The Ones

by Daniel Sweren-Becker

  “Right. That, too.”

  Then Taryn tapped him on the leg and gestured through the windshield.

  “Watch out,” she said. They had come to an intersection at the base of the mountain, and a police car had pulled up to a stop sign directly across from them.

  Cody felt a cold sweat cover her body. She stared across the road and saw the cop eyeing them. This was someone who could send her right back to the dark, cold corner of her cell. He would only have to glance inside their van.

  All four of them held perfectly still as the cars faced each other. They probably would have sat like that forever had the cop not raised his arm and waved for them to come forward—he was gesturing them through the intersection.

  Kai steered the van straight ahead, and they passed by the police car with barely a glance from the cop. Cody finally exhaled and collapsed back against the wall. Kai looked back and smiled at her. He reached out to touch the suitcase.

  “That would have been one hell of a ticket,” he said, laughing. Everyone else couldn’t help but smile. Then they rode the rest of the way to the lab in silence.

  * * *

  They waited for the perfect hour: late enough for the campus to be quiet but not too late to draw suspicion while walking around. Brandon got out of the van a few blocks away from the science building. He needed to use the lab for a chemistry class he was taking that semester, and his student ID was programmed to give him access. He would go first and let the others into the main area. Taryn hopped in the back of the van and showed Cody a schematic drawing of the building. Adjacent to the lab was a locked room that only Professor Livingston had the code for. That was where they wanted to put the bomb, but they couldn’t figure out a way in. Kai had come up with a simple work-around: Make the bomb so damn big that it didn’t matter. If they left it pressed against that door and everything went as expected, the room with the Vaccine would be obliterated. The bomb had a cell-phone-activated detonator that they would call from the car.

  They waited for Brandon to gain entry, then pulled the van closer to the building and stepped outside. Taryn popped open the back doors, and the three of them struggled to pull the suitcase out. They got it on the ground, wheels on the bottom. It would be heavy to roll, but it was better than lugging it through the forest.

  Kai took the point and walked ahead. Taryn followed at a twenty-pace distance, rolling the suitcase behind her. Cody brought up the rear, another twenty paces behind Taryn. They approached the entrance to the building.

  One after another, they swiped in with student IDs, Cody using a card borrowed from Daphne. The campus security guard in the building barely looked up.

  Kai took the stairs, Taryn pressed a button for the elevator, and Cody joined her. They took it to the second floor and emerged into a bright, clean hallway.

  Rounding a corner, Cody saw that Kai was approaching an armed soldier sitting in front of the lab door. Kai, his posture oddly crooked, had a ratty backpack slung over one shoulder, and he was holding a notebook open as he walked up to the soldier. Kai got very close to him, and the soldier lifted his arm to maintain some personal space. His heavy assault rifle hung off one shoulder, just like Kai’s backpack, and Cody was struck by the odd similarity. Then, in a blur of motion, she saw Kai pull something from his own back pocket and jam it hard against the exposed skin of the soldier’s neck. Cody gasped, certain that Kai had just killed him.

  As Cody and Taryn caught up, however, they saw that Kai had used a Taser on the soldier. He lay still on the ground, the acrid smell of burned flesh hanging in the stuffy hallway. Kai reached down and zapped him again for good measure. Then he knocked on the lab door with a precise series of raps.

  Brandon pulled it open and smiled. They were in the lab.

  Kai pulled the limp body of the soldier in behind them and shut the door. “Let’s go,” he said. “We should be out of here in three minutes.”

  He handed out headlamps to everyone. Cody turned her light on and began to look around the lab. She felt a surge of excitement at seeing all the beautiful science equipment. It put her high school to shame and obviously was a far cry from the antique science junk that she collected. She imagined what she could do with such perfect tools. This was somewhere she would have aspired to work one day, that future outside of Shasta where she fulfilled the promise of her lucky break and tried to pay it back. But that future didn’t make sense anymore, and now she saw the gleaming microscopes and trays of beakers for what they were: tools to destroy the Ones. She turned to Brandon.

  “Where’s the room with the Vaccine?”

  He pointed to the back of the lab, and they all walked over, with Taryn rolling the suitcase behind them. They gingerly laid it down against the door and unzipped it. The wires and tubes of the bomb sparkled under the glare of their headlamps. They were all staring at it.

  Kai got on his knees and started to connect some of the wires. He turned on the cell phone that was attached to the detonator. As Kai worked, Cody stepped close to the door of the Vaccine room. She tried the doorknob—it was locked, of course—and Cody could feel how heavy the door was. This is as close as she would get. Whatever scientific miracle James’s dad had figured out, she wouldn’t get to see it. She hoped no one would.

  “All right, she’s ready,” Kai said, and stood up.

  They all instinctively took a step back from the bomb.

  “No use hanging around—let’s go,” Taryn said.

  They walked briskly back toward the lab entrance. The soldier on the ground was beginning to stir. Kai bent down and used the Taser on him again.

  “What are we going to do with him?” Cody asked.

  “Let’s drag him to the stairwell. He should be protected from the blast there. Come on, give me a hand,” Kai said.

  They each picked up a limb and shuffled out of the lab and into the hallway. Taryn pushed open the door to the stairwell, and they dropped the soldier and proceeded down the stairs, their pace quickening. They tried to act normal as they passed the security guard in the lobby, but they were practically racing. And then, finally, they were outside, approaching the van and climbing into it, now just a phone call away from watching the beautiful explosion in their rearview mirror.

  That was when Cody saw the car.

  She would have recognized it anyway, but she had also just driven in it a few days earlier. It was the old-fashioned station wagon that James’s father drove.

  Cody watched as Arthur parked right in front of the building, turned the car off, and started walking inside.

  Meanwhile, Kai was steering their van out of the parking lot and taking out a cell phone, ready to dial.

  “Kai, wait! It’s him! He’s going inside!”

  The others looked up and watched Arthur enter the building. There was no doubt he’d be entering the lab in a matter of seconds.

  “Kai, you promised me,” Cody said sternly. “Don’t you dare dial that number.”

  “Cody, he’ll find the bomb. We don’t have a choice,” Kai said.

  “I don’t care. Put the phone down.”

  “Kai, dial the number,” Taryn said.

  “Shut up!” Cody shouted. “We can’t kill him. We agreed.”

  “Cody, I’m sorry. He picked a bad time to come into work,” Kai said.

  “Kai, put the phone down,” Cody said again.

  “I didn’t mean for this to happen, but he deserves it. I know he saved you, but he still created the fucking Vaccine!” Kai yelled.

  “Kai, don’t. Please, I beg you.”

  “Damn it, Kai, just do it!” Taryn shouted.

  “Put the phone down, Kai, you don’t have to do this!”

  “Do it, already!”

  Cody saw Kai lift the phone and start typing in a number, and she knew she’d never convince him. So she flung open the van doors, jumped out into the road, and started sprinting toward the science building. She had to pay her debt to James’s father. She had to pay her debt to James. She co
uldn’t let him lose his dad.

  After two steps, Cody was at top speed, flying across the pavement back through the parking lot, fifty yards from the science building. She heard Kai shout after her, but she didn’t turn around. She ran straight toward the doors, ran as if her life depended on it, ran as if her soul hung in the balance. She ran to save herself, and she ran to protect James. She ran to be different from Ms. Bixley and Marco and Agent Norton. She ran to thank her mother. She ran because she still knew right from wrong.

  And then the explosion blasted her straight into oblivion.

  CHAPTER 18

  JAMES REFUSED TO speak at his father’s funeral.

  It was a beautiful Saturday, three days after the explosion at the laboratory, and the church was packed. His mother encouraged him to say a few words, but James couldn’t do it. He knew what he was supposed to say, but he also knew it would have come out hollow and insincere. That didn’t help anyone. So he told his mom that he was too crushed to give a eulogy. She understood. She didn’t speak, either.

  For most of the service, James stared at the shiny casket resting just in front of him. What could possibly be in there? he wondered. James had seen the bombing site on campus—it was basically just a smoldering crater. Even his father’s car had been burned to a crisp. There were no bodies, no personal belongings. Just the certainty that his father had been inside. As James walked around the perimeter the day after the bombing, he considered what had been accomplished. The lab with the Vaccine was destroyed. He knew that was a good thing. But the one man who could save James from it, the only person who was trying to find a reasonable solution, was gone. Murdered.

  And now James stared at an empty casket.

  When he stood with the other pallbearers and lifted it on his shoulders, it didn’t feel light. It weighed down on him just as much as if a body had been inside. As he proceeded slowly down the aisle of the church, his emotions finally overwhelmed him. He would never ride on his father’s shoulders and eat ice cream again. Today, his father rode on James’s shoulders.

  They drove in a long procession to the cemetery outside town. It was in a sloping field at the edge of the foothills. James sat silently by the gravestone as the casket was lowered into the ground. There was a prayer. A wreath. And then the handfuls of earth that landed with a hollow thump.

  It was over pretty quickly, and everyone began to file slowly back to their cars. James lingered for a bit with his mother and Michael. They had their last moment as a family, then they began to walk away, too.

  James had gone only a few steps when a man in a suit gave him a friendly wave.

  “It’s James, right?” the man asked. He took off his dark sunglasses and offered a handshake. James took it in a daze, as he had been doing the whole day. “I’m sorry about your father. He was a wonderful man.”

  “Thank you,” James said, and started to walk away.

  “There’s something he’d probably want me to tell you,” the man said.

  James stopped in his tracks and turned around. “Did you work with him?” he asked, trying to hide his intense curiosity.

  “A long time ago. But I kept an eye on what he was doing. We stayed in touch.”

  This man knew about the Vaccine, then. He seemed friendly, but James knew he should tread lightly.

  “Your dad did a lot of great work for the government. You know how it is—the Department of Agriculture can never get enough corn, right?”

  James nodded and forced himself to smile.

  “Well, he made some arrangements with a few of his friends over there—”

  “In the Department of Agriculture,” James said.

  “Yeah, like I said,” the man in the suit continued. “Anyway, I’m sure you’ve seen all this hullabaloo about the new residential camps for the Ones. And I’m sure you know that the mandatory report date is tomorrow.”

  Of course James knew about tomorrow. Like all the other Ones in his town, he was supposed to get on a bus bound for what was sure to be some horrific concentration camp. It was all to help the country deal with the Ones in a more “organized and productive” manner, as the government had put it. James hadn’t decided what he was going to do yet. Some of the older Ones had obviously made the choice to disappear already, to go live underground, maybe slip into Canada or Mexico and hopefully wait out the Equality Movement in the shadows. James, with a better idea than most about what awaited them at the camps, considered this tactic. But to do so would surely mean needing help from the New Weathermen. He clearly wasn’t about to stoop to that. Submitting to the camps wasn’t any better, obviously, so James was torn. There were only a few hours left to decide, but it seemed like this stranger at his father’s funeral had some relevant information.

  “I know what tomorrow is,” he replied.

  “Then you should know those friends of your father are going to honor their promise to him.” The man paused. “You are not required to report to a camp. The local Equality Team has been made aware, and they won’t be contacting you. The deal is contingent on keeping this between us, is that clear?”

  James nodded, not relieved but shaken by this turn of events. The man looked back up to the top of the cemetery hill.

  “You can thank your father,” he said. “And again, my condolences.”

  The man walked away and left James alone among the gravestones. He couldn’t believe what his father had done for him. It was a bitter irony. To be granted such a gigantic favor, his dad must have done some truly commendable work on the Vaccine. And as he had said, he’d always planned on saving James. This didn’t vindicate him in James’s eyes, but he was still moved that his dad was looking out for him. He almost wished he could thank him—but what was left of his dad was unrecognizable and already underground. The churning of bitterness and grief in his stomach made James feel as if he had lost his father twice in a matter of days.

  James, alone in the cemetery now, was about to continue his walk down the gentle hill when a flash of movement caught his eye. He turned his head and squinted. Sure enough, there was Cody, her face concealed by a baggy hooded sweatshirt. She was across the cemetery, not exactly hiding but keeping her distance. James stopped and stared at her. He wasn’t ready to see her and hadn’t imagined this encounter would take place here. But now that she was in front of him, he couldn’t resist. He had held his anger in all day, and he was primed to explode. God, how he needed this. He marched straight over to her.

  “James,” Cody started to say when he was within earshot. “I’m so sorry—”

  “Shut up, I don’t want to hear it,” he snapped.

  Cody recoiled in shock.

  “You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? You knew they were going to kill him!”

  “It was an accident, James, I swear.”

  “Why didn’t you stop them? Kai is obsessed with you. He would have listened.”

  Cody tensed up at the word obsessed but recovered quickly. “The plan was to bomb the lab in the middle of the night when no one was there. To blow up the Vaccine. No one meant to kill your father. I made them promise!”

  “Cody, he saved your life! Do you remember that? Do you know where’d you be without him?”

  “James, I tried, I swear. I said I wouldn’t go unless we spared him. And then I tried to save him.”

  James couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You were there?”

  Cody didn’t answer. Instead, she pulled down the hood of her sweatshirt. James couldn’t help but grimace at the burn marks on her forehead, the bruises around her eyes, and the crusty bandages wrapped around her head. Her beautiful hair was burned at the ends, and she had obviously cut some off around her face. She must have been within spitting distance of the bomb when it went off. Still, despite how painful it looked, James hardened himself to her injuries. He couldn’t believe that Cody had been instrumental in the death of his father.

  “You put that bomb in his office, right? What did you think would happen?
” he asked. “My God, Cody, what have you become?”

  James saw Cody’s countenance change from compassion to anger.

  “I’m the same as I ever was, James. I stand up for what’s right. Your dad was creating something to destroy the Ones. I am sorry he’s dead, but he shouldn’t have been—”

  “He was trying to help us!” James yelled. Then he remembered that Cody wasn’t a One. She was in no danger of getting the Vaccine. “Trying to help the Ones, that is. He was finding a safe solution. The other people in the project wanted to lobotomize us. My dad was going to prevent that.” It felt strange to suddenly be defending his father, but it was also a relief.

  “At least that’s what he told you.”

  “It’s the truth! But I guess it’s too late to prove it now. You murdered him. You ran off with Kai and the Weathermen, and you murdered my father.”

  Cody sighed. “I’m sorry you feel that way. I came here to pay my condolences, not to fight.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t have come. You can take your condolences and stay away from my family.”

  “James, it doesn’t have to be like this.”

  “Go away, Cody! You left once—do it for real this time.”

  James glared at her, but Cody didn’t budge.

  “I always meant to come back, James. I told you, I needed to go somewhere terrible, and I didn’t want to take you there. I thought that you’d have faith in me.”

  “I did.” James pointed back to his father’s grave. “And this is where it got me. Now go.”

  Cody hesitated. “The Equality Team will be in town by tomorrow. They are going to try to put all the Ones on a bus. Ship them off to a camp—you included. We’re not going to let that happen to us. We’ve decided to stand up and fight. You should fight with us, James.”

  “I’m not like you. You are terrorists.”

  “So you’ll get in line with the other sheep and march to the slaughter?” Cody asked with disgust. “Tomorrow we aren’t terrorists. Tomorrow we’ll just be Americans fighting for our freedom.”