Fragments

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

“Who are you?” asked Samm.

The girl with the rifle kept a perfect bead on Kira’s chest. “I said drop your weapons.”

Samm dumped his rifle on the ground. Kira was too shocked to move, still staring at the children, and Samm pulled her rifle from her shoulder and threw it down in the grass. “We’re not here to hurt you,” he said. “We just want to know who you are.”

The girl lowered the hunting rifle slightly, no longer sighting down the barrel but keeping it pointed in their general direction. She had long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her leather vest seemed rough and homemade. “You first,” she said. “Where’d you come from? No one’s crossed the mountains in twelve years.”

Kira shook her head, finally finding her voice. “Not the mountains, the wasteland. We’re from New York.”

The blond girl raised her eyebrow, and the crowd of people around her murmured in disbelief. An older woman stepped forward, holding a small child in her arms, and Kira stared at the little boy like he was a miracle in human form: three years old, plump and rosy-cheeked, his face streaked with dirt and whatever sticky food he’d had for dinner. He stared back at Kira in perfect innocence, studying her as if she were the most normal thing in the world, and then smiling as he caught her eye. Kira couldn’t help but smile back.

“Well?” the woman demanded. “Are you going to answer?”

“What?” asked Kira.

“I said that you couldn’t have come from the Badlands,” said the woman, “because the wasteland is all that’s left.”

Samm put a hand on Kira’s shoulder. “I think you tuned out, staring at the child.”

“I’m sorry,” said Kira, and rose to her feet. The crowd stepped back, but kept their weapons ready. Samm stood beside her, and she gripped his hand for support. “It’s just that . . . it looks like we have a lot of explaining to do. On both sides. Let’s start over.” She looked at the blond girl. “Start with the basics—are you humans or Partials?”

The older woman narrowed her eyes, and there was no mistaking the anger in them. Kira knew at once that this woman was human. Best to pretend we are, too, thought Kira.

“My name is Kira Walker, and this is Samm. I’m a medic from the human settlement on Long Island, on the East Coast—up until five minutes ago we thought it was the last human settlement in the world, and from the way you’re talking, I bet you used to think more or less the same thing about this place. We had no way of knowing there were survivors out here, but . . . here you are. And here we are.” She held her hand out, ready to shake. “Greetings from—” She stopped herself right before saying another human being, and felt a sudden pang of loss deep in her gut. She couldn’t say that anymore. She swallowed and mumbled out an alternate end to the sentence. “—another human community.”

Kira kept her hand out, wiping her eyes with her other hand. The armed settlers stared at her in silence. After a moment the blond girl jerked her head toward the east. “You crossed the Badlands?”

Kira nodded. “Yeah.”

“You must be starving.” She lowered the rifle completely and took Kira’s hand; it was just as rough and calloused as her own. “My name’s Calix. Come over to the fire and have some food.”

Samm collected their rifles, and he and Kira followed Calix back toward the bonfire; some of the locals were still watching them warily, but they seemed more curious than scared. Kira couldn’t help but reach for the nearest child, a girl of about nine, but pulled her hand back before touching her curly black hair. The girl saw her, smiled, and grabbed Kira’s hand.

“My name’s Bayley,” said the girl.

Kira laughed, too overcome with joy to know how to respond. “It’s very nice to meet you, Bayley. You remind me of my sister. Her name is Ariel.”

“That’s a pretty name,” said Bayley. “I don’t have a sister, just brothers.”

Everything about this place seemed magical—that Kira was talking to a child, and that the child had brothers. “How many?” asked Kira, barely able to contain her excitement.

“Three,” said Bayley. “Roland’s the oldest, but Mama says I’m more responsible.”

“I don’t doubt that for a minute,” said Kira, and sat down on a low bench by the bonfire. A handful of children ran up to gawk at the newcomers, then scampered off, too full of energy to stop for more than a second. A portly man in a greasy apron handed her a plate of mashed potatoes liberally whipped together with garlic and chives and covered with a gob of smoky white cheese, and before she could thank him, he ladled on a pile of rich, meaty chili. The smell of hot peppers tickled her nose, and her mouth watered, but she was too overwhelmed to eat a single bite. Another little girl poured her a glass of cool water, and Kira guzzled it gratefully. Samm thanked everyone softly, nibbling politely on the food, but kept his focus on the people and the area around them, ever wary.

Calix and the older woman who’d spoken before pulled up a bench and sat in front of them. The three-year-old boy in her arms wriggled to the ground and ran off to play. “Eat,” said the woman, “but talk between bites. Your arrival is . . . well, like you said. We didn’t think there were any other humans left. And giving you dinner doesn’t mean we trust you. At least, not yet.” She gave a tight smile. “My name’s Laura; I’m kind of the mayor around here.”

Kira set down her food. “I’m so sorry about before, Laura—I didn’t mean to ignore you, it’s just that—how do you have children?”

Laura laughed. “Same way everybody does.”

“But that’s the thing,” said Kira, “none of us can.” She had a sudden thought and leapt to her feet in terror, afraid of what she might have brought into the settlement with her. “Do you not have RM?”

“Of course we have RM,” said Calix. “Everybody does.” She paused, frowning at Kira. “Are you saying you don’t have the cure?”

“You have a cure?”

Calix seemed just as surprised as Kira. “How can you survive without the cure?”

“How did you do it?” asked Kira. “Is it the pheromone—have you been able to synthesize it?”

“What pheromone?”

“The Partial pheromone,” said Kira, “that was our best lead. Is that not how you do it? Please, you have to tell me—we have to get this back to East Meadow—”

“Of course it’s not a Partial pheromone,” said Laura. “The Partials are all dead, too.” She paused, glancing back and forth nervously from Samm to Kira. “Unless you’ve got some bad news to go with the good stuff.”

“I wouldn’t necessary call it ‘bad,’” said Samm, but Kira cut him off before he could say any more; the people here were suspicious enough already, there was no point in telling them their newcomers were Partials until they’d built up a little more trust.

“The Partials are still alive,” said Kira. “Not all of them, maybe half a million, give or take. Some are . . . nicer than others.”

“Half a million,” said Calix, obviously shocked by the sheer size of the number. “That’s . . .” She sat back as if she didn’t know what to say.

“How many humans?” asked Laura.

“I used to know exactly,” said Kira, “but these days I’d guess about thirty-five thousand.”

“Thank God,” said Laura, and Kira saw tears streaming down the woman’s face. Even Calix seemed pleased, as if the second number was a match for the first. Kira grew suspicious—it was almost as if the girl didn’t really understand the size of either number.

Kira leaned forward. “How many of you are here?”

“Almost two thousand,” said Laura, and smiled with bittersweet pride. “We expect to pass it in the next few months, but . . . thirty-five thousand. I’ve never dreamed there would be so many.”

“What’s it like?” asked Calix. She addressed the question to Kira, but kept stealing glances at Samm. “The world outside the Preserve? We’ve explored some of the mountains, and we’ve tried to explore the Badlands, but it’s too big. We thought it covered the whole world.”

“Just the Midwest,” said Samm, “and not even all of it. From here to the Mississippi River, more or less.”

“Tell me about the cure,” said Kira, trying to steer the conversation back to this most important element. “If you didn’t get it from Partials, what is it? How do you make it? How did any of you survive the Break in the first place?”

“That’s Dr. Vale’s work,” said Laura. “Calix, run and see if he’s still up, he’ll want to meet our visitors.” Calix stood, taking a last look at Samm, and ran into the darkness. Laura turned back to Kira. “He’s the one who saved us when RM first hit—well, not right away. It was a few weeks later, about the time everyone started to realize that this was really the end. He grabbed as many of us as he could, friends of friends and whoever we could find that was still alive. And he gave us the cure, which I guess he must have synthesized himself, somehow. Then we holed up here in the Preserve.”

“You’ve had the cure that long?” asked Kira. She stammered for a minute, uncertain how to ask the next question politely, then gave up and asked directly. “Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why didn’t you save as many people as you could?”

“We did,” said Laura. “I told you, we found every single person we could find, young and old, everyone who wasn’t already dead from the war or the virus. We scoured the city for weeks, and we sent drivers out in every direction. We brought back everyone we found, but there weren’t many left alive at that point. I wasn’t lying to you, Kira, we honestly thought we were the only humans left in the world.”

“We all went east,” said Kira. “The last bits of the army gathered us all in one place.”

Laura shook her head. “Apparently they missed a few.”

“And what made you think all the Partials were dead?” asked Samm. His voice was typically emotionless, but Kira could tell something was bothering him, and had been since they’d arrived in the Preserve. She strained to pick up his feelings on the link, but without the heightened awareness of combat, her senses were too weak.

“Why wouldn’t they be dead?” asked Laura. “RM killed them the same as us.”

“Wait, what?” asked Kira. This was news—not just news but an outright shock. “RM doesn’t affect Partials,” said Kira. “They’re immune to it. That’s . . . that’s the whole point of it.” She felt a moment of panic—if this part of the world had a mutant, Partial-killing strain of RM, they were in terrible danger.

But if that was so, then they were already exposed. Better to stay calm and learn what they could.

“That’s all true,” said Laura, “but then the virus mutated. It happened here, in Denver—a new strain that appeared out of nowhere and burned through the Partial army like wildfire.”

Kira couldn’t help but glance at Samm, looking for a sign of recognition on his face, but he was as impassive as ever. He was listening so intently that Kira thought this must be the first time he’d ever heard the story, but she couldn’t be sure, and she couldn’t just ask him here in front of everybody. She filed it away to bring up later.

Kira turned back to Laura. “If a new strain hit in Denver, they must have quarantined those forces and kept it from spreading. Back east, no one’s even heard of an RM strain that targets Partials.”

Calix ran into the firelight, breathless and pointing back deeper into the Preserve. “Dr. Vale’s awake,” she said between breaths. “He wants to see you.”

Kira leapt to her feet. If this Dr. Vale had cured RM, maybe he knew more about Partial and human physiology than she did; maybe he’d already found the records they were looking for, and he could tell them more about the Trust, and the expiration date, and maybe even about who and what Kira was. She practically ran ahead of Calix as the girl led them through the village—a sprawling campus of office buildings that had long ago been converted to apartments. There were people here who hadn’t been at the bonfire, but apparently word had spread, and Kira found herself watched by hundreds of curious eyes, standing in doorways and leaning out of windows and clustering at the street corners. They stared at Kira and Samm with the same wonder Kira had felt on first seeing them, and she couldn’t help but wave as she passed. There were more people, and they had a cure, and they lived in a paradise. It was the single brightest hope she’d felt in possibly her entire life.

In the distance, behind the office building village, a massive tower rose up, as high as anything Kira had seen in Manhattan. It was pitch-black, like a hole in the night sky, and she could see it only as a patch of darkness moving against the snow-covered mountains behind. She thought Calix was leading them there, but she stopped them instead at a low building that looked like it had once been a warehouse, and had since been converted to a hospital.

“He’s in here,” said Calix, opening the door. Kira saw that it was glass, and realized with a start that almost all the windows in the Preserve still had glass in them—a classic sign of human habitation, and a phenomenon that Kira had only ever seen in East Meadow. It made her feel even more at home, and the fact that she was going into a hospital only reinforced the feeling. Samm, however, hung back, and after an awkward moment Kira walked back to drag him.

“Come on,” she said, “this is it. This is what we’ve been looking for.”

“We left the horses,” said Samm, his voice barely above a whisper. “We shouldn’t leave them overnight—let’s go get them and meet this guy tomorrow.”

“Is that what’s been bothering you?” asked Kira. She tugged on his arm. “Come on, the horses will be fine, we can get them in the morning.”

“They let us keep our guns,” Samm whispered, jostling them for emphasis. “I know that makes it seem like they trust us, but it’s creepy as hell—they have no way of knowing if anything we say is true, and that means that behind all their smiles and accommodations there’s some higher level of security we can’t see, and I don’t like it at all. Let’s come back in the morning.”

Kira paused, studying his face. She thought she could feel his worry through the link, and if she could feel it, it must be powerful. “You’re really nervous, aren’t you?”

“You’re not?”

Kira glanced around; they were still being watched, and Calix was still waiting impatiently by the door. No one was close enough to hear them—at least not with human senses. She leaned in closer and whispered. “This is a group of people who are alive, who have found a cure, and they’re living around the building that holds the secrets to RM, expiration, and whatever the hell I am, Samm—this is what we’ve been looking for.”

“Something’s not right here.”

“No one has threatened us—”

“And where’s Heron?” he asked. “Heron went ahead of us, to investigate this exact place, and yet she’s not here—that means she either saw something she didn’t like, and she’s holding back, or they saw her first and took her down. That is, they couldn’t have done anything good with her if they’re pretending to us that they’ve not seen her. And I do not want to meet the enemy that can see Heron first and take her down.”

He’s right, thought Kira. This is suspicious, and dangerous, and too good to be true, and yet . . . “They have the cure,” said Kira. “Whatever they’re lying about, they’re not lying about that—there are children everywhere. And if they have that, they might have more. I have to go into that building, Samm, I have to. If you want to wait outside, that’s fine.”

“I’m not leaving you alone,” he said, and looked at the glowing hospital before them. “I guess we’re going in, then.”