Pandemonium (22 page)

Raven gives me the barest trace of a smile. “Time for your cure.”

My heart jumps in my chest. The night is sharply cold, and it hurts my lungs to breathe deeply. Raven leads me away from the camp, one hundred feet down along the stream, to a broad, flat stretch of bank. This is where we’ve broken through the thick layer of ice every morning to pull water.

Bram is already there. He has built another fire. This one is burning high and hot, and my eyes sting with ash and smoke when we’re still five feet away. The wood is arranged in a teepee formation, and at its crown, blue and white flames are licking up toward the sky. The smoke is an eraser, blurring the stars above us.

“Ready?” Raven asks.

“Just about,” Bram says. “Five minutes.” He is squatting next to a warped wooden bucket, which is nestled between pieces of wood on the periphery of the fire. He will have soaked it with water so it doesn’t catch and burn. The proximity of the fire will eventually cause the water in the bucket to boil. I see him remove a small, thin instrument from a bag at his feet. It looks like a screwdriver, with a thin, round shaft, a sharp and glittering tip. He drops it into the bucket, handle down, and then stands up, watching as the tip of the plastic handle makes slow revolutions in the simmering water.

I feel sick. I look to Raven, but she is staring at the fire, her face unreadable.

“Here.” Bram steps away from the fire and presses a bottle of whiskey into my hands. “You’ll want to drink some of this.”

I hate the taste of whiskey, but I uncap the bottle anyway, close my eyes, and take a big swig. The alcohol sears my throat going down, and I have to fight back the urge to gag. But five seconds later, a warmth radiates up from my stomach, numbing my throat and mouth and coating my tongue, making it easier to take a second sip, and a third.

By the time Bram says, “We’re ready,” I’ve polished off a quarter of the bottle and above me, through the smoke, the stars make slow revolutions, all of them glittering like pointed metal tips. My head feels detached from my body. I sit down heavily.

“Easy,” Bram says. His white teeth flash in the dark. “How you feeling, Lena?”

“Okay,” I say. The word is harder to get out than usual.

“She’s ready,” Bram says, and then, “Raven, grab the blanket, will you?” Raven moves behind me, and then Bram tells me to lie back, which I do, gratefully. It helps the woozy, spinning feeling in my head.

“You take her left arm,” Raven says, kneeling next to me. Her earrings—a feather and a silver charm, both threaded through one ear—sway together like a pendulum. “I’ll take her right.”

Their hands grip me tightly from both sides. Then I start to get scared.

“Hey.” I struggle to sit up. “You’re hurting me.”

“It’s important that you stay very still,” Raven says. Then she pauses. “It’s going to hurt for a bit, Lena. But it will be over quickly, okay? Just trust us.”

The fear is causing a new fire in my chest. Bram is holding the metal tool, newly sterilized, and its blade seems to catch all the light from the fire behind him, and glow hot and white and terrible. I’m too frightened to try and struggle, and I know it wouldn’t do any good. Raven and Bram are too strong.

“Bite on this,” Bram says, and suddenly there is a strip of leather going into my mouth. It smells like Grandpa’s tobacco.

“Wait—,” I try to say, but I can’t choke the word out past the leather. Then Bram places one hand on my forehead, angling my chin up to the sky, hard, and he’s bending over me, blade in hand, and I can feel its tip just pressing into the space behind my left ear, and I want to cry out but I can’t, and I want to run but I can’t do that, either.

“Welcome to the resistance, Lena,” he whispers to me. “I’ll try to make this quick.”

The first cut goes deep. I am filled with burning. And then I find my voice, and scream.

L
ena.”

My name pulls me out of sleep. I sit up, heart careening in my chest.

Julian has moved his cot toward the door, pressed it against the wall, as far away from me as possible. Sweat is beading on my upper lip. It has been days since I’ve showered, and the room is full of a close, animal smell.

“Is that even your real name?” Julian asks, after a pause. His voice is still cold, although it has lost some of its edge.

“That’s my name,” I say. I squeeze my eyes closed, tight, until little bursts of color appear behind my eyelids. I was having a nightmare. I was in the Wilds. Raven and Alex were there, and there was an animal, too, something enormous we had killed.

“You were calling for Alex,” Julian says, and I feel a small spasm of pain in my stomach. More silence, then: “It was him, wasn’t it? He’s the one who got you sick.”

“What does it matter?” I say. I lie down again.

“So what happened to him?” Julian asks.

“He died,” I say shortly, because that is what Julian wants to hear. I picture a tall tower, smooth-sided, stretching all the way to the sky. There are stairs cut in the side of the tower, winding up and up. I take the first step into the coolness and shade.

“How?” Julian asks. “Because of the
deliria
?” I know if I say yes he’ll feel good.
See
, he’ll think.
We’re right. We’ve been right all this time. Let people die so that we can be right.

“You,” I say. “Your people.”

Julian sucks in a quick breath. When he speaks again, his voice is softer. “You said you never had nightmares.”

I wall myself up inside. From the tower, the people on the ground are no more than ants, specks, punctuation marks: easily smudged out.

“I’m an Invalid,” I say. “We lie.”

In the morning my plan has hardened, clarified. Julian is sitting in the corner, watching me the way he did when we were first taken. He is still wearing the rag around his head, but he looks alert now, and the swelling in his face has gone down.

I wrestle the umbrella apart, pulling the nylon shell away from its hinged metal arms. Then I lay the nylon flat and cut it into four long strips. I tie the strips together into a makeshift cord and test its strength. Decent. It won’t hold forever, but I don’t need longer than a few minutes.

“What are you doing?” Julian asks me, and I can tell he’s trying hard not to seem too curious. I don’t answer him. I no longer care what he does, or whether he comes with me or remains here to rot forever, as long as he stays out of the way.

It doesn’t take me long to remove the hinges from the flap door, just some wiggling and working with the point of the knife: the hinges are rusted and loose anyway.

Once the hinges are off, I manage to push the door outward, so it falls, clattering into the hall. That will bring someone, and soon. My heart speeds up. It’s showtime, as Tack used to say, right before heading out on a hunt. I pull
The Book of Shhh
onto my lap and tear out a page.

“You’ll never fit through that space,” Julian says. “It’s too small.”

“Just stay quiet,” I say. “Can you do that for me? Just don’t speak.”

I unscrew the mascara that made its way into my backpack, silently send a message of thanks to Raven—now that she is on the other side, in Zombieland, she can’t get enough of its little trinkets and comforts, its well-lit stores stocked with rows and rows of things to buy.

I can feel Julian watching me. I scrawl out a note on the blank side of the page.

The girl is violent. Worried she might kill me. Ready to talk if you let me out NOW.

I slip the note through the cat-flap door and into the hallway. Then I repack my backpack with
The Book of Shhh
, the empty water bottle, and pieces of the dismantled umbrella. I grip the knife in my hand, stand by the door, and wait, trying to slow my breathing, every so often flipping the knife into my other hand and wiping sweat from my palms onto my pants. Hunter and Bram once took me deer hunting with them, just to watch, and this was the part I couldn’t stand: the stillness, the waiting.

Fortunately, I don’t wait long. Someone must have heard the flap door fall. Pretty soon I hear another door close—more information; information is good; that means there’s another door somewhere, another room underground—and footsteps coming toward me. I hope it’s the girl who comes, the one with the wedding ring threaded through her nose.

I hope, above all, it’s not the albino.

But the boot steps are heavy, and when they stop just outside the door, it’s a man who mutters, “What the hell?”

My whole body feels wound up, coiled like an electrical wire. I’ll have only one shot to get this right.

Now that I’ve disabled the flap door, I have a solid view of mud-splattered combat boots and baggy green trousers, like the kind lab techs and street sweepers wear. The man grunts, and moves the flap door a few inches with a boot, as though toeing a mouse to see whether it is alive. Then he kneels down and snatches up the note.

I tighten my grip on the knife. Now my heart feels as though it is barely going at all. I am not breathing, and the space between heartbeats is an eternity.

Open the door. Don’t call for backup. Open the door now. Come on, come on, come on.

Finally there’s a heavy sigh, and the sound of keys jingling; a clicking, too, as I imagine him sliding the safety off his gun.

Everything is sharp and very slow, as though funneled through a microscope. He’s going to open the door.

The keys turn in the lock and Julian scrabbles, alarmed, to his feet, letting out a short cry. For a second the guard hesitates. Then the door begins to push inward, inward, toward me—toward where I am standing, pressed up against the wall, invisible.

Just like that the seesaw has swung: The seconds are banging together so fast I can hardly keep track of them. Everything is instinct and blur. Things happen in one collapsed moment: The door swings fully open, just a few inches from my face, as he takes a step into the cell, saying, “All right, I’m all ears,” and as he does I push against the door with both hands, slamming it toward him, hear a small crack and his short exclamation, a curse and a groan. Julian is saying, “Holy shit, holy shit.”

I leap out from behind the door—all instinct now, no more thinking—and land on the Scavenger’s back. He is staggering on his feet, clutching his head, where the door must have hit him, and my momentum carries him off his feet and onto the ground. I drive a knee into his back and press the knife into his throat.

“Don’t move.” I’m shaking. I hope he can’t feel it. “Don’t scream. Don’t even think about screaming. Just stay where you are, nice and easy, and you won’t get hurt.”

Julian watches me, wide-eyed, silent. The Scavenger is good. He stays still. I keep my knee in his back and the tip of my knife at his throat, take one end of the nylon rope in my teeth, and twist his left hand behind his back, and then his right, keeping them both stabilized with my knee.

Julian wrenches away from the wall suddenly and comes over to me.

“What are you doing?” My voice is a snarl, through the nylon and my gritted teeth. I can’t take Julian and the Scavenger at once. If he interferes, it’s all over.

“Give me the rope,” he says calmly. For a second I don’t move, and he says, “I’m helping you.”

I pass the cord to him wordlessly, and he kneels down behind me. I keep the Scavenger pressed to the ground as Julian binds his hands and feet.

I press my knee harder into the Scavenger’s back, holding him still. I picture the spaces between the ribs, the soft skin and layers of fat and flesh—and beneath it all, the heart, squeezing and pumping out life. It would only take one quick jab. . . .

“Give me the knife,” Julian says.

I tighten my grip on the handle. “For what?”

“Just give it to me,” he says.

I hesitate, then pass it back to him. He cuts off the excess nylon cord—he is clumsy with the knife, and it takes him a minute—and then passes both the knife and the strip of nylon back to me.

“You should gag him,” Julian says matter-of-factly. “So he won’t be able to call for help.”

He is amazingly calm. I tip the Scavenger’s head up and wrestle the makeshift gag into his mouth. He kicks out with his legs, thrashing like a fish pulled onto land, but I manage to get the fabric knotted behind his head. The bonds are flimsy—he’ll get his hands free in ten, fifteen minutes—but that should be enough time.