Zellie scowled. “Like I care what that tourist says.”
“I’ve been thinking about a plan,” Cam went on in the same quiet voice, and Zellie turned to look at him. Everybody stopped wheedling then, because there was no point. When Zellie paid attention to her boyfriend it was like everybody else had been switched off. It was a trait generally agreed on as totally disgusting and super sweet at the same time.
“A plan for what?” Zellie demanded.
“For how to make friends with the city. So that it helps us out more. So we can tell it we like spaghetti trees and stuff.”
“The city isn’t a dog, Cam,” said Eden impatiently, her stick-like arms crossed. “We can’t tame it with bacon.”
“Oh god, bacon,” moaned Izzy. “I’m so hungry.”
“It’s not a normal city, Eden,” said Deena earnestly. “It has a voice, if you listen.”
Cam gave Deena an encouraging smile. “I think all cities do. But this one’s special.”
“Well, yeah. It’s all post-apocalyptic empty,” said Ramone.
“It doesn’t have any food,” Izzy added.
“It’s ours,” said Deena.
“It’s a bunch of cement and stones,” mumbled Eden. “I think I’m gonna faint.” She swayed dramatically and Izzy absently put a hand on her elbow.
“It’s alive,” said Cam. “And it thinks we’re an enemy. But we’re not. The hunters were the enemy and now they’re gone, so we can all be friends.” He beamed.
Zellie sighed and repeated, “So what’s your plan?”
Cam said, “We just have to wake it up and talk to it. I’ve done a little talking already.” He hesitated. “But we’re going to need food to do that. A lot of food.” He gave Zellie a little smile.
She put her hands over her eyes. “I don’t know how to get a lot of food. Just because I can walk back over to Normaltown doesn’t mean I end up in front of an all-you-can-steal buffet.”
Confidently, Cam said, “I have a plan for that too. It’ll totally work. Only….” He hesitated, worry darkening his face.
“Spill it,” said Zellie grimly.
“Only for this plan to work, we have to go inside.”
Silence fell as everybody stared at each other. Inside was bad news. Nobody wanted to go inside. But between that or starvation? Or worse, returning to the real world? Well, it took some thinking about.
* * *
“I can’t believe that you want to start out making friends with the city by doing something it hates, Cam.” Zellie squeezed Cam’s hand as they walked to one of the persistent landmarks in the mercurial city. “That’s not you. You’re the nice one.”
Cam shrugged self-consciously. “I hate getting vaccines, but they’re good for me in the long run.”
They stopped outside the vast block-sized building they called the Mall. It wasn’t a very original name, because it looked like a mall. It had big windows on every floor, and they were almost arranged like somebody rational had been involved. It had big glass double doors, too. Looking through them showed a huge cavernous space, lit only by the windows, with a concrete floor and not a speck of furnishings. A mall, before any tenants had moved in. Or any internal floors had been built. With freestanding ladders leading up somewhere above.
Nobody knew exactly where the ladders led, because once you went inside one of the city’s buildings, things changed quickly.
Cam said, “Ouch, I’m going to need that hand, Zellie.” He stared at the glass door thoughtfully.
Zellie relaxed her own hand enough that she wasn’t crushing Cam’s anymore. His nearsightedness must be a benefit when dealing with the city’s horrors. But he was very brave, too, she certainly knew that. She wouldn’t be where she was now without him.
Ramone and the others trailing behind them stopped on the other side of the street.
“You can do it,” called Izzy encouragingly. “Nobody’ll notice you fast enough to report you.”
“Doesn’t matter if they do,” said Eden. “They’re never going to find their way back here.”
Zellie didn’t bother to correct them. Besides, maybe they were right. But she was scared, all the same. Not of going inside—well, not much afraid of going inside—but of what would be waiting for her on the other side.
But Cam said they had to do this, Cam said this would make them safe in the end, and she trusted Cam. “Let’s go.”
“All right,” said Cam softly. “You do the walking and I’ll do the talking, just like we’ve done before. But don’t take the big step until I say go, or we’ll have to come back and try again.”
“What if it doesn’t let us back again?” asked Zellie, suddenly struck by a new worry.
“Zellie,” said Cam softly, looking at her with his dark eyes. “Nobody can stop you.”
Zellie forced a smile past her dread, squared her shoulders, and pulled open the door.
When they stepped inside the Mall, the air was cool and dry. Motes of dust floated in beams of light, enough dust that the freestanding ladders were just gawky alien forms in the shadows. Two steps in and the air warmed as the humidity rose. There were mannequins deeper in the shadows, draped with blotchy cloth and posed in impossible ways.
Cam and Zellie moved cautiously, continuing to hold hands. Despite what he’d said, Cam was quiet for the moment, waiting for the bad stuff to start happening.
Twenty steps in and Zellie was about to remark on the unusual quietness of the Mall when a gong sounded and the floor vibrated beneath them. A mannequin twisted its head upside down to watch them pass. The cloth wound around its neck was stained with red and black. It dripped onto the floor, the black devouring the red and pooling around the mannequin’s feet. The pool sent out tendrils that crept around the ground toward their feet.
Zellie shivered and stuck her chin out. She might have run from this the first time she went Inside, but it wasn’t anything now. “What now?”
“We keep walking. This isn’t where we want to be. If we cross here, we could end up anywhere with a big building. Nah, I have to make it clear that there’s only one place we’ll be getting off.” Cam’s gaze, always faraway, focused on something only he could see. His mouth twitched as he whispered something just below Zellie’s hearing.
Zellie eyed another mannequin, which opened its hands. Strands of something slimy reached down to the ground and started humping along it, like earthworms made of snot. There was shuffling behind them but when she looked over her shoulder all she saw was the door out, still open, about a mile away. If they ran, they might make it to the door. Or a nightmare might eat them first. Even odds.
They wouldn’t run, though. They had a job to do. Zellie lengthened her stride, pulling Cam along behind her. She was hungry, too. The stew she’d made from weeds and bones had been a long time ago. She wouldn’t have gone back without Cam asking it of her, no way, not for a stack of pizzas. But she was excited about the prospect of real food again all the same.
A mannequin carved of lavender wood opened its shroud and teeth rained down from a gash in its belly. All wood, but the paleness was disturbing. Zellie slowed, unable to look away from the teeth scattering across the floor. Her grandmother had kept all her baby teeth for a reason and nobody but Cam had ever understood how creepy that was.
Zellie’s foot slipped on a stray tooth that rolled too close and she went down to one knee. As soon as she fell all the mannequins turned toward her, all through the gloomy building-cavern. They rippled closer. Even the ladders shuffled closer, except they weren’t ladders anymore, but elongated men with their hands bound to their sides. One bent in the middle, a skull-like head with bulging eyes swooping down toward Zellie and Cam.
Zellie didn’t scream, because she’d worked hard learning not to scream. She took a step to the side, yanking Cam hard after her, then stopped and flung up her free hand. “Cam,” she said urgently. “We have to get out of here soon.” She’d only stopped because running now would be worse.
&
nbsp; “Keep walking,” Cam muttered. “I think I’m getting somewhere.”
The mannequins were uncomfortably close to a crowd around them and the skull-like face dove again, but Zellie started walking again, just fast enough to escape the edge of the crowd before it closed around them. As a mannequin reached out for her with a clawed hand, she dodged away and the mannequin howled and collapsed into a pile of limbs that reformed into another worm-like creature. Zellie kicked it apart and pushed on ahead.
They left the mannequins behind, moving into a vastness that seemed impossible: no columns, no supports, no visible walls, just an endless high ceiling and an endless cement floor.
Cam kept on muttering to himself, talking to the city or the building or God. Zellie knew he could get results; they’d survived together this long because he could get results. But they were never what you’d call 100% reproducible, just better than the average result when somebody begged the city to feed them, save then, find them.
Then large cubes appeared in the distance, stacked on top of one another. “Now,” breathed Cam. “Here.”
Zellie promptly took a Big Step, and another, and another, dragging Cam with her. After the third Big Step, the cubes popped into pallets stacked with boxes. Noise and light and life erupted around her. They were inside a store. A big store. One of those big warehouses her grandmother had always scorned.
Cam looked at her, smiling tiredly. “We just need a cart.”
“And we need to hurry. We can get back from here? Do we have to go outside? I don’t want to—” she stopped herself uneasily, looking at people passing by with their carts.
“I can definitely bring the city back if you can get us across,” said Cam confidently. He looked around. “I’m going to need some help navigating, though. Misty weird cities, I’m great! But this place seems to have a lot of corners….”
He looked little-boy-plaintive and Zellie wanted to kiss the expression away. But—later. She looked around, figured out where the front of the store was, and then led Cam to an abandoned cart near where somebody was checking membership cards at the entrance. There were cameras there, too, and Zellie tried to stay away from them. Her initial feeling of triumph at working together to get somewhere was fading rapidly under a bad feeling.
“Cheese, maybe? And nuts.”
“Hold on to the cart,” Zellie said. “I’ll guide it. We have to hurry.” People were looking at the two of them. Their clothing was old and torn and they weren’t exactly clean but Zellie wasn’t worried about that nearly as much as other things.
They shoved their way through the crowds—it must be a weekend back in the world where that mattered—and found the dairy aisle, grabbing this and that as they waited for knots of people to unravel. The cheese aisle was huge, full of enormous rounds and long bricks of hard cheeses. Zellie piled pounds and pounds into the bottom of the cart. Then they moved on to the dried fruit and the nuts, and one aisle over, canned tuna and crackers.
“Down here!” pointed Cam. “I can smell stuff we need.” It was perpendicular to the food aisles and contained sporting goods, of all things. “You grab socks! We always need clean socks! I’ll get some other stuff!” commanded Cam, and fumbled over on the other side of the aisle. Puzzled, Zellie grabbed an armful of sock packages and then raced after Cam as he kept pushing the cart down the aisle. He rotated it awkwardly.
“Pasta and breakfast cereal!” crowed Cam, pointing at what could only be a blur of colors for him. He darted over and grabbed what turned out to be a giant-sized box of Pop-Tarts. “Ooh and there’s cookware down there!”
But Zellie was looking somewhere else. On this side of the warehouse she could see a large display of garden supplies. “Seeds,” she breathed.
There was an odd coughing sound behind her, but she was so enraptured by the idea of seeds that at first she didn’t recognize it. “Come on, Cam. We can grab some trail mix as we go over there!” Cam dropped a bag of chocolate chips into the cart and latched on. She started pushing.
The coughing sound came again. This time it cut through Zellie’s distraction. She looked around, dreading what she’d see, but all she saw was people. Nobody she recognized.
It didn’t matter.
“Dear child,” said a sad, wispy voice, from the other side of the aisle of pastries, and it was followed by another rattling cough.
Cam heard it too. His face went pale. “We need to go.”
Zellie was breathing hard. She felt cold with terror. “We need those seeds. Hop onto the back of the cart, Cam! We have to run!”
They ran, Zellie pushing both the heavy cart and Cam as fast as she could. She was strong and tough, but the rattling cough and the wispy voice followed her. “Don’t run, child. You must know I’m sorry.”
The garden section was close. There were wheelbarrows, bags of dirt—surely they had to have seeds? People weren’t moving out of the way. Somehow the voice was getting inside other customers’ heads, too, making them look around for Zellie and Cam. Terror gripped Zellie’s chest. She couldn’t seem to get enough air, but if she stopped moving they’d catch her and they’d hold her—
“I’ve been sick with worry, child, ever since that horrible boy lured you away from me. Terribly sick. How could you do that to me?” The rattling cough started again and just kept going and going.
There! A big mixed selection of vegetable seeds, heavily illustrated with happy children and grandparents. “Grab it,” yelped Zellie, and Cam windmilled one of his arms to knock some boxes into the cart. “Now, let’s out of here!”
A uniformed employee appeared at the end of the aisle, with a walkie-talkie in one hand and a concerned look on his face. They couldn’t go that way. Zellie needed room to take her Big Steps. Momentum was important.
She pivoted the heavy, awkward cart. It was slow, ridiculously slow. Cam jumped down and pushed with her, and they started running the other way down the long aisle. Three more employees were at the far end. It didn’t matter.
She fumbled for Cam’s hand and as soon as her palm met his, she pushed hard with her exhausted, aching legs and took a Big Step.
The aisle flickered around them. She took another Big Step and the flickering increased, like she was playing a new game on an ancient computer.
“No, no, child,” rattled the voice, and the flickering slowed down.
“Go to hell!” yelled Zellie and pushed as hard as she could. The final Big Step took her over the boundary point and the aisle snapped from something real into long, wavy lines that vibrated with her pounding feet.
Dust rose up around them and the air changed. Everything was once again dim and grey, filled with crowding, unfriendly shapes.
“We want to get out!” cried Cam, and a door opened in the floor under their wheels. They fell through….
and rolled the cart out of the Mall. The door slammed shut behind them and the blinds slithered down.
“Oh my God,” said Izzy. “Oh my God, you did it!” He took two steps toward the cart, then stopped himself.
Ramone didn’t wait. He darted across the street, grabbed a box of crackers and broke it open. “Hey, you okay? Was Inside that bad?”
“It’s always bad,” said Zellie shortly. “It was worse when my grandmother found us in the warehouse, though.”
Eden hissed and said, “Wow, that’s shitty luck.”
Zellie snatched the box of crackers from Ramone’s hand and tossed a stack each to Deena, Eden, and Izzy. “Wasn’t luck. I told you before my grandmother’s a witch.”
“Don’t eat too much,” said Cam. “We need this food for later.”
“Do we get to eat it then?” asked Izzy, eyeing the Pop-Tarts.
“All you want,” Cam promised. “But the first thing we have to do is round up everybody in the city.”
* * *
There were no more than two dozen mortals scattered across the feral city, and they hardly ever got together in one group. It was dangerous. Even after the hunters vanished, i
t was dangerous, because the city didn’t like it. When enough people gathered in one place, the Inside started coming out.
But Cam was right in thinking food would lure them together. Zellie brought him wood from the red and white forest that bounded the city, and he built a fire in the Fountain Plaza, another of the city’s stable landmarks. He fried onions, and stewed apples and sugar in the bent ruins of a street sign, muttering to himself about the cookware that Zellie’s grandmother had stopped them from acquiring.
Slowly, the others trickled in: Ramsey, the eldest at the ripe old age of twenty five, solitary and gifted the same way Zellie was. Rani, fifteen-years-old and never, ever in the alleys of the city, no matter how cold the night. The dreamy, scruffy twenty-year-old who answered only to Chairman. Sunny, the young woman Zellie had dismissed as a ‘tourist,’ and Dev, the creepy thirteen-year-old boy Sunny had decided to adopt. And others, too, those Zellie had only seen at a distance. They all came, edging up to the shopping cart full of food that Ramone and Eden guarded jealously.
Ramsey put down a case of beer he’d acquired on his own. “I hear we’re having a party.” He looked better fed than the rest of them, which wasn’t really surprising given his gifts. But he’d come all the same, Zellie noticed. Probably because Cam had wanted him to come. Cam could charm a girl from an ivory tower and a hermit out of isolation—but the real test was coming: could he charm the city itself?
“Oooh,” said Chairman, zeroing in on the beer. “Man, it has been a long time.”
“Take it slow,” said Ramsey, amused. “Eat something first.”
Cam frowned at the beer. “Definitely eat something first. Ramone, break out the cheese.”
Ramone grumbled under his breath but did as he was asked.
“Cheese and beer! Perfect!” said Chairman, and slung himself onto the rim of the fountain. It was big and round, with an unrecognizable stone shape in the center from which water trickled. The water from the fountain was always fresh and cold and good: an essential mercy in the feral city.
Ramsey drifted over to Zellie. “So what’s this about?”
Etiquette of Exiles (Senyaza Series Book 4) Page 16