Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

Suddenly another horse burst through from the side of the road and struck the sail cart, scattering the mast and rigging—along with the batteries, wheels, and occupants—as if all were kindling.

Mara’s head hit the ground, her limbs dragged down the road, burning her sleeves away, and then she bounced and rolled a few times.

The rifle fired off uselessly into the air.

Mara tensed as the raider on the horse rode hard toward her. Blood started to drip down over her eyes, and pain began to sear through her. She tried to sit up, but the world spun. A tall woman wearing what looked like an entire bush as clothing walked to the center of the road, holding Gillem by his collar. She reached down and picked up the rifle.

“A little young to be riding the road alone, aren’t you?”

Gillem yanked at the chain holding him to the wall. “You got us captured by raiders ,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” Mara strained at the other end of the room, pulling her own chain to its limit to try and get to a window.

“I didn’t ask to go with you,” Gillem said. “I liked being a brake-boy. The Mayor-Captain ordered me. It’s not safe to leave the ship. Everyone knows that. You’re a fool.”

Mara looked back at him. He was being brave, trying to hold back tears. He’d been born on the swaying, creaking world that was the landship Zephyr . He’d only ever known the world trundling slowly past the portholes. And even Mara, who’d only known this world for some months, found that she had quickly become addicted to it. You kept your own home around you, and yet, the rest of the world came to it. Slowly, eventually, it came to you—all you had to do was wait.

To leave the safety of the Zephyr made you feel small and vulnerable, cast out.

On the other hand, some of the crew felt like their life’s aspiration was to be no more than a turtle. Mara had only been on the great landship for three months now. Enough to get far from her controlling family for good and start a new life. Yet it had hardly been long enough to see much of the world beyond the place where she grew up.

She wanted to see the ocean. The old, shattered skyscrapers. She wanted to see the prairie grass and buffalo surge around the massive wheels of the ship.

Getting captured by raiders was not in her plans.

“Don’t say anything about the Zephyr to these people,” Mara warned him. The landship they called home was well defended, but she didn’t want to be the one that led raiders—or whatever these people were—to it. She’d first thought of them as raiders, but the small circle of fifteen or so yurts and handmade wooden buildings she’d seen when being taken here didn’t look like the fortress of some raider stronghold.

Gillem balled up against the wall and turned his back to her.

Mara began to study the locking mechanism on her handcuffs. They were pitted, and yet machined so well she knew right away they were artifacts from the time of plenty. How many people over the centuries had been trapped by this exact pair of cuffs?

There were scratch marks around the keyhole; someone had once tried to pick the lock.

And probably failed.

Mara couldn’t find anything to try the lock with, so she paced back and forth through a beam of sunlight that came through the window that was just annoyingly out of reach, dragging the chain around the tile floor behind her.

What did the burly old engineer Evgeny keep telling her? Think through the problem, examine all the resources at your disposal, then try something. He had said that to her just a week ago, as they stood on the rear of the Zephyr and eyed the wooden palisades bolted onto the sagging roof of the ancient Legacy Mall together.

“Those braces look ready to fail,” Mara had muttered to him. “The concrete’s rotted. The raiders will have them, next fall, if they don’t repair them.”

Evgeny had agreed, so Mara pushed further: “We should stay and help them, their offer to us was generous.”

“It was,” Evgeny had agreed. “Though, it was so generous they would have changed their minds about giving us a third of their crop next year.”

“It’s that or starve.”

“So,” the old engineer had said with a grin, “it was never really an offer. We can hardly afford to give them all our resources. There is little enough in this world.”

Mara remembered that she had folded her knees up to her chin. “All we do is guard what we have left, while everything around us slowly fades away.”

And then a loud crack from one of the stays as the third of the four great sail-masts sagged to its side had made her jump.

“The way of the world,” Evgeny said sadly, not even surprised. He’d been monitoring the stress fractures and predicting this for months. “But here on this ship we don’t slow down for anything. We can’t afford to get trapped anywhere. Not when it’s all dying.”

No one came for them.

Mara tried to listen to the muffled conversation outside the wooden walls, but it just sounded like chatter. It didn’t seem like it was about her and Gillem at all.

Then everything fell quiet as the voices moved away.

“Give me your glasses,” Mara said, kicking at Gillem to get his attention.

“My glasses?” Gillem blinked owlishly at her.

The beam of sun had shifted closer to the pillar they were chained to. It was a thick slab of wood.

“Yes, your glasses.”

They were Gillem’s greatest possession, glasses that had been handed down and traded across towns and no few generations, and mounted in new wooden frames. But he loosened the rubber band and handed them over.

“What are you doing?” he asked as Mara held them up to the sun. “Don’t do that, you’ll burn your eyes!”

“Exactly.”

She gathered straw from the dirt floor, ripped cloth from their sleeves, and within a half hour, had flames licking hungrily up the wooden beam.

“You’re going to kill us!” Gillem wailed, pulling all the way to the end of his chain and away from the fire.

The fire spread up the pillar, and then onto the roof. She hadn’t expected it to happen so fast. She’d wanted the pillar to burn through just enough that they could pull free of it. Now the fire began to catch the roof and spread overhead, and smoke started filling the room. But fire wasn’t the only thing spreading; Mara felt a surge of fear tingle through her whole body as well.

She yanked at the chains, looking for weakness in the wooden beam. But it remained solid.

Gillem screamed for help, and Mara couldn’t get him to shut up, though he eventually started coughing too much to shout.

“Stay low.”

She had to project a confidence she didn’t have as they tried to breathe air through their shirts.

And then, mercifully, the beam cracked .

Mara and Gillem burst out of the burning building dragging their chains behind them, and they found people struggling to pull hoses and hand pumps into the center of the village. The fire blazed along the top of two nearby buildings, wooden structures with walls starting to bow inwards.

Four men had grabbed one of the nearby yurts by the walls to drag it across the dirt away from the embers. Children sobbed in the distance, and Mara felt baleful glares aimed at her.

“I don’t think they’re raiders,” Gillem whispered, looking around them.

“It doesn’t look like it,” Mara agreed, holding him behind her and trying to shield him.

The older woman who captured them was no longer wearing a suit decorated with bushes and leaves but heavy robes. She ran up to them, tears wet on her cheeks.

“Those were storage buildings ,” she said. “That’s our winter food burning!”