Requiem

“Well you can’t stay here, either,” Tack points out.

Pippa bites her lip and exchanges a look with Beast. He nods.

“He’s right, Pip,” Beast says.

Behind Pippa, a woman speaks up suddenly. She is so thin, she looks as though she has been whittled from ancient wood.

“We’ll go.” Her voice is surprisingly deep and forceful. Set in her sunken, shipwreck face, her eyes burn like two smoldering coals. “We’ll fight.”

Pippa exhales slowly. Then she nods.

“All right, then,” she says. “Portland it is.”

As we draw closer to Portland, as the light and land grow more familiar—lush with growth and smells I know from childhood, from my longest, oldest memories—I begin to make my plans.

Nine days after we left the safe house, our numbers now hugely swollen, we catch a glimpse of one of the Portland border fences. Only now it is no longer a fence. It’s a huge cement wall, a faceless slab of stone, stained an unearthly pink in the dawn light.

I’m so startled, I stop short. “What the hell?”

Max is walking behind me, and has to dodge at the last second. “New construction,” he says. “Tightened border control. Tightened control everywhere. Portland’s making an example.” He shakes his head and mutters something.

This image—the sight of a wall, newly erected—has made my heart start pounding. I left Portland less than a year ago, but already, it has changed. I’m seized by a fear that everything will be different on the inside of the wall too. Maybe I won’t recognize any of the streets. Maybe I won’t be able to find my way to Aunt Carol’s house.

Maybe I won’t be able to find Grace.

I can’t help but worry about Hana, too. I wonder where she will be once we begin pouring into Portland: the cast-out children, the prodigal sons, like the angels described in The Book of Shhh who were thrown out of heaven for harboring the disease, expelled by an angry god.

But I remind myself that my Hana—the Hana I knew and loved—is gone now.

“I don’t like it,” I say.

Max swivels around to look at me, one corner of his mouth quirked into a smile. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It won’t be standing too much longer.” He winks.

So. More explosions. It makes sense; we need to move a large number of people into Portland somehow.

A high, thin whistle disrupts the morning stillness. Beast. He and Pippa have been scouting ahead of the group this morning, tracing the periphery of the city, looking for other Invalids, signs of a camp or homestead. We turn toward the sound. We’ve been walking since midnight, but now we find renewed energy and move more quickly than we have all night.

The trees spit us out at the edge of a large clearing. The growth has been rigorously trimmed back, and a long, well-tended alley of green extends a quarter of a mile into the distance. In it are trailer homes propped on cinder blocks and chunks of concrete, as well as rusted truck beds, tents, and blankets strung up from tree branches to form makeshift canopies. People are already moving around the camp, and the air smells like smoking wood.

Beast and Pippa are standing a little ways away, conversing with a tall, sandy-haired man outside one of the trailers.

Raven and my mother begin shepherding the group into the clearing. I stay where I am, rooted to the spot. Julian, realizing I am not with the group, doubles back to me.

“What’s the matter?” he asks. His eyes are red. He has been doing more than almost anyone—scouting, foraging, standing watch while the rest of us are sleeping.

“I—I know where we are,” I say. “I’ve been here before.”

I don’t say with Alex. I don’t have to. Julian’s eyes flicker.

“Come on,” he says. His voice is strained, but he reaches out and takes my hand. His palms have grown calloused, but his touch is still gentle.

I scan instinctively across the line of trailers, trying to pick out the one Alex had claimed for himself. But that was last summer, in the dark, and I was terrified. I don’t remember any of its features but the roll-away, plastic- tarp roof, which won’t be distinguishable from where I’m standing.

I feel a brief flicker of hope. Maybe Alex is here. Maybe he came back to familiar grounds.

The sandy-haired man is speaking to Pippa. “You got here just in time,” he says. He is much older than he appeared from a distance—in his forties at least—although his neck is unblemished. He has obviously not spent any significant amount of time in Zombieland. “Game time is tomorrow at noon.”

“Tomorrow?” Pippa repeats. She and Tack exchange a look. Julian squeezes my hand. I feel a pulse of anxiety. “Why so soon? If we had more time to plan—”

“And more time to eat,” Raven cuts in. “Half our number is practically starving. They won’t put up a very good fight.”

The sandy-haired man spreads his hands. “It wasn’t my decision. We’ve been coordinating with our friends on the other side. Tomorrow is our best chance for getting in. A large portion of security will be busy tomorrow— there’s a public event down by the labs. They’ll be pulled away from the perimeter to guard it.”

Pippa rubs her eyes and sighs. My mother puts in, “Who’s going in first?”

“We’re still working out the details,” he says. “We didn’t know whether Resistance got the word out. We didn’t know whether we could expect any help.” When he speaks to my mom, his whole manner changes—he becomes more formal, and more respectful, too. I see his eyes skate down to the tattoo on her neck, the one that marks her as a former prisoner of the Crypts. He obviously knows what it means, even if he has not spent time in Portland.

“You have help now,” my mother says.

The sandy-haired man looks out over our group. More and more people are pushing out of the woods, flowing into the clearing, huddling together in the weak morning light. He starts slightly, as though he has only just become aware of our number. “How many of you are there?” he asks.

Raven smiles, showing all her teeth. “Enough,” she says.

Hana

The Hargroves’ house is blazing with light. As our car turns into the drive, I have the impression of a massive white boat run aground. In every single window, a lamp is burning; the trees in the yard have been strung with miniature white lights, and the roof is crowned with them as well.

Of course, the lights are not about celebration. They are a statement of power. We will have, control, possess, even waste—and others will wither away in the dark, sweat in the summer, freeze as soon as the weather changes.

“Don’t you think it’s lovely, Hana?” my mother says as black-suited attendants materialize from the darkness and open up the car door. They stand back and wait for us, hands folded—respectful, deferential, silent. Fred’s work, probably. I think about his fingers tightening around my throat. You will still learn to sit when I tell you. . . .

And the flatness of Cassandra’s voice, the dull resignation in her eyes. He poisoned cats when he was little. He liked to watch them die.

“Lovely,” I echo.

She turns to me in the act of swinging her legs out of the car, and frowns slightly. “You’re very quiet tonight.”

“Tired,” I say.

The past week and a half has slipped away so quickly, I can’t remember individual days: Everything blurs together, turns the muddled gray of a confused dream.