Last Wild Boy by Hugh MacDonald Read Free Book Online

yellow wooden pencils of various lengths. It must be some sort of schoolroom within the church, Nora thought. There was a stack of red hardcover books, all identical, beside the pencils. Nora picked one up and read the words emblazoned in gold letters on the front: “Holy Bible.” She opened the cover and read the inscription: “High Park Presbyterian Church.” Must be some old religious text, she thought to herself. She slipped the book back on the shelf and left the room.
    She entered another small room, which was empty aside from a coat rack hung with metal hangers, one of which held a miniature blue blazer. She removed it from the hanger and inspected it. It looked strange to her. At first she didn’t know why, but then she noticed that the buttons were on the wrong side. She had never seen a coat with buttons like that. She looked at the label inside. “Frisky Fellows: clothes for active boys.” So this had been the jacket of an outsider child. That meant this church must have been wrecked sometime before the uprising, when outsiders still lived among the insiders. The building had probably been covered over and forgotten, or perhaps used as an underground classroom after the transformation.
    Perhaps the jacket had belonged to a young outsider who had been born too late. Nora wondered what had happened to him. Was he killed following the transformation? Did he live to see the world improve, go from violence and hatred to a place of peace and contentment? Had he become a slave to the insiders after they had successfully wrested the earth from the muscled arms of his forefathers?
    Suddenly a shrill cry pierced the air. Adam had woken up. Nora ran down the hallway to the main room and shut the door to the corridor tightly behind her.
    Adam settled in against her body when she picked him up, his tiny pink tongue bobbing in and out of his mouth.
    â€œYou must be hungry again,” Nora said, shifting him to one arm and grabbing a tube of nutrifier with the other. She removed the cap and held the nipple up to Adam’s mouth. He sucked at it greedily. Nora rocked him back and forth and sang to him as he fed. Holding him close felt good, and she was disappointed when he dropped off to sleep again.
    She set him back on the cot and watched him breathe under the orange glow of the oil lamp. She didn’t know how long she’d sat like that, but she suddenly started awake, realizing that she’d been gone from the summer house for hours and she ought to get going. Alice would be starting to panic by now. But she didn’t want to wake Adam up, and she knew she probably wouldn’t get another chance to explore the basement.
    The cot squeaked and moved under Adam as she rose. He stirred, but stayed asleep. Nora picked up the lamp and hurried back up the length of the hall and into the room opposite the one she’d been in earlier. Its ceiling had partially collapsed onto a huge metal tank of some kind, perhaps a boiler for some sort of a heating system. She looked around. Against one wall ran a wooden workbench. From a panel above it hung a variety of carpenter’s tools. Under the bench sat a rusted lawn mower. Nothing much of interest here.
    A storage room next door held dusty stacks of tables and chairs, pitted with rust where the paint had cracked and peeled away. The next room proved more interesting. Its walls were lined with books. This is a room she could spend some time in — but for now she wanted to explore as much of the underground hideaway as possible.
    The next room was stocked with gardening tools and equipment: hoes, shovels, and forks, trowels and clippers. Rows of tin boxes with faded pictures of flowers, fruits and vegetables were lined up along shelves on the walls. She pried open the cover of one and found that it was still full of seeds. She wondered if they would grow after all this time. She squeezed a few of the seeds between her fingertips. They seemed