“Go in the back bedroom then, and lie down,” Mrs. Talbot said.
“But—” Trey wasn’t sure he could trust himself to sleep ever again.
“Doctor’s orders,” Mrs. Talbot said. “You’re safe now. You’ll be hallucinating soon if you don’t get some good sleep. And change out of that horrible uniform — it’s giving me the creeps!”
Trey obeyed all of her commands, because it was easier than resisting. He lay on the bed, but every time he closed his eyes he saw a different horror: The Nezeree warden looming over him, yelling, “Give me my fax!” The mob swarming around him screaming, “Food! Food! Give us food!” The Population Police official back at the Grants’ house, demanding, “Give me your I.D. card.”
I don’t have an identity card anymore, Trey thought The Nezeree warden surely knows now that I’m an enemy. How much longer before we’re caught?
Mrs. Talbot knocked on his door and came into the room holding up a white tablet and a glass of water.
“Sleeping pill,” she said. “You probably need it.”
“Is Mr. Talbot okay?” Trey asked.
“I’m hoping he will be,” she said. “Thanks to you. I–I’m stunned. I didn’t think anyone could save him.”
Trey swallowed the pill.
“I didn’t either,” he admitted.
And then he slipped into the deepest sleep of his life, one without dreams of any kind.
When he woke up it was dark outside, and the house was quiet. And Trey was starving. He found an ordinary shirt and pants waiting at the foot of his bed, and he put them on. Then he crept out of his room and down the hall.
All his friends were clustered around the fireplace in the living room.
“I told him to go on without me, but Trey said, ‘No!’” Mark was saying. ‘And before I could say anything else, he jumped out into the crowd and shouted, ‘Gimme! Gimme! Hey wait, some of the food rolled under the truck!’ He tricked the crowd into moving the truck back on its wheels. And then, cool as a cucumber, he tricked them into running away from the truck, then picked me up, just like Superman, and—”
“You’re making it sound easy” Trey objected. “You aren’t telling how scared I was.”
Mark turned to look at him.
“You didn’t look scared to me,” he said.
Is that how all heroic epics work? Trey wondered. They only tell about the bravery and leave out the fear?
“Have some popcorn,” Lee said, but he was looking at Trey in awe.
Trey grabbed a handful.
“I want to hear about your adventure, Mark,” he said. “How you and Nedley set up our escape at Nezeree.”
“Oh, that,” Mark said modestly “There’s not much to tell.”
“Tell it anyway,” Trey said.
Mark shrugged.
“My leg hurt so bad I could hardly think,” he said. “I’m not sure I was even really awake when you got out of the truck So, the next thing I know, this scary-looking Population Police officer’s sitting next to me. I guess I was delirious, because I just started moaning, ‘Liber, liber’— because it saved me that other time, you know? And this officer, Nedley starts looking at me and looking at me—”
“I was scared to death you were a setup, and you were trying to trick me into betraying myself,” Nedley said from the couch behind them. Trey glanced back — Nedley had also changed out of uniform into civilian clothes.
“And Nedley starts saying, ‘Shut up! Quit that!’ And I knew it really meant something to him. So I asked for his help,” Mark said.
“Don’t tell the story like that,” Nedley laughed. “What he said was ‘Quit pretending you’re a bad guy I need your help, and I need it now!’ I was so surprised I almost drove the truck right into the infirmary wall.”
“I didn’t say that, did I?” Mark asked.
“Sure did,” Nedley said, chuckling. “And then Mark was the one who came up with the idea to make it look like he was kidnapping everyone. He thought nobody would shoot at us if there was a chance of ‘innocent’ Population Police guards being hit”
“They shot at us anyway” They said. He stared into the fire, with its ever-changing flames.
“Well, yeah,” Mark admitted. “But maybe not as much as they would have otherwise.”
“So I took Mark on into the infirmary, and they set his leg and cleaned out his wounds,” Nedley said. “They weren’t gentle, either. They aren’t, with prisoners. But then five minutes later, Mark’s out hopping from truck to truck in the prison parking lot, cutting the tires. I would have laughed myself silly watching him, if I hadn’t been so scared we were going to get caught.”
“I can’t believe it worked,” Mark said.
“I can’t believe you got us and Mr. Talbot out of prison,” Lee said.
“That was thanks to Jonas Sabine,” They said. “He planned it all.”
They were all silent then, and Trey knew that the others had heard about the Sabines.
“Jonas was a good man,” Mr. Hendricks murmured softly “He was my friend.”
“Maybe they haven’t executed him yet,” Trey said. “Maybe they’re still interrogating him—”
“No, they announced his death on TV,” Mr. Hendricks said heavily “On the regular channels. The Population Police are trying to discourage all dissent by showing what happened to Jonas. It was — it was a horrible death.”
“God rest his soul,” Mrs. Talbot said. “God help us all.” And somehow this was the scariest thing of all, to hear.
Mrs. Talbot sounding so solemn and reverent She’d changed since the last time Trey had seen her, when she’d bragged about polishing her fingernails, when she’d smashed expensive sculpture just for spite.
I’ve changed, too, Trey thought We all have. But what did that mean about their futures?
Chapter Thirty-Four
For a week, Trey and his friends lived like invalids. They ate, they slept, they lay around. Sometimes they watched television, but it was almost always Aldous Krakenaur making glorious speeches in front of a cheering crowd. Sometimes Trey felt feisty enough to jeer back at the screen, “Oh yeah, and what are you not showing us? How many people starved today?” Mostly they all sat in silence, trembling before Krakenaur’s shouting image, until someone got up the gumption to snap the television off.
Trey knew his friends needed the time to heal and recover. Maybe he did too. He found himself reacting oddly to the bits of news that dribbled in. It was two or three days before he asked Mr. Hendricks anything about his fellow classmates at school.
“I know they wouldn’t be outside making noise,” Trey said. "But~they're all okay over there, aren’t they?”
Mr. Hendricks sighed heavily.
“No,” he said. ‘After the Government fell… after the Population Police took over… they closed down all the schools. Temporarily, they said. They came and took away all my students for work camps. They took away the ablebodied teachers, too….
Trey could do nothing but stare at Mr. Hendricks in horror.
“I guess my wheelchair saved me,” Mr. Hendricks said. “That and the garden Lee had all the students plant back in the spring.”
And then Trey understood that everyone was gone, that the Population Police had left Mr. Hendricks behind to die. They didn’t know that Mr. Hendricks had plenty of food to survive the winter — plenty, even with nine extra people around.
But Trey said nothing more to Mr. Hendricks. He just went and sat down to watch more television with Lee.