The Volunteer

by J B Cantwell

  It’s okay, he mouthed. Come on.

  I took in a few more desperate breaths, then nodded.

  He released my hand and motioned to my jets. I did as I was told, and together we moved along the bottom of the lake, as far as possible from the surface as we could get.

  It took only minutes, but it felt like hours. As the lake gradually became shallower, I was calm enough to look at the compass built into my lens. My hopes were confirmed. West.

  I looked at the read-out that indicated the remaining air in my jets. Just one tenth left. Hardly enough to traverse a lake with. We had to find land, and soon.

  But we didn’t. Alex’s jets ran out first, and I flew past him as he slowed, only kicking with his feet now. I released my levers, and he motioned for me to continue on.

  Idiot.

  Like I was going to leave him behind.

  “Hold on,” I said into my helmet, indicating my foot. I could drag him along until we were completely out.

  He shook his head no.

  I grabbed for his hand, finding it and squeezing it hard with both of my own. Then, I pushed his hand down to my foot, and I didn’t let go until he finally relented, grabbing on.

  I had barely started up again before I felt him let go. I turned, irritated. But then I saw what he was doing. He had pulled out a blade and was cutting his jetpacks free. Though powerful when full, they were heavy and would drag along behind us now. We had to use every bit of power we could while we still had it.

  I nodded, then lifted my foot toward him again. This time he didn’t argue, gripping it with both hands as I turned and hit the jets.

  With my left eye, I pulled down a map into my lens. I saw where we were, pin-pointed on the surface of the map, and I realized just how much trouble we were in. I would have to make a decision. Continue on in the freezing water, trying to get back to the safety of the States, or take our chances on frigid Canadian land. Either way, we were going to be cold moving forward.

  I chose the land.

  I turned sharply to the right, to the north, and I was relieved when Alex didn’t question me.

  Five miles.

  My tanks lasted for a little while, maybe ten minutes at most, and when they finally gave out, I turned back to Alex. He pulled out his knife and cut mine free just as he’d done his own. The tanks had taken us about a mile. The rest was up to us now.

  The water remained shallow, only about twenty feet deep, and we kicked along, waiting for the shoreline to appear. After a while, I wanted to take a break, but I was still chilled, and I knew that the heat from my physical efforts was keeping me alive.

  But what would happen when we made it out?

  I had never learned how to make one, but already I was eager to warm myself beside the flames of a campfire.

  I had a feeling I was going to have to wait quite a while before I felt warmth again.

  Finally, the depth of the lake began to lessen, and in moments, we were in no more than five feet of water. I turned off my headlamp, and Alex did the same. Then, I got my feet under me and peeked my head up above the water line.

  There was no moon; our mission had been planned out specifically to take advantage of the deep darkness of a new moon. But another chill went through me, and it wasn’t due to the cold.

  All across the land, in every direction, the ground was covered in a light blanket of snow.

  Oh, my God.

  I spun around, searching for the enemy, but there was no one to be seen. If we were still showing up on radar, they had decided to leave us to our snowy deaths.

  It’s what I would’ve done.

  Why waste the resources for little more than revenge? Now that we were out of the area, and their pipe was destroyed, there was little in it for them to chase us. They were too late, and we’d been lucky enough to slip from their hands.

  Alex surfaced next to me, towering over my small frame with his monstrous one. He released the strap holding his helmet on, and with a sucking noise, pulled it off and threw it back into the water.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, then realized that he still couldn’t hear me. I released my helmet, too. But I held onto mine. “Don’t throw it away,” I argued. “You should—”

  But I was cut off when he reached for me and enveloped me into a giant bear hug. And once he had me, he didn’t let me go.

  “I thought you were dead out there,” he said into my wet hair.

  “So did I.”

  “What happened to Kyle?”

  “The bullets,” I said simply. I was finally starting to relax, though I was shivering now. It felt so good to be held by him, no matter how cold it was.

  He took a deep breath and pushed me back by the shoulders, hanging on.

  “I can’t believe we made it.”

  “Me, neither. You guys couldn’t hear me at all, could you?”

  “No. And at the end, I couldn’t hear anything at all. No communication with the Service. They don’t know we’re out here. They probably think we’re dead.”

  My teeth started chattering as I realized why he’d thrown his helmet away.

  “Maybe. But remember back in New York? They were tracking us that whole time. They might know exactly where we are.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “A lot of good that’ll do us.”

  “You never know. You’re a Prime, Alex. You’re a valuable investment. They might—”

  “On our soil? Maybe. In enemy territory? I’m not holding my breath.”

  He leaned down and helped me remove my tank, too.

  I knew that he was right. They would be thrilled, of course, that we had succeeded. More so if we were able to make it back to friendly territory without their help. But they would not come to retrieve us. Not even for Alex.

  I remembered our boat, on fire and sinking fast. No help for them. And no help for us.

  He reached down into the water and removed one of his flippers. Our feet were incased in a sort of shoe, with the flippers clicked onto the toes. I did the same, and soon four flippers were floating away as a brisk wind whipped up the water. I shivered again.

  “We need to go,” he said, taking my hand in his and beginning to trudge along through the water.

  There wasn’t a single soul in sight, and far above, the cosmos twinkled down at us. It would have been beautiful if I hadn’t been so cold.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked, feeling a little forlorn, and a lot like a failure. Here I was asking him the questions that a leader should keep to herself.

  The water was only a foot deep now, and the shoreline was clearly in sight.

  “We just keep moving,” he said. “We don’t have any other way to get warmed up.” He laced his fingers with mine and covered the top of my hand with his other hand.

  “Aren’t you freezing? You aren’t shivering.”

  “No,” he said. “The phasings.”

  Of course. He was a walking heat source with his massive body, so different now than it had been before we’d started in all of this, this mess we’d gotten ourselves into.

  We never should have joined.

  Anything would’ve been better than this. We could have just run. Then we could have at least been together, owing nothing to no one.

  We would have starved.

  Maybe. But just because we were poor didn’t mean we wouldn’t be able to find work. We were both Greens after all. I could be cleaning toilets right now somewhere warm and dry. There were worse things I might’ve chosen to do.

  Like this.

  I tried to imagine life back in Brooklyn. Life before I’d met anyone from the resistance. Life before I even knew what a Volunteer was. The Stilts would have continued to be nothing more to me than a simple curiosity. They wouldn’t have mattered. Those lives thriving inside would have been nothing more than a rumor.

  But I wanted more than that life. More, even, than the warmth I so craved now.

  I pushed on, gritting my teeth to keep them from chattering.


  Twenty paces more and we were out of the water. We didn’t stop moving, though. Just turned left and kept on going.

  I pulled my hand away and crosse my arms over my chest, trying to keep as much heat in as I could. My lens told me it was forty-six degrees out. Warm enough to melt the snow, but still cold enough to cause hypothermia.

  “How far?” I asked, looking for information I could’ve easily found on my own lens. But he didn’t hesitate.

  “Twenty-three miles to the outskirts of Detroit. A day’s walk. Shorter if we run.”

  Running was the last thing I felt able to do in that moment.

  “No. No running.” My feet slipped in the sand, but it was marginally warmer here than walking directly on the snow.

  “I could carry you,” he offered.

  I snorted.

  “Yeah, no.”

  Without moving, I knew I would freeze for sure, no matter how much faster he could get me back to the States.

  “We did okay,” he said. As if it were true.

  “Considering that most of us are dead, I’ve got to say I don’t agree.”

  He paused. Then, “You’re not dead.” He squeezed my frozen fingers in his hands.

  No, I wasn’t.

  Had that been his only goal?

  I pulled on his arm and kept moving.

  Slowly, as we walked, the water in my suit began to pool at my wrists and ankles, draining out. Soon, as the thick fabric gradually started to dry, I felt some warmth returning to my chest. My feet remained wet and mostly numb, even as that warmth started to radiate outward into my extremities, but any heat generated was a relief. The fingers of my right hand were starting to warm up in Alex’s grasp, too, and soon I switched sides to have him hold my left.

  “Maybe we should just give up,” I said, my mind fighting between feeling hopeful and forlorn. Would he come with me if I were to try to run?

  “We can’t. It’s too important that we stay.”

  This stopped me in my tracks. I stared sideways at him.

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked.

  “You know what I mean.” He continued walking while I stood, dumbstruck.

  “No, I don’t. I know that you followed me back in New York. I know that you’ve taken orders without faltering once. I know that you’ve got your eye on me, even though I’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Oh, come on,” he said, turning. “You know that’s not true. You’ve done plenty.”

  My jaw dropped open, and I paused, unsure.

  “What is it that you think you know?” I finally asked.

  He put his hands on my shoulders and stared me in the face.

  “I know what you’ve been doing. This whole time I’ve known. It just took me a while to make a choice. But I can’t give our position away. You know we can’t run. Somehow or another, we need to find our way back. It’s the only way.”

  At his words, where I had felt so defeated, so terrified, I now felt a weight being lifted, filling me up with relief instead of fear.

  “Leave no stone, right?” he said.

  Suddenly, it was hard to catch my breath.

  What?

  “How did you … how do you …?”

  He smiled, a little guiltily, I thought.

  “Chambers got to me. Right around the time that you had your phasing. He told me the plan. Well, my part. That’s how I came out of my … haze. He altered my treatments so that I could remember my past, so that I could remember you. Then, he told me about your training, about what you’d been going through. He wanted to know if he could trust me. And then I guess he decided he did, because he told me.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me? All this time I didn’t know about it, and I …”

  “I couldn’t give us away. If I’d told you earlier, it wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Then, when they assigned me to follow you, I had to play the other side.”

  This whole time.

  I grabbed him by the neck and kissed him. All the mistrust, all the suspicion I’d felt began to drain away like the water from my wetsuit, replaced by a warmth that radiated throughout my body. We stayed like that, locked in that embrace, for what felt like a long time. Finally, he came up for air and smiled down at me.

  “Well, that’s one way to get warmed up,” he teased.

  I laughed, a real laugh, for what felt like the first time in a long time.

  He released his hands from around my waist, and I protested, grabbing onto his arms again, reaching up for another kiss.

  But that wasn’t what he had in mind.

  “We need to go, you know. We’re going to freeze out here. We need to get you inside, or at least dry.”

  I let out a long, slow breath and shifted my gaze from his face down to the shoreline.

  “Alright,” I said. “But when we get somewhere warm, you’d better believe I’m not going to let you go.”

  He smiled.

  “When that happens, I promise you I won’t argue.”

  He took my hand in his again, now much warmer than it had been only minutes before, and together we began the long walk back.

  Chapter Three

  We didn’t talk much after that. Just walked, hand in hand, elated at having found each other once more.

  Then, far in the distance, a tiny glimmer of light came into view.

  “Wait,” I said, pointing. “Look.”

  He stopped walking and stared into the darkness, then dropped to his knees, crouching, and pulled me down after him.

  “What do we do?” I asked. I remembered that we each had a gun. I wondered if they would work after being submerged for so long.

  He pulled his own gun from his belt and shook some of the water out of the barrel.

  “Will it fire?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, cocking it.

  “No! Don’t!”

  He looked at me, one eyebrow raised.

  “You honestly think I’m going to fire a gun in enemy territory just to test it out?”

  “Well, you looked like—”

  “Give me a little credit,” he whispered. “Now, what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Why are you asking me?”

  “Well, last time I checked, you were in charge of this mission.”

  I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or scowl. But he was right.

  I considered the situation. The light looked like it was close to the shoreline, and it was the only one shining.

  “Well, if it’s coming from a building, it’s the only one. I can’t see from here if there are others.”

  “Only one building, but maybe not only one person,” he said without tearing his eyes away from the light.

  I gave a little shiver in the wind. The cold was biting through my wetsuit now that we had stopped moving.

  “What do you want to do?”

  I thought about it for a minute, then stood back up.

  “Well, I don’t see that we have much choice. We need to get inside. It’s still freezing out here, and it won’t get any warmer until the sun comes up.”

  “Okay, then.” He stood up, keeping his cocked pistol at his side. “Guns blazing?”

  “Well, maybe not blazing,” I said, taking my own gun from my belt. “Let’s just check it out first. Okay?”

  He put one hand on my cheek, his fingers warm against my skin.

  “Okay.”

  The walk toward the building took us longer than I expected; nearly twenty minutes had passed before we came close enough to see what it was that we were even looking at.

  It was a cabin amidst many others, but it was the only one that looked occupied. An old, rusted truck was parked alongside it. There was definitely someone inside. A thin trail of smoke was winding through the chimney up into the sky, and the smell of burning wood reached my nose, making me long for the warmth of a fire.

  “Why would they be out here of all places?” I asked, looking around.

  “I don’t know. Maybe to hunt
?”

  “To hunt?” I asked, worried. “That means they’ll be armed.”

  “Maybe. But we’ll surprise them. You know we can do it. And we need to get you inside.”

  I was shivering again, and the warmth that had sprung from our efforts walking along the shore was starting to subside.

  He was right.

  “Okay. Let’s go. If it’s more than two, we’re going to need to make a run for it.”

  “I have a feeling it won’t be,” he said. “That truck doesn’t exactly scream ‘party,’ if you know what I mean.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I went first, crouching low to the ground. There was no tree cover here so close to the water. All they would need to do was turn on a porch light and we were done for.

  But it was late. My lens read 0045 hours. I was surprised that anyone was even up.

  Maybe they weren’t.

  We silently approached the front door of the little place, taking great care with every step not to make a sound. At the two low stairs of the front porch, I paused. Surely they would squeak. I cocked my gun and held it in two hands, pointing it toward the ground, and indicated with my head for Alex to cross to the other side of the window.

  We hopped up to the landing as quietly as we could, and Alex peered into the cabin. He held out one finger.

  One person.

  Then he put his head in his hand, indicating that whoever it was was asleep.

  I had to consciously blow out my breath, not realizing that I’d been holding it for the past several seconds. I reached out and carefully grabbed the door handle. Then, with one last nod at Alex, I opened the door.

  I held up my gun and pointed it in the direction of a couch where a bald-headed man was snoring loudly.

  Easy.

  I crossed the floor until I stood right in front of him. Alex gingerly stepped inside, searching the small cabin. There was only a bed, a couch, and a small kitchenette with two bar stools. A large rifle was propped up against the wall.

  He was alone.

  Alex moved around behind him until he stood on the other side of the couch, both of our guns trained on the man. I held out my foot, and Alex nodded.