Among the Hidden

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  Almost instantaneously, his words vanished and reappeared at the top of the screen. He waited. Nothing. The screen stayed blank below his question.

  Because nothing was worse than doing nothing, he typed again, “Hello? Is anybody there?”

  Still nothing. He slammed his fist down on the computer desk so hard, it hurt.

  “I have to know!” he shouted. “Tell me! I can’t go home until I know!”

  He heard the door too late to react. And suddenly a voice boomed behind him: “Turn around slowly. I have a gun. Who are you and why are you here?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Luke stifled his instinct to run. He turned around as slowly as he could. Guns had been outlawed for everyone but Government officials long before he was born. But he recognized the object pointed at him from books and Dad’s descriptions. Dad had always talked about hunting rifles and shotguns, big guns to bring down deer or wolves. This gun was smaller. Meant to kill humans.

  All that flashed through Luke’s mind before he looked beyond the gun, to the man holding it. He was tall and fleshy, his expensive clothes only partially hiding his bulk. Luke had seen him only from a distance before.

  “You’re Jen’s dad,” he said.

  “I didn’t ask who I was,” the man snapped. “Who are you?”

  Luke exhaled slowly.

  “A friend of Jen’s,” he said cautiously.

  Only because he was watching very, very closely did he see the man lower the gun by a fraction of an inch.

  “Please,” Luke said. “I just want to know where she is.”

  This time the man clearly relaxed his gun hand. He circled around behind Luke and snapped off the computer.

  “Jen says you have to park the hard drive before you do that,” Luke said.

  “How do you know about Jen?” the man asked. He narrowed his eyes.

  Luke blinked. The man was bargaining, he realized, offering to negotiate. He wanted something from Luke before he would tell Luke anything about Jen. But what?

  “I’m a third child, too,” Luke said finally. The man’s expression didn’t change, but Luke thought he saw a flicker of interest in his eyes. “I’m a neighbor. I found out about her, and I started coming over, when I could.”

  “How did you know she was here?” the man said.

  “I saw—” Luke didn’t want to get her in trouble. “I saw lights when I knew everyone was gone. I guessed. I—I really wanted there to be another third child for me to meet.”

  “So Jen was careless,” the man said, with an edge to his voice that Luke didn’t understand.

  “No,” Luke said uncertainly. “I was observant.”

  The man nodded, only to accept Luke’s answer. Then he sat down in the chair by the computer desk, and rested the gun on his leg. Luke took that as a sign that the conversation might last long enough for him to find out something.

  “Did Jen teach you how to disable our alarm system?” the man asked.

  Luke saw no point in lying. “Yes. But I must have screwed up, since you came—”

  “No,” the man said. “If you’d screwed up, the security guards would have come. But I have it set so I’m automatically notified if the system’s shut down while I’m away . . . . Given the circumstances, I decided to investigate myself.”

  Luke longed to ask what “circumstances” he meant, but the man was already asking another question. “So what else did you and Jen do together?” the man said. Luke couldn’t understand why he sounded so accusatory.

  “Nothing,” Luke said. “I mean, we talked a lot. She showed me the computer. She—she wanted me to go to the rally, but I was too scared.”

  Too late, Luke thought to wonder if the man knew about the rally. Was Luke betraying Jen’s confidence? But the man didn’t seem surprised. He was studying Luke as intently as Luke had been studying him.

  “Why didn’t you stop her?” the man asked.

  “Stop Jen? That’s like trying to stop the sun,” Luke said.

  The man gave Luke the faintest of smiles, one that contained no happiness. “Just remember that,” he said.

  “So where is she?” Luke asked.

  The man looked away.

  “Jen’s—” His voice broke. “Jen is no longer with us.”

  “She—?”

  “She’s dead,” the man said harshly.

  Somehow Luke had known without wanting to know. He still stumbled backwards, in shock. He bumped into the couch and sagged into it.

  “No,” he said. “Not Jen. No. You’re lying.”

  His ears roared. He thought crazy things. This is a dream. A nightmare. I will make myself wake up. He remembered Jen talking a mile a minute, gesturing wildly. How could she be dead? He tried to picture her lying still, not moving. Dead. It was impossible.

  The man was shaking his head helplessly.

  “I’d give anything to have her back,” he whispered. “But it’s true. I saw. They gave us . . . they gave us the body. Special privilege for a Government official.” His voice was so bitter, Luke could barely listen. “And we couldn’t even bury her in the family plot. Couldn’t take a bereavement day off work. Couldn’t tell anyone why we’re going around with red eyes and aching hearts. No—we just had to pretend to be the same old family of four we’d always been.”

  “How?” Luke asked. “How did she . . . die?”

  He was thinking, if the car had wrecked, it wouldn’t be so bad. Or maybe it had nothing to do with the rally. Maybe she just got really sick.

  “They shot her,” Jen’s father said. “They shot all of them. All forty kids at the rally, gunned down right in front of the president’s house. The blood flowed into his rosebushes. But they had the sidewalks scrubbed before the tourists came, so nobody would know.”

  Luke started shaking his head no, and couldn’t stop.

  “But Jen said there’d be too many people to shoot. She said there’d be a thousand,” Luke protested, as if Jen’s words could change what he was hearing.

  “Our Jen had too much faith in the bravery of her fellow hidden,” Jen’s father said.

  Luke flinched. “I told her I couldn’t go,” he said. “I told her! It’s not my fault!”

  “No,” Jen’s dad said quietly. “And you couldn’t have stopped her. It’s not your fault. There are plenty of other people who deserve the blame. They probably would have shot a thousand. Or fifteen thousand. They don’t care.”

  His face twisted. Luke thought he had never seen such pain, not even the time Matthew dropped a sledgehammer on his foot. Tears began to spill down Jen’s father’s face.

  “What I don’t understand is—why did she do this, this Children’s Crusade? She wasn’t stupid. We’d been warning her about the Population Police all her life. Did she really think the rally would work?” he said.

  “Yes,” Luke assured him. Then, unbidden, the last words she’d spoken to him came back to him: We can hope—after she’d told him hope was worthless. Maybe she knew the rally would fail. Maybe she even knew she would probably die. He remembered the first day he’d met her, when she’d cut her hand to cover the drops of his blood on the carpet. There was something strange in Jen he couldn’t quite understand, that made her willing to sacrifice herself to help others. Or to try to.

  “I think at first she thought the rally would work,” Luke told Jen’s dad. “And then, even when she wasn’t sure . . . she still had to go. She wouldn’t call it off.”

  “Why?” Jen’s dad asked. He was sobbing. “Did she want to die?”

  “No,” Luke said. “She wanted to live. Not die. Not hide. Live.”

  The words played over and over again in his brain: “Not hide. Live. Not hide. Live.” As long as he held on to them, he felt like Jen was there. She’d just left the room for a minute, to get more potato chips, maybe, and soon she’d be back to lecture him again about how they both deserved a better life than hiding. He could believe it was her voice echoing in his ears.

  But if he
let go, let the words stop for a minute, he was lost. He felt like the whole world was spinning away from him, and he was all alone. He wanted to cry out, “Jen! Come back!”—as if she could hear him, and stop the spinning, and come to him.

  As if from a great distance, Luke heard Jen’s father heave a sigh and blow his nose in a businesslike way.

  “You may not be ready to hear this,” he said. “But—”

  Dizzily, Luke raised his head and listened halfheartedly.

  “When you logged into that chat room,” Jen’s father said, “a buzzer went off in a room in Population Police headquarters. They’re monitoring the chat room very closely—they found it after the rally. I’ve managed to . . . uh, cover up things about Jen, but they’ll trace your message back to our computer. The Population Police are backlogged right now, following leads from the rally, so I should have a day or two to come up with a plausible-sounding explanation. But if they investigate too carefully, you may be in danger.”

  “More than usual?” Luke said sarcastically.

  Jen’s dad took the question seriously.

  “Yes. They will begin actively looking for you. They’ll search every house around this one. It wouldn’t take them long to find you.”

  A chill ran down Luke’s spine. So he would die, just like Jen. Or not like her—she had gone bravely. He would be caught like a mouse in its hole.

  “But if you’ll let me,” Jen’s dad continued, “I can get you a fake I.D. You can be miles away before they come looking.”

  “You would do that for me?” Luke asked. “Why?”

  “Because of Jen.”

  “But—how?”

  “I have connections. You see”—Jen’s dad hesitated—“I work for the Population Police.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Luke began screaming and couldn’t stop. Suddenly his brain didn’t seem to have any control whatsoever over what his body did. He felt his legs spring up and propel him toward Jen’s dad. He saw his own hand grab for the gun and wrestle it away. He heard a voice he barely recognized as his own scream, again and again, “No! No! No!”

  “Stop!” Jen’s dad yelled. “Stop, you little fool, before you get us both killed—”

  Somehow, the gun was in Luke’s hand. Jen’s dad lunged at him, and Luke could picture Jen’s dad tackling him, just as Jen had tackled him all those months ago. But this time Luke stepped to the side at the last moment, and Jen’s dad crashed uselessly into the far wall. Luke pointed the gun at him and struggled to hold it steady.

  Jen’s dad turned around slowly.

  “You can shoot me,” he said, holding his hands helplessly up in the air. “I might even welcome the chance to stop missing Jen. But it would be a mistake. I swear to you, in the name of everything that’s sacred—in Jen’s name—I’m on your side.”

  Jen’s dad stared into Luke’s eyes, waiting. Luke felt a surge of pride that he’d gotten the upper hand, that he had earned the right to decide what happened next. But how could he know what was right? Surely Jen’s own father wouldn’t lie in her name. Would he?

  Luke squeezed his eyes shut. Then he lowered the gun to his side.

  “Good,” Jen’s dad said, audibly releasing his breath.

  Luke let Jen’s dad walk toward him, gently take the gun, and lay it on the desk.

  “I was going to explain,” Jen’s dad said, panting a little. He sat down. “I only work at Population Police headquarters. I don’t agree with what they do. I try to sabotage them as much as I can. Jen never understood, either—sometimes you have to work from inside enemy lines.”

  Jen’s dad talked and talked and talked. Luke thought he was repeating everything he said two or three times, but that was okay, because Luke’s brain was functioning so slowly, he needed the extra help.

  “Do you know much history?” Jen’s dad asked.

  Luke tried to remember if there were any history books among his family’s collection in the attic. Did adventure stories of long ago count?

  “Just—” He cleared his throat. “Just from the books Jen loaned me.”

  “Which ones?”

  Luke pointed to the ones on the shelves above the computer.

  “And she gave me some articles, printouts from the computer.”

  Jen’s dad nodded. “So you got the propaganda from both sides,” he said. “No truth.”

  “What do you mean?” Luke asked.

  “The Government publications are trying to convince people of one thing, so they stretch the facts. And the underground is just as extreme in its own way, making statistics match their cause. So you know nothing.”

  “Jen said the stuff from the computer was true,” Luke said defensively. Just saying her name made him wince. And now she was dead. How could she be dead?

  Jen’s dad waved that away impatiently.

  “She believed what she wanted to. But I’m afraid—” He stopped, and Luke was afraid Jen’s dad might start crying again. Then he swallowed hard and went on. “I’m afraid I encouraged her. I passed along some slanted information. I wanted to give her hope that someday the Population Law would be repealed. I didn’t know she’d . . . she’d . . .”

  Luke knew he wouldn’t be able to bear seeing Jen’s dad break down again.

  “So what should I know?” Luke asked. “What is the truth?”

  “The truth,” Jen’s dad muttered, catching onto those two words as though Luke had thrown him a lifeline. He recovered himself quickly. “Nobody really knows. There have been too many lies for too long. Our Government is totalitarian, and totalitarian governments never like truth.”

  That made no sense to Luke, but he let Jen’s dad go on talking.

  “You know about the famines?”

  Luke nodded.

  “Before that, our country believed in freedom and democracy and equality for all. Then the famines came, and the government was overthrown. There were riots in every city, over food, and many, many people were killed. When General Sherwood came to power, he promised law and order and food for all. By then, that was all the people wanted. And all they got.”

  Luke squinted, trying to understand. This was grownup talk, pure and simple. No, it was worse than the grown-up talk he was used to, because all his parents ever talked about was the corn harvest and bills and the likelihood of frost at the end of May. Those Luke understood. Governments being overthrown, cities rioting—they were beyond his comprehension.

  “Barons got more,” he blurted, then blushed because it sounded so rude.

  Jen’s dad laughed. “True. You noticed. I know it’s not fair, and I’m not proud of it, but . . . Government officials made a conscious decision to allow one class of people to have special privileges—Jen probably introduced you to junk food, didn’t she?”

  Luke nodded.

  “That’s a good example. Officially, it’s illegal, but no one ever got arrested for supplying Barons with junk food. Which is mighty convenient, considering that all the powerful Government officials are Barons.” The cynicism in his voice sounded so much like Jen that Luke almost gave in to grief again. But he forced himself to focus on what Jen’s dad was saying.

  “The Government justifies keeping everyone else in poverty because people seem to work the hardest when they’re right on the edge of survival,” he continued. “The Government does try to make sure that most people—the ones who cooperate—do survive. If you’ve heard your parents talking about other farmers, you’ll know that nobody loses their farms anymore. But, also, nobody ever makes enough to live comfortably.”

  Luke thought about his parents’ constant worries about money. Was it all unnecessary? Were they just being manipulated? He felt a spark of anger, but buried that, too, because he had other questions.

  “But even Barons have to follow the Population Law,” he said. “Is that because”—he gulped—“because it’s necessary? Were there too many people? Are there?”

  “Probably not,” Jen’s dad said. “If food had been distr
ibuted fairly . . . if people hadn’t panicked . . . if we’d had good leaders being honest about the need for everyone’s cooperation . . . we could have survived the crisis without curtailing anyone’s rights. And now—it shouldn’t be a problem if some people choose to have three or four kids, as long as some other people choose to have none. But the Population Law became General Sherwood’s proudest accomplishment. That’s why even Barons aren’t exempt. He points to that and says, ‘See how much control I have over my people’s lives.’ ”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Before Luke had a chance to move, Jen’s dad had picked him up and thrust him into the closet.

  “There’s a secret door at the back,” he hissed. “Use it.”

  Luke groped blindly, fighting through what felt like piles of hair. Behind him, he could hear Jen’s dad yelling, “I’m coming! I’m coming! That’s a twelve-thousand-dollar door. If you break it down, you’re going to pay!” Then Luke heard the computer making its be-be-be-beeep! and Jen’s dad muttering, “Fine time for them to discover efficiency. Come on, come on, connect—”

  The pounding at the door grew louder, and a gruff voice yelled out, “You have three seconds, George!”

  Luke dug deeper into the closet. He couldn’t even find the back wall, let alone any secret door. And then he heard a splintering sound from the front of the house. Seconds later, there were stomping footsteps in the computer room.

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  It was Jen’s dad’s voice coming from the hall, full of outrage. If he hadn’t witnessed it himself, Luke never would have guessed that Jen’s dad had been crying only moments before. He sounded too forceful, too assured, too confident that he was right and anyone who opposed him was wrong. The stomping stopped. From deep inside the closet, Luke heard someone snicker.

  “Caught you with your pants down, eh, George?”

  “Yes, yes, very funny,” Jen’s father replied, not sounding the least bit amused. There was a sound that could have been a zipper being zipped. “Has it come to this? A man can’t even go to the bathroom without his door being broken down by a bunch of morons with power complexes? And you will pay for that door, I assure you.”