Delirium: The Complete Collection (49 page)

At least this room feels inhabited. The upstairs looks like a normal house, and smells like a normal house, and is full of normal-house things; but it’s off somehow, as though it were tipped just a few inches on its foundations.

In contrast to the rest of the apartment, the basement is a wreck. Raven can’t clean and straighten as fast as Tack can accumulate and unravel. Books—real books, banned books, old books—are piled everywhere. Tack collects them. No, more than that. He hoards them, the way the rest of us hoard food. I tried to read a few of them, just to find out what it was like before the cure, and before all the fences, but it made my chest ache to imagine it: all that freedom, all that feeling and life. It’s better, much better, not to think about it too much.

Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That’s another reason I can’t read anymore.

Raven sighs and starts shuffling some papers piled haphazardly on a rickety wooden table in the center of the room. “It’s this goddamn rally,” she says. “It’s got everybody all twitchy.”

“What’s the problem?” I ask.

She waves away the question. “Same as always. Rumors about a riot. The underground is saying the Scavengers will show, try to pull something major. But nothing’s confirmed.”

Raven’s voice takes on a hard edge. I don’t even like to say the word
Scavengers
. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth, of things rotting, of ash. All of us—the Invalids, the resistance—hate the Scavengers. They give us a bad name. Everyone agrees that they’ll ruin, have already ruined, so much of what we are working to achieve. The Scavengers are Invalids, like us, but they don’t stand for anything. We want to take down the walls and get rid of the cure. The Scavengers want to take down everything—burn everything to dust, steal and slaughter and set the world to flame.

I’ve only run into a group of Scavengers once, but I still have nightmares about them.

“They won’t be able to pull it off,” I say, trying to sound confident. “They’re not organized.”

Raven shrugs. “I hope not.” She stacks books on top of one another, making sure their corners are aligned. For a second I feel a rush of sadness for her: standing in the middle of so much mess, stacking books as though it means something, as though it will help.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Raven gives me a tight smile. “That’s my job, okay?”

That is another one of Raven’s catchphrases. Like her insistence that the past is dead, it has become a kind of mantra.
I worry; you do what I say.
We all need mantras, I guess—stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.

“Okay.” For a moment we stand there. It’s strange. In some ways Raven does feel like family—she’s the closest thing I have to it, anyway—but at other times it occurs to me I don’t really know her any better than I did in August, when she first found me. I still don’t know much about the person she was before coming to the Wilds. She has closed that part of herself down, folded it back to some deep, unreachable place.

“Go on,” she says, jerking her head toward the stairs. “It’s late. You should eat something.”

As I head up the stairs I brush my fingers, once, against the metal license plate we’ve tacked onto the wall. We found it in the Wilds, half buried in the mud and slush, during the relocation; we were all close to dead at that point, exhausted and starving, sick and freezing. Bram was the one who spotted it; and as he lifted it out of the ground, the sun had burst through the cloud cover, and the metal had flared a sudden white, almost blinding me so I could barely read the words printed underneath the number.

Old words; words that nearly brought me to my knees.

Live free or die.

Four words. Thirteen letters. Ridges, bumps, swirls under my fingertips.

Another story. We cling tightly to it, and our belief turns it to truth.

I
t gets colder by the day. In the morning, the grass is coated in frost. The air stings my lungs when I run; the edges of the river are coated thinly with ice, which breaks apart around our ankles as we wade into the water with our buckets. The sun is sluggish, collapsing behind the horizon earlier and earlier, after a weak, watery swim across the sky.

I am growing stronger. I am a stone being excavated by the slow passage of water; I am wood charred by a fire. My muscles are ropes, my legs are wooden. My palms are calloused—the bottoms of my feet, too, are as thick and blunt as stone. I never miss a run. I volunteer to cart the water every day, even though we’re supposed to rotate. Soon I can carry two buckets by myself the whole way back to camp without once pausing or stopping.

Alex passes next to me, weaving in and out of the shadows, threading between the crimson-and-yellow trees. In the summer he was fuller: I could see his eyes, his hair, a flash of his elbow. As the leaves begin to whirl to the ground and more and more trees are denuded, he is a stark black shadow, flickering in my peripheral vision.

I am learning, too. Hunter shows me how the messages are passed to us: how the sympathizers on the other side alert us to an arriving shipment.

“Come on,” he says to me one morning after breakfast. Blue and I are in the kitchen, scrubbing dishes. Blue has never quite opened up to me. She answers my questions with simple nods or shakes of her head. Her smallness, her shyness, the thinness of her bones: When I’m with Blue, I can’t help but think of Grace.

That’s why I avoid her as much as possible.

“Come on where?” I ask Hunter.

He grins. “You a good climber?”

The question takes me by surprise. “I’m okay,” I say, and have a sudden memory of scaling the border fence with Alex. I replace it quickly with another image: I am climbing into the leafy branches of one of the big maples in Deering Oaks Park. Hana’s blond hair flashes underneath the layers of green; she is circling the trunk, laughing, calling up for me to go higher.

But then I must take her out of the memory. I’ve learned to do that here, in the Wilds. In my head I trim her away—her voice, the flashing crown of her head—and leave only the sense of height, the swaying leaves, the green grass below me.

“It’s time to show you the nests, then,” Hunter says.

I’m not looking forward to being outside. It was bitterly cold last night. The wind shrieked through the trees, tore down the stairs, probed all the cracks and crevices of the burrow with long, icy fingers. I came in half-frozen from my run this morning, my fingers numb and blunt and useless. But I’m curious about the nests—I’ve heard the other homesteaders use the word—and I’m anxious to get away from Blue.

“Can you finish up here?” I ask Blue, and she nods, chewing on her lower lip. Grace used to do that too, when she was nervous. I feel a sharp pang of guilt. It’s not Blue’s fault that she reminds me of Grace.

It’s not Blue’s fault I left Grace behind.

“Thanks, Blue,” I say, and lay one hand on her shoulder. I can feel her trembling slightly beneath my fingers.

The cold is a wall, a physical force. I’ve managed to find an old wind breaker in the collection of clothes, but it’s far too big and doesn’t stop the wind from biting at my neck and fingers, slipping beneath the collar and freezing my heart in my chest. The ground is frozen and the frost-coated grass crunches under our feet. We walk quickly, to stay warm; our breath comes in clouds.

“How come you don’t like Blue?” Hunter asks abruptly.

“I do,” I say quickly. “I mean, she doesn’t really talk to me, but…” I trail off. “Is it that obvious?”

He laughs. “So you don’t like her.”

“She just reminds me of someone, that’s all,” I say shortly, and Hunter turns serious.

“From before?” he asks.

I nod, and he reaches out and touches me once, lightly, on the elbow, to show me he understands. Hunter and I talk about everything except before. Of all the homesteaders, he is the one I feel closest to. We sit next to each other at dinner; and sometimes we stay up afterward, talking until the room is smudgy with smoke from the dying fire.

Hunter makes me laugh, even though for a long time I thought I would never laugh again.

It wasn’t easy to feel comfortable around him. It was hard to shake all the lessons I learned on the other side, in Portland, warnings drilled into me by everyone I admired and trusted. The disease, they taught me, grew in the space between men and women, boys and girls; it was passed between them in looks and smiles and touches, and would take root inside of them like mold that rots a tree from the inside out. Then I found out that Hunter was an Unnatural, a thing I’d always been taught to revile.

Now Hunter is Hunter, and a friend, and nothing more.

We head north, away from the homestead. It’s early, and the woods are quiet except for the crunch of our shoes on the thick layering of dead leaves. It hasn’t rained in several weeks. The woods are starved for water. It’s funny how I’ve learned to feel the woods, to understand them: their moods and tantrums, their explosions of joy and color. It’s so different from the parks and the carefully tended natural spaces in Portland. Those places were like animals at the zoo: caged in and also flattened, somehow. The Wilds are alive, and temperamental, and beautiful. Despite the hardships here, I am growing to love them.

“Almost there,” Hunter says. He nods to our left. Beyond the denuded branches I can see a crown of razor wire, looped at the top of a fence, and I feel a flash of fear, hot and sudden. I didn’t realize we’d come so close to the border. We must be skirting the edge of Rochester. “Don’t worry.” Hunter reaches out and squeezes my shoulder. “This side of the border isn’t patrolled.”

I’ve been in the Wilds for a month and a half now, and in that time I’ve almost forgotten about the fences. It’s amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

We veer away from the fence again. Soon we come to an area of enormous trees, bare branches gray and gnarled like arthritic fingers. It may have been years since they’ve bloomed at all; the trees seem to have been dead a long time. But when I say so to Hunter, he just laughs and shakes his head.

“Not dead.” He raps one with his knuckles as we pass. “Just biding their time. Storing up energy. They tuck all their life away deep inside, for winter. When it gets warm, they’ll bloom again. You’ll see.”

I’m comforted by his words.
You’ll see
means
We’re coming back here
. It means
You’re one of us now
. I run my fingers along a tree, feel the bark flake dryly under my fingertips. It’s impossible to imagine anything alive under all that hardness, anything flowing or moving.

Hunter stops so abruptly I almost run into him. “Here we are,” he says, grinning. “The nests.”

He points upward. High in the branches of the trees are massive tangles of birds’ nests: curls and spray, bits of moss and hanging creepers, all woven together so that it looks as though the trees are crowned with hair.

But even stranger: The branches are painted.

Drips of green and yellow paint stain the bark; delicate forked footprints, also colored, dance along the nests.

“What…?” I see a large bird, about the size of a crow, wing toward a nest directly above our heads. It pauses, watching us. Everything about the bird is black, except for its feet, which are painted a vivid shade of bright green. It is carrying something in its mouth. After a moment it flaps into the nest, and a chorus of chirping begins.

“Green,” Hunter says, looking satisfied. “That’s a good sign. Supplies will be coming today.”

“I don’t understand.” I’m pacing underneath the network of nests. There must be hundreds of them. Some of the nests are actually strung up between the branches of different trees, forming a dense canopy. It is even colder here; the sun barely penetrates.

“Come on,” Hunter says. “I’ll show you.”

He hoists himself up into the nearest tree, swinging easily up the trunk, using the many branches and protrusions as hand- and footholds.

I follow Hunter clumsily, imitating the placement of his hands and feet. It has been a long time since I’ve climbed a tree, and I remember it from childhood as effortless: swinging up into the branches without thought, unconsciously finding the nooks and cricks in the tree. Now it is painful and difficult.

I finally make it to one of the thicker, low-hanging branches. Hunter is straddling it, waiting for me. I crouch behind him. My legs are shaking a little, and he reaches back and loops his hands around my ankles, steadying me.

The nests are full of birds: piles of sleek black feathers, and winking black eyes. They are hopping and picking among heaps of tiny brown seeds, stockpiled for the winter. Several of them, disturbed by our arrival, go shrieking and cawing toward the sky.

The nests are coated with the same vivid green paint, a network of thatched claw prints as the birds flutter between nests.

“I still don’t understand,” I say. “Where does the color come from?”

“From the other side,” Hunter says, and I can hear the pride in his voice. “From Zombieland. In the summer, there are blueberry bushes that grow on the other side of the fence. The birds scavenge for food there. Over the years, the insiders started feeding them pellets and seeds, keeping them fat through winter. They line up different-colored troughs when they need to get us messages: half seeds, half paint. The birds eat and then they fly back here, to store up seeds for later. The nests get colored, and we get our messages. Green, yellow, or red. Green if everything’s fine, if we can expect a shipment. Yellow if there’s a problem or delay.”