That turns out to be a mistake, because the book smells of Miss Mailer. On top, strongest, the chemical smell from her fingers, as bitter and horrible as always: but underneath, a little, and on the inside pages a lot, the warm and human smell of Miss Mailer herself.
What Melanie feels right then is what Kenny felt, when Sergeant wiped the chemicals off his arm and put it right up close to Kenny’s face, but she only just caught the edge of it, that time, and she didn’t really understand it.
Something opens inside her, like a mouth opening wider and wider and wider and screaming all the time—not from fear, but from need. Melanie thinks she has a word for it now, although it still isn’t anything she’s felt before. Sometimes in stories that she’s heard, people eat and drink, which is something that the children don’t ever do. The people in the stories need to eat, and then when they do eat they feel themselves fill up with something, and it gives them a satisfaction that nothing else can give. She remembers a line from a song that Miss Justineau sang to the children once: You’re my bread, when I’m hungry.
So this is hunger, and it hurts like a needle, like a knife, like a Trojan spear in Melanie’s heart or maybe lower down in her stomach. Her jaws start to churn of their own accord: wetness comes into her mouth. Her head feels light, and the room sort of goes away and then comes back without moving.
The feeling goes on for a long time, until finally Melanie gets used to the smell the way the children in the shower on Sunday get used to the smell of the chemicals. It doesn’t go away, exactly, but it doesn’t torment her in quite the same way: it becomes kind of invisible just because it doesn’t change. The hunger gets less and less, and when it’s gone, all gone, Melanie is still there.
The book is still there, too: Melanie reads it until daybreak, and even when she stumbles over the words or has to guess what they mean, she’s in another world.
It’s a long time after that before Miss Mailer comes again. On Monday there’s a new teacher, except he isn’t a teacher at all: he’s one of Sergeant’s people. He says his name is John, which is stupid, because the teachers are all Miss or Mrs. or Mister something, so the children call him Mr. John, and after the first few times he gives up correcting them.
Mr. John doesn’t look like he wants to be there, in the classroom. He’s only used to strapping the children into the chairs one by one, or freeing them again one by one, with Sergeant’s gun on them all the time and everything quick and easy. He looks like being in a room with all the children at the same time is like lying on an altar, at Aulis, with the priest of Artemis holding a knife to his throat.
At last, Anne asks Mr. John the question that everybody wants to ask him: where the real teachers are, “There’s a lockdown,” Mr. John says. He doesn’t seem to mind that the children have spotted him for a fake. “There’s movement west of the fence. They confirmed it by satellite. Lots of Hungries coming this way, so nobody’s allowed to move around inside the compound or go out into the open in case they get our scent. We’re just staying wherever we happened to be when the alarm went. So you’ve got me to put up with, and we’ll just have to do the best we can.”
Actually, Mr. John isn’t a bad teacher at all, once he stops being scared of the children. He knows a lot of songs, and he writes up the words on the blackboard; the children sing the songs, first all at once and then in two-part and three-part harmonies. There are lots of words the children don’t know, especially in “Too Drunk to Fuck,” but when the children ask what the words mean, Mr. John says he’ll take the Fifth on that one. That means he might get himself into trouble if he gives the right answer, so he’s allowed not to; Melanie knows this from when Miss Justineau told them about the Bill of Rights.
So it’s not a bad day, at all, even if they don’t have a real teacher. But for a whole lot of days after that, nobody comes and the children are alone. It’s not possible for Melanie to count how many days; there’s nothing to count. The lights stay on the whole time, the music plays really loud, and the big steel door stays shut.
Then a day comes when the music goes off. And in the sudden, shocking silence the bare steel door slams open again, so loud that the sound feels like it’s shoving its way through your ear right inside your head. The children jump up and run to their doors to see who’s coming, and it’s Sergeant—just Sergeant, with one of his people, and no teachers at all.
“Let’s do this,” Sergeant says.
The man who’s with him looks at all the doors, then at Sergeant.
“Seriously?” he says.
“We got our orders,” Sergeant says. “What we gonna do, tell them we lost the key? Start with this bunch, then do B to D. Sorenson can start at the other end.”
Sergeant unlocks the first door after the shower room door, which is Mikey’s door. Sergeant and the other man go inside, and Sergeant’s voice, booming hollowly in the silence, says, “Up and at ’em, you little fucker.”
Melanie sits in her chair and waits. Then she stands up and waits at the door with her face to the mesh. Then she walks up and down, hugging her own arms. She’s confused and excited and very, very scared.
Something new is happening. She senses it: something completely outside of her experience. When she looks out through the mesh window, she can see that Sergeant isn’t closing the doors behind him, as he goes from cell to cell, and he’s not wheeling the children into the classroom.
Finally her door is unlocked. She steps back from it as it opens, and Sergeant and the other man step inside. Sergeant points the gun at Melanie.
“You forget your manners?” he asks her. “Sit down, kid.” Something happens to Melanie. It’s like all her different, mixed-up feelings are crashing into each other, inside her head, and turning into a new feeling. She sits down, but she sits down on her bed, not in her chair.
Sergeant stares at her like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. “You don’t want to piss me off today,” he warns Melanie. “Not today.”
“I want to know what’s happening, Sergeant,” Melanie says. “Why were we left on our own? Why didn’t the teachers come? What’s happening?”
“Sit down in the chair,” the other man says.
“Do it,” Sergeant tells her.
But Melanie stays where she is, on the bed, and she doesn’t shift her gaze from Sergeant’s eyes. “Is there going to be class today?” she asks him.
“Sit in the goddamn chair,” Sergeant orders her. “Sit in the chair or I swear I will fucking dismantle you.” His voice is shaking, just a little, and she can see from the way his face changes, suddenly, that he knows she heard the shake. “Fucking—fine!” he explodes, and he advances on the chair and kicks it with his boot, really hard, so it flies up into the air and hits the wall of the narrow cell. It bounces off at a wild angle, hits the other wall and crashes down on its back. Sergeant kicks it again, and then a third time. The frame is all twisted from where it hit the wall, and one of the wheels comes right off when Sergeant kicks it.
The other man just watches, without saying a word, while Sergeant gets his breath back and comes down from his scary rage. When he does, he looks at Melanie and shrugs. “Well, I guess you can just stay where you are, then,” he says.
The two of them go out, and the door is locked again. They take the other kids away, one by one—not to the classroom, but out through the other door, the bare steel door, which until now has marked the farthest limit of their world.
Nobody comes, after that, and nothing happens. It feels like a long time, but Melanie’s mind is racing so fast that even a few minutes would feel like a long time. It’s longer than a few minutes, though. It feels like most of a day.
The air gets colder. It’s not something that Melanie thinks about, normally, because heat and cold don’t translate into comfort or discomfort for her; she notices now because with no music playing and nobody to talk to, there’s nothing else to notice. Maybe it’s night. That’s it. It must be night outside. Melanie knows from stories that it
gets colder at night as well as darker.
She remembers her book, and gets it out. She reads about Hector and Achilles and Priam and Hecuba and Odysseus and Menelaus and Agamemnon and Helen.
There are footsteps from the corridor outside. Is it Sergeant? Has he come back to dismantle her? To take her to the altar and give her to the goddess Artemis?
Someone unlocks Melanie’s door, and pushes it open.
Miss Mailer stands in the doorway. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay, sweetheart. I’m here.”
Melanie surges to her feet, her heart almost bursting with happiness and relief. She’s going to run to Miss Mailer. She’s going to hug her and be hugged by her and be touching her not just with her hair but with her hands and her face and her whole body. Then she freezes where she is.
Her jaw muscles stiffen, and a moan comes out of her mouth.
Miss Mailer is alarmed. “Melanie?” She takes a step forward.
“Don’t!” Melanie screams. “Please, Miss Mailer! Don’t! Don’t touch me!”
Miss Mailer stops moving, but she’s so close! So close! Melanie whimpers. Her whole mind is exploding. She drops to her knees, then falls full-length on the floor. The smell, the wonderful, terrible smell, fills all the room and all her mind and all her thoughts, and all she wants to do is . . .
“Go away!” she moans. “Go away go away go away!” Miss Mailer doesn’t move.
“Fuck off, or I will dismantle you!” Melanie wails. She’s desperate.
Her mouth is filled with thick saliva like mud from a mudslide. She’s dangling on the end of the thinnest, thinnest piece of string. She’s going to fall and there’s only one direction to fall in.
“Oh God!” Miss Mailer blurts. She gets it at last. She rummages in her bag, which Melanie didn’t even notice until now. She takes something out—a tiny bottle with yellow liquid in it—and starts to spray it on her skin, on her clothes, in the air. The bottle says Dior. It’s not the usual chemical: it’s something that smells sweet and funny. Miss Mailer doesn’t stop until she’s emptied the bottle.
“Does that help?” she asks, with a catch in her voice. “Oh baby, I’m so sorry. I didn’t even think . . . ”
It does help, a little. And Melanie has had practice at pushing the hunger down: she has to do it a little bit every time she picks up her book.
This is a million times harder, but after a while she can think again and move again and even sit up.
“It’s safe now,” she says timidly, groggily. And she remembers her own words, spoken as a joke so many times before she ever guessed what they might actually mean. “I won’t bite.”
Miss Mailer bends down and sweeps Melanie up, choking out her name, and there they are crying into each other’s tears, and even though the hunger is bending Melanie’s spine like Achilles bending his bow, she wouldn’t exchange this moment for all the other moments of her life.
“They’re attacking the fence,” Miss Mailer says, her voice muffled by Melanie’s hair. “But it’s not Hungries, it’s looters. Bandits. People just like me and the other teachers, but renegades who never went into the western cordon. We’ve got to get out before they break through. We’re being evacuated, Melanie—to Texas.”
“Why?” is all Melanie can think of to say.
“Because that’s where the cure is!” sobs Miss Mailer. “They’ll make you okay again, and you’ll have a real mom and dad, and a real life, and all this fucking madness will just be a memory!”
“No,” Melanie whimpers.
“Yes, baby! Yes!” Miss Mailer is hugging her tight, and Melanie is trying to find the words to explain that she doesn’t want a mom or a dad, she wants to stay here in the block with Miss Mailer and have lessons with her forever, but right then is when Sergeant walks into the cell.
Three of his people are behind him. His face is pale, and his eyes are open too wide.
“We got to go,” he says. “Right now. Last two choppers are loaded up and ready. I’m real sorry, Gwen, but this is the last call.”
“I’m not going without her,” Miss Mailer says, and she hugs Melanie so tight it almost hurts.
“Yeah,” Sergeant says. “You are. She can’t come on the transport without restraints, and we don’t got any restraints that we can use. You come on, now.”
He reaches out his hand as if he’s going to help Miss Mailer to her feet. Miss Mailer doesn’t take the hand.
“Come on, now,” Sergeant says again, on a rising pitch.
“I’m not leaving her,” Miss Mailer says again.
“She’s got no—”
Miss Mailer’s voice rises over Sergeant’s voice, shouts him into silence. “She doesn’t have any restraints because you kicked her chair into scrap metal. And now you’re going to leave her here, to the mercy of those animals, and say it was out of your hands. Well damn you, Eddie!” She can hardly get the words out; she sounds like there’s no breath left in her body. “Damn—fuck—rot what’s left of your miserable fucking heart!”
“I’ve got to go by the rules,” Sergeant pleads. His voice is weak, lost.
“Really?” Miss Mailer shouts at him. “The rules? And when you’ve ripped her heart out and fed it to your limp-dick fucking rules, you think that will bring Chloe back, or Sarah? Or bring you one moment’s peace? There’s a cure, you bastard! They can cure her! They can give her a normal life! You want to say she stays here and rots in the dark instead because you threw a man-tantrum and busted up her fucking chair?”
There’s a silence that seems like it’s never going to end. Maybe it never would, if there was only Sergeant and Miss Mailer and Melanie in the room: but one of Sergeant’s people breaks it at last. “Sarge, we’re already two minutes past the—”
“Shut up,” Sergeant tells him. And then to Miss Mailer he says, “You carry her. You hold her, every second of the way. And you’re responsible for her. If she bites anyone, I’m throwing you both off the transport.”
Miss Mailer stands up with Melanie cradled in her arms, and they run. They go out through the steel door. There are stairs on the other side of it that go up and up, a long way. Miss Mailer is holding her tight, but she rocks and bounces all the same, pressed up against Miss Mailer’s heart. Miss Mailer’s heart bumps rhythmically, as if something was alive inside it and touching Melanie’s cheek through her skin.
At the top of the stairs, there’s another door. They come out into sudden cold and blinding light. The quality of the sound changes, the echoes dying suddenly. Air moves against Melanie’s bare arm. Distant voices bray, almost drowned out by a mighty, droning, flickering roar.
The lights are moving, swinging around. Where they touch, details leap out of the darkness as though they’ve just been painted there. Men are running, stopping, running again, firing guns like Sergeant’s gun into the wild, jangling dark.
“Go!” Sergeant shouts.
Sergeant’s men run, and Miss Mailer runs. Sergeant runs behind them, his gun in his hand. “Don’t waste rounds,” Sergeant calls out to his people. “Pick your target.” He fires his gun, and his people fire, too, and the guns make a sound so loud it runs all the way out into the dark and then comes back again, but Melanie can’t see what it is they’re firing at or if they hit it. She’s got other stuff to worry about, anyway.
This close up, the smelly stuff that Miss Mailer sprayed on herself isn’t strong enough to hide the Miss Mailer smell underneath. The hunger is rising again inside Melanie, filling her up all the way to the top, taking her over: Miss Mailer’s arm is right there beside her head, and she’s thinking please don’t please don’t please don’t but who is she pleading with? There’s no one. No one but her.
A shape looms in the darkness: a thing as big as a room, that sits on the ground but rocks from side to side and spits dirt in their faces with its deep, dry breath and drones to itself like a giant trying to sing. It has a door in its side; some of the children sit there, inside the thing, in their chairs, tied in with straps
and webbing so it looks like a big spider has caught them. Some of Sergeant’s people are there, too, shouting words that Melanie can’t hear. One of them slaps the side of the big thing: it lifts into the air, all at once, and then it’s gone.
Sergeant’s arm clamps down on Miss Mailer’s shoulder and he turns her around, bodily. “There!” he shouts. “That way!” And they’re running again, but now it’s just Sergeant and Miss Mailer. Melanie doesn’t know where Sergeant’s people have gone.
There’s another one of the big rocking things, a long way away: a helicopter, Melanie thinks, the word coming to her from a lesson she doesn’t even remember. And that means they’re outside, under the sky, not in a big room like she thought at first. But even the astonishment is dulled by the gnawing, insistent hunger: her jaws are drawing back, straining open like the hinges of a door; her own thoughts are coming to her from a long way away, like someone shouting at her through a tiny mesh window: Oh please don’t please don’t!
Miss Mailer is running toward the helicopter and Sergeant is right behind. They’re close to it now, but one of the big swinging lights turns and shows them some men running toward them on a shallow angle.
The men don’t have guns like Sergeant does, but they have sticks and knives and one of them is waving a spear.
Sergeant fires, and nothing seems to happen. He fires again, and the man with the spear falls. Then they’re at the helicopter and Miss Mailer is pulled inside by a woman who seems startled and scared to see Melanie there.
“What the fuck?” she says.
“Sergeant Robertson’s orders!” Miss Mailer yells.
Some more of the children are here. Melanie sees Anne and Kenny and Lizzie in a single flash of one of the swinging lights. But now there’s a shout and Sergeant is fighting with somebody, right there at the door where they just climbed in. The men with the knives and the sticks have gotten there, too. and the sticks have gotten there, too.
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