Breaking Point

by Kristen Simmons

“Make it work without me,” I said.

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Riggins, face grim. “You know what it’s like out there. You’re wanted in connection with the sniper murders.” He sounded genuinely worried.

  “I’m only wanted because he turned me in,” I spat, jerking my head toward Tucker.

  “That, actually,” ticked Tucker, “is not true.”

  “Like I believe you!”

  “I’m guilty of most everything she’ll accuse me of,” said Tucker, now speaking to everyone. “But not that. They arrested me before I made it back to my office. You remember Delilah, don’t you, Ember? You should. You tied her up and locked her in a cell.”

  An image came before me of an elderly woman with white hair and blue, translucent irises.

  “Did you kill her, too?” I asked. “You said you would if she ever told anyone.”

  “I never said that.” He glanced at his feet. I couldn’t deny he looked beaten down. I reminded myself this was all part of his plan to lure us in.

  “The guard on rounds found her. Lucky for you, she’d refused to talk, but they had a whole team waiting to question me when I got back. I said you were dead, completed, just like Jennings.” His expression turned sour. “The gatekeeper didn’t agree.”

  The gate guard at the back of the complex had let me out to deliver the body—Chase’s body—to the crematorium, just as I’d done the days before. He would have seen Tucker follow me, then return alone.

  “And they decided to kick you out, but not report me missing for another month? Let me guess, they wanted to give me a head start,” I said.

  Tucker scoffed. “You think they wanted the region to know someone—a girl, no less—escaped the holding cells? How do you think that makes them look? At least now they can build you up as accessory to a serial killer.”

  I had no retort. Tucker’s story was actually possible. And now it made sense why I’d been listed with the other four suspects. The MM wanted me dead, and linking me to the sniper made me appear dangerous, reckless. Capable of escape. They could justify admitting I bettered them if I was a hardened criminal.

  “But … he’s a murderer,” I stammered.

  “Do you think he’s the first person here to be called that?” Wallace was wild-eyed now, and shaking. “Do you think I’m so different?”

  Every voice was silent. Every eye on Wallace. Even mine, which had torn away from Tucker’s petulant form.

  Wallace had killed people. Maybe Article violators. Maybe people just like my mother. And others—Riggins, Houston, Lincoln—they might have, too. Not Sean, Rebecca had told me, but he had taken girls at the reform school down to the shack. Girls like Rosa Montoya, who’d ridden beside me on the bus. Who’d turned hollow after the torture Sean and the guards had inflicted upon her.

  I’d lived here for weeks feeling safer than I had since my mother’s arrest, avoiding the most obvious fact in the world: I didn’t talk about my past, and neither did they.

  It isn’t so bad, I told myself, even though I trembled with this new reality. They’d done bad things; they weren’t bad people. Hadn’t Chase been just inches away from that cliff as well? And he’d come back to me, redeemed himself. As had Wallace, and these others, too.

  But not Tucker. Tucker Morris could never be good.

  He was sulking now, but that was just pretend. He was trying to pull me in with his tattered street clothes and his dirty face. With his fake discharge that Billy had supposedly seen on the FBR mainframe and his anger, like I’d ruined his precious career. I wouldn’t fall for it.

  “It’s him or us—both of us—Wallace. Make your choice,” I said firmly, but my thoughts begged him to see reason, to believe us about Tucker and to begin a full-scale evacuation.

  “I should go,” said Tucker. “I’ll go … I don’t know. I’ll go somewhere.”

  “You’re staying,” Wallace told him.

  I felt my knees shake for the first time.

  Wallace had chosen. For the resistance, I told myself, nothing personal. But it felt personal. He’d hooked me with that family talk, and like a sucker, I’d bought it. As though it could fill the void within me. I had to tell myself three times to move before I finally did.

  “Can I get our things, please?”

  Wallace’s face twisted. “Someone get their bag. Just what they came in with.” He turned back in to the supply room.

  A minute later Billy appeared, our backpack in hand. He didn’t look up at me. Better that way. I hated losing friends.

  Sean swore a lot, but couldn’t leave while information about Rebecca was on the line. Riggins tried to reason with Wallace. In the end it was Lincoln and Houston that escorted us downstairs, past the smoke-filled lobby. Past John the landlord, who unknowingly reminded us to bring back a pack of smokes. And then we were outside on the street in the unfriendly morning light, exposed to whomever challenged us, barred from the only place that had felt like home in a long time.

  CHAPTER

  8

  CHASE and I made it to the Red Cross Camp just before noon. We didn’t have any other options. The safest place was a crowd. The biggest crowd was the Square, and we weren’t about to risk that place again.

  We crossed Cumberland outside the tall wrought-iron entranceway to World’s Fair Park, the location of the camp. Suspended above the white circus tent patched with blue tarps was an enormous copper globe—the sunsphere, a structure that Billy had told me was built for the World’s Fair in the early 1980s. Now, half the panels were missing, and it served as a marker that temporary relief—not the actual Red Cross, they’d gone under during the War, but the Sisters of Salvation—waited below.

  Chase motioned me through a long line and I followed him in shock, reeling from my latest encounter with my mother’s killer. From letting him go again.

  What lies was Sean being fed? All Tucker had told Sean was that Rebecca had been in the holding cells a very short time before being transferred to Chicago. But what if he’d seen her? What would he have done to her?

  And how could Wallace be so stupid? He’d always put his home, his family, first … yet here he was, letting the most dangerous person I’d ever met sneak past his defenses.

  I told myself not to think about it. He’d kicked us out and that was that. Adapt. Move on. Get over it. It wasn’t like we were going to stay there forever anyway. We’d have to find a way to meet Sean and figure out what evil scheme Tucker was devising.

  Chase stopped suddenly and snagged my elbow. He jerked me away into a crowd of people waiting for the medical clinic to open.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Soldiers.” My mind immediately shot to Tucker, but no, Tucker wasn’t here. Tucker was with the resistance.

  Chase carved an exit, not forcefully enough to cause a fight, but definitely with purpose. I kept my eyes on his heels, half skipping so I didn’t step on them. When I ventured a glance over my shoulder, I saw that there were soldiers swarming the entire compound.

  Across the street, where we’d been standing five minutes earlier, another patrol team started picking through the huddled groups of vagrants. One officer had a clipboard and was showing photos to a feeble old man who leaned against a half-collapsed bus shelter. Above, on every rooftop roamed a soldier with a shotgun.

  We would have been safer hiding out in some dark alley.

  “Come on,” Chase said. “We’ve got to keep moving. Let’s go inside; people are thinning out here.”

  The Red Cross Camp was comprised of over a hundred cots, shoved into even rows and covered by drooping canvas tents. There were no walls, no privacy, no heat in the winter or fans in the summer. It was fenced off by removable chain-link partitions, which boasted cracks large enough for any thief to sneak through. The sign-in station at the front was manned by a Sister of Salvation, and behind her, attached to a metal pole was a sign: 4 HOURS ONLY.

  Below it, on a large plywood board, were five photographs. The five suspects wanted in co
njunction with the sniper murders.

  “Chase,” I whispered. He squinted across the distance.

  Despite this, he made his way toward the entrance, where a line of twenty or so people waited to get a four-hour bunk. A warning within me screamed that this was wrong. We couldn’t go inside and pin ourselves down; I would be recognized.

  “Stay in line,” he said, and headed toward the sign-in station. I saw him glance quickly at the board. His back straightened, and that was enough to say he’d seen my photo. He leaned forward to talk to a Sister at the desk who was wearing a white paper surgical mask.

  The line moved forward. My gaze was drawn to a woman who’d moved in front of the board. Her green collared shirt made her skin appear ashen, and the long denim skirt was black where the seams dragged through the dirt. Though probably only in her early thirties, her hair had gone almost completely gray. Two soldiers, both younger than she, flanked her on either side.

  “Listen up!” one of them shouted. I bumped into someone as I stepped back. For the moment I still blended with the crowd, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long. I stared at Chase’s back, willing him to return.

  The woman stepped aside and revealed a boy maybe five years old. He had red dashes on his cheeks, not just from a recent tantrum but a long season of crying. The fingers of one hand twisted his mangy, shoulder-length hair. The other hand was missing.

  The woman approached the boy and opened his shirt. His skin was scarred and warped by past burns, red with infection. She lifted him up for everyone to see.

  “Oh God,” I said before I caught myself. Chase approached, eyes betraying no shock.

  “Here.” He was holding a surgical mask like the Sisters were wearing. Hurriedly, I looped the elastic bands around my ears and felt my breath warm the covered space over my nose and mouth. This shield would hide my identity at least for a little while.

  “There are…” The woman’s voice trembled. Her eyes darted around the crowd of onlookers.

  “Louder,” prompted the soldier.

  “There are worse ways to live!” she cried. “You think it’s bad now, but you have no idea. If you have information on the sniper, if you’ve seen the criminals from the wanted posters, tell a soldier right away!”

  Rampant whispers flew around the circle.

  The soldier unhooked the strap locking the gun in his belt. He toyed with the boy’s hair, like a father might, but for the threat so obviously posed by his weapon. From his blank expression, I knew he’d have no trouble hurting this boy to get what he wanted. I shoved back, but those behind me held solid.

  “Do you think the soldiers did that?” I whispered to Chase.

  His expression remained flat; only his eyes showed his rage. He didn’t answer.

  “Now, who has information for me?” the soldier asked.

  “Someone’s got to stop it,” whispered a man beside me. He was right. My blood was boiling again.

  “I heard that Miller girl was in Tent City yesterday after the attack,” a woman to my right confessed.

  I went absolutely rigid. I didn’t dare breathe. Chase’s shoulders rose. He shook his head as if to say don’t move.

  “Come with us. We need to ask you a few questions,” said the second soldier. The mother was now grasping her child against her chest, though she seemed too petrified to move.

  “That’s all I know,” said the confessor, her voice faltering. “I swear, that’s all I know.”

  “Come with us,” he repeated. “Or you’ll be charged with withholding information.”

  “I told you all I know!” she screamed as one of the soldiers hauled her away.

  My mouth fell open in horror. There were hundreds of people within earshot. Hundreds who could take down these two soldiers, but no one moved. I wanted to stop them myself, to say, “I’m the one you’re looking for!” but I couldn’t. They’d kill me on the spot.

  “The sniper did this to us!” The mother finally set her child down, close to where we stood in the arc surrounding her. She wept bitterly. “We were fine before he got here!” People murmured their agreement.

  I wanted to shake her. I told myself she was scared, that’s why she was saying this. Things were just as dangerous before. But the woman in Tent City had told me not everyone would see the good of the resistance, and she was right.

  The second soldier lifted his baton, and a path cleared back into the medical station. I followed Chase’s gaze to the little boy, who was now bawling quietly and trying to close his shirt with his single hand while his mother ushered him away.

  “What was that?” I whispered. I felt exposed; every sideways glance prickled my skin.

  He swore, obviously agitated. “Advertising. Nothing puts people in their place like the threat of pain. I saw it in Chicago. It’s sick.”

  It was not so unlike Wallace’s plan to let the people see me in Tent City, I thought. Only that message was meant to inspire hope, not fear.

  The world was coming unhinged. I could feel it, like a great crushing weight on my chest, pushing me into the ground beneath my feet. I’d been linked to a serial murderer, my name slandered across the country. My mother’s killer had infiltrated the resistance. Girls like Sarah were being beaten by their MM boyfriends and left for dead. Moms were using their kids to spread the MM’s tyrannical message. I’d lost Rebecca all over again, I didn’t know what was happening at home with Beth, and poor Rosa was probably still a zombie up at the reformatory. If there was ever a time to push back, it was now, but how?

  “Name?”

  My eyes refocused on a woman in front of me. A Sister. The light blue knot in her handkerchief was tied perfectly. She wore a paper mask over her mouth and nose, like mine.

  I felt a surge of panic and blurted, “Lori Whittman.”

  “Lori Whittman,” she read down the list on her clipboard. “Have you been here in the past two days, Ms. Whittman?” She didn’t look too closely at my face.

  “Mrs.,” said Chase, tearing away from another masked Sister and moving to my side. “My wife is sick,” he said. “She needs to rest.”

  I coughed for effect, adjusting the mask to cover as much of my face as possible.

  “If they’re married…” began the one who had asked my name. She was halted by the other’s dubious expression.

  “We’re married,” I said defensively. I held up my left hand, thankful for my stolen wedding band.

  “Fine,” huffed the one, still unconvinced. “Remember you’ll be issued a citation if the FBR finds out otherwise.”

  I felt myself stiffen, wondering if the MM was going to be dropping by to question us, but I didn’t see anyone in a blue uniform within the tent.

  The cranky Sister led us inside the flimsy chain-link barrier to the right, where we passed a bin for contraband items and cot after cot of sleeping individuals. There were three empty bunks in the back, these bigger.

  The pungency of human sweat was nearly dizzying. Someone hacked up a lung to my right. We picked a cot beside a family of four, all sharing a space smaller than a twin bed. I thought of the woman outside with her son and wished they would come rest here instead of continuing their campaign.

  I sat on the filthy canvas cot, avoiding a black spot near the edge that still looked damp. We’d had it good at the Wayland Inn.

  I sighed, unwilling to pull the mask down on my chin. They hadn’t recognized me, but I wasn’t feeling particularly relieved. Chase sat next to me and placed the backpack down beside his feet, avoiding a puddle of stagnant rainwater that had blown in. He took a slow, deep breath.

  “Tubman should be back in town tonight. We’ll stay with him until the roads are clear.” He kept his voice low so as not to wake those around us.

  He wanted to go to the safe house, to abandon Rebecca and everything we’d come here to do, and though I wasn’t proud of it, part of me did want to run away and hide.

  Who was I kidding? The chances of me making it that far were slim. Any one of th
ese people might turn me in. Any one of the soldiers prowling around the city might shoot me without question. I knew this; it scared me to death. But not as much as Tucker handing over the entire Knoxville resistance to the MM.

  “We can’t leave,” I said resolutely. “Tucker’s planning something.”

  He flinched at the name. “We have to leave. It’s not safe here for you.”

  “It’s not safe here for anyone.”

  “Wallace made his decision.” Chase’s hand swiped along his temple, and he held it there in pain. The earlier fight must have triggered his injuries from the arrest. When he saw my concern, he dropped his arm, as if embarrassed.

  “It’s a bad decision and you know it,” I said, wondering how much of his distance had to do with his new knowledge of me kissing Tucker.

  “It doesn’t matter what I know.”

  I felt my shoulders bunch defensively. “We’ve got to stay. Sean’s still there—I have to help him get Rebecca—and Billy.…”

  “They’re big kids.” His voice was strained.

  “They’re our friends,” I said, exasperated. “When people don’t do what’s best for themselves, you’ve got a responsibility to do it for them.” I’d learned that lesson with my mom.

  He laughed wryly.

  “Just so we’re clear, this rule doesn’t apply to you, right?”

  I glared at him.

  “That’s what I thought.” He made a frustrated sound in his throat, then mumbled, “I should’ve put you on that truck to the safe house when I had the chance.”

  I balked. “Well, you don’t have to worry about that. I wouldn’t have gone.”

  His brow quirked, and his eyes sparkled with challenge.

  I shifted my legs to the opposite side of the cot so that we could watch each other’s backs.

  “So, is it true?” he said, gaze roaming.

  He didn’t have to qualify it. I knew what he meant. My damp hands clasped, unclasped, clasped again.

  “Did he hurt you, Em?”

  “No,” I said quickly.

  Chase’s jaw twitched. He didn’t say anything.

  “It was the only way to steal his gun.” My voice was all but a whisper now. It was impossible to explain how logic changed in the face of death, but still I felt ashamed.