Breathe (25 page)

“That’s what I heard, Pod Minister. The terrorists are in the south,” Quinn says. And so there’s no going back. And there’s no knowing what will happen when they figure out they’ve been duped.

The Pod Minister claps his hands as though Quinn has performed some extraordinary feat and turns back to Mr. and Mrs. Caffrey. “Ha!” he yells. He smacks his hands on the desk and I flinch. “HA! HA!” He drains the remaining whiskey from his glass, stands up, and grabs his grotesque fur.

“Get back out to the field, Jude,” he commands as he exits the room. “And when you find them, radio in. I want to know the exact moment we raze their hideout to the ground! Ha! Good job, Caffrey Junior. Bloody good job. Ha!”

The Pod Minister disappears down the corridor, followed by his two lackeys, and Mr. and Mrs. Caffrey are standing together in a desperate embrace. I’ve never seen Quinn’s parents hug in this way. I’ve never even seen them touch each other. Quinn is watching them. His body is visibly trembling now. I reach out and squeeze his leg gently, to comfort myself as well as him, and he takes my hand in his, but quickly lets go as his father turns back to us.

“You’re telling the truth, son,” he says. “Because if you aren’t—” Here he stops. If we’re lying, then what? Why doesn’t he finish the sentence? Even Mr. Caffrey, the army’s general, hasn’t got a plan. “If you’re lying, it’s your life I’ll see they take, not his,” he says, putting his arm around his wife.

Mrs. Caffrey’s eyes are transfixed on her husband. “Jude,” she whispers. She won’t look at Quinn. She won’t defend him. All she can do is rub her belly and repeat her husband’s name again and again. I want to scream at her. I want to shout,
Quinn was once your baby, too!

“It’s nice to see you both,” Quinn says, and with that stands up and walks out of the room. I don’t ask if I can follow him because the interrogation is clearly over and neither Mr. nor Mrs. Caffrey is taking any notice of me at all.

I chase after Quinn, calling his name as he sprints down the corridor and crashes through the exit. I can’t keep up, he is running too fast, and when I finally push open the exit myself, someone catches me by the hand. My first instinct is to lash out.

“It’s us, love.” I look up and my mom and dad are beaming at me. “Oh, God, you’re safe.” They wrap their arms around me.

“I have to catch Quinn,” I say. I try to struggle free.

“What’s that, love?” Mom asks. Her eyes are red. She’s obviously not eaten or slept in days. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her looking so old. She looks like a grandmother. She must have thought she’d lost me. I lean into her shoulder and start to cry.

“I have to catch Quinn before he does something stupid,” I sob.

We’ve been walking for half the night, the blizzard worsening and our progress slower the farther we’ve trekked into the city. To keep ourselves from spiraling into lethargy we’ve sucked handfuls of snow and eaten pieces of frozen fruit. At first we’d worried about the army seeing our tracks and wasted precious time and energy trying to erase them, but it became clear that by morning any tracks we made would be covered beyond discovery. Our real problem is going to be finding our way back to The Grove in the storm.

“Location number one!” Maude finally shrieks over the drumming of the wind.

“You sure?” Silas hollers back. He pushes past me and stands next to Maude. We look up at the building, an immense structure made entirely from rusting metal posts and splintered glass.

“If that thing collapses, we’ll be sliced open,” Dorian says.

“You sure this is it?” Silas asks again.

“I’m not senile.” Maude shuffles forward through the front doors and we follow, glad to be out of the wind. “Bruce?” she calls out. “You here, Bruce? It’s old Maddie Blue come to have a talk with you. Bruce?” she sings into the intricately designed crystalline dome of the building. Only Maude’s voice and the sound of our boots squeaking against the tiled floor echo in the atrium. “Bruce?” she shouts, her voice betraying some impatience.

“A shopping city?” Dorian whispers, gaping at the long-ago looted shop fronts. “It looks like a cathedral.” He bends down to pick up a watch. “Would it be stealing if I kept this?” he asks. Without waiting for any of us to respond, he drops the watch into the pocket of his coat. The floor is strewn with shiny objects, and I’m tempted to take something myself. As I stoop to retrieve a silver hair clip from the tiles, a noise travels down from a floor above and we all scramble up the stairs to find its owner.

“Bruce! We wanna talk, that’s all. We ain’t gonna do nothing bad to you. It’s your old pal Maddie. Let’s get a look at ya!”

“Come any closer and I’ll shoot!” a voice calls. We stop climbing the stairs and look up again to see a bearded man clothed in a rainbow of color leaning over the railing and pointing a rifle. He’s filthy, the grime making his skin dark and grainy.

“You ain’t got no bullets in that thing,” Maude cackles, and keeps walking.

“Don’t move, Blue. I swear I’ll let this thing go.”

“You needn’t try and fool me, Bruce. Even if you had bullets, you ain’t got your glasses on. You can’t see a blasted thing.”

“Last warning!” he bellows.

“Maude, maybe you should stop,” I say. I try to grab her but she’s already too far ahead.

“If you can see, tell me how many people I got with me,” she says.

“That’s it,” he calls. He looks through the scope, aims the rifle in our direction, and as his finger is about to engage the trigger, he bolts from the railing and disappears. Maude howls with laughter.

“He’s off to plug himself in.” She’s right: he wasn’t wearing an airtank, so he must have been holding his breath, unless he’s somehow figured out how to withstand the atmosphere.

On the top floor, Maude leads us directly into a shop with wooden boxes and silver tubes covering the shelves. Bruce is in there, sitting on a grubby velvet armchair, the sides leaking stuffing. The rifle on his lap is pointing in our direction. His air is coming from a solar respirator much like the one Maude had. No sooner has he pressed the mask to his face than he removes it again, and with his other hand puts a brown, oblong object between his lips. He inhales deeply, holding the mask up to it and allowing oxygen to envelop it, so it stays alight. The tip smolders and then smoke is billowing from Bruce’s nose and mouth. He looks like he’s on fire.

“You’re still on those things?” Maude says. “One lung takes in the air and the other one takes in the dirty smoke, does it? They’ll kill you, you twerp. And what a waste of bloody oxygen.”

Bruce takes another slurp of air followed by a puff of the fiery cigar. “If I’m dying, I’m gonna die smoking,” he announces. “No air in the atmosphere. But there’s plenty in this thing,” he says, and kicks the solar respirator. “I ain’t brainless. Got me ways,” he says.

We don’t know much about Bruce except that he’s a drifter and that he has a bilious hatred of the Ministry ever since they abandoned him. He’s also the reason all the drifters live apart. In his view, they’re safer alone, not so prone to being exterminated in one fell swoop. He coughs and Maude, like an awful echo, coughs, too. “Well, look at you, Maddie Blue. You turned out all right.” He pats his knee and winks. “Here, take the weight off those pegs.”

“You should be so lucky,” she says.

“Oh, too good for me, now you’ve teamed up with Breathe again are you, Blue?” he asks.

“Oh, do shut up, Bruce. These here are kids of the Resistance.”

“Resistance? Planting a few weeds and sitting around chanting all day? Don’t make me laugh.”

Silas steps forward and shakes Bruce’s hand. “Not anymore. They’re after us and we’re building an army. We need all the men and women we can find to fight. We want you to be the first. Come fight with us. Help us gather up the rest and come with us.” I have to say I expected more of a sales pitch. Why would Bruce join us if there’s nothing in it for him?

“The Resistance thinks we’re scum,” he says, still alternating between air and smoke.

“The Resistance has plenty of reasons to hate you. We also need you. Simple as that,” Silas says.

Bruce smiles and nestles himself into the armchair. “I’d say you’re desperate coming out in a storm like that.”

“Eager,” Dorian corrects. He’s carrying the backpack of airtanks, which he finally drops. “We know you can fight. And you know how
they
fight.”

“What’s in it for me?” Bruce looks at Maude, raises his eyebrows, and smacks his lips together. The thought of it is too much. Silas ignores him.

“Dorian, show him,” he says. Dorian unbuckles his airtank, takes off his facemask, and puts the whole apparatus on the floor. He stands watching Bruce, breathing without any difficulty whatsoever. He’s only been wearing a mask because of the strenuous walking we’ve been doing and even then, his oxygen level has been very low.

“Well, I can do that. You saw me. No big deal,” Bruce says. Dorian takes a piece of red apple from his pocket and offers it to Bruce. The old man takes the food in his filthy hand and marvels for a moment before stubbing out the smoldering cigar and shoving it into his mouth. “Fruit. Well, that’s nice. You lot managed to grow something. Fine. What difference does that make to me?” Several minutes pass and Dorian continues to watch Bruce, as alert as he was when he first removed the mask. No one speaks except Bruce. “So what? He can hold his breath. Big deal.”

After ten minutes Bruce finally stops berating Dorian and says, “You’ll wanna put that mask on again, sonny. It’s bad for the brain.” He turns to Silas. “Is he holding his breath?”

“I’m breathing, and if I can, you can. We all can. Come fight with us and we’ll train you to do it.” Dorian leans down and retrieves a small airtank from his backpack. “You’ll need this.”

Bruce looks up at Maude. “Not even a kiss?” he asks. Maude steps forward and kisses his cheek.

“Happy now?” she says with a smile.

“I’m convinced! That’s what love will do to you, I suppose,” he says pinching Maude’s behind as he stands up.

The storm rages as Maude and Bruce lead us to an old school where a whole family of drifters live: a mother, father, son, and daughter. Even with Bruce and Maude calling out as we enter the building, an arrow scarcely misses my head and strikes the wall behind me. The parents are old. The journey will be hard. The Grove has a doctor, though, and that’s what convinces the children to unplug their parents from the solar boxes and get them ready for the journey.

Next we swoop in on a church where we hear the drifter before we see her—a high soprano voice sings out some aria to rows and rows of empty pews. She is tall with pin-straight hair. She doesn’t notice us filing in and, thinking it would be impolite to interrupt her in the middle of a performance, we slide into the back pews. When she finishes, we all clap. The shock of seeing us standing and applauding causes the poor woman to lose her balance and almost knock herself unconscious on the marble altar.

All night long we slog and search, looking for our new army. Every hideout is different and every encounter dangerous. The drifters have only managed to survive by viciously attacking unsuspecting tourists or, at the very least, defending themselves from them. And they are so distrustful it isn’t easy to convince them. Dorian has to perform for many of them and Maude and Bruce have to threaten others. Even so, some still refuse either because they are afraid of us or afraid of the storm. Many won’t give up their solar respirators, or, in the saddest cases, are simply waiting for death and not willing to try to outsmart it.

As dawn begins to blush, we turn around and head back to The Grove, followed now by a mass of hawkish drifters. We’ve managed to round up almost twenty of them and get guarantees from fifty more that if we come back with airtanks, they’ll join us. And they’ll recruit their friends. So this will be Roxanne and Levi’s job: to arrange a team to collect the remaining drifters now that we have a complete map pinpointing all their locations. And then we must train them, improve their breathing, and prepare them for battle.

“Is this going to be enough?” I ask Silas as we trudge back along the icy roads.

“I hope so,” he says. “Because we’ve got nothing else.”

I sit there, silent, as my father explains to Lennon and Keane that I was kidnapped and almost killed by a band of bloodthirsty terrorists. I have no idea whether or not he believes the story he��s telling, but the twins stare at him and then back at me with their mouths open, chewed up dinner on display. “Were you scared?” Lennon asks.

“Yes,” I say. My father squints at me, daring me to contradict him, so I try to retell the story; I have to make everyone believe we really were held captive. “They stuffed rags in our mouths and tied our hands. If we spoke to each other they punched us here.” I put my hands against my upper body, which still thrums. Lennon stares and Keane rubs his hands along his own ribcage. My mother puts down her fork and rolls her eyes as though I’m talking about some gory film I’ve seen and not my own life.

“No need for the details,” she says.

“If I met a terrorist I’d use my spear to stab him in the eye. He wouldn’t get away from me,” Keane says.

“Yes he would. It’s a plastic spear,” Lennon reminds him.