“There she is.” He stood by the driver’s side door, arms spread in delight at the sight of her.
He was relaxed. Good. That meant he had no idea about Copernicus, the van, or where his precious experiment was headed.
Tonight, Harris Kole would be the one getting fucked in this clearing, not her.
“Funny we should meet here,” Kole said mockingly. “Did you pick this spot, or did I? For the life of me, I can’t remember.”
“I did,” Claudia said. “You’ll see why.”
“Ha!” He wagged a finger of his gloved hand, approaching her. “You, with the mind games. I always liked that. Of all the girls, you were the feisty one. But let me spare us the foreplay, Claudia. Tell me where you put the boy, and I’ll go easy on you both. It’ll be like you never escaped, I promise.”
“I’ll tell you where my son is,” Claudia said. “He’s in heaven, where you’ll never touch him again.”
“Is that right? You killed him?”
“I freed him.”
He slapped her hard enough to leave her dazed.
“You think you’re smarter than me, you little ment bitch? You think I can’t get into your mind and find the answer myself?”
Ment. Someday, people would call Michael that. Claudia hated the slur, but she welcomed hearing it tonight. It would only serve to fuel the flames.
“Don’t you clam up on me,” Kole said, grabbing her chin.
Claudia opened her mouth—not to speak but to spit in his face. Kole slapped her again.
The rage was brimming now.
“Thank you,” Claudia told him.
Kole shook his head. With a disappointed sigh, he turned to one of his men. “Let’s wrap this up. Call in a region-wide search, standard procedure times ten. I want everyone in on it.”
“Yes, sir.” The soldier reached for his two-way radio.
Claudia stood on shaky legs. She glanced at the hip holster of the soldier standing closest to her. The leather strap over the gun’s grip was unbuttoned. The man had been careless tonight, probably because his prisoner was a woman.
And because they had no idea what Claudia could do. Otherwise, they’d have tranquilized her into a coma by now.
Lifting the radio to his lips, the soldier called in the search. Kole clamped a hand around Claudia’s chin, his grin malicious.
“Be sure to use a tranq,” he warned the others. “Like I said, she’s a feisty one.”
“Yes, sir,” one of the men said.
He released her and turned away, fishing one of his disgusting cigars out of his coat pocket. Claudia had gone to bed many nights with that nasty smell on her skin, transferred from his own.
The soldiers pulled her toward the car. One reached into a pouch on his belt and slipped out a leather kit. He unzipped it and removed a syringe.
Claudia’s response was immediate.
“Blind… All of you… blind!”
The command sent them staggering, moaning in agony, too stunned to consider going for their guns.
“My eyes,” one soldier howled. “I can’t see. I can’t fucking see!”
“For fuck’s sake, shoot her!”
Claudia searched for Harris Kole, but the man had disappeared. His freshly lit cigar lay smoldering by her feet.
She had another problem. The lights in the clearing seemed to pulse, the darker parts blacker than before, the lights way too bright. One side of her body felt numb.
My God, I’m having a stroke…
Good.
Locating the soldier with the loose pistol, she grabbed his gun before he realized what was happening and shot him twice. The others flinched and ducked. Claudia aimed.
Kole’s strategy was simple. Hide like a coward and wait for the drug to knock her out. Once that happened, he could haul her away, keep her strapped to a bed for the rest of her life, hopped up on drugs that would reveal her every passing thought to the men in the white coats.
He had underestimated her yet again. Claudia wasn’t afraid of death. Not anymore.
She shot the remaining soldiers, feeling nothing except a thickening exhaustion. Walking felt like trudging through knee-high mud. Her thoughts became heavy and slow. She stepped into the beams of the headlamps, her shadow elongating.
Then she pressed the gun to her temple.
“Go ahead,” Kole said from somewhere in the trees. “Do it. I could breed a hundred more just like you.”
Not like me, she said, sending the message telepathically. Not… Type I… Not anymore… you coward…
“Good for you,” Kole said, chuckling hopelessly. “I should have paid more attention to you. The brains behind the beauty.”
But he hadn’t seen it, and his mistake was eating away at him. Despite her brain’s wrecked state, Claudia could feel the anger and dread radiating from Kole’s mind as he considered tonight’s consequences. His father wasn’t going to be happy about this—and the One President, Harold Targin Kole, was not a man you could piss off, even if you were his precious son.
Billions of your father’s money, she sent to rub it in further. Gone.
Kole seethed. “Do it. Blow your worthless, spiteful brains out. Burn in hell afterward. I’ll find your boy, and I’ll return him where he belongs in no time.”
Claudia’s knees went weak. The world tilted. Taking in a lungful of pine-scented air, she gazed up at the stars. Her vision doubled, multiplying them. Her father had once told her all humans had stars in them, that the entire planet had been fused together from bits and pieces of those distant bodies of light. She hoped that was true. In Michael’s case, she knew it was.
He would burn bright someday. Maybe brighter than the world could handle.
“Your name is Michael,” she told the stars.
Closing her eyes, she pulled the trigger.
Episode I
Republic of Rage
In toil, one eats.
In obedience, one breathes.
In acceptance, one loves.
Slogan of the One Party
Chapter 1
The citizens of the Western Democratic People’s Republic of America made sure to avoid the fence. Only death lay east of it—that much was a given—but the fence itself held the promise of a quick and grisly fate.
Through its chain-link web, the gun turrets were clearly visible, swiveling, always adjusting themselves, taking aim at anyone who came too close, ready to shoot any daring individual who—somehow, impossibly—managed to cross to the other side.
Michael never touched the fence, but he liked to walk close enough that he could have grazed his fingertips against its metal links. Only an insane person would actually do it. The fence was electrified, and rumor had it the turrets might shoot even if a person remained on the legal side, just for touching it. The illegal side of the fence—known as “the Kill Zone”—was roughly a hundred feet of darkly paved no-man’s land between the fence and the wall it was meant to guard. In the Kill Zone, the turrets would immediately tear a body to shreds.
All of this—the electrified fence, the Kill Zone, the turrets—was meant to prevent citizens of the People’s Republic from doing one thing: approaching the massive wall everyone called “the Line.”
Reality stopped at the Line. A fifty-foot-tall mass of concrete, it loomed over the city’s outermost sectors, featureless except for the gun turrets, occasional propaganda posters, and well-guarded checkpoints every few hundred miles. It surrounded the People’s Republic on all sides, except where the coast met the Pacific Ocean, which was guarded by gunboats. Beyond the wall lay the place no one from the WDPRA was even supposed to think about visiting: the Eastlands.
Michael stopped. As he often did, he stood in place for a moment to stare at that wall, despite the pain in his shoulders from the weight of the grocery bags he held in both hands. Silently, he cursed it. All his life, like everyone else, he’d been unable to ignore the Line’s presence. He wished he could see through it. What would he glimpse on the othe
r side? What secrets did the Eastlands hold?
A gun turret buzzed, aiming threateningly at Michael from atop the Line.
“You wouldn’t do it,” he said, narrowing his eyes at the vulture-like machine.
A red light began to blink above the barrel, once per second. Michael’s breath caught in his chest. What the hell was he doing? He should get out of here, keep walking, maybe even get off the street.
Instead, he just stood there like a dummy, his mouth hanging slightly open.
“How could you?” he said, gaping as the light began to blink even faster. “I’m not even doing anything.”
The light was flashing madly now. Michael’s eyes widened. His heart hammered inside his chest. Did he really want to die? No, of course not, but if death was so scary, why was he more excited in this moment than he’d ever felt in his entire life? Why couldn’t he move to get away?
The turret let out an electronic bleat—an alarm Michael had never heard before.
“Oh, spite me,” he said, retreating a step.
His entire body was flung backward. Michael was sure he’d been shot, but there had been no sound of gunfire, no pain. The grocery bags slipped from his fingers as he fell and landed on something—a person—who was now struggling to get out from beneath him.
“What—sorry—I…” Michael said, rolling off the man who had yanked him by the shirt and probably saved his life. The man was in his seventies or eighties, so gaunt his face looked like it was missing cheekbones.
The alarm had stopped. Michael squinted up at the turret, noticing the light was no longer blinking. They were safe.
“Boy, you should know better,” the old man said. “Almost got yourself killed. What are you, stupid or something?”
“Must be,” Michael said with a shrug. “Thank you.”
The man eyed the food that had slipped out of Michael’s plastic bags. He appeared uncomfortable, but pressed on. “Maybe… maybe you got some extra ration slips? I just need one to get me through the day.”
Michael shook his head. “I used them to buy this, which is yours if you want it.”
His dad was going to kill him, but he could say he got mugged. Happened to people all the time.
“Really?” The man’s eyes widened as he stared at the food. “I knew today was a lucky day,” he whispered almost reverently as he bent to scoop up what he could. “I knew it as soon as I woke up.”
“Here, use the bags,” Michael said, helping him. “I’m the one who’s lucky.”
“Thank you, boy.”
“For what?” Michael asked.
Confusion filled the man’s face. “Whatcha mean?”
“You saved my life,” Michael said. “If you hadn’t shown up, they’d be scraping bits of me off the pavement right now.”
The man smiled and nodded once, as if to say, Whatever you want; just let me go home now.
“You know Lanza’s?” Michael asked. “Italian restaurant, corner of—”
“Yes, yes,” the man said. “I’ve seen it.”
“Well, my parents own it. I work there. Come by any time for lunch or dinner. No ration slips necessary. It’s on the house, okay?”
Moisture gathered in the man’s eyes. “Thank you again, boy. This is truly my lucky day.”
Without another word, he spun around and limped away, body bent from the weight of the bags.
“Thank you,” Michael said, his voice a shaky whisper. “Wrath, I should be thanking you.”
The old man whistled a carefree tune as he hobbled off, something Michael hadn’t heard a person do in years. He had almost forgotten what whistling sounded like.
Chapter 2
Lanza’s served the worst Italian food imaginable.
Michael didn’t have much to compare it to except a few local competitors who weren’t much better, but he knew pasta wasn’t supposed to taste like slime-coated wax paper.
It wasn’t his parents’ fault. Cooking methods weren’t the reason for the city’s terrible-tasting cuisine. In the Lanzas’ case, it was mostly the government distribution center’s fault for carrying exactly one spice—a dried Italian-seasoning blend manufactured from mostly non-organic ingredients. According to Michael’s father, the seasoning tasted like oregano the same way that human shit tasted like flowers.
It was better than starving. The country had been steeped in famine for months now, and Michael was lucky to eat a meal once a week that wasn’t pasta. Vegetables were a pleasant surprise. So was fruit that wasn’t bruised, battered, or sour.
And meat—he had forgotten the taste of meat altogether.
He was about to lose himself in another one of his elaborate food fantasies—his favorite involved a tower of juicy hamburgers with piping hot cheese dripping down the sides—when a voice yanked him out of his reverie.
“Mike!”
It came from outside the building, yet it hit him like a battering ram. Had his father found out about the groceries? Michael had hurried into the restaurant’s basement as quickly as possible to make it look like he was putting the groceries away. No one had seen him enter empty-handed. But his father was a meticulous man. If he’d decided to go down there, to count the inventory…
“Mike, you better answer me. Now!”
“Sorry, Dad,” Michael shouted. “I had the water on full blast. What do you need?”
“Don’t what me,” his father yelled. “You left the trash bags in front of the dumpsters again. What are you, slow? They go inside the containers. Do I have to toss you in there to show you how it works?”
Michael sighed. “What’s with me today?” he muttered as he pushed through the screen door and made his way across the yard.
When his shift was over, Michael rushed through kitchen cleanup. When he was done, he gobbled a dripping hunk of stale bread dipped in tomato sauce, then ran upstairs to his bedroom, still chewing.
He could feel the fatigue in his bones. Sleep had been scarce the night before—two hours, by his estimate, and only one hour the previous night—but there was a good reason for it. He had stayed up working on a Handy Dan until three in the morning, the result of a rare opportunity that was not only exciting and absorbing, but also incredibly dangerous.
He wouldn’t be able to get a full night’s rest until it was finished. The Handy Dan theme song had already begun to play on endless repeat in his mind:
Handy Dan: he sweeps and wipes and mops and talks. There’s nothing he can’t do!
The radio ads were wrong, of course. Handy Dan was nothing more than an awkward contraption on wheels that zipped around flat surfaces, bumping into things and spilling cleaning solution all over the kitchen floor.
Michael’s father hated the thing, but he was required to have two activated during business hours, one in the kitchen and another in the dining room. All businesses were, to stay in accordance with Federal Law, especially restaurants where alcohol was served. Drunken people were the ones most likely to speak out against the regime.
Handy Dan prevented that kind of disruptive activity by monitoring the place, using powerful cameras and microphones that made the rest of its hardware look like a jumble of gears and pulleys.
Unlike his father, Michael actually liked the stupid things. Sure, he despised the reason behind Handy Dan’s existence—the need the One Party had to spy on its own citizens—but he admired certain aspects of the machine that very few people were aware of.
The one in his bedroom was not his father’s. He’d found this one in a trash container a few days earlier. One of its long, tubular limbs had been hanging over the edge like the arm of a passed-out drunk. It might as well have been beckoning to him, promising Michael a wealth of knowledge and treasure if he would only give it a new home.
Whoever had tossed the thing had broken Federal Law. Handy Dans could not be thrown away but had to be reclaimed. This made Michael’s discovery of the appliance a rare and golden opportunity.
He had discreetly removed it from the dumpst
er, hidden it in a trash bag, and lugged it up to his bedroom, heart pounding the entire way. He made sure to wait until off-hours so the machine’s microphones wouldn’t pick up any sounds that could identify his parents’ restaurant. I could end up in a labor camp, he’d warned himself constantly throughout the trip. No matter the danger, he couldn’t bring himself to stop. It was like walking alongside the Kill Zone, fingers within reach of those electrified links. Michael was beginning to wonder if he really did have a death wish.
Closing his bedroom door, Michael twisted the locks he’d installed. Shivering, he delved deeper into the room and dug a sweater out of a pile of clothing on the floor. His parents kept the heat turned off on the second floor to save money. He threw the sweater over his head, shoved his arms through the sleeves, and went straight for the bundle in the corner of the room.
Michael lugged it over to the rickety wooden desk, unwrapped the sheet, and took a moment to admire his prize. About as big as a watermelon, the Handy Dan was made of sheet metal, painted blue and silver, and had three wheels by which it moved around. The arms were long, awkward appendages with metal clamps at the ends. They often flailed wildly when the thing was on, spilling mop buckets, knocking over mugs, and elevating his father’s blood pressure to dangerous levels. The bot had a head with a wide, painted grin, responsible for causing nightmares in small children… and probably adults, too. Its eyes were huge, cartoonish lenses Michael had covered in electrical tape to avoid being face-scanned.
The reason he was so impressed by Handy Dans—and paranoid about slipping up with this one—was the live-feed transmitter built into each model. The hardware was more advanced than anything he had ever encountered, capable of transmitting gigabytes of data across several miles every second. This was how the government managed to have eyes and ears all over the country without the burden of paying for all the warm bodies such a task would otherwise require.
Bloodcrier: The Complete Two-Book Series Page 2