The Book of M (33 page)

Wet leather slammed into the ruin of his face. The amnesiac howled, but his hands moved on their own, grabbing the straps, pulling it to him even in his mindless agony. To his surprise, he felt another pair of hands on the other side of it—because someone else had found the bag and shoved it at him.

“Get up now!” the person attached to the hands was screaming. “Get up now
get up now GET UP NOW
!” And then those hands threw him in a stumbling roll as the floor where he had just been crouched exploded.

“Gajarajan—” the amnesiac cried. The hands were on him again.

“You are the last person I know in this world, and I'll be damned if you die on me, too!
Get up now!
” the voice shouted, hysterical.

“Dr. Avanthikar—” It was her, somehow she was here, she had left the basement, she had found the bag, she had grabbed it and pushed him out of the way. “Dr. Avanthikar!”

“The roof is caving in!” She shook him. “We're going to die if we don't get back downstairs
right now
!”

He couldn't pry his hands away from the bag. He felt her grab a fistful of his shirt and take off, dragging him behind her. Freezing rain stung them through the opened sky. The amnesiac stumbled after her, trying not to catch his feet on the rubble he could no longer see as they ran. Around them, he heard the walls start to moan, faltering against the wind now that the ceiling was no longer there to help them resist. Grass, mud. The murderous rain.

“Don't stop!” she cried.

Behind, he heard the walls begin to fall, inch by inch, chasing them like a rolling concrete wave.

I WOKE UP WEEPING. I CAN TELL I'VE BEEN CRYING A
LONG
time: my chest is sore from heaving, and my face is swollen and stings at the corners of my eyes where the tears have streaked down. The dirt beneath me where I'm sitting against the side of the RV is pockmarked with salty droplets. How long have we been parked here, in the middle of this roadless, dry valley? Everyone looks hazy in the setting sun. Ysabelle is still crying, tiny choking sounds, and Victor is sitting next to her, one hand hesitantly on her shoulder. The others are bunched together near the rear tire, comforting one another. Some are still sniffling like Ysabelle, and a few—Ursula, Wes, Intisaar—are bent under the strain of sadness, but their cheeks are already long dry. Above me, the mural painted across the side of our RV is glowing with colors more vivid than I can ever remember seeing. Urging us onward, urging us toward New Orleans.

“Max,” Ursula said to me when our eyes met, “why are we all crying?” There was a horrible desperation in her voice. “It hurts so badly, but I can't remember why.”

For a moment, I could feel the sharpness of a pain that had a name, and the loss of something I could still feel. Something tremendous. What have we just given up, Ory? What have we given up, and what have we gotten for it? But the more I tried to answer her, the more dull the pain became, until it ebbed away into empty exhaustion. Nothing.

I realized that I couldn't remember either.

IT RAINED FOR SO LONG THAT EVENING THAT EVEN UNDER
cover of a patch of trees, Naz couldn't make a fire.

“Too much water is better than not enough,” Malik said as he set out extra buckets to collect the downpour for drinking later. But Naz could see in his glances at each carriage that he was worried about leaking, too. The roofs seemed sturdy for now, and each cache was stacked under layers of tarp, but she didn't blame him—she checked just as often as well. The books were all they had left.

Naz didn't like that they had to stick to main roads, but they had no choice. The carriages needed flat asphalt—especially the two antique models. Trying to drag three thousand books across a wild, forested stretch of states would be no better than leaving them there for the Reds to burn. The axles would snap in the first mile.

They had pushed the horses southeast at a gallop until Clinton, Maryland, when they were sure the last of the Reds were no longer following them, and then had finally slowed down. Watson was gasping, and every step flanged droplets of froth from her bridle into the air.

“She'll be okay,” Vienna said as she leaned in her own saddle toward Naz to pat Watson's neck. They both were riding even with the first carriage, where Ory was sitting. “Right?”

“She's just tired,” Naz replied softly, but still felt guilty. They'd had to ride as hard as they did to survive, but she knew how much Vienna loved Watson.

“Watson is my horse,” Vienna explained to Ory, as if on cue. She was talking to fill the silence, so none of them had to face it yet. The silence was where the General—now just Imanuel—was now. “Well,
not
mine
—I used to take riding lessons at the Georgetown stables, before the Forgetting, and she was the horse I practiced with there. That's how we knew to go get them and bring them to live at the Iowa.”

Ory tried to cooperate. “Your remembering them probably saved our lives. And the books,” he replied.

Vienna blushed, caught off guard by the compliment. For a moment, she looked like the teenager she was, suddenly awkward as she remembered that Ory wasn't the grunt that she'd decimated in basic training anymore, but the new General of their small war. Naz chewed her lip. She didn't know how to approach it either. She could already feel a shift in Malik's tone, and the other soldiers barely spoke to Ory at all—just saluted and then dropped their eyes respectfully to the ground.

Naz watched a small lake to their left curl up and disappear like magic as she considered the situation, leaving behind a patch of wet mud. The creature that had been crouched drinking at the water's edge startled and darted back into the trees. Yesterday she had been giving Ory orders. Now it was the other way around. But it still seemed like he needed it the first way.

“Was that . . .” Vienna trailed off. She'd seen the lake and the animal, too. “Well, what was that?”

“I don't know,” Ory said. The creature had looked like a hodgepodge—a rabbit and a pig and a frog smashed together. “It didn't seem carnivorous though, so I think we're probably fine.”

“So, General,” Naz said.

He made a face. “Please.”

“Fine. Ory. You need to make an official address to our group once we break for camp tonight. Reintroduce yourself to the rest of the soldiers and such. It might be good to prepare something now.”

“Makes sense,” he said quietly.

“That's Ahmadi,” Vienna sighed. She kicked her feet out of her stirrups and swung them absently. It reminded Naz so much of Rojan that she had to look away. She was always on the verge of crying now,
any time she thought of any of them.
Rojan. Maman. Paul. Imanuel.
“All business.”

“I am not all business,” Naz finally said.

“Yes, you are. That's why my dad likes you so much.”

“WE NEED AT LEAST FIFTEEN TO STAND GUARD AT NIGHT,”
Ory was saying to the group as the soldiers climbed exhausted from their horses. Dusk peeked at them from just over the horizon, already half gone. “Not forever, we can scale back after a few days—but we're still so close to D.C. right now, the Reds might still be on our tail. I know everyone's tired. But we're all going to have to make it with only four hours of sleep a day until we're in the clear. I'm going to take one of those posts tonight—who's with me?”

Naz tried not to smile at his surprised expression as well over half the hands in the crowd went up.

“I didn't make it through all that and then ride this far just to get ambushed my first night,” Malik said. “I'll rest when we're in New Orleans.”

IT SEEMED LIKE SLEEP WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE, BUT WHEN SHE
woke to the sounds of screaming in the pitch-black, Naz's first bleary thought was
Well, I'll be damned, I did drop off after all.
Then she was scrambling, ripping the zipper on her tent, bow and quiver already in hand.

“What's going on?” she shouted. The small campfire was out, no more than an angry, chugging column of smoke. Where were the Reds? She whipped the bow fiercely, searching. “General! Malik! Someone report!”

“The lake!” Vienna cried, suddenly beside her. “Leave the bow, come on!”

At the center of the camp, Ory and Malik were against the side of a carriage, trying to push it—somehow only their top halves visible in the night. A swarm of soldiers was racing to join them.

Water,
Naz suddenly realized.
They're in water.
“Are they . . . swimming?” she asked, dumbfounded.

“Chest deep!” Ory shouted when he saw her. “Help push, before it gets inside to the books!”

She and Vienna splashed in, gasping at the icy cold. Her hands found the rough wooden side of the carriage and she kicked as hard as she could, aiming for shore.

When the wagon was safe and all the books checked, Ory came back with a blanket over his damp hair—the best they could do for a towel. “That lake that disappeared earlier opened up right beneath us,” he said as he sat down next to her and Vienna. Someone had used new, dry wood to start another fire. The soldiers who'd jumped in wandered slowly in circles around the glow, some wearing their clothes to dry them, others clad only in undershorts, holding out shirts and pants like human clotheslines. “Thank goodness we parked all the carriages in such a wide circle. We'd never have pushed more than one out in time.”

“Put your shoes there, so they dry,” Naz said to him, pointing at the grass just beyond the flames, then shook her head. What was she, his mother? Her pants stuck to her as she shifted, slimy with lake grime. It brought all that with it too, every time it moved, it seemed. Did it also have fish?

“Hopefully we outrun it,” Ory sighed as he pried his feet out of each waterlogged boot. “Hopefully it has its own territory and will stray only so far.”

“Hopefully,” Vienna answered.

Naz watched the water reflect the light from their camp and tried not to think. About Vienna or Rojan. Or especially Ory. Every time there was danger, she filled one girl in for the other. She didn't need a third person to worry about.

“What is it?” Ory asked.

“I just—I thought it was the Reds,” she finally said.

THE LAKE WAS STILL THERE AT DAYBREAK, AND
SEEMED TO
stay where it was when they left.

They kept a blistering pace. Three days passed without sign of anyone. The scouts came back reporting empty fields, blank roads. Bodies—but long dead, with only skeletons remaining. Little by little, they all started to relax. It seemed that everyone had refused to leave the northern cities, turning New York and D.C. and Boston into inescapable hell prisons, but something different had happened here. For whatever reason, everyone south of that had just disappeared. Was it because the Forgetting was complete here? Or had they all heard about this mysterious new version of New Orleans, and thought they were close enough to make a break for it?

ON THE FIFTH DAY, JUST AS THEY WERE ABOUT TO LEAVE
Virginia, they found a grave by the side of the road. There was a simple wooden cross jammed into the earth in front of the mound, and someone had touched a piece of charcoal to the horizontal post, as if they had meant to write something. The name of the deceased, or a prayer. But that was all there was—just a dark, hesitant smudge. Maybe whoever buried the dead had forgotten their name or never knew it. Maybe they thought there would be no point, because whoever passed by the grave on this road likely wouldn't be able to read it anyway. Ory stared at it so long, it gave Naz a chill. Then it chilled her again when she realized that she cared. That she'd gotten used to him as part of their army, because that wasn't how he thought of himself. His army was only a team of two.

“I think we should talk about succession,” she said to him that night as they set up their tents. She knew it would be a hard conversation, but she'd seen his face at the grave. Tomorrow, they would leave Virginia behind and cross into North Carolina. They would leave behind the place he'd last seen Max, forever. And she knew he wasn't going to do it. So the best thing to do was just get it over with quickly,
instead of dragging it out. “I think it should be Malik, then me, then Smith Tres. He's quiet, but he knows what he's doing.”

“I know I was bad in boot camp, but I wasn't that bad,” Ory replied.

Naz fumbled, embarrassed. “That didn't come out right. I didn't mean I think you're going to . . . die.”

Ory popped the last pole of his tent into place, and stood studying his construction in grim silence as he waited for her to continue.

“I know what was promised to you, if you helped get Paul's book,” she said at last. “I'd understand if you had to go back to D.C. or Arlington to search. We'd all understand. But if you're going to do it, you have to do it sooner, not later. Before we start to depend on you.”

“You depend on people?” he asked, eyebrow cocked skeptically.

“Malik's getting close,” Naz said. “Maybe in another ten years.”

Ory chuckled. Just overhead, the strange little musical clouds—puffs of warm fog each no bigger than a deck of cards that the soldiers had taken to calling
iizingers
—scooted by in a faint chorus of flutes. “I'm staying,” he finally said. “I made a promise to Imanuel.”

“Imanuel's dead. He doesn't remember you.”

“Neither does Max,” Ory said.

It hurt to look at him, down deep. Naz tried, but it made everything tight, from the crevices of her lungs up to the top of her throat. “I'm sorry,” she finally managed. “Max—”

“Don't.” Ory shook his head.
Don't speak of it ever again,
he meant. He took a breath. “Who knows? I might forget someday, too.”

He wouldn't ever. His shadow seemed a hundred shades darker and deeper than anyone else's. “Maybe someday,” Naz said.

“I'm staying.” He looked up at her. “Even though you don't believe me.”

She didn't.

NAZ CANTERED A LEAN, TIRELESS GELDING NAMED HANNIBAL
in circles the next day, each pass around the carriages wider and wider.
Searching for footprints, places where bodies had slept, buried shit. Anything red. Signs that they were still following.

How fast could a raiding party travel in a day, if angry enough? How long until they gave up or forgot what they were pursuing? Every morning she wanted to think that she and the army had run far enough, but every night no distance ever seemed sufficient. She wondered if as the shadowless poured after their carriages, streaming out of that broken city, they turned everything red behind them—the ground, the trees, the sky.

A WEEK LATER, WATSON STUMBLED IN A FOXHOLE AT A RUN
and snapped her front leg in two. Vienna was almost crushed when the mare fell, whinnying in agony. By the time they all stopped the carriages and ran to them, there was blood everywhere, and Vienna was struggling, half-dazed, one of her own legs trapped beneath the writhing horse. Naz scrambled to help lift the animal up enough that Malik could drag her out, shuddering so hard with terror that she could barely keep her grip. The sweat that poured off her was cold as ice.

For a single instant, the face of the girl they pulled free of Watson's broken body was Rojan's, not Vienna's, and Naz almost screamed. She would have lost her hold entirely if Ory hadn't suddenly appeared behind her then and grabbed the saddle too, lifting the burden out of her hands.

Vienna's leg was fine—so was the rest of her. Just the wind knocked out of her, but not a scratch. After she pushed Malik away, she sat down by Watson's head and whispered to the mare until she calmed a little. Naz and Ory looked at each other under the shade the first carriage cast down.

“We don't have much ammo,” Naz stammered, still trembling. She wrapped her arms around herself.

“Ahmadi,” he said gently. “Don't. We owe it to Watson.”

“I know,” she replied. “I'm just saying, we've only got a handful of shells left. Malik will never order it.”

“I'll do it, then.”

Naz looked at him, surprised—not really believing he was going to actually be able to do it. She wasn't even sure
she'd
be able to do it, to look at Watson's big ebony eye and make it go dull—and she figured she'd already killed at least twenty more human beings than Ory ever would.

Ory either didn't realize how hard it was going to be, or was pretending not to. “Take Malik and Vienna around the other side of the carriages when she's ready,” he said.

Naz helped lead Vienna away as she cried. She didn't tell her or Malik that Ory had gone to get a gun from one of the soldiers. “What are we going to do?” Vienna whimpered. “We can't just leave her there like that. We can't just
leave
her, without . . .”

“I'm sorry, honey,” Malik said helplessly. “I'm sorry.”