The Farm (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Lily

Stoner Joe’s had once been a college convenience store tucked into the basement of the dining hall. I’d known Joe since we were both kids and I could trust him. He was a good guy, even if Greens, Collabs, and Breeders all shopped in his store. It was like accorded neutral territory. The Collabs could have shut the place down, but for whatever reason, they let us have it. Left us this one small seed of independence. Maybe they knew we’d be happy with it. Maybe it was just too much trouble to squash every bit of spirit.

The wind picked up as I headed down the steps into the shelter of the alcove and let myself into the store, which was unusually dark for this time of day. Before I had a chance to wonder where Joe was, I felt something cold and sharp press against the side of my neck.

“Holy crap!” I gasped.

The hand holding the blade to my throat slackened and then fell away from my skin altogether. “Lily?”

“Yeah!” I said, accusation in my voice. “What the hell, Joe?” I didn’t want to piss him off, but . . . “Seriously. What the hell?”

“Sorry. I’ve been, like, way tense lately.”

My eyes had begun to adjust to the dim lighting and I could see his sheepish smile. “Obviously. What’s with the new security measures?”

I eyed the knife in his hand. It had a long stainless steel handle and a flat face that ended in a sharp, angled blade. If I had to guess, I’d say Joe had repurposed a spatula from the kitchen that shared his building.

“Dark times, Lil. Dark times.” Joe nodded gravely, and as he spoke, his voice fell back into its normal cadence, like there was a silent
dude
at the end of every sentence. He extended his hand and clasped mine briefly before giving me a little fist bump. “What can I get you today?”

I didn’t ask what he meant by dark times. I didn’t like the idea that things might be even worse than I knew. Just one more reason Mel and I had to get out of the Farm.

“I’m here to trade,” I said.

“Whatcha need, whatcha got?” he asked, crossing to the counter that bisected the room. He set the shiv down and propped his hands on the scuffed glass top. I couldn’t tear my gaze from the weapon. It seemed so out of character. He must have noticed, because he surreptitiously nudged it to the edge of the counter, slipping it between two cardboard displays that had once held packs of gum but now contained old music CDs.

I pushed the shiv from my mind and mustered my courage.

This was it. Moment of truth and all that. Just as I had carefully planned, Joe and I were alone. But I choked. My laundry list of must-haves for the trip north suddenly seemed so . . . risky.

“I, um . . .” I let my words trail off as I shoved my hand in my pocket, relaxing infinitesimally as my fingers brushed plastic. The pills were still there. Still risky, still highly illegal, but still mine.

“What’s up, Lil?”

“I’ll look around,” I muttered, not quite meeting Joe’s gaze. “See what I can find.”

I didn’t linger by the shelves of grooming supplies. Mel and I managed to stay basically clean. It was mostly Breeders who bothered to trade for crap like that. Joe would have thought it strange if I’d looked there.

Listlessly I ran my forefinger down a stack of meticulously folded sweatshirts. Most were red and gold with the stylized kangaroo on the front, but a few sported the gray and blue of the Dallas Cowboys. I poked through them a bit, as if one of them would magically transform into the bulky winter coat I so desperately needed.

The food and snack shelf was looking a little bare. They fed us four mandatory meals a day. You might expect that given how overfed we were, no one would bother to trade for food. But Joe had told me once that the opposite was true. He did most of his business in food. That and the pharmaceuticals that had given him his start back in high school, back long before we were moved to the Farm for our “protection.”

The food Joe sold wasn’t so much about quantity. It was about selection. Freedom of choice. And, of course, nostalgia.

My fingers hovered a few inches above a can wrapped in dull silver paper.

Joe shuffled beside me, such the attentive shopkeep since the store was empty except for me. “Is today the day you’re finally going to buy those peas?”

I jerked my hand back to my pocket and looked up. “No.”

“Come on,” he coaxed. “You look at them every time you come in. Man, you must love peas.”

I’d never known that I loved them, until I couldn’t have them anymore.

“You should buy them,” he said softly. “I’ll give you a good deal, since you’re my friend. It’ll be like a”—he hesitated—“a present.”

He’d probably been about to say
a birthday present
. Or maybe that catch in his voice had been something else. Maybe he didn’t know how close Mel and I were to our eighteenth. To our doomsday.

I stuck my hand into my jeans pocket and fingered the tiny pebbles I always kept there. I blurted out, “I need a coat.”

“I just got in a couple of new hoodies the other day.” Joe rounded the shelf to a haphazard stack of clothes I hadn’t noticed.

I stopped him before he could pull any out. “No, I need a coat. Like the biggest, thickest coat you can get.” He just stared blankly at me, like he couldn’t understand why I’d be so desperate to trade for something like that. Here in Texas, even north Texas, there were only a few days a year when it got cold enough to need a big heavy coat. “It’s for Mel,” I explained.

“Oh, right.” He nodded sagely. “She has that thing about the cold.”

That thing
was an unwillingness—or perhaps an inability—to tell others when she was cold. Me, I bitch endlessly when I’m cold. I break out my scarf when it’s sixty-five degrees. Mel, on the other hand, once stood out in the snow until she was hypothermic.

I still remember sitting by the door in our bedroom, my ear pressed to the crack in the door as I listened to our parents argue about it, because Dad had been in charge and he hadn’t noticed how cold she was.
She’s not a normal child,
our mother had said.
You can’t trust her to take care of herself. You have to watch her all the time. When are you going to accept that?

Two weeks later, Dad had left and we were on our own, just the three of us. And now it was just Mel and me.

There were so many things I had to leave to chance. Mel getting cold wasn’t one of them. She wasn’t normal. Dad may never have accepted that, but I had. If I could have only one thing, it would be a coat.

“I saw Tad Jackson with a pretty big coat the other day,” Joe said. “Looked like the kind of thing one of the maintenance workers would have used. He had gloves, too.”

“Perfect.” I hadn’t dared hope for gloves. We had neoprene gloves from the lab and I’d been hoping they’d be warm enough. “Any chance you can get a second pair of gloves?”

“It might take a coupla days, but I’ll see what I can do. It won’t be cheap, though.”

“It’s not all I need.” I sucked in a breath. I rushed through the next bit. “I need sleeping bags. Two if you can find them.” Joe’s eyebrows shot up, but I kept talking. Hell, go big or go home, right? “And a lighter.”

I think I expected him to argue then. I’d known all along that he would probably figure out what was up—after all, Joe wasn’t an idiot—and I’d already decided playing dumb was the best defense. I’d expected him to warn me off, to remind me what had happened to all the kids who had tried and failed, but instead, he just studied me.

“It’s because your eighteenth birthday is coming up, isn’t it?”

“I . . .” My voice quavered and I cleared my throat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He frowned. “You’re not going to just, you know, wait it out? See what happens after you turn eighteen?”

“It can’t be anything good,” I argued.

We’d been brought to the Farm because the Ticks seemed to prefer the blood of teenagers. Something about the mix of hormones was what the newscasters had said in the Before. Our parents had been reassured that we’d be free to leave once the government got the Ticks under control. We’d been told that sometime after we turned eighteen, our hormones would even out and we’d be sent home.

“You don’t think people go home?” Joe asked, but I could tell by his tone of voice that he didn’t really believe it, either.

“Haven’t you noticed? Once a Green’s testing rate goes up, they’re allotted a larger ration of food. If they were just sending Greens home, they wouldn’t care how well fed we were.” I leaned closer and dropped my voice. “They’re fattening people up before they send them to be slaughtered.”

“Yeah, but if you get caught . .
 
.”

I thought of the girl who was tethered to the post outside the fence right now. Sometime tonight, the Ticks would come for her. They’d rip her heart from her chest and drink her blood straight from her aorta. That would happen to us, too, if we got sent to the Dean’s office.

I could feel my lower lip start to tremble so I clenched my jaw and swallowed. “Yeah. I know. But I can’t wait around to be slaughtered, either. We have to at least try.”

“You don’t have to do this.” His tone was serious. “You could get pregnant. That would protect you.”

“Yeah. For nine months. After that, who knows what happens. And have you thought about those babies? What happens to them?”

“I don’t . . . I don’t know.” Joe’s skin suddenly looked a sickly green in the dim light of the store.

“Exactly. No one knows. And like I said, who knows what’s going to happen to the Breeders once their babies are born anyway?” The scorn in my voice barely concealed the fear beneath it.

Yeah, I acted all self-righteous about the Collabs and Breeders. The Collabs worked for the Dean to keep the rest of us in line. They were bad enough. The Breeders, girls who got pregnant on purpose just because the Ticks didn’t like the taste of all those pregnancy hormones? Even the idea was repulsive.

But who knows, if it had been just me, I might have ditched the last shreds of my morality and bred like a freakin’ bunny. But that wouldn’t protect Mel. “Besides, Mel couldn’t . . . She doesn’t like it when
I
touch her. She couldn’t be a Breeder.”

Joe’s gaze was suddenly glued to an empty spot on the counter. “Yeah, I guess not,” he said in a limp voice. He looked like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to throw up or burst into tears.

He’d always been such a genuinely nice guy—sensitive, too—and I could tell the thought of what happened to Breeders really bugged him.

“Hey, don’t worry about Mel and me.” My need to reassure him surprised me. “I’ve got it figured out.”

His gaze shot to mine. Hopeful, almost. “You do?”

“Yeah, I—” I stopped just short of telling him that Mel had figured out how to get off the Farm. “We’re going to be okay.”

I hoped to God I was telling him the truth. I knew our plan wasn’t foolproof, but I hoped it was good enough.

Months ago, Mel had noticed that the Collabs turned off part of the fence every night. They couldn’t keep the fence along the river electrified because at night the nutria scurried up the cliff from the river. They’d gnaw on the fences, shorting out the whole system and making the entire Farm reek of seared animal flesh. Which meant the stretch of chain link on the north side of campus was the only weakness in the Farm’s security.

If we could make it through and if we could swim across the Red River, we’d be in Oklahoma. It was a lot of ifs.

And I had no idea what we’d find there, but we would head north. Uncle Rodney lived over in Arkansas near the Ozark Mountains. He was a crazy survivalist type. I figured a guy like that was either one of the first to go or the last to fall. For all I knew, things would be just as bad there as things were in Texas, but at least we’d be moving toward Canada, in the direction of freedom. One of the last reports I remember from the Before was the stunning news that Canada was shutting down the border. Terrified that the plague affecting so many Americans would spread to their own population, the Canadian government had set up roadblocks and was stationing military all along the border. What had previously been the world’s longest undefended border was now a no-man’s-land.

Canada was our best hope. And if we were going that far, in the winter, Mel needed that warm coat. And whatever else we could find.

I looked Joe square in the eyes and all but begged him to help. “What do you say? Can you do it?”

He studied my face. “Yeah, you and Mel were always so smart. If anyone could get off the Farm it would be you.” He nodded slowly, like he’d reached some sort of decision. “You don’t have enough credits for all that stuff. You know that, right?”

I started pulling things from my bag to trade. “Two bottles of shampoo, both of them mostly full. A bottle of conditioner.”

He looked unimpressed.

I moved on to the things I’d been hoarding for months. “Two toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste. New in their packages.”

He considered and I could see in his frown that he wanted it to be enough, even though we both knew it wasn’t. He blew out a breath. “Those will cover the coat and gloves.”

“What about the sleeping bags? And the lighter?” I asked, because maybe it would be safer, for all of us, if I didn’t have to show him that last thing I had to trade.

Joe just shook his head. “If it was stuff I just had in the store, maybe. But I’ll have to go looking for what you need. Ask around. Attract attention. That’s a lot of risk.”

“But you could do it?”

“Yeah. Sure. Anything for a price, right? I know a guy in Baker Hall whose ‘roommate’”—Joe made air quotes to indicate that by “roommate” he really meant the college student who had lived in the dorm room back in the Before—“was into camping and stuff like that. I could get all kinds of things from him.”

“So you could get the sleeping bags and the lighter?” I pressed. “If I had the right thing to trade? If I had something really valuable?”

“Sure, man. I can get anything.”

I reached into my pocket then and pulled out the plastic box of pills. I had three prized possessions. The first was a pair of gardening shears I found in an unlocked maintenance closet seven weeks ago. The second was a single capsule of Valium. In the Before, I used to carry a couple with me all the time, just in case Mel freaked out completely. I had one pill left. The third was the contents of this box.