by Logan Keys
“They’ve hijacked it,” Serena gasps.
“Who?”
Other roofs in Section have now filled with people; the rest of our commune has arrived to see what the commotion is about.
Journee answers, “Them,” and he points to a figure crouched on top of one of the cars with a face masked in black fabric that’s painted to look like a skull. It seems familiar. People hoot and holler when they spot him.
Another car passes with a skull mural on the side. It’s the same as the one I’d seen on the door of the theatre bathroom stall. This draws more excited yells. People from a few of the neighboring roofs hold papers up, shaking them at the train.
“Pamphlets,” Journee says. “Damned idiots.”
More cars pass with more masked figures.
“You think they’re doing this because of Jeremy?” Manda whispers to Journee while I pretend not to hear.
But I give in to temptation and ask, “Why would they do that?”
Journee smirks in my direction. “Well, their leader just got released, didn’t he?”
I focus overly hard on the train to avoid answering.
On the last car stands a lone figure who doesn’t wear a mask. Thick brown hair flies around an all-too-familiar face and my stomach drops.
Jeremy Writer.
Applause and whistles erupt while I’m trying to inch behind Journee to hide for no reason. At this distance, he couldn’t possibly see me, yet I can’t help but feel exposed.
Journee looks around nervously as the noise escalates to a steady roar. “We’d better get back inside,” he says. “This’ll mean guards.”
At the bottom of the ladder, after the twins are out of earshot, I stop Journee to say, “Sorry.”
He grins at me and rubs his neck. “Yeah. The lady who hired you was pissed, until I told her you were new, and if she wanted better-trained proxies, it’ll cost her double.” He laughs. “She paid up, too. It’s on your bed, minus my cut.”
“So you’re not mad?”
Journee raises his brows. “Hell no! I think some more screw-ups like that are in order, as long as they pay off.”
My relief’s instant.
“But at the same time …” He glances around before lowering his voice. “I’d try to stay out of sight for a while. The Authority isn’t going to be too happy about Jeremy being loose again, especially after this stunt today.”
I give an emphatic nod.
Journee’s warm hand lands on my shoulder. “That means no more playing hero down at the courthouse anymore, ‘kay?”
“Okay.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Tommy
I pull open the door to the barracks Joelle and I share. We have our own place—all the Specials do—but ours is in the farthest abandoned building.
Joelle’s sitting on the couch with a bowl of ice cream. She can’t eat food, though she makes me buy her some anyway, just for pretend. She likes to seem normal. Her thick black hair’s in pigtails, and she’s painted her toenails … and the couch underneath them. Though her sight’s perfect, black frames perch on a dainty noise that’s red, and her eyes look red, too.
I glance up at the flat screen, then back at her face.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, feeling uncomfortable, having only recently dealt with Joelle’s “woman trouble.” And by “dealt with” I mean ran and woke up Vero at three a.m. to aid us with womanhood and all of its irrational glory.
“This!” Joelle flings a hand at the screen. “Pause!” she yells, and it obeys.
“What’s up?” I ask cautiously.
Joelle stares at me in total overdone teenage-girl despair. The “you should know what I’m talking about like a mind reader” look gets me every time.
I say, “Uh-oh, should I call Vero?” There’s only so much a seventeen-year-old boy can do for girls. They’re … confusing. Three sisters later, and I still have trouble with … everything.
Joelle wipes her nose before she looks away, determined to show me the amount of drama intended. “I broke down and watched a movie,” she says, looking guilty. “You know, about them … us.”
I nod, completely unsure of what she’s talking about. “Okay,” I reply carefully, crossing my arms and leaning back against a bunk.
This could be a while.
“Well,” Joelle continues, “these ones were able to go out in the day and stuff. Why can’t I go out in the sunlight? Anyway, and they eat deer—yuck—and they fall in love, which I guess is kind of cool. But they were …” She pauses as if she can’t bear to go on, then says in a whisper, “Sparkly …” And her face scrunches up.
I frown in confusion, but she ignores me. “And not scary at all,” she adds for emphasis, “so I’m not sure what’s more upsetting: the fact that they were kind of lame, or that they can do lots more stuff than I can. They even played baseball, and it was just so … weak. You said we were cool, Tommy!”
Joelle’s deadpan expression crumples again, and when I lift a brow in answer, she turns more epically appalled at my lack of reaction.
Then, it dawns on me. “Sparkly …?”
“Yeah, they were pretty! And, I dunno, I just thought we were way more awesome—you said we were way cooler than that! You said we were, like, revered before, or at least had a cult following. I don’t know if I can handle this … this … what is it I’m feeling?”
I rub my face to hide my grin. “Yes, Joelle, you are cool. And if you wanted to watch your first vampire movie, you shouldn’t have picked that one. I’ll give you a list.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” She giggles. “Now?”
I sigh. No time to sleep, not with Jo-Jo around. Truth is, though, she gives me so much entertainment, and it was so damned lonely before the little hissing imp came into my life. If she left now, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.
Flipping through the display with the touch screen, I find what I’m looking for. Joelle wrinkles her nose as I nab the melted ice cream from her lap and take a seat next to her.
“Dracuuula?” she says slowly, then laughs. “That’s silly.”
I pull out what’s left of my best West Texas drawl. “Oh, you won’t be laughin’ for long, little darlin’.”
Joelle slants me a side-glance.
“This stuff is spooky!” I exclaim, and grab the blanket to hide behind.
She rolls her eyes, yet scoots closer to fit under my arm.
“Play,” I command the screen, and the dramatic music cues.
But as the movie rolls on, I have more fun watching Joelle’s surprise and excitement, and then fear, than I do viewing the actual movie.
Joelle’s not like most of us special UG projects. I’d gone into the Underground at age sixteen, broken, having given up on life, so it mattered little what they did to me. But Jo-Jo was the unlucky daughter of an original UG scientist, born to someone who’d opted for her first “whoops” baby to be a test subject at the ripe old age of nine. With a single, workaholic parent and her only entertainment available in foreign languages, Joelle spent all of her time playing in the labs with other frigid geeks.
And she never feels sorry for herself. Not at all.
When I first heard Joelle’s story, I’d been crushed for her. My parents loved all of their kids, and they would have cherished the beautiful little girl that she must have been back then, and still is, with dark eyes and lashes that blink up at you in a naïveté long since missing from this age. Her testing had been archaic, and certainly would have been more painful than mine. To imagine it makes the ice cream in my stomach curdle. For all of her antics, Jo-Jo is the most positive human being left on this hellish rock. And I plan on keeping it that way.
Joelle gasps at a scene in Dracula, and I grin. Her experience with things outside of the lab is miniscule, and her childlike innocence is still prevalent. I soak it up. In this jaded world, Joelle’s awe is like ambrosia, and it makes my heart ache. My middle sister had been her age wh
en—
Joelle sits up and turns to face me. “Are you thinking of your family, Tommy?” she asks in her uncanny way.
“I am,” I reply.
“Your daddy, the preacher man?”
“Him, too.”
“How come you don’t talk about it?”
I deftly change the subject. “’Cause he and I … we didn’t agree on everything. He wanted me to be like him.”
“And you don’t wanna.”
“No, I don’t wanna.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sergeant Nolan’s in rare form today. “Boys, we pick new team leaders for this rotation. Missions will be solidly human; I don’t want any of you weirdos creeping around using any special anything, you hear me?”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“Well, I’ll be damned … ” he says, walking up to me. “Someone get this man a fresh one from the regular barracks, and quick. If this fuzzy isn’t scratching at a rash in three days, I’ll make hell on earth.” A few laughs flit through, but I see something different in the old man’s eye. A challenge maybe. “Wienie-man here’s gonna lead you out. How’s Team Leader sound, hero?”
“Good, sir.”
He looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “You don’t get it that easy. You have to take it.”
Cory turns to face me, arms crossed.
I fight my smile. “Roger.”
Sergeant Nolan grins and slams his meaty palm into my shoulder in a gesture of what I think is meant to be goodwill, before facing the formation.
“Make a circle.”
Everyone moves until we are surrounded.
I’m feeling confident, until Nolan says, “Prince, your choice.”
I mouth, Prince? at Vero. Prince is Cory’s last name.
Veronica stifles a giggle, and I turn to face my opponent.
Cory grins. “Bo staff.”
My shoulders slump. That’s not a weapon I’ve had any experience with.
Two soldiers toss sticks into the circle, and Cory grabs his, while I stare at them, wondering what exactly I’m supposed to do with a wooden staff taller than me. I pictured myself mowing him down in a wrestling match but as I watch him do an expert spin, twirl, and kick in some sort of tantric demonstration of baton twirling and martial arts, I’m aware of how short my life as team leader will actually be.
With a sigh, I reach for my stick, but Cory plants the end of his on it and rolls it away. The group laughs, surprised.
As he does another round house, stick moving in a blur, I walk over and reach for mine again.
This time I get it halfway up before Cory smacks his end against my hand, making me drop it to shake the sting out.
My chest swells with irritation, and Nolan hollers over, “No Special, Ripley!”
“Roger.” I focus on my breathing, quickly snatch up my stick, and shove the pointy end toward my foe.
Cory and I move around the circle, and he deftly pushes my weapon aside several times before a blow to my shoulder, leg, and ankle lands me flat on my back.
My roll sideways keeps me from getting poled in the face, and I’m up and moving before he can knock me down again, but it’s a near miss.
Offense is my only way out of complete embarrassment and so, with a hacking motion that’s certainly not technically sound, I aim for brute force via axing anything that moves.
Cory takes one knock before giving my ribs a couple of bruises.
In a blur, he manages to remove my stick and poke me in the gut, and I bend over with a rush of air.
“Give up?”
Cory’s moved in to ask the question, and I latch onto his little stick, wrapping both hands around it, good and tight.
He realizes his fatal mistake and yanks backwards, but I use his momentum to pop him in the mouth and then in the throat.
Cory goes down, face bloody.
I straddle him, and we wrestle a full half-minute before I get the wood up against his throat. Something in my mind flickers, a momentary loss of control, when he wheezes out, “I give.”
Soldiers clap and pat my back as I rise to my feet, but when I reach out a hand to help up the now ex-team leader, he rolls to the side and ignores me, rising on his own.
Chapter Thirty
“Get your nav out and scout around. Real bullets, real grenades, real zombies. This is go time, people!” Nolan calls out.
This isn’t my first live-fire exercise, but this is the first time for a lot of the fuzzys here, and that’s what makes me nervous. We clear our weapons in a barrel over by the armory, and recently one soldier blew it up, accidentally firing into it only inches from where I stood. Mistakes are common in our trial-by-fire type of training.
Missions here are like giving guns to a bunch of kids, and as I take in all of the teens around me, that’s exactly what it is. Having lived on the farm, and hunted, I’d handled guns plenty before the Army. Can’t say the same for some of these newbies. I’d put a dollar to a head that most haven’t handled a weapon before this week. “Great,” I mutter.
Cory shoves through to the front, despite my new leadership role. He doesn’t care what Sergeant Nolan says. An Army boy through-and-through, he can’t handle sharing the spotlight.
I shrug and follow. At nineteen, Cory’s the oldest on our team, and a Special. He’s got some kind of mind thing. No clue what that means. Not sure I really want to know. When he turns to grin at me, I guess I’ve just found out.
So that’s how he knew I was a virgin.
“Yup,” he says, without looking back while we march.
Vero elbow-nudges me on her way to her new team, fixing her helmet while walking backwards and giving me a wink before jogging off. I want to tell her to be careful, but I’m conscious of Cory’s regard. She and I had the unlucky draw of being in different platoons this last shuffle of companies. I’ll miss her, but it’s a relief not to have to watch her back. I’ve got plenty on my plate as it is, trying to keep track of Joelle.
“That’s right,” Cory says under his breath.
I ignore his woo-woo mind reading. He’ll play any game to keep me on my toes. I’m not interested in games. We’re already going to fight for our lives, for the rest of our lives. I’m not out for his job.
We come to the ridge above the jungle where, down in the thick, bombs, wires, and other teams wait with real rounds to ambush us. Hiding somewhere in the green are zombies and just about everything but the boogie man. In the center sits a small village that you can barely see out in the distance. Our mission is simple: take control of that village.
Out of habit, I roll my neck, and the popping makes Cory grimace.
We start down.
So far, the jungle isn’t bad. Cory’s Spidey sense doesn’t reach long enough to hear the other parties, he says, plus we won’t risk being caught using any Special on a mission since it’s automatically an article fifteen. That used to mean a loss of rank and paperwork. But in Sergeant Nolan’s special army, it means they beat the hell out of you and take your rank, and if you live through his blasts on the pavement after that, you’ll wish you were dead anyway.
One of our guys, Defoe, is a tracker. Even without his Special he’s a real-deal Navajo who can spot wires, traps, and anything else that’s ready to blow us up. He’s checking a few directions now, head shakes for the ones that are a no-go, until he chooses the narrow one that’s gonna need us to cut back brush, of course.
We have real casualties in live-fires. I’ve seen them. And we lose a lot of good soldiers, so they keep these training sessions to a minimum. But Sergeant Nolan’s right when he says they would have died anyway. If we can’t take a small village in a somewhat controlled environment, how can we expect to take America back? We can’t. And live-fire is a saving grace for those who get to die quick with a medic on hand, rather than alone and slow in the wilds of what used to be our great country, with stiffs gnawing on them.
Defoe spots another trip wire, and he signals for us to change formation. C
ory nods, and we leave the wedge (like an arrow of birds in the sky) and get into a single-file line behind him.
The deeper we go, the more stuff we run into, and Cory decides to move into the lead again. I’m not gonna argue with that. Brave. Stupid. Take your pick.
He stiffens at my thoughts.
“Well, that’s what you get for listening,” I mutter to his back. “Change your frequency.”
Defoe snorts, his M-4 bumping into me when I pull up short to avoid crashing into a pissed-off ex-Team Leader who’s spun around. I’m about to tell him that now’s not the time, when a grey hand snags his fatigues and pulls him into the jungle.
There’s empty space where Cory had once been, and it takes me wasted moments before I rush through the way he’d gone. When I finally catch up, the zombie’s already latched its teeth onto Cory’s sleeve, and I slam the butt of my gun into its face several times to dislodge it.
More come from every direction. As trained, the team fans out in a stagger, firing in short bursts. No wasting bullets on wild aims. Two of the zombies are men, one’s a teenage girl, and three more women stumble behind these, bluish from lack of oxygen. I’m thinking zombies don’t breathe as much, which makes sense, ‘cause they gasp and moan as if their involuntary muscles need constant reminding.
“We’ve got an eater!” someone shouts.
One of the stiffs has a nice bloody mouth from getting a dine in before seeing us. He’s the quickest, leaping forward like a grasshopper to land on Beemoushe. Bee screams and panics, flinging all over. It takes some doing to kick the fast one off of his throat in time.
Then, we all fight back-to-back in teams, cutting them down. One by one, they each take the final dirt dive. The M-4 is a handy little zombie killer.
“Ah hell, man, damn.”
I spin around to see Bee squared off with a mini-zombie in a nightgown. My stomach clenches. All this time and I can still hardly look at the little ones. She’s barely three feet tall.
“Damn,” Bee says again. “She can’t be more than, what, five? I got sisters, man! Or did. I can’t—”