The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [46]
He riffles around on a table behind him and picks up a small jar of pins. He pours out a handful and I see they all have colored heads on them: red and green and yellow and blue.
“The Protectorate spent a lot of time sending scouts all over the world to figure out what and where was still alive, and this is where they kept all that information. When we took over we found their records.” His expression is unreadable in the dim light—sad? Resigned? Angry?
“There’s a key to the map.” He fumbles through the pins and holds up one with a green head. “Green means Protectorate-controlled. Red is infected and blue means they lost contact and don’t know the status.”
Ox turns his hand, letting the rest of the colorful pins fall back into the jar, some cascading to the floor below and scattering along the water-stained concrete.
Like everyone else, I knew the Protectorate sent Recruiters out to fight the hordes, trying to reconquer land. But I had no idea they had so much information about the entire world. I feel like I’ve been starving and someone just set out a buffet in front of me. I start to spin back to the map, to take it all in, when Ox grabs my arm.
For the first time I realize how haggard his face is, how bruised the skin under his eyes. “This is what you need to know, Annah.” He physically turns me until I’m staring at the map, his grip tight.
“A black pin means there’s nothing. Overrun by the dead. Gone. Never heard from again.”
I stare at the wall, eyes traveling from pin to pin. Almost all of them are black. “That can’t be right,” I say. The entire country—the entire world—is covered with black pins.
Ox drops his arms, moves away from me, every gesture screaming exhaustion. He knows what this means—has known. It’s what keeps him from sleeping and eating.
It means most of the world is gone.
I struggle to focus as I step closer to the map, searching for evidence that I’m somehow wrong. That not everything is gone. I scan the walls from pin to pin, trying to find some color in the emptiness of the black. And then I see it: a tiny green pin down the coast from the Dark City, on a peninsula jutting out between the Forest and the ocean. I reach a finger toward it but then hesitate, eventually letting my hand drop.
“What’s going on?” I ask him. “What is this?” My voice is shaking, my entire body trembling.
He says nothing and I turn on him. “Why did you show this to me? I don’t understand.” I want to fight, to prove this man and this map wrong. I’m not willing to believe any of what Ox is telling me.
“This is the world, Annah. This is where we are now.” He shoves himself from the desk and I notice he winces at the effort of it. Slowly, he walks to the wall and pulls out a pin from the middle of the country. “This was a city. At the Return it had a population of five hundred thousand. After the Return they tried to hold on. They were overrun fifty years ago.”
He drops the pin and pulls out three more nearby. “These were tiny suburbs around it, little enclaves that were holding on and then the walls gave out.”
Running his hand over the map, he dislodges the pins, and they scatter to the floor with tiny metallic plinks. “All these places—these were survivors. These were people trying to make it and eventually failing.
“This one.” He holds another underneath my chin. “This fell only a year ago. And this one”—he takes another—“barely lasted the Return.”
“How do you know these things?” I whisper.
He slams a hand against the wall. “This is what the Protectorate did. It was their job to keep it all together. To know where the safe zones were—to figure out how to survive. We have their books and their notes. We have their maps and letters. We know everything they knew about trying to make this world work so we could live in it.”
I back away from him slowly, putting the heft of a table between us. “Maybe there’s some place out there that’s not on the map.” I scramble for some ledge of hope to hold on to