Mr. Galloway cuts her off. “Jesus, it’s irrelevant. It’s ancient history! The Hungries tore up the map. There’s nothing east of Kansas anymore. Not a damn thing.”
So it’s possible, even quite likely, that some of Melanie’s lists need to be updated in some respects.
The children have classes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. On Saturday, the children stay locked in their rooms all day and music plays over the PA system. Nobody comes, not even Sergeant, and the music is too loud to talk over. Melanie had the idea long ago of making up a language that used signs instead of words, so the children could talk to each other through their little mesh windows, and she went ahead and made the language up, or some of it anyway, but when she asked Miss Mailer if she could teach it to the class, Miss Mailer told her no really loud and sharp. She made Melanie promise not to mention her sign language to any of the other teachers, and especially not to Sergeant. “He’s paranoid enough already,” she said. “If he thinks you’re talking behind his back, he’ll lose what’s left of his mind.” So Melanie never got to teach the other children how to talk in sign language.
Saturdays are long and dull, and hard to get through. Melanie tells herself aloud some of the stories that the children have been told in class.
It’s okay to say them out loud because the music hides her voice. Otherwise Sergeant would come in and tell her to stop.
Melanie knows that Sergeant is still there on Saturdays, because one Saturday when Ronnie hit her hand against the mesh window of her cell until it bled and got all mashed up, Sergeant came in. He brought two of his people, and all three of them were dressed in the big suits, and they went into Ronnie’s cell and Melanie guessed from the sounds that they were trying to tie Ronnie into her chair. She also guessed from the sounds that Ronnie was struggling and making it hard for them, because she kept shouting and saying, “Let me alone! Let me alone!” Then there was a banging sound that went on and on and Sergeant shouted, “Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up!” and then other people were shouting, too, and someone said, “Christ Jesus, don’t—” and then it all went quiet again.
Melanie couldn’t tell what happened after that. The people who work for Sergeant went around and locked all the little doors over the mesh windows, so the children couldn’t see out. They stayed locked all day.
The next Monday, Ronnie wasn’t in the class anymore, and nobody seemed to know what had happened to her. Melanie likes to think that Ronnie went through the thirteenth door on the left into another class, so she might come back one day when Sergeant shuffles the deck again.
But what Melanie really believes, when she can’t stop herself from thinking about it, is that Sergeant took Ronnie away to punish her, and he won’t let her see any of the other children ever again.
Sundays are like Saturdays except for the shower. At the start of the day the children are put in their chairs as though it’s a regular school day, but instead of being taken to the classroom, they’re taken to the shower room, which is the last door on the right, just before the bare steel door.
In the shower room, which is white-tiled and empty, the children sit and wait until everybody has been wheeled in. Then the doors are closed and sealed, which means the room is completely dark because there aren’t any lights in there. Pipes behind the walls start to make a sound like someone trying not to laugh, and a chemical spray falls from the ceiling.
It’s the same chemical that’s on the teachers and Sergeant and Sergeant’s people, or at least it smells the same, but it’s a lot stronger. It stings a little, at first. Then it stings a lot. It leaves Melanie’s eyes puffy, reddened and half-blind. But it evaporates quickly from clothes and skin, so after half an hour more of sitting in the still, dark room, there’s nothing left of it but the smell, and then finally the smell fades, too, or at least they get used to it so it’s not so bad anymore, and they just wait in silence for the door to be unlocked and Sergeant’s people to come and get them.
This is how the children are washed, and for that reason, if for no other, Sunday is probably the worst day of the week.
The best day of the week is whichever day Miss Mailer teaches. It isn’t always the same day, and some weeks she doesn’t come at all. Melanie guesses that there are more than five classes of children, and that the teachers’ time is divided arbitrarily among them. Certainly there’s no pattern that she can discern, and she’s really good at that stuff.
When Miss Mailer teaches, the day is full of amazing things. Sometimes she’ll read poems aloud, or bring her flute and play it, or show the children pictures out of a book and tell them stories about the people in the pictures. That was how Melanie got to find out about Agamemnon and the Trojan War, because one of the paintings showed Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, looking really mad and scary. “Why is she so mad?” Anne asked Miss Mailer.
“Because Agamemnon killed their daughter,” Miss Mailer said. “The Greek fleet was stuck in harbor on the island of Aulis. So Agamemnon put his daughter on an altar, and he killed her so that the goddess Artemis would give the Greek fleet fair winds and help them to get to the war on time.”
The kids in the class were mostly both scared and delighted with this, like it was a ghost story or something, but Melanie was troubled by it. How could killing a little girl change the way the winds blew? “You’re right, Melanie, it couldn’t,” Miss Mailer said. “But the Ancient Greeks had a lot of gods, and all kinds of weird ideas about what would make the gods happy. So Agamemnon gave Iphigenia’s death to the goddess as a present, and his wife decided he had to pay for that.” Melanie, who already knew by this time that her own name was Greek, decided she was on Clytemnestra’s side. Maybe it was important to get to the war on time, but you shouldn’t kill kids to do it. You should just row harder, or put more sails up. Or maybe you should go in a boat that had an outboard motor.
The only problem with the days when Miss Mailer teaches is that the time goes by too quickly. Every second is so precious to Melanie that she doesn’t even blink: she just sits there wide-eyed, drinking in everything that Miss Mailer says, and memorizing it so that she can play it back to herself later, in her cell. And whenever she can manage it, she asks Miss Mailer questions, because what she likes most to hear, and to remember, is Miss Mailer’s voice saying her name, Melanie, in that way that makes her feel like the most important person in the world.
One day, Sergeant comes into the classroom on a Miss Mailer day.
Melanie doesn’t know he’s there until he speaks, because he’s standing right at the back of the class. When Miss Mailer says, “ . . . and this time, Pooh and Piglet counted three sets of footprints in the snow,” Sergeant’s voice breaks in with, “What the fuck is this?”
Miss Mailer stops, and looks round. “I’m reading the children a story, Sergeant Robertson,” she says.
“I can see that,” Sergeant’s voice says. “I thought the idea was to educate them, not give them a cabaret.”
“Stories can educate just as much as facts,” Miss Mailer says.
“Like how, exactly?” Sergeant asks, nastily.
“They teach us how to live, and how to think.”
“Oh yeah, plenty of world-class ideas in Winnie-the-Pooh.” Sergeant is using sarcasm. Melanie knows how sarcasm works: you say the opposite of what you really mean. “Seriously, Gwen, you’re wasting your time. You want to tell them stories, tell them about Jack the Ripper and John Wayne Gacy.”
“They’re children,” Miss Mailer points out.
“No, they’re not,” Sergeant says, very loudly. “And that, that right there, that’s why you don’t want to read them Winnie-the-Pooh. You do that, you start thinking of them as real kids. And then you slip up. And maybe you untie one of them because she needs a cuddle or something. And I don’t need to tell you what happens after that.”
Sergeant comes out to the front of the class then, and he does something really horrible. He rolls up his sleeve, all the way to t
he elbow, and he holds his bare forearm in front of Kenny’s face: right in front of Kenny, just an inch or so away from him. Nothing happens at first, but then Sergeant spits on his hand and rubs at his forearm, like he’s wiping something away.
“Don’t,” says Miss Mailer. “Don’t do that to him.” But Sergeant doesn’t answer her or look at her.
Melanie sits two rows behind Kenny, and two rows over, so she can see the whole thing. Kenny goes real stiff, and he whimpers, and then his mouth gapes wide and he starts to snap at Sergeant’s arm, which of course he can’t reach. And drool starts to drip down from the corner of his mouth, but not much of it because nobody ever gives the children anything to drink, so it’s thick, kind of half-solid, and it hangs there on the end of Kenny’s chin, wobbling, while Kenny grunts and snaps at Sergeant’s arm, and makes kind of moaning, whimpering sounds.
“You see?” Sergeant says, and he turns to look at Miss Mailer’s face to make sure she gets his point. And then he blinks, all surprised, and maybe he wishes he hadn’t, because Miss Mailer is looking at him like Clytemnestra looked in the painting, and Sergeant lets his arm fall to his side and shrugs like none of this was ever important to him anyway.
“Not everyone who looks human is human,” he says.
“No,” Miss Mailer agrees. “I’m with you on that one.” Kenny’s head sags a little sideways, which is as far as it can move because of the strap, and he makes a clicking sound in his throat.
“It’s all right, Kenny,” Miss Mailer says. “It will pass soon. Let’s go on with the story. Would you like that? Would you like to hear what happened to Pooh and Piglet? Sergeant Robertson, if you’ll excuse us? Please?”
Sergeant looks at her, and shakes his head real hard. “You don’t want to get attached to them,” he says. “There’s no cure. So once they hit eighteen . . . ”
But Miss Mailer starts to read again, like he’s not even there, and in the end he leaves. Or maybe he’s still standing at the back of the classroom, not speaking, but Melanie doesn’t think so because after a while Miss Mailer gets up and shuts the door, and Melanie thinks that she’d only do that right then if Sergeant was on the other side of it.
Melanie barely sleeps at all that night. She keeps thinking about what Sergeant said, that the children aren’t real children, and about how Miss Mailer looked at him when he was being so nasty to Kenny.
And she thinks about Kenny snarling and snapping at Sergeant’s arm like a dog. She wonders why he did it, and she thinks maybe she knows the answer because when Sergeant wiped his arm with spit and waved it under Kenny’s nose, it was as though under the bitter chemical smell Sergeant had a different smell altogether. And even though the smell was very faint where Melanie was, it made her head swim and her jaw muscles start to work by themselves. She can’t even figure out what it was she was feeling, because it’s not like anything that ever happened to her before or anything she heard of in a story, but it was like there was something she was supposed to do and it was so urgent, so important, that her body was trying to take over her mind and do it without her.
But along with these scary thoughts, she also thinks: Sergeant has a name, the same way the teachers do. The same way the children do.
Sergeant has been more like the goddess Artemis to Melanie up until now; now she knows that he’s just like everyone else, even if he is scary.
The enormity of that change, more than anything else, is what keeps her awake until the doors unlock in the morning and the teachers come.
In a way, Melanie’s feelings about Miss Mailer have changed, too.
Or rather, they haven’t changed at all, but they’ve become stronger and stronger. There can’t be anyone better or kinder or lovelier than Miss Mailer anywhere in the world; Melanie wishes she was a Greek warrior with a sword and a shield, so she could fight for Miss Mailer and save her from Heffalumps and Woozles. She knows that Heffalumps and Woozles are in Winnie-the-Pooh, not the Iliad, but she likes the words, and she likes the idea of saving Miss Mailer so much that it becomes her favorite thought. She thinks it whenever she’s not thinking anything else.
It makes even Sundays bearable.
One day, Miss Mailer talks to them about death. It’s because most of the men in the Light Brigade have just died, in a poem that Miss Mailer is reading to the class. The children want to know what it means to die, and what it’s like. Miss Mailer says it’s like all the lights going out, and everything going real quiet, the way it does at night—but forever. No morning. The lights never come back on again.
“That sounds terrible,” says Lizzie, in a voice like she’s about to cry.
It sounds terrible to Melanie, too; like sitting in the shower room on Sunday with the chemical smell in the air, and then even the smell goes away and there’s nothing at all forever and ever.
Miss Mailer can see that she’s upset them, and she tries to make it okay again by talking about it more. “But maybe it’s not like that at all,” she says. “Nobody really knows, because when you’re dead, you can’t come back to talk about it. And anyway, it would be different for you than it would be for most people because you’re . . . ”
And then she stops herself, with the next word sort of frozen halfway out of her lips.
“We’re what?” Melanie asks.
“You’re children,” Miss Mailer says, after a few seconds. “You can’t even really imagine what death might be like, because for children it seems like everything has to go on forever.”
There’s a silence while they think about that. It’s true, Melanie decides. She can’t remember a time when her life was any different from this, and she can’t imagine any other way that people could live. But there’s something that doesn’t make sense to her, in the whole equation, and so she has to ask the question.
“Whose children are we, Miss Mailer?”
In stories, she knows, children have a mother and a father, like Iphigenia had Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. Sometimes they have teachers, too, but not always, and they never seem to have Sergeants. So this is a question that gets to the very roots of the world, and Melanie asks it with some trepidation.
Miss Mailer thinks about it for a long time, until Melanie is pretty sure that she won’t answer. Then she says, “Your mom is dead, Melanie. She died before . . . She died when you were very little. Probably your daddy’s dead, too, although there isn’t really any way of knowing. So the army is looking after you now.”
“Is that just Melanie,” John asks, “or is it all of us?”
Miss Mailer nods slowly. “All of you.”
“We’re in an orphanage,” Anne guesses. The class heard the story of Oliver Twist once.
“No. You’re on an army base.”
“Is that what happens to kids whose mom and dad die?” This is Steven now.
“Sometimes.”
Melanie is thinking hard, and putting it together, inside her head, like a puzzle. “How old was I,” she asks, “when my mom died?” Because she must have been very young, if she can’t remember her mother at all.
“It’s not easy to explain,” Miss Mailer says, and they can see from her face that she’s really, really unhappy.
“Was I a baby?” Melanie asks.
“A very tiny baby, Melanie.”
“How tiny?”
“Tiny enough to fall into a hole between two laws.”
It comes out quick and low and almost hard. Miss Mailer changes the subject then, and the children are happy to let her do it because nobody is very enthusiastic about death by this point. But Melanie wants to know one more thing, and she wants it badly enough that she even takes the chance of upsetting Miss Mailer some more. It’s because of her name being Greek, and what the Greeks sometimes used to do to their kids, at least in the ancient times when they were fighting a war against Troy. At the end of the lesson, she waits until Miss Mailer is close to her and she asks her question really quietly.
“Miss Mailer, were our moms and dads going to sacrifice
us to the goddess Artemis? Is that why we’re here?”
Miss Mailer looks down at her, and for the longest time she doesn’t answer. Then something completely unexpected and absolutely wonderful happens. Miss Mailer reaches down and she strokes Melanie’s hair.
She strokes Melanie’s hair with her hand, like it was just the most natural and normal thing in the world. And lights are dancing behind Melanie’s eyes, and she can’t get her breath, and she can’t speak or hear or think about anything because apart from Sergeant’s people, maybe two or three times and always by accident, nobody has ever touched her before and this is Miss Mailer touching her and it’s almost too nice to be in the world at all.
“Oh, Melanie,” Miss Mailer says. Her voice is only just higher than a whisper.
Melanie doesn’t say anything. She never wants Miss Mailer’s hand to move. She thinks if she could die now, with Miss Mailer’s hand on her hair, and nothing changed ever again, then it would be all right to be dead.
“I—I can’t explain it to you,” Miss Mailer says, sounding really, really unhappy. “There are too many other things I’d have to explain, too, to make sense of it. And—and I’m not strong enough. I’m just not strong enough.”
But she tries anyway, and Melanie understands some of it. Just before the Hungries came, Miss Mailer says, the government passed an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. It was because of something called the Christian Right, and it meant that you were a person even before you were born, and the law had to protect you from the very moment that you popped up inside your mom’s tummy like a seed.
Melanie is full of questions already, but she doesn’t ask them because it will only be a minute or two before Sergeant’s people come for her, and she knows from Miss Mailer’s voice that this is a big, important secret. So then the Hungries came, Miss Mailer said—or rather, people started turning into Hungries. And everything fell to pieces real fast.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 14