Hungry

by H. A. Swain

  Next, a scraggly, greasy couple fills the screen. “They drove it right out of here!” the woman says angrily, pointing to shed doors hanging off their hinges. “Stole our motorbike in the middle of the night.” The camera zooms in, and I see that the shed is oddly empty, not a trace of drug paraphernalia to be seen. “Now how are we going to get to work?” the man asks, shaking his head sadly.

  The couple is replaced by Pico and Iris who stand in front of a fuel pump. “He came in looking for a black-market toll pass,” Iris explains. “But I don’t trade in those.”

  Pico winces through a puffy black eye. “So they stole fuel, hijacked a transport, and drove off.”

  They cut to three seconds of blurry footage of us running out the front door while Pico writhes on the floor. I scrunch down to hide my pink hair, but at least I’m no longer wearing the orange dress so visible in the video. I brace myself, wondering if Betta ratted on us too, but they make no mention of her.

  Ahimsa comes back on-screen. “What’s particularly disturbing is that unlike the people she has hurt, Thalia Apple is a highly educated, privileged person with every advantage,” she says. “Rather than help create a better world, she defaces One World sites and encourages hardworking individuals to unlawfully protest the detainment of Ana Gignot and her followers, who were clearly in violation of the Universal Nutrition Protection Act. This type of reckless behavior puts all of us at risk as it jeopardizes our food supply.”

  This last bit confuses me. I try to puzzle through what she’s implying, but then the screen returns to the reporter who stands next to a guy about my age, holding a FREE ANA! sign in the midst of the prison protesters. “Does knowing that the leader of this movement is actually the daughter of One World execs change your opinion of what’s going on here?” she asks him.

  “Yes, of course!” he says into the mic. “If I had known she’s just some privy rebelling against Mommy and Daddy, I wouldn’t have come. She can afford to get arrested, but I can’t and she’s not even out here!” He rips his sign in half and tosses it to the ground.

  A still frame of us running from the biofuel building fills the screen. “Anyone with information leading to the arrest of these two armed and dangerous individuals should contact proper authorities immediately,” the reporters says.

  When did we become armed?

  Finally, Ahimsa comes back on-screen. “Naturally,” she says, “anyone who aids in their capture will be compensated for cooperation.”

  Her words send a sickening chill down my spine. Now everyone will be looking for us, but only one person knows where we are. Slowly, I stand up and make my way shakily through the waiting room with my head down. Everyone discusses the sensational story about the privy causing trouble. I try to stay calm and focus by thinking logically and systematically about what needs to be done so I don’t panic.

  First, I have to get out of here because by now someone in the Inner Loop has zeroed in on the locator signal I sent out into the world while my Gizmo was linked to the network signal. It’s no longer a matter of asking my parents to come get me. I’ve been accused of serious crimes. Soon, security agents and vigilantes will descend on this place, and no matter what anyone might think, once I’m arrested I doubt my parents will be able to buy my freedom—even if they wanted to. Next, I have to warn Basil. Despite how crappy he was to me, I owe him a chance to get out of here before his mother turns him in. After that, I have no idea what I’ll do since all the people that I thought were on my side, including Yaz and Fiyo, have turned their backs on me.

  Once outside, I toss the crutches because they’ll only slow me down. I don’t know if it’s the brace or the adrenaline coursing through me or if the medication from the patch has kicked in, but I feel no pain as I limp down the road. Or maybe I can’t feel anything because the agony of being abandoned by so many people I love is too great.

  * * *

  I keep my head down on the way through town. Fearing Basil’s mom is nearby, I cross the road when I see the rusted-out blue car with mismatched wheels parked in front of the broken-down buildings. It’s not until I turn the corner and reach the anemic river and skeletal tree that I start to feel less conspicuous, but I still hurry because whoever’s living in the football field could be just as dangerous or more so than the people back in town. From the distance, I hear sirens, but I see no flashing lights on the dirt road. I imagine security agents are swarming the clinic by now, pulling patients off of gurneys, overturning beds, and smashing equipment while demanding that the startled doctors and nurses find me. On the road ahead, I see a figure running. Probably a thrill seeker wanting to know what the sirens are all about. I step aside to let him pass, but then he stops, turns around, and runs toward me.

  Startled, I break left, heading away from the river, but my leg won’t move that fast. I look over my shoulder to see a man with a hat pulled low on his head gaining on me. I fear it might be Ribald sent by Basil’s mother to find me. I try to go fast but I trip and fall. Sprawled on the shoulder of the road, I scramble backward to find the man nearly on top of me. I start to scream and kick, but then Basil offers me his hand. He’s changed out of the jacket and pants Fiyo gave him into dirt-colored coveralls and a dark gray mechanic’s cap.

  “Thank god I found you,” he yells and pulls me into his arms. He holds me so tight that I can barely breathe. “I thought I lost you. I thought you were gone,” he says into my hair then kisses the top of my head over and over.

  “Basil,” I struggle to get free from his grip. “Let go. Let go of me.”

  “I’m so sorry,” he says, his voice husky. “I didn’t mean what I said.”

  I smack his shoulders and push him away, shouting, “You have to get out of here! They know who we are.”

  He hugs me tighter. “I know, I saw the whole thing on my mom’s screen.”

  I stop fighting and let myself go limp against his body. I hate how good it feels to be in his embrace and that’s when the tears finally come. “Everyone abandoned me!” I wail.

  With his good arm, he grips my shoulder and holds me away so he can look into my face. “It was a setup. They either paid those people or coerced them to say those things or took their words out of context. Yaz. Fiyo. That idiot with the sign. It’s not true, Apple. None of it is true.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because they do it all the time. They act like the media is independent, but it’s not. They manipulate people. Twist their words and doctor images when it suits them.” He lifts my chin. “And because Yaz would never do that to you. She just wouldn’t and you know it.”

  I suck in a ragged breath and will myself to stop crying. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” he says.

  “But what about you? What about all those things you said…?”

  “I was wrong,” he says and hugs me tighter. Over his shoulder, I see a cloud of dust moving down the road from town. “I came to find you because when I stopped being an idiot and went back into the house to apologize, you were gone.”

  “I saw you in the tree.” The dust cloud gets closer, and I hear an engine coughing.

  “I thought I had made you so mad that you took off. But when I saw the newsfeed, I knew I had to find you and make sure that you were safe.”

  I pull him closer. “Me, too.”

  The dust cloud zooms past us on the road. We turn our faces away and cover our eyes, but then we hear the car skid to a stop. We look up and see Basil’s mom jabbing her finger at us through the back window. The driver throws the car in reverse. Rocks and dirt spit out from under the spinning wheels.

  “We have to get out of here!” Basil yells. I head away from the river, but he grabs my hand and pulls me back across the road behind the car.

  “What are you doing?” I do my best to keep up with him as he half drags me down into the river ditch and up the other side of the embankment toward the football field. “We can’t go in there!”

  “There’s no other cho
ice!” he shouts.

  The blue car spins around and careens off the road, bumping and bouncing over the hardscrabble ground straight for us. It hits the ditch with a loud thud and scrape. Just as we make it to the jumble of shanties, two men explode from the stalled car and charge up the riverbank. I look over my shoulder one more time to see Basil’s mom standing next to the car with her arms crossed, waiting for the men to drag us back.

  * * *

  Quickly and quietly, we lope through the labyrinth of paths between rows and rows of rickety shacks, catching glimpses of the inhabitants’ most intimate lives through flimsy walls and makeshift windows. Someone washing from a bucket, another sleeping, two women fighting, a couple caught in an embrace. The people are thin and haggard. A few snarl or babble nonsense when we elbow past them in the passages but most seem to take no notice of us. At every corner, we turn, trying to put as much disorienting distance between us and the two men who got out of the car, until we come to an opening: a kind of courtyard in the center of the jumbled houses, where some people gather in small groups. Others sit alone on the outskirts, scratching at the dirt. I see a man gather a handful of earth and shove it in his mouth.

  “Basil,” I pant. “I can’t go much farther.” I can barely put weight on my leg.

  He slides my arm over his shoulder to bolster me.

  “Be careful of your arm,” I say.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “If we get to the other side, I know a place we can go.”

  We slow down and stick close to the edge of the courtyard, ready to dart back into the maze if needed. I catch snippets of conversation as we pass the huddles of people.

  “Said she died of malnutrition.”

  “… no, some kind of allergic reaction.”

  “He takes their eggs.”

  “You know they killed her.”

  “… said it’s a farm.”

  “What about the others?”

  “They were stupid for ever trying.”

  Then I see a familiar woman with magenta-tipped hair. I try to place her. “Zara?” I call uncertainly. She swivels around and frowns at me. “Uh, um, hi,” I stammer awkwardly. Basil tries to get me to move along, but I shake my head at him. “We met at rehab,” I tell her, knowing she won’t recognize me, but hoping she might be able to help us anyway.

  “Which time?” she says with a snort.

  “Just recently at Dr. Demeter’s.”

  “Sorry,” she says. “I don’t remember.”

  “That’s okay,” I tell her. “What are you doing here?”

  She shrugs. “Long story short is I slipped away when all hell broke loose one night. Met up with this geophag.” She elbows a guy beside her, who chuckles nervously. “He told me about this place where nobody would harass us. Decided it was better to take my chances out here instead of sticking with that creep Dr. Demeter. What about you? How’d you get out?”

  While I’m trying to come up with a plausible answer, a man lurches into the courtyard. He squints at us then points and yells, “There!” and it hits me. He’s Garvy from the clinic. Another man rushes out from a different path. He’s big and ugly with a tattoo wrapped halfway around his face. “Ribald!” Garvy yells. “That’s them!”

  Everyone turns to look. Basil wastes no time. He scoops me up and dashes away. We can’t outrun them this time, but Basil is smart. He rounds a corner and ducks inside an open door to a shack. Luckily, no one’s home. We press ourselves against the wall, holding our breath until we hear Ribald and Garvy run past. Basil waits until their footsteps fade, then he peeks out and we head back the other way. Quickly, we cross the courtyard, back past Zara and the others who seem unfazed by the chase. Basil sticks his head inside every open door as we get ourselves lost in the maze.

  “What do you want?” people yell. “Get out!”

  “Sorry!” he calls.

  Finally we come to an empty dwelling. It’s bigger than the others, a giant blue box made of ridged metal with MAERSK painted in faded white letters on the side. The crude windows cut in the walls are covered with flimsy plastic sheeting.

  “You said there was another place we could go,” I say.

  “We’ll never make it.”

  “But what happens when the owner comes back?” I protest, pulling away from the door.

  “We’ll deal with that then, but for now we need to hide.” We step inside the box. There’s not much there except a nest of blankets in the corner and some improvised chairs and storage containers made from junk.

  I follow him to the back and slump down against the wall. My leg is throbbing and my heart is pounding.

  “How’s the ankle?” he asks.

  “I’m okay,” I lie, and he must know it because with his good arm, he drags over a small metal box with a funny little door and a number pad with “Start,” “Reheat,” and “Popcorn” buttons along the side. Through the window, we see it’s filled with shoes. “Here,” he says and lifts my foot gently. “Prop up.” Then he settles himself beside me.

  We’re both quiet for several minutes, listening for footsteps and shouts, but none come and my heart slows down again. Finally, Basil breaks the silence by saying, “Apple, I’m sorry I was such a raging jerkface at my mom’s.”

  “Look, you don’t have to stay with me after we get out of here,” I say. “I get it. You don’t think a privy like me could actually…”

  “No, you don’t get it at all,” he says. “I didn’t mean anything I said. It’s just that, when I’m around my mom, she makes me feel like such a loser and…”

  “You’re not a loser!”

  “But being back at my house with her brings out the worst in me,” Basil says. “I think I was pushing you away before you had a chance to bail on me, like everyone else in my life. No one’s ever stuck by me like you have the past few days. Except my brother before he died.”

  “Oh, Basil. I’m so sorry.” I start to lean against his shoulder, but I sit upright quickly, afraid I’ll hurt him.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “Nothing a little Just-Like-Skin couldn’t fix. What about you?” He points to my ankle.

  “Hurts a little,” I tell him. “But it’ll be alright soon.”

  We hear people walking by. Their words float through the door.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “I don’t believe it. They’re lying.”

  “… just saying that so people will go home.”

  “Who are they talking about?” I say, but Basil is lost in his own thoughts.

  “Back at the house,” he says. “When you saw me in the tree, I was trying to picture you. How you were the first time we met. Do you remember? When you came through the door at Flav-O-Rite?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “The light hit you and it just bowled me over. Literally!” Basil says. “Remember? I fell off my stool. You must have thought I was pretty awesome.”

  I laugh.

  “You were so…” He stops and breathes deeply. “Beautiful,” he says on an exhale.

  A blush wraps around my body as if someone has tossed a coat over my shoulders. A clear picture of that night forms in my mind. Basil scrambling to his feet. Fists at his sides, jaw clenched, brown hair flopping over his dark eyes, and then that moment of hesitation as he sized me up.

  “I never told you this,” Basil says. “But after you left that night, I wandered around the West Loop for over an hour, just hoping I might run into you again. I even went into some PlugIn looking for you.” He laughs a little. “Which was stupid. Even if you had been there, what was I going to do? Pretend I just happened to stumble in without a Gizmo?”

  I think back to that night, running like a lunatic through the abandoned streets. I felt like a switch had been flipped inside of me and I couldn’t stand still until I found him again.

  He looks down at his hands clenched together in his lap.

  “I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “If I hadn’t met you then, I would have never put you
through all this.”

  “You didn’t put me through anything.”

  “Yes, I did!”

  “No, I willingly came along. That’s different.”

  “But you didn’t really know what you were getting into.”

  I nod. “That’s true, but now…”

  He won’t let me finish. “It’s all my fault and…”

  I press my hand over his mouth to shut him up. He holds my wrist and kisses my palm. In the quiet of this place where we’re finally alone, I wish we could stay forever. No Inner Loop and Outer Loop. No privies and workers. No One World and corporate resisters. Just me and Basil—alone. Maybe that’s why people like Zara and the others wind up in a place like this. Maybe it’s the only place nobody will bother them anymore.

  He leans in. We bow our heads together, foreheads touching, arms around one another’s shoulders. “I’ll get us out of this,” he says.

  “No,” I tell him. “We’ll get out of it together.” Then I kiss him. “I love how you taste,” I whisper.

  “Better than Synthamil?” he asks with a laugh.

  “Way better,” I tell him, and we kiss again.

  Outside, more and more people file past, talking urgently.

  “Do you think it’s true?”

  “… they could be lying.”

  “But if they aren’t?”

  “… we should get there before they close it.”

  Basil and I look at each other. “Something’s up,” he says.

  “Should we find out?”

  “You stay here, I’ll go.” He gets up.

  “No,” I try to stand. “We should stay together.”

  “I won’t go far,” he tells me. “And you need to rest that leg as long as possible because once we leave…”

  “But what if someone comes in?”

  “I’ll stay close. Just yell and I’ll be back in a flash.”

  I nod and sit down again as he heads for the door.

  * * *

  As soon as Basil’s gone, I pull out my Gizmo and search for a signal. Now that my locator is off, I can find out what new lies Ahimsa is spreading about us. Maybe even check in to see what the Dynasaurs are saying. As I’m searching for a connection to the Dynasaur network, another text from Yaz pops up. My stomach immediately rolls over when I think back to what she said about me, but then I realize it’s very strange for Yaz to text me. She hates texting. The subject line says “Don’t Believe It!” same as the earlier text I skipped over. This time I open it.