Lauren Oliver: Alex

Then I was down. I landed in a big pile of sheets and pillowcases that smelled like sweat and blood and things I didn’t want to think about. But I was safe, and nothing was broken. The laundry room was black, empty, the old machines still. The whole room had that moist feel that all laundry rooms do, like a big tongue.

I could still hear screaming and gunshots from upstairs, rolling down the laundry chute, amplified and transformed. It sounded like the world was ending.

But it wasn’t.

Out of the laundry room, around the corner, no problem at all. The service door was supposed to be alarmed, but I knew the staff always disabled it so they could go out for smoke breaks without going upstairs.

So: outside, and to the black rush of the Presumpscot River.

To freedom.

For me, the world was beginning.

How did I love her?

Let me count the ways.

The freckles on her nose like the shadow of a shadow; the way she chewed on her lower lip when she was thinking and the way her ponytail swung when she walked and how when she ran she looked like she was born going fast and how she fit perfectly against my chest; her smell and the touch of her lips and her skin, which was always warm, and how she smiled. Like she had a secret.

How she always made up words during Scrabble.

Hyddym (secret music). Grofp (cafeteria food). Quaw (the sound a baby duck makes). How she burped her way through the alphabet once, and I laughed so hard I spat out soda through my nose.

And how she looked at me like I could save her from everything bad in the world.

This was my secret: she was the one who saved me.

I had trouble finding the old homestead. It took me almost a full day. I’d crossed over the river, into a part of the Wilds I didn’t know, and there were no landmarks to guide me. I knew I had to circle southeast, and I did, keeping the city’s perimeter in my sights. It was cold outside, but there was lots of sun, and ice ran off the branches. I had no jacket, but I didn’t even care.

I was free.

There should have been freedom fighters around, escaped prisoners from the Crypts. But the woods were silent and empty. Sometimes I saw a shape moving through the trees and turned around, only to see a deer bounding away, or a raccoon moving, hunched, through the undergrowth. I found out later that the Incidents in Portland were carried out by a tiny, well-trained group—only six people in total. Of them, four were caught, tried, and executed for terrorism.

I found the old homestead at last, long after it got dark, when I was using the moon to navigate and piling up branches as markers so I could be sure I wasn’t just turning in circles. I smelled smoke and followed it. I came out into the long alley, where Grandpa Jones and Caitlyn and Carr used to set up shop in their patched-up tents and makeshift houses, where the old trailers stood. It seemed like a lifetime ago I’d lain in bed with Lena and felt her breath tickling my chin and held her while she slept, felt her heart beating through her skin to mine.

It was a lifetime ago. Everything was different.

The homestead had been destroyed.

There’d been a fire. That much was obvious. The trees in the surrounding area were bare stumpy fingers, pointing blackly to the sky, as if accusing it of something. It looked like there’d been bombs, too, from the covering of metal and plastic and broken glass vomited across the grass. Only a few trailers were still intact. Their walls were black with smoke; whole walls had collapsed, so charred interiors were visible—lumpy forms that might have been beds, tables.

My old house, where I’d lain with Lena and listened to her breathe and willed the darkness to stay dark forever so we could be there, together, always — that was gone completely. Poof. Just some sheet metal and the concrete rubble of the foundation.

Maybe I should have known. Maybe I should have taken it as a sign.

But I didn’t.

“Don’t move.”

There was a gun against my back before I knew it. I was strong again, but my reflexes were weak. I hadn’t even heard the guy coming.

“I’m a friend,” I said.

“Prove it.”

I pivoted slowly, hands up. A guy was standing there, crazy skinny and crazy tall, like a human grasshopper, with the squinty look of someone who needs glasses but can’t get them in the Wilds. His lips were chapped, and he kept licking them. His eyes flicked to the fake procedural scar on my neck.

“Look,” I said, and drew up my sleeve, where they’d tattooed my intake number at the Crypts.

He relaxed then, and lowered the gun. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought the others would be back by now. I was worried….” Then his eyes lit up, as if he had just registered what he said. “It worked,” he said. “It worked. The bombs…?”

“Went off,” I said.

“How many got out?”

I shook my head.

He licked his lips again. “I’m Rogers,” he said. “Come on. Sit. I got a fire going.”

He told me about what had happened while I’d been inside: a big sweep on the homesteads, extending from Portland all the way down to Boston and into New Hampshire. There’d been planes, bombs, the works, a big show of military might for the people in Zombieland who’d started to believe that the invalids were real, and out there, and growing.

“What happened to the homesteaders?” I asked. I was thinking of Lena. Of course. I was always thinking of Lena.

“Did they get out?”

“Not everyone.” Rogers was twitchy. Always moving, standing up and sitting down, tapping his foot. “A lot of them did, though. At least, that’s what I heard. They went south, started doing work for the R down there.”

We talked for hours, Rogers and me. Eventually, others came: prisoners who’d made it across the border into the Wilds, and two of the freedom fighters who’d launched the operation. As the darkness drew tighter they materialized through the trees, drawn to the campfire, appearing suddenly from the shadows, white-faced, as if stepping into this world from another. And there were, in a way.

Kyle, constant-wedgie-boy, never made it back. And then I felt bad, really bad.

I never even thanked him.

We had to move. There would be retribution for what we’d done. There would be air strikes, or attacks from the ground. Rogers told me the Wilds weren’t safe anymore, not like they used to be.

We agreed to catch a few hours of sleep and then take off. I suggested south. That’s where everyone had gone—that’s where Lena, if she had survived, would be. I had no idea where. But I would find her.

We were a small, sad group: a bunch of skinny, dirty convicts, a handful of trained fighters, a woman who’d been on the mental ward and wandered off soon after she joined us. We lost two people, actually. One guy, Greg, had been on Ward Six since he was fifteen years old and had been caught by the police distributing dangerous materials: poster for a free underground concert. He must have been forty by then, skinny as a rail and insect-eyed, with hair growing all the way down his back.

He wanted to know when the guards would come by to bring us food and water. He wanted to know when we were allowed to bathe, and when we could sleep, and when the lights would come on. In the morning, when I woke up, he was already gone. He must have gone back to the Crypts. He’d gotten used to it there.

Rogers shook us all awake before dawn. We’d made camp in one of the remaining trailers. It was decently sheltered from the wind, even though it was missing one of its walls. For a moment, waking up with a layer of frost crusting the blanket and my clothes, with the smell of the campfire stinging the back of my throat and the birds just starting to sing—I thought I was dreaming.