The Invasion of the Tearling

by Erika Johansen

  “The better world,” she whispered, watching another green digit trip forward on the odometer. “So close we can almost touch it.”

  She was only forty miles away.

  When Lily was growing up, Boston had still been a good place to visit for a day. Mom and Dad would take her and Maddy; even though Dad had grown up in Queens and was a diehard Yankee fan, he had a secret admiration for Boston. Mom liked to see the sights and shop, but Dad’s bent was historical; he took Lily and Maddy to Boston Common, to the Kennedy Library. Once they had even gone to the docks, to the site of the Boston Tea Party, and Dad explained what had happened there, quite a different story from the one Lily had heard in school. Maddy said that Dad’s version might get him in trouble, so Lily had never repeated it, but it had been a struggle in tenth grade not to raise her hand and tell the teacher he was wrong. Whenever Lily thought of Boston, she always remembered standing on the docks and looking down at the water.

  Now Boston was buried under a haze of smog. The last few times Lily had been here with Greg, in the daytime, there had been no sunlight, only a thin, sickly luminescence, and now, in the middle of the night, the sky over the city was bright orange, reflecting the streetlights below. When Lily rolled down the windows, the air tasted foul. When was the last time she had breathed outside air? She couldn’t remember, she was so used to scrubbed air, the purifiers that covered New Canaan.

  As soon as she passed the Washington Street exit, Lily’s phone chirped happily to let her know that service had been restored. If Greg had woken up, he would be able to track her by her tag, but that would take some time in the middle of the night. Her phone, though, was in Greg’s name, and he would be able to look up its location himself. After a moment’s thought, Lily chucked the phone out the window.

  She took the exit for Massport Haul Road and began to wind her way down Summer Street, heading toward the vast black emptiness that signified water. She had never been down to this part of the port; Dad had taken them up to the Congress Street Bridge and—in those days—the many child-friendly amusements up at Boston Harbor. But here at Conley Terminal, the waterfront was a sea of containers, and Lily was struck by the ghostly outlines of the container cranes, an endless row of storklike apparatuses towering over her head. They would be different colors, probably, but in the yellow light they all took on varying shades of jaundice. The terminal seemed empty; Lily saw no people walking across the seamed pavement, no cars or movement of machines. Security was down there, she knew, probably hidden in the shadows of buildings and containers. What if they stopped her on the way in?

  She parked the car on the edge of an enormous parking lot, behind several dumpsters in a lonely clump around a small outbuilding that looked as though it might once have taken tickets. For a moment, Lily simply sat there, feeling the adrenaline of the drive fade away. Her muscles felt as though she’d run a marathon.

  According to her map, the first condemned building was about half a mile to the north, a corrugated behemoth that looked like it was ready to collapse. The walls were covered with enormous patches of rust. Lily had brought along a plain black baseball cap, and now she gathered her hair up and tucked it inside the cap before getting out of the car. Someone might find the Mercedes and break into it while she was gone, but there was nothing to be done about that. A last look around revealed no one visible, and Lily darted across the poorly lit pavement, the stench of asphalt and chemicals burning her nose.

  The port had appeared deserted on the way in, but with each step Lily became more convinced that she was being watched. Several times she ran across port rats, big as kittens and not frightened of Lily at all. Most of them merely glanced at her as she passed by, but one actually stood its ground, squeaking in outrage, and Lily was forced to go around it, watching it with a wary eye, realizing anew how far out of her depth she really was.

  She finally reached the south wall of the warehouse and crouched against it, breathing hard. She had a stitch in her side. There were no doors on this wall; she would have to move around the corner to the east wall, the long side of the warehouse. Huddling close to the corrugated tin, she sidled down the wall until she reached the corner. She was just leaning forward to peek around it when something hard pressed against the side of her head.

  “Hands above your shoulders.”

  Lily obeyed. She had never even heard him approach.

  “She can’t be Security,” another man said.

  Lily raised her voice and spoke clearly. “I need to talk to Dorian Rice, William Tear, or Jonathan.” She felt like an idiot; she didn’t even know Jonathan’s last name.

  “No names.” The man’s hands were all over her now, but it was an impersonal search, feeling for weapons. Lily was glad she hadn’t brought Greg’s gun. She forced herself to remain still, though the man knocked her cap off so that her hair fell down her shoulders and into her face.

  “Pretty lady down here, unarmed . . . you must be out of your fucking mind.”

  “William Tear, Dorian Rice, Jonathan. I need to speak to one of them.”

  “Do you now? And what about?”

  “Just give her to us,” another man’s voice floated out of the darkness behind Lily. “She’s wall bait, it’s all over her.”

  A hand groped beneath Lily’s shirt, running across her naked shoulder. “Yup. Still tagged too.”

  “Turn around,” the first voice ordered.

  Lily turned and found a short, powerfully built black man in green army fatigues. Behind him were several other shadowy figures, their silhouettes barely visible through the fog that had begun to creep across the port. The man pressed a gun against her temple, and Lily willed herself to be calm, breathing slowly and easily, in through her nose and out through her mouth.

  “You’re right, she’s from inside the wall. But trying to dress like outside.” The man leaned closer, breathing heavily in Lily’s face. “What are you doing here, wall lady?”

  “I need to see one of them,” Lily repeated, hating her own voice. She sounded like a child stamping her feet on the floor. “You’re all in danger here.”

  “What danger would that be?”

  “Enough!” one of the shadows snarled. Lily couldn’t see his face. “My boss said to kill anyone who approached the building. Just hand her over. We haven’t had wall bait in a long time.”

  “This is our territory. My leader decides what happens to an intruder.” The black man shook his head disgustedly before turning back to Lily. “You picked a bad night to wander down here, wall lady.”

  “Please!” Lily begged. Time was ticking by, seconds rolling by constantly, impossible to get back. “Please. The better world.”

  “What do you know about the better world?”

  “I know that it’s close now. So close we can almost touch it.”

  He blinked and then studied her for a moment, his dark eyes moving rapidly across her face. Lily felt herself being dissected from the inside out.

  “What’s your name, wall lady?”

  No names, Lily almost replied. But then her mother’s voice echoed through her head, a constant phrase from Lily’s childhood: Now is not the time to be smart.

  “Lily Mayhew.”

  The short man tapped at his ear. “Come back.”

  He began to chatter rapidly in a language Lily didn’t recognize. It sounded vaguely like Arabic, but she couldn’t be sure. Her own name passed through the conversation, but Lily barely noticed; she was too busy watching the shadows who stood behind the man’s shoulder. Panic was trying to swarm in her head, which created multiple scenarios faster than she could ignore them: gang rape, torture, her own lifeless body floating in the Inner Harbor. The short man was with Tear, Lily felt certain, but at least some of these others were not, and they loomed out of the darkness, seeming ten feet tall in the fog. They made Lily think of Greg, and she suddenly saw him, clear in front of her, sitting up from the kitchen floor and opening his eyes. The image made Lily jump, as though someo
ne had prodded her with something sharp.

  “We’re taking her in,” the black man announced.

  “In there?” One of the shadows detached itself and resolved into a tall man with messy blond hair, dressed in a flamboyant woman’s jacket of bright blue silk. The rest of his clothing was utterly destroyed, and as he drew nearer, Lily realized that she could smell him, a high stink of something rotten. She didn’t like his eyes either; they had a bulging, manic look that Lily recognized from grade school, where several kids in her class had already been addicted to meth. When the man spoke, she saw that his teeth were a black-stained ruin. “She’s not going anywhere near my boss. She could be wired.”

  The black man shook his head wearily. “They’ll scan her for IEDs.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “You’re in our house.” The black man produced a second gun. “That means my leader’s orders stand. When we come down to Manhattan, you can make the decisions.” He turned back to Lily. “Lace your hands on the back of your head.”

  Lily did.

  “Walk to your right. Stay close to the building, and keep walking until I tell you to stop. Try anything creative and I won’t think twice before I shoot you in the head.”

  Lily nodded jerkily.

  “Blue Horizon my ass,” the man in the silk jacket muttered. “Bunch of pussies.”

  The black man ignored him, prodding Lily forward. “Move. Now.”

  Lily walked forward, concentrating on the ground ahead so that she didn’t stumble or stagger. The man with the two guns wasn’t bluffing; he had the air of the war vet about him, a quality Lily recognized from Jonathan. This man would do whatever needed to be done, even if that meant shooting Lily in the head and throwing her body into the harbor. She wondered what time it was, checked the instinctive motion to look at her watch. She was halfway down the corrugated side of the warehouse when the man said, “Stop.”

  Another group had emerged from the fog on her right. The leader was hooded, carrying some kind of assault rifle on a strap over one shoulder. But as they neared, the hood came down, and Lily recognized those blonde Goth-girl knots with no trouble at all.

  “Rich lady. You’re kidding me.”

  Lily had stopped, but now the gun prodded her forward again. “I couldn’t reach Jonathan. They’re coming here. At dawn.”

  Dorian’s face was marked up with black paint, but Lily still saw her brow furrow. “Who?”

  “Security. All of them. You have to get out of here.”

  “Is she nuts, coming down here?” the black man asked. “I didn’t want to take the chance.”

  “Not nuts, no,” Dorian replied slowly.

  “I’m not,” Lily blurted out. “I swear I’m not. Please . . . you have to get out of here.”

  “We can make her talk,” the man in the blue jacket offered, and the eagerness in his voice made Lily’s stomach turn.

  “Not a chance,” Dorian replied, and Lily heard real hatred in her voice. “I know your methods, you prick.”

  “You and your precious better world, where everyone’s equal to everyone else. But they aren’t, are they? You and your boss still treat our people like shit.”

  “Your people are shit. Shooting up and whoring each other out and killing each other for the clothes off your backs.”

  Lily heard a dry click behind her. Dorian looked past her and raised her gun. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “I’m thinking about it, cunt.”

  The men behind Dorian moved forward and Lily saw that they were all armed with the same weaponry: gleaming black cylinders that looked like some sort of military hardware. Lily had never heard of a separatist attack on a federal armory . . . but of course, she wouldn’t have. Security would never release that information to the public.

  “We’re wasting time!” the man in the blue jacket snapped.

  Dorian ignored him, turning cold eyes back to Lily. “Consider what you’re doing here, Mrs. Mayhew. Because if I find out that you’re here to fuck us over, I’ll watch you die slow.”

  “I’m not,” Lily insisted, trying not to let hurt creep into her voice, for she suddenly realized the staggering level of her own arrogance. In those few days in the nursery, she had convinced herself that she and Dorian had built up some sort of trust. But the divide between them was vast, and any dream of bridging it was a rich girl’s fantasy. “Security’s already surrounded this place, water and land. They’re coming in tomorrow.”

  “How would a wall bitch know something like that?” asked one of the men behind her.

  “This one might,” Dorian replied thoughtfully. “She married into the DOD.”

  Lily blushed. Dorian’s tone made it sound as though Lily had married her cousin and joined a family of inbred lunatics in their shack.

  “Scan her and bring her inside.”

  Lily held still for the body scanner, though the black man gave her an extra sharp prod in the stomach. The scanner made her wonder, again, where they had gotten all of this hardware. Security equipment was supposed to be tagged upon manufacture. Had the Blue Horizon figured out a way to remove the tracking chips from equipment as well as people? When the scan was done, Dorian chattered the strange language into her own headset for a moment and then prodded Lily with the tip of her rifle.

  “Inside.”

  Lily went through the warehouse door, her hands still laced behind her head, and blinked as light assaulted her eyes, blinding her for a few moments. When she recovered, she found herself in a large room with corrugated metal walls. A small table was set up in the middle of the room, two men seated there. Lily first spotted Jonathan, standing behind a chair at the far end, and in the chair sat William Tear, staring with narrowed eyes at the man opposite. Dorian prodded Lily in the back with her rifle, and Lily marched forward. Several more guards moved to surround her now, though she was relieved to see that they only had pistols. Two of the guards were women, which surprised Lily; she had somehow assumed that Dorian was unique.

  Tear looked up in annoyance as they approached, but as he spotted Lily, his face changed, became unreadable, and he stood up from his chair. The man at the near end of the table turned around, and Lily fought not to recoil. He had lost most of his face to acid, or something worse. Red, angry tissue covered his cheekbones and crawled over his forehead. His teeth were just as bad as those of the man outside.

  “Nice, Tear,” the burned man rasped. “Your people let a Security agent through.”

  “No,” Tear replied coldly. “Not sure what she is, Parker, but she’s not Security.”

  “Look at her clothes. Whatever she is, she’s wall meat, and she’s seen my face.”

  Parker came toward Lily. His disfigurement made him look simultaneously ancient and rapacious, and Lily shrank back. He reached out and grabbed her breast, roughly, wrenching it to the left, and Lily clamped her lips shut on a groan.

  “Take your hands off her.” Tear’s voice had turned to ice now.

  “Why should I?” Parker grabbed at Lily’s other breast, and her hand balled into a fist. But then she felt Dorian’s hand slide over her shoulder and clamp there, a warning. Lily closed her eyes, forced herself to be still.

  “Because if you don’t, Parker, I break that hand and throw you out of here with nothing, none of my toys. How would you like that?”

  Parker’s face twisted angrily, but he finally let go. Lily backed up, clutching her aching breast, until she bumped into Dorian’s rifle again. These people, Parker and his men, were what Lily had always pictured when she thought about life outside the wall: violent and careless, with none of the fundamental decency she sensed from Tear and his people. So what were they doing here?

  Tear left the table and Jonathan followed, keeping close, in the same way that he did with Lily. His eyes constantly landed on Tear and then flitted away, anxious, looking for threats, and at that moment Lily realized that Jonathan had never really been her bodyguard. He was Tear’s man, and Lily had only bee
n an incidental stop on the way.

  Tear halted in front of her, and she was struck again by his military posture: straight, with the heels together. Time seemed to be slipping away again; she wished she could check her watch, but she kept her hands up. It would be long past midnight now. How many hours until dawn?

  “Mrs. Mayhew. Why are you here?”

  Lily took a deep breath and repeated the entire evening’s events, everything since Arnie Welch had shown up for dinner. She omitted nothing except Greg and the picture frame; when the moment came, she found herself unable to tell that story in front of all of these people. Tear’s gaze never wavered from her as she spoke, and Lily found that she had been right, that night in the nursery: his eyes were not grey but silver, a bright and glimmering silver. Lily had to fight not to look down.

  “She’s lying,” Parker announced flatly, when Lily had finished.

  Jonathan leaned over to whisper into Tear’s ear, and Tear nodded. “We did lose Goodin a week ago. Several bodies were burned beyond recovery in that explosion.”

  “That’s an easy piece of bullshit for Security! They could have identified your man by dental records and then sent this whore in to tell a story.”

  “Security doesn’t have any medical records on my people.”

  “Someone else talked.”

  “How did she know where to find us, then, Parker?” Tear’s voice thinned with contempt, but he turned to Dorian. “Dori. Take your boys out and have a look around. Thirty minutes.”

  The gun barrel withdrew from Lily’s spine, and she shivered. Dorian’s hand squeezed her shoulder one last time, then left.

  “So what to do with the whore?” Parker asked. His men had moved up to surround him, and Lily saw that they carried only knives or pistols, antiquated guns that must have been at least twenty years old, none of the heavy weaponry that Tear’s people were holding. Tear’s people seemed cleaner as well, as though they had access to plumbing. Here and there Lily saw crooked teeth, but none of them seemed to be rotten. The Blue Horizon clearly had their own doctors; did they have a dentist as well? Clothes, teeth, weapons . . . everything about Tear’s people seemed to be newer. Better.