He intends to burn them alive.
Without further hesitation, I scrambled over the sill and dangled by my fingertips. There was no tree branch to swing onto as there had been at the Oakses’ place so I dropped and hoped for the best. I landed hard, but I didn’t break anything. Fade came down more gracefully and tugged me to my feet. Time was critical. We gathered more rubbish to serve as kindling and lit the house up at both doors, front and back. The fire spread quickly, fanned by the breeze blowing through. Soon the whole building was engulfed in orange flames, creating a huge glow against the night sky. This might cause more problems for us down the line if the blaze attracted more enemies, but we wouldn’t be here to see it. I lingered only long enough to hear the monsters screaming as they burned, then I ran after Fade, who was already on the move.
“They won’t bother us again,” he said with certainty.
Still, to be safe, we traveled through the night and didn’t stop until we had a full eight hours of distance between that hunting party and us. At last I collapsed, winded, and I couldn’t go on. Fade was right there with me, his face flagged with windburn. He leaned against me, seeming not to realize how easy the gesture was, and I didn’t remind him.
“We won’t make Winterville without a break,” I panted.
“You sleep. I’ll keep watch.”
Before, he’d said we could afford to rest at the same time. His caution had to mean he thought there were more Freaks in the area. I didn’t hear or smell them, but Fade had better instincts for such things, no doubt honed by his years alone down below, where his survival depended on knowing where the monsters were before they found him.
“Just an hour or two, then you. And we’ll press on.”
He neither agreed nor argued, and I lay down. Fade rested his hand on my hair. I expected to be so conscious of him close by that I couldn’t sleep, but I underrated my exhaustion. When he jostled me a few hours later, I couldn’t believe how soundly I’d gone out.
“Any problems?”
“A few squirrels threw nuts at you.”
“That’s not the kind of problem I meant.”
He smiled. “I know, but things were quiet. Your watch?”
“I’m on it.”
Luck held long enough for Fade to catch a nap, and I had food ready—such as it was—when I woke him. We drank and ate in silence. I hoped we reached Winterville soon; and to that end, I checked the map, comparing Longshot’s notes with where we were. Sometimes it was hard to judge since he kept mostly to wagon routes whereas Fade and I ran cross-country, taking the most direct route. But near as I could tell, the Freaks had only driven us a little off course. Longshot and I hadn’t spoken much about the other settlements, so I was glad he’d written memos along the edges of his maps. It was like receiving his advice when I needed it most.
Another day of breakneck travel and dodging the monsters found us outside the city limits. I said city because it reminded me of the ruins, only it wasn’t damaged in the same way. It wasn’t nearly as big as Gotham, either. Around the edges, Winterville had buildings made of brick and stone, towering compared with the homey structures I had admired in Salvation. Well-kept stands of grass lined the avenues, which were paved with stones and neatly swept. There was no gate, either—no wooden wall or barbed metal fencing—but I mistrusted my eyes. Surely no settlement could be wholly unprotected. Fade and I exchanged a glance as we approached. I expected to encounter some security measure, some hidden threat, like a man with a rifle aimed at us, but we passed into Winterville without a single warning.
“This makes me uneasy,” I said.
But I didn’t smell anything, or at least, the scent was too faint for me to place it. If the Freaks had destroyed the place, they would still be there, and the buildings wouldn’t be so intact. The monsters tended to break windows and doors in their desperation to kill all humans hiding inside. Here, it was like nothing bad ever happened, as if Winterville was a special, blessed place. Momma Oaks would say her god smiled on it.
Just when I was starting to think nobody was here, a woman stepped out her front door. She looked startled to see us, but she lifted a hand in careful greeting. “What brings you around, strangers?”
There’s nothing stranger than this.
Fade answered for us. “The colonel sent us from Soldier’s Pond. She said Dr. Wilson has been working on a project and should have some information.”
“Ah.” The conflict in her expression cleared. “Then you want to follow this main road through town. When you come to the research annex, hang a left. Then go down two blocks, turn right, and knock on the back door of the lab.”
“What’s a block?” I asked.
She eyed me like I was simpleminded. “Two streets. The lab is where Dr. Wilson works. It’s a white building, no windows at all.”
That should be easy enough to find, though Winterville was bigger than I’d expected, based on what I’d seen of the world so far. “Are all these houses occupied?”
“No,” she said sadly. “Less than half, now.”
“Did the Muties get them?” Fade remembered to use the topside word.
“No. Since Dr. Wilson spread the pheromones, we’ve had less trouble with attacks, but … there have been other problems.”
She didn’t volunteer what those might be, and I didn’t ask. Our job wasn’t to fix Winterville, only to get the necessary information and survive the return trip. But I did wonder: “Do you have a standing military?”
Once again, she shook her head. “It’s possible to coexist peacefully with the mutants if you know how to avoid enraging them.”
With a polite smile, I decided she was insane. I followed her directions, hoping they weren’t as crazy. No matter her personal delusions, she did tell us how to find Dr. Wilson. As we stood outside his lab building, I felt properly grateful.
“It looks like a giant box,” I said.
The lack of windows made the place distinctive, but it also looked rather like a cage, a place where you hid things you didn’t want the light to reveal. Mustering my nerve, I circled around and rapped sharply on the back door, as instructed. I waited what seemed like a long time before I repeated the knock. Fade tapped his foot, no more pleased by the delay than I was.
Eventually I heard shuffling movement within and a white-haired man opened the door, squinting at me with obvious annoyance. He looked as if he hadn’t bathed in days and a noisome stench wafted from the darkness behind him.
“What do you want?” he demanded. “I’m a busy man.”
“I’m sure,” Fade said politely.
“May we come in? We bring word from the colonel in Soldier’s Pond.”
“Ah, Emilia, yes, has it been that long already? I suppose it has or you wouldn’t be here. Just let me fetch my notes, come along.” He babbled the words with scarcely a pause for breath, shuffling back the way he’d come with the apparent expectation we’d follow him with no questions asked.
We did.
Fade shut the door behind us. The slam made me flinch, but it also meant this was a good solid door, and it wouldn’t give way, no matter how the Freaks battered at it. But the crazy woman had said they didn’t have trouble with raiding—and the state of their town supported her claim, however outlandish it sounded. Dr. Wilson moved ahead of us, turning left and right, seemingly at random. The hall was dim, so I was left blinking when we stepped into a large, well-lit room.
These lights were similar to the magical-looking ones in Soldier’s Pond that they claimed were powered by the sun. But if possible, these were brighter still. I had never seen anything like them and, as Wilson peered at a mess of papers, I crept closer to the lamp. It hurt my eyes a little.
“Don’t touch it,” the doctor snapped.
I drew my hand away, guiltily. “I’m sorry.”
“It’ll burn you. I suppose you’re a savage who’s never seen electricity before?” Wilson sighed the question.
I shook my head, though I wasn’t sure what he was asking. The scientist launched into a complicated explanation about windmills, grids, power sources, and currents, and I understood none of it.
But Fade was looking at him in amazement. “My dad told me stories about the old wonders. And you got them working?”
“It’s not so great a thing, the least of my discoveries,” Wilson said modestly.
It was clear Fade had a burgeoning case of hero worship. Tegan would love to meet Wilson, I thought, and ask all kinds of questions about doctoring. But the colonel had said he wasn’t a medical man, so maybe his knowledge about windmills meant he couldn’t tell her anything about fixing the human body.
“I can report limited success in the trials,” he said, “but I wasn’t able to weaponize the pheromones as Emilia hoped, and there were … complications.”
That was only so much gibberish to me, but before I could say so, a snarl echoed through the warren of hallways. I froze; I knew that sound down to my blood and bone.
Somehow, there were Freaks in here.
Shock
I expected the old man to panic, but he didn’t look worried. He waved a hand dismissively, still rummaging in his papers. “That’s just Timothy, nothing to be alarmed about.”
Fade said, “Where we come from, sir, Muties inside a dwelling means big trouble.”
The scientist sighed. “You won’t be satisfied until I prove there’s no threat, will you? Come then. Let’s get this over with.”
He led us out of the main room, which was full of equipment for which I had no name, but I recognized the articles as belonging to the old world, which I had believed to be lost. I was a little awed that any of the things still worked and that Dr. Wilson employed them as a matter of course. Soldier’s Pond had more such artifacts than Salvation, where they eschewed old technology by choice, but this was a veritable treasure trove of functioning equipment. The Wordkeeper—the man who guarded our relics down below—would’ve been astonished.
The same bright bulbs—long strips of light that flickered—lit the halls, lending the pale walls a milky tremor. Fade stayed close and I noticed he kept a hand on the knife strapped to his thigh. Wilson opened a door on the right, and the reek was unmistakable; this reminded me of the tunnels, where the Freaks had lived and bred for years undisturbed apart from the occasional run-in with our Hunters.
I expected to find a breach in his security. Instead, I saw a row of man-size cages. They were all empty, save one. To my abject shock, a Freak occupied it. The monster rattled the bars, prompting a sigh from Dr. Wilson.
“Yes, all right. It’s past feeding time. Just be patient.” He went to a white rectangular unit and withdrew a bucket, then hauled out a substantial portion of bloody meat, which he then tossed into the cage as if the Freak were his pet.
The beast fell on the food with its claws and it ate voraciously, hunched over because the cage wasn’t quite tall enough for it to stand upright. I watched with a growing sense of horror. What was the purpose of this? Tegan had said once that she would like to study the Freaks to understand how their bodies worked and possibly to work out what drove them. Maybe that was what Dr. Wilson was trying to do here?