Gods of Anthem (6 page)

My
eyes crack open to find Pretend Man watching me tonight, with a face as closed as a vault, while he searches my wrist for a pulse. He thinks I’m dead. I’m almost sure of it.

Do my eyes not open far enough to show him I’m still alive? Do they not blink?

Most of my body’s unresponsive. Maybe I’ve already expired and sight’s the final residue of my brain sparking.

When he jabs a needle into my side, I don’t feel it.

He finally realizes I’m still here, present, and his pretend gaze meets mine. It wills something to me.

My peace steals away in an instant. Anger replaces what had been a calm ready to chariot me away to eternal rest.

I’m trying to die as quickly as I can!

“You were dead!”
Mimi’s standing at my bunk, owl-eyed and pale.

“I was…? I guess I was.” My voice sounds a thousand years old, and with the blanket over my head to block the light of day, I’m hiding from the living.

Mimi gulps and leans over to be sure.

By the gasp she makes, I assume how I feel coincides with how I must look. She probably expects me to turn into a zombie at any moment. It’s unknown what will happen next, but I’m certainly alive, and I’m wondering what to do with myself now.

My three days of sleeping in the sick bay had been a merciful coma, I’m told. Apparently, I’d died during that time, as well. Flat-lined for four minutes, May said. Why they bothered to perform CPR is beyond me, but they had, and they’d brought me back.

That place on the other side of the island—the shots, the Pretend Man—evidently, it was all a dream. A very elaborate one, too. Upon waking in the sick bay, when I’d asked about it, the nurses had looked at me strangely. Even May frowned and felt my forehead.

Mimi said she thought I’d only been at the sick bay. And the look on her face now says it all: Liza is a zombie. She’s certain of it. She’s biting her lip, afraid, but willing to stay close out of loyalty. She’s shaking, though.

Am I a zombie?

I’m a really
healthy zombie. Not only am I back on my feet, but they stopped me on my way to treatment and told me I didn’t need it.

Tests show that my cancer is in remission. It was such a surprise that I sat there anyway with all of the others through their dose, arm out.

Remission. The word is completely foreign. Dying has always been my destination. Recovery is unprecedented.

I’m allowed to simply go to checkups from now on, they say. No one’s come back from what I have, or from any cancer in the last five years, for that matter, they say.

They say so many things; my head feels like it’s floating away on their words.

No use in asking: What now? They wouldn’t know. This is new territory for many of the staff. A patient who doesn’t end up as a pile of ash is so unplanned for.

Mimi and a few others gape at my smiles and waves from across the cafeteria. I’m in a good mood, and hungry, too. Ravenous. Never been so starved in all of my life.

There’s already a helping on my plate, but I beg for another, and the food servers dote on me because word’s gotten out that a shrimp-girl with blue eyes was dead, but is now all smiles.

With a tray full of food and a biscuit in my mouth, I turn to leave. What I see stops me in my tracks. In the corner of the cafeteria stands the doctor from my dream. Pretend Man. And he’s looking right at me.

I’ve stumbled into the person in front of me, and they catch an elbow to the back while I’m staring in bewilderment across the sea of prisoners.

A real doctor, not an imaginary one, not a dream at all because … here he is. The shots. The other place. It had been real.

My mind is still reeling with the possibilities when the prisoner I’d bumped turns around and then stiffens. The sudden stillness forces me to look away from the doctor and turn to find grey eyes locked onto mine.

The prisoner in front of me stares back with eyes the color of smoke—they go right through me.

Nothing makes sense, and then everything does. He seems surprised before the grey turmoil turns guilty.

My sudden recoil dumps my precious food tray onto the floor, but I’m too busy shrinking backwards to care. Panic seizes my senses: He’s alive!

All of the cafeteria fades away.

There is only me and him.

Angry red zigzags of barely healed tissue cross the now-crooked nose. Misshapen lips are severed through by a thick white line, proof of where they’d been split open by the guards. When I’d thought he’d been killed for attacking me in the woods.

Now, he hesitantly steps forward, hitching awkwardly on a bum leg. One arm hangs limply at his side. Though his expression is a cloud of regret—he’s sorry; that’s obvious—it’s too late for sorry. Much too late for that.

He reaches for me, and I shake my head.

A scream wells inside, but then gets trapped behind my clamped teeth. I step back, and he follows in tandem despite my reaction.

His hand lifts in slow motion to touch my shoulder, a gesture not meant to be evil. But my body is glass, and he’s a chisel.

That hand lands on my sleeve, and it’s like being electrocuted—a jolt that raises the hair on my arms before it moves through, shattering me with a roar of sound that’s impossible.

With my hands wrapped around his arm—the offending appendage that dared to touch me—I’m moving him, somehow, forcing him to the ground. His cry marries my own, calling out in surprise. But I’ve become louder, beyond loud, a hurricane overwhelming the alarms of the small town it devours. That is my strange, new battle cry.

Beneath my fingers comes a crunch of bone, and that’s my only reality check. He’s on his knees, and I’m pressing further, and further still, grinding him into the earth, trying to send him back into hell. Mr. Grey Eyes splinters in my grip like a piece of dry wood.

The shock of what I’ve done—what unimaginable things have just occurred, as if I’ve become incredibly strong—forces me to release him.

Lying on his side, he’s holding a badly angled arm; the bone had snapped clean through. He’s curled around his injury, hiding in a ball … from me.

Other than the squirming, crying figure at my feet, the cafeteria has gone quiet.

And then I’m running from the scene before I know what’s next, pausing near Pretend Man before shoving through to race toward my bunk.

He hadn’t seemed like the rest; surprised, suspicious, and even afraid.

No. Pretend Man had been smiling.