The Last Legend

by Ernie Lindsey

  He pops back up again, holding his hands out, trying to grab my flailing arms. “Stop it,” he says. “Stop. We don’t have time for this.” He moves closer and wraps his arms around me—something like a hug, something like an attempt at containment. “I’m sorry. Stop, stop. Hold still. I saw it, okay? I saw it, but I couldn’t do anything for him. The knife was the only thing I had, and if I’d missed, all three of us would be dead. All three of us. Do you understand that? I—Caroline, hold still—I had to make a decision, and I’m sorry, but I chose to save two lives instead of losing three. That’s… that’s the truth.”

  I struggle to break free. “You didn’t want to try. You wanted him dead.”

  “That’s not true. It’s not.”

  “Brandon,” I say, then give up. I rest my head on Finn’s shoulder and allow him to hold me.

  “He was my friend, too,” Finn says quietly.

  I’m not sure I believe him, but what choice do I have? I take a deep breath, and Finn lets go of me. I step back, wipe my eyes, and turn toward the sound of the drums echoing through the valley. “They’re getting closer.”

  “Yeah, and that’s just the vanguard. If they sent a forward party, they’ll be right behind us.”

  If he’s right, if he’s telling the truth, no one back home will be safe. There won’t be any time. We’ll never get them moving fast enough. The longer we stand here fighting over Brandon, over what might have been, the less of a chance everyone will have.

  Brandon’s gone, and I don’t want to be responsible for any more lost lives.

  With the minutes we’ve wasted standing here, I probably already am.

  “Move,” I say, ordering him. “Go.”

  7

  We reach the camp. It’s quiet. The Center is now empty, and everyone is inside their shacks. I see some of the men peeking out windows, watching to the north.

  Nothing is happening. It’s as if they’re all waiting to die.

  Or they’ve been ordered to wait.

  And die.

  It makes me angrier than I already am. Hawkins knows about the war drums. He knows the DAV army is coming.

  He knows we aren’t capable of defending ourselves against something like this. We’re trained to fight—and fight well—against small bands of Republicons, but an entire army? We don’t stand a chance. Why, why, why did he send me back with Brandon to get a better look? It was such a stupid decision. If I were General Chief, I would’ve trusted my scout and made preparations to leave, to retreat, to abandon this collection of shacks we call home.

  If Hawkins had trusted me, Brandon would be alive, and the hundreds of people who are now hiding inside these ramshackle, mini fortresses would be at least a couple of miles away. Maybe safe, maybe not, but there would be more room between them and the DAV army.

  I haven’t had time to grieve over Brandon’s death. That will come later. Now, though, I can feel the anger lighting something inside. Maybe something that’s been there all along—the thing that Grandfather swears I have, although I’ve never believed that to be true.

  Strength.

  Finn runs with me past the homes, through the soggy, muddy space where friends and families meet and trade, where they talk about their children and what neat piece of history they managed to find on a salvage mission. Where we live our lives.

  And unless we can get everyone moving, it’ll be where we all die.

  I smell the smoke from their chimneys but hear nothing other than the sounds of our footsteps and rain splattering against rooftops. A young boy, Billy Akers, runs out of his front door. He’s laughing, looking over his shoulder as Elder Akers darts out behind him. He grabs his son around the waist, lifts him off the ground, and then looks at me, saying, “Is it true?”

  “Yes,” I yell as we race past. “Tell the others we have to run.”

  “But Hawkins said—”

  “Go!”

  We don’t stop to see if he listened. None of the Elders are used to taking orders from a scout, let alone a girl my age, but I hope, for once, this fact doesn’t matter. We’re all conditioned to blindly follow whatever the GC says—it’s how things have always been—but in this case, doing so will get them killed. All of us.

  I may be younger than Elder Akers by thirty years, but I know when it’s necessary for logic and reasoning to overstep the bounds of authority.

  We reach Hawkins’s shack, and I expect him to be outside, waiting for me. Or delegating tasks—something, anything productive—but I don’t see him anywhere. His shack is much, much larger than the rest of ours. Kind of like how I imagined the White Home must have been in the Olden Days. He has multiple rooms and a porch with columns that he forced the others to build. Hawkins took when he should’ve given or shared, and right now I hate him for it.

  The man is abhorrent. Abusing his privilege, his power. Ridiculous decisions that bettered his life and made it harder on others, the people he’s supposed to protect. I never will have the chance, but if I did, I’d do things differently.

  Using the side of my fist, I pound on his door, hard enough for his walls to shake. “Hawkins! Where are you? Hawkins!” My voice screeches in desperation. I pound on the door until my fist hurts, and when he finally opens it, I push it to the side and shove past him, into his home. It’s an invasion, impolite, no matter what the circumstances, and I can tell that he’s momentarily offended.

  The sight of Finn, an unfamiliar face, is enough to distract him from my rude intrusion. “Who’s this?”

  “I’m Finn, sir.” Finn holds out his hand to shake, and Hawkins narrows his eyes.

  Hawkins says, “Caroline? Who is this?”

  I smell the scent of cooking goat meat, and it infuriates me even more than I already am. Hawkins has been hiding inside his home, fixing himself lunch, while the lives outside his doors get one drumbeat closer to the end. “You’re eating?” I shout.

  “I asked you a question, scout.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We have to—”

  Hawkins grabs my throat and slams me against the wall. Shelves rattle as my head bangs against the wood. “You bring a stranger into my house, and it doesn’t matter? Explain yourself!”

  His hand squeezes tighter around my throat, and I can’t answer him. He’s cutting off my wind, and I struggle to breathe.

  Finn is smaller than Hawkins by at least a hundred pounds, but he’s quick, agile, and strong from years spent in the woods. He lunges, wraps an arm around Hawkins’s fat neck, and yanks him backward, away from me. “Do it again, and I’ll bury my knife in your heart.” He drags Hawkins over and throws him down onto a rickety chair as if he’s punishing a misbehaving child.

  No one treats a General Chief this way—no one ever has—and Hawkins’s face goes red with contempt. He tries to stand. “I am your General Chief, and you will do—”

  Finn shoves him back into the chair, points a finger at him. “Shut up and listen.”

  Hawkins stays seated, but he persists. “Young man, I don’t care who you are or where you come from, but I do not take orders from PRV underlings such as yourself.”

  I rub my throat. It hurts, and hurts worse when I speak. My words come out in a croak. “He’s not PRV.”

  “What? So help me, Caroline, if you brought a Republicon into this encampment, I will have your badge.”

  Finn stands guard over Hawkins as I move closer to them. “You’ll have my badge? You’ll have my badge? I don’t care about your stupid badges.” I slap his cheek, hard enough to leave a bright red handprint, and for a moment, I’m amazed that I had the nerve to do it.

  Hawkins is too, but he stays silent as he touches the welts my fingers left.

  “Brandon is dead.” The words are painful, but I have to say them. Need to say them so he’ll understand. “They killed him, and unless you shut your mouth and let us explain what’s up there, we’re all dead. Do you understand me, General Chief?” I’m mocking Hawkins, and he knows it.

  But he nods and
doesn’t speak. Wise man… for once.

  “This is Finn,” I say. “He’s a scout from the DAV—sit down, Hawkins! Do not try to get up again or I’ll let him put his knife where you don’t want it. You sit there, and you listen to what he has to say. Thirty seconds, Finn, hurry.”

  Finn moves a step closer to Hawkins. “I’ve been a DAV scout for three years, and I know you won’t believe me, but you’ll just have to trust that I’m on your side. About a mile north of here, maybe more—they’ve already crossed Rafael’s Ridge, at least the vanguard has. Five hundred troops on foot, and behind that, down in the valley, there are ten thousand more just like them ready to march all the way through the PRV. Maybe more. They’ll capture your people and burn anything in their path.”

  “Tell him about the tanks,” I say.

  Finn glances at me, surprised that I already know.

  “Tanks?” Hawkins says, fearful and disbelieving at the same time. “They were supposed to get rid of those with the Pact. That was part of the—”

  “It doesn’t matter what they were supposed to do, Hawkins. How many, Finn?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Twelve?” Now it’s my turn to be shocked.

  “They probably won’t be able to send them through the forest.”

  “They’re not,” I confirm. “I overheard the soldiers say they’d have to send them around the flanks, along the roads where it’s open.”

  “Why?” Hawkins asks. “Why’re you—”

  “They,” Finn reminds him.

  “Why’re they invading? Why now?”

  Finn hesitates to give an answer. He told us he didn’t know, back in the woods when we had him tied up, and if he answers truthfully, he’ll reveal that he lied to us. At this point, I care, but I don’t. I’ll deal with him later. We’re already wasting too much time answering questions when we should be telling the others. I’m anxious, antsy, and I want him to get on with it. “Answer him, Finn.”

  “Difference of opinion.”

  “What does that mean?” Hawkins says.

  Finn steps out the door, looks toward the north. “They were renegotiating the Peace Pact.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know—about a month ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Shut up, Hawkins, let him finish.”

  “We—they need workers. The DAV is growing too fast for our workers to keep up, and our president told yours he wanted to renegotiate. He said that if the PRV provided him with a bunch of servants—”

  “You mean slaves?” I ask, barely able to grasp what I’m hearing. The idea is unthinkable.

  Finn nods, reluctantly. “President Crake told Larson that if he handed over a number of workers, he wouldn’t invade and take them. Your president dared him to try.”

  “Good God,” Hawkins says.

  “Unless you get your people out of here, right now, prayer might be your only option. Now, do we have your permission?”

  I’m so dumbfounded by the idea of slavery that I don’t wait. I can’t let that happen to my friends, the people in my extended family. To Grandfather. If he’s free, if we can find medicine, he might have a chance at survival. But as a slave, he’s as good as dead. I say to Finn, “I don’t need his permission. Not anymore. Let’s go.”

  I grab his arm, pulling him with me out the front door, leaving Hawkins behind in the chair. I should ask—tell—him to help, but it won’t do any good. The moment we’re out of sight, he’ll run like a coward. I know he will. It’s useless to waste my breath on him.

  We step off the porch into the continuous downpour. The rain smacks against my face as I look left and right, my wet hair slinging around. I point to the row of shacks across from us. “You take that side, I’ll take this one, but you’ll have to lie. Tell them Hawkins said to do it, or they won’t listen. Tell them to take nothing but food and to run. They have to stay light, or they won’t be able to move fast enough, especially the ones with children. It doesn’t matter how they get there, they just have to get back to the capital and warn as many people as possible along the way. Got it?”

  Finn nods. He pushes his hair from his eyes as he sprints across to the other side. We knock on doors, warning the Elders and their families, screaming for them to hurry, to go, to run as fast as they can. Some of them question me at first, asking why Hawkins gave the order to retreat, and I yell at them, tell them there’s no time to explain, and to do what I say. I move on to the next, and the next. Other families farther down the line of houses hear the commotion and come outside their shacks, holding babies and small children. They stare at us and wait.

  It’s easier to tell them all at once. I run to The Center and raise my voice as loud as possible. I scream my orders until my throat burns. To my left, Finn is darting from person to person, saying something, pointing at me. I can hear him begging for them to listen.

  Thankfully, they do. The shacks empty and The Center fills with people shoving, scrambling, and falling into the mud. Children are crying, and parents hurry by with worried faces and packs of food slung across their backs.

  The realization of my mistake comes too late. I’ve created a mess. Complete chaos.

  If they try to travel like this, in a fumbling horde of bodies, it’ll slow them down. I climb up on the pedestal that Hawkins uses to deliver his ridiculous speeches about how wonderful he is, and I begin shouting for them to split up, to travel in smaller packs so they can move faster. Some of them listen and break off, cutting through the spaces between the homes they’re leaving behind.

  Some don’t, and I begin counting them as losses already.

  I scan the writhing crowd of bodies, looking for Grandfather’s stringy white hair. He should be easy to spot. He’s taller than most, at least half a head above everyone else, but there’s no sign of him anywhere.

  I scream for him and get no answer.

  8

  Shoving through the crowd, trying to make it back to our shack to find Grandfather, I’m met with elbows and flying arms and terrified, panicked faces. There’s no order to this. It’s madness. I try not to blame myself, but it’s hard. There was no time for a coordinated exit, and it’s likely that even if we’d had the chance to plan how we would deliver the order to retreat, the result would’ve been the same. We’ve lived in fear of hearing the war drums for as long as our stories have been told. This lunacy I’m swimming through would’ve happened no matter what.

  I stop rationalizing and focus on getting home. I’ve lost Finn. I can hear his voice over the cacophony, shouting instructions, but it’s impossible to pinpoint his location.

  I catch a finger to my eye and wince, trying to wipe the sting away. Half-blind now, looking through a haze of tears, I keep pushing, pushing, fighting my way home, back to Grandfather’s pitiful shack where I’ve lived since the day Mother and Father left.

  It was Harvest Day, and I remember it well. Mother had amazing blond hair that almost looked yellow in the setting sun of autumn. Father’s hair was black, and I remember thinking that when they stood side by side, their heads looked like two stripes on a bumblebee. I was young enough to think that things like that were important.

  They smiled when they left me with Grandfather. Their last words were, “Be good for him, okay?” And then they left. In a way, I wish they were here, but I’m also glad they’re gone. If they didn’t want me, I don’t want them, don’t need them. Grandfather has been the only family I’ve ever needed.

  And the thought of losing him, along with Brandon, is more than I can bear.

  I reach our shack and fling the door open. I run inside and call his name. He’s on the floor, asleep. Shaking. I bend and grab his shoulder, then roll him onto his back. He mumbles something and opens one eye enough to see me.

  “Caroline,” he says. His voice is weak and hoarse. “Did you tell Hawkins?”

  “We have to go. Can you walk?”

  “What’s happening? Why are you—” He collapses into a fit of coughi
ng and groans.

  “Where does it hurt?”

  “Everywhere.”

  I feel his forehead. It’s as hot as our fireplace in the middle of winter.

  “I’m cold.”

  “You’re burning up.”

  “No. Cold.”

  “Grandfather, we have to go. There’s an army coming. They’ve declared war.”

  “I—I can’t.” Coughing, coughing. “I can’t make it. You—you go. Leave me.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “I won’t make it.”

  “You have to. You have to!”

  “How close are they?”

  “Half a mile, maybe less.”

  “Then you can escape. Go, Caroline. Listen to your Elder.” He takes my hand and kisses my fingers. “Use your strength. She gave it to you for a reason,” he says, and then he rolls away from me, wrapping his arms around his sides, shaking.

  “She gave it to me? Who—what?” I don’t know what he means. He’s never mentioned someone giving me something before.

  “Run,” he says.

  Before I can protest, before I can ask him what he’s talking about, I sense someone behind me and turn to see Finn standing in the doorway. He looks over his shoulder, northward, and motions for me to hurry.

  “I can see them coming,” he says. “Maybe twenty, and not everyone’s gone yet.”

  “Run,” I tell him. “Go with the others.”

  “I’m not leaving you here.” Finn glances out the door again. “Thirty seconds, Caroline. Hurry.”

  “And I’m not leaving him here,” I say, pointing at Grandfather.

  First Brandon, and now this. I absolutely can not abandon the only family I have left.