“Come on,” Hunter says. “I’ll show you.”
He hoists himself up into the nearest tree, swinging easily up the trunk, using the many branches and protrusions as hand-and footholds.
I follow Hunter clumsily, imitating the placement of his hands and feet. It has been a long time since I’ve climbed a tree, and I remember it from childhood as effortless: swinging up into the branches without thought, unconsciously finding the nooks and cricks in the tree. Now it is painful and difficult.
I finally make it to one of the thicker, low-hanging branches. Hunter is straddling it, waiting for me. I crouch behind him. My legs are shaking a little, and he reaches back and loops his hands around my ankles, steadying me.
The nests are full of birds: piles of sleek black feathers, and winking black eyes. They are hopping and picking among heaps of tiny brown seeds, stockpiled for the winter. Several of them, disturbed by our arrival, go shrieking and cawing toward the sky.
The nests are coated with the same vivid green paint, a network of thatched claw prints as the birds flutter between nests.
“I still don’t understand,” I say. “Where does the color come from?”
“From the other side,” Hunter says, and I can hear the pride in his voice. “From Zombieland. In the summer, there are blueberry bushes that grow on the other side of the fence. The birds scavenge for food there. Over the years, the insiders started feeding them pellets and seeds, keeping them fat through winter. They line up different-colored troughs when they need to get us messages: half seeds, half paint. The birds eat and then they fly back here, to store up seeds for later. The nests get colored, and we get our messages. Green, yellow, or red. Green if everything’s fine, if we can expect a shipment. Yellow if there’s a problem or delay.”
“Don’t the colors get all mixed up?” I say.
Hunter swivels around to look at me, eyes shining. “That’s the brilliant thing,” he says, and tips his head back toward the nests. “The birds don’t like the color. It attracts predators. So they’re constantly reforming the nests. It’s like a blank palette every day.”
And even as I’m watching, the bird in the nest closest to us is selecting the green-tinged twigs, wrestling them away from the nests with her beak: pruning, snipping, cleaning, like a woman fussing over weeds in a garden. The nest is being transformed in front of my eyes, remade into something dull and brown and normal-colored.
“It’s amazing,” I say.
“It’s nature.” Hunter’s voice turns serious. “Birds feed; then they nest. Paint them any color you want, send them halfway around the world, but they’ll always find a way back. And eventually they’ll show their true colors again. That’s what animals do.”
As he speaks, I think of the raids last summer: when the regulators in their stiff uniforms stormed an illegal party, swinging baseball bats and police batons, letting loose the foaming, snapping bull mastiffs on the crowd. I think of the swinging arc of blood on a wall; the sounds of skulls cracking underneath heavy wood. Underneath their badges and their blank gazes, the cureds are full of a hatred that’s colder and also more frightening. They are detached from passion, but also from sympathy.
Underneath their colors, they are animals, too. I could not have stayed there; I will never go back. I will not become one of the walking dead.
It’s not until we’re on the ground again and headed back to the homestead that I’m struck by something else Hunter said.
“What does red mean?” I ask.
He looks at me, startled. We’ve been silent for a while, both lost in thought. “What?”
“Green is for supplies. Yellow when there’s been a delay. So what does red mean?”
For a moment I see fear flashing in Hunter’s eyes, and suddenly I am cold again.
“Red means run,” he says.
The relocation will soon begin in earnest. We will move everyone, the whole homestead, south. It is an enormous undertaking, and Raven and Tack spend hours planning, debating, arguing. It is not the first time they have orchestrated a relocation, but I gather that the moves have been hard and dangerous, and Raven considers them both failures.
But spending the winters up north has been even harder, and proved even more fatal, and so we will go. Raven insists that this time there will be no mortalities. Everyone who leaves the homestead will arrive safely at our destination.
“You can’t guarantee that,” I hear Tack say to her one night. It’s late, and I’ve been startled awake by the sounds of retching from the sickroom. It’s Lu’s turn.
I’ve slipped out of bed and started toward the kitchen for water when I realize Tack and Raven are still there, illuminated by the low, smoldering glow from the fire. The kitchen is murky, filled with wood smoke.
I pause in the hallway.