by Tarah Benner
“Godfrey’s dead,” I murmured into her shoulder.
Logan’s arms tightened around me, and I felt the shudder of a sob roll through her.
As she squeezed me, I looked around the clearing at the people with her. I saw Roman slumped against a tree, his face pale and sweaty.
Once I’d registered the faces of the surviving rebels, my eyes automatically began another circuit, convinced they were mistaken. I saw Switch, Marcus, Ray, Shriver, and Krystal — no one else.
“Where’s Greyson?” Logan asked, her voice vibrating my shoulder.
My stomach turned.
“What?” I pulled away, eyes raking the crowd again in desperation. “I thought he was with you.”
Now Logan looked panicked. “He’s not with you?”
I shook my head, a million thoughts firing at once.
“We have to go back,” I said. “We have to find him. He could be there right now . . . and others who are wounded. He needs us.”
“Haven,” said Amory in a scratchy voice. He was looking at Logan as though he didn’t want to break the news alone. “We can’t go back.”
“We have to.” My voice was an octave too high. I sounded like a crazy person.
“The PMC will be back. They crippled us, but they’ll want to make sure we’ve been completely wiped out. They won’t let us go on at the farm, and we can’t fight them now.”
“What are you saying?” I asked, even though I knew what he was saying. The farm was gone. Most of our forces were dead. Our supplies were destroyed.
We could not carry on the mission Ida had sent us here for. We had failed.
Godfrey was dead.
“Come on,” said Logan. “We can’t stay here. Let’s see if we can meet up with the others at the Hoopers’ farm.”
I’d almost forgotten about the rebels from the west. At least they had escaped the attack unscathed . . . or so we hoped.
Logan and Amory helped Roman to his feet. He shrugged them off as soon as he was standing, his exhaustion and irritation fighting for dominance.
If he was experiencing what Logan had, he was running a high fever. He would be weak, but he would muddle through. Then he would seem to recover — right before losing himself in delirium.
We had lost everything. We’d lost the farm. We’d lost Godfrey. I’d lost my best friend, and we were close to losing Roman as well. Suddenly, the full misery of our situation hit me. We had no supplies and no guaranteed shelter from the night. I didn’t even have my rifle.
I listened to the sound of the others’ shuffling footsteps, and I forced my feet to follow.
Greyson couldn’t be dead. I knew I would feel it if he were suddenly gone from this world — as though a part of my own soul had been snuffed out. But then, I hadn’t felt anything when my parents were killed. I hadn’t known until much later that I was alone.
I didn’t know how many miles we had walked. At one point, I thought Marcus was leading us in a circle. All the trees looked alike. Then we crossed a blacktop road, and I found my bearings. We hadn’t walked as far as I had thought. I had a vague idea where the Hoopers’ farm was, and we were nowhere close.
It was nearly noon by the time we found the road that would lead us there. My stomach knotted into a pit of dread when I saw the roof of the barn jutting out over the trees. If the westerners were gone, too, I didn’t know what we would do.
When we reached the fields, I squinted out at the huge farmhouse at the end of the gravel drive. Its windows looked dark, and the door was boarded just as Ida’s had been. It didn’t look as though anyone had been there in months.
We walked straight across the field toward the house. If the rebels were there, we did not want to sneak up on them.
Then I heard a low whistle coming from the lone tree out in the middle of the field. My chest swelled in relief. It had to be their sentry, signaling the others that friendly visitors were approaching.
As we came closer to the house, I saw one of the boards on the windows lift, and two eyes appeared. I knew how we must look: dirty, tired, and covered in soot from the explosion. Switch was limping, although I wasn’t sure if that was a new injury or an old one flaring up.
The front door banged open, and Jason strode outside. His face was blackened by smoke, but his obvious distress turned to relief when he saw Marcus and Krystal.
“Come inside. Quickly,” he muttered, ushering us into the house.
Logan explained what had happened in a scratchy voice, and my eyes traveled over the rebels gathered in the dusty living room. They had been here playing cards, talking, and relaxing while we had been running for our lives.
With each face that turned out not to be Greyson’s, my heart fell a little lower in my stomach.
“Has anyone else arrived?” Logan asked.
Jason shook his head, and I felt like crying.
A woman was shooing me and Logan into one of the rooms upstairs to wash up and get our wounds treated, but I was in a daze.
I was given clean black rebel clothes, a felt blanket, bandages for the cuts running up my arms, and a hot bowl of rice and vegetables, but I didn’t register any of it.
Amory was huddled with a knot of the rebels from the west, no doubt strategizing, but I wanted no part in it.
When no one was looking, I slipped outside through the side kitchen door and sank down onto the warped wooden steps. Here, I could watch for approaching stragglers from the farm without any of the others looking at me with pity. They knew whom I had lost.
The bowl of food grew cold in my hands as a few rebels stumbled up to the farm. Every time I saw a knot of people approaching from the south field, the breath caught in my lungs. And every time Greyson wasn’t among them, I sank a little deeper into the crevices of the old steps.
At one point, Amory shuffled out and put his arm around me. He didn’t say anything because he was thinking what I already knew: Greyson was dead. Dead or lost — perhaps wounded. I knew I should go looking for him, but truthfully, I had no idea where to begin. I didn’t know the area well, and it was likely I would get lost, too.
As the sun sank over the quiet field, I heard a rustle behind me. I glanced up at the window and caught Logan’s gaze. She was watching for Greyson, too.
“Haven, you have to come inside,” said Amory once darkness had settled. “He might turn up in the morning, but he won’t be on the move now.”
I heard him, but I didn’t answer. I wanted to shout at him — say he didn’t know how I felt — but I knew that wasn’t true. Amory had lost his best friend. He’d watched him die. If anyone knew the sinking helplessness I felt, it was him.
He took my silence for refusal and instead brought out an extra blanket to drape over my shoulders. It smelled as though it had been in storage for a long time, but underneath, I could detect a whiff of summer and sunshine — Greyson’s smell. Or maybe that was wishful thinking.
Just like that, I was lost in the light pounding of our feet touching over the limestone trail. The cadence was everything: the staggered rhythm of our breathing, the sound of our feet, the pattern of sunlight flashing between the trees. He was leading me, and I was hovered near his left shoulder — always two paces behind, but always there.
I wasn’t there now. I had let him down.
But then Greyson was running again. He wasn’t running up ahead. He was running right toward me.
No, he was stumbling. He was staggering across the field, only a shadow in the darkness. But I would recognize that stride anywhere.
My breath caught in my throat, and I made a little noise of excitement like a gurgle. Tossing the blankets aside, I sprinted out into the field toward him.
When Greyson saw me, relief flashed across his face. I threw my arms around him, crushing him in a hug. His arms wrapped around me, and he dragged in a shaky breath against the top of my head.
I savored everything about him just then. He was alive. He was here. I wasn’t alone.
Pulling bac
k slightly, I took a silent inventory of his wounds. He had a bad cut that had crusted over at his temple and plenty of scrapes and bruises running down his arms. His legs were shaky, but it was the way he was hunched to one side that had me worried.
“What is it?” I asked, pulling his hand away from the small of his back. “Where are you hurt?”
He winced. “The explosion threw me against a fence post. I hurt my back pretty bad.”
Behind us, I heard a strangled little cry. I turned to see Logan dashing toward us.
Greyson’s big brown eyes lit up, and the corners of his mouth lifted into a grin.
Logan careened into him, unaware of his injuries. I saw a slight cringe flash across Greyson’s face as the full force of her hit him, but I could feel the happiness wafting off him. He grabbed her up in his arms, and to my surprise, Logan planted a brief kiss right on his mouth.
It was quick, but it was there. Greyson looked as though he couldn’t believe it.
“What the hell happened to you?” Logan breathed, pulling away.
“Got lost.”
A small laugh exploded out of Logan, and I tried to hold mine in. It wasn’t funny, but I felt giddy.
“I couldn’t remember exactly where the farm was,” he said. “I knew it was in this general direction, but I stayed in the woods for a few hours in case the PMC came back. I was looking for you, but you were long gone. I knew you probably came here. Then I ran into a pack of carriers.”
My stomach twisted with dread. I hadn’t even considered the danger he had faced alone in the woods without a weapon.
He continued. “They must have broken off from that horde we took out. Obviously I wasn’t going to try to fight them on my own, so I got as far away from them as I could. I got turned around, though. I was walking for hours in the wrong direction before I realized it.”
“I was so worried,” I said.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” he said. His voice sounded casual, but I wasn’t buying the subtle lift at the corner of his mouth. “I always find my way back, don’t I?”
Logan looped her arm through his and walked him back toward the house.
When Amory saw us from across the living room, a huge smile broke across his face. He ran into the kitchen to get Greyson some food, and I brought him over to Shriver so she could tend to his injuries. I was worried about the cut on his temple and whatever had happened to his back.
The rest of the rebels had gathered in the living room, discussing what our next steps should be. I could tell Greyson was itching to give his input, but once Shriver was satisfied that he would live, I sent him straight upstairs to rest and ice his back.
“We should reclaim the farm,” said Logan. “We can’t just fold now that they’ve launched a serious attack.”
Amory looked at her as if she were crazy. “We lost most of our men,” he said. “Another hit like that would kill us all.”
Roman shook his head. “The farm’s destroyed. Even if we could defend it, barely any of it’s still standing.”
I was surprised to hear him echo Amory’s sentiments, but it was hard to argue with the fact that the guest house and the barn had been completely destroyed in the bombing.
“What I don’t get,” said Roman, “is why they strapped a bomb to you if they were just going to give Godfrey enough time to disarm it.”
“They wanted to lure him out,” said Amory. His voice was tight, and there was a strain of grief in his eyes. “They knew he would try to diffuse the bomb, and they wanted to capture him. It was also a distraction. They knew everyone would be so focused on the bomb they could see that no one would notice them arming the bombs they couldn’t.”
“But they couldn’t have done all that in a few minutes,” Roman said.
Amory shook his head. “They must have done it in the middle of the night. It’s my fault. I was watching the road, mainly. And patrolling the woods on the far side of the field. I didn’t expect them to come from the north side.”
Roman didn’t say anything, but the tension hung thick between them. He blamed Amory, and I sensed the others did as well.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said, a little louder than I should have. “You couldn’t watch everything by yourself. Besides, they would have found another way in.”
He nodded. “I guess. They were watching me. When I went into the woods to patrol for carriers, two of them jumped me. One hit me on the head. I blacked out for a second. The next thing I knew, I was lying in the yard in front of the house.”
“They wanted to show they could manipulate us,” I said. “Drive us out, capture Godfrey, destroy our base, and then shoot down anyone who thought they could escape.”
“Well, they don’t have Godfrey,” Roman muttered.
“That’s right,” Logan said weakly. “They don’t have Godfrey.”
A strained silence fell over the group. Even among the rebels from the west, the grief for Godfrey was palpable. The westerners might not have known us, but everyone knew Godfrey.
A staticky outburst from the radio on the cabinet in the corner made us all jump. It was a huge setup I hadn’t seen before, and I realized the newcomers must have brought their own communication equipment with them.
“This is the farmer up north, over.”
“That’s Ida,” Amory said.
Shriver crossed the room and picked up the handheld. “Farmer, this is the runaway doctor, over.”
I could hear the warmth in Ida’s voice as she addressed Shriver. “It’s good to hear your voice, Doc.”
Shriver’s mouth fell into a hard line. “I’m guessing that’s not why you called?”
“No,” said Ida. Her voice was heavy. “We’ve had some problems at our other bases in the states. I . . . I was wondering if you’d returned home. What is your position, doctor?”
“The cows have come home, but . . . we’ve been hit.”
There was a long pause, and I felt my heart breaking for Ida.
“That’s what I was afraid of.” Ida’s voice was strained. “What’s left of home, doctor?”
“Not much. A few survivors, but most of us from the west made it.”
I heard a shaky intake of breath over the static. “Bring them north, then. We’ve got work to do. I’m calling everyone to the castle.”
“Message received, farmer.”
My heart sank.
If Ida was calling all the rebels north, that meant she had given up on fighting the war from the states. She was rallying the troops for one last fight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I didn’t sleep at all that night, and I barely slept the entire drive north. I couldn’t shake the idea that this was the rebels’ last stand, and I knew Amory, Roman, Logan, and Greyson were thinking the same thing.
We hadn’t brought anything other than the clothes on our backs. Everything I owned in the world was gone.
As we sped toward the New Northern Territory, I rested my head against Amory’s shoulder, savoring what I hoped was not one of my last days at his side.
Roman’s fever was worse, and he was sprawled across the back row of seats, shivering and sweating under his blankets. I tried to ignore his groans of pain, but all I could think was that maybe it was better this way. I knew Roman would prefer to die quickly fighting the people who were responsible for the virus rather than wither away slowly on Ida’s farm.
We took turns driving and staring out the window, and I began to see signage for the border.
“No CID — No Entry.”
I almost wanted to laugh. There had been a time when I’d been afraid to travel by the interstate, and now we were barreling toward the border — all of us illegals — without fear.
We took strange detours to avoid the rovers, but the rebels had such an intimate knowledge of the safe routes along the highway that Shriver never blinked an eye.
It was the middle of the night when we finally pulled off on a smaller back road. I knew we would have to cross the
border by taking down a portion of the electric fence, and that made me uneasy.
When we pulled off the road into the impressions another SUV had left in the mud, my heart sped up. Amory squeezed my hand, and I returned the pressure.
Shriver slowed down, her eyes scanning the darkness for the metal grid of the fence. I wasn’t sure how she knew we were close. She couldn’t have made this journey more than once, and the forest was pitch black.
Then, in the distance, a pair of headlights flashed. They blinked twice, and Shriver flicked our lights in response.
The tires crunched slowly over dead leaves and crackling branches, and the outline of a Jeep came into view on the other side of the fence. The metal grid towered over us, and I could almost hear the hum of electricity on the air.
A tall figure emerged from the Jeep and disappeared into the shadows. There was fumbling and some scraping of metal on metal, and the person on the other side shorted out a portion of the fence.
Then the figure sprinted back into view and grasped the fence, pulling it backward. I gasped a little as the entire section detached from the rest of the fence and swung out. This was certainly more sophisticated than our first crossing. The figure waved Shriver through, and we pulled forward into the New Northern Territory.
I watched in the rearview mirror as the rebel ran to swing the fence back into place, and I knew it was live again. As far as World Corp knew, the border was secure.
The Jeep did not follow us, and I suspected the sentry remained posted at the fence to let the other cars in our caravan pass. We had left the farm in staggered waves so we wouldn’t attract the attention of any PMC cruisers lingering on the highway south of the border.
I expected we would be headed to a camp similar to the one we had fled in the winter, but I was surprised when the trees began to thin and we returned to the highway once again. I didn’t ask Shriver where we were going. Trees along the road disappeared, giving way to fields and derelict towns. Fear was unfurling in my stomach. I didn’t like being without cover in PMC country.