Pandemonium
Page 15

The Scavenger moans, doubling up, and I jump over her, dodging all the police barricades, which are lying in a tumbled, broken ruin. The screaming is still a crest of sound around me: It has turned into one tremendous wail, like a gigantic, amplified siren.
I make it to the old subway entrance. For just a second I hesitate with my hand on the wooden plank. Its texture is comforting—weather-beaten, warmed by the sun—a bit of normalcy in the middle of all this madness.
Another rifle shot: I hear a body thud to the ground behind me. More screaming.
I lean forward and push. The door swings open a few feet, revealing murky darkness and a pungent, musty smell.
I don’t look back.
I push the door shut again and stand for a moment, letting my eyes adjust to the dimness, listening for the sound of voices or footsteps. Nothing. The smell is sharper in here; it is the smell of old death, animal bones and rotting things. I bring my jacket cuff to my nose and inhale. There’s a steady dripping off to my left. Other than that, it’s quiet.
There are stairs in front of me, covered in bits of crumpled newspaper, mashed-up Styrofoam cups, cigarette butts, all dully illuminated by an electric lantern, like the kind we used in the Wilds. Someone must have planted it here earlier.
I move toward the stairs, on high alert. Julian’s bodyguards might have heard me shoving open the door. They might be lying in wait, ready to jump me. Mentally I curse the metal detectors and all the body scans. I would give anything to have a knife, a screwdriver, something.
Then I remember my keys. I once again ease my backpack off my shoulders. When I bend my elbow, the pain makes me suck in my breath. I’m thankful I landed on my left arm—with my right arm immobilized, I’d be pretty much useless.
I find my keys at the bottom of my bag, moving agonizingly slowly so I don’t make too much noise. I thread the keys through my fingers, like Tack showed me how to do. It’s not much of a weapon, but it’s better than nothing. Then I go down the stairs, scanning the shadows for anything mobile, any sudden shapes rising through the darkness.
Nothing. Everything is perfectly still, and very quiet.
At the bottom of the stairs, there is a dingy glass booth, still smudgy with fingerprints. Beyond it, rusted turnstiles line the tunnel, a dozen of them, like miniature windmills that have been stilled. I ease myself over one of them and land softly on the other side. From here, various tunnels branch out into the darkness, each marked with different signs, more letters and numbers. Julian might have gone down any one of them. And all of them are swallowed in shadow: The lantern doesn’t penetrate this far. I consider going back to retrieve it, but that would only give me away.
Again, I stop and listen. At first there is nothing. Then, I think I hear a muffled thud from the tunnel on my left. As soon as I start toward the sound, however, there is silence once again. Now I’m sure I only imagined the noise, and I hesitate, frustrated, unsure about what to do next. I’ve failed in my mission, that’s obvious—my first real mission of the movement. At the same time, Raven and Tack can’t blame me for losing Julian when the Scavengers attacked. I couldn’t have predicted or prepared for that chaos. No one could have.
I figure my best bet is to wait down here for a few hours, at least until the police have restored order, which I have no doubt they will. If necessary, I’ll camp out for the night. Tomorrow I’ll deal with getting back to Brooklyn.
Suddenly, a darting shadow from my left. I whirl around, fist extended, and connect with nothing but air. A giant rat scurries in front of me, a bare inch from my sneaker. I exhale, watching the rat darting off down another tunnel, its long tail dragging in the filth. I’ve always hated rats.
That’s when I hear it, distinct and unmistakable: two thuds, and a low groan, a voice moaning out, “Please…”
Julian’s voice.
My body goes prickly all over. Now the fear draws my insides hard and taut. The voice came from somewhere farther down the tunnel.
I ease back against one wall, pressing myself flat, feeling moss and slick tile under my fingers as I move forward slowly, careful not to make any noise when I step, careful not to breathe too loudly. After every few paces I stop and listen, hoping for another sound, hoping Julian will say something again. But the only thing I hear is a steady drip, drip, drip. There must be a pipe leaking somewhere.
Then I see it.
The man is strung from a grate in the ceiling, a belt looped tightly around his bulging neck. Above him, water condenses on a metal pipe, dripping onto the tunnel floor. Drip, drip, drip.
It’s so dark I can’t make out the man’s face—the grate permits only a trickle of gray light from above—but I recognize him from the heaviness of his shoulders as one of Julian’s bodyguards. At his feet, another bodyguard is lying curled up in the fetal position. There is a long-handled blade protruding from his back.
I stumble backward, forgetting to be quiet. Then I hear Julian’s voice again, fainter: “Please…”
I’m terrified. I don’t know which direction the voice is coming from, can’t think of anything but getting out, out, out. I’d rather face the Scavengers in the open than trapped here, like a rat, in the dark. I will not die underground.
I run blindly, keeping my arms in front of me, collide first with a wall before groping my way into the center of the tunnel. Panic has made me clumsy.
Drip, drip, drip.
Please. Please get me out of here. My heart will explode; I can’t take a breath.
Two black shapes unfold all at once from either side of me, and in my terror they look like enormous dark birds, reaching out their wings to enfold me.
“Not so fast,” one of them says. He grabs my wrist. The keys are knocked from my hand. Then searing pain, a flash of white.
I sink into the dark.
then
Miyako, who should have been one of the scouts, is instead the last one to enter the sickroom.
“She’ll be back on her feet tomorrow,” Raven says. “You’ll see. She’s as solid as a rock.”
But the next day, her cough is so bad we can hear it reverberating through the walls. Her breathing sounds thick and watery. She sweats through her blankets even as she cries that she is cold, cold, freezing cold.
She begins coughing up blood. When it’s my turn to look after her, I can see it caked in the corners of her mouth. I dab at it with a washcloth, but she is still strong enough to fight me off. The fever makes her see shapes and shadows in the air; she swats at them, muttering.
She can no longer stand, even when Raven and I try to lift her together. She cries out in pain, and eventually we give up. Instead we change the sheets when Miyako pisses them. I think we should burn them, but Raven insists we can’t; I see her that night, furiously scrubbing them in the basin, while steam rises from the scalding water. Her forearms are the shiny red of raw meat.
And then one night I wake up and the silence is perfect, a cool, dark pool. For one second, still emerging from the fog of my dreams, I think that Miyako must have gotten better. Tomorrow she will be squatting in the kitchen, tending the fire. Tomorrow we will make rounds together, and I will watch her braiding traps with her long, slender fingers. When she catches me staring, she will smile.
But it is too quiet. I get up, a knot of dread tightening inside my chest. The floor is freezing.
Raven is sitting at the foot of Miyako’s bed, staring at nothing. Her hair is loose, and the flickering shadows from the candle next to her make her eyes look like two hollow pits.
Miyako’s eyes are closed, and I can tell right away she is dead.
The desire to laugh—hysterical and inappropriate—wells in my throat. To quash it, I say, “Is she—?”
“Yes,” Raven says shortly.
“When?”
“I’m not sure. I fell asleep for a while.” She passes a hand over her eyes. “When I woke up, she wasn’t breathing.”
My body flashes completely hot and then completely cold. I don’t know what to say, so I just stand there for a while, trying not to look at Miyako’s body: a statue, a shadow, her face thinned by sickness, whittled down to bone. All I can think about are her hands, which only a few days ago moved so expertly against the kitchen table as she beat out a soft rhythm so that Sarah could sing. They were a blur, like hummingbird wings—full of life.
I feel like something has caught in the back of my throat. “I—I’m sorry.”
Raven doesn’t say anything for a minute. Then: “I shouldn’t have made her carry water. She said she wasn’t feeling well. I should have let her rest.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” I say quickly.
“Why not?” Raven looks up at me then. In that moment she looks very young—defiant, stubborn, the way that my cousin Jenny used to look when Aunt Carol told her it was time for homework. I have to remind myself that Raven is young: twenty-one, only a few years older than me. The Wilds will age you.
I wonder how long I’ll last out here.
“Because it’s not your fault.” The fact that I can’t see her eyes makes me nervous. “You can’t—you can’t feel bad.”
Raven stands up then, cupping the candle in one hand.
“We’re on the other side of the fence now, Lena,” she says, tiredly, as she passes. “Don’t you get it? You can’t tell me what to feel.”
The next day it snows. At breakfast, Sarah cries silently while spooning up oatmeal. She was close to Miyako.
The scouts left the homestead five days ago—Tack, Hunter, Roach, Buck, Lu, and Squirrel—and have taken the shovel with them, for burying supplies. We collect pieces of metal and wood, whatever will serve us for digging instead.
The snow is light, thankfully; by midmorning, a bare half inch is on the ground. But it’s very cold, and the ground is frozen solid. After digging and hacking for a half hour, we’ve only made the barest indentation in the earth, and Raven, Bram, and I are sweating. Sarah, Blue, and a few others are huddled a few feet away from us, shivering.
“This isn’t working,” Raven pants out. She throws down a twisted piece of metal she has been using as a shovel, sends it skittering across the ground with a kick. Then she turns and starts stalking back toward the burrow. “We’ll have to burn her.”
“Burn her?” The words explode out of me before I can stop them. “We can’t burn her. That’s—”
Raven whirls around, eyes blazing. “Yeah? Well what do you want to do? Huh? You want to leave her in the sickroom?”
Normally I back down when Raven raises her voice, but this time I hold my ground. “She deserves a burial,” I say, wishing my voice wouldn’t shake.
Raven covers the ground between us in two long strides.
“It’s a waste of our energy,” she hisses, and then I can tell how full of fury and desperation she is. I remember what I heard her tell Tack: Everyone stays alive. “We don’t have any to spare.”
She turns her back to me again and announces loudly, so the others can hear, “We have to burn her.”
We wrap her body in the sheets Raven scrubbed clean. Maybe all along she knew they would be used for this purpose. I keep thinking I’m going to be sick.