An Apple for the Creature

The feeling goes on for a long time, until finally Melanie gets used to the smell the way the children in the shower on Sunday get used to the smell of the chemicals. It doesn’t go away, exactly, but it doesn’t torment her in quite the same way: it becomes kind of invisible just because it doesn’t change. The hunger gets less and less, and when it’s gone, all gone, Melanie is still there.

The book is still there, too: Melanie reads it until daybreak, and even when she stumbles over the words or has to guess what they mean, she’s in another world.

It’s a long time after that before Miss Mailer comes again. On Monday there’s a new teacher, except he isn’t a teacher at all: he’s one of Sergeant’s people. He says his name is John, which is stupid, because the teachers are all Miss or Mrs. or Mister something, so the children call him Mr. John, and after the first few times he gives up correcting them.

Mr. John doesn’t look like he wants to be there, in the classroom. He’s only used to strapping the children into the chairs one by one, or freeing them again one by one, with Sergeant’s gun on them all the time and everything quick and easy. He looks like being in a room with all the children at the same time is like lying on an altar, at Aulis, with the priest of Artemis holding a knife to his throat.

At last, Anne asks Mr. John the question that everybody wants to ask him: where the real teachers are. “There’s a lockdown,” Mr. John says. He doesn’t seem to mind that the children have spotted him for a fake. “There’s movement west of the fence. They confirmed it by satellite. Lots of Hungries coming this way, so nobody’s allowed to move around inside the compound or go out into the open in case they get our scent. We’re just staying wherever we happened to be when the alarm went. So you’ve got me to put up with, and we’ll just have to do the best we can.”

Actually, Mr. John isn’t a bad teacher at all, once he stops being scared of the children. He knows a lot of songs, and he writes up the words on the blackboard; the children sing the songs, first all at once and then in two-part and three-part harmonies. There are lots of words the children don’t know, especially in “Too Drunk to Fuck,” but when the children ask what the words mean, Mr. John says he’ll take the Fifth on that one. That means he might get himself into trouble if he gives the right answer, so he’s allowed not to; Melanie knows this from when Miss Justineau told them about the Bill of Rights.

So it’s not a bad day, at all, even if they don’t have a real teacher. But for a whole lot of days after that, nobody comes and the children are alone. It’s not possible for Melanie to count how many days; there’s nothing to count. The lights stay on the whole time, the music plays really loud, and the big steel door stays shut.

Then a day comes when the music goes off. And in the sudden, shocking silence the bare steel door slams open again, so loud that the sound feels like it’s shoving its way through your ear right inside your head. The children jump up and run to their doors to see who’s coming, and it’s Sergeant—just Sergeant, with one of his people, and no teachers at all.

“Let’s do this,” Sergeant says.

The man who’s with him looks at all the doors, then at Sergeant. “Seriously?” he says.

“We got our orders,” Sergeant says. “What we gonna do, tell them we lost the key? Start with this bunch, then do B to D. Sorenson can start at the other end.”

Sergeant unlocks the first door after the shower room door, which is Mikey’s door. Sergeant and the other man go inside, and Sergeant’s voice, booming hollowly in the silence, says, “Up and at ’em, you little fucker.”

Melanie sits in her chair and waits. Then she stands up and waits at the door with her face to the mesh. Then she walks up and down, hugging her own arms. She’s confused and excited and very, very scared. Something new is happening. She senses it: something completely outside of her experience. When she looks out through the mesh window, she can see that Sergeant isn’t closing the doors behind him, as he goes from cell to cell, and he’s not wheeling the children into the classroom.

Finally her door is unlocked. She steps back from it as it opens, and Sergeant and the other man step inside. Sergeant points the gun at Melanie.

“You forget your manners?” he asks her. “Sit down, kid.”

Something happens to Melanie. It’s like all her different, mixed-up feelings are crashing into each other, inside her head, and turning into a new feeling. She sits down, but she sits down on her bed, not in her chair.

Sergeant stares at her like he can’t believe what he’s seeing. “You don’t want to piss me off today,” he warns Melanie. “Not today.”

“I want to know what’s happening, Sergeant,” Melanie says. “Why were we left on our own? Why didn’t the teachers come? What’s happening?”

“Sit down in the chair,” the other man says.

“Do it,” Sergeant tells her.