“Yes,” he smiled, despite the circumstances.
Sophie tried to control her emotions. She’d been so worried to tell him, worried how they’d face it together. Now, in the midst of a fight, she found out he knew all along. She couldn’t believe how much she had underestimated him and his ability to handle whatever was thrown at him.
“Maybe you and Mrs. O’Dell should wait at the mouth of the tunnel.”
“Not on your life. The baby was just kicking. Now, you listen to me, Sam. They may kill me, but they’ll never stop me. You understand? We’re going into this together.” She took his hand slowly as if they had forever. “If we die tonight, we will die fighting and together. No matter what, you and I together. In the end, isn’t that what matters?”
“Of course it is. Let’s keep moving.”
As they came to the door of the bunker, Sam came to a decision. “Alright,” he whispered, sound barely carrying because of the impenetrable walls. “Sophie and I will go in. The rest of you stay out here. If you hear a scuffle, come in guns blazing. Got it?”
The group behind him nodded in agreement.
Sam took Mark’s passkey from his pocket and held it to the black box as he’d seen Mark do. The heavy metal door clicked open. He pulled his pistol, throwing the door open as they entered.
Simeon sat at a gray metal desk on the opposite side of a long rectangular room. His face was lit grotesquely under his white hair by one single desk lamp. He appeared as a skeleton staring back at them.
“Well, hello there, Sam. I’ve been expecting you. And you’ve brought your wife. How lovely.”
“This isn’t a game, Simeon!” Sam held up his pistol so it could be seen.
“Of course not. It’s most serious.” Simeon stepped out from behind his desk and walked slowly toward them.
“How did you know I’d be here?”
“Because, Sam, you are like me, and I am like you.”
“That’s the second time you’ve compared us, and I find it offensive.”
Simeon laughed an echoed laugh more frightening than if he’d growled at them. “My boy, you’re so angry. But this isn’t my fight any more than it is yours. I inherited it from the ones who came before. We’re the same, you and I. We both want peace.”
Sophie found her voice but was amazed at how difficult she found it to force sound from her lips in the room that felt like a vacuum, a void of space, feeling, or sound. “So why not just let us live in peace?”
“Because, my dear, peace like that requires a sacrifice. A blood sacrifice.” He savored the words. “History teaches us that. Look at all the countries of the world. But then, of course, you wouldn’t know about that. You’ll just have to trust me. But history was full of assassinations, plots, coups, violence. A terrible business. How can I explain this in terms you’ll understand?” Simeon took a step forward and looked to the ceiling as if his answers were there. “A mosquito is going to bite you. It’s in his nature. Inevitable. You can either wait for it to happen—the little parasite draining your blood and spreading disease—or you can kill it. Better yet, you can exterminate all the mosquitoes. That’s what this is—an extermination to prevent the spread of disease. Kill off all the troublemakers and what’s left? Peace.”
“Promising peace at the cost of freedoms is a clever lie, but a lie all the same,” Sam responded.
“Lies. So many lies from so many places. Religions used to lie to the people. The churches and religions were behind so-called holy wars. So we got rid of those. With books and then the Internet, the flow of information was too free and easy. People were drowning in information, so we saved them from that burden. The books you’re so fond of, Sam, they told lies too. I allowed you to find them in the Forbidden Grounds to prove to you what lies they all were. I knew you wouldn’t believe me. They taught you to fight for things, to stand up to the oppressor. But where has it gotten you? Death and destruction. You see, this was a test. If you had just done what you were told, you could be free now. But you ignorant, predictable fools had to always fight, always buck the system. And now you have nothing. You’ve failed the test miserably but proven what I’ve said all along: Once a rebel, always a rebel.”
Sam felt his veins pounding in his temples. The room was hot. His sweat was dripping down his back, wetting his tunic. “You took the books, the beauty, the things that make people human. You made us live like animals!”
“Oh, Samuel, we took nothing they didn’t happily give away,” Simeon laughed again. Sophie stepped closer to Sam. “We never could have taken the books away from them if they’d actually still been reading them. No, you see, they wanted nothing more than for someone to tell them what to do and how to think. They practically begged for it. First, it was the talking head celebrities, but it was easy enough for us to step in and fill that role. We’ve only given the people what they always wanted: simplicity, security, consistency. We give them security, and they give us authority. We stay the course. The government took it on ourselves to protect our citizens. And they were happier. Believe me.”
“You did all that. You admit it.”
“You’re not listening again. I inherited all this. The government made decisions before me. They needed a hard reset. The weather wars compromised the electrical grid. We were running out of food. Drought, riots, not enough resources for more food. Nearly ten billion people on the planet, and only enough food for maybe a quarter of them. It was only a matter of time before everyone found out, and there would have been utter chaos. So we knew we had to do something drastic. The leaders of the different countries got together and decided this was the best way. Basically, just turn off the lights and start over. We pulled in all of our armies and navies, called truce on every war, and agreed to each take care of our own people. What else could we have done? And is this not better? A simpler way of life? No more of the ancient distractions.”
“No, because now we’re just fighting to survive,” Sophie shouted at his complacency. “You tried to destroy the beauty of what we stayed alive for.”
Sam couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Are you telling us you intentionally killed all of those people with the Disaster?”
“Not at all. We just turned up the volume on natural selection, so to speak. We let nature take care of herself, and we took care of the leftovers.”
“The leftovers. Is that what we are?”
“Most of the fighting began to dissipate. But there were always those rebellious few. The troublemakers. So the Triumvirate came up with an experiment. I will take credit for that one. I wanted to see if we put all the rebels in one place, in a completely controlled environment, and gave them one generation, could we breed the rebelliousness out of them?”
“Why the lies? Why not just tell us we were in prison?” Sam was becoming angrier by the second.
“Everything in this plan depended on you believing you had at least some freedom. But sadly, the experiment was a failure. The only thing left was to remove the undesirable element.”
“But those weren’t your orders!” Mark shouted from the doorway.
“Ah, Colonel Goodson. The prodigal son returns.”
“The orders were to reprogram and reintegrate.”
“That never would have worked! You’re proof enough of that fact, my boy. You and that fairy Kyle I adopted. Never could reprogram either one of you. No, the rebels had to be killed off. Yes, and all their children, too. Completely cleanse the gene pool.”
“What about you, then?” Mark stepped forward, pointing his own pistol at Simeon.
“What about me?”
“You’re the child of rebels too.”
“You’re missing the point! All of you could have been so much more than you are. If you’d listened to us, if you’d let us help you, you could have been a leader. You had so much potential. Such a waste.”
An understanding began to come over Sam. A realization of why Simeon had been targeting him and all the rest. “I’ve tried to figu
re out what you hate so much about the rebels. And now I think I know. You hate that we continue to fight for freedom where you retreated and turned your back. You hate your own cowardice and want to punish us for it. Well, you’ll never beat it that way. The cowardice and fear and loathing will still be with you long after we’re all dead.”
Simeon’s cool facade started to disintegrate. “You want to know what I hate? I hate your damned arrogance. Always believing you’re right. How do you know? How can you really know? Maybe all those people you killed in the war and the ones since then—maybe their deaths were all pointless and meaningless. How can you even live with yourselves?”
Mark had to laugh at this. “You ask us that?”
“You people thought your ‘great revolution’ was going to make a difference. How could it? No one even knows you’re here. And now my Corsairs are coming to finish the extermination. Truly, it’s as if you’re already dead. We’ve killed all of your leaders, ending with Foxglove. Now there is no one left to lead you.”
Sophie stepped up. “You’re not as smart as you think. I was Foxglove all along.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
Mrs. O’Dell stepped into the room behind Sophie. “No, I was Foxglove.”
“I was Foxglove,” Mark added.
The entire group of rebels and Mark’s men filed into the bunker. “I was Foxglove,” they said in scattered voices, hitting like bullets on the concrete walls. For the first time in years, the citizens stepped forward, no longer cowed by Simeon or the fear he sowed.
“No Corsairs are coming,” Mark grinned.
“What are you talking about? I’ve already set off the alarm.”
“And I let them know you are dead. Executed at the orders of the president and vice president for high treason. No one is coming to help you.”
Simeon’s calm facade finally cracked under his skin. His eyes darted around the room, his hands shaky. In one last desperate attempt to inflict pain, he lunged for Sophie’s throat, the closest to him. But before his foot had fallen on the floor before him, twenty bullets from twenty guns had pierced his angry shell. Simeon fell in a heap, leaving a peace behind the echo of gunfire. A peace he had claimed to want so badly.
The group stood in dazed silence for a few minutes, trying to realize the truth that their enemy was in fact dead.
“You know this isn’t the end, don’t you?” Mark finally spoke. “Yes, Simeon went against the Triumvirate, but they were part of the same body. The same problem.”
“So, what’s the answer?” Sam asked.
“Remove the Triumvirate. Find a new kind of democracy or republic. Return people’s freedoms and natural rights.”
“But how?” Sophie asked.
“It will take a long time, but we have to wake up the people. They’ve been asleep, anesthetized for decades. Fed solely on a diet of entertainment and pleasure. Pleasures handed to them at the cost of their freedom and yours. The work camps supplied everything. Now that those are gone, the Triumvirate will try to create another slave class. They’ll begin by villainizing people, those who are different. And we can’t let that happen.”
“What can we do about it?” Sam asked. “There are so few of us left. And we have no idea how to live in the world on the other side of the wall.”
“You’ll learn what you need to know. A movement starts with one idea. One spark. One person. We have enough. We have the idea.”
EPILOGUE: OVER THE WALL
S ophie followed Sam out of the tunnel. The light from the other side of the wall was almost blinding after the dimness they’d left.
“The world looks almost brighter here,” she said. “Is that possible?”
“It is. You’re looking through freedom.” Sam took her hand in his. Stretching out before them in a valley, they saw a sprawling city with speeding cars and trains. Machines flew overhead, silently zipping across the sky. Mark called them airplanes. As they made their way into the city, they saw people walking in a kind of daze. Each person had a tiny transparent screen in front of one eye. Occasionally, a person would smile or speak to no one in particular. Mark tried to explain their personal communication devices. But everything seemed strange to Sophie and Sam. Foreign. Although the citizens looked clean and even radiant in their colorful clothing and fast-moving vehicles, they also seemed disconnected from each other.
“Why didn’t someone try to get over the wall before this?” Sam asked, concern on his face.
“They were told there was nothing but destruction on the other side of the wall,” Mark answered, “and they believed it. If anyone had tried to get through—and the tunnel was the only way—they would have seen nothing but the evidence to support that lie. Twenty miles is a long way to travel through a lie to reach a truth they didn’t know was there.”
“We’ve read so much about this place, Sam, and yet it’s nothing like we imagined. I’m not sure it’s better,” Sophie said, gripping his hand to still her fear and discomfort.
“I think they think it is. Look at their faces. But it’s been handed to them under a blanket of lies.”
“Not exactly a paradise.”
“I don’t think paradise is a real place to be found. I think it’s within us. One day they’ll see, like we did, how much they’re in the dark.”
“But how can they, without someone from the outside shining a light?”
Sam lifted up the flashlight he still held in his hand, pressing the circular button as he’d seen Mark do.
Sophie smiled.
* * * * *
Months Later
A Hospital in Virginia
The wall had fallen at the hands of a group of rebels, grown stronger. Piece by piece they’d struck it down with hammers and words and ideas. Sophie looked out from her hospital window ten stories high, overlooking the valley all the way to the decimated wall. She couldn’t quite see all the way to the ocean but wished she could. She sometimes missed the sound of the waves at night.
Her door beeped and then opened, Sam, Ethan, Petal, Hughie, Zacharias, and Jesse all filing into the large suite. Jesse went straight to the bed to kiss Sophie’s cheek and see how she was doing. Sam walked over to the tiny incubating crib, lifting the little baby who was only slightly bigger than his hand. The other children smiled to see her squirming and grunting. They’d never seen a baby before. It was truly a wonder. Zacharias and Jesse remembered back to their own small babies more than a lifetime ago.
Sam proudly placed the baby girl into Sophie’s waiting arms. The tiny one opened her eyes, trying to take in all around her. “Can you turn off the overhead light?” Sophie asked. “I’m still not quite used to artificial light.”
From the dimmed hospital room, the baby girl shot her tiny fist in the air, a silhouette against the sunset from the window. As the sun peaked across the river, unmuted through air no longer filled with ash, the light winked. The river twinkled with quivering movement.
“She has red hair,” Jesse observed.
Sam smiled. He couldn’t have been happier about that. “What should we call her?” he asked, taking Sophie’s hand in his.
Sophie thought for a moment, looking into the deep-blue eyes of her daughter. “Hope.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing a book is an all-consuming and sometimes solitary endeavor, but no one writes in a vacuum. All writers are influenced in some way by the people around them. So, I must acknowledge the people in my sphere who contributed to this novel.
First and foremost, I need to thank Jen and Steven. You are my truest, most loyal friends, my sounding boards, first readers, most valued critics, keepers of all the secrets, and first-aid team for my heart. I adore you both and could not survive any of this without you.
I want to thank my dear, sweet nieces and nephews. Y’all are the inspiration for all the children in this book and some of the most important people in my life. Thank you for being “my kids.” I love you to the moon and back!
Thank you to
my sisters, who encouraged me to think outside of the box, and my parents, who pushed me to follow my dreams no matter the cost.
Kristi, my counselor, friend, and encourager, a simple thank-you will never be enough.
Loralee, words are not enough to express my love and appreciation for you. I am a better person for having you as my friend. I will always be your “Clyde Frog.”
Courtney, Candi, and Aubrey, thank you for being kind and honest beta readers.
Colleen, Nicole, and Megan, thank you so much for being my daily cheerleaders and always believing in me.
Jen R., you keep me looking sharp, keep me on my toes, and bring laughter to my life.
I must thank Vince Font of Glass Spider Publishing and Judith Nicolas, the most awesome cover designer. Your work strengthened my own.
Jennifer Perry, you are the best publicist on the planet and the cheerleader I never knew I needed. Thank you for everything.
Last, but definitely not least, thank you to my writing mentors: Judy, Vicki, Merlin, Sally, Gary, Christy, and “Gibs.” You helped me begin and taught me how to improve my writing. You each, in your own ways, encouraged me to believe in myself, build self-confidence, and never give up on this crazy writing dream. Thank you for all the things!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo courtesy Kacy Peckenpaugh.
Rachel Anne Cox is an English instructor at Weber State University and author of the new novel A Light from the Ashes. She made the trek from Louisiana to Utah thirteen years ago to pursue her studies in theater, literature, and creative writing. Rachel loved university life so much that she decided to teach college English. Rachel has always been fascinated by the stories of underdogs, scrappy rebels, and seekers of truth. When she isn’t pursuing her lifelong passion of writing, you might find her looking for her newest elephant figurine, painting at her favorite pond, or exploring the trails in northern Utah, always with a camera in hand. You can visit her online at www.rachelannecoxwriter.com, find her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/rachelannecoxwriter, or find her on Instagram at www.instagram.com/rachel_anne_cox_writer.
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