Harbinger (7 page)

A stunned silence fell over the room as we all watched Meat-Is-Murder Girl lying, completely still, on the floor. Then a groan as she struggled to sit up. She looked around her and slowly, amazingly, got to her feet. She replaced the look of shock with a smile and turned to face Dr. Mordoch up at the podium. Gingerly she raised one foot and then the other, stomping out her defiance.

I hesitated for a second, but after all I’d been through that day, her pounding feet made my heart thud with rebellion. I stomped as the Takers grabbed us. The others joined in as we were shoved and herded into a line. The Marine and Meat-Is-Murder Girl in front. Then me and Zach and Hoodie Guy behind him. They marched us out of the room, our shouts competing with the Takers’ commands.

“Meat is murder! Meat is murder!”

I’d been lied to, threatened with pepper spray, and locked in the dark. What more could they do to me?

8

NEVER, NEVER, NEVER
ask that question.

As soon as the Takers maneuvered our line out of the cafeteria, Meat-Is-Murder Girl let out a wailing scream. I didn’t know what’d happened. Only that the girl was on her knees. Then I saw the Taser.

“Get up.” Freddy stood leering over her.

So the Takers weren’t carrying guns, just Tasers and pepper spray.
How humane.
The girl didn’t move, and he shocked her again. She shrieked and curled up in a ball.

“Stop!” I shouted.

Another, lower voice crisscrossed my own. “Stop! You’re hurting her!”

Kel. It was Kel’s voice coming from right behind me.

I spun around, looking for him, just as a jolt of electricity hit me square in the shoulder. The Taser filled my world with pain and I dropped slo-mo. My body was still turning as my knees gave way. I saw Kel, one piece at a time, as I fell. Dark hair tumbling across his face. Hands hidden in gloves. Thin shoulders beneath a black hoodie. And his eyes.

Deep brown eyes, spiderwebbed with green. I cringed as they met mine, ready to see the usual flicker of revulsion and fear. But his eyes held on to me, like his voice had in Solitary.

I wish I had a river so long. I would teach my feet to fly.

His hand reached out for me, trying to catch me. But he’d been tased too. Our fingertips brushed against each other as we fell, and a sharp ache filled my hand where he’d touched me. My knuckles suddenly stiff and swollen. My skin stinging. Then the pain was eclipsed as my whole body smashed into the floor. Nothing but deadweight.

My muscles, my brain, my mouth . . . Nothing would work. Kel hit the floor an arm’s length away. Deep lines of pain cut across his frozen face. The flecks of green in his eyes flared with the same strange agony I’d felt when he’d touched me.

Then his eyes cleared. Immobilized on the floor, we stared at each other and the questions flew out of my mind. It was more intoxicating than I’d ever imagined to have someone look at me like that. To let me see into them without flinching.

All the things Kel had told me in Solitary—his father, the kidnapping, standing on the roof—were embodied in front of me. How had I not recognized him earlier, sitting at the table? The same sardonic edge in his voice was mapped into his angular face. Rage barely hidden in his eyes. His mouth turned up a little at one corner, fully aware of the irony of our situation.

It was like we were right back in Solitary. We were lying on the floor, inches apart. But still separated.

Sensations started returning in strange bursts. The musty smell of the stone floor. Distant shouts. Scuffed boots coming closer. The world sped up again, and we were yanked to our feet. I was pulled to the front of the line and Kel to the back. But my eyes stayed glued to him, still fitting the voice from the dark with the person in front of me.

Kel’s stark face was framed by coal-black hair that made me think of ravens. His lips were pale against his brown skin, and his nose was a little crooked, like it’d been broken in a fight. But it was his dark hazel eyes that I couldn’t look away from.

I wasn’t used to people meeting my eyes. And Kel didn’t just look at me. He looked
into
me, like he could see every thought in my head. And whatever he saw there now, he must have liked. He gave me a slow smile that made me blush.

Then the line pushed forward, and I tripped over my own feet. The Marine reached out to steady me, and I pulled my attention back, nodding my thanks. We moved forward as a group again.
Well, we’re pulling together as a “family,” just not quite the way Dr. Mordoch imagined.
Half stumbling, half dragged, I led our perverse parade down the path to the dorms.

Back in my room, a pair of fluorescent orange jumpsuits greeted me, laid out neatly on the two beds. Other than the hideous outfits, the room was empty.

“They took it,” I mumbled, feeling numb to any more surprises. And I’d thought there was nothing left for them to take.

With my last ounce of energy, I searched the room. Under the bed, in the desk, in the bathroom, everywhere. But I already knew my sketchbook was gone.

Something inside of me shattered. I crawled onto the bed, letting the tears that had been building for the last twenty-four hours burn down my cheeks.
Fine. They win.

The lock clicked and the door opened. Meat-Is-Murder Girl, holding an ice pack on her arm, was “helped” into the room by Nurse.

“Get changed,” she ordered. Nurse was the same height as Meat-Is-Murder Girl but her cropped hair and rigid stance made her much more intimidating. “Both of you.”

“Where’s my sketchbook?” I didn’t bother to wipe the tears off my cheeks.

Nurse stone-faced me, not meeting my eyes. “I’m not here to answer your questions. Now both of you, get changed and hand me your clothes.”

“The hell I will.” This girl wouldn’t give up that easy. But after Solitary, after getting tased, after Kel’s look had split me open, I didn’t have anything left to fight with.

“If you don’t start changing in the next thirty seconds, I’ll come over there and help you.” I could see the Taser peeking out of her pocket. Meat-Is-Murder Girl scowled and grabbed a jumpsuit, heading for the bathroom.

“No,” Nurse said. “Change out here where I can make sure you don’t hide anything from your pockets.”

The girl, who thirty seconds earlier had been gearing up for battle, now skulked into a corner. Facing the wall, she went through an elaborate maneuver of changing into the jumpsuit while keeping her other clothes on as long as possible.

Her humiliation was palpable, and I turned around to give her privacy while I stripped to my underwear. The woman could’ve just as easily checked our pockets, but the goal was obviously to degrade us. To leave us with nothing. And there wasn’t anything we could do about it.

The jumpsuit chafed as I pulled it on. The cheap fabric was stiff, and the huge zipper running up the front scratched my skin.

“Now take this.” Nurse handed us each a pill.

I swallowed it without a word. It would almost be a relief to get away from this place and these people. But there was no escape yet. Nurse pulled my jaw open and squeezed my cheeks, “checking for compliance.”

“Lights out in five,” she snapped, grabbing our bundles of clothes. With a loud click the door shut and locked behind her.

“I’m getting out of this Nazi camp tomorrow.” Meat-Is-Murder Girl had also swallowed the pill, but her hard eyes hadn’t lost their defiance. It was only a matter of minutes.

“I all— I all—” My throat clamped shut in frustration. I started again. “I already tried.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Razor wire and cameras.” I glanced over at the window I’d climbed out of the night before. Four shiny new nails had been hammered into the frame so it wouldn’t open anymore. We were stuck.

The lights flicked off and back on again. There weren’t any light switches or small lamps in our room. Just the main fluorescent light in the middle of the ceiling, with no way to control it.

Meat-Is-Murder Girl yanked the covers off the bed and dumped them on the floor. Even though it was dark outside, it hadn’t cooled off. She sprawled on the mattress, her frizzy, reddish hair spread in an arc around her head.

“I’m Maya.”

“Faye.”

“Why’d you do that?” She stared up at the ceiling, glaring at it.

“What?” I looked around, trying to figure out what I was being accused of.

“You and that freak with the gloves. You got yourselves tased.” Maya propped herself up on her elbow, waiting for my answer. She aimed her glare in my direction, and all her grief, all her outrage at the unfairness of life, hit me in the gut. And as I read it in her eyes, the pain was fresh to her as well. Shuddering, Maya dropped her gaze to the faded sheets.

I sat down on the bed, trying to clear the flood of emotions from my head. Trying to figure out how to answer her. A mosquito bit me, and I swatted and missed. My head still throbbed from the jolt of electricity. I pictured Kel, his eyes holding me even as I fell.

Why did we try to stop the guards?
Maya was right. We didn’t know her, didn’t owe her anything. But she’d had no one else. How could I explain my sense that we were already tied together in this place? Finally, I turned toward Maya and shrugged.

She shrugged back, like this made as much sense as anything else at Holbrook. “What’s wrong with you?”

I wasn’t used to people my age asking questions or even talking to me. I pretended to be busy arranging my sheets. Was it so obvious that I was broken? Well, I guess we’d all been sent here for some reason. Judging by Maya’s fit tonight, she most likely had “problems with authority.” I was probably going to have this conversation over and over again at Holbrook, and I was already tired of it. What could I say?
My parents think I’m crazy?

“I get these panic attacks.”

“No, stupid. Why are you wearing dead cow on your feet? You know there used to be National Forests in this country? National Parks too. After the Peak War started, they cleared them all. Some they strip-mined for coal. Some they cut down for wood. But some they clear-cut for cattle, to replace the meat and leather they couldn’t import anymore. God forbid we stop killing animals. Or that you have to go without.”

I looked down at my hiking boots, the only clothes of mine I still had, besides my underwear.
We’ve just been tased and she’s worried about my shoes? Unbelievable.

“Why do you even care?”

“Because someone has to.” Maya’s voice was quiet, and she stared down at her empty hand like she was looking for something she’d lost. Then her face went stony again and her words came out in a long tirade.

“Because no one else is even thinking about how screwed we are. You think cellophane-wrapped meat just magically appears in your fridge? You think ninety-degree weather in September is normal for Maine? You think it’s okay for people to wipe their asses with thousand-year-old trees. No!” Maya shouted the last part, sitting straight up in bed.

I hadn’t ever heard anyone talk like this before. I mean, I’d heard about rumors of sabotage from Greenpeace extremists, but they never showed that stuff on TV. Everyone at the Cooperative, my parents, teachers, kids at school, acted like this was all just a temporary glitch. For now we’d throw up some windmills and combine our food resources, but soon we’d win the war and there’d be plenty of oil again.

My dad still talked about going back to the city to work at his PR firm. My mom insisted that once the Cooperatives turned back into suburbs, the housing market would be the first thing to rebound. She’d look around the neighborhood and say, “They’ll be clamoring for realtors once this is all over, and I’ll be back in business! Some people just hate staying put.”

But nothing ever got better. When oil peaked out and China started hoarding barrels, the news channels said it was just a phase. When war broke out, the President said it was a strategic strike. Now, four years later, the Peak War was still going strong and everything that could be used for energy in this country had been drilled and mined and slashed. Maya’s rhetoric sounded a little crazy, but maybe it was saner than everything else.

“The Earth’s been raped and the Cooperatives are pretending it’s business as usual. A water quota here, a food ration there. Just bribe enough people and keep quiet and hope it won’t affect you. But it will. Because no matter how much money you have, no matter how deep you bury the problem, it’ll never go away. You know what it took to raise that cow?”

She jabbed her finger at my leather boots and started rattling off facts. “Too much! Enough water to float a destroyer. Not to mention twenty-five hundred pounds of corn, three hundred and fifty pounds of soybeans, and a ton of black market gasoline to haul all that crap around. And after all that, let’s not forget they murdered the innocent animal. All so you could strut around covered in skin while people in the cities starve.”

Strut around?
Maybe. Maya’s rhetoric was getting muddled in my drugged-out brain. Murdered animals, government bribes, starving people, the screwed-up environment. I wasn’t sure I got what she was saying, but what kept sticking in my mind were the news reports I’d seen of Pittsburgh. It was like a war zone there. Scared kids, gaunt faces, and all that anger. “They don’t have to stay there.”

Disgust registered on Maya’s face. “Right. ’Cause I’m sure your Cooperative is throwing open its doors, offering to share its wealth. Just because there aren’t any fences keeping people in the cities doesn’t mean they have a choice.”

Kel’s words echoed in my head:
“Did they really think there was anywhere better to go?”

I couldn’t process all this. My whole body ached from the day. Every inch of me was sticky from the heat. My muscles burned, bruises throbbed. I rubbed my hand.

Was I imagining it? Or was it still sore from where Kel had touched me? A woozy feeling swept over me as I untied my boots. I shut my eyes and all I could see was Kel. The ache of his eyes cutting into me. The drugs were really kicking in now.

I shoved the offending boots under my bed and searched my blurry mind for anything I could say to shut Maya up.