The guards unlocked their bands and tied their hands to the restraints on the posts so they were facing each other. He was looking at Brody’s face, the posts at an angle to the audience, he guessed so they could see their faces, not just their backs. Fuller was nothing if not meticulous about his entertainment, it seemed. He scanned the rows of people for Fuller’s white uniform, but couldn’t see him anywhere. He wondered briefly what they would use on them, hoping that whatever it was wouldn’t break any ribs, in case they could run tomorrow. Brody’s eyes were on him, still calm, gold flecks catching in the sun, reminding him of Soren now more than ever.
He nodded to him softly and whispered the one word he needed him to pay attention to, despite his hatred for his father, “Survive.”
Fuller stepped out from behind the line of his personal guards and made his way to the stage. He faced the crowd, which was surprisingly large now and growing. “These two soldiers were convicted of treason two hours ago. A crime punishable by death. The manner of said punishment was left to me, as the highest-ranking military official in Crylo. But first things first. The one on the left happens to be my son. Take a good look at him. He is a rebel, working to overthrow the Alliance. My own son. We can show no mercy to traitors, even if they share our blood. Let this be a lesson to all of you. Brody Fuller and Lancer Maxton will be whipped at the same time every day until they expire either at these posts or from their wounds in the cell. Today, we’ll start with thirty. I will administer the sentence to my son. Captain Corliss will deliver the sentence to Maxton.”
Lancer watched him walk over to where Brody was, and saw a tall man approach on his side, a smirk on his face. Fuller pulled out a small silver handle from his belt and flicked a button on it, a razor-sharp piece of metal extending from it with a metallic twang, Hassinger’s weapon of choice. It’s as if every sadist in the bloody Alliance went to the same how-to torture class at their academies. They wouldn’t be able to survive more than a few days of this, not without being able to fix their wounds, and he hoped not for the first time that whatever Dyrig was doing would work.
He closed his eyes after the first of Fuller’s strikes landed on Brody, couldn’t bear to look at the kid’s face. He hardly felt much on his own back anymore; it was mostly scar tissue. He counted silently to himself, afraid to look at Brody, but felt he had to after a while, the kid not making any noise at all. Brody stood there the way he last saw him, eyes open, but much too dark, looking somewhere past him, his face eerily still. Twenty-six. He could see blood on the floor behind him, blood dripping from Fuller’s whip, some of it splattered on his white uniform, and his face was full of unguarded hatred. Twenty-nine. Fuller seemed furious, swinging the whip with all he had for the last strike, Brody inhaling sharply when it landed, eyes darting down for just a flash, and then it was over.
Fuller walked over to his son. “You won’t survive tomorrow, I promise you,” he spat at him, threw the whip on the stage, and walked away without a glance or another word.
They didn’t say anything to each other for the entire walk back to their cell, and for a little while after that. He rushed to the bucket of water, soaking pieces of Brody’s shirt in it, and then gently put the wet rags over the kid’s wounds, squeezing the cold water out onto his back, trying to stem the bleeding and take at least some of the pain away. Brody let him do all of it, silently, standing in front of him like a statue, nothing moving on him at all, and then insisted on helping him, though he didn’t feel any pain now, he just felt numb.
“He’ll kill me tomorrow, Lancer, he’ll find a way to do it. Don’t let them kill you so easily, if our guys don’t make it by then. Don’t let him win,” the kid said in a strained whisper, and then walked slowly, carefully to his cot and lay down on it, face first, banded hands in front of his head, and closed his eyes.
He felt Brody was right. That Fuller would find a way to do it tomorrow, that he would find a way to break him or kill him then, and Brody wouldn’t let him break him for anything. He didn’t blame him for it, either. It wasn’t just pride for him. In some strange way, as much as he hated his father, he wanted to prove him wrong….
Lancer was surprised to find a thermos of coffee and two pieces of toast on a tray by the door when he woke up. Fuller wanted them awake enough for the occasion. They had a few hours yet by the looks of it, and he hoped Brody wasn’t losing blood anymore. He looked over at him, a cautious, tentative look, and smiled. The kid was asleep, nothing bleeding on him, the slashes on his back looking much better than he thought they would, all but one.
He grabbed the tray and walked over to him, crouching by his head. “Wake up, Brody. We got us some breakfast.”
Brody grunted, and he had to tell him to be careful getting up. His pupils were large, in-pain large, but he didn’t wince or give any indication that he was hurting. He reached for the thermos and took a few gulps, smiling now. The toast he didn’t touch, and he didn’t want to force him.
“Turn around, Lancer. I know you’ve examined me plenty while I was out.”
He stood and turned his back to the kid, still feeling oddly self-conscious about his old scars.
Brody cursed, and he was pale when he faced him again.
“What is it?”
The kid walked over to the bucket without a word, soaked a rag in it, and went to work on his back, not saying anything for a while. “You are still bleeding,” Brody finally whispered, and he made him lie down on the cot, and kept pressing the wet cloth to his back hard enough to hurt.
He had to let him. Blood loss was the only thing that truly worried him today. He couldn’t afford to pass out in the middle of it, not if they had any chance of running. He must have dozed off after a while, because he didn’t hear the door open until the guards were already inside, telling them that it was time. They were the same six men from yesterday, but they didn’t seem angry at them now, and they didn’t shove the barrels of their guns into their backs. He smiled to himself, thinking just how easy it might be to turn these people against Fuller, even without the neuros.
The walk took longer today, the guards not rushing them, and there weren’t nearly as many people gathered at the stage as there were yesterday. He scanned the crowd and had to bite back a smile when he spotted Trelix and Loren standing two rows back, Loren giving him one quick nod. He hoped Brody saw them too, hoped the kid knew that they would be all right after all.
Fuller’s uniform was a pristine white, not a drop of his son’s blood on it, and the man smiled at Brody when the guard tied his hands to the restraints. Lancer so desperately wanted to make this man pay for this, for each satisfied smile, each hurtful word, for the pleasure he derived from seeing his son’s back torn up like that by his own hand. He smiled softly at Brody and nodded to him, but the kid looked at him blankly, his face serene, guarded.
Fuller had his whip out, and the same man who whipped him yesterday was waiting at his side, whip at the ready. “I don’t like repeating myself. Any of you who missed this from yesterday, I am told there are recordings that were pushed to everyone’s screens. Today, we are increasing the number of lashes for these traitors to forty. I doubt we’ll be here again tomorrow.” He nodded to the captain and raised his whip.
Lancer couldn’t close his eyes now, so he saw Brody blink when he was hit, and then saw the whip drop out of Fuller’s hand, clanking loudly on the stage, the look of surprise and then horror on his face.
“What is the meaning of this?” The man screamed, facing his soldiers, who all had their guns trained on him, and then the guards who brought them here were freeing their hands and helping them off the stage.
Fuller was surrounded by his own guard, screaming threats at them as they tied his hands behind his back and then marched him down the street, a few dozen soldiers following. Loren and Trelix finally dismissed the guards who flanked Fuller and it was just Fuller and a dozen soldiers with them for a while, and then Loren let the other soldiers go as well. Fuller was still s
creaming obscenities at everybody who was near him, threatening to kill them. Loren finally hit him across the face with the butt of his gun, and he shut up.
Ella was ready for them in the med bay, going to work on Brody as soon as he lay down. She knocked him out with a shot, telling Lancer that Trelix stole a few of them from the lab, but she couldn’t give that to him, as it was based on the same thing as those pills he couldn’t take. He was okay with it. He felt grateful they had some for Brody. The kid needed to not feel pain for a day or two or however long it would knock him out for. He watched as she stitched Brody’s back, her face betraying the pain she felt at what he went through, but her hands were steady and her voice calm. She had him tell her what happened while she worked, and he didn’t mind telling her any of it, all but about the young Zoriner girl Fuller killed. That he kept to himself.
She offered him a thermos of spiked tea when it was his turn and he drank in long gulps, cringing at the taste, the liquid burning his throat and making his insides feel hot. His mind went fuzzy after a little while and he didn’t fight it. The pain was still there, but softer, blurrier than before. He could tell Ella was stitching him up, could feel the needle going into his flesh, only it seemed too far away from him to worry about. He saw Ella’s soft face lean close to his, her eyes wet for some reason, and felt a kiss on his forehead. He tried to say something, tried to smile at her, only he was falling now and her face wasn’t there anymore, just darkness, spiraling under him, weighing heavily on his eyelids, pressing them closed, shutting them against the bruises on Tishana, and the slashes on Brody’s back, and against Fuller’s smirking face and the rage in his voice, against the ugly green walls of the cell and Tishana’s blood on the floor.
He felt the darkness lift after a little while and he was floating and then landing softly in the grass. He could smell it, the blades tickling his face, smiling blue-gold eyes looking up at him from the grass, familiar eyes. He tried to remember how he knew those eyes, only he couldn’t think of it, the name—a fuzzy smile on the tip of his tongue, a whisper in a kid’s voice, telling him to wake up, but he couldn’t recall how to do that, didn’t want to do that. He stayed where he was in the green grass, staring into the smiling eyes that made him feel strangely at peace, undamaged.
19
Executioners
Riley, June 14, 2236, The Cave
This clearing by the cave felt comfortably familiar, and they all seemed happy to be here again, surrounded by birches. He didn’t think anyone would find them here and the cave would keep them cool enough at night if they didn’t want to use aux power on the flier for that.
He tried to get Brody to talk to him since yesterday when he finally woke up, but he wouldn’t talk. Not to him, not to anybody, not even Laurel. He stayed in the cave, avoiding the clearing and the flier, barely touching his food, and it worried him. Lancer told him what happened after they brought Brody into the cell, and to give him some space, but he ached to find a way to ease the pain for his friend, only he knew it wasn’t that kind of pain. It surprised him, too, that Brody didn’t say a word to his father, didn’t even try to see him yet.
The man was strapped to a tree, hands tied with biters in front of him. He didn’t talk to anyone either, not one word. Loren tried yesterday, only he wouldn’t even look at him. But he drank and ate what they gave him, and let Loren take him to the stream to wash and do whatever else he needed to do.
Riley crouched in front of him, looking at the familiar features. Fuller was wearing his uniform pants and a white t-shirt, sweat making it stick to his chest, but the man didn’t seem to be bothered by it. He looked at him for a long time, remembering this man holding him in his arms when he was little, smiling at him. Remembering how safe he felt when he did that. How he wished he was raising him instead of his own father….
“What do you want, Riley?” A hoarse whisper, Fuller’s eyes on him.
“What the hell happened to you, Max? What you did… how could you do that to him? How could you do that to Brody?”
Fuller just tilted his head back and closed his eyes again, and he let him be. It hurt to even look at him, and he wanted more than anything for him to not be there now. They were holding him to try to get information from him, but he had a feeling they wouldn’t get anything useful, and he wished Brody would just shoot him and be done with it.
He threw a few sticks into the fire and sat on the log watching the yellow flames dance lazily in the afternoon light. Everybody was in the flier, keeping cool, everybody but Brody. He saw him standing outside the cave, looking around. He smiled at him, but Brody was looking at his father, his face pale, hands in fists. He watched him stand there like that for a long time and suddenly, Brody was walking to that tree as if he had finally decided something.
He followed him, felt he had to, felt he could maybe help him with this. “I’ll leave if you want me to,” he whispered.
“Stay,” Brody said without looking at him, his eyes trained on his father.
Riley sat down a few steps away, hoping whatever happened now wouldn’t make it harder on Brody. Hoping, too, that at the end of it, they would finally be rid of this man.
Fuller’s eyes were still closed, and he didn’t move. Brody walked around him and cut the straps around his body, freeing him from the tree, then grabbed him by the arms and made him stand up.
Fuller opened his eyes then, looking at Brody’s face, smiled. “So. You didn’t die.”
Brody didn’t say anything for a while, just stared at him. “My mother…. Tell me what happened to her,” he asked in a shaky voice.
Fuller laughed, a loud laugh that made his whole body shake. “Here I was, thinking you and your weird collection of friends would beat me, threaten me, whatever, to get me to help you in whatever war you think you’re fighting, your little rebellion… yet, here you are, wanting to talk about your mother. I really shouldn’t be surprised.”
Brody didn’t move, didn’t say anything, just stood there, waiting.
Fuller was calm again when he spoke. “All right, son, I’ll tell you. We watched you for years, up until you ran from Waller, like the coward that you are. You were an experiment if you will. You see, we needed to convince certain people at the Alliance top councils that re-integrating Zoriners into our society was a bad bloody idea, even if we started off when the kids were young. They were supposed to turn on you much earlier than they did, but maybe you were just too pretty to look at. Too pretty for them to want to hurt you.”
Riley could hear a smirk in his voice, the man’s lips curling into a small smile.
“Anyway…. Your poor mother couldn’t take you feeling so hurt, so abandoned by everyone after we staged that broadcast, so she slit her wrists with one of my knives and bled to death on the damn couch, staring at your picture on her screen. She was always a weakling. You are just like her in that, the type to kill yourself or to run, but you already know that….”
Brody dipped his head, his face a pale blank. “Thank you,” he said very quietly, and then his gun was out, one of the old ones, the barrel pressing against Fuller’s chest. “Any last words?”
Fuller shook his head, no smiles on his face now, Brody gripping the gun hard, waiting, as if not quite trusting that his father didn’t have anything more to say to him.
“Do it,” Fuller said after too long of this waiting, his voice controlled, quiet. But Brody just kept staring at him, not pulling the trigger.
“Pull the bloody trigger!”
The safety clicked off, Brody breathing hard, his jaw clenched, but Fuller’s face was strangely calm. The way Lancer’s face was when he took him to that clearing. Like he was genuinely okay with this. It didn’t add up.
Riley thought through all that Fuller said before, something in it bothering him, and suddenly he had it. He ran up to Brody and took the gun from him. “Not yet, Brody. We need to talk.”
He walked over to Fuller and pushed him down, and quickly strapped him to the tree, pul
ling on the restraints hard enough to hurt. The man just shook his head and closed his eyes.
He took Brody to the fire, working through his thoughts, trying to make sense of all of it. “He isn’t Alliance, Brody. Not really… he can’t be. I don’t think Hassinger was either. It’s like they have their own agenda. That thing he said about the Alliance wanting to re-integrate Zoriners? It doesn’t add up. I think he was fighting his own people. Remember how we all thought that it wasn’t Alliance that killed all those people in Reston, how it wouldn’t make any sense if they could do that? I think your father is working with whoever did that. And I think the Alliance has no idea they are doing it. Reston, the labs with Zoriner girls, maybe even the S-Squads, I don’t think it’s them. But he knows. Your father knows. We have to get him to tell us somehow.”
Brody winced and then nodded, not saying a word.
They sat in silence, Brody watching his father from across the clearing.
“Do you think it’s genetic, how he is?” His voice was so quiet, he barely heard him.
“You can’t be serious…. No, it’s not genetic. You’re not him. You’ll never, ever, in a million years, be him. But I think there is something personal for him in what he’s doing. He seems too invested in all of this.” He stood up and offered Brody his hand, lifting him gently from the log. “Let’s go tell the others.”
Alliance: The Complete Series (A Dystopian YA Box Set Books 1-5): Dystopian Sci Fi Thriller Page 51