscles. His dark eyes, his slow-burning gaze, roved over the crowd—and found Maggie in moments.
The man smiled faintly. Maggie’s heart lurched. Very far away, a crow cawed—a stark, bitter sound, cold and lonely—and the man looked away to stare with a sharp glance, into the sky. Maggie clung to the crow’s voice, to his angry despair, and found the strength to pedal her bicycle off the street, down a narrow lane between two old homes. No one paid attention. Everyone watched the man as though compelled—as if he was the only thing in
the world that existed. She felt it, too, but as with Irdu, she held her breath and stayed steady, strong.
The moment she was behind one of the buildings, with the man out of sight, Maggie slumped against the handlebars and gulped for air. Wings fluttered. She glanced up in time to see the crow swoop close, and managed not to flinch as it landed on her shoulder. The bird was heavier than she had expected, but comfortingly warm, and it stroked her hair with its beak for one brief moment, as if it, too, needed soothing.
“Mister Crow,” she whispered, forgetting for a moment that the bird was just a bird. “What just happened?”
The crow made a clicking sound, deep in its throat, and hopped from her shoulder to the ground. Maggie climbed off her bicycle, holding on to the handlebars for balance. Her knees were weak, but she forced herself to inch closer to the street, listening as a single voice floated, soft and insistent. The crow pecked at her ankle, and then snatched at the frayed hem of her old patched jeans, tugging backward. Maggie ignored him. She knew for a fact there was more than one of those men—just how many was the problem.
Maggie peered around the corner of the building. Edward Stoll, Amish patriarch and owner of Stoll’s General Store, was scratching his long grey beard as he watched the man on the motorcycle. “Stranger, you’ve been sitting there for some time now with nary a word. Think you might share your thoughts with the rest of us? We won’t bite,” he added, smiling faintly, though Maggie heard the tremor of concern in his voice.
He was not the only one who seemed unsettled. Otis stood nearby, his large arms folded over his chest, frowning. Other men, too, were gathered in clusters, trying to look strong, but coming up short against the robber man, who, in his stillness and silence, radiated a terrible natural menace that was, in its own way, utterly alluring. Maggie still felt the pull, and saw that the other women in the crowd did as well. Young and old, all of them staring in fear, but the kind of fear that kept the pulse fluttering high and sweet, with a breathlessness indistinguishable from wonder.
