Delirium: The Complete Collection (93 page)

The Wilds. Has to be.

A newscaster is saying, “
In an effort to exterminate the last breeding grounds of the disease, regulators and government troops are penetrating the Wilds
….”

Cut to: governmental ground troops, dressed in camouflage, bumping along an interstate highway, waving and grinning at the cameras.

“
As the Consortium gathers to debate the future of these uncharacterized areas, the president made an unscheduled speech to the press, in which he vowed to root out the remaining Invalids and
see them punished or treated
.”

Cut to: President Sobel, doing his infamous lean into the podium, as though he can barely keep himself from toppling it over into the audience of cameras.

“
It will take time and troops. It will take fearlessness and patience. But we will win this war
….”

Cut back to: The puzzle-piece vision of green and gray, smoke and growth, and tiny, forked tongues of fire. And then another image: more growth, a narrow river winding between the pine trees and willows. And then another, this time in a place where the trees have been burned all the way down to the red soil.

“
What you’re seeing now are aerial images from all over the country, where our troops have been deployed to hunt down the last harborers of the disease
….”

For the first time, it strikes me that Lena is, in all probability, dead. It’s stupid that I have not thought of it until now. I watch the smoke rising up from the trees and imagine little bits of Lena floating away with it: nails, hair, eyelashes, all gone to ash.

“Turn it off,” I say without meaning to.

All four waiters turn around at once. Immediately, they push out of their chairs, readjust their ties, and begin tucking their shirts into their high-waisted black pants.

“Can we do anything for you, miss?” one of them, an older man, asks politely. Another reaches out and turns off the television. The resulting silence is unexpected.

“No, I…” I shake my head. “I was just trying to find my
way back to the ballroom.”

The older waiter blinks once, his face impassive. He steps out into the hall and points toward the elevators, which are less than ten feet away. “You’ll just want to go up one floor, miss. The ballroom is at the end of the hall.” He must think I’m an idiot, but he keeps smiling pleasantly. “Would you like me to escort you upstairs?”

“No,” I say too forcefully. “No, I’ll be fine.” I practically take off running down the hallway. I can feel the waiter’s eyes on me. I’m relieved that the elevator arrives quickly, and I exhale as the doors slide shut behind me. I lean my forehead briefly against the elevator wall, which feels cool against my skin, and inhale.

What’s wrong with me?

When the elevator doors slide open, the sound of voices swells—a roar of applause—and I round the corner and step into the fierce glare of the ballroom just as a thousand voices echo, “To your future wife!”

I see Fred onstage, raising a glass of champagne, the color of liquid gold. I see a thousand bright and bloated faces turned toward me, like swollen moons. I see more champagne, more liquid, more swimming.

I bring my hand up. I wave. I smile.

More applause.

In the car on the way home from the party, Fred is quiet. He has insisted that he would like to be alone with me, and has
sent his mother and my parents ahead of us with a different driver. I had assumed he had something to say to me, but so far, he hasn’t spoken. His arms are crossed, and he has tucked his chin to his chest. He looks almost as though he is sleeping. But I recognize the gesture; he has inherited it from his father. It means that he is thinking.

“I think it was a success,” I say, after the silence becomes intolerable.

“Mmm.” He rubs his eyes.

“Are you tired?” I ask.

“I’m all right.” He lifts his chin. Then, abruptly, he leans forward and knocks on the window that separates us from the driver. “Pull over for a second, Tom, will you?”

Tom pulls the car over immediately and cuts the engine. It’s dark, and I can’t see exactly where we are. On either side of the car are looming walls of dark trees. Once the headlights switch off, it’s practically pitch-black. The only light comes from a streetlamp fifty feet ahead of us.

“What are we—?” I start to ask, but Fred turns to me and cuts me off.

“Remember the time I explained the rules of golf to you?” he says.

I’m so startled, both by the urgency in his voice and the randomness of the question, I can only nod.

“I told you,” he says, “about the importance of the caddy. Always a step behind—an invisible ally, a secret weapon. Without a good caddy, even the best golfer can be sunk.”

“Okay.” The car feels small and too hot. Fred’s breath smells sour, like alcohol. I fumble to open the window, but of course, I can’t. The engine is off; the windows are locked.

Fred runs a hand agitatedly through his hair. “Look, what I’m saying is that you’re my caddy. Do you understand that? I expect you—I need you—to be behind me one hundred percent.”

“I am,” I say, and then clear my throat and repeat it. “I am.”

“Are you sure?” He leans forward another inch and places a hand on my leg. “You’ll support me always, no matter what?”

“Yes.” I feel a flicker of uncertainty—and beneath that, fear. I have never seen Fred so intense before. His hand is gripping my thigh so tightly, I’m worried he’ll leave a mark. “That’s what pairing is about.”

Fred stares at me for a second longer. Then, all at once, he releases me.

“Good,” he says. He taps casually against the driver’s window once more, which Tom takes as a signal to start the car again and keep driving. Fred leans back, as though nothing has happened. “I’m glad we understand each other. Cassie never
understood
me. She didn’t listen. That was a big part of the problem.” The car starts moving again.

“Cassie?” My heart knocks against my rib cage.

“Cassandra. My first pair.” Fred smiles tightly.

“I don’t understand,” I say.

For a moment he doesn’t say anything. Then, abruptly: “Do you know what my father’s problem was?” I can tell he
doesn’t expect an answer, but I shake my head anyway. “He believed in people. He believed that if people could only be shown the right way—the way to health and order, a way to be free of unhappiness—they would make the right choice. They would obey. He was naive.” Fred turns to me again. His face has been swallowed up by darkness. “He didn’t understand. People are stubborn and stupid. They’re irrational. They’re destructive. That’s the point, isn’t it? That’s the whole reason for the cure. People will no longer destroy their own lives. They won’t be capable of it. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” I think of Lena and those pictures of the Wilds on fire. I wonder what she would be doing now had she stayed. She would be sleeping soundly in a decent bed; she would rise tomorrow to the sun coming up over the bay.

Fred turns back to the window, and his voice becomes steely. “We’ve been lax. We’ve allowed too much freedom already, and too much occasion for rebellion. It must stop. I won’t allow it anymore; I won’t watch my city, my country, be consumed from inside. It ends now.”

Even though Fred and I are separated by a foot of space, I’m as frightened of him as I was when he was grabbing my thigh. I have never seen him like this, either—hard and foreign.

“What are you planning to do?” I ask.

“We need a system,” he says. “We’ll reward people who follow the rules. It’s the same principle, really, as training a dog.”

I flash to the woman at the party:
She looks like she can handle a litter of ’em
.

“And we’ll punish the people who don’t conform. Not bodily, of course. This is a civilized country. I plan on appointing Douglas Finch as the new minister of energy.”

“Minister of energy?” I repeat. I’ve never heard the term.

We reach a stoplight—one of the few that still work downtown. Fred gestures vaguely at it.

“Power isn’t free. Energy isn’t free. It has to be earned. Electricity—light, heat—will be given to the people who have earned it.”

For a moment I can’t think of any response. Power-outages and blackouts have always been mandatory during certain hours of the night, and in the poorer neighborhoods, especially now, many families simply choose to do without dishwashers and laundry machines. They’re just too expensive to maintain.

But everyone has always had the
right
to electricity.

“How?” I finally ask.

Fred takes my question literally. “It’s simple, actually. The grid’s already in place, and all this stuff is computerized nowadays. It’s simply a matter of collecting the data and a few keystrokes. One click turns on the juice; one click turns it off. Finch will be in charge of all that. And we can reevaluate every six months or so. We want to be fair about it. Like I said, this is a civilized country.”

“There will be riots,” I say.

Fred shrugs. “I expect a certain amount of initial resistance,” he says. “That’s why it’s so important that you be on my side. Look, once we get the right people behind us—the important people—everyone else will fall in line. They’ll have to.” Fred
reaches out and takes my hand. He squeezes it. “They’ll learn that rioting and resistance will just make things worse. We need a zero-tolerance policy.”

My mind is spinning. No power means no lights, no refrigeration, no working ovens. No furnaces.

“What will people do for heat?” I blurt out.

Fred laughs a little, indulgently, as though I’m a puppy and have just learned a new trick. “Summer’s almost here,” he says. “I don’t think heat will be a problem.”

“But what happens when it starts to get cold?” I persist. In Maine, the winters often last from September until May. Last year we had eighty inches of snow. I think of skinny Grace, with her doorknob elbows, her shoulder blades like peaked wings. “What will they do then?”

“I guess they’ll find out that freedom doesn’t keep you warm,” he says, and I can hear the smile in his voice. He leans forward and knocks on the driver’s window again. “How about some music? I’m in the mood for a little music. Something upbeat—don’t you think, Hana?”

N
ight is coming quickly, and with it, the cold.

We’re lost.

We’re looking for an old highway that should lead us toward Waterbury. Pike is convinced we’re too far north; Raven thinks we’re too far south.

We’re striking out mostly blind, using a compass and a series of old sketches that have been passed back and forth among other traders and Invalids, filled in a little at a time, showing a random scattering of landmarks: rivers; dismantled roads and old towns, bombed by the blitz; the borders of the established cities, so we know to avoid them; ravines and impassable places. Direction, like time, is a general thing, deprived of
boundaries and borders. It is an endless process of interpretation and reinterpretation, doubling back and adjusting.

We come to a stop while Pike and Raven argue it out. My shoulders are aching. I unload my pack and sit on top of it, take a swig of water from the jug I have looped to the belt around my waist. Julian is hovering behind Raven, red-faced, his hair dark with sweat and his jacket tied around his waist. He’s trying to see beyond her, to the map that Pike is holding. He is getting skinnier.

At the periphery of the group, Alex is sitting, like me, on his pack. Coral does the same, inching closer to him so their knees are touching. Over the course of a few short days, they have become practically inseparable.

Even though I want to, I can’t bring myself to look away from him. I don’t understand what he and Coral have to talk about. They talk while they hike, and while they set up camp. They talk at mealtimes, sequestered in the corner. Meanwhile, he hardly speaks with anyone else, and he has not exchanged a single word with me since our confrontation with the bear.

She must have asked him a question, because I see him shake his head.

And then, just for a second, both of them look up at me. I turn away quickly, heat rushing to my cheeks. They were talking about me. I know it. I wonder what she asked him.

Do you know that girl? She’s staring at you
.

Do you think Lena’s pretty?

I squeeze my fists until my nails dig into the flesh of my
palms, inhale deeply, and will away the thought. Alex and what he thinks of me are irrelevant.

Pike is saying, “I’m telling you, we should have gone east at the old church. It’s marked on the map.”

“That isn’t a church,” Raven argues, snatching the map back from him. “It’s the tree we passed earlier—the one split by lightning. And it means we should have continued north.”

“I’m telling you, that’s a
cross
—”

“Why don’t we send out scouts?” Julian interrupts them. Startled into silence, they turn to him. Raven frowns, and Pike stares at Julian with open hostility. My stomach starts squirming, and I silently pray in his direction:
Don’t get involved. Don’t say anything stupid
.

But Julian continues calmly, “We move more slowly as a group, and it’s a waste of our time and energy if we’re headed in the wrong direction.” For a second I see his old self float to the surface, the Julian of conferences and posters, the youth leader of the DFA, self-assured. “So I say two people head north—”

“Why north?” Pike breaks in angrily.

Julian barely misses a beat. “Or south, whichever. Hike for half a day, look for the highway. If it isn’t there, hike in the other direction. At least we’ll get more of a sense of the terrain. We can help orient the group.”

“We?” Raven parrots.

Julian looks at her. “I want to volunteer,” he says.

“It’s not safe,” I burst out, climbing to my feet. “There are
Scavengers patrolling—maybe regulators, too. We need to stick together. Otherwise we’re easy prey.”

“She’s right,” Raven says, turning back to Julian. “It isn’t safe.”

“I’ve dealt with Scavengers before,” Julian argues.

“And almost died,” I fire back.

He smiles. “I didn’t, though.”

“I’ll go with him.” Tack spits a thick wad of tobacco onto the ground and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. I glare at him. He ignores me. He has made no secret of the fact that he thinks it was a mistake to have rescued Julian and a liability to have him with us. “You know how to shoot a gun?”

“No,” I say. “He doesn’t.” Now everyone’s looking at me, but I don’t care. I don’t know what Julian’s trying to prove, but I don’t like it.

“I can handle a gun,” Julian lies quickly.

Tack nods. “All right, then.” He extracts another bit of tobacco from a pouch he wears around his neck and balls it into his mouth. “Let me unload some of my pack. We’ll leave in half an hour.”

“Okay, everyone.” Raven raises her arms in a gesture of resignation. “We might as well camp here.”

The group, as one, begins to shed packs and shake supplies out on the ground, like a single animal molting its skin. I grab Julian’s arm and draw him away from everybody else.

“What was that about?” I’m struggling to keep my voice down. I can see Alex watching us. He looks amused. I wish I had something to throw at him.

I take Julian and swivel him around, so he blocks Alex from my view.

“What do you mean?” He shoves his hands in his pockets.

“Don’t play dumb,” I say. “You shouldn’t have volunteered to scout. This isn’t a joke, Julian. We’re in the middle of a war.”

“I don’t think it’s a joke.” His calmness is infuriating. “I know better than anyone else what the other side is capable of, remember?”

I look away, biting my lip. He has a point. If anyone knows about the tactics of the zombies, it’s Julian Fineman.

“You still don’t know the Wilds,” I insist. “And Tack won’t protect you. If you get attacked—if anything happens, and it’s a question of you or the rest of us—he’ll leave you. He won’t endanger the group.”

“Lena.” Julian puts his hands on my shoulders and forces me to look at him. “Nothing’s going to happen, okay?”

“You don’t know that,” I say. I know I’m overreacting, but I can’t help it. For some reason, I feel like crying. I think of the quietness of Julian’s voice as he said
I love you
, the steadiness of his rib cage rising and falling against my back as we sleep.

I love you, Julian
. But the words don’t come.

“The others don’t trust me,” Julian says. I open my mouth to protest, but he cuts me off. “Don’t try and deny it. You know it’s true.”

I don’t contradict him. “So what? You need to prove yourself?”

He sighs and rubs his eyes. “I chose to make my place here, Lena. I chose to make my place with you. Now I have to earn
it. It’s not about proving myself. But like you said, there’s a war on. I don’t want to sit on the sidelines.” He leans forward and kisses my forehead once. He still hesitates for just a fraction of a second before he kisses me, as though he has to shake out that old fear, the terror of touch and contamination. “Why are you so upset about this? Nothing will happen.”

I’m scared
, I want to say.
I have a bad feeling. I love you and don’t want you to get hurt
. But again, it’s as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears and past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.

“We’ll be back in a few hours,” Julian says, and cups my chin briefly. “You’ll see.”

But they aren’t back by dinnertime, and they aren’t back by the time we rake dirt over the fire, extinguishing it for the night. It’s a liability now, and even though we’ll be colder, and Julian and Tack will have trouble finding their way to us without it, Raven is insistent.

I volunteer to stay up and stand watch. I’m too anxious to sleep. Raven gives me an extra coat from our store of clothing. The nights are still edged with a hard chill.

A few hundred feet from the camp is a slight incline, and an old cement wall, still imprinted with ghostly loops of graffiti, that will shield me from the wind. I huddle up with my back against the stone, cupping the mug of water Raven boiled for me earlier to help warm my fingers. My gloves were lost, or stolen, somewhere between the New York
homestead and here, and now I have to do without.

The moon rises and touches the camp—the slumbering forms, the domed tents and makeshift shelters—with a fine white sheen. In the distance, a water tower, still intact, hovers over the trees like a steel insect, perched on long, spindly legs. The sky is clear and cloudless, and thousands of stars float out of the darkness. An owl hoots, a hollow, mournful sound that echoes through the woods. From even this short distance, the camp looks peaceful, wrapped up in its white haze, surrounded by the splintered wrecks of old houses: roofs collapsed into the ground, a swing set, overturned, its plastic slide still protruding from the dirt.

After two hours, I’m yawning so much my jaw aches, and my whole body feels as though it has been filled with wet sand. I lean my head back against the wall, struggling to keep my eyes open. The stars above me blur together…they became one beam of light—sunshine—Hana is stepping out of the sunshine, leaves in her hair, saying, “
Wasn’t it a funny joke? I was never planning to get cured, you know
….” Her eyes are locked on mine, and as she steps forward, I see she’s about to put her foot in a trap. I try to warn her, but—

Snap
. I jolt awake, heart throbbing in my throat, and quickly, as quietly as possible, move into a crouch. The air is still again, but I know I didn’t imagine or dream the sound: the sound of a twig snapping.

The sound of a footstep.

Let it be Julian
, I think.
Let it be Tack
.

I scan the camp and see a shadow moving between the tents. I tense up and reach forward, ever so slowly, easing the rifle into my hands. My fingers are swollen with cold, and clumsy. The gun feels heavier than it did earlier.

The figure steps into a patch of moonlight, and I exhale. It’s just Coral. Her skin shines a vivid white in the moonlight, and she is wearing an oversized sweatshirt that I recognize as belonging to Alex. My stomach clenches. I bring the rifle up to my shoulder, swing the muzzle toward her, think:
Bang
.

I bring the gun down quickly, ashamed.

My former people were not totally wrong. Love is a kind of possession. It’s a poison. And if Alex no longer loves me, I can’t bear to think that he might love somebody else.

Coral disappears into the woods, probably to pee. My legs are cramping, so I straighten up. I’m too tired to stand guard any longer. I’ll go down and wake up Raven, who volunteered to replace me.

Snap
. Another footstep, this one closer and on the east side of the camp. Coral went north. Instantly, I’m on alert again.

Then I see him: He inches slowly forward, gun raised, emerging from behind a thick copse of evergreens. I can tell right away he’s not a Scavenger. His posture is too perfect, his gun too pristine, his clothing well-fitted.

My heart stops. A regulator. Must be. And that means the Wilds really have been breached. Despite all the evidence, a part of me has been hoping it wasn’t true.

For a second everything gets silent, and then frighteningly
loud, as the blood rushes to my head, pounding in my ears, and the night seems to light up with frightening hoots and screams, alien and wild, animals prowling the dark. My palms are sweating as I bring the gun once more to my shoulder. My throat is dry. I track the regulator as he moves closer to the camp. I put my finger on the trigger. Panic is building in my chest. I don’t know whether to shoot. I’ve never shot anything from this distance. I’ve never shot a person. I don’t even know that I
could
.

Shit, shit, shit, shit
. I wish Tack were here.

Shit
.

What would Raven do?

He reaches the edge of the camp. He lowers his gun, and I move my finger off the trigger. Maybe he’s just a scout. Maybe he’s supposed to report back. That will give us time to move, to clear out, to prepare. Maybe we’ll be okay.

Then Coral reemerges from the woods.

For a split second she stands there, frozen stiff and white as though framed in a photographer’s flash. For a split second, he doesn’t move either.

Then she gasps, and he swings his gun toward her, and without thinking or planning on it, my finger finds the trigger again and pulls. The regulator’s knee goes and he cries out, sinking to the ground.

Then everything is chaos.

The kick of the rifle knocks me backward, and I stumble, trying to keep my balance. A jagged tooth of rock bites sharply
into my back, and pain shoots from my ribs to my shoulder. There are more gunshots—one, two—and then shouting. I sprint down toward the camp. In less than a minute, it has unfolded, opened, turned into a swarm of people and voices.

The regulator is lying facedown in the dirt, arms and legs splayed. A pool of blood extends like a dark shadow around him. Dani is standing near him with her handgun out. She must have been the one to kill him.

Coral has her arms wrapped around her waist, looking shocked and slightly guilty, as though she somehow summoned the regulator to her. She is uninjured, which is a relief. I’m glad that my instincts were to save her. I think about centering her in my crosshairs earlier, and feel another pulse of shame. This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.

Hatred, too, the zombies warned me about.

Pike, Hunter, and Lu are all talking at the same time. The rest of our group huddles in a semicircle around them, pale and frightened-looking in the moonlight, their eyes hollows, like resurrected ghosts.

Only Alex isn’t standing. He’s squatting, quickly and methodically repacking his backpack.

“All right.” Raven speaks quietly, but the urgency there commands our attention. “Let’s look at the facts. We have a dead regulator on our hands.”

Someone whimpers.

“What are we doing?” Gordo breaks in. His face is wild with panic. “We have to
go
.”

“Go where?” Raven demands. “We don’t know where they are, what direction they’re coming from. We could be running straight into a trap.”