More cornstalks snap, only this time it’s not because of me. I turn toward the sound as another shape plows into me. The flashlight flies from my hand as we tumble into the cornstalks. I shove my attacker, roll to the side, and am about to come up swinging when I hear a familiar voice say, “Holy hell, it’s you. You’re alive.”
“Wallace?” I scramble for the small beam of light glowing like a beacon and shine it into his dirt-streaked face. “What are you doing here?”
“Put that thing away before someone notices the light. I didn’t get us this far just to get caught.”
I extinguish the light, and push past Wallace to the passenger side of the cart. The woman I hit with my cart lies motionless, facedown on broken stalks of corn.
I hook my hands under her shoulders and grunt as I struggle to pull her free. When Wallace realizes what I’m doing he hurries over to help.
“I didn’t see her until it was too late,” I explain desperately. “She ran right in front of me.”
The woman makes no sound. Not when she’s being dragged the three feet to get her clear of the cart or when we roll her over so her nose isn’t pressed into the dirt. And when I shine the light on the woman’s round, pale face, I realize three things. I know her. She’s the woman from that first day in the orientation center. The woman who said she didn’t belong here—who believed her husband would help her get back home. The second is that she’s no longer wearing the ear cuff. Instead, there’s a huge tear where the barcode used to be. But I don’t think she feels the pain from its removal. Her eyes are blank. Her chest is still.
“She’s dead.” I clap my hands over my mouth to keep from screaming. “I didn’t see her,” I whisper. “I couldn’t see . . .”
“It wasn’t you.” Wallace grabs me by the arms and turns me so I face him.
“The wheel ran her over. I felt it.” It was like going over a speed bump. That’s what someone called the bodies on that whiteboard.
I swivel back to the woman on the ground. I killed her and I don’t even remember her name.
“She was shot.” Wallace grabs my arm again and pulls me away. “We were running. They were shooting into the field and she got hit. I got their tags off us, but they’ll be searching the area. If we don’t want them shooting us, we have to go.”
The motor of the cart still hums. The corn rustles. Wallace points at the main road where I came from and the two pinpricks of light that are moving on the horizon.
“We should put her on the back of the cart,” I say.
“There isn’t time.” He hops into the passenger side and waves for me to get moving. “We have to go.”
I hate that he’s right. There’s nothing we can do for her, and taking her body with us will slow us down.
I take one last look at her lifeless face before turning on my heel. The memory of the woman insisting her imprisonment was a mistake haunts me as I put the cart in gear and drive forward.
The red light on the dashboard still blinks.
Corn stalks crack and crumble under the cart’s wheels.
Wallace twists and looks behind us.
“The lights are gone,” he says, swiveling forward. “We’re good for now. There’s a dirt road to the left somewhere. We should try to make it there so we aren’t leaving a path of destruction all the way to wherever we are going.”
“I don’t know how much longer the cart will drive,” I say, pointing to the warning light. Still, I follow his instructions. I yank the wheel to the left and wince as the cart crashes through row after row after row of corn. Finally, I steer onto an eight-foot wide path of dirt and head east—at least, I hope I’m going east.
“This is amazing!”
“Keep your voice down!” I glance over my shoulder, waiting for someone to come rushing out of the darkness.
“Sorry,” Wallace says. “I just can’t believe we’re here.”
Wallace grins as I work to keep the cart in the center of the road. He’s right. The fact that we are here—together—is pretty unbelievable.
“If I remember the maps I studied during my training,” Wallace says, just loud enough to carry over the sound of the cart and the shuffling corn, “the fence shouldn’t be too much farther. There are guard buildings near the fence line every twenty miles or so, but those are mostly there to keep people out. Ever since we started using the safety ear tags, no one ever gets this far before getting caught.” He shoots me a grin. “But we did.”
“Yeah,” I say. A knot of unease grows in my chest and not just because I know any minute the cart will lose power. “How did you get away from the Instructors?”
“What?” He pauses, then shrugs. “Oh, we were in the fields and the alarms went off. I was certain it had to be because of you. They said you were dying, but I saw what you did with the blood. That was seriously smart.”
I keep my eyes on the darkness in front of me.
Out of the corner of my eye I see Wallace frown as he continues, “Half the Instructors were called away from the fields to help search and a group of subjects a few rows over decided to take a chance. When our Instructor’s attention was on them, three of us in my group decided to make a break for it. By the time the Instructors realized we were gone, we were too far away to catch us on foot so they opened fire. The man running right behind me was shot in the back. The other . . . well, you know what happened to her.”
The thud of her body against the front of the cart—that’s a sound I won’t forget. Ever.
The red light blinks faster. I press the gas pedal to the floor, but it’s no use. The cart has started to slow.
Wallace doesn’t appear to notice. “How about you?” he asks. “How did you get out of the infirmary?”
I picture Isaac. He must know the Instructors haven’t found me, yet. I know he must be rooting for me to get out and to help him as he helped me.
“The door didn’t latch when some guy came to check on me.” I glance over to look at Wallace again. “I pretended to still be drugged and when he left I snuck out.”
“So you didn’t convince anyone to help you? I figured you must know Instructors who help sneak people out. Some do, if the price is right.”
Warning bells flash in my head.
“I didn’t know that.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Why is that so hard to believe?”
“Because it means you got damn lucky,” he says quietly.
“I’d say we both got lucky,” I tell him. The indicator light goes black. The motor dies and the cart bumps and sputters to a stop. “I think our luck has run out,” I say in the hushed night. “We’re going to have to walk from here.”
“Well, it can’t be that much farther.” Wallace hops out. “Then . . . I guess . . .” He shakes his head and shoves his baggy shirtsleeves to his elbows.
I grab my bag, slide it over my head, and climb to the ground. “What?”
“Nothing. Once we reach the fence, I’m not sure where I’m going to go.”
“Away from here would be a good start.”
“That’s the truth.” He kicks the dirt with the tip of his boot. “I’m just not sure what I’ll do once we get out. I mean, it’s not like I can go back to the Marshals after all of this and who knows what story everyone I know has been told about why I suddenly disappeared. For all I know, my parents and friends think I’m dead.”
The moonlight catches the side of his face giving me a clearer view of the ear where the barcode used to be embedded. There was a smear of blood at the bottom of the lobe. Other than that, his ear looked fine.
“Are you okay?” Wallace asks.
I don’t think I am. All of this feels very wrong. “I was thinking about the woman you were with.”
“What happened to her wasn’t your fault. Hey! I think I see the fence beyond those trees.” He grins at me and picks up his pace. “We’re going to make it and maybe if we get back to Chicago we can try to shut this down. You know other people like u
s, right? You’re working with people who know what this place is for and are planning to tell people about it?”
He turns to me and realizes I’m several steps behind him. “Are you okay?”
No. I’m not.
“How did you get the ear tag off without hurting yourself?” I ask quietly.
He lifts a hand to his ear. “As soon as I started pulling at it, the fastener unlatched. I guess we both needed some luck to get this far.”
My stomach clenches.
“Hey, do you think you can run as far as the fence?” he asks over his shoulder. “Once we get to the other side we can talk about what we’re going to do next. I think I know where we can find a phone if you have someone you want to call. . . .” Wallace glances back to where I’m standing—scanning the landscape, looking for somewhere—anywhere—that I can run. He sighs, reaches under his shirt and when he turns to face me, he’s holding a gun.
How could I be so stupid?
Trust—but verify. I knew better and still I trusted everything Wallace told me because he said what I wanted to hear. I wanted to believe that the people who were tagging their neighbors and putting them in cages didn’t understand what they were doing. That once they saw the truth they, too, would want all this to stop.
Wallace shakes his head. “It’s always the little details that screw things up. I’ll remember that in case you aren’t as helpful as I think you’ll be and I have to do all of this over again.”
“Do what?” I ask. “I don’t understand. You were in the Unity Center when I woke up. You were a prisoner, like me. You were beaten by the Instructors after we got off the truck.”
“Not going to lie, letting them take those couple whacks really sucked.” He rolls out his left shoulder. “But after we talked in the truck, I realized you’d need an extra incentive to trust me.” Wallace smiles in the moonlight. “My boss said I was grasping at straws—that I was just looking for a way out of the crap assignment of sitting in that room day after day assessing the criminals after they were brought in. He couldn’t understand why I thought you were involved with the group we’ve been hunting. You didn’t have a tattoo. You didn’t try to kill yourself in some blaze of idiotic glory to protect the other terrorists you’re working with.”
He tightens his grip on the gun and I hold my breath.
“But the second you opened your eyes, I knew. I could tell you were different. It didn’t matter that everyone else said I was wrong or that they only let me ride here on the truck because they wanted to teach me a lesson. I knew you were the person I was sitting in that stupid room going out of my mind with boredom to find. And now they’ll know I was right.”
Gun still pointed at me, Wallace slides his free hand into his pocket and pulls out a personal screen.
“It’s Wallace,” he says to someone on the other end. I take a step to the side and Wallace moves the black-barreled gun side to side like wagging a finger at a naughty toddler.
“Send a cart to my position. I’m bringing her in.” He grins as he slides the screen back into his pocket. “A team will be here to collect us soon. While we wait, how about you tell me how you knew about the Marshals and labor unions, and how you really managed to escape the infirmary? It’ll be easier for you if you cooperate. I can promise you won’t like the other methods they use to get information.” The breeze ruffles his curly hair. “It’s seriously unpleasant. Trust me.”
In this one thing—I do. I trust that the Instructors will hurt me. They’ll find the GPS recorder. They’ll realize I’m not working alone and do whatever is necessary to get me to tell them what I know. I won’t tell them what they want to hear—at least not right away. But I don’t know if I can hold out forever. My mistakes put Isaac here. I’d rather die than have that happen to anyone else.
“How did you find me?” I stall for time while I ease my hand into my pocket and fumble to open Isaac’s thin case.
“Security spotted you on a charging station monitor. Your uniform almost fooled them. When you climbed into that vehicle we really had to scramble to catch up.”
I shift my weight and prepare to make a final run when a large, distinctive shadow moves from behind one tree to another.
Wallace shrugs. “We assumed you’d see the dirt road and take it east to the boundary. You were supposed to run into me and my tragically injured friend there. Then you—being you—would sympathetically stop to help. It never occurred to us that you’d decide to drive through the corn instead of waiting to reach the road, or that she’d have the strength to get up and run when my back was turned.”
A large shadow just over Wallace’s right shoulder creeps beyond the trees. I recognize the way the shadow moves as it comes toward us.
It’s Atlas.
He found me!
I glance over my shoulder. Several pinpricks of light shine in the distance—and they’re coming this way. Atlas doesn’t know they’re headed for us. He doesn’t know how little time we have.
All thoughts of running, of using the scalpel on myself, disappear.
“I don’t understand how you can think any of this is okay!” I raise my voice, hoping my words will mask the tread of Atlas’s footsteps as he advances. “How can you pull people off the street just because they know things you don’t want them to know? How can you lock people in cages and lie to their families about what’s happened to them? The story of the girl—”
“Wasn’t real . . .”
“It is real!” I shout.
Atlas emerges from the trees over twenty feet away from where Wallace and his gun stand.
I take a step forward as Atlas starts to run. “Every time you take someone to one of your Unity Centers,” I yell, “you destroy lives while pretending to keep the country safe.”
“You think anyone cares about those people?” Wallace laughs. “No one cares. No one gives a . . .”
A branch cracks.
Wallace spins. Atlas grabs Wallace’s arm and shoves it up to the star-studded sky.
A shot echoes in the air as Atlas hooks a foot around the Marshal’s ankle and they both hit the ground in a tangle.
Another shot explodes and I pull the scalpel from my pocket and limp forward, desperate to help as Atlas and Wallace continue to fight.
Wallace rolls away from Atlas, cocks his arm, and smashes the black metal barrel of the gun across Atlas’s face. Atlas flies backward. He lands flat on the ground—hard. It takes him a second to recover. Just a second to start pushing himself up, but that is enough for Wallace to roll to his knees and raise his gun. Wallace doesn’t hear me move. He’s smiling when I take my own aim and bury the sharp silver knife deep into his neck.
Nineteen
When I was a little kid, I couldn’t get enough of juice pouches—especially the pink lemonade ones. I liked the look of the ice-cold, shiny silver packaging. I loved how sucking on the straw made the package shrink. Mom would let me pull the straw free from the small clumps of glue on the back of the package. Then she would remove the plastic and poke the straw into the pouch because that was a big-person job.
I can still remember the excitement of finally getting to shove the straw in all on my own. How I held it tight in my hand and punched over and over again until the pointed bottom edge of the straw bit deep into the shiny silver. How the ruby red of the fruit punch streamed up and out and over my hands.
The scalpel is a lot sharper than the edge of that plastic straw. It takes only one punch into Wallace’s flesh to make him bleed like that pouch of fruit punch. His eyes widen and he screams as I grab his shoulder with my left hand and shove the knife in even deeper with my right. Then I yank it out and stab again. The gun drops from Wallace’s hand into the thick grass in front of him. He lets out a wet, bubbling gurgle when I pull out the knife and jab again. Liquid flows slick and warm over my hand. I pull the knife out one last time, and gasping, he clutches his neck to stop the blood as it drains from his throat onto the ground.
“Please,�
� he says in a wet, strangled whisper.
I clutch the bloody knife and look down at him. “You’re dead,” I say. He just doesn’t know it yet. And I’m glad I’m the one who killed him, I think as Wallace pitches forward and with a gurgle weakly claws at the ground.
Atlas appears at my side. Seeing him snaps me back. “They’re coming,” I say.
The lights on the horizon are bigger and are turning in this direction. The Instructors Wallace summoned are on the way.
“He called for reinforcements just before you arrived.” I drop to the ground next to Wallace and feel for his pockets hoping to find the personal screen he used.
“What are you doing?” Atlas asks, grabbing my arm.
“They’re tracking his phone. If we pull the battery, they’ll lose the signal. That will buy us some time.”
“In another minute they aren’t going to need the signal.” Atlas tugs me to my feet. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
I drop the scalpel and take one last look at Wallace lying crumpled as what is left of his life seeps into the grass. Then I turn and, together, Atlas and I run.
Atlas is faster than me on my best day. This isn’t my best day. I lag behind him through the grass to the darkness of the trees, glancing over my shoulder every few seconds as the lights grow closer.
My legs are heavy. It’s hard to see where we are going in the dark. I stumble over a low bush obscured by shadows and double over to catch my breath.
“You can do it, Meri,” Atlas whispers. “It’s not much farther. I promise.”
Not much farther, I repeat to myself as we weave through bushes and trees until suddenly there is a fence in front of us—a fence that despite all our training is impossible for us to climb. It’s the same style and material as the fence in the dorm courtyard. The thick black slats buried into the ground stretch up at least ten feet into the air. Beyond the fence are more trees—more shadows. Who knows what else.
Angry voices chase us on the wind.
“Is there a tree close enough to the fence for us to climb?” I ask.
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