Hungry (24 page)

“Watch out!” I scream, terrified we’ll hit her.

Basil swerves, but she catches hold of the handlebar, knocking us off balance and her to the ground. We teeter left then right, Basil grunts as he tries to regain control, but the bike tips, spilling us in the dirt. I look over my shoulder to see the woman hauling herself up and sprinting toward us again. I jump up, grab the handlebars, and yank the idling bike upright.

“Come on, come on!” I scream at Basil.

He half crawls, half runs toward me. Behind us, another person bursts out of the house. He stands on the top step and raises something long and skinny to his shoulder. For a moment I’m bewildered and feel like I’ve been transported inside a virtual game, until I realize that what he’s holding isn’t a virtual gun. It’s real.

I know then that I can’t wait for Basil to drive this thing so I throw my leg over the seat and scream, “Get on!” over the sound of the first shot. As soon as I feel Basil’s weight behind me and his arms around my waist, I pull back on the right handle as I’d seen him do. The engine revs and the bike flies forward, sending us both backward, but we hold on tight. More shots echo off the houses. Basil gasps and grunts in pain. Although I have no idea what I’m doing, I keep the handle back as far as it will go. We veer wildly from side to side, but I don’t lose control. I hunch forward, keeping my eyes on the road and my legs wrapped tight around the seat, driving as fast as I can, to put as much distance between us and them as possible.

When we’re around a corner and on the interior road, I yell, “Are you alright? Did they hit you? Are you bleeding?”

He slumps against my back and pants into my ear. “Just keep going,” he says. “Get us out of here.”

*   *   *

Within ten minutes of twisting and turning through alleyways and dirt yards, we’re back on a crumbling, dusty road heading toward the tollgates with nobody behind us. Every once in a while, we pass the remains of decrepit strip malls and old hotels looming in the moonlight like memories lurking in the shadows of my grandparents’ minds. The landscape here is so burned out and bald that it looks like the playing field for Pesky Petey before the virtual effects kick in. In the distance, beyond the toll wall, I see the highways circling the city Loops like tiny twinkling strings of gemstones. I keep blinking, half expecting this world to light up with virtual trees and grass and flowers, but the other part of my brain is slowly coming to terms with the fact that this is the reality behind every facade One World has created.

Once I believe we’re safe, I gather my courage and slow down to check on Basil. “Hey,” I call. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“He got my arm,” he tells me through gritted teeth.

“Are you bleeding badly?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says.

I cruise to the side of the road and kill the motor. “We have to take a look,” I tell him.

“It’s fine,” he says as I slide off the seat. “We should just keep going.”

I shake my head and come around to his right side where his arm hangs limp. “You’ve been shot, Basil,” I tell him because I think he might be in shock and not realize the seriousness of the situation. In the dim light, I gently press my fingers against a warm, sticky splotch on the back of his coat sleeve. Basil moans and slumps forward a bit as if he’s going to be sick.

I crouch beside him and lay my hand on the back of his head. “We have to stop the bleeding,” I tell him.

When I was little, I loved to play a game with Papa Peter. It was always the same. We were doctors in a war with few supplies. I’m sure it was my childish way of making sense of the stories I overheard. Sometimes we’d rip up old bedsheets and dress each other’s wounds. He usually ended up looking like a mummy by the time I was done with him. Now I try to remember how he did it when he tended to my imaginary injuries. “First we need to make a bandage,” I say, looking around for something to use. “Then we’ll get you to a doctor.”

“No doctor,” he says.

I choose not to argue with him even though he’s wrong. “Are you wearing a T-shirt under there?”

He nods.

“I’m going to need it.” I take a deep breath and grab the cuff of his jacket. “I’m going to take this off you slowly. It might hurt, but you’ll be okay. Why don’t you talk to me while I do this?” This is a trick Papa Peter used on me when it was time for my inocs. He’d get me so caught up in telling him a story that I’d forget all about the injections, which I hated. “Have you ever been hurt before?” I ask as I slowly thread his arms out of the coat.

“One time, when I was six or seven,” he says in a calm, almost monotone voice.

“What happened?” I ask in an effort to keep him talking.

“I was running through an abandoned hotel.” He gasps as the jacket peels away from his wound.

“And?” I ask and crane my head around to get a better look at the back of his arm. It’s too dark to make out anything but mangled skin.

He takes a breath. “I wasn’t supposed to be in there, of course, but what kid can resist jumping on all those beds or throwing old TVs inside an empty pool?”

“We need to take off the long-sleeve shirt, too.” I move around to the front and begin undoing the buttons, which makes me blush furiously. As Yaz says, this is a lot of interpersonal touching. I breathe deeply to keep my hands steady and focus on the task, rather than thinking about being so close to Basil’s body. “What happened next?”

Basil seems to relax just a bit as he digs back into his memory. “I was tearing down a hallway, and my foot went right through a rotten floorboard,” he tells me. “Whump! Down I went. One minute I was zooming around, the next, my leg had been swallowed up.”

I lean forward to shimmy the green shirt over his shoulders and down his arms. Heat rises off his skin. He winces. “Sorry,” I say.

“It’s okay,” he tells me and turns his face away.

“Now…” I stand back and try to figure out how to get the T-shirt off without killing him. “I wish I had some scissors,” I mumble.

“Here.” Basil uses his good arm to reach inside his pants pocket and remove a small compact red utensil.

“What is this?” I turn it over in my hand.

“Swiss Army knife.”

I open up different blades, some kind of screwdriver and several pointy things. “This is amazing!” Then I get to the tiny scissors. “Whoa! So cool.” I pull his shirt away from his body and slowly cut a straight line up from his belly to his neck. “So what happened to your leg?”

“I had a big gash all the way up my shin.”

“What did you do?”

“I was with my brother.…”

“Wait. What?” I stop cutting. “You have a brother?”

“He was older. His name was Arol.”

“Was?” I ask. Basil doesn’t answer so I refocus on slicing his shirt open. His newly pale skin faintly glimmers. I can see that he is lean and muscular and gorgeous in the hazy light, like something from a dream that disappears the moment you wake. With my eyes, I trace a path of hair that marches from his belly button into the waistband of his pants. Then I notice just above his right hip bone a smudge of ink. I lean closer and squint until I can see a sprouted seed and the word
Remember
tattooed on his skin. I reach out to touch it and feel the warmth of his skin beneath my fingers. I have so many questions, but I realize that now is not the time to ask. Instead, I stand up and carefully slip the shirt over his arms.

“So, um,” I ask, my voice a little shaky as I try to stay on track. “When you hurt your leg, what did the doctor do?”

Basil half laughs. “There were no doctors where we lived. This was before the free clinic came to town. And my parents didn’t have the money to pay someone in the Inner Loop, let alone get me through the tolls.”

“Didn’t your family have insurance?”

Basil frowns at me. “Uh, no.”

“Wow,” I say, unable to hide my surprise. “My grandfather used to go to the Outer Loop to treat people without insurance.” I cut the T-shirt into long, wide strips that I lay over my shoulder. “It infuriated my grandmother that he’d work for nothing. She’d call him a socialist, which made him laugh and say, ‘I’ve been called worse.’”

“Why did he stop?”

I shake my head because I don’t know the answer. “I guess he got too old.”

“He sounds like a good person,” Basil says.

I stop cutting and stare at Basil sitting shirtless on the bike. “He is,” I tell him. “He would like you.”

Basil looks down, uncertain or embarrassed. I can’t tell.

“I’m going to have to touch your arm now.” I step closer and gather up my confidence. “It might hurt, but you’re going to be okay.” I place one hand firmly on his shoulder and hold him steady in my gaze.

“Okay,” he says quietly. “I’m ready.”

“Actually, it’s not as bad as I thought it would be,” I tell him and it’s true. “I think the bullet just grazed your skin. Good thing you had on that jacket. It took most of the hit.” I quickly wrap the strips of fabric from his elbow up to his shoulder, keeping it tight enough to stop the bleeding but not too tight that it will cut off his circulation. “Want me to sing to you?” I ask. “That’s what Papa Peter used to do while he’d give me the inocs.” I try to remember the song. “‘Don’t worry about a thing.…’” I sing, but I can’t quite recall the words. I hum, but I can’t get the melody right. “Something about three little birds.”

“Never heard it,” he says and breathes deep.

I step away and check out my handiwork. It’s not half bad. Papa Peter might even be proud. “This should slow the bleeding until we get you to a doctor.”

Basil pulls away and winces in pain. “Thalia, I can’t go to a doctor! One bit of genetic material, and we’ll immediately get picked up by security agents.”

“We’ll go to my grandfather,” I tell him. “He’ll help us.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t so bad.”

“I just meant, you’re not going to bleed to death, but you’re going to need more than a dirty shirt wrapped around it to heal properly.” I help him back into his long-sleeve shirt and jacket. He tucks his mangled arm against his body and sighs with relief.

“What happened with your leg?” I ask.

“A neighbor stitched me up.”

“Stitched?”

“Needle and thread.”

I grimace and look down at his legs. “And you were okay?”

With his good arm he lifts the cuff of his pants. “Good as new.” In the dusky light, I can barely make out the jagged white scar snaking up his leg, but still it makes me flinch. “I didn’t need a doctor when that happened.” He pulls his pant leg down. “So I won’t need one now.”

“No. You
couldn’t
see one. That’s different.” I climb onto the bike in front of him and kick-start the bike like he did earlier. “Now let’s get to the tollgate so we can find my grandfather,” I say and pull onto the road again.

*   *   *

Just as the sun begins to come up rosy through the dust that hangs thick in the air out here, we reach a tollgate. Across the road a small cement building sits on an island of fractured concrete beneath a brightly blinking sign that reads,
BIOFUEL AND KUDZARS.
The haze makes everything appear ethereal, as if we are dreaming the pink-tinged, fuzzy-edged structures. With his good arm, Basil reaches in his pants pocket and pulls out the little device he handed the driver last night.

“What is this?” I ask.

“A transponder I built.” He points it at the scanner above the tollgate, but nothing happens. “Move closer,” he says. I shuffle the bike forward, and he points the device again, but the light remains red and the gate firmly closed. “That’s weird.” He shakes the device and tries a third time.

I look over my shoulder at him. “Is your account low on money?”

He gives me one of his sideways smirks, and I realize what a dumb question I just asked. I reach for the machine and study it. “How’s it work?”

“First I made a radio-frequency ID device so I could borrow account info off some Gizmos.”

“
Borrow
?” I ask. “Like how we borrowed this motorbike?”

“Something like that,” he says with a little grin. “Then I uploaded all the account info.” He turns the device over, looking for the source of the malfunction, but finds nothing. “Not all of the accounts could be empty at the same time. Maybe it got damaged when I fell off the bike. I’ll have to take it apart later and figure out what happened.” He looks over his shoulder at the biofuel and kudzar place. “We can probably get a black-market toll pass in there.”

“Is that what a kudzar is? A black-market pass?”

He chuckles. “No. A kudzar is a thing you smoke. It’s made of dried kudzu leaves and it gives you a buzz.”

“Where do people get all this kudzu?”

“The Hinterlands, I think. At least that’s what I hear.”

“God.” I shake my head and nearly laugh. “It’s pathetic how much I don’t know.”

“You’ll learn,” he says.

*   *   *

I pull into the parking lot next to the dumpy building. “You think it’s safe?”

Basil looks up and down the empty road. “I don’t think anybody’s following us if that’s what you mean.”

“What makes you think we can get a pass here?”

“Anything’s for sale out here if you have enough money,” he says as he dismounts the bike.

*   *   *

“Well good morning! You two sure are early birds today,” a woman chirps at us. She’s tall and concave like a human question mark hunched over the counter across from a large screen playing the end of a game show where people compete against virtual versions of themselves for better jobs. She stubs out what I assume is her kudzar and straightens herself up as we approach. “What can I get for you?”

The smoke from her kudzar makes me dizzy. I walk to the back where the air is more clear and check out the racks of kudzar packs next to a darkened doorway, while Basils heads up to the counter.

“I want to get through the toll,” Basil tells her. “But my mom must have forgotten to replenish our autopay. Can I buy a pass from you?”

She narrows her eyes at him. Her skin has a grayish pallor like the ashes in the little bowl by her elbow. “You see that sign out there?” she points to
BIOFUEL AND KUDZARS
blinking through the dawn. “Doesn’t say anything about toll passes, now does it?”