He doesn’t know why he should care what some feral kid says to him, but he does.Īlph shrugs. The schoolie feels heat coming to his face. “It doesn’t take guts to steal from your own mother.” Then he looks the schoolie in the eye. “He’s got guts, that’s for sure.”īut Alph isn’t impressed. One of the others laughs-a buff kid named Raf, who could have been military if he hadn’t gone feral. I took just enough so that she won’t notice it’s gone for a while. “She doesn’t think I know the combination to the safe, but I do. Other kids ooh and aah at the glittering pile of jewelry, but Alph stays silent. He hands it to Alph, who looks at him dubiously, then dumps out the contents on a dusty table beside him. The schoolie takes off his backpack and pulls out a brown paper lunch bag, but there’s no lunch in it. “So what are you wasting my time with today?” Alph asks, getting right to the point. “Nah, the Juvies don’t care-they’re too busy chasing down ferals outside of the wild zone to care about the ones in it. “Schoolie, how many times do I gotta tell you not to come here? One of these days the Juvies’ll follow you, we’ll all be screwed, and it’ll be your fault.” He’s being fawned over by a pretty, if somewhat filthy, feral girl. Right now, however, Alph isn’t being much of a terror. He’s got a scar on his face from a feral flash riot that gives him character and makes his smile impressively twisted. Alph is a key member of what the media likes to call the Terror Generation. Now that he’s feral, he does the same, on a different scale. The kid is a year older, but he always protected the younger ones. The schoolie, however, knows his real name, back from the days when they would play in the war-torn streets. The others don’t know the kid’s real name. It’s a very different kind of living than the “schoolie,” as they call him, is used to. They lounge on scavenged furniture they laugh they fight. The theater is the living space for about forty feral teens. The place is scattered with knickknacks and bits of scavenged civilization, the way a bird might feather its nest with scraps of paper woven into the twigs. The old carpet is ripped up and gathered into piles that the theater’s new residents use as beds. It used to be a theater, but the rusted seats are all stacked in the corner. A wannabe.” Then, gripping his arms, they lead him deeper into the building. “Why you always comin’ here, Schoolie?” one of his assailants asks. Because there are other feral gangs that would use that weakness against them. They push him hard against the wall-hard enough to bruise, but that’s okay. Immediately he’s grabbed by two teens waiting there. In a narrow alley he pushes open a side door that has only one hinge to keep it upright and steps inside. Angry spray-painted politics shout out from the bullet-marred bricks, and the windows are boarded over or just left broken. The buildings around him are mostly condemned. If they knew where he really goes on those days, he can’t even imagine what they’d do to him. Whenever he’s late from school, he always has an excuse they’ll believe. Easier to point fingers than actually do something about them.īut for the schoolboy this place and the people holed up there have a certain allure that he cannot explain. The Choice Army blames all the wild zones on the Life Brigade, and vice versa. Police have more important things to deal with, and not even the warring militias will go there anymore. No one who values their property or their lives will venture there. It’s called the wild zone, and every city and town has one. It’s the line that marks the border beyond which law and reason cease to exist. He turns down a side street that’s infested with pigeons by day and rats by night, crossing an invisible line that everyone knows even without being able to see it. Things are much more serious for him now. They played Lifers and Choicers with plastic guns and toy grenades, never caring which side of the game they were on, as long as they were on the same side as their best friends.īut those childhood days are gone. He and his friends played in the burned-out cars when they were little. It’s the world he knows, the world in which he grew up. Crosses in the ground marking spots where soldiers and civilians on either side died fighting for their cause. He’s not going home.Īs he races through the streets, signs of the Heartland War are all around him. He is expected to be at home fifteen minutes after school lets out. The schoolboy bursts through the door, the first one out of the building when the bell rings.
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