Chapter Twenty-Five

RAIGN – Raise the Dead

What had she done? What the fuck had she just done?

Rose crumpled against the wall, nearly catatonic but without the mercy of deafness. Every howl of rage, every bark of warning, every roar of fear thundered through fifteen feet of concrete and straight into her chest. A chorus of voices chanted her name and screamed every obscenity they could remember, even those she had reintroduced into their Glader vocabulary.

Rose tried to convince herself she'd done the right thing, that this way none of her boys would die, but why did it sound like they already were? Her vision smeared as sobs overtook her.

Wood clattered uselessly against rock as the Gladers jettisoned primitive weapons at the doors. Metallic clanking echoed inside, too, as the Builders hurled tools. It didn't matter. They weren't getting in here.

WICKED might have been full of sadists, but Rose was some kind of masochist. She willed her limbs to move her away from their anguish, but her body refused to listen. She pressed her hands flat against the Doors and rested her forehead between them, sending silently apologies to the other side.

She wanted to allow herself a few more minutes to wallow in her heartbreak, but the beetle blades above her tapped their feet like a teacher's fingers drumming while waiting for a student's answer. Whatever else she wanted, Rose had a duty to first protect the others.

I wonder what this place will make of you.

Newt's words from her first day looped in her head. For a while, Rose thought it had made her a liar and a monster, but she now knew unequivocally that she had always been a liar and a monster. No, the Glade had made her human again, and for that, she would be forever grateful. It was why she was giving up everything—they were worth the sacrifice.

"Goodbye," Rose whispered before turning back to the Maze.

Though she didn't exactly know where she was going, she had the beetle blades for a guide. They skittered forward in a line like shepherds leading her to the rest of her flock. There was no need to rush when she had all night to herself, so Rose walked, dragging her fingers along the wall. She didn't even spare a worry for a Griever—no reason for WICKED to send them when she was coming willingly—and the Maze wasn't even pretending to change.

Walking the Maze was even more impressive than running it. Rose was dwarfed by the magnitude of Thomas and Teresa's creation, the high walls, the nuanced hydraulics, the sheer physics of all of it. Even Rosalind would have bowed before such ingenuity.

And Newt had been right. The slower pace allowed more demons to tunnel under the wall in her mind. Boys being impaled on stingers, boys being ripped limb from limb by hacksaws and drills embedded in oozing insectile skin, boys being sliced in half trying to escape the Trials—all watched from behind the safety of screens in the underground honeycomb at WICKED. Rose remembered more and more death until she was convinced it was all she had ever known.

Was there ever a moment in any of her lives that wasn't steeped in horror?

Minho.

Her one perfect thing. Their one stolen night when nothing else had mattered.

Rose's feet stuttered.

It had all been worth it—every scheme, every Directive—worth it to taste his lips, to feel him, to love him. Rose had been trying to save the human race—to save him—and instead he had saved her.

What was he doing now? Probably threatening poor Renato's life no doubt or thinking of ten different ways he could break into the Maze. It would all be useless, of course, but that wouldn't stop someone as tenacious as Minho. And tomorrow when she was gone, he would comb the corridors for her, but he'd never find her. Rose wondered, after all was said and done with her Protocol, would WICKED ever tell him what happened to her? And even if they gave enough shits about her to do that, would there ever come a day after the world healed from the Flare that he could find a way to forgive her many sins?

When Rose came up for air from her pity party, it was dark in the ever-shadowy corridors. Only the brightest stars winked overhead in the sherbet sky.

Where was she? Rose had been mindlessly following her robotic tour guides as her consciousness embarked on a journey through the funhouse of horrors she called her life, and now she couldn't recall a single landmark she had passed.

Something didn't feel right. Rose was dizzy without moving. The air felt thinner, as though she'd been climbing a mountain, but the temperature kept rising, and with it came tangible steam that dampened the hair on her arms and collected in rivulets in the hollow of her throat. A strange smell joined the fray, something familiar but long-forgotten, though this memory didn't feel erased so much as a joyfully repressed.

Scrubbed potatoes and pungent cabbage. The aroma of boiled ham.

Rose grabbed her temples as pain ripped her in half. She crumpled to the floor screaming at the top of her lungs as her brain fractured like a geode being smashed to reveal the shards locked inside. Her vision whitened. She screamed until her throat went hoarse.

Until she became someone else.

Sunlight streamed in through the window, washing everything in gleaming brilliance. A steady breeze stirred the fragrances in the kitchen as thoroughly as the wooden spoon that teetered on the edge of the stove.

Drawn in by the smells of impending dinner and the sound of dulcet humming, she dragged a chair over to the sink and kneeled on it so she could watch slender white hands scour soil from brown, cratered skins.

"Come to help your Mam, Bridget?"

There was a smile in her mother's words, robust and brighter than the afternoon sun, overriding even her sharp r's and pretty accent. The woman glanced at Bridget sidelong, one orange eyebrow raised mischievously over her gray eyes. The steamy kitchen polished the rosy apple of her mother's cheeks while the fresh air matted the fine mist of sweat at her brow.

Bridget nodded and dove into the bin of potatoes she had helped dig up from their garden that morning.

"Good," her mother continued, "'cause your sister keeps getting in the way."

They glanced down at her mother's balloon of a stomach pressed against the countertop and shared a laugh. Together, Bridget washed the rest of the potatoes while her mother peeled them with a stubby knife. As they finished the last one, Bridget asked, "When's Dad coming home?"

Her mother smiled, her pale pink lips softening into a wistful grin. "You know your Dad. He'll be here exactly as he said, half past five. Now, help me with cabbage, would ya?"

As the pair finished prepping dinner and singing their favorite songs at the tops of their lungs, the sun dipped lower in the sky. Shadows lengthened and the temperature rose with the boiling water as they set the table and waited to surprise Bridget's father with a round of hugs.

But he didn't come at 5:30 or 5:31 or even the next several minutes after that.

As the clock rounded six, her mother paced the length of their little house, rubbing her belly like a magic lamp as though she could wish the man home.

Bridget's father was never late. Ever. It didn't matter whether he was gone for six hours or six months, if he told them he'd be back at 5:30 on the thirteenth of August, then that doorknob would turn the moment the second hand passed the twelve. Punctuality was his pride and joy, perhaps even more so than Bridget herself, and it was as important to him as the tucks on their sheets and the straight rows of their picture frames.

It was 8:02, and still he wasn't home.

The sun had vanished behind the craggy spikes of mountains, charring Bridget's world with apricot fire and inky silhouettes. Her mother's lithe figure had been patrolling the weathered floor boards for two and a half hours.

"Shh," she sang to her stomach, "all's well, Rosie. Shh."

Bridget did her best to draw her mind to anything other than the ice-cold colcannon on the dinner table and the empty head seat. She busied her fingers scrawling patterns against the fabric of their couch and then brushing the grain flat again. When the dread built in her chest, she moved to her tiny room, already crammed with her bed and the new addition of a crib.

Bridget didn't have a lot of possessions, and the ones she did have were mainly scavenged—the world didn't make many new things anymore, especially a mile up in a haphazard chain of houses too far apart to call a village, but she did have her fiddle. Though she'd only been practicing for less than a year, she felt a deep connection to it just as her daideó had promised. Whenever Bridget was at her loneliest or most afraid, especially when her father was on another tour, she played—so she had had plenty of chances to practice over the last year.

She reveled in the screeches of her bow over its strings, high and sharp and almost ear-piercing, but it was just what she needed to crowd out the nagging voice of a scared little girl in the back of her head. Bridget was on her second verse of "Tripping Up the Stairs" when the door to her room burst open.

Her mother raced inside, her wild pumpkin curls obscuring everything but her humongous eyes. She slammed the door and dragged the crib in front of it.

"Help me, Bridget! Help me push the dresser over here."

Bridget dropped her fiddle and grabbed one side of the dresser, letting her mother push the one side as the little girl guided the other in front of the door. Bridget's pet mouse, Gus, scampered around his cage as his home shifted beneath him.

"Get under the bed and never, ever come out unless I tell you to. Don't ya move, ya folla me?"

"Mam?" Bridget's voice cracked.

"Get!"

Tears muddying her vision, Bridget shimmied into the wedge of space under her bed until she was as far back as she could go. Her world was reduced to swollen ankles, dusty slippers, the dresser and the crib, and the door frame.

Other than Bridget's own muted sniffles, the only thing she could hear was metered tapping along the hallway on the other side of wall.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

It grew closer and closer until finally she heard a knock at her door.

"Colleen…"

Bridget thought she recognized the voice, but where it had once been filled with a firm, guiding baritone, this one was high-pitched and wild, like the howl of the wolves on a moonlit night.

They weren't knocks on the door anymore, they were bangs.

"Colleen! Colleen, for fuck's sake, open this fucking door right now!"

Bridget's mother's voice hitched as she choked on a sob. "Go on, David! I'm sorry, I love you, but you're mad with it. Ya can't stay."

"Colleen, just listen, baby, you're not well." The sharp edges to his voice dulled as Bridget's father seemed to return. His cadence was measured now with that confident rhythm he always had when he was teaching Bridget something new. "That's the virus talking, but it's all gonna be okay. I'm going to get you the help you need, and we'll figure this out. You just come out, come with me, and we'll talk, just talk like always, okay? You'll see everything's just fine.

"Tell me, baby, where's Bridget?"

Bridget could hear breaths firing from her mother's lips like an automatic weapon. Slippered feet shuffled further away from the door until they bumped against the baseboard. "She's staying over at a friend's house."

"Liar! You fucking liar!" he boomed and the room shook. "I heard her playing that fucking violin. Always grating my fucking ears. I know she's here, and she wants to see her Daddy.

"Bridget, honey, come see Daddy. Daddy's missed you. He needs to take you away from Mommy. She's not well, baby, she's sick. You need to open this door and let Daddy in so he can take you somewhere safe until Mommy's better."

Bridget cowered under the bed. Her legs trembled, and she worried she was telegraphing exactly where she was. She didn't know who was on the other side of that door, but it wasn't her father. She couldn't let that man get her.

"She's not here, David. Please, we have to get ya help."

Another thunk on the other side of the door, like a head knocking against it instead of a fist. The knob rattled a few times though, for now, the lock held.

Then silence. A long, long draft of silence.

Bridget's eyes scoured her small window of sight. Where had he gone? Did he leave? Would he ever? What was going on?

Her mother was still rooted against the back wall, but Bridget could see the tremble that rippled down into her mother's ankles.

Bridget wasn't sure how long she'd been under the bed, but her limbs cramped and her stomach ached. She had to pee and she felt like throwing up even on an empty stomach.

After an eternity of silence, Bridget ventured a finger out from under the bed frame. The effect was immediate.

"Colleen… Colleen. Colleen!"

Bridget's father's hand punched through the bedroom door as though it was made of paper. Splinters of wood showered down onto the dirty carpet, a few pieces tumbling under the bed.

The hand groped around the door until it found the knob and unlocked it. On the other side, her father slammed his body against the wood, the door banging against the barricade, but it couldn't hold, not against the unrelenting rage on the other side. A few more slams and the dresser tipped and the crib slid back.

With a clatter, Gus's cage overturned, and the little brown creature scampered toward the safety of the bed and his redheaded owner only to be squashed with a sickening crunch under a black boot. Bridget clamped her hand over her mouth to silence her scream as she jammed her eyes shut. She burrowed back into the shadows hoping to emerge in a wonderland like one of her favorite books, but the only thing she hit was the wall.

The world was reduced to blackness and cruel sound. Crunching wood. Throaty roars. Scratching, smashing, tearing, slapping. And pleading, so much pleading, high-pitched and heart-wrenching. Bridget covered her ears, but it wasn't enough.

Her mother sobbed. "David, leave now, I'm warning ya. Don't make me hurt ya. David, please. David, Rosie! Rosie, Rosie, Rosie! Stop. God, think of your daughters, David!"

And then there was screaming, so loud it could break windows or shatter the world—Bridget's world.

Feral grunts and snarls joined the fray along with something that sounded like gnashing teeth.

And then suddenly it was quiet.

Except for the rabbit thump of Bridget's heart, nothing moved. She didn't even think of leaving her hiding spot; her mother hadn't told her it was okay.

A bloody hand groped into the darkness beneath the bed. Bridget recognized a tattoo on the forearm, an eagle with antique script unraveling below its talons: "This We'll Defend." And there were newer tattoos along with it she didn't recognize, not made with ink but ribbons of filthy blood pooling beneath skin.

A face dipped down and wedged between the frame and the floor, luminous white skin mottled with black rivers and a deranged smile stained red. It was a broad, rectangular face with thick black stubble and a bold L-shaped jawline, a face Bridget had thought she knew.

But the eyes… The eyes were wild, almost as though they had no lids anymore. She could see their full whites, fractured with onyx, and the irises—once a sage green—had been overtaken by enormous pupils.

"There you are, sweetheart. Come to Daddy. Don't worry, your mother can't hurt you anymore."

Bridget's eyes slid past the man-creature to slender fingers curled upward like an unfurling flower. An aura of orange curls veiled the now-lifeless doll tossed on the floor behind him.

"Bridget, come out. Daddy's just trying to help everybody. Come on, come out so Daddy doesn't have to come and get you." Her father's fingers coiled under the bed frame, and Bridget noticed the tip of one of them was missing—just gone, like the man who had once lived inside this sickly skin.

She was terrified and confused, but she didn't have any choice. Bridget wriggled out from under the bed, crawling through a thin stream of blood emanating from the shrouded sleeping beauty behind them. Red coated Bridget's hands and oozed down her forearms to her elbows. She was swimming in death. She was drowning in it.

Her father waited with both hands on his hips, same as he often did when he supervised their projects together in the shed, their sanctuary where he had taught Bridget how to tinker and build.

"Good girl. Smart girl. That's my girl," he cooed in a raspy voice as he ran a hand over her crown, the still-open wound on his fingertip pumping a geyser of blood into her already red locks.

Bridget tried to be brave, tried to check on her mother, but she couldn't make it past her mother's waist. Her beautiful legs were folded like broken toothpicks and dappled with sprays of crimson. Her mother's skirt bunched around her narrow hips like wind-blown garbage, and her other slackened hand cradled the blood-soaked paring knife she'd used to prepare her husband's welcome home dinner. And then there was that still mountain of a stomach once full of life, not only full of rot.

Bridget's father loomed in front of her, bleeding, two bursts of reddish black on either side of his abdomen, though they didn't seem to faze him.

"You understand, don't you, baby? Mommy was sick. It's Daddy's job to take care of the sick people."

"Rosie..." Bridget sobbed, surprised she still had a voice left.

"Rosie was sick, too, because Mommy was sick. I had to take care of them, you know that. And you're sick, too, sweetheart."

Things clicked into place. The sudden violence had numbed Bridget, but it was wearing off in favor of something new. She had to get out, get away, and get help. She willed her voice to be braver than she felt: "And you're going to take care of me?"

"Mm-hm, that's my job, right? Take care of the sick people? Now be a good little Crank and let Daddy cure you." Her father stooped down and plucked the knife from her mother's fingers as he smiled at his daughter with all the warmth of an escaped lunatic.

Bridget had lost her family and her voice, but she had not lost her ability to run. She was small and fast and nimble, and she hurdled over the overturned dresser and bolted down the hall. In less than a minute, she plunged headlong into the night. Bitter, arid air buffeted her blazing skin.

The day had been hot, but the night was icy. Dew had already gathered on the rocks and made every footstep perilous as Bridget raced in the only direction she could think to go. She charged into a copse of wind-battered pines she often played in, running uphill toward the Whitlocks, their closest neighbors.

With only a half-moon and muscle memory to guide her way, Bridget scrambled on all fours up the steep incline. It was the hardest way to go, but it was the way she knew best, and she relied on the clustering shadows to hide her.

"I'm coming for you, baby!" Her father's voice echoed off the mountaintops. "I can smell the Flare in you, my little Crank. Rot, rot, rot. I smell your disease. You can't run from this, darling. You can't run from me."

But Bridget did run, higher and faster until she emerged from the woods and found the honey of lamplight in the Whitlocks' windows. She just had to cross their garden, and she could be safe again.

As she crested the lip of hillside, her feet spun on flakes of sandstone and sent her sliding belly first into her father's waiting arms. Her feet wheeled on the tops of his boots as her body refused to give up running. They were locked in a deadly father-daughter dance.

Bridget screamed at the top of her lungs, but it wasn't loud enough. No one rescued her.

"You'll be cured soon enough," her father reassured in her ear as his fingers, even the bloody nub, dug into her waist.

Bridget was small and her father was all-powerful, and he held her firmly with one hand as the other reached into his back pocket. He withdrew the paring knife, the silver glinting like his teeth in the moonlight, and turned her around in his arms so that the only thing she could see was the all-consuming blackness of night. Her father lined the blade under her left ear and, without another word, slit Bridget's throat.

In spite of the gaping wound at her neck, her hands flailed for the knife and grabbed its handle, her fingers curling around her father's. With the last of her strength, Bridget drove her father's hand backward, blade first into his abdomen. He grunted and dropped her in the grass before regaining his composure. He stuttered forward, one foot lagging behind the other.

"You filthy little Crank, I'll—"

It was a clear night, but thunder boomed across the mountain range, startling sleeping birds from their roosts. Bridget's father dropped beside her, one ever-wide eye lining up perfectly with hers.

It was dark and she was dying, so the blackness came from around her as well as within her, but with her last waking thought, Bridget noted how peaceful her father looked with that tidy bullet hole in his brain.