A Town Called Dust: The Territory 1 (23 page)

“I think you should encourage the people of Dust to pack up and move inward,” Lynn said to the Mayor of Dust. “Head for the larger towns. The horde will probably hang around at the battle site for a while yet, but eventually they’ll come this way.” She stared again at the words on the telegraph:

Surviving Apprentices of the Army of the Central Territory,

By order of The Administrator of the Central Territory you are hereby ordered to return immediately to Government House in Alice for debriefing.

In this matter my words are those of the Administrator.

Knox Soilwork, Chief Minister of the Central Territory.

Lynn, Squid and Darius stood in Mayor Rust’s office. It was small, with a window so dirty that it let in as much light as the surrounding walls. The air in the room hung heavy with a musty odor that suggested the window had been jammed shut so long that the air in the office was the same as had been in there for decades. The mayor sat in an old high-backed chair behind his desk, which was a solid piece of steel that looked like it had once been part of the water tower but was now raised precariously up to waist height on blocks of wood.

They had slept in the pub the previous night and despite being uncomfortably propped up in a chair Lynn had fallen asleep easily, a fact she still felt guilty about. How could she sleep after what had happened? All night her dreams had been a swirl of dust and blood and sound. Now this telegraph had come for them. They were being ordered back to Alice by the Administrator. What was she going to do? She couldn’t go back. Even if she kept up her disguise as Max she felt sure they would recognize her and she would be locked up in the cathedral and forced to join the Sisters, or worse.

“I’ll talk to the Workmen,” Lynn was saying to the mayor. “Some of them might be willing to stay behind. They are certainly not Diggers, but they are still numbers and can help get people out of the town if the ghouls regroup.”

The mayor was looking at Lynn. She could tell he was still unsure how to take the disastrous loss of the army and also a little taken aback that this Apprentice was telling him what to do, this Apprentice who’d turned out to be a girl.

“You think we should leave?” the mayor said.

“I don’t know,” Lynn answered. “But I think it might be a good idea.”

“But you’re from the Diggers. You must know about the tactics of ghouls.”

“I don’t think they have tactics.”

“Yes, of course,” Ferdinand Rust said. “Their behavior, then: what do you know about their behavior?”

“We are Apprentices,” Darius said, cutting into the conversation like a knife, “and we’ve only been that for a little while.”

Ferdinand Rust looked at Darius as if he had forgotten he was even in the room.

“I see,” said the mayor finally, considering this. “Well, that may be, but you’re the only Diggers we have now. We’re just a dirt-farming community, we need guidance.”

“You want guidance?” Darius said. “My advice is to listen to Lynn and get the Ancestors’ sweet sin out of here.”

“Darius,” Lynn said, “that’s not helping.” She turned back to the mayor. “I think you should convince the townspeople to leave.”

“Very well,” said the mayor.

“We will go ahead,” Lynn said, “and get back to Alice as fast as we can.”

Lynn looked at Darius and Squid. Darius still looked tired—they all did—but he had done little but sleep or talk about wanting to sleep since they had made it back to Dust. Squid, on the other hand, still hadn’t spoken to her at all.

“We will have another day’s rest,” Lynn said without taking her eyes off Darius, who was looking at the ground and yawning, “and leave in the morning.”

Later that day Lynn was sitting on the roof of the small hut under the water tower, staring along the main street of Dust and out into the infinite redness surrounding the town. She was thinking about her imminent return to Alice and the inevitable imprisonment that awaited her there. The Administrator was the one who had asked to see them; maybe he would take pity on her and hide the fact that she’d even returned from the Sisters, but she doubted it. Nothing got past the Sisters.

The roof of the hut began to shake slightly and she heard the rhythmic tapping of feet on the ladder below. She stood and watched the hatch as it was pushed open. She had wanted to be alone up here, alone with her thoughts, not that this was a problem she could solve by thinking. One way or another she had to face it.

It was Squid’s head that emerged from the hole in the roof. He looked around for a moment and then his eyes locked onto hers and he smiled a forced smile. She couldn’t help but return it. Squid pushed his small body up onto the roof and began to walk tentatively toward her, trying to stay on the line of nails that meant he was following one of the roof support beams.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said as he sat beside Lynn on the edge of the roof. Their legs dangled in the air.

“Yeah?” Lynn said.

“Yeah,” Squid answered.

Lynn stared at her feet. “All I ever wanted to be was a Digger like my dad,” she said. “My whole life I’ve wanted nothing else, and over and over again they told me I’d never be able to, that only boys could join the army. Everyone told me I should join the Sisters if I wanted to serve the Territory, but I could never do that.” She turned to Squid. “Have you seen the way the Church treats people, Squid? The way they lock them up or execute them simply for thinking something different? I could never be a part of that.”

“The sins of the father should not be the sins of the son,” Squid said, echoing the words of Lieutenant Walter.

Lynn nodded. “Exactly.” She sat in silence for a moment before speaking again. “My father was murdered, Squid.”

“Sorry, Lynn,” Squid said, because that’s what people always said when they heard something like that. “Who did it?”

“I don’t know,” said Lynn, “but I know who sent him and I’m going to find proof. The problem is I won’t be able to find anything if they lock me up when I get back to Alice. When my father was killed they sent me to the Sisters. They made me join, but I ran away. If I go back to Alice I’ll face charges of treason.”

“What will they do to you?”

“I don’t know,” Lynn said. “Lock me up, exile me from the Territory, maybe even execute me.”

“Then you can’t go back,” Squid said, a sudden burst of fear in his voice. “You can’t!”

Lynn reached over and took Squid’s hand. She held it tight. “I’m not going to run again, Squid,” she said. “No more running away.”

“Then whatever they do to you they can do to me,” Squid said.

Lynn smiled sadly. “You’re my best friend, Squid,” Lynn said. “But you’ve already done that once and I can’t let you do it again.”

“I’m sorry I got angry at you for being a girl,” Squid said. “I just—”

“I know,” Lynn said, looking down. “I should have told you earlier. I’m sorry too.”

“I don’t really mind that you’re a girl,” Squid said.

“I know,” Lynn said and then she laughed. “You’re so weird, Squid.”

Then the two of them sat, leaning against each other under the water tower in the town called Dust for a long time without saying anything at all.

Sometime later Mayor Ferdinand Rust came running down the street calling up to them.

“Lynnette! Squid!”

He ran to the base of the water tower, breathing heavily, bending at the waist and taking in deep full breaths.

“Quickly,” he said. “You need to come.”

“What is it?” Lynn said.

“It’s your friend Darius,” the mayor said. “He’s collapsed.”

Squid and Lynn looked at each other.

“Hold on,” Lynn said. “We’ll be right down.”

As they hurried up the street behind the mayor Lynn was thinking back over how Darius had been acting. He’d seemed tired, perhaps more tired than he should have been. They should have known something was wrong.

Beside the Church of Glorious God the Redeemer was a small building that served as Dust’s one-room hospital. Squid explained that they had no doctors in Dust, but one of the Sisters, Sister Rosie, was trained in rudimentary medical care and acted as the town’s nurse. She was standing beside the bed where Darius lay. His eyes were closed and he drew in the long slow breaths of sleep.

“I’ve given him something to put him to sleep,” said Sister Rosie.

“What happened?” Lynn asked.

“He was in the pub,” the mayor said. “He was getting rude and angry, having a go at Dee the nice young barmaid, so I asked him to leave. He stood up but then he collapsed and we brought him here.”

“Any idea what’s wrong with him?” Lynn said.

The Sister nodded gravely. “I’m afraid so,” she said, and pulled his shirt up to reveal his side.   

“What are you …” Lynn began, but her words died off when she saw what was under Darius’s shirt.

“That,” Sister Rosie said, “is a bite.”

Lynn placed her hand on Darius’s forehead. It was like touching a sword that had been in the sun all day. He was burning up, but strangely, she noticed, he wasn’t sweating, not a single drop. In fact his skin looked dry. She touched it with her finger and it came away in flakes. His lips were cracked too. He looked like he hadn’t had a sip of water in days, weeks even.

She watched his lips move. He was on the edge of consciousness, hiding somewhere just behind those closed eyelids. She brushed a stray lock of blond hair away from his face. His hair seemed to be lighter now, almost translucent. She brushed her fingers gently along his cheek. His skin felt alien, so dry and scaly. Even after everything that had happened, she still wished she had spent more time with him, got to know the person she suspected he really was.

Darius opened his eyes like they were on rusty hinges, his one brown iris and one green one barely visible through the thin slits between his swollen eyelids. His eyes searched for a moment before finding Lynn, then they locked onto her and he murmured something unintelligible, barely a whisper between slightly open lips. She leaned in close, straining to hear what he was saying. He had to repeat it several times; each time he seemed to be fighting to say it louder. With one last push against his failing body, he managed to lift his cracking voice enough that she could hear.

“Lynn.”

“I’m here, Darius,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Lynn said, feeling the emotion surface at her eyes as his fingers tightened around hers with a weak squeeze. “It’s okay.”

Lynn felt the tickle of a single tear running along the inside of her nose, turning at the end so that it dropped off the underside of the tip. She watched it fall and land soundlessly on Darius’s forehead. As soon as it landed Darius’s skin drank in the moisture like a raindrop falling on dry, cracked earth.

Darius’s eyes floated shut for a second or two but he seemed to use all his strength to force them open again.

“If you need to do it,” he said in a voice below a whisper, “you do it.”

“I will,” Lynn said as Darius closed his eyes again. She watched him as his chest began to rise and fall in a slower, rhythmic pattern, and his fingers lost their gentle grip on hers.     

Lynn stood and left the room, Squid in her wake. As she walked outside she turned to him. “What are we going to do?”

Squid smiled the saddest smile Lynn had ever seen on his face.

“What is it, Squid?” she asked.

“I … I saw my uncle, Lynn,” Squid said, his voice distant. “He was a ghoul.”

Lynn was silent. What was she supposed to say to that?

“That’s what will happen to Darius, isn’t it?” Squid said.

“Squid, I …” Lynn started. She had been thinking about herself the whole time. About how awful she felt about Lieutenant Walter and the battle, about the fate that awaited her on her return to Alice. She hadn’t even thought about how all this had affected Squid, and now this. She stood and hugged him. She thought of her father. At least he was just dead. He wasn’t still walking around; he didn’t look like one of them. Then Squid did something entirely unexpected. He smiled.

“Well,” Squid said, “at least he’s probably nicer now.”

Lynn looked at him, shocked at first, and then together they laughed. They laughed at the sheer ridiculousness of Squid making perhaps his first ever joke at that moment. They laughed at their continued laughing. They laughed because sometimes that’s all you can do.  

“Really though, it’s okay,” Squid said as they calmed. “We need to worry about Darius now.”

Squid was sad, Lynn could see that, and it was far from okay, really, but he was doing what he always did, being the smartest and worrying about what needed to be worried over.

“What are we going to do with him?” Lynn asked.

“I don’t know.”

“If it’s a ghoul bite, then he’ll turn.”

“I think so.”

“How long does it take?” Lynn asked, glancing back in the direction of the small wooden building. “When we were in the battle and the ghouls … when they got to Lieutenant Walter he was up again in a minute, maybe less.”

“I suppose it depends on the number of bites and how deep they are,” Squid said, “like a poison.”

“It was only a small bite,” Lynn said, “and very shallow. Maybe he’ll be all right.”

Squid nodded at first and then, chewing his lip and holding the key that hung around his neck, he looked up at Lynn. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“We need to leave,” Lynn said. “We can’t wait too long before we go back to Alice.”

“We can’t leave him here,” Squid said. “He’s, well, he’s our friend now, right?”

“I know,” Lynn said, “but I don’t know what to do.”

They were both quiet, each wanting the other to know the answer.

“My father always knew the right thing to do,” Lynn said.

“You should kill him now,” said Sister Rosie, emerging from the hospital building with the mayor on her heels. “There is nothing I can do for him and when he turns he will put the whole town in danger.”

Lynn turned to face the Sister with a ferocious glare. “That’s the Sisters’ solution to everything, isn’t it? Kill people, do away with them because they aren’t working out the way you want them too, because they’re beyond your control.”