Delirium: The Complete Collection (67 page)

“We’re trying to find our way out,” I say, and then something that the woman said earlier strikes me, and I feel a sudden surge of hope. “Wait—you said you have trouble keeping track of time unless you go aboveground, right? So … there’s a way out? A way up?”

“I don’t go aboveground,” she says. The way she says
above
makes it sound like a dirty word.

“But somebody does,” I persist. “Somebody must.” They must have ways of getting supplies: sheets and cups and fuel and all the piles of half-used, broken-down furniture heaped around us on the platform.

“Yes,” she says evenly. “Of course.”

“Will you take us?” I ask. My throat is dry. Just thinking about the sun, and the space, and the surface, makes me want to cry. I don’t know what will happen once we’re above again, but I push away the thought.

“You’re still very weak,” she says. “You need to eat and rest.”

“I’m okay,” I insist. “I can walk.” I try to stand up, and find my vision clouding with black. I thud back down.

“Lena.” Julian puts a hand on my arm. Something flickers in his eyes—
Trust me, it’s okay, a little longer won’t kill us
. I don’t know what’s happening, or how we’ve begun to communicate in silence, or why I like it so much.

He turns to the woman. “We’ll rest for a bit. Then will someone show us the way to the surface?”

The woman once again looks from Julian to me and back again. Then she nods. “You don’t belong down here,” she says. She climbs to her feet.

I feel suddenly humbled. All these people make a life from trash and broken things, living in darkness, breathing in smoke. And yet, they helped us. They helped us without knowing us, and for no reason at all other than the fact that they knew how. I wonder whether I would do the same, if I were in their position. I’m not sure.

Alex would have, I think. And then: Julian would too.

“Wait!” Julian calls her back. “We—we didn’t get your name.”

A look of surprise crosses her face: Then she smiles again, the little corkscrew lips. “I was named down here,” she says. “They call me Coin.”

Julian wrinkles his forehead, but I get it right away. It’s an Invalid name: descriptive, easy to remember, funny, kind of sick. Coin, as in two-sided.

Coin was right: Time is hard to measure in the tunnels, even harder than it was to measure in the cell. At least there we had the electric light to guide us—on during day, off at night. Every minute down here becomes an hour.

Julian and I eat three granola bars each, and some more of the jerky we stole from the Scavengers’ stash. It feels like a feast, and before I’m even finished, my stomach is cramping badly. Still, after eating, and drinking the whole jug of water, I feel better than I have in days. We doze for a bit—lying so close I can feel Julian’s breath stirring my hair, our legs almost touching—and we both wake at the same time.

Coin is standing above us again. She has refilled the jug of water. Julian utters a little cry as he is shaking himself into awareness. Then he sits up quickly, embarrassed. He runs his hands through his hair so it sticks up at crazy angles, every which way; I have an overwhelming urge to reach out and smooth it down.

“Can you walk?” Coin asks me. I nod. “I’ll have someone take you to the surface, then.” Again, she says
surface
as though it’s a dirty word, or a curse.

“Thank you.” The words seem thin and insufficient. “You didn’t need to—I mean, we really appreciate it. We’d probably be dead if it weren’t for you and … your friends.” I almost say your people, but I catch myself at the last minute. I remember how angry I’ve been with Julian for saying the same thing.

She stares at me for a moment without smiling, and I wonder if, somehow, I’ve offended her. “Like I said, you don’t belong down here,” she says. And then, her voice swelling, rising to a high pitch: “There’s a place for everything and everyone, you know. That is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people have a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.”

A small tremor passes through her body; her right hand tugs convulsively at the folds of her dirty dress.

“I’ll find someone to guide you,” she says abruptly, as though ashamed of her outburst, and turns away from us.

Rat-man is the one who comes for us, and seeing him brings back a sense of vertigo and nausea, even though this time he is alone. The rats have gone back to their holes and hiding places.

“Coin said you want to go up,” he says, the longest sentence I have heard from him yet. Julian and I are already standing. Julian has taken the backpack, and though I’ve told him I’m okay to stand, he insists on keeping a hand on my arm.
Just in case
, he said, and I think of how different he is from the boy I saw onstage in the Javits Center, the cool floating screen image—unimaginable that they should be the same person. I wonder whether that boy is the real Julian, or this boy is the real one, or whether it’s even possible to know.

Then it hits me: I’m not even sure who the real Lena is anymore.

“We’re ready,” Julian says.

We pick our way around the piles of junk and the makeshift shelters that clutter the platform. Everywhere we go, we are watched. Figures crouch in the shadows. They’ve been forced down here, the way we have been forced into the Wilds: all for a society of order and regularity.

For a society to be healthy, not a single one of its members can be sick. The DFA’s philosophy runs deeper—much deeper—than I’d believed. The dangerous are not just the uncured: They are also the different, the deformed, the abnormal. They must also be eradicated. I wonder if Julian realizes this, or whether he’s known it all along.

Irregularity must be regulated; dirt must be cleansed; the laws of physics teach us that systems tend increasingly toward chaos, and so the chaos must be constantly pushed back. The rules of expurgation are even written into
The Book of Shhh
.

At the end of the platform, the rat-man swings down into the tracks. He is walking well now. If he was injured during the scuffle with the Scavengers, he, too, has been mended and bandaged. Julian follows, and then helps me down, reaching up and putting his hands around my waist as I maneuver clumsily off the platform. Even though I feel better than I did earlier, I’m still not moving very well. I’ve been too long without enough food and water, and my head still throbs. My left ankle wobbles as I hit the ground, and for a minute I stumble against Julian, bumping my chin on his chest, and his arms tighten around me.

“You okay?” he says. I’m ultra-conscious of the closeness of our bodies, and the encircling warmth of his arms.

I step away from him, my heart climbing into my mouth. “I’m fine,” I say.

Then it’s time to go into the darkness again. I hang back, and Rat-man must think I’m scared. He turns and says, “The Intruders don’t come this far. Don’t worry.” He’s without a flashlight or a torch. I wonder if the fire was just meant to intimidate the Scavengers. The mouth of the tunnel is pitch-black, but he seems perfectly able to see.

“Let’s go,” Julian says, and I turn with him and follow the rat-man, and the dim beam of the flashlight, into the dark.

We walk in silence, although the rat-man occasionally stops, making clicking motions with his tongue, like a man calling a dog. Once he crouches, and pulls bits of crushed crackers from the pockets of his coat, scattering them on the ground between the wooden slats of the tracks. From the corners of the tunnel the rats emerge, sniffing his fingers, fighting over the crumbs, hopping up into his cupped palms and running up over his arms and shoulders. It is terrible to watch, but I can’t look away.

“How long have you been here?” Julian asks, after the ratman has straightened up again. Now all around us we hear the chittering of tiny teeth and nails, and the flashlight lights up quick-moving, writhing shadows. I have a sudden terror that the rats are all around me, even on the ceilings.

“Don’t know,” the rat-man says. “Lost count.”

Unlike the other people who have made their home on the platform, he has no noticeable physical deformities except for his single milk-white eye. I can’t help but blurt out, “Why?”

He turns abruptly back to me. For a minute Rat-man doesn’t say anything, and the three of us stand there in the stifling dark. My breath is coming quickly, rasping in my throat.

“I didn’t want to be cured,” he says at last, and the words are so normal—a vocabulary from my world, a debate from above—that relief breaks in my chest. He’s not crazy after all.

“Why not?” That’s Julian.

Another pause. “I was already sick,” the rat-man says, and although I can’t see his face, I can hear that he is smiling just a little bit. I wonder if Julian is as surprised as I am.

It occurs to me, then, that people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.

“What happened?” Julian persists.

“She was cured,” the rat-man says shortly, and turns his back to us, resuming the walk. “And I chose … this. Here.”

“Wait, wait.” Julian tugs me along—we have to jog a little to catch up. “I don’t understand. You were infected together, and then she was cured?”

“Yes.”

“And you chose this instead?” Julian shakes his head. “You must have seen… I mean, it would have taken away the pain.” There’s a question in Julian’s words, and I know then that he is struggling, still clinging to his old beliefs, the ideas that have comforted him for so long.

“I didn’t see.” The rat-man has increased his pace. He must have the tunnel’s twists and dips memorized. Julian and I can barely keep up. “I didn’t see her at all after that.”

“I don’t understand,” Julian says, and for a second my heart aches for him. He is my age, but there is so much he doesn’t know.

The rat-man stops. He doesn’t look at us, but I see his shoulders rise and fall: an inaudible sigh. “They’d already taken her from me once,” he says quietly. “I didn’t want to lose her again.”

I have the urge to lay my hand on his shoulder and say,
I understand
. But the words seem stupid. We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.

But then he says, “We’re here,” and steps to the side, so the flashlight’s beam falls on a rusted metal ladder; and before I can think of anything else to say, he has hopped onto its lowest rung and started climbing toward the surface.

Soon the rat-man is fiddling with a metal cover in the ceiling. As he slides it open, the light is so dazzling and unexpected I cry out for a second, and have to turn away, blinking, while spots of color revolve in my vision.

The rat-man heaves himself up and out through the hole, then reaches down to help me. Julian follows last.

We’ve emerged onto a large, open-air platform. There is a train track below us, torn up, a thicket of mangled iron and wood. At some point, it must descend into the underground tunnels. The platform is streaked with bird shit. Pigeons are roosting everywhere, on the peeled-paint benches, in the old trash bins, between the tracks. A sun-faded and wind-battered sign must at one point have listed the station name; it is illegible now, but for a few letters: H, O, B, K. Old tags stain the walls:
MY LIFE, MY CHOICE
, says one. Another reads,
KEEP AMERICA SAFE
. Old slogans, old signs of the fight between the believers and the nonbelievers.

“What is this place?” I say to Rat-man. He’s crouching by the black mouth of the hole that leads below. He has flipped his hood up to shield his eyes from the sun, and he seems desperate to leap back into the darkness. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to really look at him, and I see now he is much younger than I’d imagined. Other than faint, crisscrossed lines at the corners of his eyes, his face is smooth and unlined. His skin is so pale it has the blue tint of milk, and his eyes are fuzzy and unfocused, unused to so much light.

“This is the landfill,” he says, pointing. About a hundred yards off, in the direction he indicates, is a tall chain-link fence, beyond which we can see a mound of glittering trash and metal. “Manhattan is across the river.”

“The landfill,” I repeat slowly. Of course: The underground people must have a way to gather supplies. The landfill would be perfect: heaps and heaps of discarded food, supplies, wiring, and furniture. I feel a jolt of recognition. I scramble to my feet. “I know where we are,” I say. “There’s a homestead nearby.”

“A what?” Julian squints up at me, but I’m too excited. I jog down the platform, my breath steaming in front of me, lifting my arm to shield my eyes from the sun. The landfill is enormous—several miles square, Tack told me, to service all of Manhattan and its sister cities—but we must be at its northern end. There’s a gravel road that winds away from its gates, through the ruins of old, bombed-out buildings. This trash pit was once a city itself. And less than a mile away is a homestead. Raven, Tack, and I lived here for a month while we were waiting for papers and our final instructions from the resistance about relocation and reabsorption. At the homestead there will be food, and water, and clothing. There will be a way to contact Raven and Tack, too. When we lived there we used radio signals, and, when those got too dangerous, different-colored cloths, which we raised on the flagpole just outside of a burned-out local school.