pandemonium 6 страница

now

The morning of the rally is unseasonably warm. What little snow has remained on the ground and the roofs runs in rivulets through the gutters, and drips from streetlamps and tree branches. It is dazzlingly sunny. The puddles in the street look like polished metal, perfectly reflective.

Raven and Tack are joining me at the demonstration, although they’ve informed me that they won’t actually stay with me. My job is to keep close to the stage. I’m to watch Julian before he heads uptown to Columbia Memorial, where he will be cured.

“Don’t take your eyes off him, no matter what, ” Raven has instructed me. “No matter what, okay? ”

“Why? ” I ask, knowing my question will go unanswered. Despite the fact that I am officially part of the resistance, I know hardly anything about how it works, and what we’re supposed to be doing.

“Because, ” she says, “I said so. ”

I mouth the last part along with her, keeping my back turned so she won’t see.

Uncharacteristically, there are long lines at the bus stops. Two different regulators are distributing numbers to the waiting passengers; Raven, Tack, and I will be on bus 5, whenever that arrives. The city has quadrupled the quantity of buses and drivers today. Twenty-five thousand people are expected to show up at the demonstration; about five thousand members of the DFA, and thousands of spectators and onlookers.

Many of the groups that oppose the DFA, and the idea of early procedure, will also be there. This includes much of the scientific community. The procedure is just not yet safe for children, they say, and will lead to tremendous social defects: a nation of idiots and freaks. The DFA claims the opposition is overly cautious. The benefits, they say, far outweigh the risks.

And if need be, we will just make our prisons larger, and stick the damaged ones there, out of sight.

“Move up, move up. ” The regulator at the front of the line directs us onto the bus. We shuffle forward, showing our identity cards and swiping them, again, as we board, and I am reminded of a bunch of herd animals, heads down, trundling ahead.

Raven and Tack have not been speaking; they must be fighting again. I can sense it between them, a tight electricity, and it’s not helping my anxiety. Raven finds an empty two-seater in the back, but Tack, surprisingly, slides in next to me.

“What are you doing? ” Raven demands, leaning forward. She has to be careful to keep her voice down. Cureds don’t really fight. That is one of the benefits of the procedure.

“I want to make sure Lena’s okay, ” Tack mutters back. He reaches out and grabs my hand, a quick pulse. A woman seated across the aisle looks at us curiously. “Are you all right? ”

“I’m fine, ” I say, but my voice sounds strangled. I wasn’t nervous at all earlier in the morning. Tack and Raven have made me jumpy. They’re obviously worried about something, and I think I know what it is: They must believe the rumors of the Scavengers are true. They must believe the Scavengers are going to stage an upset, try to disturb the demonstration in some way.

Even crossing the Brooklyn Bridge doesn’t have its usual calming effect. The bridge is, for the first time ever, clogged with traffic: private cars, and buses transporting people to the demonstration.

As we approach Times Square, my anxiety increases. I’ve never seen so many people in my life. We have to get out at 34th Street because buses cannot progress any farther. The streets are swarming with people: a massive blur of faces, a river of colors. There are regulators, too—volunteer and official—wearing spotless uniforms; then there are members of the armed guard, standing stiffly in rows, staring fixedly straight ahead, like toy soldiers lined up, about to march. Except these soldiers, these real ones, carry enormous guns, barrels gleaming in the sunlight.

As soon as I descend into the crowd I’m pushed and jostled from all sides, and even though Raven and Tack are behind me, I manage to lose sight of them a few times as people flow between us. Now I see why they’ve given me my instructions early. There’s no way I’ll be able to keep sight of them.

It is shatteringly loud. The regulators are blowing their whistles, directing foot traffic, and in the distance I can hear drumbeats and chanting. The demonstration doesn’t officially start for another two hours, but even now I think I can make out the rhythm of the DFA’s chant: In numbers there is safety and for nothing let us want…

We move north slowly, penned in on all sides, in the endless, deep chasms between the buildings. People have gathered on some of the balconies to watch. I see hundreds and hundreds of waving white banners, signs of support for the DFA—and just a few emerald-colored ones, signs of opposition.

“Lena! ” I turn around. Tack shoves his way through the mass of people, presses an umbrella into my hand. “It’s supposed to rain later. ”

The sky is a perfect pale blue and streaked with the thinnest clouds, like bare white tendrils of hair. “I don’t think—, ” I start to say, but he interrupts me.

“Just take it, ” he says. “Trust me. ”

“Thanks. ” I try to sound grateful. It’s rare for Tack to be this thoughtful.

He hesitates, chewing on the corner of his lip. I’ve seen him do that when he’s working on a puzzle at the apartment and can’t quite get all the pieces aligned. I think he’s about to say something else—give me advice—but at the last second he just says, “I need to catch up with Rebecca. ” He stutters, just barely, over Raven’s official name.

“Okay. ” We’ve already lost sight of her. I go to wrestle the umbrella into my backpack—getting dirty looks from the people around me, since there’s barely room to breathe, much less maneuver the bag from my back—when it suddenly occurs to me that we haven’t made a plan for after the demonstration. I don’t know where I’m supposed to meet Raven and Tack.

“Hey—” I look up, but Tack has already gone. All the faces around me are unfamiliar; I’m entirely surrounded by strangers. I turn a full circle and feel a sharp jab in the ribs. A regulator has reached out and is prodding me forward with his nightstick.

“You’re holding everybody up, ” he says flatly. “Move it. ”

My chest is full of butterflies. I tell myself to breathe. There’s nothing to worry about. It’s just like going to a DFA meeting, but bigger.

At 38th Street we pass the barricades, where we have to wait in line and get patted down and searched by police officers carrying wands. They check our necks, too—the uncureds will be in their own special segregated section of the demonstration—and scan our IDs, though fortunately, they don’t call everything into SVS, the Secure Validation System. Even so, it takes me an hour to make it through. Beyond the security barricades, volunteers are distributing antibacterial wipes: small white packages printed with the DFA’s logo.

CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS. SECURITY IS IN THE DETAILS. HAPPINESS IS IN THE METHOD.

I allow a silver-haired woman to press a package into my hand.

And then, finally, I’ve arrived. The drums are furiously loud here, and the chanting a rolling constant, like the sound of waves crashing on the shore.

Once I saw a photo of Times Square: before the cure, before all the borders were closed off. Tack found it near Salvage, a homestead in New Jersey, just across the river from New York. We took refuge there while we were waiting for our forged papers to arrive. One day Tack found a whole photo album, perfectly intact, buried under a pile of limestone and charred timber. In the evenings, I would flip through it and pretend that these photographs—this life of friends and boyfriends and squinting, laughing sunshine shots—were mine.

Times Square looks very different now than it did then. As I move forward in the crowd, my breath catches in my throat.

A towering raised platform, a dais, has been built at one end of the enormous open plaza, underneath a billboard larger than any I have seen in my life. It is plastered all over with signs for the DFA: red and white squares, fluttering lightly in the wind.

The Unified Church of Religion and Science has colonized one billboard and marked it huge with its primary symbol: a giant hand cupping a molecule of hydrogen. The other signs—and there are dozens of them, gigantic, bleached-white walls—are all faded to illegibility, so it’s impossible to tell what they once advertised. On one of them I think I can make out the ghostly imprint of a smile.

And of course, all the lights are dead.

The photograph I saw of Times Square was taken at night, but it could have been high noon: I’ve never seen so many lights in my life, could never even have imagined them. Lights blazing, glittering, lit up in crazy colors that made me think of those spots that float across your vision after you’ve accidentally looked directly at the sun.

The lightbulbs are still here, but they’re dark. On many of them, pigeons are perching, roosting between the blacked-out bulbs. New York and its sister cities have mandatory controls on electricity, just like Portland did—and although there are a greater number of cars and buses, the blackouts are stricter and more frequent. There are just too many people, and not enough juice for all of them.

The dais is wired with microphones and equipped with chairs; behind it is an enormous video screen, like the kind the DFA uses at its meetings. Uniformed men are making last-minute adjustments to the setup. That’s where Julian will be; somehow, I’ll have to get closer.

I start to push my way slowly, painstakingly, through the crowd. I have to fight and elbow and say “Excuse me” every time I try to squeeze by someone. Even being five foot two isn’t helping. There simply isn’t enough space between bodies—there are no cracks to slip through.

That’s when I start to panic again. If the Scavengers do come—or if anything goes wrong—there will be no place to run. We’ll be caught here like animals in a pen. People will trample one another trying to get out. A stampede.

But the Scavengers won’t come. They wouldn’t dare. It’s too dangerous. There are too many police, too many regulators, too many guns.

I squeeze my way past a series of bleachers, all roped off, where members of the DFA Youth Guard are sitting: girls and boys on separate bleachers, of course, all of them careful not to look at one another.

At last I make it to the foot of the dais. The platform must be ten or twelve feet in the air. A series of steep wooden steps gives the speakers access from the ground. At the foot of the stairs, a group of people has gathered. I make out Thomas and Julian Fineman behind a blur of bodyguards and police officers.

Julian and his father are dressed identically. Julian’s hair is slicked back, and curls just behind his ears. He’s shifting from foot to foot, obviously trying to conceal his nervousness.

I wonder what’s so important about him—why Tack and Raven told me to keep an eye on him. He has become symbolic of the DFA, of course—sacrifice in the name of public safety—but I wonder whether he presents some kind of additional danger.

I think back to what he said at the rally: I was nine when I was told I was dying.

I wonder what it feels like to die slowly.

I wonder what it feels like to die quickly.

I squeeze my nails into my palms, to keep the memories back.

The drumming is coming from behind the dais, a part of the square that’s blocked from view. There must be a marching band there. The chanting swells, and now everyone is joining in, the whole crowd unconsciously swaying along to the rhythm. Distantly, I make out some other rhythm, a disjointed staccato: DFA is dangerous for all… The cure should protect, not harm…

The dissenters. They must be sequestered somewhere else, far away from the dais.

Louder, louder, louder. The DFA’s chants soon drown out all other sound. I join in, let my body find the rhythm, feel the hum of all those thousands of people buzz up through my feet and into my chest. And even though I don’t believe in any of it—the words, the cause, the people around me—it amazes me, still, the surge I get from being in a crowd, the electricity, the sense of power.

Dangerous.

Just as the chanting reaches a crescendo, Thomas Fineman breaks away from the bodyguards and takes the steps up to the top of the dais, two at a time. The rhythm breaks apart into waves of shouting and clapping. White banners and flags appear from everywhere, unfurling, fluttering in the wind. Some of them are DFA-issue. Other people have simply cut up long strips of cloth. Times Square is full of slender white tentacles.

“Thank you, ” Thomas Fineman says into the microphone. His voice booms out over all of us; then a sharp screeching sound as the feed lets out a whine. Fineman winces, cups his hand over the microphone, and leans back to mutter instructions to someone. The angle of his neck shows off his procedural mark perfectly. The three-pronged scar is amplified by the video screen.

I turn my eyes to Julian. He is standing with his arms crossed, watching his father, behind the wall of bodyguards. He must be cold; he’s only wearing a suit jacket.

“Thank you, ” Thomas Fineman tries again, and, when no feed kicks back, adds, “Much better. My friends—”

That’s when it happens.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Three miniature explosions, like the firecrackers we used to set off at Eastern Prom on the Fourth of July.

One scream, high and desperate.

And then: Everything is noise.

Figures in black appear from nowhere, from everywhere. They’re climbing up out of the sewers, materializing from the ground, taking shape behind the foul-smelling steam. They swarm down the sides of the buildings like spiders, rappelling on long black ropes. They’re scything through the crowd with glittering, sharp blades, grabbing purses and ripping necklaces from around people’s necks, slicing rings from their fingers. Thwack. Thwack.

Scavengers. My insides turn to liquid. My breath stops in my throat.

People are pushing and shoving, desperately trying to find a way out. The Scavengers have us surrounded.

“Down, down, down! ”

Now the air is filled with gunshots. The police have opened fire. One Scavenger has made it halfway down a building toward the ground. A bullet explodes in his back and he jerks once, quickly, and then hangs limp from the end of his rope, swaying lightly in the wind. Somehow one of the DFA banners has become entangled in his equipment; I see the stain of blood spreading slowly across the white fabric.

I am in a nightmare. I am in the past. This isn’t happening.

Someone shoves me from behind and I go sprawling to the pavement. The bite of the concrete snaps me into awareness. People are running, stampeding, and I quickly roll out of the way of a pair of heavy boots.

I have to get back on my feet.

I try to stand and get knocked down again. This time the air goes out of me, and I feel someone’s weight on the middle of my back. And suddenly the fear turns me sharp and focused. I need to get up.

One of the police barricades has already been broken, and a piece of splintered wood is lying in front of me. I grab it and jab behind me, into the crushing weight of people, of panic, and feel the wood connecting with legs, with muscle and skin. For a brief second I feel the weight shift, a slight release. I jump to my feet and sprint toward the dais.

Julian is gone. I’m supposed to be watching Julian. No matter what happens.

Piercing screams. The smell of fire.

Then I spot him off to my left. He is being hustled toward one of the old subway entrances, which is, like all the other entrances, covered with plywood. But as he approaches, one of the bodyguards steps forward and pushes the plywood inward.

Not a barrier. A door.

Then they are gone, and the sheet of wood swings closed again.

More gunshots. A massive surge in the screaming. A Scavenger has been shot just as he was beginning his descent. He is knocked clear off the balcony and tumbles down into the crowd below. The people are a wave: heads, arms, contorted faces.

I run toward the subway entrance where Julian disappeared. Above it I can see an old series of letters and numbers, faded bare outlines: N, R, Q, 1, 2, 3, 7. And in the middle of all that panic and screaming, there is something comforting about it: an old-world code, a sign from another life. I wonder whether the old world could have possibly been worse than this—that time of dazzling lights and sizzling electricity and people who loved in the open—whether they also screamed and trampled one another to death and turned their guns on their neighbors.

Then the air is knocked out of me again and I’m thrown backward. I land on my left elbow, hear it crack. Pain splinters through me.

A Scavenger looms over me. Impossible to say whether it’s a man or a woman. The Scavenger is dressed all in black and has a ski mask pulled low, covering the neck.

“Give me the bag, ” the Scavenger growls. But the voice doesn’t fool me. It’s a girl. She’s trying to make her voice sound lower, but you can hear the melody running underneath it.

For some reason, this makes me even angrier. How dare you? I feel like spitting at her. You’ve screwed everything for everyone. But I sit up, inching the backpack off my shoulders, feeling little explosions of pain radiating all the way from my elbow to my shoulder.

“Come on, come on. Hurry up. ” She’s dancing from foot to foot, and as she does she fingers the long, sharp knife she has looped through her belt.

I mentally weigh all the things I have in the bag: a tin water bottle, empty. Tack’s umbrella. Two granola bars. Keys. A hardcover edition of The Book of Shhh. Tack insisted I bring it, and now I’m glad I did. It’s nearly six hundred pages.

Should be heavy enough. I take the shoulder straps in my right hand, tightening my grip.

“I said move. ”

The Scavenger, impatient, bends down to grab the bag, and as she does, I swing upward with all my strength, moving through the pain. The bag catches her in the side of the head with enough momentum to knock her off balance—she tumbles to one side, landing hard on the ground. I launch to my feet. She grabs for my ankles, and I kick her hard, twice, in the ribs.

The priests and the scientists are right about one thing: At our heart, at our base, we are no better than animals.

The Scavenger moans, doubling up, and I jump over her, dodging all the police barricades, which are lying in a tumbled, broken ruin. The screaming is still a crest of sound around me: It has turned into one tremendous wail, like a gigantic, amplified siren.

I make it to the old subway entrance. For just a second I hesitate with my hand on the wooden plank. Its texture is comforting—weather-beaten, warmed by the sun—a bit of normalcy in the middle of all this madness.

Another rifle shot: I hear a body thud to the ground behind me. More screaming.

I lean forward and push. The door swings open a few feet, revealing murky darkness and a pungent, musty smell.

I don’t look back.

I push the door shut again and stand for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the dimness, listening for the sound of voices or footsteps. Nothing. The smell is sharper in here; it is the smell of old death, animal bones and rotting things. I bring my jacket cuff to my nose and inhale. There’s a steady dripping off to my left. Other than that, it’s quiet.

There are stairs in front of me, covered in bits of crumpled newspaper, mashed-up Styrofoam cups, cigarette butts, all dully illuminated by an electric lantern, like the kind we used in the Wilds. Someone must have planted it here earlier.

I move toward the stairs, on high alert. Julian’s bodyguards might have heard me shoving open the door. They might be lying in wait, ready to jump me. Mentally I curse the metal detectors and all the body scans. I would give anything to have a knife, a screwdriver, something.

Then I remember my keys. I once again ease my backpack off my shoulders. When I bend my elbow, the pain makes me suck in my breath. I’m thankful I landed on my left arm—with my right arm immobilized, I’d be pretty much useless.

I find my keys at the bottom of my bag, moving agonizingly slowly so I don’t make too much noise. I thread the keys through my fingers, like Tack showed me how to do. It’s not much of a weapon, but it’s better than nothing. Then I go down the stairs, scanning the shadows for anything mobile, any sudden shapes rising through the darkness.

Nothing. Everything is perfectly still, and very quiet.

At the bottom of the stairs, there is a dingy glass booth, still smudgy with fingerprints. Beyond it, rusted turnstiles line the tunnel, a dozen of them, like miniature windmills that have been stilled. I ease myself over one of them and land softly on the other side. From here, various tunnels branch out into the darkness, each marked with different signs, more letters and numbers. Julian might have gone down any one of them. And all of them are swallowed in shadow: The lantern doesn’t penetrate this far. I consider going back to retrieve it, but that would only give me away.

Again, I stop and listen. At first there is nothing. Then, I think I hear a muffled thud from the tunnel on my left. As soon as I start toward the sound, however, there is silence once again. Now I’m sure I only imagined the noise, and I hesitate, frustrated, unsure about what to do next. I’ve failed in my mission, that’s obvious—my first real mission of the movement. At the same time, Raven and Tack can’t blame me for losing Julian when the Scavengers attacked. I couldn’t have predicted or prepared for that chaos. No one could have.

I figure my best bet is to wait down here for a few hours, at least until the police have restored order, which I have no doubt they will. If necessary, I’ll camp out for the night. Tomorrow I’ll deal with getting back to Brooklyn.

Suddenly, a darting shadow from my left. I whirl around, fist extended, and connect with nothing but air. A giant rat scurries in front of me, a bare inch from my sneaker. I exhale, watching the rat darting off down another tunnel, its long tail dragging in the filth. I’ve always hated rats.

That’s when I hear it, distinct and unmistakable: two thuds, and a low groan, a voice moaning out, “Please…”

Julian’s voice.

My body goes prickly all over. Now the fear draws my insides hard and taut. The voice came from somewhere farther down the tunnel.

I ease back against one wall, pressing myself flat, feeling moss and slick tile under my fingers as I move forward slowly, careful not to make any noise when I step, careful not to breathe too loudly. After every few paces I stop and listen, hoping for another sound, hoping Julian will say something again. But the only thing I hear is a steady drip, drip, drip. There must be a pipe leaking somewhere.

Then I see it.

The man is strung from a grate in the ceiling, a belt looped tightly around his bulging neck. Above him, water condenses on a metal pipe, dripping onto the tunnel floor. Drip, drip, drip.

It’s so dark I can’t make out the man’s face—the grate permits only a trickle of gray light from above—but I recognize him from the heaviness of his shoulders as one of Julian’s bodyguards. At his feet, another bodyguard is lying curled up in the fetal position. There is a long-handled blade protruding from his back.

I stumble backward, forgetting to be quiet. Then I hear Julian’s voice again, fainter: “Please…”

I’m terrified. I don’t know which direction the voice is coming from, can’t think of anything but getting out, out, out. I’d rather face the Scavengers in the open than trapped here, like a rat, in the dark. I will not die underground.

I run blindly, keeping my arms in front of me, collide first with a wall before groping my way into the center of the tunnel. Panic has made me clumsy.

Drip, drip, drip.

Please. Please get me out of here. My heart will explode; I can’t take a breath.

Two black shapes unfold all at once from either side of me, and in my terror they look like enormous dark birds, reaching out their wings to enfold me.

“Not so fast, ” one of them says. He grabs my wrist. The keys are knocked from my hand. Then searing pain, a flash of white.

I sink into the dark.

then

Miyako, who should have been one of the scouts, is instead the last one to enter the sickroom.

“She’ll be back on her feet tomorrow, ” Raven says. “You’ll see. She’s as solid as a rock. ”

But the next day, her cough is so bad we can hear it reverberating through the walls. Her breathing sounds thick and watery. She sweats through her blankets even as she cries that she is cold, cold, freezing cold.

She begins coughing up blood. When it’s my turn to look after her, I can see it caked in the corners of her mouth. I dab at it with a washcloth, but she is still strong enough to fight me off. The fever makes her see shapes and shadows in the air; she swats at them, muttering.

She can no longer stand, even when Raven and I try to lift her together. She cries out in pain, and eventually we give up. Instead we change the sheets when Miyako pisses them. I think we should burn them, but Raven insists we can’t; I see her that night, furiously scrubbing them in the basin, while steam rises from the scalding water. Her forearms are the shiny red of raw meat.

And then one night I wake up and the silence is perfect, a cool, dark pool. For one second, still emerging from the fog of my dreams, I think that Miyako must have gotten better. Tomorrow she will be squatting in the kitchen, tending the fire. Tomorrow we will make rounds together, and I will watch her braiding traps with her long, slender fingers. When she catches me staring, she will smile.

But it is too quiet. I get up, a knot of dread tightening inside my chest. The floor is freezing.

Raven is sitting at the foot of Miyako’s bed, staring at nothing. Her hair is loose, and the flickering shadows from the candle next to her make her eyes look like two hollow pits.

Miyako’s eyes are closed, and I can tell right away she is dead.

The desire to laugh—hysterical and inappropriate—wells in my throat. To quash it, I say, “Is she—? ”

“Yes, ” Raven says shortly.

“When? ”

“I’m not sure. I fell asleep for a while. ” She passes a hand over her eyes. “When I woke up, she wasn’t breathing. ”

My body flashes completely hot and then completely cold. I don’t know what to say, so I just stand there for a while, trying not to look at Miyako’s body: a statue, a shadow, her face thinned by sickness, whittled down to bone. All I can think about are her hands, which only a few days ago moved so expertly against the kitchen table as she beat out a soft rhythm so that Sarah could sing. They were a blur, like hummingbird wings—full of life.

I feel like something has caught in the back of my throat. “I—I’m sorry. ”

Raven doesn’t say anything for a minute. Then: “I shouldn’t have made her carry water. She said she wasn’t feeling well. I should have let her rest. ”

“You can’t blame yourself, ” I say quickly.

“Why not? ” Raven looks up at me then. In that moment she looks very young—defiant, stubborn, the way that my cousin Jenny used to look when Aunt Carol told her it was time for homework. I have to remind myself that Raven is young: twenty-one, only a few years older than me. The Wilds will age you.

I wonder how long I’ll last out here.

“Because it’s not your fault. ” The fact that I can’t see her eyes makes me nervous. “You can’t—you can’t feel bad. ”

Raven stands up then, cupping the candle in one hand.

“We’re on the other side of the fence now, Lena, ” she says, tiredly, as she passes. “Don’t you get it? You can’t tell me what to feel. ”

The next day it snows. At breakfast, Sarah cries silently while spooning up oatmeal. She was close to Miyako.