pandemonium 5 страница

I force myself to smile. “I hope you find them, ” I say. “I hope you find every last one. ”

Julian nods.

As I turn around, I add, “Before they find you. ”

His voice rings out sharply. “What did you say? ”

I shoot him a look over my shoulder. “Before they find us, ” I say, and push through the doors, letting them swing shut behind me.

By the time I make it back to Brooklyn, the sun has set. The apartment is cold. The shades are drawn, and a single light burns in the foyer. The sideboard just inside the hall is stacked with a slender pile of mail.

NO ONE IS SAFE UNTIL EVERYONE IS CURED, reads the writing on the first envelope, printed neatly above our address. Then, beneath it: PLEASE SUPPORT THE DFA.

Next to the mail is a small silver tray for our identification papers. Two IDs are lined up next to each other: Rebecca Ann Sherman and Thomas Clive Sherman, both unsmiling in their official portraits, staring straight ahead. Rebecca has coal-black hair, perfectly parted, and wide brown eyes. Thomas’s hair is clipped so short it’s difficult to judge what color it might be. His eyes are hooded, as though he’s close to sleep.

Beneath their IDs are their documents, clipped together neatly. If you were to page through the packet, you would learn all the relevant facts about Rebecca and Thomas: dates and places of birth, parents and grandparents, salaries, school grades, incidents of disobedience, evaluation and board scores, the date and place of their wedding ceremony, all previous addresses.

Of course, Rebecca and Thomas don’t really exist, any more than Lena Morgan Jones exists: a thin-faced girl, also unsmiling in her official ID. My ID goes next to Rebecca’s. You never know when there might be a raid, or a census. It’s better if you don’t have to go digging for your documents. It’s best, actually, if nobody ever goes digging around here.

It wasn’t until I moved to New York City that I understood Raven’s obsession with order in the Wilds: The surfaces must look right. They must be smooth. There must never be any crumbs.

That way there is never any trail to follow.

The curtains are closed in the living room. This keeps the heat in and also the eyes—of the neighbors, of the regulators, of passing patrols—out. In Zombieland, someone is always watching. There is nothing else for people to do. They do not think. They feel no passion, no hatred, no sadness; they feel nothing but fear, and a desire for control. So they watch, and poke, and pry.

At the back of the apartment is the kitchen. Hanging on the wall above the table is a photograph of Thomas Fineman, and another of Cormac T. Holmes, the scientist credited with performing the first-ever successful cure.

Past the stove is a little alcove pantry. It is lined with narrow shelves and absolutely packed with food. The memory of a long hunger is difficult to shake, and all of us—the ones who know—are secret hoarders now. We pack granola bars in our bags and stuff our pockets with sugar packets.

You never know when the hunger will be back.

One of the pantry’s three walls is, in fact, a hidden door. I ease it open to reveal a set of rough wooden stairs. A light glows dimly in the basement, and I hear the staccato rhythm of voices. Raven and Tack are fighting—nothing new there—and I hear Tack, sounding pained, say, “I just don’t understand why we can’t be honest with each other. We’re supposed to be on the same side. ”

Raven responds sharply, “You know that’s unrealistic, Tack. It’s for the best. You have to trust me. ”

“You’re the one who isn’t trusting—”

His voice cuts off sharply as I shut the door behind me, a little louder than I normally would, so they’ll know I’m there. I hate listening to Tack and Raven fight—I’d never heard any adults fight until I escaped to the Wilds—though over time I’ve grown more used to it. I’ve had to. It seems like they’re always bickering about something.

I go down the stairs. As I do, Tack turns away, passing a hand over his eyes. Raven says shortly, “You’re late. The meeting ended hours ago. What happened? ”

“I missed the first round of buses. ” Before Raven can start lecturing, I quickly add, “I left a glove and had to go back for it. I spoke to Julian Fineman. ”

“You what? ” Raven bursts out, and Tack sighs and rubs his forehead.

“Only for, like, a minute. ” I almost tell them about the pictures and decide, at the last minute, that I won’t. “It’s cool. Nothing happened. ”

“It’s not cool, Lena, ” Tack says. “What did we tell you? It’s all about staying under the radar. ”

Sometimes it feels as though Tack and Raven take their roles as Thomas and Rachel—strict guardians—a little bit too seriously, and I have to fight the urge to roll my eyes.

“It was no big deal, ” I insist.

“Everything’s a big deal. Don’t you get it? We—”

Raven cuts him off. “She gets it. She’s heard it a thousand times. Give her a break, okay? ”

Tack stares at her mutely for a second, his mouth a thin white line. Raven meets his gaze steadily. I know they’re angry about other things—that it’s not just me—but I feel a hot rush of guilt anyway. I’m making things worse.

“You’re unbelievable, ” Tack says. I don’t think he means for me to hear.

Then he brushes past me and pounds up the stairs.

“Where are you going? ” Raven demands, and for a moment something flares in her eyes—some need, or fear. But it’s gone before I can identify it.

“Out, ” Tack says without stopping. “There’s no air down here. I can hardly breathe. ” Then he’s pushing into the pantry and the door closes at the top of the stairwell, and Raven and I are left alone.

For a second we stand in silence. Then Raven barks a laugh. “Don’t mind him, ” she says. “You know Tack. ”

“Yeah, ” I say, feeling awkward. The fight has soured the air; Tack was right. The basement feels heavy, clotted. Normally it’s my favorite place in the house, this secret space—Tack and Raven’s, too. It’s the only place where we can shed the false skins, fake names, fake pasts.

At least this room feels inhabited. The upstairs looks like a normal house, and smells like a normal house, and is full of normal-house things; but it’s off somehow, as though it were tipped just a few inches on its foundations.

In contrast to the rest of the apartment, the basement is a wreck. Raven can’t clean and straighten as fast as Tack can accumulate and unravel. Books—real books, banned books, old books—are piled everywhere. Tack collects them. No, more than that. He hoards them, the way the rest of us hoard food. I tried to read a few of them, just to find out what it was like before the cure, and before all the fences, but it made my chest ache to imagine it: all that freedom, all that feeling and life. It’s better, much better, not to think about it too much.

Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That’s another reason I can’t read anymore.

Raven sighs and starts shuffling some papers piled haphazardly on a rickety wooden table in the center of the room. “It’s this goddamn rally, ” she says. “It’s got everybody all twitchy. ”

“What’s the problem? ” I ask.

She waves away the question. “Same as always. Rumors about a riot. The underground is saying the Scavengers will show, try to pull something major. But nothing’s confirmed. ”

Raven’s voice takes on a hard edge. I don’t even like to say the word Scavengers. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, of things rotting, of ash. All of us—the Invalids, the resistance—hate the Scavengers. They give us a bad name. Everyone agrees that they’ll ruin, have already ruined, so much of what we are working to achieve. The Scavengers are Invalids, like us, but they don’t stand for anything. We want to take down the walls and get rid of the cure. The Scavengers want to take down everything—burn everything to dust, steal and slaughter and set the world to flame.

I’ve only run into a group of Scavengers once, but I still have nightmares about them.

“They won’t be able to pull it off, ” I say, trying to sound confident. “They’re not organized. ”

Raven shrugs. “I hope not. ” She stacks books on top of one another, making sure their corners are aligned. For a second I feel a rush of sadness for her: standing in the middle of so much mess, stacking books as though it means something, as though it will help.

“Is there anything I can do? ”

“Don’t worry about it. ” Raven gives me a tight smile. “That’s my job, okay? ”

That is another one of Raven’s catchphrases. Like her insistence that the past is dead, it has become a kind of mantra. I worry; you do what I say. We all need mantras, I guess—stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.

“Okay. ” For a moment we stand there. It’s strange. In some ways Raven does feel like family—she’s the closest thing I have to it, anyway—but at other times it occurs to me I don’t really know her any better than I did in August, when she first found me. I still don’t know much about the person she was before coming to the Wilds. She has closed that part of herself down, folded it back to some deep, unreachable place.

“Go on, ” she says, jerking her head toward the stairs. “It’s late. You should eat something. ”

As I head up the stairs I brush my fingers, once, against the metal license plate we’ve tacked onto the wall. We found it in the Wilds, half buried in the mud and slush, during the relocation; we were all close to dead at that point, exhausted and starving, sick and freezing. Bram was the one who spotted it; and as he lifted it out of the ground, the sun had burst through the cloud cover, and the metal had flared a sudden white, almost blinding me so I could barely read the words printed underneath the number.

Old words; words that nearly brought me to my knees.

Live free or die.

Four words. Thirteen letters. Ridges, bumps, swirls under my fingertips.

Another story. We cling tightly to it, and our belief turns it to truth.

then

It gets colder by the day. In the morning, the grass is coated in frost. The air stings my lungs when I run; the edges of the river are coated thinly with ice, which breaks apart around our ankles as we wade into the water with our buckets. The sun is sluggish, collapsing behind the horizon earlier and earlier, after a weak, watery swim across the sky.

I am growing stronger. I am a stone being excavated by the slow passage of water; I am wood charred by a fire. My muscles are ropes, my legs are wooden. My palms are calloused—the bottoms of my feet, too, are as thick and blunt as stone. I never miss a run. I volunteer to cart the water every day, even though we’re supposed to rotate. Soon I can carry two buckets by myself the whole way back to camp without once pausing or stopping.

Alex passes next to me, weaving in and out of the shadows, threading between the crimson-and-yellow trees. In the summer he was fuller: I could see his eyes, his hair, a flash of his elbow. As the leaves begin to whirl to the ground and more and more trees are denuded, he is a stark black shadow, flickering in my peripheral vision.

I am learning, too. Hunter shows me how the messages are passed to us: how the sympathizers on the other side alert us to an arriving shipment.

“Come on, ” he says to me one morning after breakfast. Blue and I are in the kitchen, scrubbing dishes. Blue has never quite opened up to me. She answers my questions with simple nods or shakes of her head. Her smallness, her shyness, the thinness of her bones: When I’m with Blue, I can’t help but think of Grace.

That’s why I avoid her as much as possible.

“Come on where? ” I ask Hunter.

He grins. “You a good climber? ”

The question takes me by surprise. “I’m okay, ” I say, and have a sudden memory of scaling the border fence with Alex. I replace it quickly with another image: I am climbing into the leafy branches of one of the big maples in Deering Oaks Park. Hana’s blond hair flashes underneath the layers of green; she is circling the trunk, laughing, calling up for me to go higher.

But then I must take her out of the memory. I’ve learned to do that here, in the Wilds. In my head I trim her away—her voice, the flashing crown of her head—and leave only the sense of height, the swaying leaves, the green grass below me.

“It’s time to show you the nests, then, ” Hunter says.

I’m not looking forward to being outside. It was bitterly cold last night. The wind shrieked through the trees, tore down the stairs, probed all the cracks and crevices of the burrow with long, icy fingers. I came in half-frozen from my run this morning, my fingers numb and blunt and useless. But I’m curious about the nests—I’ve heard the other homesteaders use the word—and I’m anxious to get away from Blue.

“Can you finish up here? ” I ask Blue, and she nods, chewing on her lower lip. Grace used to do that too, when she was nervous. I feel a sharp pang of guilt. It’s not Blue’s fault that she reminds me of Grace.

It’s not Blue’s fault I left Grace behind.

“Thanks, Blue, ” I say, and lay one hand on her shoulder. I can feel her trembling slightly beneath my fingers.

The cold is a wall, a physical force. I’ve managed to find an old wind breaker in the collection of clothes, but it’s far too big and doesn’t stop the wind from biting at my neck and fingers, slipping beneath the collar and freezing my heart in my chest. The ground is frozen and the frost-coated grass crunches under our feet. We walk quickly, to stay warm; our breath comes in clouds.

“How come you don’t like Blue? ” Hunter asks abruptly.

“I do, ” I say quickly. “I mean, she doesn’t really talk to me, but…” I trail off. “Is it that obvious? ”

He laughs. “So you don’t like her. ”

“She just reminds me of someone, that’s all, ” I say shortly, and Hunter turns serious.

“From before? ” he asks.

I nod, and he reaches out and touches me once, lightly, on the elbow, to show me he understands. Hunter and I talk about everything except before. Of all the homesteaders, he is the one I feel closest to. We sit next to each other at dinner; and sometimes we stay up afterward, talking until the room is smudgy with smoke from the dying fire.

Hunter makes me laugh, even though for a long time I thought I would never laugh again.

It wasn’t easy to feel comfortable around him. It was hard to shake all the lessons I learned on the other side, in Portland, warnings drilled into me by everyone I admired and trusted. The disease, they taught me, grew in the space between men and women, boys and girls; it was passed between them in looks and smiles and touches, and would take root inside of them like mold that rots a tree from the inside out. Then I found out that Hunter was an Unnatural, a thing I’d always been taught to revile.

Now Hunter is Hunter, and a friend, and nothing more.

We head north, away from the homestead. It’s early, and the woods are quiet except for the crunch of our shoes on the thick layering of dead leaves. It hasn’t rained in several weeks. The woods are starved for water. It’s funny how I’ve learned to feel the woods, to understand them: their moods and tantrums, their explosions of joy and color. It’s so different from the parks and the carefully tended natural spaces in Portland. Those places were like animals at the zoo: caged in and also flattened, somehow. The Wilds are alive, and temperamental, and beautiful. Despite the hardships here, I am growing to love them.

“Almost there, ” Hunter says. He nods to our left. Beyond the denuded branches I can see a crown of razor wire, looped at the top of a fence, and I feel a flash of fear, hot and sudden. I didn’t realize we’d come so close to the border. We must be skirting the edge of Rochester. “Don’t worry. ” Hunter reaches out and squeezes my shoulder. “This side of the border isn’t patrolled. ”

I’ve been in the Wilds for a month and a half now, and in that time I’ve almost forgotten about the fences. It’s amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

We veer away from the fence again. Soon we come to an area of enormous trees, bare branches gray and gnarled like arthritic fingers. It may have been years since they’ve bloomed at all; the trees seem to have been dead a long time. But when I say so to Hunter, he just laughs and shakes his head.

“Not dead. ” He raps one with his knuckles as we pass. “Just biding their time. Storing up energy. They tuck all their life away deep inside, for winter. When it gets warm, they’ll bloom again. You’ll see. ”

I’m comforted by his words. You’ ll see means We’re coming back here. It means You’re one of us now. I run my fingers along a tree, feel the bark flake dryly under my fingertips. It’s impossible to imagine anything alive under all that hardness, anything flowing or moving.

Hunter stops so abruptly I almost run into him. “Here we are, ” he says, grinning. “The nests. ”

He points upward. High in the branches of the trees are massive tangles of birds’ nests: curls and spray, bits of moss and hanging creepers, all woven together so that it looks as though the trees are crowned with hair.

But even stranger: The branches are painted.

Drips of green and yellow paint stain the bark; delicate forked footprints, also colored, dance along the nests.

“What…? ” I see a large bird, about the size of a crow, wing toward a nest directly above our heads. It pauses, watching us. Everything about the bird is black, except for its feet, which are painted a vivid shade of bright green. It is carrying something in its mouth. After a moment it flaps into the nest, and a chorus of chirping begins.

“Green, ” Hunter says, looking satisfied. “That’s a good sign. Supplies will be coming today. ”

“I don’t understand. ” I’m pacing underneath the network of nests. There must be hundreds of them. Some of the nests are actually strung up between the branches of different trees, forming a dense canopy. It is even colder here; the sun barely penetrates.

“Come on, ” Hunter says. “I’ll show you. ”

He hoists himself up into the nearest tree, swinging easily up the trunk, using the many branches and protrusions as hand- and footholds.

I follow Hunter clumsily, imitating the placement of his hands and feet. It has been a long time since I’ve climbed a tree, and I remember it from childhood as effortless: swinging up into the branches without thought, unconsciously finding the nooks and cricks in the tree. Now it is painful and difficult.

I finally make it to one of the thicker, low-hanging branches. Hunter is straddling it, waiting for me. I crouch behind him. My legs are shaking a little, and he reaches back and loops his hands around my ankles, steadying me.

The nests are full of birds: piles of sleek black feathers, and winking black eyes. They are hopping and picking among heaps of tiny brown seeds, stockpiled for the winter. Several of them, disturbed by our arrival, go shrieking and cawing toward the sky.

The nests are coated with the same vivid green paint, a network of thatched claw prints as the birds flutter between nests.

“I still don’t understand, ” I say. “Where does the color come from? ”

“From the other side, ” Hunter says, and I can hear the pride in his voice. “From Zombieland. In the summer, there are blueberry bushes that grow on the other side of the fence. The birds scavenge for food there. Over the years, the insiders started feeding them pellets and seeds, keeping them fat through winter. They line up different-colored troughs when they need to get us messages: half seeds, half paint. The birds eat and then they fly back here, to store up seeds for later. The nests get colored, and we get our messages. Green, yellow, or red. Green if everything’s fine, if we can expect a shipment. Yellow if there’s a problem or delay. ”

“Don’t the colors get all mixed up? ” I say.

Hunter swivels around to look at me, eyes shining. “That’s the brilliant thing, ” he says, and tips his head back toward the nests. “The birds don’t like the color. It attracts predators. So they’re constantly reforming the nests. It’s like a blank palette every day. ”

And even as I’m watching, the bird in the nest closest to us is selecting the green-tinged twigs, wrestling them away from the nests with her beak: pruning, snipping, cleaning, like a woman fussing over weeds in a garden. The nest is being transformed in front of my eyes, remade into something dull and brown and normal-colored.

“It’s amazing, ” I say.

“It’s nature. ” Hunter’s voice turns serious. “Birds feed; then they nest. Paint them any color you want, send them halfway around the world, but they’ll always find a way back. And eventually they’ll show their true colors again. That’s what animals do. ”

As he speaks, I think of the raids last summer: when the regulators in their stiff uniforms stormed an illegal party, swinging baseball bats and police batons, letting loose the foaming, snapping bull mastiffs on the crowd. I think of the swinging arc of blood on a wall; the sounds of skulls cracking underneath heavy wood. Underneath their badges and their blank gazes, the cureds are full of a hatred that’s colder and also more frightening. They are detached from passion, but also from sympathy.

Underneath their colors, they are animals, too. I could not have stayed there; I will never go back. I will not become one of the walking dead.

It’s not until we’re on the ground again and headed back to the homestead that I’m struck by something else Hunter said.

“What does red mean? ” I ask.

He looks at me, startled. We’ve been silent for a while, both lost in thought. “What? ”

“Green is for supplies. Yellow when there’s been a delay. So what does red mean? ”

For a moment I see fear flashing in Hunter’s eyes, and suddenly I am cold again.

“Red means run, ” he says.

The relocation will soon begin in earnest. We will move everyone, the whole homestead, south. It is an enormous undertaking, and Raven and Tack spend hours planning, debating, arguing. It is not the first time they have orchestrated a relocation, but I gather that the moves have been hard and dangerous, and Raven considers them both failures.

But spending the winters up north has been even harder, and proved even more fatal, and so we will go. Raven insists that this time there will be no mortalities. Everyone who leaves the homestead will arrive safely at our destination.

“You can’t guarantee that, ” I hear Tack say to her one night. It’s late, and I’ve been startled awake by the sounds of retching from the sickroom. It’s Lu’s turn.

I’ve slipped out of bed and started toward the kitchen for water when I realize Tack and Raven are still there, illuminated by the low, smoldering glow from the fire. The kitchen is murky, filled with wood smoke.

I pause in the hallway.

“Everyone stays alive, ” Raven says stubbornly, and her voice trembles a little.

Tack sighs. He sounds tired—and something else, too. Gentle. Concerned. I’ve come to think of Tack as a dog: all bite and snarl. No softness to him at all.

“You can’t save everybody, Rae, ” he says.

“I can try, ” she says.

I go back to my room without the water, drawing my blankets all the way up to my chin. The air is full of shadows, shifting shapes I can’t identify.

There will be two main issues once we leave the homestead: food and shelter. There are other camps, other groups of Invalids, farther south, but settlements are few and separated by large expanses of open land. The northern Wilds are unforgiving in the fall and winter: hard and brittle and barren, full of hungry animals.

Over the years, traveling Invalids have mapped out a route: They have marked the trees with a system of gouges and slashes, to indicate the easiest path south.

Next week, groups of homesteaders—scouts—will leave on preliminary expeditions. Six will trek to our next big camp, which is eighty miles south, carting food and supplies in backpacks strapped to their bodies. When they reach camp, they will bury half the food in the ground, so it will not be consumed by animals, and mark the place of burial with a group of stones. Two will return to the homestead; the other four will go on another sixty miles, where they will bury half of what remains. Two of the four will then return to the homestead.

The fifth scout will wait there while the last scout pushes a final forty miles, equipped with the remaining portion of food. They will return to the homestead together, trapping and foraging what they can. By then we will have made all the arrangements and finished packing up.

When I ask Raven why the camps get closer and closer together as they wind southward, she barely glances up from what she’s doing.

“You’ll see, ” she says shortly. Her hair is plaited into dozens of small braids—Blue’s work—and Raven has fixed golden leaves and dried red baneberries, which are poisonous, at their ends.

“Isn’t it better to go as far as we can every day? ” I press. Even the third camp is a hundred miles from our final destination, although as we move south we’ll find other homesteads, better trapping, and people to share their food and shelter with us.

Raven sighs. “We’ll be weak by then, ” she says, finally straightening up to look at me. “Cold. Hungry. It will probably be snowing. The Wilds suck the life out of you, I’m telling you. It’s not like going on one of your little morning runs. You can’t just keep pushing. I’ve seen—” She breaks off, shaking her head, as though to dislodge a memory. “We have to be very careful, ” she finishes.

I’m so offended I can’t speak for a moment. Raven called my runs “little, ” as though they’re some kind of game. But I’ve left bits of myself out there—skin, blood, sweat, and vomit—bits of Lena Haloway, flaking off in pieces, scattered in the dark.

Raven senses she’s upset me. “Help me with these, will you? ” she asks. She’s making small emergency pouches, one for every homesteader, filled with Advil, Band-Aids, antibacterial wipes. She piles the supplies in the center of squares of fabric, cut from old sheets, then twists them into pouches and ties them off with wire. “My fingers are so fat I keep getting everything all tangled. ”

It’s not true: Raven’s fingers are thin, just like the rest of her, and I know she’s trying to make me feel better. But I say, “Yeah, sure. ” Raven hardly ever asks for help; when she does, you give it.

The scouts will be exhausted. Even though they will be weighed down by food, it is for storing, not for eating, and they have room to carry only a tiny bit for themselves. The last scout, the one who goes all one hundred and eighty miles, has to be the strongest. Without conferring or discussing it, everyone knows it will be Tack.

One night, I work up the courage to approach him. He is in a rare good mood. Bram brought four rabbits from the traps today, and for once we have all eaten until we were completely full.

After dinner, Tack sits next to the fire, rolling a cigarette. He doesn’t look up as I approach.

“What? ” he asks, abrupt as ever, but his voice has none of its usual edge.

I suck in a deep breath and blurt out, “I want to be one of the scouts. ” I’ve been agonizing all week about what to say to Tack—I’ve written whole speeches in my head—but at the last second these eight words are all that come.

“No, ” Tack says shortly. And just like that, all my worrying and planning and strategizing have come to nothing.

I’m torn between disappointment and anger. “I’m fast, ” I say. “I’m strong. ”

“Not strong enough. ”

“I want to help, ” I press, conscious of the whine that is creeping into my voice, conscious of the fact that I sound like Blue when she is throwing one of her rare tantrums.

Tack runs his tongue along the rolling paper and then twists the cigarette closed with a few expert turns of his fingers. He looks up at me then, and in that second I realize Tack hardly ever looks at me. His eyes are shrewd, appraising, filled with messages I don’t understand.

“Later, ” he says, and with that, he stands and pushes his way past me and up the stairs.