Will just kept staring at Ulysses. I know he was thinking about the shootouts at the gaming center, except this one was brutal and real, and the dead did not get up and play again. Ulysses wiped his bloodstained hands on his pants, and then pushed his sweat-matted hair off his forehead with the back of one palm. His hand, I noticed, was shaking.
“There was no bird, was there?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, there was,” said Ulysses, touching the tattoo on his neck. “Her name’s Miranda.”
I understood everything then. I could see every line in the pirate’s craggy face. His skin was sunburned and dry. His ears were cracked and bloodied. But his brown eyes were like dark pools in which fantastic creatures swam.
“What happened to her? To Miranda?”
Ulysses shrugged. “What happens to most children. She got sick, and never got better.”
“And your wife?”
“The same.”
“But you said you were married,” said Will, glancing down at Ulysses’s ring, smooth and lustrous in the half-light.
“I’ll always be married. But it’ll be the next world when I see her again.”
Our father believed in Heaven, but I thought it was a place that shakers pretended existed—without it there would be too many other questions. Ulysses, however, seemed confident he would see his wife and daughter again. And maybe, I thought, the belief was all that mattered.
The children had drawn closer now. There were several of them who seemed older and more confident than the others, and they approached Ulysses.
“Please, mister,” said one. “Do you have any food?” He was nearly as tall as Ulysses but less than half his weight. Clumps of hair grew from his head in no discernible pattern, and his eyes were bloodshot and rheumy. Ulysses asked his name, and the boy said he was called Thomas and the girl next to him was Danielle. I was shocked to hear Danielle was a girl; she looked almost identical to Thomas: same hair, same height, same sickly bodies. They were, in fact, brother and sister, Thomas said.
“Where are your parents?” I asked.
Thomas shrugged. “Dead, we think.” He explained their town had been raided by Mounties, because the residents were siphoning water from a pipeline. The adults were shot; the town burned; and the children taken prisoner to the canyon.
“Most of us are dead now,” he concluded.
I looked at Ulysses, and I knew he knew what I was thinking.
“There’s nothing we can do,” he said again.
“Yes there is,” I insisted. “Give them the canyon.”
“Give it to them?”
I opened my arms and stretched them tip to tip, north to south. “The drilling site. The machinery. The trucks. The weapons. Everything.”
“They wouldn’t survive for a minute.”
“You said they won’t survive anyway.”
Ulysses rubbed his chin and frowned. “I suppose a mounted gun might help.” He glanced at the helicopter.
“There’s a weapons room in the main building,” Thomas said.
“And a cold storage with food,” said Danielle, the first words she had spoken.
“There’s water too,” I added.
Ulysses sighed, but he knew he had been outmaneuvered. He signaled the pilot to bring him the prisoner. When the tall man was before him, Ulysses grasped him by the edges of his collar. “The keys,” he said.
“No keys,” the man managed. “Tumblers.”
“The combination, then.”
The man hesitated, and Ulysses cocked his weapon and pointed it at the man’s head. “You smell bad,” he said. “I doubt you’ll be missed.”
The man stuttered, then quickly gave up the code. Ulysses sat him back on the ground and called for Thomas.
“You know how to fire this?” he asked.
Thomas took Ulysses’s gun. It looked absurdly large in his thin hands, but he released the safety like a professional. “My father taught me,” he explained.
“Good.” Ulysses turned to the man kneeling before him. “This boy’s in charge now. You’ll do as he says. If you don’t—as you can see, his father taught him how to shoot you.”
Dozens of other children had drawn closer, curious and hungry—vacant eyes calculating the risks, weighing whatever Ulysses had to offer. He coaxed them nearer and singled out several of the biggest, healthiest boys to accompany him to the helicopter. There they withdrew the mounted gun from its bay, and carried it to the front of the main building. Then they went back and forth several times with boxes of ammunition and crates of grenades. Will and I helped until the building was well-fortified and well-armed.
The throng of children pushed in on us, and I worried they might riot. They didn’t smell as bad as the foul man, but they didn’t smell good either. My grip on Will was loosening, and I felt a mounting panic as the children swelled around me. They pushed and shoved and seemed to come from everywhere.
Then Ulysses’s voice split the crowd. “Dinner!” he announced.