“Albuterol,” he said, lifting the backpack. “For the girl. And supplies for the others. Penance for my crime.”
Tylenol, Sudafed, Band-Aids, antibiotics, bacitracin, Neosporin, penicillin. It was a jackpot. No one could believe that he’d returned. No one could believe that he’d risked his life, made a crossing to the other side, to stock up on supplies so desperately needed. He said nothing about the agreement we’d made. His earlier crimes were forgiven.
He told the homesteaders about a small, plain storage facility, minimally secure and totally unmarked, on the banks of the Cocheco River. The man who owned it, Edward Kauffman, was a sympathizer, and doled out medication and even certain treatments to uncureds on the sly. Tack had moved upstream, fighting a heavy current, and crossed just east of Kauffman’s clinic. He’d had to hide out for a while before crossing back, however, waiting for a patrol to move on.
“How’d you know about the clinic?” I asked him.
“My sister,” he told me shortly. He didn’t say, but I guessed: She’d had some kind of procedure there, something he didn’t want me to know about. Later on, I understood.
“Sharp as a tack, that one,” Grandpa announced after the Thief had finished speaking; and so the Thief received a name, and became one of us.
Beyond the waiting room, the hospital looks like any other: bleak, ugly, overly scrubbed. I don’t like places that are too clean. It always makes me think about what’s getting covered up and scrubbed off.
I walk, head down, not too quick, not too slow. Hardly anyone in the halls, and the only doctor I pass barely glances at me. Good. People mind their own business here.
I get a break when I hit the bank of elevators: a guy standing, tapping his foot, checking his watch, a poster boy for impatience, with a large camera slung around his neck and the look of someone who hasn’t slept in a week. Press.
“You here for Julian Fineman?” is all I have to say.
“It’s six, right? The woman at the front desk told me it was on six.” He must be in his thirties, but he has a big pimple right on the tip of his nose, angry as a blister. His whole vibe is a little like a pimple, actually: ready to explode.
I follow him into the elevator, reach out, and punch six with a knuckle. “It’s six,” I say.
The first time I ever killed someone I was sixteen. It was almost two years since I’d escaped to the Wilds, and by then the homestead had changed. Certain people had left or died; others had showed up. We’d had a bad winter my first year, four weeks of almost straight snow, no hunting, no trapping, making do on scraps left over from the summer—dried strips of meat, and, when that ran out, plain rice. But worse than that was the freeze, the days snow piled up so quick and so heavy it wasn’t safe to go outside; when the homestead reeked of unwashed bodies and worse; when the boredom was so bad it crawled down into your skin and made a constant itch.
Mari didn’t make it past that winter. The second stillborn had hit her hard; even before the winter she sometimes spent days curled up on her cot, one arm crooked around the negative space where a baby should have been. That winter, it was like something brittle finally snapped inside of her, and one morning we woke up and found her swinging from a wooden beam in the food room.
It was snowing too hard to bring her up, so for two days we had to live alongside her body.
We lost Tiny, too, who went out one day to try and hunt, even though we told him it was no use and the animals wouldn’t be out and it was too risky. But he was going crazy from being penned in so long, crazy from the constant hunger gnawing like a rat from the inside out. He never came back. Probably got lost and froze to death.
So my second year we decided to move. It was Gray’s decision, actually, but we were all on board. Bram, who’d arrived earlier in the summer, told us about some homesteads farther south, friendly places where we would find shelter. In August, Gray sent out scouts to chart routes and look for campsites. In September, we started relocation.
The Scavengers hit in Connecticut. I’d heard stories about them, but never concrete stuff: more whispers and myths, like the monster stories my mom had told me as a kid to make me behave. Shhh. Be quiet or you’ll wake the dragon.
It was late and I was sleeping when Squirrel, who was scouting, gave the alarm: two shots fired into the darkness. But it was too late. Suddenly everyone was screaming. Blue—already big, beautiful, with the eyes of a grown-up and a pointed chin like mine—woke up bawling, terrified. She wouldn’t leave the tent. She was clinging to the sleeping bag, kicking me off, saying, No, no, no over and over again.