Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition)

  I suppose I owe her my life. Or at least the rebirth of it.

  *

  December 24th, 2067

  Luke

  I’m not sure I’ve ever approached a more miserable Christmas. It seems like we should be happy but there’s this heaviness draped over us all. Having returned to the tunnels after my three-month vacation has made it clear how unbearable the walls have become to those who live within them. The kids are desperate to get out. The adults are run ragged trying to keep things from falling apart. Food is scarce and not varied enough – I can see how badly malnourished everyone is growing. Living on bread and water isn’t enough. Mom says just about everyone has come to her with symptoms of vitamin deficiency. A brutal stomach flu recently ripped through them and left them even worse off. Without Josi or me here to run the supply operations, they wind up returning with a few measly tins and some very close calls to report. Nobody’s said a word about Christmas tomorrow – it’s too depressing.

  Something has to change. Either we leave these tunnels and this city, or we find a way to drastically improve what we have.

  Josi and I haven’t spoken since the meeting, unless you can count yesterday’s brief interaction in which I managed to make her sprint from the arena with nothing but a few talented words. I seek her out now, and find her repairing one of the wood fire smoke flutes, which has clogged, rendering an entire cooking fire useless. I can see the coals getting cold already and curse whoever stopped watching it long enough to let that happen. Josi’s head is right up in the flute and she’s banging a wrench at something within.

  “Josi?”

  Her head pops out and I can’t help laughing at how covered in coal she is. Her face is blackened with soot and her hair is sticking up at odd angles. Without thinking I reach to wipe her face and show her how dirty it is, but before my skin connects she jerks out of reach.

  My hand drops, a pit forming in my stomach. “Sorry.”

  “No worries. What’s up?”

  “You noticed how bad things have got?”

  Josi nods grimly. “We need proper food.”

  “I’m gonna do a run for supplies but we need to start thinking bigger.”

  I watch her hesitate, wiping her sweaty brow with the back of her filthy hand. “I found something,” she says. “Get armed up and I’ll show you.”

  “Now?”

  “Tonight, after dark. Don’t tell anyone.”

  “How very clandestine.”

  She doesn’t smile, just shoves her head back up the flute.

  *

  “Is this where you’ve been coming every night?” I whisper several hours later. We are flat on our stomachs, crawling through the reeds of a riverbank, both dressed entirely in black and armed to the teeth.

  Josi doesn’t reply, just commando crawls up an incline. There she stops, waiting for me. As I crest the rise, shapes appear below us. Several lights, from both a large house and what looks like a factory.

  “What is it?” I ask. We’re a long way from the city – this entire rural area was abandoned, as far as I knew. Nobody could grow anything out here anymore.

  “A farm.”

  My eyes widen. True enough, there are no trees on the other side of the house, not for miles, implying paddocks or fields. “What kind?”

  “Poultry and pork, and a whole lot of vegetables.”

  “Poultry? Holy shit.” We’ve found dozens of abandoned farms out here, not a single one working or occupied. None of them had been set up to raise poultry – since captive chickens were the only birds to survive the plague, they have become a rare delicacy. This is a strange little miracle indeed. But …

  I shake my head. “We can’t hit it. It’s too close to us.”

  “I don’t want to rob it. I want to make it ours.”

  My mouth falls open. “And how exactly do you imagine that working? The Bloods would be on us in minutes.” Same reason we haven’t started farming any of the other land we found – there’s plenty of it, just no protection from surveillance.

  “We use the people who work it as our cover.”

  “And the produce? City’s gonna notice if a huge farm like this stops providing.”

  “We’ll only siphon off a tiny portion for ourselves.”

  “The owners, then? Why would they agree to that?”

  “Because we’ll make them.”

  I don’t like the sound of that. But frankly I’m thrilled at the prospect of fresh meat and vegetables. I’m playing devil’s advocate, but if she hadn’t said it I would have: at this point I’ll do anything to make this work.

  *

  December 25th, 2067

  Luke

  Pace, Will, Zach and Dave are with us this time. Christmas day has come and gone without much fuss. A few people tried to set up a bit of a games night but no one’s heart was in it. There are more pressing things to deal with, so we put on a movie everyone’s seen a thousand times and snuck away to do another recon trip.

  “Wowzers,” Will says.

  “It’s between 800 and 900 acres,” Josi says, looking out over the farmland.

  “Wowzers.”

  “How the hell do you know that?” Pace demands.

  “I’ve been mapping it.”

  “On your own. At night. Without telling anybody. Like a full creeper.”

  Nobody responds to that. Pace is struggling with the new Josi almost as much as I am. The only person who hasn’t seemed to find her changes concerning is Will, who is the same as he always was with her, whether he notices her detachment or not. Perhaps unsurprisingly she is more relaxed with him than with anyone else.

  Josi checks the time and points. Almost simultaneously the lights in the warehouse shut off.

  “Neat trick,” Zach comments.

  We wait another thirty minutes and then creep down through the dark. Josi’s worked out where to enter the building – there’s an unlocked ventilation window two stories up, which we have to climb to in order to squeeze inside. My shoulders and then head get stuck and for one awkward moment my legs dangle from the window as Zach and Dave whack my skull painfully through. Zach definitely whacks way harder than he needs to, and mutters fatass loudly under his breath. Inside we hang from the window ledge by our hands (mine hurt like a motherfucker but I try not to make a sound) and shimmy our way across to where there’s a large metal drum we can swing onto. Josi is lithe as a cat as she drops down, leaping off the drum and landing in a smooth roll.

  “Show-off,” Pace mutters, then does the same but with much less grace and a lot more cursing.

  Dave jumps down last and because there’s no chance of him landing without breaking something I try to catch him but end up getting flattened painfully on my butt. Will and Pace do their best not to piss themselves laughing, fail, and Zach politely reminds them to shut up. He’s jittery as hell, always the first to kindly point out how many ways there are to be killed, though when you stick him over an open body he’s a freaking superhero. As much as I hate to admit it. To be honest I don’t know why he’s with us tonight – Josi brought him without explanation. She seems to be the only one in the tunnels who can abide his presence, since he spends most of his time casually insulting everyone else.

  Josi’s way ahead of us by the time we hurry after her. The building is full of farming machinery – giant sleeping metal beasts we pass in the dark. The smell of oil and dust permeates, followed by the undeniable scent of livestock. Through a door lies a huge pen within which are hundreds of pigs. Most are sleeping, some snort and sniff and rifle through the dirt in their pens. It smells intense in here, that animal scent of shit and piss and life. We walk through the pens and as I look at the beasts I wonder how they get them in and out of this building.

  The answer becomes brutally clear as we go through a vacuum-sealed exit and into a much cooler space. Meat hooks and conveyor belts line the walls, above which are hung swinging, gutted pig corpses. It’s an abattoir.

  “Oh god,” Pace whisper
s.

  They don’t leave that pen. They don’t go outside into the fresh air to roam on the grass and feel the sunshine. They are born there and raised there and when they’re fat enough they’re taken next door to be slaughtered.

  Josi leads us silently through this nightmare place. I can’t see her face but her spine is rod straight as her footsteps pound over the metal grating. We leave this building and break into a second, only a few meters away. The smells and noises are different here, but just as overpowering. Soft clucking and the rustle of feathers. As my eyes adjust to the darkness a terrible thing reveals itself and a wave of horror descends upon me.

  There are thousands and thousands of chickens in tiny metal cages barely big enough to hold them. Their talons curl over the grating, growing out of shape, and their wings have never been stretched.

  Josi walks through them and we follow unwillingly. I have to close my eyes at one point. The conclusion I come to as we reach the end of the enormous battery farm is that humans are evil.

  “We’re coming back for them,” I say.

  “Let’s let them out now,” Will begs.

  Our fingers are itching communally for the cage doors, but I shake my head. Josi isn’t listening to us so I answer. “Soon, when we have a way to care for them.”

  It’s then that I see tears glistening on her cheeks as she stares in at one of the little white chickens. I reach for her and promise, “We’ll come back.” But she pulls away from my touch and rests her head on the metal. It reminds me of the way I caught her looking through the Fury cage the other night.

  We all start for the door, silently knowing it’s time to get back. But Josi murmurs for us to go ahead, she’ll meet us at home, and when I reach the door I see her sinking to the floor beside the cage, clutching at it as though to offer some sort of wordless comfort. I grit my teeth as I leave because she is so much braver than I am – me who’s desperate to get out of here so I don’t have to look at this monstrosity any longer, me who just wants to pretend I never saw such a thing.

  *

  January 1st, 2068

  Luke

  We make our move on the first day of the new year. Fifty of us, fully armed, descend upon the farm. We seize every worker and tie them up. We cut off the power supply and the communications line. Teddy moves in to blanket the farm in firewalls and new code that will make our presence invisible to the Bloods. He runs all surveillance on a past loop and disables any alarms. We take the owners separately. Two sisters and their husbands share joint ownership, and we keep all four apart. We have their five respective children corralled in the living room of their house, surrounded by the kindest of us to reassure them of their safety. And then we sit down with the oldest of the sisters, Frida McDonaugh.

  We’re in her office at the end of the factory. She is tied to a chair and Blue’s gun is trained at her head. I sit down in the desk chair she probably works in every day and place my gun on the table between us. Josi stands behind me, fury exuding from every pore.

  “Your farm no longer belongs to you,” I tell her.

  “Deed says otherwise.”

  I eye her shrewdly. She’s an earnest woman with calloused and dirty hands and sun-bleached hair that tells me she doesn’t just sit in here – she works her farm.

  “Where are my children?”

  “Safe and well. They’ll remain that way if you cooperate. Actually they’ll remain that way even if you don’t cooperate. We don’t harm children.”

  Frida’s shoulders relax infinitesimally, so she must believe me. “You’re resistance, aren’t you?”

  “Correct.”

  “The ones on TV last year.”

  I nod.

  “What do you want with the farm?”

  “We want everything to stay the same, except we want a portion to live off.”

  “Not the same,” Josi says softly.

  “True,” I agree. “We’ll be making drastic changes to the treatment of animals.”

  Frida sighs listlessly. Her eyes move to the window and the sky beyond. “You can try. We’ll all be dead within the week.”

  “Why?”

  “You think my family wanted it like this? Farm’s been with us for generations. Bloods come along and break the fair treatment laws and force us to farm more than we can. You think I like seeing those creatures caged like that? But you change it, the productivity goes down and they’ll know something’s wrong.” Then she says, meeting my eyes and shocking me, “I’d give you anything you asked if it didn’t mean the end of my children. I would, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t need anger to know something isn’t right. Don’t need fury to resist.”

  That’s how the plan changes. We realize that instead of threatening or blackmailing the McDonaughs into doing our bidding, we can include them in the plan and ask them for help. As the evening wears on we get the same response from each of the farmers separately, and finally return them to their children. In their living room we sit and discuss our plan with the four of them, and as they serve us tea it all becomes very civilized.

  Here’s the simple fact. If you increase the workers on a farm instead of having machines and cages deal with the animals, then you get happy, healthy livestock that will breed and produce substantially more. Plus we can increase the amount of vegetables with extra workers, and we certainly have them – we have over a hundred in the tunnels. Our people get food, exercise, work in the sun and a change of scenery, their farm gets inundated with new life, new energy, unpaid hands and bent backs. The farm will make more money and it’ll be helping to fund the resistance, which, as it turns out, is a bonus for the McDonaughs. We’ll have to vet the workers they already have to make sure they can be trusted, and Teddy explains about the technical aspects of dealing with security.

  It all sounds peachy but I can see the rage hasn’t left Josi’s eyes. Halfway through the meeting she vanishes back to the animals.

  I, for one, am immensely relieved that we haven’t just caused another disaster. It’s about time something ran smoothly for a change. We haven’t been doing much resisting lately, so now that I no longer have to worry about our people dying of scurvy – or cabin fever – I can get back to business.

  Although Teddy’s done a thorough job amping up our security, we still stagger our return home so we don’t move in one enormous, incongruous group. I wait until everyone else has made their way through the dark before I set off. I take a deep breath of the cool, night air. There’s something peaceful about walking through nature in the dark, not having to worry for once about being seen. I’m enjoying the rare moments of being alone, listening to my footfall on the grass. There was no sound in the lab, for three months no sound but my own thoughts growing louder and madder. No fresh air, no stars and no moon.

  I catch a glimpse of two figures emerging from the animal factory. It only takes me a moment to recognize their walks. I change course and meander down the hill to catch up with Josi and Dave, but before I reach them they stop and look up at the stars and I find myself unwilling to interrupt their silence. I don’t think either of them would particularly welcome me, anyway. Things with Dave are strained for some reason I can’t interpret and things with Josi are … Well.

  So I pause a way back and tilt my head up to the crescent moon. I don’t look at the moon very much anymore. She and I have a complicated relationship. I used to love looking at all her shapes, and then one day I no longer admired her – I became a slave to her. Under her red gaze I did something I can’t remember and whatever it is, it’s completely destroyed our lives.

  Their voices drift over to me.

  “Do you feel anything?”

  “In general?”

  “When you look at the animals.”

  My brother considers. “Pity. Concern. I don’t want to see any creature being harmed or caged.”

  “But you don’t feel love.”

  “No. Not like I once did.”

  “But any kind
? Even an approximation of it?”

  “Not really. I mean, I’m not entirely sure. It’s not like I have a way to test it.”

  “When you look at your brother, what do you feel?”

  Dave doesn’t answer and my heart twists.

  “Did they hurt you, when they took you?” she asks him next.

  “Not too much.” He pauses. “Why, Josephine?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “The Bloods didn’t take me,” she replies.

  “I know that.”

  After a while she says, “Not too much.”

  But her mutilated body says otherwise.

  “Happy new year,” he tells her gently.

  “Happy new year,” she replies gently.

  Something about the quiet, shared compassion I can hear feels sweet.

  But who is they? I can’t stand not knowing, and since neither of them will tell me the answer, I decide to look elsewhere. Leaving them in the dark, I walk home to our tunnels and seek out Pace. She’s feeding Hal in a high chair we pinched for her and immediately orders me to remain quiet.

  “I don’t want him getting all worked up again.”

  I nod and sit, watching the little boy munch on his mashed potatoes. “Ba,” he says, reaching for me, then “Woowoo.”

  “What’s that in baby language?” I ask.

  “Beats me. Tonight went well, huh?”

  “Yeah, really well.”

  “Thank Christ. I swear my hair’s falling out from lack of vitamin D.”

  “Hey, Pace …”

  “Mm?”

  “Were you with Josi when …?”

  She sighs. “Yes. But don’t ask me because she’s already told me not to talk about it.”

  “Why?”

  “She thinks if you know what happened you’ll worry more.”

  “Nope, I’m maxed right out on the worry front.”

  “It’s not like it’s a secret or anything. I mean, you must have assumed what happened. You were meant to be there.”

  I was? Heart pounding, I try to stretch my mind but there’s nothing there, no memories whatsoever. “Where was I meant to be?”