We maneuver onto Congress, and the neighborhood changes quickly. Soon we pass one of Portland’s two gas stations, around which a group of regulators stands guard, guns pointing toward the sky; then dollar stores and a Laundromat with a faded orange awning; a dingy-looking deli.
Suddenly my mom leans forward, putting one hand on the back of Tony’s seat. “Turn this up,” she says sharply.
He adjusts a dial on the dashboard. The radio voice gets louder.
“Following the recent outbreak in Waterbury, Connecticut—”
“God,” my mother says. “Not another one.”
“—all citizens, particularly those in the southeast quadrants, have been strongly encouraged to evacuate to temporary housing in neighboring Bethlehem. Bill Ardury, chief of Special Forces, offered reassurances to worried citizens. ‘The situation is under control,’ he said during his seven-minute address. ‘State and municipal military personnel are working together to contain the disease and to ensure that the area is cordoned off, cleansed, and sanitized as soon as possible. There is absolutely no reason to fear further contamination—”
“That’s enough,” my mother says abruptly, sitting back. “I can’t listen anymore.”
Tony begins fiddling with the radio. Most stations are just static. Last month, the big story was the government’s discovery of several wavelengths that had been co-opted by Invalids for their use. We were able to intercept and decode several critical messages, which led to a triumphant raid in Chicago, and the arrest of several key Invalids. One of them was responsible for planning the explosion in Washington, DC, last fall, a blast that killed twenty-seven people, including a mother and a child.
I was glad when the Invalids were executed. Some people complained that lethal injection was too humane for convicted terrorists, but I thought it sent a powerful message: We are not the evil ones. We are reasonable and compassionate. We stand for fairness, structure, and organization.
It’s the other side, the uncureds, who bring the chaos.
“It’s really disgusting,” my mother says. “If we’d started bombing when the trouble first—Tony, look out!”
Tony slams on the brakes. The tires screech. I go shooting forward, narrowly avoiding cracking my forehead on the headrest in front of me before my seat belt jerks me backward. There is a heavy thump. The air smells like burned rubber.
“Shit,” my mother is saying. “Shit. What in God’s name—?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t see her. She came out from between the Dumpsters. . . .”
A young girl is standing in front of the car, her hands resting flat on the hood. Her hair is tented around her thin, narrow face, and her eyes are huge and terrified. She looks vaguely familiar.
Tony rolls down his window. The smell of the Dumpsters—there are several of them, lined up next to one another—floats into the car, sweet and rotten. My mother coughs, and cups a palm over her nose.
“You okay?” Tony calls out, craning his head out the window.
The girl doesn’t respond. She is panting, practically hyperventilating. Her eyes skate from Tony to my mother in the backseat, and then to me. A shock runs through me.
Jenny. Lena’s oldest cousin. I haven’t seen her since last summer, and she’s much thinner. She looks older, too. But it’s unmistakably her. I recognize the flare of her nostrils, her proud, pointed chin, and the eyes.
She recognizes me, too. I can tell. Before I can say anything, she wrenches her hands off the car hood and darts across the street. She’s wearing an old, ink-stained backpack that I recognize as one of Lena’s hand-me-downs. Across one of its pockets two names are colored in black bubble letters: Lena’s, and mine. We penned them onto her bag in seventh grade, when we were bored in class. That’s the day we first came up with our little code word, our pump-you-up cheer, which later we called out to each other at cross-country meets. Halena. A combination of both our names.
“For heaven’s sake. You’d think the girl was old enough to know not to dart in front of traffic. She nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“I know her,” I say automatically. I can’t shake the image of Jenny’s huge, dark eyes, her pale skeleton-face.
“What do you mean, you know her?” My mother turns to me.
I close my eyes and try to think of peaceful things. The bay. Seagulls wheeling against a blue sky. Rivers of spotless white fabric. But instead I see Jenny’s eyes, the sharp angles of her cheek and chin. “Her name is Jenny,” I say. “She’s Lena’s cousin—”
“Watch your mouth,” my mom cuts me off sharply. I realize, too late, that I shouldn’t have said anything. Lena’s name is worse than a curse word in our family.
For years, Mom was proud of my friendship with Lena. She saw it as a testament to her liberalism. We don’t judge the girl because of her family, she would tell guests when they brought it up. The disease isn’t genetic; that’s an old idea.
She took it as almost a personal insult when Lena contracted the disease and managed to escape before she could be treated, as though Lena had deliberately done it to make her look stupid.
All those years we let her into our house, she would say out of nowhere, in the days following Lena’s escape. Even though we knew what the risks were. Everyone warned us. . . . Well, I guess we should have listened.
“She looked thin,” I say.
“Home, Tony.” My mom leans her head against the headrest and closes her eyes, and I know the conversation is over.
Lena
I wake in the middle of the night from a nightmare. In it, Grace was trapped beneath the floorboards in our old bedroom in Aunt Carol’s house. There was shouting from downstairs—a fire. The room was full of smoke. I was trying to get to Grace, to rescue her, but her hand kept slipping from my grasp. My eyes were burning, and the smoke was choking me, and I knew if I didn’t run, I would die. But she was crying and screaming for me to save her, save her. . . .
I sit up. I repeat Raven’s mantra in my head—the past is dead, it doesn’t exist—but it doesn’t help. I can’t shake the feeling of Grace’s tiny hand, wet with sweat, slipping from my grip.
The tent is overcrowded. Dani is pressed up on one side of me, and there are three women curled up against her.
Julian has his own tent for now. It is a small bit of courtesy. They are giving him time to adjust, as they did when I first escaped to the Wilds. It takes time to get used to the feeling of closeness, and bodies constantly bumping yours. There is no privacy in the Wilds, and there can be no modesty, either.
I could have joined Julian in his tent. I know that he expected me to, after what we shared underground: the kidnapping, the kiss. I brought him here, after all. I rescued him and pulled him into this new life, a life of freedom and feeling. There is nothing to stop me from sleeping next to him. The cureds—the zombies—would say that we are already infected. We wallow in our filth, the way that pigs wallow in muck.
Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it.
But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.
We are even free to choose the wrong thing.
I won’t be able to go back to sleep right away. I need air. I ease out from under the tangle of sleeping bags and blankets and fumble in the dark for the tent flap. I wriggle out of the tent on my stomach, trying not to make too much noise. Behind me, Dani kicks in her sleep and mutters something unintelligible.
The night is cool. The sky is clear and cloudless. The moon looks closer than usual, and it paints everything with a silvery glow, like a fine layering of snow. I stand for a moment, relishing the feeling of stillness and quiet: the peaks of the tents touched with moonlight; the low-hanging branches, just barely budding with new leaves; the occasional hooting of an owl in the distance.
In one of the tents, Julian is sleeping.
And in another: Alex.
I move away from the tents. I head down toward the gully, past the remains of the campfire, which by now is nothing more than charred bits of blackened wood and a few smoking embers. The air still smells, faintly, like scorched metal and beans.
I’m not sure where I’m going, and it’s stupid to wander from camp—Raven has warned me a million times against it. At night, the Wilds belong to the animals, and it’s easy to get turned around, lost among the growth, the slalom of trees. But I have an itch in my blood, and the night is so clear, I have no trouble navigating.
I hop down into the dried-out riverbed, which is covered in a layer of rocks and leaves and, occasionally, a relic from the old life: a dented metal soda can, a plastic bag, a child’s shoe. I walk south for a few hundred feet, where I’m prevented from going farther by an enormous, felled oak. Its trunk is so wide that, horizontal, it nearly reaches my chest; a vast network of roots arch up toward the sky like a dark pinwheel spray of water from a fountain.
There’s a rustling behind me. I whip around. A shadow shifts, turns solid, and for a second my heart stops—I’m not protected; I have no weapons, nothing to fend off a hungry animal. Then the shadow emerges into the open and takes the shape of a boy.
In the moonlight, it’s impossible to tell that his hair is the exact color of leaves in the autumn: golden brown, and shot through with red.
“Oh,” Alex says. “It’s you.” These are the first words he has spoken to me in four days.
There are a thousand things I want to say to him.
Please understand. Please forgive me.
I prayed every day for you to be alive, until the hope became painful.
Don’t hate me.
I still love you.
But all that comes out is: “I couldn’t sleep.”
Alex must remember that I was always troubled by nightmares. We talked about it a lot during our summer together in Portland. Last summer—less than a year ago. It’s impossible to imagine the vast distance I’ve covered since that time, the landscape that has formed between us.
“I couldn’t sleep either,” Alex says simply.
Just this, the simple statement, and the fact that he is speaking to me at all, loosens something inside me. I want to hold him, to kiss him the way I used to.
“I thought you were dead,” I say. “It almost killed me.”
“Did it?” His voice is neutral. “You made a pretty fast recovery.”
“No. You don’t understand.” My throat is tight; I feel as though I’m being strangled. “I couldn’t keep hoping, and then waking up every day and finding out it wasn’t true, and you were still gone. I—I wasn’t strong enough.”
He is quiet for a second. It’s too dark to see his expression: He is standing in shadow again, but I can sense that he is staring at me.
Finally he says, “When they took me to the Crypts, I thought they were going to kill me. They didn’t even bother. They just left me to die. They threw me in a cell and locked the door.”