Delirium: The Complete Collection (62 page)

Then the room unfreezes, and the girl goes for her gun, and there’s no thinking anymore.

I lunge at her, knocking the gun from her hand before she has the chance to level it at me. Behind me, Julian shouts something. There’s a gunshot. I can’t look to see who fired. The girl swings at me, clipping me on the jaw with her fist. I’ve never been punched before, and it’s the shock of it, more than the pain, that stuns me. In that split second she manages to get her knife out, and the next thing I see is the blade whistling toward me. I duck, drive hard into her stomach with my shoulders.

She grunts. The momentum carries us both off our feet, and we tumble backward into a box of old shoes. The cardboard collapses under our weight. We’re grappling so close I can taste her hair, her skin in my mouth. First I’m on top, straining, then she is, flipping me down onto my back so my head slams against the concrete, her knees hard in my ribs, thighs gripping me so tight the air is getting squeezed from my lungs. She’s wrestling another knife free of her belt. I’m scrabbling on the floor for a weapon—any weapon—but she’s on me too hard, is gripping me too tightly, and my fingers are closing on air and concrete.

Julian and the man are locked in a shuffling embrace, both straining for an advantage, heads down, grunting. They swivel hard and hit a low wooden bookshelf filled with pots and pans. It teeters, teeters, and then falls: the pots spill everywhere, a cacophony of ringing and dinging metal. The girl glances backward and just that, that little shift, gives me enough room to move. I rocket my fist up, connecting with the side of her face. It can’t hurt too badly, but it sends her sideways and off me, and I’m up and rolling on top of her, ripping the knife out of her grip. My hatred and fear is flowing hard and electric and hot, and without thinking about it I lift the blade and drive it hard down into her chest. She jerks once, lets out a cry, and then goes still. My mind is a loop, an endless refrain:
your-fault-your-fault-your-fault
. There’s a mangled sobbing sound coming from somewhere, and it takes me a long time to realize I’m the one crying.

Then everything goes black for a moment—the pain comes a split second after the darkness—as the other Scavenger, the man, catches me on the side of my head with a baton. There’s a thunderous crack; I’m tumbling, and everything is a blur of disconnected images: Julian lying facedown near the toppled shelf; a grandfather clock in the corner I hadn’t noticed before; cracks in the concrete floor, expanding like a web to embrace me. Then a few seconds of nothing. Jump-cut: I’m on my back, the ceiling is revolving above me. I’m dying. Weirdly enough, I think of Julian. He put up a pretty good fight.

The man is on top of me, breathing hot and hard into my face. His breath smells like something spoiling in a closed place. A long, jagged cut runs under his eye—nice one, Julian—and some of his blood drips onto my face. I feel the razor-bite of a knife under my chin, and everything in my body freezes. I go absolutely still.

He’s staring at me with such hatred I suddenly feel very calm. I will die. He will kill me. The certainty relaxes me. I am sinking into a white snow. I close my eyes and try to picture Alex the way I used to dream of him, standing at the end of a tunnel. I wait for him to appear, to reach out his hands to me.

I’m fading in and out. I’m hovering above the ground; then I’m on the floor again. There’s the taste of swamp in my throat.

“You gave me no choice,” the Scavenger pants out, and I snap my eyes open. There’s a note of something there—regret, maybe, or apology—that I didn’t anticipate. And with that, the hope comes rushing back, and the terror, too:
Please-please-please-let-me-live
.

But just then he inhales and tenses, and the point of the knife breaks through my skin and it’s too late—

Then he jerks, suddenly, on top of me.

The knife clatters out of his hand. His eyes roll up to the ceiling, terrible, a doll’s blank gaze. He falls forward slowly, on top of me, knocking the air out of my chest. Julian is standing above him, breathing hard, shaking. The handle of a knife is sticking out of the Scavenger’s back.

A dead man is lying on top of me. A hysterical feeling builds in my chest, then breaks, and suddenly I am babbling, “Get him off of me. Get him off of me!”

Julian shakes his head, dazed. “I—I didn’t mean to.”

“For God’s sake, Julian. Get him off of me! We have to go now.”

He starts, blinks, and focuses on me. The Scavenger’s weight is crushing.

“Please, Julian.”

Finally Julian moves. He bends down and heaves the body off me, and I scramble to my feet. My heart is racing and my skin is crawling; I have the desperate urge to bathe, to get all that death off me. The two dead Scavengers lie so close to each other they are almost touching. A butterfly pattern of blood spreads across the floor between them. I feel sick.

“I didn’t mean to, Lena. I just—I saw him on top of you and I grabbed a knife and I just…” Julian shakes his head. “It was an accident.”

“Julian.” I reach out and put my hands on his shoulders. “Look. You saved my life.”

He closes his eyes for one second, then opens them again.

“You saved my life,” I repeat. “Thank you.”

He seems about to say something. Instead he nods and shoulders the backpack. I reach forward impulsively and seize his hand. He doesn’t pull away, and I’m glad. I need him to steady me. I need him to help keep me on my feet.

“Time to run,” I say, and together we stumble out of the room and, finally, into the cool mustiness of the old tunnels, into the echoes, and the shadows, and the dark.

T
he temperature drops sharply on the way to the second encampment. Even when I sleep in the tents, I’m freezing. When it’s my turn to sleep outside, I often wake up with shards of ice webbed in my hair. Sarah is stoic, silent, and pale-faced.

Blue gets sick. The first day she wakes up sluggish. She has trouble keeping up, and at the end of our day of hiking, she falls asleep even before the fire is built, curling up on the ground like a small animal. Raven moves her into her tent. That night I wake to a muffled shouting. I sit up, startled. The night sky is clear, the stars razor-sharp and glittering. The air smells like snow.

There is rustling from Raven’s tent, some whimpering; the sound of whispered reassurances. Blue is having bad dreams.

The next morning, Blue comes down with a fever. There is no choice: She must walk anyway. The snow is coming, and we are still thirty miles from the second camp, and many more miles than that from the winter homestead.

She cries as she walks, stumbling more and more. We take turns carrying her—me, Raven, Hunter, Lu, and Grandpa. She is burning. Her arms around my neck are electric wires, pulsing with heat.

The next day, we reach the second encampment: an area of loose shale set underneath an old, half-tumbled-down brick wall, which forms a kind of barrier and shields us somewhat from the wind. We set to work digging up the food, pitching traps, and scavenging the area, which once must have been a decent-sized town, for canned goods and useful supplies. We’ll stay here for two days, possibly three, depending on how much we can find. Beyond the hooting of the owls and the rustling of nighttime creatures, we hear the distant sounds of rumbling trucks. We are less than ten miles from one of the inter-city highways.

It’s strange to think how close we have been to the valid places, established cities filled with food, clothing, medical supplies; and yet we may as well be in a different universe. The world is bifurcated now, folded cleanly in half like the pitched steep sides of a tent: the Valids and the Invalids live on different planes, in different dimensions.

Blue’s nighttime terrors get worse. Her cries are piercing; she babbles nonsense, a language of gibberish and dream-words. When it is time to start toward the third encampment—the clouds have moved in, heavy-knitted through the sky, and the light is the dull, dark gray of an imminent storm—she is almost unresponsive. Raven carries her that day; she won’t let anyone help, even though she, too, is weak, and often falls behind.

We walk in silence. We are weighed down by fear; it blankets us thickly, making it feel as though we are already walking through snow, because all of us know that Blue is going to die. Raven knows it too. She must.

That night Raven builds a fire and places Blue next to it. Even though Blue’s skin is burning, she shivers so hard that her teeth knock together. The rest of us move around the fire as quietly as possible; we are shadows in the smoke. I fall asleep outside, next to Raven, who stays awake to rake the fire and make sure Blue stays warm.

In the middle of the night, I wake up to the muffled sounds of crying. Raven is kneeling over Blue. My stomach caves, and I am filled with terror; I have never seen Raven cry before. I’m afraid to speak, to breathe, to move. I know that she must think everyone is asleep. She would never allow herself to cry otherwise.

But I can’t stay silent, either. I rustle loudly in my sleeping bag, and just like that the crying stops. I sit up.

“Is she…?” I whisper. I can’t say the last word.
Dead.

Raven shakes her head. “She’s not breathing very well.”

“At least she’s breathing,” I say. A long silence stretches between us. I’m desperate to fix this. I know, somehow, that if we lose Blue we lose a piece of Raven, too. And we need Raven, especially now that Tack is gone. “She’ll get better,” I say, to comfort her. “I’m sure she’ll be okay.”

Raven turns to me. The fire catches her eyes, makes them glow like an animal’s. “No,” she says simply. “No, she won’t.”

Her voice is so full of certainty, I can’t contradict her. For a moment, Raven doesn’t say anything else. Then she says, “Do you know why I named her Blue?”

The question surprises me. “I thought you named her for her eyes.”

Raven turns back toward the fire, hugging her knees. “I lived in Yarmouth, close to a border fence. A poor area. Nobody else wanted to live so close to the Wilds. Bad luck, you know.”

A shiver snakes through me, and I suddenly feel very alert. Raven has never spoken of her life before the Wilds. She has always repeated that there is no such thing. No before.

“I was like everybody else, really. Just accepted what people told me and didn’t think too much about it. Only cureds go to heaven. Patrols are for my own protection. The uncured are dirty; they turn into animals. The disease rots you from inside. Stability is godliness and happiness.” She shrugs, as though shaking off the memory of who she was. “Except that I wasn’t happy. I didn’t understand why. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t be like everybody else.”

I think of Hana, spinning around once in her room, arms wide, saying,
You think this is it? This is all there is?

“The summer I turned fourteen, they started new construction by the fence. They were projects, really, for the poorest families in Yarmouth: the badly matched ones, or families whose reputations had been ruined because of dissent, or even rumors of it—you know what it’s like. During the day, I used to play around the construction site. A bunch of us did. Of course, we had to be careful to stay separate, the boys and the girls. There was a line that divided us: Everything east of the waterline was ours, everything west of it was theirs.” She laughs softly. “It seems like a dream now. But at the time it seemed like the most normal thing in the world.”

“There was nothing to compare it to,” I say, and Raven shoots me a quick glance, nodding sharply.

“Then there was a week of rain. Construction came to a standstill, and nobody wanted to explore the site. I didn’t mind the rain. I didn’t like to be at home very much. My dad was—” There’s a hitch in her voice, and she breaks off. “He wasn’t totally right after the procedure. It didn’t work correctly. There was disruption of the mood-regulating temporal lobes. That’s what they called it. He was mostly okay, like everybody else. But every so often he flew into rages…” For a while she stares at the fire, silent. “My mom helped us cover the bruises, put on makeup and stuff. We couldn’t tell anyone. We didn’t want too many people knowing that my dad’s cure hadn’t worked properly. People get hysterical; he could have been fired. My mom said people would make things difficult. So instead we hid it. Long sleeves in summertime. Lots of sick days. Lots of lies, too—falling down, bumping my head, hitting the door frame.”

I have never imagined Raven as any younger than she is now. But I can see the wiry girl with the same fierce mouth, rubbing concealer over the bruises on her arms, shoulders, and face. “I’m sorry,” I say. The words seem flimsy, ridiculous.

Raven clears her throat and squares her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter,” she says quickly. She breaks a long, skinny twig into quarters and feeds it, one piece at a time, into the fire. I wonder whether she has forgotten about the original course of conversation—about Blue’s name—but then she starts speaking again.

“That week—the week of the rain—was one of my dad’s bad times. So I went out to the site a lot. One day, I was just picking around one of the foundations. It was all cinder block and pits; hardly any of the building had actually gotten done. And then I saw this little box. A shoe box.” She sucks in a breath, and even in the dark I see her tense.

The rest of her story comes out in a rush: “Someone must have left it there, wedged in the space underneath a part of the foundation. Except the rain was so bad it had caused a miniature mudslide. The box had rolled out into the open. I don’t know why I decided to look inside. It was filthy. I thought I might find a pair of shoes, maybe some jewelry.”