Infraction (11 page)

One by one the women file in. As they come out, they
all have a new bandage on their arms. More shots? One contaminated
injection wasn't enough? I'm going to feel like a human pin cushion
if this keeps up.

Finally I'm next, and a nurse comes to the door. She
scans my tracker, jots something on her tablet, and then beckons me
to follow her in. She takes me to an exam room where
Dr. Benedict waits. He's wearing latex gloves and already has
a syringe in hand.

“
You're starting to be a permanent
fixture around here,” Dr. Benedict says, holding a hand to me
to help me onto the exam table.

I try to smile, but he sees the anger behind it. His
laughing demeanor fades away, his dimple disappears, and he lowers
his hand. I tell myself this is the government's fault.
Dr. Benedict couldn't have known the medicine was tainted, but
still he was the one who gave it to me. He sees the mistrust in my
eyes and sighs. He nods to the nurse, and she leaves, closing the
door.

“
I'm sorry, Terra. Really I am. But
just like you, I have to follow orders.” He sets the syringe down
on a tray and pulls back the sleeve of his lab coat. Fine dark
hairs rise on the skin over a tracker lump.

“
We all have them, even the agents.
We're all scanned and given orders. I know it looks bad because I'm
the one you're dealing with face-to-face.” He steps toward me and
touches my arm, and his fingers glide over my own tracker. The site
is still sore and I wince, but he doesn't take his hand off my arm.
I look at his black eyes, and for once they show emotion.
Unfortunately, I don't have enough experience reading him, and I
have no idea what his eyes tell me. His hand lingers, and his thumb
traces an arc on the inside of my arm, and I can't help when I
shiver under his touch. He smiles.

“
We all have to do things we don't
want to. This included.” He reaches for the syringe again. His hand
is slipping from my arm to take the cap off the needle when I grab
his.

I shake my head.
No more
nightmares.

“
You hallucinated?” His eyebrows
arch, and the concern is gone and he's all professional. He grabs
his tablet and starts typing. “What did you see?”

I look at the floor.

“
Bad things? Terra, anything you
tell me helps. There might be others who can benefit from what you
tell me.”

I know there are others. I heard their cries all
night long. I grab his hand again.

The soldiers were scorpions. We were all cattle in a
cattle chute.

Dr. Benedict rubs his chin and then types.
“Thank you for telling me, Terra. I don't think the agents realize
how important it is to provide the best care to all our citizens.
Too often I feel like they don't listen.”

He does genuinely seem like he wants to help, but as
I study his face, his skin turns pallid. His black eyes flash at me
and then swirl. His smile—meant to comfort a moment before—now
arches up to an obscene angle, and his teeth elongate. He's a
monster. I shrink back from him and hug my knees to my chest.

“
Another hallucination?”

My hands tremble as he steps closer
to me. The sweat breaks out on my forehead again, and I don't want
him to touch me. I don't want that
thing
anywhere near me. I shove his arm away.

The monster grabs the syringe and it looks tiny in
his hand. He pulls the cap from the needle with his huge teeth. I
want to kick him and run away, but the thought of putting one of my
limbs anywhere near him sickens me even more. I've shoved myself up
against the wall as far as I can; there's nowhere else to go.

Then a sharp prick focuses my thoughts, and his
monster face slips back into his normal concern. The long teeth are
gone, his eyes black, his skin golden. He pulls the needle from my
arm and slips on another stupid smiley face bandage. Now I have a
matching set.

“
I'm sorry,” he murmurs. Then he
reaches up and strokes my cheek. I might have let myself lean in to
the touch if I hadn't just seen him as something inhuman. He sees
the disgust written on my face. He clears his throat and steps
back.

“
That's all, Terra. This new batch
should be better.”

It better be. I slide off the table, and the nurse
escorts me out of the medical area.

Dinner is subdued. No one wants to talk about the
assembly or about those who had to go to the medical area. I push
dry bits of chicken around my plate. Kai shakes her head when I
offer her my applesauce.

“
The chicken's the worst. No one
wants to eat it. You need that for yourself,” she says. I put the
plastic cup on her tray anyway.

Even Madge doesn't have anything to say tonight. Her
eyes are fiery. The anger she usually keeps so well in check
bubbles over, and she doesn't dare say anything for fear of not
seeing a soldier in time. Jane scoots closer to me until our arms
brush. This startles me more than anything. I don't know what
changed, but she feels the need to comfort me even if she won't say
a word.

I am feeling better from the second shot, though I'm
not sure if I feel this way from the new serum or from being able
to see Jack if only for a moment. My anger starts to burn then,
just like Madge's. I can't help but wonder—and I'm sure it's the
same thought she's working through—if the government doesn't give
us contaminated shots on purpose.

I wish I knew more about medicine. I don't know
enough to puzzle through this, to even understand if they did do it
on purpose, why they would. I need to talk to Jack. I need to talk
about the serums, but also about so much more. We have so many
unfinished conversations, and they've been nagging at me. The
glance this afternoon wasn't enough.

I get Madge's attention and point
out the doors.
Do we have time outside?

“
Once a week.” Her voice comes out
in a hoarse whisper. None of us have talked much since the
assembly.

When?

“
Chicken jerky tonight means yard
time in two days. Guess that's the good thing about a meal
schedule. It's something to base your days around.”

Do the men come out too?

“
We overlap by five
minutes.”

Five minutes. Such a short amount of time, but I'll
take it.

Madge is so lost in thought she doesn't question why
I'm asking. Kai's eyes shift between Madge and me, but the mood
hanging over us like a thundercloud can't dampen her spirits for
long. She smiles and puts a hand to her belly.

“
The baby kicked.”

I have to smile too. She takes my hand and guides it
to her side. Underneath my fingers, I feel a nudge that rolls
across her skin and away from me. I grin at her.

Boy or girl?

She shrugs. “I don't know. They didn't tell me.”

This starts to ignite the anger again, but she
smiles, and her smile is so blissfully content as she puts a hand
on her belly that I have to sit back.

“As long as it's healthy, I don't care.”

I'm expecting another movie tonight, but the intercom
crackles on instead.

“We have located another reclamation site. Those of
you working in the cannery, instead of your normal work assignments
tomorrow, you will report to the yard and be bused to the
reclamation site. You will receive further instructions there.”
Then the scratchy voice is silent.

Madge shrugs. “Guess we're going on a field trip.
Anything better than being in here for a day.”

Reclamation?

“
They must've found a small town or
farm or something that hasn't been picked over. We'll go out and
pick it over.” She smiles at me. “They make us be the vultures
instead of them.”

The next morning, soldiers line the hall every
twenty feet as we file from the mess hall toward the yard. I have a
pounding headache, and even the pale fluorescent lights make me
squint. I didn't have any more hallucinations after the second
injection Dr. Benedict gave me, but I'm not sure which is
worse: seeing things that aren't there or waiting for my head to
split open.

I lay in bed last night and couldn't
even bring myself to put my pillow over my head once the anthem
started. The percussion throbbed into my ears, and then the lights
went out and the screams started. All I could do was clench my
fists around my blanket and squeeze my eyes closed as tightly as
possible. Jane didn't move (again), and I wondered how long it took
her to get used to the cacophony all around us. That might just be
the thing that breaks the silence between us.
So, how
long until I can actually sleep through the screams? Do you just
have a major build-up of ear wax?

So today I'm exhausted and feel like pounding my
head against a wall, but falling asleep and bludgeoning myself
aren't options, so I do my best to follow Jane down the hallway. If
I look only at her head, the lights and noise don't seem quite so
bad. She walks with her shoulders hunched, her head down, her arms
wrapped around her middle like she's trying to hold herself
together. She looks like the most pathetic thing I've ever seen,
but the soldiers leave her alone. Hardly anyone notices her.

When the doors yawn open to the outside, I'm
thankful that the sky is overcast. I long for another clear day
like yesterday, but I don't think my headache could handle
sunlight. One bus waits for us in the yard, spewing dark exhaust
into the air. The bus is painted the same mustard yellow as our
shirts. The engine sputters and chokes and then resumes roaring at
us. A soldier sits behind the wheel and his mask is turned toward
us. A few more soldiers board the bus, and then an agent steps
beside the door, scanner in hand.

We line up and she scans each of our arms as we make
our way onto the bus. Jane slides into a seat, and I sit next to
her. Her eyes rest on mine for just a second, and I catch the
faintest glimpse of more than the beat-down girl she always shows
me. Then she turns to look out the window, and the glimpse is gone
as soon as it began.

Madge sits across the aisle from us and grins
maniacally. I guess she was serious about the field trip. I just
don't know how she thinks it'll be a grand time out when there'll
be soldiers and agents breathing down our necks. She runs her
fingers through her hair, and the curls pouf out into a frizzy
torrent of red.

“
I've been waiting for another
reclamation site for months.” She grips the back of the seat in
front of her and sits up as the bus chugs us out of the yard and
beyond the fence onto the dirt road.

Simple pleasures.

We drive east. We wind on bumpy roads through the
forest, and all I can see on either side is green and more green.
The trees threaten to take over the road at some points, and the
bus squeals between branches and grumbles over tree roots. My
stomach lurches, and Jane leans further away from me. Just when I
think I'm about to see my breakfast again, the trees open up and a
small town appears.

It's nothing more than a handful of houses, a
grocery store, and a school. It looks immaculately preserved,
though, like the time between the Event and now never even
occurred—like the gas station where I made bread for Jack. It's
amazing the way some places are just skipped over as if they exist
on a completely different plane. I'm astonished nomads or the
government haven't found this place before.

As I step off the bus and into the gray, cloudy
light, everything has a magical quality to it. I've never seen
anything so untouched before: the windows are covered in grime, but
they're intact. There are toys still out in the yards where
children abandoned them ages ago. Granted the trikes are mostly
rust and look like they'd crumble under my hand and the balls are
all limp and deflated, but the sense of people having lived here is
tangible. It looks like they all just went for a picnic together
and they'll be back at any moment. They must have left quickly to
leave it like this.

Down the street there's a truck. A ramp leads down
from the back, and the inside is lined with empty shelves and
boxes. I'm guessing we'll be loading what we find in there.

We stand in a line in front of the bus. The agent
peers over us with small, brown eyes.

“
You'll proceed through the town and
collect anything that seems useful. You may go in twos or threes,
but no groups larger than that. If you get too noisy or too spread
out, the soldiers have orders to corral you back together and keep
you under control.”

The soldier standing next to her flexes his hands,
and I shudder. What means do they employ to keep us under
control?

“
If any of you try to run, you will
be shot without warning,” she says while looking at a digital
tablet. She doesn't even bother to look in our eyes. “You have four
hours until it is time to load back on the bus.” Then she turns on
her heel and walks away, typing into her tablet. She finds a front
porch, brushes it off with her hand, and sits down.

Madge leans in. “You, me, and Jane. Come on.”

We follow her. She has a knack for this, either that
or she's done this plenty of times before because she leads us to a
house, opens the door (it isn't locked), and parades us through.
I'm kind of weirded out because it's someone's home; someone used
to live here, and we're just going through it like we own the
place.

“
Blinds are good. The agents think
they're useful, the strings and slats and stuff. Let's start on
those.”

We were given screwdrivers. They're short, squatty
things with barely enough handle to grip; the agents probably
thought longer, more useful ones would be too weapon-like. It takes
us a while to simply unscrew the blinds with the ridiculous tools,
but we work our way through the house, making match-stick piles of
blinds.