by M. E. Parker
Myron hobbled toward the airship in a daze, dragging the foot of his injured leg. Sindra threw his arm over her shoulder as they ran together, certain she could smell the breath of the ghosts panting behind them. Jonesbridge would not get them again, even if she had to drag Myron by his toes and toss him into the basket herself.
As they rounded the creek bed, Sindra cringed to see Coyote Man standing inside the airship basket stoking the coals.
“You weren’t thinking of leaving without me, were you?” Coyote Man said. A streak of dried blood ran from the side of his head down his neck. He was covered in red dust, and all that remained of his coyote skins dangled from his shoulders in shreds. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.” Coyote Man waved them on.
“Don’t move. The rope has come untied.” Myron pointed at the rope dragging the ground while the unmoored balloon drifted toward the cliff on a strong wind.
“Wait,” Sindra yelled. Coyote Man had showed up yet again to stick his dirty foot in the middle of the stew pot. She’d watched Cyril shoot him and roll him down the hill, and here he was, standing in the airship basket drifting away without them. No, not this time; he wouldn’t scare them away or make them change their plans, or whack one of them over the head or sabotage their escape, not again. Sindra dropped Myron and sprinted full speed for the airship to get enough of the rope to tie it back down.
“How do you stop this thing?” Coyote Man leaned over the edge of the basket as it rose.
Sindra leaped from rock to rock, reaching for the rope that slipped through her hands before she got a grip on it.
“Sindra. Wait,” Myron called.
Wait? If they waited, they’d be stuck here forever. Their future now floated away without them. Waiting was over. She had to act fast so that her child, if she still carried one, and she was confident she did, would be born somewhere other than Jonesbridge, so that Myron could be the father, and after that, the rest of the world could wash down into the Chasm for all she cared. Sindra jumped again for the rope, this time getting a solid grip with both hands. “I’ve got it, Myron.” The basket drifted back down until Sindra’s feet slid across the rocks, skidding like a sled.
“Sindra let go,” Myron hollered.
She heard Myron but couldn’t believe her ears. He wanted her to just let go and leave their entire lives to the whims of the orange shirts over the next ridge.
“Sindra!”
She tightened her grip and widened her stance, digging the knife-edge of her foot into the ground, but the balloon lifted her just enough to keep her from getting traction. Determined to save the airship, Sindra wrapped the rope around her hands and gripped as tight as she could. Her feet skipped over the ground as she yanked down. With all of her concentration on the rope and tuning out Myron’s calls for her to stop, her stomach leaped when the ground beneath her gave way to empty space. The airship slipped over the edge of the cliff with her hanging beneath it, a hundred feet above a ravine. The balloon dipped, and Sindra swung until it stabilized in an upward tack.
“Go back!” Sindra clung to the rope. The bottom of the airship basket spun above her.
“Rudder’s not working,” Coyote Man shouted.
“Peddle.”
“Myron!”
“Hang on, Sindra. Don’t look down.”
With each twirl around on the rope, Sindra watched Myron grow smaller against the hillside. The horizon expanded into a gaping mouth of landscape, mountains, crags, clouds, against a field of snow pellets, and the sharp points of the earth beneath her made her stomach drop. The gray from Myron’s smock blended with the rocks on Iron’s Knob until he vanished, but she could still see his face in her mind, his wet eyes, the furrows in his cheeks as he stretched to reach her.
“Bora Bora,” Myron whispered.
He fell back against the hillside and watched the airship dodge in and out of a cloud bank until it diminished from a blotch to a spot and finally to a spec, with Sindra still on the rope. The pain in his leg screamed. Myron grabbed his thigh and punched his wound. He winced and doubled over before punching it again. If he hadn’t gotten injured, none of this would have happened. He would have been there with Sindra, standing beside her in that basket reaching for the sky together. He punched his leg again, and his eyes welled with tears as he rolled on the ground moaning. If he’d ignored the pain and chased her, ran as fast as he could, their weight together would have held it down. He punched again and screamed. His leg pinked under the bandage. Tears he could never muster in the dry wind of Jonesbridge flowed from his eyes. Myron found something in Sindra, more freedom than Bora Bora, more liberation than escape, true feelings for another person, and now she was gone.
He heard voices over the ridge. Ghosts advanced, and in the distance E’ster artillery still rumbled through the hills. He pulled himself forward by his hands, legs sliding behind him like a rock lizard that had lost its tail from fright. The mill pond, his grandfather’s library, afternoons in the barn; Myron summoned as many happy memories as he could to supplant the pain in his leg and the loss of Sindra, but all he could see was her face. He struggled to the top of the hill to hide in the shadow of the peak, his eyes still wet from tears and the sting of snow pellets.
From the summit of Iron’s Knob, Myron could identify the Yarin Canal, the devastated Munitions factory, Machine and Die, the salvage factory, and the row upon row of chimney stacks for the smelters and refineries that followed the Yarin from the aqueduct all the way to the Gorge. Beyond that, the maw of the salvage pit, where every war-twisted piece of wreckage began its new life, stretched for nearly a mile along the back side of the complex.
That’s where he had to go, the salvage pit. He could find all sorts of material there to build another airship. Coal, where would he find more coal? And fabric? If not an airship, maybe a pair of gliding wings or a pedal copter. With the right wind he could glide across the Gorge and catch up with Sindra, and everything could still be fine. He could help her raise the baby. They could still make it to Bora Bora. He could do it. Salvage was what he was good at, and that’s what he had to do. Salvage parts. Salvage the situation. Salvage this disaster.
When Myron first arrived in Jonesbridge, when they’d assigned him to salvage, it had been the pit where he began his service. All day in all weathers, cataloguing, sorting, hauling, rummaging through endless stacks of intertwined junk. Myron had identified with the rubbish in the pit, abused, relocated, changed, and as Jonesbridge tried to recycle him into a new thing, the way it did everything else, he had resisted. He’d never heard of a slog until he got to Jonesbridge, but that’s what they called him. He ate what slogs ate, worked where slogs worked, and lived like a slog. He didn’t know if he was a slog or not, but one thing he knew for certain, he was a natural salvager just like his grandfather.
The salvage pit was the largest work area in all of Jonesbridge, and for this reason it stood outside the confines of the fence. It was bound on the west by the Gorge, on the east by the train depots where the mangled rubbish arrived. The incinerator complex hemmed it in on the south, and on the north end, an over-mined quarry abandoned decades ago.
Myron trudged down the steep side of the hill. His leg ached with every step as he crossed the valley on the shadow side of Iron’s Knob where the promontory loomed over him. He froze at the quarry’s edge when he heard voices.
Two men emerged at the top of the narrow road that spiraled down into the excavation. Myron dropped to all fours and wiped his eyes. Though he had never seen him in person, the man in front Myron recognized immediately from his posters, the Superintendent of Industry. He sported a thick mustache that twisted up at the ends, grayer than in his pictures, and a full head of hair, also streaked with gray. He resembled the people in Myron’s books from the Old Age: strong, able, determined. Behind him, Cyril followed with a gun to the Superintendent’s head. After all that Cyril had done to try to get out of Jonesbridge and join his fellow E’sters, Myron questioned why he was here, kid
napping the Superintendent himself, if not to find another way out.
Myron followed at a safe distance into the quarry until the two men disappeared into an opening near the bottom. One explosion after another rumbled in the nearby Gorge, artillery shells and bombs falling short of Jonesbridge. A couple of explosions vibrated the ground as Myron followed the overgrown quarry road until he reached the shelter of an entrance in the stone where he found a heavy metal door standing ajar.
Myron reached for the door and hesitated. He was accustomed to hiding from the orange shirts, avoiding the administrators, keeping low and out of sight, the only way he could have built his airship and stayed alive. Following the most powerful man in Jonesbridge and an E’ster spy into a mysterious door at the bottom of a quarry cut across the grain of his instincts, but if there was even a chance of another way out of Jonesbridge, of another way of reaching Sindra, he could set aside his fear in exchange for hope.
The door creaked open to an empty concrete room no larger than the stretcher chamber. To his right, a concrete shaft plummeted into darkness, closed off by a gate, and flanked by a little red button that tempted Myron to press it. When he did, machinery groaned below the floor. Steam blasted from a vent, and the floor in the smaller chamber rose from the darkness to reveal an elevator.
He stepped in under a bundle of severed wires that dangled from the ceiling and took a deep breath before pulling the lever to his left. When the gate closed, darkness and fear enveloped him the way it had when his grandfather shut the door on the potato bin with the orange shirts right outside.
The machinery rumbled, and the descent made his stomach twitch. A wall of stone zipped passed him on the other side of the gate. He stood in the center with his legs spread apart, expecting to fall into the Chasm itself, until the elevator slowed to a stop and jolted up before inching downward to a stop. Myron faced a concrete corridor illuminated by dim bulbs and a breath of stagnant air that smelled like a musty dead yard.
A sign covered in dust hung in an alcove beside the elevator. Myron wiped it clean with his smock.
Stony Mountain Facility - R1
Below it, a black circle with three yellow triangles read:
Fallout Shelter.
Two explosions rocked the ground above him. Dust and pebbles rained down from cracks in the ceiling. Ahead in the corridor, a chunk of concrete rattled loose and tumbled onto the floor. Myron braced against the wall. Another percussive blast opened a hairline crack in the ceiling. A moment later, a droplet plopped on Myron’s head, followed by another, building into a rivulet that trickled to the corner and down the wall.
He ventured down the corridor until he spotted a control room with a large window housing a broken pane of glass three inches thick. He straddled the sill and entered a room that contained two desks with matching chairs and a skeleton slumping in the corner that stared at him with black sockets. A bank of dead computers with black screens ran along the wall. He gazed at their keyboards filled with squares, each one bearing a letter.
He stepped over an empty box on the floor bearing the same curious red symbol he’d seen on the ration crates and on a lot of the materials in the salvage line, but this box also had a word with the symbol: biohazard. Myron’s stomach wrenched to think that the symbol on their food crates meant biohazard. What sort of hazard? Had it been grown in tainted ground? Made from toxic ingredients? Spoiled ingredients?
He inspected the room and found a desk. From one of the drawers, he found a binder that he opened up on the desk. The cover read:
-U.S. Air Force.
-Stony Mountain Facility.
-Standard Operating Procedures for Containment Protocols.
Inside he spotted signed revisions of procedures from 1973, 1977, 1979, 1983, 1987, and nothing again until 2037, nearly two hundred years ago.
Myron ran his finger down the table of contents, encountering complex words and ideas he wasn’t sure about, but he froze when he reached the last entry: S.L.O.G. Development Lab.
“S-L-O-G,” Myron whispered. “Slog?”
Myron stood without moving, his ear tuned to the corridor. He heard no noises, except dripping from cracks in the ceiling, no sign of the Superintendent or the administrator, only the dead eyes of the bones in the corner. Water pooled at his feet. He turned back toward the elevator, torn by his will to find another way out of Jonesbridge and all the possible calamities that he might encounter if this corridor wasn’t a way under the Gorge but some sort of dead end, a trap ending in a showdown between a lowly slog, the traitor administrator, and the superintendent himself.
As he tiptoed down the corridor, he stopped to listen for movement at every empty door jamb. Every portal that he passed tugged at his curiosity, promising more books and more clues to the past, but he kept his focus on one thing, getting to the other side—until he saw a sign that read: S.L.O.G.
As he eased through the opening, unable to resist, the room expanded into a cavernous space surrounded by a catwalk. A giant globe on the left showed a color-coded version of the entire planet with large swaths in red, orange, and smaller zones in green, and a few tiny spots of purple. Beside it, several maps in projection depicted the polar ice caps receding in stages until they finally disappeared. Filling the middle of the room, a laboratory with dark screens and computers ran along the entire perimeter, with one enormous word on each wall. Survival. Longevity. Organic. Genesis.
The ceiling, a semicircular dome, consisted of a close-up map of the purple region. Myron studied it in the dim light and noticed a familiar name right away.
“Richterville.” That’s where he was from. Of the entire planet, of the thousands of small burgs and cities and regions, they’d singled out Richterville on this map, one of the few towns from the Old Age that actually survived. Myron experienced a burst of hometown pride.
Unsure of what any of it meant, he approached the far wall. Under a screen that filled the upper half of the wall, he saw the words: Norton Model of Accelerated Adaptation, Richterville Watershed. Paintings of five men in profile, walking, lined the bottom half of the wall. It reminded him of a progression he’d seen in a science book of the gradual modification of apes into people.
The first image, a fully clothed man, like the people in the Old Age books, stood over a green stalk of wheat. The men grew progressively taller and thinner with less hair, more tinted, thicker skin, and less clothing until the final image showed a naked man with inset eyes, no hair at all, and a body so thin his bones protruded. Like the first, the second man stood over green stalk of wheat but also an orange haystack. The third man stood over a green stalk of wheat, an orange haystack and a red biohazard symbol. Myron thought this man looked much like the slogs in Jonesbridge. The fourth stood over only an orange haystack and the red biohazard symbol. The last man in the progression only had the red biohazard symbol next to a star.
He scanned the room for anything he could read, any bits not swallowed and housed in the darkened machines and found only binders labeled “Health and Human Services.” The last date he found was 2042, the year before the Zealot War, the year of the flash in the sky that stole the life from all the machines.
“Survival. Longevity. Organic. Genesis.” In Jonesbridge they called him a slog, the same thing they called the other lowly workers not worthy of warm clothes and rations not marked as biohazards. They gave them abrasive sand to rub off their dirt and just enough water to work up a spit. This room, these depictions, these words from the Old Age, made him think, gave him hope, that maybe there was more to being a slog than just a working class designation.
“This is your last chance to guide me out of here,” Cyril shouted from beyond the main corridor wall. Myron jumped, so taken by his discovery that he’d forgotten why he wandered down here in the first place.
Though Myron had never seen the Superintendent until today, he’d heard his voice every day through the speaker box on the factory floor, and in this way, he’d come to fear him the way he wou
ld fear an unseen phantom stalking the nighttime. The noises, the voice without a body, he wielded an unknown amount of power, and hearing it in person paralyzed Myron. “I told you. It’s blocked. And there’s a breach. If we don’t get out of here soon, the Gorge is going to swallow this place whole.”
Chapter 19
Coyote Man peered over the edge of the airship basket to an expanse of jagged countryside, and Sindra screaming at the frayed end of the rope. The slug in his gut radiated sharp pains all the way to his fingers as he reeled her in an inch at a time. With each pull of the rope, the basket tipped, and the disorienting height made him woozy.
“I’m trying,” he yelled. “Climb!” He knew how scared Sindra was, but his pain weakened him, so he tuned out her cries for help and concentrated on the rope with slow, steady progress.
“I can’t hold on.” Sindra yelled. The wind snuffed the rest of her response, but he knew she was cursing him for leaving Myron.
He’d left people behind before, all part of the job, but it had never felt so wrong, never smacked him right in the soft spot in his throat the way separating those two kids had. All he wanted now was to make sure that his mistake wouldn’t cost Sindra her life.
The relief that washed over him when Sindra’s tuft of blond hair crested the edge of the basket made him forget, for a moment, that he’d never managed to do the right thing. He’d fallen so far from the man he once was, the son of the hero of the Battle of Chesapeake. If he’d been half the man his daddy was, he’d have triumphed on the battlefield and won his very own plot of clean land to farm, maybe found a woman that could stand to look at him for more than one night, but it hadn’t turn out that way.
Coyote Man reached for Sindra’s arms and hoisted her into the airship. The balloon drooped. The coal pan creaked and sprayed a wisp of ash. Sindra hunched over in the corner of the basket and stared up at up him with big eyes, wet with tears and snow and sweat. She reminded him his own daughter—what she might have looked like if she’d lived to be Sindra’s age. He looked away and stoked the coals. A toxic updraft stole his breath when the Great Gorge opened beneath them, and the other side of the divide materialized in the haze.
