Fuse

by Julianna Baggott

  The water is too dark and clouded to see into. “No,” she says. “It wasn’t anything like that.” The ghostly girls. What if they’re here, all around them, in the woods, now beastly, growling in the reeds, underwater?

  “Kick!” Bradwell says.

  “I can’t.”

  “Let go of my neck!” he shouts, but she feels the swishing around her legs again. This time, it feels like a hand fitted around her ankle, then gone.

  She screams and clutches Bradwell so hard his head goes underwater. She pushes off him to stay up, climbing up his body, forcing him down. It’s an instinct. Is she drowning him? She feels panic clawing through her. Thrashing, she screams his name across the river. She dips under now too—suddenly feeling deaf and blind and airless.

  She flails her arms, breaks the surface, gasps, chopping the water, pounding it with the doll-head fist, but she goes under again. Her eyes are wide, but still she sees only wide-eyed darkness. Quiet rushing fills her ears. She tries to force her way to the surface, but the more she moves her arms and legs, the deeper she sinks in the icy water. Air locked in her lungs, her chest feels like a cavity, freezing from the outside in.

  Can her heart freeze before she even has time to drown? Her skin will turn to ice. Her hair will become stiff. Her clothes hard. Her body—dead and blue—will be dragged out to sea. Itchy knee—the words from her dream appear in her mind again—sun, she go.

  Her lungs feel like they could burst, and Pressia sees a body of water after the Detonations; the image flashes in her mind. A bridge spanning halfway into the air, and below was a bridge of bodies. Her grandfather told her that they couldn’t swim across. She remembers it all now. They had to crawl across the bodies, and for this, there was no counting. For this, there was no reciting of itchy knees and suns and going. And there was no closing her eyes. She had to make it across, on her hands and knees, over bodies. She remembers the give of the bodies as layers of them took on her small weight. It fits with her dream of counting toppled telephone poles on fire, the electrical wires snapped loose, a body without a head, a dog without feet, the scalded sheep. These weren’t in a dream. The bodies in the water weren’t a dream. This is a memory. Her own. Panic rises inside of her. She will be swallowed by this river. It won’t ever let her go. Her lungs ache and burn. She could open her mouth, let the water fill her, and drown.

  She could let it happen now.

  She closes her eyes to the darkness and there’s only more darkness. Where is Bradwell? Is he already dead? Will their bodies be dragged out to the same glassy ocean?

  And then, from below, she feels pressure—as if there are two hands on her back. Another hand grips her doll-head fist and pulls. Pressia tries to yank the doll head back, but then she realizes that maybe she’s being saved. Maybe these hands will deliver her to air. The ghostly girls—she imagines their hair fanning around their faces, their uniform shirts slowly rippling in the water.

  Finally, she breaks the surface. She pulls air into her lungs, which sting and spasm. Her foot strikes the river’s floor. She stands, heavily the water still rushing around her. She gasps and coughs.

  She hears her name being called. It’s Bradwell’s voice. She then hears him splashing toward her, saying her name over and over. He lifts her off her feet and hauls her toward the shore.

  He falls onto the bank, still wet, the soaking maps on the ground. The feathers of the birds’ wings on his back bead with droplets. His chest and arms glisten.

  Pressia coughs. Her body holds on to the deepest chill and she feels limp, heavy, exhausted. Her soaked shirt and pants are pressed to her skin, freezing cold. She blinks, looking up at the faded moon, and then Bradwell’s face is beside the moon, his beautiful face. He brushes her wet hair from her cheek. “Breathe,” he says. “Just keep breathing.”

  She reaches up, placing her hand on his cold, wet, scarred cheek. “I didn’t kill you,” she says.

  “No, I thought I’d lost you.”

  “I thought we were both dead.”

  “It was my fault.” His lashes are wet and dark. Water drips from his chin onto her neck.

  “They saved me,” Pressia says.

  “Who saved you?”

  “The ghostly girls.” She knows it sounds crazy, but everything has become a blur. It could be true.

  Fignan buzzes up on the bank. His lights flit across their faces as if he’s happy to see them.

  “She’s okay, Fignan,” Bradwell says. “She’s alive.” He rubs her arms. “You were right. It was too cold.”

  She’s shaking. Her breaths are light and quick. “I’m okay,” she says, but the words feel slow and stiff in her mouth and she can’t feel him rubbing her arms. It’s as if her skin has grown rubbery like her doll head, her nerve endings almost deadened.

  “We have to get you out of the wind.” He takes her arm, wraps it around his shoulder, and pulls her to her feet. She can’t stiffen her knees to hold her own weight. He bends and lifts her, cradling her to his chest.

  “I’m sorry,” she says—for being a burden, but she can’t get the rest out. Her jaw is rattling. Her teeth chatter. She’s shaking so hard that it’s actually making it hard for him to carry her. Could she have been saved by the ghostly girls only to die of the cold? She knows that her body temperature has dropped. She was in the cold water for too long. The wind is too strong. Her clothes weighed her down and now they’re like cold compresses. When she was crossing that river of dead bodies as a little girl, all anyone wanted was a cold compress to the skin, and now this is how she will die.

  They’re moving through the trees. Fignan lights the narrow path. Bradwell follows. He’s shaking too. She can feel the trembling in his arms, in the herky-jerky way he’s walking.

  “I’m sorry,” she says again.

  “Don’t say you’re sorry.” He staggers then pitches forward. They land hard. He gets on his knees, lifts her again, rising unsteadily to his feet. He trudges on, his bare skin bright red. He says, “Pressia.” She looks at him—his firm jaw, his wet head, his dark eyes. “Think of something warm,” he whispers. “Think of heat. Think of something good.” Pressia can tell that he’s afraid. His breathing is ragged.

  She thinks of the moment he gave her the mechanical butterfly, the one he’d saved from her home, how he said that it seemed like a miracle—that something that beautiful could survive. He has a way of making her flush. It’s a memory of warmth, heat, goodness. She’d tell him if she thought she could form the words.

  Bradwell falls again. This time he curses under his breath. He tries to lift her again, but he can’t. The ground is hard and cold. “Fignan,” he says. “Keep going. Follow this path to the outpost. Can you do that? Are you listening? Find someone. Get help.”

  Pressia hears Fignan’s motor. It keeps buzzing along. But she doubts he’ll be able to find anyone, much less bring them back here to save them.

  Bradwell moves to a stand of trees surrounded by a thicket of underbrush and dense leaves. He digs in the leaves, lays her down. “You can’t stay in wet clothes. You’ve got to stay alive. Do you hear me? I can’t make it any farther.”

  She nods. She sees his face in pieces—an eyebrow then his lips then his hands. She has to stay alive.

  He unbuttons her pants, his fingers shaking badly, and tugs them off her. He pulls her shirt over her head. Her arms feel brittle. He lies on his side—to avoid smothering the birds—absorbing the cold earth for her. He pulls the leaves in close around them and wraps his arms around her. The birds barely flinch, barely move.

  Her ribs facing his, she imagines them locked together, ribs hooked to ribs. They breathe their quick breaths, white clouds rising from their red lips. Her cheek on his chest, he holds her, rubbing her back, her arms, but his movements are jerky and slow now. He pulls her cold, wet hair away from her skin. He says, “Stay alive. Say something. Talk.”

  She wants to tell him that she’d rather die here than without him in the cold river. She wants to tell
him that if they die now, they might be locked together forever—ribs within ribs, frozen. And then there’d come the thaw—grass and weeds, the forest’s mossy floor covering them.

  “Pressia? Speak to me. Can you talk?”

  Can she talk? She thinks back to being a little girl crossing the river full of dead bodies. Could she talk then? She said words that no one understood. And, eventually, there were no words for the things she was seeing and feeling—the give of a body that bobs when you put your weight on it, bumping a body that exists beneath it. “Itchy knee,” she whispers now through chattering teeth.

  “Itchy knee?” Bradwell repeats, and then as if he has unlocked the mysterious part of her mind, as if he knows her thoughts, he says, “Itchy knee. Sun, she go?”

  She doesn’t know what it means or how he could possibly have known the words. She nods, but it’s more of a jerk of her head. “Itchy knee. Sun, she go.”

  They say it together. “Itchy knee. Sun, she go.”

  EL CAPITAN

  BOAR

  EL CAPITAN HEARS FOOTSTEPS tramping toward them through the woods, and he’s relieved. The deactivated spider lies in pieces on the cold ground. Helmud wrapped the wounds tightly with a piece of cloth ripped from his own shirt. While El Capitan lies there on his side, the agony in his leg subsiding a little, Helmud is holding his hand and petting it like a kitten. El Capitan lets him because he’s indebted. And, too, each time he tries to wrench his hand free, Helmud whimpers. The noise could attract Beasts. Vicious ones roam at night—ones that have mutated and interbred so much, it’s hard to tell if you’re staring down a wild boar or a wolf with gnarled tusks or something part collie. It’s worse when there’s something human about them—some slip of skin, knuckles, that fleeting glimpse of humanity in their eyes. Some say survivalists out here were eaten by trees but are still alive, trapped within. He thinks of Old Man Zander, who taught him how to bury the guns before the Detonations. He owes the man his life. Was he eaten by trees? Is it a myth?

  Now there’s help on the way “I hear them coming,” he says. “Can I have my hand back?”

  “My hand back?” Helmud says, as if El Capitan’s hand belongs to Helmud too.

  “Helmud!” El Capitan scolds him, and Helmud unlocks his hold. “Thanks,” El Capitan says, flexing the hand.

  He sees Wilda first. She’s holding a flashlight, which bobbles wildly as she runs. Two soldiers follow—one male and one female, wearing coats with hoods pulled tight, and El Capitan can’t make out their marks and fusings in the dark. The boy has an uneven gait. The girl has a humped back. Both look too young to be soldiers. El Capitan thought of himself as a warrior at their age, though. In fact, he was fending for himself and Helmud by the time he was Wilda’s age. This strikes him as a little tragic now.

  Wilda jogs to him and abruptly stops, pointing the beam of light at his chest as if to say, There, see? This is what I was trying to tell you.

  “El Capitan?” the girl soldier says, startled.

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  The two straighten up—the girl still stooped by her hump—and salute.

  Wilda kneels down next to El Capitan, hugging his arm. It makes him uneasy. He doesn’t want her to start relying on him—like he needs another mouth to feed. He ignores her and addresses the soldiers. “Who are you?”

  “Riggs,” the boy says.

  “Darce,” the girl says.

  “At ease,” El Capitan tells them. It’s possible that they’ve never been in El Capitan’s presence. They seem nervous. They’ve likely heard only rumors—is he the old El Capitan out in the woods hunting down fresh recruits as live targets? Or the new El Capitan, who’s promised them fresh water, food, arms? Or is he some strange mixture of both versions?

  Wings buffet overhead. They all look up. A bleached owl perches on a nearby tree limb, which bobs with the bird’s weight. “They’re like vultures now—those pale owls,” El Capitan says. “I’ve seen them attack a soldier that was only half dead.”

  “Half dead?” Riggs ask. “Half dead how?”

  “What do you mean, ‘half dead how’? Not fully dead. That’s how.”

  “That’s how,” Helmud says.

  “It smells blood. Others will gather soon,” El Capitan says. “They’re like sharks and there’s blood in the water.”

  “I don’t know anything about sharks,” Riggs says.

  “Did I ask you?”

  Riggs shakes his head, his chin dented with worry

  “I’ll need a hand getting to the outpost. Has anyone else shown up at the outpost tonight? Anyone at all?”

  “Anyone at all?” Helmud asks.

  “No, sir. I don’t think so,” Riggs says. “Should we be expecting someone?”

  “I was hoping that Pressia Belze and Bradwell would show. Radio back and ask.”

  The soldiers exchange a look.

  “You don’t have walkie-talkies?” He left his own in the car—the mother’s orders.

  “No, sir. We haven’t earned ’em yet,” Riggs says. “Only on week two.”

  “Great,” El Capitan says.

  Another bleached owl alights on a nearby branch. El Capitan doesn’t like that this one has a bloody beak. It’s been feasting on something already tonight. He hopes it’s not anyone he knows.

  “At least you’re armed,” El Capitan says. He’s had enough puncture wounds today. “One of you should run back to the outpost—whichever one is the fastest with the clearest set of lungs. Ask for Pressia and Bradwell. If no one’s reported them, send soldiers out into the woods on recon. Do you understand?”

  “I’m faster,” Darce says.

  “Really? Under that hump?” El Capitan says.

  The girl opens her mouth to say something, then shuts it fast. Was she going to make a crack about what El Capitan has on his own back? Is this what’s going to happen to him now that they think he’s gone soft? “What? Say it.”

  “Riggs’ legs don’t work as well.”

  “Fine,” El Capitan says. “What the hell are you waiting for, then? Go!”

  “Go!” Helmud says.

  Darce salutes again and takes off running. A few more bleached owls flutter through the trees.

  “And you, Riggs, are going to prop me up and get me to the outpost. Okay? You’ll be my crutch.”

  “Yes, sir,” Riggs says.

  El Capitan hefts his and Helmud’s combined weight forward. Riggs squats down. El Capitan wraps his arm around Riggs’ shoulder. “On three,” El Capitan says. “One, two, three.” Riggs hefts El Capitan and Helmud up until El Capitan is balancing on one leg. El Capitan tries to put a little weight on the bad leg. Searing pain rips up his calf. The puncture wounds are deep, and Helmud wrapped them so tightly that his leg throbs. “Okay Let’s move.”

  “Move,” Helmud says.

  Wilda quickly picks up the parts of the robotic spider. El Capitan almost yells at her to leave them, but what do they matter now, dead as they are? The girl lost her boat, so go ahead—take the spider parts.

  Riggs is a runt. He’s some help but not much. The ground is rocky. Wilda leads the way again, holding the flashlight. El Capitan’s calf feels fiery, as if already infected—and maybe it is. Maybe that’s the scent the bleached owls have followed. There are more of them—a flock—beating their wings overhead.

  El Capitan hears snorting in the underbrush. He says to Riggs, “Let’s pickup the pace.”

  He wonders if Darce has found Pressia and Bradwell at the outpost; maybe they’re sitting by the fireplace in the headmaster’s old house. Maybe they’ll see a search party heading out into the woods any moment now. They’ll find Bradwell and Pressia—hopefully alive—if, that is, they made it out of the Deadlands at all.

  One of the bleached owls gets bold. It dips down low enough to El Capitan’s head that when he takes a swing, he almost makes contact. His fist brushes the outer wings.

  “Give me your rifle,” El Capitan says. “Two weeks in? I think I’m a b
etter shot, even a little off balance and with a moving target.”

  Riggs stops and pulls the rifle off his back and helps El Capitan secure the strap. It feels good to hold a rifle again. Guns—they always make him feel better. He hears the snorting again and sees a yellowed, twisted tusk poke through some brush, but just as quickly it’s gone.

  Wilda sings nervously, her voice trembling, like her hands. “If you ignore our plea, we will kill our hostages.”

  El Capitan can see the clearing just beyond the trees. He knows the rest by heart—the broken road leading to what was once a brick archway now toppled and blackened. The road winds between rows of stooped trees and leads to the spokes of a shattered greenhouse, twisted goalposts, hedges that have grown wild, nearly woolly stalks that offer tainted berries in the springtime, and brittle ivy that’s climbed over the stones, blooming yellow flowers with ragged-sharp petals in summer, multiple crusty seed heads that remind El Capitan of three-headed babies. The place feels haunted.

  But then Wilda stops and points the flashlight at one spot in the underbrush.

  El Capitan tells Riggs to stop. They’re at the edge of the woods. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Riggs says. “She’s spooked.”

  “Wilda,” El Capitan says. “What is it?”

  The girl bows down, shifting her head so that she can get a better look through the brambles.

  “Step away very slowly, Wilda,” El Capitan says softly She doesn’t listen. She lifts her hand to touch something.

  El Capitan shouts, “No!”

  The wild boar snarls and pounces.

  The flashlight thuds to the ground. Wilda snatches her hand to her chest and falls backward. The wild boar—furred like a coyote—lunges onto her narrow chest.

  El Capitan shoves Riggs out of the way and swings the gun to his chest, but then a bleached owl swoops down, batting him with wings, and without the soldier’s support, El Capitan tilts forward, catching himself on his bad leg, which gives. His shot goes off, but it burrows into the dirt.