Rebel Nation

by Shaunta Grimes

  “He’s not going to be able to bring us guns,” Leanne said. “And West is right, anyway.”

  “He might be able to bring us fuel.” Clover felt Mango press his head more firmly into her hand, his body against her legs. She was rocking in her seat, suddenly excited. “We can keep them out with fire.”

  “If we don’t accidentally burn down the whole town,” Jude said.

  Clover shook her head. “We can control it.”

  America now is stumbling through the darkness of hatred and divisiveness. Our values, our principles, and our determination to succeed as a free and democratic people will give us a torch to light the way. And we will survive and become the stronger.

  —GERALD FORD,

  ADDRESS TO THE ORDER OF DEMOLAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1968

  James was exhausted.

  A single nightmare had plagued him, night after night, since the day he’d fired his gun at the red cross on Cassidy Golightly’s chest. Every time he went into deep sleep, he saw the girl and heard his single gunshot. Only instead of it being a blank, it was a live round, and her blood coated the Kill Room.

  When he was awake, he could separate out that part of his brain that wanted to obsess about the people he’d killed, starting with Jane. He could slide up steel walls around that horror and function. When he went to sleep, all the walls came down.There was a real possibility that he might never sleep well again. To make matters worse, every cell in his body screamed for whiskey. He didn’t have the shakes or anything, but God, he would have given just about anything for the bottle he kept in his sock drawer.

  “You okay?”

  James looked up and realized he’d been standing in one spot, staring at the ground, for several minutes. Leanne stood next to him. He hadn’t even noticed her arrival.

  “Yeah,” he lied. “Yeah, I’m good. What’s up?”

  “Clover has an idea for reaching out to the other Freaks.”

  It was still hard for James to imagine that there were people all over the country waiting for his kids to tell them how to rise up against the Company. He’d trusted the Company for so long. Without question. He’d put his work above his family, even. How could he trust himself now? How could anyone?

  “There’s a printing press on the third floor of this building,” Clover said half an hour later. Everyone was gathered in the one remaining museum classroom. The desks in the other classrooms had been removed, to make room for sleeping. “A working, non-electric printing press.”

  The core group, the kids who had been with West since he left the city, plus Clover and Jude, seemed to know something else. James waited, quietly, for the whole story to come out.

  “Freaks for Freedom.” Clover held up a paper booklet. She was rocking, from one foot to the other, and Mango was on full alert next to her. “We wrote this. Or we will. Or we did. Jude gave this to me when I saw him on the other side of the portal last summer. It’s what started all of this. It’s time to get it out there.”

  The room exploded with questions and people scrambling to see the little book. Clover stumbled back. James tensed to go to her, but Jude was there.

  “We can start with just printing up what’s already written here,” West said. There was a sadness in his face that James couldn’t quite place. “Then we can ask Frank to help us get them out to the groups. It’s time for us all to at least start trying to band together.”

  “There’s another alternative,” Jude said. “We could just build something here. Forget about the Company. We can do what they’re doing in New Boulder and build a New Virginia City.”

  Clover pulled away and exchanged some inaudible words with Jude. Mango pushed between them, pressing his weight against Clover’s legs until she had to step back.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Clover asked, louder, looking up at Jude. Her posture, back arched, hands fisted at her sides, reminded James so much of Jane when she was angry that his heart clenched. “We talked about this!”

  “They deserve to know there’s another choice.” Jude’s voice was quieter.

  “God! What do you think we’re doing here?”

  West pushed his way through the crowd. “Okay.”

  “Okay, nothing!”

  “I said that’s enough!” West took the booklet from Clover. His sister was shaking, her hands flapping at her sides, rocking. “Breathe, Clover.”

  James watched his daughter take a breath. He watched West and Jude talking quietly to her, and he felt a pang in his gut. None of them looked to him. Clover didn’t look for her father to comfort her. He thought she probably never would again.

  “Let’s talk to Frank this afternoon,” West said. “See what he has to say about it, okay? See if there is even a way to distribute these things.”

  Clover put a hand down to Mango’s head and nodded her own. “I’m going, though. I want to talk to him myself.”

  —

  “I can’t believe you did that,” Clover said.

  Jude sat in the far back of the van, as far as he could get from Clover without staying in Virginia City. West and Leanne were in the front seats and Mango sat up on the middle bench with Clover. “I did the right thing,” he said.

  “Why can’t you ever just be on my side?”

  “Why can’t you ever see that I am always on your side?”

  They were both angry. It filled the van. West and Leanne didn’t speak at all, but Jude saw West stealing looks at them through the rearview mirror.

  Clover turned to look at him. She was carsick; he saw it in the tightness around her mouth and the way she’d gone all pale. “Passing out the zine is a good idea.”

  “Pull over,” Jude said, loud enough for West to hear. Clover had broken out in a fine sweat. “Damn it, pull over.”

  Clover threw open the door to the van the second it had stopped completely. She scrambled out and breathed, deeply, face tipped up to let the light wind hit it. Mango climbed out after her, and Jude was right behind him. Clover knelt in the dirt on the shoulder of the road. She had the heel of her hand against her forehead, banging it lightly, rhythmically. Jude knelt close and resisted the urge to reach for her.

  She inhaled through her nose and exhaled through her mouth. “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I. Keep breathing.”

  She breathed with him until her rocking stopped and the tension in her body eased. Finally, she leaned into him. She put her face against his neck and let him wrap his arms around her.

  “Okay now?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I need to drive. I don’t get sick when I’m driving.”

  West and Jude sat on the middle bench so that Clover could drive the rest of the way. Leanne sat next to her. By the time they arrived at the place where they would meet the train, Clover seemed completely calm. Jude was calmer.

  The train came ten minutes later. It billowed steam and creaked and screamed as it slowed. Clover bounced on her toes next to Jude. She had the zine that had started all of this clutched in one hand. He thought about trying to take it from her. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to ruin it, but she eased her grip on her own so he stayed quiet.

  Jude had a sudden, hard wish that he could go back and refuse to go to New Boulder. Until he saw what they’d built there, he was on board with taking on the Company, with doing something—however small and ineffectual it might be—to help the kids still in Foster City.

  But then he thought about Xavier, Alex, and Maggie and what they’d done—outside a city, completely away from the Company. He liked knowing it was possible, even if he’d never be part of something like it himself.

  Clover slipped her free hand into his as they waited for the door to the engine to open. Frank came out first, and then Melissa ran toward them. She hugged Clover, who stiffened and held still until it was over. Then she hugged Jude. He hugged her back with one arm, because Cl
over didn’t let go of his other hand.

  “Frank.” Clover moved toward the man as soon as Melissa made her way to West and Leanne. “I have an idea.”

  Clover told Frank about her idea for passing the zine out to the other Freaks in other cities. She was excited, her hands bouncing off her thighs, face lit up. Her enthusiasm was contagious, and Jude was just starting to catch it when he looked at Melissa again.

  She looked sick.

  “What is it?” Jude asked. Clover didn’t stop talking, but her eyes went to Jude, and then followed his gaze to Melissa. Frank’s did, too. His expression changed to concern.

  West and Leanne, who’d been loading some boxes into the back of the van, caught on to whatever was happening. Even Mango went on high alert.

  “Okay.” Melissa ran a hand through her long red hair. “I really thought I was doing the right thing, you know?”

  “What did you do?” Frank asked. “Melissa?”

  “Dr. Waverly gave me a copy of Freaks for Freedom. I wasn’t supposed to show it to anyone, but—” Her voice trailed off and she looked from her father to Clover, as if she were trying to convince them of something without words. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  “What did you do?” Frank asked again.

  “She’s already shown it to people,” Clover said. “Haven’t you?”

  “I made a few copies,” Melissa said. “In the office at the station. Just, like ten. And I—”

  “Oh, Missy,” Frank said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, then,” West said. “I guess there’s no question about whether we should pass out the zine.”

  “We can make more copies, pass it out more widely,” Clover said. “Did you just copy it as it is? Because it’s—it’s like getting the middle of the book the way it is. No context, just a bunch of articles about gardening and beekeeping and—”

  “And the suppressant.” West ran a hand through his hair. “Geena’s article about the suppressant. That was in there, too.”

  “I didn’t change anything. Maybe it hasn’t gone any further. Maybe it’s okay, right?”

  “We want it to go further,” Clover said. “We can make copies here. There’s a printing press, ink, paper—everything we need.”

  “We might need to at least think about being low-key here,” Leanne said. “What’s going to happen to people caught with this thing? Because they’ll get caught.”

  Clover finally settled down. Melissa looked sick again. Even sicker than before.

  “You don’t think anyone’s going to get hurt because I gave them—because I—” She looked at Frank, and he came to her side. He put a powerful arm around her and Melissa curled into him like a little girl.

  Melissa’s tears unnerved Clover, and she moved back to Jude. “It’s not like we can do this without anyone getting hurt.”

  “Clover,” West said.

  “She’s right.” Leanne paced along the side of the train. “Goddamn it. We—if we’re going to do this, we can’t do it alone. There has to be a way to connect the resistance, to bring everyone together somehow. There are pockets in every city, groups living outside the cities. Our group is so young and so unprepared. We need to be able to reach out to the others who have been thinking about this—planning for this—for years.” Leanne seemed almost manic, and her excitement was as catching as Clover’s. “Think about it. Virginia City is big. And it’s empty. And it’s near the Company’s base. We have space for more people. If we’re going to move forward, if we’re going to try to do something more than just escape, then we need them.”

  “We can distribute the zine,” Frank said. He still had his arms around his daughter. “Looks like we’ve already started.”

  We need each other. All of us—we need each other.

  We don’t have a person to waste.

  —BILL CLINTON, “A PLACE CALLED HOPE,” JULY 16, 1992

  While the others worked to prepare Virginia City, Clover had a girl named Cassidy and her sister Helena to help work on the layout and printing of two hundred and fifty copies of Freaks for Freedom.

  She’d gone to school with Cassidy, but they weren’t friends. Something had happened to put the sisters in Foster City.

  “Is it true that your dad’s an executioner?” Helena asked while they used huge tweezers to set the letters on plates.

  “Yes.” It wasn’t a secret. It kind of surprised Clover that no one else had talked to her about her dad and what he did in the city. “Why?”

  “Never mind,” Cassidy said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does matter.” Helena didn’t look up from her plate.

  “They got it right in the end.” Cassidy was separating letters out into little cups, one for each upper- and lowercase letter and one for each piece of punctuation.

  “What are you talking about?” Clover asked.

  Before either girl could answer, Jude came into the room and handed Clover a piece of paper with her brother’s messy handwriting on it. “West sent me with this.”

  It was a new front page. She and West had gone back and forth about putting one into the zine, talking about Virginia City and what they were doing here.

  On the one hand, they needed to set up a central location. A place where the rebels spread across the country could gather, if and when it came to it. On the other hand, if the zine got into the wrong hands, Bennett would be the one to show up. Clover took the paper and went with Jude into the glass-walled room that held the press itself. Cassidy watched her close the door, but didn’t say anything.

  “What if we tell them, separately,” Clover said to Jude. They were sitting in the print shop, which was really just a section of a bigger room, encased in glass to keep the noise down. “Word of mouth, you know?”

  “We have to be careful,” Jude said. Clover was pretty sure Jude still wasn’t totally on board with passing the zine out to Freaks in other places, but he was busy setting type anyway. “These people—we can’t forget that instigating a rebellion is dangerous.”

  “I’m not an instigator,” Clover said. “They’ve been doing this longer than we have.”

  Jude didn’t say anything else. His face was pale, though. She reached a hand up and touched the scar on his left cheek. He startled, then held still and let her. He’d carry the memory of his time in Foster City with him for the rest of his life, right on his face. He tipped his head a little, so that his cheek was against her palm.

  “Jude?” They both looked up at Tim, who banged a fist on the glass wall. “Jude, West is looking for you. Clover, too.”

  Jude stepped away from Clover, and she followed him to the hallway.

  Tim looked agitated. Clover was suddenly not sure they’d be able to hear the bell from inside the glass room. Had it rung? “What’s wrong?”

  He just said, “Come on!” Tim was already at the door to the classroom. “Hurry!”

  Jude led the way down the wide staircase, and Clover followed with Cassidy and Helena on her heels. Where was Mango? Had someone been hurt? Maybe the lookout had seen a car. She hurried, passing Jude, and threw her weight into opening the schoolhouse’s heavy front door.

  West, James, Leanne, Christopher, and Marta were all there in the street in front of the building, along with half a dozen of the new kids.

  It took a minute for Clover to register what she was seeing. There were two small goats with ropes around their necks. Both were female, with their udders full.

  “You caught them!” Clover went down the stairs with Jude right behind her. Mango came up to meet her and she petted his head. Just like at the ranch, she didn’t need him as much here as she did when she went to school in the city. He could be more of a regular dog. “I can’t believe it.”

  “We’re still working on gathering up their babies,” Marta said. “We’re going to have
milk and cheese again. We’re going to be fine.”

  Before she even had her sentence out, Clover noticed two boys tearing up the road from the Carson City side on bicycles. She placed them as David, Jude’s friend from the Dinosaur, and a boy she barely knew named Eric. They stood on the pedals of their bikes, fighting to get uphill.

  “West,” she said, then again, louder when he didn’t look at her. “West!”

  All hell broke loose. She saw it in snips, like still frames from a movie. David yelling something. Then Jude pulling her arm, making her go back into the building. Marta yanking the goats by their ropes up the stairs. Phire tugging on the wrist-thick rope that hung from the bell tower to the front hall. The bell rang and sound came back all at once. She covered her ears with her hands. “Oh God, oh my God, what—”

  Jude pushed her into the first-floor classroom museum, the one with the desks still in it. The room they used for meetings. “Stay here.”

  Clover yanked away from him. “What’s going on?”

  “They saw a car coming up from Carson.”

  More people came into the room. Bethany was there, with the little kids, putting each one under a desk, helping them to curl into a ball, reminding them to be quiet. Marta thrust the goats’ ropes into Clover’s hand and was gone again.

  Jude was putting her into hiding with the little kids. She pushed past him, toward the door, but the goats got stubborn and wouldn’t move. “Where’s Mango? Mango should be in here.”

  Phire came in then, with Emmy by the arm, and grabbed the goats’ ropes from Clover. Mango nipped at their heels but came when she called him.

  “There he is,” Jude said. “Get under a desk. Be quiet. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  “Are you crazy?” Clover went back to the lobby and headed for the wide staircase. “Someone needs to look out. Did David and Eric light the fires? How about on the north side, just in case? We—”

  “Fine.” Jude came up the stairs, grabbed her arm, and pulled her the rest of the way to the second floor, then around the corner and up to the third. He stopped at the bottom of the staircase heading to the attic. “You’re the lookout. Get up to the attic. I’ll be back in a few minutes. You stay there, do you hear me? Whatever you see, you stay there.”