"When we were still fighting and trying to break into their metros, these huge networks of cities with the tunnels in between and impenetrable walls for miles and miles on the outsides, that's where your kind end up living after the compounds, anyway, we were still fighting then, some of us. Rebelling against them casting us out like that and essentially cutting our people off from everything to where we had to start things from the beginning, and we had no resources to do any of it. Even basic stuff. Food, schools, medicines even, and that was the hardest thing of all. It took a very long time to make enough of the meds just to keep our kids from dying in horrible ways from things that nobody had died from in centuries. I think that's why Zoriners weren't giving up for so long, they were angry that their kids were dying like that.
Anyway, at some point the Alliance decided that the best way to stop all the fighting was to make us too afraid to do it anymore, and they knew that anyone who wanted to fight wouldn't be afraid to get caught or to die themselves, so they figured out that if they took enough of us from our cities, our communities, for every attempt at a break in, eventually we'd stop."
He stopped with the pacing then and just stood there in front of them, looking somewhere past their heads, somewhere they weren't. "That's what happened in Waller. That's why they took Ella and my parents. My mom and dad, the reason they had those journals was because they were in the fighting once. And they took a lot of other people too, and that's just from Waller. Their scientists had it all worked out to a number of people, a percentage, in each community that needed to disappear for the rest of the people in it to give up. And it worked. It always worked. This city, being dead - it means that it didn't work here. So they just killed everybody."
Nobody said anything then. Because there didn't seem to be any of the right things to say to this, and nobody wanted to say any of the wrong things. They just sat there watching the fire die. Ams made Riley sit next to her and hugged him to her, but he didn't seem to want to be hugged now. He just looked at the fire, blankly, as if it was going to tell him what they were all supposed to do now.
He stared at it for an awfully long time, but it didn't seem to be telling him anything much. It didn't seem to be telling any of them much. She knew then, knew what somebody had to tell them, so she did, "It won't do us any good to go into this city if nobody's been there for a while, and it looks like whatever happened wasn't yesterday or a week ago. There should at least still be animals or something there, dogs, but there is nobody. We won't find any food there or anything else we might need. We'll just find the bodies, and I can't do that. I wouldn't know how to do that."
Riley looked at her as if she had two heads, "Laurel, we have to go. We have to know what happened there. Maybe we'll find somebody who made it. We are traveling blind, so if nothing else, maybe we'll learn something that can keep us safe. If you are afraid of the dead bodies, we'll cover your eyes, but you should probably get used to the idea of seeing a few. I know it's hard to get past, but the rest of the world wasn't a compound, where the worst thing that ever happened to you was a badly cooked breakfast or a strange caterpillar. We are going, all of us, first thing in the morning. "I suggest we all get some sleep," he said, before walking away angrily to a patch of grass far enough away from the fire to where his blanket was. And that was that.
She looked over at Ams, for comfort, if not to take her side, as she already knew she wouldn't do that, but she just got up and ran up to where Riley was. She wanted to cry, but Ella was still sitting unmoving on the log, and she didn't want her to see it and take it to Riley, didn't want him to know that his words hurt her, so she walked back to the stream and sat by this trickle of water, crying at first, for all the wrongness that she felt, for this city with no life in it, and Riley's parents and Ella, but mostly, for Ams no longer being Ams.
And when the crying was over, she stayed there still, long enough for someone to have come looking for her, and then longer than that, but nobody came, and when she knew for sure that nobody would come, she went to the little patch of grass with her blanket on it, and curled up, making herself as small as she could manage, and went to sleep hoping that she could coax the old Laurel out of this new one, Laurel who wouldn't be so afraid of all the things she didn't even know existed for her to be afraid of. Laurel who could maybe get her Ams back.
Smoke
Drake, April 25, 2236, The Woods
He expected them to just shoot him, maybe in front of everybody but the girls, not keep him here for two days now asking questions. He didn't have anything left to tell them. They came up the tower, the boy and the mute did, and held some rag over his face and he remembered that it smelled funny, sweet, but not sage sweet. He didn't know that smell, and then he woke up and his head hurt, and kept hurting and he looked around for his gate key and his gun, but couldn't find them. That's all he remembered. He wrote it down for them on the pad so many times now, not changing a word. He didn't know anything about the two girls. He had no idea who they are, them looking so alike. No, he never spoke to anybody. Why would they even ask that of a mute? So he sat there in the same cell that he watched Hassinger torture Riley in, and waited for them to finally shoot him.
"Drake, you bloody idiot. Do you have any idea who these girls are? Why we take so much care to protect them, keep them safe until they mature? Each one of them is worth more than some countries, you ignorant, dumb mute. Their lives are worth a thousand times more than all of ours combined, mute, and that includes mine. So I can't very well tell the Alliance that we let them disappear. That we lost the replenishers..." She was pacing in front of him.
"We have to get them back, Drake, before the Selection. And I can't go looking for them or tell anybody. You have to find them. You have to find them and bring them back here. And then you can go and live your life wherever you want to. I won't hold you anymore after that. You have my word. I'm sending Keller with you. You'll leave in the morning. Go and pack all the supplies you'll need." She was speaking to him as if he were a child, small words, so he didn't get lost in them.
It amused him that she thought of him as a dumb mute, that they all did.
"Of course if you are not back with the girls before the Selection, I will have Keller cut you up into tiny pieces while you are still alive. He likes doing that sort of thing... And don't forget that until I release you, I can track you, in case you decide to do something stupid, like run. I'll send every unit to hunt you down if I have to with one call," and she smiled at him, in that way she smiled at Riley that night, and he believed her, about Keller and about that last thing.
It was lucky that they didn't tag Ella yet. They would have that morning of course, that's why they had to run when they did. Lucky too that he took one of the comms from the guard house when they dragged him in there to berate him for forgetting to charge his screens, and for what they called his stinking breath. "I can smell you coming from across the whole bloody lawn, that stench on you. Stop eating that shit, mute. It makes me wanna puke," the ugly mustached one screamed into his face, spitting on him. He could use some sage or peppermint or a toothbrush, his teeth the yellow of the underside of termite-eaten bark, sticky sour smell that he knew would stay on him for a long time afterwards. It always did.
He needed the comm to know where it would be safe for them to cut through to the next city, without running into soldiers. He hoped the mustache one wasn't the one Hassinger called Keller, but he had a feeling that it was. The name seemed to fit him. He'd know for sure soon enough.
He packed in a hurry, enough broth powder and bars and tea to last a month or so. He'd find other things in the woods to eat if that ran out. He wondered if Keller had ever been in the woods, ever had to kill an animal to eat, or if he came from one of those places where they didn't do that, where the only food you ever saw was cut up into chunks on your plate. It would give him an advantage when the time comes. He'd know that soon enough too.
By midnight, he was all packed up and ready to go. Ke
ller would collect him in five hours. He slept then, knowing he would never see the inside of this cabin again, or Riley tree, or the sad ugly walls of the compound with its dark empty rooms and its pretty inhabitants who were too brainwashed to know that they were prisoners here as much as the slaves were. All but the two of them now, he smiled. He wished he could talk to them somehow. He missed these kids and Ella. He missed her so much it hurt. Maybe this time, if he ever does find her again, he can finally tell her that.
He drifted to sleep with Ella's adult face blurring into Ella's kid face, Ella's voice soothing the kitten, silky soft, Ella's angry voice yelling at Brent and his buddies to lay off him, to leave him alone, and when they didn't - afterwards her soft silky voice walking him home, telling him that it will be okay, that they will get tired of it, the picking on him, and find someone else, and he would be safe from them then. Telling him, too, that maybe he should hit one of them, Brent maybe, right in his ugly nose, just once, hard enough to make him bleed from it, hard enough to break it, and then they would definitely stop picking on him.
And he was always ashamed in front of her after that, because he just couldn't do that one thing he knew he needed to do, so she didn't have to feel bad for him anymore, the breaking of Brent's face. He thought about doing it every day, but every time they stopped him after school, and called him all those names, shoved him until he dropped his bag and shook all his stuff onto the ground, breaking everything in it that was breakable, he just shook his head and let them. He could still hear the sound of his screens crunching, shuttering, grinding into the coal dust and gravel...
He woke up with a start at the sound emanating from his screen. So he was indeed Keller. He knew he would have no problem breaking his face, for Riley, for spitting on him and kicking his ribs in. And for every time he looked at him like he was an ant he could squish if only he wasn't Hassinger's ant. He'd know soon enough just what kind of a dumb, dickless mute he was dealing with.
"Come on, mute. Hurry your lazy ass up. Let's go," he was pointing his stun gun at his head, looking him up and down. His free hand went to his bag and searched through it. He patted him down, digging into his pockets, checking the insides of his boots, and then he put his hand right on his crotch and laughed, "So you do have a dick after all. We'll see if you still have it in a week or two."
They set out in the same direction he sent the group in. Keller said they were heading for Reston, but Drake didn't know anything about that place. There wasn't supposed to be a city in between them and where the kids were going, but they were definitely following in their tracks. Keller calculated that they'd reach them in about eight days if they didn't need to stop for more than a few hours of sleep each night and a few quick meals during the day. Keller seemed in a hurry as well. That should put them in the city that wasn't on a map for some reason a day or two before Ella and the kids.
By the second night he knew he was right about Keller never having been in the woods before. The man jumped at every sound of a snapping branch, and cursed every mosquito that had the misfortune of drinking his blood. He wondered if anything that bit him wouldn't just die on its own, from all the poison in him. Another few days of this trek should have him unraveled enough to trust him to make all their meals and tea.
He couldn't seem to get enough sleep out in the open, probably for all the noises scaring him, the owls hooting something nightmarish into his ugly head, the trees creaking in the way concrete walls never did. He walked slower now, head kept mostly down, red eyes staring right in front of him. At least he shut up, almost completely. The only time he opened his mouth was to give Hassinger an update every evening, and yell at him to make the fire faster. Maybe he wouldn't need to kill him, he thought. He could just leave him in the bloody woods and he'd be deader than dead in less than a week.
On the seventh day they saw smoke. It streamed grayly into the inky sky some twenty meters in front of them. Keller dropped to the ground, stun gun at the ready, buzzing on lethal. Idiot couldn't tell that the fire had been dead for a while from the way it smoked now. This didn't bode well for them. They must have covered less ground than he thought and he wasn't sure Keller could speed it up any, tired as he always seemed now. He'd have to carry his bag for him at least, if he wanted him to move any faster. "They were here a little bit ago. We have to move faster if you want to catch them, Keller. I can take your bag for you." He wrote it quickly, jaggedly, in big enough letters to see in the dark with the little ray Keller had.
He just nodded then and handed him his bag. Thankfully, it was light enough by now. They walked for most of the night, and slept just until the first sun spilled in wide streams through the branches. He made a small, quick-burning fire and warmed up the tea he saved from yesterday, just enough to wake Keller up to walk. He collected more than enough poisonous mushrooms by now to kill Keller twice over. They were drying in clumps in the pocket of his backpack. He could smell them drying when he put the bag under his head at night, an earthy, humid smell.
Keller saw them first and reached for his comm, smiling for the first time in days. He wondered what sort of reward Hassinger promised him.
"Dana, I got them. No, that's not what I mean. They are just a bit in front of us, so we'll have them banded and on the way back in a few hours. Ten, twelve days, I don't know how fast they can walk. It'll be recorded who we have if you send in the flier. Safer to walk," and he hung up, and crouched, watching the group at their fire.
All but Riley were sitting on the log watching the boy. He was telling them something he couldn't hear, but whatever it was seemed serious. He could see a bit of Ella's concerned face through the flames when Riley wasn't pacing in front of her. He wanted to run out there and throw his arms around her, and around the kids, and hug them all. And he will, he told himself, soon enough. He had to deal with Keller first.
"They are going to sleep here tonight, Keller. Easier to grab them when they do, no? They took guns, I'm sure of it. Too risky for you to do it now. They are not going anywhere till morning." He shoved the pad at Keller and watched him read it. His lips moved when he read. Strange, that. He didn't think they hired complete morons as guards. Didn't matter now.
"Okay, mute. You watch. I'll sleep for a few. Then maybe, if you are nice, I'll let you sleep some," and he walked away slowly, carefully, far enough away from the fire. He watched him spread his blanket and the man seemed to be asleep as soon as he closed his eyes, snoring in that loud way he had.
He took out his mushrooms, selected a small, almost dried piece, ground it in his fingers and dropped it into the thermos of still warm tea. Keller drank warm tea in big gulps, not sips, so this would be enough to get him sick first, not dead, and he shouldn't taste it, smoking that awful stuff he smoked all the time. He probably couldn't taste most things. So he waited, time moving far too slowly through this night, his last one as a dumb, dickless mute.
There was just enough of a breeze for him to smell the fire when he faced that way. He has always loved that smell, but tonight, it tore at him a little, made him ache for Ella and the kids, made time move even more slowly. He turned away and watched his enemy's chest rise and fall, waiting for that last bit of courage he'd need to do this. He thought of Brent then, the big bully with an ugly face, and wondered if he was someone like Keller now, still picking on people he thought were weaker than him, or if by some miracle he turned into something more decent than that. He didn't think people changed that much. Never saw anybody change that much, and he knew for sure then that Keller was like Brent in that way, no matter that they didn't grow up the same. Inside of this snoring ugly man was an ugly kid, and his name was Brent...
He took a spare shirt out of his bag and cut a wide strip off the bottom with a tiny but scalpel-sharp knife he hid inside his belt. He picked up the thermos and walked over to where Keller was snoring on his back, head on top of his backpack. His hand was wrapped around the stun gun, but he could tell that he turned the thing off, likely was too afraid
to accidentally shoot himself in his sleep. He crouched next to his face and put the tip of the knife to his neck just under the chin, not yet touching the skin, "Wake up, asshole. Shift change. And don't you dare make a sound," and he pressed the knife down enough to let Keller know what he was holding, just enough to draw a trickle of blood.
His eyes flew open, focusing on his face, wide awake. He watched his hand squeeze around the handle of the gun, and put a bit more pressure on the knife, Keller's hand letting go.
"This belongs to me now," he said quietly and reached over with his left hand and grabbed the gun, flicking the safety off, unmistakable buzz of a full charge overpowering the noise of the bugs.
"Get up, asshole, slowly, if you want your ugly head to stay on your neck, and walk over to that tree," and he pointed to the trunk of a youngish oak.
Gun buzzing into his back, Keller walked shakily. He tied his hands behind him with skinny metal ties that he pulled out of Keller's back pocket. These would hurt if he so much as tried to make fists. He sat him down, slamming his back into the tree, and crouched in front of him, pointing the gun directly between his eyes, almost touching his face with the barrel.
"Here? Or should I aim lower?" and he traveled down his body to just below his belt line, smiling broadly at him, enjoying this bit. He had played this all out in his mind so many times, he was surprised he still found this part funny.
"So, asshole. Here is how this is going to go. You will do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you or you die. Oh, and until I tell you to speak, you are going to be playing the mute. Clear enough for you? Or should I write it down?"
Escape (Alliance Book 1) Page 12