The Secret Citizen (Freedom/Hate Series, Book 3)

by Kyle Andrews

  Dor was standing right next to Collin, with Mek standing right behind her. Mek was a large and intimidating man, but the look in his eye as he watched that screen made him seem like a child somehow. He was as helpless as anyone else standing in that room. Rage would surely follow in the minutes, hours and days to come, but as they watched live footage of the smoke rising over the city, there was no word that could properly convey what the people of the Campus were feeling. It wasn't horror or shock. It wasn't sadness or anger. It wasn't numbness. Maybe there was too much of each one of those emotions to be properly felt or expressed. So all they could do was stand in silence, watching.

  When the report first made its way through the Campus, it was like a shock wave. Everyone felt it. Many people, Collin included, wanted to run out of the building, but where would they go? If they tried to send help to the victims of that attack, they would be walking into a battlefield without any weapons. Some wanted to go anyway, but Mig wouldn't allow it. She had to say the words that would haunt her for the rest of her life, but which she knew to be right. People would hate her for it, but she had no choice. They locked the doors of the Campus. Nobody came in or went out until they were sure that HAND wasn't coming for them.

  “We are expecting an address by Governor Garrison as well as comments from the President himself on this situation, but no time has been set for those statements to be made,” the anchor went on. “As we try to gain some perspective on the situation, we are joined in studio by our good friend, Go Bauer. Go, thank you for rushing into the studio on such short notice. I'm sure you had other plans.”

  Did she really say those words? Even worse, did she say those words with a smile on her face, while countless people were being killed? Collin was pretty sure that those members of Freedom had other plans too, but nobody seemed to mind that.

  “I'm happy to be here,” Go replied with a nod, twisting the knife in Freedom's gut that much more.

  “What can you tell us about this strike?” the anchor asked, adopting a very thoughtful-looking expression that consisted of a furrowed brow and a tilt of her head.

  “It's early to say exactly what is happening,” Go told her. “What we can say for sure is that this was a very calculated, very precise action. The damage was limited to a very specific portion of the city, away from the more populated areas. Obviously, those in command would not have wanted to endanger the lives of innocent civilians.”

  The anchor nodded, “I'm sure they hated taking any lives at all.”

  “So true. But what choice were they given? We have seen a marked increase in Hate activity over the last few weeks. They have grown more bold and more aggressive. We saw a violent riot carried out by their people. We saw children and old women gunned down by them. Obviously, something needed to be done.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I think that this strike was meant to show the members of that... let's call them an 'organization', that we aren't willing to sit by and watch as they spread their chaos, hate and vitriol throughout the city. We aren't willing to watch people die by their hands and do nothing in response.”

  “So you think this will reflect well on whoever actually gave the order to strike,” the anchor stated, rather than asked.

  “I do. It was the move of a bold leader, drawing a line in the sand. When dealing with angry, violent people you sometimes have to speak to them in their terms. In this case, that means showing them that we will not tolerate their actions.”

  “Any ideas on who gave the order?” the anchor asked with a slight grin, as though she were asking for the secret ingredient in a recipe, rather than asking who gave the order to slaughter innocent people.

  Go shrugged and answered, “Whoever it was, I think they have a pretty good leg to stand on when the elections roll around next year.”

  While the interview was taking place, the image on the screen shifted to a view of the city's skyline, with that cloud of smoke growing larger and larger by the second. Collin watched that smoke as though it were the blood draining from the body of a mortally wounded ally.

  He didn't realize it at first, but he was holding one arm in his hand, pressing his thumb into the wound where HAND had sliced him open. All of his wounds were throbbing, but he couldn't feel any pain from them as he stood there. On some level he wanted to feel that pain again; to have the dial turned back up to its highest level so that all of his feelings could be channeled into one basic, instinctual reaction. It was easier than watching the TV and not knowing what to think or feel, and having nothing to do.

  When he realized that he was trying to inflict pain on himself, Collin let go of his arm. He noticed that Dor was watching him and that Mek was trying to look as though he wasn't watching him. What must they have thought of Collin in that moment? Would they sympathize, or see him as the damaged victim of the system? The man who resorted to inflicting pain upon himself as a comforting technique?

  Funny how things had changed. When he was locked up, he used memories of his life in Freedom to get him through the hard times—more specifically, his life with Liz. But where was she now? Where was his imaginary friend who always seemed to show up right when he needed her? She was gone now, just like the real Liz.

  “Witnesses on the street are telling us that there is a standoff taking place between HAND officers and the occupants of the Hate compound,” the anchor said, putting a hand to her ear as she was being fed information. “We are attempting to get reporters on the scene, but we have been asked to keep the area clear until the situation has died down.”

  “In situations like this, you really want to minimize the civilian presence in the area. You don't want to cause harm to innocents, and I think that's why they started with the drone strike,” Go explained, as though he were a tactical expert rather than a political commentator.

  At any moment, Collin expected Go to pull out a pair of pom-poms and perform a full-on cheer for the authorities. They could have sacrificed a virgin on live TV and he would undoubtedly talk about how inspiring it was.

  The anchor grew somber, tilting her head in the other direction and said, “But let's talk about the true cost of what is being done out there for a moment. The loss of lives.”

  “It's tragic, to say the least. HAND officers put their lives on the line in order to protect the civilian population. They know what they're getting into, but that doesn't make their actions any less heroic.”

  The anchor was nodding along with what Go was saying, but then Collin saw something change. A flicker of genuine emotion passed through her eyes. Not the sorrow that Go was pretending to have, but something else. Disbelief, maybe. Annoyance.

  It was fleeting. Collin wasn't even sure of what he had seen, because nobody else in the room perked up or commented on it. Within a fraction of a second, the anchor's expression was back to being the robotic mask that she and all other news anchors had been trained to wear over the years.

  Did he really see it? Even if he did see it, did it mean anything? She could have been listening to something in her earpiece and not responding to what Go was saying. But what if Collin did see what he thought he saw? What if this anchor—whose name Collin didn't even know because they were all the same to him... What if she wasn't the same?

  There was nothing to do with this theory. He couldn't track her down and ask her whether or not she was starting to feel sympathy toward the people that she spread lies about on a daily basis. Still, this didn't stop him from wondering what it would mean to the cause if they did have one of those anchors on their side. Would it change anything at all?

  He started to think about all of those people, on all of those networks. Many of them came from the privileged class. Reporting about the goings-on of the common man made them feel as though they were getting their hands dirty, like everyone else. To them, the lesser class was dirt. Being a reporter was like doing charity work to those people.

  But there were others who were assigned to the newsroom, just like anyone is assig
ned to any of the jobs in the city. They were groomed for it their entire lives. They were told what to say and what not to say. They were presented to the world with too much makeup and hairspray, giving them the shine of the elite. But they weren't the elite. Somewhere deep down inside, they had to remember what their lives were like before they won the lottery. What it felt like to starve. To be cold at night because the only blanket they had was full of holes and they used their last patch to fix their school pants.

  What if just one of those brainwashed robots really did have a spark of life left in them? How could Collin use them to further his cause?

  31

  Rose carried as many supplies as she could take from the HAND officers when she left. She never looked at their faces as she scavenged those items from them. She never thought about who they were or where they came from, because it didn't matter. They could have been related to her by blood and it wouldn't have mattered. These were people who grew up on those streets, living the same lifestyle as every other person in the city. She could have felt sorry for them when they were assigned to HAND, but the second they turned on the citizens of the city, they weren't people anymore. They were the system. Whatever they were before died long before Rose ever pulled a trigger.

  Paul took a radio off of one of the officers and kept it close, listening to news about what the HAND leaders were referring to as the 'mark' and waiting to see if anyone mentioned the five missing officers. They barely spoke to each other as they collected supplies from the corpses in the basement. After that, they helped each other through the basement window, and they began to walk.

  The world around them fell eerily silent, which was the loudest thing in the world for Rose in that moment. Silence meant that the gunfire had ended. The gunfire ending meant that there were no more targets to shoot.

  “Are you okay?” Paul asked as he took a quick glimpse around a corner. When he saw that it was clear to move, they turned onto the street and kept moving.

  “I'm fine,” Rose replied, as they ducked into a doorway in order to avoid being out in the open for too long. For all she knew, the authorities had satellites watching her at that very moment.

  “You're quite the shot for someone's who's never held a gun before,” he said, checking out the street and then pulling back quickly as Rose heard the roar of an engine not too far away.

  “Close quarters,” she replied.

  Paul nodded, but he was looking at her as though she should be breaking down. She wasn't a victim in this. She was a soldier. If he wanted to coddle someone, it wasn't going to be her.

  “Where were you?” Rose asked him. “Why weren't you in there?”

  “You mean, why aren't I dead?”

  “I didn't mean—But yeah. Why aren't you?”

  Paul lived in the Garden. He had left his normal life behind years earlier, if he'd ever had a normal life at all. Rose didn't know everything about him. What she did know was that he didn't have a job to go to in order to protect his cover, or a family to take care of. Rose usually spent a fair amount of time telling herself that Paul didn't care about anyone but himself, but it wasn't true. She knew that much.

  To say that they had a complicated history might have been a bit of an exaggeration. When she first joined the Garden, she was useless and hated every moment of it. Paul took her under his wing and taught her how to obtain and drive cars; the thrill of acceleration. It was her first real taste of what she imagined freedom felt like and she wanted more of it.

  He gave her the life that she had, and as he did this she started to feel something. She fell in love with him.

  And that was it. There was no rejection. There was no romance. There was nothing. He simply stopped eating dinner when she was eating dinner. He stopped trying to walk with her and talk about whatever it was that they used to talk about. He was around, but he wasn't around her. After a while, they would end up circling each other again, and again he would pull away. It had happened over and over again, for as long as they'd known each other.

  As they waited for that truck to move out of the area, Rose looked down at her feet. She didn't say anything. Not because she was angry, but because she had nothing to say. It wasn't like she wanted to have a conversation about the weather while everyone she knew was dead or dying.

  Amanda was still back there. Even if everyone else could find a way to escape, what was Amanda going to do? She couldn't run, and what were the odds that someone was going to carry her out? The stupid woman probably thought that HAND was coming to save her from the terrorists.

  Rose didn't really believe that. Amanda was a lot of things, but she wasn't stupid. She could deny all she wanted, but she knew the truth.

  Justin.

  Aaron.

  Kellan.

  Lindsay.

  Simon.

  The list went on. The names of people that were in there at that moment kept running through her head. The children. The sick. The old. She couldn't wrap her mind around the concept of not being able to help them.

  “We should move,” Paul said to her.

  She looked up at him and considered following him wherever he planned on running to, but she couldn't just run away. At the very least she needed to see it with her own eyes.

  While Paul was preparing to step out of the doorway and back onto the street, Rose turned in the opposite direction, walking into the building.

  “Rose!” Paul whispered to her as she went, but she didn't stop.

  The building was dark. The windows were boarded up, so the only light that touched the place was the sharp beam of sunlight that entered through the door behind her. The floors were creaking beneath her weight with each step.

  When Rose looked down at the floor, she could see the footprints of at least three people, freshly made in the dust. As Paul followed her into the building, she turned and put a finger over her lips, telling him to be quiet. They weren't alone in that place.

  Slowly, Rose followed the footsteps into one of the apartments to her right. As she pushed the door open, she saw the silhouette of a man standing near one of the windows. There were rays of light sneaking in between the boards that covered the window and bouncing off of the particles of dust that hung in the air. At first the man looked like a hulking monster, but this was only an illusion. As he took a step toward Rose, she could see his true form. Muscular, but not hulking. Tall. Intimidating to anyone who didn't have a machine gun aimed at his head.

  He was not a HAND officer, but he wasn't Freedom either. This was one of the men who normally crept around the streets and sat on the steps in front of these abandoned buildings. The type of man who didn't want to be caught on one of the street cameras, but had no interest in life or liberty. Only the pursuit of his own happiness.

  “Are we going to have a problem here?” Rose asked the man, looking down the barrel of her gun. She sounded intimidating, no doubt, but the truth was that aside from 'machine gun', she had no idea what she was holding or how to use it.

  The man put his hands up and stepped back. He said, “No problem that I see.”

  “You open your mouth to the men outside, you'll never get to shut it again. Are we clear?” she asked him.

  The man seemed to smile, though she couldn't make out his face at all. He said, “Those men would be about as happy to see me as they would you.”

  Rose nodded, “Good to know.”

  As she relaxed a bit and tried to look around the rest of the room, Rose realized that Paul was standing next to her, aiming a gun of his own at the man.

  Turning toward the corner behind her, Rose saw an old woman sitting on an old wooden chair. She had a haunted look about her as she gazed at the ground and nodded her head slightly, as though responding to a question that had been asked only in her head. The woman was playing with her own fingers, picking away at her nails, one after the other. She was not a threat, but she was creepy as hell.

  “Let's go,” Rose said to Paul, moving back to the door.

&nb
sp; “We should get out of here,” he whispered.

  “I want to see it.”

  “That's not a good idea.”

  She stopped once they were back in the building's lobby and looked Paul right in the eye. She could tell that he was concerned for her and that his warnings were meant to spare her whatever images he was already forced to live with, but she couldn't stop herself. What she was imagining was already worse than anything that reality could show her.

  “I have to,” she told him, in barely a whisper so that the other people in the building wouldn't hear her.

  And there it was. She heard the tone of her voice, and it wasn't the tone of a soldier. It was the tone of someone looking into the eyes of someone she still loved, despite everything that they'd been through. Looking into those eyes made her feel weak, but she had to shake off that feeling. She wasn't a girl in love. She was... what? A soldier? A refugee? She didn't even know what anymore. Everything that she had been was going up in smoke, and she needed to see it.

  She climbed the stairs as far as they would take her. Paul was close behind and had her back, but he didn't say anything more to her. Admittedly, there was some part of her that wanted him to make a convincing enough argument to stop her from doing what she was about to do. If her mind could be settled by words alone, then great. But she wasn't someone who could easily just take someone's word for it and walk away. She was someone who needed to find her own answers. She needed to draw her own conclusions. It was normally considered a strength, but she didn't feel strong as she walked up those stairs.

  In her head, she could already picture the scene in front of the hospital. Bodies strewn about as HAND vehicles drove right over them, crushing bones. Officers shooting the dead just for the fun of it. She imagined them doing whatever they could to take away any shred of dignity those people had left.

  But she pressed on, because she knew that if she simply turned her back and walked away from this scene in order to spare herself the trauma of seeing it, she was no better than the countless citizens out there who would turn off their television, avoid looking out the window, and lull themselves to sleep that night with the comfort of knowing that it wasn't their problem.