The Fall of Crazy House, page 9
Peanut butter sandwiches. I remembered when Becca and I made waffles or pancakes, drenching them with syrup from our own maple trees. We’d drunk fresh apple juice and real coffee with real milk from our cows. Suddenly I missed my cell so much that my chest hurt and tears came to my eyes. If I could go back just one year, back when things were normal and I was usually mad at Becca…
The horrible thing was that now I knew what a crock it had been. I’d thought my life was normal, but I’d been living a lie. This life, as much as it totally sucked right now, was real. I mean, you know, horrible and filled with probable plague, but still. It was real. And bad real is better than good fake.
49
HOLDING MY SANDWICH IN ONE hand, I went to a table where I’d cleared a space. Every relevant newspaper account that I’d been able to find was lined up in order.
Ms. Strepp had given us a phone so we could report without having to see anyone face-to-face. I jumped when it rang loudly and grabbed it. “Hello?”
“Report,” Ms. Strepp said.
“We’re not dead,” I said, and took a bite of sandwich.
“Any symptoms?” she asked.
I looked over to see Tim starting to sit up. “Nope.”
“I hope your theory is wrong,” she said. “It’s quite possible that any plague spores are long dead. Tell me what you’ve found out.”
“Well, weirdly, reports about the plague stop abruptly,” I said. “It was plague, plague, plague for about three months, then no papers at all, and then suddenly the papers were back, looking different, with no mention of any plague.”
“Are there any numbers anywhere of how many people died?” she asked.
“Between October 2037 and March 2038—I mean, this sounds crazy,” I said. “But everything added up, it’s about two hundred million people, dead.”
There was a long silence and finally I said, “Hello?”
“I’m here.” Her voice sounded flat, quiet. “Then the newspapers suddenly stopped?”
“Yeah. They start again in May 2038. But get this—in the early stacks I’ve got newspapers from all over, all these weird places: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, DC. And they’re all separate, like different companies or whatever. After May, all the newspapers say New World News, New York edition, or Chicago edition, or whatever. The news got centralized by one company.”
“This is amazing information, Cassie,” Ms. Strepp said. “You’ve done remarkably well in putting clues together and forming theories.”
“But what does it mean?”
“I’m not sure,” Ms. Strepp said. “It looks like the New World party killed vast numbers of people to be able to control the relative few who were left. To divide them up into cells.”
“So the New World party became the United?”
“I don’t know. Keep digging,” she said, and hung up.
I finished my sandwich and glumly looked around the attic. We still had untold piles of crap to wade through. Piles of possible clues. We had to sift through it all, as long as we were able.
He shook his head and rubbed his neck, scowling at me. “Wish you were Becca,” he said out of the blue, sounding mean.
“Wish you were Nate,” I snapped back.
As if realizing he’d been a jerk, he muttered, “I have a headache.” Like that was an excuse.
I realized I had a headache, too. “Eat something,” I said, pointing to the basket.
We had to keep going—I didn’t know how much time we had.
50
BECCA
WE DIDN’T STOP AFTER THE sun came up. We needed to leave wolf country and get to a cell or safer place to rest. The last fifteen miles had been one horror show after another, with the sea of tombstones, the skeletons hanging from trees, and rabid wolves.
The land had changed to small, flattened hills and then to rocky, thickly forested woods. We hadn’t seen anything of note since four a.m., which was how I liked it.
I kept Nate ahead of me so I could watch him. He was matching our pace, but it was costing him. He moved stiffly in his torn, bloody coat, and his face was grim and pale, his lips pressed together so hard they were surrounded by white. Every so often I noticed him putting a hand up to the bandage at his neck, which was becoming splotched with blood. Maybe I should have added more staples.
The rest of the team was unusually silent and subdued, but more alert. We each jumped with every cracking twig, every odd birdcall, every rustle in the undergrowth. I was remembering to scan up as well as all around, and Bunny and Jolie had been ordered to look out for traps, trip wires, and sudden pits of doom. Anything was possible.
It was on one of my three-sixty sweeps that I noticed an old, rusted metal rung stuck into a tree trunk—almost entirely grown over. I stopped and peered upward. The rung was about a third of the way up the tree, maybe twenty feet in the air.
“Hang on,” I said softly, and the team stopped. I pointed at the rung, then peeled off my backpack and rummaged in it for my rope. I tossed the rope over a branch and climbed up while Mills and Jolie belayed me. There were more rungs, some of them only slightly visible, deeply embedded in the tree’s bark. But they were climbable. After twelve feet I saw a small platform way at the top of the tree’s crown. Now the branches were thinner and closer together, which was good because the rungs had either stopped or been swallowed completely.
I had to squirm through a narrow spot to get up to the actual metal platform, which had been bolted to the tree who knew how long ago. A rotted canvas tarp was thrown over something lumpy. I gritted my teeth, sure this would be some horrible dead body, maybe more than one. Holding my breath, I yanked the tarp off to reveal…
“What the hell is that?” Bunny asked, pulling herself up onto the platform.
“It’s an anti-aircraft gun,” I said slowly, brushing a pile of dried leaves off the metal seat. We’d all been drilled on every kind of weapon Strepp could find out about, everything from nunchucks to the big tank-mounted 150-millimeter war cannons. So I’d seen pictures of things like this.
I sat down on the metal seat and looked at the scope. It was crusted with dirt and rusted into place but I scrubbed the gunk off and peered through it. With effort I turned various dials and finally fuzzy blobs in the distance merged into focus. I sat up and looked at Bunny.
“What?” she asked.
“It’s pointed right at a cell,” I said, looking again. I scanned along the boundary until I spotted a sign near the road. “Cell B-24-23.”
“Huh,” Bunny said. “How far away? Likely to be friendly?”
“Can’t tell about the friendly part—maybe… four miles?” I sat back, somewhat relieved. They’d have real medical facilities—maybe we could get Nate patched up better. Plus, it felt good to have a concrete destination instead of just heading east.
“Can I see?” Bunny asked.
“Yeah, just a sec,” I said, moving the gun’s barrel with effort. It showed more wooded plains, more hills, more…
“What the almighty hell?” I muttered in shock.
“What? What?” Bunny asked.
“Holy shit,” I said, feeling like I couldn’t take a breath. “It’s a… I think that’s a city.”
51
“A CITY?” BUNNY SAID. “YOU mean a cell?”
“No,” I murmured, unable to believe what I was seeing. “It’s so much bigger than a cell.” I moved the barrel back and forth, my mouth hanging open. The city never seemed to end.
“Get up, goddamnit,” Bunny said, hitting my shoulder.
I stood, my brain reeling. Bunny sat down, put her eye to the scope, and I was gratified to see her mouth drop open, too.
“Oh, my freaking God,” she said. “Those buildings are way too big! Like fifty, sixty stories tall. There are lights on. How could there be that many people in one place?”
I tapped my comm so I wouldn’t have to yell. “Guys, come up here and see this. Not you, Nate. Don’t you dare.”
“I’m fi—” he started, but I cut him off.
“You. Will. Stay. There,” I spit out. “Keep watch or something.” I clicked my comm off as he started to swear.
Jolie and Mills joined us on the small platform. Bunny got up, looking shocked, and Jolie sat down and focused the scope. Her blue eyes widened and she stared at me. I nodded. She reached for my hand and spelled out B-I-G-C-I-T-Y-T-H-A-T-G-U-Y- T-O-L-D-U-S-A-B-O-U-T-?
“Yeah,” I said. “I won’t lie—I am freaking.”
Mills nudged Jolie and she got up.
“It can’t be that big,” Mills said, moving the barrel back and forth like I had. “It’s like… twenty-five, thirty miles across? That’s impossible!”
“But you see lights, right?” I asked. “It’s inhabited.”
“So are we headed there?” Bunny demanded.
“Yep,” I said, then thought about Nate. “I think the city is about twelve to fifteen miles away. We’re all fried. So first we’ll head to the cell, which is much closer. Rest up there for a night, then make a line for the city.”
I knew they wanted to argue—we were all dying to see it up close. But yeah, we were all fried. One more time I sat down and put my eye to the scope. From this distance the city was a huge, lit-up blob compared to the tidy, ordinary outlines of the cell. What kind of cell, I wondered, moving the scope back and forth. And what… what is that other thing?
“Momento,” I said, holding up one finger. The others had climbed down, but Bunny was still halfway on the platform.
“What,” she said.
“There’s something else,” I said. “Closer. Something this gun could have hit even with its sights covered.”
Bunny climbed back up and took my seat. I helped her point the rusted metal in the right direction. “Gol’ dang,” she breathed.
“It’s a United outpost,” I said, stating the obvious.
“It’s small,” Bunny said, her eyes narrowing as she thought.
“We need to go there,” I said, lowering my voice.
Bunny nodded, then pointed downward and mouthed, “Nate.”
I nodded. He was a problem.
We climbed down, hitched up our gear, and I told Nate about the freakishly huge city.
“Are we headed there now?” he asked.
“No. We’re headed toward Cell B-24-23,” I said, and explained why. He was silent for a while, amazingly enough.
Then he said, “Who was the gun aimed at? The cell or the city?”
I’d wondered that. Had this been self-protection for the Resistance? Or a tool for the United to help squelch troublemakers?
“I don’t know,” I said.
We walked on in silence—we had four miles to cover before we could rest or eat. Nate kept up, despite still being pale, despite being in obvious pain. Hm, I thought. Not bad for a Provost’s son.
52
CASSIE
TIM LAY ON HIS STOMACH on the floor, looking out one of our four small windows. Neither of us felt like working or doing twenty-minute workout breaks or anything productive. It was more like we just sat there and tried to turn our brains off.
I lay next to him, pushing him to move over. Once again I was reminded of the differences between him and Nate. Tim was bigger, heavier, more physical. Nate was muscular—after Crazy House, everyone was. But he was more finely built, less bulky. He felt just right when I held him close. Tim would feel like I was hugging a statue. Not that I would be hugging him.
Below us in Regular Land, we saw recruits in training, marching up and down or running past us in formation. I heard Ms. Strepp barking at them through a bullhorn, telling them to move their lazy asses, etc. I sighed. Good times.
Out of sight we heard gunfire and shouting but we were used to that. One way to make recruits pay extra attention is to use live ammunition. It has a distinctive sound.
“I feel stupid, being up here like this,” he said. “I should be down there, where I could do some good. Up here, I’m just—”
I got to my feet, resigned to working my way through one more box, one more bag, one more pile. “You’re my manly brawn,” I said.
He gave me a look. “You can lift and move anything up here.”
I tried again. “You’re my entertainment.”
“That’s awesome. That’s what I want to be. That’s what I trained so hard for.”
His voice was bitter. I was saying all the wrong things.
“I don’t mean entertainment,” I said, thinking quickly. “I mean… look. I’m stuck up here because I got good grades in school. I assume. Basically Ms. Strepp looks at me and thinks ‘librarian.’ That’s not what I want, either. You might not be doing all the writing or cataloguing, but I mean it, Tim. If I can’t be with Becca and Nate, then I’m really glad I’m with you. You… make me feel less scared.”
I hadn’t meant to get all gushy, and I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea.
I looked up to see him gazing at me thoughtfully. “Yeah?” he said.
“Yeah.” I nodded. “You don’t get hysterical. You don’t take it all personally. You’re not an asshole.”
His eyebrows went up. “Okay, I feel better now. Thanks for the pep talk.” His face was sardonic but his voice let me know he was kidding. He stood up, hunched over, and came to see what I was working on.
I’d opened an old suitcase, but instead of the usual clothes and personal things, it was full of books. They were mostly for kids, and some of them were really, really old, like from the 1990s. There was one about a kid who lives on a farm. It showed them harvesting their wheat, which was totally normal, but then they just sold it themselves to another company, which was crazy. They didn’t turn it over to the United for the collective or the Co-op. It was beyond weird to think there was a pre-System time when the United didn’t exist.
There was one about a bunny and how much his bunny mom loved him. For some reason it made my throat hurt, but it passed. I logged the books’ titles and the date they were published, handed them to Tim, and he stowed them in the Keep Because It Might Be Important But Sure Doesn’t Seem Like It pile.
“I like seeing the old-fashioned clothes and cars and everything,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s weird,” he said, then coughed. He coughed more and I watched him solemnly. Was this the first sign of illness?
He saw me looking at him and frowned. “We’re surrounded by hundreds of years of dust,” he pointed out.
Yeah, okay. I’d give him that.
At the very bottom of the suitcase, I found a thin book wrapped in stained and faded tissue paper. The paper disintegrated when I opened it. Inside was another book, but this one had been partly burned. Across its singed back someone had scrawled, Lies! Destroy! Is that why someone had tried to burn it? It had been saved so carefully.
Trying to keep the covers from falling off, I opened the book.
Its title was Adam and the Plague, and it had been published in 2037.
53
ADAM AND THE PLAGUE WAS obviously meant for kids—it was short, not too many words, and had pictures on almost every page. But it was incredibly dark and depressing. Like, if you wanted to make a kid cry themselves to sleep every night for a week, give ’em this book.
“Geez, Tim, look at this,” I said, and read out loud: “‘One day Adam’s sister, Amy, came home from school early. She felt terrible. Her throat hurt. Her eyes were red. She had a fever.’”
Tim made a face and coughed again.
For Tim’s sake I skipped the whole middle part, with the illustrations showing exactly how Amy’s symptoms progressed. I mean, the kid died in three days, and by the end of the third day Amy barely looked human.
I put it into a Keep pile and wandered casually to the dinky, inadequate bathroom. As soon as I shut the door I peered at my face in the mirror, feeling my neck for swollen glands. They felt fine. Then I looked at my skin everywhere to see if I had weird blisters or pustules. I didn’t. So far.
When I came out, he was working his way through what looked like a homemade pamphlet—printed poorly, stapled together. Its title was FIGHT BACK NOW!
“It says that the New World party infected everyone in the United States with the plague on purpose,” he said, looking disgusted.
“Yeah, we knew that,” I reminded him, then leaned over so we could read the pamphlet together.
Here are the facts!
• The plague has been disseminated by the New World party.
• Their goal is to reduce the population to a “manageable” number of people with strong immune systems.
• Their final goal is to restructure society. Everything is run by them, and the rest of the people provide for them.
I frowned. Like, in cells? Farming cells, manufacturing cells?
The final paragraph of the pamphlet said:
People! Fight Back! Drop off the grid! Build self-sufficient homes and hide them! Live on your own, don’t connect with anyone! Never let anyone know where you are! Don’t depend on the government for anything! Self-sufficiency is your only chance.
“I’m getting such a bad feeling about this,” he said.
“A bad feeling like, oh, God, this is the truth?” I asked him. He nodded.
I thought about the different cells I’d seen and the big expanses of empty land between them. Could some people still be hiding away, self-sufficient, after all this time? What would happen if we found some?
54
BECCA
“OKAY,” I SAID, PUTTING ON my best leader voice. “Let’s stop and rest for a minute.”
Nate’s determined trudging came to a slow halt. His face was damp with sweat and he looked a bit greenish. But that wasn’t why I had stopped.
“We must be just a mile or so from the cell,” Mills said.
