The Fall of Crazy House, page 6
My fingers flattened out, the better to bitch-slap his handsome face. Resisting the urge to mention the words “Provost’s son,” instead I just repeated, “yes.”
He looked up and down the road, then up in the sky.
“If they use drones or helicopters, they’ll see us either way,” he said, and I tried not to look startled. I’d forgotten about drones or anything from above.
I nodded, like, of course. “Yeah. So I’m thinking road. We can always dive into the grass if we hear anything.”
“Yeah,” he said.
Walking on the edge of the road, heading east, I could tell it hadn’t been used in a long time. It was cracked and unrepaired, with weeds growing up through the cracks. Tall grass and other plants, shrubs, and small trees were creeping onto it from both sides. It was being taken back by nature.
“Becca?” said Levi after a couple of hours.
“Yeah, Levi?”
“Jolie says there’s no birds and no little animals,” he said.
I turned and Jolie nodded, making a zero with her thumb and index finger.
We stopped to listen and look.
“It’s true,” I said, frowning. “I don’t hear a single bird. And it’s almost dusk—that’s when they all go apeshit.”
“Have you thought about becoming a poet?” Nate asked mildly. I gave him a sour look, then motioned for everyone to keep going.
For an hour into the evening, we didn’t see any living creature except ourselves. It was unbearably unnerving—the animals clearly knew something we didn’t. We came across three abandoned cars, rusted and silent with open doors, missing windows. None of us recognized their makes. They were bigger than cell cars, with more complicated dashboards and seats like sofas. For some reason they made my skin crawl.
“Something really bad happened here,” Mills said.
“Yeah,” said Bunny, looking hyper alert and wary. “This whole place feels dead.”
“Bunny!” Levi cried.
“What?” she said, spinning.
“No, bunny,” Levi repeated, pointing.
Down the road, a small, shadowy creature hopped across the road and disappeared into the scrub.
“That’s a good sign,” said Mills.
A moment later we got another sign of life: the long, low howling of wolves as they bayed at the rising moon.
“Crap,” I muttered to Nate.
“Wait, I see something else,” he said, squinting in the darkness. “Lights!”
As we crested a small hill, we saw an extremely recognizable circle, enclosed with a fence and well lit. A cell.
31
EVEN KNOWING WHAT I KNEW about the United, I was so freaking glad to see a cell, something familiar. Still, I forced us to wait and watch until after midnight before we belly-crawled closer.
It had the familiar boundary fence, the unmanned guard towers, the open gate. A sign hung on the right side of the gate: E-07-20. It was so homey that my chest hurt. We saw no police, no guards, no nothing, so finally we walked through, two at a time, waiting five minutes in between to see if we triggered something.
When we were all through and walking past large manufacturing buildings, Nate said, “Look for a sign of a cat.”
“Like poop?” Bunny asked, confused. “Scratches or something?”
Nate grinned at her and for a moment I remembered that my sister loved him. I guess he grinned at her a lot. Changed his whole face.
“No,” he said. “Like, the outline of a cat’s face, or a drawing of a cat. Painted small on something or scratched into a wooden post. Maybe carved on a rock.”
“Why?” Levi asked, so I didn’t have to.
“It’s the sign of a Resistance-friendly house. I was the leader of the Youth Resistance back in my home cell, and that kind of stuff is passed through the network—ways to find each other, help each other.”
Another thing I hadn’t known. I guess Nate had his uses.
We reached the first row of houses, all pretty much the same, mostly dark, mostly quiet. A few dogs barked. It was like home but not like home, and my throat tightened. I wondered if they had a curfew, like we had.
“Everyone, stay in the shadows,” I reminded them softly. “Don’t walk through streetlights. If a car comes, scatter and disappear.”
That was when it really hit me: this was a cell, but who knew what had been going on in the outside? Maybe they’d found the bell tower guy. Maybe we were being tracked right now, the United Army circling us in the dark. I kept my hand on my rifle, ready to swing it up if necessary.
House after house had no cat sign.
“Maybe there isn’t one here,” Nate said, sounding exhausted.
“I’m starving,” Bunny said.
“I’m really tired,” Levi said.
“Let’s check out the next row of houses,” I said. “If we don’t see one there, we’ll leave the cell and camp in the woods.”
“Maybe there just isn’t one here,” Mills said.
Very possible, I thought wearily. My stomach growled and I felt like if I lay down I would sleep for a week. The next house had a garden in front, still bare from winter. A gnome stood in front of a small windmill, laughing. There was a stone frog next to him, a stone squirrel, and… a stone cat.
32
“NATE?” I WHISPERED. “COULD IT be a whole cat, not just a symbol?”
He looked at the statue, thinking. “Yeah, I guess. You guys stay back—let me go up.” Quietly he went around to the house’s back door and we followed. Nate tapped on the door, three raps, then two, then three again.
Please don’t be a trap, I thought, or a sound sleeper.
After a couple moments the door opened, spilling light onto the cold brown grass. A white-haired man in pajamas stood there with a shotgun, which he pointed at Nate.
“You’re pretty heavily armed, eh, son?” the man said.
“I thought I smelled a pie cooling,” Nate said quickly, and the man squinted at him.
“We got a cherry one, just come out of the oven,” the man said.
“Cherry’s my favorite,” Nate said, and the man lowered his gun and opened the door wider.
One by one we appeared from behind shrubs, cars, and a broken wooden fence. The man blinked, but let us all in.
“Why didn’t you tell me the code?” I hissed at Nate when we were inside and following the man down his cellar steps.
“I didn’t have to,” Nate said in surprise. “I’m here.”
Making a mental note to destroy that lame argument later, I watched as the man knelt before a cabinet and opened its bottom door. It was full of home-canned peaches, green beans, peppers, and so on, the jars clean and shining, labeled carefully.
The man did something inside the cabinet and it swung open slowly. He went through first and clicked on a light to reveal a small room, maybe ten by eight, with two rough wooden bunk beds, a small table and chairs, and a big map on the wall showing all of section E. There was a dot at the very top of the map showing where we were, and other dots labeled as cells.
“You all wait here, and I’ll get some food,” the man said, leaving us and shutting the cabinet door.
“Look,” I said. “These cells are connected by lines.”
“Roads. Trucks have to ship stuff,” Nate said.
Mills looked closer at it. “No—roads are marked differently. These lines don’t connect every cell—just a small number of them.”
“Maybe they’re cells who are friendly to the Resistance,” Levi said.
“Huh,” Bunny said, and nodded. “It’s nice to know we’re not alone.”
And that seemed like the most profound thing anyone had ever said.
33
“SO IS IT MOSTLY TRACTORS you build here, or combines, or what?” I asked. It was early afternoon—the six of us had basically eaten and then crashed last night, and it had been almost noon when we woke today. I felt amazing—clean, fed, and rested. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had all three things going for me at one time.
Nate and I were wearing typical cell clothes—T-shirts that said UNITED MANUFACTURING, and basic blue coveralls over that. The other four members of my squad had been content to stay back at the house, watching Cell News and eating again.
“Tractors and some attachments, like disk harrows,” the man said proudly. We hadn’t exchanged names or anything else, nothing we could be questioned about. “Plus we rolled out cotton pickers last year, and word is we’re going to add a silage machine next year.”
“I saw some of these tractors at an ag cell,” I said. My parents had had an ancient model. When that broke down, we’d used oxen—Ed and Ned. When my dad killed himself, Cassie and I let the farming go.
“Yeah?” The man looked pleased. “I never knew what happened to them after they leave here. I figured they probably all went east to the big city.”
“What big city?” I asked. Nate touched my hand with his as if to say, Be careful.
“I don’t know,” the man admitted, looking truthful. “It’s just an idea I had. I don’t know if anything like that exists. You know, you hear rumors.”
“Yeah,” I said.
I’d never had a tour like this of another cell, and it was interesting and infuriating. Interesting because they had schools and grocery co-ops and other familiar things, and because everything was manufacturing oriented instead of farming oriented. Infuriating because I’d somehow forgotten how the United stuck their name all over everything and took all the credit.
THE UNITED NEEDS YOU TO DO YOUR BEST! was one of the most common factory signs. DON’T MAKE EXTRA WORK FOR YOUR NEIGHBOR! said another. HEALTHY UNITED WANTS TO SERVE YOU! They really stuck out after we’d seen the signs at the not-cell. This place had United Eyewear, United Shoes ’n’ Boots, and United Car Repair.
All I wanted to do was run through the cell, ripping down sign after sign—which would be a dead giveaway that the Resistance existed. So I imagined ripping them down and stomping on them, and that was almost as fun.
“For ten bucks I’ll rip these signs down and run over them,” Nate had murmured, and I’d blinked in surprise at how similar our thoughts were.
The three of us stood and watched as a shiny new yellow tractor rolled onto a big shipping container. The man glanced at us and said, “We’ve… we’ve built some flaws into the tractors.”
I stared at him. He was taking a huge chance by telling us this. If we were captured and tortured, I might offer this up to protect my friends. My sister. Tim.
Nate gave him a sharp glance. “Won’t they be traced back to this cell?”
The man shook his head. “It will look like a flaw in the metal. When they trace that, it will look like a flaw in the actual ore.”
My mind raced. If tractors broke down, most people couldn’t plant or harvest crops. No crops meant nothing to take to the collective. This one link of the chain breaking would cause the System problems everywhere. My mind reeled when I thought about the enormous implications of this. The Resistance was much bigger and more widespread than I’d thought. But it also showed how huge the United was that we were up against.
I squared my shoulders, refusing to think about it. If I really let myself understand what we were doing, I’d try to sit out the rest of the war. Probably.
“We better get back,” I said. “We’re taking off at sundown.”
34
CASSIE
“VERY GOOD, CASSIE.”
I tried not to glance at Tim, standing behind Ms. Strepp, because he was making an “Oh, my God she said something nice” face, and I would crack up if I looked at him. But yes, it was stunning to hear. In fact, it was pretty much the most unbelievable thing I’d ever heard out of her mouth.
“So this is the kind of thing you’re looking for?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. This is a tiny piece of a huge puzzle, but it is a piece. Look at the date: 2034. The note says the deportations have started.”
“What deportations is she talking about?” I asked.
“We don’t know,” she said. “But do you appreciate the value of being able to ask that? To even know about the deportations?”
“Yeah?” I said. It came out sounding like a question.
“And this map,” she went on. “This shows one of the first divisions of the United into the sections. How did this happen? Who was Murtaugh? Were these some of the first resisters? What happened?”
I’d never seen her look so excited. Her eyes shone and her hands trembled, holding the map. Then she seemed to remember herself, and in a second the same old Ms. Strepp was standing there: cold, forbidding, unyielding.
“We need the rest of the puzzle. Speed it up.”
Late that night I lay in my bunk, listening to the breathing of the soldiers left behind, not looking at Becca’s empty bunk next to mine or the dozens of other empty bunks of soldiers not condemned to office work.
Someone came and lay down in Becca’s bunk—it was Tim. He pressed his face into her pillow and breathed. “Still smells like her,” he said.
“How can you tell? Most of us take maybe one shower a week,” I said.
“I can tell.” He got under her covers. “I can’t believe we have to go back to that goddamn attic tomorrow.”
“I know,” I groaned. “And it’s kind of creepy, finding out about this stuff. Like, a hundred or two hundred years ago, everything was totally different. Ms. Strepp thinks people were forced to change, forced to go into cells. So was there a war? Were there resisters even then?”
“Well, if there were,” he said, looking up at the empty bunk above him, “we know one thing: The resisters lost.”
35
AFTER OUR ONE BREAKTHROUGH, TIM and I spent the day being slightly more motivated. But whoever had collected this stuff had simply gathered everything they could find without stopping to think if it was a crucial clue to the past or, like, a piece of useless crap.
He held up a shirt that said ATLANTA BRAVES. “I’ve seen this word before,” he said, pointing to “Atlanta.” He went to the map that we’d tacked on the wall and started searching.
I’d made an executive decision of what to do with useless items we’d gone through: The trash bags were piling up. Printed pieces of paper called “coupons” showed that food had been super, super expensive but they also had a lot of things I’d never heard of, like SpaghettiOs and “sports drink.”
“Found it!” he said. “It’s a cell, here!” He pointed to an area in section F. “A cell called At-lan-ta,” he clarified, sounding out the word. “Maybe they were famous for their extra-brave people.”
“Cool,” I said. “What do you make of this?” I threw another T-shirt at him and saved him the trouble of sounding the words out. “It says ‘Grateful Dead.’”
He frowned. “That’s a weird name for a cell. I’ll see if I can find it.”
I smoothed out Crumbling Yellow Newspaper #1647 and wrote down its date: March 18, 2029. CHINA LAUNCHES MISSILES AT JAPAN! IS THIS THE START OF WORLD WAR III?
“World War Three?” I read. “So… there were two others? Two other whole world wars? Tim, put this on the timeline.”
We’d drawn a long, long timeline across one of the solid walls, and when we found something interesting that had a date on it, we wrote it in.
He came over to get the newspaper and I showed him which words to copy. He had all his numbers down, so that was good. “I couldn’t find the Grateful Dead cell anywhere,” he said.
“Put that paper in the Ms. Strepp stack when you’re done, okay?”
“Look—what’s this?” He held out a flat silver disk about as wide as his hand. “It says ‘Adele’ on it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Is it part of some machine? Hey, like one of those little machines on that table? See if it fits any of them.”
While he looked at the machines, I tossed a menu for Popeyes fried chicken, business cards for a tax service, an ad for a haircut salon, and an ad for something called a tarot card reader into a garbage bag.
“It fits in this one!” he said, pressing a button. The blast of music startled both of us and for a minute we just stared at each other in surprise. “I like it,” he decided.
“I like it, too,” I said. Soon we were both singing along, and I was tapping my fingers on the pile I was working on. “Send my love to your new luh-uh-ver, treat her be-eh-ehter, we gotta let go of all of our ghosts…”
This was definitely a solid link to the past.
36
BUT EVEN WITH THE MUSIC and the challenge of figuring out the past, this was a boring, dirty job. We were hunched over for hours, shaking dust and cobwebs off everything, reading every last slip of paper or artifact. For each possible clue, we weeded out thousands and thousands of valueless garbage.
One day after lunch I was on the floor leafing through a magazine called The New Yorker, reading its cartoons. I remembered Julie’s diary entry about going to visit her aunt in New York—maybe it wasn’t fantasy after all.
I jumped when Tim tossed an empty plastic cup at me. “We’re falling asleep, because we have the stupidest job ever,” he said. “But we’re not gonna let it make us soft! Drop and give me twenty!”
“What?”
“Thirty!” he commanded.
A week ago, thirty push-ups wouldn’t have winded me. This time I was panting and sweating, my arms shaking when I finished. Then he surprised me by also doing thirty push-ups.
“New plan,” he panted when he was done. “We work for two hours, then work out for twenty minutes. If we get invaded we need to stay in top fighting condition!”
It was a good plan. Maybe his reading was on a kindergarten level, but he had practical smarts.
During our next twenty-minute break he leaped on me and we wrestled hard, using the tricks we’d learned at the Crazy House. Our sweat mixed with the dust and we looked like we’d come from a mining cell.
My moment of pride was when I slammed his head against the floor and he grunted, but my victory was immediately wiped out by him pinning me for the third time. His arm across my neck, one leg holding my body to the floor, he panted, “I miss Becca so bad.”
