Survival Colony 9 (6 page)

This time, though, my dad wasn’t going to yield.

“Jars we keep,” he said when he returned with Aleka. “But not for hair and fingernails. Those are potential drinking vessels, storage containers. Empty them and set them aside.”

“And the rest?” she said.

“We’ve got important things to carry,” he said. “Food, weapons, medical supplies. I can’t have people weighing themselves down with junk.”

“We could wait a day or two,” she tried. “Give them time to adjust.”

“We might not have a day or two,” he said, and walked off.

Aleka took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and turned her unsparing gaze on the crowd.

“You heard the man,” she said. “Collection jars are to be emptied for future use. As for the rest, anything not directly necessary to the survival of the colony is to be placed in a pile of disposables.”

“Necessary according to who?” the man with the painting of the light tower challenged her.

“According to me,” she countered. “I’ll be inspecting the results in one hour.” When no one budged, she repeated, “One hour.” Then she left, striding rapidly in the direction my dad had gone.

“If anyone tries to mess with my comic book collection,” Yov said loudly, “I’ll kill them.”

For once, no one laughed.

I double-checked to make sure nothing in my own pack would fail Aleka’s test, then shoved it all back inside. Meanwhile, the people who were supposed to be our elders sat there, surrounded not only by camp supplies but by four or five treasured but totally worthless things. As the minutes passed by and no one made a move to separate the essentials from the trash, I could see in their faces that they weren’t going to be able to do it. They put their hands on the items lying in front of them, moved and rearranged piles, held objects in each palm as if weighing them, threw furtive glances at their neighbors, and all the while their faces got more panicky and desperate. The collection jar fanatics sat frozen, eyes darting around as if cages had sprung up out of the dust, trapping them inside. But they weren’t the only ones. The man with the picture of the light tower hugged it to his chest like a child he needed to defend against a horde of ravenous Skaldi.

And it dawned on me why.

Everything was important to them. Jars, paintings, sunglasses, baby doll heads. Not just because of what it was. Not even mostly because of that.

Because it was all they had.

I rose from the ground. People sitting paralyzed among their small piles of junk watched me leave.

“Where you going, Space Boy?” Yov called out lazily. “To ask daddy if you can keep your model train set?”

This time, Kelmen did laugh, a mindless bark that barely sounded human.

But I didn’t listen. I scanned the compound until I located my dad, standing with Aleka outside our makeshift fence on the crest of the hill. As I approached, I could hear their voices, see her gesturing toward the bomb shelter and the trucks, him shaking his head slowly but insistently. Watching him there, oblivious to the pain he was causing, made anger bubble in my chest. It wasn’t fair, I decided. The more I thought about it, the more certain I felt.

Maybe, I thought, only someone who’s lost everything knows he has no right to tell others to throw everything away.

“Hey, Dad,” I said. “Can we talk?”

“Not a good time,” he said without looking at me. “Can it wait?”

In my dad’s language, that’s not a question but an order.

“No,” I said. “It’s important. To the colony’s survival.”

He turned to face me, his expression keen and wary. Whether he really thought I had something worthwhile to say or was simply on the lookout for another of my brain freezes, I couldn’t tell. Only now that I found him staring at me with his dark, penetrating eyes, I felt my confidence start to crawl down my throat and look for a hiding place in my stomach.

“I’m waiting,” he said.

“Okay.” I tried to put the words together the way they’d shaped themselves in my mind. “It’s about people’s stuff. The jars and things. I was thinking, when we were sorting, I was thinking. . . .”

He held up his first two fingers, tapped his forehead. “Clock’s running, Querry.”

“Maybe I should go,” Aleka said.

“No,” he said. “Querry’s got something important to say, you should hear it too.” He lifted an eyebrow. “It is important, isn’t it, son?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.” I took a breath and said in a rush, “I don’t think it’s fair to make people throw away their stuff. Even if it looks like junk to you. It doesn’t look like junk to them.”

He snorted. “Which is exactly why someone like me has to make the call.”

“But,” and I could feel my thoughts getting tangled again, “what if they’re right? I mean, wouldn’t they know their own things better than you?”

His face showed nothing but contempt for that idea. “It’s time people in this camp learned the difference between
need
and
want
,” he said. “The difference between necessities and luxuries.”

“That’s just it,” I said, because his word reminded me of what I wanted to say. “They’re not luxuries.”

“Ballet slippers aren’t luxuries?”

“Not to them.”

“When we’re fighting a war.”

“
Life
isn’t a luxury,” I said. “And if you take away the ballet slippers, you might be taking away their life.”

He looked at me piercingly. Aleka, I saw out of the corner of my eye, watched me too, her face as stern and unrevealing as ever. I wondered what ballet slippers were, heard the distant ring of Mika’s tools against the underbelly of the truck, felt the hot wind blow.

“Aleka,” my dad said at last, “would you check on the others? Tell them,” and his eyes never left mine, “that we’ll make a thorough inventory of camp equipment before returning to personal items.”

“Gladly,” she said. She left, but not before leveling one last, appraising look at me.

My dad put a hand on my arm. “I need to check the lookouts.” He let go and we circled the outskirts of camp, him limping and me following a half-step behind.

Nothing much had changed that I could tell. He’d posted sentries in the upper-story windows of a couple houses that still had upper stories. He pointed them out to me, because I wouldn’t have seen them on my own. He also told me he’d moved the two drivable trucks once more, west of our sleeping quarters, closer to the trail that led down the hill. It was obvious, he said, nodding at the dust that had accumulated against the foundations in the last couple hours, that the vehicles weren’t serving much purpose as windbreaks, and so he’d decided to put them where we could get to them and get out as quickly as possible.

“Last time was too close for comfort,” he said. “The next time we’re forced to evacuate, it’s got to be fast. No time to pack, no time to look around for anything missing.”

I knew what he was getting at, but I decided to play along. “Wouldn’t it be better to have everything loaded on the trucks?”

“The fuel’s already there,” he said. “The rest of the heavy equipment we can load on a moment’s notice. But that plus the little ones will take up all the room we have. Everything else will have to be shipped by hand.”

“Which means we can’t take personal stuff too,” I finished his thought.

He nodded, his mouth set in a line beneath his mustache. “That’s the predicament. I’ve allowed people to carry that garbage for so long, I know it’s hard for them to let go. I wish I’d done away with it from the start. Before people started to depend on it. Before they got attached.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He raked his teeth over his upper lip, let out a breath. “Guess I was being sentimental,” he said. “Trying to protect them. To give them hope.”

“And now you’re taking it away?”

He didn’t answer at first. His brow lowered, and I thought he was going to let me have it. But when he spoke his voice carried its usual tone of certainty and command.

“Some will see it that way,” he said. “Some, maybe, who don’t like following my orders. Some who might be willing to tear this colony apart if they think that’s the only way for them to end up on top.”

“Like Araz,” I said.

He shrugged. “Araz I’ve got no quarrel with. But I can’t be responsible for how people feel. They’ll have to find the hope they’re offered. Find it where it truly lies.”

“What if there’s none to find?”

His eyes narrowed. “Come again?”

“You still don’t get it,” I said. “You take away their stuff, you’re taking away who they are. Listen to Mika, banging away on a truck she knows can’t be fixed. You take away the things that let them know who they are when they wake up each morning, it won’t matter who’s in charge. You take those things away from them,” I drew a deep breath, “it’s over.”

For a second longer his eyes cornered mine. Then, moving faster than I thought he could, he grabbed my arms and squeezed. Hard, so hard it hurt. His face loomed in front of me, his breath sour, his eyes on fire. I tried to twist away, but he clasped me in a grip like a steel trap.

“It’s not over,” he hissed. “You hear me? You don’t say that, you don’t even think it. When you start thinking that way, you end up like . . .”

My arms burned. “Like who?”

“Like them,” he said, tossing his head. I couldn’t tell if he meant the people in camp or someone, something, out there in the dying world.

As suddenly as he’d grabbed me, he let go.

“Life isn’t a luxury, Querry,” he said. “You’ve learned that much. But despair is. A luxury and a waste. You think those trinkets they carry around are what’s keeping them alive. I think they’re just a more subtle form of despair. A form that’ll kill them as surely as any monster we have to face.”

He pointed toward the tallest of the houses, a full three stories. A sentry’s outline filled the frame of the top-floor window.

“That’s what’s going to keep us alive,” he said. “Focus. Caution. Sharp eyes. Concentrating on what can be saved, not crying over what we have to let go. You want hope, you fix your mind on those things. Not on magic and daydreams.”

With that, he left me to return to his sentries, his officers, his broken-down truck and secret schemes.

When he was gone I hugged my arms, felt the blood pounding in them, closed my hands over the place I could still feel his fingers. I waited until my heart had settled, then went back to the others. I found the man with the light tower shaking Aleka’s hand, over and over, thanking her for what he didn’t know was only a reprieve.

That night, for the first time in the past six months, my dad didn’t show up for our bedtime interrogation. I fell asleep to the sound of Mika’s tools clattering away in the darkness.

5

Waste

I woke up sweating.

Heart pounding. Hands clenched to my chest. Like always, my first thought was that it was a Skaldi attack. But there was no sign of movement from any of the bodies sleeping around me, no noise in the night. Mika must have finally given up and gone to bed. I held my breath to make sure. Dead silence. Whoever came up with that expression sure had it right. When just about everything’s dead, there’s nothing but silence.

It wasn’t an attack that had woken me up. It was a dream, only a dream. But I couldn’t remember it.

I sat and rested my head in my hands. My palms felt clammy against my forehead. But no matter how hard I concentrated, whatever I’d dreamed had vanished as completely as the rest of my memory.

And that’s the way it always was. I don’t remember my dreams. Ever. You’re supposed to remember what you’re dreaming if you wake up in the middle of one, but for me it felt like a wall slid into place the second I woke. A wall between me and my own mind. I’d clutch at the hazy shapes I sensed on the other side of the wall, but they’d slip through my hands like dust and shadows.

Even so, I was sure I was having dreams. Bad ones. Nothing else could explain why, when I wrenched myself from sleep on nights like this, my gut felt twisted in knots and my pulse raced wildly.

A panic reaction, Tyris called it. A night terror. The kind of dream that happens in deep sleep, when you’re not supposed to be dreaming. Dreams that scare you to death while they’re playing in your mind, but that you can’t call back once they’re gone.

My dad filled me in on some of the details. He told me he’d seen me thrashing around on my cot. Clawing at the air. He said he’d even heard me screaming. I didn’t thank him for that piece of information.

“It might be related to the head trauma,” Tyris said.

And that’s all she could say. Though she was officially our camp healer, she didn’t have any medicine, any real way to treat anyone. She had bandages, needles and thread for stitching, maybe enough plaster to make a cast. According to her, there’d been a time when people who got sick were taken care of better than anyone, with buildings to live in, workers to stand by their side, machines to feed them drugs and oxygen. Story was her own parents had been working in a building like that when it got bombed. But these days, people who got sick mostly recovered on their own. Or they didn’t, and the colonies dug a grave deep enough that the Skaldi couldn’t find it. And then they moved on, in case the Skaldi did.

I got my legs under me, stood, almost fell. This was the worst episode yet. The times before, my heart would slow to normal in a minute and all that would be left was a slight tightness in the pit of my stomach. Tonight I felt dizzy, drained. Like I wasn’t totally there, like some part of me was back in the depths of the dream I couldn’t remember.

I wondered what had triggered it. The truck? The stalker at the bomb shelter? The feeling I’d had since the attack in the hollow that something was wrong, something more than usual? Or the fact that Aleka seemed to feel the same way?

Maybe it was my latest argument with my dad. His anger when he thought I was giving up. Maybe this time, if I really focused, I could give him what he wanted at last.

But I couldn’t. The dream had evaporated, and the effort to concentrate made my stomach clench and my head throb. I knew that if I remained where I was, I’d spend the rest of the night staring at the moon-blurred sky, waiting for sleep that wasn’t about to come.

I stepped around bodies and made my way across the compound. Moving helped a little. The nausea subsided and my thoughts came into better alignment with the outside world. The trucks squatted in their new location, their black bodies like the shells of some long-dead creature. The light had gone out in the house my dad had designated as headquarters, so even he must have been sleeping. I knew I couldn’t get far without running into Wali, who was on guard duty tonight. Thinking about him reminded me of Korah, and thinking about what the two of them probably did when they were alone in the dark didn’t help my stomach either. So I stopped at one of the nearby houses, one with an empty swimming pool. I lowered myself carefully by the edge, dangled my legs into the hole, and listened to the silence. The crater in the compound’s center yawned like a lake of darkness.

I decided to try one of Tyris’s memory exercises. She’d taught them to me in the week after the accident, and though they’d done nothing to restore my past, they did help pass the time. Her favorite was to have me isolate a memory from as far back as I could, a pleasant memory. I’d almost laughed when she said that. “A memory where you felt safe,” she amended. I shut my eyes now and remembered the first time my dad took me out in the field after my accident. I’d been cooped up in my tent much of the time before that, and it was something just to get out and move around. He drew troop formations in the dust with a stick,
X
’s for us and
O
’s for them, wiped the diagrams out, made me redraw them from memory. He showed me a tattered field guide he’d picked up somewhere along the way, which described how to determine your position if you had a compass, how to plot points on the horizon if you didn’t. It gave me an odd thrill to realize I was one of only a handful of people in camp who knew how to read, though he said nothing about how I’d learned. He tested me on the book’s concepts, and it turned out I was pretty good at putting theory to practice. My mind seemed to expand with the open air. There’d been no signs of Skaldi in the days after my accident, so we stayed out well into dusk. When the light got too bad to do any more work, he clapped me on the back and we headed for the mess tent.

That’s when he saw a ball one of the little kids had dropped, a tightly wound bundle of twine. He leaned over to pick it up, weighed it in his hand. Then he looked at me, an almost impish gleam in his eyes.

“It’s been a while since I’ve had a catch,” he said. “You game?”

He tossed me the ball, and my left hand shot out without hesitation to snatch it from midair. When I threw it back he slid smoothly to his right to pick it off, his bad hip bracing easily for the return throw. We tossed back and forth for the few minutes the dying day left us, snagging flies, backhands, short-hops. My arms and eyes seemed to remember what to do, and thoughts of the creatures pursuing us receded like the last shadows on the dusty ground.

The next day I hunted for the ball, but it was gone.

I leaned back, kicked my legs in the pool, let the memory seep into me. I wasn’t sure what the point of the exercise was, but for once I felt glad I’d done what Tyris asked.

The sound of footsteps behind me was so soft I almost mistook it for the beating of my own heart.

I turned my head to see a dark figure come gliding across the sleeping area toward me. It moved swiftly but cautiously, following the trail I’d taken, avoiding bodies and the rubble of buildings. My memory of that long-ago catch shredded as I jumped up to confront it, realizing I had nothing to confront it with. If it was the prowler from the night before, I had no idea what to say. If it was Skaldi, the best thing for me to do was shout, sound an alarm, hope someone woke up before it took too many of us. If it was Skaldi I was dead anyway, so attracting its attention didn’t make any difference. But my throat caught as if it was stuffed with dust, and no sound emerged as the shape closed in on me.

Then I saw the long black hair streaming behind it, and I let out a grateful breath. It was Korah.

She came to my side, peered into my face. Every time I looked at her I marveled at how she alone had avoided being wilted by sun and dust. Her complexion was neither too burned nor too pale, her hair fell past her shoulders free of snarls. Even in the moon-dappled dark, her eyes glowed so blue they seemed transparent, like you could see through them if you stared long enough. Which, for obvious reasons, I wasn’t about to do.

“Can’t sleep?” she said.

I mumbled something noncommittal.

“Neither can I,” she said. “I stayed up half the night working on the truck with my mom, but it’s dead. Not a chance of bringing it back. Laman’s pretty set on paring down supplies, huh?”

“You could say that.”

She sighed. “Maybe it’s best if we move on. Wali says this place freaks him out. I can’t decide whether I agree with him or not. It seems safe to me. Or as safe as any place we’re likely to find.”

“Even with someone poking around the bomb shelter?”

“Still on that, huh?” She smiled. “People get restless sometimes, Querry. Especially at night. Like they just have to get up and move around. Like”—she spread her arms and made a face—“me.”

She sat by the poolside, and I joined her. Under the usual smells of grime and sweat, her body gave off a husky aroma that twisted my stomach back into the knot that had just started to loosen.

“So what do you think of this place?” she said.

“I’m hardly the guy to ask,” I said. “No basis for comparison.”

She barely nodded, as if she wasn’t really listening. “I keep thinking this is the kind of place the Skaldi first came,” she said. “Cities, towns. My mom told me. I guess they figured it’d be easier to blend in where there were more people. Plus it gave them a more plentiful food supply.” She shook her head as if to wipe the memory away. “I don’t want to think about those things. But I can’t help it.”

I watched her, tried to think of something to say. What are you supposed to say when someone else’s girlfriend shows up in the middle of the night to talk about monsters?

“I keep wondering if they’re us,” she went on in a strange, tight voice. “When they take us, I mean. If they can copy our look, our voice, does that make them us? Do they think like us? Feel like us? Or is it all just counterfeit?” Her shoulders rippled. “I’ve really got to stop thinking about this.”

She took a deep breath, let it out in a
whoosh
. She picked up a stone from beside the pool and dropped it to the bottom, where it landed with a soft
poof
on the pile of dust. I stole a glimpse at her arm, slim but sleek with muscle.

“Did you ever wonder what the world was like before?” she asked.

“Before when?”

“Before now,” she said. “Before the wars, the warming. Before people destroyed it.”

“What does Wali say?” I asked, and instantly regretted it.

“He won’t talk about it.” I thought I heard a note of anger in her voice. “He says it’s a waste of time to think about how we got here. He says we’re here now, and that’s all that matters.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“Laman.” She smiled, then sobered. “He won’t talk about it either.”

“Except to curse the fools who wrecked the place.”

She laughed. It was a deep, melodious sound, and it startled me. You don’t hear laughs, real laughs, much in camp.

I imitated his gruff voice. “Big cities, fast cars, instant gratification! It was like living in an amusement park!”

Korah laughed again. Then she asked, “What’s an amusement park?”

“I don’t know.” I felt a smile steal across my lips. “I don’t think he knows either.”

We fell silent, swinging our legs in the empty swimming pool.

“All the other grown-ups talk about it,” she interrupted the quiet. “Even though they never saw it.”

“The old woman did.”

“But the rest of them,” she said. “The ones born after the wars. It’s like they have this obsession with it. And no one even knows if any of it’s true.”

I shrugged.

“My mom’s one of the worst offenders,” Korah said. “She’s not even forty, but she talks about it like she lived there all her life. Like she’d go back there in a second if she could.”

The anger had returned to her voice. She brushed hair from her eyes, swung her legs so violently her heels smacked the edge of the pool. They gave off a series of dull echoes, immediately stifled in the dust below.

“The old woman told me she used to wake to the songs of birds,” I said quietly.

“Birds.” Korah took a deep breath, closed her eyes. When they opened again, their blue struck me like something precious I hadn’t seen in years. “Now all we have are bugs.” She crossed her eyes, stuck out her tongue. It didn’t work. Still beautiful. “Dinner.”

“Mostly they’re arachnids,” I said, then realized what a geeky thing it was to say. In the six short months I could remember, most of the animals I’d seen had been long-legged brown spiders that spun cone-shaped webs in the ground, scorpions black as the beetles they ate. Neither of them particularly dangerous. They could give you a bad stomachache is all. I’d seen them scurry out from inside my boots in the morning, looking for a new place to hide. “I saw a snake once,” I added. “I cornered it and tried to catch it.”

“Ooh,” she said. “A gourmet meal.”

“It got away,” I said. “Pretty anti-climactic.”

“What did the old woman say about the birds?”

“She tried to describe their songs,” I said. “But she couldn’t really remember.”

“She told me about trees,” Korah said. “Green trees that changed color once a year and became a rainbow of red and orange and gold. Then the colors would all turn brown and fall off the branches.”

“Trees that lost their needles,” I said.

“Not needles,” she said. “Leaves.”

“How’d they get them back?”

She shook her head, and I was left to imagine trees that could die and come back to life every year.

We sat in silence for a long time. I heard the wind whining through the empty rooms, and I knew we’d be up first thing moving dirt again, like a colony of giant ants.

“The old woman told me it was beautiful,” Korah said. “But I don’t think she really wanted to remember. Not like the others. Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded of what was gone.”

I turned to look at her. She held her head high, and she watched me with the look of determination I’d gotten so used to seeing in camp. But in the second before I dropped my gaze, I thought I saw tears glistening in her incredible blue eyes.

“I’d give anything to get my memory back,” I said.

“That’s what you think.” Her voice was gentle, but her words cut through me. “But that’s because you haven’t seen what I’ve seen.”