The Girl in the City (3 page)

“I’m—”

“Now!”

Leah turned and ran up the wooden staircase and along the hallway towards her room. She felt ill. Guilt and the feeling that she’d let her father down in some terrible, permanent way gnawed at her.

As she walked into her room, she saw the dollhouse her father had made for her, with its bright red roof and the two little figures he’d carved from clothes pegs. The guilt burrowed deeper. Tears stinging her eyes, she threw herself onto the bed and lay there, listening to the muffled voice of her father in the room below. He was talking to someone on the telephone. He was speaking too quietly for her to hear, the way he always did when he was discussing topics that weren’t suitable for “little ears.”

A few minutes later, Leah heard the familiar sound of her father coming up the stairs. She wiped her face, blinking away the remnants of her tears. As her father walked towards her room, she sat staring at the door. She was ready to apologize, to promise to be more careful and not to go near the Wild Ones ever again.

He didn’t come to talk to her.

Leah heard him unlock the door leading to the attic and go upstairs. His footsteps traced a path across the ceiling above her to the corner at the front of the house. There was a scraping noise, the sound of a box being dragged across the wooden floorboards of the attic, followed by the creak of wood and then the scraping again.

Her father retraced his footsteps across the attic and down to the landing. Leah heard him lock the attic door, and she was convinced he was going to come and speak to her this time.

But again he didn’t. He just went back downstairs.

A couple of minutes later, the front door opened and closed. Leah ran to the window just in time to see her father cutting across the street, heading north towards the merchant zone where she’d got the bag. Where the man had been shot.

Leah watched her father until he vanished out of sight around a corner, then she returned to bed. Weary, and with an uncomfortable empty feeling in the pit of her stomach, she closed her eyes and cried herself to sleep.

Leah dozed—a restless, haunted sleep, filled with running across endless hills, dying men crawling in her wake. When she woke, her pillow was damp with tears. It took her a few seconds to realize where she was, and a few seconds more before the past day’s events came crashing back over her. The failed trip into the rural zone, the lost salvage, the dead man, the bag with its circuit board encased in plastic. Her father’s disappointment.

“Dad?” she called, her voice brittle.

No one replied.

She rolled off her bed, swaying slightly as the blood rushed to her head, then hurried downstairs. She ran from room to room, expecting to find her father somewhere. She checked her watch. She’d been asleep almost three hours. Surely he’d be back by now. Concern slowly raised its ugly head, panic coming along for the ride. She didn’t see the note resting on the table until her second trip through the kitchen. It was in her father’s neat script.

Leah,

Had to go out, didn’t want to wake you. Sandwich in the fridge.

Love,

Dad

The sandwich was simple, just a thin slice of anemic cheese between two slices of dry bread. The bread was thin, the sides ragged where her father had cut one slice into two. Leah felt another pang of guilt at having lost her salvage. Without anything to trade, they’d be forced to eke out their meager supplies for even longer. The guilt and her restless sleep had stolen Leah’s appetite, and she left the sandwich in the fridge.

Leah sat at the kitchen table, reading and rereading her father’s note as though doing so might reveal some hidden meaning. She didn’t like not knowing where he was, and the thought that she’d made him angry left a sick feeling in her stomach. She felt the tears well up again, but she blinked them away and took a deep breath. She’d find a way to make up for losing the salvage. Somehow.

Leah’s thoughts drifted to the man in the alley, the blankness in his eyes, the blood flowing from his leg. She shuddered. She pushed the memories away, focusing instead on the problem of restoring her father’s faith in her. She’d go out scavenging again tonight, of course—if he let her—but there was no guarantee she’d find something they could trade. The rural zone was rapidly being picked clean by the Wild Ones, and she had to roam farther and farther to find anything of value. That was why she’d gone to the encampment. That was how she’d ended up in this mess.

Her stomach gave an irritated gurgle, and the answer hit her. Suddenly excited, she checked the clock. The timing was perfect—if she was quick. Grinning, Leah grabbed a salvage bag from a hook in the cupboard beneath the stairs and ran out of the house.

The Amish came to the City once a week, to trade food for what few resources they needed from the City’s inhabitants. Sometimes they would stay in the City for a few days, quietly going about their business while the people around them whispered and pointed. Leah had never spoken to the Amish, although she’d heard a little about them from her father, and they seemed to have the sort of life she might enjoy herself. She often found a hiding spot near the square in the merchant zone and watched the men unload the wagons of grain, bread, and meat. Once the wagons were empty, they’d refill them with medicine or a few pieces of salvaged metal to take back to the Amish Zone where they lived. She’d never quite understood
why
the Amish gave so much for so little. The City needed them so much more than they needed the City. But today she was grateful for the Amish’s generosity.

When Leah arrived, there were already queues outside the food distribution center at the entrance to the square. A couple of dozen men and women stood quietly, their paper food vouchers gripped tightly in their hands. They watched as the Amish loaded up the handcarts that would take the food to the distribution center and others like it around the city. A Transport policeman walked along the line, checking the vouchers and searching the cloth bags each of the men and women carried.

Leah crept around the edge of the square, to her favorite hiding spot behind a pile of battered old crates that had been there as long as she could remember. When she was out of sight behind the crates, Leah looked around the square.

Four of the handcarts had been lined up against a wall, ready to be taken into the city. There were several Transport policemen positioned about the square, but they were talking to each other, not paying much attention to what was going on around them. If Leah could make it to the carts, she’d probably be able to get some food without being seen. Probably.

Somewhere across the city, there was the dull crump of an explosion and the crackle of gunfire. The policemen stopped talking, and Leah willed them to leave to investigate. One of them lifted a radio to his mouth. He spoke into it for a few seconds then returned it to his belt, and the men resumed their previous conversation. Across the city, a thin line of black smoke drifted up into the sky.

Leah heard a shout. The policeman checking the line at the food distribution center, a middle-aged man with close-cropped brown hair, was standing in front of a young man in jeans and a T-shirt. There were dark stains on the young man’s clothes, and his arms were so thin they looked like twigs sticking out of the sleeves of his shirt. Like the people around him, he was carrying a gray cloth sack in one hand, a food voucher in the other.

The policeman leaned forward and whispered in the man’s ear. The young man swallowed and looked at the woman beside him. She took a sideways step away.

The policeman held out his hand, and the young man gave him his food voucher. The policeman examined it, checking both sides, and then took the young man’s cloth sack. The policeman reached into it and pulled out a battered metal tin—a lunch box. He threw the sack onto the ground, opened the lunch box, and tipped it upside down. When nothing fell out, he hammered on the side of the box. The young man glanced around.

The policeman was about to hand back the lunch box when he stopped. He peered inside it for a moment, then reached in and pulled out a thin piece of metal. He waved it at the young man, then dropped it on the ground, next to the sack. The policeman reached into the lunch box again, and this time he removed a slip of paper, a food voucher.

The policeman held both of the vouchers up in front of the young man’s face. The people standing nearby backed away.

The young man opened his mouth to say something, but the policeman backhanded him across the jaw. The young man’s head snapped sideways and Leah winced. The man raised a hand to his face, rubbing it across the corner of his mouth. He stared at the back of his hand for a moment, then looked at the policeman.

He said something—Leah couldn’t hear the words—but the policeman’s reaction was instantaneous. He snapped his hand forward and grabbed the young man’s T-shirt and pulled. Yanked off balance, the young man took a couple of steps forward. The policeman twisted sideways and stuck out a foot, using the other man’s momentum to send him sprawling to the floor.

As the young man tried to stand, the policeman swung the lunch box. It hit the man on the side of the head. Blood spattered across the ground. He raised his hands to fend off the next blow, but the policeman kicked him in the stomach and then swung the box again.

Leah turned away, covering her ears until the man’s screams died away.

When she looked back, the policeman was dragging the man out of the square by his feet. The young man was unconscious, dead perhaps, and his battered, bloody head left a dark trail across the ground. Most of the Amish were focused on the wagons, hurriedly unloading the last of the food, but one, an older man with a thick beard and a wide-brimmed hat, was standing beside his wagon, watching the policeman.

Leah looked at the handcarts filled with food. The thought of the risk she was taking made her heart race, but if she was going to do this, she had to do it now—while everyone was distracted.

Leah ran towards the handcarts, crouching low and hugging the buildings so that she was at least partially in shadow. She threw herself beneath the first cart. After no one started shouting, she peered out between the spokes of the wheels. She could see most of the square, and no one had noticed her. Leah let out a slow breath and planned her next move.

The cart she was lying beneath was full, loaded down with loaves of bread and smoked meat. The Amish men were loading up the last couple of carts, and most of them were already readying their wagons to leave. She probably had five minutes or so, but that was it. She had to be quick or another opportunity would slip through her fingers. With luck, the carts would keep her hidden from the rest of the square.

Leah unhooked the brass catch on her salvage bag and opened it. She figured she could fit a couple of loaves of bread in there, plus two lengths of the smoked meat, maybe three. Leah’s stomach gurgled at the thought of the food. She slid carefully out from underneath the handcart.

Heart pounding, she stood and pulled a loaf of bread off the cart. It was soft, freshly baked, and she had to force herself not to sink her teeth into it right there and then. She pushed the bread into the bag and grabbed a second loaf. The meat was a little tougher to get to. It was further onto the cart, and she had to climb up to get to it.

As she reached towards the meat, she heard voices. One of them was male; the other was high-pitched and female. The man said something, and the woman laughed, the sound so discordant it made Leah wince. She ducked down and got ready to run. The voices passed by, their owners too wrapped up in their own world to notice her. Leah peered around the corner of the cart and watched as they walked away, hand in hand.

As soon as it was clear they weren’t about to turn around and come back, Leah climbed onto the cart again, picked out two lengths of meat, and slid them into her bag. As she reached to get a third piece, the cart creaked ominously, and she realized she’d forgotten to make sure the brake was on. She let the cart settle. It didn’t seem like it was going to roll off into the square, so she leaned forward and grabbed the meat. It was ham, and as she crammed it into the bag, her mouth watered at its sweet, smoky smell. The bag’s flap wouldn’t quite snap shut, so she’d have to hold it closed. That might mean trouble if anyone looked too closely at her on the way home, but she’d deal with that if it came up.