Cured (25 page)

The sound of tapping shoes gets closer. And closer. I stare wide-eyed at black nothing, stop breathing, and listen as the shoes get closer and then stop. The small space beneath the door lights up like a thin line of gold. My muscles come alive, ready to run or fight. Indistinct voices rumble on the other side of the door, and then the light beneath it pales to dark and the shoes start tapping again, fading, fading, until I cannot hear them anymore. Kevin sucks in a deep breath of air and puts his hands on my shoulders. They are trembling.

My heart swells with an emotion I don't understand, that I've never felt before, and I think of how terrible I was to him. “I'm sorry I kicked you,” I whisper. “When you handed me over to them. I didn't know what was really going on.”

His hands tighten on my shoulders. “It's okay.”

I take a deep breath and smell a trace of vomit again. “Are you the one who cleaned me up? After I got sick?”

“Yeah.”

I put my hand on his arm. “Thank you.”

Slowly he moves his hands from my shoulders, down to my hips, and leaves them there. “Jack.”

“What?”

“Can I kiss you? Please?”

For an answer I put my palms on his chest and lean the front of my body against the front of his. His thumbs slip under my T-shirt and touch the soft skin above my waistband and I shiver. The darkness completely hides him from me, so when his lips brush my forehead, I jump. He traces his lips across my forehead, over my temple, and then our noses bump as his lips find mine. His hands squeeze my hips, and fire burns behind my closed eyes. I grab his face and pull his mouth harder against mine and kiss him like I'm going to die. I kiss him
because
I am going to die if he can't get me out of here.

He pushes me back and it takes a minute for him to catch his breath. “I hope we both make it out of here alive. I want more time with you,” he whispers. He opens the door and I follow him out.

The hallway is lighter than the room we've just left and I can almost see. We turn the corner we turned earlier, pause for a minute, and then Kevin starts walking fast, pulling me behind him. I have to trot to match his pace. At the end of the hall looms a big gray rectangle. As we approach it, I realize what it is—glass doors leading outside—and my heart starts pounding with anticipation.

We reach the doors and Kevin doesn't pause, just pushes them open and walks out into the pale-gray predawn world.

We are in a parking lot with four-wheelers parked on top of faded parking-space lines. The cracked pavement hurts my bare feet. Kevin pulls me behind one of the vehicles, and we crouch. His eyes lock on mine, and I want to cry at the fear that is making
his pupils huge and his mouth a hard line. “There's this place,” he whispers, “where uninfected bees are alive. Where people are growing a new way of living.” A dog howls, and Kevin jumps and looks over his shoulder.

I'm too shocked to move. “Where?” I ask.

“In the Rockies—there are high-pressure pockets in the high elevations where the pesticide didn't reach. Ward, Colorado, is one of them. People are there, hoping for a cure. Waiting for a cure. My sister—” Kevin jumps again and looks over his shoulder.

“You're the Siren. You lead people to this place, don't you? You get them away from the raiders and help them find these places.”

He nods.

“Did you ever meet a man named Dean Bloom? Did you take him to this place?”

Kevin nods and then looks down.

“Is he still there? That's my brother! That's who I'm looking for out here!”

“He brought an older woman up there to live—Abigail Tarsis—but he didn't stay.”

“Why didn't Dean stay? Where did he go?”

Kevin focuses on my face. “He said he needed to get back to Denver.”

All the hope I have been clinging to since the day my brother left fades away. Dean never made it back to Denver. He's probably dead.

I think back to what Jonah said. “If you're the Siren, did
you
free the raiders' women?”

“Yes, but I had help.” He presses his palm to the side of my face. “You have to go now. Find Fo. She has the map I made for you. When you get to Ward, tell them I sent you, and tell them a cure has been found. Tell them I'll try to bring it to them.” His hand drops to his side.

Every part of me freezes except my mouth, which drops open.

“Go!” Kevin grabs my shoulder and gives me a small shove.

“But—” I grab his shirt and pull him so close our noses touch. “Aren't you coming with me?”

“No! Go! You only have . . .” He looks at his watch. “You only have four minutes before they switch out the watch. You have to go now!” He stands and pulls me to my feet. “Run!”

Slowly, I take a step away from him, staring at him so hard I might absorb him into my mind forever. And then I turn. I put one foot in front of the other. And I run.

“Weight,” Mom said, setting the scale on the floor by the treadmill. I climbed on, peered between my feet, and watched the dial spin almost straight up
.

Mom clicked her tongue. “One hundred and forty-four pounds.” She smiled, making dimples appear in her soft cheeks. “Now, onto the treadmill.”

I tried to tuck my hair behind my ears before I remembered it had been shaved off a week earlier. I stared at the machine. My brothers had brought it home, piece by piece, a few days before. They'd found it in the Sanchezes' basement—something they had left in their house when they fled the city to get away from the approaching gangs
.

“I'm fourteen. That's too young to start exercising,” I whined
.

“And I'm too old,” Mom snapped. “But that doesn't matter. We need to be strong, Jack. And we're not. So toughen up. If I can do it, you can do it.”

Mom set the treadmill at four miles per hour and told me I couldn't slow it down until I'd run for ninety seconds. I gritted my teeth, balled my
fists, and then tried to make my pudgy legs run. I could barely lift them. My thighs rubbed together. My body bounced with each step. Everything started to hurt. When I hit the sixty-second mark, I slammed my hand on the emergency stop button and clutched the sidebars, wheezing
.

“Maybe you should dangle a doughnut in front of her,” Dean said, coming down into the basement
.

“Do we have any doughnuts?” I asked, standing a little taller. Dean laughed. Mom swatted him and frowned
.

Dean walked over to the treadmill and started it again, slowly increasing the speed until I was walking at three miles per hour. “The key to gaining endurance is starting slow and going long,” he said
.

“Says who?” I gasped, forcing my legs to march forward
.

“Coach Winward used to tell that to the guys on the team. Tell you what. If you can do that for twenty minutes, I'll find you something sweet the next time I go scavenging. Deal?”

I looked at the timer on the treadmill. I had eighteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds to go to reach that goal
.

“It will be a good treat,” Dean coaxed
.

I turned my nose up
.

“I'll find you two treats, Jack. I know you can do it.”

“Oh, all right.” I thrust my chin forward and started swinging my arms as I walked. But I did it—twenty minutes
.

After that day, I got on the treadmill three days a week, and each time I got on, I could run a little bit longer. Sixty seconds turned into one hundred. And then two hundred. And it hurt. Every single time, it hurt
.

But after a month, not only could I run a whole mile in just under fifteen minutes, but my thighs didn't rub together quite as much. After two months, I could run two miles in twenty-five minutes, and my body didn't
jiggle when I ran. After three months, I could run five miles in an hour. None of my brother's old clothes fit because they were too big in the waist. Even his belt was too big. I sewed all the waistbands of his clothes to fit and gave the belt to a Fec. The fourth month, I started running six days a week, five miles a day minimum. Right before I fled from my house, I could run twenty-six miles in under four hours and thirty minutes. I had turned into a running machine
.

I run away from Kevin, run toward the black mass of the Rocky Mountains, and it is like I'm the chubby fourteen-year-old again who could hardly lift her legs. My body feels like lead. My ribs feel too tight to breathe. My heart hurts so badly that I hardly notice the rocks and gravel bruising the soles of my bare feet. Tears start streaming down my face, turning the gray world into a colorless blur.

I've only been running a minute when I hear feet pounding the ground behind me. I glance over my shoulder. A man is chasing me. He's thick and hefty, wearing big boots. There's no way he can catch me, even
with
my bare feet. I veer toward a parked car and something collides with my chest, knocking my feet out from under me. I fall backward and slam into the ground.

My head seems to triple in size as it explodes with pain. Stars flash before my eyes and I can't breathe. I cough and gasp for air. Slowly, the stars fade. Standing above me, framed by the morning sky, is a man with a baseball bat.

“Looks like Soneschen was right to switch up the patrols,” a gruff voice says. I blink at the man.

“What you got?” someone answers from farther away.

“I just caught the dog bait running toward the hills,” the man with the baseball bat says. He turns and starts walking away. “Take him back to the compound,” he calls over his shoulder.

Boots scuff the ground by my head. I am yanked to my feet and stare into the bearded face of a stranger. My gaze travels down his face and stops on his dingy shirt. Sweat stains have turned the red fabric nearly black under his armpits. The man flips me around, grabs the scruff of my neck, and starts marching in the direction I've just come from. My muscles barely respond, and I am too dazed to fight. In less than two minutes, a wide one-story brick building comes into view. Words are painted on the side of it. I can just make them out in the predawn light:
Newhaven Psychiatric Hospital
.

I scan the parking lot for Kevin, but he's gone.

We walk to the building and enter the same glass doors I just left through. Instead of going straight down the hall toward the room where Jonah and Bowen are, we turn left and stop in front of the first door on the right. My captor lifts his hand to knock, but he hesitates. His grimy fist falls to the door handle and he twists.

The door swings open on squeaky hinges, and dozens of candles flicker from the draft. A man is in the room, wearing an unbuttoned white dress shirt and sitting in front of a polished mirror, sipping something from a mug. “You're supposed to knock,” the man says, never taking his eyes from the mirror.

Without a word, the bearded man pulls the door shut again. As soon as the latch clicks, he grumbles under his breath, “That son of a … Who does he think he is? When Flint was in
charge . . .” And then he balls his beefy hand and pounds so hard I expect the door to break in two.

“Come back later.” The words are muffled. “I'm busy getting ready for the morning's planned event.”

The raider's hand tightens on my neck and he curses. He knocks again, but before the man on the other side can reply, my captor blurts out, “I caught the bait running!”

In two seconds, the door whooshes open and the candles in the room sputter. The man in the unbuttoned white dress shirt looks at me. His hair is neatly combed to the side, and his face is freshly shaved.

“Where did you find him?” the man asks. I wrinkle my nose at the strange smell of his breath.

“He was running toward the mountains, Mr. Soneschen, just like you guessed.”

I take a closer look at the man standing in front of me, at his smooth skin, clean fingernails, and sharp eyes, which look left, then right, and then settle back on me. I feel fourteen again, standing at the wall, with a plate of scones in my pudgy hands. Heat floods my face—anger, not embarrassment. This is the man who wouldn't let us live inside the wall.

“Who set him free, Bob?” Soneschen asks, putting his clean hands on his hips. His dress shirt falls open, giving me a glimpse of sculpted abs and tight pectorals, and a perfectly round scar over his pasty white ribs.

I feel the man behind me shrug, and a cloud of body odor hits me. Soneschen scowls and fans the air in front of his face. “You don't know who set him free?”

“He was alone. Maybe he got out on his own.”

Soneschen eyes me from my bare feet up to my buzzed hair and shakes his head. “No. This kid isn't smart enough or strong enough or brave enough to get out on his own.” He looks right into my eyes. “Who helped you, Jack?”

I swallow hard and clench my teeth together. He glares into my eyes, and it feels like he is going to steal the soul out of my body. I shrink and look away.

“Coward,” Soneschen whispers, as if proving his statement of a moment before.

“What do you want me to do with him?” Bob asks.

“Have you ever heard of Solomon?” When Bob doesn't reply, Soneschen adds, “from the Bible.”

“I've never read the Bible.”

“Jack? Have you heard of Solomon?”

I glower at the floor and nod. “He was a king.”

“Not
just
a king,” Soneschen corrects. “He was the most brilliant king in the history of the world. When two women came to him claiming they were both the mother of a baby, what did Solomon do, Jack?”

“Threaten to cut the baby in half and give each woman half of the baby.” My voice comes out a shaky whisper.

“Correct. And what happened?”

I have no idea what this has to do with anything, but I answer, “The real mother offered to give the baby to the other woman.”