He said, “I’ll try anything to get out of this damn water.”
Mom and Laurie waited in the pond near Dad while Jeremy dug his hand into the purse and found Mom’s keys. When it seemed clear enough—there were only a few bugs now quartering the surface of the water—he ran for the fairway, around the pond to the side that was opposite the shed, Mom’s ring of metal keys and bangles dangling from his hand.
A few bugs followed him, but when Jeremy reached the middle of the golf course, he pushed and held the unlock button on the car remote. Bugs rose all around him: from the remains of the shed, from the pond, and from the condos on the other side of the fairway. Thousands of bugs.
He hadn’t thought of that. They were
He flung the keys as far toward the condos as he could, and dashed up the brown grass, zigzagging, hearing the bugs tear past him, stinging and burning as they bounced off his face; and then he seemed to be clear of them.
Jeremy circled back around to the pond, where Mom and Laurie had helped Dad out of the pond and into the trench, then laid the fiberglass panels across the raised dirt walls. They were scooping dirt on top of him as fast as they could. Jeremy tried to help, but blood kept running down into his eyes. When the first layer of soil covered the fiberglass, Mom made him go sit in the shade and hold a T-shirt to his face until the bleeding stopped.
Dad stayed in the bunker for seven more days. The structure was open at each end but they built zigzag walls leading out from it, so there were no straight lines for his pacemaker EMF to leak out.
Jeremy scavenged food from the condos, fishing food out of pantries with long sticks—lucking out early on with plastic jars of peanut butter and spaghetti sauce. He went alone, moving carefully among the slowly collapsing buildings, and he always came back with food or liquids. No cans, of course. No jars with metal lids.
Fortunately, most of the residents had fled early on.
Laurie and Jeremy built a solar still with clear plastic sheets and a hose, and the surface of the pond was substantially lower by the time the National Guard found them.
The Guard moved Dad thirty miles to the west, shielded by sandbags, on the back of an improvised cart, and when they got to a place where they couldn’t find any bugs, they put a white chalk symbol on the ground twenty yards across. A helicopter dropped down from ten thousand feet just long enough for them to throw Dad aboard. Bugs came, but the copter went high, fast, shooting for the thin air at the upper reaches of its operational altitude.
It worked. The bugs couldn’t keep up, and the helicopter didn’t fall out of the sky.
Mom, Laurie, and Jeremy didn’t see Dad for another two weeks—the time it took them to walk out—but he was waiting for them when they crossed out of the zone, near Calexico.
The bugs were behind them, still reproducing, but they weren’t spreading out of Arizona and New Mexico, a guardsman told Jeremy.
“We don’t know why. Maybe they only like the areas with sunshine? Or they’re consolidating before they expand farther?”
Like Jeremy, the soldier had half-healed bug burns across his face. Jeremy had told him about the bodies he’d found in the condos.
The soldier understood. “With holes in their heads, right? Mostly around the jaw?”
Jeremy gulped and nodded.
The soldier hooked a finger in his mouth and pulled his cheek back to show a gap in his molars. “Once we realized what they were after, I had my CO knock out that crown using a rock and a stick as a chisel. This was after we starting ditching all our metal gear.
“It was nice getting your dad out. We found too many people who stayed, with metal crowns or artificial joints. I mean, we saved one guy by amputating his leg while the bugs were working on his artificial knee; and we knocked a lot of teeth out. Your dad, though, is the only survivor I saw with an electronic prosthesis. Saw a lot of nonsurvivors.”
Then the soldier shook his head, smiling slightly. “Almost weirder are the survivors who’ve stayed in there, trying to make it without metal, staying clear of the bugs. We were told to evacuate
Dad moved them to Maine, and he would’ve moved farther if there’d been any place in the Continental United States that was farther from the bugs. Jeremy couldn’t blame him. If Jeremy had a pacemaker, he’d do the same.
When kids asked him about the scars on his face, he told them the truth, but they usually looked at him like he was crazy, like he was making it up.
Fine. They weren’t there. They couldn’t really know.
Jeremy tried to be a good kid, working hard in school. He read everything he could find on the bugs and their dominion, the newly declared Southwest Emergency Zone. He made a special effort to get along with his sister. His parents had been through enough, he thought, and he did his best to ease their days.
It was going to be hard enough on them later, when he went back.
FAINT HEART
by Sarah Rees Brennan
After the Fourth Great War, when most of the cities of the world were leveled, for decades the people lived without governance. Until our city was built, and those who would become the Court came together and decided that the element of the population that in the past had caused crime and unrest—the young, angry, and disadvantaged men who had been sent into a hundred pointless wars—needed a war that made sense to them, needed to compete for a real and fixed goal.
They also, for the good of the rest of the city, needed to be eliminated.
The reward of a hero in children’s stories is the hand of a princess, the fairest of them all, and half her kingdom. Power and beauty is what men fight for.
The people who would become the Court created the most beautiful woman who ever lived, and held the first Trials. They set the traditional tasks of the maze, the monster, and the mystery, built the maze beneath the city for men to get through, created the monster for the men to fight, and made up the riddle for men to think their way past. Every step of the way, the men had to battle with each other, because they knew that only one of them would be allowed out alive. Every unmarried man who did not receive the dispensation of the Court had to participate in the Trials.
All but one of the men died, and that one married the queen. With its most violent element eliminated, the city was at peace.
It was clear to all that the way to ensure civil peace was to repeat the Trials.
We created the most beautiful woman in the world again, and again.
• The Trials must take place every generation: that is, every twenty-five years, or when the old queen dies and the princess inherits. The Trials may be delayed or put forward according to the judgment of the Court, but it must not be delayed more than two years. Each queen is designed to last no more than forty years.
• Men of Court families, and other families the Court determines to be contributing to society, are exempt from entering the Trials.
• To be considered for exemption, families must pay the Court five hundred drachmae per head.
• Married men are exempt from entering the Trials, but as marriage must not be entered into lightly, every man must pay a brideprice. Each family may set their own bride-prices for their daughters, but it cannot be less than a hundred drachmae. A bride should be treasured, as the queen must be treasured.
• All volunteers for the Trials will be accepted. Wishing to enter shows either a commendable desire for the queen, or a volatile and violent spirit that needs eliminating.
