Death Thieves

by Julie Wright

  What if the people who lived here came home? What if a spying neighbor turned us in and we got shot for trespassing? With a grunt, I got up dragging the blanket off the bed with me as I all but ran across the hall. “Tag?”

  “Go to sleep, Summer.” His tired, muffled voice came from the mound of covers.

  “I can’t sleep alone.”

  He sat straight up. “Well you can’t sleep in here!” He all but yelled at me.

  “Why not?”

  “You hate me. Remember that!”

  Surprised by his outburst and his demand that I keep hating him, I turned on my heel and stormed out of the room. “Fine!” Once back in the room and sitting on the big bed, the dumbness of the interchange made me roll my eyes. So what if I hated him? Hating him had nothing to do with needing another breathing person in the same room with me while I slept. Going back in there, trying to apologize, and making him scoot over enough to give me room on the bed seemed like it would only end up with him getting pissy again. I waited ten minutes, counting to sixty ten times like I did when I was little to make time pass quicker. Not that counting actually made time move with any more speed, but it gave me something to do while waiting. It beat counting sheep.

  I tiptoed back in to Tag’s room, holding my breath so he wouldn’t hear me. I sat on the floor between the wall and his bed and wrapped myself up burrito style in the blanket. I went to sleep to the sound of his deep breathing and pretended it was Winter and pretended the blanket wrapped around me was my own sun quilt.

  I awoke sometime in the early morning. The sun hadn’t crawled up over the horizon yet, but its stretching rays lightened the sky. I sat up, realizing I felt comfortable. What was I doing in a bed? A quick visual search revealed that I still occupied Tag’s room, only Tag was now on the floor. He looked uncomfortable.

  Guilt.

  I hated guilt.

  How had he ended up on the floor? Did I get up and crawl into bed with him in the night—pushing him out? Or had he found me on the floor and put me in the bed, taking the floor for himself?

  I tsked softly. I’m a creep. The only way to switch places would be to wake him up. Would it be worse to wake him up when he might not be able to get back to sleep or to leave him on the hard floor? Lying back on my pillow, I closed my eyes. He might be one of those grouchy types if he wakes up too soon. And he really needed his sleep. Tag had stayed awake on the few occasions I’d slept throughout the last two days. The least I could do now was let him sleep as long as he needed.

  I allowed myself to drift back into slumber as well, knowing that if the day ahead was anything like the day behind, I’d need every last second available.

  The sun shone full on through the window when my eyes opened again. Tag’s blanket sat in a neatly folded pile on the floor. With a deep stretch, I eased myself up and out of bed and wandered out of the room.

  “Tag?” I called out once I’d reached the kitchen and found it empty. Fear edged into my heart. Would he have left me here? “Tag?” I called again, louder this time.

  I took a deep breath to scream his name when he showed up in the doorway and put his finger to his lips to hush me. I exhaled the breath and frowned, the fear flowing from a trickle to a river. His tensed body with his knees bent for action caused me to take the same posture. I slipped in next to him and whispered, “What is it?”

  “Neighbors out taking a walk or something.” His hand went to the small of my back as he directed me toward the hallway. “I double-checked the door locks and the window we opened to make certain there wasn’t anything out of place.” His whispers were so quiet I had to put my head right to his in order to hear him. “I was just coming to get you. If they are here to look after the place, we’ll need to be ready to move.”

  I thought of Winter’s shirt still in the bathroom drying, and my jeans. They were all I had left of the world I’d known. Leaving them behind was not an option. “My clothes.” I mouthed the words. When he gave me a quizzical look, I put my mouth to his ear and whispered them, my lips accidentally brushing his earlobe. He pulled away as though I’d shocked him with a lightning bolt.

  He put his hand out as though it were a stop sign and whispered “stay” in a way that made me feel like a bad dog waiting for punishment while my master went and got the rolled-up newspaper. He came back with my bundle of clothes. He stuffed them into his backpack and leaned against the wall.

  When I stepped closer to him to whisper the question, “So what are we doing now?” He stiffened his whole body as though I had a disease he didn’t want to catch.

  “We’re waiting for the noise of entry.” He didn’t elaborate and put his finger to his mouth again in a hushing motion.

  We stood like statues for several minutes, my own body so tense that my muscles cramped. When the front door opened, I nearly bolted, but Tag put out his hand to stop me, his head giving one violent shake, no.

  “I don’t see why they need a housekeeper for a house no one is living in.” A man’s voice whined. “No one’s here to make a mess.”

  A woman’s voice answered. She sounded patient and used to her husband not wanting to do what she wanted. “They’re coming home next week. They don’t want to come back to a bunch of dusty shelves”

  Cleaning? They were here to clean today of all days? My panicked thoughts raced to the towel and pots on the counter in the bathroom. To the two unmade beds I’d vacated. Even if we tried to hide and lay low until they left, they were bound to notice the disaster we’d left. The owners wouldn’t be back for another week. We’d be long gone by then. If they didn’t call the police over all the mess we’d left.

  “Home?” The man scoffed. “A place you visit two weeks out of every year is hardly something you could call home.”

  I wholeheartedly agreed with him, though I was pretty sure both of us only felt that way because we were jealous.

  The noise stayed in the front room by the door. “Let’s start here. Should only take an hour if we hurry.” The woman’s tone indicated the man had a problem with dawdling.

  I hoped they didn’t hurry. I hoped that room had cobwebs, and things living in the cobwebs, and layers upon layers of dust. I grabbed Tag’s hand and pulled him with me back toward the bathroom. His eyes widened in panic at my taking the lead, but in an effort to stay quiet, he had no choice but to follow me.

  With a towel I quickly wiped down the sink and counter to remove any sign of water. The goal was to clean faster than the couple—to stay ahead of them.

  We took the pans to the bedroom and stuffed them under the bed. I grabbed the blankets, handing the one from the floor to Tag and threw the other over the bed, not trying to do a tidy job of it. I nodded Tag toward the door. He went to the other room to make the bed. I moved to follow him, but he was back before I could.

  We’d cleaned as much as possible. Tag motioned me to the window, sliding it up. I threw one leg over the edge when we heard the man coming down the hall.

  There wasn’t enough time to get us both out.

  Chapter Nine

  Tag pushed me out the window. I wanted to protest—to scream at him for being stupid. I landed hard on my bare feet, the impact jolting through my spine. I nearly bit my tongue off in an effort to suppress the cry of pain. It hadn’t occurred to me to grab my shoes. It hadn’t occurred to me we were really leaving the house until Tag pushed me through the window.

  I’d left my shoes somewhere in the house. In all that cleaning I hadn’t seen them. But worse, Tag was still in the house. Alone. He being alone meant I was alone. I couldn’t survive out here in this future alone. “Stupid!” The window had closed right behind me. I tried peeking through the glass but saw nothing. Sharp needles poked into the soles of my feet, but I didn’t dare move to a place that might be needle-free.

  The man’s voice grumbled about having to dust an already clean house. He must not have noticed the window incident, and Tag must have been hiding or there would be very different noises coming fro
m the room. The man scuffed around, moving things, adjusting things, and grumbling the whole time.

  It felt as though he took his time on purpose, just so my body could cramp in the tense posture held under the windowsill. I strained hard to listen for sounds of a struggle—of a fight. Would Tag win such a fight? He seemed pretty tough, and he kept calling himself a soldier, but thus far he hadn’t done any actual fighting, aside from the wrestling we’d done over the Orbital. And I was pretty sure if he hadn’t been so weak and tired, he would’ve triumphed.

  No sounds of struggling came, which meant they hadn’t found him. Yet. The woman’s voice filtered loud and squeaky through the glass. She made a clucking sound. “That’s the worst-made bed I’ve ever seen.” Her declaration irritated me. I’d definitely seen worse, and it looked pretty good considering I’d only had a moment to put it together. The man replied with something I couldn’t hear. He seemed to have moved toward the door—away from the window.

  “I told you I wanted to go in order. We aren’t even done with the front room yet. Just leave the rest for now. We’ll get to it later.” The noises that followed sounded as though the pair had gone. I waited, holding my breath, my heart slamming against my rib cage. The room remained silent, every passing second filling me with dread.

  What was I supposed to do out here by myself? If he didn’t get out, would I be trapped in this time zone with crazies, ID rings, and curfew?

  The window finally opened, and Tag’s leg swung out. I remembered to breathe.

  Tag nearly landed on me as he jumped down. He closed the window and moved us away from the house. The hard pine cones and sharp needles from the trees made it impossible for me to move very fast, but Tag kept us going away from the house, not allowing me time to try to baby my feet. His eyes swiveled everywhere, keeping tabs on our surroundings, ensuring we hadn’t been noticed as we evacuated our hideout.

  “We can go back in another hour,” Tag said.

  “Are you crazy?” I had my mouth open ready to spew out all the reasons going back that soon would be worse than walking around barefoot when he interrupted me.

  “I am not crazy. I’ve been certified by the best doctors of my time. Never call me that!” He scrubbed his hand over his head, making his hair stick out. His outright anger and stormy appearance, along with the newly mussed-up hair made him look totally and completely crazy. I had the good sense not to mention that.

  Slack-jawed, I stared at him. He could have grown wings and flown off and surprised me less. His little outburst overshadowed my relief at having him outside with me. “Touchy much?”

  “What?”

  “You’re acting a little sensitive, don’t you think? I wasn’t calling you crazy as in lock-you-up-in-a-padded-room crazy; I was only saying your idea sucks rocks. No need to get all up in my face over it.” I tried to turn on my heel and stomp off, which would have looked very dramatic considering the way the beaded skirt fluttered at my feet, but the first step landed right on a pinecone. In that moment I’d determined nothing hurt worse than stepping on a pinecone.

  I hopped on one foot while cradling the injured one and trying not to yell. Yelling always made me feel better when I’d hurt myself. “Stupid!” I hissed between my teeth.

  Tag chuckled.

  “Don’t laugh or I’ll call you names that would make a mental patient cry.”

  Tag sobered up quickly. “Summer, really, please don’t use words like crazy or insane when talking to people out on the street. Not here in this time, and not in the future that will be your home. It is a sensitive topic, one that could get you killed, or tased at the very least. Most people have children who were, or are, crazies in this time. In the future, most people have lost, or will lose, children to the crazies. No one uses those words the way you just did. No one would dare. To accuse someone of being crazy if they are certified as stable is enough to get you executed. The government has no patience for false accusations. If you call someone out, you’d better be right.”

  “But I wasn’t calling you out.” I leaned against a tree to rub my foot. “I was just saying stuff. Don’t you just say stuff where you’re from?”

  He pulled off his backpack after looking around to ensure we were alone and rummaged through it. “No, we don’t. We say what we mean.” He pulled out two empty packages that had contained the dehydrated food from the day before. Their shiny aluminum packages glinted silver in the light filtering through the trees. With his knife, he cut a hole at the end of each, and then laced twine through the hole. “Give me your foot.”

  I felt sort of like Cinderella placing my foot on his bended knee. But Tag didn’t have any glass slippers on him. He used the twine to wrap the aluminum package to the bottom of my foot like a sandal.

  “Better?” he asked.

  I walked several steps, hardly feeling anything through the packages under my feet. “Much better. And, hey, they don’t look too bad, considering . . .”

  The makeshift shoes actually fit my preconceived notions of how shoes from the future might look. “Do you think they’ll find my shoes and freak out?” I nodded back in the direction of the house.

  “We didn’t see them when we cleared out. If we didn’t, they might not. Of course, you’re probably right about waiting longer to go back. I wasn’t thinking. It’s been a long few days. I’m losing my reasoning. We should wait until after dark to return, which will make locating your shoes tonight difficult. We might have to wait until tomorrow morning to search for them.”

  We were walking again, though where to was anyone’s guess. It felt like we’d walked a long way before Tag seemed comfortable enough to halt our little march. From the position of the sun in the sky, I figured we’d hiked several hours. We ended up at a ravine near one of the tributaries. He pulled off his pack and sat down. “We don’t have anything to eat. I’m sorry I didn’t think to take anything with us. There wasn’t much time for packing.”

  I shrugged. “You will never have any need to apologize to me for anything.” I threw his words from the previous night back at him.

  He gave me a dry look but said nothing. I joined him on the ground. For a while we just listened to the water rumble over rocks as it pushed toward the Puget.

  “Did you love him?” Tag asked abruptly. He had a way of looking at me that made me decidedly nervous.

  I almost asked who he meant but knew as soon as the question formed in my mind. He meant Nathan. “I don’t know.” I shifted uncomfortably, positioning myself so my hand could graze over the water next to us. I didn’t love Nathan—not like that. He’d been my friend, my co-conspirator. “He was fun to kiss.” I gave over a lopsided smile that Tag did not return. My smile dropped.

  “I am sorry for your loss.” It seemed to take an effort for him to look away from me and instead fix his gaze on the water. He looked miserable and guilty. He looked as though he’d broken something he couldn’t fix.

  “We were just dating, you know? It wasn’t like we were planning on getting married or anything. I cared about him. I care about what happens to him, and I love him as much as I love any of my friends—maybe a little more, but not love like I love Winter or love like I would imagine loving someone I planned on marrying.” Why the need to make him feel better about Nathan’s death? I shook my head. Nathan’s death wasn’t exactly Tag’s fault. It’s not like Tag caused the accident or anything like that. Yet, I didn’t think it was Tag’s fault he hadn’t pulled Nathan out, either. That blame fell on whoever sent Tag to me in the first place.

  “Yesterday, you said we’d finish our conversation in the morning. Since we’ve got nothing but time right now, tell me the rest.”

  Tag stiffened but finally nodded. “Where did we leave off?”

  “We won the crazy war. Wait a minute. Is the crazy problem worldwide?”

  He leaned back on his elbows, nodding at the same time he said, “Yes. There are rumors of small groups of people with no HTHBI taint, and no crazies, but no one has ever
produced evidence. They say the government is hiding these groups in the center of some mountain, waiting for the rest of us to kill ourselves off. It’s a petty conspiracy theory.”

  “Whose government?”

  “The world’s government.” He sat up and pushed up the sleeves to his jacket as though about to deliver a lecture. “In order for the war on crazies to be won, the countries all had to band together or face annihilation. Each country worried that the crazies would lead us to the use of nuclear weapons, so they went to the United Nations and signed treaties to band together under one regent. Each country elected its own official regent to speak for them under the supreme regent. After the war was won, no one could see a reason to defect from the rule of the regents. The system worked well enough, and the voice of the people unanimously voted to keep the rule of regents until such time as it proves ineffective.”

  “So you won the crazy war and people still have babies in—what did you call them? Public nurseries?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about this for a moment, watching where the river disappeared around a bend. The future sounded confused and ugly to me. “I don’t see what kidnapping people from the past will do to help the future. Your war is over; the countries are united. It’s not like I can do anything to help. You can already have babies in your public nurseries, so why am I here?”

  “The people of the world are sick. Everyone. No one in the future is immune. Their blood holds impurities that they cannot control or cure. Everyone is born with the HTH infection.” His eyes locked with mine with such intensity I was afraid to look away. “Do you know what crazy law is?”

  I shook my head.

  “A baby brought home from the public nursery cannot be named or officially recognized until its third birthday. On its third birthday, the government has the baby evaluated. If the child is found unstable, then it is euthanized. It’s the law.” His voice cracked. “Some parents have a hard time letting go of the child they raised. For the greater good, anyone who tries to harbor an illegal child without testing them is . . . removed.”