Pandemonium

Page 16

“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.