Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
Get Book 2
Acknowledgments
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
We sat on our bikes in the empty street, my grown-up son and I. The son I didn’t remember, the son I would forget again. We sat on our bikes, watching the house.
It was an ordinary house, but nobody was home, and nobody had been for a long time. The windows were broken. A mailbox lay pushed over and crumpled. Chains hung from the swing set, whining as they swung in the breeze. One house on a street of such houses. One street in a neighborhood of such streets.
“That one?” I asked.
Arie unfolded his smudged and rumpled map of the neighborhood, where the progress of our searches was marked in pencil. He nodded, and so I tightened my ponytail. We rolled our bikes into the thicket of weeds where a lawn had once grown. It’d been hard to find a bike tall enough for Arie and almost as hard to find one that wasn’t too tall for me. We climbed the steps to the porch. The storm door had been ripped from its hinges, and the door frame was cracked, probably from a search a long time ago, but maybe something worse. Arie pushed on the door and it swung open.
We stayed for a moment on the porch.
“Careful,” I said.
“Mom,” he said.
At the beginning of the year, I’d told him he didn’t have to call me “mom”. He could call me Alison, like everyone else, but he called me mom anyway. And I liked it.
“I don’t want to be here in the first place,” I said. “Just—be careful.”
We never knew what we’d find beyond the closed doors. Booby traps, wild animals, mummified corpses. And that was assuming the house was unoccupied. There could be Agency goons inside looking to make trouble, or other lawless characters.
I was there to make sure Arie stayed safe. Something about the houses compelled him to search them, and he’d search whether or not I came along. So, I helped him. I was his mother.
Arie stepped in first, like always. He stood in the living room a few seconds, then shoved his hands in his pockets and took a long, slow look around. He was thin, and tall enough that his head almost touched the ceiling fan. I might never remember how he grew from baby to kid to teen and then into this tall young man.
He glanced at me over his shoulder. “You coming?”
Even with my shoes on, I felt the crusted dust on the floor as it crunched underfoot. The odors of abandonment, of decay. How many years had passed since someone had stood in that place?
There was always a certain excitement when we searched the houses, but I also felt a sense of not belonging. Like the home itself was waiting vainly for the children to start up a Nerf war in the basement, waiting for the husband to steal a kiss from his wife in the kitchen. When we entered there was disappointment in the air. We were the wrong family in the wrong home.
Arie went to a stack of magazines on a side table in the corner. He held them up with both hands and blew the dust into a gray cloud that lingered.
“I think I’ll be a while,” he said, taking a seat on the deflated, filthy sofa.
“Don’t take forever,” I said. The longer we were outside of our Zone the more dangerous it was, but Arie was already thumbing through the dust-caked magazines, examining each of the covers.
“Seen it,” he said, tossing the first one aside. “Seen it. Seen it.” He tossed them away. The next one he opened.
I wandered into the kitchen. Most of the cabinets gaped open, the doors broken and hanging. Nothing in them but crumbs and cobwebs, anyway. The food was all gone. Had been for years. Medicine, too, and most other useful things. That wasn’t why we were there.
On the dining room table there sat a tea set painted with roses. Kettle, teacup, saucer. I took a seat at the table and looked into the cup. Inside there was a succession of brown lines where the tea had once been but had dried away. The teaspoon had been set on the saucer as though its owner had risen from the table expecting to return after only a moment.
Arie rummaged in the living room and then continued down a hall to the other rooms on the ground floor. Next I heard him bumping around and sorting in the back of the house.
I looked back at the tea set. Someone had made tea and it had remained there—undisturbed, evaporating. I wondered about the others just as much as I wondered about Arie and myself. What had really happened to them?
Arie poked his head into the kitchen and ran a hand through his hair to sweep the long bangs from his eyes.
“I’m going up,” he said. He shoved a few magazines and what appeared to be a photo album into his backpack, then headed for the staircase.
As I rose to follow him, I put the teacup and spoon into the pocket of my coat.
The curtains were drawn shut in the first bedroom upstairs, making it nearly too dark to see. Arie split them wide open and sunlight poured in. He stared out the window. I joined him.
“Hey,” I said, pointing, “a Ferris wheel.”
Out beyond the trees and shingled rooftops, the skeletal wheel with its spokes rose lonely and still on the horizon.
“Yeah,” said Arie.
“I never noticed it,” I said.
“You’ve never been this far south.”
“It’s getting late,” I said. “You about finished here?”
Arie stood there awhile, concentrating on the distant Ferris wheel, as though he might remember.
“Arie.”
He turned away from the window and said, “I’ll search this one if you’ll do the one down the hall.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s make it fast. I want to get out of here.”
“Look everywhere,” he reminded me as I went. “Not just the drawers and shelves. Under stuff, behind.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “People hide things. Don’t be so bossy.”
He smiled sheepishly. “Sorry.”
The room had been a girl’s bedroom. A teenager. A four-poster princess bed sat ruined in the center of the room beneath the shroud of a faded canopy. Curled and faded posters clung to the walls. The makeup table and dresser had been ransacked. I stepped inside and knelt in the debris of school supplies and clothing.
I pawed through a pile of textbooks. Western Civ, Algebra II—useless. There was a spiral notebook the girl had kept for biology class—not enough blank pages to keep. There were dingy stuffed animals and once-pretty blouses and a curling iron. Nothing of any use. Arie was so much better at this. I lifted the dust-caked mattress, looked under the bed. Nothing.
I’d had a room like that once. I assumed so, anyway. It was only common sense. Before all of the trouble, long ago, I’d been a teenage girl, somewhere. Maybe someday I’d remember.
In the corner of the room there was a bookshelf. Most of its contents lay toppled out and scattered. Books about teen lovers and winsome horses and young wizards. Arie never wanted any of those. The shelf was heavy and tall. At the top, where the top of the bookcase almost touched the ceiling, there was a dark line of shadow.
It was a hiding p
lace. I stood up.
“Mom,” Arie called from the other room.
“Just a second,” I said.
“No. Now. Quick!”
I heard the engine rumbling as I went down the hall to the other bedroom where Arie crouched at the window. He made a frantic gesture to stop me. I dropped to all fours and crawled to the window. We peeked over the sill.
An armored troop carrier turned the corner at the top of the block and rolled down the street. Enormous, angular, with a machine gun protruding from a turret that traversed slowly, seeking.
“Patrol,” I said.
“They’ll see our bikes.”
It wasn’t against the rules for us to be here. Not officially. But that wouldn’t matter to an Agency goon bent on mayhem.
I put my hand on Arie’s arm to steady him, and then chanced a glance down into the yard, where our bikes lay in the tall weeds.
“We need to get downstairs,” I said. “We could get stuck up here.”
Arie slung his backpack and we crawled from the room through the drifts of dust on the carpet. The noise of the vehicle grew louder. We picked our way down the stairs, ducking to see out of the windows of the ground floor. We’d seen a few patrols before, but never this close, and never so far from our Zone.
“Are they stopping here?” Arie hissed. “I think they’re stopping.”
“Arie,” I snapped, “quit freaking out. Jesus. Just wait.”
“What if they catch us?”
I shushed him furiously. “Hold still.”
There were stories of what they’d do to us. We knew people who’d disappeared, and we’d even seen a few beatings and arrests with our own eyes. And that was inside the Zone boundaries.
The troop carrier slowed as it approached the house where we hid. Then it stopped. The hatch on the turret swung open and a soldier appeared. I suddenly knew Arie was about to bolt. Something about the way his backed tensed—technically, I barely knew this boy, but I knew for sure he was getting ready to run. I put my hand on his shoulder and squeezed hard.
“Hold still.”
The soldier hopped down from the fender of the troop carrier and walked to the side of the road. He looked in either direction as he unfastened his pants, and then he relieved himself. Our bikes lay in the weeds near enough that he could have sprayed them if he’d known they were there.
After a minute he fastened his pants, mounted the troop carrier, and slid down into the turret. The hatch swung closed with a thunk, and the vehicle rolled on until it was out of sight.
“He’s gone,” I breathed. “Time to get home.”
We waited in the living room for a few minutes to see if the patrol would return or if another would come along, but the street remained quiet and empty. My hands were shaking as we crept down into the living room. Arie opened the front door an inch or two and looked through the crack.
Then I remembered.
“Wait,” I said. “I nearly forgot. Wait here a sec.”
I took the stairs a couple at a time, raising clouds of gray dust. There were few windows upstairs, and it had gotten darker. I felt my way to the girl’s bedroom and found the tall bookshelf. I got on my tiptoes and felt along the top. There was something there. My fingers touched it. A box maybe, or a book. The shelf stood too high for me grasp whatever hid there. I stretched and reached and nearly pulled the shelf over on top of me, but then I had it.
A diary.
Arie waited at the bottom of the stairs. As I came down, I held out the diary. When he saw it, his mouth opened a bit, but he didn’t snatch it away from me or tear it open. He took it carefully, with both hands. Then he ran his fingers over the cover, which was a collage of flowered stickers and decals. He smiled a little.
“Good job, Mom,” he said opening the diary.
I knew that Arie was my son only because they’d told me so. I’d known for less than a year, and in three more months, they’d need to tell me again. We both had blue eyes and dark hair, but I didn’t remember feeding him or teaching him to ride a bike. However, as we left the Agency facility that morning nine months before, I knew I was his mother. When he coiled up on the stairs, ready to run, I knew. And when he turned to the first handwritten page of the flowered diary, I knew again. My son was happy. I’d made him happy. Even with how much it scared me to be caught out there in those desolate suburbs, it was worth it to see him smile.
“Read later,” I said. “We gotta go.”
“‘Kay.” He snapped it shut.
We climbed down the front steps and waded through the weeds to our bikes.
“Where’d you find it?” he asked.
“On top of the bookshelf in this little crack way up—did you hear that?”
“Hear what.”
Something was moving through the backyard. I heard the rustling of dead weeds, and when I turned to see, I caught a glimpse of motion.
“Get down,” I snapped at Arie.
We crouched.
“They must have seen us and circled back on foot,” I whispered.
Fast movement to our left and to our right. Then, behind us, too. It wasn’t the patrol.
“Dogs,” I shouted. “Run!”
CHAPTER 2
They burst from the overgrown brush at the side of the house. Three or four of them—snarling and barking. They barreled after us as we sprinted across the yard. Arie was a lot faster than me.
“Tree,” shouted Arie.
A fruit tree stood nearly leafless at the edge of the yard. Arie made it there first. He was taller than me by a head. He grabbed a branch seven or eight feet up, and he walked his legs up the trunk until he was perched like some enormous chimp. I ran as fast as I could, crashing through the weed stalks dry with autumn, the dogs so close behind I heard their hoarse panting and the popping sound their jaws made as they snapped at me.
Stretched out on the high branch, Arie extended his arm. I took hold, but as Arie swung me up, one of the dogs caught my pant leg. He was big and black. With a thrash of his head he tore me from Arie’s grip, and I tumbled back into the weeds.
“Mom!” Arie yelled. He jumped down.
The black dog clamped onto my leg, shaking his head and tugging at me. I felt his teeth tear open the skin of my ankle. A smaller dog bit the sleeve of my coat and pulled me in the other direction. The third dog loped in, snarling and nipping at me. I swung at them, kicked at them, drowning in a sea of hot savagery.
Arie got my sleeve free but then the two smaller dogs went after him. He raced around the weedy yard in a crazed game of tag, spinning and dodging as they snapped at him.
I kicked the black dog, connecting with his cheeks and snout, but he only flinched and bit harder. His body shuddered with guttural growls. The whites of his eyes showed when he shook me. I thought he might rip my leg off at the knee.
More dogs came galloping into the yard. Arie tripped and stumbled and was buried in a frenzy of fur and bared fangs. So many dogs. Beneath their snarling, I heard Arie shouting. The black dog let go of my leg and lunged for my throat, head low, ears flattened. I shoved him away and tried to rise, but his big paws were on my stomach, my ribcage, pressing me down. He forced his muzzle between my arms and hands, teeth bared. For a split second our eyes locked. His mouth opened.
There came a deafening boom.
The black dog convulsed and then went limp. I raised my head. The other dogs stood frozen, looking toward the street. Another boom, a gunshot. The dogs flinched in unison. A few scampered away, tails tucked. I rolled to one side and the black dog slid off me and lay still.
I stood. My pant leg was torn and bloody, and my leg burned. Arie kicked at the dogs as the last of them ran yapping down the street. Their claws clicked dryly on the pavement.
Standing in the street was a stout woman holding a pistol. She wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve.
“You kids all right?”
We checked ourselves, turning and twisting. Arie’s hand dripped blood. My leg began to
throb miserably. We were covered in dry leaves, dead flower petals, and the broken stems of thistles.
“We’ll live,” I said, brushing the weedy debris from my clothes.
Arie went to the sidewalk and picked up his backpack. The magazines and books he’d found had spilled and lay fanned out on the concrete. He collected them and returned them to the pack while the woman watched.
“What’s all ’at?” she asked.
“Nothing,” said Arie. “My stuff.”
“You shouldn’t be out here,” she scolded. Her voice was loud and brassy. “But if you’re gonna be, you oughta least be able to defend yourself.”
The woman brandished the pistol and then put it away somewhere under her coat. When she ambled closer, she limped, favoring her left leg. Her face was lumpy and her hair was cropped short like a man’s. With the toe of her boot, she nudged the black dog’s body. It made no movement.
“Look at this,” she said, pointing to the dog’s collar with a stubby, grimy finger. The collar was sun-faded and frowzy. “This was somebody’s pet.”
I noticed the dog’s ribs and the thinness of its body. The woman bent down and tilted her head back to read the tarnished metal tag through her battered bifocals.
“Chieftain,” she said, frowning. “His name. This is what happens when living things get forgot. They turn mean. Some of these others might have been littered since Year One. But not this guy. He was part of somebody’s family. Back before.”
She patted him on the neck, then pushed her glasses higher up her round, pitted nose. She squinted at me.
My ears still rang from the gunshot, and I struggled to catch my breath. “Thank you,” I panted.
“This makes me really mad,” she said. “I love dogs. I’m an animal lover.” She jabbed her finger at me. “You owe me now. Big time.”
“What do you want? Food? We have a little food. Some good firewood, too,” I said.
“We’ll figure it out another day,” she said. Then she pointed to my leg. “You’re gonna need stitches.”
Arie was clutching his hand to his chest. Blood ran down his forearm and dripped from his elbow.
“You, too,” she said to him. “That looks bad.”
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