by Joe Hart
Lee’s grip tightens on her hand and she squeezes back.
They meet Vivian halfway between the two groups. She stops several feet away, gazing intently at Zoey.
The nerve that brought her the last dozen steps flees as Vivian unfolds the blanket’s edge and turns slightly.
Every sense sharpens to a needlepoint.
She can see each fiber of the blanket, smells what could be a flowery soap paired with the field loam. She feels sweat running down her spine despite the cold, tastes the dried briny parch of her mouth, and hears grit skating across the road over the vigorous slam of her heart.
A hand so small it defies reason pokes from the blankets.
A hand that tiny can’t exist. The little fingers and joints are impossible and the pinkness of the skin nearly matches the blankets surrounding it. Then Vivian shifts the bundle a little more and a face appears within its folds.
Zoey drags in a breath and finds she can’t release it.
Her daughter looks out at her.
Sapphire eyes find her and hold above a minute button of a nose. Hair, dark and already beginning to curl, grows from the top of her head and she holds the hand not reaching into the air below her chin so that her lips purse out slightly.
She is the most beautiful thing Zoey’s ever seen.
Lee makes a gasping sound beside her.
“These are your parents,” Vivian says in a low voice to the baby. Zoey finds herself taking a lurching stride forward but Vivian backs away. “Now Zoey, you can’t think I’d hand her over to you, do you? What would stop you from simply running away? You’d have no fear of getting shot. No, Lee will have to take her, not you.”
“But—”
“Do you want to make the exchange or not?”
Breathless. Dazed. “Yes.”
“Then do exactly what I tell you. Move past me and I’ll give Lee the child.”
She finds herself balancing on a narrow ledge over an incredible drop. It has all come to this. And yes, the fear is there, but something more prevalent casts it aside like an insubstantial barrier. She would die for the girl in the blanket, easily give her life through some atavistic instinct more powerful than anything she’s experienced before.
She’s being pulled around, away from the beautiful little face peering at her, and she almost begins to fight before Lee says her name.
She looks at him, knowing the time has come. So much to say. How can she put into words days and years of love’s potential lost? How can she pour forth the sentiment that she’s finally found what she’s been looking for, and it is so much more than she could have hoped for? Love is too small a word. How can she tell him?
“Take care of her,” she whispers.
“I will.” He blinks and a tear escapes, glittering down his face. “I’ll find you. I promise.”
“Okay.”
“Like you said, it’s my turn to rescue you.”
A sob wracks her but she holds it at bay, kissing him before drawing away. Vivian watches without reaction. She might as well be seeing the disassembly of two machines for all the emotion she exudes.
Zoey looks in through the blankets as Vivian walks by her. The little girl yawns, eyes scrunching shut before blinking at the solemn sky.
Then she has passed, and all she can see is Vivian depositing the baby into Lee’s arms, who looks as if he might faint. He cannot tear his eyes away from the bundle and the greater part of her wants to fight, to stay with them both no matter the cost.
“Good. That’s done,” Vivian says, coming even with Zoey. She roughly grabs her by the upper arm and guides her toward the two vehicles. They’re fading away, her family. Growing smaller and smaller by the second, and she wonders if the memories of them will follow suit over time. Will she forget their faces, their names? Will she forget who she’s become, who she finally is?
All her thoughts fray as she nears the first vehicle, Steven holding the rear passenger door open.
“Hello, Zoey,” he says, guiding her into the dark interior. But something stops her. Lee is yelling, yelling something she can’t understand. She begins to step back out onto the road but Vivian flicks a hand at Steven and he shoves her onto the hard seat.
The door slams shut and Vivian climbs in the front beside the driver, another guard wearing reflective sunglasses. Zoey looks out through the side window at Lee holding the swaddled child. What had he been yelling? Something about a name?
Eli’s last words come back to her then. Don’t let them go. The ones you love. They disappear.
The vehicle’s engine rumbles to life and they begin to reverse.
Wait. I’m not ready.
Wait.
Wait.
“Wait,” she says aloud, sitting up to the steel grating separating the front and rear seats. She hooks her fingers through it. “There’s an army coming.”
“Really Zoey, I’d expect a better story from you.”
“I’m telling the truth. They’re—”
“They’re going to storm the ARC and break you out, right? That’s kind of a weak intimidation tale, don’t you think?”
“You don’t understand. There are thousands of them.” She scrambles for something to make Vivian believe her, because if she can convince the other woman now before her family is out of sight, maybe the insistent premonition of losing them can be refuted and dissolved.
“Relax, Zoey, everything will be okay,” Vivian says, reaching for something beneath her seat as the vehicle bucks into gear and begins to pull away.
“His name is Hiraku and he’s coming here. He knows the location and he’s got an army of men.”
Vivian turns, holding a small canister with a short steel tube attached to it. “Just relax,” she says, and presses a button on its top.
A mist sprays out of the tube’s end and Zoey reels back coughing as a pungent chemical odor clogs her nasal passages, forces its way into her lungs as she takes an involuntary breath.
Can’t inhale. Don’t breathe.
But already her muscles are weakening and she’s slumping back, melting into the hard seat as if it’s a plush and enveloping bed. Vivian’s voice follows her down the tunnel she’s fallen through. Because darkness is eating the corners of her vision and her tongue is too heavy to move.
In the last seconds before she loses the slipping hold she has on consciousness, she realizes what Lee was yelling on the road.
He was asking what he should name her. What he should name their daughter.
41
The man watches the two Humvees roll away down the road before they disappear from sight.
He trains the binoculars on the remaining group of people beside the larger transport. The man holding the bundle of blankets walks toward them like a zombie, feet shuffling and head down. He’s crying, that much is apparent. The others gather round him and the old man from their group, who had taken a position in a house nearby, emerges, rifle slung over one shoulder.
He’s seen enough.
Quickly he tucks the binoculars away in their case and slings it into his small pack along with the last of his energy mix he hasn’t finished yet. He stands, hoisting his rifle from where it rests on its tripod in the open window, the water-warped desk he drug to the opening supporting its stock. Even at the half-mile distance between him and the two groups he’s sure he could have picked each of them off without a problem. But that wasn’t his mission, and from what he’s heard through rumor and conversation before he was sent on reconnaissance, the girl that just got into the Humvee and disappeared toward the river is Hiraku’s property. As he descends the rotting stairs of the abandoned house he wonders, not for the first time, how she was able to get the better of Shirou. The man had been one of their best: smart, fast, tough, and brutal. The idea that that waif of a woman could outthink and outmaneuver him is as unbelievable as it is unsettling.
He leaves the house through the rear entry, checking the remaining group’s position once more before departing.
They are all inside the vehicle now and he watches it trundle away. But they aren’t his concern. Hiraku made it abundantly clear that those with her didn’t matter. If he was honest with himself, he would concede that their leader has lost his grip since Shirou’s death. Preservation of the species and a new life are no longer driving the mission. Instead it is vengeance.
Not that he truly cares as long as his son gets a fair shake at a better life someday. The boy is almost nine and he deserves to have children of his own. The end, for him at least, justifies the means.
He crosses the gap between the house and the low hill nearby. With the camouflage he wears he would be nearly impossible to see even while moving. When he’s behind cover his nerves relax slightly from the tension that’s built inside him during the surveillance, and he begins to jog.
It is early afternoon when the encampment comes into view. He exits a dense patch of woods into a clearing that might’ve once been a hay field, now grown over and encroached by bramble. The convoy takes up the better part of the forty acres before him. There are masses of small tents and nearly two hundred vehicles of all sizes. Some of the men even rode motorcycles when they’d moved out of Seattle two days before, which turned out to be a terrible mistake when they reached the first mountain pass covered with snow. Even going slow there were several accidents and one bike’s rider slid from the highway and fell a dozen feet before coming to rest on a bed of rocks that broke his fall, as well as his left femur.
He heads across the field, noting several of the other scouts are already back and enjoying a hot meal. They nod his way as he passes, eyeing his route directly toward the largest tent at the center of the field. Six soldiers guard the entrance and relieve him of his rifle and sidearm before he enters.
The inside of the tent carries a harsh smoky aroma of burnt wood and cooked onions. The latter of the two sends a spike of hunger through his stomach. A long folding table takes up the majority of the space and several men sit around it, a map splayed out across its middle. Hiraku is at the far end, elbows propped on the table’s edge, eyes cast down at the map, hands folded beneath his chin. When he enters, the commander glances up at him.
“Sir, I located her.”
“Where?” Hiraku says, leaning forward.
“About twenty miles to the east, near the river. I was moving south when their transport came into view, so I set up position and observed when they stopped in the highway.”
“What happened?”
“There was an exchange.”
“An exchange?”
“Yes. Her group handed her over to a woman who must be from the facility we located with the drone. In return they gave the group a bundle of blankets.”
“Bundle of blankets?”
“Yes sir.” He pauses. “I’m sure it was a baby.”
Hiraku sits back from the table as the other men stare at him. He passes a hand across his lips. “You’re certain they took her to the facility in the river?”
“They were heading in that general direction, so I’d say yes.”
Hiraku shuffles through several papers along with some hand-drawn sketches. “Draiman, you’re sure these estimates are correct about the wall thickness?”
The pale man to Hiraku’s left nods. “As close as we can tell from the drone footage. Give or take a couple inches.”
Silence falls over the room. The fire crackles in the little stove situated in one corner. All eyes hold on Hiraku who continues to stare at the map.
Finally, he glances up as if realizing he isn’t alone. “Make the men ready. We move out at 3:00 a.m. tomorrow. Attack is at first light.”
42
Lee stares down at the tiny girl in his arms, tracing the lines of her face over and over as the ASV rumbles along the road.
He knows he’s in shock, but the awareness of the fact does nothing to pull him free of it.
Zoey is gone, and now he’s holding what’s left of her.
The baby makes a cooing sound and her eyelids flutter before she yawns. She’s done this at least four times now since he took her from Vivian and it’s yet to fail to enthrall him. This little life is his complete responsibility now, the gravity of it almost overpowering. He manages to drag his attention from her for a moment as he realizes someone’s saying his name.
He looks up at Tia. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I said, are you okay?”
“Oh. Yeah, yeah I’m fine.” But his voice sounds like someone else’s speaking in another room. The detachment isn’t alarming. In fact, he welcomes it because otherwise he’ll start thinking about Zoey and how they shoved her into the back of the vehicle and out of sight like she was being eaten and—
“Would you like me to hold her?” Ian asks, dragging him away from the thoughts that are trying to close over his mind like cold water.
“Um. No. No, I’m okay.” Lee glances out the window past Tia’s head, thinking that they’ve been driving almost as long as they did coming to the meeting point. When they return to the inn he’ll have to find something for the baby to eat. Milk. He’ll need milk. But where are they going to get milk? He hasn’t seen a cow since stumbling across one after fleeing the mountains before his arrival in Seattle. He’s about to open his mouth and ask out loud what the others think about food for her when Merrill begins to slow the vehicle.
They’ve driven up a slight incline and turned a corner onto a dirt road that empties out onto a plateau. A squat brick building stands at one end of a long parking lot and a series of heavy electrical cables run in sagging lengths between several towers in the distance. Below the flat lookout they’ve stopped on, the river valley drops away. Far to the east he spots something that catches his gaze and holds it as Tia crosses the aisle and reaches for the door.
The southern lip of the ARC is barely visible beyond the rim of the rise they’ve parked on. Its concrete shelf rounds outward like a blossoming flower petal. Slightly to the right he can see the impassive wall of the dam. They’re maybe four miles from the structures but seem so much closer, the open air between the positions as deceiving as it is breathtaking.
“What are we doing here?” he asks as the others begin to file out of the vehicle.
Merrill pauses on the steps leading outside. “Come on. You’ll see.”
The wind tugs at his jacket as he steps from the ASV, snapping the blankets around the baby like an animal trying to tear her from him. He hugs her closer, tucking the loose folds of material in around her face. She gazes up at him with a long look before scrunching up her nose and letting out a brief cry that turns into another yawn.
“It’s okay. We’re going to be okay,” he says, following the others around the side of the ASV. When he looks up, he’s stunned to see another vehicle there, a small car the color of turned soil, with rims of rust adorning its wheel wells. The rest of the group are climbing free of it, looking at him expectantly. All except Lyle, who is opening up a black folding case on the hood of the car, a strange crosshatched piece of aluminum in one hand attached to it with a length of cord.
Chelsea hurries to Lee, giving him a brief hug before brushing back the blanket to look at the baby.
She inhales quickly, and when she speaks her voice creaks with emotion. “Oh Lee, she’s beautiful. She’s absolutely gorgeous.”
“Yeah. Yeah, she is,” is all he can manage.
“Can I?” Chelsea asks, reaching out.
Lee frowns but slowly transfers the bundle over, an unfamiliar reluctance coming over him at the request. He doesn’t want to let her go.
“Hello,” Chelsea whispers, beginning to sway in place, her face only inches from the baby’s. “I’m Chelsea. I—” She abruptly looks up at Lee and he shakes his head.
“We didn’t name her. There was no time. We ah . . .” He feels heat prickle at the back of his eyes and bites his lower lip.
“Oh Lee.” She leans into him, holding the girl with one arm and wrapping the other around him. “Don’t worry. We’re
going to get her back.”
When she draws away, he reabsorbs his surroundings. “What’s going on anyway? Why are we here?”
“Merrill hasn’t told you?”
“No.”
“Come on. We’ll explain.”
They move to the car where Merrill, Tia, and Ian huddle around Lyle and the case that rests on the hood. Lee inches in beside them close enough to see the case is filled with electronics. Several open circuit boards glow with dots of red and green, a number of places patched with soldered lines and jumper wires. A corded headset sits over Lyle’s ears, and the older man squints at a dial as he turns a knob attached to one side of the conglomeration.
“Tia, hold this, will you?” Lyle says, passing the antennae to her.
“Where?”
“Take a couple steps in the direction of the ARC.”
“What’s going on? What is this?” Lee asks, moving his gaze from the apparatus Tia holds to Merrill as he turns to face him.
“It’s a rudimentary tracking device.”
“For what?” Merrill says nothing and waits for the understanding to finally wash over Lee. “For Zoey?”
“Yes. When she started talking about returning to the ARC, I had Lyle and Tia begin scrounging for parts.” He motions to the open case on the hood. “They cobbled together all this from a store they found in Newton’s hometown along with some electronics that were in the basement of the inn last night. Lyle can read the signal’s strength and gauge distance by its intensity. More or less we can narrow down her location by a hundred yards or so.”
Lee frowns. “How? You said a signal, but where is it coming from?”
“A small, battery-powered transmitter,” Ian says. “I attached it to her jacket beneath her hood when I hugged her good-bye.” Lee stares at the old man and sees a flicker of guilt on his features.
“We couldn’t let her go in there without having a way to find her,” Merrill says.
“Why didn’t you say something to me?”
“Honestly because we couldn’t trust you not to tell her.”