But we’ve trained her too well, and at a couple of minutes before ten a.m., I spot her moving up the street, head down against the rain, which has petered out to a slow drizzle. She’s wearing clothes that don’t belong to her, except for the wind breaker, which she must have taken from the safe house. Still, her walk is unmistakable: light on her feet, kind of bouncing on her toes, as if she might break into a run at any second.
Tack spots her the same time I do and sinks down a little in the front seat, as if worried she might spot us. But she’s totally focused. She barely pauses at the entrance to the clinic. She slips inside.
Any moment now. The air inside the van is humid, and my skin feels sticky. The windows are fogged from our breath. I feel another roll of nausea and fight it back. No time for that.
After a few minutes, Tack sighs and reaches for the jacket balled up on the seat between us. He shakes it out and shoves his arms, hard, into the sleeves. He looks funny in a suit jacket, like a bear dressed up in a costume for the circus. I would never tell him that, though.
“Ready?” he says.
“Don’t forget this.” I pass him a small laminated ID. It’s so old and stained, the picture is nearly indistinguishable—which is good, because its original owner, Dr. Howard Rivers, was about twenty pounds heavier than Tack and had a decade on him.
Then again, Howard Rivers wasn’t actually Howard Rivers, but Edward Kauffman, a respected doctor in Maine who worked to keep the deliria out of our schools and homes, who had ties to the governor, who subsidized medical centers in poorer parts of town. Secretly, though, he was a radical and controversial resister, famous for performing under-the-table abortions on uncureds who’d gotten pregnant and were desperate to conceal it.
Over the years he established identities for a dozen fake doctors so he could increase his shipments of medicine and antibiotics, which he then distributed to Invalids in the Wilds.
Edward Kauffman, the original, is dead now—has been dead for two years. He was outed in a police sting operation and executed only two weeks later. But many of his pseudonyms, his fake identities, survived. They’re healthy and practicing still.
Tack clips the ID to his jacket. “How do I look?” he says.
“Medical,” I answer.
He checks his reflection in the rearview and tries unsuccessfully to mash down his hair. “Don’t forget,” he says. “Parking lot on Twenty-Fourth. I’ll be waiting for you.”
“We’ll be there,” I say, ignoring the weird feeling in my stomach. More than nausea. Nerves. I hate being nervous. It’s a weakness. It reminds me of the person I used to be, and the ticking quiet of the old house, my father brewing, growing his anger like a storm.
Every time I have to kill someone, I pretend he has my father’s face.
“Be careful, Rae.” For a second, I get a glimpse of Michael, the boy no one sees. Face open like a kid’s. Scared. “I wish you’d let me do the heavy lifting.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” I press my fingers against my lips, bring them to his chest. It’s our sign. Neither one of us is super touchy-feely, and besides, it’s too risky to kiss in Zombieland. “See you on the other side.”
“On the other side,” he parrots, then slips out of the van, jogging across the street pooled with rain.
I count off sixty seconds, make some last-minute adjustments to my gear, flip down the mirror, and check my teeth. Feel for the gun concealed in my jacket and check the supplies in my right jeans pocket. All good. All there. Count another sixty seconds, which helps me ignore the nerves. Nothing to be afraid of.
I know what I’m doing. We all do. Too well.
Sometimes I imagine that Tack and I will just crap out—flake on the whole war, the struggle, the resistance. Say good-bye and see you never. We’ll go up north and build a homestead together, far away from everyone and everything. We know how to survive. We could do it. Trap and hunt and fish for our food, grow what we can, pop out a whole brood of kids and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Let it blow itself to pieces if it wants to.
Dreams.
It has been two and a half minutes. I open the van door and hop down to the curb. The rain is nothing more than a mist now, but the gutters are still overflowing, swirling eddies of crushed coffee cups and cigarette butts and flyers.
When I push open the door to the clinic, it’s like a different world: thick green carpet, and furniture polished so it shines. Big, showy clock in the corner, ticking away the minutes. Not a bad place to die, if you had to choose.
Tack is standing at reception, drumming his fingers against the desk. He barely glances at me when I come in.
“I’m so sorry, doctor.” The lab tech behind the desk is punching buttons frantically. Her fingers are fat and weighted down with rings that cut deep into her flesh. “An inspection—today—there must be a mistake.”
“It’s on the books,” Tack says, in a voice that belongs to someone older and fatter and cured. “Every clinic is subjected to an annual regulatory—”