by Astor Penn
Of course, this woman could be lying. Maybe they just want to give us false hope, a head start before they shoot us down in cold blood. Doesn’t matter; I’m still going to run.
“Those guards you killed won’t be the last here. There will be more coming soon to replace them, and this time they won’t be fooled. You can count on that.” Despite the almost mournful tone and the fragility of her voice, she sounds confident we won’t actually pose a threat to them again. She’s a believer in her camp, even in the hazmats.
Lyson, who was closer to me than I thought, stands up calmly, as if he has no regrets. His people follow suit. I stay down where I am for the moment, waiting. Pausing. Life will resume shortly.
There are new voices, a few of them, talking quietly. Too quietly for me to hear. Arguing, probably, about how wise it is to let us go. It’s a wave again—voices cresting and growing closer, then cutting off. Nightmares come true every day.
“What is it, honey?” the old woman asks. I wonder what she looks like—like someone’s grandmother, probably. I could look, but I don’t.
“That girl. She’s mine.” And I know that voice. Of course I do. It’s the one I’ve been waiting to hear, convinced that what I saw earlier was a ghost—one that could move things and people and deny me until my heart shattered.
Dare I look now?
“She’s part of the group that attacked us,” the woman says. I wonder how she came to be the voice of the group; was it merely her age? Have we regressed so far back into civilization that the oldest is considered the wisest?
“Maybe,” Raven replies, and I hear the tone of doubt in her voice already. I should speak up. I don’t. “It doesn’t matter. We were together before this.”
There it is: I feel my heart again. It’s back in full force, and she may not see it, but the smile on my face might rip it in two. I haven’t smiled in such a long time. It’s half hope in the pit of my stomach, half delirious hysteria.
“She’s not welcome inside.”
Is it because of my involvement with the riot or because of my status as a possible carrier, I wonder? Doesn’t matter. I don’t care. I’m not going back in there, even if they baked me a cake with my name on it.
“I know,” Raven replies, and this time I definitely hear the sadness in her voice. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard such resigned melancholy from Raven.
I hear the footsteps on wet earth, and it’s a sigh to my ears after listening to them thunder on concrete floors. When they stop directly next to me, I’m afraid to look up; I have to be sure first. Sure that this is what I think it means.
Wordlessly, I offer my hand. Palm up. Fingers shaking. Asking. Searching. Hoping. It’s there for her to take it, but it’s still a choice. If she doesn’t take it, she could be safe. She could recant and pretend she never knew me and fade into the oblivion of the camp. And if she does take it? What will it mean for her?
I am selfish in asking her to take my hand. She does it anyway, and those fingers are cold, but their presence fans flames under my skin. A sob nearly rips out of my throat; instead I clutch madly at her hand with both of mine, nearly dragging her down in the process. She keeps upright on her feet, tugging at my hands, at first I think to take hers away from me, but she’s only pulling me to my feet. I stand next to her, turning to face the people behind us. Her people.
Lyson and his group are all looking cautiously at them in their issued uniforms. Only a small group has followed us outside, most of them armed, and they’re not just built men in their twenties or thirties, but men and women of different ages. It’s a stupid thing to notice, but their leader is a woman who must be in her eighties, hunchbacked with age and sorrow. Her hair is nearly all gone, just a few long wisps of gray, and her lips are so thin her mouth looks like it’s been cut away, and there’s just a scar of an opening now. She’s wearing thick glasses. I had forgotten glasses exist.
Raven takes a half step in front of me. I almost laugh; the hysterical feeling in my stomach hasn’t quite passed, and I can’t look at this old woman and see any kind of threat. Regardless, Raven puts a physical claim on me despite having already placed a verbal one. I keep one hand in hers and place the other on her back. She doesn’t need to protect me—I will protect her. Moving to the side, she glances up at me. Her eyes are more honey-colored than I remember. She has more freckles on her cheeks. Her hair is longer.
There’s something else, though—something I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s not a physical change in Raven, not enough that I can spot it, anyway. It’s something else, something in the way she moves, the way she looks at me and the people in front of her. With almost fondness. More fondness than I ever saw in her eyes when she looked at me before, or when she looked at Poppy or Bryant. It is simultaneously infuriating and endearing; I feel the sting on the behalf of my good people now gone, but I am pleased to the bone to see her happiness upon seeing me again.
I am whole again, with righteous anger and soothing love. I am two halves, two-faced and more than two-dimensional. It was never enough to be frightened or angry; I didn’t have the drive to make it until I had hope, and I didn’t have hope again until I had Raven. Now she drives me both with hope and anger. I should be thankful, but part of me pities her, because I know what it is that’s changed about her. She’s lost her edge—she loves more than she can hate now.
What struck me most about Raven was her own self-obsessed will to live. I had to ask myself what I meant to her because I knew who meant the most to her: only herself. Something has changed that, and it’s not me, or not wholly me, anyway. We don’t know what each of us has been through in the past several months, but I can see that these people mean something to her. Yet she stands between us—the group she now loves and the girl she used to love. Is she afraid they’ll hurt me or does she see the differences in my eyes too? Is she afraid I’ll hurt them?
She should be.
“If you leave with her, you won’t be welcomed back inside,” the woman says indifferently, with no apparent attachment to Raven.
Raven glances at me, as if gauging whether or not I’m worth it. “I understand.”
She squeezes my hand to comfort me. It’s strange being comforted by her. It’s off-putting—I am in a different universe entirely.
“You don’t have to come with me,” I say finally. She looks at me like I’m a stranger, as if she feels the same way as I do—hardly recognizable. “It’s enough that I know you’re here, and you’re happy. Safe, even. It’s more than I thought I’d find.”
Shaking her head she steps closer to me until her forehead brushes the tip of my chin. “No, I’m coming with you. They don’t need me.” They’re words meant only for me to hear; they slip into my ears, my hair, my shoulder. I soak in them like sunlight.
She says this with the implication that I still need her. A strand of her hair feels coarse in my hand, but her cheek velvety with finer hairs. I feel no fear in touching her, knowing that I have no disease to give or take and knowing these people cannot judge me by standards no one can uphold.
“I don’t need you anymore either,” I say finally, taking a step back, letting her hair fall from my fingers. “I want you to come with me, because I still care for you. I don’t want you to come with me because you feel obligated to or because you think I can’t take care of myself.
“I made it out of New York, one of the biggest disaster areas of the outbreaks, and I was completely alone. I traveled several hundred miles before I met you, completely alone. I just spent the last I don’t even know how long in hell completely alone. I wasn’t sure I’d see you again, but I wanted to. I wanted to tell you I could survive being alone those last few weeks because of you, even if you weren’t there anymore.”
I don’t squeeze her hand; I drop it.
“And now I’m telling you I have to go on because I don’t think I can stop, but I’ll be happy to think of you here if you stay.” I take another step back. “So stay, if you want. It’s
okay to stay.”
My nodding is frantic enough that tears shake out of my eyes, but I won’t wipe them away or acknowledge them. I mean every word—she could stay, and I could go on like that. I just don’t want to.
Then I turn and walk when I want to run, because moving is life. It used to hurt to look at Raven because I was scared of her, scared for a long time not knowing what it was to be scared. Now I can’t look at her because I am changing, or changed. I don’t know who I am now—not a teenage girl or a martyr of an apocalypse. I’m not a daughter or a girlfriend or a friend to anyone right now.
In the beginning I was lucky to make it out of New York. That’s the simple truth. I left my dorm room that day because I didn’t know what to do. I followed the mass of people uptown, to the tunnel, through the tunnel, climbing over cars and people and raising above the screams and panic not because of any particular might I hold, but from sheer luck and stupidity. The truth is I should be long dead, not even buried, but rotting somewhere in the open air. This truth at least I’ve always known; it’s not like the lie I tell myself to keep going that I am stronger and smarter than those who haven’t made it. It’d be not only folly to believe that, but it’d be spitting on the theoretical graves of the people who were smarter and better than I ever was or will be.
The future used to look like anything and everything. That’s no longer the case.
“Brie!” It’s not startling that it’s Raven—the girl I’ve only dreamt of in past weeks—but it’s startling because I haven’t heard anyone call my name in so long. Beside Wyles and the top doctors—Barlett and Ringley and Jackson—the majority of the men and women in the center never asked me my name. They never knew and never cared. When the people on the road found me, the last thing they would have asked me is my name.
I wonder if they’re all still alive in the hospital. Was there really an outbreak? What could cause such panic if they were so sure things were on their way to being better?
These thoughts are all tangential and barely felt, just fleeting things sprinting in the periphery. I don’t hold them, simply feel their brush, barely making sense of them in their wake. It’s Raven I see, feel, and know completely. She’s quickly catching up to me without running. It’s strange to realize you’ve missed someone for something as insubstantial as their gait, how with a few steps someone looks so entirely angry and near venomous.
“I’m coming with you,” Raven says, but despite the look of determination on her face, her voice is near tender. I once would have mistaken it for tenderness toward me, but now I see it as hesitation on her part.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.” She rolls her eyes, and it feels like the cracks are showing just enough to see the Raven I knew under the new, fortified one in front of me. “You need to trust me that I know what I can do and what I want to do. I’m coming with you.”
She takes my hand again. “Are you ready?”
She asks me like I’m the one who’s hesitating. Nodding, I turn, catching just the blurred edges of the people behind Raven—her people of the camp, and the men from the road still frozen as unsure witnesses—and pull her with me. We don’t look back, and we keep a solid, silent pace until we reach the heavily forested woods. At least now I need not worry about watching my back from those people; Raven is like a security charm. They won’t harm me so long as we’re together.
She follows my lead without verbal instruction to the tree where I left most of my supplies. Immediately I pull out more clothes to pile on—it’s going to be freezing or below shortly now that we’re headed into the dead of winter, and neither of us is adequately dressed. She helps tug a sweater over my head because my arms are too stiff with chill and postadrenaline relapse, and I knot a blanket around her shirt under her coat. We tear strips of bandages and tie them around our feet in absence of additional socks.
The last thing I give her is something I lifted off the road men without their knowledge. It’s lying in the bottom of my bag, wrapped in an old rag like a Christmas present. When I hand it to her, she opens it without comment, but I see her miss a breath, holding it in until she wraps it around her knuckles.
“Do you want a knife as well?” I now have three, more than I had before, but none of them are as familiar to me as the ones now lost. Thinking of them reminds me of the floating body I once peeled apart to survive. It hurts less to think of this now than it did then.
“Not now.” The wire I fished off the road people is thinner than the wire she once threatened me with. It will work all the same. “Thank you.”
Now I am riddled with guilt. “Don’t thank me. You should have stayed with them. We most likely won’t last the winter.”
“I’m glad I have the chance to find out.” There’s a space between us; neither of us reaches for the other now, not when there’s no one to watch us, no one to prove ourselves to. We have only ourselves, and suddenly I feel just as lonely as I did trapped as a prisoner behind high walls, because we’ve both changed, but it’s me that’s changed for the worse. It feels as if I can’t be reached now.
“You know I survived as long as I did because I was a loner,” I say. “I loved my family but hardly spent more than the hour it took for us to eat dinner together with them. I got along with classmates but never went with anyone to the movies or to their families’ places for the summer.
“I felt pity for the ones who didn’t have anything to eat, or who were stupid enough to trust the vans in the beginning, but I never stopped to help anyone. I survived because I didn’t care, only back then I still thought of myself as a good person. I told myself they couldn’t be helped, and I fooled even myself. I think I just didn’t care. I wasn’t brave enough to admit it, but the only people who’ve lasted this long are the bad ones.”
“It’s the truth, isn’t it?” she says after a pause. “You know me. You know some of the things I’ve done, but the worst things are the ones you know nothing of.”
“I just want you to know the truth.” It’s painful, standing here with her. More painful than I would have ever thought.
“I’ve always known that truth,” she says quietly. The space between us grows without either of us moving a muscle, as if by breathing, more words cut into each other.
Only when I realize how much I can hate her and still love her do I smile. I hate her because I’m more similar to her than I ever wished, but I love her because she’s changed. And, I think, she loves me too. There’s no one I want to be with now except her. My longing for family is gone, or replaced, and it is only my wish for them to be alive, even if we never meet again. It’s just me, the bitterest and darkest parts of me, and her, who helped burn the edges so no one will see past the scar tissue.
We could fill the distance between us with just a wire and a knife.
“Are you ready?” she asks.
“I guess I always was.” The backpack on my shoulders weighs more than food and water; it weighs in blood and sweat. “I’m going west, not south.”
I still have to know. It was a promise, more to myself than to them. But I’m going home.
“I guess that’s where I’m going too, then.” She gives where she would not have before.
By the time it starts snowing, just the big, harmless flakes that melt right into the earth, our feet are long numb and our tongues stick like glue in our mouths. I’m sore not from hiking the terrain, but from the head-to-toe shivering that feels like mild electrocution.
“Are you going to tell me now?” The words sound muffled from my frozen tongue.
“Tell you what?” She breathes heavily; we move to keep warm—moving is life, moving is a heartbeat, a song, and a whisper—but we’re both out of shape now. Our short-lived peace cost us our measured strength, but we’d sooner admit it than stop.
“Your story.”
A snort of laughter. “I told you,” she says grinning, “We’ve got to survive this first.” She grunts, picking up pace. “Then I’ll tell you eve
rything you never wanted to know.”
Prove myself to know her. Prove myself to live.
“What would you do if tomorrow you woke up and I was infected?” It’s strange asking this, because I asked myself this question about her constantly and then not at all.
“Presumably I’d be infected too,” she says with little emotion.
“What if you weren’t? What if we were miles from here, and you woke up and were alone because I was gone?”
“The infection—”
“Forget the infection. What if someone shot me or if I die from exposure? What if I’m gone?”
Finally she stops, wrenching herself toward me. I could wear her fury in comfort.
“Are you asking if I’d mourn you? Like a widow?” Her eyes narrow. Snow melts in her dark hair. “Are you asking if I still love you?”
“You never said. You never said the word ‘love’ before.” That was always the crux with her; how much did she feel for me?
But she did just leave safety with me. For me. Maybe she, too, has stopped asking the question of what might happen tomorrow.
“I’m here. I came back for you before! I just left the first collective group of people to give a damn about me in my whole life, for you! I care!” she yells, and there’s a flutter of movement in the trees near us, a bird setting to flight. “I care!”
“I love you too,” I finally say. What else can I say?
We stand there, face to face but with that same ominous space between. In declarations of love, two people are usually standing together, holding hands or kissing.
“What happened to you?” she asks. I wonder if she’s been dying to ask all along.
I’d like to tell her about the building and all its hallways, the rooms inside them, some empty, but most filled with suffering patients. I could tell her about Jackson, or Wyles. Barlett. The closest thing I had to a collective group of people who gave a damn about me. I could tell her about checks and needles and blood. I could tell her that I have no fear of infection, and supposedly, neither does she.