EL CAPITAN
BOY
At first, El Capitan thinks the kid is following them because he’s lost and dazed and has nowhere else to go. He ignores the boy—a gimp with one stiff leg and his face half-burned. They’re looking for orphans as it is, though he knows they’re likely dead. Still, they don’t need any more lost souls hanging on to them.
He also doesn’t have the heart to tell the kid to shove off, though—not yet.
But then Bradwell says, “Where’s Pressia? I haven’t seen her in a while.”
El Capitan and Helmud both look around. It’s still raining hard, the wind pushing it across the streets. Hastings freezes and sniffs the air.
“Hastings,” Bradwell says, nervous suddenly. “Where’d she go?”
Hastings climbs onto some rubble to get a better view.
“Hastings!” Bradwell says impatiently.
And the boy walks closer. He tugs on El Capitan’s sleeve.
“Not now,” El Capitan says.
The boy cowers but then says, “I got a message from her.”
“Who?” Bradwell says, walking to the boy, who’s afraid of Bradwell’s hulking frame and large wings. He takes a few steps away, and El Capitan has to step in, talking in a quiet voice and getting down on one knee.
“Tell us,” he says.
“Tell us,” Helmud repeats in a soft singsong.
“The one you’re looking for. Pressia Belze.”
He’s got her full name, which means a lot out here. Hastings clambers down from the rubble, and they all gather a little closer.
“What’s the message?” El Capitan says.
“She had to go. She had to head out.”
“Where?” El Capitan shouts.
“We know where!” Bradwell yells.
“Where? Where?” Helmud says to the boy, again using his singsong.
“She didn’t say. She said you’d know.”
“We know,” Hastings says.
“She said she’d send you a message once she got there,” the boy says. “She said she’d find her brother, and he’d help her send it.”
“What kind of message?”
“She said she’d tell you to take it down or not. She said you’d know what she meant and that she’d draw a picture on the message.”
“A picture of what?” El Capitan asks.
“She wouldn’t tell me, but she said you’d know by the picture that it was a message from her.”
“See what you did!” El Capitan shouts at Bradwell, who runs his hands through his wet hair and backs away from the kid.
“See what you did?” Helmud says, shifting blame back to El Capitan.
“Listen to your brother for once,” Bradwell says, shaking rain from his wings.
“You told her she couldn’t go. You acted like you owned her,” El Capitan shouts, standing back up. “She left the way she did so she wouldn’t have to fight you!”
The boy takes a limp backward and crouches behind some rocks, one straight leg propped to the side, watching.
“You were willing to let her go,” Bradwell says. “You’d let her do whatever she wants because you want her to be in love with you.”
“You want her to be in love with you,” Helmud says to Bradwell coldly.
“What did you say, Helmud?” Bradwell says.
“Helmud means that you want her to still love you so you can punish her with it. At least I told her how I feel,” El Capitan says. “If you weren’t so scared, maybe you would.”
Bradwell charges him, driving his shoulder into El Capitan’s sternum. They hit a brick wall, ramming Helmud into it. El Capitan feels his brother’s ribs contract, airless.
Hastings moves in to break them up, but El Capitan rolls away from him, grabbing Bradwell by the throat. Bradwell rips loose and gets El Capitan in a headlock. Helmud punches Bradwell in the back of the head while El Capitan drives his elbow into Bradwell’s gut. Bradwell loses his grip and falls to one knee.
“Don’t ever shove Helmud around!” El Capitan says, reaching up and supporting the back of his brother’s head. “You hear me? I’ll protect him with every drop of blood in my body. You got that?” He turns his face to his brother’s. “You okay?” he whispers.
Helmud’s breath is ragged. “Okay,” he mutters.
Bradwell and El Capitan are breathless too.
“Did you even think about the bacterium?” El Capitan shouts. “You idiot!” And then he shouts at Helmud. “Check it!”
He feels Helmud’s nimble fingers touch its outline. “Check,” Helmud says weakly.
“Sorry,” Bradwell says, pushing on his head with both hands. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“She’s unprotected,” Hastings says.
“She wouldn’t have it any other way,” El Capitan says.
“She told us she’d send us a message,” Hastings says. “Let’s give her time to assess the situation.”
Bradwell looks at El Capitan sharply.
El Capitan lets his eyes rove the rubble around them, the distant pile of bodies. “She could die before she even gets there.”
Bradwell draws a deep breath. “Why didn’t she at least let us help escort her in?”
“If she dies, it’ll be on her own terms,” El Capitan says. “That’s what you wanted, right? To die on your own terms?”
Bradwell rubs his eyes. Maybe he’s crying. El Capitan can’t tell.
The boy says, “There was something else.”
El Capitan had forgotten about the kid, who steps out from behind the rocks. This time he talks as fast as he can. “She said don’t give up on the kids. Wilda and them. Don’t give up on them. Keep looking.” And before they have a chance to ask him any questions or get in another fight, he turns and runs away.
They’re all silent for a moment.
And then Hastings stands tall. “She might get mad, but I have to at least try to find her and protect her. I still have some loyalty coding, and it’s fixed on her. I have an excuse.” And that’s it. He jerks his head as if flipping his hair out of his eyes and moves off into the rain, swinging his prosthetic in front of him and hopping over it with quick agility.
“I’ve got somewhere I need to go too. Somewhere I can think straight,” Bradwell says. He looks at El Capitan almost pleadingly and then down at the ground. “Will you come with me?”
“Depends. Where?”
“I didn’t say it was someplace I wanted to go. I said I need to go there. Just say yes. We’ll stay together.”
“Together,” Helmud says.
“Okay,” El Capitan says. “We’ll stick together.”
PRESSIA
HOME
Pressia steps in through what was once the doorway, her boots crunching the broken glass. Its roof is gone, like a gaping maw over her head. The floor shines with dark puddles of rain. There’s the old striped pole, lying on its side, the row of blasted mirrors, and tucked in way back, up against the solid wall, the one remaining barbershop chair, the counter, the combs upright in an old glass Barbasol container. The fire made its way here. The walls are even more blackened, the remaining shards of the mirrors fogged gray as if sealed shut. Pressia reminds herself that it hasn’t been that long since she was here. But that doesn’t help. Everything is different.
There could be snipers near, but she doesn’t care. Kill me, she thinks. Wilda and the children are dead. If she’d gotten here faster, if she’d never left them so unprotected… It’s her fault.
She sees the fake panel that her grandfather built along the back wall—her escape hatch—fitted back into place. It leads to the barbershop’s back room, her childhood home. She walks up to the panel, wedges it loose.
And there is the cabinet where she once slept. She rubs her hand on the wood, the fine grit of ash. This was where she drew the lopsided grin of the smiley face. She promised her grandfather she’d come back, and now here she is, finally. Even though he’s dead, she should be true to that promise—to herself if no one else.
The cabinet door is slightly ajar, and she can see the old storage room—the table legs, her grandfather’s chair. She crawls into the cabinet and fits the panel back into place. Once inside the small space, she tightens the cabinet door from within. It’s dark, and she feels small again. She tucks the doll head under her chin. She tries to remember what it was like to be here that first time—the cramped space, the fine motes of dust and ash spinning in the air, and how some part of her hoped she could survive just by being good and quiet and small. She remembers her grandfather sitting in his usual spot by the door, his stump knotted with the veins of wires, the brick on his lap, the fan in his throat whirring one way and then the other with each of his ragged breaths.
She misses him. She misses who she once was in this cabinet. She was his granddaughter. He’s dead, and it turns out she wasn’t even his granddaughter. She was just a lost little girl surrounded by dead people in an airport. He saved her.
She wants to be saved again.
She thinks of the shoes her grandfather gave her for her sixteenth birthday—that pair of clogs—as if he knew she was leaving soon and wanted her to have sturdy shoes at least so that she could make it in the world. And what kind of world was it?
Nothing she could have ever imagined.
As awful and bloody and filled with suffering and death as it is, she fell in love in that world. Love. Who would ever have guessed that it could still exist—after everything—but it does.
She touches her fingers to the cabinet door lightly. It creaks open. The room is more or less intact. The table is singed but not gone. Her grandfather’s old pallet went up in smoke. It’s small and blackened—mostly soot. But the brick is there. It sits by the back door.
She can tell that someone else lived here since her grandfather was taken. There was a sack hanging on a hook in the wall. The sack is mostly gone, but the handle still rests on the hook. The table is covered in bits of what looks like an attempt to rebuild something electronic—a radio, a computer, a simple toaster? Impossible to say.
This is no longer her home. Her grandfather is gone. It’s as if he never existed.
She closes the door and climbs back out through the fake panel into the barbershop and brushes herself off. She’s wasted time. She feels guilty about it but then angry. Would Bradwell go back if he could to a time when he had parents to watch over him? Wouldn’t El Capitan take Helmud back to the place in the woods where they lived with their mother before she was taken away?
Is that why she wants to get the vial and the formula to the Dome laboratories? Because she thinks that if enough people can return to the way they once were, it won’t just feel like they’ve been cured but that they’ve been able to erase this awfulness and return to a time when…what? When they felt safe? Has she ever felt truly safe? By safe, maybe she just means not alone in the world.
What if Bradwell and El Capitan are right? Maybe the world doesn’t need more intervention from science and medicine. Maybe they just need to even the playing field and take down the Dome.
She has to see Partridge first, though. She can’t be a part of that unless she knows what’s happened. She still has faith in him. She has to. If she loses faith in him, her faith in everyone slips. And she can’t afford to lose any more faith. It’s too precious.
She walks to the gutted door, back out on the street. Again, she runs—head down, breathless. She knows the way now. She runs until she can see the bright spot of the Dome, far-off, its cross shining against the dark silk of the clouds.
EL CAPITAN
SAINT
Bradwell stops on top of some rubble. He lifts a piece of cast-iron gate. “This way.” He goes in first, down a small set of stone steps. El Capitan knows this part of town—or thought he did. He used to make rounds back when he drove the truck, picking up unwilling recruits, but he’s never seen this hole before.
El Capitan says to Helmud, “Where’s he taking us?”
“Us?” Helmud whispers, as if he’d rather stay behind alone.
El Capitan follows Bradwell down the stairs, pulling the gate back into place overhead, covering them.
The room is small, but not just because it’s caved in. No, it was built to be small. “Is this near where the old church used to be?” El Capitan says, trying to get his bearings.
“We’re in it.”
“The church?”
“It’s a crypt.”
Bradwell looks too big for the space. His massive wings rub the walls. He hunches down and keeps his head bowed—because he’s too tall or is he being respectful? He walks to a wall and kneels.
But Bradwell has folded his hands together. He’s whispering into them. Why? El Capitan’s never understood religions.
“I didn’t know you were churchgoing,” El Capitan says, more to himself than Bradwell. At first it looks like Bradwell is praying to a Plexiglas wall, a little shattered but still holding up. Then he sees that the Plexiglas is covering a recess in the wall, and through the splintered plastic, he sees a girl. Her face is slightly lifted; her hands are in her lap. She’s sitting there, wearing a long old-fashioned dress, her hair pulled back from her face—a beautiful face, simple and yet profoundly sad. She’s patient. She’s waiting for something or someone. Maybe she was waiting for Bradwell. Maybe she’s waiting for God.
“Who is she?” El Capitan says, but he knows Bradwell won’t answer. He’s praying. His eyes are clenched, his hands locked together. Dome worshippers used to kneel and pray like this. He’s seen them lined up in the Deadlands before, all pointing toward the Dome.
“Who?” Helmud says. “Who?”
A row of candles on a ledge have melted, covering it in wax. Offerings. Many people have been here. El Capitan spots a placard. He steps up to it closely. Half the words are gone. It’s all banged up. The statue is of a saint whose name started with Wi. He knows that she was a patron saint of something. He sees the word abbess but doesn’t know what it means. There’s more about small children and miracles and the word tuberculosis, which he knows well. It’s likely how the saint died. A disease of the lungs. His mother died young of a disease. She was like a saint—to him at least.
El Capitan moves to the back wall and sits down, leaning against Helmud. Helmud lets his head rest on El Capitan’s shoulder.
El Capitan wonders how long Bradwell is going to take. He seems pained. His whispers—El Capitan can’t make out the words—sound urgent. Is he praying to the saint to keep Pressia safe? Is he praying to be forgiven? That’s something that always comes up with religions, isn’t it?
El Capitan props his forearms up on his knees and clasps his hands together. He sits that way for a while before he realizes that his hands are linked almost like someone who’s praying. He closes his eyes, wondering if in a place like this, something might come to him.
He whispers, “Saint Wi.” He tries to imagine who she was. Did she help children? What were her miracles? He thinks of her face. He doesn’t have to look at her. Her face is locked in his mind—her way of gazing. She’s waiting patiently. For El Capitan? For him to say what he needs to say?
Say it, he hears the words in his head whisper. Say it.
He sees the face of someone he killed. And then another. He remembers driving that truck, making rounds, picking up kids he knew wouldn’t ever be soldiers—too sick, too weak, too fused and deformed. Say it. He sees a mangled arm. A festered leg. He sees the cage where he kept the ones who would never make it. He remembers the smell of death in that cage. Say it.
There was the time he took Pressia, just a fresh recruit herself then, out into the woods to play The Game—hunting down a sickly recruit. Ingership gave the order to have Pressia play The Game, but would Ingership have ever really known if El Capitan hadn’t gone through with it? No. He could’ve faked it. And then the boy, crawling through underbrush, got caught in one of El Capitan’s traps. The metal spokes drove into his ribs, punctured his chest. He begged for them to shoot him. Pressia couldn’t, but El Capitan could and did. It was easy.
So why does he see the boy’s face now, begging him to pull the trigger? Why does the pain of it dog him still?
He takes a breath. He feels sick. Say it. He gulps air.
He knows he should ask for forgiveness. The thought is there in his head.
Say it. Say it.
He opens his mouth, but instead of saying I’m sorry, he says, “We got to go.”
Bradwell lifts his head, turns, stares at him. “Give me a minute.”
“Okay, but that’s all—just a minute.” El Capitan gets to his feet, but his head doesn’t feel right. He lurches toward the statue of the saint, dizzy now. He presses his pale, scarred hands to the splintered Plexiglas, and lowers his head so that it touches the plastic too.
“You okay?” Bradwell asks.
El Capitan straightens up, rubs his face. “Fine,” he says. “We’re fine. Right, Helmud?”
“Right?” Helmud says.
And El Capitan turns and runs up the stone stairs, moves aside the piece of cast-iron gate, and steps into the dusty air. He breathes deeply. He looks up and down the streets. He remembers running through these streets—in Death Sprees. He leans over and spits on the ground.
“Right?” Helmud asks again.
“Not right,” El Capitan says. “Not right at all.” He imagines Pressia making her way to the Dome. She’s the one who has hope, who still believes in Partridge. He’s glad she’s free of them. “She’s out there trying to make something right. And you and me, Helmud? What should we do? What’s the point of the two of us on this earth? You tell me that.”
“You tell me,” Helmud says.
Bradwell climbs up the steps, covers the opening again, and says, “I’m going after her.”
El Capitan feels a spike of jealousy. He wants to tackle Bradwell and beat his head with a rock. That’s how he would have handled something like this—before he met Pressia. “Let her go.”
“No. I have to find her—not to protect her. I have to tell her something.”
El Capitan knows that he loves her, that he’s figured that this might be his last chance to tell her the truth. Bringing down the Dome will likely lead to something like war. God, it would feel good to grind Bradwell’s face into the ground, but this is beyond El Capitan. He has to bow out. He’s got no shot at love. He says, “You’ll go this one alone.”
“I know the ending, Cap.”
“What ending?”
“My own.”
“How does it turn out?”
“It could be better, but I have to see it through.”
“I guess that’s all we can do—see it through.”
“See it through,” Helmud says.
“Will we meet up?” El Capitan says.
“We can meet at the old vault. Should be safe and dry there.”
“The bank?”
“What’s left of it.” Bradwell is about to go, but then he turns back. “What happened to you in there?”
“In there?” Helmud says, reaching around and tapping El Capitan’s chest.
El Capitan doesn’t know, so he doesn’t answer. “Promise me you’ll really tell her.” His chest burns. “Tell her the whole truth. Whatever it is. She deserves that much.”