“Join us for the premiere of The Frontlines,” says Simon Montpellier, the narrator for all the military’s propaganda shows. “Watch boys become men, and men become heroes.”
The video ends.
“Rewind it,” I say, glad my voice comes out strong.
“Melissa, I don’t think . . .”
I snatch the tablet from Keith and return to the portion of the clip where I’d seen that flash of silver. I pause and zoom in. I’d hoped it was the Saint George pendant reflecting the sunlight, prayed Sam didn’t share our family curse, but the starburst of light appears at the corner between his helmet and his close-cropped red hair, where there should be nothing but receding darkness.
The tablet winces in my grip. I set it down. “How long have you known?”
“They aired the first episode a few weeks ago. Storm-trooper boot camp,” Preston says. “Sam and Alpha Squad just went on their first salvo. Don’t worry, Cosgrove, it’s mostly fake.”
Mostly fake, but not that glint of silver.
“If Oren’s been off the radar, it must be. Your brother’s safe, Melissa,” Colin says.
“Safe?” I trace the CENSIR line along my head. Colin reaches for me, but I shrug away. I look at Keith. “Do you have a way to contact my uncle?”
“He’s an FBI analyst, Melissa. He won’t have access to military or BoDA databases.”
“I remember him telling Sam that he knew some D-men.” Back when Sam wanted to interview a BoDA agent for a “dream job” class project. “He can point me in the right direction.”
Preston shakes his head. “They’ll be monitoring his phone lines.”
Plan B. “You got a car?”
“Your uncle’s actions are already under intense scrutiny.” Keith doesn’t say it, but I know he means because of me. “It’s too dangerous, Mel. You need to lay low until we figure things out.”
“I’ve figured things out, Keith. Allie’s gone silent. My brother’s trapped in some military prison camp being tortured and exploited just like I was. I can’t sit here and lay low. Help me, or get out of my way.”
“There is one thing you could do that could help them both,” Preston says.
“We discussed this,” Keith says. “Absolutely not. I don’t want her involved.”
“I’m already involved.”
Colin claps Keith on the back. “Why don’t you wait outside, Major?”
“He blames himself for what happened to you,” Preston says when he’s gone. “He blames himself for Sam, too. Try to be easier on him.”
“I’ll be easier on him when he stops treating me like a child. What’s going on, Preston? No more secrets.”
He drops into a chair. “Everything’s completely hosed. The Reds who weren’t killed have gone into hiding, and those of us who didn’t join Oren—”
“There were others?” I say.
“The pull of the dark side is strong. News reports suggest that Greens across the globe are flocking to Oren’s call. Unimpeded, of course.”
“No doubt,” Colin says. “I bet the rest of the world’s thrilled.”
“Yep. Not their problem anymore. We think he’s got at least three hundred now.”
“Holy hell,” Colin says. He sips from his coffee as he examines the touchboard map.
“Yeah. The apocalypse is coming if we don’t do something.” Preston looks at me. “That’s where you come in.”
“If it helps my brother or Allie, I’ll do whatever I can, but I don’t see what good I can do.”
“You don’t realize how popular you were, do you?”
I catch his meaning. “You can’t be serious.”
“Showing the world the cruelty of men does us no good if everyone believes dragons are monsters. We need to show them the truth.”
“The Greens are monsters, Preston,” I say.
“We have to try something. War’s coming.”
“And I better choose on which side of the fence I’ll stand, huh?” I say, earning me a couple of confused expressions. “Never mind. I don’t see how I can help, but I’ll do it, Preston. I’ll do anything I can. We can discuss details tomorrow. I’m tired.”
“Jedi. I’ll have to get supplies anyway.”
He leads us to an adjoining room occupied by several cots, a folding table, a couple of kerosene lamps, and a heater. Based on the Monopoly money and playing cards on the table, it appears our arrival interrupted their entertainment for the morning.
Preston departs with a bounce in his step that awakens a pang of guilt. I push it away and make for the bed in the darkest corner.
Colin grabs my hand and brings me to a standstill. “I’m not going to let you sneak off.”
I fixate on the wrinkled leather of my hiking boots. “What are you talking about?”
“What was your plan? Were you going to fly Grackel out in the middle of the night? Walk to your uncle’s?”
I glare at him. “Don’t try to stop me.”
“You don’t get it,” he says, cupping my face in his hands and pulling my gaze to him. “I’m with you, Melissa Callahan. I’m always with you.”
14
11:05 p.m. Preston’s snoring on his cot, and Keith drove off thirty minutes ago in his truck to run some errands. I slip a letter beneath his pillow and tiptoe from the room.
After kissing Baby good-bye, with a reminder to obey Grackel, I hurry down the escalator. Colin greets me at the baggage claim, a pair of machine guns slung over one shoulder, our go bags over the other.
I push open the sliding doors that lead outside. Gusts of wind kick at us. Heads down, we make our way to the Prius parked in the loading zone. It used to be Dad’s. The license plates have been changed, but the scratches along the driver’s side are unmistakable. The thumbprint scanner on the handle accepts my fingerprint, and the doors unlock.
“You know Keith could have changed ID allowances anytime?” Colin says.
“What’s your point?” I climb into the driver’s seat and shut the door.
Colin gets in, screwdriver in hand. “Ten to one I won’t have to reprogram it, either.”
I place my thumb on the scanner beside the driving column, and the car starts. He sticks the screwdriver in the glove compartment, gives me a tight smile.
“Preston said it’s a three-hour drive to the nearest store. You actually think he’s gonna hit up a 7-Eleven at ten thirty at night?”
“Yes, I do. He’s less likely to be spotted now,” Colin says, which is the same reason we’re leaving late. The drone zone’s more active at night, but the patrolling UAVs become much more focused on the skyways than the highways.
“It’s easier this way,” I say as I maneuver out of the parking lot.
“He’s gonna be real upset to find you gone, Melissa.”
“He’ll understand,” I say. “I thought you said you were with me. So stop trying to talk me out of it.”
Colin nods, locks his jaw, and stares out his window.
I drive us to the economy lot. Squatting on his haunches between stripped cars, Randon gnaws on the remnants of a deer. He spits out antlers and lumbers over.
“Any word from Allie?” I ask. The dragon springs off his feet, latches his talons around the car chassis, and picks us up.
She still sleeps.
Skimming over fields and deserted highways, Randon carries us to Rapid City, South Dakota, near the edge of the drone zone. We take shifts driving. Except when there’s no other route, we stick to the back roads on our way to Ann Arbor.
I’m not even sure if Uncle Travis and Aunt Susan live there anymore. Five months ago they did. Along with Sam. I know that much from the drone surveillance my captors showed me in Georgetown. However, with all the paparazzi and journalists swarming them because of their relationship to me, my aunt and uncle might have gone into hiding.
If they’re not there, Dad’s at the Detroit VA, getting treatment for his paralysis. He’ll know something. I reach into my jacket pocket for his letter, wo
rrying over a pair of sentences written near the end. Your brother loves you, Melissa. One day, he will forgive you.
Or will he turn out like Claire? A reconditioned monster? That look in his eyes from the promo video, those angry words—they haunt my quiet moments. Perhaps the dragon was fake, perhaps the dead girl, too, but that hatred was real.
When they threw me into the reconditioning chamber, I came a cycle away from hating not just dragons, but also Mom, who they portrayed as a murderous insurgent. Sam already blames me for Dad. It wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge.
But I will bring him back. As I stare down the highway, I repeat this to myself. Because I can’t bear the alternative—that Sam’s lost, too.
Colin obeys the rules of the road to the letter. When on empty streets or traveling through abandoned towns, I drive well above the speed limit, ignoring traffic lights and stop signs because it keeps the adrenaline going and me from fixating on how fast the clock changes while the scenery doesn’t. I slow when Colin reminds me about the drones, but my foot’s back to the floor within a few miles.
We meet our first counterterrorism patrol at the South Dakota-Minnesota border. In the faded light of the rising dawn, Colin pulls up to the control gate. A soldier steps from the guard post and orders us out of the car. He’s dressed in a parka and dragon camos. It’s the first time I’ve seen the standard-issue black fatigues in person since Georgetown. I shut my eyes, repeating my mantras, but can’t stop trembling.
Colin squeezes my leg. “It’s going to be okay. Let me handle this.”
We get out, and he hands the soldier our phony IDs. “How’s the grind treating you, Corporal?” he says, affecting a slight Southern accent that reminds me of someone I once knew.
“Cold. Slow.”
Colin laughs and claps him on the back. “Better than hot and fast.”
“Amen.” The corporal examines our IDs. He scrutinizes Colin, then me. I stare over his head at the field of dirt and speckled snow behind him and focus on identifying Colin’s vocal doppelgänger. Someone from Mason-Kline? No matter how hard I concentrate, I can’t remember a name, much less the twang of a single Kansas farmboy.
“So what brings you two this way before hours?” the corporal says.
“Didn’t know they reinstituted the curfew. We don’t get much news out on the frontier. Keep your head down and stay out of trouble, right?” Colin says with a smooth smile.
“Frontier, huh? Ex special forces?”
“The few, the proud, the crazy.”
“Don’t know if you heard, but they closed the frontier down about a month ago. No civilians allowed.”
Colin winks. “It used to be you just had to avoid the dragons. Now it’s the drones, too. Still, it’s a pretty good life if you work it right. Lets you forget about the world for a little bit.”
“There’s a dream. Don’t know what you’ve heard, but we got another war on the way.”
“I miss chasing scales.” Colin taps his left temple. “Can’t see a lick out this side anymore, though, and the army’s got no use for one-eyed snipers.”
The corporal gives Colin our IDs. “Where you headed?”
“Ann Arbor, to visit my girlfriend’s father. He was injured in a car accident.”
“My apologies, but I’m going to have to check your car before I send you on your way,” the soldier says. “Please open the trunk.”
Colin unlatches the rear hatch. “New protocol?”
The machine guns are stowed in a hidden storage compartment beneath the trunk floor. I wanted to bring them in case our cover got blown and we needed to fight our way out of a situation.
Seemed like a good idea at the time.
I reach a quivering hand under my jacket for the Beretta I took from Keith’s weapon rack, but hesitate when Colin gives me a slight shake of his head.
He follows the soldier to the back of the car, staying no more than a step behind him. Neck snapping distance.
“It’s complete horseshit,” the corporal says. “They stick us out here in God’s crack, looking for ghosts. Yeah, the surgers are out there somewhere, waiting to cut our throats and steal our children.”
“And eat your pets,” Colin says.
The soldier chuckles, gives a cursory glance into the trunk, and closes the hatch. “Don’t get me wrong, the surgers need to be put down quick, particularly those Dios, but we’ll see a tidal wave out here before we find one of them coming at us, rolling in a Prius. And God only knows I’m not gonna be checking a Greenie for its credentials, ’cause my ass’ll be hauling.”
They come back around the front, and the corporal opens the passenger-side door for me. “Sorry to have wasted your time. Hope your father’s all right, ma’am.”
“I didn’t know you were such an actor,” I say once we’ve put some distance between us and the border.
“I did a few plays in high school.”
“You don’t strike me as a drama geek.”
He grins. “I was a drama stud, thank you very much.”
“You’re proud of yourself, aren’t you?”
“A little bit.”
“Would you have killed him?”
His features harden. He turns on the sat radio, cranks up the volume on the metal station, and accelerates until we’re twenty mph over the speed limit. Thirty-two mile markers later, he pulls over to the side of the road, shuts off the radio, and looks at me. “Were you afraid or hopeful?”
It takes me a few seconds to figure out his words, a good deal more to figure out my answer. “Both.”
He flinches, doesn’t speak for a minute. “What about me?”
“Hopeful,” I say without hesitation.
He leans over and kisses me on the cheek, then eases the car back onto the road. He switches the radio back on and sets it on a station I prefer. I rest my head against the window and watch him through half-closed eyes.
Hopeful. Yes, so very hopeful.
As we head farther east, the counterterrorism checkpoints increase, as do the number of drones in the sky. Fallow fields and abandoned farms give way to the near-ubiquitous blackness of civilization.
Electronic billboards crop up along the highway. They intersperse PSAs reminding people to report suspicious activity to the Bureau of Dragon Affairs with promotions for Kissing Dragons, Kissing Dragons: The Other Side. . . .
And then I see my brother’s face. He’s the forty-foot-tall centerpiece of a six-soldier team of hard-eyed teenagers. Kissing Dragons: The Frontlines flashes beneath their angry visages.
Colin squeezes my knee. “It’ll be okay.”
I try to believe that.
In Chicago, tanks and armored personnel carriers intermingle with the ant parade of black cars that marches into the maw of the downtown abyss. In the shadows between buildings, in parks, in plazas, artillery and missile launchers gaze at the cloudless sky. These are the decorations that comforted me in Arlington until Mom died, and now they remind me of Sam.
We stop at an underground fuel station. Colin returns from the mart with my requested bag of Cheetos and a Mountain Dew, then heads back inside because they have a landline. While he calls his parents to let them know he’s still alive, I devour my food and contact Randon.
Allie still sleeps.
The blackness of city fades back to farmland. The billboards here, nonelectronic, encourage young men and women to enlist in the various military branches, warn of the approaching apocalypse, implore you to store your precious keepsakes in underground banks.
We reach my aunt and uncle’s house more than an hour after curfew, according to the loudspeakers that blare across the city. No cars in the driveway; none on the adjoining curb. No lights in the windows, but that’s a curfew mandate.
I ring the doorbell. It doesn’t work.
Colin knocks on the door. Nobody answers. He knocks louder.
“Go away!”
“Uncle T, it’s me,” I say.
The door cracks open. A fl
ashlight’s shined on my face. “Melissa?” He glances skyward, then pulls me into a dark hallway. Colin squeezes in behind us and shuts the door.
“Sorry about that,” Uncle Travis says, leading us down the basement stairwell. “Thought you were reporters.”
“Who was it?” Aunt Susan calls from the lit room at the bottom of the stairs. I stumble at her voice. So familiar. Painfully familiar.
She sits on a couch, a tablet on her lap, a textbook beside her. Put her hair in a bun, take off ten pounds, and darken the gray hairs, and she wouldn’t look a wrinkle different from the Mom I see every day in my head. She glances up, puts her hand to her mouth, then stands and opens her arms. “Well, come on now, get on over here and give me a hug.”
We embrace. “You’re not mad at me?” I ask.
“Travis, go get us something to drink. You want some—” She notices Colin. “Who’s this fine young man?”
I introduce them.
Uncle Travis studies Colin. “Former All-Black? Nice as it is to see you both, I’m not sure why you—”
“Travis, where are your manners?” Aunt Susan says. “Be a host and get us some drinks.”
He gives a short bow impeded by a belly that’s grown substantially since I last saw him. “Brewski?”
Colin waves him off. “I’m fine, sir.”
“What about you, Mel? Got some Shirley Temple mix.”
“Not a word,” I say to a grinning Colin. “Actually, Uncle T, if you have some brandy . . .”
“That would be swell,” Colin whispers in my ear, and I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing.
“How ’bout a Coke?”
“Travis, get her a drink. Get me one, too,” Aunt Susan says. “Why don’t you go help him, young man?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So polite. And quite handsome,” she says once they’re gone. “What’s this nonsense about me being mad?”
“After Mom . . . ,” I say, but can’t finish the thought aloud. After Mom died, I stopped visiting during summer vacations. “I’m sorry, Aunt Sue.”
She hugs me again. “You silly girl. You don’t apologize for anything.” She helps me out of my jacket and we sit on the couch. “So what’s the story with Mr. Brown Eyes? Boyfriend?”
The Other Side Page 9