Contaminated 2: Mercy Mode (5 page)

I squeeze his hands. “Hey. Stop. You know that’s unrealistic. You have to work. In another six months, so will I. And then what will happen to Opal and Mom?”

“Mrs. Holly will be here. And that has nothing to do with you waiting for me to go with you—”

“And what happens when they pull me aside for testing at the checkpoint, just because the soldier in charge of things is bored that day? You know how much more likely it is for that to happen there than at the pickup location itself.”

Dillon doesn’t answer.

“We need to stock up,” I tell him sharply. “I can’t miss a ration delivery. We can’t let the vegetables in the garden die or go to waste. We need to be harvesting and drying and canning and hoarding, Dillon. Because when I turn eighteen, they’re going to assign me to some job that means I have to leave the house for hours a day, just like you do now, and there won’t be anyone here to do everything—”

I’m crying, and I hate it, but Dillon enfolds me in his arms. He kisses and hugs me every day, but it’s been a long time since he held me like this. I melt into him. He strokes my hair. He rocks me a little, back and forth, and I want to let him soothe me, but all at once everything seems so hopeless that there is no solace, not even in his arms.

“You don’t have to do all this yourself, Velvet. I’m here. I’m a part of this family now. You have to start letting me help you.”

I say nothing.

Dillon kisses the side of my face. He hesitates. Then kisses my cheek. Lower. He finds my mouth, and even though he kisses me all the time, it hasn’t been like this for a long time, either. He breaks it before more than a few seconds have passed, and pushes away, leaving me blinking and confused.

“I’ll go turn off the genny. Make sure Opal’s tucked in. Check on your mom and Mrs. Holly. You,” Dillon says, mock sternly with a shake of his finger, “get into bed and sleep. You need it. You’re going to be in a lot more pain tomorrow. Did you take anything?”

“A couple of aspirin.” A couple is all we have, and I lied; I took one. It’s hard to get more.

“You need ice for those bruises. And some ibuprofen or something.”

We’re both silent at that. Like pioneers, we keep our perishables cool in the basement because we don’t want to use the energy to run the fridge. We haven’t had ice in months. Well. Since winter. And we have a small bottle of aspirin that came a few weeks ago in the rations, but I don’t want to use it unless we really have to.

“I’m all right.”

“I’ll take care of things. Go to sleep,” he whispers after a moment, when I slip my legs under the sheet and curl against my pillow.

But I can’t sleep. Not for a long time. Everything hurts
so much that I can’t get comfortable. I doze a little, but that’s almost worse than not sleeping at all. The lights go out when he turns off the generator, and the silence helps, but even after he comes to bed and the soft, regular hush of his sleeping breaths should lull me into dreams, I stay awake.

Eventually, I can’t stand it anymore. I get out of bed, quietly as I can, though Dillon’s exhausted from working so hard all day and probably wouldn’t wake up unless I banged a gong in his ear. From Opal’s room comes the soft whistle of her nighttime breathing—she’s got a constant cold or allergies or something that makes her snore. The room at the end of the hall glimmers with the flicker of candlelight. Mrs. Holly is almost always the last of us to go to sleep. She says it’s because she’s old enough to feel how close she is to sleeping forever. Mrs. Holly can be kind of depressing sometimes.

In my mom’s room, the one that used to be mine, I find her tucked into her big bed. It takes up most of the room, but she uses only one small piece of it. With a shudder, I remember how I used to have to tie her up at night to keep her from wandering. The shock collar that was supposed to keep her under control had almost killed her.

Mercy Mode, they call it.

I call it murder.

“Mom?”

She blinks her eyes open and holds out a hand for me to
crawl into bed next to her. I’m too old for cuddling, but we hold hands and lie side by side, staring into the darkness. I can distinguish the night sound of everyone’s breathing, and Mom’s is raspy and hoarse, the way her voice is.

“I miss you,” I tell her, knowing she won’t say anything. “And Daddy.”

Beside me, she turns and strokes a hand down my hair. “Hmmm.”

I tell her about the Connie in the woods and the riot at the ration station. About how the woman had tried to take our peanut butter and how I’d knocked her to the ground. My fists clench and open while I talk. I can still feel the thud of flesh against my knuckles. My hands are bruised and aching, just like all the rest of me, but they feel good, too. As if they remember how it had felt to defend myself, to punch and slap and pinch, as if that’s supposed to feel good. I know it’s not, and ashamed, I look at her.

“I liked it,” I whisper. “When she fell on her butt, I wanted to laugh. I wanted her to hurt and be scared, Mom. Because she was trying to hurt us, maybe not with her fists, but by stealing what was ours. And we needed that peanut butter. It’s ours. We deserve it.”

“Shhh,” my mother says. Her fingers tangle in my hair, pulling, but not on purpose. She’s clumsy, that’s all. The Contamination changed her, but what they did to her brains before they released her into the kennels … that’s what broke her.

I want to cling to her and cry, have her comfort me the way she did when I was little. The way she still does for Opal when she has a tantrum. Instead, I curl up next to her and listen to her tuneless, singsong hum of random lullabies until she drifts into sleep.

Downstairs in the kitchen, I fill a glass with cool water and sip it slowly. The longer I’m still, the stiffer I get. Moving helps. Looking out the window over the sink, I see movement in the trees. We don’t have much of a backyard: just a deck that meets the slope of a hill into the woods. My dad had built a set of pretty wooden stairs, painted red, from the deck and up the hill to a flatter patch where we’d put a fire ring and a hammock, both gone now. Squirrels and chipmunks like to run up and down those stairs, which are splintery and faded. They don’t run in the dark, though.

Slowly, I put down my glass on the counter with a clink that sounds very loud. Slowly, slowly, I turn and find the wooden block that holds the knives. They’re all very sharp. My dad bought them for my mom one year for her birthday; I thought it was a dumb present, but she’d kissed him and said it was perfect.

I pull out the longest, biggest knife. They’re supposed to be weighted just right, balanced to make chopping and slicing easier, and I let it almost dangle from my fingertips as I go to what used to be a sliding glass door before our next-door neighbor Craig slammed his head into it over and over again a few years ago. Dillon and I added hinges to
the plywood covering the broken space so that we can use it as a door. It was one of the first projects we did once he moved in. The hinges squeak when I push open the wood, and I tense—without being able to see through any glass, I could be opening the door to anything.

The deck is mossy and slick under my bare toes. Ivy that’s supposed to landscape the slope has grown up in a lot of the cracks between the boards, but that’s better than the insistent creep of the raspberry bushes, which are slowly overtaking the entire yard. I love raspberries, but hate the spiny, prickly vines. I step on one now and hop, cursing while I bite my tongue. There are prickers still stuck in the sole of my foot, but it’s too dark to get them out now.

Limping, I hold the knife a little tighter. I could’ve grabbed a flashlight from the drawer—we use it sparingly, careful with the batteries. Like with everything else, we have to be aware of using things up and not being able to replace them. Besides, there’s a half-moon tonight, and my eyes have adjusted.

In the dark, a Connie will stumble and trip and be made at least a little more helpless than I will be.

More movement catches the corner of my eye. Something jerks and twitches in the trees just beyond the steps. The woods are full of deer, turkeys, raccoons. Opal swore she saw a coyote once, but I’m sure it was one of the mangy dogs that now run in packs. We have feral cats by the dozen. But animals are silent and know how to move through the
woods without making a commotion. Even deer slip quietly along their regular paths, running and crashing through the trees only when they’re startled. Humans are the ones who don’t know how to be quiet in the woods. We haven’t had any Connies since we moved back here, but I’m always ready.

Knife in hand, I go up the steps, wishing I’d taken the time to put on some shoes. Even a pair of flip-flops would be better than this—my foot already hurts from the prickers, and now a splinter from the steps digs deep in the meat of my sole.

My foot crunches on leaves and sticks, the sound like a gunshot in the otherwise silent night. I freeze. Ahead of me in the low-slung bushes that have sprung up around an old rabbit hutch, something is rustling. I tense. My fingers sweat. The knife slips. With a raspy growl, I lunge toward the bushes, determined to chase away whoever’s in there getting ready to bust through our windows and try to get inside.

I stumble forward, catching myself at the last minute before I can slice myself open. The bushes part, and the source of the noise leaps out. It’s not a Connie.

It’s a chicken.

“I’M GOING TO NAME HER BOKKY. BECAUSE
she says, ‘bok, bok, bok.’ ” Opal, with the chicken on her lap, pets the red feathers and giggles when the hen pecks at her palm. “She’s hungry.”

Opal had been more excited than at Christmas when she woke this morning to find the red hen I’d captured last night. I’d locked the hen in the laundry room until I could figure out where else to keep her. I didn’t want her getting eaten by something. She was lucky she had made it in the woods as long as she had.

“Feed her some bugs from your hair,” I tease. “She’ll like that.”

Opal makes a face, but it’s hard to insult her when she could have a headful of bugs and not care. I don’t remember ever being such a gross little kid, especially not at her age. Heck, at twelve, I’d started getting my period and shaving
my legs.… That sudden thought sobers me. What will I do when that happens to Opal?

“Chickens like grain. But not rice.” Mrs. Holly shakes a gnarled finger. “That’s not good for them. Velvet, maybe you can get some feed the next time you and Dillon go into town. It will be too heavy for you to carry on your own.”

And it will cost money. No government rations for chicken feed. We all stare at the hen, which seems to be sleeping.

“She’s in pretty good shape for living wild in the woods.” Dillon’s dressed for work. Heavy work pants and boots, long-sleeved shirt. He carries his thick gloves in one hand. His hair’s still wet from the shower he took. I don’t know how he can stand it. We have plenty of water, but unless the generator’s running, it’s no better than lukewarm.

“Where’d she come from, Velvet?” Opal pets the soft feathers. “Will she lay eggs?”

“I’m sure. I hope so.” Suddenly, my mouth waters. It’s kind of ridiculous to salivate at the thought of scrambled eggs. Chocolate? A cheeseburger, tainted memories aside? Sure. But eggs? Who gets worked up about that?

Dillon shakes his head. “Sorry, kiddo, we don’t have a rooster.”

I give him a sideways look while Mrs. Holly laughs a little. Mom, who’s busy organizing the silverware drawer, a task she does again and again and again, looks over her shoulder and smiles.

“What? You need both, right? To make eggs.” Dillon frowns.

“You only need a rooster if you want chicks,” I tell him.

His brow furrows. He doesn’t always have it easy, being the only dude in a house full of women. I don’t mean to laugh at him, but I can’t help it. He looks so cute that I lean to kiss him.

“Hens will lay eggs so long as they’re fed and watered,” Mrs. Holly says. “If we take care of this girl, we should be able to get an egg a day from her.”

It doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you haven’t had any in forever … nothing but powdered vegan egg substitute … My stomach grumbles. Dillon blushes. He’s figured it out. I find him so totally endearing just then.

“Gotta get to work. Velvet, do you need me to get anything in town?”

“Chicken feed? I don’t know how much it will cost, but you should be able to get some from the Tractor Supply.” Lots of other businesses have gone under. Businesses selling things most people don’t need or can’t afford anymore, like office supplies or manicures or fancy furniture. But Lebanon’s a rural area, and even people who weren’t farmers before have picked up the habit of homesteading the way we have. “Do you have any cash?”

“Yeah.”

At the door, I kiss him good-bye. So domestic. So sweet.
In the bright morning sunshine, I can see a hint of stubble on his chin and shadows under his eyes.

Dillon worries as much as I do. Maybe more, because while I have the luxury of my mom and sister beside me, his parents are both gone. I hug him hard, because even if I’m too young to be married, too young to know about forever, I’m not too young to know how it feels to miss someone so much, it makes you feel like you can’t make it another minute.

“Have a good day.” It’s what my mom always said to my dad when he was on his way out the door.

“You, too.” Dillon pauses, looking past me, though everyone else is in the kitchen. His troubled gaze meets mine. “Be careful today.”

“You, too.” I think we both know that every time he goes out, there’s a chance he won’t come back. All it takes is being in the wrong place at the right time.

I watch him walk down the driveway to get his truck, parked in the spot in the trees that we cleared to keep it hidden from the passing patrols. The big tree that fell across the driveway is still there—we thought about cutting it apart, even though it’s kind of a pain for Dillon to have to park his truck at the bottom instead of closer to the house. But that tree also makes it impossible for any other vehicles to get up the driveway, which means it’s just enough of a pain for the patrols that they’ve mostly left us alone. I wave. Behind me, Opal nudges me with the chicken in her arms. I look at my
little sister and touch the chicken’s smooth beak. Her bright, dark eyes don’t blink as she tilts her head to stare at me.