The Walls Have Eyes

by Clare B. Dunkle

  “The Ursulas!” Martin whispered.

  Chip addressed them in bot, and then they addressed one another. They didn’t vibrate—at least, not as far as Martin could tell—but they conveyed by tiny gestures and glances the idea of a conversation rapidly transmitted.

  “You need to come with us, Martin Glass,” the first one said again, towering over him.

  “Okay,” he said, conscious of how high his voice sounded after hers. “I just—well, I just gotta check this one thing.”

  He turned to Lieutenant Tango. Next to the Ursulas, the soldier seemed silly and artificial, like an inflated action figure. “Is it true what the agents said about them?” Martin whispered. “About ripping people apart with their bare hands?”

  The lead Ursula spoke up. “We generally dislocate or fracture the cervical vertebrae. Body fluids stain carpets and wall coverings.” Her expression was as bland and long-suffering as if she were complaining that she couldn’t get her shirt collars white.

  “Oh!” Martin’s voice was very high now. It seemed to have gone up an octave. “Oh, wow. That’s all I needed to know. Thanks, ma’am.”

  “Are you ready to go?”

  “You bet,” Martin said. So she hoisted his knapsack and held out her hand, and he took it as if he were three.

  They walked down the hall, past broken handhelds and sheets of paper that swirled by the open doors. Outside was the gray hush that comes just before dawn. White tendrils of cloud seemed to have drifted down from the sky and woven a net among the trunks of the dripping fir trees. The Ursulas walked into the net of cloud, and Martin found that it was chilly.

  The cold air helped to focus his thoughts and free him from the feeling of awe that the Ursulas had inspired. The important thing, he reminded himself, was that the prototypes had done it. They had moved the school. That means Cassie’s safe, he thought, and that means the plan is still on. I have to find them and get them to help Mom.

  But that meant getting away from the Secretary of State. Even the agents were afraid of him.

  “What’s this Secretary guy like?” he asked the Ursula who held his hand. “Is he nice?”

  “No.”

  “Why do you work for him, then?”

  “We don’t,” Ursula answered. “Our duty is to protect and defend the President. But the President told us to protect and defend the Secretary of State.”

  “So who’s defending the President while you’re gone?”

  Ursula pondered. “I don’t know.”

  They were climbing out of the valley, clambering from boulder to boulder to get to the entrance of the tunnel. Martin wasn’t sorry to have a strong hand to hold. He knew the Ursulas were killers, but their morose pessimism wasn’t nearly as frightening as the obsessive enthusiasm of collector bots.

  Besides, Cassie was free. That was half his worry gone. But where was she? How had they gotten away? The red packet car. Martin was sure of it. The Wonder Babies were too little to make an escape on foot.

  He was walking through the long tunnel now. The Ursulas filled it up completely. They had to stoop in order not to bump their heads. Martin felt a little claustrophobic at the center of their crowd. All he could see were generous blue backs and upholstered blue fronts, like an escort of massive pillows. As the Ursulas swung their flashlights, strange shadows formed and jumped from place to place.

  The prototypes must have used the red packet car; it was longer than a regular packet, so it could hold lots of kids, and it had controls a human could work. But it was also conspicuous. That meant no traveling near cameras. There was a camera near BNBRX, so they wouldn’t have gone that way. Where else was there a camera? Martin didn’t know, but at least he had a place to start looking.

  He came out of the tunnel to a band of sky on the horizon that had lightened to the color of dust. “Hey, I left something over this way,” he told the Ursulas. “Do you mind if we walk by to get it?”

  “Will it help the interrogation?” Ursula asked.

  “Maybe,” Martin lied.

  Sure enough, the red packet car was gone. Nothing was left but a wasp’s nest hanging from the rafter under the tin roof and a faint shine on the empty rails.

  “Sorry,” Martin said. “It’s not here. No help.”

  The Ursulas looked deeply disappointed. But then, they always did.

  They led him past the rusted, peeling packet cars to the front of the rail yard, where the single set of tracks branched out into three pairs of rails, then five, then more. At the head of this steel delta stood a short packet car, shadowy and anonymous in the poor light. Ursula helped Martin up onto the open grillwork of its small platform.

  The interior was cozy, with dark walnut paneling and polished brass fixtures. A boy, a dog, and twelve large Ursulas made it cozier still. Martin took his seat as directed on a tapestry-covered bench that jutted out from the wall.

  Next to the bench, a large picture window with crystal-clear glass framed the shifting colors of dawn. When Martin leaned close, it played mirror as well and showed him his own dim reflection. I’m about to meet a good friend of the President, he thought, and it’s been two days since I brushed my teeth.

  Across from Martin, sharing his picture window, squatted a generously proportioned leather armchair. An Ursula unfolded a stowaway end table beside it while another Ursula knocked on a door in the front wall.

  “Good morning,” she called.

  Thumps and bumps erupted in the room beyond. Then came the sound of running water. Chip wormed his way through the crowd of Ursulas to lean up against Martin’s bench. He was panting a little from the close quarters and the excitement.

  “Hey, buddy,” Martin whispered to him. “We need to find a way out of here. Mom’s counting on us to get help.”

  The knob turned, and a hairy arm with rolled-up sleeves pushed the door open. The Secretary of State stumbled out. His face was as red as a beefsteak and shiny with sweat. He had abandoned his coat and tie, and his shirt had pulled out from his creased trousers. He tucked it back in as he staggered through the door.

  The Secretary collapsed into the armchair, which gave a loud, protesting creak, and he glared at them all through sleep-filmed eyes. The Ursulas gathered around and ministered to him as if he were critically ill.

  “Here’s your coffee.”

  A steaming mug the size of a soup bowl appeared on the stowaway table. The Secretary fumbled for the handle without looking, and Ursula turned the cup so it would meet his groping hand.

  “Ugh,” he muttered, or something that sounded like it, and hid his face behind the wide brim. It parted from the mug shinier than ever.

  An Ursula laid a white porcelain saucer on the table and dropped two large brown pills onto it with a sharp, high-pitched tinkle. The Secretary winced and swore at her, swept the pills up in a large fist, and consumed them with the next swig of coffee.

  Martin brightened a little. Maybe we’ll get breakfast, he thought. I’m pretty hungry—okay, really hungry. Really thirsty, too.

  An Ursula pressed a panel, and it slid aside to reveal a television screen. The President was silently talking. She touched a button, and his voice filled the crowded packet car, the same earnest voice Martin had grown up hearing every morning.

  “You have voted to authorize Poison Safety Day,” the President was saying. “A day to examine your cabinets and check the expiration dates on your medications to be sure your family is safe from accidental injury.”

  The Secretary of State leaned toward the television screen, his coffee cup halfway to his face. His incoherent grumbling smoothed out into a purr.

  “My dear fellow citizens,” continued the President, “my dear men, women, and children of this great and prosperous land, if Poison Safety Day saves only one life, it will be—” The Secretary gestured, and the television went black.

  Confused, Martin looked at the saffron-tinted sky. Then he checked his watch. “Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “It’s not seven o’clock yet.
Nobody’s done their voting.”

  The Secretary took a noisy swallow of coffee. “Oh, Lord,” he mumbled. “An idealist!” Another Ursula counted out several tan capsules of various sizes, and he swept them into his mouth with a martyred expression.

  Martin still gazed at the black television screen, trying to sort out what that meant. “He looks so sad,” he remarked, remembering what Mom had said. “He looks tired all the time these days.”

  That was how he learned that the Secretary had a very unpleasant laugh.

  Several more brown bottles of pills came and went, along with the sound of slurping and crunching. Martin climbed onto his knees on the bench to watch the sunrise.

  The sky in the east warmed by the second until it was a delicate magenta haze. Then the sun progressed in unhurried fashion over the horizon. It widened from a rim of orange to a great ruby circle that shimmered like an organdy party dress.

  “Wow,” Martin breathed, unable to tear his eyes away. “You gotta get a look at that!”

  The Secretary of State put down his empty coffee mug. He muttered, “You can’t make a dime off a sunrise.”

  An Ursula took the cup away while another put away all the pills. Several more Ursulas stood by the controls. The packet car lurched and started to roll.

  “But people would like to see it,” Martin pointed out. “Everything doesn’t have to cost money.”

  “You talk like a subversive,” the Secretary said. “So, you think things ought to be free.”

  Philosophy wasn’t Martin’s strong suit, and neither was politics, but he did feel strongly about sunrises. “Well, it shouldn’t be a crime to come out and look around,” he said. “People could go back inside, and it would be fine.”

  “That shows what you know,” the Secretary said scornfully. “Ursula! Slower! You’re upsetting my stomach.” The car slowed down, and he rested his massive forehead on his hand. “What do you know?” he grumbled with his eyes closed. “You don’t even know what suburbs are for.”

  “We’re the lucky ones,” Martin recited. “Our grandparents competed for the right to live in comfort—”

  “Blah, blah, blah.” The Secretary leaned back in his armchair and stuck a hand inside his shirtfront to scratch. “Ursula, how long till I get out of this pigsty?”

  “At this speed, seventeen hours.”

  “Oh, hell! Speed up, then. Just mind the bumps, will you?” He dropped his head onto his hands again.

  Martin watched the landfills slide by. First the shoe dump. Then the plastic dump. How far away could the Wonder Babies be?

  “Those lucky suburbs,” continued the Secretary with his hand over his eyes, “are nothing more than focus groups. Market test audiences.” He enunciated the words carefully, as if he could taste them in his mouth. “We give the suburbs a little money, and they indicate which products they like. They show us what’s out of date and which commercials work. Our corporations produce these products in large quantities, which they sell in similar ad campaigns overseas. There, less enlightened countries, stuffed to the seams with surplus people, buy our products by the billions.”

  He fixed Martin with his disagreeable stare, made more disturbing by the light pink hue of his bloodshot eyes.

  “For the privilege of being ‘world leaders’ and doing business from our shores, these corporations pay our government fantastic sums. Central laps up the cream and skims off a little whey to keep the suburbs happy, and the whole world spins along like a top. But you think we should give it all up to scratch in the dirt and watch the sun rise.”

  The Secretary brooded over Martin. Martin knew to keep his mouth shut now. Every teacher from kindergarten up had brooded over him. Principal Thomasson had practically made a career out of it.

  “Martin Revere Glass, from Suburb HM1,” he said. “You know something I don’t. And that makes me very unhappy.”

  Martin kept his face blank. That was all a kid could do when adults were brooding.

  “Even worse,” the Secretary continued, “the agents are after you because they appear to know something I don’t. And that makes me very concerned. Do you know how many members of our Central government have suffered assassination in recent years? Forty-four. And I only ordered half of them.”

  The Secretary cupped his chin in his hands and pulled absently at the folds of his neck.

  “Martin Revere Glass,” he said again, “who has done the impossible, who enters and leaves suburbs at will. Who defied a collector and spirited away a packet chief. I believe you have a story to tell me.”

  Martin felt his cheeks flush under the Secretary’s relentless stare. He reached down to pet his dog and discovered that Chip had slunk out of sight around the edge of the bench. Chip has the right idea, he thought.

  “Ursula!” called the Secretary. “Bring me my handheld. Mr. Glass—get to talking. Now.”

  So Martin talked. Some of it was the truth. Not much of it, but some.

  “How did you get out of the suburb?” the Secretary growled at one point.

  “Rolled,” Martin said.

  “On what?”

  Martin waved his hands. “On a packet thing. The nets catch you if you walk.”

  They came to the junction, where the packet lines split four ways. Martin felt the packet rattle and sway from side to side as they rolled over the switch. But they didn’t turn, and before long, bright green produce fields flowed by.

  Like I don’t have enough to worry about, Martin thought. Now we’re heading for the old suburb. But maybe the Wonder Babies came this way too.

  “Why did you leave the suburb?” the Secretary prompted as Martin fell silent. “Everything you wanted was there.”

  “I told you, my sister was gone.”

  “A Wonder Baby! Little parasites!” The Secretary’s face darkened, and he heaved in his seat like bubbling oatmeal. “They’re a menace to society! They belong in a cage in a lab.”

  Martin was too shocked to reply. He resumed his rambling story. As he talked, he scanned the scenery for clues.

  “You say you found the tunnel to the hidden school by accident,” the Secretary interrupted a few minutes later. “I’ve seen pictures. It’s not easy to find.”

  “I just got lucky, I guess.”

  Sooner than Martin would have believed possible, they reached the massive aerial knot of roads and passed beneath it into the haunted suburbs. The packet car slowed down. Battered houses covered in vines began drifting past. Martin wondered how many skeletons they held.

  The Secretary broke into Martin’s completely pointless digression about how to choose the perfect campsite. “Where are your parents now?”

  “I dunno,” Martin said. And he didn’t, not for sure. He eyed the damaged houses. Skeleton houses, he thought. Each with its own skeleton family.

  “So you just split up from your parents, went off on your own, left them in the wilderness without a backward glance. And you’re telling me you did that—why?”

  “A kid gets tired of hanging around with his mom and dad all the time.” That was the truth, one hundred percent.

  Ruined buildings gathered by the tracks in greater and greater numbers, big brick boxes several stories high. Rusted wire fences cordoned off the weedy spaces between them. Streets were everywhere now, some mere suggestions buried under generations of leaves, others with most of their concrete intact beneath a sprinkling of spindly weeds. Dark metal hulks on wheels sat in neat rows along them. Each hulk was large enough to hold an entire family at once, with a rusted roof overhead to keep off the rain. A tiny steel dome, Martin thought.

  “Well, well,” the Secretary said when Martin came to the end of his story. “That’s quite an improbable tale.”

  “Thanks,” Martin murmured.

  The old city spread out around them, full of useless junk of all sizes, from the derelict buildings sporting caved-in doors to the cascades of ancient trash that spilled out of every store-front and choked the busted sidewalks. Discolore
d signs still lined the streets. Those that he could make out made no sense. QUICK WASH. U-FIX. DRY CLEAN. HANDI LUBE. What a weird world.

  I bet the Wonder Babies came this way, he thought. There’s lots of cover, lots of room to hide. That’s important. You can’t stash a thousand kids behind a juniper bush.

  The Secretary hummed and grumbled to himself as he pressed buttons on his handheld. “My program,” he remarked, “tells me that you lied or prevaricated eighty-nine times.”

  They rattled through an old rail yard. A few packet cars stood abandoned there, wreathed in vines, their sides all but black with rust. Packet cars! Martin scanned them avidly.

  The Secretary’s massive fist came down with a crash and broke the little stowaway table. “You will look at me when I’m talking to you! Ursula! Persuade Mr. Glass of the error of his ways.”

  But at that second, Martin spied a packet car swathed in a gray tarp. He knew that tarp! It was Rudy’s. And underneath—

  He bolted to his feet. “Chip, we gotta go!” he called.

  “Ursula! Break something,” the Secretary said. “Teach Mr. Glass some manners.”

  The Ursulas stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the back half of the packet car, a fearsome barricade between Martin and the door.

  “Wha—Break? What are you supposed to break?” he asked.

  They gazed at him sorrowfully, as if he were a cake that had fallen in the middle. “We start with the fingers,” they said.

  “Don’t hurt me,” he begged, clutching his fingers together. “I just need to get past.”

  “Go ahead,” the Ursulas told him.

  Martin hesitated. Maybe they intended to attack him when he came within reach. But the Secretary’s face flushed light purple.

  “Ursula, what are you waiting for?” he roared. “Since when do you not do what I say?”

  “One of us thinks hurting this boy isn’t guarding the President. Guarding the President is what we’re supposed to do.”

  “What do you mean, one of you? Which one?” Veins stood out on the Secretary’s forehead. “Good Lord, he isn’t one of you! That’s a dog!”