The One Safe Place (2 page)

He lay on his bed that night with his boots still on and his hands and face unwashed. A great silence came. It swept through the orchard and over the fields and trickled along all the veins and tunnels in his body, right into his fingers. He looked up through the window at the stars, but even they made no noise.

In the morning Devin got up and gathered provisions: boiled eggs, vegetables, a knife, his grandmother’s locket, and the small handful of coins from the pot in the kitchen. The city was far to the north. His grandfather used to live there years ago and had described it to him—the buildings, the huge numbers of people. Devin had trouble imagining crowds. He visualized himself and his grandfather and then added all the people from the picture book. It came to about fifty or sixty, which seemed like an impossibly large number.

“You’ll go there someday too, Dev,” his grandfather had told him “When you’re ready to leave.”

“When will I be ready to leave?”

“When you know for sure how to come back again.”

Devin didn’t think that time had come. He didn’t feel ready at all. But in the city he would find help, someone to work on the farm, perhaps. He couldn’t do it alone, and the longer he waited, the more impossible it would become.

He went to the spring and filled up the large leather water carrier. Then he opened the gate to the field so the cow could roam free. There was nothing he could do for the chickens, but they were hardy creatures and he thought most would survive until he got back. Finally Devin went to the barn and led Glancer out. He took off her halter and stood for a long moment with his forehead resting against her nose, feeling her breath, the shiver of her skin. She had been his horse since before he could remember, and the beating of her heart was as familiar as his own.

“Go,” he whispered at last. “I can’t take you. Go.”

The horse stood in front of the barn, not moving as Devin walked away, but when he looked back a moment or two later, she had already wandered off a little way, head down, her brown rump shadowed by the trees. From behind the barn, the rooster crowed purple and then fell silent.

Devin turned toward the north and began to walk.

Two

THE CITY WASN’T ANYTHING
like his grandfather had described. It was more like something out of a nightmare.

It had taken Devin a week of walking over hard and desperate country to reach it. His farm lay in a tiny valley watered by a secret spring that flowed into a stream. Millions of years ago, the earth itself had slipped and formed this hidden place, surrounded on all sides by slopes of rock. The only way in or out of the valley was a narrow path that twisted between immense boulders. If you didn’t know the valley was there, you would miss it completely. Inside, sheltered from the worst of the sun, there were trees and fields and meadows.

Outside it was different.

Outside it was dry and flat and empty. The earth had a weightless feel, rising in small clouds of dust as Devin trudged along, the water carrier bouncing at his waist, his eyes pinched against the glare of the sun. He stumbled over slopes of loose white stones, his feet slipping, sending the stones skittering and bouncing. Ahead lay a huge expanse where little grew except low, brittle shrubs the same color as the earth. The sky seemed far higher than normal, as if someone had scraped away at the underside of it, leaving nothing but a thin, burning shell. Eventually Devin came to a channel in the ground and clambered down into it. It was an old, dried-up riverbed. He could see where water had once smoothed and hollowed out the rocks.

On the second day, Devin saw the biggest coyote he’d ever seen in his life. It trotted across his path, ignoring him, its muscles moving like liquid beneath its hide. During the afternoon of the third day he saw buildings.

At first he thought he must have arrived at the city, because there were so many buildings; he counted nearly a hundred. From a distance everything looked orderly, almost neat; but as he approached, he saw tilting roofs and weeds creeping out through cracks in the sidewalks. Devin walked down a broad street with homes on either side. Drifts of dust had gathered on the doorsteps like silent visitors, and children’s toys lay scattered in the backyards. Ragged clothes hung from a broken washing line. A row of poplar trees had been planted on the edge of town but they were brown and dead.

There was nobody around. They must have left a long time ago, Devin thought. And they had gone without picking up the toys or taking in the laundry, as if they knew they weren’t ever coming back.

There was a main street, with bigger buildings, some with large glass windows so you could look inside, but there was nothing to see except some bottles smothered with cobwebs, and rows of empty shelves. There was a car parked on the street, its lid open. Devin knew it was a car because he had seen pictures of them. They didn’t have a car at the farm, nor any machines or artificial lighting or screens or buttons, nothing that his grandfather called technology. It was foolish to rely on such things, his grandfather had said, because if they went wrong, you were stuck. You were better off relying on yourself.

Devin peered under the lid of the car and saw a mass of wires and dirt. It was hard to imagine that this battered old thing had ever moved. He reached up and closed the lid, not sure why he was doing it, only that it felt a little terrible to leave it gaping open like that.

The next day he came to a road. It was the straightest and flattest thing he’d ever seen in his life. Vehicles were moving along it, although they looked different from the car in the abandoned town. These were low to the ground and made no more sound than a whisper as they passed by, shrinking to dots on the horizon. They must be some of the new inventions his grandfather had talked about, Devin thought. He tried to see who was driving them, but he could sense only dim shapes inside. For a second he thought of trying to stop one, but he was frightened by their strangeness and their speed. How did people breathe, traveling so fast? Just looking at them made him dizzy.

Soon after, he ran out of water. He found a spot where more shrubs grew and began to dig, as his grandfather had taught him. He dug with his hands and then with a sharp stick; the hole was deep before he finally saw a thin layer of liquid seeping up through the gravel. He took off his shirt and wet it and squeezed it carefully into his carrier. The water amounted to barely half a cup, and it tasted orange-brown and gritty.

On he went, a lonely speck against the sky. More roads appeared, forking in various directions. Then on the seventh day he came to hills, empty at first but becoming greener. Plants meant water, he thought. Perhaps he was on the outskirts of the city at last.

To begin with, it seemed like a pleasant place, although strange. There were a great many trees. They weren’t the trees he was used to but tidy things, regularly separated, their trunks surrounded by tiny fences. Then a large green space opened up. At first Devin took it for cloth, but then he saw it was grass, although unlike any that he had ever seen before. It was cut perfectly evenly and very close to the ground, but what astonished him most was the color—a green of such tingling, glassy richness that he immediately sank to his knees to examine it further. The ground was moist, although no rain had fallen in many days. Devin thought perhaps it was watered by underground streams or pipes, although why anyone would go to that trouble for mere grass, clearly not intended for the grazing of livestock, he didn’t know.

A little farther along, he came upon houses. They were huge, the size of three barns, and they were surrounded by more of the strange grass, and their roofs were covered with great shining panels of something that looked like glass, only darker. The houses were all completely spotless. Even the borders of the flower beds were razor sharp.

Every single house was set back and every single one was surrounded by steel fences.

As he stared, the windows in one house seemed to move, the horizontal shutters gliding closed like eyes blinking shut. But he didn’t see any people at all. It was very quiet.

A few cars passed him. They were larger than those he’d seen on the highway and had windows that weren’t clear glass, but darkened to a whistling brown so that he couldn’t see inside at all.

The city looked to be almost empty, Devin thought. But then, coming around a corner to the top of the highest hill, Devin saw he was completely wrong about this. These houses, these gates and pathways and stretches of perfect grass, were only a corner of the city, a tiny section, sheltered by trees. The rest of it—the real city—lay below him.

It was a vast jumble of buildings, one on top of the other, dusty and crowded. Some of the buildings looked half in ruins; others had huge pictures flickering on them. Great flocks of birds wheeled and darted overhead. In the middle of the confusion lay the thick brown stripe of a river, the water flowing low and sluggish around the legs of three great bridges that rose with a tangled arrangement of pillars and cables. A yellow haze obscured the farther horizon, and Devin heard a distant roar, made up of a million voices.

For a second, his courage failed him and he thought of turning back. But he was very tired and there was nowhere else to go.

Devin made his way through a labyrinth of streets and found an alley as the sky grew dark. He curled up in a pile of dirty paper, his hands clutched tight against his chest. At dawn three boys, older than he was and far stronger, attacked him, keeping him face down on the ground while they searched his clothes. In three minutes they had taken everything: his knife, jacket, coins, the last of his food, and even his boots. They didn’t find his grandmother’s locket, because Devin had hidden it in the hem of one of his pant legs. He lay on the ground after they’d gone, too terrified to move for several minutes. Then he got to his feet and limped to the entrance of the alley.

He was in a street so crammed with people that he almost bumped into a woman walking past, leading a small child by the hand.

“Please,” Devin said, his voice jerky with shock. “Please, they took everything. Can you help me?”

The woman looked at him quickly and her mouth went tight and her eyes swung away. She shook her head with a small, angry gesture and hurried on, pulling her child with her. A boy riding a two-wheeled vehicle with a huge box on the back swerved suddenly out of the crowd toward him. Devin stumbled back and half fell. “Need help?” the boy shouted in a laughing voice. “Call the POLICE! Ha!” And then he was gone, as quickly as he came.

Nobody else seemed to have noticed. Everyone was moving, jostling, hurrying. Most of the buildings nearby were run down, and the ground was littered with trash and pieces of brick. Devin joined the stream of people, not knowing what else to do.

He began to walk fast and then broke into a trot. The wide street met another, and then a huge crossroads of four streets met in a knot of dust and traffic. There were more two-wheeled things, and small, old-looking cars, and men dragging light carts as they ran along. So many people, faces upon faces. Devin whirled and ducked, unable to take it all in; the clamor and color, the flapping clothes and spinning wheels, the market stalls, the doors and dark openings, the noise of a thousand things clanging and clattering.

He was running now, his bare feet hot against the broken sidewalk, his skin burning with a hundred sensations at once, his ears ringing painfully, his head pounding. At last he stopped and crawled under a sheet of corrugated iron that was leaning against a wall. He crouched there for a long time, watching feet pass in front of his shelter, his hands pressed tight to his ears, his mind grappling with the reality that faced him.

His idea to get help with the farm had seemed simple when he was back home. Now that he was in the city, it was a different matter. He couldn’t just go up to someone and ask. He might have if there had been three—or five—or even ten people here. But there were so many. He had no idea where to begin or whom to approach. You had to know people, he thought. Or else they would look at you like the woman with the child had. Or not look at you at all.