The Deadheart Shelters Read Online Free PDF

asked him he said “I don’t have one yet. I think the people I was supposed to wait for would have told me, but we left.”
    “I was the person you were supposed to wait for. Can I name you?”
    “Sure.”
    “Your name is Lilly.”

But I stopped calling him that quickly. Soon saying it while looking at his face left a bad taste in my mouth and got me homesick. It made me wish I could open his face like a cardboard box and find hers behind it; but no. I muttered, “Pick a new name. I don’t care what you call yourself. It doesn’t matter.” At that moment the wilderness ended and plains broke out. He bent down, scooped up a handful of the ground, and said “Dirt.”
    “Sure, why not?”
    “That’s not what I meant. But yeah, why not?”
    Turquoise clouds with mud burst inside staggered above the hill, and soon a man on a bicycle made a silhouette over them. We stood still and let him come to us. “Hello there!” he called, lifting one hand off the grip to wave. Both of us waved silently back. He was almost going to pass us and go into the woods when I called for him to stop.
    “Where are you coming from?” I asked.
    “The city right back there,” he said, pointing over the hill. He pushed the kickstand out on his bike and stood it. “Where you fellas from?”
    “Nowhere,” I said, while Dirt said, “Right there.”
    He tilted his head and smiled, then got back on his bike. “Well, have a good day.”
    We walked up the hill to where the city was promised us. A fog like powdered pills hung between us and it, but you could still see what was there. Two bookshelves facing each other, enlarged to much bigger than mountains. Antenna like uncombed hair. An apparatus of limbless hands between them constantly rearranging cubes, from one shelf to another. Some cubes were dropped to the land, broken forever, the shrapnel flung almost to our feet.
    The man on the bicycle came back now. “I just wanted to warn you fellas to be careful. There are some guys near the city and they look like they want trouble.”

Dirt and I got closer to the city and then we saw them. Six men sitting on different steps of a moss-painted staircase. The stairs led up to the boughs of a cherry tree, where the grown fruit dangling made the branches dip. The tree seemed as if it were a home or something with doors. But none were inside it. And when the men saw us they descended and encircled us like vultures, watching the last twitches leave the living meat underneath.
    One abruptly stuck out his arms and grabbed my face. I tried not to change my expression, but I imagine my eyes widened. Another got behind us and the rest went back up the stairs, digging through a tan sack placed there. The man holding me rubbed the soft places on my cheeks that, the day before, were holes they put corks through. He smiled and said, “You are free, O, you are free.”
    “You understand?”
    He nodded. When he smiled his eyes bent like bananas downwards, and wrinkles spread from them calmly. He kept patting me on the cheek and smiling bigger. “You are very rare, you know.”
    “I am?”
    “I have met one other escaped slave in my life.” I was nervous when he said it because Dirt didn’t know. But he had said it and now it was known. I looked at my feet. “He came to the city with the corks still in his cheeks and began to beg. Do you know how long he lasted there?”
    “A month?”
    “Less.”
    “A week? A couple days?”
    “Twelve minutes. In twelve minutes they shot him in the forehead and left him there. Now guess how long it took them to clean him up.”
    “I don’t want to.”
    “They never did. No human ever touched that corpse.”
    The man behind us stiffened and grabbed Dirt behind the neck. “This is one of the new ones!”
    From the tan sack on the steps they drew out stones smaller than the ones that drowned Thomas. “You were made in those forests? You were one of those that hatched into life?”
    “Yes, I was. Please let