chapter THIRTY-FIVE
Kira kept one eye on the sky as they traveled, watching for rain, and one eye on the fields around them. They could never afford to be far from shelter in the toxic wasteland, but in the great plains of the Midwest, they were often far from everything.
They lost another horse in the first acid rainstorm—But no, Kira reminded herself, we didn’t lose Buddy in the rainstorm, we lost him in the house—the house that I brought him into. The mad kicking of the horses, thrashing wildly with their hooves as the acid burned their flesh, had destroyed the room and everything in it, and by the time they’d washed them clean and calmed them down, Buddy had been kicked too hard, and in too many places; he had a broken foreleg, two broken ribs, and a shattered jaw. Kira herself put him out of his misery. There was nothing else I could have done, she told herself, probably for the hundredth time. It was either bring him inside or let him die in the acid, and I couldn’t do that to him. It didn’t soothe her conscience, but she pushed it aside anyway. The worst part of all was that it wasn’t even the biggest problem on her mind.
Kira and Heron were both burned by the acid, though the blisters had healed into angry welts after a few days. Samm was much worse off, and spent three days near blind before his Partial accelerated regeneration was able to fight off the poisons and rebuild the damage to his corneas. Afa, the only human in the group, had it worst of all: He’d survived the harrowing fifteen minutes tied to the back of the kicking, thrashing horses, but in the process his back and arms and legs had been horribly burned by the acid, and his eyes, burned even worse than Samm’s, showed no sign of having healed. Kira stopped in every city they passed to scrounge for ointments and painkillers, but most of the time they kept him doped and tied to the back of Oddjob, trying to make the travel as easy as possible for all of them. They didn’t know what they’d find at the ParaGen complex in Denver, but Kira hoped it would have, at the very least, adequate shelter and a clinic they could scavenge for supplies. Afa deserved better than they could give him on the move.
Highway 34 took them through the state of Iowa, a vast, flat checkerboard of farmland that was now marked only by bleached-white fences and sickly yellow trees. The poison wind blew steadily from the south, broken by the occasional acid rainstorm or, even more terrifying, vast black dust storms that swept across the land like swarms of locusts, blotting out the sun and scouring the last desperate leaves from those few bushes strong enough to draw strength from the toxic earth. Kira had tried at first to use their water purifier on the oily yellow streams that flowed here and there across the land, but they gave up when the purifier itself started to break down under the caustic onslaught. Instead they searched every grocery store and shopping center they passed for bottled water, loading as much as they could on their own backs and using Bobo, the last remaining horse aside from Oddjob, as a pack animal to carry their few remaining supplies. Clean feed for the horses was even harder to come by, and as the journey wore on Kira was forced to spend more and more of their rest stops swatting their mouths away from the poisoned grasses sticking up through the dust. Their good traveling clothes were left in a smoking heap on that first farmhouse’s floor, and they were dressed now in the farmers’ family’s clothes. They were too big, but Kira joked that at least now they were properly dressed for the Midwest country they traveled through. It was the kind of joke she thought Marcus would have made.
When the Missouri River appeared before them, cutting a deep, treacherous border between Iowa and Nebraska, Heron growled, “If I never see another river again, it will be too soon.”
“That doesn’t make linguistic sense,” Samm started, but Kira cut him off.
“It’s an expression,” she said, staring at the river. She sighed. “And one I agree with in this case.” The Missouri was thick and putrid, a gray-green river laced with streaks of yellow and pink. It smelled like burned detergent, and the air around it tasted strangely metallic. Kira shook her head. “It’s not as big as the last one, but it’s not one I exactly want to take any chances with, either. Where’s the nearest bridge?”
“I’m looking,” said Samm. He had found a new map in a bookstore, replacing the one they’d lost in the Mississippi crossing, and he stood now carefully unfolding it. Kira patted Bobo on the neck, soothing him gently, then moved to Oddjob and Afa. The big man was asleep, lolling precariously in the harness they’d rigged to keep him strapped to the saddle. He hadn’t fallen yet, but Kira checked the straps anyway, talking softly to Afa as she did. “You want to go north or south?” asked Samm, peering at the road map. “There’s a crossing north in Omaha and another south in Nebraska City, and we’re about halfway between them both.”
“Omaha will be bigger,” said Heron. “Better chance the bridges are still up.”
“It’s also out of our way,” said Kira, checking the bandage on Afa’s still-broken leg. “We need to get off the plains soon or Afa is going to die. We’re going to eventually have to turn south anyway, so I say we do it now.”
“If we don’t have time for a detour,” said Heron, “we don’t have time to head back north again when the bridge in Nebraska City turns out to be at the bottom of the river. We should go for the sure thing.”
“Heading north takes us across a second river,” said Samm, still looking at the map. “The Platte merges with the Missouri just a few miles north of here, and if we go to Omaha, we’ll have to cross them both.”
“All right, then we go south,” said Heron. “The second river can bite me.”
“I agree,” said Samm, refolding the map and looking up. “Nebraska City still looks pretty big, and if the bridges are gone, we can just head farther south to Kansas City. The bridges there were huge—they’re bound to be up.”
“Unless someone destroyed them in the Partial War,” said Kira. She ran her hands through her hair—far too greasy, after weeks of travel with no clean water to wash it in. She shrugged, too exhausted to think. “I just hope this wasteland doesn’t get any worse the farther south we go.”
The bridge to Nebraska City was indeed still standing, and Kira made a silent prayer of thanks as they trudged toward it. A sort of levee to the south had become clogged with debris, and the river below the bridge had swelled to create a small lake, stinking of chemicals and topped with a layer of stagnant foam, like an ice cream float. It hurt just to breathe the air above it, and Kira tied a spare shirt across her mouth—and another across Afa’s—to try to filter the worst of it. Halfway across they found themselves trapped by a cluster of cars, crashed into a snarl that completely blocked the road. Kira and Samm strained to shift them out of the way while Heron scouted ahead, and by the time they cleared a hole wide enough for the horses to pass through, Heron was back, reporting that portions of the bridge were unstable, corroded by the river or the rain until pieces had started to slough off. They proceeded carefully, controlling their breathing; at one point Kira could look down through the cracks by her feet and see the multicolored water drifting lazily below them, iridescent in the pale sunlight. She kept a firm hand on Oddjob’s reins, hoping no more cracks appeared until they were safely across. They reached the far side after nearly half an hour, and if the ground hadn’t been poisonous, Kira would have kissed it.
The land west of the river was, if possible, even more featureless than the land east of it. They followed the map to rejoin I-80 in a town called Lincoln, and made good time on a stretch of highway so remarkably straight it didn’t deviate more than an inch for days. They hit the Platte, but they didn’t have to cross it, and when the road curved north to follow the river, they plunged south instead, eventually rejoining Highway 34 on the banks of the Republican. They kept between these two rivers, traveling in a wide corridor through bleached fields and corroded cities. During the day the sun baked the toxic chemicals on the ground, and acrid smoke and steam rose up in wisps like ghosts in the fields. At night the land was eerily silent, stripped of crickets and birds and howling wolves until nothing remained but the wind, rippling through the pallid grasses and sighing through the shattered windows of the houses they camped in. Kira kept her eye on the rain, thinking of Buddy and Afa’s blistered face.
Afa was asleep most of the day now, with or without the sedatives they gave him, and Kira grew more worried than ever. His broken leg was refusing to heal, as if all his body’s strength was routed to some other purpose. In a town called Benkelman she used most of their water to wash him, head to toe, cleaning his hair and his leg wound and the sores from the acid and shooting him full of antibiotics; she didn’t know if it would do any good, for the surface wounds, at least, seemed uninfected, but she didn’t know what else to do. In the East Meadow hospital she would have had more options, but in a crumbling farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, there was nothing to do but hope. She wrapped him tightly and covered him with blankets, and the next day they tied him back in his saddle and headed west again, leaving the road—it tried to cross the river, but the bridge was gone—and striking out across the fields themselves. They passed a town called Parks, and a bigger town called Wray, and soon the river petered out to nothing and the fields stretched out to nothing on every side, as if the world had run out of terrain altogether and there was nothing left but land and sky, a lost limbo of never-changing nothing.
Afa died days later, the travelers still lost in the pale yellow wasteland.
They buried him in dirt that smelled like broken batteries, and crouched in a fiberglass shed while the acid rain poured down to dissolve his flesh and bleach his bones.
“What the hell are we doing?” asked Heron. Samm looked up at her; Kira, too tired to move, lay in the corner with her eyes closed.
“We’re saving people,” said Samm.
“Who are we saving?” asked Heron. Kira looked up, her head loose on her neck, her movements shaky and uncoordinated from weeks of malnutrition, exhaustion, and fear. “Have we saved anybody? We’ve killed somebody. We killed two horses. Afa lived for twelve years on his own, completely alone, in the one of the most dangerous parts of the world, and now he’s dead.” She spit onto the ground and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “Let’s face it: we’ve failed.”
Samm peered in the dark at his careworn map, nearly falling apart at the creases. Poison rain drummed down on the fiberglass over their heads. “We’re in Colorado now,” he said. “We have been for a few days. I’m not a hundred percent certain of where in Colorado, but based on how fast we were traveling before, I’m pretty sure we’re . . . here.” He pointed at a spot on the map, far from any roads or cities.
“Yay,” said Heron, not even looking. “I’ve always wanted to be here.”
“Heron’s tired,” said Kira. She was herself on the verge of tears, practically broken by Afa’s death. But she couldn’t quit now. She sat up to take the map from Samm and her own hand shook with the effort. “We’re all tired. We’re genetically perfect super-soldiers, designed to keep going under the harshest conditions, and we can barely move. We need to conserve our strength if we’re going to get to Denver.”
“Are you kidding?” said Heron. “You aren’t still planning on completing this idiotic mission, are you?” She turned to Samm, incredulous. “Samm, you know it’s time to do what we should have done weeks ago. Turn around.”
“If I’m right,” said Samm, “we’re barely a day’s journey to Denver. We could get there tomorrow.”
“And do what?” Heron demanded. “Find another ruined building? Risk our lives to get its generator running? Beat our heads against the computer because everything we want to look at is trapped behind firewalls and encryptions and passwords and who knows what other kinds of security? Afa was the only one who knew how to get past that; without him we don’t even know how to navigate the filing system.”
“We’re too close to give up,” said Samm.
“We’re not close to anything,” said Heron. “We’re going to go, and we’re going to find nothing, and this entire trip has been a waste of everyone’s time. We’re not going to cure RM, we’re not going to solve the expiration date, we’re not going to do anything but die in a wasteland.”
She lurched to her feet. “I’m not even going to say it.”
“Say what?” Kira demanded. “‘I told you so’? ‘We should have turned around after Chicago’? ‘We should never have left New York in the first place’?”
“Take your pick.”
Kira struggled to her feet, panting with the exertion. “You’re wrong. We came here with a job to do. If we don’t do it, Afa will have died for nothing. All of us will have. And we’ll take the whole planet with us.”
“Come on,” said Samm, but the girls ignored him. Heron reached Kira’s side before Kira even realized she was moving, and her fist slammed into Kira’s chin like a sledgehammer. Kira staggered back, already bracing herself to pounce back and attack before her mind had fully processed the punch, but before they could go any further Samm shoved himself between them. “Stop it.”
“She’s out of her mind,” said Heron. “We had a chance if we’d gone back east after Chicago—we could have gone to Dr. Morgan, we could have even gone to Trimble. Anything would have given us a better chance than this. What’re you looking for, Kira?” she asked, looking at Kira over Samm’s shoulder. “What is this about? Is this even about saving our race? Or the humans? Or is this whole insane expedition all just so you can figure out what the hell you are? You selfish little bitch.”
Kira was speechless. She wanted nothing more than to bash Heron’s head against the ground, but Samm kept himself solidly between them. He faced Heron solemnly, keeping Kira back with his arm.
“Why’d you come with us?” asked Samm.
“You said you trusted her!” Heron snarled. “You told me to come, so I came.”
“You haven’t done what you’re told since the day I met you,” said Samm. “You do what you want, when you want, and if anyone gets in the way, you take them out. You could have stopped us at any time. You could have incapacitated me and kidnapped Kira and brought her to Morgan and done everything exactly the way you wanted, but you didn’t. Tell me why.”
Heron looked at him fiercely, then scowled at Kira. “Because I actually believed her. She talked about researching everything ParaGen had done to find some sort of cure, and for some stupid reason I thought she meant it.”
“I did,” said Kira, thought the fight had gone out of her voice. She felt drained and empty, as hollow as the fiberglass shed they were hiding in.
“And you,” Heron spat, looking at Samm. “I can’t believe you’re still siding with her. I thought you were smarter than this—I thought I could trust you. That’s what I get for believing in something, I guess.”
Heron’s words were clearly meant to cut Samm deeply, and it broke Kira’s heart to hear them, knowing how they must make him feel. But if they did affect him, he didn’t show it. Instead, he held up a hand to silence Heron and turned to Kira, his eyes dark with fatigue. “You say you did mean it. Do you still?”
Kira was reeling from Heron’s accusations, and felt even more empty as she searched for an answer. Was she really doing this—putting them through all this hell, starving her friends and torturing the horses and killing Afa—just for her own selfish reasons? She didn’t know what to say, and they stood in tense silence for what felt like an eternity.
“Intentions are all I have left,” she said at last. “We’re going to go there, and whatever we find, it’ll be more than we have now. At least there’s a chance. At least . . .” She trailed off. She had run out of words.
“You’re out of your mind,” Heron said again, but stopped when Kira turned away and sat, collapsing in a heap as her legs buckled. She lay down on the floor of the shed and wished she could cry.