“You’re a thief,” I said, looking away. Only a month in the Wilds—I hadn’t even begun to shake my fear of them. Boys.
He shrugged. “I’m a survivor.”
“You were stealing our food,” I said. I didn’t add: Everyone thought I was to blame. “That makes you a Scavenger in my opinion.”
For the past several weeks, the homesteaders had noticed supplies gone missing, some traps empty that should have been full, a jug or two of clean water mysteriously emptied overnight. The group had grown tense, suspicious, and I became the prime suspect. I was the newest, after all. No one knew who I was or where I’d come from or what I was about, and the thefts had started soon after I’d arrived with Blue.
So this guy named Gray, who was kind of the group leader at the time, had started surveillance without telling anyone. In the middle of the night he got out of bed and circulated to all the snares and traps, checked the storerooms, made sure everyone from the homestead was exactly where they should be. On the second day of his rounds, he caught Tack wrestling a rabbit out of one of our traps. Stealing. Tack nearly put a knife through Gray, trying to escape. But he missed and just sliced off a chunk of Gray’s shoulder blade, and Gray managed to shout and pin Tack to the ground, and since then he’d been our prisoner and everyone had been debating what to do about him.
“Welcome to freedom,” he said. And he spit. Right next to his feet, on the ground. “Everyone has an opinion.”
I turned my attention back to Blue. Grandma had told me not to get too attached. So many of them don’t make it out here, she’d said. But I was already attached. From the second I found her; fnd found hrom the second I felt the skating pressure of her heartbeat beneath her tiny ribs. I knew she was mine—my job, my duty to protect.
At first she’d barely taken any food from Mari, but after two weeks she was eating better and beginning to gain weight. When Mari nursed, I sat next to her, sometimes with an arm around Blue, like I could absorb them both. Like I was the one sending life out through my fingertips and into Blue’s veins and heart and mouth. I kept Blue with me all the time. Grandma gave me an old baby carrier, faded to a dull and genderless gray from so many washings, so I could strap her to my chest when I was helping the others with the rounds.
But then she’d gotten sick again. She fussed and wouldn’t stay asleep for more than fifteen minutes at a time. Her nose was always running, and on the second day, her fever was so bad, I could feel the heat of her body when I held my hand six inches from her chest. She stopped feeding, and she cried for hours at a time. Everyone told me it was just a cold, and she’d get over it.
For three days, I’d been moving through a thick fog of exhaustion, a relentless tiredness like nothing I’d ever known. At night, I stayed awake and whispered to her, rocking her even as she tried to push me off, keeping her cool with wet cloths. We had moved, both of us, into the sickroom. Tack had been placed there too, temporarily, while the other homesteaders convened in the main room and talked about whether to let him go and trust that he wouldn’t steal from us again, or whether he should be punished, even killed.
The law of the Wilds was just as harsh, in its way, as the law on the other side of the fence.
Tack watched me as I bent over Blue, murmuring to her, wiping the sweat from her forehead. She wasn’t crying anymore. Her eyes were half-closed, and she barely stirred when I touched her. Her breathing was short and shallow.
“It’s RSV,” Tack spoke up suddenly. “She needs medicine.”
“You some kind of doctor?” I fired back. But I was scared. I wished she would cry, open her mouth, respond to me in any way. But she was just lying there, fighting for breath. And I knew then that it wasn’t just a cold. Whatever she had was getting worse.
“My mother was a nurse,” Tack said calmly. This startled me. It was weird to think of the Thief, the wild and lawless boy, as having a mother—as having a past at all. I looked at him.
“Untie me,” he said, his voice low, convincing, “and I’ll help you.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
There’s a part of me—a big part—that’s hoping Lena won’t show up. She might have gotten stuck at the border, or caught by a patrol without an ID. She might have gotten lost. She might just be too late. Then Tack and I won’t have to get involved, won’t risk a big fat stinking mess.
But we’ve trained her too well, and at a couple of minutes before te" fes befon a.m., I spot her moving up the street, head down against the rain, which has petered out to a slow drizzle. She’s wearing clothes that don’t belong to her, except for the wind breaker, which she must have taken from the safe house. Still, her walk is unmistakable: light on her feet, kind of bouncing on her toes, as if she might break into a run at any second.
Tack spots her the same time I do and sinks down a little in the front seat, as if worried she might spot us. But she’s totally focused. She barely pauses at the entrance to the clinic. She slips inside.
Any moment now. The air inside the van is humid, and my skin feels sticky. The windows are fogged from our breath. I feel another roll of nausea and fight it back. No time for that.
After a few minutes, Tack sighs and reaches for the jacket balled up on the seat between us. He shakes it out and shoves his arms, hard, into the sleeves. He looks funny in a suit jacket, like a bear dressed up in a costume for the circus. I would never tell him that, though.
“Ready?” he says.
“Don’t forget this.” I pass him a small laminated ID. It’s so old and stained, the picture is nearly indistinguishable—which is good, because its original owner, Dr. Howard Rivers, was about twenty pounds heavier than Tack and had a decade on him.
Then again, Howard Rivers wasn’t actually Howard Rivers, but Edward Kauffman, a respected doctor in Maine who worked to keep the deliria out of our schools and homes, who had ties to the governor, who subsidized medical centers in poorer parts of town. Secretly, though, he was a radical and controversial resister, famous for performing under-the-table abortions on uncureds who’d gotten pregnant and were desperate to conceal it.
Over the years he established identities for a dozen fake doctors so he could increase his shipments of medicine and antibiotics, which he then distributed to Invalids in the Wilds.
Edward Kauffman, the original, is dead now—has been dead for two years. He was outed in a police sting operation and executed only two weeks later. But many of his pseudonyms, his fake identities, survived. They’re healthy and practicing still.
Tack clips the ID to his jacket. “How do I look?” he says.
“Medical,” I answer.
He checks his reflection in the rearview and tries unsuccessfully again to mash down his hair. “Don’t forget,” he says. “Parking lot on Twenty-Fourth. I’ll be waiting for you.”
“We’ll be there,” I say, ignoring the weird feeling in my stomach. More than nausea. Nerves. I hate being nervous. It’s a weakness. It reminds me of the person I used to be, and the ticking quiet of the old house, my father brewing, growing his anger like a storm.
Every time I have to kill someone, s pll someI pretend he has my father’s face.
“Be careful, Rae.” For a second, I get a glimpse of Michael, the boy no one sees. Face open like a kid’s. Scared. “I wish you’d let me do the heavy lifting.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” I press my fingers against my lips, bring them to his chest. It’s our sign. Neither one of us is super touchy-feely, and besides, it’s too risky to kiss in Zombieland. “See you on the other side.”
“On the other side,” he parrots, then slips out of the van, jogging across the street pooled with rain.
I count off sixty seconds, make some last-minute adjustments to my gear, flip down the mirror, and check my teeth. Feel for the gun concealed in my jacket and check the supplies in my right jeans pocket. All good. All there. Count another sixty seconds, which helps me ignore the nerves. Nothing to be afraid of.
I know what I’m doing. We all do. Too well.
Sometimes I imagine that Tack and I will just crap out—flake on the whole war, the struggle, the resistance. Say good-bye and see you never. We’ll go up north and build a homestead together, far away from everyone and everything. We know how to survive. We could do it. Trap and hunt and fish for our food, grow what we can, pop out a whole brood of kids and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Let it blow itself to pieces if it wants to.
Dreams.
It has been two and a half minutes. I open the van door and hop down to the curb. The rain is nothing more than a mist now, but the gutters are still overflowing, swirling eddies of crushed coffee cups and cigarette butts and flyers.
When I push open the door to the clinic, it’s like a different world: thick green carpet, and furniture polished so it shines. Big, showy clock in the corner, ticking away the minutes. Not a bad place to die, if you had to choose.
Tack is standing at reception, drumming his fingers against the desk. He barely glances at me when I come in.
“I’m so sorry, doctor.” The lab tech behind the desk is punching buttons frantically. Her fingers are fat and weighted down with rings cut deep into her flesh. “An inspection—today—there must be a mistake.”
“It’s on the books,” Tack says, in a voice that belongs to someone older and fatter and cured. “Every clinic is subjected to an annual regulatory—”
“Excuse me,” I say loudly, interrupting him, as I come toward the desk. I make sure to walk a little funny, just for show. Tack and I can laugh about it later. “Excuse me,” I repeat, a little louder. Too loud for the space.
“You’ll have to hold on,” the receptionist says to me, picking up the phone and angling her chin awayes er chin from the receiver. She turns immediately back to Tack. “I’m so sorry. You have no idea how embarrassed—”
“Don’t be sorry,” he says. “Just get somebody down here who can help me.”
“Hey.” I lean forward over the counter. “Look, I’m talking to you.”
“Ma’am.” She’s losing it. She’s probably shitting bricks, thinking she’s going to get the whole clinic shut down because she screwed up the review dates. “I’m in the middle of something. If you have an appointment, you’re going to have to sign in and take a seat in the—”
“I don’t have an appointment.” I’m really putting it on, now, practically yelling. Tack does a good job of looking disgusted. “And I won’t wait. I got this rash, okay? It’s driving me crazy. I can’t hardly even sit.”
I undo my belt and start to hitch my pants down over my waist, like I’m about to moon her. Tack draws back with a noise of disgust, and the nurse slams down the phone and practically hurls herself around the desk.
“This way, ma’am, please.” She clamps a hand on my arm. I can smell the sweat underneath her perfume. She pilots me quickly out of the reception area—away from Dr. Howard Rivers, medical inspector, where I can’t do any harm, where I won’t embarrass the clinic any further—and through a set of double doors into a long white hallway. I feel a hitch of excitement in my chest, a slight break, like I always do when a plan is going off like we expected. With my free hand I fumble in my right jeans pocket for the small glass bottle, uncork it with a thumb, let the contents spill out into the rag stuffed in my pocket. Acetone, bleach, and heat.