Ruins (Partials Sequence #3)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Kira crouched in the shade, surveying the destruction before her. She guessed the ashes were at least a month old, maybe more. Animals—maybe foxes, probably cats, and by the looks of it at least one wild pig—had already ravaged the site, dragging clothes and backpacks through the dirt, scattering the remnants of old, weathered equipment. Picking clean the bones.

Kira picked up a scrap of an old armored vest and turned it over in her hands before dropping it with a thump back into the dust. Dr. Morgan’s records of the smaller factions were accurate, but apparently out of date; she had sent a patrol out in this direction, but there was no report of this battle. The corpses might be Morgan’s soldiers, rival soldiers, or a mix of both. Kira wondered if there were newer, more complete records hidden in a drive somewhere, encrypted and secret, or if Morgan had simply stopped bothering to complete them. They were both equally possible, but Kira’s gut told her the latter was more likely. Morgan was obsessed, pursuing the cure for expiration with fanatical zeal. Everything else was being left by the wayside, including the people Morgan was trying to save. This forgotten battleground might very well be the last attack she’d ordered. Kira prayed that it was.

A small breeze lifted the ashes from an old grenade blast. Kira sat on a fallen log, staying under the trees and keeping her back to the water, where attack was less likely, and pulled out her map. She was in a thick beech forest on the shores of the North Stamford reservoir—about ten or twelve miles from Morgan’s headquarters in Greenwich—where Morgan’s scouts had marked the location of a possible recon camp for a faction of Partials called the Ivies. Obviously the recon camp was gone, but what about the rest of the Ivies? Kira hadn’t been able to find clear data on each faction’s beliefs or alignments, but the file on speculation listed the Ivies as “strongly opposed to medical experimentation.” That marked them as potential allies for Kira, and their suspected territory was relatively close.

She examined her map, scavenged from a high school library on her way out of Greenwich. She had transferred Morgan’s records to a data screen, purely in the interest of speed, but the battery wouldn’t last more than a few days, and as soon as she was out of Morgan’s reach, she’d sat down and painstakingly copied as much of the info as she could into a musty paper notebook. The map, too, she had heavily marked with pencil, denoting all the possible faction camps and her most likely routes to travel between them. Some were weeks away, either north along the Hudson or east through Connecticut and Rhode Island. One group had allegedly traveled all the way to Boston, fleeing the faction war almost completely. The Ivies, if Morgan’s scouts were correct, had retreated to the wilderness in between, making their home by a place called Candlewood Lake. Maybe twenty miles away, as the crow flies. Kira checked her supplies—a bedroll, a poncho, a handgun, a compass, and a knife. A bag of apples. Only what she could glean from the hospital without arousing suspicion. She’d look for more on the road.

She filled her canteen in the reservoir. Time to go.

The first leg of her journey ignored the highway and cut across the countryside, through a wooded stretch of land that the map said was more empty forest, but that turned out to be broken asphalt roads that wound through a loose collection of massive homes, each with its own fetid swimming pool, and most with their own tennis court. Kira kept to the trees when possible, just in case someone was following her, but when she reached the town of New Canaan, she turned north on Route 123 and made much better time. It was late enough in the year that most of the leaves had changed color, and foliage seemed to burn with bright yellows and oranges. Most of the leaves would fall soon, a callback to the old days when the winters were fierce and heavy, but the beeches kept theirs well into the spring. Kira wondered if they’d always been that way or if it was a new development, nature’s way of adapting to the new, winterless world the humans had created.

She passed a golf course, the long, open greens overgrown by saplings. It always felt like such a waste when she saw that—old golf courses were some of the easiest fields to clear for farming. A good sign, she decided, that the Ivies were nowhere near.

Kira camped for the night in a fire station; the giant bay doors were open and the trucks gone, making Kira wonder if the firefighters had succumbed to RM while out on a call. The disease didn’t normally kill that fast, but if they were already infected and working while sick . . . She hadn’t seen an infected adult in thirteen years, but she knew the disease was painful, and she couldn’t imagine the strength it would take to keep going in those final stages. She had to admire anyone who’d try to fight fires while dying of the plague. She rolled out her blanket in the barn-like cavern of the open station, protected from rain but smelling the cool night air, and fell asleep to dreams of fire and death. In the morning she felt like she hadn’t slept at all. She repacked her bedroll and started walking again.

She followed Route 123 north until it ended, then traveled east on something called the Old Post Road. Her route seemed to weave back and forth between New York and Connecticut, and she couldn’t help but wonder how those ancient divisions had been decided, and what they meant for the people who’d lived there. There were no gates or walls, no clear delineations of where one state ended and another began. She didn’t even know what that division meant. It had been so obvious to the adults, and so meaningless to the post-Break children, that they’d never bothered to teach it in school.

However the state relationship had worked, it was over now, the houses empty, the cars rusted and falling apart, the roads buckling and breaking as new plants and trees encroached relentlessly back into their ancient territory. Birds roosted in the upper windows of sagging houses, while deer and other animals stepped lightly through the overgrown lawns, nibbling the new young leaves that grew up between the ruins. In another hundred years, Kira thought, these houses would crumble and fall completely, and the forest would swallow them up, and the deer and the boars and the wolves would forget that there had ever been anyone here at all.

The thought of wolves made her worry about Watchdogs—the bizarre talking hounds that ParaGen had made as scouts and companions for the Partial soldiers. There were none on Long Island, but she had been attacked by a feral pack of them on her trip to Chicago with Samm. He had assured her that they weren’t fully intelligent, at least not to a human level, but Kira couldn’t decide if that knowledge made her more or less nervous; more or less disturbed. She had no idea how widespread they were, but prayed she wouldn’t encounter any on her trip to Candlewood Lake.

Eventually the Old Post Road ended as well, and she turned north on Route 35 toward the town of Ridgefield. The town wasn’t large by any means, but it was far more developed than the forest and scattered houses she’d been walking through since Greenwich, and the heightened visibility gave her pause. In all likelihood there was nobody here, nobody for miles—and if there were, it would probably be a scout or spotter for the Ivies, not a far-ranging agent of Dr. Morgan. Even so, the urban center scared her. Instead of trees and dirt on the edges of the road, there was simply more concrete, which meant the forest hadn’t regrown as heavily. The sight lines were longer and more open. An enemy would be able to see her from blocks away, instead of the few dozen feet allowed by the woods; she would be easier to ambush, or simply snipe from long range. She hesitated on the outskirts of the thinning forest, trying to convince herself she was being paranoid, but in the end she backtracked and cut through the trees and yards, pushing her way through dilapidated fences and dashing across each open street. The detour was barely an extra mile, maybe two, but she breathed easier when she finally passed the last shopping center and rejoined the narrow forest highway.

Eventually 35 merged into Route 7, and Kira made her camp in a small house just outside the crossroads. The windows were all broken—most were, outside the maintained areas—but the roof was holding, and despite a few cat prints in the hallways, it didn’t seem to have become a den for any animals. Two human skeletons lay in the bedroom, their bony arms resting loosely around each other, the decayed remnants of a blanket clinging in tatters to their ribs. Two victims of RM. She cleared a space in the living room and fell asleep looking at the old, faded photos of the family on the wall.

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