by Laken Cane
In the end, I left the door unlocked.
Richard, Lila, and Caleb had carried in several gallon jugs and placed them against the walls around the back porch. Some of them were completely filled.
“Alcohol,” I whispered. They’d been busy.
I chose an extra-large canvas bag from the pile in the corner. I’d need something to put bottles of alcohol in. Despite my energy, my muscles were a little stiff.
Because of everything I’d found—the extra water gun, the containers of alcohol, my nearly exploding bladder—I began to realize I’d slept longer than one night.
I shut the porch door gently and stepped out into the backyard, inhaling deeply. It was almost cool enough to make me go back inside for a heavier jacket. The yard had been freshly covered with a blanket of leaves. The air smelled wet and the ground was damp. Sometime while I’d slept we’d had some rain, and fall had come for real.
And I had a new purpose.
Searching for alcohol would become one of the most important things I ever did.
I patted my new mutant-killer, almost surprised at how much more confidence the gun gave me. I’d seen what it could do. I was going to stock up on squirt guns. It couldn’t hurt to have backups.
Slipping from backyard to backyard, tree to tree, shadow to shadow, I stayed alert for sounds of mutants in the area as I watched for Sage and the others.
I went into a two-story halfway down the block, figuring I’d work my way back up both sides of the street until I was once again home. If these homes didn’t net me much alcohol or any water guns, I’d try the houses in the opposite direction.
There were no sounds in the house. It was unlikely a mutant would be lying in wait, but there could easily be baddies. Raiding, healing, sleeping, hiding…
But the house was dusty with disuse. Sure, there could have been a human hiding in a closet or under a bed, but the house just felt empty. I hoped it wasn’t my wishful thinking.
I found eight bottles of alcohol—most of them only half full—before I neared my house again. I’d also found eleven squirt guns. Only one was large and similar to the one I wore at my hip. The others were the tiny, cheap toys that I could stick in my pockets and pull out if I were desperate.
The next house was a tall, skinny house with peeling green paint and a rickety porch. The place had belonged to a horrible cockroach of a man named Bertram Riggs and his wife, a thin, quiet woman named Bonnie. They’d had six kids, so surely there’d be a few water guns, as well as a couple bottles of alcohol.
Every time I’d seen those kids, they’d sported a bruise, cut, or swollen lip. My mother had said their father had a temper. Baker County Children Services had been there dozens of times. Didn’t seem to matter how many times they took the kids away.
They always came back.
Any house with that many banged up kids would surely have a lot of alcohol.
I went upstairs before checking the lower floor. The upstairs always made me nervous, and I was eager to get it out of the way first.
There were three bedrooms. The kid’s rooms held few toys, but I did find two plastic squirt guns. I looked around the room, wondering if the faded brown stain on the wall was blood, and if the splintering hole in the cheap door had been put there by a child’s head.
I closed my eyes.
Sorry, Robin.
As always, guilt and grief rose up to choke me and for a second, I couldn’t get air past the lump in my throat.
I couldn’t wallow in the cold, painful past. How many times had I told myself that? The problem was I didn’t seem to know how to dig myself out.
I took a deep breath and left the oppressive kid’s room. I’d check the bathroom, then head downstairs to the kitchen.
As I stood in the small bathroom, rifling through the medicine cabinet, I thought I heard a distant sound. A crack, like someone had hurled a bottle at a metal traffic sign.
I listened for a moment longer but when I heard no other sounds, I tiptoed from the room. There was almost too much silence. The old house held its breath, watching as I crept down the carpeted stairs, harsh odors rising up to greet me as I descended.
Mustiness. Rot. Blood.
Death.
I missed Sage’s company.
I pulled my machete strap over my head and clutched the weapon as I stood at the bottom of the stairs, my head tilted, listening.
There was nothing.
No sounds, no movements, no creaks.
I slung the strap of the canvas bag over my shoulder, patted my holstered water gun, then walked through the living room with a bit more determination. A bit less fear.
Dust covered the furniture, the walls, the drapes. Lacy cloths like thick, dusty cobwebs lay on the backs and arms of the sofa and chairs, and braided rugs were everywhere.
It made me inexplicably sad.
I walked on to the kitchen.
And then, I heard voices.
I dropped my bag and pulled my gun from its holster. Silently, quickly, machete in one hand and gun in the other, I walked to the window and peered through the dusty, splattered glass.
The hair on the back of my neck stood at attention.
My heart beat like a hummingbird’s wings, and for one second I swayed as dizziness washed over me.
Then I saw Richard Connor and his two companions walking down the street.
“Shit,” I whispered, and shoved the water gun into its holster. I grabbed the bag and bolted from the kitchen, then slammed out the front door and across the yard.
“Hey,” I called. “Wait!”
They had their water guns up and aimed at me almost before the words left my lips. I wasn’t afraid they’d attack me. I barely even considered it.
My heart was being squeezed by a giant fist of fear, and it had nothing to do with Richard Connor and his friends.
The three of them stood staring at me, eyes narrowed, bodies stiff, weapons ready.
“What did you do with her?” I yelled, as I raced toward them. “Where is she?” I swiveled my head wildly, searching the yards and the street, terrified.
Because I saw Richard, and Caleb, and the angry Lila.
But Sage…
Sage was not with them.
Chapter Eleven
“When we left this morning, she was sitting on a chair beside your cot, waiting for you to wake up.” Richard’s voice was calm—cold, even—but there was a spark of worry in his odd, pale eyes.
I paced the floor, chomping away at my fingernails, worried sick. I believed them. At least, I wanted to. They couldn’t have traded her to the gods—they’d have traded me as well. “Where the hell is she?” I whispered. “Where did she go?”
I stopped pacing abruptly. “The door. Did you lock the door when you left this morning?”
“No,” Richard told me. “Sage said she’d lock up after us.”
I sat on the couch—Sage’s bed—and buried my face in my hands. She’d been missing since that morning. “They have her.”
“Why do you think that?” Caleb asked.
“For all we know, you killed her,” Lila said. She sat in a chair across the room, unloading the bag she’d filled from their raid.
I ignored her and strode toward the kitchen.
“Where are you going?” Caleb asked, following me. His voice was carefully friendly—cheerful, even—but the look in his eyes was almost as cold as Richard’s.
I wasn’t sure why he thought he needed to hide himself behind a façade of jovial blandness, but he wasn’t quite to the point where he could disguise what was in his eyes.
Richard was, but Richard was older. He’d had more time to harden his shell.
“I’m going to find Sage.”
“You can’t go out there by yourself. Hang on. I’ll go with you.”
I stopped walking. “You will?”
He grinned. “Yeah. She’s a sweetheart.”
I heard Lila snort. “Yeah. You’re going for the kid.”
&nb
sp; Caleb’s stare didn’t waver. His smile remained firmly in place, but there was a flicker of something I didn’t recognize deep in his eyes.
Richard walked into the kitchen and strode by both of us without a word or a glance our way. He grabbed his water gun, shoved it into its holster, then walked out the door.
I raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
“Ready?” Caleb asked.
“What’s her story?” I asked him, once we were out of the house and walking down the street.
“Lila?” He shrugged. “She’s…angry.”
“I figured that much out for myself.”
“What about you,” he asked. “You lived in Crowbridge all your life?”
“Yes. After everything happened, I found a different house to live in, but this is my town.” I paused. “Where were you this morning? Did you go into town?”
“We got as close as we could, then spied on them with binoculars. There are a lot of them. This cluster is bigger than any I’ve seen before.”
I swallowed. “Do you think they have Sage?”
“I don’t know, Teagan. It’s a possibility. But why would she have left the house in the first place? She was a smart kid.”
“Is,” I said, a little too loudly. “She is a smart kid.”
He nodded and looked away. “Yeah.”
The sun was beginning to drop as the day faded, and the air was getting chillier. I hated to think of Sage being out there by herself, cold, alone. Maybe she’d fallen and hurt herself and couldn’t get back home. Maybe she was trapped. Maybe she’d broken a leg or knocked herself unconscious.
Maybe a dark, horrible human had kidnapped her.
“Shit,” I whispered.
I wanted to yell her name, but I couldn’t. The mutants seemed to be hanging close to their cluster, but who knew when a pack of scouts might head this way? Still, we had the alcohol guns. Maybe a yell wasn’t a bad idea.
I patted my gun. “How did you find out that alcohol would kill them?”
He smiled, and it made his eyes sparkle in the evening light. “Lila discovered it, actually. She’d been injured and was pouring a bottle of it over the wound. A mutant surprised her and the first thing she did was fling the alcohol—bottle and all—at the asshole.”
“That was lucky.”
“Very. From then on, we’ve been spreading the word and gathering as much alcohol as we can find. In every town, we fill drums with it before we move on.”
“For those who come after.”
“Yes. We tape notes to the drums explaining. We also have people making the stuff.”
I frowned. “People?”
“We’re everywhere.” His voice was full of something I finally recognized as pride. “You haven’t seen us, but we exist. This is our world—not theirs. We’re going to take it back.”
I studied him. His face was open and almost innocent with his shiny brown eyes and quick smile.
Before the world ended, he could have sat behind me in algebra and I wouldn’t have noticed him. He wouldn’t have been remarkable back then.
But now he was. How many teenagers were left? Not many.
“You can trust me,” he said. “You can trust all three of us.”
But trust was an unfamiliar concept. The word sounded strange when I whispered it to myself. Trust?
No. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Halfway down the block, I caught a movement from the corner of my eye.
“What?” Caleb asked, when I stopped walking and stared into the deep shadows of the porch across the street.
“I thought I saw something.”
He slipped his gun from its holster. “Where?”
I slid my own gun free and jogged toward the house. I knew he was hissing at me to stop, but his voice wafted away like fog and I wouldn’t have listened to him anyway.
It was Sage. It had to be.
I needed it to be.
Caleb ran beside me, and I sped toward trouble with more abandon because of him. I knew he’d help me with whatever threat happened to show itself.
I also knew that was a sort of trust.
I wasn’t alone, and there were people who’d help me, people I could maybe depend on.
The feeling, now that I allowed it in, was indescribable.
And it was scary. But trusting someone was always scary.
“Aim for their eyes and throats,” Caleb said, quietly. “Takes them out quicker.”
I darted to a skinny tree in the front yard and stared at the porch, squinting so hard I gave myself a headache. My eyes began to burn with the strain.
“If it were mutants, they wouldn’t be hiding,” I whispered. “Mutants don’t hide.”
“The orphans don’t,” he agreed. “They don’t have enough sense to hide. But the scouts and the gods. They know to hide.”
“How do you know so much about them?” I hissed. Was I the only person in the dark? Even Sage knew more than I did. Of course, she’d been their prisoner for God knew how long, but still.
“I’ve been fighting them for two years,” he said. “I learned.”
I felt heat climbing my face at his exasperation, but I squared my shoulders and said nothing. I’d been alone. I hadn’t left town to join others or fight mutants because…
I just hadn’t.
“Sage?” I called, but too quietly. I cleared my throat. “Sage! Is that you?”
Before I could decide whether or not to leave the tree and climb the porch steps, Lila, baseball bat in her hand, jogged past me.
“What the hell?” But when I looked around for Caleb, he was gone. He’d slipped away and even as I cowered behind the tree, I caught sight of him sliding around the corner of the house. He made his way toward the porch.
I stepped out from behind the tree. “Assholes,” I muttered, but not loudly enough for anyone to hear.
“What do you have up there, Lila?” he asked.
She materialized from the deep shadows of the porch, something in her arms.
My heart leapt and I holstered my gun, then sprinted toward her. But I realized after a few seconds she wasn’t carrying Sage.
She was carrying a dog.
A starving, injured dog.
I ran up the steps and wrapped my arms around it, barely noticing Lila’s quick withdrawal when I got into her space.
“Hey,” she muttered. She practically shoved the dog at me, then backed up a couple of steps. “Take it, already.”
“Oh, honey,” I murmured. “Sweet boy. I’ve got you.” I walked back down the steps to sit on the bottom one, cradling the injured dog on my lap.
He wasn’t very big, probably because he’d been starved most of his life. His light brown fur was intermittently marked with splotches of black, like spilled paint on a worn, wrinkly blanket.
His eyes were pale and calm, and made me think of Richard Connor. His thin face was marred by a couple of fresh wounds and some scars, though he wasn’t very old. Three or four, maybe.
“How’d you know there was a dog on the porch?” I asked Lila.
She’d fetched her bat, and twirling it gently, she walked down the steps to join me. She leaned against the wall. “The porch rails on the left are broken. I saw him. He was limping and when I got to him, he was huddled in a corner.” She stared down her nose at me, and though she obviously cared about the dog, she still hadn’t warmed up to me. “He’s going to need some fixing up. You might as well be the dog doctor.”
“Since I’m not good for anything else,” I said. But I really didn’t care what she said or thought. I was going to doctor the dog. “Come on, baby boy. I’ll take you home.”
“What about the kid?” Lila asked.
I closed my eyes and squeezed the dog. Sage.
“Look what I found on the porch,” Caleb said. He jumped down the steps and when he stood on the ground, he held up a long, silver chain on which a bejeweled dragon dangled.
“What is that?” Lila asked. She pulled off her cap and b
egan digging at her skull like a colony of lice had taken up residence in her short hair.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, and reached out to yank the chain from Caleb’s grasp. “It’s Sage’s necklace. She was here.”
Lila put her hat back on. “And?”
I closed my eyes and blew out a hard breath. “I know why she left the house. I know what she was doing when she was taken.”
Chapter Twelve
I took a deep breath, but it did nothing to calm me. “She followed the dog here. She knew I wanted a dog.” I squeezed the dragon so tightly it cut into my hand. “She left this here hoping we’d eventually find it.”
“Hoping we’d find the dog,” Lila said. “Kid was a softie. Just like you.”
I curled my lip. “Says the girl who carried the dog off the porch.”
She shrugged.
“Teagan, take the pup back to the house. We’ll do some tracking, see if we can find any footprints. Knowing the kid, she’s left us a trail of breadcrumbs that’ll lead right to her.”
I was sure he was trying to comfort me, but I couldn’t be comforted while Sage was out there. “Where are you?” I murmured.
“You know where she is,” Lila said. “She’s in town. The scouts have taken her back to the gods.”
I shuddered. “We don’t know that for sure. Could be baddies.”
She rolled her eyes, then looked at Caleb. “We have to decide if we want to go after her.”
I stood, the dog in my arms, Sage’s necklace in my fist. “Of course we’re going after her.”
Neither of them said a word.
“You said you fight the mutants,” I said, sneering, dangerously close to tears. “Did you mean you fight the occasional orphan while you’re running away?”
Caleb met my stare. “We’ll attack the cluster. We go in to kill, not to rescue.”
“This time you’re going in to rescue.” I clenched my teeth together so hard they began to ache. “You’re going to save Sage. You can kill the cluster another time.”
“We can’t just walk in and take her back. You do understand that the mutants are dangerous, don’t you?”
“I understand that perfectly well—which is why we have to go in and get her. We’re not leaving her with them.”
“If we see her while we’re fighting and the opportunity presents itself—”