Hungry (32 page)

Can’t be,
I think. But just in case, I ping her to ask. She doesn’t answer. So I send a quick, quiet vid to her message center, but it immediately bounces back. My heart sinks. One World probably knocked her off-line and confiscated her Gizmo when they arrested her. I read through some of YAZ’s comments on the threads, and I have to admit, it sounds like my Yaz, so I direct message her through the Dynasaur chat.

YAZ is that you?

Within seconds, I have an answer.

Can u believe it? Me, a Dynasaur!

I press my hand over my mouth to stop from laughing out loud.

How?

Long story, deets later, but short version is, yr dad got me out of OW custody then set me up with a jalopy (sp?) some crazy thing he built & showed me how to get online without being traced—seriously awesome. still got my hovercam tho:)

My dad?

Yep. Yr dad
=
amazing. Yr fam is soooo worried ab U.

Really?

YES!!!! We all R. Where R U

I hesitate. The truth is I don’t know where I am, but also I can’t be sure this is really Yaz or if it is that I can trust her. Behind me, Basil stirs. “Apple?” he says.

“I’m here,” I whisper then quickly send off one last text.

I’m ok more soon.

I cloak the Gizmo before I pocket it and climb over the seat to nestle up against Basil again. He hugs me close and presses his nose into my hair. “I thought you were gone,” he says sleepily.

“I wouldn’t leave,” I tell him.

We lie twisted up together, our breath synchronized, as I gaze out the window at the stars above me again. When I was little, if I woke up from a bad dream, Grandma Apple would take me outside, and we’d look at the one lone star bright enough to shine through the haze that covers the Loops.
Make a wish,
she’d say. Now I wish I knew who to trust, who’s really on my side. But it seems childish to expect help from some cosmic light, a mere projection of the past onto the present. I close my eyes and drift into a heavy sleep with Basil’s arms wrapped snugly around me.

PART 3

THE HINTERLANDS

“The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”

—Che Guevara

All night, I dream of war—flashes of artillery, earthshaking explosions from bombs, the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire overhead, but I’m too exhausted to wake myself up fully, until a familiar gnawing in my belly rouses me. I struggle to open my eyes and see shimmering patterns on the ceiling above me. Basil’s at my side. We bob and spin. The growling in my stomach turns into the roar of rushing water, and I force myself to sit up.

“What the hell?” I shout when I put my feet into a cold puddle on the floorboards.

Basil jerks awake. “Where are we? What’s happening?” He presses himself against the window. Water swirls, frothy and brown, on all sides of us as the world rushes by, but I can’t make sense of what I see. We’re in a car, but we’re not driving. We’re in the water, but this isn’t a boat. Then Basil shouts, “Flash flood!” He bashes his shoulder against the door but the pressure from the water outside is too strong. “Give me your crutch!”

I scramble to find it in the rising water, which has filled the wheel wells and reaches the seat. “Can you swim?” he asks as he smashes the crutch against the window until the glass shatters.

“Of course I can! Can you?” I yell back, but I don’t hear his answer because water pours in through the opening, tilting the car hard to the left then back up to the right. The last thing I hear before getting a face full of water is Basil screaming, “Kick! Kick!”

I lift my head and take a final deep breath then push off the seat. Ahead of me, Basil slips through the window then he turns, hair swirling in the current, cheeks puffy with air, to look for me underwater. I fight against the torrent filling the car and grab the edge of the window to haul myself through. The car slips behind me like a lost shoe and sinks into the murky swirl, pulling me down with it. I swim as hard as I can but I’m disoriented. I somersault and twist, trying to find Basil, but I can’t see anything. The roiling water bullies me forward. My lungs scream for air and I start to go limp. I feel as if I’m on a cloud, watching myself struggle in the water when a voice inside of me says,
Fight!
I see light above my head, so I kick as hard as I can and pop up above the surface, gasping and flailing.

Basil grabs me by my shirt. “Roll on your back,” he splutters. “Point your feet downstream.”

I do what he says and find myself swept into the current, but my head stays above the water.

“We have to get to land,” he tells me with amazing calm. “Get ready.” I nod and take a deep breath just as he shouts, “Go!”

We both roll to our stomachs and pump our arms and legs, furiously fighting the undercurrent trying to clear us away like flotsam, but we won’t give up. I kick and claw and fight my way to the side until I’m scraping up handfuls of mud and rocks, then I put my feet down and stumble to the slippery shore. “Basil!” I shout. “Basil!” I look around frantically, fearing that he hasn’t made it.

“Over here!” He’s upstream from me, using old tree roots and rocks to climb up the muddy slope. I do the same, working my way toward him, until side by side we scramble over the top of the embankment and roll to our backs, panting and coughing.

“Oh my god. Oh my god. What just happened?” I sputter and half wonder if I’m stuck in a nightmare.

“Must’ve been in a riverbed,” he says, breathing heavily. “Must’ve been a storm.” That would explain my dream. Flashes of lightning. Explosions of thunder. Rain pounding the top of the car. “Those old riverbeds fill up fast when it pours, and once it starts, there’s nothing anybody can do to stop it,” he tells me.

I sit up and take stock. I’ve lost my shoes, my brace, and my pants, but I still have underwear. Luckily the shirt I took from Basil’s mom is long enough to cover half of me. Somehow my pouch has gotten twisted tightly under my arm and miraculously my Gizmo is still inside. When I feel it, my first instinct is to make sure it still works and call for help, but then I remember, the people who would help us are the same ones who would throw us in jail.

“Goddamn it!” I yell in frustration. I grab a handful of rocks and dirt and fling them at the unrelenting water surging downstream. “How much more could we possibly go through? This is getting completely ridiculous!” I pound my fists into the ground and fling more rocks and dirt against the air. “I’ve been chased! I’ve been shot at! I’ve stolen a car! Everyone knows I’m HectorProtector and now this! A freakin’ flash flood? You have got to be kidding me! I don’t even have pants anymore!” I rant.

“But, Apple.” Basil kneels barefoot beside me and holds my shoulders.

“What?” I seethe at him. I realize I’m acting like a toddler, but I can’t help it; I’m just so fed up. “What is it now?”

“Look.” He points behind us, away from the river.

Slowly I turn and see spread in front of us a thick tangle of green blanketing everything from the ground to strange foliage-covered figures reaching for the sky. “Oh my god!” I gasp as I try to take it all in, but my brain can’t make sense of what I see. “What is it?”

“We made it.”

“To what? Where are we?”

Basil stands and shakes himself, flinging droplets of water from his hair and clothes. They sparkle like tiny prisms in the sunlight. He reaches down and pulls me up beside him. We stand side by side, looking out onto the green horizon, then a smile spreads slowly over his face as he says, “The Hinterlands.”

*   *   *

I limp down the other side of the embankment behind Basil. Little green wisps tickle my ankles and my feet. “What is this stuff?” I point to the leaves creeping up the hill toward us, because honestly I’m scared that it’ll swallow us up like it has everything else in its path.

“Probably kudzu,” says Basil. “I’ve heard the stuff grows like a foot a day out here.”

“But I thought … but everybody said … but … but … but…” I stammer and stutter because I cannot believe what I’m seeing. This is nothing like the desolate wasteland I’ve always heard was beyond the Loops. “This isn’t supposed to be here,” I finally spit out.

Basil looks at me and grins. “But it is here.”

On tender feet, we step carefully through the thick tangle of vines with heart-shaped leaves. Gigantic shaggy green creatures populate the hillside like some long-forgotten zoo of extinct animals. Grandma and I used to play a game naming shapes in clouds. Now I try to imagine what these beasts could be. Dinosaurs or elephants or giraffes? Maybe a fairy-tale giant reaching for the sun.

I pull a leaf from one of the vines and rub it between my forefinger and thumb. It’s as soft as worn denim and has a pleasant, almost sweet soaplike smell, only there is something deeper and more complex to the scent. I press it against my nose and inhale again. “This is amazing,” I whisper reverently. “I had no idea anything could grow.”

“Look up there.” Basil points high on the hill where a giant, white stone face with a long green beard peers out of the leaves. I squint at the shape of a man towering toward the sky in a long robe. He holds out his arms. His hands are missing, but his eyes are kind and they seem to follow us as we explore. At the base of the hill is an arch between two pillars. Basil pulls back some vines to reveal the words
BETHLEHEM—OUR HOPE
inscribed in stone. A tumbledown staircase made from rocks leads up the terraced hill. White stucco parapets push through the vines. Black windows peek out of the foliage like hidden woodland creatures watching silently as we pass a flock of crumbling white stone animals, sheep maybe, grazing on the leaves. We wind around a ramshackle structure, half the walls collapsed to expose pairs of fallen animals impaled on posts. Horses? Hippos? Some kind of bears? Basils grabs the end of a vine and tugs.
NOAH’S ARK CAROUSEL
reads the sign in the dirt.

“What is this place?” I ask, half creeped out and half amazed as we pick our way through the rubble, avoiding the sharpest rocks.

“I don’t know. Maybe some kind of religious park or something?”

We come to another archway decorated with more lacy shrubbery casting shadows across another sign. I pluck the vines away to reveal
GARDEN OF EDEN
carved above the arch.

Basil steps into the clearing, but I begin foraging around the edges, wondering what else might grow in the midst of all this kudzu. Could there be flowers? Bugs? Small animals burrowing beneath the ground? I pull apart a snarl of leaves. At first all I see is green. Then, a tiny spot of red. And another. I kneel down to get a better look and am nearly bowled over when I come across a cluster of bright fruit.

“Look,” I say with wonder, pointing at beautiful red globs among all the green. “I think these might be … could they be…?” I reach cautiously through the brambles. Thorns scratch my hands but I don’t care. I pluck a few from the vine and hold them up, dumbstruck. It’s like if someone you thought was dead walks through a door and shakes your hand.

“What are they?” Basil asks, peering closely.

“Berries,” I whisper.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I tell him, regaining my voice. “Grandma Apple told me about these.” I marvel at their color, their texture, their utter perfection. “They’re more beautiful than I ever imagined.” I can’t stop turning them over and over, exploring every facet that glistens in the sun. “They were one of her favorites. She told me so many stories about what they grew and what they gathered. Mushrooms, roots, ferns, and wild greens. We used to draw pictures of different kinds of fruit and vegetables or make them out of clay then pretend to cook. But I never thought…” I bring a berry close to my nose and inhale. The smell is subtle but sweet. A scent from my dreams.

“Be careful!” says Basil. “What if they’re poisonous?”

“It’s okay. See how it looks like lots of itty-bitty balls stuck together, but then it’s hollow on the inside?” I turn one over to show him the concave white belly. I put five on my fingertips and make them dance. “The poisonous ones were smooth and not as bright, and they didn’t grow on prickly vines like these.” I stop and laugh. “Just think, all that time Grandma was playing with me, she was really teaching me what you could and couldn’t eat.” I hold one close to my mouth. “Should I?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

“Only one way to find out!” A little thrill zips through me as I pop a berry in my mouth. Basil stares. I roll it on my tongue. The texture is strange. Bumpy. Almost rubbery. I start to gag but then my mouth fills with spit. The taste is fleeting and too unfamiliar to name, but I like it and I want more. I move the berry to the side of my mouth, between my teeth and my cheek and I suck, drawing out small gulps of pleasure. When that’s not enough, I cautiously bite down. A squish of sweet, tart juice is released. “Oh my god,” I say as the amazing new flavor spreads across my tongue and up into my nose. “This is incredible. Delicious.” The more I chew the stronger the taste becomes. Plus I love the satisfying crunch of tiny seeds grinding between my teeth. When I swallow the berry mush, I immediately reach for another one. “You have to try one!”

“You’re sure?” he asks and I nod while I stuff myself with more. Carefully, Basil plucks a berry from the brambles and lays it on his tongue. When he chews his eyes get wide. “It’s like my mouth and part of my brain are waking up,” he says. “It’s like … like…” He swallows and reaches for another. “It’s like this is what we’re meant to do!”

Basil and I laugh and chew berries one by one for several minutes. When he puts them on his fingers like I did before, I snatch them one by one with my teeth and growl, “More! Give me more!”

“You’ve become a monster!” He pelts me with fruit, yelling, “Back! Back, you beast!”

I roar at him then lunge and grab his waist. We spin around and fall to the ground with me on top of him demanding that he feed me.