by Brian Yansky
I turn to Catlin. “Could the Hunter have planted something on Michael?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know exactly. Some kind of tracking device maybe.”
“Sure. It’s possible.”
“Wait, what?” Michael sounds outraged.
I ignore him and stay focused on Catlin. “Wouldn’t you have seen it, though, when you were treating him?”
“Not necessarily. I wasn’t looking for it. And to be honest, I’m not sure I would know it even if I found it. Sanginian talent is so advanced.”
“No way,” Michael says. “I’d know. I’d feel something. Wouldn’t I?”
“But that would mean . . .” Sam says.
“Jesus,” Catlin says.
Michael looks stricken. I can hear him thinking again that he would know — but what if he didn’t?
“It was his contingency plan,” I say. “The Hunter’s. In case we somehow managed to get Michael out of there. That way even if he lost, he could still win. He could track Michael.”
“Not just Michael,” Catlin says. “All of us.”
“All of us, then. It doesn’t matter. We’ve got to go back.”
We pile into our ships and set a course for the camp. Catlin and I join again and put up a shield.
“We have to get Running Bird a message,” I say.
“How?”
“I don’t know. If I could fall asleep or if we were in a sweat lodge, maybe I could dreamwalk.”
“I don’t think we have time for you to fall asleep.”
I try to think of Running Bird. What would he do? He’d probably tell me to stop whining and start acting like the Chosen One. Find the Warrior Spirit in me. Use it.
“Push me,” I say to Catlin.
“Push you?”
“Give me a push out of the ship.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Mentally. Push me mentally. Send my essence, or whatever it is, falling.”
“Still a bad idea,” she says.
“Stay joined with me. It will be like bungee jumping. You’ll be the cord that yanks me back.”
“It’s too dangerous,” she says.
“We don’t have a choice,” I say. “I need you to trust me. Push. Now!”
So she pushes. I call the Warrior Spirit, which feels kind of like shouting off a cliff and waiting to hear something besides an echo. I don’t hear anything but my voice, but I do fall. I fall very fast. I still don’t feel any Warrior Spirit.
“I’m pulling you back!” Catlin shouts.
“Don’t!” I shout.
I send her a picture of the camp destroyed. It’s not real. I make it up. It looks pretty real, though. And she gets the message. She lets me go.
I’m more in control now, more flying instead of falling. I picture Running Bird, because somehow I know that this is how I get to him. I imagine his large arms and that muffin-top stomach, the brown spots on his hands and face, the long white ponytail.
I see him in his tent, which is up above the camp, near his sweat lodge. He’s sitting in his tent, and he’s holding something in his hands and staring at it. It’s a picture, I realize. Him and Doc and a woman. They’re all young.
“Running Bird,” I say.
He looks up. At first he doesn’t see anything, but then he looks in a different way. I can feel him do it. He sees me.
“You asleep?” he asks.
“No. Listen —”
“Didn’t think so. You’re dreamwalking, but you aren’t dreaming. You’re getting to be a regular prodigy, Warrior Boy.”
“The Hunter,” I say.
“What?”
I’m being pulled away, pulled back up. Catlin is pulling me back. I try to tell her to stop, but she’s too far away. “The Hunter!” I shout at Running Bird just before I’m yanked up out of the tent.
I’m back in the ship.
“Why’d you pull me back?” I shout at her.
“You were slipping from me. I almost lost you.”
I was so close. “I don’t know if he understood.”
“But you made it. How is that possible?”
“I don’t think it was me,” I admit. “I mean, I think I had some help.”
She nods. She thinks so, too, I guess.
“I’m going to pray that he understood,” she says.
We don’t talk much after that. We speed through the blue moonlight. She prays to her gods. I don’t know for sure that there’s a Warrior Spirit in me, but I’m pretty sure what I just did was a leap of faith. So I thank him for his help and pray he will help us again.
The camp is gone. I can feel it before we land, and the feeling only gets stronger as we drive up the mountain in Sam’s truck. Catlin and I make one of our best shields, and it’s a good thing because we see ships in the sky over us. One, then two, then another pass right above us. The third slows but keeps going. We get to the ski lodge, hide the truck, and hurry up the trail.
We approach from the side with the densest woods and work our way above the camp so we can get a good view of it. Even though I expected it to be bad, the sight of scattered objects, mostly missing tents, and smashed machinery from the main tent still disturbs me. This was our home, and it isn’t anymore. But then I realize I don’t see scattered bodies — which I would if the New Americans had been caught by the hunters — and I feel better. They escaped. That’s something. Everything, really.
A few aliens mill about, but they don’t detect us. We’re well hidden by the woods and our shield.
“Where is everybody?” Michael asks, whispering even though he could shout and the aliens wouldn’t hear him.
“They got away,” Catlin says. “Jesse warned them.”
“How?” Sam asks, looking at me intently.
“I dreamwalked,” I say. “I managed to find Running Bird. I guess he understood my warning.”
“Maybe you really are the Chosen One,” Sam says, but her usual sarcasm is unnervingly absent.
“Where would they go?” Catlin asks Sam.
“Doc had another camp on the south side of Taos,” Sam says. “It’s not as nice, but that’s where we were supposed to meet if anything happened.”
Before we go, Catlin slips into Michael’s mind to try to find the tracking device. It takes her twenty minutes to find it. It’s not a device at all, though. More like what Catlin would call a spell. The Hunter is connected to Michael. Catlin breaks the connection.
We hike back down to Sam’s truck, and Catlin and I weave a cloak over it, then we drive down the main road and into Taos, none of us saying a word. There are aliens patrolling around camp, but once we get by them, the road is clear. We’re lucky the hunters aren’t around. We’re lucky.
The new camp is rough and unmade and nothing like the old camp. Everyone looks like they’ve had a bad night. Some people are sleeping, curled up on the ground. Others just sit in small groups, looking dazed.
They do look glad to see us, though. An old man says, “Running Bird said the Warrior Spirit in you flew to him and warned him. We escaped just in time. Thank you, Warrior Spirit.”
Others thank me. Or they thank the Spirit of the Warrior in me, anyway. People seem lifted a little by this hope that the Spirit is stirring in me and helping them, but I feel a familiar feeling, too: loss. It’s all over this camp. We’d started to think of our former camp as home, but there is no home.
“Where’s Running Bird?” I ask the old man who spoke to me.
“He is with Dylan, preparing for the funeral.”
Catlin groans softly.
“Doc?” I say.
Then I realize that it’s not just the loss of the old camp that I’ve been sensing but of Doc as well. He led a lot of these people into the mountains after the invasion and kept them alive, and now he’s gone.
Sam, Catlin, Michael, and I are all exhausted, but we go to the funeral. How can we not go?
They’ve found a little place up against a ston
e wall. They have Doc laid out there on a bed of leaves. They have a freshly dug hole next to him.
Running Bird nods solemnly when he sees us. Dylan pretends not to see us. Lauren is up front, along with Dylan’s sidekicks. Everyone walks in a solemn line past Doc, paying their last respects. It’s strange; no one is crying, yet I can hear weeping all around me.
When we get close, Dylan moves between us and the body.
“If you’re so powerful,” he says, “why couldn’t you stop him from dying? Why couldn’t you stop the aliens from finding us?”
It doesn’t feel like he’s lashing out because of grief. It feels more calculated than that, more like a performance. As soon as I think this, I feel guilty. Doc was his father. I know what it’s like to lose a father.
I just want to say good-bye to Doc, I tell him. I‘m sorry. I’m very sorry.
“We can’t fight them,” Dylan says loudly, looking all around. “All we can do is run. You can see how it is. They will kill us all eventually.
“My father gave his life for New America,” he continues. “And I will do the same. He would have wanted me to serve New America, and I will.”
There’s some grumbling that this is not the time to talk of such things, but mostly there’s silence. Then others get up to say words about Doc, Robert Penderson among them. Running Bird is the last to go. He sings a death song and talks about how Doc is still alive in many moments and they should all remember this. No one truly dies. “I will especially remember the moments when I beat Lorenzo in chess, which were few but good ones.” And then all the words are said and Doc’s body is lowered into the grave and that’s all. And it doesn’t seem enough. It doesn’t seem nearly enough.
I seek out Running Bird after the funeral. He welcomes me into his tent, which is once again set apart from the rest of the camp. He tells me about getting my message and putting out the warning to the camp. Thanks to Doc, they had an evacuation plan. The storage cave had a hidden exit to the other side of the mountain. They hid inside the cave while the aliens searched the area. Doc was still alive at this point, though he wasn’t conscious — he would never regain consciousness, as it turned out — but he was still alive enough that Running Bird was able to join with him and create a shield over the cave.
“Don’t know how he did it,” Running Bird says. “Somehow he kept himself alive long enough to get us out of there.”
“You and Doc saved them,” I say.
Because of you, he mindspeaks. You must feel the Warrior Spirit now.
I say maybe. He says that without Doc, New America may not hold together. They need the Warrior Spirit.
“We need you, Warrior Boy.”
When I come out of Running Bird’s tent, I see Catlin. She looks as tired as I feel, but I appreciate that she’s stayed up waiting for me.
“Can you two do a cloak over the camp?” Running Bird says, poking his head out of the tent. “Don’t know if I have the strength to do it. I can help if you need me.”
We say we can make one. We do, but it’s not one of our best efforts. I hope it’s good enough.
We make our way to the new supply area to get sleeping bags and then head off in search of a nice spot to lay them down. The sun is out and bright and warm but not hot. We agree that a shady tree would be the best sleeping spot. We look for a good one that’s a little off from the main gathering of people.
“I know you just want to sleep,” Catlin says. “I do, too. But I need to ask you about something.”
I point to a tree that has a nice pocket of shade and some grassy weeds underneath it. She nods.
“What’s wrong?”
She looks around like she’s afraid someone might be listening. “I felt something strange when I walked by Doc’s body,” she says. “Like there was something altered in him.”
“Altered how?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “He just felt different.”
“Well, he’s, you know, dead,” I point out. I know. Snarky. Tired.
“I think we should talk to Marta. Something wasn’t right about Doc.”
“Okay,” I say. “We can talk to her. I’ve got to rest first, though.”
“Rest first,” she agrees.
We lie down in the grass, so tired we hardly manage to lay out our bags.
“Just rest our eyes,” I say. “Maybe just rest our eyes for a minute, and then we’ll talk to her.”
“Just for a minute,” she agrees.
I wake up to the sound of giggling. I open my eyes and see two girls looking down at me and Catlin. We have our arms wrapped around each other. Catlin is still asleep. The girls giggle some more when they see that I’m awake, see me become aware of how tangled my body is with Catlin’s.
“Go away,” I whisper to the girls.
That really ups the giggling. They run off.
Catlin wakes up, sleepy eyed. She almost smiles with her almost smile. She yawns prettily, stretching her thin brown arms.
“What time is it?” she asks.
Then she hears the girls giggling from a little distance.
“What’s that?” she says.
“Girls,” I say. “They saw we were sleeping tangled together.”
“Sorry,” she says, pulling away and blushing.
“No reason to be sorry,” I say, already missing her warmth.
Just then, an alien ship passes overhead. It banks and goes right, and it reminds me once again that I’m not free.
“They’re getting closer,” I say. “They know we’re near.”
We work on strengthening the cloak we put over the camp earlier. It’s not powerful enough, though. Not for the long term. And now Doc is gone. He always knew what to do. Like my father. I miss him — I miss them both. And now there’s an empty place in New America. I feel it, and everyone else feels it. And I feel something else: a lot of people are depending on me to fill it.
“They’re too close,” I say. “You know they are. They’ll find us eventually.”
“Maybe,” Catlin says.
This irritates me. Maybe? No maybe. I’m tired of pretending. Even if I do have the Warrior Spirit in me — and that’s still an “if” as far as I’m concerned — it wasn’t enough to stop them from finding us. And it won’t be enough to save the rest of us.
And Doc is dead. He held us together. What’s going to hold us together now? I’m so sick of losing people. Losing everyone.
“We can’t get far enough away, Catlin. That’s the truth. Stay or hide in caves, they’ll find us eventually. It’s all just putting off the inevitable. I don’t know why I thought the rebel camp would be any different. I was fooling myself.”
Catlin looks awake now. “What’s this all about, Jesse?”
“What do you think it’s about?” I snap.
“I don’t know,” she says reasonably. “That’s why I asked.”
“People just keep dying,” I say. “The aliens are too strong, and there are too many of them. It’s time we faced that.”
“You’re wrong.”
“We can’t win. It comes down to that.”
“You forget that we’re changing,” Catlin says. “We’re getting stronger. It means something. And you — you can do things no talented person has ever been able to do. I believe you’re chosen to get us through this. I have faith in you.”
Her cheeks are flushed with color.
“I didn’t ask for your faith,” I snap. “I don’t want it.”
She looks like I’ve just strangled her puppy. What did she expect? She’s a fool to put her faith in me. They all are.
She reaches out to touch me, and I take a step back.
“You’re stupid,” I say. “We are going to die, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Least of all me.”
She turns her back on me and walks off. Then she starts to run. I know from the shiver down her back, from the way her head bows, that she’s crying.
“Catlin!” I shout.
But s
he doesn’t stop.
“I didn’t mean —”
I did, though. I meant everything I just said.
I don’t run after her. I go the opposite way instead, into the thick trees and away from the trail. I climb. Just like I did that first morning in the old camp. The sun drops below a peak to the west, and the temperature starts to drop. I keep climbing.
My dad tries to talk to me. He appears on the trail in front of me. “Are you really going to run from your problems?” He sounds disappointed. I don’t let him say any more. I make him go away. I think how I don’t believe in him, not really, and as soon as I think this, he’s gone.
I don’t believe in anything. I don’t believe in the Warrior Spirit. I don’t believe we can fight and win. I don’t believe we can even survive. I’ve been pretending. I’ve just been fooling myself.
I struggle up a rocky slope. I stumble a few times on the loose rocks, but I keep going. I think I might just climb all the way to the top of this mountain. It’s the kind of useless act I’m totally used to.
It’s all useless. The end is the same no matter what we do. We die. What’s the point?
At the top of the slope, I have to rest to catch my breath. In the fading light, I see something move. It’s not small. And not alone. Two other shapes are with it. I brace myself for a fight.
I move a few steps closer and accidentally kick a rock. It clatters down the mountain in the still evening air.
Three surprised brown and black faces turn toward me. A deer and her two fawns.
They’re beautiful.
How can they be here? Fawns.
They stare at me for what seems like minutes but is probably only seconds, and then the mother turns and runs and the fawns follow.
How?
I collapse onto the loose rocks, which poke into my backside.
How is it possible they’re here? They were all killed.
But then I realize that of course it’s possible. That’s life. The aliens didn’t kill off all life. The deer found each other, and now there are fawns that will eventually have fawns of their own. It’s life doing what life does.
I’m the stupid one. I’m letting them take my life now without a fight. I’m giving up. I won’t do that. I won’t give them my life. They will have to fight me for it.