pandemonium 2 страница

Raven finishes a braid, flicks it over her shoulder, starts on another one. “As real as any name, ” she says. “Roach has been in the Wilds his whole life. Originally comes from one of the homesteads farther south, close to Delaware. Someone down there must have named him. By the time he got up here, he was Roach. ”

“What about Blue? ” I ask. I make it through the whole first pancake without feeling queasy, then set the plate on the floor next to the bed. I don’t want to push my luck.

Raven hesitates for just a fraction of a second. “She was born right here, at the homestead. ”

“So you named her for her eyes, ” I say.

Raven stands abruptly, and turns away before saying, “Uh-huh. ” She goes to the shelves by the sink and clicks off one of the battery-operated lanterns, so the room sinks even further into darkness.

“How about you? ” I ask her.

She points to her hair. “Raven. ” She smiles. “Not the most original. ”

“No, I mean—were you born here? In the Wilds? ”

The smile disappears just like that, like a candle being snuffed out. For a second she looks almost angry. “No, ” she says shortly. “I came here when I was fifteen. ”

I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t stop myself from pressing. “By yourself? ”

“Yes. ” She picks up the second lantern, which is still emitting a pale bluish light, and moves toward the door.

“So what was your name before? ” I say, and she freezes, her back to me. “Before you came to the Wilds, I mean. ”

For a moment she stands there. Then she turns around. She is holding the lantern low so her face is in darkness. Her eyes are two bare reflections, glittering, like black stones in the moonlight.

“You might as well get used to it now, ” she says with quiet intensity. “Everything you were, the life you had, the people you knew … dust. ” She shakes her head and says, a little more firmly, “There is no before. There is only now, and what comes next. ”

Then she heads into the hallway with her lantern, leaving me in total darkness, my heart beating very fast.

The next morning, I wake up starving. The plate is still there with the second pancake, and I half tumble out of bed reaching for it, banging onto my knees on the cold stone floor. A beetle is exploring the surface of the pancake—normally, before, this would have grossed me out, but now I’m too hungry to care. I flick the insect away, watch it scurry into a corner, and eat the pancake greedily with both hands, sucking on my fingers. It saws off only the barest corner of my hunger.

I climb slowly to my feet, leaning on the bed for support. It’s the first time I’ve stood in days, the first time I’ve done more than crawl to a metal basin in the corner—placed there by Raven—when I’ve had to use the bathroom. Crouching in the dark, head down, thighs shaking, I am an animal, not even human anymore.

I’m so weak I’ve hardly made it to the doorway before I have to take a break, leaning against the doorjamb. I feel like one of the gray herons—with their swollen beaks and bellies, and tiny spindly legs—I used to see sometimes at the cove in Portland, totally out of proportion, lopsided.

My room opens into a long, dark hallway, also windowless, also stone. I can hear people talking and laughing, the sounds of chairs scraping and water sloshing: kitchen sounds. Food sounds. The hallway is narrow, and I run my hands along the walls as I move forward, getting a sense of my legs and body again. A doorway on my left, missing its door, opens into a large room, stacked, on one side, with medical and cleaning supplies—gauze, tubes and tubes of bacitracin, hundreds of boxes of soap, bandages—and, on the other, with four narrow mattresses laid directly on the floor, heaped with an assortment of clothes and blankets. A little farther I see another room that must be used entirely for sleeping: This one has mattresses laid from wall to wall, covering almost every inch of the floor, so the room looks like an enormous patchwork quilt.

I feel a pang of guilt. I’ve obviously been given the nicest bed, and the nicest room. It still amazes me to think how wrong I was all those years, when I trusted in rumors and lies. I thought the Invalids were beasts; I thought they would rip me apart. But these people saved me, and gave me the softest place to sleep, and nursed me back to health, and haven’t asked for anything in return.

The animals are on the other side of the fence: monsters wearing uniforms. They speak softly, and tell lies, and smile as they’re slitting your throat.

The hallway takes a sharp left and the voices swell. I can smell meat cooking now, and my stomach growls loudly. I pass more rooms, some for sleeping, one mostly empty and lined with shelves: a half-dozen cans of beans, a half-used bag of flour, and, weirdly, a dusty coffeemaker are piled in one corner; in another corner, buckets, tins of coffee, a mop.

Another right and the hallway ends abruptly in a large room, much brighter than the others. A stone basin, similar to the one in my room, runs along one whole wall. Above it, a long shelf holds a half-dozen battery-operated lanterns, which fill the space with a warm light. In the center of the room are two large, narrow wooden tables, packed with people.

As I enter, the conversation stops abruptly: Dozens of eyes sweep upward in my direction, and I’m suddenly aware that I am wearing nothing more than a large, dirty T-shirt that reaches just to mid-thigh.

There are men in the room too, sitting elbow-to-elbow with women—people of all ages, everyone uncured—and it is so strange and upside down, it nearly takes my breath away. I’m petrified. I open my mouth to speak, but nothing emerges. I feel the weight of silence, the heavy burn of all those eyes.

Raven comes to my rescue.

“You must be hungry, ” she says, standing and gesturing to a boy sitting at the end of the table. He’s probably thirteen or fourteen—thin, wiry, with a smattering of pimples on his skin.

“Squirrel, ” she says sharply. Another crazy nickname. “You finished eating? ”

He stares dolefully at his empty plate as though he could telepathically force more food to materialize there.

“Yeah, ” he says slowly, looking from the empty plate to me and back again. I hug my arms around my waist.

“Then get up. Lena needs a place to sit. ”

“But—, ” Squirrel starts to protest, and Raven glares at him.

“Up, Squirrel. Make yourself useful. Go check the nests for messages. ”

Squirrel shoots me a sullen look, but he stands up and brings his plate to the sink. He releases it clatteringly onto the stone—which makes Raven, who has sat down again, call out, “You break, you buy, Squirrel, ” and provokes a few titters—then stomps dramatically up the stone steps at the far end of the room.

“Sarah, get Lena something to eat. ” Raven has returned to her own food: a pile of grayish mush lumped in the center of her plate.

A girl pops up eagerly, like a jack-in-the-box. She has enormous eyes, and a body as tight as a wire. Everyone in the room is skinny, actually—all I see are elbows and shoulders everywhere, edges and angles.

“Come on, Lena. ” She seems to relish saying my name, as though it’s a special privilege. “I’ll fix you a plate. ” She points to the corner: an enormous dented iron pot and a warped covered pan are set over an old-fashioned wood-burning stove. Next to it, mismatched plates and platters—and some cutting boards—are stacked haphazardly.

This means actually entering the room, walking past both tables. If my legs felt unsteady before, now I’m worried they’ll actually buckle at any second. Strangely, I can feel the texture of the men’s eyes differently. The women’s eyes are sharp, evaluating; the men’s eyes are hotter, stifling, like a touch. I’m having trouble breathing.

I go haltingly toward the stove, where Sarah is standing, nodding at me encouragingly, as though I’m a baby—even though she can’t be more than twelve herself. I stay as close as possible to the sink—just in case I do stumble, I want to be able to reach out and steady myself quickly.

The faces in the room are mostly a blur, a wash of color, but a few stand out: I see Blue watching me, wide-eyed; a boy, probably my age, with a crazy thatch of blond hair, who looks like he might start laughing any second; another boy, a little older, scowling; a woman with long auburn hair hanging loose down her back. For a moment our eyes meet and my heart stutters: I think, Mom. It hasn’t occurred to me until now that my mother could be here—that she must be here, somewhere, in the Wilds, in one of the homesteads or camps or whatever they’re called. Then the woman shifts slightly and I see her face and realize that no, of course it’s not her. She’s far too young, probably the age of my mother when I last saw her twelve years ago. I’m not sure I’d even recognize my mother if I saw her again; my memories of her are so fuzzy, distorted through layers of time and dream.

“Slop, ” Sarah says as soon as I make it to the stove. I’m exhausted from the walk across the room. I can’t believe that this is the same body that used to do six-mile runs on an easy day, sprint up and down Munjoy Hill like it was nothing.

“What? ”

“Slop. ” She lifts the cover off the tin pot. “That’s what we call it. It’s what we eat when supplies run low. Oatmeal, rice, sometimes some bread—whatever grains we have left. Boil the shit out of it, and there you go. Slop. ”

It startles me to hear a curse word come from her mouth.

Sarah takes a plastic plate—with ghostly silhouettes of animals still faintly visible on its surface, a kid’s plate—and piles a big serving of slop at its center. Behind me, at the tables, people have started talking again. The room fills with the low buzz of conversation, and I start to feel slightly better; at least that means some of the attention is off me.

“The good news, ” Sarah continues cheerfully, “is that Roach brought home a present last night. ”

“What do you mean? ” I’m struggling to absorb the lingo, the pattern of speech. “He got supplies? ”

“Better. ” She grins at me, slides the top off the second covered pan. Inside is golden-brown meat, seared, crispy: a smell that almost brings me to tears. “Rabbit. ”

I’ve never eaten rabbit before—never thought of it as something you could eat, especially not for breakfast—but I gratefully accept the plate from her, and can hardly stop myself from ripping into the meat right there, standing. I’d prefer to stand, actually. Anything would be better than having to sit down among all those strangers.

Sarah must sense my anxiety. “Come on, ” she says. “You can sit next to me. ” She reaches out and takes my elbow, steering me toward the table. This, too, is surprising. In Portland, in bordered communities, everyone is very careful about touching. Even Hana and I hardly ever hugged or put our arms around each other, and she was my best friend.

A cramp runs through me, and I double over, almost dropping my plate.

“Easy. ” Across the table is the blond-haired boy, the one who looked as though he could hardly contain his laughter earlier. He raises his eyebrows; they’re the same pale blond as his hair, practically invisible. I notice that he, like Raven, has a procedural mark behind his left ear, and like hers, it must be fake. Only uncureds live in the Wilds; only people who have chosen, or been forced, to flee the bordered cities. “You okay? ”

I don’t answer. I can’t. A whole lifetime of fears and warnings beat through me, and words flash rapidly in my mind: illegal, wrong, sympathizer, disease. I take a deep breath, try to ignore the bad feeling. Those are Portland words, old words; they, like the old me, have been left behind the fence.

“She’s fine, ” Sarah jumps in. “She’s just hungry. ”

“I’m fine, ” I echo about fifteen seconds too late. The boy smirks again.

Sarah slides onto the bench and pats the empty space next to her, which Squirrel has just vacated. At least we’re at the very end of the table, and I don’t have to worry about being sandwiched next to someone else. I sit down, keeping my eyes on my plate. I can feel everyone watching me again. At least the conversation continues, a comforting blanket of noise.

“Go ahead. ” Sarah looks at me encouragingly.

“I don’t have a fork, ” I say quietly. The blond guy does laugh then, loud and long. So does Sarah.

“No forks, ” she says. “No spoons. No nothing. Just eat. ”

I risk glancing up and see that the people around me are watching, smiling, apparently amused. One of them, a grizzled, gray-haired man who must be at least seventy, nods at me, and I drop my eyes quickly. My whole body is hot with embarrassment. Of course they wouldn’t care about silverware and things like that in the Wilds.

I take the piece of rabbit with my hands, tear a tiny bit of flesh from the bone. And then I think I really might cry: Never in my whole life has anything tasted this good.

“Good, huh? ” Sarah says, but I can’t do anything but nod. Suddenly I forget about the roomful of strangers and all the people watching me. I tear at the rabbit like an animal. I shovel up a bit of slop with my fingers, suck them into my mouth. Even that tastes good to me. Aunt Carol would absolutely flip if she could see me. When I was little, I wouldn’t even eat my peas if they were touching my chicken; I used to make neat compartments on my plate.

All too soon the plate is clean, except for a few bones. I drag the back of my hand across my mouth. I feel a surge of nausea and I close my eyes, willing it away.

“All right, ” Raven says, standing abruptly. “Time for rounds. ”

There’s a flurry of activity: people scraping away from their benches, bursts of conversations I can’t follow (“Laid traps yesterday, ” “Your turn to check Grandma”), and people are passing behind me, releasing their plates noisily into the basin, then stomping up the stairs to my left, just past the stove. I can feel their bodies, and smell them, too: a flow, a warm, human river. I keep my eyes closed, and as the room empties, the nausea subsides somewhat.

“How are you feeling? ”

I open my eyes and Raven is standing across from me, leaning both hands on the table. Sarah is still sitting next to me. She has brought one leg to her chest, on the bench, and is hugging her knee. In this pose, she actually looks her age.

“Better, ” I say, which is true.

“You can help Sarah with the dishes, ” she says, “if you’re feeling up to it. ”

“Okay, ” I say, and she nods.

“Good. And afterward, Sarah, you can take her up. You might as well get a feel for the homestead, Lena. But don’t push it, either. I don’t want to have to drag your ass out of the woods again. ”

“Okay, ” I repeat, and she smiles, satisfied. She’s obviously used to giving orders. I wonder how old she is. She speaks with such easy command, even though she must be younger than half the Invalids here. I think, Hana would like her, and the pain returns, knifing just below my ribs.

“And Sarah”—Raven is heading for the stairs—“get Lena some pants from the store, okay? So she doesn’t have to prance around half-naked. ”

I feel myself going red again, and reflexively start fiddling with the hem of my shirt, tugging it lower down my thighs. Raven catches me and laughs.

“Don’t worry, ” she says, “it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. ” Then she takes the stairs two at a time, and is gone.

I used to be on dish duty every night at Aunt Carol’s house, and I got used to it. But washing dishes in the Wilds is another story. First there’s the water. Sarah leads me back through the hall, to one of the rooms I passed on my way to the kitchen.

“This is the supply room, ” she says, and for a moment frowns at all the empty shelves and the mostly used bag of flour. “We’re running a little low, ” she explains, as though I can’t see that for myself. I feel a twist of anxiety—for her, for Blue, for everyone here, all that bone and thinness.

“Over here is where we keep the water. We pull it in the mornings—not me, I’m too small still. ” She’s over in the corner by the buckets, which now I see are full. She hefts one up by its handle with both hands, grunting. It’s oversized, nearly as big as her torso. “One more should do it, ” she says. “A small one should be okay. ” She toddles out of the room, straining, with the bucket in front of her.

I find, to my embarrassment, that I can barely lift one of the smallest buckets. Its metal handle digs painfully into the palms of my hands—which are still covered in scabs and blisters from my time alone in the Wilds—and before I’ve even reached the hallway I have to set the bucket down and lean against the wall.

“You okay? ” Sarah calls back.

“Fine! ” I say, a little too sharply. There’s no way I’m going to let her come to my rescue. I heave the bucket in the air again, advance forward a few halting steps, place it on the ground, rest. Heave, shuffle, ground, rest. Heave, shuffle, ground, rest. By the time I reach the kitchen, I’m out of breath and sweating; salt stings my eyes. Fortunately, Sarah doesn’t notice. She’s squatting at the stove, poking around at the fire with the charred end of a wooden stick, coaxing it higher.

“We boil the water in the mornings, ” she says, “to sanitize it. We have to, or we’ll be shitting a river from breakfast to dinner. ” In her last words, I recognize Raven’s voice; this must be one of her mantras.

“Where does the water come from? ” I ask, grateful that she has her back to me so that I can rest, momentarily, on one of the nearest benches.

“Cocheco River, ” she says. “It’s not too far. A mile, a mile and a half, tops. ”

Impossible: I can’t imagine carrying those buckets, full, for a mile.

“The river’s where we get our supplies, too, ” Sarah rattles on. “Friends on the inside float them down to us. The Cocheco crosses into Rochester and then out again. ” She giggles. “Raven says that someday they’ll make it fill out a Purpose of Travel form. ”

Sarah feeds the stove wood from a pile stacked in the corner. Then she stands up, nodding once. “We’ll just warm the water a little bit. It cleans better when it’s hot. ”

On one of the high shelves above the sink is an enormous tin stockpot, big enough for a child to bathe in comfortably. Before I can offer to help, Sarah hefts herself onto the basin—balancing carefully on its rim, like a gymnast—and stands, removing the pot from the shelf. Then she hops off the sink, landing soundlessly. “Okay. ” She brushes hair out of her face; it has come loose from its ponytail. “Now the water goes into the pot, and the pot goes on the stove. ”

Everything in the Wilds is process, slow steps, shuffling forward. Everything takes time. While we wait for the water in the pot to heat, Sarah lists the people in the homestead, a blur of names I won’t remember: Grandpa, the oldest; Lu, short for Lucky, who lost a finger to a bad infection but managed to keep her life, and the rest of her limbs, intact; Bram, short for Bramble, who appeared miraculously in the Wilds one day, in the middle of a tangle of brambles and thorns, as though deposited there by wolves. There’s a story for almost everyone’s name, even Sarah’s. When she first came to the Wilds seven years ago with her older sister, she begged the homesteaders to give her a cool new name. She pulls a face, remembering—she wanted something tough, like Blade, or Iron—but Raven had only laughed, put a hand on her head, and said, “You look just like a Sarah to me. ” And so Sarah she remained.

“Which one is your sister? ” I ask. I think briefly of my sister, Rachel—not the Rachel I left behind, the cured one, all blank and curtained off, but the Rachel I can still remember from my childhood—and then let the image skitter away.

“Not here anymore. She left the homestead earlier in the summer; joined the R. She’s going to come back for me as soon as I’m old enough to help. ” There’s a note of pride in her voice, so I nod encouragingly, even though I have no idea what the “R” is.

More names: Hunter, the blond boy who was sitting across from me at the table (“That’s his before name, ” Sarah says, pronouncing the word before in a kind of hush, like a curse word—“He can’t actually hunt for nothing”); Tack, who came from up north a few years ago.

“Everyone says he has a bad attitude, ” she says, and again I hear the echo of Raven’s voice in her words. She is worrying the fabric of her T-shirt, which is worn so thin it is practically translucent. “But I don’t think so. He’s always been nice to me. ”

From her description, I’ve matched Tack with the black-haired guy who was scowling at me when I came into the kitchen. If that’s his normal look, I can see why people think he has a bad attitude.

“Why’s he called Tack? ” I ask.

She giggles. “Sharp as, ” she says. “Grandpa named him. ”

I decide to stay away from Tack, if I remain at the homestead at all. I can’t see that I have much of a choice, but I can feel that I don’t belong here, and a part of me wishes that Raven had left me where she found me. I was closer to Alex then. He was just on the other side of that long, black tunnel. I could have walked through its blackness; I could have found him again.

“Water’s ready, ” Sarah announces finally.

Process, agonizingly slow: We fill up one of the basins with the hot water, and Sarah measures soap into the sink slowly, not wasting a drop. That’s another thing I can see about the Wilds: Everything gets used, reused, rationed, measured.

“So what about Raven? ” I ask as I submerge my arms in the hot water.

“What about her? ” Sarah’s face brightens. She loves Raven, I can tell.

“What’s her story? Where did she come from before? ” I don’t know why I’m pushing the issue. I’m just curious, I guess, curious to know how you become someone like that: confident, fierce, a leader.

Sarah’s face clouds over. “There is no before, ” she says shortly, then falls silent for the first time in an hour. We wash the dishes without speaking.

Sarah turns talkative again when the dishes are done and it’s time to outfit me with clothes.

She leads me to a small room I mistook for one of the bedrooms before. There are clothes strewn everywhere, masses of them, all over the floor and shelves. “This is the store, ” she says, giggling a little and gesturing grandly with one hand.

“Where did all the clothes come from? ” I move carefully into the room, stepping on shirts and balled-up socks as I do. Every inch of floor space is covered in fabric.

“We find them, ” Sarah says vaguely. And then, turning suddenly fierce, “The blitz didn’t work like they said, you know. The zombies lied, just like they lie about everything else. ”

“Zombies? ”

Sarah grins. “That’s what we call the cureds, after they’ve had the procedure. Raven says they might as well be zombies. She says the cure turns people stupid. ”

“That’s not true, ” I say instinctively, and nearly correct her: It’s the passions that turn us stupid, animal-like. Free from love is close to God. That’s an old adage from The Book of Shhh. The cure was supposed to free us from extreme emotions, bring us clarity of thought and feeling.

But when I think about Aunt Carol’s glassy eyes, and my sister’s expressionless face, I think that the term zombies is actually pretty accurate. And it’s true that all the history books, and all our teachers, lied about the blitz; the Wilds were supposed to have been wiped absolutely clean during the bombing campaign. Invalids—or homesteaders—aren’t even supposed to exist.

Sarah shrugs. “If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love. ”

“Did Raven tell you that, too? ”

She smiles again. “Raven’s super smart. ”

It takes me a little bit of digging, but I finally find a pair of army-green pants and a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt. It feels too weird to wear someone else’s old underwear, so I keep on the pair I’ve been wearing. Sarah wants me to model my new outfit—she’s enjoying this, and keeps begging me to try on different things, acting like a normal kid for the first time—and when I ask her to turn around so I can change, she stares at me like I’m crazy. I guess there isn’t much privacy in the Wilds. But finally she shrugs and swivels to face the wall.

It feels good to get out of the long T-shirt, which I’ve been wearing for days. I know I smell bad, and I’m desperate for a shower, but for now I’m just grateful for some relatively clean clothes. The pants fit well, low on my hips, and they don’t even drag too badly after I roll them at the waist a few times. The T-shirt is soft and comfortable.

“Not bad, ” Sarah says when she turns around to face me again. “You look almost human. ”

“Thanks. ”

“I said almost. ” She giggles again.

“Well, then, almost thanks. ”

Shoes are harder. Most people in the Wilds go without during the summer, and Sarah proudly shows me the bottoms of her feet, which are brown and hardened with calluses. But finally we find a pair of running shoes that are just a tiny bit too big; with thick socks, they’ll be fine.

When I kneel down to lace up the sneakers, another pang goes through me. I’ve done this so many times—before cross-country meets, in the locker rooms, sitting next to Hana, surrounded by a blur of bodies, joking with each other about who’s a better runner—and yet somehow I always took it for granted.

For the first time the thought comes to me—I wish I hadn’t crossed—and I push it away instantly, try to bury it. It’s done now, and Alex died for it. There’s no point in looking back. I can’t look back.

“Are you ready to see the rest of the homestead? ” Sarah asks.

Even the act of undressing and redressing has exhausted me. But I’m desperate for air, and space.

“Show me, ” I say.

We go back through the kitchen and up the narrow stone stairs beyond the stove. Sarah darts ahead of me, disappearing as the stairs make a sharp turn. “Almost there! ” she calls back.

A final serpentine twist, and suddenly the stairs are no more: I step into a blazing brightness, and soft ground underneath my shoes. I stumble, confused and temporarily blinded. For a second I feel as though I’ve walked into a dream and I stand, blinking, struggling to make sense of this otherworld.

Sarah is standing a few feet away from me, laughing. She lifts her arms, which are bathed in sunshine. “Welcome to the homestead, ” she says, and performs a little skipping dance in the grass.

The place where I’ve been sleeping is underground—that I could have guessed from the lack of windows and the quality of dampness—and the stairs have led upward, aboveground, and then released us abruptly. Where there should be a house, an over-structure, there is just a large expanse of grass covered in charred wood and enormous fragments of stone.

I was not prepared for the feeling of the sunshine, or the smell of growth and life. All around us are enormous trees, leaves just tinged with yellow as though they are catching fire slowly from the outside, patterning the ground with alternating spots of light and shadow. For a second something deep and old rises inside me and I could fall on the ground and weep for joy, or open up my arms and spin. After being enclosed for so long, I want to drink in all the space, all the bright, empty air stretching around me on all sides.

Sarah explains, “This used to be a church. ” She points behind me, to the splintered stones and the blackened wood. “The bombs didn’t reach the cellar, though. There are plenty of underground places in the Wilds where the bombs didn’t touch. You’ll see. ”

“A church? ” This surprises me. In Portland, our churches are made of steel and glass and clean white plaster walls. They are sanitized spaces, places where the miracle of life, and God’s science, is celebrated and demonstrated with microscopes and centrifuges.

“One of the old churches, ” Sarah says. “There are lots of those, too. On the west side of Rochester there’s a whole one, still standing. I’ll show you someday, if you want. ” Then she reaches forward and grabs the bottom of my T-shirt, tugging at me. “Come on. Lots to see. ”

The only other time I’ve been to the Wilds was with Alex. We snuck across the border once so that he could show me where he lived. That settlement, like this one, was situated in a large clearing, a place once inhabited, an area the trees and growth had not yet reclaimed. But this clearing is massive, and filled with half-tumbled-down stone archways and walls that are partially standing, and—in one place—a series of concrete stairs that spiral up from the ground and end in nothing. On the last step, several different birds have made their nests.