Everything in the Wilds is process, slow steps, shuffling forward. Everything takes time. While we wait for the water in the pot to heat, Sarah lists the people in the homestead, a blur of names I won’t remember: Grandpa, the oldest; Lu, short for Lucky, who lost a finger to a bad infection but managed to keep her life, and the rest of her limbs, intact; Bram, short for Bramble, who appeared miraculously in the Wilds one day, in the middle of a tangle of brambles and thorns, as though deposited there by wolves. There’s a story for almost everyone’s name, even Sarah’s. When she first came to the Wilds seven years ago with her older sister, she begged the homesteaders to give her a cool new name. She pulls a face, remembering—she wanted something tough, like Blade, or Iron—but Raven had only laughed, put a hand on her head, and said, “You look just like a Sarah to me.” And so Sarah she remained.
“Which one is your sister?” I ask. I think briefly of my sister, Rachel—not the Rachel I left behind, the cured one, all blank and curtained off, but the Rachel I can still remember from my childhood—and then let the image skitter away.
“Not here anymore. She left the homestead earlier in the summer; joined the R. She’s going to come back for me as soon as I’m old enough to help.” There’s a note of pride in her voice, so I nod encouragingly, even though I have no idea what the “R” is.
More names: Hunter, the blond boy who was sitting across from me at the table (“That’s his before name,” Sarah says, pronouncing the word before in a kind of hush, like a curse word—“He can’t actually hunt for nothing”); Tack, who came from up north a few years ago.
“Everyone says he has a bad attitude,” she says, and again I hear the echo of Raven’s voice in her words. She is worrying the fabric of her T-shirt, which is worn so thin it is practically translucent. “But I don’t think so. He’s always been nice to me.”
From her description, I’ve matched Tack with the black-haired guy who was scowling at me when I came into the kitchen. If that’s his normal look, I can see why people think he has a bad attitude.
“Why’s he called Tack?” I ask.
She giggles. “Sharp as,” she says. “Grandpa named him.”
I decide to stay away from Tack, if I remain at the homestead at all. I can’t see that I have much of a choice, but I can feel that I don’t belong here, and a part of me wishes that Raven had left me where she found me. I was closer to Alex then. He was just on the other side of that long, black tunnel. I could have walked through its blackness; I could have found him again.
“Water’s ready,” Sarah announces finally.
Process, agonizingly slow: We fill up one of the basins with the hot water, and Sarah measures soap into the sink slowly, not wasting a drop. That’s another thing I can see about the Wilds: Everything gets used, reused, rationed, measured.
“So what about Raven?” I ask as I submerge my arms in the hot water.
“What about her?” Sarah’s face brightens. She loves Raven, I can tell.
“What’s her story? Where did she come from before?” I don’t know why I’m pushing the issue. I’m just curious, I guess, curious to know how you become someone like that: confident, fierce, a leader.
Sarah’s face clouds over. “There is no before,” she says shortly, then falls silent for the first time in an hour. We wash the dishes without speaking.
Sarah turns talkative again when the dishes are done and it’s time to outfit me with clothes.
She leads me to a small room I mistook for one of the bedrooms before. There are clothes strewn everywhere, masses of them, all over the floor and shelves. “This is the store,” she says, giggling a little and gesturing grandly with one hand.
“Where did all the clothes come from?” I move carefully into the room, stepping on shirts and balled-up socks as I do. Every inch of floor space is covered in fabric.
“We find them,” Sarah says vaguely. And then, turning suddenly fierce, “The blitz didn’t work like they said, you know. The zombies lied, just like they lie about everything else.”
“Zombies?”
Sarah grins. “That’s what we call the cureds, after they’ve had the procedure. Raven says they might as well be zombies. She says the cure turns people stupid.”
“That’s not true,” I say instinctively, and nearly correct her: It’s the passions that turn us stupid, animal-like. Free from love is close to God. That’s an old adage from The Book of Shhh. The cure was supposed to free us from extreme emotions, bring us clarity of thought and feeling.
But when I think about Aunt Carol’s glassy eyes, and my sister’s expressionless face, I think that the term zombies is actually pretty accurate. And it’s true that all the history books, and all our teachers, lied about the blitz; the Wilds were supposed to have been wiped absolutely clean during the bombing campaign. Invalids—or homesteaders—aren’t even supposed to exist.
Sarah shrugs. “If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love.”
“Did Raven tell you that, too?”
She smiles again. “Raven’s super smart.”
It takes me a little bit of digging, but I finally find a pair of army-green pants and a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt. It feels too weird to wear someone else’s old underwear, so I keep on the pair I’ve been wearing. Sarah wants me to model my new outfit—she’s enjoying this, and keeps begging me to try on different things, acting like a normal kid for the first time—and when I ask her to turn around so I can change, she stares at me like I’m crazy. I guess there isn’t much privacy in the Wilds. But finally she shrugs and swivels to face the wall.
It feels good to get out of the long T-shirt, which I’ve been wearing for days. I know I smell bad, and I’m desperate for a shower, but for now I’m just grateful for some relatively clean clothes. The pants fit well, low on my hips, and they don’t even drag too badly after I roll them at the waist a few times. The T-shirt is soft and comfortable.
“Not bad,” Sarah says when she turns around to face me again. “You look almost human.”
“Thanks.”
“I said almost.” She giggles again.
“Well, then, almost thanks.”
Shoes are harder. Most people in the Wilds go without during the summer, and Sarah proudly shows me the bottoms of her feet, which are brown and hardened with calluses. But finally we find a pair of running shoes that are just a tiny bit too big; with thick socks, they’ll be fine.
When I kneel down to lace up the sneakers, another pang goes through me. I’ve done this so many times—before cross-country meets, in the locker rooms, sitting next to Hana, surrounded by a blur of bodies, joking with each other about who’s a better runner—and yet somehow I always took it for granted.
For the first time the thought comes to me—I wish I hadn’t crossed—and I push it away instantly, try to bury it. It’s done now, and Alex died for it. There’s no point in looking back. I can’t look back.
“Are you ready to see the rest of the homestead?” Sarah asks.
Even the act of undressing and redressing has exhausted me. But I’m desperate for air, and space.
“Show me,” I say.
We go back through the kitchen and up the narrow stone stairs beyond the stove. Sarah darts ahead of me, disappearing as the stairs make a sharp turn. “Almost there!” she calls back.
A final serpentine twist, and suddenly the stairs are no more: I step into a blazing brightness, and soft ground underneath my shoes. I stumble, confused and temporarily blinded. For a second I feel as though I’ve walked into a dream and I stand, blinking, struggling to make sense of this otherworld.
Sarah is standing a few feet away from me, laughing. She lifts her arms, which are bathed in sunshine. “Welcome to the homestead,” she says, and performs a little skipping dance in the grass.
The place where I’ve been sleeping is underground—that I could have guessed from the lack of windows and the quality of dampness—and the stairs have led upward, aboveground, and then released us abruptly. Where there should be a house, an over-structure, there is just a large expanse of grass covered in charred wood and enormous fragments of stone.
I was not prepared for the feeling of the sunshine, or the smell of growth and life. All around us are enormous trees, leaves just tinged with yellow as though they are catching fire slowly from the outside, patterning the ground with alternating spots of light and shadow. For a second something deep and old rises inside me and I could fall on the ground and weep for joy, or open up my arms and spin. After being enclosed for so long, I want to drink in all the space, all the bright, empty air stretching around me on all sides.
Sarah explains, “This used to be a church.” She points behind me, to the splintered stones and the blackened wood. “The bombs didn’t reach the cellar, though. There are plenty of underground places in the Wilds where the bombs didn’t touch. You’ll see.”
“A church?” This surprises me. In Portland, our churches are made of steel and glass and clean white plaster walls. They are sanitized spaces, places where the miracle of life, and God’s science, is celebrated and demonstrated with microscopes and centrifuges.
“One of the old churches,” Sarah says. “There are lots of those, too. On the west side of Rochester there’s a whole one, still standing. I’ll show you someday, if you want.” Then she reaches forward and grabs the bottom of my T-shirt, tugging at me. “Come on. Lots to see.”
The only other time I’ve been to the Wilds was with Alex. We snuck across the border once so that he could show me where he lived. That settlement, like this one, was situated in a large clearing, a place once inhabited, an area the trees and growth had not yet reclaimed. But this clearing is massive, and filled with half-tumbled-down stone archways and walls that are partially standing, and—in one place—a series of concrete stairs that spiral up from the ground and end in nothing. On the last step, several different birds have made their nests.
I can barely breathe as Sarah and I make our way slowly through the grass, which is damp and almost knee-high in places. It is a ruined-world, a nonsense-place. Doors that open nowhere; a rusted truck, wheel-less, sitting in the middle of a stretch of pale green grass, with a tree growing straight through its center; bits of glittering, twisted metal everywhere, melted and bent into unrecognizable shapes.
Sarah walks next to me, practically skipping, excitement bubbling out of her now that we’re outside. She easily dodges the stones and the metal detritus littering the grass, while I have to keep my eyes constantly on the ground. It is slow going, and tiring.
“This used to be a town,” Sarah says. “This was probably the main street. The trees are still young in a lot of places around here, but there aren’t hardly any buildings left at all. That’s how you know where the houses were. Wood burns a lot easier. Obviously.” She drops her voice to a hush, eyes growing wide. “It wasn’t even the bombs that did the worst damage, you know. It was the fires that came after.”
