Authors: S.M. McEachern
“Not to mention the sunglasses,” Hayley said. “Are you people going to be able to take them off without going
blind or whatever happens to you?”
Reyes crossed his arms over his chest and looked at her. “
You people?
”
Hayley had the decency to blush. “I meant, you know, the sun hurts your eyes and, well, I don’t think anyone else will be wearing sunglasses in Ryder’s city. It’ll be hard for you to blend in wearing them.”
Reyes’ mouth hardened into a tight line. “Being raised underground in a coalmine
wasn’t a choice.”
I raised a hand to stop his next words, knowing exactly where the conversation would lead. “Although I take exception to the way she said it, she has a point. We’ll make it there by morning, and I’m not going to wait around until night when I can take these glasses off to go find the men.”
“Give me those disgusting clothes,” Hayley said. “I’ll be a recruiter.” She took an
outfit off the rails and pulled a tunic on over her own clothes, gagging at the smell. “So the plan is to blend in with the comings and goings of the community, right? Or is there security to get through?”
Eli and Jin waded out of the river, their net half full of fish. Jin threw a couple more to the bears on the way by.
“There’s usually a few guards patrolling the edge of the city,” Eli
said. He flicked his head toward the wagon. “From a distance, we won’t look out of place.”
“And if we do look out of place?” I asked.
Hayley held up her rifle. “Then we start shooting.”
A nervous excitement ran through me. This could be it, the end of the mission. By this time tomorrow, Jack might actually be standing next to me. I cast a glance toward my belly and thought,
Almost, little
guy. Daddy’s almost with us again.
Eli and Jin tucked into the fish, eating them raw, as they had the day before. The rest of us mixed up some packaged mush.
“So what can we expect between here and the city?” Summer asked Eli.
Eli shrugged. “More of the same, I suppose. We need to be on the lookout for cats and Ryder’s men. There are dog packs that live in the old city, but they usually
don’t venture too far from it. Oh, and we need to find a trail and stick to it. The area was heavily populated before the War, and there are hundreds of holes left behind from old houses. Experienced recruiters know their way through, so we’ll find the most worn trail.”
“Got it,” I said. The sun was low, and it was our turn to guide the cart while the others got some rest.
“Are we ready then?”
Hayley asked, climbing into the back of the cart.
Reyes climbed onto her vacated bike. “Let’s ride.”
We had barely left the foothills when we stumbled across a tiger standing guard over his kill. We could tell by the bike and the shredded uniform it was Jonas.
Why had he come this far? Why had he even chosen to leave the safety of our group? It was senseless.
Hayley alighted from the
cart clutching her rifle, her jaw clenched and eyes shiny with tears. She shot the tiger three times and was ready to go for a fourth when I yelled at her to stop. The tiger was down, a bleeding hole between his eyes, and she was wasting bullets.
Even though I was sure the animal was dead, Reyes and I approached it with caution. Another growl, not too far away, startled all of us. Upon closer
inspection, I saw that the tiger’s hindquarters were gouged and bleeding and surmised that he must have been the victor over what was probably a fight for Jonas. I didn’t even want to imagine the terror Jonas must have felt.
“Poor guy. He must have been running scared,” I whispered to Reyes.
Hayley came up behind us, dropped to her knees, cut off Jonas’s name badge, and took his watch. Then
she checked his pockets and took the personal items she found there. “For his family,” she said in a shaky voice.
His rifle was on the ground a few feet away, and she snatched it up and threw it in the back of the cart.
Reyes picked up his bike. “Can we fit this back there?” he asked.
“I’ll ride,” Hayley said.
No one argued with her. She was obviously too upset to rest.
We got the
bears moving again and had barely vacated the area when two tigers sprang from the brush and began to fight over what was left of Jonas.
At some point you’d think I would have become accustomed to the constant huffing and grunting of the bears. And I hated to be annoyed with them because they really were gentle, docile giants who were working very hard for us. But now that we were in the
thick of Ryder’s territory, I wanted to slip through the forest as silently as the People could. I didn’t want to attract attention, but if I did, then I wanted to hear it coming. Eli said recruiters usually stopped for the night because, unlike us, they couldn’t see very well in the dark. With night stalkers like tigers and dogs, not to mention the remains of old building foundations they could
fall into, they were safer in a group by a fire with guards keeping a lookout.
Summer, Reyes, and I rode beside the wagon as it ambled along the trail. None of us talked, not even in hushed whispers. It was a moonless night, perfect for us but not great for Hayley. We didn’t want her to turn on the bike’s headlight, so she was forced to stop driving and get in the back of the cart. It was a
tight fit, but we managed to get the extra bike in the back too. There was some discussion of leaving it behind, but I did the math. Five bikes and ten people if we found Jack, Naoki, and Talon. Although we had come up with a plan to get into the city, we still hadn’t talked about getting out. The bikes would make for a quick getaway.
As Eli had suggested, we steered clear of the old city. That
made me happy. Even from this distance, the decaying skyscrapers that towered over the forest were just as eerie at night as they had been against the stark blue sky. It felt like the eyes of millions of ghosts were watching our every move, ready to wipe out what was left of humanity and finish the job they’d started three hundred years before. I knew it was nonsense. There was no such thing as
ghosts. Yet I was relieved when we finally passed the city and put some miles between us.
The sky was just beginning to lighten when we saw the end of the forest. We grabbed the ropes and brought the cart to a stop. Hayley jolted awake, reaching for her rifle. I put my fingers to my lips.
I shook Eli awake. “I think we’re here.”
He sat up, suddenly alert, and exited the wagon. We all crept
to the forest edge.
The sight that greeted me wasn’t at all what I’d expected. A tall wooden fence, about twelve feet high, ran the equivalent of two of our city blocks. About a mile of open terrain stretched from us to the fence, without so much as a single plant, tree, or patch of moss growing on it. Once we left the forest, we would be out in the open with nowhere to hide.
“You didn’t
say anything about a fence,” I said to Eli.
“There wasn’t one the last time I was here.”
“How long ago was that?” Hayley asked.
“Fifteen years.”
“There,” Reyes said.
My eyes followed in the direction he pointed, and I saw a figure move along the top of the fence. “How many? Just the one?”
“Another one at the other end,” Hayley said.
“This isn’t what we expected,” I said. I’d
imagined dwellings, roads, and some kind of plastic industry, with a stream of people coming and going that we could just blend in with and enter the city undetected.
Hayley’s lips tightened into a straight line. “Okay. So we have to breach a perimeter. We need a concrete plan.”
“We have a concrete plan,” Eli said. “That wagon should still get us in.”
“It just got a lot riskier though,”
I said. “Maybe Reyes, Summer, and I should go in on our own. If they start shooting arrows, our suits will protect us.”
“Wearing your sunglasses?” Eli asked and shook his head. “They’re not going to open the gate for you.”
“I was thinking about it last night,” I said. “If Ryder really is taken in by technology, getting in is going to be easy. Getting out, especially if they catch on to us,
is going to be a lot harder.”
“We’re taking our weapons,” Hayley said firmly.
“I’m not giving up mine,” Reyes agreed.
“If they see your weapons on the way in, tell them they’re part of the treasure you found,” Eli said. “They won’t suspect they actually work.”
“What about finding Jack, Naoki, and Talon?” I asked. “Do they keep the recruits locked up or in a specific area?” Eli’s eyes shifted
away from mine, like he was avoiding me. I got a real bad feeling. “What are you not telling us?”
He briefly looked at his feet. “When I was there, they had a detention area for recruits who resisted joining.”
Hayley took a step closer to Eli. “Look, you need to tell us
everything
you know before we walk in there. I’m not going in blind.”
“I can tell you what I remember,” Eli said. He pointed
to a stone chimney that rose above the fence. “That’s the plastic factory, and I recall the detention area wasn’t far from it. The market, where they take recruits to be appraised, is in the center by Ryder’s house. I’m not sure what’s at the other end. I only made it to the market, spent a night in detention, and then got carted off to a plasticmine.”
“So if they don’t shoot us on sight,” Hayley
said, “we can expect to pass through some kind of security before we’re given permission to enter. We better make sure they see the bait on the way there.”
“You mean the bikes?” I asked.
“Bikes, weapons, whatever gets their greedy little hands rubbing together. The more tempted they are, the more likely we’ll gain entry.”
“Or be shot and our treasure stolen,” Reyes said. “Maybe Sunny’s right—the
three of us should go in wearing our suits.”
She leveled a stern look at him. “I didn’t come all this way to stay behind, and I’m already wearing the get-up.” She ran a hand down the filthy animal-skin outfit.
The sun was almost up, and wisps of smoke began to curl out of the compound. I assumed people were waking, stoking fires, and starting their day. Was Jack waking too?
My mouth suddenly
went dry, and my hands started to shake. If Jack wasn’t there, I didn’t know where else to look. If he wasn’t there, it meant he was truly lost. The memory of Gaia’s psychotic rage flashed through my mind. At the time, I couldn’t understand why she
blamed
me for shutting off the tagging system on the range, until I realized it was because she had been holding on to the hope for two years that
her husband was still alive. When faced with the moment of truth, she was too scared to look.
Just like I was terrified right now.
“Time is wasting,” I said. “Let’s go knock at the gate.”
Jack
The first heaves gripped me before I was even fully conscious. Choking, I rolled to my side and let the vomit spill from my mouth. It was the same foul-tasting,
thick white stuff I had retched up the first time I’d been shot with devil’s blood. My stomach convulsed again, and as my body expelled the vile, pasty liquid, it registered that I was back in the shed. As usual, my hands were tied. A shuffling somewhere behind me alerted me that I wasn’t alone.
When the vomiting finally stopped, I rested my head on the wooden floorboards to catch my breath.
I was pretty sure the person behind me was Teegan, and she was probably scared out of her wits to be locked up with a man puking all over the place. I needed to collect myself and put on a good face for her. My stomach twitched a few times, but nothing else came up. When I was sure I was done, I rolled onto my back and faced her. She not only looked frightened, she looked really sick.
“Hey,
Teegan,” I said. “Sorry about that.”
I sat up, wincing at the unbearable pressure in my head. I’d do anything for a painkiller. But more than that, I needed water.
Only one plate and one cup sat on the dinner tray. The cup was empty, but the food was untouched. Teegan wasn’t eating, which wasn’t a good sign.
“Do you know how long I’ve been here?” I asked.
She nodded. “Since dinner.”
“A couple of hours then?”
She nodded again.
“You’re not feeling very well, are you?”
She shook her head.
Even if I could get her out of here, where would I take her? The only medical supplies I knew of were at the Dome. It had taken almost two weeks for us to get here, and the way back to the Dome was all uphill. Yet, if I were successful in escaping, would my conscience allow me to
leave her behind? A sick kid would slow me down, but not helping her would haunt me for the rest of my life.
I cursed Ryder again.
The small shiv I had retrieved from the broken spade was still fastened to my inner thigh. I could feel the pointy end cutting into my skin. I set about working my bound hands from my back to my front, grimacing against the pain it caused in my head. With every
movement, the shiv dug in deeper, and a bright red stain grew on the leg of my pants. Teegan’s eyes grew wide as she fixated on the stain.
“I’m okay. It’s just a little scratch,” I said. It was more than a scratch, but I knew it would be completely healed within a few hours. “Can you turn around and give me some privacy for a minute?”
She didn’t say anything, just shifted without standing
until she faced the wall.
I rolled my baggy pants up high and exposed the shiv. The tip of it was lodged nearly an inch deep into my thigh. I untied the cloth and eased the shiv out. A spurt of blood came with it, and I retied the cloth around the wound to put pressure on it until the nanobots could do their work. I pulled my pant leg back down.
“Thanks, Teegan. All done.” She turned back
to face me.
Maneuvering the shiv, I put the sharp side against the plastic ties holding my wrists and tried to saw back and forth. Usually when they tied my wrists, I was awake and could hold myself in such a way that the ties weren’t too tight. But this time I had been unconscious, and the ties were tight enough to cut off my circulation. It was impossible to apply enough pressure for the sawing
action to have any effect.