Pandemonium (28 page)

This is a new kind of terror. I’m frozen on my knees as the rats rush around me, drumming me with their bodies, squeaking and slithering and whipping my skin with their tails. I’m sickened and paralyzed with fear.

This is a nightmare. It must be.

A rat crawls up onto my lap. I shout and swat it away, nausea rising in my throat. It hits the wall with a sickening thud, squeaking; then it scrabbles back to its feet and joins the stream again, blurring past me. I’m so disgusted I can’t even move. A whimper works its way out of my throat. Maybe I’ve died and gone to hell, to be punished for
deliria
and all the terrible things I’ve done—to live in squalor and chaos, just like
The Book of Shhh
predicts for the disobedient.

“Stand up.”

I raise my head. Two monsters stand above me, holding torches. That’s what they look like: beasts from the underground, only half-human. One of them is enormous, practically a giant. One of his eyes is milky white, blinded; the other is as darkly glittering as an animal’s.

The other figure is hunched over, back as crookedly swollen as the warped hull of a boat. I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. Long, greasy hair mostly conceals the person’s face. She—or he—has twisted Julian’s hands behind his back and bound them with a cord. The Scavengers are gone.

I stand. The bandage on my neck has come loose, and my skin feels slick and wet.

“Walk.” The rat-man gestures with his torch toward the darkness behind me. I see that he is slightly doubled over and is clutching his right side with the hand not holding the torch. I think of the gunshots and hearing someone shout. I wonder if he was hit.

“Listen.” My voice is shaking. I hold up both hands, a gesture of peace. “I don’t know who you are, or what you want, but we’re just trying to get out of here. We don’t have much, but you can take whatever you want. Just—just let us go. Please, okay?” My voice breaks a little. “Please let us go.”

“Walk,” the rat-man repeats, and this time jabs so close to me with his torch I can feel the heat from the flames.

I look at Julian. He gives a minute shake of his head. The expression in his eyes is clear.
What can we do?

I turn, and walk. The rat-man goes behind me with his torch, and in front of us, hundreds of rats disappear into the darkness.

N
o one knows what to expect at the third encampment, or whether there will even be a third encampment. Since Tack and Hunter never made it home, we can’t know whether they successfully buried supplies just outside of Hartford, Connecticut, roughly 180 miles south of Rochester, or whether something happened to them along the way. The cold has buried its claws in the landscape now: It is relentless, and will not let go until spring. We are tired, hungry, and defeated. Even Raven can’t maintain the appearance of strength. She walks slowly, head bowed, not speaking.

I don’t know what we’ll do if there is no food at the third encampment. I know Raven is worried too, although she won’t talk about it. None of us talk about it. We just push blindly, obstinately forward.

But the fear is there. As we approach Hartford—threading through the ruins of old towns, bombed-out shells of houses, like dry insect husks—there is no sense of celebration. Instead there is anxiety: a hum of it, running through all of us, making the woods feel ominous. The dusk is full of malice; the shadows are long, pointed fingers, a forest of dark hands. Tomorrow we will reach the third encampment, if it is there. If not, some of us will starve before we make it farther south.

And if it is not there, we can stop wondering about Tack and Hunter: It will mean that in all probability they are dead.

The morning dawns weakly and is full of strange electricity, like the waiting feeling that usually precedes a storm. Other than the crunching of our shoes in the snow, we move in silence.

Finally we reach it: the place where the third encampment should be. There is no sign that Tack and Hunter have been here: no gouges in the trees, no tattered pieces of fabric looped over tree branches, none of the symbols we’ve been using to communicate, and no indication that any goods or supplies have been buried here. This is what we’ve all feared, but still the disappointment is almost physical.

Raven lets out a short exclamation of pain, as though she’s been slapped; Sarah collapses, right there in the snow, and says, “No-no-no-no-no!” until Lu tells her to shut up. I feel as though my chest has caved in.

“There must be a mistake,” I say. My voice sounds too loud in the clearing. “We must be in the wrong place.”

“There’s no mistake,” Bram says in a low voice. “This is it.”

“No,” I insist. “We took a wrong turn somewhere. Or Tack found a better place for the supplies.”

“Be quiet, Lena,” Raven says. She’s rubbing her temples, hard. Her fingernails are ringed with purple. “I need to think.”

“We need to find Tack.” I know I’m not helping; I know I’m half-hysterical. But the cold and the hunger have turned my thoughts dull too, and this is the only one that stands out. “Tack has our food. We need to find him. We need to—”

I break off as Bram says, “Shhh.” Sarah scrambles to her feet again. Suddenly we are all tense, alert. We all heard it—the crack of a twig in the woods, sharp as a rifle report. As I look around at us—all of our faces still and listening, anxious—I’m reminded of the deer we saw two days ago in the woods, the way it froze, and tensed, just before bounding away.

The woods are stark-still, brushstrokes of straight black leafless trees, expanses of white, collapsed logs and rotten tree trunks hunched in the snow.

Then, as I am watching, one of the logs—from a distance, just a mass of gray and brown—twitches.

And I know that something is very, very wrong. I open my mouth to say so, but in that exact second everything explodes: Scavengers appear from all around us, shaking off their cloaks and furs—trees becoming people becoming arms and knives and spears—and we are scattering, running, screaming in all directions.

This is, of course, how they want us: panicked, weak, and separated.

We are easier to kill that way.

T
he tunnel we are following slopes downward. For a minute I imagine that we are tunneling toward the center of the earth.

From up ahead, there is light and movement: a fiery glow, and sounds of banging and babbling. My neck is wet with sweat, and the dizziness is worse than ever. I am having trouble staying on my feet. I trip and barely manage to right myself. Rat-man steps forward and seizes one of my arms. I try to wrench away from his grasp, but he keeps one hand firmly on my elbow, walking beside me now. He smells terrible.

The light breaks, expands, and becomes a cavernous room filled with fire and people. The ceiling above us is vaulted, and we emerge from the darkness into a space with tall platforms on either side of us; on them, more monsters—tattered, ragged, dirty people, all of them bloodless and pale, squinting and hobbled—move among metal trash cans where several fires are burning, so the air is clotted with smoke and an old, oily smell. The walls are tiled, and papered with faded advertisements and graffiti.

As we advance along the tracks, people turn and stare. They are all withered or damaged in some way. Many of them are missing limbs, or have other kinds of defects: shriveled infant-hands, strange tumor-growths on their faces, curved spines or crippled knees.

“Up,” the rat-man says, jerking his chin toward the platform. It is impossibly high.

Julian’s hands are still tied behind his back. Two of the larger men on the platform come forward and grab him under the armpits, help haul him up out of the tracks. The hunchback moves with surprising grace. I get a glimpse of strong arms and delicate, tapered wrists. A woman, then.

“I—I can’t,” I say. The people on the platforms have stopped now. They are staring at Julian and me. “It’s too high.”

“Up,” Rat-man repeats. I wonder if these are the only words he knows—
stand
,
walk
,
up
,
down
.

The platform is at eye level. I place my hands flat on the concrete and try to heave myself up, but I’m far too weak. I collapse backward.

“She’s hurt!” Julian cries out. “Can’t you see that? For God’s sake—we need to get out of here.”

It’s the first time he has spoken since the Scavengers tracked us down, and his voice is full of pain and fear.

The rat-man is piloting me back toward the platform, but this time, as though by silent agreement, some of the observers move simultaneously forward toward us. They crouch at the platform lip; they reach out their arms. I try and twist away, but the rat-man is behind me. He grabs me firmly by the waist.

“Stop it!” Now Julian is trying to break free of his captors. The two men who helped him onto the platform are still holding him firmly. “Let her go!”

Hands are grabbing me from all directions. Monstrous faces loom above me, floating in the flickering light.

Julian is still screaming. “Do you hear me? Get off her! Let her go!”

A woman comes through the crowd toward me. She seems to be missing part of her face; her mouth is twisted into a horrible grin.

No.
I want to scream. Hands are gripping me, lifting me onto the platform. I kick out; there is a release. I land hard on my side, rolling onto my back. The woman with the half face looms over me. She reaches for me with both hands.

She is going to strangle me.

“Get away from me!” I scream out, flailing, trying to push her away. My head smacks back against the platform, and for a second my vision explodes with color.

“Be still,” she is saying, in a soothing voice—a lullaby voice, surprisingly gentle—as the pain stops, and the screaming stops, and I drift away into a fog.

W
e scatter, panicked and blind. We’ve had no time to load our weapons, and we have no strength to fight. My knife is in my pack—useless to me now. No time to stop and retrieve it. The Scavengers are fast and strong: bigger, I think, than any normal people should be, bigger than anybody should be who makes a home in the Wilds.

“This way! This way!” Raven runs ahead of me, dragging Sarah by the hand. Sarah is too scared to cry. She can barely keep up with Raven. She is stumbling in the snow.

Terror is a heartbeat drumming in my chest. There are three Scavengers behind us. One of them has an ax. I can hear the blade whistling in the air. My throat is burning, and with each step I sink six inches, have to wrench my legs forward. My thighs are shaking from the effort.

We come over a hill and suddenly, looming ahead of us, there is an outcropping of rock, large boulders shouldering together at angles like people crowding together for warmth. The rocks are slick with ice and form a series of interlinking caves, dark mouths where the snow has not penetrated. There is no way to go around them, or climb over them. We will be caught there, pinioned, like animals in a corral.

Raven freezes for just a second, and I can see the terror in her whole body. A Scavenger lunges for her, and I cry out. She unfreezes, dragging Sarah forward again, running straight for the rock because there is nowhere else to run. I see her fumbling at her belt for her long knife. Her fingers are clumsy, frozen solid. She can’t work it out of its pouch, and I realize, heart sinking, that she intends to make a stand. That is her only plan; we will die out here, and our blood will seep into the snow.

My throat is grating, aching; bare branches whip my face, stinging my eyes with tears. A Scavenger is close to me now, so close I can hear his heavy panting and see his shadow running in tandem with mine—to our left, twin figures cast long on the snow—and in that moment, just before he catches up to me, I think of Hana. Two shadows on the Portland streets; sun hot and high; legs beating in tandem.

Then there is no place left to run.

“Go!” Raven is screaming, as she pushes Sarah forward into a dark space, one of the caves made by the rocks. Sarah is small enough to fit. Hopefully the Scavengers will not be able to get to her. Then there is a hand on my back, and I am tumbling roughly to my knees, teeth ringing as I bite down on ice. I roll onto my back, six inches from the wall of sheer rock.

He is above me: a giant, a leering monster. He raises his ax, and its blade glitters in the sun. I’m too scared to move, to breathe, to cry.

He tenses, ready to swing.