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?”