by Jake Marley
“Are those directions?”
“They’re parts of a story I’ve been told.”
“Stories can lie,” Thursday said. “You have no map?”
“I have no map,” she confirmed. Her scarred lips crinkled in a smile. “That’s why I need you.”
Thursday swiped a hand over his mouth. “In that case, I’d appreciate the company.” The muscle in his jaw jumped again. “If you can get me north, I’ll find a way to teach you.”
Queen Mary suddenly spoke, much louder, startling them both. “Very good! Very, very good.” She cackled like a madwoman, then leaned over the table, her unfocused eyes not only lucid now, but boring into Thursday’s own. “Now, tell me boy . . . can you drive?”
Thursday wasn’t sure he heard her correctly. “Ma’am?”
~~~
It took time to get the caravan ready. The mechanics never seemed to stop, laughing and whistling and hauling large pieces of chrome machinery into the dead, rusting hulls of junkyard cars. The centipede beasts of metal and rust were tied together end to end by thick chains and cables. When five or six cars were strung together the mechanics inserted thick metal pipes into portholes on the sides of each car and they pushed the cars out of the aquarium’s back courtyard onto the wide road outside. They never started the engines, but there was always a man behind the wheel, steering the cars into place.
That night Thursday ate better than he had in weeks, drank his fill of flat, boiled water, and regained his strength. He wanted to be moving on, knew he had to leave as soon as possible, but he was in unfamiliar territory and believed Queen Mary and Peligra that he’d have a nasty time trying to go north on his own.
Better the devils you know, he thought.
Peligra studied his maps, and Thursday watched her as she sounded out the words and traced the landmarks he’d recorded.
He said, “I thought you were Death, back there on the beach, come to collect me.”
Peligra didn’t laugh with him. Instead she nodded solemnly. “I am Death. We all are.” She tapped her mask, indicating her and the other women like her, the women on the watch. “We are the Muertas.”
Thursday didn’t know what to say to that. He heard the mechanics heaving another centipede out of the courtyard—they had five of them ready now.
“What’re they going to do with those cars?”
Peligra tapped her fingers on the pages of his book. “Queen Mary needs to keep her promise to her brother, and it’s a long way to Castaic.”
“I get it. Promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep. To paraphrase.”
“You’re going to ride with us. Lead car. Are you a fighter?”
“I was taught to protect what was mine.”
“And you’ve killed?”
“When I’ve had to.”
“That’s good. You may have to again.”
“Other families, familias, who want your cars?”
“No, not that. Everyone fears the cars. Queen Mary told us the stories, about roads that connected all of us, but were always crowded, always slow, and how the people from here tried to run and were torn apart. Millions died in the swarms. The cars were junked and abandoned. Wrecked and filled with the rotting dead. They don’t want the cars.”
“So we’re protecting something?”
“Of course.” Behind her mask, her eyes squinted, and Thursday could almost hear the smile in her voice. “I’ll protect you, and you’re protecting me.”
~~~
Queen Mary found Thursday watching the final preparations. She sat beside him, sighing like a deflated balloon. Those sores on her skin seemed to be worse than before, and it took all the effort he had not to scoot away from her.
“I’ve listened to the gods and they tell me you speak truths, but if you harm Peligra Bruja I’ll have them on you and they shall rip you apart.”
“Your gods sound intense, ma’am.”
She held up her hands, fingers splayed. “Oh, they are.”
Those black marks embedded in her skin started moving, crawling over her fingertips.
He understood. The nanoswarm was eating into her.
Thursday flinched away from her, but the old woman only laughed and shook her head. “Oh, my boy, you have nothing to fear from them. Nobody else listens to them, but I do. I understand them. I believe in them.”
“If they’re so close, I have to tell the others. We can’t start those engines. We’ll all die.”
Her yellow grin again. Her bright eyes in that shrunken face. “No. No, I’ve spoken with them, and tomorrow the caravan will ride and the swarm will let it be. I’ve spent decades feeding the swarm, befriending them. Engines and flesh. Sacrifices to my small gods. We’ve come to an understanding. There’s a word I learned so many years ago, as a young girl. Symbiosis. Do you know it?”
“I’ve read the word,” Thursday said.
“It means we work together. This is important to me, and they understand. They will let us start the engines, and they’ll let us pass.”
“You’re willing to lose everything if you’re wrong?”
“I am not wrong. I know this will work, because they’ve told me.”
Again, she held her fingers to her ears and her eyes became dreamy and looked away, as if she heard the call of angels instead of the tiny, deadly hum of the nanoswarm.
“Besides,” she said, “we all get our time.”
~~~
Just before dawn, the mechanics used the metal posts to line the cars down a wide road that Peligra called PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway. Thursday walked beside Peligra, hitching his rucksack, and saw old restaurants, apartments, strip malls, gas stations. The invaders had left most of the buildings intact, but rioters and looters had taken it upon themselves to do a lot of damage. Whatever had happened on this road so long ago, it wasn’t a congregation of humanity banding together to defend themselves. This had been chaos and selfish destruction, pure and simple.
The sky grayed, and Thursday could taste the morning. Salt, sweat, anticipation. The mechanics were all grinning as they passed around baskets filled with warm tortillas wrapped around eggs and peppers and beans. Thursday took one and ate greedily, filling his stomach so he’d have enough energy for what came next. He could almost convince himself he wasn’t still sick. That he wasn’t dying.
Peligra stationed him on the platform built atop the back of the lead car. The caravan behind them was a string of cars that trailed half a mile back. More of the Muertas ran to the vehicles armed with their salvaged, jagged spears. There were no flame throwers, no bows, no crossbows, no guns.
“This is insanity,” he said. “We can’t start the engines or the swarms will kill us all.”
Peligra lifted her mask and rubbed the last remnants of sleep from her eyes. Her scarred mouth twisted into a smile. “Queen Mary knows the swarms. She will keep us safe.”
“Have there been many of these caravans?”
“Of course not. Years have gone into this.”
A mechanic with broad shoulders and wild black hair grinned and jumped over the door frame into the pilot’s seat of the lead car. He had a key clutched in a raised fist. From their wooden platform over the back seat, Peligra leaned forward and kissed the key before pulling her skull mask back down to cover her face.
“And you think there’s any chance you’ll ever make it back?”
“The aquarium is my birthright. And the ship is my destiny. I will return,” she said fiercely, “and I’ll have my map with me.”
Thursday tightened the straps on his pack. He wanted a weapon, and suddenly missed his crossbow. The Muertas were melee fighters, and all moved with the same confident grace as Peligra.
Behind them, each car had a driver, a Muerta, and other mechanics who were tied to the platform structures by long ropes. They crawled over dashboards and right into the exposed engines, giving everything another once-over before the sun rose.
The road ahead was straight and wide, cleared of br
oken wreckage. Tall palms swayed in the morning breeze, rustling shaggy leaves high, high over head.
“Promises to keep,” he said. “For both of us.”
Peligra stood on the platform and raised her arm. Behind her, each Muerta did the same as a response. The air thickened with tension, preparation, anxiety. Thursday looked back and saw each skull-faced woman with a fist raised in the air and all the mad, grinning faces of the mechanics perched along the platforms, on the engines, gripping the rails the way Thursday himself was doing.
There were cargo cars tied in the center of the centipedes. Barrels of fuel, of water, of supplies. Queen Mary’s promises. Items, Thursday knew, that would be worth killing for to other familias.
“Are we really that likely to be attacked?” He asked, but he already knew the answer.
“Oh, most definitely. The Saint de España has followers everywhere, and they covet what we have. But we’ll be ready, yes?”
What had she said before? Scavengers, killers, cannibals.
Thursday really missed his crossbow.
Peligra screamed something, and it was answered by every man and woman in the caravan but Thursday. Then the car beneath them bucked and jounced and roared to life as the key was turned in the engine. It was deafening, terrifying, and Thursday ducked his head defensively. There was a rumble, a throb, an earthquake beneath him. The mechanics had been very, very good at their jobs, and had just brought the dead back to life.
Each car roared and screamed. The sun rose, casting long shadows across the road. Thursday’s knuckles whitened on the knots of the rail as he waited for the swarm to burst forth, to gather like a cloud of locusts and swoop down upon the engines, the drivers, the passengers.
Peligra Bruja—Death personified—stood upright with her hands on her hammers and her chin aimed toward their destination.
“Drive,” she said, and the mechanic threw the car into gear.
The caravan rolled forward. The engines roared and the chains between the centipede cars clanked and rattled, then a sudden scattering of birds exploded from a palm tree overhead. Thursday shrank away and almost leapt from the caravan, sure the nanoswarms were gathering to attack.
Behind him he saw the flat-topped cars, the exposed engines, the eager faces. Many of the mechanics had their fingers to their ears, just like Queen Mary had, and Thursday’s heart started hammering.
The swarm wasn’t tucked away, hiding back at the aquarium with Queen Mary. The nanoswarm was with them. Close. Riding inside the mechanics the way the mechanics were riding in the cars.
~~~
Peligra stood with her knees bent, swaying with every pothole and bump the car rolled over, rocking her hips. She had her hammers out and ready, her fingers settling on the grips, as if anticipating she’d need to use them on someone soon.
The speed made him nervous, the velocity was terrifying. The dust-covered buildings, husks of what they’d once been, started to blur past them and he couldn’t watch for long. Couldn’t focus. He tried to rub some feeling back into his fingers, scared at the idea of paralysis. Time was running out.
He needed to take his mind off of it, so he studied Peligra instead, trying to see her eyes behind her mask. She turned her head constantly, scanning the road, and soon enough Thursday saw a pattern emerge. Every few minutes she’d look down to the seat beside the driver. Down to a small brown leather bag tucked in the footwell. After clocking it, Thursday made a point not to look again for the rest of the journey.
All of that obvious cargo behind them, but she was worried about a small bag. Thursday wasn’t going to give her a single reason to think he was after what was inside.
“Faster,” she said to the driver.
Panic hit him again. “Aren’t we going fast enough?”
Peligra answered him, but didn’t take her eyes off the road. “At this speed we can still be caught by cyclists and leapers.”
Before he could ask, Thursday saw them ahead. Armed men on bicycles crisscrossing the road. There was a street sign with a metal cross bar overhead and Thursday saw at least three or four men atop it, perched there waiting for the caravan. Leapers.
“Scavengers,” Peligra said. “Don’t worry, I won’t let them get you.”
“Is that even an issue?”
She laughed, and bent to touch the mechanic’s shoulder with her hammer. “More speed!” she screamed, and the car beneath them roared even louder.
~~~
Behind them, a smaller centipede of three cars swerved out of the line of the caravan and rocketed past them on the right. The driver had a long braided beard and there were three Muertas right behind him, all armed with those long spears, machetes, knives. The three cars raced ahead but instead of cutting in front of the lead car they stayed to the edges, to the sidewalks, and raced right into the cluster of cyclists ahead. The cyclists scattered, but a few of them were struck hard. They flipped over the engines or were plowed under the front grill. The three-car centipede rocked as its tires ran over men and bikes in sudden, violet splashes of red.
The Muertas made short work of the cyclists who’d flipped onto the car with them. Thursday saw flailing arms, more blood, then they were booted from the moving vehicle off to the side, away from the lead caravan.
“Who are these guys?”
“These are the faithless.” Peligra’s voice was a shout behind her mask so she’d be heard over the roar of the engines. “The selfish. The damned. Not the Saint’s men, but desperate killers.”
Scavengers, killers, cannibals.
Passing under the streetlight, the leapers jumped down onto the caravan several cars back. An instinctual part of Thursday wanted to rise, to somehow help rid the caravan of the interlopers. He hadn’t known he was getting to his feet until he felt Peligra’s hand on his shoulder, pushing him back to a kneeling position.
“Stay put. Hang on.”
The cyclists swarmed them, jabbing at them with fire-hardened broomstick spears, rusted wedges of metal sharpened into scimitars, short lengths of chain. Thursday rolled and weaved, dodging what he could, and Peligra skipped past the attacks and leaned precariously far out over rails of the platform. She swung her hammers at the attackers. Cracked cheekbones, jaws, eye sockets. She hit them in the shoulders, the temples, the necks. So fast. Bicycles clattered and the cyclists went down in heaps. This close Thursday saw they were all emaciated and filthy. Violent marauders, resigned to death and destruction rather than let outsiders pass through their territory.
Peligra tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Faster!”
The driver nodded. He made a signal with his left hand that was answered by each driver down the line. In the back cars some of the invaders had latched on, fighting tooth and claw with the mechanics, with the Muertas, with the drivers. Blood sprayed, and one of the Muertas with a rusted kitchen knife in her throat was thrown off the side, only to have her killer follow soon after when he was brained by two mechanics wielding massive blunt wrenches.
Someone leapt on Thursday’s back and he felt a sharp jab in his shoulder. He bucked, tried to roll, but the guy on his back grabbed his hair and nipped at his ear. Thursday could hear the man’s teeth clicking violently together only millimeters away. It hurt to move, but Thursday reached up and grabbed the attacker’s hair. He dipped his sore shoulder and pulled with everything he had. The attacker went up and over, between the rails of the platform, falling, then getting pulled under the wheels of the car directly behind them.
Thursday didn’t even hear the man scream.
He turned and saw Peligra in combat with two other leapers. Her arms were corded in muscle, and she swung the hammers like they weighed nothing. She attacked elbows, kneecaps, collarbones. The men tried defending, sought openings, but none presented themselves and the hammers cracked through the bones of their forearms.
These men screamed.
She spun the hammers in her hands and buried the clawed end into the skull of one man and hooked it behind the
ear of the other. She brought her arms together violently and the men crashed together before she shifted her body on the wooden platform and sent them both flying on opposite sides of the car.
“Peligra!” The driver’s cry was almost lost over the roar of the engines. He was staring at his mirrors and hooked a thumb back.
Covered in blood, with a cracked skull mask, Peligra looked past Thursday and screamed. “No!”
Thursday turned. Behind them, the other cars had slowed, taking on the scavengers, but holding their own. Bodies crawled along the cars, warriors killed, mechanics fought with their bare hands, and the scavengers kept coming.
Further back, though, was something worse. A black cloud swallowed the back of the caravan. It dipped, and the cars were torn apart. It was like something inside of them exploded outward, sending shrapnel, tires, and bodies flying apart.
Another swarm had caught them, and whatever control Queen Mary had over her nanoswarm was gone.
~~~
Thursday was on his feet. “We have to leave the caravan!”
“No! We can’t!” Peligra turned to the driver. “Slow down!”
“You’ll kill us, too,” Thursday said. Behind them, the remaining cyclists peeled away from the caravan as the cloud rolled forward, tearing apart the centipede cars and sending them plowing into the dead strip malls and restaurants lining the road.
Peligra ripped her mask off and let it sail out behind her. Stray wisps of hair fluttered off her forehead. There were tears in her eyes, of rage and sorrow.
Thursday could feel the buzz in his heart. In his soul. He’d barely survived the swarm before. How could he have let himself believe differently? “If you try to save them, we die.”
The driver shouted back to them. “Peligra, the turn is coming!”
Peligra bared her teeth, and there was a sudden explosion several cars back as the swarm ripped the fuel tanks apart. The heat sent them to the platform, clutching the edge just behind the driver, and Peligra screamed again.
