With the Enemy (6 page)

T
he upside of using an old map is that it has the now-closed libraries on it. The downside is what it’s missing.

According to the map, the area we’re now walking through is filled with housing developments named things like Hobson Wood, Downer’s Grove, and Century Dairylands, after the family farms that had once been there. But the buildings in those developments weren’t made well enough to withstand the weather changes, so now they are all just uninhabitable rubble. Anything useful was taken away a long time ago, and there’s no one here now.

I’m walking with Rosie and Louisa, with the boys behind us, but none of us is talking. Until now the only noise has been the crunching of our feet on the rocky
path churned up by the bulldozers that moved some of the rubble away. But as we pass a peeling paint sign that says
ELLSWORTH ACRES,
pausing to check it against the map to make sure we’re still going the right way, we begin to hear the faintest whistle of wind.

As we walk on, it gets louder. There is something about the sound it makes, like a witch singing a lullaby, that gives me goose bumps but makes me want to hear more at the same time. Maybe that’s why, even when I feel the vibrations beneath my feet and my internal DANGER! alarm starts flashing, I don’t say anything to Rosie and Louisa. By the time we see the first field of them, we’ve crossed the boundary and it’s too late to turn back.

Breezers. I see them as we come over the crest of a hill. Hundreds of the squat mini-windmills that work well in flat areas, like the ones the government put up around the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Unlike the government breezer farms, though, these aren’t set up in neat lines, but more like haphazard groves, each one ringed by a barbed wire–topped fence. That must be the source of the odd wind noise, I realize, the air moving
through the barbed wire. But the arrangement still doesn’t make sense. If they were all together, it woul —

Rosie’s strong grip on my arm interrupts my thoughts and stops me in my tracks. She doesn’t say anything, just points to the right of the breezers. My gaze follows her finger and I see a flash of light off a piece of metal. Then my eyes adjust and I register that it’s not just a sheet of metal; it’s a roof, one of dozens — no, of hundreds, no — as far as I can see, there’s a motley quilt of roofs and tent peaks blanketing the land. My stomach lurches.

“Whoa. What the …” Alonso’s voice trails off as he comes up beside me.

But I can’t speak. It’s Rosie who says, “It looks like we’ve wandered into the Settlement Lands.”

None of us has ever been near the Settlement Lands, but all of us know what they are. They are the kind of place that you hear about only in the safety of your living room, in stories on the NewsServ, or in blogs.

At first those stories used words like “reunion,” “families,” and “new start.” That was a few years ago, when the government set up tents and trailers to house the
people from California and the South who came pouring into the middle of the country after they lost their homes to the rising waters. The tents were considered a temporary stop until the families got resettled. But since the War keeps getting worse, not better, and no new homes can be found for anyone, the temporary resettlement camps have become the permanent Settlement Lands. And now the stories about them involve words like “gangs,” “murder,” and “innocent bystander.”

“Is there any way to avoid going through them?” Drew asks.

Rosie squints over the map and shakes her head.

“Can’t we just go around?” Louisa asks.

I join Rosie at the map. Even though it’s too old to have the Settlement Lands on it, it shows the developments whose names are most often associated with them, and they stretch in a band around northern Chicago. Trying to go around them will add four, if not more, hours to our trip. Four hours Maddie might not have.

“Our only option is to go through,” I say.

“Maybe we should split up, so we don’t draw as much attention to ourselves,” Ryan says.

“If we do, I’m going with Rosie,” Louisa announces.

“Me, too,” I agree.

“Thanks, but we’re not splitting up,” Rosie tells us. “We stay together, keep moving, and don’t bother anyone. Think of it like the first day at a new school — remain alert, but don’t be obvious about it. We’ll be fine.”

I don’t know if she believes it, but the way she says it makes me believe it. And everyone else, too, I think, since we all seem much less jumpy as we start walking again.

We pass near one of the groups of breezers. There’s a hand-lettered sign that reads
Hello Daytime! Property KEEP OFF! Guard on duty at all times
, tied on to the fence but no evidence of anyone. The next group of breezers is larger, with a more official-looking sign saying
You Are Now Entering a Desert Fresh Facility
planted in front of a small shack.

“There’s someone in there,” I whisper to Rosie.

“Ignore him and keep walking,” she says, and we do, although I notice us all pulling our sleeves down to cover where our missing ID bracelets should be.

Each of the stands of breezers has wires running from it. Although I doubt either the makers of Hello Daytime! vitamins or Desert Fresh Dry Shower Powder are in the business of generating energy, I’m pretty sure that’s what is going on here. The wires crackle with electricity as we walk under them and into the settlement itself.

Like flipping a switch, the ground goes from rubble to some kind of street. As we keep walking in the direction my compass says is toward Chicago, the streets become more crowded, but apart from one or two small children, no one seems to be paying any attention to us.

Most people are going about their business the way they would anywhere, except instead of stores and houses made of bricks and stone, theirs are pieced together out of whatever is available: a car door, a balcony railing, a stop sign. To our left is a substantial structure with a bay window surrounded by bushels of hay. The door was once
a table at a fast food restaurant with a yellow-and-red clown face on it.

We pass a bootleg software merchant who has decorated his booth with a fringe of finger-drives, a girl selling rice cakes off the back of a bike, a woman offering heavily patched T-shirts, a man with a greasy ponytail hawking Ozone Block SPF 350, which I know doesn’t even exist. Everything is either a fake or secondhand.

Unlike in downtown Chicago, almost no one here is wearing a uniform of any kind. And unlike in downtown Chicago, every twenty or thirty feet, someone has painted three parallel black lines on the side of a building.

“What do those mean?” Louisa asks, pointing at the symbol.

“It’s to show they support the Resistance,” Rosie tells her. “The three stripes are the sign of the Hornet, the leader of the Resistance.”

“The Hornet is a myth,” Drew says.

Rosie shrugs. “Maybe. But if you talk to people in the Resistance, they believe in him.”

“Have any of them actually
seen
him?” Drew asks.

Rosie stands up straighter and I get ready for her to give him a piece of her mind, but instead she says out of the corner of her mouth, “At the next alley, go left. No matter what, keep moving.”

I look around and realize that as we’ve been talking, people have begun to disappear from the street. Not in a rush but still fast, melting into doorways and sliding into shadows until we are the only ones out.

And then it happens.

They appear almost out of nowhere. One second there’s no one in the street in front of us; the next there are a dozen people blocking the way. They’re all on bikes and scooters. They are about half girls and half boys. Several of them look really young, like ten or eleven, and none of them can be more than two years older than we are, but there’s something serious and grown-up about them.

In the center of all of them is a bike that’s got a buggy with a kind of canopy attached to it. The buggy is cobbled together from different car parts with the front made out of a piece of an old soda ad that says
Bring Dr. Yum Yum and have lots of Fun Fun
.

I do not think we are about to have a lot of fun fun, though.

The guy in the buggy seems to be the leader. He rises, puts one hand on either side of the canopy, and just stands there. It’s hot but he’s wearing long sleeves and a scarf and gloves. His face is visible, a few shades darker than mine, but his eyes are pale green, almost milky, from under the shadow of the canopy.

He’s eyeing us like we’re a new toy for him and his friends to play with. From the coolness of his stare and the fact that I now notice everyone in his gang is armed, we’re not talking about a tea party.

We so don’t have time for this.

He says, “This is Dr. Yum Yum gang territory. What brings you to our little paradise?”

There are a few chuckles from his posse.

“We came for the shopping,” I say lightly.

Apparently he’s the only one who is allowed to make jokes. He squints and leans forward. “You being funny?”

I shrug. “I was trying to, but I guess it didn’t work.

What do you think I could have done to make it funnier? I’m always working to improve my act.”

“Is she nuts?” he says, addressing the rest of our group.

“I’m afraid so,” Drew says, stepping forward and resting his hand lightly on my shoulder. “She wandered away from our school and we were sent out to bring her back.”

The guy in the buggy’s expression changes and his strange pale eyes narrow. “You’re scouts,” he says, and spits afterward, like “scouts” is a bad word. “Filthy scouts.”

“What’s a scout?” I ask.

No one answers me, but the members of the Dr. Yum Yum gang seem to grow more alert. One girl on a scooter has pale skin and red hair and a set of spikes wrapped around her fingers. She keeps her eyes on us but says to the leader, “Want me to show them what we think of scouts, Bailey?”

The guy called Bailey scratches his chin and comes to a decision. “Round them up, Slam. Maybe we can trade them for something.”

“No, no, no, this is a misunderstanding,” I say. “We’re not scouts; we don’t even know what —”

“And shut that one up.”

“Gladly,” the red-haired girl, Slam, says. The littlest of the kids hops off the back of a bike and comes to steady the scooter as Slam steps from it.

I feel Rosie and Drew exchanging glances across me. We are outnumbered and outarmed. But we can’t let ourselves be taken.

A loud whistle splits the air three times in succession.

“Mount up!” Bailey hollers. Slam jumps back onto her scooter, grabs the littlest kid around the waist, and all the riders take off in different directions, kicking up a cloud of dust.

“What just —?” Ryan starts to ask.

The dust settles, and, where the riders had been, there’s now a Jeep parked sideways. The back fender of it says
Joey’s Antidepression Drops. We care for you when you couldn’t care less
. The front door reads
MILITARY POLICE.

A soldier steps out of the Jeep. She’s got a rifle across her chest and a helmet on, but beneath it her face is round and young. She’s probably not even sixteen.

I can’t decide if this is better or worse than the Dr. Yum Yum gang. On the one hand, there’s only one of her.

“Hands up, wrists front,” she calls, reaching for something on her belt.

On the other hand, the thing she’s reaching for is an ID bracelet scanner.

“State your business here,” she says.

I don’t think my shopping line will go over this time but before I can think of anything else to say, Alonso steps forward. “We’re on a school field trip,” he says, sounding friendly. “We’re studying the effects of migration on famili —”

“Get back there and put your wrists in the air,” the soldier barks. She moves toward us with the ID scanner.

“But —”

“LINE UP AND SHUT UP!” she shouts. “Get those bracelets where I can see them.”

Definitely worse. This is it. The end. Through her teeth, Rosie whispers, “Take the others and go. I’ll create a —”

I see a flash of yellow out of the corner of my eye like a scarf. I hear a
whooooooooosh
and the area fills with smoke. The soldier starts to cough and I catch the sound of static and then her yelling into her walkie-talkie. “Incident in quadrant five, section eight. Requesting backup.”

I can’t see a thing but someone grabs my hand, and Rosie’s voice in my ear says, “Run,” and I do.

We run together, tripping, directly into the cloud of acrid smoke. I pull my T-shirt over my nose and mouth. My lungs are burning and my eyes are stinging and I can barely keep them open.

When the smoke begins to thin, I see that Louisa is holding Rosie’s other hand. But Alonso, Drew, and Ryan have vanished.

W
e can’t stop,” Rosie pants. “We have to keep moving.”

“What was that?” Louisa coughs as we stagger on.

“Smoke bomb,” I say. “We can’t just abandon the others. We have to go back.”

“No way,” Rosie says, dragging me on.

From Louisa’s pocket there’s an odd squawking noise and Drew’s voice crackling, “Team Beta, this is Team Alpha. Do you read?”

“It works,” I say, amazed.

Rosie grabs it from Louisa. “We’re Team Alpha; you’re Team Beta,” she says into the handset. “Where are you?”

“We’ll talk about that alpha-beta thing later. We ran straight down. In front of us we see a big silver thing —”
“Us, too,” Rosie cuts him off and we make for it as fast as we can.

“Who threw the smoke bomb?” Louisa is frowning. “Do you think it was that gang?”

“Doesn’t matter. We lucked out,” Rosie pants.

I agree, although that kind of luck makes me uneasy. “What do you think scouts are?” I ask.

“Something unpopular,” Rosie says.

We meet up with the boys, but we don’t stop running. In five minutes we cross a dry creek bed that seems to be the border of the Settlement Lands. We make it through but the landscape in front of us is not much more welcoming than what we’ve left.

We spend the next hour running through backyards that used to have sparkling blue pools and swing sets, jumping over squeaky hinged gates, and climbing fences. The windows of the houses all watch with blank, unoccupied disinterest. Where there are still doors, bright orange
CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE RESOURCE ALLOCATION AND DEFENSE AGENCY
labels flutter against them like pennants.

We’re on the outskirts of Chicago but I’ve never been here. I was only eight when the first mandatory relocation plans went into effect, forcing residents on the edges of the city to move into central Chicago to save water and energy. I was not even ten when the relocation for security happened, so no one I knew ever lived out here.

The trees begin to rustle and the swings in a playground we run through start to sway with low squeaks from their rusty joints. Eddies of leaves swirl around our feet.

The wind is picking up. We’re close enough to Chicago to be in the band of the mini-typhoon that’s coming.

Louisa looks up at the lowering sky. “Are you sure we shouldn’t just go to the police when we get to the city?”

“You saw what happened back there,” I say. “Without ID bracelets, they’ll arrest us instantly.”

“Maybe it will work better if we go right to the station,” Ryan suggests. “Then we could call our parents and they could explain it all —”

“Some of us could,” Rosie cuts in.

“Plus, how seriously do you really think they’d take us? Six kids with no IDs who claim their friend was
kidnapped by Alliance agents in the middle of the United States? I mean, that sounds nuts even to
me
.” I tap myself on the chest. “And I was there.”

Drew nods. “Evelyn is right. You can do what you want, but I’m not wasting time trying to explain things to the police and waiting for them to call my parents while Maddie is in the hands of her kidnappers. Finding Maddie is my number one priority.”

“I agree,” Rosie says. “But we have to be smart about it. We’re too visible. We’ve got to take shelter. What we need to find is an abandoned building in the middle of the city with no nosy neighbors but solid construction and good drainage so it can withstand the storm.”

“Oh, is that all? A completely habitable building that is uninhabited in the middle of the most overcrowded city in the US. No problem,” Drew says.

“Yeah, while we’re at it, I’d like to request a full-service all-you-can-eat buffet, a slick set of wheels, and some volumizing shampoo.” Ryan pats his short hair. “I don’t think my hair is doing all it could be for me.”

Rosie looks at Louisa and me and rolls her eyes.

A few minutes later we pass a sign that reads,
CHICAGO CITY LIMITS.

The five skyscrapers still standing in downtown Chicago loom in front of us, reflecting the gathering green-gray storm clouds like immense windows into another world. I know Rosie is right; going straight there without setting up camp first would mean taking unnecessary risks. Still, I find the closer we get, the more homesick I feel. In my pocket I wrap my hand around my compass.

All around us the empty houses show signs of having been struck by lightning storms. Those that are still standing are half-burned, dark husks with the occasional bathtub or dining table still inside. A piece of flowered wallpaper tumbles by us, carried on the wind.

The emptiness feels ominous to me. Or maybe it is just because the closer we get to learning the truth about where Maddie is, the more afraid I feel.

Louisa seems to get happier with every step. “We’re finally here,” she says, bouncing along next to me. “We
could even have Maddie back by tonight, right? Tomorrow at the latest.”

“Oh, completely,” I say, trying to match her enthusiasm. And we could.

If she’s alive.

But of course I don’t say that out loud. How could I? What would it do besides upset them?

The first ribbons of lightning are beginning to mass on the horizon around the city, when it hits me that by not telling Louisa the whole story, by purposely shielding her from the truth, I’m doing what my parents do to me.

And that’s when I realize: Maybe my parents don’t do it to leave me out or exclude me. Maybe they say those things because they desperately want to believe them, too. They are protecting me and protecting themselves, trying to weave a cocoon of hope around all of us.

As the truth of this crashes over me, I miss my parents so much it makes me ache inside. I feel like for the first
time I’m really understanding them. I want to apologize to them. I want to tell them I love them. I just want to hear their voices.

I look around at the desolate landscape we’re running through, houses reduced to embers and rubble, and I wish I could close my eyes and be with them. Be safe.

How did I end up here? How did I end up so far from home?

I miss you, Mommy and Daddy
.

I have an almost insurmountable urge to just stop. Sit down. Give up. What are we doing? How can we possibly think we can save Maddie? Six starving kids on the run with nothing but a compass, an old map, and a lame theory? There’s no chance we can avoid being picked up by the authorities.

A ragged curtain of silver lightning appears in the sky to our left, followed by a plume of smoke as it sets a building on fire.

Assuming we’re not incinerated first.

“No way,” Louisa says. “Look.”

My eyes follow her finger past three blackened carcasses of buildings to a squat, solid cement structure. The words
LUXE LIFE CAR WASH
are printed in faded paint on the side.

No neighbors. Built to withstand storms. Good drainage. And since there’s not enough water to take showers, let alone wash cars, unlikely to be in use.

We run for it.

Inside, it’s not exactly Cozy Corners.

The floor is blanketed with broken bottles and soda cans and pieces of debris. It turns out that those air freshener things that dangle from rearview mirrors don’t smell better when they’re old, moldy, and decaying.

But the building is fairly well boarded up so it’s private, and, as the storm whips itself into a frenzy outside, it proves itself to be mostly leak free.

It’s also only six blocks from the nearest library.

We spend the hour the storm lasts setting up camp. When the sky clears, it’s almost three o’clock, at least
according to the clock Rosie and Drew “borrowed” from a motel office when we first escaped from CMS. The six of us set out. We’re on a double mission: to get into the library and to get food.

The car wash seems to mark the end of the relocation zone, and a block away from it, the houses show signs of being lived in. The streets are quiet now because most people keep factory hours, which run until five. The only person we come across is an elderly woman looking for her cat, but it is a good reminder that we need to start being more careful about where we go and when.

I check both my map and my compass when we get to 1150 West Fullerton Avenue to make sure we’re in the right place. The building is made of brick and has a tower to one side, but there’s nothing to show it was once a library. The sign outside says
HELPING HANDS CHARITIES, REFUGEE RESOURCE CENTER.

The refugees must not get their help here, though, because the place is deserted. There’s a single car in the parking lot with an ad for 2
GOOD
2
B TOFURKEY
and
the words
MARTIN SECURITY
on the side. There’s no sign of anyone inside.

We split into two teams, Alpha team — Rosie, Ryan, and Louisa — going left, and Beta team — me, Alonso, and Drew — going right, both looking for a way into the building.

“All locked on our side,” Rosie’s voice says over the phone.

“Here, too,” Alonso confirms. “But we might have something. Will keep you posted.”

He, Drew, and I are standing at the bottom of a sloping driveway. There’s a loading dock, a door, and two Dumpsters blocking the view from the street. Which means it’s a good lock for us to try picking.

Drew kneels in front of the door with an unbent paper clip. “I used to pick the lock on my mom’s office all the time,” he says. “And it’s a pretty serious lock.” He turns to me. “Neither of you would happen to have a rubber band, would you?”

We’ve left our backpacks at the car wash, but I always carry a few essentials in the pockets of my pants. I fish
out a rubber band and hand it to him. “Your mom works at home?” I ask.

“Kind of. It’s more like we live at her office,” he says, holding the paper clip between his teeth. “I think I’ve almost got —”

We hear the whine of brakes as a truck slows to turn into the driveway. The only possible cover is provided by the two Dumpsters, so we tuck ourselves behind them.

I hear a grinding noise from somewhere, and then the tiny beep of a truck going in reverse. From between the Dumpsters we watch a NutriCorp truck back toward the loading dock.

The driver honks his horn twice and the loading dock door rolls up.

“What’s going on?” Rosie’s voice squeaks through the phone, which Alonso quickly hides under his shirt.

But not quickly enough. The truck driver and the security guard have both turned to stare at the Dumpsters.

The security guard moves his hand toward the gun on his hip. “Hey, you there,” he bellows in our direction, bobbing his head to get a better look. “Show yourself.
Now
.”