An Apple for the Creature

Iphigenia in Aulis MIKE CAREY

Mike Carey is the author of the Felix Castor novels and (along with Linda and Louise Carey) The Steel Seraglio. He has also written extensively for comics publishers DC and Marvel, including long runs on X-Men, Hellblazer and Ultimate Fantastic Four. He wrote the comic book Lucifer for its entire run and is the co-creator and writer of the ongoing Vertigo series The Unwritten.

Her name is Melanie. It means “the black girl,” from an ancient Greek word, but her skin is mostly very fair so she thinks maybe it’s not such a good name for her. Miss Justineau assigns names from a big list: new children get the top name on the boys’ list or the top name on the girls’ list, and that, Miss Justineau says, is that.

Melanie is ten years old, and she has skin like a princess in a fairy tale: skin as white as snow. So she knows that when she grows up she’ll be beautiful, with princes falling over themselves to climb her tower and rescue her.

Assuming, of course, that she has a tower.

In the meantime, she has the cell, the corridor, the classroom and the shower room.

The cell is small and square. It has a bed, a chair and a table in it. On the walls there are pictures: in Melanie’s cell, a picture of a field of flowers and a picture of a woman dancing. Sometimes they move the children around, so Melanie knows that there are different pictures in each cell. She used to have a horse in a meadow and a big mountain with snow on the top, which she liked better.

The corridor has twenty doors on the left-hand side and eighteen doors on the right-hand side (because the cupboards don’t really count); also it has a door at either end. The door at the classroom end is red. It leads to the classroom (duh!). The door at the other end is bare gray steel on this side but once when Melanie was being taken back to her cell she peeped through the door, which had accidentally been left open, and saw that on the other side it’s got lots of bolts and locks and a box with numbers on it. She wasn’t supposed to see, and Sergeant said “Little bitch has got way too many eyes on her,” but she saw, and she remembers.

She listens, too, and from overheard conversations she has a sense of this place in relation to other places she hasn’t ever seen. This place is the block. Outside the block is the base. Outside the base is the Eastern Stretch, or the Dispute Stretch. It’s all good as far as Kansas, and then it gets real bad, real quick. East of Kansas, there’s monsters everywhere and they’ll follow you for a hundred miles if they smell you, and then they’ll eat you. Melanie is glad that she lives in the block, where she’s safe.

Through the gray steel door, each morning, the teachers come. They walk down the corridor together, past Melanie’s door, bringing with them the strong, bitter chemical smell that they always have on them: it’s not a nice smell, but it’s exciting because it means the start of another day’s lessons.

At the sound of the bolts sliding and the teachers’ footsteps, Melanie runs to the door of her cell and stands on tiptoe to peep through the little mesh-screen window in the door and see the teachers when they go by. She calls out good morning to them, but they’re not supposed to answer and usually they don’t. Sometimes, though, Miss Justineau will look around and smile at her—a tense, quick smile that’s gone almost before she can see it—or Miss Mailer will give her a tiny wave with just the fingers of her hand.

All but one of the teachers go through the thirteenth door on the left, where there’s a stairway leading down to another corridor and (Melanie guesses) lots more doors and rooms. The one who doesn’t go through the thirteenth door unlocks the classroom and opens up, and that one will be Melanie’s teacher and Melanie’s friends’ teacher for the day.

Then Sergeant comes, and the men and women who do what Sergeant says. They’ve got the chemical smell, too, and it’s even stronger on them than it is on the teachers. Their job is to take the children to the classroom, and after that they go away again. There’s a procedure that they follow, which takes a long time. Melanie thinks it must be the same for all the children, but of course she doesn’t know that for sure because it always happens inside the cells and the only cell that Melanie sees the inside of is her own.

To start with, Sergeant bangs on all the doors, and shouts at the children to get ready. Melanie sits down in the wheelchair at the foot of her bed, like she’s been taught to do. She puts her hands on the arms of the chair and her feet on the footrests. She closes her eyes and waits. She counts while she waits. The highest she’s ever had to count is 4,526; the lowest is 4,301.

When the key turns in the door, she stops counting and opens her eyes. Sergeant comes in with his gun and points it at her. Then two of Sergeant’s people come in and tighten and buckle the straps of the chair around Melanie’s wrists and ankles. There’s also a strap for her neck: they tighten that one last of all, when her hands and feet are fastened up all the way, and they always do it from behind. The strap is designed so they never have to put their hands in front of Melanie’s face. Melanie sometimes says, “I won’t bite.” She says it as a joke, but Sergeant’s people never laugh. Sergeant did once, the first time she said it, but it was a nasty laugh. And then he said, “Like we’d ever give you the fucking chance, sugarplum.”

When Melanie is all strapped into the chair, and she can’t move her hands or her feet or her head, they wheel her into the classroom and put her at her desk. The teacher might be talking to some of the other children, or writing something on the blackboard, but she (unless it’s Mr. Galloway, who’s the only he) will usually stop and say, “Good morning, Melanie.” That way the children who sit way up at the front of the class will know that Melanie has come into the room and they can say good morning, too. They can’t see her, of course, because they’re all in their own chairs with their neck-straps fastened up, so they can’t turn their heads around that far.

This procedure—the wheeling in, and the teacher saying good morning, and then the chorus of greetings from the other kids—happens seven more times, because there are seven children who come into the classroom after Melanie. One of them is Anne, who used to be Melanie’s best friend in the class and maybe still is except that the last time they moved the kids around (Sergeant calls it “shuffling the deck”) they ended up sitting a long way apart and it’s hard to be best friends with someone you can’t talk to. Another is Steven, whom Melanie doesn’t like because he calls her Melon-Brain or M-M-M-Melanie to remind her that she used to stammer sometimes in class.

When all the children are in the classroom, the lessons start. Every day has sums and spelling, but there doesn’t seem to be a plan for the rest of the lessons. Some teachers like to read aloud from books. Others make the children learn facts and dates, which is something that Melanie is very good at. She knows the names of all the states in the United States, and all their capitals, and their state birds and flowers, and the total population of each state and what they mostly manufacture or grow there. She also knows the presidents in order and the years that they were in office, and she’s working on European capitals. She doesn’t find it hard to remember this stuff; she does it to keep from being bored, because being bored is worse than almost anything.

Melanie learned the stuff about the states from Mr. Galloway’s lessons, but she’s not sure if she’s got all the details right because one day, when he was acting kind of funny and his voice was all slippery and fuzzy, Mr. Galloway said something that worried Melanie. She was asking him whether it was the whole state of New York that used to be called New Amsterdam, or just the city, and he said, who cares? “None of this stuff matters anymore, Melanie. I just gave it to you because all the textbooks we’ve got are twenty years old.”

Melanie persists, because New Amsterdam was way back in the eighteenth century, so she doesn’t think twenty years should matter all that much. “But when the Dutch colonists—” she says.

Mr. Galloway cuts her off. “Jesus, it’s irrelevant. It’s ancient history! The Hungries tore up the map. There’s nothing east of Kansas anymore. Not a damn thing.”

So it’s possible, even quite likely, that some of Melanie’s lists need to be updated in some respects.

The children have classes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. On Saturday, the children stay locked in their rooms all day and music plays over the PA system. Nobody comes, not even Sergeant, and the music is too loud to talk over. Melanie had the idea long ago of making up a language that used signs instead of words, so the children could talk to each other through their little mesh windows, and she went ahead and made the language up, or some of it anyway, but when she asked Miss Mailer if she could teach it to the class, Miss Mailer told her no really loud and sharp. She made Melanie promise not to mention her sign language to any of the other teachers, and especially not to Sergeant. “He’s paranoid enough already,” she said. “If he thinks you’re talking behind his back, he’ll lose what’s left of his mind.”

So Melanie never got to teach the other children how to talk in sign language.

Saturdays are long and dull, and hard to get through. Melanie tells herself aloud some of the stories that the children have been told in class. It’s okay to say them out loud because the music hides her voice. Otherwise Sergeant would come in and tell her to stop.

Melanie knows that Sergeant is still there on Saturdays, because one Saturday when Ronnie hit her hand against the mesh window of her cell until it bled and got all mashed up, Sergeant came in. He brought two of his people, and all three of them were dressed in the big suits, and they went into Ronnie’s cell and Melanie guessed from the sounds that they were trying to tie Ronnie into her chair. She also guessed from the sounds that Ronnie was struggling and making it hard for them, because she kept shouting and saying, “Let me alone! Let me alone!” Then there was a banging sound that went on and on and Sergeant shouted, “Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up!” and then other people were shouting, too, and someone said, “Christ Jesus, don’t—” and then it all went quiet again.

Melanie couldn’t tell what happened after that. The people who work for Sergeant went around and locked all the little doors over the mesh windows, so the children couldn’t see out. They stayed locked all day. The next Monday, Ronnie wasn’t in the class anymore, and nobody seemed to know what had happened to her. Melanie likes to think that Ronnie went through the thirteenth door on the left into another class, so she might come back one day when Sergeant shuffles the deck again. But what Melanie really believes, when she can’t stop herself from thinking about it, is that Sergeant took Ronnie away to punish her, and he won’t let her see any of the other children ever again.

Sundays are like Saturdays except for the shower. At the start of the day the children are put in their chairs as though it’s a regular school day, but instead of being taken to the classroom, they’re taken to the shower room, which is the last door on the right, just before the bare steel door.

In the shower room, which is white-tiled and empty, the children sit and wait until everybody has been wheeled in. Then the doors are closed and sealed, which means the room is completely dark because there aren’t any lights in there. Pipes behind the walls start to make a sound like someone trying not to laugh, and a chemical spray falls from the ceiling.

It’s the same chemical that’s on the teachers and Sergeant and Sergeant’s people, or at least it smells the same, but it’s a lot stronger. It stings a little, at first. Then it stings a lot. It leaves Melanie’s eyes puffy, reddened and half-blind. But it evaporates quickly from clothes and skin, so after half an hour more of sitting in the still, dark room, there’s nothing left of it but the smell, and then finally the smell fades, too, or at least they get used to it so it’s not so bad anymore, and they just wait in silence for the door to be unlocked and Sergeant’s people to come and get them. This is how the children are washed, and for that reason, if for no other, Sunday is probably the worst day of the week.

The best day of the week is whichever day Miss Mailer teaches. It isn’t always the same day, and some weeks she doesn’t come at all. Melanie guesses that there are more than five classes of children, and that the teachers’ time is divided arbitrarily among them. Certainly there’s no pattern that she can discern, and she’s really good at that stuff.

When Miss Mailer teaches, the day is full of amazing things. Sometimes she’ll read poems aloud, or bring her flute and play it, or show the children pictures out of a book and tell them stories about the people in the pictures. That was how Melanie got to find out about Agamemnon and the Trojan War, because one of the paintings showed Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra, looking really mad and scary. “Why is she so mad?” Anne asked Miss Mailer.

“Because Agamemnon killed their daughter,” Miss Mailer said. “The Greek fleet was stuck in harbor on the island of Aulis. So Agamemnon put his daughter on an altar, and he killed her so that the goddess Artemis would give the Greek fleet fair winds and help them to get to the war on time.”

The kids in the class were mostly both scared and delighted with this, like it was a ghost story or something, but Melanie was troubled by it. How could killing a little girl change the way the winds blew? “You’re right, Melanie, it couldn’t,” Miss Mailer said. “But the Ancient Greeks had a lot of gods, and all kinds of weird ideas about what would make the gods happy. So Agamemnon gave Iphigenia’s death to the goddess as a present, and his wife decided he had to pay for that.”

Melanie, who already knew by this time that her own name was Greek, decided she was on Clytemnestra’s side. Maybe it was important to get to the war on time, but you shouldn’t kill kids to do it. You should just row harder, or put more sails up. Or maybe you should go in a boat that had an outboard motor.

The only problem with the days when Miss Mailer teaches is that the time goes by too quickly. Every second is so precious to Melanie that she doesn’t even blink: she just sits there wide-eyed, drinking in everything that Miss Mailer says, and memorizing it so that she can play it back to herself later, in her cell. And whenever she can manage it, she asks Miss Mailer questions, because what she likes most to hear, and to remember, is Miss Mailer’s voice saying her name, Melanie, in that way that makes her feel like the most important person in the world.

One day, Sergeant comes into the classroom on a Miss Mailer day. Melanie doesn’t know he’s there until he speaks, because he’s standing right at the back of the class. When Miss Mailer says, “. . . and this time, Pooh and Piglet counted three sets of footprints in the snow,” Sergeant’s voice breaks in with, “What the fuck is this?”

Miss Mailer stops, and looks round. “I’m reading the children a story, Sergeant Robertson,” she says.

“I can see that,” Sergeant’s voice says. “I thought the idea was to educate them, not give them a cabaret.”

“Stories can educate just as much as facts,” Miss Mailer says.

“Like how, exactly?” Sergeant asks, nastily.

“They teach us how to live, and how to think.”

“Oh yeah, plenty of world-class ideas in Winnie-the-Pooh.” Sergeant is using sarcasm. Melanie knows how sarcasm works: you say the opposite of what you really mean. “Seriously, Gwen, you’re wasting your time. You want to tell them stories, tell them about Jack the Ripper and John Wayne Gacy.”

“They’re children,” Miss Mailer points out.

“No, they’re not,” Sergeant says, very loudly. “And that, that right there, that’s why you don’t want to read them Winnie-the-Pooh. You do that, you start thinking of them as real kids. And then you slip up. And maybe you untie one of them because she needs a cuddle or something. And I don’t need to tell you what happens after that.”

Sergeant comes out to the front of the class then, and he does something really horrible. He rolls up his sleeve, all the way to the elbow, and he holds his bare forearm in front of Kenny’s face: right in front of Kenny, just an inch or so away from him. Nothing happens at first, but then Sergeant spits on his hand and rubs at his forearm, like he’s wiping something away.

“Don’t,” says Miss Mailer. “Don’t do that to him.” But Sergeant doesn’t answer her or look at her.

Melanie sits two rows behind Kenny, and two rows over, so she can see the whole thing. Kenny goes real stiff, and he whimpers, and then his mouth gapes wide and he starts to snap at Sergeant’s arm, which of course he can’t reach. And drool starts to drip down from the corner of his mouth, but not much of it because nobody ever gives the children anything to drink, so it’s thick, kind of half-solid, and it hangs there on the end of Kenny’s chin, wobbling, while Kenny grunts and snaps at Sergeant’s arm, and makes kind of moaning, whimpering sounds.

“You see?” Sergeant says, and he turns to look at Miss Mailer’s face to make sure she gets his point. And then he blinks, all surprised, and maybe he wishes he hadn’t, because Miss Mailer is looking at him like Clytemnestra looked in the painting, and Sergeant lets his arm fall to his side and shrugs like none of this was ever important to him anyway.

“Not everyone who looks human is human,” he says.

“No,” Miss Mailer agrees. “I’m with you on that one.”

Kenny’s head sags a little sideways, which is as far as it can move because of the strap, and he makes a clicking sound in his throat.

“It’s all right, Kenny,” Miss Mailer says. “It will pass soon. Let’s go on with the story. Would you like that? Would you like to hear what happened to Pooh and Piglet? Sergeant Robertson, if you’ll excuse us? Please?”

Sergeant looks at her, and shakes his head real hard. “You don’t want to get attached to them,” he says. “There’s no cure. So once they hit eighteen . . .”

But Miss Mailer starts to read again, like he’s not even there, and in the end he leaves. Or maybe he’s still standing at the back of the classroom, not speaking, but Melanie doesn’t think so because after a while Miss Mailer gets up and shuts the door, and Melanie thinks that she’d only do that right then if Sergeant was on the other side of it.

Melanie barely sleeps at all that night. She keeps thinking about what Sergeant said, that the children aren’t real children, and about how Miss Mailer looked at him when he was being so nasty to Kenny.

And she thinks about Kenny snarling and snapping at Sergeant’s arm like a dog. She wonders why he did it, and she thinks maybe she knows the answer because when Sergeant wiped his arm with spit and waved it under Kenny’s nose, it was as though under the bitter chemical smell Sergeant had a different smell altogether. And even though the smell was very faint where Melanie was, it made her head swim and her jaw muscles start to work by themselves. She can’t even figure out what it was she was feeling, because it’s not like anything that ever happened to her before or anything she heard of in a story, but it was like there was something she was supposed to do and it was so urgent, so important, that her body was trying to take over her mind and do it without her.

But along with these scary thoughts, she also thinks: Sergeant has a name, the same way the teachers do. The same way the children do. Sergeant has been more like the goddess Artemis to Melanie up until now; now she knows that he’s just like everyone else, even if he is scary. The enormity of that change, more than anything else, is what keeps her awake until the doors unlock in the morning and the teachers come.

In a way, Melanie’s feelings about Miss Mailer have changed, too. Or rather, they haven’t changed at all, but they’ve become stronger and stronger. There can’t be anyone better or kinder or lovelier than Miss Mailer anywhere in the world; Melanie wishes she was a Greek warrior with a sword and a shield, so she could fight for Miss Mailer and save her from Heffalumps and Woozles. She knows that Heffalumps and Woozles are in Winnie-the-Pooh, not the Iliad, but she likes the words, and she likes the idea of saving Miss Mailer so much that it becomes her favorite thought. She thinks it whenever she’s not thinking anything else. It makes even Sundays bearable.

One day, Miss Mailer talks to them about death. It’s because most of the men in the Light Brigade have just died, in a poem that Miss Mailer is reading to the class. The children want to know what it means to die, and what it’s like. Miss Mailer says it’s like all the lights going out, and everything going real quiet, the way it does at night—but forever. No morning. The lights never come back on again.

“That sounds terrible,” says Lizzie, in a voice like she’s about to cry. It sounds terrible to Melanie, too; like sitting in the shower room on Sunday with the chemical smell in the air, and then even the smell goes away and there’s nothing at all forever and ever.

Miss Mailer can see that she’s upset them, and she tries to make it okay again by talking about it more. “But maybe it’s not like that at all,” she says. “Nobody really knows, because when you’re dead, you can’t come back to talk about it. And anyway, it would be different for you than it would be for most people because you’re . . .”

And then she stops herself, with the next word sort of frozen halfway out of her lips.

“We’re what?” Melanie asks.

“You’re children,” Miss Mailer says, after a few seconds. “You can’t even really imagine what death might be like, because for children it seems like everything has to go on forever.”

There’s a silence while they think about that. It’s true, Melanie decides. She can’t remember a time when her life was any different from this, and she can’t imagine any other way that people could live. But there’s something that doesn’t make sense to her, in the whole equation, and so she has to ask the question.

“Whose children are we, Miss Mailer?”

In stories, she knows, children have a mother and a father, like Iphigenia had Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. Sometimes they have teachers, too, but not always, and they never seem to have Sergeants. So this is a question that gets to the very roots of the world, and Melanie asks it with some trepidation.

Miss Mailer thinks about it for a long time, until Melanie is pretty sure that she won’t answer. Then she says, “Your mom is dead, Melanie. She died before . . . She died when you were very little. Probably your daddy’s dead, too, although there isn’t really any way of knowing. So the army is looking after you now.”

“Is that just Melanie,” John asks, “or is it all of us?”

Miss Mailer nods slowly. “All of you.”

“We’re in an orphanage,” Anne guesses. The class heard the story of Oliver Twist once.

“No. You’re on an army base.”

“Is that what happens to kids whose mom and dad die?” This is Steven now.

“Sometimes.”

Melanie is thinking hard, and putting it together, inside her head, like a puzzle. “How old was I,” she asks, “when my mom died?” Because she must have been very young, if she can’t remember her mother at all.

“It’s not easy to explain,” Miss Mailer says, and they can see from her face that she’s really, really unhappy.

“Was I a baby?” Melanie asks.

“A very tiny baby, Melanie.”

“How tiny?”

“Tiny enough to fall into a hole between two laws.”

It comes out quick and low and almost hard. Miss Mailer changes the subject then, and the children are happy to let her do it because nobody is very enthusiastic about death by this point. But Melanie wants to know one more thing, and she wants it badly enough that she even takes the chance of upsetting Miss Mailer some more. It’s because of her name being Greek, and what the Greeks sometimes used to do to their kids, at least in the ancient times when they were fighting a war against Troy. At the end of the lesson, she waits until Miss Mailer is close to her and she asks her question really quietly.

“Miss Mailer, were our moms and dads going to sacrifice us to the goddess Artemis? Is that why we’re here?”

Miss Mailer looks down at her, and for the longest time she doesn’t answer. Then something completely unexpected and absolutely wonderful happens. Miss Mailer reaches down and she strokes Melanie’s hair. She strokes Melanie’s hair with her hand, like it was just the most natural and normal thing in the world. And lights are dancing behind Melanie’s eyes, and she can’t get her breath, and she can’t speak or hear or think about anything because apart from Sergeant’s people, maybe two or three times and always by accident, nobody has ever touched her before and this is Miss Mailer touching her and it’s almost too nice to be in the world at all.

“Oh, Melanie,” Miss Mailer says. Her voice is only just higher than a whisper.

Melanie doesn’t say anything. She never wants Miss Mailer’s hand to move. She thinks if she could die now, with Miss Mailer’s hand on her hair, and nothing changed ever again, then it would be all right to be dead.

“I—I can’t explain it to you,” Miss Mailer says, sounding really, really unhappy. “There are too many other things I’d have to explain, too, to make sense of it. And—and I’m not strong enough. I’m just not strong enough.”

But she tries anyway, and Melanie understands some of it. Just before the Hungries came, Miss Mailer says, the government passed an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. It was because of something called the Christian Right, and it meant that you were a person even before you were born, and the law had to protect you from the very moment that you popped up inside your mom’s tummy like a seed.

Melanie is full of questions already, but she doesn’t ask them because it will only be a minute or two before Sergeant’s people come for her, and she knows from Miss Mailer’s voice that this is a big, important secret. So then the Hungries came, Miss Mailer said—or rather, people started turning into Hungries. And everything fell to pieces real fast.

It was a virus, Miss Mailer says: a virus that killed you, but then brought you partway back to life; not enough of you to talk, but enough of you to stand up and move around and even run. You turned into a monster that just wanted to bite other people and make them into Hungries, too. That was how the virus propagated itself, Miss Mailer said.

So the virus spread and all the governments fell and it looked like the Hungries were going to eat everyone or make everyone like they were, and that would be the end of the story and the end of everything. But the real people didn’t give up. They moved the government to Los Angeles, with the desert all around them and the ocean at their back, and they cleared the Hungries out of the whole state of California with flamethrowers and daisy cutter bombs and nerve gas and big moving fences that were on trucks controlled by radio signals. Melanie has no idea what these things are, but she nods as if she does and imagines a big war like Greeks fighting Trojans.

And every once in a while, the real people would find a bunch of Hungries who’d fallen down because of the nerve gas and couldn’t get up again, or who were stuck in a hole or locked in a room or something. And maybe one of them might have been about to be a mom, before she got turned into a Hungry. There was a baby already inside her.

The real people were allowed to kill the Hungries because there was a law, Emergency Ordnance 9, that said they could. Anyone could kill a Hungry and it wouldn’t be murder because they weren’t people anymore.

But the real people weren’t allowed to kill the unborn babies, because of the amendment to the Constitution: inside their moms, the babies all had rights. And maybe the babies would have something else, called higher cognitive functions, that their moms didn’t have anymore, because viruses don’t always work the same on unborn babies.

So there was a big argument about what was going to happen to the babies, and nobody could decide. Inside the cleared zone, in California, there were so many different groups of people with so many different ideas, it looked like it might all fall apart and the real people would kill each other and finish what the Hungries started. They couldn’t risk doing anything that might make one group of people get mad with the other groups of people.

So they made a compromise. The babies were cut out of their mommies. If they survived, and they did have those function things, then they’d be raised, and educated, and looked after, and protected, until one of two things happened: either someone came up with a cure, or the children reached the age of eighteen.

If there was a cure, then the children would be cured.

If there wasn’t . . .

“Here endeth the lesson,” says Sergeant.

He comes into Melanie’s line of sight, right behind Miss Mailer, and Miss Mailer snatches her hand away from Melanie’s hair. She ducks her head so Melanie can’t see her face.

“She goes back now,” Sergeant says.

“Right.” Miss Mailer’s voice is very small.

“And you go on a charge.”

“Right.”

“And maybe you lose your job. Because every rule we got, you just broke.”

Miss Mailer brings her head up again. Her eyes are wet with tears. “Fuck you, Eddie,” she says.

She walks out of Melanie’s line of sight, very quickly. Melanie wants to call her back, wants to say something to make her stay: I love you, Miss Mailer. I’ll be a warrior for you, and save you. But she can’t say anything, and then Sergeant’s people come. Sergeant’s there, too. “Look at you,” he says to Melanie. “Fucking face all screwed up like a tragedy mask. Like you’ve got fucking feelings.”

But nothing that Sergeant says and nothing that Sergeant does can take away the memory of that touch.

When she’s wheeled into her cell, and Sergeant stands by with his gun as the straps are unfastened one by one, Melanie looks him in the eye. “You won’t get fair winds, whatever you do,” she tells him. “No matter how many children you kill, the goddess Artemis won’t help you.”

Sergeant stares at her, and something happens in his face. It’s like he’s surprised, and then he’s scared, and then he’s angry. Sergeant’s people can see it, too, and one of them takes a step toward him with her hand halfway up like she’s going to touch his arm.

“Sergeant Robertson!” she says.

He pulls back from her, and then he makes a gesture with the gun. “We’re done here,” he says.

“She’s still strapped in,” says the other one of Sergeant’s people.

“Too bad,” says Sergeant. He throws the door open and waits for them to move, looking at one of them and then the other until they give up and leave Melanie where she is and go out through the door.

“Fair winds, kid,” Sergeant says.

So Melanie has to spend the night in her chair, still strapped up tight apart from her head and her left arm. And it’s way too uncomfortable to sleep, even if she leans her head sideways, because there’s a big pipe that runs down the wall right there and she can’t get into a position that doesn’t hurt her.

But then, because of the pipe, something else happens. Melanie starts to hear voices, and they seem to be coming right out of the wall. Only they’re not: they’re coming down the pipe, somehow, from another part of the building. Melanie recognizes Sergeant’s voice, but not any of the others.

“Fence went down in Michigan,” Sergeant says. “Twenty-mile stretch, Clayton said. Hungries are pushing west, and probably south, too. How long you think it’ll be before they cut us off?”

“Clayton’s full of shit,” a second voice says, but with an anxious edge. “You think they’d have left us here, if that was gonna happen? They’d have evacuated the base.”

“Fuck if they would!” This is Sergeant again. “They care more about these little plague rats than they do about us. If they’d have done it right, we didn’t even need to be here. All they had to do was to put every last one of the little bastards in a barn and throw one fucking daisy cutter in there. No more worries.”

It gets real quiet for a while after that, like no one can think of anything to say. “I thought they found a cure,” a third voice says, but he’s shouted down by a lot of voices all at the same time. “That’s bullshit.” “Dream on, man!” “Onliest cure for them fuckin’ skull-faces is in this here clip, and I got enough for all.”

“They did, though,” the third voice persists. “They isolated the virus. At that lab in Houston. And then they built something that’ll kill it. Something that’ll fit in a hypo. They call it a phage.”

“Here, you, skull-face.” Sergeant is putting on a funny voice. “I got a cure for you, so why’n’t you come on over here and roll up your sleeve? That’s right. And all you other cannibal motherfuckers, you form an orderly line there.”

There’s a lot of laughter, and a lot of stuff that Melanie can’t hear clearly. The third voice doesn’t speak again.

“I heard they broke through from Mexico and took Los Angeles.” Another new voice. “We ain’t got no government now. It’s just the last few units out in the field, and some camps like this one that kept a perimeter up. That’s why there’s no messages anymore. No one out there to send them.”

Then the second voice comes in again with, “Hell, Dawlish. Brass keep their comms to theirselves, like always. There’s messages. Just ain’t any for you, is all.”

“They’re all dead,” Sergeant says. “They’re all dead except us. And what are we? We’re the fucking nursemaids of the damned. Drink up, guys. Might as well be drunk as sober, when it comes.” Then he laughs, and it’s the same laugh as when he said, “Like we’d ever give you the chance.” A laugh that hates itself and probably everything else, too. Melanie leans her head as far to the other side as it will go, so she can’t hear the voices anymore.

Eddie, she tells herself. Just Eddie Robertson talking. That’s all.

The night is very, very long. Melanie tells herself stories, and sends messages from her right hand to her left hand, then back again, using her sign language, but it’s still long. When Sergeant comes in the morning with his people, she can’t move; she’s got such bad cramps in her neck and her shoulders and her arms, it feels like there’s iron bars inside her.

Sergeant looks at her like he’s forgotten up until then what happened last night. He looks at his people, but they’re looking somewhere else. They don’t say anything as they tie up Melanie’s neck and arm again.

Sergeant does. He says, “How about them fair winds, kid?” But he doesn’t say it like he’s angry, or even like he wants to be mean. He says it and then he looks away, unhappy, sick almost. To Melanie, it seems like he says it because he has to say it; as though being Sergeant means you’ve got to say things like that all the time, whether that’s really what you’re thinking or not. She files that thought next to his name.

One day, Miss Mailer gives Melanie a book. She does it by sliding the book between Melanie’s back and the back of the wheelchair, and tucking it down there out of sight. Melanie isn’t even sure at first that that’s what just happened, but when she looks at Miss Mailer and opens her mouth to ask her, Miss Mailer touches a finger to her closed lips. So Melanie doesn’t say anything.

Once they’re back in their cells, and untied, the children aren’t supposed to stand up and get out of their chairs until Sergeant’s people have left and the door is closed and locked. That night, Melanie makes sure not to move a muscle until she hears the bolt slide home.

Then she reaches behind her and finds the book, its angular shape digging into her back a little. She pulls it out and looks at it.

Homer. The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Melanie makes a strangled sound. She can’t help it, even though it might bring Sergeant back into the cell to tell her to shut up. A book! A book of her own! And this book! She runs her hands over the cover, riffles the pages, turns the book in her hands, over and over. She smells the book.

That turns out to be a mistake, because the book smells of Miss Mailer. On top, strongest, the chemical smell from her fingers, as bitter and horrible as always: but underneath, a little, and on the inside pages a lot, the warm and human smell of Miss Mailer herself.

What Melanie feels right then is what Kenny felt, when Sergeant wiped the chemicals off his arm and put it right up close to Kenny’s face, but she only just caught the edge of it, that time, and she didn’t really understand it.

Something opens inside her, like a mouth opening wider and wider and wider and screaming all the time—not from fear, but from need. Melanie thinks she has a word for it now, although it still isn’t anything she’s felt before. Sometimes in stories that she’s heard, people eat and drink, which is something that the children don’t ever do. The people in the stories need to eat, and then when they do eat they feel themselves fill up with something, and it gives them a satisfaction that nothing else can give. She remembers a line from a song that Miss Justineau sang to the children once: You’re my bread, when I’m hungry.

So this is hunger, and it hurts like a needle, like a knife, like a Trojan spear in Melanie’s heart or maybe lower down in her stomach. Her jaws start to churn of their own accord: wetness comes into her mouth. Her head feels light, and the room sort of goes away and then comes back without moving.

The feeling goes on for a long time, until finally Melanie gets used to the smell the way the children in the shower on Sunday get used to the smell of the chemicals. It doesn’t go away, exactly, but it doesn’t torment her in quite the same way: it becomes kind of invisible just because it doesn’t change. The hunger gets less and less, and when it’s gone, all gone, Melanie is still there.

The book is still there, too: Melanie reads it until daybreak, and even when she stumbles over the words or has to guess what they mean, she’s in another world.

It’s a long time after that before Miss Mailer comes again. On Monday there’s a new teacher, except he isn’t a teacher at all: he’s one of Sergeant’s people. He says his name is John, which is stupid, because the teachers are all Miss or Mrs. or Mister something, so the children call him Mr. John, and after the first few times he gives up correcting them.

Mr. John doesn’t look like he wants to be there, in the classroom. He’s only used to strapping the children into the chairs one by one, or freeing them again one by one, with Sergeant’s gun on them all the time and everything quick and easy. He looks like being in a room with all the children at the same time is like lying on an altar, at Aulis, with the priest of Artemis holding a knife to his throat.

At last, Anne asks Mr. John the question that everybody wants to ask him: where the real teachers are. “There’s a lockdown,” Mr. John says. He doesn’t seem to mind that the children have spotted him for a fake. “There’s movement west of the fence. They confirmed it by satellite. Lots of Hungries coming this way, so nobody’s allowed to move around inside the compound or go out into the open in case they get our scent. We’re just staying wherever we happened to be when the alarm went. So you’ve got me to put up with, and we’ll just have to do the best we can.”

Actually, Mr. John isn’t a bad teacher at all, once he stops being scared of the children. He knows a lot of songs, and he writes up the words on the blackboard; the children sing the songs, first all at once and then in two-part and three-part harmonies. There are lots of words the children don’t know, especially in “Too Drunk to Fuck,” but when the children ask what the words mean, Mr. John says he’ll take the Fifth on that one. That means he might get himself into trouble if he gives the right answer, so he’s allowed not to; Melanie knows this from when Miss Justineau told them about the Bill of Rights.

So it’s not a bad day, at all, even if they don’t have a real teacher. But for a whole lot of days after that, nobody comes and the children are alone. It’s not possible for Melanie to count how many days; there’s nothing to count. The lights stay on the whole time, the music plays really loud, and the big steel door stays shut.

Then a day comes when the music goes off. And in the sudden, shocking silence the bare steel door slams open again, so loud that the sound feels like it’s shoving its way through your ear right inside your head. The children jump up and run to their doors to see who’s coming, and it’s Sergeant—just Sergeant, with one of his people, and no teachers at all.

“Let’s do this,” Sergeant says.

The man who’s with him looks at all the doors, then at Sergeant. “Seriously?” he says.

“We got our orders,” Sergeant says. “What we gonna do, tell them we lost the key? Start with this bunch, then do B to D. Sorenson can start at the other end.”

Sergeant unlocks the first door after the shower room door, which is Mikey’s door. Sergeant and the other man go inside, and Sergeant’s voice, booming hollowly in the silence, says, “Up and at ’em, you little fucker.”

Melanie sits in her chair and waits. Then she stands up and waits at the door with her face to the mesh. Then she walks up and down, hugging her own arms. She’s confused and excited and very, very scared. Something new is happening. She senses it: something completely outside of her experience. When she looks out through the mesh window, she can see that Sergeant isn’t closing the doors behind him, as he goes from cell to cell, and he’s not wheeling the children into the classroom.

Finally her door is unlocked. She steps back from it as it opens, and Sergeant and the other man step inside. Sergeant points the gun at Melanie.

“You forget your manners?” he asks her. “Sit down, kid.”

Something happens to Melanie. It’s like all her different, mixed-up feelings are crashing into each other, inside her head, and turning into a new feeling. She sits down, but she sits down on her bed, not in her chair.

Sergeant stares at her like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. “You don’t want to piss me off today,” he warns Melanie. “Not today.”

“I want to know what’s happening, Sergeant,” Melanie says. “Why were we left on our own? Why didn’t the teachers come? What’s happening?”

“Sit down in the chair,” the other man says.

“Do it,” Sergeant tells her.

But Melanie stays where she is, on the bed, and she doesn’t shift her gaze from Sergeant’s eyes. “Is there going to be class today?” she asks him.

“Sit in the goddamn chair,” Sergeant orders her. “Sit in the chair or I swear I will fucking dismantle you.” His voice is shaking, just a little, and she can see from the way his face changes, suddenly, that he knows she heard the shake. “Fucking—fine!” he explodes, and he advances on the chair and kicks it with his boot, really hard, so it flies up into the air and hits the wall of the narrow cell. It bounces off at a wild angle, hits the other wall and crashes down on its back. Sergeant kicks it again, and then a third time. The frame is all twisted from where it hit the wall, and one of the wheels comes right off when Sergeant kicks it.

The other man just watches, without saying a word, while Sergeant gets his breath back and comes down from his scary rage. When he does, he looks at Melanie and shrugs. “Well, I guess you can just stay where you are, then,” he says.

The two of them go out, and the door is locked again. They take the other kids away, one by one—not to the classroom, but out through the other door, the bare steel door, which until now has marked the farthest limit of their world.

Nobody comes, after that, and nothing happens. It feels like a long time, but Melanie’s mind is racing so fast that even a few minutes would feel like a long time. It’s longer than a few minutes, though. It feels like most of a day.

The air gets colder. It’s not something that Melanie thinks about, normally, because heat and cold don’t translate into comfort or discomfort for her; she notices now because with no music playing and nobody to talk to, there’s nothing else to notice. Maybe it’s night. That’s it. It must be night outside. Melanie knows from stories that it gets colder at night as well as darker.

She remembers her book, and gets it out. She reads about Hector and Achilles and Priam and Hecuba and Odysseus and Menelaus and Agamemnon and Helen.

There are footsteps from the corridor outside. Is it Sergeant? Has he come back to dismantle her? To take her to the altar and give her to the goddess Artemis?

Someone unlocks Melanie’s door, and pushes it open.

Miss Mailer stands in the doorway. “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay, sweetheart. I’m here.”

Melanie surges to her feet, her heart almost bursting with happiness and relief. She’s going to run to Miss Mailer. She’s going to hug her and be hugged by her and be touching her not just with her hair but with her hands and her face and her whole body. Then she freezes where she is. Her jaw muscles stiffen, and a moan comes out of her mouth.

Miss Mailer is alarmed. “Melanie?” She takes a step forward.

“Don’t!” Melanie screams. “Please, Miss Mailer! Don’t! Don’t touch me!”

Miss Mailer stops moving, but she’s so close! So close! Melanie whimpers. Her whole mind is exploding. She drops to her knees, then falls full-length on the floor. The smell, the wonderful, terrible smell, fills all the room and all her mind and all her thoughts, and all she wants to do is . . .

“Go away!” she moans. “Go away go away go away!”

Miss Mailer doesn’t move.

“Fuck off, or I will dismantle you!” Melanie wails. She’s desperate. Her mouth is filled with thick saliva like mud from a mudslide. She’s dangling on the end of the thinnest, thinnest piece of string. She’s going to fall and there’s only one direction to fall in.

“Oh God!” Miss Mailer blurts. She gets it at last. She rummages in her bag, which Melanie didn’t even notice until now. She takes something out—a tiny bottle with yellow liquid in it—and starts to spray it on her skin, on her clothes, in the air. The bottle says Dior. It’s not the usual chemical: it’s something that smells sweet and funny. Miss Mailer doesn’t stop until she’s emptied the bottle.

“Does that help?” she asks, with a catch in her voice. “Oh baby, I’m so sorry. I didn’t even think. . . .”

It does help, a little. And Melanie has had practice at pushing the hunger down: she has to do it a little bit every time she picks up her book. This is a million times harder, but after a while she can think again and move again and even sit up.

“It’s safe now,” she says timidly, groggily. And she remembers her own words, spoken as a joke so many times before she ever guessed what they might actually mean. “I won’t bite.”

Miss Mailer bends down and sweeps Melanie up, choking out her name, and there they are crying into each other’s tears, and even though the hunger is bending Melanie’s spine like Achilles bending his bow, she wouldn’t exchange this moment for all the other moments of her life.

“They’re attacking the fence,” Miss Mailer says, her voice muffled by Melanie’s hair. “But it’s not Hungries, it’s looters. Bandits. People just like me and the other teachers, but renegades who never went into the western cordon. We’ve got to get out before they break through. We’re being evacuated, Melanie—to Texas.”

“Why?” is all Melanie can think of to say.

“Because that’s where the cure is!” sobs Miss Mailer. “They’ll make you okay again, and you’ll have a real mom and dad, and a real life, and all this fucking madness will just be a memory!”

“No,” Melanie whimpers.

“Yes, baby! Yes!” Miss Mailer is hugging her tight, and Melanie is trying to find the words to explain that she doesn’t want a mom or a dad, she wants to stay here in the block with Miss Mailer and have lessons with her forever, but right then is when Sergeant walks into the cell.

Three of his people are behind him. His face is pale, and his eyes are open too wide.

“We got to go,” he says. “Right now. Last two choppers are loaded up and ready. I’m real sorry, Gwen, but this is the last call.”

“I’m not going without her,” Miss Mailer says, and she hugs Melanie so tight it almost hurts.

“Yeah,” Sergeant says. “You are. She can’t come on the transport without restraints, and we don’t got any restraints that we can use. You come on, now.”

He reaches out his hand as if he’s going to help Miss Mailer to her feet. Miss Mailer doesn’t take the hand.

“Come on, now,” Sergeant says again, on a rising pitch.

“I’m not leaving her,” Miss Mailer says again.

“She’s got no—”

Miss Mailer’s voice rises over Sergeant’s voice, shouts him into silence. “She doesn’t have any restraints because you kicked her chair into scrap metal. And now you’re going to leave her here, to the mercy of those animals, and say it was out of your hands. Well damn you, Eddie!” She can hardly get the words out; she sounds like there’s no breath left in her body. “Damn—fuck—rot what’s left of your miserable fucking heart!”

“I’ve got to go by the rules,” Sergeant pleads. His voice is weak, lost.

“Really?” Miss Mailer shouts at him. “The rules? And when you’ve ripped her heart out and fed it to your limp-dick fucking rules, you think that will bring Chloe back, or Sarah? Or bring you one moment’s peace? There’s a cure, you bastard! They can cure her! They can give her a normal life! You want to say she stays here and rots in the dark instead because you threw a man-tantrum and busted up her fucking chair?”

There’s a silence that seems like it’s never going to end. Maybe it never would, if there was only Sergeant and Miss Mailer and Melanie in the room: but one of Sergeant’s people breaks it at last. “Sarge, we’re already two minutes past the—”

“Shut up,” Sergeant tells him. And then to Miss Mailer he says, “You carry her. You hold her, every second of the way. And you’re responsible for her. If she bites anyone, I’m throwing you both off the transport.”

Miss Mailer stands up with Melanie cradled in her arms, and they run. They go out through the steel door. There are stairs on the other side of it that go up and up, a long way. Miss Mailer is holding her tight, but she rocks and bounces all the same, pressed up against Miss Mailer’s heart. Miss Mailer’s heart bumps rhythmically, as if something was alive inside it and touching Melanie’s cheek through her skin.

At the top of the stairs, there’s another door. They come out into sudden cold and blinding light. The quality of the sound changes, the echoes dying suddenly. Air moves against Melanie’s bare arm. Distant voices bray, almost drowned out by a mighty, droning, flickering roar.

The lights are moving, swinging around. Where they touch, details leap out of the darkness as though they’ve just been painted there. Men are running, stopping, running again, firing guns like Sergeant’s gun into the wild, jangling dark.

“Go!” Sergeant shouts.

Sergeant’s men run, and Miss Mailer runs. Sergeant runs behind them, his gun in his hand. “Don’t waste rounds,” Sergeant calls out to his people. “Pick your target.” He fires his gun, and his people fire, too, and the guns make a sound so loud it runs all the way out into the dark and then comes back again, but Melanie can’t see what it is they’re firing at or if they hit it. She’s got other stuff to worry about, anyway.

This close up, the smelly stuff that Miss Mailer sprayed on herself isn’t strong enough to hide the Miss Mailer smell underneath. The hunger is rising again inside Melanie, filling her up all the way to the top, taking her over: Miss Mailer’s arm is right there beside her head, and she’s thinking please don’t please don’t please don’t but who is she pleading with? There’s no one. No one but her.

A shape looms in the darkness: a thing as big as a room, that sits on the ground but rocks from side to side and spits dirt in their faces with its deep, dry breath and drones to itself like a giant trying to sing. It has a door in its side; some of the children sit there, inside the thing, in their chairs, tied in with straps and webbing so it looks like a big spider has caught them. Some of Sergeant’s people are there, too, shouting words that Melanie can’t hear. One of them slaps the side of the big thing: it lifts into the air, all at once, and then it’s gone.

Sergeant’s arm clamps down on Miss Mailer’s shoulder and he turns her around, bodily. “There!” he shouts. “That way!” And they’re running again, but now it’s just Sergeant and Miss Mailer. Melanie doesn’t know where Sergeant’s people have gone.

There’s another one of the big rocking things, a long way away: a helicopter, Melanie thinks, the word coming to her from a lesson she doesn’t even remember. And that means they’re outside, under the sky, not in a big room like she thought at first. But even the astonishment is dulled by the gnawing, insistent hunger: her jaws are drawing back, straining open like the hinges of a door; her own thoughts are coming to her from a long way away, like someone shouting at her through a tiny mesh window: Oh please don’t please don’t!

Miss Mailer is running toward the helicopter and Sergeant is right behind. They’re close to it now, but one of the big swinging lights turns and shows them some men running toward them on a shallow angle. The men don’t have guns like Sergeant does, but they have sticks and knives and one of them is waving a spear.

Sergeant fires, and nothing seems to happen. He fires again, and the man with the spear falls. Then they’re at the helicopter and Miss Mailer is pulled inside by a woman who seems startled and scared to see Melanie there.

“What the fuck?” she says.

“Sergeant Robertson’s orders!” Miss Mailer yells.

Some more of the children are here. Melanie sees Anne and Kenny and Lizzie in a single flash of one of the swinging lights. But now there’s a shout and Sergeant is fighting with somebody, right there at the door where they just climbed in. The men with the knives and the sticks have gotten there, too.

Sergeant gets off one more shot, and all of a sudden one of the men doesn’t have a head anymore. He falls down out of sight. Another man knocks the gun out of Sergeant’s hand, but Sergeant takes his knife from him somehow and sticks it into the man’s stomach.

The woman inside the copter slaps the ceiling and points up—for the pilot, Melanie realizes. He’s sitting in his cockpit, fighting to keep the copter more or less level and more or less still, as though the ground is bucking under him and trying to throw him off. But it’s not the ground, it’s the weight of the men swarming on board.

“Shit!” the woman moans.

Miss Mailer hides Melanie’s eyes with her hand, but Melanie pushes the hand away. She knows what she has to do, now. It’s not even a hard choice, because the incredible, irresistible human flesh smell is helping her, pushing her in the direction she has to go.

She stops pleading with the hunger to leave her alone; it’s not listening anyway. She says to it, instead, like Sergeant said to his people, Pick your target.

And then she jumps clear out of Miss Mailer’s arms, her legs propelling her like one of Sergeant’s bullets.

She lands on the chest of one of the men, and he’s staring into her face with frozen horror as she leans in and bites his throat out. His blood tastes utterly wonderful: he is her bread when she’s hungry, but there’s no time to enjoy it. Melanie scales his shoulders as he falls and jumps onto the man behind, folding her legs around his neck and leaning down to bite and claw at his face.

Miss Mailer screams Melanie’s name. It’s only just audible over the sound of the helicopter blades, which is louder now, and the screams of the third man as Melanie jumps across to him and her teeth close on his arm. He beats at her, but her jaws are so strong he can’t shake her loose, and then Sergeant hits him really hard in the face and he falls down. Melanie lets go of his arm, spits out the piece of it that’s in her mouth.

The copter lifts off. Melanie looks up at it, hoping for one last sight of Miss Mailer’s face, but it just disappears into the dark and there’s nothing left of it but the sound.

Other men are coming. Lots of them.

Sergeant picks up his gun from the ground where it fell, checks it. He seems to be satisfied.

The light swings all the way round until it’s full in their faces.

Sergeant looks at Melanie, and she looks back at him.

“Day just gets better and better, don’t it?” Sergeant says. It’s sarcasm, but Melanie nods, meaning it, because it’s a day of wishes coming true. Miss Mailer’s arms around her, and now this.

“You ready, kid?” Sergeant asks.

“Yes, Sergeant,” Melanie says. Of course she’s ready.

“Then let’s give these bastards something to feel sad about.”

The men bulk large in the dark, but they’re too late. The goddess Artemis is appeased. The ships are gone on the fair wind.