Contaminated 2: Mercy Mode (19 page)

“We should pay you something,” Dillon says. “I could bring you some real sugar next time I come into town.”

Ellen grins. “That would be great.”

In the truck, my mom between us, I say, “You shouldn’t have offered her the sugar.”

“We have plenty,” Dillon says.

“Not if you keep giving it away,” I tell him.

I’ve never seen him look at me the way he does now. Cold and hard and sort of condescending. It makes me feel small.

“She just gave us a month’s worth of drugs to help your mom and bracelets that will get us past the soldiers. I think a freaking bag of sugar is worth that, don’t you?”

I don’t answer, just look out at the boarded-up windows and grass-grown parking lots we pass on the way out of town. I can’t explain to him that I don’t trust that doctor, no matter how much help she gave us. She used to be one of
them
, wasn’t she?

The soldiers don’t ask to see our bracelets, but, yeah, knowing we have them makes it way less stressful when they stop us at the roadblock and wave us on. I wait until we’ve driven a mile before I say, “When do you think
they will stop letting you back through?”

Dillon turns into the development, driving slower because there are fallen trees and debris all over the roads here. He gives me a quick glance across my mom, who stares out the front window, barely blinking. “I don’t know.”

Soon, I think. I shiver like someone dumped ice water down my shirt. With the way everything’s changing, it’s going to happen soon.

DILLON SPENDS THE NEXT FOUR DAYS AT HOME.
It’s been nice having him there. We leave Opal behind while we take the pickup truck to scavenge more houses, and though we share a bedroom, there’s something better about being alone together. Really alone.

But I can’t stop thinking about the way he looked at me the day we took my mom to Ellen’s. He wasn’t wrong to judge me for being a brat, but I hate that he thinks I was being unreasonable. He must’ve been thinking about it, too, because as we glean the cupboards in one of the houses toward the back of the neighborhood, he pulls out a bag of sugar shut with a plastic clip.

“I’ll take this to Ellen tomorrow when I go back to work.”

“Dillon.”

He looks at me, sort of furtively and guiltily, like he feels bad for poking me, but not that bad. “What?”

“I’m sorry.” I shrug. My parents taught me it was important to own up to things you did wrong, even if you did them for the right reasons. To say you’re sorry when you are, and I am, if only because my reaction made him think less of me. “I know we owe her something, and if it’s sugar, that’s fine. It’s just that I don’t think she has our best interests at heart. That’s all.”

“She risks a lot to help people, you know. She risked a lot to help us.” He snags my wrist and holds it up, rubbing the red mark the orange bracelet’s left on my skin. “You know what would happen if she got caught?”

“The same thing that’s happening to people who try to leave the boundaries. Or just the ones who test positive. The same thing that’s happening to a lot of people.” It sounds harsher than I mean it to. “She tested people, Dillon. Who knows, she might’ve been one of the ones who ran tests on my mom.”

He doesn’t answer that, and drops my wrist. I can see he’s working up to tell me something, though, and I wait for him to spit it out. I busy myself opening drawers and pulling out broken pens and notepads and rubber bands, setting aside anything that looks like it might be useful.

“It’s just that … you’re hard, sometimes, Velvet.”

I don’t look at him, though his words sting. I keep my shoulders from hunching, pretending I’m not at all upset by what he said. I dig through someone else’s junk and say nothing.

“Most of the time, you’re strong and determined and you work hard, and I know it’s frustrating for you. Doing all this. And scary. But, sometimes, you’re hard, too.”

“And you don’t like it?”

“No,” Dillon says after what feels like a really long time. “I guess I don’t.”

I don’t turn. “I don’t know what to say to that.”

“You don’t have to say anything, I guess. I just wanted to tell you.”

“Why?” I cry, finally facing him. “Why would you tell me that? Does it serve a purpose? You want me to be sweet and soft and passive, or what?”

“No,” he says, but I cut him off.

“Because that’s ridiculous!”

I toss the pens with their missing caps and the broken stubs of pencils to the floor. I kick them, making them roll. I slam the drawer shut hard enough to splinter the cheap wood.

“If I’m hard, it’s because I have to be!” I shout.

Dillon reaches for me, but all I see is red, the edges of my vision blurring and wavering. I try to breathe, but the air’s so tight and close in this dark, stinking kitchen that reeks of mold and decay that all I can do is cough and choke. I swat away his hands, meaning only to keep him from hugging me, but the back of my hand catches him under the chin and sends him staggering back.

Silence.

Long, painful silence.

Dillon touches his lip, which is swelling a little from where he bit it. His eyes are wide. He backs up from me when I move toward him.

“I didn’t mean to,” I tell him, but it doesn’t matter.

He leaves me there.

I don’t run out after him. I wait for the pickup truck to start up and drive away, and then I let myself loose in the kitchen until everything within reach is destroyed.

LATER, I LIMP HOME WITH MY HANDS BATTERED
and bruised. Every part of me aches, but mostly my head hurts. Not like a headache. It’s full of my thoughts and fears, all of them pressing against the walls of my skull until I want to scream.

I think Dillon’s scared of me.

I want to cry.

I want to break more things.

Instead, I let myself in the front door and go to my bathroom to scrub away the dirt under my fingernails. It’s hard. I have plenty of soap but the water from the well is icy cold. I bend at the sink and splash my face again and again.

The smell of something good greets me when I come downstairs, as clean as I can get and wearing fresh clothes at least. The table’s set. Opal and Mrs. Holly made a pasta dish with olive oil and veggies from the garden. My mom’s already sitting in her spot. Dillon won’t look at me.

“Can we play a game after dinner?” Opal says, stabbing her fork into a pile of pasta. “I kind of want to beat your butts at Monopoly.”

Dillon laughs, not looking at me. “Good luck with that.”

“I think a game would be wonderful,” Mrs. Holly says so carefully, I know that Dillon must’ve said something to her about me. “Lots of fun. Velvet?”

“You all play. I’m going to read.” I concentrate on my dinner, scooping mouthfuls of pasta and chewing just enough to keep myself from choking on it. The food’s delicious, but I can’t appreciate it. My stomach’s aching with emptiness, though, so I force myself to eat even though I don’t want to.

After dinner, they play Monopoly while I read and my mom sits and stares out the window. She hasn’t had any clarity since we brought her back from Ellen’s, but she hasn’t had any seizures or anything, either. I haven’t given her the shots, figuring that despite what Ellen said, we’d only use them when she has trouble.

I wonder if I should shoot myself up with whatever’s in them.

I go to bed early, before it’s even dark. When I was little and my parents made me go to bed in the summer before night had fallen, I remember pounding my pillow at the injustice of it. Maybe I’ve always been an angry kid.

I fall asleep so hard, I don’t remember the descent into dreams, and I wake up as fiercely.

I smell smoke.

There’s a rustling, like paper being crumpled in a fist over and over. And it’s hot, worse than the normal summer heat that comes from being upstairs without air-conditioning or even electric fans. When I try to sit up, it’s like a fist is holding me down. No, worse, like I’m underwater and I can’t get to the surface, and I’m going to drown.

I open my eyes, but they immediately sting. I take in a deep, choking breath that shreds my lungs. I roll out of bed and onto the floor with a thump hard enough to rattle my teeth, and finally, I can breathe. It’s just cooler enough here that I can gather my senses.

It’s a fire. I can’t tell if the house is on fire or if it’s in the woods outside, but now I’m awake enough to remember all the things I ever learned about what to do in a fire. I crawl toward Dillon’s bed and shake him until he also rolls onto the floor.

We crawl to the bedroom door, but before I can open it, he slams a hand against it to keep it closed. He touches it all over. I remember. He’s feeling it to make sure it’s not hot. There’s less smoke in the hallway, maybe because there aren’t open windows here and it’s coming in from the outside.

“Opal!” In her room, I pull her from bed. She stumbles, sleepy, following me while Dillon races to wake Mrs. Holly. Dexter, sleeping at the foot of her bed, barks raspily and tumbles after us.

In my mom’s room, I find her already awake and sitting up in bed. Her windows are open, so the smoke is thicker in here. She’s coughing when I pull her from the bed. In the hall, Opal, Dillon, and Mrs. Holly are already heading downstairs.

The fire’s in the backyard. It eats the trees, turning them black with its red and orange and gold mouth. A tree falls as I watch through the windows, and the crash of it makes us all scream. Opal’s crying, and Mrs. Holly has her arm around her.

If the house were on fire, we’d run outside. But it’s the outside that’s on fire, so where do we go? Dillon runs to the kitchen.

“Wet towels,” he shouts over the sound of the crackling.

We run the water in the sink, soaking dishcloths and a few beach towels Mrs. Holly brings in from the laundry room. We wrap them around our heads and our shoulders, dripping them down our backs. My mother doesn’t move. She stands perfectly still, blinking with the light of the fire lighting up her face.

“Mom! Come on! We have to get out of here!”

No time to grab anything. We push out the front door and into the driveway. There’s fire there, too. Pushing from the back of the neighborhood toward the front.

We stumble-run to the bottom of the driveway, into Dillon’s truck, all of us crammed into the front seat that doesn’t have enough room for five, plus a frightened,
squirming dog. The smoke is so thick that when Dillon turns on the lights, it’s like they shine onto a stone wall. He drives, too fast for safety.

Animals run ahead of us. The pack of dogs that roams the neighborhood runs in front of us, too. Bounding deer leap across the road, and he nearly hits one before braking to a halt.

Everything’s confusing and terrible, but I trust Dillon to get us out safely. And he does, navigating the dark and twisting streets until we get to the highway. And there he comes to another screeching, braking halt.

Because there’s a blockade of soldiers and trucks there, waiting for us.

“
WHERE ARE YOU TAKING HER?! YOU LET HER
go!” I fight against the soldier who has me by the back of my T-shirt.

They’ve already loaded Mrs. Holly and my mother into a van. Dillon into another. Dexter has fled into the night, and I can only hope he makes it to safety. But now they’re trying to take Opal, and I can’t let them.

“Let go of me!” I wrench myself free and run after her, but another soldier is in the way.

This one hits me on the head with something hard, and I drop to my knees. Only for a minute, because even though there’s pain and the shine of whirling stars, I am desperate to get to my sister. I struggle to my feet, and the look of surprise on the soldier’s face is enough to give me the time to go after her.

I don’t make it. This time, they tackle me. Force my face into the ground. Gravel cuts my cheeks. Two of them
lift me, one with his hands between my shoulder blades, the other’s fingers hooked into the waistband of my pajama bottoms. I swing between them like they’re going to give me an airplane ride, twirl me around in a circle. Instead, they toss me onto my feet, changing their grip to my upper arms.

“Velvet!” Opal’s scream stretches out between us.

I open my mouth and scream. No words. Just fury. Do they let me go? Or do I pull away? I’m on my feet and running toward Opal, who’s being shoved into the back of a van. Her arms and legs flail. They put a hand on her head to keep her from hitting it on the door as she struggles.

Their shouts go low and somehow syrupy, like time is stretching out all around us. Someone swipes at me, but I duck him. A hand passes over my hair, fingers snagging, yanking my head back. I keep going. I’m free. I jump over bundles and duffle bags on the ground and come down hard on my ankle, which twists. Pain shoots up my leg, but I ignore it.

Opal reaches for me, but there are people between us and I can’t get to her. I shove and punch and kick. I see
Dillon watching with horrified eyes. But I’m trying to get to Opal.

That’s when something thick and sour smelling, worse than the smoke, fills my nostrils. A white haze covers me. Gas. They’re spraying me.

I’m down.

WHEN I WAKE UP, I’M IN A HOSPITAL BED. MY
wrists are cuffed. My feet, too. I can’t move.

My head hurts so bad, I’d gladly cut it off. I’m wearing a hospital gown, I can tell that much. A needle pinches the back of my hand, attached to a tube that runs to a hanging bag of clear liquid.

I’m in the Sanitarium.

I look around, expecting dirty floors and a crowded room, but everything is white and sterile. I’m alone in here. My throat is raw, painful when I swallow. I’m desperate for a glass of water, but I can’t call out for one. There’s no button for me to press, either. But in a minute, a guy in a pair of brightly colored scrubs bustles into my room. He’s older than me but younger than my parents, and he has kind brown eyes and a head of thick, dark hair that looks like it could use a brush.