Savage Drift

^{CHAPTER FOUR} JOSIE

As hungry as they are, the kids are skittish at mealtimes. They’re scared to go to the dining hall for breakfast. It’s called Plaza 900. I don’t know why it has the fancy name of Plaza 900. Maybe it’s a Missouri in-joke. I’m not from here. I don’t know.

“Quiet! Quiet down now!” Mario shouts today. It’s Freddy who gets them riled up. Always Freddy, who is sort of unhinged and shrill. Can’t settle down. He’s like a flea, always jumping and even biting sometimes.

“Settle down, here we go,” Mario tells the kids.

Once, of course, Excellence had been a nice dorm. Color scheme of cream and aqua. Flecked carpet and artful paintings on the walls. Like a nice hotel chain.

Now everything that could be pried off the walls has been. There are stains on the walls and the floor—coffee, blood, tobacco spit, urine, who knows.

The men are out already. Now we pass through their hall on the way to the front door.

Design flaw.

We have to go through the first-floor Men’s hall to get into the front hall and get outside. The Men’s hall is a zoo, these men being more animal now than they ever thought they’d be.

We walk, single file, down the Men’s hall, along with the seventy other women, children, and old people from the second floor.

“Stick together now,” Mario says, more to offer reassurance to Heather and Aidan than instruction.

“Sssstick together,” says a wild-eyed creep, lurching from his room.

Heather screams and the man laughs.

He’s smelly and skinny with just a few wisps of hair.

“Back off,” I growl.

He sticks his tongue out at me and I can smell his stanky breath. God-awful.

“All right, all right,” Mario says. “Out we go.”

We step out into the cold, clean morning air and cross the courtyard.

Autumn’s in effect and it’s getting cold. I feel it as we walk across the deadland stretch of dried grass and cement that is the courtyard.

None of us have real winter clothes. I gave my jacket to Freddy, in a moment of softheartedness, so I now wear the two shirts I have at all times. Along with my dirty jeans and the EZ-on mules that used to belong to Mario’s wife. They fit me, almost.

Mario gave his sweater to Lori, perhaps more for safety than for warmth. She’s chesty and had only her one paperweight thermal top. She was a little nipply.

I think of all the clothes we used to donate through our church. Where are the cast-off clothes of the free citizens of America? Do they feel no pity for us?

We’d wear anything—doesn’t have to fit. Doesn’t have to be clean. People would kill, truly kill, for a change of underwear.

The guards give clothing to their favorites. We are nobody’s favorites.

So now Mario and I feel the cold, as we head to Plaza 900 for breakfast.

The sky is the color of silt, with a creamy peach band at the horizon. It’s the prettiest thing we’ll see today, no doubt.

I breathe it in, but the beauty catches in my lungs, like I inhaled a bit of gravel.

“The drifts come in the night, I heard,” Heather whispers to Aidan and Freddy, with her lisp on the s.

“Wrong,” Freddy blurts out. “They LOOK like night. They’re black clouds that zoom in.”

He darts ahead, arms raised like a vampire’s closing in on prey. “And then BOOM, they hit a town and everyone’s dead.”

Lori scoffs, “That’s not how the compounds work, Freddy.”

“Says you,” he snorts. “I was out there, too, you know.”

“Shut it, you two,” Mario says. “Those drifts are rumors, nothing more. Josie and I saw the bombs go off. They blasted those compounds out of the air. Right, Josie?”

The kids look to me.

I shrug.

Mario keeps trying to get me to talk to them, to take interest.

I think he thinks it would be good for me.

I stuff my hands in my pockets.

“Can I go ahead?” I ask. “It’s cold.”

“Nope,” Mario says. “We stick together. That’s what we do.”

As if. As if this little band of kids could ever matter in the face of this hellish prison. As if this little group of kids is any kind of group at all.

We go in together.

“Find a table, kids. Lori, take Heather by the hand,” Mario says. “Josie and I will bring the eats.”

He has to talk loud over the bedlam.

(Because Mario is officially the sponsor to all of us, he works the system a bit. According to the rules, the little kids should stand in line with us. But he waves their passes and they don’t have to brave the lines, which can get rough. Also the ladies serving the food have a soft spot for Mario. No surprise there—he’s the only nice person in the whole camp, salty as he can be.)

Even without the fights and the brawls that inevitably break out (we’re all type O, after all), the sound of six hundred–plus people eating and talking and clattering their silverware always gives me a headache and an anxious knot in my stomach.

The kids go off to find a table in the corner and Mario and I get on line.

I keep my eyes on the floor. That’s the best way not to engage.

Before the disaster, Plaza 900 was probably a very cool place to be. Luxurious, even with different food stations scattered in the giant hall. From the signage, you can see that before it was Pizza Time! Or diners could have Zen Gen Sushi, or Tío’s Burritos or Omelets Your Way!

They all serve the same dishes now: Everyone Eats Oatmeal! And for lunch, Always Soup! And for dinner, Eternal Spaghetti!

They serve us in shifts.

Excellence and Responsibility eat from 6–7 a.m.

Discovery and Respect eat from 7–8 a.m.

Gillett and Hudson from 8–9 a.m.

There is pushing in the food lines, and fighting. Every meal. Over oatmeal. (Actually the fighting isn’t over the oatmeal, but over the sugar we get to put on the oatmeal. Two packets apiece and people are always accusing one another of taking more.)

We get in line.

I’m shoved. I take no notice. Mario’s shoved. My head goes up.

“Good morning, Mr. Scietto,” comes a voice from behind.

It’s Carlo. The leader of the Union Men, one of the three gangs of idiots that vie for control of the Virtues.

One’s all Latinos and is run by a guy named Lucho. There’s the Clubbers out of the Discovery dorm. They have clubs they hit people with. They also have a way with words.

And the one based in our dorm calls itself the Union, and its members are called Union Men.

I don’t want to take them seriously. I want to blow them off, pretending that they are just men playing at being hoodlums. But they hurt people.

Sometimes they hurt people in public. While the guards look away.

Carlo puts his hand on one of Mario’s thin arms.

My blood amps up for a fight, immediately.

The sounds from the rest of the room seem to dim and my sight somehow takes in only Carlo, and the three Union Men with him. One broad, one tall, one teenager.

“It’s time for you to start paying your share,” Carlo murmurs. He’s dark-skinned. Shaved head. Has watery brown eyes and a calm, dignified “comportment” that seems fashioned after some Bond villain. He almost speaks with a British accent.

He wears a mostly clean button-down shirt every day, tucked into tight black jeans. A mostly clean shirt takes a lot of resources here.

“You’re holding up the line,” Mario grumbles.

“Mario Scietto, you’re a mystery to me. Do you know who gives us tribute? Do you? The old and the weak,” Carlo says.

“Maybe you should look in a mirror, Scietto,” says the teenager. He has a thin, wispy mustache and the teeth of a smoker.

“Brett’s right,” Carlo says. “You truly fit the description. Both old and weak. And those kids rely on you. Mr. Scietto, what if something happened to you?”

“Leave us alone,” I choke through gritted teeth.

“Oooh,” Carlo purrs. “She speaks. We were beginning to think you were a mute, little sister.”

“I’ve heard her talk,” says the homely Brett guy.

I have no memory of him whatsoever.

“Someone tried to take a towel away from one of her brats and she nearly took his head off.”

I do remember the jerk who’d tried to snatch one of our two towels from Heather, but I have no memory of this Brett.

“Yeah,” he continues. “She’s feisty.”

I hate that word. It’s used to describe any woman with an opinion.

“Move the LINE!” some deranged someone shouts from behind us.

I push forward, taking Mario gently by the shoulder, trying to move him away from the Union Men, but they push through the milling people to catch up with us.

We put our trays on the line and the cafeteria workers set out bowls for us.

“You got four little ones, right, mi amor?” the lady asks Mario.

“Good morning, Juanita. Yes. There are six of us total.”

Juanita spoons the porridge into six bowls and starts sliding them across the glass to us.

“All we want today is a percentage of your rations, Mario,” Carlo says, lifting a bowl off Mario’s tray. God knows what they would want tomorrow.

“That’s not for you, pendejo!” Juanita bellows.

“It’s okay,” Mario tells the serving lady. “I’m not hungry today.”

Juanita slips me our twelve sugars as Mario and I move forward. I put them in my pocket.

We push past the Union Men. I see the kids at a table in the corner. They look small and scared as usual.

“And I’ll take those sugars.” Carlo holds out his hand.

“Go to hell,” I say.

Carlo steps close and puts his foul-smelling face up in mine.

“We’re already there, sweetmeat,” Carlo murmurs.

“Give him the sugars, Josie,” Mario directs. “Go on, now.”

BAM, BAM, BAM goes my heart. Oh, the bloodlust is up and I want to hurt Carlo. I could hurt him so much. And Brett. Entitled, arrogant idiots. Hurt them both.

And I see Mario there, standing next to me, a light, God help me, shining in his eyes.

I take our sugars, most of them anyway, and shove them into Carlo’s hand.

“See? She knows what’s good for her,” the creep Brett says with a smile.

He slides his hand onto my hip and pulls me to his body.

“We got a table, Uncle Mario!” chirps Heather, pushing through the crowd to us.

I see Lori standing, craning her neck, watching us anxiously.

“Come on,” Heather insists. I follow Mario as Heather leads us away.

“Don’t worry, Uncle Mario,” Carlo calls. “You’re under our protection now.”

Mario’s hands shake with the tray.

He glances at me and sees my expression.

“Never mind,” he says. “One less bowl of mush. Big whoop.”

“We need the food,” I say.

“We do what we gotta do to stay safe,” he murmurs. “Heck, maybe it’ll do us some good.”

I let him think that and I swallow down what I know to be true: give in to a bully and he always wants more.