First Girl

by Julie Aitcheson

  “What!” Marnie yelled over the noise.

  “I said Mathew and Jordan passed!” Gabi shouted as she ushered Marnie to the front row where they had a clear view of the Witnesses. Burton Ames, Apostle General for the mission, stood in front of his team with the swell-chested pride of a new father. He was a short, thick man. The top of his head came only to Mathew’s shoulder, who stood beside Ames looking humble but dashing in his khaki travel uniform. Jordan was a few places down the line, looking more like a misplaced package. Bradley was among them too, doing his best imitation of Burton Ames, while Noel watched with tortured longing from the crowd. Sam stood in front of the Witnesses, wrapping up his bon voyage address beside Messenger Nystrom and the other councilmembers. Sam noticed Gabi making her way to the front and spoke the rest of his speech directly to her.

  “And so in this time, it is not Armageddon that we approach, but Armageddon in which we live. The word Armageddon refers to the gathering place on the mountain where all came together to give their testimony before God and be counted among his flock. Some have rested easily at the mountaintop, while others must be carried up in the arms of their loving fellows. As they venture forth, we pray for the protection and good keeping of our brave Witness teams. In God’s great name, amen.”

  The band struck up on the crowd’s amens as the Witnesses began to board their shuttles with a final wave to friends and family.

  “All right, Jordan!” Marnie yelled, pumping her fist in the air as the crowd clapped encouragement. She stopped cheering abruptly and seized Gabi by the arm. “Hey, wait, you didn’t get to say goodbye to Mathew!”

  Gabi gripped Marnie by the shoulders and spun her around so they were nose to nose. “Listen to me, Marnie. I don’t need to say goodbye because I’m getting on one of those shuttles, and so are you. You, me, and Jordan are all going, and we’re going together.” Gabi needn’t have worried about Marnie interrupting. She was dumbstruck. “We have to get on a shuttle, and we have to do it now. It’s not Willow. It’s the Pacific Northwest, it’s dangerous, and it’s actually in the complete opposite direction from where you want to go, but it’s our only chance to get out of here.”

  They were carried along as the crowd pressed toward the vans to get a better view of the departing Witnesses. Gabi could feel Mathew’s eyes searching for her, craning for a chance to wave goodbye to his kid sister. Marnie’s mouth stretched wide in a smile that showed every one of her teeth.

  “Come on, Randolph,” Gabi said, giving Marnie’s shoulders a shake. “It’s this or custodial services. What do you say?”

  In one movement Marnie broke Gabi’s hold and spun her friend around until she faced the van, putting her mouth close to Gabi’s ear. “I say get your scrawny butt on that shuttle so we can get some decent seats. No offense.”

  Chapter SEVENTEEN

  “THEY’RE TAKING us through Spruce,” Jordan stated hollowly as he watched busloads of refugees blur by outside the windows of the shuttle. Though Gabi, Marnie, and Jordan had been talking for nearly three days straight, Jordan had become increasingly withdrawn as their van made its way northwest. His parents, if they were still alive, would be on one of the buses on its way to the hastily assembled refugee camps in the central branches. All the outer branches were being evacuated, their populations funneled into emergency shelters in Alder, Birch, and Cedar. Within twenty-four hours of the big send-off in the plaza, Tribal insurgents reinforced with lethal Lilim troops had launched coordinated attacks from the West Coast. The few navigable interbranch roads were clogged with refugees, and the Witness shuttles’ progress had been slow.

  “I guess Unitas finally got what it wanted,” Jordan said as wind-bitten women with young children clinging to their legs squatted alongside the road to urinate by the idling buses. “My mom always said they weren’t trying to starve us out. They were trying to starve us in.” Their Witness convoy had been shrinking steadily as the vans split off over the Rocky Mountains. Two Witness teams were assigned for every Tribal stronghold, from whence reports of gruesome skirmishes flooded in over the van’s shortwave radio. Gabi, Jordan, and Marnie had been assigned to the first van with three other Junior Witnesses, five veterans, and a taciturn Apostle named Sykes, who drove the van in single-minded absorption. Only one shuttle was behind theirs now—the one that contained Apostle Ames, Bradley, and Mathew.

  After the initial thrill of their reunion subsided, Marnie and Jordan had demanded Gabi’s account of how she’d finagled spots on a Witness team for her and Marnie.

  “That’s so messed up,” Marnie said when Gabi recounted how Sam had insisted she still needed the pills despite her improvement. At that point in the drive, Marnie was only halfway through her first day without cigarettes, and her emotions were running high. “No wonder you were desperate to get away, though I’m surprised he backed down just because you threatened to tell everyone you were adopted if he didn’t get the three of us on a team.”

  “Me too, actually,” Gabi admitted, “but councilmen have to be above reproach. He’s been passing me off as his all these years. I think he must have had to pay off at least one person at the Care Center to keep it secret. Someone had to deliver me, right?”

  “Are you okay?” Jordan asked. “It must have been so hard to confront your dad. The bulletins always make him sound like such a family guy.”

  “He’s not my dad,” Gabi stated. It had been hard, and if Sam’s only sin had been lying about being her father, she would have balked at the idea of blackmail. But his reaction to her threat to reveal the true story of her birth and her refusal to take her pills hinted that there was more to it than he let on. That combined with the memory of him disappearing into D Wing with Messenger Nystrom had been enough to ease her guilt. What Sam and Messenger Nystrom were doing in the name of Unitas was beyond forgiveness.

  “But why would your dad, I mean Sam, force you to take pills that made you sick? It just doesn’t make sense,” Marnie asked, gnawing savagely on her thumbnail to appease her nicotine craving.

  “I don’t know,” Gabi admitted. “We never got to that part. He couldn’t force the pills down my throat, and he was in round-the-clock council meetings right up until we left. I’m sure there was a lot of resistance to putting us on a team.”

  Jordan didn’t ask many questions as Gabi told her story. When she got to the part about passing out on the cross-country course during the physical test, he shrank into his seat and ducked his head.

  “Hey, Jordan,” Gabi said, “you know that wasn’t your fault, right? You couldn’t have helped me. If you had, you wouldn’t be here right now. I had a Plan B, but you didn’t.” Gabi placed her hand on his arm, which vibrated with tension under his travel uniform.

  “I came back,” Jordan mumbled, his chin dipping into his collar.

  “On the course?”

  “Yeah, I… when I lost sight of you, I got nervous. You looked ready to drop when I left, so I waited for Ruth to pass me, then doubled back. I wasn’t that far ahead anyway. I got over the hill and saw Trainer Foulkes crouched beside you on that flat stretch through the field. You were totally out. He looked up and shouted at me to keep going.”

  “But then how did you pass the test?” Marnie asked.

  “Second-highest score on the written, I guess, and passing the physical part, though it took me three and a half hours. By the end, some people were just laying by the side of the trail waiting for stretchers to carry them back to the gym.”

  “Thanks, Jordan,” Gabi said, touched by his selflessness.

  “Who got first?” Marnie asked.

  “First in the written? You did,” Jordan answered. “Didn’t they at least mail you the results? I assumed that’s how you made it onto the shuttle when I saw you guys climb on. Highest score on record.”

  Gabi laughed as Marnie’s jaw dropped. “Marnie, you’re a genius!” Gabi teased, tipping the girl’s mouth shut with an index finger under her chin.

  “Shut up, Lowell,” Marn
ie grumbled, hiding a smile.

  THE VANS finally rattled to a stop after dark on the third day, and not a moment too soon. Seventy-two consecutive hours of travel on worsening roads had taken its toll on the bodies and morale of the Witness teams, and there were moans all around as everyone disembarked for their first night of camping.

  Jordan had ceased responding to Gabi and Marnie’s attempts at conversation after lunch, only grunting in acknowledgment when they passed him his brown-bag dinner. When their van rolled past the pockmarked sign reading “Welcome to Spruce Branch, Unitas Incorporated since 2058,” the two girls understood why. As the vans drew abreast of the sign, the pockmarks resolved into bullet holes, and what lay beyond it was a blacked-out shambles. Piles of debris smoldered where buildings had once stood. The Unitas Distribution Center at the end of Main Street remained standing since it was built using reinforced concrete, but all the windows were blasted out.

  “Why would they stop here?” Marnie whispered to Gabi as they climbed out of the van behind Jordan. “We passed way better spots to camp on the way in.” There was shattered glass everywhere, and no shelter in sight. The smoke stung Gabi’s eyes, and there was a smell in the air that reminded her of the Care Center.

  “This way,” Apostle Sykes called before Gabi had the chance to search the darkness for Mathew. Just knowing he was nearby calmed her, no matter how angry with her he might be. They fell in step behind Sykes as she picked her way down the street, and Gabi could hear Apostle Ames barking orders for the others to do the same. Their gear was still on the shuttles, but headlamps were passed out to make navigating the debris less treacherous. Wind howled down the destroyed streets, barely held at bay by the parkas the Witnesses wore over their uniforms. Temperatures in Alder had already streaked up into the sixties a few times to signal the onset of the hot season, but in Spruce, a mottled shell of ice and snow was still on the ground, melted into puddles where it met embers.

  “About-face!” Apostle Ames shouted, and the Witnesses turned toward the battered exterior of a small plain temple. Even the rushing wind couldn’t dilute the rotten smell emanating from it. The temple’s paint had bubbled and peeled away, and the steeply pitched roof buckled in on one side, but the structure looked stable otherwise. Gabi breathed through her mouth and dipped it below the collar of her jacket, trying to ward off the oppressive odor as Ames and Sykes conferred. Aiming her headlamp at the ground, she saw that the wet puddles under her feet weren’t water at all, but congealed pools of blackish-red muck. She swallowed a scream.

  “Don’t look down,” she warned Marnie in a strangled whisper.

  “Too late,” she croaked. “Jesus fucking Christ.” Farther down the line, someone threw up.

  “Quiet!” Apostle Ames said, sweeping his flashlight over the lineup. “Headlamps off! We’ve brought you all here because there are several Junior Witnesses among you, and we must ensure that you harbor no illusions about the work we are about to do. In the early days, Witnesses were Samaritans. We were met with gratitude and a thirst for receiving God’s Word. Those days are gone. The majority of those who could be Returned to his flock, have been. The rest are mounting their final assault on his chosen people. You, or most of you—” And here Ames paused, drilling Gabi in the face with the beam of his flashlight. “—have been chosen for this mission because of the qualities you demonstrated in prior missions or during your Witness exams.”

  The flashlight beam moved on. “If you fail to perform your duties as a Witness to the highest possible standard, you will endanger yourself and every one of your teammates, as well as our mission. This will not be tolerated, politics be damned. The mission comes first. What you are about to see are the wages of demonic possession. In converting the Tribes, we have tried to undo the devil’s work, but in the Lilim, Satan has found his strength.” Gravel and debris crunched under Ames’s boots as he paced the line, broken by a wet splash when he encountered one of the dark puddles. “Do not forget this moment. Use it to motivate yourself in the days ahead, when you will be called upon to exact vengeance. There is much worse to fear in this world than death.”

  Ames turned and marched into the temple, gesturing for all of them to follow. When the last of the Witnesses stepped from the nave into the reeking sanctuary, the Apostles aimed their floodlights at the scene before them. What Gabi observed just before she heard Jordan’s body hit the ground was that the chairs were still perfectly arranged and the seated congregants had been torn to bloody shreds.

  CAMP WAS silent during dinner that night, except for the sounds of muffled weeping from one of the tents and the metallic scrape of plates being emptied into a shallow trench for burial to deter scavengers. Though it was the Witnesses’ first hot meal in days, no one was hungry except for Apostles Ames and Sykes, who licked their plates clean, then swilled water across them and drank the soupy liquid. Even the veteran Witnesses only picked at the rehydrated potato mush and meat-speckled gravy before consigning the rest to the trench.

  After Jordan had recovered from his faint in the temple, he’d started talking again. Now it seemed as if he might never stop. “I’ve been to that meeting a hundred times,” Gabi heard him chattering to Marnie at one of the small campfires. “I would have been there if I hadn’t been at the training center. It was a weekly prayer meeting for teens. Netta Barnes always sits close to the front because she has a crush on Brother Vick. She was there. She was definitely there.” Jordan had shrugged off Gabi and Marnie’s attempts to comfort him once they’d overcome their own shock at the carnage. He couldn’t stand to be touched and couldn’t seem to hear anyone’s voice but his own. He just talked and talked with a feverish glint in his eyes, staring into the fire as if he might find his parents there. Parents, Jordan insisted, who had safely made it onto one of the evacuation buses before the Lilim got hold of them.

  Gabi felt guilty for leaving Marnie to comfort Jordan on her own, but the fires would be banked soon and everyone sent to their tents for an early start the next day. They would keep driving until the convoy either ran into a raiding party or reached the Witness base camp east of Babylon, which was the name Unitas had assigned to the sliver of unclaimed territory between the foothills of the Cascades and the coast. Babylon, dwelling place of demons. If Gabi wanted to talk to Mathew, she had to do it now.

  Mathew was wielding a towel at the dishwashing station, mostly sending the plates back to the wash bucket where Bradley was halfheartedly dunking them and passing them on still caked with glops of potato. Though Ames hadn’t said a direct word to Gabi, he seemed to have taken a special interest in making Mathew’s life hell. While everyone else was given a rest before making camp to recover from the ordeal of the temple, Mathew was set to clearing twigs and rocks from the site and pounding tent stakes. Ames undid every task he completed, finding fault and demanding three or four attempts before the result was acceptable. Bradley had mistaken Ames’s bullying for favor and glued himself to Mathew’s side to gain some of the attention for himself.

  Gabi knew that Apostle Ames’s persecution of her brother was about her. Mathew had excelled on his exams, distinguished himself during his brief training and performed every task to perfection. Gabi was who Ames hated, as every poisonous look he shot her way attested, yet whatever strings her father had pulled to get her and Marnie onto a team had also created a force field of protection around them that Ames didn’t dare breach. Instead he took his resentment out on Mathew.

  “Hey, reject,” Bradley sneered as she approached the washing station. “What are you doing over here? There’s actual work being done, in case you didn’t notice. Why don’t you stick to the campfire with the other deadweight?

  “Shut up, Fiske,” Mathew barked, lifting the tub of dirty dishwater and carrying it to the edge of the clearing to dump it in the concealment of brush. Gabi followed her brother, but he refused to look at her.

  “Mathew, will you please talk to me?” Gabi asked. Mathew dropped the tub, greasy water sloshing over
the side. He stared at it in silence. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I know you must feel like I used you to get ready for the exam, but I did it for a good reason. Can’t you just trust me?”

  When Mathew finally looked up, his eyes were ablaze. “Trust you? Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Did you even think for one second about me or Dad or anyone else on these teams?”

  “Of course I did,” Gabi protested. “That’s all I’ve been thinking about! Do you think it’s my dream to go off to some forsaken, dangerous place with a bunch of people who hate me to face people who want to kill me? I’m not in this for the same reasons you are, Mathew. There’s more at stake than you realize.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Mathew demanded, tugging her into the shadows when he noticed a few of the other Witnesses casting them curious looks.

  “I mean that you’ve been playing at being a Witness since you were a little kid. You’re here to prove you’re tough or brave or better than Dad or something, so you can go back and get on the council and be a big shot, so don’t you dare question my motives. I don’t have to ask your permission to live my life!” As soon as the words were out, Gabi regretted their edge, if not their meaning. She didn’t want to hurt her brother. She just wanted him back.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said with quiet finality. “You being here puts all of us in danger. I don’t know how you got Dad to get you on a team, but it killed him to do it. He told me to look out for you, but I’ll be lucky to survive Ames, thanks to you, never mind the Lilim. I’m scared, and you should be too. This isn’t a Junior Mission. Even the vets on my team say they’ve never seen anything like we saw today. Just do me and everyone else a favor and stay out of the way.”

  His words landed like blows as he stalked back to the dishwashing area. She knew what he said was true. As long as the others believed her incapable of taking care of herself, they would feel obligated to pick up her slack and endanger themselves in the process.