Push (Beat series Book 2)

by Jared Garrett

  “I know.” Dyana’s voice echoed across the site she’d chosen for us to camp in.

  Jan smiled and met my gaze. “I better go help set up.”

  “Okay.” I watched her go.

  I got my stuff organized and wandered over to where Melisa was setting up her sleeping space. My wrist had begun to really throb. Which reminded me of something I should have found out earlier.

  “Hey, do you know if anyone else was hurt?” I helped Melisa unroll her mat.

  “Minor injuries, mostly,” James said from the other side of Melisa’s spot.

  “Pol’s ankle,” Melisa said. “Other than that, not really.”

  “Except for you, of course,” James said.

  “The guy who always has to be the center of attention,” Melisa said.

  “What? I haven’t had everybody worried about me for a few seconds,” James said, doing a really bad impersonation of me.

  “I’d better get burned by this otherwise innocent-looking box,” Melisa said. “After getting shot, of course.”

  They exchanged a look and burst out laughing.

  I forced a laugh. So now really bad burns and a bullet hole in your side were something to laugh about? “You two sure are funny.” I noticed how near James’s space was to Melisa’s. Were these two always this close?

  “Very true,” Melisa said.

  I stood there for a minute, trying to think of something to say. Melisa helped me out. “So you were saying the Ranjers’ body armor suits changed colors?” I’d told them what I’d seen in the forest before we left the destroyed campsite

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess we’ve always been on the run, so we’ve never noticed. But when I was hiding in the stream, I saw this Ranjer’s legs change color to match the water.”

  “That’s incredible,” James said. “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “Then why wouldn’t it work when we tried it?” Melisa asked. We’d pulled armor off a Ranjer and tried it on, but it hadn’t changed color.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, it didn’t fit me very well,” James said. “And it had fit that Ranjer like a second skin, like it was made specifically for him.”

  “That doesn’t answer why it didn’t work wh—”

  James cut me off. “Let me finish. It might be keyed biometrically to the Ranjer’s DNA or something. So it works only for him.”

  That was a great point. “Holland’s smart enough to do something like that.”

  “True,” Melisa said. “And that helmet—it looked like it did some amazing stuff. We know it has thermal and light sensors. I wonder what else it can do.”

  “We need to get some armor like that,” I said.

  “It’s not as if it stops bullets forever,” James said. “Fire ten, fifteen bullets and they go down. Unless you get a lucky shot in.”

  “Like I usually do,” Melisa said. She pulled a tube of protein paste from her pack and sat on her opened bed mat. “Dinner time.”

  I stuck out my tongue in disgust. “I can’t believe you still eat that.”

  “It’s convenient,” Melisa said.

  “Never goes bad, either,” James said. He should know; the tubes had come from the Enforsers’ pods. It turned out that the pods had been outfitted so Enforsers could basically live on them for a while.

  “No,” I said, turning away. “Because they start bad. Can’t get worse than awful.”

  Melisa and James laughed as I stepped over and around roots. “Maybe so,” James called.

  Those two sure are friendly. I pushed the dumb thought away. James was much older than Melisa and me. I got back to my sleeping mat and studied our camping area. We were in a clearing, although plenty of skinny saplings and old pine needles covered the ground. Long tree branches still obscured us from view from above.

  James had a point. The armor provided only a little protection from bullets and stuff, but it would still be useful to help us hide. Besides, wearing the enemy’s uniforms was a proven technique for us, if you thought about it. At least, we’d been able to pull off their ammunition cuffs and belts and use them. And their keepers worked fine for us.

  I tried to picture where we were in relation to New Frisko, which was now abandoned. We’d learned in school where old Frisko had been and why New Frisko was built so far inland—the tsunamis had made the Bug survivors scared of the coast, so the new city had been built near a huge swath of hilly forest more than fifty kilometers from old San Francisco. A long mountain range ran to the east of New Frisko.

  We had headed north since leaving the caves, doing our best to keep out of sight from any drones or patrols. Annie had led the way, with her squad fanned out through the forest to the left and right. She was one of the luckiest ones. She and her parents and baby sister Amy had all made it out of New Frisko together. Amy was with the other babies, along with Annie’s mom and dad. Annie had to be looking forward to seeing them.

  Annie was maybe two years older than me and was almost as tall as James. She didn’t talk much. Most of the time she was watching the world around her, watching people talk and work. Sometimes I wondered if she felt alone out here with a bunch of strangers, but it didn’t seem to bother her. She’d volunteered to join us, and her parents had been mad enough about the Bug and Holland’s terrible actions that they’d let her. She was probably the smartest person I knew. I’d seen her get so thoughtful while walking that she’d almost walked into a thorn bush. She would watch and listen to arguments, then talk quietly, basically solving whatever the problem was.

  And she was amazing with her keeper. I’d seen her shoot a leaf off a tree with a rubber bullet from thirty meters away. Add to that how strong and fast she was and it wasn’t surprising that she’d become a squad leader along with me, Koner, and Dyana. I sometimes wondered why Melisa hadn’t wanted to lead a squad, but I liked working with her. She was smart, too, and thought of things I would never consider. Like the projectors. People had thought we should take them along, maybe use them as weapons. But Melisa had pointed out that Holland might have thought of that and he had a history of putting trackers in things. So we’d left the projectors in a pile in one of the caves. I never would have thought of that.

  I pulled an apple out of my pack and took a bite. Still the greatest thing ever. How could the New Chapter have thought that protein paste and nutrient gel were better than this stuff? Maybe ten meters away, I spotted Koner making camp along with Pol, both of their faces slack. David and Koner had been really close. Koner’s squad, a few girls my age and a man who had lost his entire family in the New Frisko escape, surrounded Pol and Koner. While I watched, one of the girls—Sara maybe?—drew closer to Koner and took his hand, talking quietly to him.

  Good. He needs somebody.

  I counted in my head. The Ranjers had killed more than half of our group and taken at least ten people captive. My parents, Jan’s dad, and several others.

  We had less than twenty people left.

  This is crazy. Stupid, too. What do we think we’re going to do out here? I thought back to that first night, arguing with Melisa and Bren about what came next after I’d proved the Bug was gone. Except it hadn’t been gone, not really.

  I’d never wanted to start a rebellion or anything. I just wanted to be free.

  But here we were, basically rebels, in some kind of war with Adam Holland, the murderer of nearly the entire human race. And he was pretty determined to murder a good number of the rest of humanity.

  A chilly breeze blew through the trees, and I wished we could have a fire. But we never had a fire at night. Luckily we didn’t need one to cook food. Pol and I had rigged a pod propulsion unit to be a stove. Lexi and Krista were setting it up now. Annie showed up and cooked some meat from a deer that she’d taken yesterday. James and a few others erected an opaque thermal shield cloth above the campsite. It would hide any light we made from drones or other watchers in the sky, as well as obscuri
ng our body heat. It only worked that way if it was a few meters away from our bodies—it had something to do with ambient temperature. The Enforsers had taken it from some Wanderers they’d caught.

  By the time I lay down on my sleeping pad, my left wrist was throbbing again. The pain had been returning for a while as we walked, but I’d kept it to myself, not wanting to have everybody’s attention on me. Besides, nobody really spoke during the hike. We were probably all in a little bit of shock.

  As I lowered myself to my sleeping pad, I bumped my wrapped arm and hissed in pain.

  “Nik,” Melisa said, “do you need more painkiller?”

  I wanted to scream yes. “Uh, maybe a little.”

  James came over. “Need a shot?”

  This pain was much different from when I broke my arm. That had been a dull ache that I could work with. This, though, was insane. It was like a burning beetle had burrowed under my skin and was cooking my wrist from the inside out—at the same time that it was chewing on the bones of my wrist. The image made me shudder.

  “Yeah. That would be good.”

  He loaded the injector with a dose of painkiller and pressed it against my left arm. A cool sensation cascaded down my arm, washing the hot pain away. Wonderful stuff. Better than an apple.

  Silence settled over the campsite. The singing of insects and whispers of leaves covered us like a soft blanket.

  “What do we do now?” Koner’s voice sounded far away.

  I craned to see him. He was sitting on his mat, looking at me, then Dyana, and everyone else.

  “Seriously. What do we do?”

  “What do you mean?” Krista asked.

  “Holland’s got us. We can’t fight him. The Ranjers will keep finding and killing us. We can’t win.” Koner dragged his fingers over the forest floor. “So what’s the point? What do we do now?”

  I sat up taller, stretching out my spine, and glanced around. Why was everyone looking at me? I shook my head. Holland had my parents and a few others. He had what seemed like an endless supply of Ranjers who had more weapons than I could imagine. He’d been lying, killing people, and hiding the worst secret in history for decades. We were new to this.

  Koner was right. We had no chance.

  “Bug that,” Pol said. “Spam all that.” He looked Koner in the eye, then me. It felt like he was challenging me to argue with him. “I don’t know what we do, but we don’t stop. No way. Holland’s got to feel what we’re feeling.”

  “But he just killed—” Koner cut himself off.

  “And he has my dad,” Jan said. “And Nik’s parents. And a bunch of others.”

  “I don’t care!” Pol stopped. “I mean, no, I do care, but we can’t let that stop us. We have to get him.”

  “Koner’s right,” I said. “We don’t have a chance.” Almost everybody wound up yelling at me. “But Pol’s right too!” I had to shout. “Pol’s right too. We have to find Holland and we have to stop him. And we need to figure out what to do with him, for like, justice or something.”

  “Justice?” Pol asked.

  Koner glared at me. “Justice? Easy. He dies.”

  I swallowed. I wanted Holland dead too, but something about hunting him down to kill him, being the person who decided that another person had to die—that felt odd to me. I mean, sure, during a battle, I was going to fight to stay alive. But hunting and killing a person?

  “Okay, well, maybe so. We have to find him first and get our families back.”

  “But he said he’ll kill them!” Jan cried.

  “He only said that he would kill them if we tried to go to Anjeltown or Mento,” Krista said. “He didn’t say anything about trying to find him.”

  “He’s not going to care about technicalities like that,” James said.

  “Exactly,” Melisa said. “He wants us to be scared. And we are. But we can’t let that stop us.”

  “We have to stay ahead of him and the Ranjers,” I said. Their faces were getting clearer as my eyes adjusted to the dark. “But at the same time, we have to hunt and find him.”

  Pol nodded. “Exactly. We have to make sure he thinks he’s still after us, but at the same time, we’re after him.”

  Nobody disagreed, and we sat there in silence. Annie’s voice broke in. “How?” She stood at the edge of the campsite. Our conversation must have drawn her closer. “I mean, not only how do we make him keep chasing us—without catching us? And how do we hunt him down at the same time? We have no way of knowing where he is.”

  I spoke up. “One of us could get captured, with a tracker or something—”

  Melisa cut me off. “Okay, no. We’re not trying the get captured thing again. We got lucky last time. So just no.”

  “We could follow a Ranjer pod,” Koner said.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” James said. “But how do we keep up, especially without being seen?”

  Everybody got quiet again. I felt at the edges of my clothes; the walk had finally dried me off from my earlier swim. I was still cold, but my blanket was helping.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” Dyana said. “We’ll think and talk about it more tomorrow.”

  She was right. We couldn’t solve this tonight.

  Before long, the sounds of the forest were all I heard. Those sounds faded too, as sleep claimed me.

  ****

  I jerked awake. Something was pressing my uninjured arm down. A shape loomed close to me.

  “It’s me, Nik.” Jan. Her face was maybe half a meter from my face.

  “Jan?” Sleep drained right out of me. What’s she doing? “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She crouched back a little and kept her voice quiet. “Can we talk?”

  “Sure.” I sat up and looked around. Everyone was still sleeping. Somewhere out there, either Annie’s or Koner’s squad was patrolling. “What’s going on?”

  “I just…” Jan sat next to me on my mat. Her body heat warmed my right side a little.

  I’d been watching Jan for over a year in school, terrified of saying something to Bren about how I felt about his sister. I’d imagined talking like this, being this close more than once. Now that we were here, my brain was completely paralyzed.

  “I just need to talk. Mom’s so focused on fixing things.” She trailed off. “I just wish we could talk sometimes.”

  “Yeah.” What was that? That’s all you have, Granjer?

  “Bren and I sometimes talked about stuff,” Jan said.

  “Really?”

  “He told me about you and the other Pushers.”

  “He did?” Good job, Nik. Two whole words.

  “He talked about you all the time. He really admired you.” Jan’s breath caught. “He said you were brave.”

  My throat closed painfully. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I know.” She scooted closer and put a warm hand on my arm. “I know. It’s not your fault.”

  I pulled away. Did she know everything that had happened? If I told her, would she ever talk to me like this again?

  She had to know. “It was my fault. It was my idea. I figured out how to block the knockout.” Reliving that night was not something I wanted to do. But I wasn’t going to hide this. “So we met that night and I blocked it. I got my pulse to at least 160 and was fine. The others got scared. Well, maybe not Melisa or Pol, but they’re…” I trailed off. “They’re different.”

  Jan stayed quiet, but squeezed my arm. She was great.

  “And Bren copied me. He blocked the knockout and we raced and he pushed his heart rate up. But he’d had the knockout recently and I hadn’t.” I rolled my shoulders back to try and stretch the tightness out of my chest. No good. “So the Bug—the Bug got him.”

  “I know.” Her voice was soft and fragile. I heard the tears in it. I wanted to comfort her and had no idea—

  Stop being such a coward. I reached around her with my good arm and pulled her closer. She leaned into me a little at first, then she put her arms around my stomach, be
ing careful of my injured hand. I felt her tears through my shirt.

  We sat that way for a while. I could have stayed like that all night.

  “Sorry,” Jan said. She sat up, and rested her head a little higher up on my chest.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m really sorry about your dad.”

  “You’ll find him.”

  Her confidence in me was scary. But I would do anything for her. “I’ll do my best.”

  She sat up more, her face close to mine. My heart skipped and might have stopped. “I know. You’re brave.”

  “Not really.” My breath caught. Even in the dark, with only stars and a small moon for light, she was so pretty.

  “Nik?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you like me?”

  I nearly exploded into crazy laughter. Did I like her? “Uh…yeah.”

  Her whisper was so quiet, I almost didn’t hear her. “I like you too.”

  My face burned hot. She was so close and warm. She turned her face up to me, her lips parted a little.

  My mind emptied. I bent closer.

  Her lips were soft, somehow cool and warm, and they filled me right up. Every millimeter of my skin ignited. She pressed back against my kiss, not hard, but just right. The world compressed completely. All the loss of the last months, the running and fear—it all dissolved. Replaced by the soft warmth of Jan’s lips.

  Chapter 7

  After a few seconds, we separated slightly. The cool night air and the forest sounds came rushing back. Through the darkness, her face was pale skin and shaded eyes, nose, and mouth. I found her hand with my good one.

  “One more time?” I tried not to grin stupidly.

  She giggled softly and scooted in. The second kiss was even better. Her lips were sweet and a little wild. I thought there was some cold stream there, too. If I’d been wearing a Papa, I would have had the knockout at least once by now. I felt her breath on my face as I pulled back a little.

  “Jan.” I stared at her lips. One more time again?

  “We should sleep,” she said.

  She was right. “But we should do that again. And again.” I squeezed her hand. I’d never thought this day would end like this. I’d never thought this would ever happen. Months ago, back in New Frisko, Jan had just been my best friend’s sister who I saw when I was at Bren’s house and who I really loved talking to. Now all of a sudden she filled my mind completely. Her name kept repeating itself in my head.