by Tara Brown
When I glance back at the men I can see they are getting really drunk, and the fire is starting to dim. I flick at the silver thing and drag it back to me with several small movements. It's an old rusty nail with a silver tip. I reach my fingers through the bars and grab it.
"How old are you?” she asks, watching the men.
"Nineteen."
"You look older."
I want to frown at her, but the nail in my hands feels too amazing to bother. I pass her the nail. “Pick your lock."
She eyes it, smiling. “Wow, you're good.” She reaches her hands through the bars. She makes a funny face and I hear the clunk of the lock. She picks locks faster than I do but I’ve only ever picked a couple.
"Stay in the cage with the lock open."
She nods. “Momma says we have to do whatever it takes not to be a breeder. I will die before I go there."
Her voice reminds me of the girl in the back of the truck who screamed. I have a terrible feeling I am the reason she is here.
The rusty nail clanks in the lock but I can’t seem to get it. Not like she did.
"Want me to do it?"
I give her a look. “They’ll notice your tiny arm slipping through to my cage." I fumble with it again.
"Creepy guy is coming back,” she says.
I pull my arm in and sit on the nail as he grins at me. “I think I wanna taste the merchandise before I give it away." He pulls a key out of his pants and licks his lips. He gets down on the ground in front of my cage and sticks the key in. “You're gonna like this,” he says as he grins at me.
I feel like I might throw up.
He opens the door and reaches in lightning fast. His huge hand grabs my thin wrist and clamps down. He drags me from the cage. I kick at him but he's really strong. He pins me to the ground on my stomach. He pulls my hair and whispers into my ears, “Scream and I slit your throat.” He lets go of my hair with force and shoves my face into the pine needles and dirt. I cough and choke. My eyes flicker at the young girl. She looks terrified.
"Don’t do this in front of her,” I beg.
He shoves my face into the pine needles again. “She needs educating.”
He’s behind me. I throw up—I can't stop myself. I don’t have anything in my stomach, but bile fills my mouth and I spit it to the side of my face, fearful he will rub my face in it.
He pulls at my clothes and my ears fill with the sounds of my own tearing. His hands are on my back, making me want to scream and fight, but my hands are pinned. If I scream, he will kill me but I make a snap decision that death would be better than this. I open my mouth to scream as he puts all his weight on me and covers my mouth.
Her little voice whispers in my ear, “Shhh, Em. Don't scream. We need to go now. Before they find him."
Tears spring from my eyes as I look back and see his open eyes still staring at me. The rusty nail sticks out only a little bit from his head, next to his eye. Blood trickles down his face. I’m breathing hoarse whines and nodding, convincing myself I’m going to be okay.
She heaves him off of me quietly and flumps him into the pine needles. The fire is only twenty feet from us, and I can see that the group of men has dwindled. They must have gone to sleep. I push myself up and grab my pants, seeing my knife in his boot. I take it and hold it tightly, fighting the want to stab it into his dead body repeatedly.
She grabs my hand and points to the woods.
As we walk hunched over, I grab my bow and quiver and follow her into the forest, running as fast as we can barefoot. I recognize the forest after a few moments. Even in the dark, I know where we are.
"Oh, crap.” She sounds panicked.
I stop, hearing her speak. I'm ready for the worst and instead it's the best. Glowing yellow eyes meet us in the dark, making me drop to my knees, ignoring the branch that cuts my knee. His paws are around my neck within seconds. His warm breath is in my hair. I cry and he holds me like a mother would a child, and soothes me.
"He's yours?"
I nod through the tears. “Leo."
She pats his ears. “That’s a big dog."
"He's a wolf—a timber wolf. We better get moving before they find us.” I stand and run toward the farmhouse. I know it's through the woods and not far. My brain can't seem to make my own survival important. I need to know if Jake and Anna are safe. The dark shadow of the farmhouse looks like an outline in the open field, making me run faster.
Meg runs as fast as I do. Her footsteps are a whisper in the grass beside me. I burst through the door screaming for Anna and Jake. The house is dark and silent. “ANNA? JAKE?” The living room is empty. The blankets are gone. I don’t know where to go. I don’t know where they would go. I run down the basement steps into the bunker but nothing is there besides my heaving breath.
I run back up the stairs. “We need to go hide. They're gone. They might be looking for me."
"Who?"
"My friends.” The words feel funny in my mouth.
I grab her sweaty fingers in the dark and pull her back out to the barn. We slip inside the dark of the barn. I drop to my knees in the hay and feel for the hatch. It has hay glued to the top of it. It's impossible to find even in the bright of day. I only found it because it was open when I arrived.
I groan, lifting the hatch and whisper, “Hurry, climb down here. They probably know we came this way, I think they followed me here."
Leo jumps down into the hole like he has before, many a time. Meg feels for me in the dark and then the hatch. “What is this place?”
“Safety.” I climb down after her and pull the huge hatch back over the hole. I grope in the silence for the stools and sit, as the pain in my feet is overwhelming. I know they’ve been cut. "Did your feet get hurt?” I ask and start to feel my wounds.
Meg is closer than I think. Her whisper is right in my face, “No. Momma makes us walk and run in the woods barefoot all the time. They always take the shoes, the others."
"Smart."
"Yeah, Momma was a warden at a maximum security prison before. She says she knows all the worst things people can do, and she knows why they do it."
I shiver at the thought.
We don't hear voices or noises. Eventually, I fall asleep on the wooden floor against the warm fur of Leo. Meg sleeps against me. She touches me and tries to hold me in her sleep.
My feet pound too hard for me to get a good night’s sleep.
Chapter Ten
"It's been five days, Em. He walks to the same spot and makes weird noises. I have a hunting hound. He does the same thing when he wants me to follow him. We need to get following him in the woods."
She has not stopped talking for five days. Momma this and Momma that. I don’t know what to do to make her be quiet. She doesn’t take my silence as a hint.
"Yup, that there wolf is trying to tell us the way to go to find them. Are your feet better?"
I look at the cuts on the bottoms and nod. “They have scabs." I rub salve into the bottoms of my feet, dragging my thick socks over the scabs and pull on the boots I had stored in the farmhouse bunker ages ago. I always have extras.
"For a survival expert, you'd think he woulda told you about thickening the soles of your feet. I can walk across coals with mine.” She lifts a foot showing off her padded feet. I want to grimace at the filthy things, but I know she's right.
She throws a huge bone for Leo. He runs and gets it and chews it in the field. “Not so sharp, is he? My hound brings it back."
I look at the bone and grimace. “Is it a human bone?"
She shrugs. “Does it matter?" Leo picks up the long thin bone and walks toward the same spot in the field he has for five days and whines.
"Okay, let's follow him then.” I sling on my backpack. I stare back at the farmhouse. I've left a note in the bunker under the barn and Anna knows it's my favorite hiding place. My heart hurts. I don’t look behind me and I don’t run through the field either. Leo trots along like a real dog. He doesn’t wait
at the meeting tree.
Nothing is the same.
I opened the cabin door for Anna that night and suddenly my life feels lost. I knew I would regret opening the stupid door and helping her. I never imagined the regret would be being separated from them.
Leo picks up the pace as we enter the woods. I reach out and brush my fingers along the meeting tree. Instead of going the way home to the cabin, he cuts a hard left and we climb a different hill.
Meg rambles on and fills the air up with her voice, “So then, when I was eleven, Momma says that she wants to try to go to the city. So we get all dressed up and I mean bathed and real spiffy. We walk all the way to the city, but they don’t just let us in. We have to go through a bunch of tests and other nonsense. The city was brand new. It looked like nothing I've ever seen. Anyway, they come to us in the bright white clothes and make me take all my brand-new clean clothes off. They burned them. Momma was mad as a wet hen. Aunty Lisa failed the diabetes test they gave us, and so if we wanted to go into the city, we would have to leave her behind. No diabetes in the city. Momma said they could shove that up their behinds. So we left the city. My Aunty Heather got grabbed there. Momma thinks because she tested healthy, they told the bad ones to take her to the breeder farms. They drove up in their trucks and held guns on us. They dragged her into the truck. She screamed and reached for us. Momma never moved. She just watched. I never seen Aunty Heather again."
Her story is the story of thousands of women.
I nod. “I've seen them taken too. They always leave the kids behind."
She puts a finger to her lips. “Shh—you hear that?"
I listen. All I hear is my own heartbeat and it dawns on me that as she natters on, she listens to the forest song the way I do. I don’t hear them. No birds, no squirrels. I stop walking. I pull an arrow instantly and hold the bow ready.
A branch breaks to the side of us. I swing the bow with the arrow trembling in my hands. A huge black bear groans and walks past us on the ridge below. Leo growls and crouches. He looks at me but I shake my head.
We don’t turn our backs on it. We walk up the hill backward until the bear is far enough away. Leo's dark hackles stay up until he starts sniffing the ground again. He wanders in a circle for a moment.
"So then I was saying to Momma—hey, look! I think he has a smell. Not totally useless, is he?"
I glare at her.
She puts her hands up. “What? He's no hound, but I think he's got the scent."
I follow him through the thick woods until suddenly he stops walking. We've hiked for hours, and this is the most animated I've seen him. He growls in his low tone and crawls along the forest floor on his belly. We follow him low to the ground. I am scanning the forest, but I see nothing.
"There.” Meg points to a man wearing camouflage high up in a tree. He holds a sniper rifle. There is no way we will get around him. I pull my bow out but Meg stops my hand and points to a man in another tree just behind him.
"We wait for dark,” she whispers.
I look at her and frown. “Where is your home? Your people? You should go there. It’s dangerous to be with me."
Her brown eyes look haunted. “It's back closer to the town by the big river. Momma was taken when they were looking for some girl. They searched all the houses and found my Aunty Lisa and Momma hiding. They didn’t find me. I snuck out the back and over the pointy log wall. The others snatched me outside the gates. The hunters were long gone though, so they were gonna wait for them to come back.
"It was me.” The words slip from my mouth and I’m as shocked as she is. She was the girl screaming in the town as I hid in the bushes.
She crouches in some larger brush, waiting for nightfall. It’s awkward in her silence—she's never silent. I speak after a while. "I can help you find your mom,” I say quietly.
She looks to the side. “She never got taken."
"Where would she go?” I don't understand.
She shrugs. “Knowing Momma, she went to hell. She was a mean and spiteful woman. Full of piss and vinegar is what Aunty Lisa always said."
It hits me like a club to the face. “She died?"
Meg glances at me. “I told you what she always said. You do whatever it takes not to go there. They woulda put her in the fields anyway. Her insides were injured having me. She couldn’t have more babies."
She had a mother. She had someone. It feels like it's my fault somehow. Not somehow—it is. "I'm really sorry, Meg. Do you have anywhere you can go? Do you have other people?"
She shakes her head. “Nope, it was me and Momma and Aunty Lisa."
I won't ever leave her. No matter what, I won't ever leave her. I stole her mother from her. I owe her that debt. I ran into that town, bringing the hunters and the others. I will find her somewhere safe to live if it's the last thing I do. If that exists at all.
The day fades to night slowly. Spring is further along and the days are longer. The cool air is still fresh and crisp, but the sun is getting warmer.
Leo sleeps against me and Meg whittles a small piece of wood. She passes me the finished product. I don’t know what it is.
"It's a rook.” She says it like I should know.
I raise an eyebrow.
"For chess.” She says it like I'm an idiot.
"The game?” I ask.
She nods and smiles. “I'm making the pieces for a board. I guess I have to start over. Mine were in our village."
I’m confused. “You have a village?"
She shakes her head. “Nope. Had. The others came last month and burned it to the ground. That's how we ended up in the towns, trading.”
"Life is hard, Meg. I'm convinced that the God that everyone talked about before hates us."
Her brown eyes harden, and she pulls her dark-brown hair back from her filthy little face. “Don't ever say that, Em. No matter what, we have to believe that he's going to help us. The evil is us."
Leo jumps up but it's too late. A branch snaps behind me at the same moment a black hood is shoved over Meg's little face. I jump up but the guns are on me.
"What have we got here?" A man comes out of nowhere, grinning and pointing a rifle in my face.
Leo is ready to attack but I put my hand out. “No, Leo. No.” He looks at me confused—I can see it in his eyes, but I shake my head and speak softly to the man. “We'll walk with you, but you can't put that over my head. If he can't see my eyes, he's going to lose it and kill at least one of you, if not two, and you never know how many I’ll kill before you get me down."
“Girl after my own heart.” He nods. “You walk with the wolf. I will kill him if I have to.” He removes the black hood from Meg, who looks like Leo. I give her a sharp look too. “No, Meg."
I know the desperation on her face is trying to overtake her. I feel the same way. But we can't win the fight. We can’t die like her mom did in a senseless battle against men who got the drop on us.
One of the other young guys with a gun smirks at me boldly. When he speaks I can hear the smile on his face, “I'd ask if you were spies for the others, but you're girls. What girls would help them out? So that leaves me with only one assumption.” He grins and nudges me. “You're looking for a date."
I frown at him but it makes him smile wider.
Meg snorts. “You wish. No, we're looking for our friends. The others had us but we got away."
I shoot her a dirty look. She scowls. “Don't give me that look, Em. Momma says we need to remember some ways of the world before and manners is one of the things we all seems to forget about."
The man with the gun smiles. “Her momma sounds like the kind of girl we are always looking for. Warm my bed, bake my bread, and say please and thank you, like a lady should."
Meg shoves him. “My momma never warmed no man's bed. She weren’t no lady. She was a survivor. She was a fighter."
"Easy, kid." He shoves Meg back. I catch her. “Control your friend.” The leader gets in my face with his gun. I look up in
to his dark-blue eyes angrily. “Her mom just died creating a diversion for her to escape the hunters but she got caught anyway and watched her mom die."
He makes a remorseful face that surprises me. “I'm sorry, Meg, is it? Never speak ill of the dead, unless they're one of the monsters who started all of this.” He holds his hands out.
She sniffs and wipes her nose on her arm. “It ain't nothing. She died the way she wanted."
I know the pain Meg feels and the strength she hides behind. The eyes of the man in front of me tell me he does too.
Leo nudges against me, nervous and whining.
My heart nearly stops when we enter a huge camp in the valley of the mountainside I have never been on. Campfires are lit, making the woods smoky and smell of food, and making my mouth water and stomach grumble. I don’t remember the last time we really ate.
"New recruits?” a man asks, looking me up and down and nodding his head. Leo lunges at him. I seriously think the wolf can read minds, and that man's mind is not pure.
He jumps back, tripping and falling backward. “Holy crap, is that a timber wolf?"
I grin nervously, unable to help myself while Leo is hovering over him snarling.
The men who've escorted us laugh at the fallen man as I call my savage friend over, “Leo." He snarls once more and runs to my side, standing tall and proud with his chest out. He snarls at everyone. It makes me nervous that he is being so angry. I glance around, muttering, “You have my friends here, don't you?”
The man with the smile frowns. “Who are your friends? We don't force people to stay, everyone is welcome."
I watch his eyes when I talk, “A girl and a guy. They're brother and sister."
His eyes narrow. “No one has come recently. Except you and that thing." He looks shifty.
Pointing a finger at him, I snap, “Don’t lie to me. He's tall with dark hair and blue eyes. He has an injury on his leg. She is younger and about my size. She has dark hair and blue eyes too. They look alike."
He shakes his head. “Look, we don’t have anyone here. We don’t take prisoners."
I look at the guns surrounding us and raise my eyebrows.