The Invasion of the Tearling

by Erika Johansen

  Arnie looked uncomfortable too. “I’m off duty now, man. I don’t want to talk about that shit.”

  “Yeah, I suppose not,” Greg replied grudgingly. “So what did he say?”

  “He wasn’t high up or anything, but he gave us a lot.” Arnie’s face became animated again. “The leader of the Blue Horizon is some guy who calls himself Tear. A Brit, if you can believe it.”

  “I do believe it. The UK and their fucking socialist experiment.”

  “Well, this Tear is apparently the big money. The separatists think he’s some kind of god. Blue Horizon sprang up out of the old Occupy movements, but you know they didn’t know what they were doing. This Tear, though, he’s a trained guerrilla. That’s why they’ve been such a pain in the ass the last few years.” Arnie lowered his voice, and Lily thumbed the volume control on the screen. “They’re holed up in an abandoned warehouse down on Conley Terminal.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Port of Boston. I’ve spent all day looking at maps. That warehouse has been condemned for at least ten years, but Frewell’s boys took all the money Boston was supposed to use for a new container facility and put it into some God crap or another, so all the containers have just been standing there. Goodin said they’re using the warehouse as a headquarters. We’re going in at dawn.”

  Lily stared at the screen, frozen.

  “They’ve put Langer in charge of the whole thing; it’s his baby now, and he wants prisoners. We have to surround the Terminal on land and water, which is no easy trick . . . lots of boats and lots of men. My division is supposed to provide a secondary perimeter tomorrow morning.” Arnie sighed and stubbed out the remains of his cigar. “So no booze.”

  “Want to play some poker? I’ve got a game downtown.”

  “Can’t, really. I have to be in Boston in two hours. My copter’s waiting down at the pad.”

  Greg nodded, though his lip had pushed out in that little pout that Lily had come to know so well lately. “Fine. I’ll walk you out.”

  Lily shut off the screen and hurried back into the dining room, where she set the washer to begin clearing plates. When Greg and Arnie’s voices had disappeared out the front door, she dug her phone from her purse and called Jonathan, but he didn’t pick up; there was only his dry, deep voice, a generic greeting. Lily couldn’t leave him a real message; her calls were monitored. Trying to keep the panic from her voice, she demanded that he call her back immediately. But she couldn’t escape the feeling that wherever Jonathan was, he wouldn’t get back to her in time. She could see it now: the darkened warehouse, Dorian inside with William Tear. Dorian had said that she wasn’t going back into custody, not ever again. The Boston waterfront. The Blue Horizon. Lily closed her eyes and saw the tiny group of wooden houses beside the blue river, bathed in sun.

  I have to do something.

  And what can you do, Lil? Maddy asked, her voice jeering. You’ve never had the courage to do anything in your entire life.

  I did, Lily insisted. When Dorian fell into the backyard, I did.

  But deep down, she knew that Maddy was right. Dorian had been a low-risk decision, almost a game, insulated in the relatively safe environment of the nursery. What Lily was contemplating now was something else entirely. She formulated a plan, rejected it, formulated another, rejected that, formulated a third and examined it, turning it over for flaws. It was a stupid plan, no doubt. It would probably get her arrested, maybe even killed. But she had to do something. If the better world was real, it was also unutterably fragile, and without Tear, there would be nothing.

  “Arnie’s gone.”

  Lily focused on the window again and found Greg reflected behind her, though she could not read his expression in the glass. She said nothing, looking ahead now, toward Boston. There was no place for Greg in that journey. He would only get in her way.

  “Are you excited, Lil?”

  “About what?”

  “About Monday.”

  Lily’s hand clenched on the handle of a pot, and for a moment she very nearly turned and flung the pot at his head. But her mind cautioned patience. Her aim might not be good enough. Greg had six inches and nearly a hundred pounds on her. She would have one shot only, and she could not afford to miss. She cast along the counter, and her gaze fixed on a large, heavy picture frame, nearly a foot tall, that stood on the windowsill. Photos of their wedding day flashed endlessly over the screen in sparkling pixels; Lily saw herself, only twenty-two years old, covered in yards of white satin, getting ready to cut an enormous tiered cake. Even though her hair was beginning to come down from its elaborate coiffure and Greg’s wretched father stood beside her, she was laughing.

  God, what happened?

  Greg took a few steps forward, so close now that Lily could feel his breath on the back of her neck. She reached out to touch the picture frame, grasping its edge in her good hand.

  “Lil?”

  If he tries to fuck me now, she thought, I will go insane. It will be very easy; I’ll just float off, and then none of this will matter, not William Tear or the Blue Horizon or a warehouse down on the Boston port. None of it.

  “Lil? Are you excited?”

  His hand settled on her shoulder, and Lily whipped around, bringing the frame with her, swinging it sidearm as she would a tennis racket at the club. The frame crunched into the side of Greg’s head, tiny plastic shards flying everywhere, peppering Lily’s hand and arm, and Greg fell sideways, banging his head on the marble counter on the way down, a deep thunk. Lily raised the frame again, ready, but Greg was down for the count, sprawled on his side on the kitchen floor. After a moment, blood began to trickle down his face from his scalp, tiny red dots dripping onto the white tile.

  “Well, that’s done,” Lily whispered, unsure whom she was talking to. She thought about checking Greg’s pulse, but couldn’t bring herself to touch him. Moving slowly, as if in a dream, she went upstairs to their bedroom. She pulled out her oldest jeans, the ones she never wore when Greg was around, and a faded black T-shirt. These clothes were still nicer than anything poor people would wear outside the wall, but they were better than nothing and might offer some camouflage. She covered them with a beaten leather jacket she’d had since she was fifteen, a remnant of better times that Lily refused to give away. The Mercedes was an automatic; after a moment’s thought, Lily removed her splints and left them on the dresser. She tapped at the wallscreen, examining maps of the Port of Boston while she dressed. Conley Terminal was a big container facility down near Castle Island, tucked into one of the thousand inlets that seemed to make up the Massachusetts coastline. Public roads, it would be have to be, Highway 84 to the Mass Turnpike. The private roads would be full of Security checkpoints, particularly at night, and when they scanned her chip and found out that she had left her husband behind, it would raise more questions. Lily would have a better chance on public roads . . . if she even managed to get outside the New Canaan wall at all.

  After a bit more searching, she found that condemned property was the province of the Department of the Interior. There were two condemned buildings located on Conley Terminal; only one looked like a warehouse, but Lily mapped each location carefully and sent the maps on to the Mercedes. Belatedly, she realized that these searches were probably going to trip an alarm somewhere at Security, and she had a quick moment of panic before she realized how small a problem that really was, with her husband lying bleeding on the kitchen floor. Even if Greg wasn’t dead, women had been executed for less. Lily went downstairs and grabbed the small codekey with the Mercedes emblem off the hook on the wall. The Mercedes was their third car, the fancy one for emergencies or important visitors. When she held the key up to the light, she found that her hands were shaking. Her driver’s license was still valid, but she hadn’t driven a car since she was eighteen.

  “Like riding a bike,” she whispered. “Just like riding a bike, that’s all.”

  She spared a final glance at Greg, who still lay sprawled in t
he same position on the kitchen floor. Blood had begun to pool beneath his right ear now, but he was still breathing, and for a moment Lily wondered at her own coldness, until she isolated its source: it didn’t really matter whether Greg lived or died, or whether she did herself, only that she got to Boston. The better world, the small village beside the river, these were the things which mattered, and they burned inside Lily’s head, searing through the fear, lifting her up.

  She turned and headed down the hallway toward the garage.

  No one had driven the Mercedes in a while, but it didn’t seem any worse for disuse. Jonathan must have been taking care of it; he liked tinkering with cars, kept the BMW and Lexus in good working order. The Mercedes had a full tank, and its headlights cut easily through the night as Lily turned off Willow Avenue and onto the checkpoint road. Ahead of her the wall loomed: twenty feet of solid steel polymer, topped with laser edging, blocking off the horizon. Something inside Lily seemed to freeze at the sight, and a low, panicked voice began to babble inside her . . . the voice of her marriage, Lily realized now, its tone craven and helpless.

  You’ll never make it through, not in a million years, and when they find Greg—

  “Shut up,” Lily whispered. Her voice shook in the darkness of the car.

  The checkpoint appeared out of the fog: a fifteen-foot break in the wall, lit by bright fluorescent lamps. A small guardhouse, also walled in steel, stood off to the left, and as Lily approached, two guards in Security uniforms emerged. Each of them carried a gun, the small laser pistols that Security seemed to favor these days. Greg had a gun, Lily suddenly remembered, a tiny thing that he kept in his study. She could have grabbed it, and this made her wonder what else she had forgotten. But it was too late.

  “Evening, ma’am,” the first guard said as she lowered the window. He squinted at her for a moment, then smiled wide. “It’s Mrs. Mayhew, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, John. How are you tonight?”

  “Fine, ma’am. Where you heading?”

  “Into the city to see friends.”

  “All by yourself at this hour? Where’s that black bodyguard of yours?”

  “He had to run an errand for my husband.”

  “Just a moment.” He walked around the hood and disappeared back into the guardhouse. The other guard remained on the right side of the hood, a dark silhouette against the fluorescent lamps. Lily kept a pleasant smile on her face, but her fingers had clamped on the steering wheel. The guard had gone to call Greg, and now her mind produced a clear picture: the kitchen, Greg lying there motionless, but his phone rang on and on. The muscles in her thighs were shaking. Outside the bright circle of fluorescence that bathed the car, everything was pitch-black.

  “Ma’am?”

  Lily jumped; the guard had silently reappeared at the other window.

  “We’re not getting any reply from your husband, ma’am.”

  “He’s ill,” she replied. “That’s why he’s not coming with me.”

  The guard consulted a tiny handheld, and Lily knew that he was scrolling through the details of her life. Greg’s position, the fact that they were not under surveillance, would weigh in Lily’s favor. Lily had never been in trouble, and that would help too. Maddy would be in there, certainly, but so would the information that Lily had been instrumental in turning Maddy in.

  “Does your husband always let you go into the city at night by yourself?”

  “No. This is the first time.”

  The guard stood staring down at her, and Lily had the disturbing certainty that his eyes were crawling, even though her breasts were encased in the thick leather jacket. But she kept the smile plastered on, and after a moment the guard raised something black and gleaming. For one panicked moment, Lily thought it was a gun, but then she saw that it was only a scanner. She offered her shoulder and waited for the scan to register with a soft beep. The guard waved Lily forward, and she depressed the gas pedal. Too hard, for the Mercedes leapt forward with a growl. She stomped on the brake, gave an apologetic smile out the open window. “I haven’t driven in a while.”

  “Well, be careful, ma’am. Stay off the public roads. And don’t open your door for any strangers.”

  “I won’t. Have a good night.”

  Lily pressed the gas again, gently this time, and rolled the car forward, out of the bright circle of light.

  When Lily was in the car, Jonathan used the private highway. But there had been a few times when the highway was down, blocked by debris dragged onto the roadway or sabotaged by explosives. Even Security couldn’t repair a badly damaged highway in less than a week, and at such times Jonathan always turned onto a small back road a few miles outside the wall, a dirt track that headed north for a few minutes through the woods before it joined with Highway 84. No matter how hard Security worked to keep the public off the private roadways, they always found a way through, cutting new paths through the woods and digging tunnels beneath fences. This idea, which would have alarmed Lily a few weeks ago, now seemed oddly comforting. Jonathan’s back road might have allowed William Tear to get close to New Canaan before slipping over the wall, might have allowed Dorian to evade Security as she fled from the base. It took Lily several U-turns before she spotted the small break in the undergrowth. When she guided the car through, she could hear the scrape of brambles along the paint.

  “The better world,” she whispered as she guided the Mercedes forward through the woods, feeling the sharp thump of rocks beneath the tires. Trees surrounded the car, ghostly white pillars in the glare of the headlights. “It’s out there, so close we can almost touch it.”

  She kept an eye on the side windows and rearview mirror; there were probably some people living out here somewhere, though they’d need some serious weaponry to break into this car, which had steel-reinforced windows and was built like a tank. But she saw no one, and after twenty minutes of carefully crawling along, she emerged onto the public highway. Highway 84 was much wider than the private roads, its northern span stretching six lanes across, and without the ten-foot walls that bordered most private freeways it felt very wide, almost limitless in its emptiness, remnant of a bygone era when everyone could afford cars and gas. Signs on Lily’s right advertised the speed limit as sixty-five, but Security never bothered to police the public highways anyway, and sixty-five seemed ridiculously slow, almost like standing still. Lily sped up, then sped up further, easing the car over eighty-five and up toward ninety, finding a pure pleasure in going fast, in watching the miles fly by.

  Several times she saw the remains of old barricades on the highway shoulder: piles of trash, blown tires and tree branches that had simply been cleared to one side and left for wind and time to disperse. She couldn’t fathom the purpose of such barricades, and this, more than anything else, drove home to Lily how little she knew about life outside the wall. Even as a child, she had always used the private roadways, always had temperate weather, never needed to worry about starving.

  Occasionally she saw fires lining the sides of the road, large bonfires surrounded by the silhouettes of many people. The poor, moving out of the cities and into the forests . . . safer, most likely, but also harder to survive. Lily couldn’t slow down to take a closer look; armored or not, a Mercedes rolling at street speed was an open invitation. But she couldn’t help staring at them in the rearview mirror, all of those human shadows standing around the flames. She couldn’t help imagining the lives they led.

  “The better world,” she whispered, repeating it every time another mile ticked off the odometer and into the night at her back. Green exit signs flew by, some of them so worn that Lily could barely read the white letters announcing their towns. Vernon, Tolland, Willington. Some of these were undoubtedly ghost towns, while others were alive but given over to lawlessness. Lily dimly remembered hearing Willington mentioned on a news site a few months ago, something about a cult. But she couldn’t remember, and then Willington was behind her. She was halfway to Boston now, only seventy-five
miles to go.

  Her phone beeped, and Lily gave a small croak of fright, certain that Greg had woken up, that he had gotten hold of a phone. She could barely bring herself to look at the screen, but when she did, she saw the word Jonathan shining against the bright blue background.

  “Answer . . . Jonathan?”

  “Where are— Mrs. M.?” His voice crackled with static, dropped out. But of course, cell service would be wretched outside the walls. People like Lily weren’t even supposed to be here. With the advent of panic buttons in cars, no one even used a phone for emergencies anymore.

  “I’m on my way to Boston.”

  “What’s in Boston?” She might have been imagining it, but even under the static, Lily sensed a sudden, guarded quality about Jonathan’s voice.

  “The warehouse! The port! They’re in trouble, Jonathan. Mark had Arnie Welch over for dinner—”

  “Mrs. M.? Can— hear you. Don’t—” Now the static cut in for a long moment, “Boston!”

  “Jonathan?”

  The call dropped.

  Lily redialed, but she knew already that it was an empty gesture. She didn’t even get Jonathan’s voicemail this time, only a dead and empty silence. Peering down at her phone, she saw that she had no service. Too late, she realized that the brief call had surely been recorded by Security.

  “Fuck,” she muttered. Jonathan had told her not to go to Boston, she was sure of it. But Jonathan didn’t know what she did, and inertia had taken over now. She was already in trouble. There was no turning back.

  At Sturbridge, she switched over to the Massachusetts Turnpike. For the first fifteen miles of the Pike there were no freeway lights at all, not even the old arc-sodiums; the highway was completely dark except for the faint glow of moonlight, and Lily was forced to slow down to forty-five, which felt like crawling after the pure, open speed of 84. She navigated on intuition rather than sight, squinting for the outline of things ahead, knowing that she should have turned back long ago. She breathed a sigh of relief as she passed Auburn and spotted the thin orange glow of lights in the distance.