by Tom Isbell
“We figure out who they are and what they want,” Hope said.
“And then?”
“And then we go from there.”
That night, sitting beside the fire’s dying embers, a group of us tried to crack the code, substituting letters for numbers until we were dizzy from trying. Even though we came up empty, it seemed obvious that the Brown Shirts were up to something. But what that was, we still couldn’t tell.
When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of Chancellor Maddox. She was far away from me, but even from the distance I could tell what she was doing. She was carving Xs into Hope’s face. I took off running, trying to get there in time to stop her, but I wasn’t fast enough. When I finally reached Hope, Maddox was gone and blood was streaming down Hope’s cheeks. She refused to look me in the eye.
I’d never felt so powerless in all my life.
A group of us set out the next morning: Cat, Hope, Red, Sarah, and me. Once again, Hope found a reason to be as far away from me as possible.
Overnight, a frost had painted all the trees and bushes white, and it was like walking in a world without color. Dense thickets hid us from view as we made our way up a snow-covered hill. When the thicket cleared, Sarah pointed to a series of lines arcing through the snow, and it was easy to identify the tracks.
ATVs. Hunters.
As we studied them, we saw where the tracks converged … and where the riders had dismounted. It was clear they’d been looking down the hill in the direction of the lodges. Just as Hope had guessed, they were spying on us.
My stomach dropped as we eased back through the thicket, and no one said a word. We strode into camp, and Sisters and Less Thans emerged from the buildings, gazing at us expectantly.
Helen was the last to appear, wiping her hands on her apron. “Well?” she asked.
“We need to get busy,” Hope said. She walked right by her, not even stopping to talk. Instead, she headed for the supply closet and began handing out axes, shovels, and saws.
18.
THEY WASTE NO TIME building their defense. Some arm crossbows, others sharpen logs, still others dig pits, covering them with false blankets of leaves. Twitch and Flush head up a crew tasked to build a series of small catapults. There were hidden pits and booby traps before, but if the Hunters are daring enough to attack Dodge’s Log Lodges, they’ll have to work their way through twice as many of them.
The woods are filled with the sounds of hammering and sawing.
At one point, Hope finds herself next to Book, setting traps at the camp’s outskirts. For the longest time they work in silence, spreading out nets on the snow.
“So you’re not talking to me anymore?” Book finally asks.
She shrugs and keeps working, bending branches to attach to the corners of the nets.
“Or do you think I’m invisible?” he goes on. “’Cause I’m right here, you know.”
“I can see that.”
“So?”
“Maybe I don’t have anything to say.”
She slips a knot around a corner of netting and pulls it taut.
“So what happened between us, what was that?” Book asks.
“The past. That was then, this is now.”
“That kiss on the plateau—”
“The past.”
“The one in Camp Liberty after Cat killed Dekker—”
“The past.”
“Lying together in the tunnel, holding you—”
“Let it go, Book! All of it!”
A couple of Sisters glance in their direction.
“Why?” he asks.
She sighs noisily and lowers her voice. “We’re too different. We don’t have anything in common.”
“Sure we do. I don’t believe in myself, and you don’t believe in me either. I’d say we’re perfect for each other.”
If he’s hoping that she’ll smile, it doesn’t work. Her mouth is a straight, unwavering line.
“My feelings for you haven’t changed,” he whispers. “Have yours?”
She looks up at him. Her mouth opens, but no words come. Instead, she flings her net to the ground and stomps off, leaving Book alone, his breath pulsing slow and steady in the winter air.
That night, it takes Hope forever to get to sleep. It’s not soreness from work, it’s not even the gnawing hunger. It’s the conversation; she can’t get it out of her head. Although she regrets her words, she can’t seem to make it clear to Book that things are different now. Two scars have changed everything.
When she finally falls into a sleep, it’s a deep and soundless one. Diana has to nudge her to wake her up.
“Morning already?” Hope asks, her words slurred.
Diana presses her finger to her lips and whispers, “Shh.”
An oblong of moonlight splashes the floor—enough illumination for Hope to see Diana’s worried face. Hope quickly throws on clothes and grabs her weapons. They slip into the dark, snow crunching beneath their feet. Others are up as well, moving soundlessly between cabins. Hope wonders what’s going on. Why does everyone seem to be creeping to the lake, to the back edge of the resort? If they’re about to be attacked, shouldn’t they be getting into position?
When they crouch on the snowy beach, Hope is surprised that everyone else is already there, their breaths ballooning in front of them. What Hope can’t understand is why their backs are turned away from Dodge’s.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
Cat points across the frozen lake, but Hope doesn’t know why. Finally she sees them: a series of dim yellow lights, small as fireflies, wavering like mirages just above the surface of the ice.
ATVs.
But they aren’t coming from the surrounding countryside where the Sisters and Less Thans expected them to come from; they’re riding across the frozen lake for a sneak attack.
“What do we do?” one of the younger Sisters asks. It isn’t just panic that laces her voice, it’s more like terror. She’s heard the stories of how the Hunters have massacred Less Thans.
“Just turn around,” Sunshine says. “Hide ourselves behind trees and boulders and fire at ’em from this direction.”
“It won’t stop ’em,” Cat says.
“But if we take cover and our shots are good—”
“You haven’t seen these people.”
Sunshine has the sense to realize no one else supports him—especially those who fought the Hunters in the Brown Forest. They know this enemy.
“We could run,” someone suggests, but that won’t work. The Hunters have vehicles. They have guns. It wouldn’t be a fair fight at all.
“So if we don’t face ’em and we don’t run,” Sunshine says, “what do we do?”
“The only thing we can,” Hope says. “We surrender.”
They take pillowcases and tie them onto sticks. A dozen of them venture onto the beach, waving flags of surrender. The white cloth snaps in the midnight air.
The four-wheelers draw closer. There are several dozen in all. The rumble of their engines is muffled and far off. Hope tries to see the riders’ faces, but only their silhouettes are visible, wreathed by headlights and exhaust. If the Man in Orange is among them, she can’t yet tell. In the past, he’s been their leader—the one who seems to take the most pleasure in killing Less Thans.
“You sure this is the right thing to do?” Sunshine asks.
No one answers him, in part because no one knows. Besides, it’s too late to change plans now. They’ve made their decision.
“Will they honor our surrender?” Diana asks.
“They’d better,” Hope says.
“And if they don’t?”
Before Hope has a chance to answer, the first bullets go whizzing by, embedding themselves in trees and the backs of buildings. Shards and splinters rain down. A window shatters. The Sisters and LTs scramble for cover. They had never intended to surrender, but they’d hoped to trick the Hunters longer than this.
When the firing comes to a lull, Cat
yells out, “Rocks!”
A long line of Less Thans springs up, each holding a miniature boulder. The line stretches far and wide, and when they step onto the frozen lake, it’s a struggle to maintain their balance while lugging the heavy stones.
“Arrows!” Hope shouts.
Another line pops up behind the first. These are the archers—Sisters mostly—who nock their arrows quickly, efficiently.
“Draw!” Hope yells, and the archers do.
The four-wheelers near. Their rumble vibrates across the ice.
“Fire!”
A rush of arrows sails through the sky, their whoosh like a flock of screaming birds. When the arrows strike, their flint points clatter against the frozen lake, a hailstorm of stone on ice. Not a single Hunter goes down. The ATVs slow but keep coming.
“At will!” Hope cries, and the night rains arrows. Whoosh whoosh whoosh.
Led by Cat, the Less Thans have ventured out to a good twenty feet from shore. He motions them to stop. A couple crumple to the ice when hit by bullets. The others hold their ground. Then Cat hefts the rock above his head and counts out loud. “One … two …”
On three he brings the boulder down with all his might, chucking it into the ice in front of him. The rock breaks through the frozen lake and sends up a fountain of slushy water. The other Less Thans do the same. The ice is suddenly dotted with a series of boulder-sized holes. It’s one thing to walk or ride atop a frozen lake; it’s something else altogether to hurtle small boulders into it.
The LTs race back to shore, passing a second line of LTs who also carry boulders. They venture to the same place as the first group and heave their heavy rocks into the ice. Geysers arc skyward as more holes mar the surface. Bullets strike two more Less Thans, and their friends drag them to shore.
The Hunters keep coming, their headlights growing sharper.
Cat’s group returns with another set of rocks.
“Throw!” he shouts, heaving his rock through air. The other Less Thans do the same.
Hope has that coppery taste of fear in her mouth. They had hoped the holes would connect, creating a chasm of frozen water between the Hunters and them. But it hasn’t worked that way. The ice is too thick, and all they’ve done is make a series of gaps. It’s enough to slow the Hunters down … but not enough to stop them.
Out of instinct, Hope looks at Book, just as he looks at her. For the briefest of seconds, their eyes lock, and then he rises from behind an overturned picnic table and yells at the top of his voice, “On the ice!”
19.
EVERYONE LOOKED AT ME, confused.
I ran forward on the lake, sliding to a stop just shy of the holes. A couple of the LTs reached for rocks, but I stopped them.
“Just you!” I said. “Nothing else!”
They still had no idea what I was thinking … until I began jumping up and down on the frozen lake.
“Come on!” I screamed, desperation growing. Hope was the first to understand what I was getting at. She ran from the cover of a log until she was by my side. Once the others saw her, they came out as well, until we’d created a massive line of Sisters and Less Thans that stretched as far as we could see.
“As one!” I said, and began jumping up and down. Others gradually joined me, and in no time the ice dipped and swayed, water sloshing from the holes and soaking our shoes and numbing our feet. The four-wheelers grew closer. For the first time I realized how many of them there were. Not just a couple dozen like our previous encounters with them, but fifty or sixty—an army of Hunters, each one atop an ATV.
“Higher!” I said, and all of us began leaping into the air in unison as though on trampolines, the ice undulating beneath us.
And then we heard it. The sound of a crack, louder than any rifle shot, like an enormous tree being ripped in half. We watched a gap run from one end of the lake to the other, connecting the holes we’d created earlier. It shook the ice beneath our feet, and many of us tumbled and fell. No matter. A watery abyss revealed itself, and the gap widened, slowly at first and then faster, until several feet separated our shelf of ice from the ice the ATVs were on.
Some of the Less Thans started to cheer.
“Get back!” I yelled, and we scrambled for cover on the rocky beach just as the four-wheelers reached the edge.
When the first Hunters arrived, they tried to brake, but their vehicles skimmed across the ice, unable to stop. As they tumbled into the icy water, we responded with a flurry of arrows.
The other Hunters slid to a stop, and they stared at the watery gap that separated them from us. Even in the dark, I could make out the Man in Orange: the burn on his face from the propane explosion, the scar where the arrow had nicked him in the Brown Forest.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he called out over the idling engines. “You choose.”
We didn’t answer.
“All right then,” he said. “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.” He turned and nodded, and bullets raked the ground, the trees, the lodges. Every lake-facing window exploded into shards.
We stayed hidden behind boulders, logs, overturned picnic tables—anything we could find.
When the barrage finished, the Man in Orange said, “We can wait you out, you know. I can send some of my men back around so you’ll be surrounded. And then there’s nothing you can do.”
He was right. We had won this battle, but not the war. We were fortified but also trapped. That gap in the lake meant one less exit out of there.
“Starvation is such a gruesome way to die,” he said, as the other Hunters chuckled. “Or we can talk about this. Give yourselves up, and we’ll work out a deal.”
We looked at one another but said nothing. The wind shook the surrounding trees and sent snow ghosts skittering across the frozen lake.
“Fine,” he said. “Your funeral.”
He made a motion to his fellow riders, and they began turning their vehicles around.
But I had something else in mind.
I read in a book once about Molotov cocktails, how they got their name during a war in the 1930s when Finnish soldiers used improvised bombs against Russia. Dodge’s Log Lodges just happened to have all the necessary ingredients.
As part of our plan to “surrender,” we had emptied out the wine bottles in the cellar, replacing the alcohol with gasoline from lawn mowers in the shed. Once we stuck in bits of kerosene-soaked cloth, our bombs were ready. Meanwhile, others began turning the catapults around.
“Light cocktails!” I yelled, and small blue flames erupted up and down the line. I waited until all the four-wheelers were facing the other way, and then I cried out, “Now!”
Some of us raced forward, past the beach and onto the ice. It buckled and dipped beneath our feet, cracking and sloshing water. Still we ran, the burning cocktails gripped in our outstretched hands, not stopping until we reached that watery line where ice ended and lake began. Once there, we heaved the flaming bottles over the Hunters’ heads. The catapults did the same, even more effectively landing cocktails well behind the enemy. There was a sound of shattering glass, followed seconds later by igniting flames.
Whoompf. Whoompf whoompf. Whoompf whoompf whoompf!
A line of fire spread in a distant arc.
The Man in Orange turned around. The flickering flames caught his scornful expression.
“You missed,” he said drily. “Too bad.”
But we hadn’t missed.
When the fire began eating into ice—right down to the lake itself—the Hunters began to panic. Some revved their engines and tried to make it across. They weren’t successful. The gap was far too wide, and those who attempted to fly from one scrap of ice to the other ended up in the water—an immediate and icy grave.
Four-wheelers suddenly buzzed around in a noisy panic, only gradually realizing they were imprisoned on a circle of ice. They throttled their ATVs, looking for a bridge where they could get across.
It didn’t exist. With rocks
and fire, we had managed to create an enormous island in the lake … and they were stuck on it.
The Man in Orange glared at us.
“Starvation is such a gruesome way to die,” I yelled.
And then we turned and walked away, taking the four dead LTs with us so we could give them a proper burial.
20.
DAYS PASS. A THIN skin of ice forms on the open water, but nothing thick enough for a person to walk on or an ATV to drive on. The Hunters remain stranded, huddled behind their four-wheelers like a circled wagon train on the Oregon Trail.
Hope and the others go about their daily activities, gathering food, building defenses … and keeping one eye on the Hunters. If they even think about crossing the ice, the Sisters will open fire.
On the fifth day, the Man in Orange rises from the circle and walks to the edge of the ice floe. He raises his arms and waves a white handkerchief.
“We want to talk,” he calls out. His voice is raspy, and he looks pale and weak.
Diana is on watch. Instead of responding, she makes a motion to Sarah, who goes loping off. A few minutes later, Hope, Cat, and Book return, followed by a couple of dozen Less Thans and Sisters.
The Sisters and LTs regard the huddled Hunters, and then Hope steps onto the beach. “We’re listening,” she calls out. “What do you want to say?”
“We’re starving and freezing. We need food and blankets.”
“Why should we trust you?”
The Man in Orange scowls. “Look at us. There’s nothing we can do.”
“You still have guns—there’s plenty you can do.”
“So what do you want?”
“What else? Put down your weapons.”
The Man in Orange turns to the other Hunters. With his back to the shore, it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying, but a moment later the Hunters raise their hands high in the air.
“Not good enough,” Hope says. “You need to actually drop your weapons. All of them.”
The Man in Orange sighs, lowers his hands, and then his gun goes clattering to the ice. Others follow.
“Better?” he asks.
“Almost. Now kick them in the water.”