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Someone shoves me from behind, and I nearly go sprawling to the ground. Julian just manages to get his hand around my arm, keeping me on my feet. The crowd is seething now: The voices and bodies have become one, like dark water teeming with a many-headed, many-armed monster.
This is not freedom. This is not the new world we imagined. It can’t be. This is a nightmare.
I push through the crowd after Julian, who never lets go of my hand. It’s like moving through a violent tide, a surge of different currents. I’m terrified that we’ve lost the others, but then I see Tack, Raven, Coral, and Alex, standing a little ways off, scanning the crowd for the rest of our group. Dani, Bram, Hunter, and Lu fight their way to us.
We huddle close together and wait for the others. I scan the crowd for Gordo, for his chest-length beard, but all I see is blur and haze, faces merging in and out behind clouds of oily smoke. Coral begins to cough.
The others don’t come. Eventually we are forced to admit that we’ve been separated from them. Raven says, halfheartedly, that they will no doubt track us down. We need to find somewhere we can safely camp, and someone who might be willing to share food and water.
We ask four different people before we find one who will help us. A girl—probably no more than twelve or thirteen, and dressed in clothes so filthy they have all turned a uniform, dingy gray—directs us to speak to Pippa, and gestures to a portion of the camp illuminated more brightly than the rest. As we make our way toward the place she indicated, I can feel the young girl watching us. I turn around once to look at her. She has a blanket pulled over her head, and her face is fluid with shadows, but her eyes are enormous, luminous. I think of Grace and feel a sharp pain in my chest.
It seems the camp is actually subdivided into little areas, each claimed by a different person or group of people. As we push toward the series of small campfires that apparently mark the beginning of Pippa’s domain, we hear dozens of fights breaking out over borders and boundaries, property and possessions.
Suddenly Raven lets out a shout of recognition. “Twiggy!” she cries, and breaks into a run. I see her barrel into a woman’s arms—the first time I have ever seen Raven voluntarily embrace anyone besides Tack—and when she pulls away, they both begin talking and laughing at once.
“Tack,” Raven is saying, “you remember Twiggy! You were with us—what?—three summers ago?”
“Four,” the woman corrects her, laughing. She is probably thirty, and her nickname must be ironic. She’s built like a man: heavy, with broad shoulders and no hips. Her hair is cropped close to her scalp. She has a man’s laugh, too, deep and full-throated. I like her immediately. “I’ve got a new name now, you know,” she says, and winks. “Around here, people call me Pippa. ”
The bit of land Pippa has claimed for herself is larger and better organized than anything we have yet seen in the camp. There is real shelter: Pippa has constructed, or claimed, a large wooden shed with a roof, enclosed on three sides. Inside the hut are several crudely made benches, a half-dozen battery-operated lanterns, piles of blankets, and two refrigerators—one large, kitchen-sized, and one miniature—both chained shut and padlocked. Pippa tells us that this is where she keeps the food and medical supplies she has managed to gather. She has, additionally, recruited several people to man the campfires constantly, boil the water, and keep out anybody with an inclination to steal.
“You wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve seen around here,” she says. “Last week someone was killed over a goddamn cigarette. It’s crazy. ” She shakes her head. “No wonder the zombies didn’t bother bombing us. Waste of ammunition. We’ll kill each other off just fine at this rate. ” She gestures for us to sit on the ground. “Might as well park here for a bit. I’ll get some food on. There isn’t a lot. I was expecting a new delivery. We’ve been getting help from the resistance. But something must have happened. ”
“Patrols,” Alex says. “There were regulators just south of here. We ran into a group of them. ”
Pippa doesn’t seem surprised. She must have already known that the Wilds have been breached. “No wonder you all look like shit,” she says mildly. “Go on. Kitchen’s about to open. Take a load off. ”
Julian is very quiet. I can feel the tension in his body. He keeps looking around as though he expects someone to leap out at him from the shadows. Now that we are on this side of the campfires, encircled by warmth and light, the rest of the camp looks like a shadowy blur: a writhing, roiling darkness, swelling with animal sounds.
I can only imagine what he must think of this place, what he must think of us. This is the vision of the world that he has always been warned against: a world of the disease is a world of chaos and filth, selfishness and disorder.
I feel unjustifiably angry with him. His presence, his anxiety, is a reminder that there is a difference between his people and mine.
Tack and Raven have claimed one of the benches. Dani, Hunter, and Bram squeeze onto the other one. Julian and I take a seat on the ground. Alex remains standing. Coral sits directly in front of him, and I try not to pay attention to the fact that she is leaning back, resting against his shins, and the back of her head is touching his knee.
Pippa removes a key from around her neck and unlocks the large refrigerator. Inside it are rows and rows of canned food, as well as bags of rice. The bottom shelves are packed with bandages, antibacterial ointment, and bottles of ibuprofen. As Pippa moves, she tells us about the camp, and the riots in Waterbury that led to its creation.
“Started in the streets,” she explains as she dumps rice into a large, dented pot. “Kids, mostly. Uncureds. Some of them were riled up by the sympathizers, and we got some members of the R in as moles, too, to keep everybody fired up. ”
She moves precisely, without wasting any energy. People materialize out of the dark to help her. Soon she has placed various pots on one of the fires at the periphery. Smoke—delicious, threaded with food smells—drifts back to us.
Immediately there is a shift, a difference in the darkness that surrounds us: A circle of people has gathered, a wall of dark, hungry eyes. Two of Pippa’s men stand guard over the pots, knives drawn.
I shiver. Julian doesn’t put his arm around me.
We eat rice and beans straight out of a communal pot, using our hands. Pippa never stops moving. She walks with her neck jutting forward, as though she constantly expects to encounter a barrier and intends to head-butt her way through it. She doesn’t stop talking, either.
“The R sent me here,” she says. Raven has asked her how she came to be in Waterbury. “After all the riots in the city, we thought we had a good chance to organize a protest, plan a large-scale opposition. There are two thousand people in the camp right now, give or take. That’s a lot of manpower. ”
“How’s it going?” Raven asks.
Pippa squats by the campfire and spits. “How does it look like it’s going? I’ve been here a month and I’ve found maybe a hundred people who care about the cause, who are willing to fight. The rest are too scared, too tired, or too beat down. Or they just don’t care. ”
“So what are you going to do?” Raven asks.
Pippa spreads her hands. “What can I do? I can’t force them to get involved, and I can’t tell people what to do. This isn’t Zombieland, right?”
I must be making a face, because she looks at me sharply.
“What?” she says.
I look at Raven for guidance, but her face is impassive. I look back to Pippa. “There must be some way . . . ” I venture.
“You think so?” Her voice gets a hard edge. “How? I have no money; I can’t bribe them. We don’t have enough force to threaten them. I can’t convince them if they won’t listen. Welcome to the free world. We give people the power to choose. They can even choose the wrong thing. Beautiful, isn’t it?” She stands abruptly and moves away from the fire. When she speaks again, her voice is composed. “I don’t know what will hap
pen. I’m waiting for word from higher up. It might be better to move on, leave this place to rot. At least we’re safe for the moment. ”
“What about fears of attack?” Tack says. “You don’t think that the city will retaliate?”
Pippa shakes her head. “The city was mostly evacuated after the riots. ” Her mouth quirks into a small smile. “Fear of contagion—the deliria spreading through the streets, turning us all into animals. ” Then the smile fades. “I’m telling you something. The things I’ve seen here . . . They might be right. ”
She takes the stack of blankets and passes them to Raven. “Here. Make yourself useful. You’ll have to share. The blankets are even harder to keep around than the pots. Bed down wherever you can find the space. Don’t wander too far, though. There are some crazies around here. I’ve seen it all—botched procedures, loons, criminals, the lot. Sweet dreams, kiddies. ”
It’s only when Pippa mentions sleep that I realize how exhausted I am. It has been more than thirty-six hours since I’ve slept, and until now I have been fueled primarily by fear of what will happen to us. Now my body is leaden. Julian has to help me to my feet. I follow him like a sleepwalker, blindly, hardly conscious of my surroundings. We move away from the three-sided hut.
Julian stops by a campfire that has been allowed to burn out. We are at the very base of the hill, and here the slope is even steeper than the one we came down, and no path has been beaten in its side.
I don’t care about the hardness of the ground, the bite of the frost, the continued shouts and hoots from all around us, a darkness alive and menacing. As Julian settles behind me and wraps the blankets around us both, I’m already somewhere else: I am at the old homestead, in the sickroom, and Grace is there, speaking to me, saying my name over and over. But her voice is drowned out by the fluttering of black wings, and when I look up I see that the roof has been blown apart by the regulators’ bombs, and instead of a ceiling there is only the dark night sky, and thousands and thousands of bats, blotting out the moon.
Hana
I wake up as the dawn is barely washing over the horizon. An owl hoots somewhere outside my window, and my room is full of drifting dark shapes.
In fifteen days, I will be married.
I join Fred to cut the ribbon at the new border wall, a fifteen-foot-tall, concrete and steel-reinforced structure. The new border wall will replace all the electrified fences that have always encircled Portland.
The first phase of construction, completed just two days after Fred officially became mayor, extends from Old Port past Tukey’s Bridge and all the way to the Crypts. The second phase will not be completed for another year, and will place a wall all the way down to the Fore River; two years after that, the final wall will go up, connecting the two, and the modernization and strengthening of the border will be complete, just in time for Fred’s reelection.
At the ceremony, Fred steps forward with a pair of oversized scissors, smiling at the journalists and photographers clustered in front of the wall. It’s a brilliantly sunny morning—a day of promise and possibility. He raises the scissors dramatically toward the thick red ribbon strung across the concrete. At the last second he stops, turns, and gestures me forward.