Cured Page 2

  Dawn is smeared against the eastern horizon and barely illuminates the debris-filled road. As usual, the morning is completely silent, like someone has pushed an omnipotent mute button. No birdsong, no crickets, no car motors, no droning airplanes, no voices. Opening the top pocket on my tackle vest, I take out a silver J—my lucky charm—and press it to my lips before tucking it back into my pocket. I need all the luck I can get.

  Careful not to rattle the bulging pack on my back, I tiptoe down the porch steps and slink over the dead lawn. When I get to the road, I pause. I am about to step over the line that I have been forbidden to cross. I take a deep breath, walk off my property, and start to run, chasing the silence away with the gentle slap of my shoes on dusty pavement.

  When I have covered three blocks, I stop running, take Dad’s gun from my belt, and point it at the silent sky. The gun recoils in my hand as the bullet rips toward heaven, rumbling like thunder.

  The sound echoes off the mountains, devouring the silence. If my plan works, every person in my house—except Josh—will be waking up right now, able to protect themselves. They won’t be sitting ducks. My dogs start barking, as if they knew what I was planning. “Buoni cani!” I whisper. Good dogs!

  Movement catches my eye. My stomach drops, and I point my gun at a shadow standing frozen in the middle of the street. His gloved hands are up, his voice quiet. “Please.” That’s all he says, but it’s enough. I am aiming my weapon at the vagabond that wanders to my house a couple of times a month for food. I lower the gun and run past him. My destination? The city inside the wall. I need to talk to Fiona Tarsis.

  Chapter 4

  For three years I have trained for all worst-case scenarios. All worst-case scenarios include me running away from danger. I run and run. The sky slowly grows lighter, illuminating the tops of the Rocky Mountains. The golden glow creeps down their steep sides, and the world around me becomes visible. I gasp an involuntary breath. This is my first time off my property in two years, ten months, and sixteen days. Since the day I became Jack.

  Silent, odorless, still, the dawn-washed world seems as if it is holding its breath. As if the oxygen has been stripped from it and everything exists in a vacuum. A city of black and white. The only bright color comes from the canary-yellow fliers nailed to power-line poles, poles that serve no purpose anymore except to hold the colorful announcements:

  Cure!

  My feet pump a rhythmic thump-thump-thump on the road, sending up little puffs of dust that float ghostlike above the cracked pavement, marking my path. A path where no other feet have trod for a long time. I push harder, run faster, wondering why running on pavement, out in the open, feels so different from running on the treadmill at home. It feels so easy.

  The world continues to hold its breath around me, claustrophobic with silence as the sun’s light creeps to the base of the mountains and paints the city. Abandoned houses? Gold. Broken-down cars? Gold. Rusted bikes? Gold. Glass skyscrapers? Gold. The tears in my eyelashes? Gold.

  I swipe my eyes, blink away the tears that blur the houses on either side of the road into two long trains, and go faster, rushing through a world that breaks my heart. A world I’ve heard talked about for nearly three years but have never seen, except from my front yard. It is worse than I ever imagined. So empty. So abandoned. So dead.

  By the time the sun hovers a hand span above the eastern horizon, I have passed through neighborhoods, business districts, industrial factories, and skyscrapers. I come to a jolting stop and stare up, and up some more, at a wall that springs skyward from the side of the road, as if it grew out of the sidewalk. It runs left and right with no door in sight. I turn left—south—and nearly trip. With hardly a thought, my hand is on my gun, finger trembling against the trigger. Slowly, just like I’ve practiced, I brace for the recoil and take aim at the man leaning against the corner of a building on the opposite side of the road.

  Trust no one! That is the first thing I was taught about survival. That, and never get caught. And then I have to wonder how this timeworn beggar, who was at my house when I left, is now here in front of me. His cheeks look hollow beneath his scraggly beard, and I know he’s hungry. The first time I saw him I gave him an individual serving of applesauce in a plastic container, the kind with the foil lid you can peel back. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but he looked so ravenous—I figured I could live one more day without it. I wasn’t sure about him.

  “Please. I’m not going to hurt you,” he wheezes, slowly lifting broad, gloved hands. He stares at me, eyes vibrant beneath bushy brows. A long, matted beard hides most of his face, and rags hang from his hunched body. What’s visible of his face is flushed and damp with sweat, his chest lifting and falling fast beneath his tattered brown shirt. I swallow and keep my gun up and ready. “I’m not going to hurt you, Jack.” Only his mouth and beard move, like a ventriloquist’s puppet.

  I swallow past the fear in my throat—I know this guy … sort of—and take a deep breath. I narrow my eyes. “Weren’t you by my house this morning?”

  The man nods, and the unexpected movement makes me jump and almost drop my gun. He flinches. “Your dad was supposed to meet me this morning at sunrise,” he says. “Why don’t you let me walk away from here? Before you accidentally shoot me.” Slowly, he lowers his hands and takes a tiny step backward. When he’s taken ten steps, he turns his back to me and keeps slowly walking. I stare at his back, at the torn, ragged, dirt-covered shirt straining against a pair of thick shoulders, and my knees go weak. I might be good with a gun. And I might know how to run. But without my brothers, Dad, and Uncle Rob, I am vulnerable. That guy would be able to snap me in half without even trying, and no one would come to my rescue. I wait until he’s gone from sight to start running again, south along the wall.

  After a few minutes, I slow my pace. They don’t see me, the two guards who stand talking to each other at the wall’s base, and I can’t help but wonder how they’ve managed to stay alive if I can sneak up on them without trying. I clear my throat before I am too close so that they don’t startle and shoot me. They both whip around, rifles aimed at my heart. I lift my hands and stop walking.

  Their eyes dart over me and, despite the gun at my belt, they visibly relax. I don’t blame them. I’m short, I’m too thin like everything else in this starved world, and they don’t know that I’m a perfect shot. Without a second thought, they underestimate me. Being underestimated is an advantage, and yes, that saying is framed and hanging on the bathroom wall at home.

  “What do you want?” one of them asks. His hair is sandy blond, cut short, with three lines shaved above his left ear. I take a few cautious steps closer, and his sun-bleached eyebrows furrow. “Aren’t you the dentist’s kid?” he asks.

  I take a closer look at him. “Top left incisor,” I say. “Root canal.”

  He grimaces, flashing the silver-capped fang my dad fixed, and lowers his gun. “That’s right. Minimum numbing. What are you doing in this part of town?” He looks past me. “And alone?”

  My family is well known. People come to us for doctoring and tooth problems. They also think we never leave our property. But they’re wrong about that. I never leave, and my mother and little brother never leave, but everyone else does.

  “I’m looking for someone. I’m hoping you know her. Fiona Tarsis.” I can’t believe those words are coming out of my mouth. It has been a little more than two months since I have seen her. I thought I would never see her again.

  “Fiona Tarsis?” He looks at me a little closer. “Everyone wants to get a look at her. Why do you want to see her?”

  “I have a message for her.”

  Every time the dogs barked, my heart lurched inside my chest. I worried that one day it would lurch so hard it would stop beating altogether, and I’d be dead. I could think of worse ways to die. Lots of them.

  It lurched tonight. So badly that I dropped my forkful of beans, and it splattered on my shirt. Everyone jumped up from t
he table and ran for their guns. I was last out the front door, since I had to put my vest on. Sometimes being a girl is so unfair.

  I stepped out into the evening sunlight and for a split second was filled with hope. Hope that my brother would be walking down the street toward me, his barrel chest and heavy shoulders framed by the sunset. I put my hand up to block the sun, and my hopes were dashed to bits. And then dread smashed the bits into nonexistence.

  My brother was not on the road in front of our house. It was a girl. A woman. With long blond hair and breasts that swelled gently against her clean white shirt. I wanted to call out to her, to warn her. If the raiders saw her … and that’s when I realized who I was looking at. Fiona Tarsis. A girl I’d gone to school with until midway through seventh grade, when they shut the schools down because of the bee flu. Our moms were practically best friends.

  “Ellen! Come here!” Dad yelled. Dad never had Mom come outside when there was a threat, and he never called her by her real name unless he was frazzled.

  I heard the front door open, heard a foot scuff on the porch. “Dear Lord Almighty, that’s Fiona Tarsis,” Mom said. “If she doesn’t have the mark of the beast, let her pass.”

  “Hold your hand up,” Dad said. I watched as she lifted both of her hands up high into the air, like she didn’t know what Dad was talking about. “No. Your right hand.”

  She turned her right hand and showed us the back of it, where the tattoo would be since she had been infected with the bee vaccine. Her skin was pure. Unmarked. “She’s clean,” Dad said, voice full of surprise. But I wasn’t going to tell Dad the truth about her. I remembered her talking about how much she hated the shots. She might not have the mark, but she was infected. Slowly, I lowered my gun.

  “Get on past here, Fiona,” Dad said. Fiona started walking, her hips gently swaying, her long hair gleaming with sunlight. Her gaze locked on mine, and I could tell by the way her eyes grew round and her steps slowed that she recognized me despite my boy hair and the vest covering the only real curves I had, small though they were. “Get on past here,” Dad warned, his voice mean. Fiona broke eye contact with me and started a weary sprint away.

  I ran to the edge of my yard. “Fo—Fiona . . .” I didn’t ask, just stuck my hands into her hair, twisted it, and shoved it down the back of her shirt. “Cut your hair off!” I wanted to say more—that if the raiders caught her, she’d be raped every day for the rest of her life. But I didn’t have time. I reached into a pocket of my vest and pulled out the crackers I’d been nibbling on—savoring—for two days, and shoved what was left of them into her hand. Fiona’s dazed eyes swept over me, over my house, over my little brother perched on the roof with his gun, and then she turned and slowly jogged down the road.

  I stared after, wondering how long it would take for her to get caught. There was no way she would make it out here on her own. That thought hurt my heart. It made me want to scream with frustration, made me want to chase after her, made me want to do something to change the world we lived in. Instead, I held it inside, all those feelings, and funneled them into a space in my empty heart.

  One of the dogs started barking. And then the other three joined in. They were all straining in the direction Fo had come from, their chains pulled so tight I wasn’t sure if the stakes would hold. My two older brothers were in the yard again, guns up, beside Dad. My little brother, perched on the roof, stood and took aim. Uncle Rob came out of the house, still chewing his dinner, Dad’s Glock in his hand. I looked down the shadowed street and my blood ran cold. Men were coming. Lots of men. Running. Armed.

  Dad didn’t wait. He shot a warning bullet into the air and the men stopped. There were fourteen of them. We’d held off more before, but it always ended with a lot of them dead on the street in front of our house, and Dad and Uncle Rob cleaning up the mess the next day. And I was always sent inside first.

  “We don’t have any business with you, dentist,” one of the raiders called. “We just want to walk past here and catch up with someone.”

  Oh no. He meant Fo. They already saw her. I wanted to scream a warning down the street to her. She had to hide.

  There was a long pause where the raiders’ predatory eyes shifted between Dad and the road Fiona just went down. I waited for Dad to tell me to lower my gun and let the raiders pass. Instead he said, “Jack. Go into the house.”

  Without lowering my gun, I backed up to the front steps. I lifted my foot to step onto the porch, when a shot rang out. Lesson number one about guns? When you’re being shot at, you get down as fast as possible. A flat target is a lot harder to hit than a standing one. But I didn’t mean to take cover. My body just crumpled to the ground. A split second later, everyone else fell to the ground—Uncle Rob, Dad, Steve, Josh. The raiders ran. Raiders never run when they can fight. Never, at least, until now. Now that they have something they want more than a fight. Dad rolled to his stomach and fired a single shot at the raiders, but they were already fading into the dusky evening.

  Everyone got up and watched them disappear down the shadowed road. Everyone but me. I lay half on the dead grass, half on the cement walkway leading to the front porch, and stared at the purple sky, wondering why my arm was wet. And then it hit me. I’d been shot.

  Chapter 5

  I blink and rub the jagged scar hidden beneath the sleeve of my shirt. It’s still tender, two months later.

  “You have a message for Fiona Tarsis?” The militiaman asks, snapping my attention back to him. “What kind of message? Is she overdue for a cleaning?” He starts laughing and elbows his companion, a black-haired man I have never seen before. “Get it? The dentist’s son coming to tell someone they’re overdue for … Never mind.” He rolls his shoulders and scowls. “She’s sort of busy today.”

  “It’s a really, really important message. Life-or-death important,” I explain.

  Brow furrowed, he studies me for a moment before taking a walkie-talkie from his belt and saying, “Hey, Tommy. Tell Dreyden Bowen to come to the east side of the wall, exterior. Someone needs to talk to him.”

  “No way, man. He’s busy today,” a voice crackles over the walkie-talkie.

  “I know he’s busy, but it’s a matter of life or death. Just send him out for five minutes.”

  I fold my arms over my tackle vest and tap my toe, studying the militiaman—Rory is his name. I never forget a name. “Rory, I need Fiona Tarsis. Why did you ask for Dreyden Bowen to come out here?” I know—knew—Dreyden Bowen. And he’s definitely not the person I am looking for.

  “Where Bowen is, she is.” There’s a yearning in Rory’s voice, a tightening in his eyes. He clears his throat and I might as well have disappeared as his focus returns to the lifeless, silent city.

  Dreyden Bowen takes his time coming, sauntering down the street with his arm around someone, and a rifle in his free hand. He’s dressed in clean blue jeans and a long-sleeved pinstripe button-down shirt, and his dark-brown hair is brushed neatly to the side, barely covering a short patch of hair above his left ear. He sees me standing with one shoulder pressed against the wall, and his body tenses. His eyes quickly move over every millimeter of me, lingering momentarily on my gun, and then on the knife attached to my belt.

  The person with him is wearing tan pants and a dark-blue blouse that does nothing to hide her curves. Her long, blond bangs are being held out of her face by a dark-blue headband and all I can think is, She’s so dead if the raiders see her! She hasn’t once looked at my face because she is too intent on my right hand. I glance at her hand, at her ten-legged tattoo, before flashing my tattoo-free hand at her. Finally, she looks at me—right at my face—and her brown eyes go wide.

  “Jacqui?” she blurts.

  I glare at her and clear my throat. “It’s Jack,” I growl, gaze darting to Rory and his partner to see if they’ve noticed. They have. Rory’s eyes are traveling over my entire body, searching for the subtle signs that I am, in fact, female. His partner is doing the same—both of them
squinting at my flat, vest-covered chest, like if they look hard enough, they might see something.

  “Do you know this kid?” Bowen asks Fo.

  “Yes! It’s Jacqui Bloom,” Fo says, grinning.

  Bowen frowns and looks me up and down again, and then focuses on my face. “Jacqui Bloom!” He smiles and clasps my shoulders in his hands. And then he laughs and hugs me.

  I stand there, rigid and confused, bulky pockets of my tackle vest digging into my bony ribs. This is the guy who used to steal my homemade school lunch because he was too embarrassed to tell the teacher that he couldn’t afford to buy a hot lunch and too broke to make a bag lunch. I was so scared of him beating me up if I reported it that I started packing two lunches—one for him and one for me.

  My mom used to leave a turkey—fully cooked, with all the trimmings—on his front porch every Thanksgiving afternoon. She would have Dean and Steve ring the doorbell and run. I was sworn to secrecy.

  “Jacqui Bloom. How have you been?” he asks, pushing me to arms’ distance. He is so happy to see me that I wonder if he knew it was my family all those years ago giving him Thanksgiving dinner.

  “Um . . .” I have no words. How have I been? I’ve been a prisoner in my own home for several years, pretending to be a boy, training to run for my life, living on near-starvation rations. I slide my hand over my buzzed hair and shrug. “I’ve been better.”

  “I almost didn’t recognize you. You look like a boy. And you’re … thinner,” Bowen says.

  “Yeah. That’s sort of an inevitable consequence of living in a world without food,” I say. He laughs. So do Rory and his black-haired partner. And then I’m being smothered with another hug—Fo. I put my arms around her and hug back. She’s soft, a sign of being well fed. “I need to talk to you,” I say, breathing in the floral smell of shampoo.