pandemonium 7 страница

The scouts left the homestead five days ago—Tack, Hunter, Roach, Buck, Lu, and Squirrel—and have taken the shovel with them, for burying supplies. We collect pieces of metal and wood, whatever will serve us for digging instead.

The snow is light, thankfully; by midmorning, a bare half inch is on the ground. But it’s very cold, and the ground is frozen solid. After digging and hacking for a half hour, we’ve only made the barest indentation in the earth, and Raven, Bram, and I are sweating. Sarah, Blue, and a few others are huddled a few feet away from us, shivering.

“This isn’t working, ” Raven pants out. She throws down a twisted piece of metal she has been using as a shovel, sends it skittering across the ground with a kick. Then she turns and starts stalking back toward the burrow. “We’ll have to burn her. ”

“Burn her? ” The words explode out of me before I can stop them. “We can’t burn her. That’s—”

Raven whirls around, eyes blazing. “Yeah? Well what do you want to do? Huh? You want to leave her in the sickroom? ”

Normally I back down when Raven raises her voice, but this time I hold my ground. “She deserves a burial, ” I say, wishing my voice wouldn’t shake.

Raven covers the ground between us in two long strides.

“It’s a waste of our energy, ” she hisses, and then I can tell how full of fury and desperation she is. I remember what I heard her tell Tack: Everyone stays alive. “We don’t have any to spare. ”

She turns her back to me again and announces loudly, so the others can hear, “We have to burn her. ”

We wrap her body in the sheets Raven scrubbed clean. Maybe all along she knew they would be used for this purpose. I keep thinking I’m going to be sick.

“Lena, ” Raven barks at me sharply. “Take her feet. ”

I do. Her body is heavier than seems possible. In death, she has become a weight of iron. I’m furious with Raven, so furious I could spit. This is what we are reduced to here. This is what we have become in the Wilds: We starve, we die, we wrap our friends in old and tattered sheets, we burn them in the open. I know it’s not Raven’s fault—it’s the people on the other side of the fence, it’s Them, the zombies, my former people—but the anger refuses to dissolve. It burns a hole in my throat.

A quarter mile from the homestead there is a gully where at one point a stream must have flowed. We place her there, and Raven splashes her with gasoline: just a little, as there isn’t much to spare. The snow is falling harder now. At first she won’t light. Blue begins to cry, loudly, and Grandma pulls her sharply away from the fire, saying, “Quiet, Blue. You’re not helping. ” Blue turns her face into Grandma’s overlarge corduroy jacket so the sound of her sobbing is muffled. Sarah is silent, white-faced, trembling.

Raven douses the body with more gasoline and finally gets it lit. The air is filled right away with a choking smoke, the smell of burning hair; the noise is terrible too, a crackling that makes you think of meat falling away from bones. Raven can’t even speak the whole eulogy before she starts to gag. I turn away, tears stinging my eyes—from the smoke or from anger, I can’t tell.

Suddenly I have the wild urge to dig, to bury, to hack up the earth. I move blindly, numbly, back to the burrow. It takes me a little while to locate the cotton shorts and the old, tattered shirt I was wearing when I came to the Wilds. We’ve been using the shirt as a dishrag. These are the only items left from before: the remnants of my old life.

The others have now gathered in the kitchen. Bram is stoking the fire, coaxing it to life. Raven is boiling water in a pot: for coffee, no doubt. Sarah is shuffling a pack of water-warped and dog-eared cards. Everyone else is sitting in silence.

“Hey, Lena, ” Sarah says as I stalk past her. I’ve stuffed the shorts and the T-shirt under my jacket and am keeping my arms tightly crossed over my stomach; for some reason, I don’t want anyone to know what I’m doing, especially Raven. “You want to play Spit? ”

“Not now, ” I growl at her. The Wilds turn us mean, too. Mean and hard, all edges.

“We could play something else, ” she says. “We could play—”

“I said no. ” Then I’m running up the stairs before I can see I’ve hurt her feelings.

The air is thick: a white blur. For a moment the cold stuns me and I stand, blinking, confused. Everything is sprouting a layer of snow, a fuzzy growth. I can still smell Miyako’s body burning. And I imagine that with the snow there is ash blowing over us. I fantasize that it will cover us in our sleep, seal us into the burrow, and suffocate us there, underground.

There is a juniper bush at the edge of the homestead, where I start and end my runs. Underneath it the snow has not accumulated. There is a bare dusting on the ground, which I sweep away with the cuff of my jacket.

Then I dig.

I claw at the earth with my fingers. The anger and the grief is still throbbing behind my eyes, narrowing my vision to a tunnel. I can’t even feel the cold or the pain in my hands. Dirt and blood are caking my fingernails, but I don’t care. I bury those last, tattered parts of me there, under the juniper, in the snow.

Two days after we burn Miyako, the snow has still not stopped. Every day Raven scans the skies anxiously, cursing under her breath. It is time to move. Lu and Squirrel, the first of the scouts, have returned. The homestead is mostly packed up, although we are still gathering food and supplies from the river, and trying to trap and hunt what we can. But the snow makes it hard. The animals stay underground.

As soon as the rest of the scouts return, we will leave. They’ll be here any day now—that’s what we all tell Raven, to ease her anxiety. The snow falls slowly, steadily, turning the world to white drift.

I’ve started checking the nests for messages twice a day. The trees, encased in ice, are harder to climb. Afterward, when I come back to the burrow, my fingers throb painfully as the feeling returns to them. For weeks the supplies have been floating to us regularly, although sometimes we’ve found them caught upriver, in the shallows, which freeze more easily. We have to break them out with broom handles. Roach and Buck make it back to the homestead, exhausted but triumphant. The snow finally stops. Now we are just waiting on Hunter and Tack.

Then one day, the nests are yellow. And again the next day: yellow.

On the third day of yellow, Raven pulls me aside.

“I’m worried, ” she says. “Something must be wrong on the inside. ”

“Maybe they’re patrolling again, ” I say. “Maybe they’ve turned on the fence. ”

She bites her lip, shakes her head. “Whatever it is, it must be major. Everyone knows it’s time for us to move. We need all the supplies we can get. ”

“I’m sure it’s temporary, ” I say. “I’m sure tomorrow we’ll get a shipment. ”

Raven shakes her head again. “We can’t afford to wait much longer, ” she says, and her voice is strangled. I know she isn’t thinking only of the supplies. She’s thinking of Hunter and Tack, too.

The next day, the sky is a pale blue, the sun high and amazingly warm, breaking through the trees and turning the ice to rivulets of flowing water. The snow brought silence with it, but now the woods are alive again, full of dripping and twittering and cracking. It is as though the Wilds have been released from a muzzle.

We are all in a good mood—everyone but Raven, who does her daily scan of the sky and only mutters, “It won’t last. ”

On my way to the nests, stamping through the snow, I’m so warm I have to take off my jacket and tie it around my waist. The nests will be green today, I can sense it. They’ll be green, and the supplies will come, and the scouts will return, and we’ll all flow south together. The light is dazzling, bouncing off the glittering branches, filling my vision with spots of color, flashes of red and green.

When I get to the nests, I untie my jacket and loop it over one of the lower branches. I’ve gotten good at the climb—my body finds its way up easily, and I feel a kind of joy in my chest I haven’t felt for a long time. From far away I hear a vague humming, a low vibration that reminds me of crickets singing in the summertime.

There is a vast world for us, a boundless space beyond and between the fences and the rules. We will travel it freely. We will be okay.

I have almost reached the nests. I adjust my weight, seek better purchase for my feet, and pull myself upward, toward the final branch.

Just then a shadow zooms past me—so sudden and startling I nearly slip backward. For a moment I feel the terror of free fall—the tipping, the cold air behind me—but at the last second I manage to right myself. My heart is pounding, though, and I can’t shake that momentary impression of falling.

And then I see that it wasn’t a shadow that startled me.

It was a bird. A bird struggling through stickiness: a bird coated in paint, floundering in its nest, splashing color everywhere.

Red. Red. Red.

Dozens of them: black feathers coated thickly with crimson-colored paint, fluttering among the branches.

Red means run.

I don’t know how I get down from the tree. I am slipping and sliding, all the grace and ease driven out of my limbs by the panic. Red means run. I drop the last four feet and land tumbling in the snow. Cold seeps through my jeans and sweater. I snatch my jacket and run, just like Hunter told me to do, through the dazzling, melting world of ice, while blackness eats at the edges of my vision. Every step is an agony, and I feel like I’m in one of those nightmares where you’re trying to escape but you can’t move at all.

Now the humming I heard earlier is louder—not like crickets at all. Like hornets.

Like motors.

My lungs are burning and my chest is aching and tears are stinging my eyes as I flounder toward the homestead. I want to scream. I want to sprout wings and fly. And for a second I think, Maybe it was all a mistake. Maybe nothing bad will happen.

That is when the humming turns into a roar, and above the trees I see the first plane tearing across the sky, screaming.

But no. I’m the one screaming.

I am screaming as I run. I am screaming when the first bomb falls, and the Wilds turn to fire around me.

now

I open my eyes into pain. For a second everything is swirling color, and I have a moment of total panic—Where am I? What happened? —but then shapes and boundaries assert themselves. I am in a windowless stone room, lying on a cot. In my confusion I think that perhaps I’ve made it back to the burrow, and found myself in the sickroom.

But no. This room is smaller and dingier. There are no sinks, and only one bucket in the corner, and the mattress I’m lying on is stained and thin and without sheets.

Memories return: the rally in New York; the subway entrance, the horrible vision of the bodyguards. I remember the rasping voice in my ear: Not so fast.

I try to sit up and instantly have to lay back again, overwhelmed by the surge behind my eyes, like the pressure of a knife.

“Water helps. ”

This time I do sit up, whipping around despite the pain. Julian Fineman is sitting on a narrow cot behind me, leaning his head against the wall, watching me through heavy-lidded eyes. He is holding a tin cup, which he extends toward me.

“They brought it earlier, ” he says. There is a long, thin gash that runs from his eyebrow to his jaw, caked with dried blood, and a bruise on the left side of his forehead, just beneath his hairline. The room is outfitted with a small bulb, set high in the ceiling, and in its white glow, his hair is the color of new straw.

My eyes go immediately to the door behind him, and he shakes his head. “Locked from the outside. ”

So. Prisoners.

“Who’s they? ” I ask, even though I know. It must be Scavengers who brought us here. I think of that hellish vision in the tunnels, a guard strung up, another knifed in his back … no one but the Scavengers could have done that.

Julian shakes his head. I see, too, that he has bruises around his neck. They must have choked him. His jacket is gone and his shirt is ripped; there’s more blood ringing his nostrils, and some of it has dripped onto his shirt. But he seems surprisingly calm. The hand holding the cup is steady.

Only his eyes are electric, restless—that vivid, improbable blue, alert and watchful.

I reach out to take the cup from him, but at the last second he draws it away a fraction of an inch.

“I recognize you, ” he says, “from the meeting. ” Something flickers in his eyes. “You lost your glove. ”

“Yeah. ” I reach again for the cup.

The water tastes mossy, but it feels amazing on my throat. As soon as I have a sip, I realize I’ve never been so thirsty in my life. There isn’t enough to take more than a bare edge off the feeling; I gulp most of it down in one go before realizing, guiltily, that Julian might want some. There’s a half inch of water left, which I try to return to him.

“You can finish it, ” he says, and I don’t argue. As I drink, I can feel his eyes on me again, and when I look at him, I see that he has been staring at the three-pronged scar on my neck. It seems to reassure him.

Amazingly, I still have my backpack. For some reason, the Scavengers have let me keep it. This gives me hope. They may be vicious, but they’re obviously not very practiced at kidnapping people. I remove a granola bar from my bag, then reconsider. I’m not starving yet, and I have no idea how long I’m going to be trapped in this rat hole. I learned in the Wilds: It’s better to wait when you still can. Eventually, you’ll be too desperate to have self-control.

The rest of the things I’ve brought—The Book of Shhh, Tack’s stupid umbrella, the water bottle, which I drank dry on the bus ride into Manhattan, and a tube of mascara, probably Raven’s, nestled at the very bottom of the bag—are useless. Now I know why they didn’t bother confiscating the backpack. Still, I take everything out, lay it carefully on my bed, and overturn the backpack—shaking it hard, as though a knife or a lock pick or some other kind of salvation might suddenly materialize.

Nothing. Still, there’s got to be a way out of here.

I stand up and go to the door, bending my left arm. The pain in my elbow has faded to a dull throb. It isn’t broken, then: another good sign.

I try the door: locked, like he said, and made of heavy iron. Impossible to break down. There’s a smaller door—about the size of a cat flap—fitted into the larger one. I squat down and examine it. The way its hinges are fitted allows it to be opened from their side, but not from ours.

“That’s where they put the water through, ” Julian says. “Food, too. ”

“Food? ” This surprises me. “They gave you food? ”

“A little bit of bread. Some nuts, too. I ate it all. I didn’t know how long you’d be out. ” He looks away.

“That’s all right. ” I straighten up, and scan the walls for cracks or fissures, a hidden door, or a weak place we might be able to push through. “I would have done the same thing. ”

Food, water, an underground cell: Those are the facts. I can tell we’re underground because of the pattern of mold at the top of the walls—it’s a particular kind that we used to get all the time in the burrow. It comes from the dirt all around us.

It means, essentially, that we’re buried.

But if they’d wanted us dead, we’d have been dead already. That is a fact also.

Still, it is not particularly comforting. If the Scavengers have kept us alive so far, it can only be because they’re planning something far worse for us than death.

“What do you remember? ” I ask Julian.

“What? ”

“What do you remember? About the attack? Noises, smells, order of events? ” When I look directly at Julian, he clicks his eyes away from mine. Of course, he has had years of training—segregation, principles of avoidance, the Protective Three: Distance, Detachment, Dispassion. I’m tempted to remind him that it isn’t illegal to make eye contact with a cured. But it seems absurd to have a conversation about right and wrong here.

He must be in denial. That’s why he’s staying so calm.

He sighs, runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t remember anything. ”

“Try. ”

He shakes his head, as though trying to dislodge the memory, leans back again, and stares at the ceiling. “When the Invalids came during the rally…”

I wince unconsciously as he pronounces the word. I have to bite my lip to keep from correcting him: Scavengers. Not Invalids. We’re not all the same.

“Go on, ” I prompt him. I’m moving down the walls now, running my hands along the concrete. I don’t know what I’m hoping to find. We’re trapped, pure and simple. But it seems to make it easier for Julian to speak when I’m not looking at him.

“Bill and Tony—those are my dad’s bodyguards—grabbed me and dragged me toward the emergency exit. We’d planned it earlier, in case something went wrong; we were supposed to go into the tunnels and reconvene, wait for my father. ” His voice catches the slightest bit on the word father, and he coughs. “The tunnels were dark. Tony went looking for the flashlights. He’d stashed them earlier. Then we heard—then we heard a shout, and a cracking noise. Like a nut. ”

Julian swallows hard. For a moment I feel bad for him. He has seen a lot, and quickly.

But I remind myself that he and his father are the reason that the Scavengers exist—the reason they’re forced to exist. The DFA and organizations like it have pushed and squeezed and elbowed out all the feeling in the world. They have clamped their fists around a geyser to keep it from exploding.

But the pressure eventually builds, and the explosion will always come.

“Then Bill went ahead, to make sure Tony was okay. He told me not to move. I waited there. And then—I felt someone squeezing my throat from behind. I couldn’t breathe. Everything went blurry. I saw someone approaching but couldn’t make out any features. Then he hit me. ” He gestures to his nose and shirt. “I passed out. When I woke up, I was in here. With you. ”

I’ve finished my tour of our makeshift cell. But I’m filled with nervous energy and can’t bring myself to sit down. I continue pacing, back and forth, keeping my eyes trained on the ground.

“And you don’t remember anything else? No other noises or smells? ”

“No. ”

“And nobody spoke? Nobody said anything to you? ”

There’s a pause before he says, “No. ” I’m not sure whether he’s lying or not. But I don’t push it. A feeling of complete exhaustion overwhelms me. The pain comes slamming back into my skull, exploding little points of color behind my eyelids. I thump down hard on the ground, draw my knees up to my chest.

“So what now? ” Julian says. There’s a small note of desperation in his voice. I realize that he isn’t in denial. He isn’t calm, either. He’s scared, and fighting it.

I lean my head back against the wall and close my eyes. “Now we wait. ”

It is impossible to know what time it is, and whether it is night or day. The electric bulb fitted high in the wall casts a flat white light over everything. Hours pass. At least Julian knows how to be quiet. He stays on his cot, and whenever I am not looking at him, I can feel him watching me. This is, in all probability, the first time he has ever been alone with a girl his age for an extended period of time, and his eyes travel over my hair, and legs, and arms, as though I am a strange species of animal at the zoo. It makes me want to put on my jacket again, to cover up, but I don’t. It’s hot.

“When did you have your procedure? ” he asks me at a certain point.

“November, ” I answer automatically. My mind is turning the same questions over and over again. Why bring us here? Why keep us alive? Julian, I can understand. He’s worth something. They must be after a ransom.

But I’m not worth anything. And that makes me very, very nervous.

“Did it hurt? ” he asks.

I look up at him. I’m once again startled by the clarity of his eyes: now a clear river color, threaded with purple and navy shadows.

“Not too bad, ” I lie.

“I hate hospitals, ” he says, looking away. “Labs, scientists, doctors. All that. ”

A few beats of silence stretch between us. “Aren’t you kind of used to it by now? ” I say, because I can’t help it.

The left corner of his mouth twitches upward: a tiny smile. He looks at me sideways.

“I guess there are some things you never get used to, ” he says, and for no reason at all, I think of Alex and feel a tightening in my stomach.

“I guess so, ” I say.

Later on there is a change, a shift in the silence. I have been lying on the cot, preserving my strength, but now I sit up.

“What is it? ” Julian says, and I hold up my hand to quiet him.

Footsteps on the other side of the door, coming closer. Then a grinding sound, as the hinges on the small metal cat flap squeak open.

Instantly I dive to the ground, trying to catch a glimpse of our captors. I land hard on my right shoulder just as a tray clatters through the opening and the metal door bangs shut again.

“Damn. ” I sit up, kneading my shoulder. The plate holds two thick chunks of bread and several ropes of beef jerky. They’ve given us a metal bottle filled with water as well. Not bad, considering some of the stuff I used to eat in the Wilds.

“See anything? ” Julian asks.

I shake my head.

“It wouldn’t help us much, I guess. ” He hesitates for a second and then slides off the bed, joining me on the ground.

“Information always helps, ” I say, a little too sharply. That’s something else I learned from Raven. Of course Julian wouldn’t understand. People like Julian don’t want to know, or think, or choose anymore; that is part of the point.

We both reach for the water, and our hands collide over the tray. Julian jerks back as though he has been burned.

“Go ahead, ” I say.

“You first, ” he says.

I take the water and begin sipping, watching Julian the whole time. He tears the bread into pieces. I can tell he’s trying to make it last; he must be starving.

“Have my bread, ” I say. I’m not sure why I offer it to him. It isn’t smart. I’ll need my strength to break out of here.

He stares at me. Strangely, despite the rest of his coloring—caramel-and-wheat-blond hair, blue eyes—his lashes are thick and black. “Are you sure? ”

“Take it, ” I say, and almost add, Before I change my mind.

The second piece he eats greedily, with both hands. When he’s finished, I pass him the water bottle, and he hesitates before bringing it to his mouth.

“You can’t catch it from me, you know, ” I tell him.

“What? ” He starts a little, as though I’ve interrupted a long period of silence.

“The disease. Amor deliria nervosa. You can’t catch it from me. I’m safe. ” Alex told me that very same thing, once. I push the memories of him away, willing them deep into the darkness. “And besides, you can’t catch it from sharing water and food, anyway. That’s a myth. ”

“You can get it from kissing, ” Julian says, after a pause. He hesitates before he says the word kissing. It’s not a word that gets used very much anymore, except in private.

“That’s different. ”

“Anyway, I’m not worried about that, ” Julian says forcefully, and takes a big slug of water as if to prove it.

“What are you worried about, then? ” I take my rope of jerky, lean back against the wall, and start working it with my teeth.

He won’t meet my eyes. “I just haven’t spent that much time with—”

“Girls? ”

He shakes his head. “Anyone, ” he says. “Anyone my own age. ”

We make eye contact for a second then, and a little jolt goes through me. His eyes have changed: Now the crystal waters have deepened and expanded, become an ocean of swirling color—greens and golds and purples.

Julian seems to feel he has said too much. He stands up, walks to the door, and returns. This is the first sign of agitation I’ve seen from him. All day he has been remarkably still.

“Why do you think they’re keeping us here? ” he asks.

“Ransom, probably. ” It’s the only thing that makes sense.

Julian fingers the cut on his lip, considering this. “My father will pay, ” he says after a beat. “I’m valuable to the movement. ”

I don’t say anything. In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust.

“He won’t like dealing with the Invalids, though, ” he adds.

“You don’t know they’re responsible for this, ” I say quickly, and then regret it. Even here, Lena Morgan Jones must act the way she is supposed to.

Julian frowns at me. “You saw them at the demonstration, didn’t you? ” When I don’t answer, he goes on, “I don’t know. Maybe what happened is a good thing. Maybe now people will understand what the DFA is trying to do. They’ll understand why it’s so necessary. ” Julian is using his public voice, as though he’s addressing a large crowd. I wonder how many times he has had the same words, the same ideas, drilled into his head. I wonder whether he ever doubts.

I’m suddenly disgusted with him, and his calm certainty about the world, as though all of life can be dissected and neatly labeled, just like a specimen in a laboratory.

But I don’t say any of this. Lena Morgan Jones keeps her mask on. “I hope so, ” I say fervently, and then I go to my cot, curling up toward the wall so he’ll know I’m done talking to him. For revenge I mouth words, silently, into the concrete—old, forbidden words Raven taught me, from one of the old religions.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He makes me to lie down in green pastures: he leads me beside the still waters.

He restores my soul: he leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Yes, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…

At a certain point, I drift off to sleep. I open my eyes into blackness, suppressing a cry. The electric light has been switched off, leaving us in perfect darkness. I feel hot and sick, and push the woolen blanket all the way to the foot of the cot, enjoying the cool air on my skin.

“Can’t sleep? ”

Julian’s voice startles me. He is not in his cot. I can barely see him. He is a large black shape against the darkness.

“I was sleeping, ” I say. “What about you? ”

“No, ” he answers. His voice sounds softer now, less precise—as though the darkness has somehow melted its edges. “It’s stupid, but…”

“But what? ” Dream images are still fluttering through my head, skirting the edges of consciousness. I was dreaming of the Wilds. Raven was there; Hunter was too.

“I have bad dreams. Nightmares. ” Julian speaks the words in a rush, obviously embarrassed. “I always have. ”

For a split second I feel a little hitch in my chest, like something hard there has loosened. I will the feeling down and away. We are on opposite sides, Julian and I. There can never be any sympathy between us.

“They say it will get better after the procedure, ” he says, almost like an apology, and I wonder if he is thinking the obvious: If I even make it through.

I don’t say anything, and Julian coughs, then clears his throat.

“What about you? ” he asks. “Did you ever have nightmares? Before you were cured, I mean. ”

I think of hundreds of thousands of cureds, sleeping dreamlessly in their marital beds, their heads enveloped in fog, a sweet and empty smoke.

“Never, ” I say, and roll over, drawing the covers over my legs again, and pretend to sleep.

then

There is no time to leave the way we planned. We grab what we can and we run, while the Wilds behind us turn to roaring fire and smoke. We stay close to the river, hoping the water will offer us protection if the fire spreads.