She wasn’t going to attack at all. She planned to wait us out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Still only one candy bar each?” asked the woman as I handed it to her.
“Yes,” I said shortly. “I’m sorry.”
Vera shot me a sympathetic glance. Another day had passed. Realizing there was no end in sight, I’d had to lock the concessions supply room and start rationing the food. Even with us all on a single candy bar and a handful of peanuts a day, we’d run out in a week.
As I looked down the long line of people waiting for their share, I was suddenly propelled back to Harmony Five – how we’d all trembled with hunger as we’d watched a Gun ladle out our thin broth.
Except now I was the Gun.
My stomach lurched. I forcibly regained myself and handed the next person in line their ration.
After the unknown broadcaster had finished exulting about the unrest in the city, he’d said, “Wildcat, if you’re listening – New Manhattan is behind you!”
Static. I’d remained standing, my thoughts whirling. The sunset had shone through the stadium’s high windows, casting the woman in silhouette as she still held up her transistor.
She’d turned it off and clambered to the floor. She was smiling, her cheeks damp.
“Wildcat – Miss Vancour – we’re all behind you too,” she said hoarsely.
Even then, I’d known it wasn’t totally true. People were scared. But there was applause – a few cheers.
There were no cheers now. Everybody realized we were under siege. I’d announced that we were trying to dig out through a caved-in tunnel, though had to admit success was far from certain.
“If I give myself up, she’d still execute everyone here,” I said. “You can leave if you want – I’m not stopping anyone. But I don’t think she’d be merciful. The tunnel’s probably our only real hope.”
My clenched fists likely hadn’t gone unnoticed. A real hope…but such a slim one.
A sea of apprehensive faces had stared back at me. No one left.
Another day passed in a haze of dense heat – of our snipers still guarding us, and the Guns still waiting. Some had cameras, I saw now. I gazed bitterly at the boxy instruments. Of course: Pierce wanted to record my surrender.
The diggers had rapidly become heroes in my eyes. They worked tirelessly. About fifteen feet of the cave-in had been cleared now, the work lit by flashlights. I’d held half the batteries back and was parcelling them out like a miser. We could do without flashlights up above. Not down there. I watched their progress closely, sick with hope, praying it wasn’t one of the cave-ins that lasted hundreds of feet.
Three days on, most people seemed in shock, as if wondering how the hell they’d gotten into this. Following me in the heat of the moment had been one thing; this was another.
Almost as bad as the constant tension and the hunger, was the boredom. As the hours dragged, squabbles broke out often. I found playing cards in the concessions storeroom and passed them out.
“Yup, you sure throw a great party,” drawled Harlan.
I managed a thin smile. “Hey, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Even with all of that, things still weren’t too bad…though I didn’t realize that until the morning of the fourth day.
That’s when they turned the water off.
When a woman came to tell me the toilets weren’t working, a cold foreboding swept me. Vera and I had been counting the remaining candy bars. We locked up the office and raced for the ladies’.
“Please, please,” I muttered a few moments later, standing in the shadowy, tiled room. I tried flushing first one toilet, then another. The tanks gurgled uselessly.
“No!” I darted to the sinks. Vera was already trying them, her face pale. I twisted a tap. No water. I twisted the next one. No water. Next one. Nothing. I tried every sink, my panic rising.
At the last silent, stilled tap, I slammed my fist against the sink. “Damn it! You bastards!”
Shuddering, I leaned against the cool porcelain and put my head in my hands. “You bastards,” I whispered again.
Vera touched my arm. She didn’t speak.
I let my hands fall. Our gazes met. Vera’s eyes were round and scared – mirrors of my own.
“I…I guess we have to go tell people this now,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said finally.
The non-flushing toilets quickly became unusable. We found all the containers that the Garden owned – buckets, popcorn kettles, a vat for boiling hot dogs in – and put these in the restrooms instead. Within hours the rooms turned fetid.
People had been drinking the soda and beer all along. I’d allowed it, because the beer cheered them up. Why, why couldn’t I have seen this move coming? Now there were far too few bottles of each left – hardly even enough for everyone to have a single bottle of beer and another soda.
I kept the beer back for now; it would make people thirstier. We doled the soda out in the smallest cups the stadium had. Groups gathered up in the bleachers, whispering. Sometimes I caught snippets of conversation:
“I thought she had a plan when I followed her. She’s Wildcat!”
“Is this really her best strategy? Damned if we do, damned if we don’t?”
“Yeah, the tunnels don’t sound very hopeful. At least she freed the captives, I guess.”
“Wonderful, now they can die of thirst instead…”
Down from one of his shifts, Hal murmured to me, “Things are getting bad, Sis. I can hear people talking—”
“Yes, I know!” I snapped. I squeezed my temples. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry.”
The weather stayed unseasonably hot. I had to give the diggers extra soda rations or they couldn’t have kept going.
Harlan and I stood in the cellar’s shadowy main stairwell. He drained his soda ration in a single gulp and jerked his sweat-stained head upwards. “What’s happening in the city? Can you tell?”
“Riots might still be going on,” I said. “We can see smoke from the east side, and Hal said he heard more chanting earlier. But all our Guns are still right there outside.”
Harlan’s expression was as stony as I felt. He started to respond, then we both fell silent as a faint, low rumble came from somewhere below.
“Explosives,” I murmured. I stood listening hard. “Remember, I told you the Guns have them?”
We exchanged a glance. “Trying to get in here through the tunnels, do you think?” said Harlan.
I frowned. “Maybe.”
The Guns didn’t know we were trying to dig our way out. If Pierce was tired of waiting, perhaps they hoped to stream in and grab us, without us having a chance to make a stand.
Harlan gave a hard smile. “Well, they’re in for a surprise if they try anything.” He was right; defending a single narrow tunnel entrance would be child’s play.
“Let’s hope they do,” I said flatly. “We could use help digging it out.”
I longed for more news from the outside – so much that when the woman’s transistor had finally died, I’d been tempted to give her some of the precious batteries. But digging out the cave-in, if we could manage it, was more important.
Other explosions came occasionally. Thankfully, up on the main level you hardly noticed. All I needed was more panic.
Soon it seemed as if swallowing too-hard against a dry throat had always been our reality. On the evening of the fifth day, a small group decided to leave. I didn’t try to stop them.
As we watched from the windows above, they waved white flags made from torn shirts and ventured out the front door – over a dozen, mostly older people. One was a woman who’d said she was a librarian. Another a man who’d been injured in the battle. His arm was still in a sling.
They were all shot down.
The deaths left the Garden stunned and cowed. To my shame, I took advantage of people’s fear and cut their soda ration even smaller, knowing they were less likely to grumble just then – trying d
esperately to make it last a little longer.
My own fear was a cold snake choking my insides. We were nearly our of food now too. I can’t let them down, I kept thinking. There must be something I haven’t thought of.
“Maybe we should just forget the tunnel and storm out – take our chances,” I whispered to Hal the next morning. I was up beside one of the windows with him as he crouched on guard duty. I gazed down at the Guns with helpless loathing.
Hal swiped his grimy face across his shirtsleeve and glanced quickly at me. “You don’t mean that.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I do.”
My brother’s eyes flashed. “No,” he said. “Too many people would die. The rest would just be hanged later.” When I didn’t answer, he added, “You told me yourself…as long as we’re alive, there’s hope.”
I pressed my head against the warm glass. My five-days-ago self seemed hopelessly naïve to me now…and I’d never thought I could be naïve ever again, after Collie and Harmony Five.
A dozen pairs of work gloves lay in a supply closet that smelled of bleach. I took a pair myself and doled out the rest. Vera took one, and Harlan, and the others who’d volunteered: a young mechanic; a schoolteacher; a few more.
“We’ll all take turns,” said Vera.
I shook my head, surveying the different groups scattered across the bleachers. “People are already muttering about me,” I said in an undertone. “I can’t let them see me sitting back while others do this.”
Harlan and Vera glanced at each other. At this point, we all knew what a knife-edge things teetered on in here. Finally Harlan gruffly clasped my shoulder.
“Come on then, Vancour,” he said. “That shit’s not going anywhere on its own.”
The smell that assaulted us in the toilets brought back my shed in Harmony Five, with its constantly-overflowing chamber pot. The improvised commodes were heavy, awkward. It was impossible to carry them up the stairs that cut through the bleachers without sloshing some of their contents.
With our snipers covering us, we awkwardly angled each container out of a broken window and emptied it in fetid streams that stained the wall and plopped onto the parking lot below.
Part of the window sill exploded in a bullet’s whine, wood and mortar shattering outwards. A piece hit me on the wrist and I yelped, almost dropping my side of the popcorn kettle.
Our snipers responded immediately. No more bullets came, but raucous shouts and laughter drifted up: “Filthy Discordant animals!”
“We’re trying not to be filthy, if they haven’t noticed,” muttered Vera. Her damp hair clung to her neck.
Shaken, I put the empty cauldron down. It half-fell, landing with a clatter. Harlan pressed my shoulder when I reached for another, pushing me down onto a bleacher. I sank onto it wearily, rubbing my wrist.
The images of Harmony Five were very strong now, except I wasn’t always sure where in the parallels I stood. Was I the one rationing food, ordering people what to do? Or the one cowering in fear?
How could I be both?
Finally we carried the containers back down the long stairs and cleaned them out the best we could, dousing them with bleach and wiping them down with scraps of newspaper.
“Does it still beat truck-driving?” I asked Harlan.
He grimaced. “I’m not even gonna answer that.”
Once we were done, the eight of us shared a single bottle of warm beer in the kitchen. Seventy-two left, I thought automatically. It sounded like so many. It was nothing.
“At least people won’t piss as much, when they’re not getting enough to drink,” said Harlan wearily.
“They’re already starting to use the containers again,” said Vera. “There’s a line outside both restrooms.”
It struck all of us as darkly humorous, for some reason. I snorted, pressing my hands to my temples.
“We should ration that too,” said Joe, one of the diggers who’d taken a break to help us. “One piss a day. No arguments.”
“Why stop there?” I said with a faint smile. My tongue felt fuzzy, aching for water. “We’ll say you can only go if it’s your star sign’s turn. And if it’s more than the regulation amount, we’ll—”
“Oh, don’t!” moaned Vera with a tired chuckle. “We’ll have to start calling you Madame Pierce.”
We went back out into the main area. The group dispersed, our helpers heading off towards the bleachers. Harlan stretched and started to say something – then frowned, squinting towards the cellar entrance.
“Think something’s up,” he murmured.
The mood tensed abruptly. I glanced over and saw another of the diggers, standing in the cellar doorway scanning the stadium. He saw us and started over.
Vera, Harlan and I met him halfway. “We’ve heard Guns on the other side of the cave-in,” he said in a low voice. “We think they’ve almost made it through.”
I caught my breath. My eyes flew to Harlan’s and Vera’s.
“A way out,” she whispered.
My thoughts raced. How many Guns would there be? A dozen? Two dozen? “We have to defeat them – we have to get into that tunnel,” I said. “We have to.”
“We’ll fucking defeat them,” said Harlan grimly.
I quickly scanned the top of the stadium, where the snipers crouched. We had to get weapons down here – and fast – but if people realized there was a danger, I could have a panic on my hands.
Without taking my eyes from the snipers I said, “Can you three go and bring half of them down here? Say that…we need to service the rifles.”
Vera licked her lips. “Will anyone fall for that?”
“I don’t know! Maybe some people. Just…keep it looking casual, all right? But hurry.”
Ten minutes later, an armed group, including Harlan, had gone down the concrete stairs and headed to the tunnel entrance, their flashlights hooded. Hal, Vera and I stood just inside the cellar, craning to hear. Hal still held his rifle, his jaw tense.
The dull scrape of rock against rock came from the tunnel. At a direction from Harlan, the group rushed through the doorway leading to it. Two hung back, shining flashlights over the scene.
“Stop right there!” boomed Harlan.
Shouts – the sound of a scuffle. I sprinted forward, Vera and Hal right behind me. At the top of the tunnel stairs, I stopped short. Two of the snipers had a man pinned up against the rough, earthen wall, his hands in the air.
Harlan’s cheek was bruised; his rifle lay on the ground. He had a second man in a half nelson. The other snipers covered the struggling captive. His grey suit with its Harmony armband was rumpled and torn – he was taller than Harlan, but thinner, with dark curls.
“Go on – shoot me – do you think I give a shit?” he gasped out between gritted teeth.
I felt faint suddenly.
“Harlan, let him go!” I cried. I lunged down the stairs – rushed over just as Harlan slowly released him. The others lowered their rifles uncertainly.
Ingo.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Ingo stood breathing hard, massaging his neck, his dark eyes still fierce. In the flashlight’s glow his scar looked like some strange half-mask.
The surge of joy and relief left me weak. Ingo. Alive. I remembered him gripping my arms, saying, I will come back for you. The warmth of his lips on my palm.
I gripped my elbows tightly. I was close to tears.
“I told you not to come back into the city,” I whispered.
Ingo’s gaze hadn’t left mine. “Yes, I know you did,” he said softly.
A draught whispered in from the narrow tunnel. I swallowed and tried to regain myself. “We’ve – we’ve been hearing explosions for days. We thought the Guns were trying to blast their way through to us.”
“Maybe they were,” said Ingo. “Maybe they closed themselves off by mistake, somehow. But we were able to get through.”
I couldn’t stop staring at him. “How did you know where to find us?”
> “You’re infamous on the airwaves these days, Wildcat. Or didn’t you know?”
For once, there was no humour in his tone. His eyes were hooded with exhaustion – his features drawn. I glanced belatedly at Harlan.
“It’s okay, he’s Resistance,” I said. I looked at the man Ingo had brought with him and cleared my throat. “Who…?”
He had round glasses and an intelligent face. With a glance at the snipers, he stepped forward. “I’m Jean Buzet, Miss Vancour. From World United.”
His English wasn’t nearly as good as Ingo’s. It took me a beat to decipher “United”. He held out his hand and I shook it automatically. It added to the sense of unreality.
“What’s World United?” I said.
“It’s a new organization,” he told me. “A league of allies against Can-Amer. All fifty-nine countries have joined.”
“Amity, it’s what we’ve all been hoping for,” Ingo said. “The world’s finally ready to act.”
We moved into the cellar’s main space. As the snipers slipped back upstairs, I gazed after them. It was just starting to really hit me: we could escape.
“Ingo, we’ve got over three hundred people in here,” I said in a quick undertone. “We’ve got to start getting them out. The Guns have turned the water off. Things have been…bad.”
Mr Buzet had overheard. “Let us talk first,” he urged me. “Ten minutes.”
“What about?”
“There’s a reason I brought him here,” said Ingo. From his expression, whatever the reason was, he wasn’t crazy about it.
When they learned there was a way out, people would go berserk. I glanced at Harlan and Vera. Hal, who’d hung back, stood behind them. He caught my eye and shrugged.
“Ten minutes,” I said finally.
Mr Buzet looked relieved. “Good. Thank you.” Then he hesitated. “You say there is no water? Is there a restroom?”
Unreasonable irritation hit me. I told him where it was. He climbed the stairs and headed off across the stadium. I hoped no one would realize that he’d only just appeared.
Hal still held his rifle, pointing it towards the ground. He nodded at Ingo. “Hi,” he said. “Holy moley, are we ever glad to see you.”
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