EL CAPITAN
GUNS
THE FABRIC OF THE AWNING IS WORN AWAY. All that’s left are the aluminum spokes, bolted to the old asylum. El Capitan looks up through the awning’s charred metal spines at the gray sky. Pressia Belze—the name is heavy. Why is Ingership suddenly obsessed with some survivor named Pressia Belze? El Capitan doesn’t like the name—the way it draws itself out, a buzz in the mouth. He gave up looking for her. It’s not his job to be out on the streets, so he came home an hour ago and sent the men back out. Now he wonders if he’ll pay for that decision. Could those idiots really find the girl without him? He doubts it.
He shouts into the walkie-talkie. “Did you get her? Over.”
The radio goes silent.
“Do you read me? Over.”
There’s nothing.
“Dead again,” El Capitan says.
And then El Capitan’s brother, Helmud, mutters, “Dead again.”
Helmud is only seventeen, two years younger than El Capitan, and he’s always been the smaller of the two. El Capitan and Helmud were ten and eight, respectively, when the Detonations hit. Helmud is fused to El Capitan’s back. The visual effect is that of a permanent piggyback ride. Helmud has his own upper body, but the rest feeds into his brother—the lumpy bone and muscle of his thighs forming a thick band across El Capitan’s lower back. They’d been riding a motorized dirt bike when the whitest white and the hot wind blasted them down—Helmud on the back of the dirt bike holding on to his older brother. El Capitan had rebuilt the engine himself. Now Helmud’s skinny arms are draped around his brother’s thick neck.
The walkie-talkie crackles to life. El Capitan can hear the truck’s radio and growling gears, as if it’s climbing a hill. Finally the officer’s voice pops through the noise. “No. But we will. Trust me. Over.”
Trust me, El Capitan thinks. He shoves the walkie-talkie into his holster. He glances back at his brother. “Like I ever trusted anybody. Not even you.”
“Not even you,” Helmud whispers back.
The truth is he’s always had to trust Helmud. For so long, they’ve only had each other. They never had a father, really, and when El Capitan was nine, their mother died of a virulent influenza in an asylum like the one he stands in front of now.
El Capitan shouts into the walkie-talkie, “If you don’t get her, Ingership will have our asses. Don’t mess this up. Over.”
It’s late. The moon is lost in a gray haze. El Capitan thinks about going in to see if Vedra is still working in the kitchen. He likes the way she looks through the steam of the dishwasher. He could order her to make him a sandwich. He’s the highest-ranking official on the ground here at headquarters, after all. But he knows how it will go with Vedra. They’ll talk as she cuts the meat, her hands raw from all that work, so much of her scarred skin showing, her brightly seared flesh. She’ll talk to him with that soft voice, and eventually her eyes will slide to his brother’s face, which is always there, always gazing blankly over his shoulder. He hates the way people can’t help but look at Helmud while El Capitan is speaking, a stupid puppet bobbing behind his back, and a rage will rise up inside El Capitan—so quick and sharp he could snap. Sometimes, at night, while listening to his brother’s deep breaths, he imagines rolling to his back—smothering his brother once and for all. If Helmud died, he would too, though. He knows that. They are both too large to have one die and the other live, too entwined. Sometimes it seems so inevitable, he can barely stand the waiting.
Instead of seeing Vedra in the kitchen’s steam, he decides to head to the woods—what’s left of it, what’s growing back—to check his traps. Two days in a row, his traps have been picked clean. He caught something all right, but then something else came along and ate it.
Once he’s walked behind headquarters, there are forts made of planks of wood, shears of metal on a barren dirt field, a wall built out of stones. On top of it, there’s barbed wire. Beyond that, there are wrecked buildings. One had a row of columns, and two of the columns remain with nothing behind them but a sooty sky. He loves the sky more than anything. He’d wanted to be in the air force, once upon a time, as a kid. He used to know everything there was about flying; he had library books and an old flight simulation video where he logged hours upon hours of practice. He knew nothing about his own father except that he’d been in the air force, a fighter pilot, kicked out of the military on a psych discharge. “Crazy as hell,” his mother used to say about him. “We’re lucky he’s gone.” Gone where? El Capitan never knew. But he knew he was like his father in some ways—he wanted to be in the sky and he was crazy. The closest he ever got to flying was riding that motorized dirt bike, catching air after hitting a jump. He doesn’t like thinking about that now.
He’s no pilot, but he is an officer. He’s in charge of sorting out fresh recruits. He decides which ones can be trained and which ones can’t. He sends some of them to the de-education outposts to get them stripped down a little, mentally, to make them a little more willing to take orders and not stir things up. And he picks off the weak ones, keeping a few in a holding pen on the grounds. He sends reports directly to Ingership via Ingership’s own personal messengers.
Sometimes Ingership sends El Capitan things to feed the weakest recruits—twisted ears of corn, pale tomatoes with innards more dust than pulp, a certain kind of unlabeled meat. He then reports to Ingership which foods make them sick, which don’t. Where do the foods come from? He doesn’t ask questions. El Capitan tests things on the weak recruits for his own purposes too—berries he finds in the woods, morels, leaves that could be basil or mint but never are. Sometimes the weak recruits get sick. Occasionally they die. Every once in a while, they’re just fine, and so El Capitan collects those foods and shares them with Helmud.
Sometimes Ingership orders El Capitan to play The Game, letting one of the weak recruits loose so El Capitan can hunt the recruit down like a sick deer. It’s a mercy really, that’s what El Capitan tells himself. Why have them suffer in a pen? Better to get it over with. It’s the way he’d want it, really. The Game reminds El Capitan of when he hunted squirrels as a kid in the woods near his house, but, then again, not really. Nothing’s like it used to be. It’s been a while since Ingership has ordered him to play The Game, and El Capitan hopes that Ingership has forgotten about it and won’t ever ask again. Ingership has become unpredictable recently. In fact, just yesterday he organized his own team for a Death Spree that he decided to spring on everyone without warning.
As El Capitan makes his way toward the woods, he passes the caged pen—twenty feet by twenty feet, enclosed by chain link, with a cement floor. Recruits are huddled together in one corner of the pen. They moan and shudder until they hear his footsteps; then one of them hushes then another, and they quiet down quickly. He can see their strange twisted limbs, the glint of various metals, the shine of glass. They’re barely human when you get right down to it, he reminds himself, but still he looks away when he passes by.
“There but for the grace of God, Helmud. That could be you in there,” he says.
“You in there,” Helmud says.
“Shut up, Helmud.”
“Shut up.”
He’s not sure what’s got Ingership all heated up about this new recruit, Pressia Belze. Ingership wants this girl to be promoted to officer upon arrival. He wants El Capitan to await emergency orders for her, a mission, but meanwhile to bring her into the fold. El Capitan isn’t sure what this means exactly. He’s not sure how much he himself is supposed to know. Is he supposed to know, for example, that he’s really just a midlevel bureaucrat? Is he supposed to know that this militia—five thousand in three facilities each and another three thousand getting uneducated—no matter how big it gets, no matter how strong, will never be able to take down the Dome? The Dome is impenetrable, heavily armed. Does Ingership know that El Capitan has lost his fire? He’s given up on the idea that he might get to open fire on some of his Pure brothers and sisters one day. He’s sti
ll just trying to survive.
But surviving is what he’s known. He’s been a survivalist since his mother died when he was nine. He took care of his brother, living in a fort El Capitan built in the woods surrounding their old house. He got money however he could, dealing this and that, and he stockpiled guns and ammo, including things his father had left behind.
“Remember all our guns,” El Capitan says to Helmud, trudging into the woods now, headquarters looming at his back. Sometimes he feels deeply nostalgic for his guns.
“Guns,” Helmud says.
Before the Detonations, there were many survivalists living off the grid in those woods. One neighbor, an old man who’d been in a war or two, taught El Capitan how to hide his guns and ammo. El Capitan did everything Old Man Zander told him to. He bought 40 PVC pipe with end caps, six inches in diameter, and some PVC solvent. He and Helmud disassembled their rifles in their house one afternoon in late winter. El Capitan remembers the driving sleet, the sound of it ticking against the windows. The two brothers rubbed the gun parts down with anti-rust oil, which gave the guns and their hands a waxy sheen. Helmud had gotten hold of the aluminized Mylar bag, cut it into smaller pieces, and wrapped the barreled actions, stocks, trigger assemblies, hand guards, magazines, scopes, mounts, and several thousand rounds of .223 along with silica gel desiccant packets. Those were El Capitan’s ideas. He’d seen them in boxes of his mother’s old high heels in her closet. Helmud fused the ends of the bags with an iron. They vacuum-packed the bags with the neighbor’s Shop-Vac.
They packed six small cans of 1,1,1-trichloroethane to degrease it later, plus cleaning rods, patches, Hoppe’s No. 9 Solvent, gun oil, grease, a set of reloading dies, and a well-worn owner’s manual. Then they wrapped it all in duct tape.
They filled the pipe with the bags of ammo and the rifle pieces and supplies. They sealed up the end caps and then Helmud said, “We should paint our initials on all this.”
“You think?” El Capitan said.
And so they did. El Capitan knows that they thought they might actually die before they got to dig it up, and if someone did find it, they’d be known in some small way. With a thick black permanent marker, Helmud wrote H. E. C., for Helmud Elmore Croll. As for El Capitan, that was a nickname his mother gave him before she left for the asylum. She said, “You’re in charge ’til I get back, El Capitan.” But she never came back. And so El Capitan wrote his initials, E. C. C.—El Capitan Croll—and let his baptismal name die forever.
Old Man Zander loaned them a posthole digger, and they dug deeper into a hole left from a felled oak. They buried the stuff straight up and down so it’d be harder to find by metal detectors. El Capitan drew up the map, numbering paces because Old Man Zander had suggested it, “just in case the landscape is blown clean of its markings.” El Capitan thought Old Man Zander was crazy, but he followed his orders. He never saw him again after the Detonations, never looked for him either.
After the Detonations, El Capitan thought Helmud would die on his back, and El Capitan wasn’t doing so well either. He was burned, blistered, bloody. He made it back to the woods near their house, though, and found the metal tip of a shovel, paced the steps out from memory. The map was long gone. He dug, holding the head of the shovel in his hands with his brother dying on his back.
When he found the guns, he thought about shooting Helmud in the head and then himself, ending it there. But El Capitan could feel his brother’s heartbeat through his own ribs, and there was something about it that wouldn’t let him pull the trigger.
The guns, that’s how they survived. Not so much from using them—though El Capitan had to kill people for survival’s sake those early months. Mainly he leveraged them to get a good position in the OSR. This was after Operation Search and Rescue became Operation Sacred Revolution, and they were looking for young fiery recruits with nothing to lose. Plus, joining the OSR meant that he and Helmud wouldn’t go hungry.
The woods here still look burned out, older trees toppled and blackened. Some trees withstood the blast, shorn of their limbs; others had boughs permanently bent down by the pressure of the Detonations, trees reaching for the earth instead of the sky, as if wanting to hold on. But the underbrush has regenerated, slowly fighting for the ash-covered sun. Stubble has inched up from the tree roots, strange new bushes that El Capitan can’t get used to. They have small berries that are poisonous, and their leaves are sometimes scaly. Once he found a low-lying bush nudging up from under a gutted maple, and its leaves were covered in downy fur. Not just fuzz, actual fur.
He walks from trap to trap, heading deeper into the woods. Each one has been tripped. Not a speck of blood. But the skins are there, and the bones, some of which have been snapped and sucked clean of their marrow. It makes no sense. But he’s more baffled than angry. He can’t think of any kind of creature who’d work this neatly, and it sets him on edge.
About twenty feet from his last trap, he hears something in the air, a deep bass hum. He stops. “You hear that?” he asks his brother, but it’s like talking to himself.
The hum grows softer as if it’s traveling away from him at a fast rate of speed. Is it an engine? It seems too clean to be an engine. It fades too fast.
He walks to his final trap, and there’s a wild hen of some sort—dead, plump, plucked clean. But it’s not in the trap. It lies there beside the trap, which has been tripped, but the hen shows no signs of having been killed by anything other than a farmer’s quick twist of the neck. It seems as if it’s lying there like a gift, set out for El Capitan. He nudges it with a bamboo stick. It jostles. He picks it up, and there, nestled under its body like some strange joke, are three eggs. Brown eggs. One is speckled.
He lifts the speckled egg, cradles it in his palm. It’s like someone out here wants to reach out to him somehow.
When was the last time he saw an egg and held it in his palm? Maybe it was before the Detonations when his mother was still in the house, buying eggs in Styrofoam cartons.
The hen and her eggs feel like a strange miracle, and he remembers what it was like pulling the PVC from the ground, like extracting a long white bone from the earth, and how the soil was still loose, soft and tender in his hands. He found a bit of his old handsaw. He wiped the mud away and sawed off the end caps. Everything slid out, just like they’d planned—except his brother was fused to his back. Helmud wouldn’t die. No, he’d be a weight El Capitan would have to shoulder forever.
But sometimes he remembers the sound of guns slipping down the inside of the PVC pipe, the weight of those Mylar bags, the heavy clicks as he assembled the rifles, one after the other, and he loves Helmud as much as he hates him. He feels like he wouldn’t have made it without him. The weight of his brother has made him stronger.
The hum returns, and El Capitan squats down as low as he can. He lies flat in the brush. His brother seems to be crying softly on his back. Sometimes Helmud cries for no reason.
“Shut up,” El Capitan whispers softly. “Shut up, Helmud. It’s okay. Shut up.”
He can see them then, strange creatures—both human and not human—shifting through the trees.
PARTRIDGE
SINGING
OUT ON THE STREET, Bradwell leads the way, taking long quick strides. Pressia is next, then Partridge. Bradwell never looks back at Partridge, but Pressia does, and Partridge wonders what she thinks of him. Is he just a pawn? Does she just want to get off the OSR list, whatever that is, and get help for her grandfather, like she said? If so, fair enough. She’ll help him, and he’ll help her if he can. Plus, he has proof that she’s got a good heart. She saved his life before she could have possibly known who he was or what he could do for her. He trusts her; that’s the bottom line.
And he knows that Bradwell hates him, resents the privilege of Partridge’s Dome life, and who can blame him? Partridge just hopes that Bradwell doesn’t hate him so much that he’ll let him get his head bashed by Groupies, as Bradwell put it. It would have been funny if it weren?
??t such a real possibility.
Bradwell stops to look up an alley to see if it’s clear.
The wind has gotten colder. Partridge pulls his coat in close to his ribs. “This is what winter feels like, right?” he says to Pressia.
“No,” she tells him. “Winter’s cold.”
“But this is cold,” he says.
“It’s not winter-cold.”
“I’d like to see all of this covered in snow,” he says.
“The snow is dark by the time it hits the ground, already stained.”
Bradwell doubles back. “They’re too close,” he says. Partridge doesn’t know who he’s talking about. “We’ll have to go underground. This way.”
“Underground?” Partridge asks.
Partridge doesn’t like going underground. Even in the basement of the academy library, it’s too easy for him to lose his bearings without the landmarks, the sun, moon, stars. Here, though, one of those fixed bearings is the Dome itself, which is brighter than everything else in the sky, its shining cross pointing directly at heaven, though, like Pressia, he’s not sure what he believes in.
“If he says underground is the best way to go, it is,” Pressia says.
Bradwell points to a square hole by a gutter. Its metal grate is long gone, probably stolen. He slips his legs in first and then drops down. Pressia slips in next. Her shoes clap loudly against cement. Partridge goes down last. It’s dark and damp. So many puddles, he can’t even try to sidestep them all. They have to just go splashing through. Every once in a while, he hears animals, their shadows scampering past, their various squeaks and chirrups.
“Seriously,” Partridge says, “why are we down here?”
“You heard the chanting, right?” Bradwell says.
“Yeah,” Partridge says. He can still hear it. “What’s so wrong with a wedding?”