with no earbuds.
Here were photo albums, pizza crusts, Bibles, half-bitten doughnuts, a book Michael recognized from freshman English, Story of a Girl. Here was—oddly heartbreaking and heartwarming—a plastic sheriff’s belt with orange-tipped guns.
The room held lives, in other words.
Michael whirled, looked out the windows: the glass was covered with protective mesh, which pixelated the world, and that was actually perfect, because what Michael saw outside was something out of Modern Warfare.
A courtyard, dotted with statues.
Government buildings—anonymous, the color of drizzle, pocked with a trillion grimy windows—hedging the plaza on two sides.
And, in the courtyard: a network system of barricades.
Layer beyond layer of chain-link fence stretched for an acre at least. The fences’ tips were coiled with razor wire, which swayed back and forth in the wind, and whistled a thin, tinny tune.
Between these layers, spaced evenly, were sandbagged gun posts, outfitted with heavy artillery. Here and there were high shooting towers.
Beyond the fence, arranged in a rough arc, were Hummers. Beside the Hummers, a camouflage-colored fuel truck.
And at the very end of the courtyard, positioned before a statue of a coal miner, was a freaking tank.
Michael felt a grin spreading on his mouth. It faltered, held frozen a moment. Then it spread to a point of almost-ache. I can’t see the mountains. The thought hovered before him, almost incomprehensible. The mountains and monsters of the gray zone were gone, blotted out by things that people had made. He had battled back to the sane and charted sections of the map. To The End, Michael thought.
I won.
I saved myself. I saved us.
He stood there, wrapped up in the sunlight and silence of the Safe Zone, and it seemed to him that the moment tasted almost holy.
And then, in a thin, cracking voice, he shouted: “HEYYYYY, YOU CRAZY MUTHAFUGGING WORLD, YOU JUST GOT P’OWNED!
“I BEAT YOU!” he said, then paused because this was making his headache throb like the world’s worst cavity. Then went on, ’cause it was worth it. “YOOOOOU GOT OWNED, BONED, AND STALLONED! I TEABAG YOU!” He began, half realizing it, to jump up and down. “IIIII—TEEEEEABAAAG—YYYY—”
“—oh Christ—”
There was someone at the door to the Senate chambers. Michael looked over his shoulder and saw it was a girl. For one single instant, he was embarrassed by her witnessing him smack-talk Earth, but then he was flooded with a happiness so intense that he was surprised by his own small tears. Day twenty-four, he imagined himself writing in his journal. Saw first new person in three weeks who IS NOT CRAZY OR DEAD.
“So sorry!” she cried.
The girl’s hands flew up to her face: the tray of food she’d been carrying flipped to the ground. She fled, slamming the enormous oak double doors behind her.
Didn’t get a good look, he mind-wrote. But I think she’s kinda cute.
Also: uh, maybe is crazy.
Michael blinked, wondering why the girl was horrified. Then he realized why, and the horror was his.
He was naked.
Ohcrapohcrap, he thought.
“Ohcrapohcrapohcrap,” he hissed desperately, and, several seconds too late, cupped himself.
“So so emphatically sorry!” said a voice through the door.
Michael stood there, his mouth working open and closed. Bwah, he started to say; but that was not, strictly speaking, English. A long time since he’d held a mature conversation, but he felt reasonably sure even his A-Game might not have been up to the task of smoothing out Surprise Nudity as Introduction.
“Uh,” he said, “it’s cool.”
And cold. Understand me, girlie: in here, it is cold.
“I thought that you would have . . . There were supposed to be, like, clothes left on your cot.”
There were: a blue V-neck like a nurse would wear, and a pair of camouflage pants. Michael tugged them on, wondering how and why he’d wound up, y’know, nude. But despite his bewilderment, he smiled at the door with a little awe, jittery with embarrassment but also adrenaline and a buzzy joy. He was talking to a person. A girl. A human. In the Safe Zone.
He stepped around the apple juice burbling out of a plastic bottle on the overturned tray. “H-hi?” he called through the door.
Flatly: “Yes.”
“You can come in,” Michael said.
“No thank you.”
“I mean I’m dressed now.”
“And yet,” she said.
Michael smiled a little.
He waited for her to go on. But all he could hear was that rusty tune of the razor-tipped fence outside. Michael placed his hand on the cool oak of the door, leaning against it. “Hey.”
No answer.
“Hey, I get it,” he said. “You saw me naked. Embarrassing. Obvz. But you, I’m sorry to say,