Writers of the Future Volume 31

  “I’m not seeing the proof to back up what you’re promising.”

  “Perhaps if you let him stay over the summer—”

  Nass pounds the desk with a fist and the lamp, the strawberry pots, and everyone in the room jumps. “You may have been a darling of the last command, but all I can see is that keeping you requires more and more maintenance. You need to make yourself useful. This,” she holds out an open hand toward Pup, “is not useful.”

  “General—”

  “No.” To Pup, “I’m afraid Alice led you here for nothing. I decide who stays and goes.”

  Alice tries again, “Please, General Nass—”

  The general fixes her in a glare that silences her. To the soldier standing beside Pup she says, “Lock him up.”

  Pup tries not to think, but he’s been so stupid it’s hard not to go over every mistake that led him here. Letting himself get robbed so close to summer. Traveling too far too fast to gather enough scavenge. Trusting the shadow of a girl when he knew something was off. But she was Ghost. His Ghost. How could she have led him here to this?

  He pushes the image of the flesh-and-blood woman out of his mind. It’s harder to forget her voice, speaking about him as though he wasn’t standing before her.

  It’s cold in the holding cell. The room is made of unpainted cement that still looks new and smells somewhere between dust and bleach. There are no windows, but long tubes overhead cast sickly light and buzz with electricity. Every so often they dim or flicker. One set of bunk beds is bolted to the wall, and Pup can see that it’s been torn away from somewhere else and remounted here. Scavenged.

  Time passes strangely. The air doesn’t change, the lights don’t change, and Pup’s not sure if he’s hungry or if the hollow feeling wearing on his stomach is the fear that they won’t remember to feed him.

  The false lights overhead go out and it’s beyond any blackness Pup’s ever known on the plains. Like he’s been buried alive. His breath comes fast and shallow. Sweat soaks the tattered collar of his shirts and the fabric sticks to his cold skin in clumpy wisps. No matter how wide he opens his eyes, he can’t see.

  If it’s been minutes or hours, Pup can’t say, but he’s staring at the door when Ghost’s head pops through. The door doesn’t open—it’s not the girl from upstairs—it’s really Ghost: see-through and purple and glowing without giving off any light. Pup’s heart beats so loudly that the soldier on the other side of the door might hear it.

  Ghost looks over Pup and vanishes.

  Pup sits up as the bolt groans in the wall and the door opens, yellow lamplight pooling in.

  Alice moves the door only enough to let herself in. She’s carrying a flashlight that could double as a club and wearing thick socks that make her footsteps a whisper against the concrete floor.

  “Hello, Pup.” Even though she’s whispering her voice seems too loud, too real.

  Pup glances at the door without meaning to. She didn’t bolt it again. How far could he get before someone noticed?

  “If I thought we could sneak out, I’d try. Nass has you locked down. That’s why it took me this long to sneak in.”

  Pup angles away from her, crosses his arms over his chest.

  She watches him, her too-small eyes wide, as she straightens her loose, short-sleeved shirt.

  Pup opens his mouth to speak, softly so that the guard won’t hear, but he’s not sure what to say, “Look, Alice—”

  “You can still call me Ghost. If you like.” Her smile is a phantom of the one he knows. “I don’t mind.”

  He grinds his teeth. She looks so convincingly like his best friend but is completely different in every way. “Fine. Ghost, then. I don’t have the reactor part anymore. You’re on your own.”

  “I didn’t come for that.”

  “So what do you want?”

  “To talk to you. After all this time, I can’t believe you’re here.” She sets the flashlight down and crosses the room to sit lightly at the other end of his cot.

  Pup puts elbows to thighs, massaging his forehead with the tips of his fingers so he doesn’t have to look at her. “Funny, since you’re the one who led me here.”

  “You were hurt, and I thought if I got you here, I could convince Nass—”

  “I heard what you said to Nass. How I’m one of your marks.”

  “A mark? I didn’t—”

  “Anchor.” Pup leans back against the wall. “Yeah, I got what you meant.”

  She folds her arms over her chest in that way that always made Ghost seem small. “I can project my mind outside my body.”

  It’s not what Pup expected her to say, and the reply he has ready gets lodged in his throat.

  “I can’t go very far, maybe half a mile, but there’s a machine that lets me go much further. I was part of a military experiment just before the Collapse. And when General Ackerman—a real general, not like Nass—lost contact with the outside world, he asked me and the others like me to scout for him.”

  Ghost holds her chin high. “I’m the youngest. And better at it than the others. A lot better. But the plane and the physical world aren’t alike, and I hadn’t learned how to control my projection.

  “I got lost.”

  She’s studying Pup now, like she’s saying something he should understand. But he doesn’t.

  “My body was dying here while I was on the plane looking for something to latch onto. To get my bearings.” Ghost is smiling in a way that doesn’t suggest happiness. “And then you found me.

  “You weren’t like the others. I can make most people see me, but at that time it was chaos. I couldn’t make a connection. When I reached out to you, you reached back. You were my anchor.”

  Pup is shaking his head.

  “You saved my life.”

  “No,” Pup’s voice is thicker than he means for it to be. “I’d lost my parents and I didn’t stand a chance until you found me. I’d have died of heat stroke in a day—I was just a kid.”

  “So was I.”

  “But I didn’t do anything.”

  “You were there for me when no one else was.”

  It’s all backward from what he knows. Ghost takes care of him; it was never the other way around.

  “That’s why I was always pushing you in this direction. I thought if I could get you here …”

  Pup finishes for her, “They’d let me stay.”

  Ghost rubs her fingernails together, making little clicking noises in the silence. Her voice is too soft, “And then Nass came. She was a refugee. Smart. Gained support. And General Ackerman died.” She swallows hard. “He was old but … It happened so suddenly. We were all devastated.”

  “But not Nass,” Pup guesses.

  She meets his gaze. “No. Not Nass. She named herself general. We lost a lot of our original people. Nass got rid of them, one way or another.”

  Pup asks, “Why didn’t you try to get away?”

  “I couldn’t have found you without the machine. When we scavenged a reactor, I hoped that Nass might let you sign on. She wants to expand, has a salvage of factory equipment—if she can get the plant really running. But now it’s all so messed up. This is my fault. I should’ve been with you last night.”

  “Why weren’t you?”

  She points to the dead overhead lights and spits out the words, “Power restrictions.”

  Pup imagines reaching out, touching her shoulder, feeling that she’s real. “That’s not really your fault then, is it?”

  She looks away. “Feels like my fault.”

  Silence settles over the space. The cold concrete wall at Pup’s back is leeching the warmth from his body and he’s afraid that if he doesn’t say the right thing, she will leave. “I thought you were really a ghost.”

  She smiles the familiar, completely foreign, smile. “Most peopl
e I project to can hear me. You’re the least psychic person I’ve ever met. I could’ve hurt you, forcing my way further into your mind than your nature allows.”

  Pup takes a moment to consider that.

  “Tomorrow,” Ghost says, “Nass will decide what to do with you.”

  “Any chance I’ll get to stay?”

  “I doubt it. Nass … likes to be the smartest person in the room. She only keeps people she knows she can control.”

  Pup’s not sure he wants to hear the answer, but he asks anyway, “How does she control you?”

  “With the machine. She thinks I’m addicted to it. She doesn’t know the real reason that I needed it was you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She blinks. “For what?”

  “I didn’t know,” he gestures at nothing, struggles for the right way to say it, “that it took so much for you to help me.”

  She smiles her best Ghost smile, the one that always made her purple glow a little stronger. Only now, in the splintered light she’s brighter than he’s ever seen her.

  “I should get back before they find me here. Nass is treating you like enemy number one while you’re on base. Pulling extra staff to guard duty in this part of the complex.”

  “Wait.” Pup’s brow furrows. “Where is she pulling guards from?”

  Ghost shrugs. “I’m not sure. Why?”

  He’s staring at the door, trying to remember the layout of the complex.

  “Pup?”

  “Sorry. Could you do me a favor?”

  She tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, giving up on keeping it in the braid. “Anything.”

  It shouldn’t make his stomach flip-flop to hear her say that. But it does.

  Pup wakes when the glaring electric lights hum to life overhead. The soldiers don’t offer him food or water. They lead him out of the depths of the base, through narrow corridors with well-maintained pipes overhead. The surface looks different in the daylight. Though Pup recognizes the spot where the trucks had been the night before, they’re gone now.

  Nass waits for him in the yard at the gate with more soldiers than Pup could possibly merit.

  “Mr. Pup,” she says with a hint of amusement that Pup takes as an insult, “you’re free to go.”

  “Just like that?”

  She shrugs. Standing, Nass is neither tall nor short, broad nor lean. She moves with absolute confidence, an ease about her that Pup can’t copy with so many rifles at the ready. “I might believe that you found a reactor, Alice seems to, but without proof, you’re not useful, so you’re on your own.”

  “What if I want to sign on?”

  Her eyes narrow for an instant. “You’re not the sort of man I like to recruit.”

  “What happens to Alice?”

  Nass’s jaw muscles flex tight for an instant before she answers. “Alice is mine and none of your concern.”

  “If you send me out into the plains now, with nothing, I won’t last the summer.”

  Her head wobbles from side to side as she weighs an answer. She motions one of the soldiers flanking Pup to step forward. Unbuckles his belt while he stands at attention. Frees a knife in a leather sheath. Tosses it to Pup’s feet. “Tell you what, you bring me working scavenge from a real reactor—I’ll pay you enough to buy you in anywhere.” She smiles without humor. “But if my people catch you around here without something to show for it, you’ll have more to worry about than summer heat.

  “Cut him loose.”

  Pup barely manages to scoop up the knife before soldiers begin shoving him toward the perimeter.

  Pup’s careful to stay within half a mile of Base and the day is gone by the time Ghost appears. His muscles uncoil at her familiar image, though she seems too small to be the person he now knows. Her features are hard to make out, fuzzy around the edges, like a sun-bleached photograph. Her butterfly-bush purple flat and bland.

  He asks, “How’d it go?”

  She hesitates, nods.

  Pup breathes out a sigh. “Okay, let’s have it.”

  She bites her lower lip as she lifts both hands to mime the answer. Her fingers hang rigid in the air between them a moment and then she lets her arms fall back to her sides. She huffs noiselessly. There’s too much.

  “You said that you could push your way into my head. I need to know what you know.”

  Her form wavers, her eyes growing large before she crosses see-through arms over see-through chest.

  “Do whatever you have to do, I’ll be fine,” his voice is even, but his stomach twists against itself.

  Her lips press into a tight line and she shakes her head.

  Pup grits his teeth. “Just do it.”

  Ghost looks to the sky as if she’s looking for a way out, but there isn’t one, so she extends a delicate hand toward Pup’s forehead. When her not-really-there fingers brush against his face, Pup’s world vanishes in a flash of blinding pain.

  The inside of Pup’s skull is on fire. His throat is shredded and his mouth is dry, tacky. His hands and feet tingle and his guts quiver. He opens his eyes one at a time and finds the world a bleary haze. He’s on his back and there’s something crusty coating his face. When the washed-out blue sky comes into focus, he lifts a shaking hand to scrape the film away from his nose, lips, chin. It’s blood, sticky and flaking.

  He sits up and the world spins. He doesn’t remember walking, but he’s not in the reaped field outside of Base anymore. Ghost isn’t in sight, but the town of Bootstrap is. And he knows what he has to do.

  Neither of the guards at the gate are the one from before, and Pup’s not sure if they’re the two friends that helped rob him on the plain. He doesn’t have the time to wait until a shift change that might not see the guard he needs come on duty.

  Pup lingers among the shanty booths, chewing his lip as he considers. The scent of roasted carrots and spiced meat causes his mouth to water, reminding him that he hasn’t eaten, and if he had something to trade he could buy a skewer. A skewer …

  The old woman.

  He tears his attention from the gate to see gray dreadlocks hunched over a frayed shawl. She’s holding the bit of wire but has stopped turning the skewers on the open-pit grill and they’re starting to blacken on one side, char ruining the flavor hanging in the air. Her face is bowed down, but one eye watches him with that knowing stare that says she’s survived in the After as long as he has and knows how to get by.

  “You.”

  Her voice is dry, high pitched. She doesn’t run. She’s too old to escape him. “Care for a hot meal?”

  “You told him where I was going. Which direction I was headed.”

  Her tongue darts over her flat lips. “I didn’t—”

  “I don’t care. I’m not here for you. I just want to talk to him. He’s got something worth way more than he knows, but he doesn’t have a clue what to do with it. You tell him to meet me where we met last time.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Just tell him.” He glares at her until her jaw clenches and her features settle. She nods once. When Pup snatches a pair of skewers off the grill, she doesn’t try to stop him, only watches as he makes his way onto the plain.

  Pup sits in the glaring sun, wishing that he’d thought to say that he’d meet them in the shade of the market. At least here he can see them coming. The dry grass is crumbling in the heat and already patches of dirt show through. In a week or two, the dust storms will start.

  He’s expecting three men, but four figures appear in the distance. They’re washed out to dusty pale by the high sun and flicker in waves of heat, ghosts on the plain.

  As they draw near, Pup sees the guard who turned him away. He’s the tallest not because of height, but because he carries himself upright. The other three are lean, hungry, prowling after their leader like coyotes.

&
nbsp; The guard stops a few arm-lengths beyond Pup’s reach and the others surround him, loose and snickering. The guard speaks first, “You wanted to see me.”

  His friends laugh.

  “I have a deal for you.”

  The guard’s spotted face angles toward the man to Pup’s right, but he’s still looking at Pup, a purple welt across his nose. “Dumb shit here thinks we’re gonna give his stuff back. Whatcha think, guys?”

  There’s a chorus of grumbling threats that Pup interrupts, “You’ve still got that box from my pocket.”

  “’Fraid I traded all your crap away.”

  “No you didn’t. Not this. No one will trade with you for it.”

  “And you will?”

  “I’ve got a buyer.” Pup pauses to let the idea hang in the air.

  “So, what? I’m supposed to give it back to you and you’ll let me in on the trade?”

  Pup folds his arms over his chest. “No. You’re going to give it back to me and while I’ve got General Nass and her soldiers at Base occupied, you’re going to steal a working military truck with tread on the tires and a full tank of gas. Drive it down to Springfield and trade it for a small fortune.”

  It takes a second for them to realize what he’s said, a brief silence before the three goons start to break down and laugh. But the guard’s not laughing. “Nobody steals from Base. Their patrol routes change, their guns are better, their supplies are never in the same place twice.”

  For the first time it occurs to Pup that for someone like this guard, stealing from the base would be a constant temptation. A dangerous one.

  “I have someone on the inside.”

  “You have a friend on Base? You’re some little shit scavenger. Who could you know?”

  “My friend got volunteered. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I’m here to cash in.”

  “Then what were you doing trying to buy your way into Bootstrap?”

  Pup shifts his weight and rolls his eyes up toward the sky as if he’s annoyed with the guard’s stupidity, but really he’s taking a moment to pick the right lie. “I can’t exactly do it alone, now can I? If I’m busy distracting, how am I supposed to steal a truck?”