If only they knew.
"This is your final warning, Miss Jones," Mrs. Fierstein says. "Do you understand?"
"It won't happen again," I say, trying to look obedient and contrite. I'm pushing aside the memory of my nightmare, pushing aside thoughts of Alex, pushing aside thoughts of Hana and my old school, push, push, push, like Raven taught me to do. The old life is dead.
Mrs. Fierstein gives me a final stare--meant to intimidate me, I guess--and turns back to the board, returning to her lecture on the divine energy of electrons.
The old Lena would have been terrified of a teacher like Mrs. Fierstein. She's old, and mean, and looks like a cross between a frog and a pit bull. She's one of those people who makes the cure seem redundant--it's impossible to imagine that she would ever be capable of loving, even without the procedure.
But the old Lena is dead too.
I buried her.
I left her beyond a fence, behind a wall of smoke and flame.
then
Some Vet8212;likeone is always sick in the Wilds. As soon as I am strong enough to move out of the sickroom and onto a mattress on the floor, Squirrel has to move in; and after Squirrel's turn, it is Grandpa's. At night, the homestead echoes with the sounds of coughing, heaving, feverish chatter: noises of disease, which run through the walls and fill us all with dread. The problem is the space and the closeness. We live on top of one another, breathe and sneeze on one another, share everything. And nothing and no one is ever really clean.
Hunger gnaws at us, makes tempers run short. After my first exploration of the homestead, I retreated underground, like an animal scrabbling back into the safety of its lair. One day passes, then two. The supplies have yet to come. Each morning different people go out to check for messages; I gather that they have found some way to communicate with the sympathizers and resisters on the other side. That is all there is for me to do: listen, watch, stay quiet.
In the afternoons I sleep, and when I can't sleep, I close my eyes and imagine being back in the abandoned house at 37 Brooks with Alex lying next to me. I try to feel my way through the curtain; I imagine if I can somehow pull apart the days that have passed since the escape, can mend the tear in time, I can have him back.
But whenever I open my eyes I am still here, on a mattress on the floor, and still hungry.
After another four days, everyone is moving slowly, as though we're all underwater. The pots are impossible for me to lift. When I try to stand too quickly I get dizzy. I have to spend more time in bed, and when I'm not in bed I think that everyone is glaring at me, can feel the Invalids' resentment, hard-edged, like a wall. Maybe I'm just imagining it, but this is, after all, my fault.
The catch, too, has been poor. Roach traps a few rabbits and there is general excitement; but the meat is tough and full of gristle, and when everything is dished up there is barely enough to go around.
Then one day I am in the storeroom, sweeping--Raven insists we go through the motions, insists on keeping everything clean--when I hear shouts from aboveground, laughter and running. Feet pound down the stairs. Hunter comes swinging into the kitchen, followed by an older woman, Miyako. I have not seen them--or anyone--so energetic in days.
"Where's Raven?" Hunter demands breathlessly.
I shrug. "I don't know."
Miyako lets out an exasperated sound, and both she and Hunter spin around, prepared to dart up the stairs again.
"What's going on?" I ask.
"We got a message from the other side," Hunter says. That's what people here call the bordered communities: the other side, when they're feeling generous; Zombieland, when they aren't. "Supplies are coming in today. We need help taking delivery."
"Can you help?" Miyako asks, sizing me up. She is broad through the shoulders, and very tall--if she had enough to eat, she would be an Amazon. As it is she is all muscle and sinew.
I [="j she shake my head. "I--I'm not strong enough."
Hunter and Miyako exchange a look.
"The others will help," Hunter says in a low voice. Then they pound up the stairs again, leaving me alone.
Later that afternoon they come back, ten of them, bearing heavy-duty garbage bags. The bags have been placed in half-full wooden crates in the Cocheco River at the border, and the crates have floated down to us. Even Raven can't maintain order, or control her excitement. Everyone rips the bags to shreds, shouting and whooping as supplies tumble onto the floor: cans of beans, tuna, chicken, soup; bags of rice, flour, lentils, and more beans; dried jerky, sacks of nuts and cereal; hard-boiled eggs, nestled in a bin of towels; Band-Aids, Vaseline, tubes of ChapStick, medical supplies; even a new pack of underwear, a bundle of clothes, bottles of soap and shampoo. Sarah hugs the jerky to her chest, and Raven puts her nose in a package of soap, inhaling. It's like a birthday party but better: ours to share, and just for that moment I feel a rush of happiness. Just for that moment, I feel as though I belong here.
Our luck has turned. A few hours later, Tack takes down a deer.
That night we have our first proper meal since I've arrived. We dish up enormous plates of brown rice, topped with meat braised and softened with crushed tomatoes and dried herbs. It's so good I could cry, and Sarah actually does cry, sitting and sobbing in front of her plate. Miyako puts her arm around her and murmurs into Sarah's hair. The gesture makes me think of my mother; a few days ago I asked Raven about her, with no luck.
What does she look like? Raven had asked, and I had to confess I didn't know. When I was younger she had long, soft auburn hair, and a full-moon face. But after over ten years in Portland's prison, the Crypts--where she had been my whole life, while I believed her dead--I doubt she resembles the woman from my hazy childhood memories.
Her name is Annabel, I told her, but Raven was already shaking her head.
"Eat, eat," Miyako urges Sarah, and she does. We all do, ravenously: scooping up rice with our hands, lifting our plates to lick them clean. Someone from the other side has even thought to include a bottle of whiskey, wrapped carefully in a sweatshirt, and everyone cheers when that makes the rounds as well. I had alcohol only once or twice when I lived in Portland, and never understood its appeal, but I take a sip from the bottle when it makes its way to me. It burns hard going down, and I start coughing. Hunter grins and claps me on the back. Tack nearly tears the bottle out of my hands and says, curtly, "Don't drink it if you're just going to spit it up."
"You get used to it," Hunter leans in to whisper, almost an identical refrain to Sarah's remark a week ago. I'm not sure whether he's talking about the whiskey or Tack's attitude. But already there's a warm glow spreading through my stomach. When the bottle comes around again I take a slightly larger sip, and another, and the warmth spreads to my head.
Later: I'm seeing everything in pieces and fractions, like a series of photographs shuffled randomly together. Miyako and Lu in the corner, arms interlinked [s ig everyth, dancing, while everyone claps; Blue sleeping curled up on a bench, and then borne out of the room, still asleep, by Squirrel; Raven standing on one of the benches, making a speech about freedom. She is laughing, too, her dark hair a shimmering curtain, and then Tack is helping her down: brown hands around her waist, a moment of suspension when she pauses, airborne, in his arms. I think of birds and flying away. I think of Alex.
One day Raven turns to me and says abruptly, "If you want to stay, you have to work."
"I work," I say.
"You clean," she counters. "You boil the water. The rest of us haul water, look for food, scout for messages. Even Grandma hauls water--a mile and a half, with heavy buckets. And she's sixty years old."
"I--" Of course she's right, and I know it. The guilt has been with me every day, as heavy as the thickness of the air. I heard Tack say to Raven that I'm a waste of a good bed. I had to squat in the storeroom for almost half an hour afterward with my arms wrapped around my knees until I stopped shaking. Hunter's the only one of the homesteaders who's nice to me, and he's nice to everybody.<
br />
"I'm not ready. I'm not strong enough."
She watches me for a second, and lets the silence stretch uncomfortably between us so I can feel the absurdity of the words. If I'm not strong by now, that's my fault too. "We're moving soon. Relocation starts in a few weeks. We'll need all the help we can get."
"Moving?" I repeat.
"Going south." She turns away, starts retreating down the hallway. "Shutting up the homestead for the winter. And if you want to come, you're going to help."
Then she pauses. "You're welcome to stay here, of course," she says, turning around and raising an eyebrow. "Although winters are deadly. When the river freezes, we can't get any supplies. But maybe that's what you want?"
I don't say anything.
"You have until tomorrow to choose," she says.
The next morning, Raven shakes me awake from a nightmare. I sit up, gasping. I remember a fall through the air, and a mass of black birds. All the other girls are still sleeping, and the room is full of their rhythmic breathing. There must be a candle burning out in the hall, casting a tiny bit of light into the room. I can just make out Raven's shape, squatting in front of me, and register the fact that she is already dressed.
"What did you choose?" she whispers.
"I want to work," I whisper back, because it's the only thing I can say. My heart is still beating, hard, in my chest.
I can't see her smile, but I think I hear it: her lips cracking, a small exhalation that could be a laugh. "Good for you." She holds up a dented bucket. "It's water time."
Raven withdraws, and I fumble for my clothes in the dark. When I first arrived at the homestead, the sleeping room looked like a mess, an explosion of fabric and clothing and miscellaneous belongings. Over time I've realized it isn't actually so disorganized. Everyone has a little area, a space circumscribed for their things. We've drawn invisible circles around our little beds, or blankets, or mattresses, and people guard those spaces fiercely, like dogs marking out their territory. You must keep everything you own and need inside your little circle. Once it leaves, it is no longer yours. The clothes I've picked out from the store are folded at the very bottom of my blanket.
I fumble out of the room and feel my way down the hall. I find Raven by the kitchen, surrounded by empty buckets, coaxing last night's fire up with the blunt, charred end of a large stick. She hasn't turned on the lanterns here, either. It would be a waste of battery power. The smell of smoking wood, the low, flickering shadows, Raven's shoulders touched by an orange glow: It makes me feel as though I haven't yet woken from my dream.
"Ready?" She straightens up when she hears me, loops a bucket over each arm.
I nod, and she jerks her head toward the remaining buckets.
We wind our way upstairs and then get coughed out into the outside world: The release from inside, from the air and the closeness, is just as startling and abrupt as it was the time I explored the rest of the homestead with Sarah. The first thing that strikes me is the cold. The wind is icy and drives right through my T-shirt, and I let out a gasp without meaning to.
"What's the matter?" Raven asks, speaking at a normal volume now that we're outside.
"Cold," I reply. The air smells like winter already, though I can see that the trees still have their leaves. At the very edge of the horizon, over the ragged and frayed skyline of the trees, there is a bare, golden glow where the sun is edging upward. The world is all grays and purples. The animals and birds are just beginning to stir.
"Less than a week until October," Raven says, shrugging, and then, as I trip over a piece of twisted metal siding half-embedded in the ground, she says, "Watch your step."
That's when it really hits me: I've been following the rhythm of the days, keeping mental track of the date. But really I've been pretending that while I stayed buried underground, the rest of the world stayed motionless as well.
"Let me know if I'm walking too fast," Raven says.
"Okay," I say. My voice sounds strange in the empty, thin air of this autumn world.
We pick our way down the old main street. Raven walks easily, avoiding the torn-up bits of concrete and the twisted metal litter almost instinctively, the way that Sarah did. At the entrance to the old bank vault, where the boys sleep, Bram is waiting for us. Bram has dark hair and mocha-colored skin. He's one of the quieter boys, one of the few who doesn't scare me. He and Hunter are always together; in Zombieland we would have called them Unnaturals, but here their [ut one relationship seems normal, effortless. Seeing them reminds me of pictures of Hana and me: one dark, one light. Raven passes him several buckets wordlessly, and he falls in next to us in silence. But he smiles at me, and I'm grateful for it.
Even though the air is cold, soon I'm sweating and my heart pushes painfully against my ribs. It has been more than a month since I've walked more than sixty feet at a time. My muscles are weak, and carrying even the empty buckets makes my shoulders ache after a few minutes. I keep shifting the handles in my palms; I refuse to complain or ask Raven to help, even though she must see that I'm having trouble keeping up. I don't even want to think about how long and slow the way back will be, once the buckets are full.
We've left the homestead and the old main street behind, and veered off into the trees. All around us, the leaves are different shades of gold, orange, red, and brown. It is as though the whole forest is burning, a beautiful slow smolder. I can feel the space all around me, unbounded and unwalled, bright open air. Animals move, unseen, to our left and right, rustling through the dry leaves.
"Almost there," Raven calls back. "You're doing good, Lena."
"Thanks," I puff out. Sweat is dripping into my eyes, and I can't believe I was ever cold. I don't even bother to elbow or swat the stray branches out of my way. As Bram pushes through them ahead of me, they rebound and thwack me hard on my arms and legs, leaving tiny stinging lashes all over my skin. I'm too tired to care. I feel as though we've been walking for hours, but that's impossible. Sarah said the river was a little over a mile away. Besides, the sun has only just risen.
A little bit farther and we hear it, over the twittering of the birds and the rush of the wind in the trees: the low, babbling sound of moving water. Then the trees break apart, and the ground turns rocky, and we're standing at the edge of a wide, flat stream. Sunlight glints off the water, giving the impression of coins laid underneath its surface. Fifty feet to our left is a miniature waterfall, where the stream comes churning over a series of small, black, lichen-spotted rocks. All of a sudden I have to fight the desire to cry. This place has always existed: While cities were bombed and fell into ruins, while walls went up--the stream was here, running over the rocks, full of its own secret laughter.
We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control; we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Book of Shhh.
Raven and Bram are already wading into the stream, holding their buckets, crouching to fill them.
"Come on," Raven says shortly. "The others will be waking up."
They have both come barefoot; I crouch down to untie my shoes. My fingers are swollen from the cold, even though I can no longer feel it. Heat drums through my body. I have a hard time with the laces, and by the time I edge close to the water, Raven and Bram have their buckets full, lined up on the bank. Pieces of grass and dead insects swirl over their surface; we will pick them out later, and boil the wa [d b buter to sterilize it.
My first step into the stream nearly takes me off my feet. Even this close to the bank, the current is much stronger than it looks. I pinwheel my arms wildly, trying to stay upright, and drop one of the buckets. Bram, who is waiting on the bank, starts to laugh. His laugh is high and surprisingly sweet.
"All right." Raven gives him a push. "That's enough of a show. We'll see you at the homestead."
He to
uches two fingers obediently to his temple. "See you later, Lena," he says, and I realize it's the first time somebody other than Raven, Sarah, or Hunter has spoken to me in a week.
"See you," I say.
The streambed is coated in tiny pebbles, slick and hard on the underside of my feet. I retrieve the fallen bucket and crouch low, as Raven and Bram did, letting it fill. Lugging it back to the bank is harder. My arms are weak, and the metal handles dig painfully into my palms.
"One more to go," Raven says. She is watching me, arms crossed.
The next one is slightly larger than the first, and more difficult to maneuver once it's full. I have to carry it with both hands, half bent over, letting the bucket bang against my shins. I wade out of the stream and set it down with a sigh of relief. I have no idea how I'll make it back to the homestead carrying both buckets at once. It's impossible. It will take me hours.
"Ready to go?" Raven asks.
"Just give me a second," I say, resting my hands on my knees. My arms are already trembling a little. I want to stay here for as long as possible, with the sun breaking through the trees, and the stream speaking its own, old language, and the birds zipping back and forth, dark shadows. Alex would love it here, I think without meaning to. I've been trying so hard not to think his name, not to even breathe the idea of him.
On the far side of the bank there is a small bird with ink-blue feathers, preening at the edge of the water; and suddenly I have never wanted anything more than to strip down and swim, wash off all the layers of dirt and sweat and grime that I have not been able to scrub away at the homestead.
"Will you turn around?" I ask Raven. She rolls her eyes, looking amused, but she does.
I wiggle out of my pants and underwear, strip off my tank top and drop it on the grass. Wading back into the water is equal parts pain and pleasure--a cutting cold, a pure feeling that drives through my whole body. As I move toward the center of the stream, the stones underneath my feet get larger and flatter, and the current pushes at my legs more strongly. Even though the stream isn't very wide, just beyond the miniature waterfall there's a dark space where the streambed bottoms out, a natural swimming hole. I stand shivering with the water rushing around my knees, and at the last second can't quite bring myself to do it. It's so cold: The water looks so dark, and black, and deep.
Hana: A Delirium Short Story Page 6
