pandemonium 13 страница

“Down here! ”

But the voices grow louder, closer. We hear feet ringing against the metal ladder, a sound that makes my blood sing with terror. Just then I see it: light zigzagging against the walls, flashing yellow tentacles. They’re using flashlights, of course. No wonder they’re coming so fast. They don’t have to worry about being seen or heard. They are the predators.

And we are the prey.

Hide. It’s our only hope. We need to hide.

There’s an archway on our right—a cutout of even blacker darkness—and I squeeze Julian’s hand, pulling him back, directing him through it, into another tunnel, a foot or so lower than the one we’ve been traveling, and this one dotted with puddles of stagnant, stinking water. We grope our way through the dark. The walls on both sides of us are smooth—no alcoves, no piled wooden crates, nothing to conceal us—and the panic is building. Julian must be feeling it too, because he loses his footing, stumbles, and splashes heavily into one of the narrow beds of still water.

Both of us freeze.

The Scavengers, too, freeze. Their footsteps stop; their voices fall silent.

And then the light seeps through the archway: a creeping, sniffing animal, roving the ground, ravenous. Julian and I don’t move. He pulses my hand, once, then releases it. I hear him shift the backpack from his shoulder and know that he must be fumbling for a weapon. There’s no longer any point in running. There’s no point in fighting, either—not really—but at least we can take a Scavenger or two down with us.

My vision goes suddenly blurry and I’m startled. Tears sting my eyes, and I have to wipe them away with the inside of my wrist. All I can think is—Not here, not like this, not underground, not with the rats.

The light widens and expands; a second beam joins it. The Scavengers are moving silently now, but I can feel them taking their time, and enjoying it, the way a hunter draws his bow back the last few inches before releasing an arrow—those final moments of quiet and stillness before the kill. I can feel the albino. Even in the dark, I know he is smiling. My palms are wet on the knife. Next to me, Julian is breathing heavily.

Not like this. Not like this. My head is full of echoes now, fragments and distortions: the heady smell of honeysuckle in the summer; fat, droning bees; trees bowed low under the weight of heavy snowfall; Hana running ahead of me, laughing, her blond hair swinging in an arc.

And strangely, what strikes me then—in that exact second, as I know with solid certainty that I am going to die—is that all the kisses I have ever had are behind me. The deliria, the pain, all the trouble it has caused, everything we have been fighting for: for me it is done, washed away on the tide of my life.

And then, just as the beams of light grow to headlights—huge, blinding, bearing down on us, and the shadows behind them unfold and become people—I am filled with desperate rage. I can’t see; the light has dazzled me, and the darkness has melted into explosions of color, spots of floating brightness, and dimly, as I leap forward, thrusting blindly with my knife, I hear shouting and roaring and a scream that bursts through my chest, whines through my teeth like the reverberation of a metal blade.

Everything is chaos: hot bodies and panting. There’s an elbow in my chest and thick arms encircling me, choking out my breath. I get a mouthful of greasy hair, a blade of pain in my side; foul breath in my face, and guttural shouts. I can’t tell how many Scavengers there are—three? four? —and don’t know where Julian is. I am striking without looking, struggling to breathe, and everything is bodies—hardness and enclosure, no way to run, no way to break free—and the slashing of my knife. I hit flesh, and flesh, and then the knife gets wrenched from my hand, wrist twisted until I cry out.

Enormous hands find my neck and squeeze, and the air goes out of the tunnel, and shrivels to the point of a pen in my lungs. I open my mouth to gasp and find that I can’t. In the darkness above me I see a tiny bubble of light, of air, floating high above me—I am reaching for it, fighting my way out of a thick, consuming murk—but there is nothing but mud in my lungs and I am drowning.

Drowning. Dying.

Faintly I hear a tiny drumming, a constant pitter-patter, and think that it must once again be raining. Then there are lights blazing again on either side of me: dancing, mobile light, twisting and live. Fire.

Suddenly the circle around my neck breaks. The air is like cold water washing into me, making me gasp and splutter. I sink to my hands and knees, and for one confused second I think I must be dreaming—I fall into a stream of fur, a blur of tiny bodies.

Then my head begins to clear and the world returns from the fog and I realize the tunnel is filled with rats. Hundreds and hundreds of them: rats leaping over one another, wriggling and writhing, colliding with my wrists and nipping at my knees. Two gunshots explode; someone cries out in pain. Above me there are shapes, people, grappling with the Scavengers; they have enormous, smoldering torches, stinking like dirty oil, and they scythe through the air with their fire like farmers cutting through fields of wheat. Various images are frozen, briefly illuminated: Julian doubled over, one hand on the tunnel wall; one of the Scavengers, face contorted, screaming, her hair lit up with fire like one of the torches.

This is a new kind of terror. I’m frozen on my knees as the rats rush around me, drumming me with their bodies, squeaking and slithering and whipping my skin with their tails. I’m sickened and paralyzed with fear.

This is a nightmare. It must be.

A rat crawls up onto my lap. I shout and swat it away, nausea rising in my throat. It hits the wall with a sickening thud, squeaking; then it scrabbles back to its feet and joins the stream again, blurring past me. I’m so disgusted I can’t even move. A whimper works its way out of my throat. Maybe I’ve died and gone to hell, to be punished for deliria and all the terrible things I’ve done—to live in squalor and chaos, just like The Book of Shhh predicts for the disobedient.

“Stand up. ”

I raise my head. Two monsters stand above me, holding torches. That’s what they look like: beasts from the underground, only half-human. One of them is enormous, practically a giant. One of his eyes is milky white, blinded; the other is as darkly glittering as an animal’s.

The other figure is hunched over, back as crookedly swollen as the warped hull of a boat. I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. Long, greasy hair mostly conceals the person’s face. She—or he—has twisted Julian’s hands behind his back and bound them with a cord. The Scavengers are gone.

I stand. The bandage on my neck has come loose, and my skin feels slick and wet.

“Walk. ” The rat-man gestures with his torch toward the darkness behind me. I see that he is slightly doubled over and is clutching his right side with the hand not holding the torch. I think of the gunshots and hearing someone shout. I wonder if he was hit.

“Listen. ” My voice is shaking. I hold up both hands, a gesture of peace. “I don’t know who you are, or what you want, but we’re just trying to get out of here. We don’t have much, but you can take whatever you want. Just—just let us go. Please, okay? ” My voice breaks a little. “Please let us go. ”

“Walk, ” the rat-man repeats, and this time jabs so close to me with his torch I can feel the heat from the flames.

I look at Julian. He gives a minute shake of his head. The expression in his eyes is clear. What can we do?

I turn, and walk. The rat-man goes behind me with his torch, and in front of us, hundreds of rats disappear into the darkness.

then

No one knows what to expect at the third encampment, or whether there will even be a third encampment. Since Tack and Hunter never made it home, we can’t know whether they successfully buried supplies just outside of Hartford, Connecticut, roughly 180 miles south of Rochester, or whether something happened to them along the way. The cold has buried its claws in the landscape now: It is relentless, and will not let go until spring. We are tired, hungry, and defeated. Even Raven can’t maintain the appearance of strength. She walks slowly, head bowed, not speaking.

I don’t know what we’ll do if there is no food at the third encampment. I know Raven is worried too, although she won’t talk about it. None of us talk about it. We just push blindly, obstinately forward.

But the fear is there. As we approach Hartford—threading through the ruins of old towns, bombed-out shells of houses, like dry insect husks—there is no sense of celebration. Instead there is anxiety: a hum of it, running through all of us, making the woods feel ominous. The dusk is full of malice; the shadows are long, pointed fingers, a forest of dark hands. Tomorrow we will reach the third encampment, if it is there. If not, some of us will starve before we make it farther south.

And if it is not there, we can stop wondering about Tack and Hunter: It will mean that in all probability they are dead.

The morning dawns weakly and is full of strange electricity, like the waiting feeling that usually precedes a storm. Other than the crunching of our shoes in the snow, we move in silence.

Finally we reach it: the place where the third encampment should be. There is no sign that Tack and Hunter have been here: no gouges in the trees, no tattered pieces of fabric looped over tree branches, none of the symbols we’ve been using to communicate, and no indication that any goods or supplies have been buried here. This is what we’ve all feared, but still the disappointment is almost physical.

Raven lets out a short exclamation of pain, as though she’s been slapped; Sarah collapses, right there in the snow, and says, “No-no-no-no-no! ” until Lu tells her to shut up. I feel as though my chest has caved in.

“There must be a mistake, ” I say. My voice sounds too loud in the clearing. “We must be in the wrong place. ”

“There’s no mistake, ” Bram says in a low voice. “This is it. ”

“No, ” I insist. “We took a wrong turn somewhere. Or Tack found a better place for the supplies. ”

“Be quiet, Lena, ” Raven says. She’s rubbing her temples, hard. Her fingernails are ringed with purple. “I need to think. ”

“We need to find Tack. ” I know I’m not helping; I know I’m half-hysterical. But the cold and the hunger have turned my thoughts dull too, and this is the only one that stands out. “Tack has our food. We need to find him. We need to—”

I break off as Bram says, “Shhh. ” Sarah scrambles to her feet again. Suddenly we are all tense, alert. We all heard it—the crack of a twig in the woods, sharp as a rifle report. As I look around at us—all of our faces still and listening, anxious—I’m reminded of the deer we saw two days ago in the woods, the way it froze, and tensed, just before bounding away.

The woods are stark-still, brushstrokes of straight black leafless trees, expanses of white, collapsed logs and rotten tree trunks hunched in the snow.

Then, as I am watching, one of the logs—from a distance, just a mass of gray and brown—twitches.

And I know that something is very, very wrong. I open my mouth to say so, but in that exact second everything explodes: Scavengers appear from all around us, shaking off their cloaks and furs—trees becoming people becoming arms and knives and spears—and we are scattering, running, screaming in all directions.

This is, of course, how they want us: panicked, weak, and separated.

We are easier to kill that way.

now

The tunnel we are following slopes downward. For a minute I imagine that we are tunneling toward the center of the earth.

From up ahead, there is light and movement: a fiery glow, and sounds of banging and babbling. My neck is wet with sweat, and the dizziness is worse than ever. I am having trouble staying on my feet. I trip and barely manage to right myself. Rat-man steps forward and seizes one of my arms. I try to wrench away from his grasp, but he keeps one hand firmly on my elbow, walking beside me now. He smells terrible.

The light breaks, expands, and becomes a cavernous room filled with fire and people. The ceiling above us is vaulted, and we emerge from the darkness into a space with tall platforms on either side of us; on them, more monsters—tattered, ragged, dirty people, all of them bloodless and pale, squinting and hobbled—move among metal trash cans where several fires are burning, so the air is clotted with smoke and an old, oily smell. The walls are tiled, and papered with faded advertisements and graffiti.

As we advance along the tracks, people turn and stare. They are all withered or damaged in some way. Many of them are missing limbs, or have other kinds of defects: shriveled infant-hands, strange tumor-growths on their faces, curved spines or crippled knees.

“Up, ” the rat-man says, jerking his chin toward the platform. It is impossibly high.

Julian’s hands are still tied behind his back. Two of the larger men on the platform come forward and grab him under the armpits, help haul him up out of the tracks. The hunchback moves with surprising grace. I get a glimpse of strong arms and delicate, tapered wrists. A woman, then.

“I—I can’t, ” I say. The people on the platforms have stopped now. They are staring at Julian and me. “It’s too high. ”

“Up, ” Rat-man repeats. I wonder if these are the only words he knows—stand, walk, up, down.

The platform is at eye level. I place my hands flat on the concrete and try to heave myself up, but I’m far too weak. I collapse backward.

“She’s hurt! ” Julian cries out. “Can’t you see that? For God’s sake—we need to get out of here. ”

It’s the first time he has spoken since the Scavengers tracked us down, and his voice is full of pain and fear.

The rat-man is piloting me back toward the platform, but this time, as though by silent agreement, some of the observers move simultaneously forward toward us. They crouch at the platform lip; they reach out their arms. I try and twist away, but the rat-man is behind me. He grabs me firmly by the waist.

“Stop it! ” Now Julian is trying to break free of his captors. The two men who helped him onto the platform are still holding him firmly. “Let her go! ”

Hands are grabbing me from all directions. Monstrous faces loom above me, floating in the flickering light.

Julian is still screaming. “Do you hear me? Get off her! Let her go! ”

A woman comes through the crowd toward me. She seems to be missing part of her face; her mouth is twisted into a horrible grin.

No. I want to scream. Hands are gripping me, lifting me onto the platform. I kick out; there is a release. I land hard on my side, rolling onto my back. The woman with the half face looms over me. She reaches for me with both hands.

She is going to strangle me.

“Get away from me! ” I scream out, flailing, trying to push her away. My head smacks back against the platform, and for a second my vision explodes with color.

“Be still, ” she is saying, in a soothing voice—a lullaby voice, surprisingly gentle—as the pain stops, and the screaming stops, and I drift away into a fog.

then

We scatter, panicked and blind. We’ve had no time to load our weapons, and we have no strength to fight. My knife is in my pack—useless to me now. No time to stop and retrieve it. The Scavengers are fast and strong: bigger, I think, than any normal people should be, bigger than anybody should be who makes a home in the Wilds.

“This way! This way! ” Raven runs ahead of me, dragging Sarah by the hand. Sarah is too scared to cry. She can barely keep up with Raven. She is stumbling in the snow.

Terror is a heartbeat drumming in my chest. There are three Scavengers behind us. One of them has an ax. I can hear the blade whistling in the air. My throat is burning, and with each step I sink six inches, have to wrench my legs forward. My thighs are shaking from the effort.

We come over a hill and suddenly, looming ahead of us, there is an outcropping of rock, large boulders shouldering together at angles like people crowding together for warmth. The rocks are slick with ice and form a series of interlinking caves, dark mouths where the snow has not penetrated. There is no way to go around them, or climb over them. We will be caught there, pinioned, like animals in a corral.

Raven freezes for just a second, and I can see the terror in her whole body. A Scavenger lunges for her, and I cry out. She unfreezes, dragging Sarah forward again, running straight for the rock because there is nowhere else to run. I see her fumbling at her belt for her long knife. Her fingers are clumsy, frozen solid. She can’t work it out of its pouch, and I realize, heart sinking, that she intends to make a stand. That is her only plan; we will die out here, and our blood will seep into the snow.

My throat is grating, aching; bare branches whip my face, stinging my eyes with tears. A Scavenger is close to me now, so close I can hear his heavy panting and see his shadow running in tandem with mine—to our left, twin figures cast long on the snow—and in that moment, just before he catches up to me, I think of Hana. Two shadows on the Portland streets; sun hot and high; legs beating in tandem.

Then there is no place left to run.

“Go! ” Raven is screaming, as she pushes Sarah forward into a dark space, one of the caves made by the rocks. Sarah is small enough to fit. Hopefully the Scavengers will not be able to get to her. Then there is a hand on my back, and I am tumbling roughly to my knees, teeth ringing as I bite down on ice. I roll onto my back, six inches from the wall of sheer rock.

He is above me: a giant, a leering monster. He raises his ax, and its blade glitters in the sun. I’m too scared to move, to breathe, to cry.

He tenses, ready to swing.

I close my eyes.

A rifle shot explodes in the silence, then two more. I open my eyes and see the Scavenger above me collapse to one side, like a puppet whose strings have been suddenly cut. His ax falls blade-first in the snow. Two other Scavengers have fallen too, pierced cleanly with bullets: Their blood is spreading against the whiteness.

Then I see them: Tack and Hunter jogging toward us, rifles in hand, thin and pale and haggard and alive.

now

When I come to, I’m lying on my back on a dingy sheet. Julian is kneeling next to me, his hands unbound.

“How are you feeling? ”

All of a sudden I remember—the rats, the monsters, the woman with the half face. I struggle to sit up. Little fireworks of pain go off in my head.

“Easy, easy. ” Julian puts his arm under my shoulders and helps move me into a seated position. “You cracked your head pretty badly. ”

“What happened? ” We are sitting in an area that has been partially blocked off by dismantled cardboard boxes. All along the platform, flowered sheets are strung up between broken slats of plywood, offering some privacy to the squatters inside; mattresses have been placed inside enormous, sagging cardboard structures; walls and blockades have been made by interlocking broken chairs and three-legged tables. The air is still hot, stinking of ash and oil. I watch the smoke trace a line along the ceiling, before getting sucked up and out through a tiny vent.

“They cleaned you up, ” Julian says quietly, in a tone of disbelief. “At first I thought they were going to—” He breaks off, shaking his head. “But then a woman came, with bandages and everything. She wrapped up your neck. It was bleeding again. ”

I touch my neck: It has been taped up with thick gauze. They’ve taken care of Julian, too; the cut on his lip has been cleaned, and the bruises on his eyes are less swollen.

“Who are these people? ” I say. “What is this place? ”

Julian shakes his head again. “Invalids. ” Seeing me flinch, he adds, “I don’t know any other word for them. For you. ”

“We’re not the same, ” I say, watching the bent and crippled figures moving beyond the smoky fire. Something is cooking; I can smell it. I don’t want to think about what kind of food they eat down here—what kind of animals they manage to trap. I think of the rats, and my stomach lurches. “Don’t you get that yet? We’re all different. We want different things. We live different ways. That’s the whole point. ”

Julian opens his mouth to respond, but at that moment the monster woman appears, the one I tried to fight off at the edge of the platform. She pushes aside the cardboard barricade, and it strikes me that they must have arranged it that way so Julian and I would have some privacy.

“You’re awake, ” the woman says. Now that I’m not so terrified, I see that she’s not missing part of her face, as I imagined; the right side of her face is just much smaller than the left, collapsed inward, as though her face is composed of two different masks, imperfectly joined. Birth defect, I think, even though I’ve seen only a few defectives in my life, and all of them were in textbooks. In school we were always taught that kids born from the uncured would end up like this, crippled and mangled in some way. The priests told us this was the deliria manifesting in their bodies.

Children born of the healthy and the whole are healthy and whole; children born of the disease will have sickness in their bones and blood.

All these people, born crippled or bent or misshapen, have been driven underground. I wonder what would have happened to them as babies, as children, if they had stayed aboveground. I remember, then, what Raven told me about finding Blue. You know what they say about deliria babies. . . . She would probably be taken and killed. She wouldn’t even be buried. . . . She’ d be burned, and packed up with the waste.

The woman doesn’t wait for me to answer before kneeling in front of me. Julian and I are both silent. I want to say something to her, but I don’t have the words. I want to look away from her face, but I can’t.

“Thank you, ” I finally manage. Her eyes flick to mine. They are brown and webbed with fine lines. She has a permanent squint, probably from existing in this strange, twilight world.

“How many were they? ” she asks. I would have expected her voice to be mangled and broken, a reflection of her face, but it is high and clear. Pretty. When I don’t immediately respond, she says, “The Intruders. How many? ”

I know immediately that she is referring to the Scavengers, though she uses a different word to describe them. I can tell from the way she says it: the mixture of anger, fear, and disgust.

“I’m not sure, ” I say. “Seven, at least. Maybe more. ”

The woman says, “They came three seasons ago. Maybe four. ” I must look surprised by her way of speaking, because she adds, “It isn’t easy to keep track of time in the tunnels. Days, weeks—unless we go above, it’s hard to know. ”

“How long have you been down here? ” I ask, almost afraid to know the answer.

She squints at me with those small, sludge-colored eyes. I do my best not to look at her mouth and chin: There, the deformity is at its worst, as though her face is curling up into itself, a wilting flower. “I’ve been here always, ” she says. “Or almost always. ”

“How—? ” The question gets caught in my throat.

She smiles. I think it’s a smile, at least. One corner of her mouth corkscrews upward. “There is nothing for us on the surface, ” she says. “Nothing but death, anyway. ”

So it’s like I thought. I wonder if that’s what always happens to the babies who don’t find their way underground, or to a homestead in the Wilds. Maybe they get locked in prisons and mental institutions. Maybe they are simply killed.

“For all my life, the tunnels have belonged to us, ” she says. I’m still having a hard time reconciling the melody of her voice with the look of her face. I focus on her eyes: Even in the dim, smoky light, I can see that they are full of warmth. “People find their way to us with babies. This is a safe place for them. ” Her eyes flick to Julian, and I notice her scan his unblemished neck; then she’s back to me. “You’ve been cured, ” she says. “That’s what they call it aboveground, right? ”

I nod. I open my mouth to try and explain—I’m okay, I’m on your side—but to my surprise, Julian speaks up. “We’re not with the Intruders, ” he says. “We’re not with anyone else. We’re—we’re on our own. ”

We’re not with anyone else. I know he’s just saying it to appease her, but the words still buoy me up, help break apart the knot of fear that has been lodged in my chest since we’ve been underground.

Then I think of Alex, and I feel nauseous all over again. I wish that we had never left the Wilds. I wish that I had never agreed to join the resistance.

“How did you come here? ” the woman says. She pours from a jug next to me, and offers me a plastic cup: a child’s cup, with faded patterns of deer prancing around its rim. This, like everything else down here, must have floated in from above—discarded, unwanted, drifting through the cracks of the earth like a melting snow.

“We were taken. ” Julian’s voice gets stronger now. “Kidnapped by the Intruders. ” He hesitates, and I know that he’s thinking about the DFA badges we found, the tattoo I saw. He doesn’t understand yet, and I don’t either; but I know this was not merely the effort of Scavengers. They were paid or were supposed to be paid for their trouble. “We don’t know why, ” he says.

“We’re trying to find our way out, ” I say, and then something that the woman said earlier strikes me, and I feel a sudden surge of hope. “Wait—you said you have trouble keeping track of time unless you go aboveground, right? So … there’s a way out? A way up? ”

“I don’t go aboveground, ” she says. The way she says above makes it sound like a dirty word.

“But somebody does, ” I persist. “Somebody must. ” They must have ways of getting supplies: sheets and cups and fuel and all the piles of half-used, broken-down furniture heaped around us on the platform.

“Yes, ” she says evenly. “Of course. ”

“Will you take us? ” I ask. My throat is dry. Just thinking about the sun, and the space, and the surface, makes me want to cry. I don’t know what will happen once we’re above again, but I push away the thought.

“You’re still very weak, ” she says. “You need to eat and rest. ”

“I’m okay, ” I insist. “I can walk. ” I try to stand up, and find my vision clouding with black. I thud back down.

“Lena. ” Julian puts a hand on my arm. Something flickers in his eyes—Trust me, it’s okay, a little longer won’t kill us. I don’t know what’s happening, or how we’ve begun to communicate in silence, or why I like it so much.

He turns to the woman. “We’ll rest for a bit. Then will someone show us the way to the surface? ”

The woman once again looks from Julian to me and back again. Then she nods. “You don’t belong down here, ” she says. She climbs to her feet.

I feel suddenly humbled. All these people make a life from trash and broken things, living in darkness, breathing in smoke. And yet, they helped us. They helped us without knowing us, and for no reason at all other than the fact that they knew how. I wonder whether I would do the same, if I were in their position. I’m not sure.

Alex would have, I think. And then: Julian would too.

“Wait! ” Julian calls her back. “We—we didn’t get your name. ”

A look of surprise crosses her face: Then she smiles again, the little corkscrew lips. “I was named down here, ” she says. “They call me Coin. ”

Julian wrinkles his forehead, but I get it right away. It’s an Invalid name: descriptive, easy to remember, funny, kind of sick. Coin, as in two-sided.

Coin was right: Time is hard to measure in the tunnels, even harder than it was to measure in the cell. At least there we had the electric light to guide us—on during day, off at night. Every minute down here becomes an hour.

Julian and I eat three granola bars each, and some more of the jerky we stole from the Scavengers’ stash. It feels like a feast, and before I’m even finished, my stomach is cramping badly. Still, after eating, and drinking the whole jug of water, I feel better than I have in days. We doze for a bit—lying so close I can feel Julian’s breath stirring my hair, our legs almost touching—and we both wake at the same time.