Naturals (13 page)

“Go away, Lockwood,” I whispered.

There was a small part of me that hoped he would put up more of a fight, but mostly I wanted him to disappear, become another face in the crowd, just another person I didn’t have to expect something from. Because when I did that, I was always disappointed.

He didn’t stay. He walked away just like I had asked.

As I headed back to my building, my legs felt heavier and heavier. My chest tightened, and it was becoming more and more difficult to breathe. Despite the comfort of my small, homely room only feet away, I stopped to rest on the porch of my building. I needed a break before climbing the stairs. Climbing the stairs The air felt hot and sticky. I moved my shaky hands to unfasten my jacket, but they could only fumble with the buttons.

“You need some help there?” someone asked, laughing. Clearly my inability to do something as simple as putting on a coat was a riot.

I looked up to see Eric. “No, thank you.”

A weighty silence fell between us. Eric plopped down on the stairs next to me. It was only then that the smell made its way through my congested nose. It was different than the familiar odor that covered the people of the community. It reminded me of the night of the party and the mysterious liquid Henry, Lockwood, and I drank.

“Are you drunk?” I asked.

Eric chuckled, pulling out a small container from his coat pocket. “Want some?” I shook my head and frowned. Despite being close to me in age, he always seemed like more of a grown-up. Someone beyond such weakness. I didn’t like seeing him like this. Somehow it was all right that I took part in the drinking, but not Eric. “You don’t approve?” he asked.

“I didn’t say that,” I mumbled.

“You didn’t have to. You wear your emotions all over your face,” he replied before taking a swig. “Care to elaborate as to
why
you don’t approve?”

I cleared my throat. “It’s just…well…what if we’re attacked? If you, McNair, and the other men are all drunk, who will fight?”

“Ah, that. Right. I forgot my only purpose in life is to serve and protect you,” he replied, leaning his head back against the post and closing his eyes.

“That’s not what I was saying.”

“I don’t play the part of hero twenty-four hours a day,” he drawled.

I realized Eric was right. He hadn’t been my favorite traveling companion during my journey from the compound to the community, but I did look to him as a protector. Somewhere between attempting to put me in my place and shooting the chosen one, he had come to embody this role for me—even if he was a flawed one at best.

Villains and heroes. Maybe Lockwood was right. Maybe it wasn’t everyone else trying to label me and put me in my place. Perhaps I was the one who saw the whole world as made up of only two kinds of people—those trying to save it and those trying to destroy it.

I sniffled, running the back of my hand under my nose.

“You sick?” Eric sat up and opened his eyes to examine me.

“A cold.”

“Oh, I bet Sharon was freaking out. A little compound girl like you, sick? Did you go see her?”

I nodded. “Why would she care?”

“You haven’t gone yet, have you?” he asked, a slow grin appearing on his face. “I told McNair you’d be a tricky one.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Did you know Sharon wasn’t from here?”

“You mean she wasn’t born in the community?” I asked, unable to hide my shock. Sharon seemed like a community member through and through—a woman born in this place who would make sure it would never die out.

“Nope. Similar story to yours. Well, minus the hooking up with an abnorm,” he replied, making a face.

I felt my cheeks go red at the implication. I wouldn’t waste my breath trying to explain to him that the chosen ones were people, too. He would never understand the way I saw James and what he meant to me. I didn’t have the energy for it. Besides, if all went according to plan, after saving Louisa, I’d likely never run into another chosen one—with the exception of Robert—again.

The arrival of chosen ones in the community would mean only one thing—the war that these people were so desperate to stay out of had come for them.

“Like you, some of the leaders got word about her condition. It wasn’t entirely unbelievable that someone of her age could still produce children. I was my mother’s last child. She died with the baby she tried to carry after me,” he stated matter-of-factly.

I supposed most people would have told Eric how sorry they were for his loss, but I knew he didn’t need me to say anything. He wasn’t the sort to waste time with formalities. That was one of my favorite things about the community: the naturals who lived here were so busy with plain surviving that they only said what they needed or wanted to say. They didn’t have time to worry about what was proper or improper.

Eric took another drink before continuing his story. “That’s how it happened with most of our mothers. One by one they started to die. We had heard rumors that it was happening in compounds everywhere. And that the younger girls couldn’t reproduce at all. The first cases started in the compounds closest to the places where the bombs fell during the Great War. I mean, years and years before the affliction made it out our way. Sharon’s family lived in one of those compounds. She was the only child born after the war in that territory. Most people assumed it was some sort of fallout sickness.”

I was interested in this story, but I wondered what it had to do with why Sharon would care about my cold. Eric wasn’t as drunk as I’d believed him to be—he was certainly talking more than I’d ever heard him—but maybe this was what the drink did to Eric. I rushed him toward the end of his story, anxious to get inside. “So when she went in for her inspection they found out she was…” My voice trailed off. What to call people like Sharon and me? Fertile? Freaks?

“Like you. Yes. Word of it spread through the community. Now that the illness had reached our lands, we knew it wasn’t the fallout illness. Our grandparents had been too far from where the bombs were dropped to suffer the effects.”

“So what caused it, then?” I asked, my heart pounding. Did the community know why my sister had to die?

Eric shrugged. “We’re not entirely sure, but we figure it’s something
they
did.”

“They?” I asked. “You don’t mean the council?”

“Why do you say it like you’re shocked? They created a whole species of people to take our place. Do you really think they ever gave a damn about trying to keep us around?” he asked before taking yet another drink.

“How is that even possible?” I asked. It couldn’t be. I knew the council was corrupt, but this seemed too big, an act of God.

“It had to have started with our grandparents, because it was our parents’ generation where the illness first showed itself. Whatever way they did it, they were smart about it. Our parents were able to produce children. It wasn’t until later in their lives that the women started to die. It wasn’t until our mothers brought girls into the world that whatever the council had put into motion generations before finally worked.”

I reached above me and grabbed onto the rail, grunting as I shakily pulled myself to my feet. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. The council didn’t even come into power until after the war. Even if they were capable of what you’re accusing them of, they couldn’t possibly do something like this when they didn’t even exist.”

I hated the council.
Hated
them. But what Eric was telling me seemed too unreal, too horrifying to be true.

Eric followed my lead and stood up. He leaned against the railing next to me and looked out at the street, which was becoming crowded with members of the community returning to their rooms before dinner. “You ever think it weird that both the eastern and western sectors were able to create those abnorms? We had a government that didn’t work, but that didn’t mean they weren’t working, creating, trying to find a way to make it all better and us more obedient. I think they disagreed on how to get it done, but I bet the plan always was and always will be to get rid of the naturals. The name may have been different before the war, but I’m telling you the council is responsible for this.”

Was it possible?

Eric leaned closer to me to let people enter the building. “So when they found Sharon, a member of one of the first communities to suffer from what our government did, they had to have her. You wouldn’t believe what they went through to get her.”

I crossed my arms across my chest, slightly uncomfortable with how close he was standing. All his talk of conspiracy theories made me feel light-headed. “And so she got here and just started having as many babies as she could?” I asked, my voice bordering on disbelief.

“Not exactly,” he replied. “She offered herself up.”

I stilled. I took a deep breath before asking my next question. “You mean she just let whoever wanted a child—”

“That’s not what I was talking about, but yes,” he said.

“Then what were you talking about?” I asked. I felt queasy. I needed to go lie down.

“They somehow managed to find a clinic a few weeks’ journey from here that hadn’t been destroyed by the council. She went to the community leaders and asked them to take her there. And even though they only had a rudimentary understanding of medicine at best, random facts picked up through medical books and passed down through generations in order to survive, they experimented on her for weeks.”

I gulped.

“When she got back she didn’t speak for a good month. Later, when people asked her what happened, she told them the leaders were unable to find out what made her different.”

“I can’t believe she let them do that to her,” I said. I wouldn’t. Ever. I would pull my weight in my new home, but I vowed to myself in that moment to never become a test subject.

Eric drank from the flask again. “She felt like it was her duty. If somehow they could find out why she’d lived, then maybe she could stop all the girls born after her from dying. And when she realized she couldn’t save her people that way, she decided to save them in the only way she could.”

“Well, I’m not her. So if the point of your little story was to convince me to start giving myself to any man who wanted his way with me, then you wasted your time.”

Eric shook his head. “That wasn’t the point of my story. I just suspect that Sharon hopes you are like her.”

“I’m nothing like her.”

Eric chuckled. “Apparently not.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but he held up his hand to stop me. “No need to get all upset. No one would ever force you to do anything like that. We’re not like them. If we were, you might as well have never left the compound.”

“I think I’ve had enough story-time today. I’m going to my room.”

“What? And not even cheers to my mother?” he asked, blocking my way. “Today’s the anniversary of her death. It’s the only day off I give myself. I guess we all try to save our people in our own little ways.”

He was right. This place, my new home, was a new country—a country of survivors. I would have to find my own way to help save them, because the way Sharon had chosen would never be mine.

I reached out and snatched the flask from Eric’s hand. “To your mother,” I mumbled before tipping it back. The contents of the container slid down my throat, and just like the other time I had drunk alcohol, it felt good. The warmth from the liquid spread into my forehead, dulling the aches and pains of my cold.

A generation of motherless children. That’s what we had become.

“To my mother,” I whispered and tipped the bottle back again.

She would have loved this.

Chapter 15

“Where the hell have you been? I was looking all over for you!”

I sluggishly moved my arm to lay it across my eyes and groaned, shifting in a vain attempt to get comfortable on the cot. I wasn’t in the mood for a fight with Henry. It had been a rough afternoon, and combined with the effects of the drink, I felt really tired. The pain in my chest was lessened, but I felt listless. When I didn’t answer, Henry pushed his cot all the way against mine, taking a seat.

It was hard to keep him in focus. The room was spinning.

“You’re not looking too good.” Henry’s anger morphed into concern.

I tried to speak but only a hiccup came out.

“Are you
drunk
?” he asked, not even trying to hide his disapproval.

I sighed. “Yes. So what?” I gathered all of my strength to turn over onto my side, showing him my back. I hoped he would interpret that as I meant it: I didn’t want to have this fight tonight. He wasn’t my guardian, so he had no right to ask me where I was or what I was doing.

I was the leader of my own life.

“I waited all afternoon! I thought something might have happened to you,” he said.

“Nothing happened to me. I just wasn’t feeling well and Lockwood took me to see Sharon. She told me to rest, so why don’t you stop nagging me so I can.”

There she was. The old Tess. The girl angry at the whole world. Was the alcohol to blame? The sickness? Or would she always live in me?

“Lockwood. Of course. I don’t trust him, Tess. Any of them. If you were feeling sick, you should have come to me,” he said.

I shifted so I was lying on my back and turned my face so I could look at him. “You’re being ridiculous. You can’t be there for every little moment. I’m allowed to have a life outside of you.”

His face fell. He took a shaky breath. “I know that.”

I wasn’t being fair. I didn’t want to be this girl, and Henry didn’t deserve my anger.

With a good deal of effort, I got myself up on my feet. I’m not sure why, but I needed to be level with him. I needed us on the same page. I reached my hand forward and touched him gently on the back. He stiffened. “You’re upset for no reason,” I said softly.

I was exhausted, and I didn’t want to argue, but that didn’t mean I wanted to hurt him. Besides, I was sure a fight with Henry would only lead to questions I wasn’t ready to answer. My feelings toward him weren’t black and white. I cared for him, and sometimes, if I was honest, I wondered would it would be like to be with him. He knew me in ways no one else had. He was my oldest friend. That had to mean something.

I was never going to see James again. He would only ever be a memory, and I couldn’t live forever deep in my thoughts of him.

Henry spun around to face me. “I can’t believe you’re standing here drunk right now and asking me why I’m upset. Drunk. Really? Classy, Tess.”

“Last time I drank, you were right there next to me!”

It was so easy to slip back into this routine. Henry wasn’t helping matters, either. He always knew exactly what buttons to push.

“You’re missing the point,” he said, throwing his hands up in the air. “A lot of people risked their lives to bring you here, and you don’t show the least bit of appreciation,” he said, pointing a finger in my face.

I smacked it away and moved past him, my shoulder knocking into his as I stalked over to the window. I needed some fresh air. The room had become sweltering. I struggled to get the window up. “I wake up every morning and go to work without complaining. I do my part. I
am
thankful.”

“Yeah, thankful for the wrong people,” he said.

I let out a string of obscenities as the window refused to cooperate.

Henry sighed and reluctantly walked over to me. He opened the window with ease. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

I leaned my head against the windowpane and closed my eyes, allowing the cool air to brush across my clammy skin. “Then what do you want? You told me we could start a new life out here. That’s what I’m doing.”

“No, you’re holding onto your old life. You’re shutting me out.”

“I’m shutting you out? I share my living space with you. I talk to you and spend time with you. What else do you want from me? You think you’re so different, but you’re not. Everyone wants something from someone.”

Henry fell silent. I opened my eyes but couldn’t bear to turn around and look at him. Instead, I stared down at the darkness of the dirt road below my room. Someone was moving quickly through the street. I pressed my head harder against the glass. Whoever it was out there wasn’t wearing a coat or any other means of warmth. I could tell by the outline of her body that it was a woman, and I wondered where she was rushing off to. Was she running to someone or from them? Suddenly, the woman stopped in front of my window and looked up.

I squinted my eyes to get a better view.

And there she was. Again. My mother.

I opened my mouth but no words came out. She slowly raised a finger to her lips.

She was asking for my silence.

How was this possible?

If my mother was alive then nothing in my life made sense. She was dead. I’d seen her dead, and if I couldn’t believe in death, then what could I believe in?

I turned around to ask Henry if he saw my mother, too, only to find him staring at me. “I’m not good with words, Tess.”

I opened my mouth to ask him what he was talking about, but he cut me off. “I’m no good with them. Never have been. I either can’t find the right ones to use, or I speak all the ones I shouldn’t say. I could blame my childhood or a million other things, but I think it’s just me. And I don’t think that will ever change.”

Henry paused and took a shaky breath. “I do know that I meant what I said before we came here, that we could be happy, Tess. We could make each other happy. Don’t you want to feel that? I know it could be messy. Damn it, I know it
will
be messy. We’re both too stubborn for it not to be. But I love you, and I want you all the same.”

My heart skipped a beat, and I knew I was close to being lost.

And then he was kissing me. His lips pressed quickly against mine and then they were gone. The smallest of moments with the largest of impacts.

I felt dizzy.

This wasn’t the boy I was supposed to be kissing.

But I had no hope of ever kissing that boy again.

I knew what I was supposed to feel, kissing someone other than James, but like many of life’s big moments, what I was supposed to feel and what I actually did never seemed to match up. But then nothing did.

I felt out of control. And I needed that control back.

I leaned forward and returned his kiss.

It felt good. Really good. It didn’t feel anything like kissing James, but to say that I didn’t enjoy it would be a lie. How long had it been since I had kissed or been kissed? There was a certain kind of delicious forgetfulness in physicality. This community, unlike the compound that had raised me, embraced these desires.

I pulled away and wiped the traitorous tear that rolled down my cheek.

“I’m sorry…I shouldn’t have—”

I covered his mouth with mine to silence him. And because I wanted to. Pure and simple want. His hand moved to my face, and my head knocked against the wall with the force of our kiss. I knew he could taste the alcohol on my lips, but I was thankful for it. It muted everything I didn’t want to feel and amplified everything I did.

His touch was electric. One hand moved from my face down to my lower back. He clutched onto the fabric there and pulled my body against his. There was nothing subtle or nervous about his movements. This was a boy—a man—who knew what he was doing. I purged from my mind the brief pang of jealousy when I thought of whom he’d learned these things from.

I grabbed onto his shirt and pulled him away from the window, never letting my mouth leave his. I didn’t have to think about the world and its many conundrums as long as I was doing this. My hands moved to my shirt’s buttons. Henry broke away and looked down. He only paused for a second before his hands were helping mine.

My shirt fell to the floor, and my skin felt so good as the cool night air from the window blew into the room. The strap of my slip fell from my shoulder, and Henry’s eyes went wide. His lips found my bare skin, and I couldn’t help but moan.

This
I wanted to feel.

I didn’t want to feel dirty or tired. I didn’t want to feel sick or weak. I didn’t want to feel scared or alone.

Suddenly, I wanted to feel him.

I tugged at his shirt and pulled it over his head. Henry moved his mouth up my neck, close to my ear. “Are you sure about this?”

Why did he have to question it? Why couldn’t he just let things be and forget about everything? That’s all I wanted to do. I wanted this to be my life. This moment. This feeling.

My stomach lurched painfully and I backed away from him, then doubled over. There was no chance of stopping it before it happened.

I threw up all over the floor.

After Henry helped me clean up and asked me a thousand times if I was okay, he left. He told me he was going see if he could get me some water. I knew he needed to be away from me. I didn’t blame him.

Not my finest moment, to say the least.

I managed to find a clean nightgown tucked away in one of the dresser drawers. As I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I shuddered. My face was ragged and pale. There were dark circles under my eyes. A strand of my hair stuck to my face in a mixture of sweat and my own sick.

I looked like my mother.

I peered out the window, but it framed nothing but barren trees.