But stand it does.
“So?” I say, turning back to Julian. “You coming or what?”
“I’ve never… It’s not possible.” Julian shakes his head, as though trying to rouse himself from a dream. “This isn’t at all what I used to imagine.”
“We can build something out of almost anything—out of scrap,” I say, and I remember, then, when Raven said almost the exact same thing to me after my escape, when I was sick and weak and unsure whether I wanted to live or die. That was a half a year and a lifetime ago. For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.
Julian’s eyes are electric now, a mirror of the sky, and he turns to me. “Up until two years ago, I thought it was all a fairy tale. The Wilds, the Invalids.” He takes two steps and suddenly we are standing very close. “You. I—I never would have believed it.”
We are still separated by several inches, but I feel as though we are touching. There is an electricity between us that collapses the space between our bodies.
“I’m real,” I say, and the electricity is an itch, a nervous jumping under my skin. I feel too exposed. It is too bright, and too quiet.
Julian says, “I don’t think—I’m not sure I can go back.” His eyes are full of watery depth. I want to look away, but I can’t. I feel as though I am falling.
“I don’t know what you’re saying.” I force the words out.
“I mean, I—”
There is a loud bang from our right, as though someone has kicked something over. Julian breaks off, and I see his body tense. Instinctively, I push him behind me, toward the door, and wrestle the handgun from my backpack. I scan the area: all shrapnel and stone, dips and depressions, plenty of places to hide. The hair is standing up on my neck, and my whole body is an alarm now. They are always watching.
We stand in agonizing silence. The wind lifts a plastic bag across the brittle ground. It makes three slow revolutions, then settles at the base of a long-disabled streetlamp.
Suddenly there is a flicker of movement to my left. I turn around with a cry, gripping the gun, as a cat darts out from behind a mound of cinder block. Julian exhales, and I loosen my hold on the gun, letting the tension flow out of my body. The cat—skinny and wide-eyed—pauses, turning its head in our direction. It meows piteously.
Julian touches my shoulders lightly, with both hands, and I jerk away quickly, instinctively.
“Come on,” I say. I can tell I’ve hurt his feelings.
“I was about to say something,” Julian says. I can feel him searching for my eyes, willing me to look at him, but I am already at the door, fiddling with the rusty handle.
“You can tell me later,” I say as I lean in against the door. It gives, finally, and Julian has no choice but to follow me inside.
I am scared about what Julian has to say, and what he will choose, and where he will go. But I am terrified by what I want: for him, and worst of all, from him.
Because I do want. I’m not even sure what, exactly, but the want is there, just like the hate and anger were there before. But this is not a tower. It is an endless, tunneling pit; it drives deep, and opens a hole inside me.
then
Tack and Hunter weren’t able to salvage many supplies from the Rochester homestead. The bombs and ensuing fires did their job. But they did find a few things miraculously preserved among the smoking rubble: cans of beans, some additional weapons, traps, and, weirdly, one whole, entirely unmelted chocolate bar. Tack insists that it remain uneaten. He straps it to his backpack, like a good luck charm. Sarah eyes it as we walk.
It does seem like the chocolate brings good luck—or maybe it’s just having Tack and Hunter back, and the way it changes Raven’s mood. The weather holds. It’s still cold, but we’re all grateful for the sun.
The beans are enough to give us energy to move on, and only a half day after we’ve left the last encampment we stumble upon a single house, entirely preserved, in the middle of the woods. It must have been miles from any major road when it was built, and it looks like a mushroom sprouting up from the ground: Its walls are covered in brown ivy, thick as fur, and its roof is low and round, pulled down like a hat. This would have been a hermit’s house, back before the blitz—far away from everyone else. No wonder it survived intact. The bombers would have missed it, and even the fires might not have spread this far.
Four Invalids have made it their home. They invite us to camp on their grounds. There are two men and two women, as well as five children, none of whom seems to belong to either couple in particular. They all act as one family, they tell us over dinner, and have inhabited the house for a decade. They are nice enough to share what they have: canned eggplant and summer squash, bitingly sour with garlic and vinegar; strips of dried venison from earlier in the fall; and various other kinds of smoked meat and fowl: rabbit, pheasant, squirrel.
Hunter and Tack spend the evening retracing our steps and slicing patterns in the trees, so next year when we migrate—if we migrate again—we will be able to locate the mushroom house.
In the morning, one of the children runs out as we are getting ready to leave. He is barefoot, despite the snow.
“Here,” he says, and presses a kitchen towel into my hand. Inside are hard, flat loaves of bread—made, I overheard one of the women say, from acorns and not flour—and more dried meat.
“Thank you,” I say, but he is already running back, bounding toward the house, laughing. For a moment I am jealous: He has grown up here, fearless, happy. Perhaps he will never even know about the world on the other side of the fence, the real world. For him there will be no such thing.
But there will also be no medicine for him when he is sick, and never enough food to go around, and winters so cold the mornings are like a punch to the gut. And someday—unless the resistance succeeds and takes the country back—the planes and the fires will find him. Someday the eye will turn in this direction, like a laser beam, consuming everything in its path. Someday all the Wilds will be razed, and we will be left with a concrete landscape, a land of pretty houses and trim gardens and planned parks and forests, and a world that works as smoothly as a clock, neatly wound: a world of metal and gears, and people going tick-tick-tick to their deaths.
We ration carefully, and at last, after another three days’ walking, we come to the bridge that marks the final thirty miles. It is enormous and narrow, made of vast ropes of steel, all slicked with ice and blackened by weather. It looks to me like a gigantic insect, straddling the river, plunging its jointed legs into the water. Barricaded years ago, it has been so long out of use, except as a passage for traveling Invalids, that the clumsily erected wooden boards at its entrance have all but rotted away.
A large green sign, detached from its metal supports on one side, now hangs so that its words run vertically. I read as we pass: TAPPAN ZEE BRIDGE. It sways in the wind—a brutal wind; exposed as we are, it drives right through us, bringing tears to our eyes—and fills the air with ghostly moaning.
Below us, the water is the color of concrete, and capped with waves. The height is dizzying. I read once that jumping into water from this height would feel just like a plunge into stone. I remember the news story of the uncured who killed herself by jumping from the roof of the labs on the day of her procedure, and the memory brings with it a feeling of guilt.
But this is what Alex would have wanted for me: the scar on my neck, miraculously well-healed, just like a real procedural scar; the ropy muscles, the sense of purpose. He believed in the resistance, and now I will believe in it for him.
And maybe someday I will see him again. Maybe there really is a heaven after death. And maybe it’s open to everyone, not just the cured.
But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival—hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water, and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven.
Heaven is hot water. Heaven is soap.
Salvage—which is what we always called this homestead—consists of four rooms. There is a kitchen; a large storage space, almost the size of the whole rest of the house; and a cramped sleeping room (filled with rickety and clumsily constructed bunk beds).
The last room is for bathing. Various metal tubs are sitting on a raised platform fitted with a large grate; beneath it, there is an area of flat stone, and bits of charred wood, remnants of the fires we kept burning through the winter, to heat the room and the water at once.
After I’ve fumbled through the darkness and found a battery-operated lantern, I light a fire, using the wood piled high in one corner of the storage shed, while Julian wanders with a glass lantern through the other parts of the house, exploring. Then I crank water from the well. I’m weak, and I can only fill half of one tub before my arms are shaking. But it’s enough.
I take a bar of soap from storage, and I even find a real towel. My skin is itching, crawling with dirt. I can feel it everywhere, in my eyelids, even.
Before I begin undressing, I call out, “Julian?”
“Yes?” His voice is muffled. From the sound of it, he is in the sleeping space.
“Stay where you are, okay?”
There is no door on the bathing room. It is unnecessary, and things that are unnecessary in the Wilds do not get built, made, or used.
There is a slight pause. “Okay,” he says. I wonder what he is thinking. His voice sounds high, strained, although that might be the effect of distortion through the tin and plywood walls.
I place the gun on the floor, then strip out of my clothes, enjoying the heavy thud of my jeans on the ground. For a moment my body looks alien, even to myself. There was a time when I was a little bit round everywhere, despite the muscles in my thighs and calves from running. My stomach had swell to it, my breasts were full and heavy.
Now I am all carved inward—wire and rope. My breasts are two small, hard peaks; my skin is crisscrossed with bruises. I wonder if Alex would still find me beautiful. I wonder if Julian thinks I am ugly.
I push away both thoughts. Unnecessary; irrelevant.
I scrub every last inch of my body: under my fingernails, behind my ears, inside my ears—between my toes, and between my legs. I lather my hair and let soap run into my eyes, burning. When I finally stand up, still slippery with soap, like a fish, the tub is ringed with dirt. I’m once again grateful that we have no mirrors here; my reflection is darkly indistinct on the surface of the water, a shadow-self. I don’t want to see more clearly what I look like.
I dry myself and put on clean clothes: sweatpants, heavy socks, and a large sweatshirt. My bath has rejuvenated me, and I feel strong enough to draw more water from the well and fill another tub for Julian.
I find him in the storage room. He is squatting in front of a low shelf. Someone has left a dozen books, all of them banned long ago. He is leafing through one of them.
“Your turn,” I say, and he jerks, slamming the book shut. He straightens up, and when he turns to me his face is guilty. Then his eyes shift, an expression I can’t identify.