Текст книги "Requiem"
Автор книги: Лорен Оливер
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 19 страниц)
Alex stares at me. “You really don’t get it, do you?” His voice is hard.
I cross my arms and squeeze tight, trying to squeeze back the pain, to push it deep under the anger. “Don’t get what?”
“Forget it.” Alex shoves a hand through his hair. “Forget I said anything at all.”
“Lena!”
I turn. Tack and Julian have just emerged from the woods on the other side of the stream, and Julian runs toward me, splashing through the water without seeming to register it. He charges straight past Alex and sweeps me up in his arms, lifting me off the ground. I let out a single, muffled sob into his shirt.
“You’re okay,” he whispers. He’s squeezing me so tightly, I can hardly breathe. But I don’t mind. I don’t want him to let go, ever.
“I was so worried about you,” I say. Now that my anger at Alex has drained away, the need to cry is resurging, pushing at my throat.
I’m not sure Julian understands me. My voice is muffled by his shirt. But he gives me another hard squeeze before setting me down. He brushes the hair back from my face.
“When you and Tack didn’t come back . . . I thought maybe something had happened. . . .”
“We decided to camp for the night.” Julian looks guilty, as though his absence was somehow the cause of the attack. “Tack’s flashlight went bust and we couldn’t see a damn thing when the sun went down. We were worried about getting lost. We were probably only a mile from here.” He shakes his head. “When we heard the shots, we came as fast as we could.” He touches his forehead to mine and adds, a little softer, “I was so scared.”
“I’m fine,” I say. I keep my arms wrapped around his waist. He is so steady, so solid. “There were regulators—seven or eight of them, maybe more. But we chased them off.”
Julian finds my hand and laces his fingers in mine.
“I should have stayed with you,” he says, his voice breaking a little.
I bring his hand to my lips. This simple thing—the fact that I can kiss him like this, freely—suddenly seems like a miracle. They have tried to squeeze us out, to stamp us into the past. But we are still here.
And there are more of us every day.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s make sure the others are okay.”
Alex must have crossed the stream and rejoined the group already. At the edge of the water, Julian doubles down and sweeps an arm behind my knees, so I stumble backward and into his arms. He picks me up, and I put my arms around his neck and rest my head against his chest: His heart is a steady rhythm, reassuring. He wades across the stream and deposits me on the other side.
“Nice of you to join us,” Raven is saying to Tack,as Julian and I push our way into the circle. But I can hear the relief in her voice. Despite the fact that Raven and Tack are often fighting, it’s impossible to imagine one without the other. They are like two plants that have grown around each other—they strangle and squeeze and support at the same time.
“What are we supposed to do?” Lu asks. She is an indistinct shape in the darkness. Most of the faces in the circle are ovals of dark, individual features fragmented by the small patches of moonlight. A nose is visible here; a mouth there; the barrel of a gun.
“We go to Waterbury, like we planned,” Raven says firmly.
“With what?” Dani says. “We have nothing. No food. No blankets. Nothing.”
“It could have been worse,” Raven says. “We got out, didn’t we? And we can’t be too far.”
“We aren’t.” Tack speaks up. “Julian and I found the highway. It’s a half day from here. We’re too far north, just like Pike said.”
“I guess we can forgive you, then,” Raven says, “for almost getting us killed.”
Pike, for the first time in his life, has nothing to say.
Raven sighs dramatically. “Okay. I admit it. I was wrong. Is that what you want to hear?”
Again: no response.
“Pike?” Dani ventures, into the silence.
“Shit,” Tack mutters. Then he says again, “Shit.”
Another pause. I shiver. Julian puts his arm around me, and I lean into him.
Raven says quietly, “We can light a small fire. If he’s lost, it will help him find his way to us.”
This is her gift to us. She knows—just like we all know in that instant, deep down—that Pike is dead.
Hana
God forgive me, for I have sinned. Cleanse me of these passions, for the diseased will wallow in the dirt with the dogs, and only the pure will ascend into heaven.
People aren’t supposed to change. That’s the beauty of pairing—people can be plotted together, their interests made to intersect, their differences minimized.
That’s what the cure promises.
But it’s a lie.
Fred isn’t Fred—at least, he’s not the Fred I thought he was. And I’m not the Hana I was supposed to be; I’m not the Hana everyone toldme I would be after my cure.
The realization brings with it a physical disappointment—and a feeling, too, of relief.
The morning after Fred’s inauguration, I get up and take a shower, feeling alert and very refreshed. I’m overly conscious of the brightness of the lights, the beeping of the coffee machine from downstairs, and the thump-thump-thumpof the clothes in the dryer. Power, power, power all around us: We pulse with it.
Mr. Roth has once again come over to watch the news. If he behaves, maybe the minister of energy will give him his juice back, and then I won’t have to see him every morning. I could speak to Fred about it.
The idea makes me want to laugh.
“Morning, Hana,” he says, keeping his eyes locked on the TV.
“Good morning, Mr. Roth,” I say cheerfully, and pass into the pantry. I scan the well-stocked shelves, run my fingers over the boxes of cereal and rice, the identical jars of peanut butter, a half-dozen jams.
I’ll have to be careful, of course, to steal only a little at a time.
I make my way directly to Wynnewood Road, where I saw Grace playing with the doll. I again abandon my bike early and go most of the way on foot, careful to stick closely to the trees. I listen for voices. The last thing I want is to be taken by surprise by Willow Marks again.
My backpack digs painfully into my shoulders, and underneath the straps, my skin is slippery with sweat. It’s heavy. I can hear liquid sloshing around when I move, and I just pray that the lid of the old glass milk jug—which I’ve filled with as much gasoline from the garage as I could get away with stealing—is screwed on tightly.
Once again, the air is scented faintly with wood smoke. I wonder how many of the houses are occupied, and which other families have been forced to live way out here, scraping out a living. I don’t know how they make it through the winters. No wonder Jenny, Willow, and Grace look so pale and drawn—it’s a miracle that they’re still alive.
I think of what Fred said: They must learn that freedom will not keep them warm.
So disobedience will kill them slowly.
If I can find the Tiddles’ house, I can leave them the food I’ve stolen, and the bottle of gasoline. It’s a small thing, but it’s something.
As soon as I turn onto Wynnewood—only two streets away from Brooks—I once again see Grace in the street, this time squatting on the sidewalk directly in front of a weathered gray house, chucking stones in the grass as though she is trying to skip them over water.
I take a deep breath and step out of the trees. Grace tenses up instantly.
“Please don’t run,” I say softly, because she looks like she’s about to bolt. I take a tentative step toward her and she scrambles to her feet, so I stop walking. Keeping my eyes on Grace’s, I unsling the backpack from my shoulder. “You might not remember me,” I say. “I was a friend of Lena’s.” I choke a little on her name and have to clear my throat. “I’m not going to hurt you, okay?”
The backpack clinks against the sidewalk when I set it down, and her eyes flit to it briefly. I take this as an encouraging sign and move into a crouch, still keeping my eyes on her, willing her not to run. Slowly, I unzip the backpack.
Now her eyes are darting between the bag and me. She relaxes her shoulders a little.
“I brought you a couple of things,” I say, slowly reaching into the bag and withdrawing what I’ve stolen: a bag of oatmeal; Cream of Wheat and two boxes of macaroni and cheese; cans of soup; vegetables and tuna fish; a package of cookies. I lay them all out on the sidewalk, one by one. Grace takes a quick step forward and then stops herself.
Last, I remove the old milk jug full of gasoline. “This is for you too,” I say. “For your family.” I see movement in an upstairs window and feel a quick jolt of alarm. But it’s only a dirty towel, strung up like a curtain, fluttering in the wind.
Suddenly she darts forward and snatches the bottle from my hands.
“Be careful,” I say. “It’s gasoline. It’s very dangerous. I thought you could use it for burning things,” I finish lamely.
Grace doesn’t say anything. She’s trying to stuff her arms with all the food I’ve brought. When I crouch down and try and help her, she grabs the pack of cookies and presses it protectively to her chest.
“Easy,” I say. “I’m just trying to help.”
She sniffs, but allows me to help her stack and gather up the cans of vegetables and soup. We’re just a few inches apart, so close I can smell her breath, sour and hungry. There is dirt under her fingernails, streaks of grass on her knees. I’ve never been this close to Grace before, and I find myself searching her face for a resemblance to Lena. Grace’s nose is sharper, like Jenny’s, but she has Lena’s big brown eyes and dark hair.
I feel a quick pulse of something: a squeeze deep in my stomach, an echo from another time, feelings that should have been quieted forever by now.
No one can know, or even suspect.
“I have more to give you,” I tell Grace quickly as she stands up, holding a teetering pile of packages and bags in her arms, along with the plastic bottle. “I’ll come back. I can only bring a little bit at a time.”
She just stands there, staring at me with Lena’s eyes.
“If you’re not here, I’ll leave the food for you somewhere safe. Somewhere it won’t get—damaged.” I stop myself at the last second from saying stolen. “Do you know a good hiding place?”
She turns abruptly and darts around the side of the gray house, through a patch of overgrown grass and high weeds. I’m not sure whether she intends for me to follow her, but I do. The paint is peeling; one of the shutters hangs crookedly from a window on the second floor, tapping lightly in the wind.
At the back of the house, Grace waits for me by a large wooden door set in the ground, which must lead to a cellar. She sets down the pile of food carefully in the grass, then grabs the rusted metal handle of the trapdoor and heaves. Underneath the door is a gaping mouth of darkness, and a set of wooden stairs descending into a small, packed-dirt space. The room is empty except for several crooked wooden shelves, which contain a flashlight, two bottles of water, and some batteries.
“This is perfect,” I say. For just a second, a smile flits across Grace’s face.
I help her carry the food down into the cellar and stock it on the shelves. I place the bottle of gasoline against one wall. She keeps the package of cookies hugged to her chest, though, and refuses to let it go. The room smells bad, like Grace’s breath: sour and earthy. I’m glad when we emerge back into the sunshine. The morning has left a heavy feeling in my chest that refuses to dissolve.
“I’ll be back,” I say to Grace.
I’ve nearly rounded the corner when she speaks.
“I remember you,” she says, her voice hardly louder than a whisper. I spin around, surprised. But she is already darting away into the trees, and disappears before I have a chance to reply.
Lena
The dawn is double: a twin smoky glow at the horizon and behind us, above the trees, where the fire continues to smolder. The clouds and the drifts of black smoke are almost indistinguishable.
In the dark, and the confusion, we didn’t realize we were missing two members of our group: Pike and Henley. Dani wants to go back and look for their bodies, but the fire makes it impossible. We can’t even go back to forage for cans that will not have burned, and supplies that have made it through the flames.
Instead, as soon as the sky is light, we push forward.
We walk in silence, in a straight line, our eyes trained on the ground. We must get to the camp at Waterbury as soon as possible—no detours, no resting, no explorations of the ruins of old towns, picked clean of useful supplies long ago. The air is charged with anxiety.
We can count ourselves lucky for one thing: that Raven’s map was with Julian and Tack and have not been destroyed with the rest of our supplies.
Tack and Julian walk together at the front of the line, occasionally stopping to consult notations they’ve made on the map. Despite everything that has happened, it gives me a rush of pride to watch Tack consulting Julian, and a different kind of pleasure too—vindication, because I know Alex will also have noticed.
Alex, of course, takes up the rear with Coral.
It’s a warm day—so warm I have removed my jacket and rolled my long-sleeved shirt to the elbows—and the sun is splashed liberally over the ground. It’s almost impossible to believe that only hours ago we were attacked, except that Pike’s and Henley’s voices are missing from the murmured conversation.
Julian is ahead of me. Alex is behind me. So I push forward—exhausted, my mouth still full of the taste of smoke, my lungs burning.
Waterbury, Lu has told us, is the beginning of a new order. An enormous camp has amassed outside the city’s wall, and many of the city’s Valid residents have fled. Portions of Waterbury have been totally evacuated; other parts of the city are barricaded against the Invalids on the other side.
Lu has heard that the Invalid camp is almost like a city itself: Everyone pitches in, everyone helps repair shelters and hunt for food and gather water. It has so far been safe from retaliation, partly because no one has remained who canretaliate. The municipal offices were destroyed, and the mayor and his deputies were chased out.
There, we’ll build shelters out of branches and salvaged brick, and finally find a place for ourselves.
In Waterbury, everything will be okay.
The trees begin to thin, and we pass old, graffiti-covered benches and half-shell underpasses, speckled with mold; a roof, intact, sitting on a field of grass, as though the rest of the house has been simply suctioned underground; stretches of road that, leading nowhere, are now part of a nonsense-grammar. This is the language of the world before—a world of chaos and confusion and happiness and despair—before the blitz turned streets to grids, cities to prisons, and hearts to dust.
We know we’re getting close.
In the evening, when the sun begins to set, the anxiety comes sweeping back. None of us wants to spend another night alone, exposed, in the Wilds, even if we have managed to put the regulators off our trail for now.
From ahead, there is a shout. Julian has circled away from Tack and fallen into step beside me, although we have been mostly walking in silence.
“What is it?” I ask him. I’m so tired I am numb. I can’t see past the people ahead of me. The group is fanning out over what looks as though it was once an old parking lot. Most of the pavement is gone. Two streetlamps, empty of lightbulbs, are staked into the ground. Next to one of them, Tack and Raven have both stopped.
Julian cranes onto his tiptoes. “I think . . . I think we’re there.” Even before he finishes speaking, I am pushing through the group, angling for a look.
At the edge of the old parking lot, the ground drops away suddenly and cuts sharply downward. A series of switchback trails leads down the hillside to a barren, treeless portion of land.
The camp is not like I’ve envisioned it at all. I’ve been imagining real houses, or at least solid structures, nestled between trees. This is simply a vast, teeming field, a patchwork of blankets and trash, and hundreds and hundreds of people, pushing almost directly up against the city’s wall, stained red in the dying light. Fires burn sporadically across the great, dark expense, winking like lights from a distant city. The sky, electric at the horizon, is otherwise stretched dark and tight, like a metal lid that has been screwed shut over waste.
For a moment I flash back to the twisted underground people Julian and I met when we were trying to escape the Scavengers, and their grimy, smoky, underground world.
I’ve never seen so many Invalids. I have never seen so many people, period.
Even from here, we can smell them.
My chest feels like it has caved in.
“What is this place?” Julian mutters. I want to say something to comfort him—I want to tell him it will be okay—but I feel weighted down, dull with disappointment.
“This is it?” Dani is the one to voice what we must all be feeling. “This is the big dream? The new order?”
“We have friends here, at least,” Hunter says quietly. But even he can’t keep up the act. He shoves a hand through his hair so it sticks up in all directions. His face is white; all day, he has been hacking as he walked, his breath coming wet and ragged. “And we had no choice, anyway.”
“We could have gone to Canada, like Gordo said.”
“We wouldn’t have made it there without our supplies,” Hunter says.
“We would still haveour supplies if we had headed north in the first place,” Dani fires back.
“Well, we didn’t. We’re here. And I don’t know about you guys, but I’m thirsty as hell.” Alex pushes his way through the line. He has to sidestep down the hill to the first switchback trail, sliding a little on the sleep slope, sending a spray of gravel skidding down toward the camp.
He pauses when he reaches the path and looks back up at us. “Well? Are you coming?” His eyes slide over the whole group. When he looks at me, a small shock pulses through me, and I quickly drop my eyes. For a split second, he had looked almost like my Alex again.
Raven and Tack move forward together. Alex is right about one thing—we don’t have a choice now. We won’t make it another few days in the Wilds, not without any traps, or supplies, and vessels to boil our water. The rest of the group must know this, because they follow Raven and Tack, sidestepping down toward the dirt path one after another. Dani mutters something under her breath, but follows at last.
“Come on.” I reach for Julian’s hand.
He draws back. His eyes are fixed on the vast, smoky plain below us, and the dingy patchwork of blankets and makeshift tents. For a moment, I think he’s going to refuse. Then he jerks forward, as though pushing his way through an invisible barrier, and precedes me down the hill.
At the last second, I notice that Lu is still standing on the ridge. She looks tiny, dwarfed by the enormous evergreens behind her. Her hair is nearly down to her waist now. She is staring not at the camp, but at the wall beyond it: the stained-red stone that marks the beginning of the other world. The zombie world.
“You coming, Lu?” I say.
“What?” She looks startled, as though I’ve woken her up. Then, immediately: “I’m coming.” She casts one more look at the wall before following us. Her face is troubled.
The city of Waterbury looks, at least from this distance, dead: no smoke floats up from the factory chimneys; no lights shine from the darkened, glass-enclosed towers. It is the empty husk of a city, almost like the ruins we pass in the Wilds. Except this time, the ruin is on the other side of the walls.
And I wonder what about it, exactly, makes Lu afraid.
Once we reach the ground, the smell is thick, almost unbearable: the stink of thousands of unwashed bodies and unwashed, hungry mouths; urine; old fires and tobacco. Julian coughs, mutters, “God.” I bring my sleeve to my mouth, trying to inhale through it.
The periphery of the camp is ringed with large metal drums and old, rust-spotted trash cans, in which fires have been lit. People crowd around the fires, cooking or warming their hands. They look at us with suspicion as we pass. Immediately, I can tell that we are not welcome.
Even Raven looks uncertain. It’s not clear where we should go, or who we should speak to, or whether the camp is organized at all. As the sun is finally swallowed by the horizon, the crowd becomes a mass of shadows: faces lit up, grotesque and contorted by the flickering light. Shelters have been constructed hastily from bits of corrugated tin and scraps of metal; other people have created makeshift tents with dirty bedsheets. Still others are lying, huddled, on the ground, pressing against one another for warmth.
“Well?” Dani says. Her voice is loud, a challenge. “What now?”
Raven is about to respond when suddenly a body rockets into her, nearly pushing her over. Tack reaches out to steady her, barks, “Hey!”
The boy who catapulted into Raven—skinny, with the jutting jaw of a bulldog—doesn’t even glance at her. Already, he is plowing back toward a dingy red tent, where a small crowd has assembled. A man—older, bare-chested but wearing a long, flapping winter coat—is standing with his fists balled, his face screwed up with fury.
“You filthy pig!” he spits. “I’m going to fucking kill you.”
“Are you crazy?” Bulldog’s voice is surprisingly shrill. “What the hellare you—”
“You stole my goddamn can. Admit it. You stole my can.” Bits of spit are collected at the corners of the old man’s mouth. His eyes are wide, wild. He turns a full circle, appealing to the crowd. Then he raises his voice. “I had a whole can of tuna, unopened. Sitting right with my things. He stoleit.”
“I never touched it. You’re out of your mind.” Bulldog starts to turn away. The man in the ragged coat lets out a roar of fury.
“Liar!”
He leaps. For a second, it seems he is suspended in midair, his coat flapping behind him like the great leathery wings of a bat. Then he lands on the boy’s back, pinning him to the ground. All at once the crowd is a surge, shouting, pressing forward, cheering them on. The boy rolls on top of the man, straddling him, pounding him. Then the older man kicks him off and wrestles the boy’s face into the dirt. He is shouting, but his words are unintelligible. The boy thrashes and manages to buck the old man off, sending him into the side of a metal drum. The man screams. The fire has obviously been burning for a long time. The metal must be hot.
Someone shoves me from behind, and I nearly go sprawling to the ground. Julian just manages to get his hand around my arm, keeping me on my feet. The crowd is seething now: The voices and bodies have become one, like dark water teeming with a many-headed, many-armed monster.
This is not freedom. This is not the new world we imagined. It can’t be. This is a nightmare.
I push through the crowd after Julian, who never lets go of my hand. It’s like moving through a violent tide, a surge of different currents. I’m terrified that we’ve lost the others, but then I see Tack, Raven, Coral, and Alex, standing a little ways off, scanning the crowd for the rest of our group. Dani, Bram, Hunter, and Lu fight their way to us.
We huddle close together and wait for the others. I scan the crowd for Gordo, for his chest-length beard, but all I see is blur and haze, faces merging in and out behind clouds of oily smoke. Coral begins to cough.
The others don’t come. Eventually we are forced to admit that we’ve been separated from them. Raven says, halfheartedly, that they will no doubt track us down. We need to find somewhere we can safely camp, and someone who might be willing to share food and water.
We ask four different people before we find one who will help us. A girl—probably no more than twelve or thirteen, and dressed in clothes so filthy they have all turned a uniform, dingy gray—directs us to speak to Pippa, and gestures to a portion of the camp illuminated more brightly than the rest. As we make our way toward the place she indicated, I can feel the young girl watching us. I turn around once to look at her. She has a blanket pulled over her head, and her face is fluid with shadows, but her eyes are enormous, luminous. I think of Grace and feel a sharp pain in my chest.
It seems the camp is actually subdivided into little areas, each claimed by a different person or group of people. As we push toward the series of small campfires that apparently mark the beginning of Pippa’s domain, we hear dozens of fights breaking out over borders and boundaries, property and possessions.
Suddenly Raven lets out a shout of recognition. “Twiggy!” she cries, and breaks into a run. I see her barrel into a woman’s arms—the first time I have ever seen Raven voluntarily embrace anyone besides Tack—and when she pulls away, they both begin talking and laughing at once.
“Tack,” Raven is saying, “you remember Twiggy! You were with us—what?—three summers ago?”
“Four,” the woman corrects her, laughing. She is probably thirty, and her nickname must be ironic. She’s built like a man: heavy, with broad shoulders and no hips. Her hair is cropped close to her scalp. She has a man’s laugh, too, deep and full-throated. I like her immediately. “I’ve got a new name now, you know,” she says, and winks. “Around here, people call me Pippa.”
The bit of land Pippa has claimed for herself is larger and better organized than anything we have yet seen in the camp. There is real shelter: Pippa has constructed, or claimed, a large wooden shed with a roof, enclosed on three sides. Inside the hut are several crudely made benches, a half-dozen battery-operated lanterns, piles of blankets, and two refrigerators—one large, kitchen-sized, and one miniature—both chained shut and padlocked. Pippa tells us that this is where she keeps the food and medical supplies she has managed to gather. She has, additionally, recruited several people to man the campfires constantly, boil the water, and keep out anybody with an inclination to steal.
“You wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve seen around here,” she says. “Last week someone was killed over a goddamn cigarette. It’s crazy.” She shakes her head. “No wonder the zombies didn’t bother bombing us. Waste of ammunition. We’ll kill each other off just fine at this rate.” She gestures for us to sit on the ground. “Might as well park here for a bit. I’ll get some food on. There isn’t a lot. I was expecting a new delivery. We’ve been getting help from the resistance. But something must have happened.”
“Patrols,” Alex says. “There were regulators just south of here. We ran into a group of them.”
Pippa doesn’t seem surprised. She must have already known that the Wilds have been breached. “No wonder you all look like shit,” she says mildly. “Go on. Kitchen’s about to open. Take a load off.”
Julian is very quiet. I can feel the tension in his body. He keeps looking around as though he expects someone to leap out at him from the shadows. Now that we are on this side of the campfires, encircled by warmth and light, the rest of the camp looks like a shadowy blur: a writhing, roiling darkness, swelling with animal sounds.
I can only imagine what he must think of this place, what he must think of us. This is the vision of the world that he has always been warned against: a world of the disease is a world of chaos and filth, selfishness and disorder.
I feel unjustifiably angry with him. His presence, his anxiety, is a reminder that there is a difference between his people and mine.
Tack and Raven have claimed one of the benches. Dani, Hunter, and Bram squeeze onto the other one. Julian and I take a seat on the ground. Alex remains standing. Coral sits directly in front of him, and I try not to pay attention to the fact that she is leaning back, resting against his shins, and the back of her head is touching his knee.
Pippa removes a key from around her neck and unlocks the large refrigerator. Inside it are rows and rows of canned food, as well as bags of rice. The bottom shelves are packed with bandages, antibacterial ointment, and bottles of ibuprofen. As Pippa moves, she tells us about the camp, and the riots in Waterbury that led to its creation.
“Started in the streets,” she explains as she dumps rice into a large, dented pot. “Kids, mostly. Uncureds. Some of them were riled up by the sympathizers, and we got some members of the R in as moles, too, to keep everybody fired up.”
She moves precisely, without wasting any energy. People materialize out of the dark to help her. Soon she has placed various pots on one of the fires at the periphery. Smoke—delicious, threaded with food smells—drifts back to us.
Immediately there is a shift, a difference in the darkness that surrounds us: A circle of people has gathered, a wall of dark, hungry eyes. Two of Pippa’s men stand guard over the pots, knives drawn.
I shiver. Julian doesn’t put his arm around me.
We eat rice and beans straight out of a communal pot, using our hands. Pippa never stops moving. She walks with her neck jutting forward, as though she constantly expects to encounter a barrier and intends to head-butt her way through it. She doesn’t stop talking, either.
“The R sent me here,” she says. Raven has asked her how she came to be in Waterbury. “After all the riots in the city, we thought we had a good chance to organize a protest, plan a large-scale opposition. There are two thousand people in the camp right now, give or take. That’s a lot of manpower.”
“How’s it going?” Raven asks.
Pippa squats by the campfire and spits. “How does it look like it’s going? I’ve been here a month and I’ve found maybe a hundred people who care about the cause, who are willing to fight. The rest are too scared, too tired, or too beat down. Or they just don’t care.”
“So what are you going to do?” Raven asks.
Pippa spreads her hands. “What can I do? I can’t force them to get involved, and I can’t tell people what to do. This isn’t Zombieland, right?”
I must be making a face, because she looks at me sharply.
“What?” she says.
I look at Raven for guidance, but her face is impassive. I look back to Pippa. “There must be some way . . .” I venture.
“You think so?” Her voice gets a hard edge. “How? I have no money; I can’t bribe them. We don’t have enough force to threaten them. I can’t convince them if they won’t listen. Welcome to the free world. We give people the power to choose. They can even choose the wrong thing. Beautiful, isn’t it?” She stands abruptly and moves away from the fire. When she speaks again, her voice is composed. “I don’t know what will happen. I’m waiting for word from higher up. It might be better to move on, leave this place to rot. At least we’re safe for the moment.”
