Read an Excerpt
1
FRIDAY 1ST 12:05 p.m.
–42 HOURS
Adam Stone empties the bucket of rotting vegetables into the trough and then he stands back to watch. Dried mud hangs in clots from the pig’s coarse, hairless skin. The pig shovels its nose into the muck, squeals and looks up with a dumb expression. As though it’s surprised to be alive.
Which it ought to be, given it’s the only one left.
He likes the pig. It’s tough. Has to be, to survive when all the others got sick and died.
But he hates the pig too. He wonders what drives it to endure the foul-smelling sty. A prisoner, dependent on a food supply outside its control.
He thinks about releasing it sometimes, letting it free into the wild. But where would it go? And how long would it last?
As he watches the pig, he thinks about the Race. The Blackwater Trail. Just two days away. Less than forty-eight hours. It dominates his thoughts. Each day. Every day.
How long will he last, out there in the desert?
“What are you doin in that barn? You black out again?”
It’s the old man. Adam shakes his head and makes for the door. He steps outside, bolts the door fast and turns into the glare of a noon sun.
“Finish with the hog?” comes the old man’s thin voice.
Adam squints in the harsh light. “Yessir.”
Old Man Dagg. Oldest man in Blackwater. Seen more than fifty summers. He stands in the sparse shade of a charred cedar tree, leaning on his stick. He’s wearing a gray-white vest with yellow sweat stains and a pair of ancient jeans blackened with dirt. Same thing he always wears. His face is hidden in the shade of a battered wide-brim hat. He leans to the side and spits.
“Goddamn hot,” he says, and limps into the house.
No kidding. Old Man Dagg always says the obvious. Always about the weather. It’s hot. Looks like rain. Gonna be freezin come winter.
“Need me for anything else, Mr. Dagg?”
He follows the old man, steps up onto the cool porch. The stone floor is worn smooth, and flakes of gray paint peel from the walls. He moves to the door and looks into the gloom. Hears nothing but the squeak of a mosquito door on busted springs.
“Mr. Dagg?”
He steps over the threshold and is hit with a strong reek. Stale sweat and boiled vegetables--cabbages and turnips, something else he can’t place.
He shifts his weight and the floorboards creak underfoot. Then he hears the tapping of a stick. Emerging from the shadows, the old man comes with his pale, sightless eyes. His face is drawn and gray and the bags under his eyes are dark, almost green. His O2 mask, with its clear airpipe, dangles loose at his neck.
Old Man Dagg draws the back of his hand across his mouth and clears his throat. The rattling sound doesn’t bode well.
“You’re bleedin me dry, boy.” Old Man Dagg pulls a yellowed note from an open billfold. “S’pose you think it’s fine stealin from an ol’ man?” His breath could peel paint.
“No, sir.”
The old man turns his head to the side, the way a dog listens to distant sounds. He doesn’t move. Now Adam hears the muted roar. He looks to the horizon and sees a white jet stream and the tiny, metal glint of a solar rocket.
“You fixin to ride the Race?” the old man says.
“Yessir,” he answers, watching the distant rocket climb into the sky.
“Yessir, no sir, three bags full, sir. Don’t you never say nothin else?”
Adam looks at him. “No, sir.”
Old Man Dagg’s eyes are rheumy and red-rimmed. Adam wonders if he can see anything. Shadows, maybe. Shapes.
“You ain’t afraid?” the old man says.
“Nope.”
Old Man Dagg sneers. “You will be afraid. Mark my words. You will be.”
He massages his neck and pulls it to the side. Adam hears the bones click.
“I seen kids like you come and go,” the old man says. “All the same. Think you don’t belong here with the Left-Behind. Think you belong up yonder with the Watchers. But you’re wrong.”
Adam says nothing.
“Figure you’re some kind of special case? That you know how to win?”
He shrugs. “Reckon I got a chance.”
“Hell. You don’t know nothin. Nothin about before neither.”
“I know things were different.”
The old man nods, but not in agreement. “Things were more’n different. How many summers you got . . . fourteen?”
“Fifteen.”
“Hell. Had myself a full head a hair when I was a boy. Goddamn toxic sky. My grandpap lived to a full sixty summers, if you’d believe it. But not him or any damn one of us had enough cash money to get his ass up to Sky-Base.”
“Maybe he should’ve learned to ride. Could’ve earned a ticket.”
Old Man Dagg’s top lip curls. He shuffles past Adam. With his right hand, he drags a metal cart that supports his O2 canister. It looks like a bomb, a chipped silver tube with a red base and a tap for the O2 at the top end. Old Man Dagg lifts his face to the sky, arches his neck, twitches and sniffs the air. Then he turns his head to the side and spits. “Rain comin.”
Adam looks up. The sky is a brown haze.
The old man must be addled with booze, because Adam can’t see a hint of rain. Not a storm cloud in sight. Just a chalk-smudge of white jet stream, a reminder of the rocket’s upward thrust.
The old man holds out his hand. The yellowed note flutters between the stubs of his dirt-stained fingers. It’s the last note Adam needs to enter the Race. The note that will fly him away. He grabs it with a shaking hand, stabs it into his back pocket before the wind can snatch it.
Old Man Dagg pulls up his O2 mask and sucks in a ragged breath. Adam stares at the dripping beads of condensation on the transparent plastic. He watches the old man’s lips pull at the cloudy air. When he lowers it, there is something else in his look. A sadness, maybe. He turns and limps back to his door. The wheels of the O2 cart make a wretched squealing noise.
“You gonna wish me luck?” Adam calls after him.
Old Man Dagg turns at the door. “Luck?” He tilts his face to the sky and shakes his head. “What’s comin is comin. Not a damn thing in the world you can do about that.”
Adam climbs on his byke, claps on his goggles and suctions on his air-filter mask. He takes the money from his pocket and transfers it to a secret chamber in his boot, knocked out of his heel. Then he rolls back the throttle, loving the vibration in his hands.
Everything is different on the byke. It’s the only place he feels free.
The engine thrums. The hot westerly cuts into his face. The sun burns his neck. All thoughts of crazy Old Man Dagg drift away.
He takes the lake towpath. Past the deserted woodcutter’s lodge, down through the burnt-out cedar tree forest to the old jetty. The way he always goes on hot days like this when the air is choked with dust and everything moves in slow motion.
Everything but the byke.
The Longthorn is a thing of beauty. A wonder-machine.
She elongates on the flat, reducing air resistance for speed. On the dirt jumps, with a slick gear shift, she cinches up, providing maximum control. The byke borrows her power from the elements--the wind and the sun--trapping and storing energy through air ducts and solar panels, concentrators and photosensors. A control panel, set between the handlebars, has a gauge showing cumulative charge capacity and another indicating bursts of charge, delivered by a flash of sunlight, a strong wind or even movement.
The byke works in sync with him. Feels him, feeds off his movements.
If he takes evasive action and swerves, the byke remembers, she learns. And the next time he leans for a sharp turn the byke is one step ahead, keeping him safe, keeping him alive. From the byke he draws what he always does. Resilience. A cold resolve. Frank told him never to ride for too long. It will take over, this hardness. It will engulf and it will corrode.
He glances at the Longthorn’s dashboard.
His digital timer is set to countdown mode. Just forty-one hours.
His capacity gauge blinks seven bars. Maximum charge. This gives him another seven or eight hours of riding, depending on how he rides and where he goes. The byke will carry her charge into the dark, losing power after the sun dies when the wind is still.
But night is a far-off thing. Now there is only blazing heat.
He rides with a keen sense of instinct. A sixth sense. He could ride blind he knows the byke so well.
The gears click and take and Adam feels resistance in her shocks as they careen down a hill. The byke wallows and floats. She needs a tune-up.
The Longthorn isn’t new. She isn’t anywhere close. Father to son, brother to brother, mother to daughter--bykes are passed through the family line. He knows they were gifted to the planet by Sky-Base back when the Races were first conceived and that each byke carries an echo of her previous Riders--all of them through the bloodline--fading as time passes.
He can sense his brother’s echo now, running through the machine. He can feel him. And, further back, a residue of someone else. Pa.
Adam powers forward, eyes on the road. Bony tree limbs point the way and he follows, as if in a trance. This is how riding makes him feel. In the zone. A different dimension. That place he goes when he rides. The road is a tunnel and he floats along it, without consciousness.
He’s free. Free of this dead place.
The cracked white cement comes at him and his tires grip. He plunges onto a gravel path. He carves through a rutted track. He knows it by heart. Every stone. Every turn. He comes sweeping full tilt up the trail, pulling wheelies and charging tree stumps. He swerves at the last second. Rubber burns as he brakes. Then he belts it round a bend, exploding out of the turn, towards the jetty. One false move and he’s in the scrub.
He smells the silt now and feels the air cool. Blackwater Lake.
He thinks of the money in the sole of his boot and he feels a wild excitement build. But then his thoughts turn to Frank. And Sadie. Beautiful, determined and dangerous Sadie. Adam feels something altogether different. A dull ache in his stomach.
Guilt.
He’s free. But he’s not free at all.
He strips to his underwear, folds his clothes into the dry grass. Now he stands at the end of the jetty and watches the dark water. He knows what lies beneath the surface. But he runs to it anyway. He gulps a breath, and leaps feetfirst.
Cold grips him. He pinches his nose to equalize the pressure, then he jackknifes and down he goes. Down deep where it’s quiet and dark and green weeds drift.
Frank taught him how to swim. Taught him the mean way. Swung him round by an arm and a leg . . . and let go. Adam remembers the feeling. The frantic panic in his chest. The water in his mouth, in his nose. Thrashing his arms and his legs. He kicked and he pulled and he screamed. Somehow, he made it back to the bank and his brother stood over him, watching him suck air. Adam didn’t speak to him for weeks after that.
He floats now, hanging limp, arms outflung, head spinning. He’d sink to the bottom if he could. Down to the lake bed. He can see it beneath his pale feet, out of reach, shimmering like a face in the darkness. A ghost face. A cold feeling stirs in him. Colder than the water.
Frank warned him. Told him never to come back. But if he didn’t want him coming to the lake then he shouldn’t have taught him to swim.
Bubbles rise from his nose. He feels a movement in the water and turns. Fast. His heart hammers. He pushes himself through a one-eighty arc.
He’s alone.
The burning in his lungs is fierce.
He can feel the Blackness rising.
Up through his legs. Deadness in his calves. Spots of light in his vision. A tiny dart of pain in the back of his head. He feels tired. Bone-tired. His eyelids droop.
No! Pass out now and I’m dead. Just like Pa.
He stares at the warping surface. Cranks himself out of the stupor. Rises with slow and steady kicks. He bursts out of the water with a showering spray and a gasp. He throws up his arms, shouts at the hazy sky, at the white sun with its rainbow halo in the blurry light.
That’s when he sees him.
At first, just a vague outline. A shadow.
Then a kid. Sitting on his haunches. Looking at his byke.
“This your byke?” the kid says in a flat tone. Head down, eyes in shadow.
Adam blinks and wipes the water from his eyes. He looks up the trail, through the skeleton trees. Then glances at his boot, where he hid the money. “Who’s askin?”
The kid shifts on the balls of his feet and looks down at him. “Nobody else here.”
Adam makes him out to be near the same age as him. Maybe a summer or two older. Seventeen most likely. Darkly tanned skin. Crazy wolf-yellow eyes, quick and calculating. And low on his skull, behind his left ear, a jutting metal tube.
Adam feels his jaw tighten. A twinge of panic in his gut.
A Circuit Rider.
“She’s a nice byke,” the kid says.
“I know. She’s mine.”
Stupid. I should’ve been watching.
Adam treads water, playing it cool. “Who are you?”
“They call me Kane,” he says, rising off his haunches.
He wears a black riding suit, frayed at the seams. He’s tall. Maybe five eleven. And well-built with broad shoulders. His face is handsome, regular . . . if not for the ugly scar running up his cheek, from his lip to his eye. Adam wonders what left him this terrible memento and what he might have looked like before.
Kane’s eyes are impossible to read. These are eyes that miss nothing and hide everything.
“Just Kane?” Adam asks. “Nothin else?”
“Nothin else.”
“You from Monument?”
“Nope.”
“Providence?”
“Hell, no.”
Adam hesitates. He’s running out of towns. “What are you doin here?”
Kane undoes the zip on his suit and peels it from his shoulders. “Come to swim.”
Adam watches him pull off his boots, one by one. “This is where I swim.”
Kane dumps his riding suit in a heap, flings down his underwear. “It’s a free world, right?”
