Contaminated 2: Mercy Mode (4 page)

My mom would be so ashamed if I went begging, especially with a pack full of food. There are people who have nothing, absolutely nothing, and in comparison, we are rich. So it’s in me to snatch up the dollar and run after the woman’s car to give it back to her. Yet when I start to, when I see it’s not a one-dollar bill, but a twenty, I don’t run after her. I smooth it in my hands and look across the parking lot to the convenience store, where they still sell things that are
never included in the government rations. Sure, the selection is small and the prices make everything a luxury, not a mere treat. But I have twenty dollars in my fist, and I know just what I’m going to spend it on.

If that makes me a beggar, I think as I finish loading my pack and putting it back on, then that’s what I am.

OPAL SQUEALS AND DANCES WHEN I HAND
her the pack of gum and the candy bar. For Mrs. Holly, I’ve brought some artificial sweetener packets—she’s diabetic and usually has to do without any kind of sweetener for her tea. I hand Dillon some “beef” jerky—it’s made of tofu, of course, since meat products are so highly regulated that now everyone’s become vegan by default. He takes it with a slow groan of pleasure that makes me laugh.

“You’re welcome.”

“Where’d you get this stuff? That’s not government rations.” He holds me close, and I don’t protest, even though to be honest, he stinks of oil and smoke and other messy stuff he has to deal with in his job on the garbage truck. He stinks, but then again, I’m sure I do, too. Funny how we used to all be so obsessed with deodorant and soap and body spray, and now it’s good enough if we brush our teeth with the nasty, gritty government ration toothpaste.

“Can I eat it now?” Opal, still dancing, waves the candy in front of me.

“After dinner. Save it for dessert,” I tell her.

Opal, crestfallen, scuffs her foot on the floor and looks for confirmation from our mom, who’s sitting quietly as she usually is, in the rocking chair. Opal huffs out a breath, but whatever she sees on Mom’s face convinces her it’s not worth an argument. “Fine. But can I chew the gum now, at least?”

I’ve already gone through a piece myself, chewing until long after the flavor faded and my jaws hurt. “Sure.”

“Where?” Dillon asks quietly in the kitchen while we unload my pack together. “Did you steal it?”

“No.” I’d rather tell him I stole it than that a stranger gave me money that I spent on junk … though, honestly, there isn’t much else to spend it on. Our currency has become the vegetables we’re trying to grow in the poor soil of the yard and the scarves and socks my mom and Mrs. Holly knit from salvaged yarn. “A lady gave me money in the gas station parking lot.”

“For what?”

I laugh, but keep my voice low. I don’t want my mom to hear. Or Opal, who won’t be able to keep her mouth shut. “For looking like a beggar.”

Dillon frowns and shakes his head. “You should be more careful. Next time, I’m going to go—”

“You know you couldn’t.” He has to work. Not for the
money; that’s barely enough to make it worth his efforts. But because all people between eighteen and sixty have to sign up for assignments in the local utilities.

People still eat and drink and poop and throw stuff away—people who are living in town, and not out here the way we are, still demand electricity, even if it’s sporadic and there are enforced brownouts and curfews to save energy. The trouble is, there are more people using up the resources than there are people to provide them. Dillon’s been on the garbage detail for the past few months. He likes it because, despite the way the world has turned, lots of people are still wasteful and throw away so much good stuff.

Yesterday, he brought home a bagful of sweaters and old jeans that Mom and Mrs. Holly will take apart to use. Today, I brought home candy and gum and artificial sweetener. When you look at it that way, it’s not hard to see who’s the better provider.

“It’s dangerous out there.” Dillon reaches to pull me close again, and I let him.

I should tell him what happened at the ration station, but he’ll worry even more. And he can’t miss work. You can lose your ration card for that. Or worse.

“Hey! Can we have mac and cheese and beanie weenies for dinner?” Opal nudges against us, pushing us apart.

Dillon and I exchange a glance. “With a vegetable,” I tell her. “And you have to promise to eat it.”

In the kitchen, I pull out a can of green beans and toss
it to Dillon, who opens it and pours the slimy, soft beans into a saucepan we’ll heat over the small fire in the fire pit outside. Our generator runs on gasoline, and we use it only for a few hours when it gets dark, to give us lights and some hot water. That’s one thing I forgot to get today, even though I was at the station. A gallon or so of gas. It’s all you can really buy anymore. No more than five gallons at a time, unless you have paperwork. But you can still buy the red gas containers, and I buy and fill them whenever I can, keeping them in the shed.

My dad would’ve said that’s dangerous, but what else are we supposed to do? Someday, we won’t be able to get any. Right now everything we get, we put half away for the winter.

We live like pioneers in a house filled with electronics gone dusty. We hoe and weed and build up compost heaps in the yard, and fight the deer and squirrels and birds to keep them from eating our crops. We wash our clothes in pails of water because the washer and dryer take too much electricity to run, even if we do have enough water to use. It’s not so bad, really.

While living in the crappy apartment in the days after the last wave, when Opal and I didn’t know if we’d ever find our mom, we had “more,” but it felt like so much less. Now, at least, we’re a family, and if we have to work harder for everything we get … well, my mom always used to say, “You appreciate what you have to work for more than what you don’t.”

She’d say it again, I think, if she was able to say much at all, but even though we got the collar off her, Mom is mostly still silent. She understands what we say, especially if we speak slowly and are very, very clear about what we mean. She communicates just fine, mainly with hand gestures. But she hardly ever talks, except at night when she dreams. Sometimes, she wakes us up with her screaming.

Dinner is, as Opal requested, macaroni and cheese and beanie weenies, all from cans. The green beans, which I tried to spice up with a little soy sauce and some garlic and olive oil, aren’t terrible, but you’d think we were asking her to gulp down live spiders by the way she wriggles and gags. I frown, tired and frustrated and still thinking about the showdown at the ration station. I’ve been half expecting a knock on the door any minute. The police. Or worse, the army. Coming to take me away for the part I played in it.

“C’mon, Opal. You have to eat your veggies.” Dillon’s so much better at getting her to do whatever she needs to do than I am. I lose my patience with Opal, but he’s never had a younger sibling. For him, it’s still sort of a novelty.

“And your vitamin.” I hold out the bottle.

Because Opal’s under thirteen, she’s issued the government vitamins that are supposed to give her 100 percent of her daily requirements, including vitamin C. It took an epidemic of rickets and other vitamin deficiencies for the pills to start showing up in the ration shipments. The
government might once have declared ketchup a vegetable, but at least in this brave new world of post-Contamination insanity, they’re trying to keep the kids healthy.

“I hate it!” Opal cries.

Mrs. Holly tut-tuts, which makes Opal look at least a little ashamed. “It’s good for you, dolly.”

Mom says nothing, but fixes Opal with a look that leaves no interpretation necessary. With a put-upon sigh, Opal eats a few bites of beans and washes down her vitamin with a giant swig from the glass of reconstituted soy milk I made earlier. Along with any kind of beef and even most chicken products, cow milk has become rare. The Contaminated protein water that started everything off was supposed to be animal-protein free, but it got infected with what seems to have been a chemically altered organic protein. You couldn’t pay me to eat a real cheeseburger, and most everyone else seems to feel the same way.

After dinner, Mrs. Holly helps Opal with her schoolwork—we gave up the pretense of her going to any sort of school last year, and have been homeschooling her ever since. Everyone else in this house is more patient with Opal than I am. They work on math problems far more useful than any I ever learned in school. Instead of lame story problems about two trains meeting, Mrs. Holly quizzes Opal on converting measurements and figuring out how much square footage of garden plots a certain number of seeds need. That sort of thing. Mom works on a pair of soft,
thick socks she’s knitting from the yarn she pulled from an old baby blanket.

And I go upstairs to finally, at last, take a shower.

Between the sound of the water pounding all around me and the rasping cough of the generator outside the bathroom window, I don’t hear Dillon open the bedroom door. So when I come out of the bathroom, after a shower that was way too short and not nearly hot enough for my taste, I jump, startled when he says softly from behind me, “Hey.”

“Hey.” I’m still not used to this. Sharing a house with him, much less a bathroom and a bedroom, even though we’ve set up two twin beds instead of the king-sized bed that had been my parents’. It’s certainly not the way I’d ever imagined my life when I pictured it. At least not at seventeen.

Dillon’s riffling through the dresser to get something, his back to me and giving me the privacy he knows I still need. We might be husband and wife on paper—that’s so I can be covered under his health benefits, the ones he gets from his forced service as a garbage collector. Opal will be taken care of, too, when she’s no longer covered under the children’s initiative, and also my mom, because they’re my family and now his. But words on paper are only that. Words.

We share a bedroom because he can’t share with Mom or Opal or Mrs. Holly. We tried having Mom share, but she keeps anyone who sleeps near her awake all night with her mutters and sighs. Mrs. Holly would share a room with
whoever we ask her to—she’s just grateful we’ve become her family so she doesn’t have to live all alone in the big house she used to share with Gerald. But Opal is such a messy kid that it’s not fair to subject Mrs. Holly to the dangers of tripping over every single possession Opal owns. Everything is always all over the floor. And I could share with Opal, but we’d end up killing each other sooner rather than later.

So Dillon and I are roomies, which feels weird and awkward, like we’re shacking up right under my mom’s nose. In my parents’ house. Except that we went and got ourselves married for the sake of dental care. My mom didn’t even have to sign her consent, since I’m an adult now in the eyes of the law.

It doesn’t quite feel that way, though. It still feels odd, even if we do have separate beds. Sometimes I think about Tony. Once upon a time, I’d imagined what it would be like to marry him, and I’m not at all sorry about never getting the chance. But I know Tony wouldn’t be as understanding as Dillon has been about my reluctance to turn the words that have made him my husband into the more physical reality of it. Tony would’ve been all over me, all the time, but Dillon’s not like that.

He kisses and hugs me and stuff, but sometimes, I wonder if he’s really into me at all.

The towel I have wrapped around me doesn’t do anything to cover the bruises and scrapes that showed up when
I washed away the mud. My face miraculously managed to miss most signs of the abuse I earned at the hands of Tess the cheerleader, but the rest of me …

“Oh my God.” Dillon grabs me by the shoulders, turning me to face him, not letting go, even though I wince at his grip. “Velvet. What the hell happened to you?”

“I just ran into someone in the woods—”

“Who? Who did this?”

Carefully, I shrug out of his grasp and go to my dresser to pull out a pair of pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. I slip the bottoms on without taking off the towel, but then keep my back to him while I let it drop so I can pull on my top. Bending to pick up the towel, I wince again and gasp a little at the stab of pain in my ribs.

“Velvet.”

I turn. Dillon takes my wrist and leads me to the mirror on the back of the door. He turns me and lifts the hem of my shirt to reveal a cascade of darkening bruises all the way up and down my back. He’s gentle, but I ache. Suddenly, now that I’m letting myself think about it, I hurt everywhere.

He touches the bruises lightly with a fingertip, and our eyes meet in the reflection. I give him a small smile. “Hey. It could’ve been worse. She didn’t bite me. Tried, but didn’t.”

“What did you do to her?”

I don’t want to think about that. My chin goes up. “I fought her off.”

“A Connie.”

“Yes.”

“There are more of them all the time. Turning.” Dillon frowns.

“Yeah. So much for the mandatory testing.” I tug my shirt down and push past him. I need to check on Opal and Mrs. Holly and Mom before I go to bed. I need to check the locks on the doors—not that they’ll keep out anyone determined to get inside. I need to turn off the generator. I need to …

“Velvet,” Dillon says again. Louder this time. Harder. “What happened today at the ration station?”

My legs are sore from running and kicking, but they should still be strong enough to hold me up, and I mutter a low curse when they betray me. I sink onto the edge of my bed, which is inches from Dillon’s. We could reach out in the night and hold hands across the space between them, if we wanted to. We never have, but we could.

“The Voice was talking about it on the radio,” he says. “There was a riot? Were you there when it happened?”

Briefly, I describe the woman who wanted peanut butter. I look at him without flinching. “It was ours, Dillon. I couldn’t let her just take it.”

He sits on his bed. Our knees touch. He reaches for my hands, linking our fingers together. “You can’t go by yourself anymore. The woods are too dangerous. And if there are going to be riots—”