“Yes.” His gaze sinks into mine and remains there, linking us. “Now I am.”
“I should make a Flirty AF sign to use whenever you say creepy come-ons.”
“Oh, gosh, please do.”
People, I have discovered, are layers and layers of secrets. You believe you understand them, but their motives are always hidden. You’ll never truly know them, but sometimes you decide to trust them. I trust Jack, but he is composed of layers I can’t comprehend. Maybe I’m layered, too.
Maybe we can reveal the truth in each other.
“We’ve just got to commit, yeah?” Jack bends his knees and rubs his hands together. “On the count of three, we both jump. One … two … three!” He springs from the dock and plummets into the dark water with a repercussive splash.
If I could press a universal pause button and inspect the moment as an onlooker, I’d call myself an idiot for jumping into a lake half-naked because of a boy. Liquid ice sucks me into a freezing cradle, petrifies my muscles, and floods my airways. Bubbles swirl around me as I break the surface. Dummy. Now I’ll probably get hypothermia and die. My skin is already numb.
“We’ll have to stay in the water for an hour to get hypothermia.” Jack floats like a sailboat, rocking back and forth. “And no, I’m not a mind reader. You just look as if you’re trying to survive the sinking of the Titanic.” He saves my hand from the cold and reels me to his side.
We cling to the ladder, shivering shoulder-to-shoulder with a sea of stars uniting us. Jack looks at me, stares as if I’m something beautiful. His hands glide around my waist—callused fingers against soft skin, hot bodies fighting the cold. Butterflies swarm within me the closer he drifts.
I think I love you. I send this message through my fingers, up his arm, and into his heart. You’re brilliant, weird, and incredibly strong. It annoys me that you always leave your underwear inside your jeans. I hate washing your clothes, and your love for ramen noodles is disgusting. But I’m sure I love you anyway. We make sense. We fit. And I’m subconsciously asking if you could try to love me, too.
Not kissing him is like fighting the desire to gasp for air underwater.
Gasp. I coil my arms around his neck. Gasp. His lips brush against mine, lingering in our tenuous rift. Gasp. Our foreheads press together, and his oxygen becomes mine.
Time to take the exam. We’ll make a passing grade. All we have to do is kiss.
“We can’t do this. Not now.” Jack releases his hold and climbs from the water, leaving me suspended in a pool of rejection. “I can’t kiss my best friend’s teenage sister. Don’t you realize how wrong that’d be? Not only would I be disrespecting him, I’d be making out with someone who is barely a legal adult. Look at me, Julie. I’m, like, five years older than you. I have a career, a past. Heck, I can get into bars and rent cars. You can’t.”
Can’t was not in his vocabulary when we danced in the pineapple fountain, met for coffee, or held hands in the greenspace between Porter’s Lodge and Randolph Hall. He was in line for me. And I tried to get past my crush on him. Even though I was sure we’d end up together. Even though he still had a mighty grip on my heart. Can’t? He made me love him. He wanted me to love him.
If age and relation drew a line between us, he crossed it weeks ago.
“Stop treating me like a kid. You know better than anyone I’m not a kid.” I crawl onto the dock and redress. If I get any hotter, I’ll probably erupt into flames. “Say you aren’t attracted to me, not that I’m a baby my dead brother has marked off-limits. Now, Jack. Say it.”
“There are rules.” He slides on his t-shirt, buttons his jeans.
“You didn’t say it.” A twitchy smile tugs at my mouth and the fear of being alone in a love affair meant for two is replaced by a weird kind of hope, maybe in time and age, maybe in human instinct.
Levi’s barks reverberate over the water, sharp and distinct. Silence falls onto the landscape, and a breath gets tangled in my throat. He’s howling to warn us. Of what? Scavs? The flyovers won’t begin for seven more hours. We should be safe.
“Something isn’t right. He rarely makes noise.” Jack walks across the gangplank to where the dog waits. “What’s wrong?” He kneels and runs his fingers through the animal’s mud-caked fur. As if on cue, Levi whimpers and sprints into the foliage.
“Are we supposed to follow him?” I half-walk, half-hop as I lace my boots. The loose knit of my sweater does little to contain heat—why didn’t I choose a hoodie or wetsuit? At least I wouldn’t be shivering to death if I was dressed as a deep-sea diver.
Jack reaches into the pocket of his jacket and removes a handgun. Same model as the one I found in Jon’s backpack. Which means there was someone worth shooting then as there is now. Someone who wants to kill us—who might be nearby.
“Please put that away.” Pain tears through my stomach. Gunshot. Blood sloshing in a pool around me. Stitches. A scar that brands Jon’s death to my body. “I can’t look at it.”
“Guns are inanimate objects,” Jack says. “The people using them determine their sins.”
“If they didn’t exist, people wouldn’t shoot other people.”
“In a world without guns, people would still find a way to kill one another. History is proof. Native Americans fought with spears and arrows. Europeans used swords, axes, and trebuchets. There are a million examples of murder without guns.” He clicks a magazine into his weapon and aims it at the shoreline. “We can blame an object … but we should blame someone’s evil and fight to put a stop to it.”
Twigs crackle under our weight as we trudge through the woods. Branches tear at our damp clothes like greedy fingers. I huddle behind Jack because if a monster jumps from the shadows, I’m helpless. Remind me—why are we going toward the scary, dangerous thing?
Levi digs at the edge of a ravine two miles from the cabin. He pants when we emerge from the brush and drops a tiny, pink ballet flat.
“Wow, he found a shoe. Smart dog.” I crouch to pet the German Shepherd and smile when he plants a sloppy kiss on my cheek. “Your dog doesn’t have a problem kissing me.”
Jack gazes into the gulch, frozen. Even in the dim light, his face is stark white. “He found more than a shoe.” The tone of his voice is grim, stripped of emotion. Horrified.
I rise from the ground and follow his stare into the narrow chasm.
A layer of putrefying skeletons blankets the earth, bones of all sizes. They’re clothed in decomposing rags. Men, women, children—hundreds of corpses are piled in the ravine. Rodents have built nests in their hair. Worms have chewed away their skin.
Vomit burns my throat. I stumble backward, hyperventilating. They weren’t evacuated. They were slaughtered. Why? Was the government afraid suspicions would be raised if so many people were transferred to different locations? Did they decide murder was the best way to smite loose-ends? How could this have happened?
Hollow eye sockets lust for my flesh and the life still surging through my veins. They can’t have me. I won’t be the next addition to their necrotic collection.
“Sometimes you find a lie, and sometimes it finds you.” Jack turns from the mass grave and looks at the star-streaked sky, the dome. His bottom lip quivers. “Liars need the thrill of knowing they could get caught, so they leave clues unintentionally. I’ve spent the past few months searching for a breakthrough, a thread that’d braid information into a single strand. This is the clue.”
“People are dead,” I scream. “How can you be happy about that?”
“Emotions must relent to cold, hard facts.” He returns the gun to his pocket and meets my line of sight with a scowl. “Their deaths will help me stop our world from coming to a total end.”
Chapter Eleven
“From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose.”
Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
“Hand me that roll of duct tape, would you?” Charlie crouc
hes in the threshold of the main tunnel, sweating dirt. His headlamp blinds anyone who dares to look at him. “Hurrying would be good, Julie, since I’m currently being doused with someone’s piss.”
“Stop whining.” I scramble over mounds of excavated dirt and hand him the tape. Dust creates concrete in my lungs—I wheeze, cough, and douse my throat with water from a canteen, but the paste remains hard as rock. “Bellamy needs us in the west corridor. He and the other Listers are digging a tunnel from the mess hall to the Command Center.”
“Ugh, I don’t like so many people working down here. It’s too crowded.” Charlie patches a leak in the plastic interior and then slides from the tube like an animal emerging from its burrow. “If you and Jack hadn’t found those bodies, we’d still be crawling through our own fecal matter, perfectly chuffed.”
Dead maggots with full bellies and rat nests made of hair, hollow eye sockets begging me for a sliver of life essence—I can’t dwell on the massacre, think about each child piled in that ravine because now, every tragedy, coincidence, and unexplainable event could be hints, threads raveling to answer the big questions: Who chose us to survive? Why did our world end? What deeper secret was worth murdering hundreds of families to protect?
This is war. To outlast it and save Mom and Dad, I need to relent my emotions to cold, hard facts.
“We’re working to secure the tunnels in case the Scavs attack, not because of what Jack and I found. Why are you in such a rotten mood today? Did Tally cut holes in your knickers again?” I slide down a pile of rocks to where the ground levels. Blood darkens the fabric around my knees, caused by some unknown injury. Nowadays, I bleed as much as I sweat.
“Knickers are girl underwear. I wear pants.” His brow furrows as he marks a red ‘V’ above the tunnel’s threshold, tagging it as repaired. “Something bad is going to happen, Julie. I taste it in the air.” He wipes mud from his face and hands me a tool belt.
“No, that’s just crap.” I laugh. “Let’s go.”
The clangs of shovels echo through the underground maze. People flow through the pipework like rats scampering through a sewer. Their headlamps fade in and out of sight, brightening and dimming with each passing soldier.
Charlie and I travel to where Bellamy and his crew gouge earth from a new shaft. Their assembly line hauls buckets of soil from the deepening hole. They reek with the stench of body odor and metal, completely covered in dirt so the whites of their eyes are all that are visible.
“Coker, Stryker, pick up a shovel and start digging,” Bellamy shouts from the mouth of the tunnel. He peers out and looks at us, grinning. “It’s all hands on deck.”
I grab a spade from the floor and crawl between makeshift support beams to where Bellamy, Brady, and a few other Listers work. “Make space. Geez, I can’t help with armpits and butts in my face.” Dirt rains from the ceiling and sends me into a sneeze and cough frenzy.
This is normal life.
Home is a place of claustrophobia and extreme discomfort.
Family are the people still alive.
“Hey, it’s our girl, Stryker.” Brady gives a knuckle-bump before filling a bucket with rocks. “Is it true that the Feds killed all those people to keep the dome a secret?”
“Yeah.” There’s no reason for me to elaborate.
“Why would they murder the people they’re protecting?”
“They wouldn’t.” Bellamy stops digging. His eyes search mine for confirmation—they find it. “Which means they’re not protecting us.”
Jon caught me hiding peaches behind Mom’s flower vases when we were kids. I told him I was protecting them from Dad. He said there are very few people who protect something out of goodwill—protecting is saving for later with the intention to devour once they’ve ripened to their full potential.
We are the peaches hidden behind glass, safe until we’ve ripened to the brink of rot.
“Nash and I worked in the research lab and eavesdropped on the council’s meeting. They said the Feds need us to be oblivious, continue normal life so our labor will sustain them,” Charlie says as he settles into the open space next to me with a pickaxe and lantern. “If we knew about the apocalypse, there’d be chaos and civilization would crumble. We’re their workforce. Without us, they’d die.”
“We have an advantage, then.” I slam my shovel into the wall and yank earth into the narrow shaft. Sweat stings my eyes and creates muck on my skin. Thick muck that weighs down my shaky arms and reeks of sewage. Abram will have to give me painkillers later. And if Sutton hogs the shower, I’ll drag her out by her hair like she once did to me.
“A Lister needs to be on the council. Too many bigwig soldiers in charge,” Bellamy says. “It’s not constitutional. We don’t have equal representation.”
“You’d make a great councilman, Bellamy. Want to start a campaign? I’ll make posters.” Brady snickers and pours fuel into his lantern.
Pain slices through my abdomen when I shove a boulder out of our workspace. I slump against a plastic slat and clutch the scar. Jon’s mark. His memory. Engraved on my skin. The ache will subside like always. A few seconds more of hurt. Count to ten and it’ll be over.
“Need water, Listers?” Tally tosses a jug into the shaft. She slouches at the entrance with bottles fastened to her belt. “Ugh, you all stink. Maybe I should start toting around soap, too.”
“You’re a water-girl?” Charlie scoffs. “I thought you’d be assigned a more hardcore…”
“Shut up.” Tally glares at him and sits on a stool outside the tunnel. “General Ford assigned me the night shift in the security room and didn’t want to give a day job that’d wear me out.”
“Don’t you have water to deliver?” I uncap the jug and drink until my stomach is full.
“I’m on my break,” she says as she cleans the grime from underneath her fingernails. “All this end of the world crap is annoying. Everyone is so wound up about the dome and those corpses. The world deserved to end. It was screwed-up.”
“Millions, maybe billions, of people are dead. Don’t you care?”
“Not really.” She shrugs. “I certainly won’t lose any sleep at night thinking about every soul I didn’t have the pleasure of meeting.”
“Gosh, you’re a horrible person.” Charlie sneers.
Tally flips him off. “Whatever. I’ll live longer than you, Coker.”
Filtered, oxygen-rich air is beyond the tube where natural light strikes the incandescent flicker of lanterns. If I can’t crawl the fifteen yards, I’ll keel over and drown in dirt. Lung pollution has killed three Listers. I can’t join the count. I have to survive.
“Must get out. Need better air.” I wheeze, but all that enters and exits my mouth is dust. Red specks dot my vision as I dig my fingers into the tilled soil and crawl past Charlie. Heart beats fast. Too fast. “Let me through!”
Bellamy yells for help. The assembly line grips my arms and passes me off like a bucket of rocks. Seven more yards. I’ll make it. Jon taught me to hold my breath for two minutes. How many seconds have I been completely without oxygen? Not enough to kill me.
With a final yank, I tumble into the shaft intersection. A girl props me against a crate of shovels, and then leaves. Why isn’t the air fixing my body? I should be able to breathe now.
“No wonder Listers have died down here. Those freaks are idiots.” Tally squats next to me and smirks. “Open up, Stryker.” She plunges her hand into my mouth, down my esophagus.
What the heck.
Mud bubbles up my throat. I lean over and cough the inhaled grime from my respiratory tract, heaving and spewing until the dust is gone. Lungs stretch and contract. The red specks disappear.
“You’re welcome.” Tally pats the top of my head and then disappears into a connecting tube.
How many times will I have to swish mouthwash to get the taste of her fingers from my tongue?
Jack climbs from a shaft, drenched in sweat and sludge. He turns off his headlamp and pours the
remnants of a canteen onto his oil-smeared face. “There’s a tunnel in the east corridor that needs repairing. Want to help, Julie?”
Why is he smiling as if nothing’s changed?
I cast him a snarky glare. “Are you sure I’m not too young?”
“Only one way to find out.” He leans into the tunnel under construction. “Bellamy, I need you to come help with a repair job. Charlie can take your current assignment.”
“Sure thing, Sarge.” Bellamy squeezes through the assembly line and removes a tattered backpack from a nail on the wall. “Nobody better do anything stupid while I’m gone. You hear?”
The crew of Listers nods in response.
“We better start moving. The tunnel is on the other side of camp.” Jack pulls me to my feet. His hand tightens around mine, lingering before release. “You’re not too young,” he whispers.
Missy used to say a guy who doesn’t fight for a girl’s heart isn’t worth her time. If I shared what Jack said last night, she’d tell me to move on, get over my love for him, and be secure as a strong, independent woman. I don’t need the extra hurt in my life. But I do need him, even if he betrays me, stabs me in the back, and lies to my face. He’s my family, and family doesn’t give up on family.
What happened to Missy? Is she in Columbia with her mom? Wow, I truly am the worst best friend. Why haven’t I thought of her until now? She’s as important to me as Jon.
The three of us enter the main passageway, winding left and right. People slide past. Their bodies crush us against the rigid walls. At least the air is less polluted. At least I’m not suffocating.
“Is General Ford planning to move us underground?” Bellamy asks.
“No, repairing the tunnels is just a precaution. He wants us to relocate inward, away from the dome.” Jack’s muscles flex. He glances back at me every fifty yards. “The Scavs are searching this area more aggressively. They know where to look and will find us if we don’t leave.”
The Vestige Page 13