Partials series 1-3 (Partials; Fragments; Ruins). Dan Wells
Pom, pom, pom.
She felt the next stone in front of her, testing for handholds, probing its stability. I think I can move this one, she thought. He’s got to be right on the other side of it, and then they’ll see. I know he’s alive.
“Hey, Mr. Turner,” she shouted, “can you hear me? I’m coming to get you—we’re not leaving you behind.” She braced herself on the basement floor, praying she didn’t dislodge anything vital, and pushed on the largest stone, feeling it rotate slightly against a stiff, off-center axis. She pushed again, straining at the weight, then shoved the stone to the side. There was another shape in the darkness, too twisted for her to recognize the outline. She thumbed the scope again, reaching forward desperately.
Dit, dit, dit, dit . . .
Wait, thought Kira, that’s not right, and then her fingers brushed against slick, wet flesh. She caught a piece of fabric between two fingers and pulled it closer, hearing the dit grow louder in the tiny cavern. She felt the bloody limb with both hands, refusing to believe it; she inched back toward the light and held it up, confirming it with her eyes.
“It’s his arm,” she said softly. “He’s gone.”
Jayden stared. “And the heartbeat?”
She held up the arm, the wrist glinting metallically. Dit, dit, dit. “His wristwatch.” She felt drained and lifeless. “He’s gone.”
Jayden pulled the arm away from her, steadying her with his hand. “Let’s get out of here.”
“We have to take him back,” said Kira.
“This was not an accident,” said Jayden. “Someone came through here and set this bomb—someone who knew we were coming. They’re probably still nearby.”
Kira frowned. “Why would someone blow up a weather station?”
“It was a radio,” said Gianna. “We didn’t see it all before it blew, but I know that much for certain. This was the biggest communications hub I’ve ever seen.”
“Voice,” said Kira.
Jayden’s voice was low and grim. “And after that noise, they definitely know we’re here.”
Jayden gathered the survivors in the shadow of the smoking wagon. “There’s no way we’re getting home in this thing, which puts us at least two days out from civilization. Our radio’s been destroyed as well. We’re on our own.”
“We’ll have to rig a stretcher for Private Lanier,” said Marcus. “He has a compound fracture in his shin. I’ve set it as best I can, but he’s not walking anywhere.”
Kira scanned the trees and ruins around them, tensing at every movement. She’d been in the hospital once when the Voice attacked; she’d seen the wounded soldiers they brought in, moaning and screaming in pain as the triage medics wheeled them into surgery. It still shocked her to think that any human would harm another one.
“Build a stretcher,” said Jayden. “We have two horses left: Patterson and Yoon will ride ahead and send backup as soon as they can reach the Defense Grid perimeter. The rest of us follow on foot.”
“It’s nearly thirty miles,” said Yoon, “and the horses are already tired. They can’t do it in one shot.”
“They can go for at least another hour,” said Jayden. “You’ll run out of light by then anyway. Go as far as you can, then let the horses rest till first light.”
“We don’t have to go all the way back to East Meadow,” said Gianna. “There’s a farm community west of here, and several more to the east. They’re a whole lot closer than thirty miles, and Lanier can get help sooner.”
“Our map was in the side of the wagon that blew up,” said Jayden. “I’m not in the mood to just wander around the island looking for rednecks.”
“They’re not rednecks,” said Gianna. “Most of them have more education than you do—”
“Their amazing educations aren’t much good to us without a map to find them,” said Kira. Why was Gianna arguing at a time like this? “East Meadow’s our best bet—we can follow major roads the whole way.”
“Lanier’s not going to make it back,” said Gianna, “not with that fracture. The farms have hospitals just like we do.”
“Not ‘just like we do,’” said Kira, “and no, Lanier’s not going to die on the road. Do you have some kind of medical background you forgot to mention?”
“Anyone can see—”
“Anyone can see that he’s bad,” said Marcus, speaking calmly, “but we’ve splinted it, we’ve wrapped it, and I can drug him so hard he’ll think he’s flying home on a magical gumdrop rainbow. You could get high on his farts.”
“Patterson and Yoon, go south to East Meadow,” said Jayden firmly. “The rest of us follow with the same goal, but”—he looked at Gianna—“if we run across a farm or an outpost or anything like that, we can try to commandeer another wagon.”
“You don’t have the authority to commandeer a wagon,” Gianna snapped.
“And you don’t have the authority to disobey my orders,” said Jayden. “This is a military operation, in a state of emergency, and I will take you home the way I think is best if I have to drug you as much as Lanier to do it. Am I clear?”
“Is this what we have to look forward to?” asked Gianna. “Is this our brave new world when you plague babies grow up and start running things?”
Jayden didn’t waver. “I asked you if I was clear.”
“Perfectly,” said Gianna. “Let’s get back to paradise.”
Jayden stood up and the group dispersed, gathering their equipment and preparing for the journey. Kira took Jayden’s arm and pulled him back.
“We can’t just leave them,” she said. “The dead horses, sure, but there’s three dead people in that house. How are we going to get them home?”
“We can come back for them.”
“I counted six feral house cats walking past us just during your little planning meeting, and that clinic you had us in was home to a pretty big pack of dogs. If we leave three bodies here, there won’t be anything left to come back to.”
Jayden’s eyes were cold. “What do you want me to do, Walker? We can’t carry them, and we don’t have time to bury them. We’ll come back in force to investigate the site and recover the generators, but right now ten live people are more important than three dead ones.”
“Ten minutes,” said Kira. “We can spare that.”
“You think you can bury them in ten minutes?”
“They’re half-buried already.”
Kira watched him consider, then shrug and nod. “You’ve got a point. I’ll help.”
In addition to Andrew Turner, the explosion had killed two soldiers, and their bodies were laid out carefully by the house. A man and a woman—a boy and girl, really, probably no more than sixteen years old each. The girl might have been even younger, but Kira couldn’t tell. She stood over them solemnly, wondering who they had been: what they had done for fun, who they had lived with, how they had come to be here. She didn’t even know their names. Jayden took the girl by the arms, Kira grabbed her legs, and they picked their way carefully through the ruins. The deepest hole was the one they’d dug trying to save Turner, and they lowered the girl’s body down into it as gently as they could, pushing her back