Delirium: The Complete Collection (68 page)

“This is where I leave you,” Rat-man says. He has swung his lower body back into the hole. I can tell he’s desperate to get out of the sun and go back to safety.

“Thank you,” I say. The words seem stupidly insufficient, but I can’t think of any others.

The rat-man nods and is about to swing himself down the ladder when Julian stops him.

“We didn’t get your name,” Julian says.

The rat-man’s lips twitch into a smile. “I don’t have one,” he says.

Julian looks startled. “Everyone has a name,” he says.

“Not anymore,” the rat-man says with that twitchy smile. “Names don’t mean a thing anymore. The past is dead.”

The past is dead. Raven’s refrain. It makes my throat go dry. I am not so different from these underground people after all.

“Be careful,” the rat-man says, and his eyes go unfocused again. “They’re always watching.”

Then he drops down into the hole. A second later the iron cover slides into place.

For a moment, Julian and I stand in silence, staring at each other.

“We did it,” Julian says finally, smiling at me. He is standing a little ways down the platform, the sun streaking his hair with white and gold. A bird darts across the sky behind him, a fast-moving shadow against the blue. There are small white flowers pushing up between the cracks in the platform.

Suddenly I find that I am crying. I am sobbing with gratitude and relief. We made it out, and the sun is still shining, and the world still exists.

“Hey.” Julian comes over to me. He hesitates for a second, then reaches out and rubs my back, moving his hand in slow circles. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay, Lena.”

I shake my head. I want to tell him that I know, and that’s why I’m crying, but I can’t speak. He pulls me into him and I cry into his T-shirt and we stand there like that, in the sun, in the outside world, where these things are illegal. And all around us there is silence, except for the occasional twittering of birds, and the rustle of pigeons around the empty platform.

Finally I pull away. For a second I think I see movement behind him, in the shadows beyond one of the station’s old stairwells, but then I’m sure I’ve only imagined it. The light is unrelenting. I can’t imagine what I must look like right now. Despite the fact that the underground people have cleaned and treated Julian’s wounds, his face is still patterned with bruises, a multicolored patchwork. I’m sure I look just as bad, if not worse.

Belowground, we’ve been allies; friends. Aboveground, I’m not sure what we are, and I feel uneasy.

Thankfully, he breaks the tension. “So you know where we are?” he says.

I nod. “I know where we can get help from—from my people.”

To his credit, he doesn’t flinch. “Let’s go, then,” he says.

He follows me down into the tracks. We startle the pigeons from their roost, and they whirl up around us, a blurry, feathered hurricane. We pick our way over the train tracks and onto the high grass beyond it, bleached pale from the sun and still sheathed in frost. The ground is hard and webbed with ice, although here, too, there is evidence of spring growth: small, curled buds of green, a few early flowers scattered among the dirt.

The sun is warm on our necks, but the wind is icy. I wish I had something warmer than a sweatshirt. The cold reaches right through the cotton, grabs on to my insides, and pulls.

Finally the landscape becomes familiar. The sun draws stark shadows on the ground—towering, splintered shapes of bombed-out buildings. We pass an old street sign, doubled over, that once pointed the way to Columbia Avenue. Columbia Avenue is now nothing more than broken slabs of concrete, and frozen grass, and a carpet of minuscule shards of glass, shattered into a reflective dust.

“Here it is,” I say. “Right up here.” I start jogging. The entrance to the homestead is no more than twenty yards away, beyond a twist in the road.

And yet, there’s another feeling drilling through me: some inner alarm sounding quietly. Convenient. That’s the word that keeps floating through my mind. Convenient that we ended up so close to the homestead; convenient that the tunnels led us here. Too convenient to be a coincidence.

I push away the thought.

We turn the corner and there it is. Just like that, all my concerns get whipped away on a surge of joy. Julian stops, but I go straight up to the door, recharged, full of energy. Most homesteads—at least the ones I’ve seen—have been built out of hidden places: basements and cellars and bomb shelters and bank vaults that remained intact during the blitz. We have populated them like insects reclaiming the land.

But this homestead was built long after the blitz was over. Raven told me it was one of the very first homesteads, and the headquarters of the first ragtag group of resisters, who scavenged for materials and built a quasi-house, a weird patchwork structure made from timber, concrete, stone, and metal. The whole place has a junky look, a Frankenstein facade, like it shouldn’t possibly be standing.

But stand it does.

“So?” I say, turning back to Julian. “You coming or what?”

“I’ve never… It’s not possible.” Julian shakes his head, as though trying to rouse himself from a dream. “This isn’t at all what I used to imagine.”

“We can build something out of almost anything—out of scrap,” I say, and I remember, then, when Raven said almost the exact same thing to me after my escape, when I was sick and weak and unsure whether I wanted to live or die. That was a half a year and a lifetime ago. For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.

Julian’s eyes are electric now, a mirror of the sky, and he turns to me. “Up until two years ago, I thought it was all a fairy tale. The Wilds, the Invalids.” He takes two steps and suddenly we are standing very close. “You. I—I never would have believed it.”

We are still separated by several inches, but I feel as though we are touching. There is an electricity between us that collapses the space between our bodies.

“I’m real,” I say, and the electricity is an itch, a nervous jumping under my skin. I feel too exposed. It is too bright, and too quiet.

Julian says, “I don’t think—I’m not sure I can go back.” His eyes are full of watery depth. I want to look away, but I can’t. I feel as though I am falling.

“I don’t know what you’re saying.” I force the words out.

“I mean, I—”

There is a loud bang from our right, as though someone has kicked something over. Julian breaks off, and I see his body tense. Instinctively, I push him behind me, toward the door, and wrestle the handgun from my backpack. I scan the area: all shrapnel and stone, dips and depressions, plenty of places to hide. The hair is standing up on my neck, and my whole body is an alarm now. They are always watching.

We stand in agonizing silence. The wind lifts a plastic bag across the brittle ground. It makes three slow revolutions, then settles at the base of a long-disabled streetlamp.

Suddenly there is a flicker of movement to my left. I turn around with a cry, gripping the gun, as a cat darts out from behind a mound of cinder block. Julian exhales, and I loosen my hold on the gun, letting the tension flow out of my body. The cat—skinny and wide-eyed—pauses, turning its head in our direction. It meows piteously.

Julian touches my shoulders lightly, with both hands, and I jerk away quickly, instinctively.

“Come on,” I say. I can tell I’ve hurt his feelings.

“I was about to say something,” Julian says. I can feel him searching for my eyes, willing me to look at him, but I am already at the door, fiddling with the rusty handle.

“You can tell me later,” I say as I lean in against the door. It gives, finally, and Julian has no choice but to follow me inside.

I am scared about what Julian has to say, and what he will choose, and where he will go. But I am terrified by what I want: for him, and worst of all, from him.

Because I do want. I’m not even sure what, exactly, but the want is there, just like the hate and anger were there before. But this is not a tower. It is an endless, tunneling pit; it drives deep, and opens a hole inside me.

T
ack and Hunter weren’t able to salvage many supplies from the Rochester homestead. The bombs and ensuing fires did their job. But they did find a few things miraculously preserved among the smoking rubble: cans of beans, some additional weapons, traps, and, weirdly, one whole, entirely unmelted chocolate bar. Tack insists that it remain uneaten. He straps it to his backpack, like a good luck charm. Sarah eyes it as we walk.

It does seem like the chocolate brings good luck—or maybe it’s just having Tack and Hunter back, and the way it changes Raven’s mood. The weather holds. It’s still cold, but we’re all grateful for the sun.

The beans are enough to give us energy to move on, and only a half day after we’ve left the last encampment we stumble upon a single house, entirely preserved, in the middle of the woods. It must have been miles from any major road when it was built, and it looks like a mushroom sprouting up from the ground: Its walls are covered in brown ivy, thick as fur, and its roof is low and round, pulled down like a hat. This would have been a hermit’s house, back before the blitz—far away from everyone else. No wonder it survived intact. The bombers would have missed it, and even the fires might not have spread this far.

Four Invalids have made it their home. They invite us to camp on their grounds. There are two men and two women, as well as five children, none of whom seems to belong to either couple in particular. They all act as one family, they tell us over dinner, and have inhabited the house for a decade. They are nice enough to share what they have: canned eggplant and summer squash, bitingly sour with garlic and vinegar; strips of dried venison from earlier in the fall; and various other kinds of smoked meat and fowl: rabbit, pheasant, squirrel.

Hunter and Tack spend the evening retracing our steps and slicing patterns in the trees, so next year when we migrate—if we migrate again—we will be able to locate the mushroom house.

In the morning, one of the children runs out as we are getting ready to leave. He is barefoot, despite the snow.

“Here,” he says, and presses a kitchen towel into my hand. Inside are hard, flat loaves of bread—made, I overheard one of the women say, from acorns and not flour—and more dried meat.

“Thank you,” I say, but he is already running back, bounding toward the house, laughing. For a moment I am jealous: He has grown up here, fearless, happy. Perhaps he will never even know about the world on the other side of the fence, the real world. For him there will be no such thing.

But there will also be no medicine for him when he is sick, and never enough food to go around, and winters so cold the mornings are like a punch to the gut. And someday—unless the resistance succeeds and takes the country back—the planes and the fires will find him. Someday the eye will turn in this direction, like a laser beam, consuming everything in its path. Someday all the Wilds will be razed, and we will be left with a concrete landscape, a land of pretty houses and trim gardens and planned parks and forests, and a world that works as smoothly as a clock, neatly wound: a world of metal and gears, and people going
tick-tick-tick
to their deaths.

We ration carefully, and at last, after another three days’ walking, we come to the bridge that marks the final thirty miles. It is enormous and narrow, made of vast ropes of steel, all slicked with ice and blackened by weather. It looks to me like a gigantic insect, straddling the river, plunging its jointed legs into the water. Barricaded years ago, it has been so long out of use, except as a passage for traveling Invalids, that the clumsily erected wooden boards at its entrance have all but rotted away.

A large green sign, detached from its metal supports on one side, now hangs so that its words run vertically. I read as we pass:
TAPPAN ZEE BRIDGE
. It sways in the wind—a brutal wind; exposed as we are, it drives right through us, bringing tears to our eyes—and fills the air with ghostly moaning.

Below us, the water is the color of concrete, and capped with waves. The height is dizzying. I read once that jumping into water from this height would feel just like a plunge into stone. I remember the news story of the uncured who killed herself by jumping from the roof of the labs on the day of her procedure, and the memory brings with it a feeling of guilt.

But this is what Alex would have wanted for me: the scar on my neck, miraculously well-healed, just like a real procedural scar; the ropy muscles, the sense of purpose. He believed in the resistance, and now I will believe in it for him.

And maybe someday I will see him again. Maybe there really is a heaven after death. And maybe it’s open to everyone, not just the cured.

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival—hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water, and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven.

H
eaven is hot water. Heaven is soap.

Salvage—which is what we always called this homestead—consists of four rooms. There is a kitchen; a large storage space, almost the size of the whole rest of the house; and a cramped sleeping room (filled with rickety and clumsily constructed bunk beds).