“This is perfect,” I say. For just a second, a smile flits across Grace’s face.
I help her carry the food down into the cellar and stock it on the shelves. I place the bottle of gasoline against one wall. She keeps the package of cookies hugged to her chest, though, and refuses to let it go. The room smells bad, like Grace’s breath: sour and earthy. I’m glad when we emerge back into the sunshine. The morning has left a heavy feeling in my chest that refuses to dissolve.
“I’ll be back,” I say to Grace.
I’ve nearly rounded the corner when she speaks.
“I remember you,” she says, her voice hardly louder than a whisper. I spin around, surprised. But she is already darting away into the trees, and disappears before I have a chance to reply.
Lena
The dawn is double: a twin smoky glow at the horizon and behind us, above the trees, where the fire continues to smolder. The clouds and the drifts of black smoke are almost indistinguishable.
In the dark, and the confusion, we didn’t realize we were missing two members of our group: Pike and Henley. Dani wants to go back and look for their bodies, but the fire makes it impossible. We can’t even go back to forage for cans that will not have burned, and supplies that have made it through the flames.
Instead, as soon as the sky is light, we push forward.
We walk in silence, in a straight line, our eyes trained on the ground. We must get to the camp at Waterbury as soon as possible—no detours, no resting, no explorations of the ruins of old towns, picked clean of useful supplies long ago. The air is charged with anxiety.
We can count ourselves lucky for one thing: that Raven’s map was with Julian and Tack and have not been destroyed with the rest of our supplies.
Tack and Julian walk together at the front of the line, occasionally stopping to consult notations they’ve made on the map. Despite everything that has happened, it gives me a rush of pride to watch Tack consulting Julian, and a different kind of pleasure too—vindication, because I know Alex will also have noticed.
Alex, of course, takes up the rear with Coral.
It’s a warm day—so warm I have removed my jacket and rolled my long-sleeved shirt to the elbows—and the sun is splashed liberally over the ground. It’s almost impossible to believe that only hours ago we were attacked, except that Pike’s and Henley’s voices are missing from the murmured conversation.
Julian is ahead of me. Alex is behind me. So I push forward—exhausted, my mouth still full of the taste of smoke, my lungs burning.
Waterbury, Lu has told us, is the beginning of a new order. An enormous camp has amassed outside the city’s wall, and many of the city’s Valid residents have fled. Portions of Waterbury have been totally evacuated; other parts of the city are barricaded against the Invalids on the other side.
Lu has heard that the Invalid camp is almost like a city itself: Everyone pitches in, everyone helps repair shelters and hunt for food and gather water. It has so far been safe from retaliation, partly because no one has remained who can retaliate. The municipal offices were destroyed, and the mayor and his deputies were chased out.
There, we’ll build shelters out of branches and salvaged brick, and finally find a place for ourselves.
In Waterbury, everything will be okay.
The trees begin to thin, and we pass old, graffiti-covered benches and half-shell underpasses, speckled with mold; a roof, intact, sitting on a field of grass, as though the rest of the house has been simply suctioned underground; stretches of road that, leading nowhere, are now part of a nonsense-grammar. This is the language of the world before—a world of chaos and confusion and happiness and despair—before the blitz turned streets to grids, cities to prisons, and hearts to dust.
We know we’re getting close.
In the evening, when the sun begins to set, the anxiety comes sweeping back. None of us wants to spend another night alone, exposed, in the Wilds, even if we have managed to put the regulators off our trail for now.
From ahead, there is a shout. Julian has circled away from Tack and fallen into step beside me, although we have been mostly walking in silence.
“What is it?” I ask him. I’m so tired I am numb. I can’t see past the people ahead of me. The group is fanning out over what looks as though it was once an old parking lot. Most of the pavement is gone. Two streetlamps, empty of lightbulbs, are staked into the ground. Next to one of them, Tack and Raven have both stopped.
Julian cranes onto his tiptoes. “I think . . . I think we’re there.” Even before he finishes speaking, I am pushing through the group, angling for a look.
At the edge of the old parking lot, the ground drops away suddenly and cuts sharply downward. A series of switchback trails leads down the hillside to a barren, treeless portion of land.
The camp is not like I’ve envisioned it at all. I’ve been imagining real houses, or at least solid structures, nestled between trees. This is simply a vast, teeming field, a patchwork of blankets and trash, and hundreds and hundreds of people, pushing almost directly up against the city’s wall, stained red in the dying light. Fires burn sporadically across the great, dark expense, winking like lights from a distant city. The sky, electric at the horizon, is otherwise stretched dark and tight, like a metal lid that has been screwed shut over waste.
For a moment I flash back to the twisted underground people Julian and I met when we were trying to escape the Scavengers, and their grimy, smoky, underground world.
I’ve never seen so many Invalids. I have never seen so many people, period.
Even from here, we can smell them.
My chest feels like it has caved in.
“What is this place?” Julian mutters. I want to say something to comfort him—I want to tell him it will be okay—but I feel weighted down, dull with disappointment.
“This is it?” Dani is the one to voice what we must all be feeling. “This is the big dream? The new order?”
“We have friends here, at least,” Hunter says quietly. But even he can’t keep up the act. He shoves a hand through his hair so it sticks up in all directions. His face is white; all day, he has been hacking as he walked, his breath coming wet and ragged. “And we had no choice, anyway.”
“We could have gone to Canada, like Gordo said.”
“We wouldn’t have made it there without our supplies,” Hunter says.
“We would still have our supplies if we had headed north in the first place,” Dani fires back.
“Well, we didn’t. We’re here. And I don’t know about you guys, but I’m thirsty as hell.” Alex pushes his way through the line. He has to sidestep down the hill to the first switchback trail, sliding a little on the sleep slope, sending a spray of gravel skidding down toward the camp.
He pauses when he reaches the path and looks back up at us. “Well? Are you coming?” His eyes slide over the whole group. When he looks at me, a small shock pulses through me, and I quickly drop my eyes. For a split second, he had looked almost like my Alex again.
Raven and Tack move forward together. Alex is right about one thing—we don’t have a choice now. We won’t make it another few days in the Wilds, not without any traps, or supplies, and vessels to boil our water. The rest of the group must know this, because they follow Raven and Tack, sidestepping down toward the dirt path one after another. Dani mutters something under her breath, but follows at last.
“Come on.” I reach for Julian’s hand.
He draws back. His eyes are fixed on the vast, smoky plain below us, and the dingy patchwork of blankets and makeshift tents. For a moment, I think he’s going to refuse. Then he jerks forward, as though pushing his way through an invisible barrier, and precedes me down the hill.
At the last second, I notice that Lu is still standing on the ridge. She looks tiny, dwarfed by the enormous evergreens behind her. Her hair is nearly down to her waist now. She is staring not at the camp, but at the wall beyond it: the stained-red stone that marks the beginning of the other world. The zombie world.
“You coming, Lu?” I say.
“What?” She looks startled, as though I’ve woken her up. Then, immediately: “I’m coming.” She casts one more look at the wall before following us. Her face is troubled.
The city of Waterbury looks, at least from this distance, dead: no smoke floats up from the factory chimneys; no lights shine from the darkened, glass-enclosed towers. It is the empty husk of a city, almost like the ruins we pass in the Wilds. Except this time, the ruin is on the other side of the walls.
And I wonder what about it, exactly, makes Lu afraid.
Once we reach the ground, the smell is thick, almost unbearable: the stink of thousands of unwashed bodies and unwashed, hungry mouths; urine; old fires and tobacco. Julian coughs, mutters, “God.” I bring my sleeve to my mouth, trying to inhale through it.
The periphery of the camp is ringed with large metal drums and old, rust-spotted trash cans, in which fires have been lit. People crowd around the fires, cooking or warming their hands. They look at us with suspicion as we pass. Immediately, I can tell that we are not welcome.
Even Raven looks uncertain. It’s not clear where we should go, or who we should speak to, or whether the camp is organized at all. As the sun is finally swallowed by the horizon, the crowd becomes a mass of shadows: faces lit up, grotesque and contorted by the flickering light. Shelters have been constructed hastily from bits of corrugated tin and scraps of metal; other people have created makeshift tents with dirty bedsheets. Still others are lying, huddled, on the ground, pressing against one another for warmth.
“Well?” Dani says. Her voice is loud, a challenge. “What now?”
Raven is about to respond when suddenly a body rockets into her, nearly pushing her over. Tack reaches out to steady her, barks, “Hey!”
The boy who catapulted into Raven—skinny, with the jutting jaw of a bulldog—doesn’t even glance at her. Already, he is plowing back toward a dingy red tent, where a small crowd has assembled. A man—older, bare-chested but wearing a long, flapping winter coat—is standing with his fists balled, his face screwed up with fury.
“You filthy pig!” he spits. “I’m going to fucking kill you.”
“Are you crazy?” Bulldog’s voice is surprisingly shrill. “What the hell are you—”
“You stole my goddamn can. Admit it. You stole my can.” Bits of spit are collected at the corners of the old man’s mouth. His eyes are wide, wild. He turns a full circle, appealing to the crowd. Then he raises his voice. “I had a whole can of tuna, unopened. Sitting right with my things. He stole it.”
“I never touched it. You’re out of your mind.” Bulldog starts to turn away. The man in the ragged coat lets out a roar of fury.
“Liar!”
He leaps. For a second, it seems he is suspended in midair, his coat flapping behind him like the great leathery wings of a bat. Then he lands on the boy’s back, pinning him to the ground. All at once the crowd is a surge, shouting, pressing forward, cheering them on. The boy rolls on top of the man, straddling him, pounding him. Then the older man kicks him off and wrestles the boy’s face into the dirt. He is shouting, but his words are unintelligible. The boy thrashes and manages to buck the old man off, sending him into the side of a metal drum. The man screams. The fire has obviously been burning for a long time. The metal must be hot.