by Лорен Оливер
Suddenly he jerks backward, simultaneously finding my wrists and pulling them down to my sides. “There were days I would rather they have killed me.” He doesn’t drop my wrists; he squeezes them tightly, pinning my arms, keeping me immobilized. His voice is low, urgent, and so full of anger it pains me even more than his grip. “There were days I asked for it—prayed for it when I went to sleep. The belief that I would see you again, that I could find you—the hope for it—was the only thing that kept me going.” He releases me and takes another step backward. “So no. I don’t understand.”
“Alex, please.”
He balls his fists. “Stop saying my name. You don’t know me anymore.”
“I do know you.” I’m still crying, swallowing back spasms in my throat, struggling to breathe. This is a nightmare and I will wake up. This is a monster-story, and he has come back to me a terror-creation, patched together, broken and hateful, and I will wake up and he will be here, and whole, and mine again. I find his hands, lace my fingers through his even as he tries to pull away. “It’s me, Alex. Lena. Your Lena. Remember? Remember 37 Brooks, and the blanket we used to keep in the backyard—”
“Don’t,” he says. His voice breaks on the word.
“And I always beat you in Scrabble,” I say. I have to keep talking, and keep him here, and make him remember. “Because you always let me win. And remember how we had a picnic one time, and the only thing we could find from the store was canned spaghetti and some green beans? And you said to mix them—”
“Don’t.”
“And we did, and it wasn’t bad. We ate the whole stupid can, we were so hungry. And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and told me there was a star for every thing you loved about me.” I’m gasping, feeling as though I am about to drown; I’m reaching for him blindly, grabbing at his collar.
“Stop.” He grabs my shoulders. His face is an inch from mine but unrecognizable: a gross, contorted mask. “Just stop. No more. It’s done, okay? That’s all done now.”
“Alex, please—”
“Stop!” His voice rings out sharply, hard as a slap. He releases me and I stumble backward. “Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that—what we felt, what it meant—that’s done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.”
“Alex!”
He has started to turn away; now he whirls around. The moon lights him stark white and furious, a camera image, two-dimensional, gripped by the flash. “I don’t love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never loved you.”
The air goes. Everything goes. “I don’t believe you.” I’m crying so hard, I can hardly speak.
He takes one step toward me. And now I don’t recognize him at all. He has transformed entirely, turned into a stranger. “It was a lie. Okay? It was all a lie. Craziness, like they always said. Just forget about it. Forget it ever happened.”
“Please.” I don’t know how I stay on my feet, why I don’t shatter into dust right there, why my heart keeps beating when I want it so badly to stop. “Please don’t do this, Alex.”
“Stop saying my name.”
Then we both hear it: the crack and rustle of leaves behind us, the sound of something large moving through the woods. Alex’s expression changes. The anger drops away and is replaced by something else: a frozen tenseness, like a deer just before it startles.
“Don’t move, Lena,” he says quietly, but his words are laced with urgency.
Even before I turn around, I can feel the looming shape behind me, the snuffle of animal breath, the hunger—craving, impersonal.
A bear.
It has picked its way into the gully and is now no more than four feet away from us. It is a black bear, its matted fur streaked silver in the moonlight, and big: five or six feet long, and, even on all four legs, almost as high as my shoulder. It looks from Alex to me, and back to Alex. Its eyes are just like pieces of carved onyx, dull, lifeless.
Two things strike me at once: The bear is skinny, starving. The winter has been hard.
Also: It is not afraid of us.
A jolt of fear shocks through me, shorting out the pain, shorting out all other thoughts besides one: I should have brought a gun.
The bear takes another step forward, swinging its massive head back and forth, evaluating us. I can see its breath steaming in the cold air, its peaked shoulder blades high and sharp.
“All right,” Alex says, in that same low voice. He’s standing behind me, and I can feel the tension in his body—ramrod straight, petrified. “Let’s take it easy. Real slow. We’re going to back away, all right? Nice and slowly.”
He takes a single step backward and just that, that little movement, makes the bear tense up in a crouch, baring its teeth, which glisten bone white in the moonlight. Alex freezes again. The bear begins to growl. It is so close that I can feel the heat from its massive body, smell the sourness of its starving breath.
I should have brought a gun. No way to turn and run; that makes us prey, and the bear is looking for prey. Stupid. That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.
The bear swings forward another step, still growling. Every muscle in my body is an alarm, screaming at me to run, but I stay rooted in place, forcing myself not to move, not to twitch.
The bear hesitates. I won’t run. So maybe not prey, then.
It pulls back an inch—an advantage, a tiny concession.
I take it.
“Hey!” I bark, as loud as I can, and bring my arms above my head, trying to make myself look as large as possible. “Hey! Get out of here! Go on. Go.”
The bear withdraws another inch, confused, startled.
“I said go.” I reach out and strike against the nearest tree with my foot, sending a spray of bark in the bear’s direction. As the bear still hesitates, uncertain—but not growling now, on the defensive, confused—I drop down into a crouch and scoop up the first rock I can get my fist around, and then I’m up and chucking it, hard. It connects just below the bear’s left shoulder with a heavy thud. The bear shuffles backward, whimpering. Then it turns and bounds off into the woods, a fast black blur.
“Holy shit,” Alex bursts out behind me. He exhales, long and loud, bends over, straightens up again. “Holy shit.”
The adrenaline, the release of tension, has made him forget; for a second, the new mask is dropped, and a glimpse of the old Alex is revealed.
I feel a brief surge of nausea. I keep thinking of the bear’s wounded, desperate eyes, and the heavy thud of the rock against its shoulder. But I had no choice.
It is the rule of the Wilds.
“That was crazy. You’re crazy.” Alex shakes his head. “The old Lena would have bolted.”
You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher.
A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn’t love me.
He never loved me.
It was all a lie.
“The old Lena is dead,” I say, and then push past him, back down through the gully toward the camp. Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone.
You must hurt, or be hurt.
Alex doesn’t follow me, and I don’t expect him to. I don’t care where he goes, whether he stays in the woods all night, whether he never returns to camp.
As he said, all of that—the caring—is done now.
It’s not until I’ve almost reached the tents that I begin crying again. The tears come all at once, and I have to stop walking and double up into a crouch. I want to bleed all the feelings out of me. For a second I think about how easy it would be to pass back to the other side, to walk straight into the laboratories and offer myself up to the surgeons.
You were right; I was wrong. Get it out.
“Lena?”
I look up. Julian has emerged from his tent. I must have woken him. His hair is sticking up at crazy angles, like the broken spokes of a wheel, and his feet are ba
re.
I straighten up, swiping my nose on the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “I’m okay,” I say, still hiccuping back tears. “I’m fine.”
For a minute he stands there, looking at me, and I can tell that he knows why I’m crying, and he understands, and it’s going to be all right. He opens his arms to me.
“Come here,” he says quietly.
I can’t move to him fast enough. I practically fall into him. He catches me and pulls me in tightly to his chest, and I let myself go again, let sobs run through me. He stands there with me and murmurs into my hair and kisses the top of my head and lets me cry over losing another boy, a boy I loved better.
“I’m sorry,” I say over and over into his chest. “I’m sorry.” His shirt smells like smoke from the fire, like mulch and spring growth.
“It’s okay,” he whispers back.
When I’ve calmed down a little, Julian takes my hand. I follow him into the dark cave of his tent, which smells like his shirt but even more so. I lie down on top of his sleeping bag and he lies down beside me, making a perfect seashell arc for my body. I curl up in this space—safe, warm—and let the last tears I will ever cry for Alex flow hot over my cheeks, and down into the ground, and away.
Hana
H ana.” My mother is looking at me expectantly. “Fred asked you to pass the green beans.”
“Sorry,” I say, forcing a smile. Last night, I hardly slept. I even had little snatches of dream—bare wisps of image that skittered away before I could focus on them.
I reach for the glazed ceramic dish—like everything in the Hargrove house, it is beautiful—even though Fred is more than capable of reaching it himself. This is part of the ritual. Soon I will be his wife, and we will sit like this every night, performing a well-choreographed dance.
Fred smiles at me. “Tired?” he says. In the past few months, we have spent many hours together; our Sunday dinner is just one of the many ways we have begun practicing merging our lives.
I’ve spent a long time scrutinizing his features, trying to figure out whether he is attractive, and in the end I have come up with this: He is very pleasant to look at. He is not as attractive as I am, but he is smarter, and I like his dark hair, and the way it falls over his right eyebrow when he has not had time to smooth it back.
“She looks tired,” Mrs. Hargrove says. Fred’s mother often talks about me as though I’m not in the room. I don’t take it personally; she does it with everybody. Fred’s father was mayor for more than three terms. Now that Mr. Hargrove is dead, Fred has been groomed to take his place. Since the Incidents in January, Fred campaigned tirelessly for nomination and appointment, and it paid off. Only a week ago, a special interim committee appointed him the new mayor. He will be inaugurated publicly early next week.
Mrs. Hargrove is used to being the most important woman in the room.
“I’m fine,” I say. Lena always said that I could lie my way out of hell.
The truth is, I’m not fine. I’m worried that I can’t stop worrying about Jenny and how thin she looked.
I’m worried that I’ve been thinking of Lena again.
“Of course, the wedding preparations are very stressful,” my mother says.
My father grunts. “You’re not the one writing the checks.”
This makes everybody laugh. The room is suddenly illuminated by a brief flash of light from outside: A journalist, parked in the bushes directly outside the window, is snapping our picture, which will then be sold to local newspapers and TV stations.
Mrs. Hargrove has arranged for paparazzi to be here tonight. She tipped the photographers off to the location of a dinner that Fred arranged for us on New Year’s Eve. Photo opportunities are arranged and carefully plotted, so the public can watch our emerging story and see the happiness we’ve achieved by being paired so perfectly together.
And I am happy with Fred. We get along very well. We like the same things; we have a lot to talk about.
That’s why I’m worried: Everything will go up in smoke if the procedure has not worked correctly.
“I heard on the radio that they’ve evacuated parts of Waterbury,” Fred says. “Parts of San Francisco, too. Riots broke out over the weekend.”
“Please, Fred,” Mrs. Hargrove says. “Do we really have to talk about this at dinner?”
“It won’t help to ignore it,” Fred says, turning to her. “That’s what Dad did. And look what happened.”
“Fred.” Mrs. Hargrove’s voice is strained, but she manages to keep smiling. Click. Just for a second, the dining room walls are lit up by the camera’s flash. “It really isn’t the time—”
“We can’t pretend anymore.” Fred looks around the table, as though appealing to each of us. I drop my eyes. “The resistance exists. It may even be growing. An epidemic—that’s what this is.”
“They’ve cordoned off most of Waterbury,” my mother says. “I’m sure they’ll do the same in San Francisco.”
Fred shakes his head. “This isn’t just about the infected. That’s the problem. There’s a whole system of sympathizers—a network of support. I won’t do what Dad did,” he says with sudden fierceness. Mrs. Hargrove has gone very still. “For years there were rumors that the Invalids still existed, that their numbers were growing, even. You know it. Dad knew it. But he refused to believe.”
I keep my head bent over my plate. A piece of lamb is sitting, untouched, next to green beans and fresh mint jelly. Only the best for the Hargroves. I pray that the journalists outside don’t take a picture now; I’m sure my face is red. Everyone at the table knows that my former best friend tried to run off with an Invalid, and they know—or suspect—that I covered for her.
Fred’s voice gets quieter. “By the time he accepted it—by the time he was willing to act—it was too late.” He reaches out to touch his mother’s hand, but she picks up her fork and begins eating again, stabbing green beans with such force, the tines of her fork make a sharp, clanging noise against the plate.
Fred clears his throat. “Well, I refuse to look the other way,” he says. “It’s time we all face this head-on.”
“I just don’t see why we have to talk about it at dinner,” Mrs. Hargrove says. “When we’re having a perfectly nice time—”
“May I be excused?” I ask too sharply. Everyone at the table turns to me in surprise. Click. I can only imagine what that picture will look like: my mother’s mouth frozen in a perfect O, Mrs. Hargrove frowning; my father lifting a bloody piece of lamb to his lips.
“What do you mean, excused?” my mother says.
“See?” Mrs. Hargrove sighs and shakes her head at Fred. “You’ve made Hana unhappy.”
“No, no. It’s not that. It’s just . . . You were right. I’m not feeling well,” I say. I ball my napkin on the table and then, seeing my mother’s look, fold it and drape it next to my plate. “I have a headache.”
“I hope you’re not coming down with something,” Mrs. Hargrove says. “You can’t be sick for the inauguration.”
“She won’t be sick,” my mother says quickly.
“I won’t be sick,” I parrot. I don’t know exactly what’s wrong with me, but little points of pain are exploding in my head. “I just need to lie down, I think.”
“I’ll call Tony.” My mom pushes away from the table.
“No, please.” More than anything, I want to be left alone. In the past month, since my mother and Mrs. Hargrove determined that the wedding needed to be fast-tracked, to correspond with Fred’s ascension to mayor, it seems the only time I can be alone is when I go to the bathroom. “I don’t mind walking.”
“Walking!” This provokes a miniature eruption. All of a sudden, everyone is speaking at once. My father is saying, Out of the question, and my mother says, Imagine how that would look. Fred leans toward me—It isn’t safe right now, Hana—and Mrs. Hargrove says, You must have a fever.
In the end, my parents decide that Tony will drive me home and return for them later. This is
a decent compromise. At least it means I’ll have the house to myself for a bit. I stand up and bring my plate to the kitchen, despite Mrs. Hargrove’s insistence that the housekeeper be allowed to do it. I scrape food into the trash, and flash back to the smell of the Dumpsters yesterday, the way that Jenny materialized from between them.
“I hope the conversation didn’t upset you.”
I turn around. Fred has followed me into the kitchen. He leaves a respectful distance between us.
“It didn’t,” I say. I’m too tired to reassure him further. I just want to go home.
“You don’t have a fever, do you?” Fred looks at me steadily. “You look pale.”
“I’m just tired,” I say.
“Good.” Fred puts his hands in his pockets, dark, creased in front, like my father’s. “I was worried I’d gotten a defective one.”
I shake my head, sure that I’ve misheard him. “What?”
“I’m kidding.” Fred smiles. He has a dimple in his left cheek, and very nice teeth; I appreciate that about him. “I’ll see you soon.” He leans forward and kisses my cheek. I draw back involuntarily. I’m still not used to being touched by him. “Go get your beauty sleep.”
“I will,” I say, but he’s already pushing out of the kitchen and returning to the dining room, where soon, dessert and coffee will be served. In three weeks, he will be my husband, and this will be my kitchen, and the housekeeper will be mine too. Mrs. Hargrove will have to listen to me, and I will choose what we eat every day, and there will be nothing left to want.
Unless Fred is right. Unless I am a defective one.
Lena
The argument continues: where to go, whether to split up.
Some members of the group want to loop south again, and then east to Waterbury, where there are rumors of a successful resistance movement and a large camp of Invalids flourishing in safety. Some want to head all the way out to Cape Cod, which is practically unpopulated and will therefore be a safer place to camp out. A few of us—Gordo, in particular—want to continue north and try to make a break across the U.S. border and into Canada.