No. Not a garbage bag. It’s Riley, the Richardsons’ black mutt.
I take a few shaky steps toward him. I need only one glance to know that he’s dying. He’s completely coated with a sticky, shiny, black substance—blood, I realize as I get closer. That’s the reason I mistook his fur, in the dark, for the slick black surface of a plastic bag. One of his eyes is pressed to the pavement; the other is open. His head has been clubbed in. Blood is flowing freely from his nose, black and viscous.
I think of the voice I heard—Probably has fleas, anyway, the regulator said—and the swift thudding sound that followed.
Riley is staring at me with a look so mournful and accusatory I swear for a second it’s like he’s a human and he’s trying to tell me something—trying to say, You did this to me. A wave of nausea overtakes me and I’m tempted to get down on my knees and scoop him up in my arms, or strip off my clothes and start soaking the blood off him. But at the same time I feel paralyzed. I can’t move.
As I’m standing there, frozen, he gives a long, shuddering jerk, from the tip of his tail to his nose. Then he goes still.
Instantly my arms and legs unfreeze. I stumble backward, bile pushing itself up into my mouth. I careen in a full circle, feeling like I did the day I got drunk with Hana, totally out of control of my own body. Anger and disgust are shredding through me, making me want to scream.
I find a flattened cardboard box sitting behind a Dumpster and drag it over to Riley’s body, covering him completely. I try not to think of the insects that will tear into him by morning. I’m surprised to feel tears prick at my eyes. I wipe them away with the back of my arm. But as I start off toward Deering all I can think is, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, like a mantra, or a prayer.
One good thing about raids: They’re loud. All I have to do is pause in the shadows and listen for the footsteps, the static, the bullhorn voices. I switch directions, choose the side streets, the ones that have been skipped over or raided already. Evidence of the raids is everywhere: overturned garbage cans and Dumpsters, trash picked through and spilled out onto the street, mountains of old receipts and shredded letters and rotting vegetables and foul-smelling goop I don’t even want to identify, red notices coating everything like a dust. My shoes get slick from clomping over it, and in the worst places I have to keep my arms out like a tightrope walker just to stay on my feet. I pass a few houses marked with a big X, black paint splashed across their walls and windows like a black gash, and my stomach sinks. The people who live in these houses have been identified as troublemakers or resisters. The hot wind whistling through the streets carries sounds of yelling and crying, dogs barking. I do my best not to think about Riley.
I stick to the shadows, slipping in and out of alleys and darting from one Dumpster to the next. Sweat is pooling at the base of my neck and under my arms, and it’s not just from the heat. Everything looks strange and grotesque and distorted, certain streets glittering with glass from smashed windows, the smell of burning in the air.
At one point, I come around a corner onto Forest Avenue just as a group of regulators turns onto it from the other end. I whip back around, pressing flat against the wall of a hardware store and inching back in the direction I’ve come. The chances any of the regulators saw me are slim—I was a block away and it’s pitch-black—but still, my heart never goes back to its normal pace. I feel like I’m playing some giant video game, or trying to solve a really complicated math equation. One girl is trying to avoid forty raiding parties of between fifteen to twenty people each, spread out across a radius of seven miles. If she has to make it 2.7 miles through the center, what is the probability she will wake up tomorrow morning in a jail cell? Please feel free to round pi to 3.14.
Before the shakedown, Deering Highlands was a nicer part of Portland. The houses were big and new—at least for Maine, which means they were built within the past hundred years—and set back behind gates and hedges, on streets with names like Lilac Way and Timber Road. There are a few families still clinging on in some of the houses, dirt-poor ones who can’t afford to move anywhere else, or haven’t gotten permission for a new residence, but for the most part it’s totally empty. Nobody wanted to stay on; nobody wanted to be associated with the resistance.