Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

“Oh, Joffrey,” smiled Desdemona as another explosion pummed and lit up the windows. Suddenly, there, in that moment, she felt something soft and warm encompassing her, a sparkle of déjà vu that seemed to descend on the two of them like a summer shower. She realized what it was: She was suddenly and acutely recalling her first onscreen kiss. The one she’d shared with Sergei Goncharenko on the set of A Night in Havana, there in a dusty back lot in Kiev, when they’d had only one shot left and the crew was getting tired and the budget had been strained and they had to nail this one final shot, a bare minute of film, and they’d fired the pyrotechnics and the rain was pouring down from hoses suspended above them and Sergei had said his one line (“Let’s make this one count, then.”) and Desdemona had felt such an upswell of emotion that she’d completely transported herself to that place, to that café in Havana, amid the chaos of a popular uprising, and had kissed Sergei so deep and long that when he’d gasped and fallen back, per the screenplay, and feigned the first spasms of his character’s death, she’d gone there, hadn’t she, she’d believed it. And now: Desdemona, as if reenacting the screen directions of that seminal film, leaned in to kiss Joffrey and their lips met.

A very loud bang sounded. It seemed to shake the white paper chandeliers that hung over the wide room. Then a look of intense surprise awoke in Joffrey’s eyes as he pulled away from the kiss and his eyebrows jutted upward and his face slackened and his mouth fell open. Then, a little trickle of blood, the bloom of a rose, appeared on his argyle sweater-vest and as it was absorbed by the fabric, it flowered out like an opening poppy, red and full, across the breadth of his chest.

Desdemona looked over his shoulder, shocked, and saw the figure of Bradley Wigman standing in the gap between the brass doors, holding a pistol, straight out away from him. A thin tongue of smoke licked away from the barrel. A cough escaped Joffrey’s lips and he tumbled, a rag doll, into Desdemona’s arms.

“My beacon,” repeated Joffrey weakly. “My guiding light.”

“Bradley!” Desdemona shouted in disbelief. “What have you done?”

Wigman drew closer, the gun still outstretched. As he came into the light, she got a better look at him—he looked as if he’d just escaped some horrible car accident. He was covered in a fine black spray, head to toe, like a coal miner in some old photo, and his bespoke shirtsleeves were torn into little shreds along his dirtied arms. His hair, typically so immaculate in its pomaded wave, literally could not have been more mussed up—if you had tried to muss it any more you would have only succeeded in making it more groomed.

“He’s the enemy,” said Wigman, a kind of traumatized gravel to his voice. “He’s a turncoat. A rat.”

“You shot him,” she replied, barely able to speak.

“Damn right I did,” said Bradley, approaching them. “For the good of the Wastes. For the good of the Quartet.”

Joffrey coughed and his knees buckled and Desdemona fell to the floor under his weight, kneeling and cradling him in her arms. “Oh, Joffrey,” she cried. “Dear Joffrey.” His head jerked a little in her palms, and he turned to look up at her face. He became still. He smiled warmly, lovingly at Desdemona. His hand moved imperceptibly toward his left coat pocket.

When Titan Tower exploded, erupting in a shower of glass and concrete and bathing the entire Industrial Wastes in unearthly light, the five Unadoptables had only just made it out of the emergency elevator and were running across the grounds of the tower, racing after a pair of figures they’d spotted who were, in turn, struggling away down a gravel road toward a distant line of trees.

All of them, the five Unadoptables, the two figures struggling away (revealed in the light of the detonation to be Roger and Carol), the little groups of warring stevedores and Chapeaux Noirs on the outskirts of the containing walls—all of them stopped to watch the magnificent immolation of Titan Tower. It was as if day had arrived in the middle of the darkest night. The world was flooded with illumination. The stevedores, some frozen in position with their red pipe wrenches held high above their heads, blinked and stared at the sight. The Chapeaux Noirs saboteurs, in midthrow, tossed their lit bombs to a safe distance and watched the glass cascading from the top floors like a shower of crystalline rain, ignoring the detonation when their own bombs had landed, some feet away, and exploded impotently.

The stevedores all but shriveled at the sight; the heart of their entire operation, the center of the hive mind, was crashing down before them in a cataract of silver light and heat. They dropped their wrenches, each one, and fell to their knees. The Chapeaux Noirs gaped and stumbled; some pulled their black berets from their heads and held them, crushed, to their chests, so great was their reverence for this single gorgeous explosion. The tremendous light made long shadows across the blasted ground of the Industrial Wastes from all the combatants; the light touched the farthest reaches of the Wastes, the boom and rattle soon after. In Portland, even, among the quiet, dormant houses filled with Outsiders at their evening leisure, the light could be seen, a beacon of flame in some far-off field. Somewhere in the north part of the city, a child ran to his window and called out to his parents to see the strange light; he was loudly shushed and sent back to his bed so his parents could finish watching their television show.

Rachel Mehlberg, standing by a group of similarly shocked and frozen saboteurs, spied the group of five Unadoptables, shadows cast by the burning building, racing across the tower’s grounds toward some unknown goal; she’d been waiting for them at the East Gate of Wigman Plaza, having long deploy

ed her allotted four bombs, worried sick about the welfare of her sister and cursing herself for ever letting Elsie out of her sight. The sound of the battle had been deafening; a high-pitched whistle was singing in her ear. She’d just checked her watch, the chain watch that Nico had given her, and was chagrined to see that ten o’clock, the time of the rendezvous, had long passed. That was when she saw them running, charging across the budget-bin landscaping that served as greenery in the tower’s interior square, now covered in a squall of glass and ash.

“There they are!” shouted Rachel. She’d counted five children; she made the quick guess: “They’ve got Martha!”

Nico was standing with her. “Let’s go,” he yelled over the sound of the tower’s residual collapse. The two of them arced out, away from the falling debris, in line to bisect the Unadoptables’ course.

“Elsie!” screamed Rachel, as she charged after them. The noise of the settling wreckage of the tower blotted out all sound. A cloud of smoke and dust was barreling out from the base of the demolished building, obscuring everything in a deep, dark haze.

Just as this fog consumed them, Rachel and Nico managed to fall in line behind the running Unadoptables. “Elsie!” Rachel tried again.

Her sister quickly looked over her shoulder, seeing Rachel in pursuit. “He’s got Carol!” she shouted between heaving breaths.

“Who?”

“Just . . . follow them!” shouted Elsie, exasperated.

Rachel looked ahead; they were now funneling into one of the narrow corridors that etched the face of the Industrial Wastes. The buildings in the smoke and fog were just shapes in the dark. Ahead of them, the way was lit by the occasional yellow streetlamp, glowing dimly in the haze; about fifty yards away, she could see two figures emerge into the light and disappear again.

The air around them was hot and close. Enveloped by the cloud of dust, they each pulled their black turtlenecks to their mouths to filter the grime and charged ahead. No sooner would the two figures, stumbling through the fog, disappear from sight, than they would appear again as the swirl of cloud parted and eddied away.

“STOP!” yelled Rachel, pulling her mouth away from the fabric of her shirt long enough to shout that one, sharp directive. She was immediately thrown into a fit of coughing, and she stumbled as she ran. Elsie saw her sister falter and fell back to help.

The dust cloud grew all-consuming. The horizon was blotted out. Only the closest streetlamps could be seen on the road. The looming chemical silos along the gravel roadside became deeply shrouded in the gray dust, transforming into still, white ghosts in the dark. The pursuers continued forward, arriving after a short time at a chain-link fence.

“Look!” shouted Nico, pointing to a ripple in the fence where the bottom had been lifted from the ground. A piece of rough gray fabric was caught in the wire mesh; Nico grabbed the wire and pulled, holding it open as the six children scrambled through. On the other side of the fence was a wide, fallow stretch of scrub brush and scotch broom. Just at that moment, a gust of wind picked up and peeled away the curtain of clouds like a hand on a fogged windscreen, revealing the way ahead: a looming line of trees, a dense weave of bracken and greenery, a whining creak from ancient boughs.

Ahead, not far off, a robed figure could be seen, ankle deep in fern fronds, dragging his reluctant companion past the threshold of trees and into the Impassable Wilderness.

CHAPTER 21

A Revival Is Born