Stung (19 page)

“How is Jonah?” Lis asked before Mom could say a word. “Where is Jonah?”

Mom’s lips thinned and she studied the carpet. I leaned away from Lis and shivered—not because Jonah had gone to the doctor again; he’d been going on a weekly basis for the last two months—but because I was freezing on the outside while a fever burned hot inside of me, making my blood pulse through my body at an alarming rate
.

“What did the doctor say?” Lis asked, dropping my hair around my shoulders before climbing from the bed to stand beside Mom. I buried my hands in the quilt’s folds so Mom couldn’t see the veins bulging beneath my skin
.

“The doctor put Jonah in a straightjacket. That way he can’t keep pulling out the morphine drip.” Tears pooled in the corners of Mom’s eyes and trickled out. Lis put her arms around Mom and spoke quietly in her ear
.

Heat filled me. Sweat broke out on the bridge of my nose, and my blood vessels began aching with my pulse. I pushed my quilt off and swiped my hand over my forehead. “I don’t see why you still give him morphine. It doesn’t help anymore,” I blurted, glaring at Mom
.

Mom nodded and her bottom lip quivered. “I know. The doctor said there’s another alternative.” She sniffled and wiped her nose on the back of her hand, and for some reason that made me even hotter
.

I clenched and released my jaw, poked my tongue in the hole where I’d lost my last baby molar. “What alternative?” I asked, fanning my face with the corner of the quilt
.

“A medically induced coma. It might buy him some time while they try to find a cure.” Mom looked up, right into my eyes, and I felt like I might throw up. Her tears were gone, replaced with bright, eager hope
.

“No!” I shouted between clenched teeth. “You can’t do that to him!” My body started to tremble, my heart beating too fast, pumping too much
boiling blood through me. Sweat trickled down my temple and dripped from my chin
.

“He’s scheduled for the procedure tomorrow morning, so we’re taking you to the hospital tonight to say good-bye,” she said
.

Like I
could
say good-bye. Jonah had stopped talking a month ago. “Is Dad okay with all this? He’s not going to allow it, you know. He loves us too much,” I retorted. He always stood up to Mom when it came to really important things
.

Lis gasped. Mom put a hand up to her mouth and tried to stifle a sob. “Honey. Fiona. Your father’s dead, remember? Last month … Jonah …”

An image of my father flashed into my head, where he lay dead on the music room floor, his wheelchair overturned beside the piano. Jonah, my sweet, gentle brother, crouched at his side, weeping, muscles bulging. “I didn’t mean to,” he kept saying over and over. That was the last time he spoke
.

Blood surged through my body, faster than before, making my ears ring. “There has to be another option,” I whispered. “You can’t do this to Jonah! Lis! Talk some sense into her!” My breathing sped up and I pressed on my temples
.

“Fo, you’re going in, too. To the hospital.” I could barely hear her over the siren shrieking in my brain
.

Slowly I climbed from the bed and took a step toward Mom and Lis. Pushing harder on my temples, I squeezed my eyes shut. “For a morphine pump?” I asked
.

Mom didn’t answer. I opened my eyes and took a step closer. Fresh tears shimmered in her eyes, and one eye was swollen and framed in black. I blinked and looked at my knuckles, black and blue and still swollen. I had put that bruise on her earlier that day, before Lis came over, before Mom went to the doctor’s office. How had I forgotten?

“No,” Mom said. “We’re not trying morphine on you, honey. We are having the doctor induce comas in both of you.”

At Mom’s words, tears filled Lis’s eyes and gushed out. Seeing my sister so sad made me want to scream. Made my skin feel too tight. Made me want to tear at my skin until it came off
.

Instead, I jumped on Mom and tried to claw her eyes out
.

I chuck the magazine across the room and curl up onto my side, letting tears splatter over my nose and onto the sleeping bag. My father is dead. He didn’t die when the wall was built. He has been dead for four years. How could I forget that? Forget the fact that Jonah flew into a violent rage and killed him? I should have remembered. And my poor mother. I punched her in the face. Attacked her. And now she’s most likely dead and I’ll never get to apologize. I wrap my arms around my head and weep, soaking the sleeping bag with tears. Somehow I fall asleep.

Bowen lives in my dreams, in a world of green and gold, budding with new life. My mom is there, too, lazing beneath the shadow of a tree, netting covering her face, with Lis, my sister, at her side, mixing honey into porcelain teacups for the three of them. Lis sees me and smiles, swinging her long blond hair off her shoulder and motioning me to join them. Only, I can’t move. My hand, my tattoo, is stuck to the side of a towering wall, and I can’t pull it free.

Bowen waves me over, mouths the words,
Come on, it’s time to go
. I pull harder but am stuck fast. His face falls, as if he thinks I don’t want to come, don’t want to run with him. He stands, shakes his head in disappointment, and walks off until he
disappears against the horizon. Mom and Lis pack up the tea party and wave good-bye, blowing me kisses and leaving me in the looming shadow of the wall.

I wake sweating, still lying atop a sleeping bag in a deserted hotel, trapped in a blazing world. Sweat trickles down my neck and pools in my collarbone. And I am alone.

Night comes too slowly, a darkness that brings fear. It has been nineteen hours since Bowen left, and every hour that passes without his return, I imagine worse things happening to him. And worse things happening to me if he never comes back.

I hold the gun and stare at blackness, listening to the sound of air moving in and out of my lungs and the pulse beating faintly in my ears. My eyelids grow heavy, but my mind refuses to relax enough to sleep—anxiety claws at my nerves and eats at my belly.

The hours drag by. I find myself looking at Bowen’s watch every half hour. And then every twenty minutes. And then every ten. By the time it is six in the morning, I look at his watch every five minutes, and every time I check, every five minutes that passes, it seems more impossible that he is coming back. I want to scream with frustration.

I lean against the headboard and force my breathing to slow. The anxiety has found its way into my muscles, my brain, even my lungs. But even slowed breathing does nothing to soften anxiety’s fierce grip. I look away from the minuscule glow outlining the window. Dawn means Bowen isn’t coming back. If I refuse to see the dawn, maybe it won’t come.

I sit up tall and hold my breath. The air has shifted, a bare
touch of breeze that cools my damp face. The hotel door eases open, slowly swinging wider. Hope and fear battle inside me, mingling with the ever-present panic. I lift the rifle to my shoulder and rest my finger on the trigger, hoping to hear Bowen’s reassuring voice.

A shadow slips into the room, a gaunt wisp of a person, accompanied by the smell of the tunnels. All my hope fades with that smell.

“Arrin? Er—Arris,” I whisper.

“Hurry! And it’s Arrin. I only pretend to be a boy when it suits me,” she whispers, and steps back out the open door.

“Wait! I can’t go. If Bowen comes back and I’m not here …”

“He won’t be coming. Come here and I’ll show you why.”

With rifle in hand, I climb from the bed and follow. The hall is black after the small amount of light from the hotel room. The smell of Arrin is what I follow. When she’s halfway down the hall, she opens a door and the light of dawn stretches into the hallway. Heart pounding, I follow her into another hotel room.

She goes past the bed and straight to the broken window, pointing. I follow her and look. From up here I can see the whole city. It looks perfect, as if nothing has changed. Until I notice the complete lack of human life, complete lack of movement and sound.

A cool breeze flits through the broken window, carrying with it the scent of soil and grass. I fill my lungs with the mineral-rich fragrance and sigh the air back out. Surely I must be dreaming.
But then I gag on the smell of Arrin and wonder if I imagined the good smell.

The breeze stirs the air, and I smell green things once more.

“What is that smell?” I whisper, leaning toward the window. Arrin points again. We are close to the wall, maybe two blocks away. And from fifteen floors up, I can see what is on the other side of the wall. My eyes grow wide, and a yearning fills my chest, like my heart is trying to claw its way free.

Patchwork fields of green and gold fill the land inside the wall, where City Park Golf Course and the zoo used to be. Houses and buildings frame the green-and-gold fields. Men and women are walking toward the fields, hoes and shovels over their shoulders, baskets on their arms.

Something flickers inside my brain. A familiarity I can’t explain, the feeling that I’ve been in there, seen the skyline framed by stars. A fleeting image of blue eyes and hushed words fills my mind.

“Now, look down there,” Arrin whispers, shattering my thoughts. She puts a dirt-caked finger to her lips, warning me to be silent. I peer over the side of the window frame and stare down at the shadowed streets and rooftops below. For several minutes I stay there, waiting for something to happen. When nothing does, I look at Arrin with raised eyebrows.

“Look harder,” she says softly, her eyes never leaving the street. I look again, following her gaze. And then I see it. Or them. And I forget to breathe.

They are hiding, squeezed into doorways, lurking in broken
windows, crouched on rooftops. And they are men, not beasts, with four thick scars in their forearms—the men Bowen and I saw two nights ago. Some of them hold guns. Knives and baseball bats are in the hands of others. They are absolutely still, every single one of them looking in the same direction. I follow their gaze and stand tall.

Huddled in a shallow doorway is Bowen.

Bowen has his back pressed against another man’s—Tommy’s. Bowen holds a grenade in one hand; the other hand pinches the pin. Tommy aims his rifle toward the street.

Arrin claws at my arm and forces me back down. “They’ll see you,” she warns, her eyes flashing.

“Then let them see me!” I say, my voice too loud. “Bowen is—” I am thrown backward, a hot, grimy hand clasped against my mouth, bony legs straddling my hips. Metal presses against my neck—Arrin’s knife.

“Shut up or I will kill you. I didn’t bring you here so you could get me caught!”

Anger warms my blood, makes my muscles taut. I yank Arrin’s hand from my mouth and knock her other hand away from my throat, not caring if her knife cuts me. “Then leave,” I
say, glaring into her blue eyes. “I have to help Bowen or they’ll kill him. And I don’t
care
if I die trying.” Because without Bowen, life will hold nothing for me.

“They
won’t
kill you, Fo.” Arrin’s knife hand moves lightning fast, aiming for my neck again, but I grab it and hold it suspended in the air. Arrin raises one thick eyebrow. “They won’t kill you,” she says again, trembling with the effort to get her hand free from mine. “You’ll only wish they did.”

Something in her eyes speaks louder than words, making me more scared about my future than I have ever been before. A future as a slave, without Bowen.

“They never kill women. The women end up killing themselves, if they are lucky enough to find a weapon,” Arrin says, a smug smile tugging at one side of her mouth, as if she knows she’s won.

“All right. I’ll be quiet,” I whisper. “Just get off me.”

She’s off in a flash, shaking out her wrists as if I’ve hurt her. I swallow and hug the rifle to me, then stand. Without making a sound, I peer over the side of the window. I rest the rifle on my shoulder and take aim at the man closest to Bowen, tightening my finger on the trigger.

The rifle is jerked aside, and Arrin shoves her face in front of mine. “Are you bloody crazy? If you shoot one of them, they’ll all come for us! I brought you up here so you’d know I’m not lying!”

“Lying about what?” I whisper.

“If you want to survive, you have to leave with me right now. I know a way inside the wall through the tunnels.
I’ll
take you to the lab and collect the reward.”

I cannot leave. Not when Bowen’s down there facing almostcertain death.

“It’s what Bowen would want, because there’s no way they’re going to let him walk away alive,” she says, as if she can read my mind.

My hands start to tremble, so I hug the rifle to my chest. Can I leave him there and save myself? It
is
what he would want, and I know it. Just thinking it makes me feel as if I’ve been torn in two. “No. I have to help Bowen.”

“You can’t. He and Tommy have been sitting there all night, hoping the raiders would forget about them. We’ve got to run before it’s too late. I’ll show you where—”

“They’ve been there all night?” I gasp.

Arrin nods. “Why do you think it took me so long to get to you? I had to sneak like I’ve never snuck before.”

Completely unconcerned for my own safety, I stand tall, shove Arrin aside, and put the rifle back on my shoulder, balancing my elbow on the windowsill for a steadier shot. Like a beacon of hope, the sun crests the horizon and shines on me, gleaming against the gun. Bowen’s head comes up, his face turned toward mine, toward the flash of sunlight on metal. He waves at me to get down, but I’ve already decided what needs to be done.

I point the rifle at a rooftop half a block away, at the man closest to me. He’s holding a gun, pointing it toward Bowen’s hiding place. I take a deep breath and close my eyes, knowing this is the most important shot I will ever take in my life. And probably the last. My father’s voice speaks in my head, teaching me how to aim a gun all over again.
It’s just like learning to play the piano—all
in the fingers
. As the air leaves my lungs, I open my eyes, brace for the recoil, and slowly squeeze the trigger. The sound of gunfire echoes off sunlit buildings.