Read Fragments for Free Online Page A

though Marcus thought some of it felt
     obligatory. A handful of people shouted back in disagreement, but the tenor of the
     room had changed, and Marcus knew the argument was done; Woolf didn’t look happy about
     it, but after Hobb’s words he didn’t look eager to keep calling for execution, either.
     Marcus tried to get a look at the prisoners’ reactions but still couldn’t see them.
     Isolde was muttering, and he stooped back down to hear her.
    “What did you say?”
    “I said he’s a stupid glad-handing bastard,” Isolde snapped, and Marcus backed away
     with a grimace. That was not a situation he wanted any part of. She insisted that
     her encounter with Hobb had been willing—she’d been his assistant for months, and
     he was very handsome and charming—but her attitude had soured significantly in the
     months since.
    “It doesn’t look like we’re going to be deliberating any further,” said Tovar. “I
     call for a vote: Marisol Delarosa and Cameron Weist will be sentenced to a life of
     hard labor on the Stillwell Farm. All in favor.”
    Tovar, Hobb, and Kessler all raised their hands; a moment later Woolf did the same.
     A unanimous vote. Tovar leaned down to sign the paper in front of him, and four Grid
     soldiers walked in from the wings to escort the prisoners out. The room grew noisy
     as a hundred little conversations started up, people arguing back and forth about
     the verdict and the sentence and whole drama that had unfolded. Isolde stood up, and
     Marcus helped her into the hall.
    “All the way outside,” said Isolde. “I need to breathe.” They were ahead of most of
     the crowd and reached the outer doors before the main press of people. Marcus found
     them a bench, and Isolde sat with a grimace. “I want french fries,” she said. “Greasy
     and salty and just huge fistfuls of them—I want to eat every french fry in the entire
     world.”
    “You look like you’re going to throw up, how can you even think about food?”
    “Don’t say ‘food,’” she said quickly, closing her eyes. “I don’t want food, I want
     french fries.”
    “Pregnancy is so weird.”
    “Shut up.”
    The crowd thinned as it reached the front lawn, and Marcus watched as groups of men
     and women either wandered off or stood in small groups, arguing softly about the senators
     and their decision. “Lawn,” perhaps, was misleading: There used to be a lawn in front
     of the high school, but no one had tended it in years, and it had become a meadow
     dotted with trees and crisscrossed with buckling sidewalks. Marcus paused to wonder
     if he’d been the last person to mow it, two years ago when he’d been punished for
     playing pranks in class. Had anyone mowed it since? Had anyone mowed anything since?
     That was a dubious claim to fame: the last human being to ever mow the lawn. I wonder how many other things I’ll be the last to do.
    He frowned and looked across the street to the hospital complex and its full parking
     lot. Much of the city had been empty when the world ended—not a lot of people eating
     out and seeing movies while the world collapsed in plague—but the hospital had been
     bustling. The parking lot spilled over with old cars, rusted and sagging, cracked
     windows and scratched paint, hundreds upon hundreds of people and couples and families
     hoping vainly that the doctors could save them from RM. They came to the hospital
     and they died in the hospital, and all the doctors with them. The survivors had cleaned
     out the hospital as soon as they settled in East Meadow—it was an excellent hospital,
     one of the reasons the survivors had chosen East Meadow as a place for their settlement
     in the first place—but the parking lot had never been a priority. The last hope for
     humanity was surrounded on three sides with a maze of rusted scrap metal, half junkyard
     and half cemetery.
    Marcus heard a surge of voices and turned around, watching Weist and Delarosa emerge
     from