pandemonium 17 страница

Over the next few hours, I watch an additional five trucks pass. In each case, the ritual is repeated, although one truck, marked EXXON, is opened and thoroughly searched. As I wait, I plan. I move closer to the border, keeping low to the ground, moving only when the highway is empty and the moon has skated behind one of the heavy, massed clouds in the sky. When I am no farther than forty feet from the wall, I once again hunker down to wait. I am so close, I can make out individual features of the guards—both men—as they emerge periodically from the guard hut to circle the approaching trucks. I can hear snatches of conversation, too: They ask for ID, they verify license and registration. The ritual lasts no longer than three or four minutes. I will have to act quickly.

I should have worn something warmer than a wind breaker. At least the cold keeps me awake.

By the time I see an opportunity to move, the sun is already rising behind a thin covering of fleecy dark clouds. The floodlights are still illumined, but their power is diminished in the murky dawn, and they’re not nearly so blinding.

A garbage truck, with a ladder that extends up one of its sides and onto its metal roof, shudders to a halt in front of the metal gate. I move into a crouch and wrap my fingers around the rock I selected earlier from the ditch. I have to flex my fingers a few times just to get the blood flowing. My limbs are stiff, and aching with cold.

One guard circles the vehicle, completing his inspection, cradling his rifle. The other stands at the driver’s window, blowing air onto his hands, asking the usual questions. Where are you coming from? Where are you headed?

I stand up, cupping the rock in my right hand, and thread quickly through the trees, careful to step only where the leaves have been trampled to wet mulch—a good muffler for my footsteps. My heart is drumming so hard in my throat I can hardly breathe. The guards are twenty feet to my right, maybe less. I have only one chance.

When I’m close enough to the wall to be sure of my aim, I wind up and rocket the stone toward one of the floodlights. There’s a miniature explosion when it hits, and the sound of falling glass. Instantly I’m retracing my steps, circling backward as both guards whip around.

“What the hell? ” one of them says, and starts jogging toward the damaged floodlight, shouldering his rifle. I’m praying that the second guard follows. He hesitates, shifting his gun from his left hand to his right. He spits.

Go, go, go.

“Wait here, ” he says to the driver, and then he, too, moves away from the garbage truck.

This is it: This is my chance, while the guards are distracted, examining the shattered light forty feet down the wall. I have to approach the truck at an angle, from the passenger’s side. I double over and try to make myself as small as I can. I can’t risk letting the driver get a look at me in his side mirror. For twenty terrifying seconds I’m on the road, totally exposed, free of the trees and gnarled brown bushes that have been serving as cover, and just then I have a memory of the first time Alex took me to the Wilds—how scared I was sneaking over the fence, how exposed I felt—raw and terrified, as though I’d been cut open.

Ten feet, five feet, two feet. And then I’m swinging myself up onto the ladder, the metal freezing, biting my fingers. When I get up to the roof I press myself perfectly flat, belly-down on a coating of bird shit and rust. Even the metal smells sick and sweet, like rotten garbage, a smell that must have seeped over the years into the truck frame. I turn my face toward the cuff of my wind breaker to keep from coughing. The roof is slightly concave, and ringed by a two-inch metal rail, which means at least I won’t be in danger of slipping off when the truck begins to move. I hope.

“Hey! ” the driver is calling out to the guards. “Can you let me through or what? I’m on a schedule. ”

There’s no immediate response. It feels like an eternity before I hear footsteps returning to the truck, and one of the guards says, “All right, go ahead. ”

The iron gate clanks open, and the truck begins to move. I slide backward as the truck picks up speed, but manage to wedge my hands and feet against the metal railing; I must look like a giant starfish from above, suctioned to the roof. The wind whips by me, stinging my eyes: a biting cold that carries with it the smells of the Hudson River, which I know must be close. On our left, just off the highway, is the city: billboards and dismantled streetlights and ugly apartment buildings with purple-gray faces, bruised complexions turned toward the horizon.

The truck rattles down the highway, and I strain just to hang on, to keep myself from getting bounced off and onto the road. The cold is an agony now, a thousand needles on my face and my hands, and I have to squeeze my eyes shut because they’re watering so badly. The day comes dark and slow. The red glow at the horizon quickly smolders and burns out, getting sucked up behind the woolen clouds. It begins to drizzle. Each drop of rain is a tiny shard of glass on my skin, and the roof of the truck becomes slick and difficult to hold on to.

Soon, thankfully, we are slowing and bumping off the highway. It is still very early, and the streets are mostly silent. Above me, apartment buildings loom, enormous fingers pointing toward the sky. Now I can smell food scents carried out onto the street through open windows: gasoline and wood smoke; the closeness of millions and millions of people.

This is my stop.

As soon as the truck slows at a light, I retreat down the ladder—scanning the street to make sure no one is watching—and jump lightly onto the pavement. The garbage truck continues its lumbering journey as I try to stamp some feeling into my toes and blow hot air onto my fingers. Seventy-second Street. Julian lives on Charles Street, he told me, which is all the way downtown. Judging from the quality of the light, it must be a little before seven—maybe a little later, since the thick cloud cover makes it hard to tell time accurately. I can’t risk being seen on a bus looking the way I look—water-spotted, covered with mud.

I double back toward the West Side Highway, and the footpath that cuts north to south through the long, well-tended park that runs parallel to the Hudson. It will be easier to avoid people here. No one will be strolling on a rainy day this early in the morning. At this point exhaustion is burning the back of my eyes, and my feet feel leaden.

But every step brings me closer to Julian, and to the girl I pledged to become.

I’ve seen pictures of the Finemans’ house on the news, and once I reach the tangle of narrow streets in the West Village—so different from the ordered grid that defines the rest of Manhattan, and in some ways a surprising choice for Thomas Fineman—it does not take me long to find it. The rain is still coming down, moisture squelching in my sneakers. The Finemans’ townhouse is impossible to mistake: It is the largest house on the block, and the only one that is encircled by a high stone wall. An iron gate, hung with brown nests of ivy, gives a partial view of the front path and a tiny brown yard, churned mostly to mud. I walk the street once, checking the house for signs of activity, but all the windows are dark, and if there are guards watching Julian, they must be inside. I get a surge of pleasure from the graffiti someone has scrawled on the Finemans’ stone wall: murderer. Raven was right: Every day, the resistance is growing.

One more turn around the block, and this time I’m scanning the whole street, keeping my eyes up, looking for witnesses, nosy neighbors, problems, escape routes. Even though I’m soaked through, I’m grateful for the rain. It will make things easier. At least it keeps people off the streets.

I step up to the Finemans’ iron gate, trying to ignore the anxiety buzzing through me. There’s an electronic keypad, just like Julian said: a tiny LCD screen requests that I type in a PIN. For a moment, despite the rain and the desperate scrabbling of my heart in my chest, I can’t help but stand there, amazed by the elegance of it: a world of beautiful, buzzing things, humming electricity, and remote controls, while half the country flounders in dark and closeness, heat and cold, sucking up shreds of power like dogs picking gristle from a bone.

For the first time it occurs to me that this, really, might have been the point of the walls and borders, the procedure and the lies: a fist squeezing tighter and tighter. It is a beautiful world for the people who get to play the fist.

I let hatred tighten inside of me. This, too, will help.

Julian said that his family kept clues embedded in or around the gate—reminders of the code.

It doesn’t take me long to figure out the first three numbers. At the top of the gate, someone has tacked a small metal plate engraved with a quotation from The Book of Shhh: HAPPY ARE THEY WHO HAVE A PLACE; WISE ARE THEY WHO FOLLOW THE PATH; BLESSED ARE THEY WHO OBEY THE WORD.

It’s a famous proverb—one that comes, incidentally, from the Book of Magdalena, a passage of the Book I know well. Magdalena is my namesake. I used to scour those pages, looking for traces of my mother, for her reasons and her message to me.

Book 9, Proverb 17. I type 917 into the keypad: If I’m right, I have only one number to go. I’m about to try final digits at random, when something within the yard flutters, catches my eye. Four white paper lanterns, stamped with the DFA logo, have been strung up above the porch. They are flapping in the wind, and one has been stripped almost loose of the string; it dangles awkwardly, like a semi-severed head, tapping a rhythm against the front door. Except for the DFA logo, the lanterns look like decorations you might find at a child’s birthday party. They look strangely incongruous above the massive stone porch, swaying high above the bleak yard.

A sign. Has to be.

9174. The gate clicks as the locks retract, and I’m in.

I slip into the front yard quickly, closing the gate behind me, taking in as much as I can. Five floors, including a sunken basement level; curtains all drawn, everything dark. I don’t even bother with the front door. It will be locked, and if there are guards anywhere, they are no doubt waiting in the hall. Instead I slip around the side of the house and find the concrete stairs that lead to a warped wooden door: the basement entrance. A small window set in the brick should allow me to see inside, but a set of heavy wooden window slats obscures the view completely. I will have to go in blind, and pray that there are no guards at this entrance.

This door is also locked, but the doorknob is old and loose, and should be relatively easy to pick. I drop to my knees and take out my knife. Tack showed me how to pick locks once with the narrow tip of a razor, not knowing that Hana and I had perfected the skill years ago. Her parents used to keep all the cookies and sweets locked in a pantry. I wedge the knife tip in the narrow space between the door and its frame. It takes just a few moments of twisting and jiggling before I feel the lock release. I tuck the knife into the pocket of my wind breaker—I’ll need it close now—take a breath, and push through the door and into the house.

It is very dark. The first thing I notice is the smell: a laundry smell, of lemon-scented towels and dryer sheets. The second thing I notice is the quiet. I lean against the door, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. Shapes begin to assert themselves: a washer and dryer in the corner, a room crisscrossed with laundry lines.

I wonder whether it was here that Julian’s brother was kept; whether he died here, alone, curled on the cement floor, under dripping sheets with the smell of moisture clotting his nostrils. I push the image quickly from my mind. Anger is useful only to a certain point. After that, it becomes rage, and rage will make you careless.

I exhale a little bit. There is no one with me down here—I can feel it.

I move through the laundry room, ducking under several pairs of men’s briefs, which are clipped to a line. The thought flashes through my mind that one of them might be Julian’s.

Stupid how the mind will try to distract itself.

Beyond the laundry room is a small pantry stacked with household cleaning supplies, and beyond that, a set of narrow wooden stairs that leads to the first floor. I ease my way onto the stairs, moving at a crawl. The stairs are warped and look like they will be loud.

At the top is a door. I pause, listening. The house is silent, and a feeling of creeping anxiety starts snaking over my skin. This is not right. It’s too easy. There should be guards, and regulators. There should be footsteps, muffled conversation—something other than this deadweight silence, hanging heavy like a thick blanket.

The moment I ease open the door and step out into the hallway, the realization hits me: Everyone has gone already. I’m too late. They must have moved Julian early this morning, and now the house is empty.

Still, I feel compelled to check every room. A panicked feeling is building inside of me—I’m too late, he’s gone, it’s over—and the only thing I can do to suppress it is to keep moving, keep slipping soundlessly across the carpeted floors and searching every closet, as though Julian might appear within one.

I check the living room, which smells of furniture polish. The heavy curtains are pulled shut, keeping out a view of the street. There is a pristine kitchen and a formal dining room that looks unused; a bathroom, which smells cloyingly of lavender; a small den dominated by the largest television screen I have ever seen in my life. There is a study, stacked with DFA pamphlets and other pro-cure propaganda. Farther down the hall, I come across a locked door. I remember what Julian told me about Mr. Fineman’s second study. This must be the room of forbidden books.

Upstairs, there are three bedrooms. The first one is unused, sterile, and filled with the smell of must. I feel, instinctively, that this was Julian’s brother’s room, and that it has remained shut up since his death.

I inhale sharply when I reach Julian’s room. I know it is his. It smells like him. Even though he was a prisoner here, there are no signs of struggle. Even the bed is made, the soft-looking blue covers pulled haphazardly over green-and-white-striped sheets.

For a second I have the urge to climb into his bed and cry, to wrap his blankets around me the way I let him wrap his arms around my waist at Salvage. His closet door is open a crack; I see shelves filled with faded denim jeans, and swinging button-down shirts. The normalcy of it almost kills me. Even in a world turned upside down, a world of war and insanity, people hang their clothing; they fold their pants; they make their beds.

It is the only way.

The next room is much larger, dominated by two double beds, separated by several feet of space: the master bedroom. I catch a glimpse of myself in a large mirror hanging over the bed and recoil. I haven’t seen my reflection in days. My face is pale, my skin stretched tight over my cheekbones. My chin is smeared with dirt, and my clothing is covered with it too. My hair is frizzing from the rain. I look like I belong in a mental institution.

I rummage through Mrs. Fineman’s clothing and find a soft cashmere sweater and a pair of clean, black denim jeans. They’re too big around the waist, but once I belt the pants I look almost normal. I remove my knife from my backpack and wrap the blade in a T-shirt so I can safely carry it in the pocket of my wind breaker. I ball up the rest of my clothes and stuff them into the very back of the closet, behind the shoe rack. I check the clock on the bedside table. Eight thirty a. m.

On my way downstairs, I spot a bookshelf in a hallway alcove, and the small statue of a rooster perched on the highest shelf. I can’t explain what overcomes me, or why it matters, but all of a sudden I need to know whether Thomas Fineman has been keeping the key to the second study there all these years. He’s the kind of man who would do that, even after the hiding place had been discovered by his son. He would trust that the beating had served as a sufficient deterrent. He would do it as a test and a tease, so that every time Julian saw the stupid thing, he would remember, and regret.

The bookshelf isn’t particularly big, and the last shelf isn’t very high—I’m sure Julian could easily reach it now—but I have to stand on a footstool to get at the rooster. As soon as I pull the porcelain animal toward me, something rattles in its belly. The head of the rooster unscrews, and I tip a metal key into my palm.

Just then I hear the muffled sound of footsteps, and someone saying, “Yes, yes, exactly. ” My heart stops: Thomas Fineman’s voice. At the far end of the hallway, I see the handle on the front door begin to rattle as he works a key in the lock.

Instinctively, I jump off the footstool, still clutching the key in my palm, and whirl around to the locked door. It takes me a few seconds of fumbling before I can make the key fit, and in that time I hear the front door locks slide open, two of them, and I am frozen in the hallway, terrified, as the door opens a crack.

Then Fineman says, “Damn it. ” Pause. “No, Mitch, not you. I dropped something. ”

He must be on the phone. In the time it takes him to pause and scoop up whatever he has dropped, I manage to get the key in the lock, and I slip quickly into the forbidden study, closing the door a split second before the front door closes as well, a double-heartbeat rhythm.

Then the footsteps are coming down the hall. I back away from the door, as though Fineman will be able to smell me. The room is very dim—the heavy velvet curtains at the window are imperfectly closed, allowing a bare ribbon of gray light to penetrate. Towers of books and artwork spiral toward the ceiling like twisted totems. I bump into a table and have to spin around, catching a heavy, leather-bound volume at the last second, before it thuds to the floor.

Fineman pauses outside the study door, and I could faint. My hands are shaking.

I do not remember whether I put the head back on the rooster.

Please, please, please, keep moving.

“Uh-huh, ” he is saying into the phone. His voice is flinty, clipped: not at all the upbeat drawl he uses when he speaks on radio interviews and at DFA meetings. “Yes, exactly. Ten a. m. It’s been decided. ”

Another pause, and then he says, “Well, there really is no choice, is there? How would it look if I tried to appeal? ”

His footsteps retreat up the stairs and I exhale a little, although I’m still too afraid to move. I’m terrified I’ll bump into something again and disrupt one of the piles of books. Instead I wait, frozen, until Fineman’s footsteps once again pound down the stairs.

“I got it, ” he is saying, as his voice grows fainter: He is leaving. “Eighteenth and Sixth. Northeastern Medical. ”

Then, faintly, I hear the front door open and shut, and I am once again left in silence.

I wait another few minutes before moving, just to be absolutely sure that I’m alone, that Fineman won’t be coming back. My palms are so sweaty I can barely return the book to its place. It is an oversized volume, stamped with gold lettering, perched on a table next to a dozen identical books. I think it must be a kind of encyclopedia until I see the words EASTERN SEABOARD, NEW YORK—TERRORISTS, ANARCHISTS, DISSENTERS etched on one of the spines.

I feel, suddenly, as though I’ve been punched in the stomach. I squat down, peering at the spines more closely. They are not books, but records: an enumerated list of all the most dangerous incarcerated criminals in the United States, divided by area and prison system.

I should leave. Time is running out, and I need to find Julian, even if I’m too late to help him. But the compulsion is there, equally strong, to find her—to see her name. It’s a compulsion to see whether she has made it onto the list, even though I know she must have. My mother was kept for twelve years inside Ward Six, a place of solitary confinement reserved exclusively for the most dangerous resisters and political agitators.

I don’t know why I care. My mother escaped. She scratched through the walls, over years, over a decade—she tunneled out like an animal. And now she is free somewhere. I have seen her in my dreams, running through a portion of the Wilds that is always sunny and green, where food is always abundant.

Still, I have to see her name.

It doesn’t take me long to find Eastern Seaboard, Maine—Connecticut. The list of political prisoners who have been incarcerated in the Crypts in the past twenty years spans fifty pages. The names are not listed alphabetically, but by date. The pages are handwritten, in chicken scrawls of varying legibility; this book has obviously passed through many hands. I have to move closer to the window, to the thin fissure of light, to read. My hands are shaking, and I steady the book on the corner of a desk—which is, itself, almost completely concealed with other books, forbidden titles from the days before the cure. I’m too focused on the list of names—each one a person, each one a life, sucked away by stone walls—to care or look closer. It gives me only marginal comfort to know that some of these people must have escaped after the bombing of the Crypts.

I easily find the year my mother was taken—the year I turned six, when she was supposed to have died. It is a section of five or six pages, and probably two hundred names.

I track my finger down the page, feeling dizzy for no reason. I know she will be in the book. And I know, now, that she is safe. But still, I must see it; there is a piece of her that exists in the faded ink traces of her name. Her life was taken by those pen-strokes—and my life was taken too.

Then I see it. My breath catches in my throat. Her name is written neatly, in large, elegant cursive, as though whoever was in possession of the log at the time enjoyed the looping curls of all the l’s and a’s: Annabel Gilles Haloway. The Crypts. Ward Six, Solitary Confinement. Level 8 Agitator.

Next to these words is the prisoner’s intake number. It is printed carefully, neatly: 5996.

My vision tunnels, and in that moment the number seems lit up by an enormous beam. Everything else is blackness, fog.

5996. The faded green number tattooed on the woman who rescued me from Salvage, the woman with the mask.

My mother.

Now my impressions of her are shuffling back, but disjointed, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t quite interconnect: her voice, low and desperate and something else. Pleading, maybe? Sad? The way she reached out, as though to touch my face, before I swatted her away. The way she kept using my name. Her height—I remember her being so tall, but she is short, like me, probably no more than five-four. The last time I saw her, I was six years old. Of course she seemed tall to me then.

Two words are blazing through me, each one a hot hand, wrenching my insides: impossible and mother.

Guilt and twisting disbelief: shredding me, turning my stomach loose. I didn’t recognize her. I always thought that I would. I imagined she would be just like the mother in my memories, in my dreams—hazy, red-haired, laughing. I imagined she would smell like soap and lemons, that her hands would be soft, smoothed with lotion.

Now, of course, I realize how stupid that is. She spent more than a decade in the Crypts, in a cell. She has changed, hardened.

I slam the book closed, quickly, as though it might help—as though her name is a scurrying insect between the pages, and I can stamp it back into the past. Mother. Impossible. After all that, my hoping and wishing and searching, we were so close. We were touching.

And still she chose not to reveal herself. Still, she chose to walk away.

I am going to be sick. I stumble blindly down the hall, out into the drizzle. I am not thinking, can hardly breathe. It is not until I’ve made it to Sixth Avenue, several blocks away, that the cold begins to clear the fog from my mind. At that point I realize I’m still clutching the key to the forbidden study in one hand. I forgot to lock it again. I’m not even sure I closed the front door behind me—for all I know I have left it swinging open.

It doesn’t matter now. Nothing matters. I am too late to help Julian. I am too late to do anything but watch him die.

My feet carry me toward 18th Street, where Thomas Fineman will be attending his son’s execution. As I walk, head down, I grip the handle of the knife in my wind breaker pocket.

Perhaps it is not too late for revenge.

Northeastern Medical is one of the nicer lab complexes I’ve seen, with a stone facade and scrolled balconies, and only a discreet brass sign above the heavy wooden door indicating that it is a medical facility. It was probably once a bank or a post office, from the days when spending wasn’t regulated; from the days when people communicated freely across unbounded cities. It has that look of stateliness and importance. But of course Julian Fineman would not be put to death among commoners, in one of the city wards or hospital wings of the Craps. Only the best for the Finemans, until the very end.

The drizzle is finally letting up, and I pause on the corner, ducking into the alcoved doorway of a neighboring building, and shuffle quickly through the stack of ID cards I stole from the Scavengers. I select Sarah Beth Miller, a girl who resembles me pretty closely in age and looks, and use my knife to put a deep gouge in her height—five-eight—so you can’t read it clearly. Then I whittle away at the identification number below her picture. I have no doubt that the number has been invalidated. In all probability, Sarah Beth Miller is dead.

I smooth down my hair, praying that I look at least halfway decent, and push through the front door of the lab.

Inside is a waiting room decorated tastefully, with a plush green carpet and mahogany furniture. An enormous clock, ostentatiously antique or made to look like it, ticks quietly on the wall, pendulum swinging rhythmically. A nurse is sitting at a large desk. Behind her is a small office: a series of metal filing cabinets, a second desk, and a coffee machine, half filled. But the clock, the expensive furniture, and even the scent of freshly brewed coffee can’t conceal the normal lab smell of chemical disinfectant.

At the right-hand side of the room are double doors with curved brass handles; these must lead to the procedural rooms.

“Can I help you? ” the nurse asks me.

I walk directly to her, laying both hands on the counter, willing myself to seem confident, calm. “I need to speak with someone, ” I say. “It’s very urgent. ”

“Is this regarding a medical issue? ” she asks. She has long fingernails, perfectly filed into rounds, and a face that reminds me of a bulldog—heavy, low-hanging jowls.

“Yes. Well, no. Kind of. ” I’m making it up as I go; she frowns, and I try again. “It’s not my medical issue. I need to make a report. ” I drop my voice to a whisper. “Unauthorized activity. I think—I think my neighbors have been infected. ”

She drums her fingernails, once, against the counter. “The best thing to do is make an official report at the police station. You can also go to any of the municipal regulatory stations—”

“No. ” I cut her off. Sign-in sheets, clipped together, are stacked next to me, and I straighten them, scanning the list of doctors, patients, problems—poor sleep/dreaming! , deregulated moods, flu—and pick a name at random.

“I insist that I speak to Dr. Branshaw. ”

“Are you a patient of the doctor’s? ” She drums her nails again. She is bored.

“Dr. Branshaw will know what to do. I’m extremely upset. You have to understand. I’m living underneath these people. And my sister—she’s uncured. I’m thinking about her, too, you know. Isn’t there some kind of—I don’t know—vaccination Dr. Branshaw might give her? ”

She sighs. She turns her attention to the computer monitor, makes a few quick keystrokes. “Dr. Branshaw is completely booked up today. All of our medical specialists are booked. An exceptional event has made it necessary—”

“Yeah, I know. Julian Fineman. I know all about it. ” I wave my hand.

She frowns at me. Her eyes are guarded. “How did you know—”