The streets were chaos, a mass of disorder shaken up like dice and spilled across the land.
But that wasn’t the scary part. The scary part was how normal everything felt—as if the world had been arcing toward this moment since the day its rocky surface first cooled and the oceans ceased to boil. Remnants of suburbs lay in scattered, trashy ruin; buildings and homes with broken windows and peeled paint; garbage everywhere, strewn about like the tattered pieces of a shattered sky; crumpled, filthy, fire-scorched vehicles of all sorts; vegetation and trees growing in places never meant for them. And worst of all, Cranks ambling about the streets and yards and driveways as if merchants were about to begin a massive winter market: All items half-price!
Newt’s old injury was acting up, making his limp worse than usual. He stumbled to the corner of a street and sat down heavily, leaned against a fallen pole whose original purpose would forever remain a mystery. In the oddest, most random of occurrences, the words winter market had rattled him. He didn’t understand fully why. Even though his memory had been wiped long ago, it had always been a strange thing. He and the others recalled countless things about the world that they’d never seen or experienced—airplanes; football; kings and queens; the telly. The Swipe had been more like a tiny machine that burrowed its way through their brains and snipped out the specific memories that made them who they were.
But for some reason, this winter market—this odd thought that had found its way into his musing on the apocalyptic scenes around him—was different. It wasn’t a relic of the old world that he knew merely by word association or general knowledge. No. It…
Bloody hell , he thought. It was an actual memory.
He looked around as he tried to process this, saw Cranks of various stages shambling about the streets and parking lots and cluttered yards. He could only assume these people were infected, every one of them, no matter their actions or tendencies—otherwise why would they be out here, out in the open like this? Some had the awareness and normal flow of movement that he still did, early on in that infection, their minds still mostly whole. A family huddled together upon wilting grass, eating scavenged food, the mom holding a shotgun for protection; a woman leaned against a cement wall, her arms folded, crying—her eyes revealed the despair of her circumstances, but not madness, not yet; small clusters of people talked in hushed whispers, observing the chaos around them, probably trying to come up with plans for a life that no longer had plans anyone might desire.
Others in the area were seemingly in-between the first and last stages, acting erratic and angry, uncertain, sad. He watched a man march across an intersection with his young daughter in tow, holding her hand, looking for all the world as if they might be going to a park or to the store for candy. But right in the middle of the street he stopped, dropped the girl’s hand, looked at her like a stranger, then wailed and wept like a child himself. Newt saw a woman eating a banana—where had she gotten a buggin’ banana?—who stopped midway through, tossed it on the ground, then started stomping it with both feet as if she’d found a rat nibbling at her baby in a knocked-over pram.
And then there were, of course, those who had, without a doubt, traveled well past the Gone, that line in the sand that divided humans from animals, people from beasts. A girl, who couldn’t have been older than 15 or 16, lay flat on the ground in the middle of the nearest road, babbling incoherently, chewing on her fingers hard enough that blood dripped back down onto her face. She giggled every time it did so. Not far from her, a man crouched over a chunk of what looked like raw chicken, pale and pink. He didn’t eat it, not yet, but his eyes darted left and right and up and down, empty of sanity, ready to attack any fool who dared try to take his meat away. Farther down that same street, a few Cranks were fighting each other like a pack of wolves, biting and clawing and tearing as if they had been dropped in a gladiator’s coliseum and only one would be allowed to walk away alive.
Newt lowered his eyes, sank onto the pavement. He slipped the backpack from his shoulders and cradled it in his arms, felt the hard edge of the Launcher he’d stolen from Jorge’s weapons stash on the Berg. Newt didn’t know how long the energy-dependent, electric-firing projectile device would last, but he figured it couldn’t hurt to have it. The knife resided in the pocket of his jeans, folded up, a pretty sturdy one, if it ever came to hand-to-hand battle.
But that was the thing. Like he’d thought earlier, everything he saw around him had become the “new normal” of sorts, and for the life of him he couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t terrified. He felt no fear, no apprehension, no stress, no innate desire to run, run, run. How many times had he come across Cranks since escaping the Maze? How many times had he almost soiled his pants from sheer terror? Maybe it was the fact that he was now one of them, quickly descending to their level of madness, that stayed his fear. Or maybe it was the madness itself, destroying his most human of instincts.
And what of that whole winter market thing? Was the Flare finally releasing him from the hold of the Swipe he’d been subjected to by WICKED? Could that perhaps be the ticket to his final journey past the Gone? He already felt the most acute and abject despair he’d ever felt in his life, abandoning his friends forever. If memories of his life before , of his family, began to invade him without mercy, he didn’t know how he could possibly take it.
The rumbling sound of engines finally, mercifully, ripped him from these increasingly depressing thoughts. Three trucks had appeared around the corner of a street that led away from the city, although calling them trucks was like calling a tiger a cat. The things were massive, 40 or 50 feet long and half that in height and width, heavily armored, windows tinted black with steel bars reinforcing them against attacks. The tires alone were taller than Newt himself, and he could only stare, wondering in awe what he might be about to witness firsthand.
A horn sounded from all three vehicles at once, a thunderous noise that made his eardrums rattle in their cages. It was the sound he’d heard earlier from inside the Berg. Some of the surrounding Cranks ran at the sight of the monsters-on-wheels, still smart enough to know that danger had arrived from the horizon. But most of them were oblivious, looking on much as Newt did, as curious as a newborn baby seeing lights and hearing voices for the first time. He had the advantage of distance and plenty of hordes between him and the new arrivals. Feeling safe in the most unsafe of places, Newt watched things unfold—though he did unzip his backpack and place one hand on the cool metal surface of the stolen Launcher.
The trucks came to a stop, the blasting noise of their horns ceasing like a shattered echo. Men and women piled out of the cabins, dressed to the hilt in black and gray, some with red shirts pulled over their torso, chests armored, heads covered with helmets as shiny as dark glass, all of them holding long-shafted weapons that made Newt’s Launcher look like a toy gun. At least a dozen of these soldiers began firing indiscriminately, their aim fastened on anyone who moved. Newt didn’t know a single thing about the weapons they used, but flashes of light shot from their barrels with a noise that reminded him of Frypan—when he’d bang a heavy stick against a warped piece of metal they’d found somewhere in the nether parts of the Glade. To tell people his latest and greatest meal was ready to be devoured. It made a vibrating whomp sound that made his very bones tremble.
They weren’t killing the Cranks. Just stunning them, temporarily causing paralysis. Many of them still shouted or wailed after they’d fallen to the ground, and continued to do so as the soldiers dragged them with the least amount of tenderness possible toward the huge doors at the back of the trucks. Someone had opened them while Newt observed the onslaught, and beyond those doors was a cavernous holding cell for the captives. The soldiers must’ve eaten a lot of meat and drank a lot of milk because they picked up the limp bodies of the Cranks and tossed them inside the darkness as if they were no more than small bales of hay.
“What the hell are you doing?”
A voice, a tight strum of words, came from right behind Newt’s ear, and he yelped so loud that he just knew the soldiers would stop everything they were doing and charge after him. He spun around to see a woman crouched next to him, shielded by the fallen pole, a small child in her arms. A boy, maybe three years old.
Newt’s heart had jolted at her voice, the first time he’d been startled since coming outside, despite all the horrors developing around him. He couldn’t find words to respond.
“You need to run,” she said. “They’re doing a full sweep of the whole damn place today. You been asleep or what?”
Newt shook his head, wondering why this lady bothered with him if she felt it so important to get out of there. He searched for something to say and found it in the haze that filled his mind lately.
“Where are they taking them? I think I saw a place from the Ber—I mean, I’ve heard of a place where they keep Cranks. Where Cranks live. Is that it?”
She shouted to be heard over the commotion. “Maybe. Probably. They call it the Crank Palace.” The lady had dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes. She looked as rough as Newt felt, but at least those eyes had sanity with a dash of kindness thrown in. The little boy was as scared as any human Newt had ever seen, eyes cinched tight and his arms wrapped around his mum’s neck like twisted bars of steel. “Apparently there are people who’re immune to the Flare”—Newt bristled at that word, immune , bristled hard, but kept silent as she went on—”people who are kind enough or stupid enough or just paid a crap-ton money enough to kinda take care of them at the Palace until they’re… you know. Un-take-care-able anymore. Although I heard the place is getting full and they might be giving up on that whole idea. Wouldn’t surprise me one damn bit if this roundup ends at the Flare pits.”
She said the last two words as if it were something anyone with half a brain knew all about, an image that seemed appropriate for their new world.
“Flare pits?” he asked.
“What do you think the constant smoke on the east side of the city is?” Her response said it all, though Newt hadn’t noticed such a thing. “Now, are you coming with us or not?”
“I’m coming with you,” he said, each word popping from his mouth without any consideration.
“Good. The rest of my family is dead and I could use the help.”
Even through the shock of her words, he recognized the self-serving motive in coming to him; otherwise he would’ve suspected a trap. He started to ask a question—he didn’t know exactly what yet, something about who she was and where they were going—but she’d already turned around and sprinted in a direction away from where the soldiers were still tossing lifeless but living bodies into the hold of the trucks. The wails and cries of anguish were like a field of dying children.
Newt threw his backpack onto his shoulders, cinched the straps, felt the dig of the Launcher against his spine, then took off after this new friend of his and the little one clutched to her chest.
