by A. S. Hames
I’m about to mention it to Jay when Ax comes running toward us from the south.
“What happened?” he calls.
“Why weren’t you here?” I ask.
“I was scouting ahead…”
“It was Dub,” Zu explains as Ax reaches us. “He went crazy.”
“I’ll go after him,” Ax says.
“No,” Jay tells him.
“You don’t give the orders.”
“Dub’s gone,” she says. “We have to continue south.”
“Why?” Zu says. “The Representative’s dead.”
Jay shakes her head. “I have to take a report to the Lake Towns and tell the damned Leader to stop the damned war. That’s why.”
“What are you talking about?” Ax demands.
“No more lies,” Jay says.
She goes to the dead film woman.
“She told more lies than anyone I’ve ever known.”
She takes the camera and smashes it under her boot.
Ax goes over and grabs her. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Is this how you grabbed Ti?”
He lets go and slaps her hard across the face.
I leap up and go after him, but Jay steps across my path to block me off. Her eyes remain on her brother.
“You heard it all wrong,” he says.
Jay turns away and goes back to the Representative. I follow and try to drop my anger at Ax. Any decisions we need to make won’t be helped by us fighting.
I feel a little calmer as I watch Jay go through the Representative’s pockets. She retrieves a blood-stained map, some cookies, and dried fruits. I can see it’s affecting her though.
“It’s okay, Jay,” I tell her. “We’ll get through this.”
“I know, but… this is all my fault,” she says. “It was me who told the rebels about the Representative being on the train.”
I’m stunned.
JAY
Ax stares at me. “What?”
Taff looks sick with worry. “Jay, you said no more lies.”
Von licks Taff’s face. I doubt he’d lick mine.
“It’s the truth.”
I summon up the energy and tell them everything. How I let slip that the Representative would be on the train and how the colonel’s idea to take Von to impress the Leader was actually my idea. How I believed Henry Crawford’s clerk to be an honest man only to discover he’s an enemy colonel called Steven Rose. And how the Representative was really the Leader’s father and that the envelope in Taff’s pocket might stop the war.
“I ought to shoot you,” Ax says.
“Then shoot. Otherwise, I’m going to the Lake Towns.”
Taff pulls out the envelope. His blood is smeared across it.
“You really believe this can stop the war?”
Ax goes and takes it off him and pulls open the string tie. He studies it awhile, looking puzzled, and then he hands it to me. It’s four pages of writing and I’m staring at the first of them. It begins…
3 098/9&+ ~9809/
I check all four pages – they’re written in the same way.
“What does it say?” Ben asks.
“It’s encrypted,” Ax says. “Nobody can read it.”
And memories of my father come flooding back… because it hits me that Pa taught me about cyphers by making it a word game. Now I see we weren’t playing – he was training me for just this kind of situation. God, I miss him so much.
“Can you read it?” Taff asks me.
“No. The idea is you replace letters with symbols and numbers so no one knows what it says. D might be W, T might be 6. You have to know the decode formula to make it readable. For that I’d need plenty of paper and plenty of time. Even then I might not get there.”
“How do you know any of that?” Ax says. “I never even started that course.”
“I know plenty of things, Ax.”
I put the report back in the envelope.
“Are you sure you can’t work it out now?” Ben says.
“It’s too hot,” I say, putting it in my pocket. “And I’m too tired. And I’d need to try hundreds of different ways. Besides, we already know it’s about our failings in the north and how the Nation’s lies won’t cover it up for much longer.”
“Sounds about right,” Ax says.
“We have to take it to the Lake Towns,” I say.
“I make the decisions, Jay.”
“The Representative made me his emissary. I outrank you.”
“You what?”
“He did,” says Taff. “I heard him.”
“Me too,” Ben says.
I’m not sure if they did. Maybe they just fear Ax being in charge. That I can understand.
“We have a job to do, Ax. If you’re going to hit me, do it quick so we can get moving.”
He stares at me hard. I stare straight back at him. I even dare to try to get a sense of him, but it’s pointless because I’m useless and he’s too experienced at shielding himself.
“Okay,” he says, “we head for the Lake Towns. But you get this straight, Jay. You might have some stupid new title, but any military decisions are down to me. You understand?”
“The Nation is about to fall,” I tell him. “Our army pretty much doesn’t exist anymore.”
“We can get it back.”
“What do you mean?”
“Use your intelligence, Jay. Some died, yes, but most are prisoners of war, held by the East State.”
“What?”
“Those people you lit a candle for? They’re busy working in factories producing East State weapons.”
I think we’re all stunned, because none of us says anything. I can only marvel at the fact so many losses aren’t losses after all. It just means the East State will rise and the Nation is almost as good as dead. Unless, like Ax says, we can free our people.
“I still don’t know who the East and South States are,” Zu says.
Ax sighs. “It’s simple. Arcadia was made up of three States: East, South, and West. The Nation wasn’t a new name for Arcadia, it was a new name for the West State. This war is about control. Damn, everything is about control. That’s why the Nation shut down all information, okay? To control you.”
Two weeks ago, this would have shocked me to the core. Now? It all adds up.
“Are you sure we should carry on south?” Zu asks. “There are only five of us.”
I think we all reflect on the near impossibility of it all.
“What shall we do about Von?” Ben says, breaking the tension.
“Von can make his own decisions,” I say. Seeing as he hasn’t worn a leash for some time, he’s been free to leave all along.
“He’ll stay with us,” Taff says.
“Then we are six,” I say, turning to the Representative’s bloodied map. Annoyingly, I’ve never handled one before, so it’s not obvious how we’re meant to use it. Although…
“Lost farmers… a game Pa played with me. I had to draw the town and our farm, and then work out how get a lost farmer home, while Pa would have his own lost farmer and try to beat me there.”
Pa was teaching me about maps.
“Is that the railroad?” Ben asks, pointing to a kind of millipede running alongside a yellow line.
I wait for Ax to tear the map away, but he doesn’t. He studies it with the rest of us.
“Map reading’s a course I did do,” he says. “See the White Tip Mountains there?” He points to the blood-stained paper. “The train crashed on the north side, up here… then we headed south.” He runs his finger along a line that must be Roadway Five – over mountains, and forest, and into the valley. “Renner’s Town is hereabouts,” he says, “although it’s not marked.” His finger continues south into more hills. “And this is where we’ve got to.”
Farther south, there’s too much blood mingled with the ink to read anything, so I fold the map away and drink some water. Then it’s a matter of pulling the dead to one side and
retrieving anything useful from them. Dub will no doubt take any weapons back at the ambush site, so I take the handgun the film woman was carrying, while Zu takes the Representative’s handgun to give herself a spare. Ax already has a good gun.
“May God protect you,” I say over the bodies. Then we turn from the dead to face the southern horizon.
“South,” Ax says, just like an echo of the colonel.
We set off.
My mind is still aflame with all that’s happened. I wonder what Dub is doing right this second. I wonder what’s in his head. Surely he’s realizing he’s done wrong. We were never really friends but we did a lot of things together on the farm. He hated rules and was always keen to break them, but there was always a good side to him visible in any of his misdemeanors. He was someone you could forgive because some kind of truth blazed in him. He’s certainly taught me the truth about rebellion – that it can come from anyone, anytime, anywhere. I want to trust in people, but I know now, more than ever, I must learn how to be calm in difficult moments. That’s the only way my heightened intuition can work. Being an empath is one way to get myself killed by superstitious folk and fear is a powerful reason to put off practicing and refining those abilities. Right now though, in a fast-changing world, it might be the very thing to save my life.
We stop. Taff’s a fair way back.
“I can’t…”
And now I see what’s about to happen.
“Make your way home,” Ax says. “We have a long journey ahead of us.”
“On my own?”
“You can do it.”
I wonder if Taff will show the same bravery the child-sergeant showed. But he doesn’t. He just burst into tears and wets himself.
“What about Dub and those murderers?” he whines.
“Stay with us,” I tell him. “See if you improve.”
Ax eyes me with contempt, but says nothing.
“No-one’s walking fast in this heat,” I point out.
So we turn and face the southbound trail again. After all the hard days of being followed, of being the prey, we no longer have to worry about what’s behind us. Now our concerns must shift solely to what lies ahead.
To be continued…
Keep scrolling for an excerpt from the next installment:
LAND OF THE DEAD
(Rise of the Empaths: Book 2)
An excerpt from
Land of the Dead
Rise of the Empaths: Book Two
1. Hope and Fear
JAY
We wake at first light around five miles south of the madness we experienced at Dub’s hands. It’s deathly quiet, like we’re perfectly alone in the world.
Taff looks like he might be okay, as long as he doesn’t get the wound infected. Back home, it would be plenty of fresh dressings and a bed to sleep in. Here, in the open, we can only hope he’ll be lucky, even though we haven’t seen too much evidence of good luck yet.
Ax is eyeing me. I think he has questions. But I have questions too.
“How come you never let us know you were alive?”
He shrugs. “I was a long way off.”
“Fighting alongside the redcoats?”
He seems mildly surprised. “It was kept secret on account of nobody expecting it to last. That’s why we kept making those films.”
“So they’re our friends now?”
“No, they’re still our enemy. But there are bigger enemies out there. The buffs, for one.”
I take a guess. “Would the buffs be the East and South States?”
“You’d make a good spy, Jay. The buffs are the army of the East State. It’s the color of their jackets.”
“Are we at war with them?”
“Yes and no. We’re at war with rebels from our own towns – but recently they’ve been trying to get the East State to back them.”
“So we can expect new films where the buffs have replaced the redcoats.”
“Sounds about right. The main objective has always been the same – never admitting the Nation’s biggest problem is its own rebels.”
The whole thing sounds a long way from being easily resolved. I wonder about the encrypted letter the Representative gave me. How will that persuade the Leader of the Nation to make peace? I suppose there’s only one to find out, and that’s to trek five hundred miles and deliver it.
As soon as we’re all ready, we hit the trail. Right now, water isn’t a problem, but it’s a concern that the farther south we travel, the more the summer sun might affect what the land has to offer.
Taff requires a stop every now and then, but it’s okay, because Ax has conceded that we’re stuck with him. In truth, we all require these stops. Only our bold wolf Von seems to have any energy – either trotting fifty yards ahead then stopping to wait for us, or letting us get fifty yards ahead, as if he’s making sure no one is following us.
We walk mile after mile with hills stacked up on either side of the high twisting trail, but this eventually opens out a little and the landscape begins to change once again.
“Looks like we’re moving into lower land,” Ax tells Zu. “With any luck, we’ll find a river and throw Jay in to catch us some fish.”
Zu laughs and I think she’s a little too impressed with my brother’s stupid joke. That worries me. She’s fifteen but doesn’t seem very mature, so I don’t know if I can trust Ax with her – at least, not after what Dub said. I really do need to find out the truth about that.
I recall overhearing Pa telling Ax about hormones, and how they can land us with an obsession, where the pursuit of physical love becomes addictive.
A little later, while Ax is scouting up ahead with Von, and Ben and Taff are way back, I mention my concerns to Zu in private. I don’t touch on Ax being an empath – I’d never tell anyone that – but I do mention him being a young man with natural urges and desires.
“You’re imagining things,” Zu tells me. “He’s just making friends.”
“Yeah, well, he’s a lot older than you. Be careful.”
I can’t say any more. Ax and Von are scampering back.
“Three men,” Ax says. “We need to hide.
I’m not arguing. A gunfight is the last thing we need. We have five guns between us but not as many bullets as we’d like. We’re not exactly bursting with resolve either.
Above us to the left are some trees. It’s a climb up the embankment to reach them but we need the advantage. We help Taff up the slope and we get ourselves tucked away behind the trunks.
All eyes face south and we wait.
It feels a little like the colonel’s ambush that didn’t go so well for us, but I remain focused. If it comes to a firefight, I feel okay about handling three men who will be below us in the open.
We don’t have to wait long before they come hiking uphill, armed and carrying packs. I wonder what they think they’re heading into, and what they’ve left behind that awaits us.
Once they pass, I use the spyglass to make sure they’re not coming back. Then I try the other way to make sure there’s no one following them.
I see something unexpected.
“There’s a car. I can just about make it out.”
“Coming this way?” Ben says, sounding worried.
“No, it looks abandoned.”
I hand him the spyglass.
“It must have been those men driving it,” Ax says. “Maybe it broke down.”
“Maybe we can fix it,” I say.
“Jay and me drive tractors,” Ax explains to Zu.
“Really?” She looks impressed. So does Ben. And that’s the weirdest thing, because I feel disgust that Zu admires Ax, but something very different regarding Ben and me.
We make our way down the hill, stopping every so often to check there’s no-one nearby who might want to shoot us for taking an interest in their vehicle. As it is, we’re soon alone with a grimy gray car that has its fair share of dents.
“Give it a try,” Ax says.
It’s exciting to get inside. I’ve never sat in a car before. Still, the controls look the same as our tractor.
Feeling nervous, I flick the battery contact switch, pull out the choke, push the starter button, and press the gas pedal. There’s a struggling sound. The engine won’t start.
“It’s out of fuel,” I inform them. “That’s why it’s been dumped.”
“I’ll check the trunk,” Ax says.
“There won’t be a can of gas, Ax. They would have used it.”
He checks all the same – and waves an empty can and a length of thin rubber hose at us.
Sometimes it’s better not to find something like a car. It gets your hopes up. We were okay before we found it, but now it feels like a bad sign.
“Let’s go,” Ax says.
I grumble a little as I get out. For no reason, I check the fuel filler cap. Maybe I imagine filling it with lovely, wonderful fuel, but the reality is nothing more than a dribble of gasoline on the bodywork below it. Although… that should have dried out in this heat.
“Looks like someone put some gas in not so long ago.”
I check for fuel splashes under the vehicle and along the road it came up. A leaky tank will waste fuel in no time. There’s no sign of any loss though.
“Maybe they didn’t have much to put in…”
“Come on,” Ax says. He’s already moving off.
I begin to follow him, but I halt.
“They were driving uphill.”
“So?” Zu says.
“The fuel tank’s on an incline. There might still be a little in there.”
Ax turns. “Why didn’t I think of that? If we turn it around, the fuel would flow into the… it doesn’t matter. We might be able to drive it downhill, maybe for a couple of miles.”
“I don’t think we can turn it round,” Taff says. “It’s too heavy.”
“We’ll bounce it,” I say. “You lot get on the front.”