Requiem

Lena

We waste no time in leaving the safe house, now that it’s been decided: We go to Portland as a group, to join with the resistance there and add our strength to the agitators. Something large is in the works, but Cap and Max refuse to say a word about it, and my mother claims they all know only the sketchiest details, anyway. Now that the wall has come down between us, I’m no longer so resistant to returning to Portland. In fact, a small part of me even looks forward to it.

My mother and I talk around the campfire while we eat; we talk late into the night until Julian pokes his head out of the tent, sleepy and disoriented, and tells me I should really get some sleep; or until Raven yells at us to shut the hell up.

We talk in the morning. We talk as we walk.

We talk about what my life in the Wilds, and hers, have been like. She tells me that she was involved in the resistance even when she was in the Crypts—there was a mole, a resister, a cured who still had sympathies for the cause and worked as a guard in Ward Six, where my mother was imprisoned. He was blamed for my mother’s escape and became a prisoner himself.

I remember him: I saw him curled, fetus-like, in the corner of a tiny stone cell. I haven’t told my mother this, though. I haven’t told her that Alex and I gained admittance to the Crypts, because it would mean talking about him. And I can’t bring myself to speak about him—not with her, not with anyone.

“Poor Thomas.” My mother shakes her head. “He fought hard to get placed in Ward Six. He sought me out deliberately.” She looks at me sideways. “He knew Rachel, you know—long ago. I think he always resented that he had to give her up. He stayed angry, even after his cure.”

I squeeze my eyes shut against the sun. Long-buried images begin flashing: Rachel locked in her room, refusing to come out and eat; Thomas’s pale, freckled face floating at the window, gesturing for me to let him in; crouching in the corner on the day they dragged Rachel to the labs, watching her kick and scream and bare her teeth, like an animal. I must have been eight—it was only a year after my mom died, or after I was told she had died.

“Thomas Dale,” I blurt out. The name has stuck with me all these years.

My mom passes her hand absentmindedly through a field of waving grasses. In the sun, her age, and the lines on her face, are starkly obvious. “I barely remembered him. And of course, he had changed a great deal by the time I saw him again. It had been three, four years. I remember I caught him hanging around the house once when I came home early from work. He was terrified. He thought I would tell.” She barks a laugh. “That was just before I was . . . taken.”

“And he helped you,” I say. I try to force his face into clarity in my mind, to make the details resurface, but all I see is the filthy figure curled on the floor in a grimy cell.

My mom nods. “He couldn’t quite forget what he had lost. It stayed with him. It does, you know, for some people. I always thought it did for your father.”

“So Dad was cured?” I don’t know why I feel so disappointed. I didn’t even remember him; he died of cancer when I was one.

“He was.” A muscle twitches in my mom’s jaw. “But there were times I felt . . . There were times it seemed as though he could still feel it, just for a second. Maybe I only imagined it. It doesn’t matter. I loved him anyway. He was very good to me.” She brings her hand unconsciously to her neck, as though feeling for the necklace she wore—my grandfather’s military pendant, given to her by my dad. She used it to tunnel her way from the Crypts.

“Your necklace,” I say. “You still aren’t used to being without it.”

She turns to me, squinting. She manages a small smile. “There are some losses we never get over.”

I tell my mother about my life too, especially what has happened since crossing from Portland, and how I came to be involved with Raven, Tack, and the resistance. Occasionally we bring up memories from the time Before, too—the lost time before she went away, before my sister was cured, before I was placed in Aunt Carol’s house. But not too much.

As my mother said, there are some losses we never get over.

Certain subjects remain completely off-limits. She doesn’t ask what compelled me to cross in the first place, and I don’t volunteer to tell her. I keep Alex’s note in a little leather pouch around my neck—a gift from my mom, procured from a trader earlier in the year—but it is a memento from a past life, like carrying the picture of someone who is dead.

My mother knows, of course, that I have found my way into loving. Occasionally, I catch her watching me with Julian. The look on her face—pride, grief, envy, and love commingled—reminds me that she is not just my mother, but a woman who has fought her whole life for something she has never truly experienced.

My dad was cured. And you can’t love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.

It makes me ache for her, a feeling I hate and am somehow ashamed of.

Julian and I have found our rhythm again. It’s as though we have skated over the past few weeks, skated over Alex’s long shadow, and landed neatly on the other side. We can’t get enough of each other. I’m amazed by every part of him again: his hands, his low, gentle way of speaking, all his different laughs.

At night, in the dark, we reach for each other. We lose ourselves in the nighttime rhythm, in the hoots and cries and moans from the animals outside. And despite the dangers of the Wilds, and the constant threat of regulators and Scavengers, I feel free for the first time in what feels like forever.

One morning I emerge from the tents and find that Raven has overslept, and it is instead Julian and my mom who have been stoking the fire. Their backs are turned toward me, and they are laughing about something. Faint wisps of smoke twist up into the fine spring air. For a moment I stand perfectly still, terrified, feeling as though I am on the brink of something—if I move at all, take a step forward or back, the image will break apart in the wind, and they’ll scatter into dust.

Then Julian turns and sees me. “Morning, beauty,” he says. His face is still bruised and swollen in places, but his eyes are exactly the color of early-morning sky. When he smiles, I think he is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

My mom grabs a bucket and stands. “I was going for a shower,” she says.

“Me too,” I say.

As I wade into the still-freezing stream, the wind raises goose bumps on my body. A cloud of swallows skates across the sky; the water carries a slight taste of grit; my mother hums downstream. This is not any kind of happiness that I imagined. It is not what I chose.

But it’s enough. It is more than enough.

On the border of Rhode Island, we encounter another group of about two dozen homesteaders, who are on their way to Portland as well. All but two of them are on the side of the resistance, and the two who don’t care to fight don’t dare to be left alone. We are nearing the coast, and the detritus of old life is everywhere. We come across a massive cement honeycomb structure, which Tack identifies as an old parking garage.

Something about the structure makes me anxious. It’s like a towering stone insect, outfitted with a hundred eyes. The whole group falls silent as we pass under its shadow. The hair on my neck is standing up, and even though it’s stupid, I can’t shake the feeling that we are being watched.

Tack, who is leading the group, holds up his hand. We all come to an abrupt stop. He cocks his head, obviously listening for something. I hold my breath. It’s quiet, except for the usual rustle of animals in the woods, and the gentle sighing of the wind.

Then a fine spray of gravel lands on us from above, as though someone has accidentally toed it out of one of the upper levels of the parking garage.

Instantly, everything is blur and motion.

“Get down, get down!” Max yells as all of us are reaching for weapons, unshouldering rifles, and dropping into the underbrush.

“Coo-ee!”

The voice, the shout, freezes us. I crane my head toward the sky, shielding my eyes from the sun. For a second, I’m sure I’m dreaming.

Pippa has emerged from the dark caverns of the honeycomb structure and stands on a sun-drenched ledge, waving a red handkerchief down at us, grinning.

“Pippa!” Raven cries out, her voice strangled. Only then do I believe it.

“Hey, yourself,” Pippa shouts down. And slowly, from behind her, more and more people edge into view: masses of skinny, ragged people, packed into all the different levels of the garage.

When Pippa finally makes it to the ground, she is immediately engulfed by Tack, Raven, and Max. Beast is alive too; he lopes out into the sunshine directly behind Pippa, and it seems almost too much to believe. For fifteen minutes, we do nothing but shout and laugh and talk over one another, and not a single word gets said that anyone understands.

Finally, Max makes himself heard over the chaos of competing voices and laughter. “What happened?” He’s laughing, breathless. “We heard no one escaped. We heard it was a massacre.”

Instantly, Pippa grows serious. “It was a massacre,” she says. “We lost hundreds. The tanks came and encircled the camp. They used tear gas, machine guns, shells. It was a bloodbath. The screaming—” She breaks off. “It was awful.”

“How did you get out?” Raven asks. We have all gotten quiet. Now it seems horrible that only a second earlier we were laughing, rejoicing in Pippa’s safety.

“We had hardly any time,” Pippa says. “We tried to warn everyone. But you know how it was—chaos. Hardly anyone would listen.”

Behind her, Invalids are stepping tentatively out into the sunlight, emerging from the parking garage—wide-eyed, silent, nervous, like people who have weathered a hurricane and are amazed to see the world still exists. I can only imagine what they witnessed at Waterbury.

“How did you get around the tanks?” Bee asks. It’s still hard for me to think of her as my mother when she acts like this, like a hardened member of the resistance. For now, I am content to allow her to exist doubly: She is my mother sometimes, and sometimes, a leader and a fighter.

“We didn’t run,” Pippa says. “There was no chance. The whole area was swarming with troops. We hid.” A spasm of pain crosses her face. She opens her mouth, as though to say more, and then closes it again.

“Where did you hide?” Max presses.

Pippa and Beast exchange an indecipherable look. For a moment, I think Pippa will refuse to answer. Something happened at the camp, something she won’t tell us.

Then she coughs and turns her eyes back to Max. “In the riverbed, at first, before the shooting started,” she says. “It didn’t take long for the bodies to start falling. We were protected under them, once they did.”

“Oh my God.” Hunter balls his fist into his right eye. He looks like he’s about to be sick. Julian turns away from Pippa.

“We had no choice,” Pippa says sharply. “Besides, they were already dead. At least their bodies didn’t go to waste.”

“We’re glad you made it, Pippa,” Raven says gently, and places a hand on Pippa’s shoulder. Pippa turns to her gratefully, her face suddenly eager, open, like a puppy’s.

“I was planning to get word to you at the safe house, but I figured you had already left,” she says. “I didn’t want to risk it when there were troops in the area. Too conspicuous. So I went north. We stumbled on the hive by accident.” She jerks her chin to the vast parking structure. It really does look like a gigantic hive, now that there are figures, half-shadowed, peering down at us from its different levels, flitting through patches of light and then retreating once again into the darkness. “Figured it was a good place to hide out for a bit and wait for things to settle down.”

“How many you got?” Tack asks. Dozens and dozens of people have descended and are standing, herded together, a little ways behind Pippa, like a pack of dogs that has been beaten and starved into submission. Their silence is disconcerting.

“More than three hundred,” Pippa says. “Closer to four.”

A huge number: still, only a fraction of the number of people who were camped outside Waterbury. For a moment I am filled with a blind, white-hot rage. We wanted the freedom to love, and instead we have been turned into fighters, savages. Julian moves close to me and puts his arm around my shoulder, allowing me to lean into him, as though he can sense what I am thinking.

“We’ve seen no sign of the troops,” Raven says. “My guess is they came up from New York. If they had tanks, they must have used one of the service roads along the Hudson. Hopefully they’ve gone south again.”

“Mission accomplished,” Pippa says bitterly.

“They haven’t accomplished anything.” My mother speaks up again, but her voice is softer now. “The fight isn’t over—it’s only beginning.”

“We’re headed to Portland,” Max says. “We have friends there—lots of them. There’ll be payback,” he adds with sudden fierceness. “An eye for an eye.”

“And the whole world goes blind,” Coral puts in quietly.

Everyone turns to look at her. She has barely spoken since Alex left, and I have been careful to avoid her. I feel her pain like a physical presence, a dark, sucking energy that consumes and surrounds her, and it makes me both pity and resent her. It’s a reminder that he was no longer mine to lose.

“What did you say?” Max says with barely concealed aggression.

Coral looks away. “Nothing,” she says. “It’s just something I once heard.”

“We have no choice,” my mother insists. “If we don’t fight, we’ll be destroyed. It’s not about payback.” She shoots a look at Max, and he grunts and crosses his arms. “It’s about survival.”

Pippa runs a hand over her head. “My people are weak,” she says finally. “We’ve been living on scraps—rats, mostly, and what we could forage in the woods.”

“There will be food up north,” Max says. “Supplies. Like I said, the resistance has friends in Portland.”

“I’m not sure they’ll make it,” Pippa says, lowering her voice.

“Well you can’t stay here, either,” Tack points out.

Pippa bites her lip and exchanges a look with Beast. He nods.

“He’s right, Pip,” Beast says.

Behind Pippa, a woman speaks up suddenly. She is so thin, she looks as though she has been whittled from ancient wood.

“We’ll go.” Her voice is surprisingly deep and forceful. Set in her sunken, shipwreck face, her eyes burn like two smoldering coals. “We’ll fight.”

Pippa exhales slowly. Then she nods.

“All right, then,” she says. “Portland it is.”

As we draw closer to Portland, as the light and land grow more familiar—lush with growth and smells I know from childhood, from my longest, oldest memories—I begin to make my plans.

Nine days after we left the safe house, our numbers now hugely swollen, we catch a glimpse of one of the Portland border fences. Only now it is no longer a fence. It’s a huge cement wall, a faceless slab of stone, stained an unearthly pink in the dawn light.

I’m so startled, I stop short. “What the hell?”

Max is walking behind me, and has to dodge at the last second. “New construction,” he says. “Tightened border control. Tightened control everywhere. Portland’s making an example.” He shakes his head and mutters something.

This image—the sight of a wall, newly erected—has made my heart start pounding. I left Portland less than a year ago, but already, it has changed. I’m seized by a fear that everything will be different on the inside of the wall too. Maybe I won’t recognize any of the streets. Maybe I won’t be able to find my way to Aunt Carol’s house.

Maybe I won’t be able to find Grace.

I can’t help but worry about Hana, too. I wonder where she will be once we begin pouring into Portland: the cast-out children, the prodigal sons, like the angels described in The Book of Shhh who were thrown out of heaven for harboring the disease, expelled by an angry god.

But I remind myself that my Hana—the Hana I knew and loved—is gone now.

“I don’t like it,” I say.

Max swivels around to look at me, one corner of his mouth quirked into a smile. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It won’t be standing too much longer.” He winks.

So. More explosions. It makes sense; we need to move a large number of people into Portland somehow.

A high, thin whistle disrupts the morning stillness. Beast. He and Pippa have been scouting ahead of the group this morning, tracing the periphery of the city, looking for other Invalids, signs of a camp or homestead. We turn toward the sound. We’ve been walking since midnight, but now we find renewed energy and move more quickly than we have all night.

The trees spit us out at the edge of a large clearing. The growth has been rigorously trimmed back, and a long, well-tended alley of green extends a quarter of a mile into the distance. In it are trailer homes propped on cinder blocks and chunks of concrete, as well as rusted truck beds, tents, and blankets strung up from tree branches to form makeshift canopies. People are already moving around the camp, and the air smells like smoking wood.

Beast and Pippa are standing a little ways away, conversing with a tall, sandy-haired man outside one of the trailers.

Raven and my mother begin shepherding the group into the clearing. I stay where I am, rooted to the spot. Julian, realizing I am not with the group, doubles back to me.

“What’s the matter?” he asks. His eyes are red. He has been doing more than almost anyone—scouting, foraging, standing watch while the rest of us are sleeping.

“I—I know where we are,” I say. “I’ve been here before.”

I don’t say with Alex. I don’t have to. Julian’s eyes flicker.

“Come on,” he says. His voice is strained, but he reaches out and takes my hand. His palms have grown calloused, but his touch is still gentle.

I scan instinctively across the line of trailers, trying to pick out the one Alex had claimed for himself. But that was last summer, in the dark, and I was terrified. I don’t remember any of its features but the roll-away, plastic-tarp roof, which won’t be distinguishable from where I’m standing.

I feel a brief flicker of hope. Maybe Alex is here. Maybe he came back to familiar grounds.

The sandy-haired man is speaking to Pippa. “You got here just in time,” he says. He is much older than he appeared from a distance—in his forties at least—although his neck is unblemished. He has obviously not spent any significant amount of time in Zombieland. “Game time is tomorrow at noon.”

“Tomorrow?” Pippa repeats. She and Tack exchange a look. Julian squeezes my hand. I feel a pulse of anxiety. “Why so soon? If we had more time to plan—”

“And more time to eat,” Raven cuts in. “Half our number is practically starving. They won’t put up a very good fight.”

The sandy-haired man spreads his hands. “It wasn’t my decision. We’ve been coordinating with our friends on the other side. Tomorrow is our best chance for getting in. A large portion of security will be busy tomorrow—there’s a public event down by the labs. They’ll be pulled away from the perimeter to guard it.”

Pippa rubs her eyes and sighs. My mother puts in, “Who’s going in first?”

“We’re still working out the details,” he says. “We didn’t know whether Resistance got the word out. We didn’t know whether we could expect any help.” When he speaks to my mom, his whole manner changes—he becomes more formal, and more respectful, too. I see his eyes skate down to the tattoo on her neck, the one that marks her as a former prisoner of the Crypts. He obviously knows what it means, even if he has not spent time in Portland.

“You have help now,” my mother says.

The sandy-haired man looks out over our group. More and more people are pushing out of the woods, flowing into the clearing, huddling together in the weak morning light. He starts slightly, as though he has only just become aware of our number. “How many of you are there?” he asks.

Raven smiles, showing all her teeth. “Enough,” she says.