Lauren Oliver - Delirium (28 page)

And then, suddenly, we are out--past the limited protection offered by the trees, moving quickly over the loose gravel and shale of the old road. Alex moves ahead of me, bent nearly double, and I stoop as low as I can, but it doesn't make me feel any less exposed. Fear screams, slams into me from all sides at once; I have never known anything like it. I'm not sure whether the wind picks up at that second or whether it's just the terror cutting through me, but my whole body feels like ice.

The darkness seems to come alive on all sides of us, full of darting shadows and malicious, looming shapes, ready to turn into a guard any second, and I picture the silence suddenly punctuated by screams, sighs, horns, bullets. I picture blooming pain, and bright lights. The world seems to transform into a series of disconnected images: a bright white circle of light surrounding guard hut twenty-one, which expands ever outward, as though hungry and ready to swallow us; inside, a guard slumped backward in his chair, mouth open, sleeping; Alex turning to me, smiling--is it possible he's smiling?-- stones dancing underneath my feet. Everything feels far away, as unreal and insubstantial as a shadow cast by a flame. Even I don't feel real, can't feel myself breathing or moving, though I must be doing both.

And then just like that we're at the fence. Alex springs into the air, and for a second he pauses there. I want to scream Stop! Stop! I picture the crack and sizzle as his body connects with fifty thousand volts of electricity, but then he lands on the fence and the fence sways silently: dead and cold, just like he said.

I should be climbing up after him, but I can't. Not immediately. A feeling of wonder creeps over me, slowly pushing out the fear. I've been terrified of the border fence since I was a baby. I've never gotten within five feet of the fence. We've been warned not to, had it drilled into us. They told us we would fry; told us it would make our hearts go haywire, kill us instantly. Now I reach out and lace my hand through the chain-link, run my fingers over it. Dead and cold and harmless, the same kind of fence the city uses for playgrounds and schoolyards. In that second it really hits me how deep and complex the lies are, how they run through Portland like sewers, backing up into everything, filling the city with stench: the whole city built and constructed within a perimeter of lies.

Alex is a fast climber; he's made it halfway up the fence. He looks over his shoulder and sees that I'm still standing there like an idiot, not moving. He jerks his head at me like, What are you doing?

I put my hand out to the fence again and then immediately jerk it back again: A shock runs through me all at once, but it has nothing to do with the voltage that should be pumping there. Something has just occurred to me.

They've lied about everything--about the fence, and the existence of the Invalids, about a million other things besides. They told us the raids were carried out for our own protection. They told us the regulators were only interested in keeping the peace.

They told us that love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end.

For the very first time I realize that this, too, might be a lie.

Alex rocks carefully back and forth on the fence so that it sways a little. I glance up, and he gestures to me again. We're not safe. It's time to move. I reach up and hoist myself onto the fence and start climbing. Being on the fence is even worse, in some ways, than being out in the open on the gravel. At least there we had more control--we could have seen if a guard was patrolling, could have hurried back to the cove and hoped to lose him in the darkness and the trees. A small hope, but hope nonetheless. Here we have our backs turned to the guard huts, and I feel like I'm a gigantic moving target with a big sign on my back saying SHOOT ME.

Alex reaches the top before me, and I watch him pick his way slowly, painstakingly, around the loops of barbed wire. He makes it over and lowers himself carefully down the other side, climbing backward a few feet and pausing to wait for me. I follow his motions exactly. I'm shaking by this point, from fear and exertion, but I manage to pass over the top of the fence and then I'm climbing down the other side. My feet hit the ground. Alex takes my hand and pulls me quickly into the woods, away from the border. Into the Wilds. Chapter Eighteen

Mary bring out your umbrella--

The sun shines down on this fine, fine day

But the ashes raining down forever

Are going to turn your hair to gray.

Mary keep your oars a-steady

Sail away on the rising flood

Keep your candle at the ready

Red tides can't be told from blood.

--"Miss Mary" (a common child's clapping game, dating from the time of the blitz), from

Pattycake and Beyond: A History of Play

The lights from the guard hut get suctioned away all at once like they've been sealed back behind a vault. Trees close in around us, leaves and bushes press on me from all sides, brushing my face and shins and shoulders like thousands of dark hands, and from all around me a strange cacophony starts up, of fluttering things and owls hooting and animals scrabbling in the underbrush. The air smells so thickly of flowers and life it feels textured, like a curtain you could pull apart. It's pitch-black. I can't even see Alex in front of me now, can just feel his hand in mine, pulling.

I think I might be even more frightened now than I was making the crossing, and I tug on Alex's hand, willing him to understand me and stop.

"A little farther," comes his voice, from the darkness ahead of me. He tugs me on. We go slowly, though, and I hear twigs snapping and the rustle of tree branches, and I know that Alex is feeling his way, trying to clear a path for us. It seems that we move forward by inches, but it's amazing how quickly we've lost sight of the border and everything on the other side of it, as though they've never existed at all. Behind me is blackness. It's like being underground.

"Alex--" I start to say. My voice comes out strange and strangled-sounding.

"Stop," he says. "Wait." He lets go of my hand, and I let out a little shriek without meaning to. Then his hands are fumbling on my arms, and his mouth bumps against my nose as he kisses me.

"It's okay," he says. He's speaking almost at a normal volume now, so I guess we're safe. "I'm not going anywhere. I just have to find this damn flashlight, okay?"

"Yeah, okay." I struggle to breathe normally, feeling stupid. I wonder if Alex regrets bringing me. I haven't exactly been Miss Courageous.

As though he can read my mind, Alex gives me a second small peck, this time near the corner of my lips. I guess his eyes haven't adjusted to the dark either. "You're doing great," he says.

Then I hear him rustling in the branches all around us, muttering little curses under his breath, a monologue I don't quite follow. A minute later he lets out a quick, excited yelp, and a second after that a broad beam of light cuts upward, illumi-nating the densely packed trees and growth all around us.

"Found it," Alex says, grinning, showing off the flashlight to me. He directs the light down to a rusty toolbox half-buried in the ground. "We leave it there, for the crossers," he explains. "Ready?"

I nod. I feel much better now that we can see where we're going. The branches above us form a canopy that reminds me of the vaulted ceiling of St. Paul's Cathedral, where I used to sit in Sunday school to hear lectures about atoms and probabilities and God's order. The leaves rustle and shake all around us, a constantly shifting pattern of greens and blacks, set dancing as countless unseen things hurry and skip from branch to branch. Every so often Alex's flashlight is reflected for a brief second in a pair of bright wide blinking eyes, which watch us solemnly from within the mass of foliage before vanishing once again into the dark. It's incredible. I've never seen anything like it--all this life pushing everywhere, growing, as though at every second it's expanding and thrusting upward, and I can't really explain it but it makes me feel small and kind of silly, like I'm trespassing on property owned by someone way older and more important than myself.

Alex walks more surely now, occasionally sweeping a branch out of the way so I can pass underneath it, or swatting at the branches blocking our way, but we're not following any path that I can see, and after fifteen minutes I begin to fear that we're just turning in circles, or going deeper and deeper into the woods without any real destination. I'm about to ask him how he knows where we're going when I notice that every so often he hesitates and sweeps his flashlight over the tree trunks that surround us like tall, ghostly silhouettes. Some of them, I see, are marked with a swath of blue paint.

"The paint . . . ," I say.

Alex shoots me a look over his shoulder. "Our road map," he says, pressing on, and then adds, "you don't want to get lost in here, trust me."

And then, abruptly, the trees just peter out. One second we're in the middle of the forest, penned in on all sides, and the next we're stepping out onto a paved road, a ribbon of concrete lit silver by the moonlight like a ribbed tongue.

The road is filled with holes, and cracked and buckled in places, so we have to step around enormous piles of concrete rubble. It winds up a long, low hill, and then disappears over the hill's crest, where another black fringe of trees begins.

"Give me your hand," Alex says. He's whispering again and without knowing why, I'm glad of it. For some reason, I feel as though I've just entered a cemetery. On either side of the road are gigantic clearings, covered in waist-high grasses that sing and whisper against one another, and some thin, young trees, which look frail and exposed in the middle of all of that openness. There seem to be some beams, too--enormous beams of timber piled on top of one another, and twists of things that look metallic, gleaming and glinting in the grass.

"What is this?" I whisper to Alex, but just after I ask the question a little scream builds in my throat and I see, and I know.

In the middle of one of the fields of whispering grass is a large blue truck, perfectly intact, like someone might have driven up just to have a picnic.

"This was a street," Alex says. His voice has turned tense. "Destroyed during the blitz. There are thousands and thousands of them, all across the country. Bombed out, totally destroyed."

I shiver. No wonder I felt like I was walking through a graveyard. I am, in a way. The blitz was a yearlong campaign that happened long before my birth, when my mom was still a baby. It was supposed to have gotten rid of all the Invalids, and any resisters who didn't want to leave their homes and move into an approved community. My mother once said that her earliest memories were all clouded by the sound of bombs and the smell of smoke. She said for years the smell of fire continued to drift over the city, and every time the wind blew it would bring with it a covering of ash.

We go on walking. I feel like I could cry. Being here, seeing this, it's nothing like what I was taught in my history classes: smiling pilots giving the thumbs-up, people cheering at the borders because we were at last safe, houses incinerated neatly, with no mess, as though they were just blipped off a computer screen. In the history books there were no people, really, who lived in these houses; they were shadows, wraiths, unreal. But as Alex and I walk hand in hand down the bombed-out road, I understand that it wasn't like that at all. There was mess and stink and blood and the smell of skin burning. There were people: people standing and eating, talking on the phone, frying eggs or singing in the shower. I'm overwhelmed with sadness for everything that was lost, and filled with anger toward the people who took it away. My people--or at least, my old people. I don't know who I am anymore, or where I belong.

That's not totally true. Alex. I know I belong with Alex.

A little farther up the hill we come across a trim white house standing in the middle of a field. Somehow it escaped the blitz unscathed, and other than a shutter that has become detached and is now hanging at a crazy angle, tapping lightly in the wind, it could be any house in Portland. It looks so strange standing there in the middle of all of that emptiness, surrounded by the shrapnel of disintegrated neighbors. It looks tiny all on its own, like a single lamb that has gotten lost in the wrong pasture.

"Does anyone stay there now?" I ask Alex.

"Sometimes people squat, when it's rainy or freezing. Only the roamers, though--the Invalids who always move around." Again he pauses for a fraction of a second before he says Invalids, grimacing like the word tastes bad in his mouth. "We pretty much stay away from here. People say the bombers might come back and finish off the job. But mostly it's just superstition. People think the house is bad luck." He gives me a tight smile. "It's been totally cleaned out, though. Beds, blankets, clothes--everything. I got my dishes there."

Earlier, Alex told me he had his own special place in the Wilds, but when I pressed him for details he clammed up and told me I'd have to wait and see. It's still weird to think of people living out here, in the middle of all this vastness, needing dishes and blankets and normal things like that. "This way."

Alex pulls me off the road and draws me toward the woods again. I'm actually happy to be back in the trees. There was a heaviness to that strange, open space, with its single house and rusting truck and splintered buildings, a gash cut in the surface of the world.

This time we follow a fairly well-worn path. The trees are still splattered with blue paint at intervals, but it doesn't seem as though Alex needs to consult them. We go quickly, single file. The trees have been shoved away here, and much of the underbrush has been cleared so the walk is much easier. Beneath my feet the dirt has been tamped down over time by the pressure of dozens of feet. My heart starts thumping heavily against my ribs. I can tell we're getting close.

Alex turns around to face me, so abruptly I almost slam into him. He clicks the flashlight off, and in the sudden darkness strange shapes seem to rise up, take form, swirl away.

"Close your eyes," he says, and I can tell he's smiling.