Requiem (3 page)

I was glad when the Invalids were executed. Some people complained that lethal injection was too humane for convicted terrorists, but I thought it sent a powerful message: We are not the evil ones. We are reasonable and compassionate. We stand for fairness, structure, and organization.

It's the other side, the uncureds, who bring the chaos.

“It's really disgusting,” my mother says. “If we'd started bombing when the trouble first—Tony, look out!”

Tony slams on the brakes. The tires screech. I go shooting forward, narrowly avoiding cracking my forehead on the headrest in front of me before my seat belt jerks me backward. There is a heavy thump. The air smells like burned rubber.

“Shit,” my mother is saying. “Shit. What in
God's
name—?”

“I'm sorry, ma'am, I didn't see her. She came out from between the Dumpsters. . . .”

A young girl is standing in front of the car, her hands resting flat on the hood. Her hair is tented around her thin, narrow face, and her eyes are huge and terrified. She looks vaguely familiar.

Tony rolls down his window. The smell of the Dumpsters—there are several of them, lined up next to one another—floats into the car, sweet and rotten. My mother coughs, and cups a palm over her nose.

“You okay?” Tony calls out, craning his head out the window.

The girl doesn't respond. She is panting, practically hyperventilating. Her eyes skate from Tony to my mother in the backseat, and then to me. A shock runs through me.

Jenny. Lena's oldest cousin. I haven't seen her since last summer, and she's much thinner. She looks older, too. But it's unmistakably her. I recognize the flare of her nostrils, her proud, pointed chin, and the eyes.

She recognizes me, too. I can tell. Before I can say anything, she wrenches her hands off the car hood and darts across the street. She's wearing an old, ink-stained backpack that I recognize as one of Lena's hand-me-downs. Across one of its pockets two names are colored in black bubble letters: Lena's, and mine. We penned them onto her bag in seventh grade, when we were bored in class. That's the day we first came up with our little code word, our pump-you-up cheer, which later we called out to each other at cross-country meets.
Halena.
A combination of both our names.

“For heaven's sake. You'd think the girl was old enough to know not to dart in front of traffic. She nearly gave me a heart attack.”

“I know her,” I say automatically. I can't shake the image of Jenny's huge, dark eyes, her pale skeleton-face.

“What do you mean, you
know
her?” My mother turns to me.

I close my eyes and try to think of peaceful things. The bay. Seagulls wheeling against a blue sky. Rivers of spotless white fabric. But instead I see Jenny's eyes, the sharp angles of her cheek and chin. “Her name is Jenny,” I say. “She's Lena's cousin—”

“Watch your mouth,” my mom cuts me off sharply. I realize, too late, that I shouldn't have said anything. Lena's name is worse than a curse word in our family.

For years, Mom was proud of my friendship with Lena. She saw it as a testament to her liberalism.
We don't judge the girl because of her family,
she would tell guests when they brought it up.
The disease isn't genetic; that's an old idea.

She took it as almost a personal insult when Lena contracted the disease and managed to escape before she could be treated, as though Lena had deliberately done it to make her look stupid.

All those years we let her into our house,
she would say out of nowhere, in the days following Lena's escape.
Even though we knew what the risks were. Everyone warned us. . . . Well, I guess we should have listened.

“She looked thin,” I say.

“Home, Tony.” My mom leans her head against the headrest and closes her eyes, and I know the conversation is over.

Lena

I
wake in the middle of the night from a nightmare. In it, Grace was trapped beneath the floorboards in our old bedroom in Aunt Carol's house. There was shouting from downstairs—a fire. The room was full of smoke. I was trying to get to Grace, to rescue her, but her hand kept slipping from my grasp. My eyes were burning, and the smoke was choking me, and I knew if I didn't run, I would die. But she was crying and screaming for me to save her, save her. . . .

I sit up. I repeat Raven's mantra in my head—
the past is dead, it doesn't exist
—but it doesn't help. I can't shake the feeling of Grace's tiny hand, wet with sweat, slipping from my grip.

The tent is overcrowded. Dani is pressed up on one side of me, and there are three women curled up against her.

Julian has his own tent for now. It is a small bit of courtesy. They are giving him time to adjust, as they did when I first escaped to the Wilds. It takes time to get used to the feeling of closeness, and bodies constantly bumping yours. There is no privacy in the Wilds, and there can be no modesty, either.

I could have joined Julian in his tent. I know that he expected me to, after what we shared underground: the kidnapping, the kiss. I brought him here, after all. I rescued him and pulled him into this new life, a life of freedom and feeling. There is nothing to stop me from sleeping next to him. The cureds—the zombies—would say that we are already infected. We wallow in our filth, the way that pigs wallow in muck.

Who knows? Maybe they're right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love
is
a disease, and we would be better off without it.

But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.

We are even free to choose the wrong thing.

I won't be able to go back to sleep right away. I need air. I ease out from under the tangle of sleeping bags and blankets and fumble in the dark for the tent flap. I wriggle out of the tent on my stomach, trying not to make too much noise. Behind me, Dani kicks in her sleep and mutters something unintelligible.

The night is cool. The sky is clear and cloudless. The moon looks closer than usual, and it paints everything with a silvery glow, like a fine layering of snow. I stand for a moment, relishing the feeling of stillness and quiet: the peaks of the tents touched with moonlight; the low-hanging branches, just barely budding with new leaves; the occasional hooting of an owl in the distance.

In one of the tents, Julian is sleeping.

And in another: Alex.

I move away from the tents. I head down toward the gully, past the remains of the campfire, which by now is nothing more than charred bits of blackened wood and a few smoking embers. The air still smells, faintly, like scorched metal and beans.

I'm not sure where I'm going, and it's stupid to wander from camp—Raven has warned me a million times against it. At night, the Wilds belong to the animals, and it's easy to get turned around, lost among the growth, the slalom of trees. But I have an itch in my blood, and the night is so clear, I have no trouble navigating.

I hop down into the dried-out riverbed, which is covered in a layer of rocks and leaves and, occasionally, a relic from the old life: a dented metal soda can, a plastic bag, a child's shoe. I walk south for a few hundred feet, where I'm prevented from going farther by an enormous, felled oak. Its trunk is so wide that, horizontal, it nearly reaches my chest; a vast network of roots arch up toward the sky like a dark pinwheel spray of water from a fountain.

There's a rustling behind me. I whip around. A shadow shifts, turns solid, and for a second my heart stops—I'm not protected; I have no weapons, nothing to fend off a hungry animal. Then the shadow emerges into the open and takes the shape of a boy.

In the moonlight, it's impossible to tell that his hair is the exact color of leaves in the autumn: golden brown, and shot through with red.

“Oh,” Alex says. “It's you.” These are the first words he has spoken to me in four days.

There are a thousand things I want to say to him.

Please understand. Please forgive me.

I prayed every day for you to be alive, until the hope became painful.

Don't hate me.

I still love you.

But all that comes out is: “I couldn't sleep.”

Alex must remember that I was always troubled by nightmares. We talked about it a lot during our summer together in Portland. Last summer—less than a year ago. It's impossible to imagine the vast distance I've covered since that time, the landscape that has formed between us.

“I couldn't sleep either,” Alex says simply.

Just this, the simple statement, and the fact that he is speaking to me at all, loosens something inside me. I want to hold him, to kiss him the way I used to.

“I thought you were dead,” I say. “It almost killed me.”

“Did it?” His voice is neutral. “You made a pretty fast recovery.”

“No. You don't understand.” My throat is tight; I feel as though I'm being strangled. “I couldn't keep hoping, and then waking up every day and finding out it wasn't true, and you were still gone. I—I wasn't strong enough.”

He is quiet for a second. It's too dark to see his expression: He is standing in shadow again, but I can sense that he is staring at me.

Finally he says, “When they took me to the Crypts, I thought they were going to kill me. They didn't even bother. They just left me to die. They threw me in a cell and locked the door.”

“Alex.” The strangled feeling has moved from my throat to my chest, and without realizing it, I have begun to cry. I move toward him. I want to run my hands through his hair and kiss his forehead and each of his eyelids and take away the memory of what he has seen. But he steps backward, out of reach.

“I didn't die. I don't know how. I should have. I'd lost plenty of blood. They were just as surprised as I was. After that it became a kind of game—to see how much I could stand. To see how much they could do to me before I'd—”

He breaks off abruptly. I can't hear any more; don't want to know, don't want it to be true, can't stand to think of what they did to him there. I take another step forward and reach for his chest and shoulders in the dark. This time, he doesn't push me away. But he doesn't embrace me either. He stands there, cold, still, like a statue.

“Alex.” I repeat his name like a prayer, like a magic spell that will make everything okay again. I run my hands up his chest and to his chin. “I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry.”

Suddenly he jerks backward, simultaneously finding my wrists and pulling them down to my sides. “There were days I would rather they have killed me.” He doesn't drop my wrists; he squeezes them tightly, pinning my arms, keeping me immobilized. His voice is low, urgent, and so full of anger it pains me even more than his grip. “There were days I asked for it—prayed for it when I went to sleep. The belief that I would see you again, that I could find you—the hope for it—was the only thing that kept me going.” He releases me and takes another step backward. “So no. I don't understand.”

“Alex,
please
.”

He balls his fists. “Stop saying my name. You don't know me anymore.”

“I do know you.” I'm still crying, swallowing back spasms in my throat, struggling to breathe. This is a nightmare and I will wake up. This is a monster-story, and he has come back to me a terror-creation, patched together, broken and hateful, and I will wake up and he will be here, and whole, and mine again. I find his hands, lace my fingers through his even as he tries to pull away. “It's me, Alex. Lena. Your Lena. Remember? Remember 37 Brooks, and the blanket we used to keep in the backyard—”

“Don't,” he says. His voice breaks on the word.

“And I always beat you in Scrabble,” I say. I have to keep talking, and keep him here, and make him remember. “Because you always let me win. And remember how we had a picnic one time, and the only thing we could find from the store was canned spaghetti and some green beans? And you said to mix them—”

“Don't.”

“And we did, and it wasn't bad. We ate the whole stupid can, we were so hungry. And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and told me there was a star for every thing you loved about me.” I'm gasping, feeling as though I am about to drown; I'm reaching for him blindly, grabbing at his collar.

“Stop.” He grabs my shoulders. His face is an inch from mine but unrecognizable: a gross, contorted mask. “Just stop. No more. It's done, okay? That's all done now.”

“Alex, please—”

“Stop!” His voice rings out sharply, hard as a slap. He releases me and I stumble backward. “Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that—what we felt, what it meant—that's done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.”

“Alex!”

He has started to turn away; now he whirls around. The moon lights him stark white and furious, a camera image, two-dimensional, gripped by the flash. “I don't love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I
never
loved you.”

The air goes. Everything goes. “I don't believe you.” I'm crying so hard, I can hardly speak.

He takes one step toward me. And now I don't recognize him at all. He has transformed entirely, turned into a stranger. “It was a lie. Okay? It was all a lie. Craziness, like they always said. Just forget about it. Forget it ever happened.”

“Please.” I don't know how I stay on my feet, why I don't shatter into dust right there, why my heart keeps beating when I want it so badly to stop. “Please don't do this, Alex.”

“Stop saying my name.”

Then we both hear it: the crack and rustle of leaves behind us, the sound of something large moving through the woods. Alex's expression changes. The anger drops away and is replaced by something else: a frozen tenseness, like a deer just before it startles.

“Don't move, Lena,” he says quietly, but his words are laced with urgency.

Even before I turn around, I can feel the looming shape behind me, the snuffle of animal breath, the
hunger
—craving, impersonal.

A bear.

It has picked its way into the gully and is now no more than four feet away from us. It is a black bear, its matted fur streaked silver in the moonlight, and
big
: five or six feet long, and, even on all four legs, almost as high as my shoulder. It looks from Alex to me, and back to Alex. Its eyes are just like pieces of carved onyx, dull, lifeless.

Two things strike me at once: The bear is skinny, starving. The winter has been hard.

Also: It is not afraid of us.

A jolt of fear shocks through me, shorting out the pain, shorting out all other thoughts besides one:
I should have brought a gun.

The bear takes another step forward, swinging its massive head back and forth, evaluating us. I can see its breath steaming in the cold air, its peaked shoulder blades high and sharp.

“All right,” Alex says, in that same low voice. He's standing behind me, and I can feel the tension in his body—ramrod straight, petrified. “Let's take it easy. Real slow. We're going to back away, all right? Nice and slowly.”

He takes a single step backward and just that, that little movement, makes the bear tense up in a crouch, baring its teeth, which glisten bone white in the moonlight. Alex freezes again. The bear begins to growl. It is so close that I can feel the heat from its massive body, smell the sourness of its starving breath.

I should have brought a gun.
No way to turn and run; that makes us prey, and the bear is looking for prey.
Stupid.
That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.

The bear swings forward another step, still growling. Every muscle in my body is an alarm, screaming at me to run, but I stay rooted in place, forcing myself not to move, not to twitch.

The bear hesitates. I won't run. So maybe
not
prey, then.

It pulls back an inch—an advantage, a tiny concession.

I take it.

“Hey!” I bark, as loud as I can, and bring my arms above my head, trying to make myself look as large as possible. “Hey! Get out of here! Go on.
Go.
”

The bear withdraws another inch, confused, startled.

“I said
go
.” I reach out and strike against the nearest tree with my foot, sending a spray of bark in the bear's direction. As the bear still hesitates, uncertain—but not growling now, on the defensive, confused—I drop down into a crouch and scoop up the first rock I can get my fist around, and then I'm up and chucking it, hard. It connects just below the bear's left shoulder with a heavy thud. The bear shuffles backward, whimpering. Then it turns and bounds off into the woods, a fast black blur.

“Holy shit,” Alex bursts out behind me. He exhales, long and loud, bends over, straightens up again. “Holy
shit
.”

The adrenaline, the release of tension, has made him forget; for a second, the new mask is dropped, and a glimpse of the old Alex is revealed.

I feel a brief surge of nausea. I keep thinking of the bear's wounded, desperate eyes, and the heavy thud of the rock against its shoulder. But I had no choice.

It is the rule of the Wilds.

“That was crazy.
You're
crazy.” Alex shakes his head. “The old Lena would have bolted.”

You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher.

A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn't love me.