“He went so many times to her platform. He begged her for help, for forgiveness. He spoke with the doctors, too. He listened when they spoke to him through their megaphones and he shouted back, he shouted back all kinds of promises.
“The rest of us were close by, hiding in the trees. We listened to the things he said. He had an idea, a vision he called it, of what we could become. Not everyone agreed with it. When he couldn’t make the humans change their minds, some of them decided it was his fault. Ian’s. After all, he had come up with the idea, the plan, that let Malcolm get away.
“Some of them, they tried to kill Ian on their own. They challenged him or ambushed him in the trees, or tried to steal his food and starve him. He beat everyone who came for him. He killed them if he had to. So his enemies, they got smart, and they joined together. They made the first gang.
“That was called the Blame War. It was our first war. It was bloody and many died. The worst was the Battle of the High Oaks. Ian had retreated to a place on a hill, northwest of here. Malcolm was with him and swore oaths to him. Quinn was with him, too, Quinn who was always the strongest.
“The gang came for them on a rainy night. Nobody could see. The gang was led by Franklin, who was almost smart as Ian, and almost strong as Quinn. But not enough of either. Quinn was the great hero then and killed many. But in the morning, Ian was our leader. He told us what to do.”
Chapel’s eyes went wide listening to the story. It was amazing to him — this little world had its own history, its heroes and its villains. Walled away from the world, the chimeras had created their own struggles, their own nations.
“He had a way for us to live,” Samuel went on. “A way to survive. We would each go and make our own place, our own house, as far away from each other as we could stand. We would come together only when the food was thrown over the fence, and then only to share it out. It was too dangerous for us to be together.
“It worked, for a while. Winters were hard. It gets so cold here, and the snow is so deep, and it’s hard to stay warm. Some of us made new gangs and slept all in a house together, even though Ian said not to. Some of the gangs thought Ian was no good, and they wanted a new leader. There were more wars then. But Ian always won. When they challenged him, he fought back, though always he tried not to kill. Already there were so few of us left. He said the humans wanted us to kill each other off. To destroy each other, so they wouldn’t have to think about us anymore.”
Julia shot Chapel a glance, and he knew what she was thinking. From the sound of it, and what Ellie had told them, that probably wasn’t too far from the truth.
“Ian said we couldn’t give the humans what they wanted. Too long, we’d tried to be good boys. We did what Miss P and the doctors told us. We listened when the guards talked. Ian said they’d turned their backs on us, and now we had a duty to be better on our own. A duty to live.
“Still, we were chimeras. And that meant we fought. Chimeras always fight. So Ian made new rules. He made rules about how fights could go, and what you could and couldn’t do. No weapons. No killing someone who was already unconscious. No killing a chimera who couldn’t fight back — that rule was about me,” Samuel said, looking glum. “He had to make that rule so I could live.”
He shook his head and went on. “Most times, we followed his rules, and we lived. Nobody died for many years. We ate what was thrown over the fence. We lived in our own little houses in the woods. We stayed apart. Sometimes, one of us would steal food or take something from another’s house. Then we had to come together. The two chimeras who disagreed, the one who claimed he’d been stolen from and the one he said did it, they would fight. Only with fists, that was the rule. And then Ian would say who won, and it was the one who followed his rules better. We would stand in a circle, with the fighters in the middle, and the one who broke a rule first we would grab and pull away and beat until he was unconscious, and that was that.
“It worked. For years it worked. Until they made the last gangs.
“Alan was the leader of one gang. Him and his three, they said they were done. That Ian wasn’t a doctor, and he wasn’t like Miss P, and they didn’t have to do what he said. It started because there was less food; there were times, whole weeks, when no food came over the fence. What did come, Ian split up among us all, but Alan said no. He said only the strong should have food. He said I should be left to starve. Ian challenged him to come to the ring, to send the best man of his gang to stand in the circle and fight it out with Ian’s best man, but Alan said that was stupid. Ian had Quinn, who could beat anybody in the ring. Alan took a bunch of food that wasn’t his and said it belonged to his gang, and they were going to go live out by the pond, and if Ian wanted the food back, he could come and get it.
“Ian went alone, just to talk. He said, if Alan and his whole gang would come here, to the church, he would give them a bunch of stuff he’d been hiding. He said he had a radio and some books and a lot of medicine, and he would share it. It was a lie, but they didn’t know that.
“Ian waited for them here. He was waiting with Quinn, and Brody, and Malcolm, and Stephen, and with Harrison. They waited here in the church and they had knives they made from broken windows. Alan and his gang came, all four of them, and when they weren’t looking, Ian and his gang cut them and killed them.”
Chapel gasped. “The four in the schoolhouse,” he said. “The bodies hanging on the blackboard—”
“That’s them,” Samuel agreed. “He put them there and told me he did it for me. So I could eat and not starve. I keep the animals away from those bodies and make sure they don’t fall down.”
“The words next to them,” Chapel said. “It says ‘we did this together.’ ”
“Sure,” Samuel said. “Ian wrote that. Him and his gang, they broke the rules, they used weapons when they did it. They broke Ian’s own rules. But he said that was all right because they did it together. If they worked together instead of against each other, then the rules didn’t apply.”
Sharing the guilt, Chapel thought. Ian didn’t want them to turn on him so he’d made sure they were all implicated.
“This can’t have been that long ago,” Julia said. “Those bodies weren’t that old.”
Samuel nodded. “This was just last fall, when the leaves were red. Just before the Voice came.”
CAMP PUTNAM, NEW YORK: APRIL 14, T+47:59
“Some of them, some of Ian’s gang, they thought the Voice was a sign. They said the doctors had been waiting and watching, that they had wanted us to prove ourselves. That we’d passed some test, and that’s why the Voice came. Some of us just thought it was because there were so few left. The Voice needed us and wanted to reach us before we were all gone. All dead.” Samuel shook his head. “I don’t know. I just know when it came, it changed things. It changed everything.”
“How did the Voice come, Samuel?” Julia asked. “Where did it come from?”
“From heaven,” he told her.
“It came down from the sky,” he went on, when she wrinkled her nose in distaste. “You can call it what you want. It came on a parachute, a little parachute that got caught in a tree near here. It came down and it was talking already, even before we found it. It was saying the same thing, over and over. It said ‘Press the green button.’ It said that for hours while Ian and his gang, they stared at it, wondering if it was a trick, wondering what would happen. Quinn thought if he pressed the green button, they would all die. Brody thought it would make more food come. There was hardly any food then, and there’s been none since, so I guess Brody was wrong.