by Anna Carey
Page 16
One boy knelt beside the boar carcass. He ran two knife blades against each other, letting out a sharp, scraping sound that made the hair on my arms bristle. His eyes wandered over Arden’s body, and then, when he’d had his fill, he started on the boar, hacking at its neck. Bits of bone flew into his face. It was savage, the way his knife landed again and again at the place where its head met its body. I winced with every blow.
The boy didn’t stop until the head split off and rolled across the floor. The boar stared at me, its pupils covered in a gray film. I wanted to run through the corridor, back the way we’d come, not stopping until the open air embraced me. But I felt Arden limp at my side, and reminded myself why we were here. As soon as she was better we’d be gone, away from this dank dugout with these boys who looked at me as though I were something to be devoured.
A hefty one with blond, matted hair threw some more wood on the fire. He inspected Arden’s slight frame. “They can stay in my room,” he laughed. I gripped Arden tightly. “I’d be happy to share my bed. ”
“They’re not staying in anyone’s room,” a gruff voice interrupted. “They’re not staying at all. ”
An older boy appeared from one of the tunnels beyond the fire. He was wearing long shorts that hung past his knees and his chest sprouted dark curls. His black hair was pulled into a bun, revealing thick, crisscrossing scars on the top of his back. A group of older boys emerged in a line behind him, spilling out into the room. My skin prickled with fear. There were ten more of them at least, all taller and wider than me. And they looked angry.
“This isn’t good,” Arden breathed.
Caleb placed himself between us and them. “It isn’t a debate, Leif. I found them in the woods. She was attacked by a bear. ” I looked down at the dirt floor, trying to avoid the stares. “They need to stay here. ”
Leif’s eyes were deep brown, their edges lined with a thick curtain of black lashes. “It’s too dangerous. You know how the King is about the sows. He’s probably looking for them already. ” He came toward us, his face only two feet from Caleb’s. He was so close I could see the bits of leaves buried in his hair and the smears of ash on his tense, muscular arms.
“Sows?” Arden whispered, her breath hot on my neck. “That’s what we are?”
“That may be what we’re called,” I answered. “But that’s not what we are. ”
The band of boys circled us. The pack closed us in, blocking our escape route. Arden coughed, her body heaving with the effort.
“She’s sick?” a gap-toothed boy asked, his face softening. I noticed a tattoo on his shoulder—a circle with The New American crest inside it. It was the same one Caleb had, in the same exact place. I looked around, noticing that all the boys were tattooed.
“Very,” I said. They retreated at the word, breaking into whispers, a short, chubbier one muttering something that sounded like “plague. ” Arden’s head lolled to the side and rested on my shoulder.
Caleb’s eyes were still locked with Leif’s. “If we throw them out she’ll die. I won’t have it. ”
The corner of Leif’s lip curled up in displeasure, reminding me of a snarling dog. “They have to stay in the west room, away from the others,” he finally said. Arden was barely able to look up, so he instead fixed his narrow, almost-black eyes on me. “You are not to go above-ground without permission. And you are to stay out of our way. Do you understand?”
Leif glanced at the boy beside him, who carried a short stack of bowls. As if instinctually, the boy kneeled down, filling two from a pot of beans that rested near the fire. Then he handed them to Leif. I stepped forward. Leif’s massive shoulders were nearly level with my eyes. He handed me a bowl. I grabbed it but he didn’t let go, his fingers still clutching it.
“Welcome,” he said in a voice that made it clear we were anything but. He held me there, in his gaze, his eyes roaming over my face until they lowered to my breasts, my waist, my legs. I felt a rush of panic and pulled at the bowl, trying to get free. He released his grip suddenly, sending me stumbling backward. The beans sloshed down the front of my shirt. Another boy let out a loud, callous laugh.
I dabbed at the stain, my cheeks hot and red. It wasn’t enough that I was unprotected in this camp, it wasn’t enough that Leif terrified me. He had to humiliate me, too.
“Come on,” Caleb said, taking Arden’s dinner from Leif. “I’ll show you where you’ll stay. ” He wrapped an arm around Arden’s side, and we started down a tunnel illuminated by rows of flashlights set into the dirt floor. “So that is Leif,” Caleb whispered.
I turned back as Leif angrily kicked aside the boar’s head. The boys resumed their activities. The large one launched another arrow, two skinnier boys wrestled, and a few others worked feverishly to skewer slabs of meat onto sharpened sticks. I thought at once of Lord of the Flies, and the day Teacher Florence read the scene where Simon is murdered by the pack of wild boys, citing Gang Mentality as the motivation. It is when they’re isolated, encouraged only by one another’s violence, that men are the most dangerous, she’d said, sitting on the edge of her desk, the book open in her lap.
Remembering the chorus of hoots, the eyes that shamelessly roamed my body, the whispering between them, I knew: some things she’d told us were true. Even now.
Chapter Twelve
“MORE?” I ASKED, HOLDING THE SPOONFUL OF BEANS IN front of Arden’s cracked lips. She mumbled something that sounded like “no,” then rolled back onto her side, kicking the quilt off her mottled legs. Her eyes fell closed.
It had been like this all night. She’d wake occasionally, asking for water or food, then crumple back onto the sunken mattress. Sometimes she twisted in pain, complaining of an ache that shot up her spine. Caleb had dragged in a tub filled with lake water, and I’d kept her awake long enough to wash the sweat from her skin and pick the leaves from her hair with a broken comb.
The dirt cavern was off one of the main tunnels, a cramped room with only a mattress and a desk covered with yellowed children’s books. I had searched its drawers wishing, against all logic, to find medicine. I had never quite realized its value before. At School they seemed to have a limitless supply.
We took it for granted, the ease with which anything—a cough, an infection, skin sliced on a broken lantern—was treated. A pill here, a shot to numb the flesh before stitches, sweet bubble-gum-pink syrup dripping down your throat. When Ruby seized up in the yard, overcome by a knifing pain in her side, she was whisked away and emerged days later, black twine marking her abdomen where her appendix had been cut out. What would have happened, in the wild? we’d wondered aloud as we inspected that scar. Maxine guessed she would’ve had to take it out herself, probably with rusty scissors. No, Headmistress corrected. She’d been walking behind our table in the dining hall, making sure we’d swallowed down the last of our vitamins. She simply would have died.
I brushed back Arden’s thick black hair, feeling the heat of her skin. I remembered the first time I saw her. In those years following the plague new students arrived regularly, some found in the woods, some dropped off by adults who could no longer provide for them. She was the tall girl in the faded blue dress who had appeared at School three years after I had, an eight-year-old rushed in through the side gate. She stayed in a quarantine room for a month, alone, as we all did when we first arrived. Pip and I had huddled by the tiny glass window in the door, watching while she brushed her teeth. She spit the white foam into the trash can and we wondered aloud if she seemed any different. It was a game among the students. We all paused there whenever we walked down the hallway, looking for the telltale blue bruises to appear beneath the skin’s surface. We waited for the whites of her eyes to turn a phlegm-colored yellow. They never did.