Among the Free

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  I don’t think they’d turn me in, even now, he decided. But I still have to stay alert.

  “How is it that you showed up in our village?” Eli asked. “Except for the Population Police, we haven’t had an outsider here in ages.”

  Luke calculated what he could safely tell.

  “I was running away from the Population Police. I wanted to go home. I fell asleep in an abandoned village over . . . ” Luke wanted to point toward the ruins, but he’d gotten disoriented.

  Eli nodded anyway.

  “Over there,” he said, pointing past the fireplace. “Yes. Go on.”

  “When I woke up, I heard voices—the Population Police. I . . . I panicked and ran away, and they heard me, and so I ran more. . . . It was just luck that I ended up here.”

  Eli kept nodding.

  “Ah,” he said. “Then you’ve seen our true homes.”

  “You mean that old village? The ruins?” Luke asked skeptically.

  “They weren’t ruins when we lived there,” Eli said, shaking his head slowly, his white beard swaying. “We had beautiful houses, lush gardens. Then the droughts came. The Government said we had to move. They said we were too far off their main supply lines. We didn’t fit in their plans. We were inconvenient.”

  “We thought they would save us from starving,” Adriana said, “so of course we did what they said.”

  She poured more broth into Luke’s bowl and watched him spoon it up to his mouth, as if she could get her nourishment from watching him eat.

  Eli went on with his story. “Then they said we couldn’t have gardens anymore, because it was an inefficient use of the land. They said we couldn’t grow flowers, because that was a waste. They said we had to grow soybeans instead of corn one year, corn instead of soybeans the next. There were rules on top of rules. Anything we grew had to go right back to the Government. Then they would give us what we were allowed to eat—if we met our quota.”

  “We never grew enough,” Adriana whispered.

  Luke thought about the cold, hard soil he’d fallen down on. Then he thought about the rich, dark, loamy dirt of his family’s farm.

  “Maybe your soil isn’t right for corn and soybeans,” Luke offered.

  “That’s what we told the Government, but they never listened,” Eli said. “They weren’t people who knew about soil. They’d just point at numbers on their forms and yell at us, ‘We have you down for this many bushels this year. Got it?’ ”

  Luke remembered how he’d pictured the Government as some big, fat, bossy man when he’d been a little kid. That image seemed so innocent now.

  “Then they took away everyone they could to work for the Population Police,” Adriana said. “We haven’t seen any of them since.”

  “James,” Eli said. “Aileen. Twila. Sue. Peter. Robin. Jonathan. Detrick. Lester. Sal. . . . ”

  It took Luke a moment to realize that Eli was listing all the people the village had lost to the Population Police. Luke wanted to yell out, No, stop! Don’t tell me! With each name he heard, he could imagine yet another person crowded into the room—ghosts joining the skeletons.

  Eli finished the listing of names, and a silence fell over the room. Now that he had a little food in his stomach, Luke was thinking more clearly. He realized that he was the only one still eating, the only one who’d been given more than a crumb of bread and a swallow of broth.

  It’s just like the Population Police always said, he thought in horror. If food goes to third children, others starve.

  Luke put his spoon down.

  “No, eat,” Adriana urged. “There is still hope for you.”

  “But do you think . . . ” Luke had to be careful about what he said. “The Government always said that if people followed the Population Law, there’d be enough food for everyone. Do you think you’re starving because some people broke the Population Law? Do you think illegal third children stole your food?”

  The people all stared at him as if those questions had never entered their minds.

  “We’re starving,” Eli said, “because the Population Police don’t care if we live or die. And they made our lives so miserable, we stopped caring too.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  By the time the “feast” was over, the sun had slipped down over the horizon, and the scene outside the windows slid into darkness. Eli began to talk of making a bed for Luke in front of the fireplace.

  “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you want,” Eli said.

  Luke’s eyelids felt heavy as he watched the other villagers leave for their own homes. His legs felt so sore that it hurt just to shift position in his chair.

  “Tonight,” he decided. “I’ll stay tonight.”

  Eli found threadbare quilts for him to sleep on. “Twila made this one,” Eli recounted, laying the quilts on the floor. “This was Aileen’s handiwork. . . . ” He disappeared into a back room for a few minutes, and brought back a goose-down pillow. “Adriana wanted you to have this.”

  Luke curled up in the blankets. They were much more comfortable than sleeping on rock or decaying linoleum.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Eli didn’t leave yet.

  “There’s a little bread left. Feel free to have some breakfast if you’re up before us,” he said, yawning. “You probably will wake up first. We spend a lot of our time now sleeping.” He hesitated. “Good night.”

  Luke expected to fall asleep immediately after Eli left the room. But somehow his eyes stayed open. He stared at the embers of the fire, his mind racing.

  What if the Population Police come back and find me here? What if they’ve figured out now that I was the one who dropped the gun and ran away?

  What if the people in Chiutza are right, and the Population Police are totally out of power? Shouldn’t the people in this village know that? Wouldn’t it give them hope?

  What is wrong with these people? Are they really going to die? How could they just give up like that? Why don’t they send someone out to look for food? Do they truly want to die? Why?

  Luke forced his eyes shut, but he felt no less alert. He squirmed around, the quilts bunching up underneath him. He got up and smoothed them out again, but he didn’t lie back down right away. The moon had risen while he was curled up on the floor, and its silvery light drew him to the window. He stood there looking out at the bright, full orb in the sky, so much more beautiful than the dull, ugly huts of the village, the hard-packed dirt lanes, the leafless trees. And then he saw lights below the moon—a long string of lights along the lanes, snaking their way toward the village.

  Headlights.

  Luke jerked away from the window, dropping down below the windowsill just as he’d been trained to do when he was a little boy hiding in his parents’ house. Then he realized how useless that action was, what a waste of precious time. Whoever was behind those headlights couldn’t see him in the window from that distance. But they were getting closer.

  Luke sprang up and dashed toward Eli’s room. He banged his hand against the door.

  “Eli! Adriana! Someone’s coming! It’s got to be the Population Police! You’ve got to run away! You’ve got to hide!”

  An eternity seemed to pass before the door creaked open and Eli stood there blinking, his whiskers and sparse white hair in disarray.

  “Didn’t you hear me? We’ve got to wake the others! We’ve got to leave! We’ve got to hide!” Luke screamed. When Eli didn’t move, Luke grabbed Eli’s arm and tugged him toward the window. “Look!”

  Eli stared out at the line of headlights. They were closer now, and Luke could make out vague shapes; he could tell which vehicles were cars and which were trucks. He thought maybe he could even make out the Population Police logo on the doors.

  “Come on!” Luke said, yanking on Eli’s arm.

  “No,” Eli said.

  Eli’s arm slipped out of Luke’s grasp.

  “Are you crazy?” Luke asked, spinning around. “Don’t you know what will happen
when they get here? You—you defied the Population Police! You said no right to their faces! They don’t let people get away with that. Don’t you see? They’re coming back for revenge!”

  Eli turned slowly toward Luke, his face still half in shadows.

  “They can’t do anything to us that we don’t deserve,” Eli said. “You run away—you save yourself. The rest of us will stay right here.”

  “That doesn’t make sense!” Luke screamed.

  Sorrow crept over Eli’s face.

  “I didn’t tell you everything about our village,” Eli said. “I was ashamed. You asked about illegal third children. . . . There was one in our village. Everybody knew. And we . . . we turned him in. We turned in his whole family. We informed the Population Police. And when they rewarded us, we informed on other people. Innocent people who had done nothing wrong except live next to us when we were hungry. We said they were rebels. We said they were plotting against the Government. We were like little children, tattling. We were that . . . gleeful. Only, the people we tattled on died. . . . ” Eli was whispering now, his head bowed low.

  “But—but—you saved me,” Luke said.

  “One good deed, a million sins,” Eli said, shrugging sadly. “Do you see why we would welcome an escape from our guilt?”

  Luke backed away from Eli. He kept shaking his head, wanting to protest: No, no, you’re good people, you were nice to me, you couldn’t have sent anyone to their death. . . . But Eli was looking back at the line of headlights again.

  “You should leave now,” he said. “You’ve got no part in our guilt. Here, take a quilt with you. And take our bread—we’ll have no need of it.”

  Eli was rummaging through cupboards, shoving food into a bag. He thrust the bag into Luke’s arms and wrapped a quilt around Luke’s shoulders.

  “If you go that way up the path, no cars can follow you,” he said, pointing around the corner of the house. “They’d have to chase you on foot, and you’ll have a head start.”

  Eli shoved Luke out the door, and Luke took off running, the food sack thumping against his legs. Every few steps he had to slow down and pull up the quilt so it didn’t drag on the ground. Once he got into the woods it caught on branches, broke off twigs.

  I’m probably leaving a trail, he thought bitterly. I should just throw it down and keep running.

  But he feared that that would give him away too. And as he kept hugging the quilt around his neck, it began to seem wrong to leave Eli’s gift behind. He remembered how tenderly Eli had handled the quilt, how sadly he’d mumbled, “This is Aileen’s handiwork. . . . ”

  He also remembered how Eli had said, “We informed the Population Police. . . . We were like little children, tattling. . . . ”

  Luke was still close enough to the village to hear the cars and trucks arriving, their engines rumbling and then, one by one, shutting off. He pressed the quilt over his ears because he didn’t want to hear the screams and cries. But even through the quilt he could hear someone behind him shouting, “Wait! Stop!”

  Luke veered off the path and ran even faster.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Even with the moonlight guiding him, it was a nightmarish journey. Luke was in a section of the woods where the trees grew thick and close together. He couldn’t tell the trees from their shadows. He ducked around trunks that weren’t really there; he banged his head on too-real branches he thought were phantoms. When he tripped on a root and sprawled on the ground, he found he no longer had the will to spring back up immediately. He lay huddled under the quilt, listening.

  “Lu-uke! Lu-uke!” someone called in the distance.

  Was it only his imagination? Only the wind? Or was someone from the village trying to find him?

  They probably want to turn me in, he thought bitterly. They’ve changed their minds.

  He pulled the quilt tighter around himself, sealing off his entire body from the howling wind. He dozed fitfully, jolting awake every time he heard a noise. Then he’d lie awake in the darkness, his heart pounding, his ears straining to make sense of silence.

  Someone’s creeping up on me. . . . They’re about to pounce. . . . He’d wait, but nothing would happen. Nobody’s there, he’d try to assure himself. Nobody’s there at all.

  Finally he woke up to light. Even through the thick quilt, he could tell that the sun was high overhead now. The quilt was made of scraps of different colored material, and the effect was like stained glass, the cloth tinting the sunlight red and blue, yellow and green, orange and purple. For a while Luke lay still, marveling at the colors. Somehow he didn’t care about being caught; he didn’t worry about where he was going or where he had been. He didn’t think.

  Then the sun went behind a cloud, and the spell was broken. Luke lifted one corner of the quilt and peeked out.

  Trees. Leaves. Sky.

  He shoved his head out farther so he could survey his surroundings a little better. Then he burst out laughing.

  This is perfect! It almost looks like I planned it!

  He was at the bottom of a gentle hill. One whole side of his quilt—the side closest to the hill—was covered with leaves, blown there by the howling wind the night before. Anyone walking by would have thought he and his quilt were just a small hillock, a natural part of the woods.

  I’ll have to remember this trick, he thought, and that seemed incentive enough to go on, to have another chance to use such clever camouflage.

  He stood up and shook out the quilt. He nibbled on a little of the bread Eli had given him the night before, then wrapped the food sack around his waist and the quilt around his shoulders. The sun came out from behind the cloud again, and Luke took that as a blessing of sorts.

  I’m fine, Luke told himself as he took off walking toward the east again. It’s warmer today; I have food in my stomach. I’m safe. But it’d be nice to have someone to talk to, you know?

  He thought about how he’d felt standing with Eli and Adriana and the rest of the villagers. With their arms linked and their shoulders touching, they’d seemed so united. They’d had a common purpose. Luke had been much less terrified than he would have expected, because he’d had all the other people on his side.

  Now Luke was alone again. And Eli and the others were—

  Luke decided to think about something else.

  Wonder who’s taking care of my horses back at Population Police headquarters. Whoever it is had better be brushing Jenny down really well. It better not be some slacker who doesn’t know anything about animals, like . . .

  The image that came into his mind was the face of the boy who’d gone to Chiutza with him, who’d stolen Luke’s cornbread and refused to share “his” territory with Luke. The boy Luke had last seen in the middle of a circle of threatening men. Luke couldn’t see that boy caring much about horses, but Luke didn’t want to think about him either.

  What’s there left to think about? Is there any part of my mind that isn’t booby-trapped, laid with secret passageways back to thoughts I don’t want to think?

  Luke could imagine the kind of answer Jen would have given to that question: No, there isn’t, Luke. As long as third children are illegal, as long as we’re not supposed to exist, you’ll always feel trapped. You’ll always be trapped. That’s why you have to work for freedom.

  Luke wished Jen were still alive just so he could tell her to shut up.

  The sun hovered overhead for a long time, then began to slip over Luke’s shoulders, behind the trees. That was the only way Luke could gauge how long he’d been trudging forward. He tried to keep alert, to watch for any sign of Population Police officers or rebels with guns or even just ordinary people going about their usual business. But there was nothing to see. Trees, sky, uneven ground—oops, watch out for that root over there. You don’t want to trip again. A couple of times Luke could see the edge of a field, just beyond the trees. Once he dared to detour toward the field, thinking he might find withered soybeans again. But this field, when he came to it
, looked more like a meadow, abandoned to thistles and weeds. Luke could see the ruts in the field where tractor tires had once rolled. But it looked like that had been years earlier; clearly the weeds had replaced crops many growing seasons ago.

  But why? Luke wondered. Why wouldn’t someone try to grow food here? People are starving. . . .

  Luke moved back into the woods, feeling more disturbed than he wanted to admit.

  As sunset approached, Luke had a more urgent concern: water. His throat was parched after his hours of walking, and he hadn’t come to a single stream or pond the entire day. The only water he’d seen had been dew quivering on fallen leaves early in the day, and he hadn’t been desperate enough then to lick it up.

  How long can someone survive without water? he wondered. More than a day? A week? He was too thirsty to remember.

  Just as he began to despair of ever finding water, he saw a break in the trees ahead of him. He began moving very cautiously as soon as he caught his first glimpse of a house. What if it’s another place like Chiutza? he worried. Or what if it’s a village the Population Police are in the middle of subduing? His throat aching, he hoped for another abandoned village instead—one with deep, still-functioning wells.

  And then, when he got to the edge of the trees . . . he couldn’t tell. The houses before him were mostly shacks in bad shape, but both Eli’s village and Chiutza had been full of broken windows and rotting roofs too. Luke squinted into the glare of the setting sun, reflected off dozens of windows. He couldn’t see any people, but he could make out a bucket on a post, hanging beside a spigot at the back of one of the houses.

  “Oh, please,” Luke whispered. Did he dare? Now that he could see a possible water source, he felt half crazed with thirst. Dizzily, he crept forward, keeping his step light. If there were people inside the houses, he had to make sure they didn’t hear him.

  Luke made it across the entire backyard. His mind was playing tricks on him now, remembering the many times he’d crept from his family’s house over to Jen’s. He’d been in danger on those trips, too; he’d risked his life for something that wasn’t even as essential as water. Or had it been? He’d felt so desperate to get out of hiding, to go outside. He’d needed the hope Jen gave him, the vision she left him with. Luke shook his head, trying to clear his mind. He reached out for the bucket on the post—and knocked it over. It clanged against the side of the house like an alarm, then plunged to the ground.