Delirium - Lauren Oliver [100]
I shiver. No wonder I felt like I was walking through a graveyard. I am, in a way. The blitz was a yearlong campaign that happened long before my birth, when my mom was still a baby. It was supposed to have gotten rid of all the Invalids, and any resisters who didn’t want to leave their homes and move into an approved community. My mother once said that her earliest memories were all clouded by the sound of bombs and the smell of smoke. She said for years the smell of fire continued to drift over the city, and every time the wind blew it would bring with it a covering of ash.
We go on walking. I feel like I could cry. Being here, seeing this, it’s nothing like what I was taught in my history classes: smiling pilots giving the thumbs-up, people cheering at the borders because we were at last safe, houses incinerated neatly, with no mess, as though they were just blipped off a computer screen. In the history books there were no people, really, who lived in these houses; they were shadows, wraiths, unreal. But as Alex and I walk hand in hand down the bombed-out road, I understand that it wasn’t like that at all. There was mess and stink and blood and the smell of skin burning. There were people: people standing and eating, talking on the phone, frying eggs or singing in the shower. I’m overwhelmed with sadness for everything that was lost, and filled with anger toward the people who took it away. My people—or at least, my old people. I don’t know who I am anymore, or where I belong.
That’s not totally true. Alex. I know I belong with Alex.
A little farther up the hill we come across a trim white house standing in the middle of a field. Somehow it escaped the blitz unscathed, and other than a shutter that has become detached and is now hanging at a crazy angle, tapping lightly in the wind, it could be any house in Portland. It looks so strange standing there in the middle of all of that emptiness, surrounded by the shrapnel of disintegrated neighbors. It looks tiny all on its own, like a single lamb that has gotten lost in the wrong pasture.
“Does anyone stay there now?” I ask Alex.
“Sometimes people squat, when it’s rainy or freezing. Only the roamers, though—the Invalids who always move around.” Again he pauses for a fraction of a second before he says Invalids, grimacing like the word tastes bad in his mouth. “We pretty much stay away from here. People say the bombers might come back and finish off the job. But mostly it’s just superstition. People think the house is bad luck.” He gives me a tight smile. “It’s been totally cleaned out, though. Beds, blankets, clothes—everything. I got my dishes there.”
Earlier, Alex told me he had his own special place in the Wilds, but when I pressed him for details he clammed up and told me I’d have to wait and see. It’s still weird to think of people living out here, in the middle of all this vastness, needing dishes and blankets and normal things like that.
“This way.”
Alex pulls me off the road and draws me toward the woods again. I’m actually happy to be back in the trees. There was a heaviness to that strange, open space, with its single house and rusting truck and splintered buildings, a gash cut in the surface of the world.
This time we follow a fairly well-worn path. The trees are still splattered with blue paint at intervals, but it doesn’t seem as though Alex needs to consult them. We go quickly, single file. The trees have been shoved away here, and much of the underbrush has been cleared so the walk is much easier. Beneath my feet the dirt has been tamped down over time by the pressure of dozens of feet. My heart starts thumping heavily against my ribs. I can tell we’re getting close.
Alex turns around to face me, so abruptly I almost slam into him. He clicks the flashlight off, and in the sudden darkness strange shapes seem to rise up, take form, swirl away.
“Close your eyes,” he says, and I can tell he’s smiling.
“Why bother? I can’t see anything.”
I can practically hear him roll his eyes. “Come on, Lena.