Three (Article 5 #3)(10)

“What kind of stuff?” I asked.

Her smile was triumphant. “Oh, you know. Just your run-of-the-mill treason.”

*

MAKEUP tips. Gossip about movie stars. And sometimes mixed in, political stories about the rise of the Federal Bureau of Reformation. Concerns about President Scarboro’s moral platform, and what that meant for women’s rights and religious freedom. The writers snuck those stories in between glamorous photo shoots and new fashions. They never advertised them on the front covers. They must have known the danger of what they were writing, even then.

“What are you looking at?” Rebecca asked.

I fought the sudden urge to keep it for myself and take it with me. The memories were too sharp: going home after the arrest, learning that all my things had been taken by the MM. My best friend Beth had managed to snag only a few items—one of my mother’s magazines that we’d later lost in the tunnels in Chicago among them. It seemed wrong to take this now, when it could mean so much to someone who might one day come back.

Still, it hurt to hand it over to Rebecca.

I winced at the tracks my boots left over the carpet and wandered down the hallway toward the back rooms, bypassing the kitchen.

The bedroom door squeaked as I pushed it open. Just inside was an antique wooden dresser, covered with a doily and a small silver comb. I cringed at my reflection in the round mirror atop it—my cropped hair flat and fading back from black to brown, my skin too pink from the sun.

And then, beside me in that reflection, I saw the two bodies lying on the bed, and screamed.





CHAPTER


3


DEAD. Inhuman. Brown shells of skin and lips drawn back into leathery snarls. Holes where there should have been eyes. Painted skeletons dressed up in moth-eaten clothes.

My heel caught in a floor rug and I stumbled backward into the wall. It knocked the wind out of me, or maybe I didn’t have any to begin with, because when I tried to swallow another breath I couldn’t.

The bodies were moving now, coming alive on their floral comforter. A whispering, scuttling sound, and the clothing shifted. I was paralyzed, my muscles frozen. I’d landed near the foot of the bed, and watched in horror as a faded pink house slipper twisted slightly on its boney ankle and then slid off an old weathered foot as if pulled by some invisible hand.

From the slipper erupted a legion of roaches, each the length of my thumb, flowing like lava from a volcano.

I scrambled backward into the hallway, then leaped to my feet. Chase appeared, saying my name, but I couldn’t hold on to it. I stared past him through the door, to Sean, who’d arrived moments after Chase, now grimacing over the bodies. They weren’t moving. It was the roaches that were moving. Hundreds of them. They were everywhere.

I jolted back, swiping my hands down my arms, shaking out my hair. My skin itched like they were on me, under my clothes and on my neck and in my shoes. Get them off get them off get them off.

Chase grabbed my face between his hands, and finally my gaze locked on his. There was a steadiness there that grounded me and slowed my pulse.

“Why are they here?” I asked, suddenly angry at them—the dead people. They shouldn’t have scared me. I’d seen worse. Much worse.

“Let’s go get some air,” he said.

I peeled his fingers away.

“Why didn’t they clear out like everyone else?” There wasn’t any sign of violence; it was like they’d laid down to sleep and not woken up, and for some reason this bothered me even more.

“I don’t know.”

“They should have evacuated.” The government had cleared this area years ago.

I swiped at my arms again, feeling the tickle on my skin.

“Maybe they didn’t want to.” He chewed his bottom lip, looking into the room.

His words shifted my fear to something more solid, something stronger. I’d had it backward. These people hadn’t given up, they’d made their stand. Maybe that was all we really got: a choice to control our own fate.

“I hate roaches,” Sean was saying. “They’ll eat anything, you know. Glue. Trash. Fingernails. They even eat each other. Roach cannibals. Disgusting.”

Chase gave him a look. “Sean.”

“They can survive without their heads. I bet you didn’t know that.”

“Sean,” said Chase. “Let it go.”

“Right.”

Behind them something had caught my eye. On the floor, where the shoe had landed, a strip of silver peeked out from beneath the thin bedspread. Chase stepped aside when I gave his forearm a small squeeze.

“There’s something under the bed,” I said.

Sean, pale and damp with sweat and rain, gave a grunt and motioned toward the bodies.

“After you,” he said “I like my fingernails just fine where they are.”

Mouth pulled tight, Chase kicked the shoe out of the way and then swept his leg beneath the mattress, knocking out a tarnished silver box the size of a briefcase but twice as thick, with a combination lock. Roaches crawled up his legs and he hastily brushed them to the floor.

I asked, “What do you think it is?”

“Something good,” said Sean. “Otherwise it wouldn’t be locked.”

Chase knelt and tried to pry it open, but to no avail. The contents inside slid and clanked together as he carried it out into the hallway, where the stench was not so intoxicating.