UnSouled (Unwind Dystology 3)

The mob in the street—barely a mob at all, numbering only four or five—passes without incident. They’ve never had trouble at their house even though theirs is the only home on the street without window bars and an iron security gate. On the other hand, several of the security doors on the street have been vandalized. These kids, they may be lacking in education since the school closures, but they’re not stupid. They see distrust all around them, and it makes them want to deliver their anger all the more. “How dare you distrust me?” their violence says. “You don’t know me.” But people are too wrapped up in their own fearful security measures to hear it.

Sonia comes up behind him now, wrapping her arms around him. He wants to accept her comfort, but can’t allow himself. He can’t be consoled or find a sense of peace until he’s undone this terrible wrong.

“Maybe it will be like the old Cold War,” Sonia suggests.

“How do you figure?”

“They have this new weapon,” she says, “unwinding. Maybe just the threat of it is enough. Maybe they’ll never actually use it.”

“A cold war implies a balance of power. What do these kids have if the authorities start unwinding them?”

Sonia sighs, finally seeing his point. “Not a chance in hell.”

Now at last he can take some comfort that she understands. That he’s not alone in seeing the murky depths to which this new law could lead.

“It still hasn’t happened,” she reminds him. “Not a single feral teen has been unwound.”

“No,” Janson says. “Because the law doesn’t take effect until midnight.”

And so they decide to spend the rest of their evening together, holding each other close like it’s the last night of civilization. Because in a very real sense, it is.

1 • Connor

It begins with roadkill—an act so random and ridiculous that it boggles the mind to consider the events to which it leads.

Connor should have pulled off the road to sleep—especially on a windy night like this. Certainly his reflexes behind the wheel would be much better in the morning, but the burning need to get himself and Lev to Ohio keeps pushing him harder each day.

Just one more exit on the interstate, he tells himself, and although he had resolved to stop once they crossed into Kansas, that marker came and went half an hour ago. Lev, who is good at talking sense into Connor, is no help tonight, slumped in the passenger seat, fast asleep.

It’s half past midnight when the unfortunate creature leaps into Connor’s headlights, and Connor has enough time only to register a brief impression of it as he jerks the wheel in a desperate attempt to avoid a collision.

That can’t be what I think it is . . . .

Even though he swerves wide, the stupid thing bolts right into the car’s path again as if it has a death wish.

The “borrowed” Charger slams into the creature, and it rolls over the hood like a boulder, shattering the windshield into a million bits of safety glass. Its body wedges in the windshield frame, with a twisted wiper blade embedded in its slender neck. Connor loses control of the steering wheel, and the car leaves the asphalt, careening wildly through the roadside chaparral.

He screams and curses reflexively, as the creature, still clinging to life, rips at Connor’s chest with its talons, tearing fabric and flesh, until finally Connor pulls enough of his wits together to slam on the brakes. The abominable creature dislodges from the windshield, launching forward as if shot from a cannon. The car keels like a sinking ship, comes to a sudden stop in a ditch, and finally the air bags deploy, like a faulty parachute opening upon impact.

The quiet that follows feels like the airless silence of space, but for the soulless moan of the wind.

Lev, who woke up the second they hit the thing, says nothing. He just gasps for the breath that was knocked out of him by the air bag. Connor has discovered Lev to be more of an opossum than a screamer. Panic makes him freeze.

Connor, still trying to process the previous ten seconds of his life, checks the wound in his chest. Beneath the tear in his shirt is a diagonal gash in his skin maybe six inches long. Oddly, he’s relieved. It’s not life-threatening, and flesh wounds can be dealt with. As Risa would have said when she ran the infirmary at the airplane graveyard, “Stitches are the least of all evils.” This wound will take about a dozen. The biggest problem will be where a fugitive-presumed-dead AWOL can get medical attention.

Both he and Lev get out of the car and climb up from the ditch to examine their roadkill. Connor’s legs are weak and wobbly, but he doesn’t want to admit it to himself, so he concludes that he’s merely shaky from the adrenaline rush. He looks at his arm—the one with the shark tattoo—and pumps the hand into a fist, coopting the brutal strength of that stolen arm for the rest of his body.

“Is that an ostrich?” asks Lev, as they look down on the huge dead bird.

“No,” snaps Connor, “it’s the freaking Road Runner.” Which was actually Connor’s first irrational thought when the giant bird had first loomed in his headlights. The ostrich, which had still been alive enough to rip into Connor’s chest a minute ago, is now very dead. Its torn neck is twisted at a severe angle, and its glassy eyes stare at them with zombielike intensity.

“That was some bird strike,” Lev says. He seems no longer fazed by it, just observational. Maybe because he wasn’t driving, or maybe because he’s seen things far worse than a roadkill raptor. Connor envies Lev’s calm in a crisis.

“Why the hell is there an ostrich on the interstate?” Connor asks. His answer comes with the rattle of a fence in a sudden gust of wind. Passing headlights illuminate the limb of an oak tree brought down by the wind. The bough was heavy enough to take out a piece of the chain-link fence. Long-necked shapes move behind the fence, and a few ostriches have already come through the breach, wandering toward the road. Hopefully they’ll have better luck than their comrade.

Connor has heard that ostrich farms were becoming more common as the price of other meat soared, but he’d never actually seen one. He idly wonders whether or not the bird’s death was suicide. Better roadkill than roast.

“They used to be dinosaurs, you know?” says Lev.