Delirium dt-1

by Lauren Oliver

  “What? I can’t—”

  “Citizen 914-238-619-3216. Dismount and put your hands above your head.

  If you do not dismount immediately, we will be forced to shoot.”

  “Lena.” The way he says my name makes me shut up. “They’ve electrified the fence. It’s powered on.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Just listen to me.” Desperation and terror creep into Alex’s voice. “When I say go, you drive. And when I say jump, you jump. You’ll be able to get over the fence, but you’ll have thirty seconds before the power comes back online, a minute, tops. You have to climb as fast as you can. And then you run, okay?”

  My whole body goes ice-cold. “Me? What about you?”

  Alex’s expression doesn’t change. “I’ll be right behind you,” he says.

  “We’re giving you ten seconds… nine… eight…”

  “Alex—” Icy fingers are reaching up from my stomach.

  Alex smiles for just one second—the briefest flicker of a smile, like we’re already safe, like he’s leaning in to brush my hair from my eyes or kiss my cheek.

  “I promise I’ll be right behind you.” His expression hardens again. “But you have to swear you won’t look back. Not even for a second. Okay?”

  “Six… five…”

  “Alex, I can’t—”

  “Swear, Lena.”

  “Three… two…”

  “Okay,” I say, almost choking on the word. Tears are blurring my vision. No chance. We have no chance. “I swear.”

  “One.”

  At that second explosions start lighting up around us, bursts of sound and fire. At the same time Alex screams, “Go!” and I lean forward and twist the throttle like I saw him do. I feel his arms wrap around me at the last second, so strong they might have carried me off the bike if I weren’t gripping the handlebars so tightly.

  More gunfire. Alex cries out and releases one arm from around my chest. I look back and see him cradling his right arm. We bump up onto the old road, and there is a line of guards waiting to greet us, rifles pointed. They’re all screaming, but I can’t even hear them: All I can hear is the rushing, rushing of the wind and the hum of electricity coursing through the fence, just like Alex said. All I can see are the trees in the Wilds, just turning green in the morning light, all those broad, flat leaves like hands reaching for us.

  The guards are so close now, I can see individual faces, make out individual expressions: yellow teeth on one, a large wart on the nose of another. But still I don’t stop. We plunge through them on our bike and they scatter, fall back and jump apart so they don’t get mowed down.

  The fence looms above us: fifteen feet, ten feet, five feet. I think, We’re going to die.

  Then Alex’s voice, clear and forceful and, incredibly, calm, so I’m not sure if I hear him or only imagine him speaking the words into my ear. Jump. Now.

  With me.

  I let go of the handlebars and roll to one side as the bike skids forward into the fence. Pain goes through every single part of my body—my bone is being ripped from my muscle, my muscle is being ripped from my skin—as I tumble across jagged rocks, spitting up dust, coughing, struggling to breathe. For a whole second the world goes black.

  Then everything is color and explosion and fire. The bike hits the fence and a tremendous, rolling boom echoes through the air. Fire shoots into the air, enormous tongues licking up toward the ever-lightening sky. For a moment, the fence gives a high, shrill whine and then goes dead again, silent. No doubt the surge shorted it momentarily.

  This is my chance to climb, just like Alex said.

  Somehow I find the strength to drag myself to the fence on my hands and knees, dry-heaving, vomiting dust. I hear shouting behind me, but it all sounds distant, like under-water noise. I limp to the fence and haul myself upward, inch by inch. I’m going as fast as I can but it feels like I’m crawling, barely making progress. Alex must be behind me because I hear him shouting, “Go, Lena! Go!”

  I focus on his voice: It’s the only thing that keeps me going up. Somehowmiraculously—I reach the top of the fence, and then I step over the loops of barbed wire like Alex taught me, and then I tip over the other side and let myself drop twenty feet to the ground, hitting the grass hard, half-unconscious now and incapable of feeling any more pain. Just a few more feet and I’ll be sucked into the Wilds; I’ll be beyond its impenetrable shield of interlocking trees and growth and shade. I wait for Alex to hit next.

  But he doesn’t.

  That’s when I do the thing I swore I wouldn’t do. Suddenly all my strength is back, fueled by panic. I scramble to my feet as the fence begins to hum again.

  And I look back.

  Alex is still standing on the other side of the fence, beyond a flickering wall of smoke and fire. He hasn’t moved a single inch since we both jumped off the bike, hasn’t tried to.

  Strangely, in that moment I think back to what I answered all those months ago, at my first evaluation, when I was asked about Romeo and Juliet and could only think to say beautiful. I’d wanted to explain; I’d wanted to say something about sacrifice.

  Alex’s T-shirt is red, and for a second I think it’s a trick of the light, but then I realize he’s drenched, soaked in blood: blood seeping across his chest, like the stain seeping up the sky, bringing another day to the world. Behind him is that insect army of men, all of them running toward him at once, guns drawn. The guards are coming too, reaching for him from both sides as though they are going to tear him apart, straight down the middle. The helicopter has him fixed in its spotlight. He is standing white and still and frozen in its beam, and I don’t think I have ever, in my life, seen anything more beautiful than him.

  He is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent if we had ten thousand billion years.

  And then he opens his mouth and his mouth forms one last word.

  The word is: Run.

  After that the insect men fall on him. He is taken up by all their snapping, ravaging arms and mouths like an animal being set upon by vultures, enfolded in all their darkness.

  I run for I don’t know how long. Hours, maybe, or days.

  Alex told me to run. And so I run.

  You have to understand. I am no one special. I am just a single girl. I am five feet two inches tall and I am in-between in every way.

  But I have a secret. You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear.

  I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.

  FB2 document info

  Document ID: 537b5300-513a-46f7-abd4-06b7a913fea8

  Document version: 1.1

  Document creation date: 5.5.2011

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  Document history:

  1.1 - book structure, epigraphs (Namenlos).

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