Jack pulls into the gravel driveway hours later. He retreats to the mobile home and no matter how many times I bang on the metal door, he doesn’t speak or let me inside. Why is he dividing us? We’re meant to go through this together, be the voice in each other’s ears yelling get up and stand on your own two feet.
“Damn your pride, Jack Buchanan.” I slam my fists one last time on the RV’s door and then drift toward the house. My face springs a leak, soaks skin and fabric with steamy heat. It’s almost as if his fingers are somehow hollowing my chest one handful at a time, and I moan from the pain.
We weren’t supposed to hurt each other.
But he’s hurting me.
Rumbles reverberate across the pasture and vibrate up my calves, expanding into an animalistic growl. The horizon shifts from a linear plain to a jagged ridge flickering with light pixels. Another contraction. Another step closer to the end.
“Julie, would you trek to the gas station? We need more supplies,” Nash yells from the front porch. He tosses me a backpack. “Get toilet paper.”
“Sure.” I massage my black-blue knuckles and tighten the backpack’s straps. Leaving is good. Maybe when I come back, Jack won’t be in pieces. Maybe he’ll be able to glue himself back together without me. Maybe we don’t really need each other to survive.
Sunlight breaks through the ceiling of clouds—Earth is fighting to keep us all. Mud cakes my boots like concrete—we’re trudging forward because we’ve seen the unseen, we’ve become the unseen, and until the figment veil has been torn, we’ll always live in darkness.
Jon used to hide things in the visors of Mom’s Land Rover—sprigs of dried lavender, autumn-painted leaves, notes and pictures, bizarre trash he found on the roadside. He wanted to give Mom fragments of him so that when his leave was over, she’d be left with more than a memory. I’d like to fill my pockets with those memories. I’d like to leave some of my own.
A bell chimes when I enter the ramshackle gas station. There isn’t a security camera in sight, but I slide a God Bless the Second Amendment cap onto my head as a precaution, and then grab cans of soup, a bottle of shampoo, toilet paper, matches, and a sleeve of Oreos. The two dirty construction workers and pregnant cashier don’t even look in my direction as I saunter up and down the aisles.
This place probably failed its health inspection. The dropdown ceiling is stained a putrid brown color. Cockroaches writhe in the corners, and I’m pretty sure each item of food I touch has been expired for weeks.
“How you boys doing this fine afternoon?” the cashier says when three men enter the building. They’re wearing military uniforms with the Scavs’ crest ironed onto their right sleeves.
“We are quite well. Thank you for inquiring.” A soldier with shimmering gray eyes takes a beer from a cooler and pivots toward me, shifting his pale gaze from the rack of jerky to the refrigerators.
I drop behind a shelf packed with candy and press myself against the tile. Heart drums. A metallic taste contaminates my tongue. Dust rolls back and forth from my mouth. Okay. I’m stuck. They’ll leave eventually, right? Dang it—Nash forgot to give me a gun. What did he expect me to do in an emergency, turn into a psycho ninja? I can barely change the song on my relic of an iPod while running.
“Do you have a wireless jump starter? Our vehicle’s battery no longer functions.”
Window of opportunity—the bathroom door is cracked wide enough for me to slither through unnoticed. If I can crawl to the next aisle without drawing attention, I’ll have a decent chance of survival.
“Yes, there’s one behind those tire pumps. You need a mechanic?”
“No. The jump starter will suffice.”
A throbbing sensation pulses through my body as I half-scramble, half-slide into the neighboring canyon of trail mix and potato chips. Sweat makes my skin cold, my hands slippery. I shift from elbow to knee to avoid the sticker sound of damp flesh peeling off dry tile.
One wrong move will finish me. The Vestige made a pact—put the mission’s needs above our own lives, do whatever is needed to ensure the unit isn’t compromised. Being captured and interrogated isn’t an option. I can’t let the Scavs silence us, bury the truth in an even deeper grave. No, if I’m found, I’ll have to make sure they can’t get a word out of me.
I’ll have to silence myself.
“Add three beers and a handful of razors to our bill,” the youngest Scav says. His gelled head crests the donut case, and his shoulder dips into the aisle’s threshold.
“What’re y’all doing out in these parts?”
“We are performing surveys for the government.”
Surveys of the human population. Surveys that’ll result is mass murders and dome contractions. I don’t understand—how can they interact with the people they’re devising to kill without remorse? In their shimmering eyes, how is our species beneath theirs?
I remove a hook from the chip rack and crouch in a sniper stance when the entourage appears in the framed space beyond the crevice of shelves. One alien hands the pregnant cashier a stack of money. He flashes her a luminescent smile, calls her a ‘swell doll.’ The other Scavs confront the two construction workers with similar grins twisting their faces.
Good. They’re distracted. Now is the time to move.
“Do me a favor.” Pale-Gaze Scav rips open a package of razorblade refills. “Test the sharpness of the blades. I must know they are efficient.” He gives each human a metal piece and snickers.
A supernatural stillness crashes into the room when he says, “Slice your throats.” The victims caress their gullets with the blades, eyes vacant and hands confident. I open my mouth to scream for them to stop, but all that emits are hyperventilated gasps. I try to move, but my body is heavy like a rock. They can’t be saved. The command has been given.
Blood trickles from their windpipes and stains their shirts. The cuts are deep and accurate, as if they knew how to make themselves unfixable. Their expressions remain unchanged even when they hit the floor, and the vacancy in their eyes becomes a permanent exhibit.
Ringing resounds in my head as the last breath trickles from their nostrils. I clutch my mouth and scoot down the aisle, away from the corpses and their laughing murderers. Run. Get out. Where’s an escape? Help. They’ll come for me next. And I won’t be able to let myself survive.
The doorbell chimes.
I roll from my hiding place after half an hour of silence and sprint from the gas station. Tears stain my skin like blood, and each step creates a slit of pain in my chest, a violent throbbing. My hands shake as I walk up the winding driveway to the farmhouse. Why won’t they stop? I need them to stop before someone notices.
“Julie!” Jack emerges from the RV and jogs toward me. The moment we’re in reaching distance, he sweeps me against his chest. “My parents lied. Everyone lied.”
“You’re not defined by their mistakes.” I can’t seem to coil my arms his neck—they claw at the air instead, flailing away from his DNA and striking, spooling irises.
“But I am,” he whispers. “Everything that I am … is what I’ve fought against, what I hate.” His stubble scratches my cheek, and I shiver. “The only thing I like about me is you.”
Waterfalls of blood cascaded down their necks, drained the innocent life from their bodies. They sacrificed themselves like animals because of a single command. What if I’ve been manipulated, too? Colonel Buchanan said his ex-wife made him love her. What if my feelings for Jack are a lie?
“You’re flushed. Did something happen?” His touch makes my skin crawl.
Jon rolled up the car’s windshield and catapulted across the street in a broken, bloody wad. Sutton’s face disappeared in a cloud of red mist. Bellamy was flattened beneath rock in a single crunch. Jack was there when they all died—he questioned the system, so everyone he charms is murdered. I can’t trust what we have is real. I’m not willing to risk everything for a potential illusion.
I’m not willing to risk my heart.
>
“Get your hands off me.” My throat constricts once the words are spoken. I avoid eye contact because a moment of connection between us will surely shatter my strength and composure.
It’ll hurt to keep him. It’ll hurt to let him go. I must protect myself. This environment isn’t safe. Our lives are a battlefield and existence is survival of the fittest, every man for himself. No one’s looking out for me. I am my own guardian. Releasing him releases the risk of pain.
“What do you mean?” He takes a step backward and surrenders his hands.
Tears blur the pasture into a green smear. My chest aches. I speak fast to rid myself of the discomfort, like ripping off a Band-Aid, but the pain grows. “I didn’t think any of this would bother me, but it does. You haven’t changed, I know, but our situation has. We’re not the same. And I don’t think I can have a relationship with you, not for a while. It’s too hard.”
“Uh … you said we were in this together.” He tilts his head, furrows his brow as if I’ve asked him to solve an impossible equation. “You said you wouldn’t hurt me. You said you loved me.”
“I do love you, but it might not be real. You could’ve…”
“Made you love me?” He scoffs. “You can’t explain what we have, and I can’t prove my genetics didn’t influence our relationship. But I love you. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
The pain in my chest morphs into a piercing, all-consuming sting. He is the only man who has ever loved me. I thought we’d grow old together, spend the next sixty years of our lives kissing and drinking coffee. I wanted him like he wants me. Not anymore. I have to sacrifice the future we might’ve had for better odds, a chance to survive as a whole entity, not fragments.
“We’re done,” I say. “We have to be done.”
“Fine. I get it. No one can love the half-blood alien freak, so why ask, right?”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“Dramatic?” He smirks. “You’re the one who’s making a big deal about this. I would give you everything, Julie, if you asked. Why can’t you overlook the questions, get past your delusional suspicions, and accept that what we have is worth keeping?”
“Because every time I look at you, I see the end of the world,” I yell. “You’re a constant reminder of who ruined my family, what happened to my home. I don’t want to love you. I don’t want to kiss and spend time with the worst thing that’s happened to me.” Too far. Not true.
Jack emits a faint gasp, the sound someone makes when they’re punched in the stomach, and grits his teeth. “You’re a liar.” Water turns his eyes to glass. He leans forward until our faces are inches apart. “I’d rather not love the thing I’m waging war against.”
“Same here.” I turn and tromp up the hillside. Heartbreak burns through me, and sobs rattle my body before they reach my mouth. We’re done. Over.
I’ve made a huge mistake.
****
“Eat.” I lower a platter to the damp, concrete floor. “It’s time for us to have that talk.”
Colonel Buchanan yanks his chains and props himself against the rusty bunk bed. He glares at the rifle propped against my shoulder. “Do I look like an idiot to you? I know how these sorts of things work. Once I tell you what you want to know, you’ll kill me.”
“No, I won’t. It’s not good business.”
“Why else would you have brought that gun?”
“To protect myself.”
A single bulb illuminates the scarcely furnished storm cellar and shelves of canned produce, swings pendulum shadows across his weathered face. He rattles the chains. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Pardon the precaution.” I fish a notebook and pen from my pocket and toss them to him. “Give me the location of the City and its layout. List all possible entrance routes.”
“There’s no way to prevent what’s going to happen.” He fingers the pen and paper as if they decide his fate, which in all honesty, they do.
“Let’s say there is a way. If you had a chance to attack the City and smite the aliens in their own backyard, how would you do it?” When he hesitates, I drag a chair toward him, just out of reach, and sit. “You’re a bad man, Colonel Buchanan, but you could be better. Help me. Do it for Jack. I know you love him in your own strange way. Please.”
“You don’t ask easy questions.”
“I don’t want easy answers.”
Colonel Buchanan scoots to the mattress’s edge and snickers through a toothy grin, one that cuts through me like a poison-coated knife. “Atlanta is now their City. It’s protected by a smaller dome. Getting through the force field will be impossible.” He sketches a map of Severance.
“We already know how to get through.”
“Really? How?”
“There are some cards I’d rather not show before I play my hand.” I tap his paper with the rifle’s barrel. “Continue.”
He tilts the notepad and points to the crudely drawn city in the dome’s center. “The City is unlike anything you’ve seen or experienced. You and the Vestige will have to alter your appearances, mannerisms, and speech to blend in with the Pureblood population.”
“You can help us with that.”
“Maybe,” he says, “but I can’t fix your genetics. Before entering a building, taking transportation, or making a purchase within the City, one must place their hand on a tile-like scan that searches their DNA for the alien genetic marker. Those who have the marker are allowed clearance. Without it, they’re dead.” He scratches his chin and stares at the paper. “Only two of you will be able to enter the City. Jack will have to give you transfusions each night to insure the genetic marker stays within your system.”
“It is possible to trick the scans, then.”
“Yes, it’s possible.” He writes notations in the margins. “Your attack must be silent, an infiltration. There aren’t enough of you to win a war, but you’re smart. You can ruin them from within. Strike where they’re strongest, and they’ll crumble.” He sets the notebook beside him and connects with my line of sight as if to verify that what he said is true. “Give me the night to strategize. Tomorrow morning, I’ll have a plan of attack.”
“You’re cooperating. Why?”
“We have a common enemy. Besides, I owe it to Jack.” His words are pretty, but believing them would be like gulping a drink leftover from a frat party.
“Thank you.” I stand and grab a few of the diagrams from his lap before leaving.
When did I become the girl who hurts others to save herself? Did Jon’s murder change me, or have I been using his death, the kidnapping of my parents, and the bullet in my stomach as excuses for the transformation that’s come from seeing the dark and twisty truth and not caring about how it darkens me? Interrogations, bloody necks, aliens, and the apocalypse—I have to be better, I can’t become a lie.
An ink-black sky greets me when I exit the cellar. Flashlights coruscate near the tool shed, where Nash and Abram help Jack secure a satellite to the roof. I move parallel to them, zip up my jacket, and toy with his ID tags like a bad habit.
They’re cold against my skin.
He became the person I’d catch fireflies with on hot nights when the cicadas hissed and the bullfrogs croaked, the person who told me to stick my head out the car window so I could feel the estuary’s breeze on my face. He became my everything in an instant and now haunts the recesses of my memory as a profile, a silhouette, glimmering eyes and a deep dimple, warm hands that reach out for me to take hold before their offer expires. I’m no longer ignorant. The hold is broken, yet I still love him. I love him so much I don’t know how to tell him without it seeming inconsequential. What’s wrong with me? He is the one. He has always been the one. Why can’t I get past my fear and just be in love?
“Come help us, Julie,” Nash shouts. “Don’t you want to be a part of the action?”
Jack sits at the roof’s edge with a wrench in his hands. He looks at me, and I pray he can still read my face like a book. I need
him to know the truth. I need him to see past my layers.
If I seem to not want to be with him now, it’s only because love scares me too, more than manipulation, because love is a choice I make and not something forced upon me. I trust him, but I don’t trust myself. I must have time to trust myself so I can completely love him.
He’s the grenade. I’m the grenade. We’ll blow each other to pieces…
Together.
Chapter Seventeen
“We did not ask if he had seen any monsters, for monsters have ceased to be news. There is never any shortage of horrible creatures who prey on human beings, snatch away their food, or devour whole populations; but examples of wise social planning are not so easy to find.”
Thomas More, Utopia
Nash hovers over the worktable to my right, measuring and cutting strips of metal from the support beams we salvaged from a nearby warehouse. “You’re a quick learner, Stryker,” he yells over the roar of fire and grinding metal. “I ain’t never seen someone pick up the skill so fast.”
“If we’re able to fix the world, I guess I could work as a welder.” I use the torch to fuse together the doorframe’s lower left-hand corner. Sparks dance across the steel surface, fleeing from molten iron and flame. Sweat bullets drop from my mask and fizz, turning to gas.
“Nah, you can’t leave me, darlin’. You and Charlie are my crew. I’ll never find better sets of hands,” he says, “or better listeners.”
“That’s me: good hands and ears.” I unstrap my helmet and lift the windowpane—a gust of air chills my saturated flesh, crisp and fresh like jumping into a pool of mountain water. I haul another iron strip to the workspace. It kidnaps the yellow glow of electric lighting and ignites with rust hues.
“We’ll be finished with the frame in a few days.” Nash removes his mask and writes notations on a crudely drawn blueprint. “Good thing, too. We’re approaching a neap tide. The dome will be at its weakest gravitational lapse.” His fingernails are black with accumulated dirt.
“Better than waiting a month.” I replace my gas cylinder and check its gauges. “Does our frame conduct enough magnetic flux to reroute the force field?”
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