Most of them didn’t even talk about their parents anymore, those who could remember their parents at all. Their old families were like stories once told and then mostly forgotten. Their old families Were no longer real.
Some of them could still recall a little of their past lives. Hawk wasn’t one of them. He remembered almost nothing, and what he did recall was so fragmented and disconnected from his current reality that he could not give a context to it. His father was a faceless shadow, but every now and then he could catch glimpses of his mother—an image of her face on a smudged wall, a beckoning of her hand in the movement of shadows, her laugh in the cry of a gull. He could never put the pieces together, though; could never make her whole. Even the particulars of his past life were vague. He remembered swimming on the Oregon coast. He remembered the beach. Not much else. It was almost as if he had not had a life until he came to this city.
He gave a mental shrug. Life before coming here didn’t matter anyway. The Ghosts had reinvented their lives in more ways than not. Customs and rituals were all new. Owl set the rules for eating, sleeping, and bathing.
Hawk assigned chores. Routine kept them focused on staying alive. They did not celebrate holidays. No one except for Owl could even name more than one or two.
They celebrated them in the compounds, he knew. Sometimes Tessa talked glowingly of those celebrations, but to him they sounded perfunctory and forced. There even seemed to be disagreement on the kinds of holidays worth remembering. It was just more clinging to the past. The Ghosts did celebrate birthdays, even though most of them no longer knew when their birthdays actually were. Owl had assigned birthdays to those who had forgotten them, and she marked them off on a makeshift calendar she had drawn on the wall. She didn’t know what day it was or even what year. She just made it up, and it became a game they could all play.
Off to one side, deep in the shadows of a mostly whole building, something moved. Cheney went into a crouch, faced the black opening of the doorway, and growled softly. Hawk stopped where he was, holding the prod ready.
After a few tense moments, Cheney turned away and started off again. Hawk swung in behind him, and they continued on.
Sometimes he thought that it would all be so much simpler if they lived in the compound with Tessa and the others. Not that it would ever be allowed after they had lived on the streets for so long, hut just for the sake of argument.
There was safety in numbers. There was less to be responsible for and less to worry about on a daily basis. Food and shelter and medical supplies were easier to come by. Some of the people in the compounds still had special skills that street kids would never have. But there was something so abhorrent about compound life that it overshadowed everything that made it appear desirable. Too many restrictions and rules. Too little freedom. Too much conformity of the few for the benefit of the many. Too much fear of everything outside the walls. It was the old world in miniature, and if Hawk was certain of one thing in this life it was that the old world was dead and gone and should remain that way.
Eventually, a new world would be born from the ashes of the old, and living in a walled fortress was not the way to make that happen.
Darkness was almost complete when he emerged from the ash-and sootblackened ruins of the city’s south end and could see clearly the dark bulk of the compound outlined against the gray skyline. Walls several stories high surrounded what had once been an arena and playing field, stretching away on four sides to occupy several city blocks. A raised metal roof rested atop a network of steel girders and wheels that had once allowed it to move back and forth on a track to open the playing field to the sky, but now was rusted permanently open. Barbed wire rimmed the tops of the walls and the perimeter of the compound in thick rolls. Watch towers dotted the corners and heavy barricades blocked those entrances that hadn’t been sealed completely. A wide swath of open space separated the compound from the rest of the city; everything close had been torn down to prevent enemies from approaching without being seen.
A sign with bits and pieces of its letters broken off and its smooth surface blackened and scarred proclaimed that this was SAFECO FIELD.
Rumor had it that there had once been an adjacent arena that occupied the open space between the city and the compound. But terrorists had bombed it when it was one of the last active playing fields in the country and still fighting to maintain its traditions. More than two thousand had died in the attack, and much of the building had collapsed. Shortly after, the first of the plagues struck, wiping out fifty thousand in less than a week, and that was pretty much the beginning of the end of the old ways.