Ruins

The Preserve sat against the base of the Rocky Mountains, on the outskirts of the Denver ruins. Before the Break, the sprawling city had become a megalopolis stretching all the way from Castle Rock to Fort Collins, from Boulder to Bennett. In the years since, it had become an acid-drenched hell, the western edge of the vast poisonous Badlands that consumed the Midwest. Every gutter and depression was filled with cracking salt pans, smoldering phosphorus, or the scattered dust of crystallized bleach. Not a single living plant or animal remained.

Samm and his group set out early in the morning on their journey back to East Meadow—back to bring the humans the cure, and the incredible news that the cure was self-sustaining. He worried about how, if at all, they would convince the humans and Partials to work together, but he supposed their group was a good demonstration: himself, Heron, Ritter, Dwain, and two more recovered Partials named Fergus and Bron; Phan had come with them as well, and Calix on one of their two horses. The Preserve had no horses of its own, just the two that Samm and Heron and Kira had brought with them from New York. Kira had named them, and Samm allowed himself a brief, wistful moment to think of her. The other Partials looked at him, immediately aware of his thoughts through the link. He thought of the horses again, worried about their ability to find food in the Badlands. Calix was riding Bobo, Kira’s horse, and following behind her on a lead was Oddjob, Afa’s curious, disobedient mount, now relegated to a pack animal. He’d always hated being ridden, stubbornly going his own way and ignoring their commands, but he seemed content to follow Bobo. Samm hoped it would last.

Thinking of Oddjob made him think again of Afa, the childlike genius they’d brought with them through the wilderness, the only human on their journey out—and, not coincidentally, the only one who hadn’t made it. He’d been injured in Chicago and finally died in the toxic fields of Colorado. Samm still didn’t know if any human could survive the journey, and Calix was particularly at risk. Her injury made her slower and tied up her body’s resources in healing; if anything happened to her it would slow down the entire group, making them all more vulnerable. Worse still . . . I would miss her, he thought. Afa was my responsibility, but Calix is my friend. If it becomes a question of abandoning her or dying myself . . . I don’t know if I’ll be able to make that choice.

He glanced at Heron as they walked through the corroded city. Several times during the Isolation War he’d envied her detachment, her ability to let all her pain, both physical and emotional, slide off her like she was changing clothes. She had lived through the worst that war had thrown at them, and the worst times since; she could face any problem they came up against, and could make any decision she needed to survive. Even if all of them died crossing the Badlands, she would live. She would make it home, because that was the mission. She was frightening, even to Samm sometimes, and she was hard to understand and even harder to befriend, but she was the group’s best hope. He would have to talk to her in private and put together a contingency plan.

It took them three days to cross the city, and when they reached the eastern fringe, the Badlands spread out before them as far as the eye could see: flat, featureless, and dead. Here and there a bone-white tree twisted up from the poisoned soil, murdered by the rain and baked brittle by the sun. No longer forced to weave between buildings, they were able to pick up speed, and their first day east of Denver they traveled nearly as far as they had in the first three days combined. Heron took the lead, ranging far ahead to scout out the territory. Phan kept up admirably, not quite as resilient as Samm but still managing to show more endurance than the four Partials still healing from their comas. The horses were the slowest, built not for speed but for distance; they fell behind in the morning, Calix and Dwain staying with them, but then gradually caught up again as night began to fall. The group had been traveling northeast all day, following I-76 as it curved to follow the path of the South Platte River, and Samm couldn’t help but notice that the night air was abnormally cold. Calix caught up to the others along the side of a foul-smelling river. She was shivering.

“We need to camp soon,” said Dwain, accompanying the statement with a silent link message: THIS HUMAN’S NOT DOING WELL.

“It’s cold,” said Phan. “Much colder than usual. We’ll need shelter.”

“We’ll need shelter from more than just cold,” said Heron. “If we’re caught outside when it rains, we’ll be dead in minutes.”