by Jackson Ford
Whoever owns the campground had taken in three or four wooden picnic tables from the front deck, stashing them in a corner. Garcia and Okoro wasted no time in dragging them to the windows and setting them up so they could lie prone on top, looking out.
Okoro’s rifle is surprisingly low-tech, with a flimsy grip and a thin barrel that looks as if it would blow away in a stiff breeze. But it’s got a no-fucks-given vibe to it – kind of like Okoro herself. Whoever made it didn’t give a shit about looking cool. All they wanted to do was make it easy to kill someone.
Garcia cracked the window very slightly, letting the barrel poke out. He and Okoro spent a while debating how to disguise what they called their nest, talking in murmurs. They settled on placing the tables at an angle, so they’re exposing as little of themselves as possible while still getting a good line of sight.
Okoro’s had her eyes to the scope for hours, Garcia lying alongside her. Neither of them have moved. Not a muscle. Occasionally, Garcia will mutter something to Okoro about wind direction, or temperature, or MOA and DOPE, whatever those are, which Okoro always acknowledges with a barely audible grunt.
At first, I was confused about why they’d need a sniper rifle at such close range – surely their regular assault rifles would be fine? Then again, bullets lose power with distance, so technically Okoro’s even more deadly from the building than De Robillard and Grayson in the trees. The only reason they’re the primary team and she’s secondary is that if they miss, the boy won’t know where he’s being shot at from. Okoro and Garcia are a backup, nothing more.
I have no idea where De Robillard and Grayson are – no matter how often I’ve scanned the trees, I can’t spot them, which I guess is the idea. Occasionally, one of them – Grayson, I think – will check-in with Burr, a clipped voice on the radio: “Alpha, all clear,” or “This is Alpha, nothing yet.”
Annie and I have been made to lie prone on one of the tables, too, at the window on the other side of the door. Instead of a sniper rifle, we each have a pair of high-definition binoculars. I personally didn’t think we needed them, not this close to the parking lot, but Burr was insistent. When Santos tells us there’s movement on the road leading to the camp, Annie and I will train the binoculars on the parking lot. We’ll identify Matthew and…
And this will all be over.
“Stop fidgeting,” Annie murmurs. It’s the most she’s said in the past four hours. Every time I’ve tried to talk to her, she’s responded in monosyllables, never looking away from the road. All the same, the waiting is starting to get to her – she’s getting restless, too, shifting her prone body more and more. She’s not like Okoro, who appears to be carved from stone.
I yawn. I can’t help it. I may be jittery and on edge, but my body has decided that lying prone equals sleepy time.
Annie flicks an annoyed glance at me. “They’ll be here soon. Focus.”
I stare into the still morning. There’s a bird in the dirt of the parking lot, pecking at something on the ground. “Easy for you to say.”
She gives a small sigh, still not looking away from her lenses.
Something in the sigh irritates me. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“I said it’s nothing. Relax.”
“Ladies. Kill the chatter.” Burr is lounging in a camp chair behind us, a leg up on his knee. He’s set up a hefty-looking laptop on a second chair next to him, with video links to the other three locations.
I flip him a middle finger, hardly even realising I’m doing it. “Annie… you know you can talk to me, right? I’m around if you need to—”
She lowers the lenses, fixes me with a dark stare. “Need to what?”
My mouth is a lot drier than it should be. Why oh why did I think that now was the time to start in on this? “I just—”
“No, you know what? Shut the fuck up. I’m not actually talking about this now. Not with you.”
That stings. “Hey, I was there too.”
“I told you, quiet,” Burr says.
I ignore him. “I’m literally the only other person who knows what it was like.”
It’s the wrong thing to say. It is the Olympic gold medalist of wrong things to say. It just popped out of me.
Annie’s stare could drill a hole through the moon. “You have no idea,” she says slowly.
“I—”
“Get this straight in your thick-ass head. This is not about you. Not everything is about you. You don’t get to make this about your feelings and your story and your bullshit. You want me to tell you it’s OK? Give you a fucking hug? I’m not your therapist, Teagan. I’m not Reggie, or your boy Nic. I don’t care. I just want to get this done and go home. That’s it.”
“… I’m sorry.” I don’t know what else to say.
“Good for you.” She puts her eyes back to the lenses.
“Hey!” Burr says. “If you two don’t can it, I’m gonna—”
“Dude, no one cares,” I tell him, just as Annie says, “How about you shut the fuck up, man?”
Garcia snorts.
In the silence that follows, Annie’s eyes meet mine. She’s definitely still pissed at me… but maybe a fraction less than before.
“Just be professional,” Burr grumbles. “And you, Garcia – another noise outta you…”
I shift position on the bench again, trying to take a little bit of the weight off my stomach. Maybe we can roll out a sleeping bag for padding – I should have looked, ages ago. I’ll tell Burr to go find us some. It’s not like he’s doing anything useful right now…
I squeeze my eyes shut. I don’t care about sleeping bags. I don’t even care how uncomfortable how I am. I care about not murdering a child.
“Annie,” I say slowly. “I don’t wanna do this. He’s a kid.”
And of course, I made it about me. It is really hard to stay mad at Annie when she’s right.
The same sigh from before, like I’m a kid – one who can’t possibly understand. “You saw his face, same as I did. He wanted to hurt somebody.”
“Yeah, but—”
“And are we forgetting that he caused not one but two major earthquakes all by himself? Probably ’bout to cause another one? One that’s even worse?” She shakes her head. “We’re gonna save lot of people here. A lot of other kids get to survive because we kill this one. Focus on that. Watch the damn road.”
“It’s just that… I feel like everybody’s making out that this is simple, and it isn’t.”
“It is.”
“What about his mom? What happens to her after we… we shoot him? Do we kill her too? Arrest her? On what charge? Annie, he’s, like, four…”
“Don’t make a difference,” says Burr.
I look over my shoulder at him. He’s still sitting in his camp chair, legs crossed, leaning back. Out the corner of my eye, Okoro and Garcia exchange the briefest glance.
“Thought you wanted quiet,” I say.
“Yeah, well, you won’t shut the fuck up anyway. And you got me intrigued. Okoro, you were in Helmand, right?”
“Uh-uh.” Okoro’s mouth hardly moves. “Kandahar.”
“What about you, Garcia? You also in Afghanistan?”
“No, sir. Fallujah, though.”
“OK. Okoro: little kid with a soccer ball approaches a checkpoint. He’s got something bulky under his shalwar, and you can’t see what it is. What do you do?”
“Has he been ordered to stop? In Pashto?”
“Dari too. He ignores the order.”
“Can he see a weapon pointed at him? Are the signs around the checkpoint clear and visible?”
“Yep.”
“Shoot him,” Okoro says, not even changing her tone.
“Wait – what?” I prop myself up on my elbows, staring in horror at Okoro.
The sniper doesn’t look away from her scope, just gives the barest shrug of her shoulders.
Behind me, Burr leans back, crosses his ankles. “Wha
t Okoro is trying to say, in her own eloquent way, is that you make the call based on the information you have, and the risks the kid presents.”
“He could be deaf! He could have a mental illness! Maybe he didn’t hear, or his friends dared him to do it, or—”
“Or he could be carrying twenty pounds of fertiliser and nails.”
“That someone made him carry.”
“That’s an assumption. All those things you just said? Assumptions. What we know, for sure, is that you are in a dangerous area known for hostile activity, approached by an unknown civilian with a suspicious bulge in his clothing. That’s concrete, verifiable information, and you have to act on it.”
“No, you don’t.” I hate how the words come out, all small and irritated.
“With your squad occupying the checkpoint? Plus however many other civilians around? Of course you do.”
“Bullshit. You just get off on shooting people who don’t speak American.”
“Now that’s not fair,” he drawls, more amused than anything. He’s unwrapping a piece of gum, long fingers moving. “I couldn’t give a rat’s ass what God you pray to, or what colour your skin is. You refuse to eat with your left hand? Who gives a shit?” He smirks at the pun, then grows serious. “But if you are a threat to me, my team or the people I’ve been ordered to protect, and you don’t stop when I tell you to, then you’re going down.”
He pops the gum in his mouth. “Of course, I don’t expect you to understand that. You can try to breed a supersoldier, but you can’t give them combat judgement. That only comes through experience.”
“This again,” I mutter.
“What?” he says, speaking around the gum. “It’s the truth.”
“You know, for someone who claims he isn’t prejudiced, you seem fine with hating on me for who I am.”
“I don’t hate you. Truly. I just think the whole supersoldier fantasy is bullshit. You can give someone all the physical and mental gifts you like, but the only thing that makes a combat professional is training and experience. That’s—”
“Well, yeah. Duh.”
He gives me a strange look. “What?”
“Of course you need training to make a soldier. I don’t know why you think my ability is gonna change that.”
“Way I heard it, you were supposed to replace conventional soldiers.”
“Oh, you are such a douchetard, Burr.”
“Is that even a word?” Garcia says.
I ignore him. “We weren’t supposed to replace conventional soldiers, you idiot. We were supposed to stop the world needing them in the first place. Did they not brief you on this? You seem to know all these things about me, but did they not actually tell you what me and my brother and sister were made for?”
Garcia’s head whips round. “There’s more than one of you?”
“Guess that answers that question. There was more than one of me. I got the psychokinesis, Chloe got the infrared vision, Adam never needed to sleep. They tried to put all of those things in one person, but it didn’t quite work out. The whole point was to create someone who could end a battle before it even started. If you shut down the enemy right at the beginning, you don’t need war.”
“So someone to replace soldiers,” says Burr.
“No. It’s not the same thing.”
“It’s literally the same thing.”
“It kind of is,” Okoro says, not looking up from her scope.
“Whatever. The point is, nobody actually asked us what we wanted. Me, my brother and sister. We were just told one day that this was what we were supposed to do, like we didn’t have any choice. Well, let me set your feeble little mind at ease, Burr. I’m not going to replace you. My family’s dead, and the government don’t have the first fucking clue how to produce more of me. You can shoot as many kids in Afghanistan as you want.”
“Yeah.” Burr spits his gum back into the wrapper. “Doesn’t change the fact that there are more of you. Like the kid making the earthquakes.”
I bite my lip. “Nothing to do with me. I didn’t make him. I don’t even know where he comes from. And I still have absolutely no intention of getting involved in a war. You know what I’m going to do? I’m gonna go to chef school. I’m gonna learn how to work in a professional kitchen, and then I’m gonna open my own restaurant.”
“You’re what?” Annie says.
“Surprise.”
“Tanner—”
“Would never let me, I know, Reggie told me the same thing. That’s not actually the point, though. The point is—” I look Burr in the eyes. “The point is I don’t want to be a soldier, super or not. I never did. Your job is safe, Kyle. Congratulations.”
The cabin for silent for a long minute. Outside, the wind has picked up, the leaves of the trees rustling softly. I go back to my binoculars, scanning the road. Willing the tight feeling of worry in my chest to stay where I tell it to.
“What kind of restaurant?” Burr says.
“What do you care?”
“Just curious.”
Another few seconds of silence. Then he says, “You like barbecue?”
“Yeah. So?”
“When this is done, go up to Mukilteo. North of Seattle.”
“And what, exactly, is in Mukilteo?”
“Barbecue, dumbass. Diamond Knot Brewing. Best outside of Georgia. They got brisket that’ll blow your—”
At that moment, his radio crackles. Santos’s voice, clipped and hard.
“Delta One, Charlie. Contact.”
FIFTY-ONE
Amber
They’d hitched a ride with a family in an SUV – a young couple and their baby daughter, who had taken them as far as Castle Rock, just past the Washington border. Amber had wondered if Matthew might force them to go further, use his power on them. The thought wasn’t a worried one – it passed through her with a kind of cold detachment. If he wanted to hurt them, she certainly wouldn’t be able to stop him.
But Matthew had let them go with a smile, then turned and asked – not told, asked – her to find them another ride.
They’d found an old Corolla in the parking lot of a self-storage unit, on the outskirts of town. Amber had been thinking she could track down a piece of metal to open the door, when Matthew had used a rock to smash the window. Amber had watched the glass shatter, blinking slowly. Then she’d gone to work, opening the door and clambering inside and reaching under the dash, her hands practised and quick.
Get him as far as he needs to go.
The interstate took them into dense forests, and Amber found herself calmed by the huge trees. Matthew had already told her where to go; unlike California, there was still cell signal in Washington, and he’d wasted no time in pulling up Google Maps on his iPad – there was still some battery left, enough for him to spend a few minutes memorising the directions. Matthew used the rest of it reading up on wilderness survival tips. When Amber had asked him about it, he’d been uncharacteristically honest. “We might be quite far in the woods for the next one.” His fingers danced across the iPad’s surface. “I know we have supplies, but we should definitely know how to find water and stuff, and which berries we can eat.”
They drove for hours, well into the afternoon. The landscape became more rugged, the forest greener under the gathering sky. Every leaf seemed to shine with an inner light, a dark green glow, offset by the deep brown trunks and the black shadows in the canopy. Amber thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
Just one more, and I’ll never use my power again.
At around three o’clock, they’d turned onto a gravel road, winding through the dense forest. Less than half an hour later, Matthew spotted the campground through the trees, and a moment after that, they rounded a bend and entered the parking lot. The Corolla’s balding tyres crunch over the gravel.
“Doesn’t look like there’s anyone around,” Amber says, peering at the darkened building. A sign above the doors reads WELCOME TO VANCE CREEK CAMPGROUND
.
The lot is deserted, and Amber doesn’t bother parking straight. She pulls the car over at a diagonal, close to the main building. She’s suddenly aware of how much denser the forest is here, how tall the trees are. The shadows between them shift and move in strange, unearthly patterns. The camp building is silent, deserted. A stack of metal sheets propped against one side creak in the wind.
A sudden thought occurs. “Matthew, honey… we don’t have any water. For the hike.“
He gestures to the main building. “We can get some in there. And if the water’s off or whatever, I know how to find some in the forest.” He taps the iPad again.
She’s about to tell him that the building will be locked, but then, so was the car.
As far as he needs to go.
Matthew pops the door, climbing out of the car.
FIFTY-TWO
Teagan
“Is it him?”
I’m so focused on the approaching car that I don’t realise Burr is right next to me until he speaks. I start in surprise, jogging my view through the scope.
The radio crackles – Grayson this time, one of the snipers. “Delta One, Alpha, we see the vehicle too. No clear view of the occupants. Over.”
“Can you see inside?” Burr asks us.
“Nothing yet,” Annie replies.
Let it not be them. Let be literally anybody else. Let it be the camp owner coming to check up on the place or something, I don’t care.
The problem is, that will mean Matthew isn’t here. It’ll mean he’s somewhere else, maybe getting ready to turn Cascadia loose.
The car takes an age to come to a stop. There’s a woman driving it, although I can’t see her face from here. Someone in the passenger seat, too. A child.
The car parks at an angle, the hood pointing at the far corner of the building. The engine cuts, leaving the camp in silence. Okoro is made of stone. Garcia too. The only sound is Burr’s breathing. No – there’s my own heart, thundering in my ears.
The passenger door opens. It’s on the other side of the car from where I am, so I can’t quite see who climbs out. But the driver’s side is in full view, and as the door opens, Annie sucks in a very quick breath.