Burn (Pure #3)(58)

Pressia, Bradwell, El Capitan, and Hastings help carry the dead to the mass grave. They lean into the cold wind, sweating from the work, hands starting to go numb. Sometimes one of them will walk to the edges just to recover. They breathe heavily. Sometimes they cry. But then they come back. Ready to keep going.

The Dome worshippers are broken. It’s not that they no longer believe in the Dome. It’s that the grief has swept through them. They’re vacant.

One man with a crooked leg and a face tainted with coppery flecks tells them that the dead include Special Forces. “Them bodies over there—we stripped the weapons from their ligaments. Got some of ’em to work even. But we keep the bodies covered. Can’t bear the sight.”

There are three lumps wrapped in a single dark sheet, splotched with dried blood. Pressia understands why they wouldn’t want to look at the enemy’s dead eyes staring at them.

“Young ones they’re sending down now,” the man goes on to say, “like they run out of the ones old enough to be soldiers and sent in their little brothers.”

Pressia imagines arms bulked with weapons too big for their thin frames to hold.

“Careful,” the man says. “Some still out there. Not many, but they got good eyes too.”

Pressia keeps calling for Wilda as they move through the Black Market stalls that have all been burned to nothing, the tarps, carts, and lean-tos. All the wares are charred past recognition, heaped in piles. Survivors pick through them.

Pressia hears whimpering. She walks to a pile of rocks—what used to be a homemade house—and starts digging.

“Someone’s alive here!” she shouts, and the others gather. They don’t step on the pile of rubble—too much weight. But they take the rocks from her as she lifts them up. “I hear a voice!” she says.

El Capitan and Helmud’s faces are smeared with ash. Bradwell’s face is flushed by the cold. Hastings hasn’t cried—maybe he’s programmed not to—but his face looks lost and broken.

She’s dug closer to the moan. Is she going to pull a final stone away and see Wilda? She wraps her hand around a rock, jimmies it until it gives and she can pull it loose.

And there’s a woman’s face, pale with blue lips—she gasps and then her eyes go glassy. She’s dead, but then there’s whimpering. Could this woman be one of the children’s nurses?

Pressia says, “Wilda! Wilda!” even though she knows it can’t be Wilda—can it?

El Capitan says, “Pressia,” like a warning. Maybe he knows that her heart is set on finding the girl.

And then she pulls away enough stones to see a small gray dog—it looks up at her wide-eyed, shaking. The woman protected the dog, pulling it in tight to her body. Pressia reaches down and grips the dog under its bony ribs.

She lifts the dog, rubs its ears, and as soon as she’s climbed down the rubble, the dog twists from her arms and jumps to the ground, darting off.

Her arms are empty. Her heart feels like it might heave from her chest. She sits down on the dirt.

Bradwell walks over to her. “Are you ready now?”

“What?”

“Have you seen enough?”

She feels dizzy and sick. “If I go in and find Partridge and try to figure out what’s going on in there, and I can get to the labs and start them working on the cure while you all keep looking… You just keep…looking…for Wilda and…” She feels breathless, like her throat is starting to constrict. She puts her hand on her chest.

Bradwell holds his head with both hands. “Pressia, after all we’ve seen, after all these dead bodies and destruction, you want to go in and try to figure out what’s going on? I think we know what’s going on! Partridge needs to be stopped. He’s worse than his father—whether he’s too weak to keep this from happening or ordered it himself.”

She shakes her head. “We have to try to talk to him. We have to try to help the children.”

“Goddamn it, Pressia!” Bradwell says. “Wilda and the other children are dead!”

The air seems to snap all around her. She blinks and it feels like an electrical pulse in her head.

Bradwell whispers, “Wilda’s dead.”

“You don’t know that,” Pressia says, but her voice is small. She looks at El Capitan. “Cap, tell him.”

El Capitan looks at the ground, and she knows he thinks they’re dead too.

She stands up and grabs El Capitan, gripping his coatsleeves. “How long have you… How long have you kept it from me? Cap, tell me. How long?”

“I never thought the chances were very good,” he says. “But when there were only more and more dead—”

“Shut up,” she says quietly.

“Pressia,” El Capitan says, “we should hear Bradwell out. He’s—”

“Shut up,” Helmud tells him.

Wilda and the children can’t be dead. They’re lost—that’s all. Pressia starts to cry and walks away from them toward an overturned market stall. Wilda is a survivor, like Pressia. If she’s dead, then some part of Pressia will die with her. “No,” she says, turning back toward the group. “You don’t know that they’re dead. You can’t give up on people.”

Bradwell shakes his head.