Pandemonium
Page 18

Julian seems to feel he has said too much. He stands up, walks to the door, and returns. This is the first sign of agitation I’ve seen from him. All day he has been remarkably still.
“Why do you think they’re keeping us here?” he asks.
“Ransom, probably.” It’s the only thing that makes sense.
Julian fingers the cut on his lip, considering this. “My father will pay,” he says after a beat. “I’m valuable to the movement.”
I don’t say anything. In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust.
“He won’t like dealing with the Invalids, though,” he adds.
“You don’t know they’re responsible for this,” I say quickly, and then regret it. Even here, Lena Morgan Jones must act the way she is supposed to.
Julian frowns at me. “You saw them at the demonstration, didn’t you?” When I don’t answer, he goes on, “I don’t know. Maybe what happened is a good thing. Maybe now people will understand what the DFA is trying to do. They’ll understand why it’s so necessary.” Julian is using his public voice, as though he’s addressing a large crowd. I wonder how many times he has had the same words, the same ideas, drilled into his head. I wonder whether he ever doubts.
I’m suddenly disgusted with him, and his calm certainty about the world, as though all of life can be dissected and neatly labeled, just like a specimen in a laboratory.
But I don’t say any of this. Lena Morgan Jones keeps her mask on. “I hope so,” I say fervently, and then I go to my cot, curling up toward the wall so he’ll know I’m done talking to him. For revenge I mouth words, silently, into the concrete—old, forbidden words Raven taught me, from one of the old religions.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures: he leads me beside the still waters.
He restores my soul: he leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yes, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…
At a certain point, I drift off to sleep. I open my eyes into blackness, suppressing a cry. The electric light has been switched off, leaving us in perfect darkness. I feel hot and sick, and push the woolen blanket all the way to the foot of the cot, enjoying the cool air on my skin.
“Can’t sleep?”
Julian’s voice startles me. He is not in his cot. I can barely see him. He is a large black shape against the darkness.
“I was sleeping,” I say. “What about you?”
“No,” he answers. His voice sounds softer now, less precise—as though the darkness has somehow melted its edges. “It’s stupid, but…”
“But what?” Dream images are still fluttering through my head, skirting the edges of consciousness. I was dreaming of the Wilds. Raven was there; Hunter was too.
“I have bad dreams. Nightmares.” Julian speaks the words in a rush, obviously embarrassed. “I always have.”
For a split second I feel a little hitch in my chest, like something hard there has loosened. I will the feeling down and away. We are on opposite sides, Julian and I. There can never be any sympathy between us.
“They say it will get better after the procedure,” he says, almost like an apology, and I wonder if he is thinking the obvious: If I even make it through.
I don’t say anything, and Julian coughs, then clears his throat.
“What about you?” he asks. “Did you ever have nightmares? Before you were cured, I mean.”
I think of hundreds of thousands of cureds, sleeping dreamlessly in their marital beds, their heads enveloped in fog, a sweet and empty smoke.
“Never,” I say, and roll over, drawing the covers over my legs again, and pretend to sleep.
then
There is no time to leave the way we planned. We grab what we can and we run, while the Wilds behind us turn to roaring fire and smoke. We stay close to the river, hoping the water will offer us protection if the fire spreads.
Raven holds Blue, stiff-white and terrified, in her arms. I lead Sarah by the hand. She cries soundlessly, wrapped in Lu’s enormous jacket. Sarah had no time to grab her own. Lu does without. When the frostbite starts to set in, Raven and I take turns giving Lu our coats. The cold reaches in, squeezes our guts, makes our eyes water.
And behind us is the inferno.
Fifteen of us made it safely away from the homestead; Squirrel and Grandma are missing. No one can remember seeing them, in our rush to leave the burrow. One of the bombs exploded a wall of the sickroom and sent a shower of rock and dirt and insects rocketing into the hall. After that, everything was screaming chaos.
Once the planes withdraw, the helicopters come. For hours they circle above us, and the air is spliced into fragments, beaten to shreds by the endless whirring. They mist the Wilds with chemicals. It burns our throats, stings our eyes, makes us choke. We wrap T-shirts and dish towels around our necks and mouths, move through the haze.
Finally it is too dark for the attacks to continue. The night sky is smudgy with smoke. The woods are full of distant crashing and cracking as so many trees succumb to the flames, but at least we have moved far enough downstream to be safe from the fire. At last Raven thinks it safe to pause and rest, and take stock of what we have.
We have only a quarter of the food we’d been storing, and none of the medical supplies.
Bram thinks we should go back for the food. “We’ll never make it south with what we’ve got,” he argues, and I can see Raven trembling as she struggles to get a fire lit. She can barely strike a match. Her hands must be freezing. Mine have been numb for hours.
“Don’t you get it?” she says. “The homestead is done. We can’t go back. They meant to wipe us out today, all of us. If Lena hadn’t warned us, we’d all be dead.”
“What about Tack and Hunter?” Bram says stubbornly. “What’ll they do when they come back for us?”
“Damn it, Bram.” Raven’s voice rises a little, hysterical, and Blue, who has fallen asleep finally, curled up among the blankets, stirs fitfully. Raven straightens up. She has managed to get a fire started. She takes a step back and stares at the first twisting flames, blue and green and red.
“They’ll have to take care of themselves,” she says more quietly, and even though she has regained her self-control I can hear the pain running under her words, a ribbon of fear and grief. “We’ll have to go on without them.”
“That’s fucked,” Bram says, but halfheartedly. He knows she’s right.
Raven stands there for a long time, as some of the others move quietly along the banks of the river, setting up camp: piling the backpacks together to form a shelter from the wind, unpacking and repacking the food, figuring out new rations. I go to Raven and stand next to her for a while. I want to put my arms around her, but I can’t. You don’t do that kind of thing with Raven. And in a weird way, I understand that she needs her hardness now more than ever.
Still, I want to comfort her somehow. So I say, low so that nobody else can hear me, “Tack will be okay. If anybody can survive out here, no matter what, it’s Tack.”
“Oh, I know,” she says. “I’m not worried. He’ll make it just fine.”
But when she looks at me I can see a deadness in her eyes, like she has closed a door somewhere deep inside of her—and I know that even she does not believe it.
The morning dawns gray and cold. It has begun to snow again. I’ve never been so cold in my life. It takes forever to stamp the feeling back into my feet. We have all slept out in the open. Raven worried that the tents would be too conspicuous, making us easy targets should the helicopters or planes return. But the skies are empty and the woods are still. Bits of ash intermingle with the snow, carrying the faint smell of smoke.
We head for the first encampment, the one Roach and Buck prepared for our arrival: a distance of eighty miles. At first we all walk quietly, occasionally scanning the skies, but after a few hours we start to loosen up. The snow continues to fall, softening the landscape, purifying the air, until the lingering smells of smoke have all been whited out.
Then we talk a little more freely. How did they find us? Why the attack? Why now?
For years, the Invalids have been able to count on one critical fact: They are not supposed to exist. The government has for decades denied that anyone inhabits the Wilds, and thus the Invalids have remained relatively safe. Any large-scale physical attack from the government would be tantamount to an admission of error.
But it seems that has changed.
Much later, we will find out why: The resistance has stepped up its game. They grew tired of waiting, of minor pranks and protests.
And so, the Incidents: explosives planted in prisons, and city halls, and government offices across the country.
Sarah, who has been running ahead, loops back around to me. “What do you think happened to Tack and Hunter?” she says. “Do you think they’ll be okay? Do you think they’ll find us?”
“Shhh.” I hush her sharply. Raven is walking ahead of us, and I glance up to see whether she has heard. “Don’t worry about that. Tack and Hunter can take care of themselves.”
“But what about Squirrel and Grandma? Do you think they got out okay?”
I think about that giant convulsive shudder—stone and dirt blasting inward—all the shouting and the smoke. There was so much noise, so much flame. I try to reach for a memory of Squirrel and Grandma, some vision of them running into the woods, but all I have are silhouettes, screaming and shouted orders, people turning to smoke.
“You ask too many questions,” I tell her. “You should be saving your strength.”
She has been trotting like a dog. Now she slows down to a walk. “Are we going to die?” she asks solemnly.
“Don’t be stupid. You’ve relocated before.”
“But the people on the inside of the fence…” She bites her lip. “They want to kill us, don’t they?”
I feel something tighten inside of me, a spasm of deep hatred. I reach out and put a hand on her head. “They haven’t killed us yet,” I say, and I imagine that one day I will fly a plane over Portland, over Rochester, over every fenced-in city in the whole country, and I will bomb and bomb and bomb, and watch all their buildings smoldering to dust, and all those people melting and bleeding into flame, and I will see how they like it.
If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit.
This is the way the world is made now.
We reach the first encampment just before midnight on the third day, after a last-minute confusion about heading east or west at the large overturned tree lying gutted, roots exposed to the sky, which Roach had marked with a red bandanna. We waste an hour going the wrong way and have to double back, but as soon as we spot the small pyramid of stones Roach and Buck piled together to mark the place where the food is buried, there is general celebration. We run, shouting, the last fifty feet to the small clearing, full of renewed energy.