by Linda Marr
She reached in her purse and pulled out a five dollar bill. “But here. For your trouble,” she said.
I would have liked not to take it; it felt more like a bribe for me to go away than a reward of any kind. But I was hungry, and I’d already eaten what I’d taken from the farmhouse.
“Thank you.”
I shoved the money into my jeans.
Maybe getting something to eat was the next step. I had no idea where I was going, and I felt fuzzy and tired. As I pushed my way back into the throng though, I heard a voice.
“Over here.”
I glanced around. No one seemed to be paying any attention to me, so I walked on. I was looking for some place to buy food, but the steady chaos of the street was daunting. And finding food was just one problem. The bigger one lay ahead. I had to figure out a way to get to the old city and find Jeremiah Bell.
“Hey, donor!” The voice was louder now. “I said - over here.”
I froze.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Donor.”
I spun toward the voice. My stomach dropped. Half-hidden in the shadows of a doorway, was the same tall boy who’d helped the old woman. What could he possibly know? I tried to reassure myself. I cleared my throat and trying to sound as intimidating as possible, I growled, “What’d you call me?”
He stepped closer, towering over me. “You know what you are.”
I knew what happened to donors in this society; they were killed. I needed to get the guy to shut up, and fast. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said coldly.
“When you were trying to reach the old lady, your shirt rode up.”
I looked down. He was right; my tee shirt was hanging loose, no longer tucked into my jeans. I quickly pushed it back beneath my belt. I was panicked, who else had seen?
I swallowed hard. “So?”
“No belly button. There’s a slight tip-off.”
I studied him. He was older than I would have thought, close to my age. His face was thin and his expression wary, but his amber eyes were intensely bright. He gazed at me with those hypnotic eyes like he was trying to see inside me and figure me out. I wasn’t about to let him.
“Donors just can’t help themselves,” he said, “that’s the other sign. Always trying to do the ‘right’ thing.”
“So, wasn’t that what you were doing?”
“It was practical. Someone gets trampled, the soldiers come, and everybody gets questioned. Nobody wants that. Especially you, Sparkles.”
“Sparkles?” Who was this guy? Part of me was scared. He knew my darkest secret and yet I didn’t get the feeling he was going to use it against me. I hoped I was right.
“Yeah. Sparkles. Your hair. It catches what sun still gets through these days.”
“Nice line,” I laughed in spite of myself.
He shrugged. There were circles under his sharp eyes, “I’m Jax.”
He had a different kind of confidence from Kavan’s. There was nothing easy-going about him. He was edgy all over, coiled tight. He reminded me of danger.
He was wearing black jeans and a black tee shirt. How could he possibly know about me? I should get away from him, but yet I had to ask.
“How do you know about -” I wanted to say the word donor, but of course I couldn’t. I’d almost forgotten what Jeff had done to me. That horrible violation. Which had started the chain of events that brought me here.
“You’ve had the shot.” He moved closer, and smiled.
I wanted even more to get away from him, and yet somehow I couldn’t.
“How do you know?” I swallowed hard.
“I hang with Jeremiah Bell.”
I almost laughed. Was it going to be this easy to find him?
“Really,” I said. “You?” I was wary of Jax, this was almost too good to be true.
“Yeah. I deliver stuff for him. Bring him a fresh donor or two to join the cause.”
“What does he want with donors?” Was this a trap?
Jax shrugged, “Guess he feels like you’re family. Another vat baby.”
And now he smiled, which made his face lose some of that edge. Whether or not I could really trust him, I had to take a chance. “Vat baby, is that what you call us?”
“Not to Bell’s face, that’s for sure. So you are coming or not?”
“Okay, then, take me to him.”
Jax eyed me head to toe. “That old lady. She give you any money?”
Maybe that’s what his game was. “You want money to take me there?”
“No, I want lunch, and I bet she gave you something.”
“I have a few bucks,” I said.
“Few bucks, few choices.”
He gestured for me to follow. I hesitated.
“Let’s go Sparkles.”
I trailed him down the sidewalk. What did I really have to lose?
He shoved his way through the crowd. Suddenly, he stiffened. He was looking ahead of us, and I saw a group of soldiers come into view.
Jax grabbed my arm and yanked me over to look at a menu in a diner window.
“Keep a low profile around those guys,” he said.
I saw the people on the street crowd together and push away from the soldiers. No wonder the old woman was nearly trampled. All around us I could see people shove their way closer to the buildings or cross the street to give the soldiers plenty of room. The air almost changed around us, became colder. It was fear, you could smell it. I didn’t know anything about the soldiers, but once again I was afraid too.
We stood there staring into the cafe. I could feel Jax pressed against me, taut, tight, as if he were ready to fight at a moment’s notice. I forced myself not to look at whatever was happening around us. There was a menu posted in the window, I focused on reading it. The prices were astronomical, even a grilled cheese was forty dollars. What could five dollars possibly buy?
Finally the soldiers rounded the corner, and Jax pulled me down the street. “Only government brown-nosers can afford that place.” He led me to a run down newspaper stand. The guy behind the counter brushed his greasy hair off his face and nodded.
“Hey Tony,” Jax said.
“How much is it you got today?” Tony grunted.
“Show him,” Jax told me.
I pulled out the bill, and the guy whisked it out of my hand and into his pocket. I saw he had a gun holstered beneath his jacket. Was everyone here armed? Maybe they had to be. He reached into something that looked like a trash can and pulled out two packaged sandwiches, and thrust them into my hands.
The bread felt like cardboard. The filling looked like something that was maybe once peanut butter and jelly but was now only ooze. I wasn’t sure I was quite hungry enough to eat it.
As soon as we left the stand, Jax tore into his sandwich and wolfed it down. I unwrapped mine and took a bite. It was just as bad as I thought.
Behind us, there was a low crackling sound, like lightening somewhere underground.
I spun around.
The traffic lights flashed red then green. The gridlock of cars on the streets lurched forward. Brightly colored illuminated signs snapped on. On the sides of the skyscrapers not broken by bombs, enormous neon billboards, three, four, five stories tall flashed ads.
And then, overhead there was a low rumble. The monorail lurched forward. Another moment, and then it streaked away, fast.
“Kind of sad, isn’t it?” Jax said.
“What?”
“All those shiny trains and nobody wants to be caught dead getting stuck up there. Sometimes the power’s off for days.”
It was sad. But entirely reasonable.
Then there was a horrible grinding sound coming from a pile of trash right next to me. Jax grabbed me by the arm and dragged me away just in time. The enormous pile began to move as if it was being devoured somehow.
After a moment, I could see the sides of a mammoth black trash can. It was so overflowing with trash it had been invisible. But as I watc
hed, the metal sides opened like a Venus fly trap, sucking in the garbage, until the corner was clear.
“You would’ve been trash too,” Jax said, as I shook my arm free.
“Where does it all go?” I asked.
Up and down the street more cans were literally taking big bites of garbage and swallowing them up.
“All the junk’s shot through tunnels to underground dumps.”
“They put garbage in the ground?”
Jax nodded. “There’s no more room up here. It’s like the earth is a burial ground for crap these days.”
We walked away from the main street, things were a little quieter. Here the high-rises gave way to smaller buildings – store fronts, brownstone townhouses, and apartments with small courtyards in front.
Only some were missing altogether, craters where bombs or fragments of bombs had wiped the buildings away. And probably the people inside them, I shuddered.
Of the buildings still standing, most had blown out or boarded up windows, and the brick was crumbling, you could see the exposed steel beams behind the walls. People still lived there, clothes flapped on a laundry line, music blared through those gap toothed windows.
One little girl, maybe around my brother’s age, was sitting on the cracked stoop of a building whose top floors had been blown off. Her eyes were red, vacant. Other children were playing some kind of game on the steps around her. She didn’t notice.
Jax veered closer to her for a moment, and patted her hair. “Hang in there kid,” he said.
Maybe I was underestimating this guy.
The girl barely looked at him, but she nodded.
Jax plowed ahead, I couldn’t risk losing him. I’d had the same feeling when Kavan and I were dream walking. I didn’t want to be out here on my own either.
There were crowds here too, but they were different from the people in their business suits swarming around the office towers, trying to escape the soldiers. Here they carried bags of groceries, or waited in line to get in one shabby looking shop or another. Many wore ragged clothes, and they looked dirty, unkempt.
In a vacant field, a small city of tents had sprung up. And maybe they were the lucky ones. There were others just sprawled out on the sidewalk, their heads cushioned on plastic bags that seemed to hold all they had in the world.
I hurried to keep up with Jax, moving through the rubble.
“How did you first meet Jeremiah Bell,” I asked him.
“It was right around here. I saw this crowd gathered and heard some guy ranting. I elbowed my way in to see what was going on. And there he was, sitting in his wheelchair shouting about freedom and government and secrets. At first I thought who cares. Not anything that could help me. But I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Nobody could. There’s just something about him. What he was talking about was donors.”
“He used that – word?” I asked, surprised.
“No. Of course not. You can’t, right?”
I shook my head. “So how’d you find out what he was talking about?”
“That came later. At the time, I just liked listening to him talk about liberty and humanity, at last some guy who actually cared about something in this toilet,” he smacked his hand against the side of a building. The mortar crumbled against his fist. “So after that first day, whenever I heard he was talking on some corner I’d stop by.”
I heard the roar before the ground shook.
Jax grabbed me and we fell. For a moment, feeling him lying next to me, I thought of Kavan, and lying next to him in the blankets on his floor. But only for a second.
A flash of light, intense heat, a deafening crash. A bomb exploded behind us. We crouched against a brick wall as the sidewalk shook and a plume of black smoke forced its way over the tops of buildings we’d passed just minutes before.
I was shaking. My ears rang. I could feel ripples of heat, and through the ringing, I heard walls still shuddering around us.
After the initial blast was over, the smoke spread across the sky. I took a deep breath to calm myself, and the acrid smoke seared my lungs. I pressed my hands together to stop them from shaking. Finally my heart slowed.
There was a crackling sound, and once again, the power went off. How often did this happen? It was silent now, there was no more music blaring from windows, just the sound of children crying.
Jax stood up. “It should be all clear for a little while.”
I couldn’t imagine how it must be to live with the fear of being bombed, day in and day out. For a moment, I wished I was back at the farmhouse, safe, far away from this mess. But I reminded myself of why I’d come. I had my family to rescue.
All the same, I was still feeling shaky as I followed Jax. But he picked up his story about Jeremiah Bell as if nothing special had happened.
“Whenever Bell finished speaking, his helpers led him to his van, and drove away fast so the law couldn’t follow. But one day I was hanging out and I saw this cop putting something underneath the bumper of the van.”
“What was it?”
“Some kind of listening device. I told one of Bell’s guys. Bell was so grateful I’d caught it, he asked me to join his group. I’ve been working for him ever since. It’s hard not to admire the guy.”
Jax led me into what looked like an abandoned grocery store. What now? We crossed the back of the place to a set of dank stairs, and descended into some kind of cellar. The floors and walls were crumbling and the ceiling had been reinforced with a few beams of rotten looking wood. I slowed down. Now I was really apprehensive again.
“Where are we going?” My mouth was dry.
“To Bell’s place.”
My heart began to pound. Were we that close?
There was a hole in the wall. Jax crouched down and squeezed himself halfway into it.
“It gets better inside,” he said.
Reluctantly, I followed him in, what choice did I have? The tight space smelled of mold and decay. But it did get better. Or at least larger. After I made it through the hole I was able to stand up and look around.
We were in an underground tunnel that was surprisingly big, maybe five feet wide and tall enough for a man to walk upright, barely.
Jax pulled a flashlight from his pocket. The walls and ceilings were reinforced with more planks of wood that ran off into the darkness.
“It’s this way,” he said.
As we walked deeper into the tunnel, we stepped over mounds of dirt that looked like they had trickled down from above. I wondered how long it would be before at least part of this tunnel collapsed around us. Jax used his foot to sweep a dead rat out of our path. Now it began to smell like garbage. I gagged.
“There’s an underground dump nearby,” Jax said.
To keep my mind off the smell and my fear, I asked more questions. “Who else works for Jeremiah besides you?”
“A bunch of guys. I can’t get a handle on them. You’ll see for yourself.”
“What do you mean?” I said, although I thought I understood already - this wasn’t going to be anything like the farmhouse.
“As far as I can tell, they’re crazy religious and the only thing they’re interested in is rescuing donors.”
That sounded all right to me. Jax wasn’t a donor so maybe he couldn’t understand what it was like to discover that your life was fake. If Jeremiah’s group wasn’t all warm and fuzzy, that was okay, as long as they could get the job done.
Finally the stench of garbage receded and then we were standing at the base of some imposing stone stairs. There was a heavy wooden door at the top of them, with a circular wrought-iron pull where the knob should have been.
I hesitated for a moment. Behind that door was the man who wanted to rescue all the donors and set them free. If he’d have me and I could help him, I would be able to set my family free as well. This was it. This was what I’d left the farmhouse and risked my life for. I took a deep breath.
Jax unlocked the door.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
>
The enormous door swung open to what looked like a jail cell from the Middle Ages. An empty one made of stone. I glanced around; this wasn’t at all what I expected to see. Once again it struck me that I’d followed someone I didn’t know at all through a dangerous city, into a dark tunnel to – what? I felt my whole body stiffen.
“What is this place?” I turned to Jax.
“Shhhhh,” he said. “Quiet.”
I chewed my lip, and looked around. Would I have to fight my way out of here? And was I any match for this guy?
One side of the room was paneled in dark wood. There was a latch about waist high in the center of it, and I could see a faint crack of light shining through. That could be my way out.
I walked over to it and reached up unfastened the bolt that held the two sides together. Another surprise.
Inside rows of men were sleeping on a worn carpet under a high arched ceiling. Broken stained glass windows spilled rainbows of dim light on them. We were in a church of some kind.
What were they doing sleeping there, side by side? There were so many of them, was this Jeremiah’s army?
But one man wasn’t asleep. He was kneeling, staring straight at me, a scowl on his face. He looked like he was about to spring up and come after me. But then I realized he wasn’t really looking at me. He was mumbling, hands folded, as if lost in prayer, that made sense, I thought. Crazy religious, that’s what Jax said.
Jax pushed me aside, and gently closed the paneled doors. “Bell’s men sleep in there,” he whispered. “They’re usually up all night. And you don’t want to piss them off.”
“Why not?”
He let out a slight snort, “You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Jeremiah’s headquarters are in a church?”
“Churches are one of the few places that usually don’t get bombed.”
“Okay,” that made sense to me. We never went to church much ourselves, just on holidays. My mom once told me she considered herself spiritual, not religious.
I realized now that was incongruous, somehow. A donor who was spiritual. How did a helpless body in a vat believe in anything? I ran my hand over my belly-button-less stomach. Such a small disfigurement, such a large scar in my heart.