Pandemonium (14 page)

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.

M
iyako, 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.

“Lena,” Raven barks at me sharply. “Take her feet.”

I do. Her body is heavier than seems possible. In death, she has become a weight of iron. I’m furious with Raven, so furious I could spit. This is what we are reduced to here. This is what we have become in the Wilds: We starve, we die, we wrap our friends in old and tattered sheets, we burn them in the open. I know it’s not Raven’s fault—it’s the people on the other side of the fence, it’s Them, the zombies, my former people—but the anger refuses to dissolve. It burns a hole in my throat.

A quarter mile from the homestead there is a gully where at one point a stream must have flowed. We place her there, and Raven splashes her with gasoline: just a little, as there isn’t much to spare. The snow is falling harder now. At first she won’t light. Blue begins to cry, loudly, and Grandma pulls her sharply away from the fire, saying, “Quiet, Blue. You’re not helping.” Blue turns her face into Grandma’s overlarge corduroy jacket so the sound of her sobbing is muffled. Sarah is silent, white-faced, trembling.

Raven douses the body with more gasoline and finally gets it lit. The air is filled right away with a choking smoke, the smell of burning hair; the noise is terrible too, a crackling that makes you think of meat falling away from bones. Raven can’t even speak the whole eulogy before she starts to gag. I turn away, tears stinging my eyes—from the smoke or from anger, I can’t tell.

Suddenly I have the wild urge to dig, to bury, to hack up the earth. I move blindly, numbly, back to the burrow. It takes me a little while to locate the cotton shorts and the old, tattered shirt I was wearing when I came to the Wilds. We’ve been using the shirt as a dishrag. These are the only items left from before: the remnants of my old life.

The others have now gathered in the kitchen. Bram is stoking the fire, coaxing it to life. Raven is boiling water in a pot: for coffee, no doubt. Sarah is shuffling a pack of water-warped and dog-eared cards. Everyone else is sitting in silence.

“Hey, Lena,” Sarah says as I stalk past her. I’ve stuffed the shorts and the T-shirt under my jacket and am keeping my arms tightly crossed over my stomach; for some reason, I don’t want anyone to know what I’m doing, especially Raven. “You want to play Spit?”

“Not now,” I growl at her. The Wilds turn us mean, too. Mean and hard, all edges.

“We could play something else,” she says. “We could play—”

“I said no.” Then I’m running up the stairs before I can see I’ve hurt her feelings.

The air is thick: a white blur. For a moment the cold stuns me and I stand, blinking, confused. Everything is sprouting a layer of snow, a fuzzy growth. I can still smell Miyako’s body burning. And I imagine that with the snow there is ash blowing over us. I fantasize that it will cover us in our sleep, seal us into the burrow, and suffocate us there, underground.

There is a juniper bush at the edge of the homestead, where I start and end my runs. Underneath it the snow has not accumulated. There is a bare dusting on the ground, which I sweep away with the cuff of my jacket.

Then I dig.

I claw at the earth with my fingers. The anger and the grief is still throbbing behind my eyes, narrowing my vision to a tunnel. I can’t even feel the cold or the pain in my hands. Dirt and blood are caking my fingernails, but I don’t care. I bury those last, tattered parts of me there, under the juniper, in the snow.

Two days after we burn Miyako, the snow has still not stopped. Every day Raven scans the skies anxiously, cursing under her breath. It is time to move. Lu and Squirrel, the first of the scouts, have returned. The homestead is mostly packed up, although we are still gathering food and supplies from the river, and trying to trap and hunt what we can. But the snow makes it hard. The animals stay underground.

As soon as the rest of the scouts return, we will leave. They’ll be here any day now—that’s what we all tell Raven, to ease her anxiety. The snow falls slowly, steadily, turning the world to white drift.

I’ve started checking the nests for messages twice a day. The trees, encased in ice, are harder to climb. Afterward, when I come back to the burrow, my fingers throb painfully as the feeling returns to them. For weeks the supplies have been floating to us regularly, although sometimes we’ve found them caught upriver, in the shallows, which freeze more easily. We have to break them out with broom handles. Roach and Buck make it back to the homestead, exhausted but triumphant. The snow finally stops. Now we are just waiting on Hunter and Tack.

Then one day, the nests are yellow. And again the next day: yellow.

On the third day of yellow, Raven pulls me aside.

“I’m worried,” she says. “Something must be wrong on the inside.”

“Maybe they’re patrolling again,” I say. “Maybe they’ve turned on the fence.”

She bites her lip, shakes her head. “Whatever it is, it must be major. Everyone knows it’s time for us to move. We need all the supplies we can get.”

“I’m sure it’s temporary,” I say. “I’m sure tomorrow we’ll get a shipment.”

Raven shakes her head again. “We can’t afford to wait much longer,” she says, and her voice is strangled. I know she isn’t thinking only of the supplies. She’s thinking of Hunter and Tack, too.

The next day, the sky is a pale blue, the sun high and amazingly warm, breaking through the trees and turning the ice to rivulets of flowing water. The snow brought silence with it, but now the woods are alive again, full of dripping and twittering and cracking. It is as though the Wilds have been released from a muzzle.

We are all in a good mood—everyone but Raven, who does her daily scan of the sky and only mutters, “It won’t last.”

On my way to the nests, stamping through the snow, I’m so warm I have to take off my jacket and tie it around my waist. The nests will be green today, I can sense it. They’ll be green, and the supplies will come, and the scouts will return, and we’ll all flow south together. The light is dazzling, bouncing off the glittering branches, filling my vision with spots of color, flashes of red and green.

When I get to the nests, I untie my jacket and loop it over one of the lower branches. I’ve gotten good at the climb—my body finds its way up easily, and I feel a kind of joy in my chest I haven’t felt for a long time. From far away I hear a vague humming, a low vibration that reminds me of crickets singing in the summertime.

There is a vast world for us, a boundless space beyond and between the fences and the rules. We will travel it freely. We will be okay.

I have almost reached the nests. I adjust my weight, seek better purchase for my feet, and pull myself upward, toward the final branch.