by M. E. Parker
Now gone completely, sky had replaced the sagging roof of the chapel, and the crew had turned their attention to the walls. Some boards splintered off in shards. Others took the force of the hundred-slog destruction team to work off, prying and pulling until the wood moaned before the walls finally came to rest in a flurry of dust that left only a waist-high stone foundation in the shape of a chapel. Watching this process, Sindra felt as though they had ripped her apart as well.
On the far side of the chapel, near where the bell tower once stood, Sindra spotted a mule-drawn cart with Lalana and Errol adjusting the load as slogs piled on boards and sticks and anything else that would burn. She slid down the bank, kneeling as low as she could, envisioning the spring thaw that would bring a toxic wash through the gulley.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
Sindra looked up to see a ghost, discipline rod drawn, standing at the edge of the creek.
“Got a deserter.” He motioned for another ghost to join him.
The other ghost reached down and grabbed Sindra by the hair, pulling her to her feet and up off the ground. She twisted in midair by her hair until she flopped out on the ground at the feet of two ghosts.
Chapter 14
Myron pulled at the bars on the coop, rattled them, rammed his back into the door until he collapsed against the web of cold metal, now certain he was going to die. His vision was blurry. He saw two of each of the bars on the cage, six smokestacks over munitions instead of three, two of everything. His mouth felt like it was lined with burlap, and he couldn’t swallow. Just one sip, that’s all he needed, a single drop of water.
If not for the munitions factory still in operation, Jonesbridge would resemble one of the extinct towns on the rails Sindra described. Myron’s ears had grown so accustomed to the hum of factory turbines that their absence made his head ache. In the corner of his eye, he spotted movement, giving him hope that someone would bring him water. On the backside of Munitions #2, a man crawled along the ground pushing a roll of wire. He adjusted it every few feet, pushing the wire to the edge of the building. Myron rubbed his eyes, trying to focus, convincing himself he was not hallucinating.
The man wasn’t wearing the gray burlap of a slog, or the orange of Civility, but administrator tan. His face blurred in and out of focus, but Myron recognized him, Cyril, the salvage factory administrator. The man stopped to attach a brown bundle to the wire, continued and stopped again, repeating this until he reached the corner of the building. After checking in all directions, Cyril assembled a black tripod with a box on top that was a little bigger than a ration crate. From a bag, he pulled out a set of salvage tools and attached the wire in several places to the black box. He tinkered with it, turned his wrench, checked over his shoulder and adjusted it some more, never noticing that someone was in the coop—watching.
Myron dangled his arm through the cage, resting his head on the door hinge. His mouth felt as though he had eaten sand. First he saw the white sand of Bora Bora, but that gave way to the dunes of a far away desert, a place his Old Age atlas called Sahara, where a waterless ocean of sand drifted with the wind, and when the sun fell, the parched ground grew cold. Sahara, he thought would make a lovely name for a girl.
“You Myron?”
Myron lifted his head, unsure if the voice was real.
“Hurry.” The shirker coop lowered to the ground. It wasn’t the salavage administrator he’d seen earlier outside Munitions, but someone different, a man in orange, a ghost, that unlocked the cage door and inched it open.
Myron crawled out of the coop. His legs cramped and his bones ached. When he spotted the canal his thirst took over, certain that if he didn’t get a drink in the next few seconds the coop would have beaten him. He didn’t care why or who had opened the door—water, that was all. Knees scraping the brick walkway, he pulled himself toward the canal as the liquid shimmered in the sunlight, taunting him. When he reached the edge of the water, he dug both hands in to scoop a drink. The water dripped through his fingers as he raised it to his mouth.
“No!” The ghost that had freed Myron ran up behind him and rolled him over, slapping Myron’s hands from his mouth. “Don’t do it. That stuff will kill you.”
“I’m so thirsty.” Myron sprawled out on the ground, still disoriented.
The ghost opened his canteen and gave Myron a swig. “Sindra set me free. So I’m setting you free. She’s out there.” He pointed in the direction of Iron’s Knob. “Said to meet her somewhere—a chapel I think. Don’t know what that means, but you’re on your own, now.” The ghost wrenched his canteen from Myron’s lips and jogged toward the Civil Guard post.
“Sindra?” Myron stumbled to his feet, heading toward the salvage factory and the grate.
The factories, all red brick, were otherwise covered in windows so that they required no artificial light during the daytime hours. From inside the factories, especially the administrator’s office or the foreman’s perch, only the haze in the air and other factories obstructed the view. As he passed Munitions #2, he remembered that there were at least two hundred slogs still hard at work in munitions with an administrator on duty and two ghosts at the door, so he snaked along the ground to keep under the line of windows.
When he got closer, he spotted the tripod, the black box, and the empty spool of wire that the salvage administrator had set around the factory, wondering what he had been doing and why. Still crawling, Myron followed the wire to the first bundle, which he recognized as mining ordinance, rock blaster they called it. Affixed to the bundle of explosives was a wire mechanism that looked like a mouse trap. Myron continued along the wire to the next bundle, the same as the last, following it until he reached the tripod.
Connectors, wires, incongruent devices hemmed together, all topped by an antenna; this stuff had to have come from the salvage floor. This surprised him because the law forbade anyone, even the administrator of the factory in question, from taking anything from a factory. An ornate clock, something Myron recognized, a piece he had processed himself, sat beside the antenna. The hands on the clock did not move.
From the box, another larger wire ran across the brick pathway to the edge of Munitions #1, currently shut down due to coal shortage. From there, another wire ran to Ironworks. It was an explosive chain, some sort of a bomb, and a big one. Myron studied the jumble of connectors and yanked out the one leading across the path. A mechanism under the clock clicked. The clicks grew louder and more frequent with each until a thud sounded inside the box, and the hands on the clock began to move. Myron looked back along the wall at the spacing of the explosives, placed at support beams, and thought of the many slogs that worked day shift at Munitions #2.
Munitions employed Jonesbridge’s most productive, most patriotic, and trusted workers. He knew a couple of them. They had transferred there after exemplary performance in Salvage.
Myron pulled another wire that connected the clock to the mechanism below it, hoping that would stop the device. The clock ticked faster, as though time had sped up. The antenna, like Coyote Man’s radio, Myron knew could receive a signal through the air, so he yanked it off and broke it in half. Another device snapped, and the clock’s second hand sped around the face. It reminded him of the time he pulled a board from under a contraption in his grandfather’s barn, and the whole thing fell apart with a crash.
The ticking continued to speed up. Myron had run out of ideas to stop the process. He panicked and jumped up, peeking through the glass of the nearest window at all the slogs inside.
Myron ran along the back of the munitions factory, tempted to slap on the windows, yelling bomb, urging his fellow slogs to flee for cover. They had to get out of there, but Myron had just escaped the coop. He had to find Sindra. They had a plan.
He sprinted toward the canal, but the ghost at the entrance of Munitions #2 saw him.
“The shirker’s loose!” the ghost yelled, pointing to the empty shirker coop. He grabbed two other ghosts and hurried in Myron
’s direction with their discipline rods raised.
Myron stopped. He turned around slowly with his hands in the air. “There is a bomb. Goes all the way around Munitions #2. You have to go back and get everybody out.” Myron enunciated each word with care.
The ghosts froze, stopping their chase for the moment. One ghost turned to the others and nodded. “There’s a what?”
“A bomb.”
“What? Not satisfied with shirking. You want to take everybody out with you?”
“No. No. I didn’t do it. I saw it.” Myron shook his head, the urgent tick of the bomb clock playing in his head. “No! You got it wrong.”
“Bomb!” A ghost yelled. He headed toward Munitions #2. The other two ran toward Myron.
“The shirker’s loose,” a ghost yelled. He chased Myron down the brick path between factories.
His legs still cramping from dehydration, Myron slipped behind the outtake of Munitions #1. The two ghosts ran passed. He trained his eye on the doors of Munitions #2, expecting, hoping, praying to see hundreds of his fellow slogs pouring out to safety, but he only saw the foreman standing out front, surveying the situation.
“There he is.” The two ghosts ran towards him. Myron headed for the canal bridge. On the other side he could make it to Salvage and the grate where he could escape. He spotted a courier bicycle leaning against a coal shed. He hopped on and pedaled. His legs burned.
As he reached the bridge, he tumbled off the bicycle when the ground underneath him shook, the earth slipping from under the wheels. An explosion rocked the building behind him, a deafening blast as if it had filled his ears with wet clay. He steadied himself on the bridge wall, and caught in the murky reflection of the Yarin Canal, window after window popping out of Munitions #2 with each successive blast, all two hundred slogs unable to escape in time.
In Jonesbridge, slogs had more in common with overloaders and copper ore and salvage material than people. They represented production, pieces processed, ore smelted, steel refined—take a slog away, subtract the numbers. Munitions #2, where they combined the saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur to fabricate black powder, where they assembled the ammunition, the artillery shells, piss whistles, and bullets, each one of those mattered, and as the fire spread, the chain reaction of explosions ended in thunder that rattled Myron’s teeth.
He raced across the bridge, leaping into the noxious waters of the Yarin ahead of the hot blast and flurry of broken glass, dust and ash that rocketed across the water. Bricks and debris rained onto Myron as he struggled to keep his head up while avoiding the fallout. Beside him, the shirker coop splashed down followed by the chain that it had hung on. The water sloshed, and a wave rose from the base of the demolished factory, sending Myron down the Yarin so fast he couldn’t get to the bank.
He treaded water and fought to navigate a barrage of sharp metal and bricks as the rainstorm of detritus continued. He hoisted his arms over a door floating beside him and rode the Yarin until he could see a plume of black smoke darkening the sky above Jonesbridge, mournful of the sudden loss of two hundred of his fellow slogs who hadn’t been able to escape. Some ghosts ran for cover, but others gave chase, certain Myron was to blame for the mayhem. They jumped into a coal barge tug and pursued Myron on the turbulent canal.
Beginning with stinging on his legs, the canal water started to burn. Myron crawled farther onto the door, paddling toward the bank, which was a steep wall of concrete on either side in this part of the canal. Where the water disappeared on the horizon in front of him, he saw only sky and remembered that the final destination for the Yarin was the bottom of the Great Gorge.
Behind him, the boat filled with ghosts gained on him. Myron paddled to the concrete wall. A gun fired. The bullet ricocheted across the canal, striking the door inches away from his chest. The current in the canal continued to race him toward the Gorge lock. He paddled to the bank, worked all the way on top of the door and steadied himself with his hands along the wall, the stone scraping his palms as he got up to his knees. The door tipped underneath him. He regained his balance, leaning against the wall, and in one sudden movement, rose to his feet and reached for the top of the wall. As he dangled from the ledge, the door sped off down the canal without him while the ghosts upstream got closer.
Myron hoisted himself over the bank and rolled down the levy where he scrambled to a control platform. There he witnessed the salvage administrator turning a red valve. Myron’s eyes met the man’s who had just killed two hundred of his fellow slogs.
Just as he decided to stop the salvage administrator from doing more harm, behind him, the top of a ladder hooked over the wall from the canal. The ghosts from the tug in the canal had caught up with him, and the real bomber stood right in front of him, someone he could never accuse because an administrator’s word would always carry more weight than a slog’s. Unsure of his bearings, Myron ran in the opposite direction of the plume of black smoke rising from Munitions #2. The salvage administrator also ran, but in the other direction.
With all the craziness occuring, he thought,—if he could find Sindra—they might make it over the Gorge after all. He fled toward the chapel with abandon, no looking over his shoulder, no keeping out of sight, in a sprint to stay ahead of the ghosts he had managed to evade—and the column of smoke rising from Munitions #2.
Myron reached the chapel to a chaotic scene. A hundred slogs and nearly as many ghosts had convened in the footprint of what was once the chapel. Some were staring at the smoke from the demolished factory, others hung their heads as the ghosts tried to regain order.
Myron’s grandfather once told him that what we were was a big part of who we are, that old discarded buildings, like old discarded people, have something to say. Myron had listened to the decaying chapel. He had heard what it told him about how people used to live, and he had heard his grandfather’s advice from inside the walls, a voice now dismantled board by board and loaded on mule carts to feed the bellies of war factories. Seeing it all gone evoked the pain of losing his grandfather, but in that pain he could find his strength.
In the middle of the fray, Myron spotted Sindra. Surrounded by ghosts, she kicked one direction and punched in another. One ghost had her by the hair. The other swung at her with his discipline rod. He had seen enough today. Myron stood from his hiding position and charged the ghosts from behind, his anger manifesting in the form a shrill coyote howl, envisioning what they had done to her late at night, and in front of him, and what they continued to do.
Myron grabbed the unsuspecting ghost’s discipline rod and whacked him across the back of his head. The others scattered. He could see Sindra’s smile emerge under her hair that resembled a pitchfork full of hay hanging down over her face. Their eyes locked. She wiped her hair from her face. He had hoped the next time he looked into her eyes it would remind him that everything would somehow turn out. Instead, he saw fear—that this moment might be the last time their eyes would ever meet.
Myron ducked a punch and swung at the nearest ghost, landing a hit in his abdomen. Sindra jumped on his back and rode him to the ground. Myron swung again in a broad sweep, connecting with arms and heads at random as the other ghosts ran toward him. He heard the clap of gunfire. Everyone froze as the ghost next to Myron fell to the ground. Another clap followed, this time from the creek bed, ending in a flurry of dust.
Several ghosts blew their whistles at once. Myron looked up to see a team of four mules pulling an armored combat tank on track wheels, pieced together by parts of different machines, all topped off with a cannon turret. It stopped on the other side of the creek. Two defensemen sat beneath the barrel of the cannon as it spun in the direction just beyond the chapel where the gunfire originated. A whoosh of air passed over Myron’s face. He jerked his head in the direction of the whistling projectile to see it impact the hillside behind him with an explosion. Clumps of dirt and rocks rained down.
Myron spotted Coyote Man with a pistol in his hand hiding in the creek. When the g
host leader took aim on Coyote Man, Myron rushed him, striking his head with a discipline rod. More shots sounded from the opposite direction. Myron turned toward the other guards, and, in that moment, another pop that ended in a thump, connected with the meat of Myron’s thigh. It felt like the time he snagged his leg on a jagged piece of scrap iron, a deep penetrating hit that cut and bruised at the same time. Everything inside his body quickened, his heart, breathing, thoughts racing about what he wished he and Sindra could have done together.
Myron grabbed his leg and tumbled over in time to see dozens of confused slogs in a jumble, some hiding on the ground, some just standing there, looking at him. Others came to his aid. An older man about Coyote Man’s age stood over him, gawking at him. Myron handed him the rod, and the man eyed it as though he knew he should have a spirit somewhere inside that transcended that of a common slog. He shook the rod and began swinging blindly right up the gut of an approaching squad of ghosts, yelling, taking one swat after another.
Myron watched as his fellow slogs, people he had never met, jumped into the skirmish, flailing, punching and swinging boards, but they all fell, one by one, each after the dull pop of one of the ghost’s guns. The base of the old chapel soon filled with lifeless bodies.
Myron could feel the blood gushing out of him like the muck churning through the turbines in the Yarin Canal. He felt lighter, his thoughts leaving him. He crawled toward the ravine. With bullets whizzing by, people dying, chaos all around, he imagined being at the front lines, about to die the same way his father had, and it made him realize how secure life in Jonesbridge was, where he had at least been alive enough to dream.
The closer he got to the safety of the dry creek bank, Myron felt as though his body was bubbling down the drain on the salvage floor in a vortex of sanitizer, that he was a float making one desperate bob after another to surface. He could hear the holler of guards mustering aid from other teams on their way to the scene. And in the first clear blue sky in years, between the firearms exchanging pops and the cries of scattering slogs and ghosts, Myron heard muffled thunder—a motor.
