by Tracey Ward
And it sucks more than I ever thought it could.
When I open my eyes and adjust my binoculars, she’s being thrown violently into the van. And it might be my imagination, but I could swear as they go to slam the doors shut, she looks dead at me.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Vin
The back doors to the truck are wide open. I can see daylight. Road. So much road. And there’s only one guy guarding us.
“Can we make it?” Nats asks quietly.
The girls are flanking me again, just like in the street. We sit with our backs pressed up against the far wall. Breanne is practically clinging to me, sobbing as silently as she can, and I’m itching to shake her off and make a run for it.
Can we make it? No. But I could. Alone.
“No,” I answer Natalie darkly. “There’s no point trying. Not yet.”
“How are we going to get out of this?”
“I told you. I’m working on it.”
She curses in frustration, looking away. Breanne shudders against my side.
A blur blows past the back of the van, feminine and small. Stretch and another guy chase after her. They shout like idiots. Like they can stop her with their words. She’s probably running for her pimp, hoping he can keep her from getting snatched up.
Good luck with that, sweetheart, I think bitterly. If I couldn’t manage it, no pimp out there can. We’re all screwed five days past Friday.
“Get her inside, now!” someone yells. “She’s bleeding. It’ll call the Risen straight to us. Let’s move!”
“You don’t want to be out here dizzy and disoriented when the Risen show,” Stretch tells her consolingly, his voice getting closer.
“And unarmed,” the other guy adds.
She mutters something I can’t hear. Probably pleading to be let go.
There’s a scuffle just out of sight. Their shadows fight on the asphalt in front of us, then the guy is laughing.
“Kitten has claws,” he chuckles condescendingly.
Kitten must have more than claws, because his laughter doesn’t last long. I see her shadow strike, a blade digging into his thigh. She snaps up, cracking her skull against his face in one last, futile screw you.
“You bitch!” he roars with rage.
They toss her small body into the back of the van. She tucks in tightly to absorb the fall, her face staring out the doors as they slam them firmly shut.
She lays like that for a long time. She doesn’t move when they load up in the cab or when the engines turn over, or even when we start bouncing down the uneven roads toward one of the stadiums. Breanne leans in closer to me, trying like hell to leach comfort or heat out of my body as the temperature inside the truck drops. It’s all metal, no windows. No sunlight. It’s a freezer and that paper-thin thing they tossed in here isn’t wearing a jacket.
“Are you cold?” Nats asks gently.
Kitten stirs at the sound of her voice, lifting herself up off the floor into a sitting position. She sways too hard, too far, her face unfocused in the dark.
“Um,” she mumbles thickly. Her eyes are glassy, her head lolling dangerously to the side.
“Uh oh.” I shake off the girls to slide across the floor so I can catch her, holding her shoulders in my hands. She’s nothing but skin, bones, and air in my grasp. Long, red hair and snow-white skin. She’s pretty in an uncomplicated kind of way, her features small but straightforward and well defined. “She’s going over. Nats, give her the sweater under your coat.”
I hear Nats rustling behind me as the girl stares blankly. Her eyes roam my face, looking confused, but then suddenly she finds a little clarity. Right around the Hornet tattoo on my neck.
“You’re in the Hive,” she whispers vaguely.
Nats hands me her sweater. I let go of the girl just long enough to shake it out before gingerly pulling it over her head. I’m careful with the back because I’m pretty sure that’s where they cracked her skull. Probably on the pavement. “You’ve heard of us?” I ask sarcastically.
“No one in the wild hasn’t heard of the Hive.”
“I guess we’re pretty well known.”
Fire flares in her eyes. She tries to shake me off. It’s a weak effort but I let her do it. “Well known? Notorious is more like it. Feared is even better.”
I sit back, giving her space because she wants it. Because she looks like she’s ready and willing to kill for it, and that’s just adorable in a little kitty cat like her. “You don’t seem too scared right now.”
She snorts like I don’t matter. Like she’s ten feet tall and not five-foot-nothing. “Not of you. You’re not my biggest problem at the moment. Hell, you’re not even my smallest problem.”
Natalie snickers behind me.
I grin in amazement at the stones on this girl. “What crew has been hiding you?”
“None,” she answers defiantly. “I’m not in one. Never have been. I never will be.”
“No joke?” I laugh. “You’ve been going it alone?”
“Six years now.”
“That was a good run.”
She frowns, pulling away. She scoots back until she’s pressed up against the closed doors, as close as she can be to freedom and as far from me as she can get. “It’s not over yet.”
“Oh, Kitten,” I remind her emphatically, “you know where you are. It’s over.”
“Don’t call me kitten and it’s not over until I’m dead.”
Her words stop me cold because that’s the kind of thing I would say. She’s a kid, probably eighteen or younger, but she’s pure piss. There’s something feral in her. An animal inside that stirs the animal in me.
“Where have you been hiding?” I whisper to myself.
She either doesn’t hear me or doesn’t want to answer. Either way, I leave her alone. I slip back to the rear of the van and let the girls lean in close again, but I’m watching the kitten in the corner. I’m wondering how she’s lived as long as she has completely alone. It doesn’t make sense, but there she is. A total mystery and a bit of a pill.
A pill with head trauma.
“Hey!” I shout at her when her eyes start to close. “Wake up!”
She blinks heavily, glaring at me. “I’m awake.”
“Try to stay that way.”
“What do you care?”
“That’s a really good question.”
Ten minutes later she’s dozing again.
“Kitten! Wake up!”
“Shut up!” she shouts back. “I’m awake!”
I smile at her spit and her lie. “You weren’t, but you are now.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Quit falling asleep.”
“Whatever.”
“Let her sleep,” Breanne complains drowsily.
“None of you should be sleeping. Least of all her.”
“Why not her?”
“Because she has a head injury.”
“So what?”
“So she could die.”
“Hmmm,” Breanne hums without interest.
Five minutes later Breanne is asleep and so is the girl, and I’m getting real sick of playing nursemaid to everyone.
“Wake up!” I shout at all of them.
Kitten jerks awake, pulling Nats’ sweater tight around her body. She squints in the dark, one hand going to her head to rub her temple. She’s got a headache. Definitely a concussion.
“Quit yelling at me.”
“Quit falling asleep,” I warn her. “You have a concussion. You’ll die if you sleep.”
“You know an awful lot. Taken a few hits to the head, have you?”
Who the hell is this chick?
“What’s your name?” I ask curiously.
She freezes, staring without answering.
I sigh impatiently. “Do I look like Rumplestiltskin?”
“What?”
“I’m not Rumplestiltskin. Giving me your name doesn’t give me power.”
Nats shifts next to me
. “That’s not how it goes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yep.”
“I thought the whole point was a name exchange.”
“It is, but it’s the other way around. It doesn’t make sense the way you said it. If she’s hiding her name then she would be Rumplestiltskin.”
“Who would I be?”
Nats smirks. “You’re a Queen.”
I chuckle as I turn back to Kitten, asking one last time, “What’s your name?”
“Joss,” she replies warily.
“Well, Joss, this is Natalie or Nats. Snoring in her lap is Breanne.”
“And who are you?”
Nats laughs. “He’s a Stable Boy.”
“I am the Stable Boy,” I correct indignantly.
Kitten frowns in confusion. “What does that mean?”
“It means he watches out for The Hive’s women,” Nats explains. “Breanne and I included.”
“Did a piss poor job of it today,” I gripe. I’m still kicking myself for getting caught. My reputation is going to be shot to hell if I ever get out of here.
Nats looks at me sharply, that kind of hot, scolding look only women can give. “Knock it off, Vin. You did all you could for us.”
“Then why are you in this van?”
“What’s important is that we’re not alone in this van,” she reminds me carefully because she knows me. She knows I thought about ditching them. “You could have left us, but you didn’t.”
“That’s not a victory. I should have saved you.”
“You’re here, aren’t you? Maybe you still will.”
I chuckle doubtfully, spinning Lucio’s ring on my finger. I’m thinking about all the ways he messed up and all the ways I thought I was better than him, but right now I’d just about to trade places with him. This cage they’re taking me to, it’s not going to be like my cage at the Hive. I had power there. Real strength. I had freedoms they won’t give me here. This, the Colonies, is a prison I can’t stomach. I’m a lion going to the zoo and I’ll go insane within a week.
Joss won’t fair one bit better. I better dollars to dicks she’ll get herself killed trying to break out. Looking in her eyes is like looking in a mirror. Our packaging is different but the contents are the same. We're both feral, both fighters, and we deserve better than to die like this, but that's what's going to happen if we don't get out. It'll happen slowly from the inside, but eventually the virus will spread until we're no better than the Risen stumbling blindly through the streets.
“Maybe Kitten here will help me,” I think out loud.
She scowls bitterly. “You saw what happened to the last guy who called me that, right?”
I smile slowly, eating up her fire and filling my stomach with it. It’s oddly satisfying.
It makes her uncomfortable. She doesn’t know what to do with me or my smiles or my eyes that rake her over, assessing and reassessing her with every word she says. She’s not used to being looked at, but she’s used to fighting, and that’s all I really need from her anyway.
“Help you do what?” she asks eventually.
“Escape the Colony.”
“We haven’t even gotten there yet. How do you know you won’t love it?”
“Because I belong in the wild. So do you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know a wild thing when I see it and you, Kitten, are a wild thing. Six years on your own? You don’t want to be locked up in a cage or you would have joined willingly years ago. I’m still trying to sort out how you hid from the gangs all these years, let alone the Colonists and Risen.”
“I found ways. You said it yourself, I don’t want to be locked up in a cage.”
“Or a stable?” Nats asks wryly.
Kitten looks at her uncertainly. “Not anywhere by anyone.”
The girls fall silent. All of them but Breanne. She keeps snoring and the truck keeps jostling, and pretty soon Kitten has dozed off too. I let her sleep. I’m watching her breathing, and as long as her chest keeps rising and falling under the thick wool of Nats’ sweater, I’m happy.
“Don’t even think about it,” Nats warns me quietly.
I smirk at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She’s cute. Too skinny, but still cute.”
“That’s not what I’m thinking about.”
“Bull,” she chuckles. “That’s all you think about.”
“Not always.”
“Alright, so what are you thinking about right now?”
“I’m thinking I can use her.”
“Use her for what?”
“To get us out.”
Natalie studies her, trying to see what I see. “She’s tough, I guess.”
“She’s more than tough.”
“She doesn’t look it.”
“And that’s how they’re going to screw up with her. They’re going to underestimate her.”
“But not you, huh?” she yawns, losing interest.
“No.” I shake my head, smiling at my gently purring kitten. “Not me.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Vin
The last time I rode in a car was six years ago. It wasn’t even a car, actually. It was a golf cart Yenko managed to get running with a nearly drained battery, and a steady stream of cursing and begging to God, the Devil, and Shania Twain, because the dude likes country music. No one’s perfect.
The cart couldn’t handle the rough roads around the Hive so we took it to the mall. I remember the way the squeal of the tires mixed with our laughter echoed around us as we tore down the main concourse. Yenko took a turn so hard I fell out of the open side. I flew across the dust covered floors until I smashed into the marble wall outside Macy’s. The wind was knocked out of my lungs and I got a bruise the size of Texas on my back. Yenko laughed so hard he nearly pissed himself.
It was one of my last great days. One of the last times I can remember feeling young and honest to God happy.
I’m thinking about that day as the truck bounces roughly down the road, but I can’t get a grip on the memory. I can’t recreate the way I felt and what I actually start to feel is nauseas. It’s been so long, I had forgotten that I get car sick.
I can’t tell how long we’ve been in here. Without windows to see the buildings going by, I can’t get a read on our speed or direction, but I have a feeling we’re not heading to the Stadiums. The light sneaking in through the cracks in the doors is weak. Too weak to be coming from the western sky, which means we aren’t going east which means where the hell are we going? And when the hell will we get there? My butt is going numb from sitting so long.
Ten minutes or ten hours later – who can tell in this box – we slow to a stop. The driver shouts. Someone far off shouts back. We lurch forward again, nice and slow.
I reach over to shake Nats’ shoulder hard. “Hey. Wake up. We’re here.”
Her eyes peel open slowly. “Where’s here?”
“I don’t know yet. Wake up Breanne.” I get up on my knees to go to Kitten. I almost fall on my back as the truck rocks sharply to the left, but I catch myself on the tips of my fingers. I also catch my throat closing up like I’m about to vomit. I swallow it down to yell at Joss, “Hey!”
“What?” she slurs sleepily.
I wave her forward. “Get back here against this wall.”
I’m glad she’s too tired to ask questions. She’s quick to scuttle across the floor, pinning herself to the back of the truck with the rest of us. She sits on my left as Breanne and Nats straighten on my right. Nats is solid but Breanne has those doe eyes on, looking around terrified at everything. Push comes to shove, she’s going to be useless to me. Nats has already proven she won’t be much better. My best shot, my only ally at this moment, is Kitten.
“So what do you say?” I ask her quietly, my hand going to my back pocket. I wrap my fingers around the small shiv they were too dumb to take from me. “You gonna help me get us out of here?”
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Metal screams against metal, making Breanne cower pitifully. When we roll forward, sound changes suddenly, echoing like we’re inside a box inside a bigger box. The light from the outside begins to fade.
Kitten gasps as a door slams outside. The van goes pitch black.
“No one’s ever escaped the Colonies,” she whispers nervously.
“There’s a first time for everything.” I look over at her, getting an eyeful of her outline; nothing against nothing. But then she blinks and I catch sight of her eyes. They’re pale, almost eerie like an emptied Risen. That’s not her, though. Inside, she’s a live wire.
I offer her my hand. I don’t know if she can see it, but she knows I’ve moved toward her in the dark and she doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t back away.
Metal screeches again, louder this time in the echo of our second cage, then the doors outside are yawning open. A different set at the front of the van, and suddenly it dawns on me –we’re passing through the double doors on a massive steel box. Kind of like a shipping container.
We’re at the freaking MOHAI.
We lurch forward. Kitten is jostled. She blinks, her eyes darting to the door then back to me. She knows we’re inside a Colony. She knows how real this just got.
She puts her small hand in mine, her palm pressing against the flat of the shiv I have hidden there. She blinks again, looking down at it just as light starts to filter through the cracks.
“They’re going to separate me from you girls,” I explain to her quickly and quietly. “Keep them safe and I’ll work on our escape. Deal?”
The van stops. Doors are opened and slammed. Footsteps approach from both sides to meet at the back door.
Joss doesn’t answer me and she doesn’t close her hand around that shiv.
“Do we have a deal?” I demand.