Wasteland (Wasteland - Trilogy)

by Kim, Susan

  What Esther saw at the mutant camp: goods from the Source.

  And now, his baby, under this roof.

  “You hired the mutants,” Caleb said. “To kill my partner, to kill me. You paid them off, to steal my boy. And now, you have my son. And you still want to kill me.”

  Levi was watching him, saying nothing. It was like they were playing a game of dare.

  “Why?” Caleb said. “Just tell me why.”

  When there was no reply, Caleb forced the blade even deeper into Levi’s neck. Blood started to run, dripping down and pooling on the cement floor.

  Levi stopped struggling. Ever practical, he knew there were to be no more secrets—not if he wished to live.

  He looked away from Caleb and into the distance, into the past.

  “I shouldn’t be surprised you managed to survive,” he said. “You were always the stronger one. You were always lucky. That’s what this was about.”

  Caleb started, confused, and his hold on the knife wavered.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  Levi turned his gaze back to him. “That’s why they gave me away. Because even though we were both so young, you were clearly the only one worth saving.”

  Caleb sat back, stunned. Part of his mind fought what he was hearing even as the words started to make a terrible sense.

  “You’re my brother,” he said at last.

  “I was,” Levi said.

  No longer pinned, the boy in black sat up and got to his feet. He managed to keep his poise and walk back to his desk.

  “I don’t blame them, really. At least not anymore.” As he spoke, he took a handkerchief from a drawer and dabbed at the blood running down the side of his neck. “As you know, keeping one child fed is virtually impossible, let alone two. Why wouldn’t our parents keep the stronger, younger boy and cast out the sickly, older one? That is what animals do, isn’t it?”

  Still on his knees, Caleb was finally able to answer.

  “That’s not what they told me,” he said, his voice catching. Inwardly, he was reeling with disbelief; the idea that they were related was obscene, unthinkable. “They told me you were ill. They said you died years ago.”

  Levi smiled; it wasn’t a pleasant sight.

  “As far as our parents were concerned, I did die,” he replied. “Happily for me, some animals behave better than others. Strangers pitied me, and took me in. I was never strong. But even as a small child, I knew how to use people, how to make them do what I wanted. Soon, I started to build a new family, to make friends. Or at least collect acquaintances.”

  As he spoke, Levi had begun to clear up the mess on his desk. He stacked papers, put his writing utensils back into their container, arranged files, restored order. Caleb, mesmerized by the boy’s actions and words, made no move to stop him.

  “Of course, between us, what I was really doing was cobbling together an army. Or would you call it a gang . . . a posse? Well, a group of boys, anyway, strong and I’ll admit not very smart boys who nevertheless respect power almost as much as they like having their bellies filled on a regular basis. You’ve met some of them—or at least they’ve encountered you.”

  He gestured at the door, outside of which the two guards still lay motionless in a heap.

  “They followed me when I came to Prin, five or six years ago,” Levi said. “I always knew I was smart. But it wasn’t until I came here that I learned how to read and improve myself. Suddenly, I understood what potential there was . . . not just for scrabbling together an existence day to day, but for real power. I planned how to break into this building, and with my army’s help, I eventually succeeded.”

  His workspace orderly, Levi once more assumed a position of authority. He sat behind his desk.

  “And my boys have been good scouts, as well,” continued Levi. “They’ve brought me back things from not only Prin, but places far beyond. News, mostly. But also goods, trinkets, pretty little things they thought would amuse me. Like Michal.”

  Caleb looked up sharply and Levi laughed.

  “But most important, my guards managed to find out what I really wanted to know all these years . . . and that’s what became of you.”

  Levi rubbed his temple. For a moment, his expression seemed haunted; traces of pain and longing appeared as deep lines etched around his mouth and eyes. Then they disappeared, like shadows.

  “They knew where you were,” he continued. “They told me you had partnered and had a son. Again, you were lucky. I’ve tried to father an heir many times, with different females. And yet I can’t.”

  Levi’s voice, normally so controlled, broke at this last statement. And as Caleb looked at his brother, he finally recognized the similarities in their faces, things he had sensed at their first meeting but couldn’t name.

  “Once I knew where you were,” Levi was saying, “I decided to take from you everything, just as everything had been taken from me. Most important, I would have a son, a true heir, one linked to me by my own blood. One who will carry on what I’m about to achieve.”

  At last, Caleb found the strength to stand. He leaned forward on the desk in front of him. Only the whiteness of his knuckles revealed the intense emotions roiling inside of him. He looked into his brother’s eyes.

  “You can’t have him,” he said.

  Levi nodded. Then he reached behind him to a panel embedded in the wall and pressed one of three buttons.

  The room shook.

  Caleb looked up, startled. Behind him, two large metal plates, the doors to the office that had been hidden in ceiling and floor, were sliding shut like jaws in a mouth; the two boys were quickly trapped in the small space.

  Then, with a grinding of ancient gears, the entire room began to move. Through the wire mesh walls, it was clear that they were advancing down a dirty brick shaft.

  “Use your head,” Levi said. “The boy’s much better off with me than he would be with you. What have you possibly got to offer him?”

  “I’ll kill you first,” Caleb said.

  “Go ahead,” Levi said. “When the doors open, and they will any second now, you will be greeted by all my guards. I know you can handle a few mutants waving rocks; I’m not so sure what your chances will be against eighteen of my guards carrying Tasers. Especially if I’m dead. And where will that leave the boy?”

  With a sudden lurch, the room came to a halt and the huge doors behind Caleb began to grind open again.

  “Forget the boy,” Levi said. He sounded so sensible, even wise. Like a big brother, in fact. “It’ll be easier for you—for everyone—if you’re far away.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Caleb said.

  Now the doors opened. Four hooded guards burst in and surrounded Caleb. Levi held them off with a raised hand.

  “Very well,” he said. “I can’t force you to leave. But I have my own plans, bigger plans than you can ever understand. I asked you to join me in them before, but you refused. So now I will not tolerate your interfering in them. You can stay if you want. But if you do, you are not to lift one finger to defend the town or its people from the mutants again. Do you understand?”

  Taken aback, Caleb hesitated. “What I do is my own business.”

  Levi shrugged. “If you disobey me, no matter where you are, I will hear word of it from my boys. And the moment I do, I will kill your child. Do I make myself clear?”

  Caleb was furious—and flabbergasted.

  “You would do that . . . after all the trouble you went through to track him down? Even after you tell me you—”

  But Levi cut him off. “Do I make myself clear?”

  Caleb nodded, uncomprehending. When Levi gave a signal his guards seized Caleb and started to drag him out. This time, he was reminded of the pain, which had returned worse than ever; he could not resist even if he wanted to.

  In the main room, the guards dragged Caleb forward on his knees. He kept his face impassive, refusing to give them the satisfaction of knowing he
was in agony. But he could not keep the blood from dripping from his shirt again, leaving a glistening red trail.

  “Enjoying yourself?” one asked.

  Caleb gritted his teeth as they yanked him around a bend. Ahead, he saw that the giant main door of the Source was open, revealing the tarry black sky.

  The guards picked him up and threw him outside. Caleb landed hard on his hands and knees, scraping himself on gravel and broken glass.

  His backpack and hat were thrown after him and landed nearby. Next to them fell pieces of his weapon. They had been ripped from each other and scattered, like a squirrel’s bones from a cat’s mouth.

  Caleb was about to pick them up, when he sensed a guard standing above him.

  “This is for the others,” he said.

  He was holding the weapon all the guards wore, the plastic box with two wires at the end that crackled with blue fire. Caleb was trying to crawl away when the guard rammed it into the small of his back. He screamed as a bolt of white-hot electricity erupted through his spine and exploded in his brain, seeming to set everything in his body on fire. He dropped to the ground, immobilized.

  Nearly unconscious, he heard the three guards walk away, chuckling. The door of the Source creaked and then slammed shut.

  Caleb lay there, motionless. It was as if his entire body had been scorched from within. He felt blood from his wound seeping into the hot, baked earth beneath him. It was all he could do to open his eyes. Still, the physical pain was nothing compared to his emotional anguish.

  All along, it was one person who destroyed his family.

  It wasn’t the mutants after all. For months, he had blamed them; poisoned by his rage and hatred, he had worked obsessively to track them down and destroy them.

  Mutants.

  For the first time, Caleb was struck by the ugly word, one he had used a thousand times without thinking, and he winced. For they, the variants, were nothing but pawns, poor and pathetic; had it not been them, Levi could have found someone else desperate and hungry enough to do his bidding.

  The variants weren’t responsible; it was his brother. The person who was in a real sense closest to him, his own flesh and blood, had set out to destroy him . . . and very nearly succeeded.

  When Caleb thought of the months Levi must have taken to plan and carry out his campaign, his mind reeled. Levi’s revenge was no impulsive act done in the heat of anger. It was carried out with clear eyes and cold calculation.

  If what Levi said was true, he had been brutally wronged in childhood. Still, Caleb couldn’t imagine lifting a hand or plotting against his own brother, especially a brother who was innocent of any wrongdoing.

  Caleb’s only sin was the fact of his birth.

  Levi waited until they had gone. Then he got up and retrieved the small dagger that had dropped to the floor.

  After wiping the blade clean, he placed it back on his desk, next to the matching penholder and leather blotter. He discovered that he was trembling and breathing fast, nearly hyperventilating. He had waited years for this moment, this long-anticipated revenge on his younger brother; and his victory was all the sweeter in that he had won it by his wits alone.

  Caleb’s days as the town’s savior were over. Prin would need a new hero. And that would be easy enough to arrange.

  Levi knew he should be glad. Yet, strangely, he was not.

  One thought continued to nag at him: Somebody must have told Caleb about the boy. That meant someone, like his parents so long ago, must have betrayed him, someone he had trusted and housed and fed.

  Levi called together a meeting of his guards.

  Now he leaned against the wall, watching as one by one, his guards were tied to a steam pipe against the wall and questioned. Assisting in the interrogation was a tool from the gardening and patio aisle, a black wand filled with fuel. When a button was pressed, a small flame blossomed out from the top. As the smell of butane mixed with and then was overpowered by the stink of charred flesh, the basement of the Source echoed with screams that no one could hear from the outside.

  Levi watched not because he enjoyed it; in fact, the constant weeping and pleading wore on his nerves. He had to make sure his instructions were being followed; he could not be certain that his guards would do their job. The very one asking questions, after all, would soon be the one interrogated by his peers.

  While a clumsy system, it had always served its purpose before. Yet after an hour, no one had confessed to anything. By now, Levi was tired of not only their tears and moans, but the glimpses of their squinched and sweating faces, only partly hidden by their hoods. They looked as pink and helpless as cornered mice. It sickened him.

  Exasperated and impatient, Levi was about to begin the cycle of interrogation once more, when a guard, shaking, separated himself from the group.

  “I hate to say it . . .” His voice was almost inaudible. “But when the stranger come down to the basement, there was someone who came out of the security room only a second before.” He swallowed hard. “It was your girl. And she was acting funny.”

  Levi stared at him. He felt almost faint with anger: the gall of the guard to try saving himself with such a blatant lie! Yet the more he thought about it, the more it made a hideous kind of sense. If he had been betrayed, why shouldn’t the treachery be of the worst, most intimate kind? That was the story of his youth: Wasn’t his childhood trust paid back with cruelty and abandonment? So now, wasn’t it likely that he had been forsaken by the person who had always said she loved him?

  Levi kept his voice calm, revealing nothing.

  “You better be right.”

  He ended the session.

  Levi returned to his office, any sense of jubilation forgotten. Yet as he sat alone, brooding, he felt strangely content. Once again, the world had proven itself to be the way he had always known it to be: faithless and cold. It was reassuring.

  He would search Michal’s room himself.

  TWELVE

  BY DAWN, CALEB REACHED THE SCHOOL.

  He fell against the front door and leaned upon it, breathing hard. It had taken nearly everything he had to walk back. He was light-headed from blood loss and thirst, and exhausted from fighting. When he closed his eyes, he could still feel the lingering shock of the electrical current surging through his body.

  He stumbled toward his schoolroom, and took two faltering steps over the threshold.

  Then he saw her.

  Esther looked thinner than ever, her face burned by the sun. His shock giving way to joy, he moved quickly to her. But he could only go so far before his legs buckled, and she had to catch him before he fell.

  Caleb was almost unrecognizable: dusty and bloodied, shivering in the heat. He clung to her as if he was drowning, and she led him to his cot, where she eased him down. Then she fetched water to clean his wounds and for him to drink.

  Esther’s own journey here had been as much a hardship. Escaping from the Valley of the Dead, she had eventually found discarded robes in an abandoned van. She put them on over her clothes, and they both protected her from the sun and shielded her identity. The irony was not lost on her: Now that she was Shunned, she was finally dressed like one of the people she had long disdained and who had exiled her. By the time she reached the school late that evening, she was not able to remove the robes fast enough.

  To her disappointment and misery, the schoolroom had been empty.

  Esther was never good at waiting. Unable to sleep, she paced up and down the room all night, glancing out the window and door, listening in vain for the sound of Caleb’s footsteps.

  And now that she was alone with him, her relief was replaced by fury at the people who did this to him, as well as the need to cherish and make him well again. She had come here seeking his protection, but now she realized he needed hers just as badly.

  “What happened?” she asked, once he had stopped drinking.

  Caleb told her, haltingly. He spoke of seeing his child, the revelation of Levi’s kinsh
ip, and his terrible retribution for their parents’ neglect, hiring the mutants to carry out the dirty work he would not do himself. At last, when there was nothing more to say, he buried his face in his filthy hands.

  And he cried.

  Esther could not bear to see it. She alone understood that Caleb wore a tough exterior, a mask to protect what was important and precious inside; she knew this because it was what she did as well. For him to drop his guard meant that he no longer had the strength to fight off his despair, and she felt his pain as keenly as she felt her own.

  She reached out and grabbed his hands.

  They were icy cold and she wrapped her own hands around them, trying to give him her warmth and life, the way she knew variant shamans did to the dead. Her thumbs traced the ridges of blisters on his palms, the rough and bruised skin along his knuckles. Then she pressed her palms against his, and their fingers intertwined.

  She raised her eyes to his face, at the stubble built up over days. Then she looked into his eyes and felt herself overwhelmed by his intense gaze, which mixed relief with gratitude and something more. As he caressed her hand, she lifted her fingertips to his face, tracing his cheek to his chin, then toward his lips.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she whispered.

  But something had shifted inside her, a strange new emotion moving into the other. Her desire to ease Caleb’s suffering had been joined with another desire, one even more powerful, like two streams meeting and converging in a riverbed, mingling in a current against which she had no strength.

  She had never known this feeling before.

  Her fingers found his lips, which moved together and pressed against her fingertips, so softly she could hardly feel it. Then he kissed them again, this time harder; and at the pressure, she felt her body tremble.

  “Caleb,” she said, his name meaning everything she could not say.

  Then their lips were on each other’s, at first brushing there, like a question. Each applied more pressure, first quickly, then lingeringly. Esther closed her eyes, feeling only his mouth, his hands clasped in hers.