Raven: A Delirium Short Story (4 page)

I walk, head down, not too quick, not too slow. Hardly anyone in the halls, and the only doctor I pass barely glances at me. Good. People mind their own business here.

I get a break when I hit the bank of elevators: a guy standing, tapping his foot, checking his watch, a poster boy for impatience, with a large camera slung around his neck and the look of someone who hasn’t slept in a week. Press.

“You here for Julian Fineman?” is all I have to say.

“It’s six, right? The woman at the front desk told me it was on six.” He must be in his thirties, but he has a big pimple right on the tip of his nose, angry as a blister. His whole vibe is a little like a pimple, actually: ready to explode.

I follow him into the elevator, reach out, and punch six with a knuckle. “It’s six,” I say.

The first time I ever killed someone I was sixteen. It was almost two years since I’d escaped to the Wilds, and by then the homestead had changed. Certain people had left or died; others had showed up. We’d had a bad winter my first year, four weeks of almost straight snow, no hunting, no trapping, making do on scraps left over from the summer—dried strips of meat, and, when that ran out, plain rice. But worse than that was the freeze, the days snow piled up so quick and so heavy it wasn’t safe to go outside; when the homestead reeked of unwashed bodies and worse; when the boredom was so bad it crawled down into your skin and made a constant itch.

Mari didn’t make it past that winter. The second stillborn had hit her hard; even before the winter she sometimes spent days curled up on her cot, one arm crooked around the negative space where a baby should have been. That winter, it was like something brittle finally snapped inside of her, and one morning we woke up and found her swinging from a wooden beam in the food room.

It was snowing too hard to bring her up, so for two days we had to live alongside her body.

We lost Tiny, too, who went out one day to try and hunt, even though we told him it was no use and the animals wouldn’t be out and it was too risky. But he was going crazy from being penned in so long, crazy from the constant hunger gnawing like a rat from the inside nwa the inout. He never came back. Probably got lost and froze to death.

So my second year we decided to move. It was Gray’s decision, actually, but we were all on board. Bram, who’d arrived earlier in the summer, told us about some homesteads farther south, friendly places where we would find shelter. In August, Gray sent out scouts to chart routes and look for campsites. In September, we started relocation.

The Scavengers hit in Connecticut. I’d heard stories about them, but never concrete stuff: more whispers and myths, like the monster stories my mom had told me as a kid to make me behave.
Shhh. Be quiet or you’ll wake the dragon.

It was late and I was sleeping when Squirrel, who was scouting, gave the alarm: two shots fired into the darkness. But it was too late. Suddenly everyone was screaming. Blue—already big, beautiful, with the eyes of a grown-up and a pointed chin like mine—woke up bawling, terrified. She wouldn’t leave the tent. She was clinging to the sleeping bag, kicking me off, saying,
No, no, no
over and over again.

By the time I managed to get her up, get her into my arms and out of the tents, I thought the world was ending. I’d grabbed a knife, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I’d once skinned an animal and it had nearly made me puke.

I found out later that there were only four of them, but at the time it seemed like they were everywhere. That’s one of their tricks. Chaos. Confusion. There was fire—two tents went up just like that, like two match heads exploding—and there were shots and people screaming.

All I could think was
run
. I had to run. I had to get Blue away from there. But I couldn’t move. I felt terror like a cold weight inside me, rooting me in place, the same way it always had when I was a little girl—when my dad would come down the stairs,
stomp, stomp, stomp
, his anger like a blanket meant to suffocate us all. Watching from the corner while he kicked my mom in the ribs, in the face, unable to cry, unable to scream, even. For years I’d fantasized that the next time he touched me, or her, I’d stick a knife straight in through the ribs, all the way up to the handle. I’d thought about the blood bubbling from the wound and how good it would feel to know that he, like me, was made out of real stuff, bones and tissue, skin that could bruise.

But every time I was frozen, empty as a shell. Every time I did nothing but take it: red starburst explosions to the face, behind the eyes; pinches and slaps; hard shoves to the chest.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” Tack was shouting from the other side of the camp. I started running to him without thinking, without watching where I was going, still clotted up with panic, with Blue soaking my neck with snot and tears and my heart drilling out of my chest, and when the Scavenger came from the left I didn’t even see him until he was swinging a club at my head.

“Run,” I said. “Go on.” I pushed her. She was crying, and I pushed her. But she ran, as well as she could, on legs that were still too short for her body.

The Scavenger drove a foot between my ribs, exactly the spot where my dad had fractured them when I was twelve. The pain made everything go black for a second, and when I rolled over on my back, everything was different. The stars weren’t stars but a ceiling spotted with water stains. The dirt wasn’t dirt but a nubby carpet.

And the Scavenger wasn’t a Scavenger but Him. My dad.

Eyes small as cuts, fists as fat as leather belts,breath hot and wet in my face. His jaw, his smell, his sweat. He’d found me. He raised a fist and I knew it was starting all over again, that it would never stop, that he would never leave me alone and I would never escape.

That Blue would never be safe.

Everything went dark and silent.

I didn’t know I’d reached for the knife until it was deep between his ribs.

That’s all I’ve ever heard: silence. The times I’ve killed. The times I’ve had to kill. If there is a God, I guess he has nothing to say about it.

If there is a God, he must have gotten tired of watching a long time ago.

There is silence in Julian Fineman’s execution room, except for the occasional
click-click
of a camera, except for the drone of the priest’s voice.
But when Abraham saw that Isaac had become unclean, he asked in his heart for guidance . . .

Silence like whiteness: like things painted over and concealed, or left unsaid.

Silence except for the
squeak, squeak
of my sneakers on the linoleum floor. The doctor turns to look at me, annoyed. Confused. My voice, in that big, vast white room, sounds unfamiliar.

The first gunshot is very loud.

I’m remembering: all those years ago, sitting with Tack when he was newly named. The red-ember glow of the fire in the old woodstove, and Blue, breathing easier already, heavy in my arms. Sleep sounds from the other rooms, and somewhere above us, the hiss of the wind through the trees.

“You came back,” I said. “I didn’t think you would.”

“I wasn’t going to,” he admitted. He looked different, wearing clothes Grandpa had found for him in the storeroom—much younger, much skinnier. His eyes were huge dark hollows in his face. I thought he was beautiful.

I hugged Blue a little closer. She was still hot, still fussing in her sleep. But her breaths came even and slow, and there was no trapped rattle in her chest. For the first time, it struck me that I’d been lonely. Not just at the homestead, where everyone was too busy surviving to worry about making friends, where most of the Invalids were older or half-soft in the head or just liked to keep to themselves. Even before that. At home I’d never had friends either. I couldn’t afford to, couldn’t let them see what my house was like, didn’t want anyone paying attention or asking questions.

Alone. I’d been alone my whole life. “Why did you change your mind?” I said.

He smiled a little. “Because I knew you thought I’d bail.”

I stared at him. “You crossed over to the other side—you risked your life—just to prove a point?”

“Not to prove a point,” he said. “To prove you wrong.” He smiled, bigger this time. His hair smelled like smoke from the fire. “You seem like you might be worth it.”

Then he kissed me. He leaned over and just touched his lips to mine with Blue held between us like a secret, and I knew then that I would not be so alone anymore.

“How did you—?” Lena is breathless, white in the face. Shock, maybe. Her palms are cut up, and there’s blood on her jacket. “Where did you—?”

“Later,” I say. My cheek is stinging. Got a face full of glass when Lena decided to break through the observation deck, but it’s nothing a pair of tweezers can’t fix. I’m lucky the glass missed my eyes.

Julian, up close, looks different than he does in all the DFA literature. Younger, and kind of sad and overeager, like a puppy begging for attention—even a swift kick.

Luckily, he asks no questions, just falls in behind me, walking quickly, saying nothing. He must be use to obeying. If it wasn’t for Lena, if she hadn’t switched up the rules, the needle would be in his arm by now, and he’d be dead. It would have been better for us, and for the movement.

No point in thinking about that now. Lena took a stand, and so I took a stand with her.

That’s what you do for family. Anything.

We go out the emergency exit to the fire escape, which leads down into the little courtyard I scouted earlier. So far, so good. Lena’s breathing fast and hard behind me, but m clnd me, y breath is easy, even, and slow.

This is my favorite part of the story: the escape.

Tack is waiting with the van on Twenty-Fourth Street, just like he said he would be. I open the cargo door and shut Lena and Julian inside.

“You got ’em?” Tack asks when I climb into the passenger seat.

“Would I be here if I didn’t?” I answer.

He frowns. “You’re cut.”

I flip down the mirror and take a look: a few uneven cuts on my cheek and neck, beaded with blood. “Just a scratch,” I say, blotting the blood with the sleeve of my sweatshirt.

“Let’s roll, then,” Tack says, and sighs.

He guns the engine and pulls out into the street, gray and blurry with old rain. I keep my sleeve pressed to the side of my face to stanch the bleeding. We make it all the way to the West Side Highway before Tack speaks again.

“It’s a risk, taking him back with us,” he says in a low voice. “Julian Fineman. Shit. A big risk.”

“I’ll take responsibility.” I turn my face to the window. I can see the ghost-outlines of my reflection, feel the hum of cold air through the glass.

“She’s important to you, isn’t she? Lena, I mean.” Tack’s voice stays quiet.

“She’s important to the movement,” I answer, and see the ghost-girl speak too, her teeth flashing, superimposed over passing images of the city.

Tack doesn’t say anything for a second. Then I feel his hand on my knee. “I would have done it for you, too,” he says, even quieter. “If you’d been taken. I would have gone back. I would have risked it.”

I turn to look at him. “You already did come back for me,” I say. I remember that first kiss, and Blue’s warmth between us, and Tack’s lips, dry as bone, soft as shadow. I still can’t say her name, but I think he knows what I’m thinking. “You came back for us.”

Recently I’ve been having the fantasy more and more: the one where Tack and I run away, disappear under the wide-open sky into the forest with leaves like green hands, welcoming us. In my fantasy, the more we walk, the cleaner we get, like the woods are rubbing away the past few years, all the blood and the fighting and the scars—sloughing off the bad memories and the false starts, leaving us shiny and new, like dolls just taken out of the package.

And in this fantasy, my fantasy life, we find a stone cottage hidden deep in the forest, untouched, fitted with beds and rugs and plates and everything we need to liveg we neo live—like the owners just picked up and walked away, or like the house had been built for us and was just waiting all this time.