Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

I don’t know what cigarettes are, but I know I wouldn’t buy them—or anything else—from him.

“Come on.” He slips between the stalls and gestures for me to follow. The opening to another tunnel waits, but there are no strings of lights hanging across this one. It’s completely dark. Even the water trickling from the mouth looks blacker.

I shouldn’t follow him. I’ve heard stories of kids being hacked to pieces in the alleys of Burn 3. Down here, it could be worse. But at sixteen, I’m not a kid anymore—only a year younger than my father was when he saved hundreds of people—and my sister is missing.

“Where are we going?” My voice echoes against the slick walls. “Shh!” He waves a scarred hand at me. The skin is darker and rough, the mark of a severe burn. I picture a pack of lit matches in his hand and the flame jumping from the matchstick to his clothes.

I blink the image away and listen to his footsteps to be sure they stay ahead of mine. If he stops walking, I want to know. But he doesn’t, moving quickly until we reach a dead end.

A lopsided wooden shack leans against the tunnel wall, its windows covered in black tape. Who blacks out their windows when they live underground?

Someone crazy .

The man glances around as if he thinks we’ve been followed. Satisfied, he sorts through the keys attached to a long chain at his waist, carefully matching them to the rows of locks on the door.

He’s just like the evacuators who were exposed to burning plastic and other chemicals. Paranoid. The ones who didn’t die immediately went crazy, their minds rotting away from the poison they inhaled to save others. I should know.

I don’t want to go in, but what if he knows something about Sky or the bottle I found?

“Get inside.” He opens the door and shoves me through.

A cracked bulb buzzes to life, and when I see the room, I realize he is crazy. The walls are plastered with papers, strange numbers and symbols scrawled all the way to the corners. And photos—not digital scans, but actual photos—of children with dirty faces and tired eyes. One stands out.

The boy has blond hair like Sky’s. I can’t take my eyes off his face.

“Who are all these kids?” I point at the pictures, the edges water-stained and bent.

He takes a long look at the photos and swallows hard. “Mind your own business,” he snaps.

I step away from the images and the numbers I don’t understand. Boxes of dirty beakers and lab equipment are stacked along the far wall, next to torn and partially burnt books. He must have salvaged the books from somewhere. I doubt he could afford to buy them.

“Know what those are?” He points to the strange symbols and numbers and shakes his head before I have a chance to answer. “’Course you don’t. Those are equations. Scientific compounds.”

“I’m just trying to find my sister.”

He points at my pocket. “Show it to me one more time.”

I hand him the bottle, and he holds it up to the light. “Ketamine. Give a kid enough of this stuff and they lose consciousness—or worse.”

I clench my fists, imagining someone dragging my sister’s limp body out of the domicile.

“Makes it easy to take them to the Skinners.”

The word makes my skin crawl, even though I don’t know what it means. “What’s a Skinner?”

He turns quickly, so he can look at me with his good eye. “Are you messing with me? If you’re holding that bottle, you know who they are. Or you will soon.”

“Please tell me.” I don’t know what I can say to convince him to help me. “My father is dead, and my sister is all I have.”

“How did he die?” The man’s tone is suspicious.

“What?” I don’t know why he cares, but he waits for me to answer. “My father was an evacuator,” I say as if that’s explanation enough.

He flips his eye patch up, and there’s a hollow recess where his eyeball should be. “Then you know what it’s like when they take someone from you.”

Those are the delusions talking. This guy is too far gone to give me any information, and I’ve already wasted enough time. I turn to leave. “Thanks for your help.”

The man starts pacing in the cramped space, muttering and biting his nails. I remember the way my father paced at night when he thought we were asleep. Sometimes his mind was sound, and others I could see the effects of the poison he inhaled during the Evacuation. Toxins that were slowly killing him.

“Wait here.” The man disappears behind a folding screen, and I can hear him rummaging around. He emerges wearing a heavy black coat that makes his thin frame look much bigger.

“I really think I should—”

He slides a rotted panel of wood along the back wall of the shack, revealing the opening to another sewer tunnel. “Do you want to find your sister or not?”

I have no way of knowing if this man has any information—if the symbols on his walls are scientific equations or the delusions of a damaged mind. But something about the photos of the children convinces me he knows something, even if he is insane.

My father had moments of clarity when every word he spoke was the truth. This man reminds me of him, the flashes of sanity grappling for footing on the sliding rocks of madness. If one of those moments can help me find Sky, I have to follow him.

We step into the darkness, and a flame illuminates the void. The man is holding a gold object between his fingers. A small flame rises up from the wick inside it. “Never seen one of these before, have you?”

I shake my head and take a step back. No one produces fire intentionally in Burn 3. The risk of starting a fire is too great when there is so little water to extinguish one.

I picture the flame catching his skin again and wonder if that’s how he got the burn on his hand.

“It’s called a lighter. You fill this part with oil.” He taps on the bottom half of the rectangular object. “Then you turn this dial and it strikes the flint.”

I nod as if I understand, and he seems satisfied.

We move deeper into the sewage tunnel, the device he calls a lighter illuminating barely a few feet in front of us. “Kids started disappearing down here first. Bet you didn’t know that, did you?”

I remember the photos from his walls. Were they missing children from the Abyss?

“The vid screens don’t broadcast news outside of Burn 3.”

He shakes his head at my ignorance. “We aren’t outside of Burn 3.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

He waves me off. “Forget it. Children who live aboveground with hair the color of the sun will always be more valuable than ours.”

“But the boy in the picture on your wall had blond hair.”

His body tenses and I realize I’ve made a mistake mentioning it. “Don’t worry about the kids down here. Your sister’s the one you care about.”

Heat creeps up my neck, and shame settles in the pit of my empty stomach. The Abyss—the underground sewers I’m walking through—were the only safe place to live for years. Now people don’t venture down here unless they want to buy something on the black market. He’s right. No one cares if kids in the Abyss go missing.

Yet I expect this stranger to care about my sister. A little blond girl from a world that treats the people in his like rats. “I just meant—”

He cuts me off again. “I know what you meant. Now shut up. We’re getting closer.”

Closer to what?

The cement cylinder stretches out in front of us, murky water splashing under our boots. The stench of mold turns to something more nauseating, one even worse than flesh burning.

I try not to gag. “What is that?”

“The smell of bodies rotting.”