What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) (12 page)

What he’s saying takes my breath away. I feel a gush of strength, a little adrenalin starts to flow. My heart beats faster. I’m starting to think that maybe I
can
shove him aside and run past.

“Why are you being so good to me?” I ask.

“To be honest, we need this room. They’re bringing in someone else tonight. Besides, we want to put you to work. You can help us out with the younger kids. I’m sick of being stuck here.”

After days of being trapped in this cold, gray, dismal place, this is information overload. My sleepy mind reels.

They’re bringing in someone else.

I start to wonder, is there another one like me out there who’s done something to them that’s so awful they want to punish whoever it is as much as they’ve punished me?

But much more important is the fact that he’s telling me that Emily, Stace, CJ and Terry are somewhere above me,
in this building
. And he’s going to take me to them. If he isn’t lying. If this isn’t some new torture. I swear to myself that I will make him pay if it is.

Finally I say, “Let me put my boots on.”

William and I
head up a stairwell. It’s hard to keep up with him. I’m breathing heavily and my heart is beating fast. None of the lights in the building work and he doesn’t have a flashlight but he seems totally familiar with where we’re going.

On a landing between flights of stairs, I tug at the back of his jacket. “Stop for a second. I have to catch my breath.”

A little light is coming from up above and I can just make out the shape of his wiry body pulling away from me. “Don’t come too close,” he says peevishly. “I should take you outside and hose you off. If we had running water. But I guess I don’t have to worry about you trying to make a break for it. You couldn’t make it halfway down the block.”

I hate how haughty he is, how unkind. “Do I scare you?”

He grunts. “Not without your rifle. I’m not saying that you’re not tough. You had to be to survive for as long as you did out there. You were good to those kids.”

“When I get my strength back…”

“We’ll have to see how tough you are then.”

“Why do you do it, William?” I ask abruptly.

“Do what?” He sounds confused.

“Help them. Moira and the others.”

“Because…” For a second I think he’ll give me an answer but he never finishes his sentence. I can sense that there’s something he’s afraid of, especially now that he’s alone, without Jendra. He’s worried, not just about me but about something that’s about to happen.

“Let’s go,” he says.

At the top of the stairs, out of the stairwell, we stop at one end of a long corridor. To one side there is a row of tall narrow windows. They reach up to a ceiling far above our heads. Rain pelts cracked glass, seeps through sodden sections of plastic and cardboard where the window panes have been smashed away and someone’s tried to plug the open spaces. It’s cold in here, drafty. Opposite the windows is a series of doorways, some open, some shut. There’s no movement, no sound.

“What is this place?” I ask.

“We call it the Orphanage. It used to be a grade school. This is where we put all the younger kids until they get old enough to join the rest of us.”

He looks at me. I can see his face clearly for the first time. There’s the large scar above his right eye I noticed before, shaped like a crescent moon, as if someone had cut away a moon-shaped piece of his flesh years ago. He doesn’t look as neat, as well-groomed as he did before. His sandy hair is shaggy, uneven and greasy. Splotches of pimples are clustered around the corners of his nose. His clothes are wrinkled, the cuffs of his jeans and his shoes mud-stained.

“We have to climb up to the next story. It’s a big building but there’s only two floors.”

He’s not ordering me around as he says this. Maybe now that he can see me clearly, he feels a little sympathy for me. But I’m sure it’s only a
little
sympathy, if any. I’m not expecting much.

I nod my head and follow after him. This time I push myself so I don’t have to stop to catch my breath on the next landing. We emerge at the end of another long hallway, the same bank of windows on one side, doorways on the other.

We walk about halfway down the corridor. I look outside at masses of ashen storm clouds pressing down on the roofs of empty houses. There are fallen trees, the usual tangle of cars stopped every which way, possessions looted or abandoned scattered across front lawns, sidewalks. Then I hear a murmur of voices from an open doorway that grows louder the closer we get.

The murmur becomes the sound of children playing. Someone raises their voice about someone else taking something that’s theirs. A pair of heavy doors with glass wire-mesh windows is propped open with boxes of books.

Then someone inside the room kicks a blue rubber ball out into the hall, like the ones I used to play kickball with in school. It smacks against the steel-gray pipes of an old radiator squatting below the windows, ricochets against the opposite wall and skitters toward my feet.

From the room, a small boy darts out and runs toward me. Right away I see that it’s CJ. He’s looking at the ball as he runs and doesn’t realize it’s me until he’s only a few feet away when he glances up and skids to a stop. He’s confused for a few seconds and then his face breaks into a smile. He runs at me, throws his arms around me and clutches me tightly.

I run my fingers through his thick curly hair and whisper his name. Then he turns his head and calls out, “Stace, Terry!”

CJ’s older brother and Stace run out, stop for a moment, mouths open in surprise, and fling themselves at me. Three pairs of arms grip me tight, not minding how I smell or what I look like. “I’m so glad to see you guys,” I say, my voice breaking, unsteady.

Stace pulls back for a moment so she can look me in the eye. She’s got the fingers of my right hand in a tight squeeze. “We didn’t think we’d see you again. Ever,” she says.

Over her narrow shoulders, other children are drifting into the hallway to see what the commotion is. I see five, six, seven of them. The clothes they wear are oversized, ill-fitting like castoffs from older siblings. Their hair is long and unruly, faces and hands smudged, knees and sleeves stained. I don’t see—

“Where’s Emily, Stace?”

She drops my hand and looks away, her face suddenly scrunched up tight. Then she looks at where William is standing near the old radiator. He’s shifting from one foot to another, rubbing his hands together. I imagine he’s uneasy, unsure of what he should be doing now that I’m free to mingle with the others. “She’s with them,” Stace says, pointing right at him.

A troll-like creature
with a grimy face and matted clumps of hair dangling across its shoulders stares at me. It takes an effort to convince myself that this is my own reflection.

The lips I see are swollen and split. The skin is worn and hard, drained of color, scratched and bruised. I look so much older than I am, so much older than I was just a few weeks before.

I have a bowl of water with me, perched on the edge of one of the sinks. I’m on the second floor of the Orphanage, in the large girls’ room at one end of the hall, studying myself in the depths of a dirty mirror. I’ve found a wash cloth and towel that are almost clean and an untouched bar of soap.

This is the morning of my first full day above ground, free of the cellar. Unbarred, uncaged.

I unzip my jacket, unbutton the few buttons still attached to the heavy wool shirt that’s under it until I’m down to just a flannel tee shirt, a grubby gray thing I haven’t taken off since we arrived in Raintree. I cup my hands, dip them into the cold water in the bowl and begin to splash my face and arms and hair. I drop the bar of soap into the bowl and try to work it into lather.

“You’ll have to do better than that.” I turn around and a girl called Tetch is standing in the doorway.

The door to the girls’ room has been pried from its hinges and removed. Maybe a moment of privacy in the restroom is a thing that has to be earned, a privilege only the most compliant children are worthy of. But it also serves a purpose, allowing enough cloudy daylight in from the windows across the hall to let me see what I’m doing.

“Can I have, like, a moment?” I say. I watch her staring at me just beyond my left shoulder in the smudged surface of the mirror. I have to look away, unable to bear the contrast between my withered, pinched features and her healthy face with large brown eyes and long, dark hair tied neatly into a ponytail. She’s the first person I saw at the Orphanage, the one who brought me food when I was locked in the cellar.

“You can have a moment if I want you to have a moment,” she says petulantly, like I have no right to talk back to her. Then her expression softens and she takes a few steps into the girls’ room. “You’d be pretty if you knew how to clean up.”

“I’d do all right if I had what you use to clean up.”

She laughs a little. I wonder if she’s trying to be friendly, opening up to me.

Despite what William had said about them watching me—I imagined a whole group of older kids in control of this place—I see only two of them left in this old school. The others, including Jendra, have gone and William won’t say where.

I first got a good look at Tetch last night. She said almost nothing to me, acted like I was hardly worth noticing. William told me her name. She’s not very tall, thick-bodied, a plain looking girl but in this place it’s not how attractive you are but how clean, how healthy you can look. On that scale, she’s totally my superior.

“I can get you toothpaste. Shampoo,” she says.

“Why are you being nice to me?”

She shrugs. Her expression doesn’t change much. I get the feeling that everything happens on the surface with her, that she doesn’t experience many deep thoughts or emotions. She obviously spends a lot of time on her appearance, like Jendra does. She wears a succession of clean, soft, warm sweaters that I want to rip off her body and take for myself.

“No reason,” she says. “Just bored, tired of the kids. Thought I’d take a walk around.” She looks at my figure appraisingly. “I could give you a few older things of mine but I don’t think they’d fit you. Maybe later we’ll try to dig something up.” She shrugs again as if it’s of no importance and disappears down the hall.

When I return
to the dorm, down the hall from the girls’ room, I’m cleaner than I was but not by much. I’ve used up half the bar of soap, scrubbing and rinsing until only a thin residue of brown murk remained at the bottom of my once clean bowl of water.

My hair is damp and tangled but less greasy, less clotted with dirt and debris like an unwrung mop. The skin on my face feels softer. When I touch my cheeks and forehead, my fingers no longer come away smudged with soot and oil.

The dorm is what they call the enormous room CJ burst out of the day before, chasing after his ball. It was once an auditorium or a gym, a cavernous, rectangular space in the middle of the second floor of the school. Huge iron beams span the ceiling. A raised platform dominates the far end, once a stage for school plays and speakers at assemblies. Across the open floor are scattered dozens of narrow steel-framed cots like in an old-fashioned hospital ward. I imagine that when the plague was at its worst, the school was reconfigured into a temporary shelter for those too ill to flee the city.

The dorm is now my home. The night before, William and Tetch told me to sleep here with the others so I nestled in with what remains of my small adopted family, a small island of familiarity among all these other children I’ve never seen before. CJ and Terry brought me a little food which I gobbled down and I fell asleep soon after, curling up with Stace in her bed, sleeping more soundly than I have since the night the Black Riders found us.

My little family has pushed a group of cots together in a far corner of the room, well apart from the others. And this morning they helped me drag over another one and gather some spare bedding. Stace even made up my bed for me. Many of the cots are unused but look recently occupied. I’m almost positive that I can make out the imprints of children’s bodies still marking sheets and blankets tossed over thin, plastic-covered mattresses.

Our cots are only inches apart. I can see that the three of them, CJ, Terry and Stace, haven’t made any attempt to blend in with the other children, to be accepted. They’ve built a fort out of their beds, a little haven of safety in this vast, chilly space. The unfamiliar children circle nearby, stop and stare but never approach or try to speak to us.

Stace has come over to sit on the edge of my cot, watching me towel my hair dry, then try to drag a comb through it. “Has anybody been bothering you here?” I ask her, looking over to several kids playing with a set of plastic bricks.

She shrugs. “They don’t talk to us. We don’t talk to them.”

Then, without warning, she darts out a hand, latches onto the fingers of my left hand with a fierce grip. Her eyes are suddenly wide and her mouth open, her lower lip trembling. She reminds me of someone who’s been hanging by her fingertips from a ledge for hours and now finds an arm to grab onto, a person to help pull her to safety.

“We didn’t know what to do and then they took Emily away,” she says, looking off across the dorm. It’s gloomy, almost as dark as the cellar, a thin fan of muddied daylight seeping across the floor from the open doorway.

“Did they make her go somewhere?”

“No,” Stace says, speaking faster, wanting to get the words out before she starts blubbering. “She
wanted
to go with them They’re the older ones. They told us to call them the Elders.”

The Elders.
It sounds so ridiculous I want to laugh.

“It wasn’t like what they promised. What William and Jendra promised.” Her face is very pale, her red hair looking more intensely red then ever when compared to pasty skin now scrubbed nearly free of dirt and stippled with rust-colored freckles.

Then her eyes narrow and she leans forward, searching into all corners of my face like she’s a doctor seeking signs of illness. I’ve been thinking that
she
looks sickly but she says, squeezing my hand again, “You don’t look too good. You’re not…” She lets her voice trail away.