The Last Legend

by Ernie Lindsey

  “Let’s go! Now!” Finn rushes forward and grabs my upper arm, then tries to pull me away.

  I plant my boots on the wooden floor and hold my ground. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll die with Grandfather if it comes to that. “No!” I scream. I jerk myself free and crawl over to the sweating, whimpering man that raised me as his own child. I lean down and put my lips on his forehead, feeling the heat on his skin.

  Finn runs back to the door, panicking, looking out and then back in at us. “Fifteen seconds.” His voice is high and panicked.

  Grandfather coughs and grabs my rain jacket. “You were always my little girl,” he says—and his body goes limp. His eyelids don’t close. His chest doesn’t move. He’s gone. There will be no saving him.

  And it’s too late to save ourselves.

  I scream at the ceiling, my muscles straining and fists clenched into tight rocks of flesh and bone. I should’ve traded my shifts for the past week. I should’ve gone on a salvage mission to look for medicine. But all these years later, would there have been anything left? It doesn’t matter. I should have tried.

  Finn backs away from the door just as a DAV soldier runs toward it. Finn slams the door shut and drops the thick piece of wood we use as a bar into its metal slot.

  I stand, listening to the pounding outside as the man shoves his shoulder against the door, again and again, trying to break inside.

  Grandfather and I never had the luxury of a rear entrance in our shack like some of the others. There are no windows either. Finn and I are trapped. We have only my slingshot and two knives. It’ll never be enough to take on twenty men.

  Or even one, if he’s armed with a gun.

  I stand and retreat to the far wall. Finn joins me, both of us watching the door rattle and the bar bend. The metal strains, and soon the latch will splinter free from the wall.

  In the seconds I have remaining, I look around the room at our pathetic beds and our meager possessions, trying to recall the memories attached to each one. I want to remember. The memories are all I have left.

  I see the metal bucket that Grandfather and I found together last summer. Grandmother’s dress hangs limply on the wall. It’s white with blue flowers. It was always too big for me, so it hung as a reminder of what little time we had together.

  As a community rule, we’re supposed to share—required to share—and the dress would’ve been perfect for Elder Keryn and her bulky frame. But Grandfather refused. Hawkins fined him, and Grandfather told me that keeping the dress was worth more to him than the five pounds of cured deer meat that we lost.

  I see something else we kept—this time in secret. Grandfather’s second pair of salvaged boots. They never fit, but he refused to part with them because maybe one day we’d need to trade them for something valuable, like food, or a new dress for me on my wedding day—a day that now would never come. I get angry with him, knowing that those boots sat wasted all those years. We could’ve used them so many times for so many things.

  The soldier slams against the door and I hear the first crack of wood. It won’t be long now. Outside, out in The Center, I hear screaming and gunfire. The pops are sharp, and I wonder whom they’ve gotten. I wonder if it’s any of my friends, if it’s Brandon’s family or if they forced Hawkins up against a porch column and executed him.

  My legs shake and nearly buckle. The door splinters again.

  I look up at the shelves that Grandfather and I built together two years ago. Sitting on them are random items we collected, like a pair of baby shoes and a jigsaw puzzle that makes a picture of the ocean I’ve never seen and never will. Grandfather’s reading glasses and a stack of books. A candle holder that hasn’t held a candle since I was five years old.

  These items, with so many memories attached to them, rattle and bounce with each pounding shoulder on the door. They dance around, skitter close to the edge, and fall.

  Finn takes my hand. Our fingers close together, and he squeezes.

  He says, almost lightheartedly, “Any last words?”

  If he’s feeling what I’m feeling, it’s a mixture of fear and disbelief that this is how it actually ends. I’ve always been convinced that I would die an old woman—meet my fate from pneumonia like Grandmother or eat a piece of spoiled meat and visit the afterlife with a stomachache. It was to be something simple, something unfixable because we didn’t have the supplies or something to trade.

  Never did I imagine that I would die at the hands of an invading DAV army.

  I squeeze back and say, “I wish it would stop raining.” It’s a pointless thing to say, because we all wish the same, but I can’t think of anything else. I already miss Grandfather. I miss Brandon. I could say that, but I want to keep it to myself. I want to keep that for me.

  We wait, and I’m surprised the door has held this long. The soldier outside curses and slams against it one more time.

  Beside me, I hear Finn gasp and feel him let go of my hand. He drops and scrambles over to Grandfather’s bed. Reaching under it, he pulls out the axe that I’d completely forgotten about. Grandfather had taken to keeping it inside recently, after someone within the encampment had been accused of stealing and hoarding things. Hawkins never caught the thief, yet I have a feeling that he, or she, will get the appropriate comeuppance at the hands of the DAV soldiers outside. Eventually.

  Finn points at me and whispers, “Stay right there. Let him see you. Don’t move, and don’t look at me, no matter what, okay?”

  I can barely hear him over the pounding of my heartbeat, and the pounding at the door, but I nod. I understand.

  Finn scoots against the wall, flattening his back to it, hiding, waiting, holding the axe tight to his chest.

  The latch finally explodes in a shower of splinters. The door swings wildly open and slams against Finn’s side.

  I shriek as the DAV infantryman barrels through the door, off balance from the door swinging inside, his weight and momentum carrying him ahead in a couple of wobbly, staggering steps. He regains his footing and stops in the middle of the room, eyeing me. A look of realization flickers across his face, but only for a fraction of a second. I’m not the boy he saw.

  Before the soldier can move, Finn shoves the door clear, lifts the axe, and swings at the man’s legs like he’s chopping down a tree. The sound of the blade burying into thigh flesh works its way into my gut, and I feel my insides swirl. It’s too much. Too violent.

  And when the man screams and falls to the floor, howling, holding his hands up at Finn to beg for mercy, I cover my face. I don’t want to see what happens next.

  There’s another dull thunk. I swallow my disgust.

  The screaming stops, but I keep my eyes closed.

  I feel Finn’s sweaty palm on my wrist, and he’s pulling me. I go with him, eyelids still jammed shut. My foot kicks something, a body, but I keep blindly moving until we’re outside my shack, until I can feel the rain on my face.

  When I open my eyes and see the aftermath, I wish I’d kept them closed.

  I wish I’d kept them closed forever.

  What I see leaves me with such an overpowering feeling of rage and sadness, hate and guilt, that I double over. Everything goes numb.

  Finn says, “Oh my God.” He doesn’t move. It’s too unbelievable. We’re stunned to the point of inaction.

  I hear a loud, unfamiliar voice say, “You there, stop!” and feel a rough hand around my neck and another on my chest. Grabbing, clamping around me. I look to my side and watch Finn hurtling downward, a DAV soldier on top of him, yanking Finn’s arms behind his back and tying them together with a short rope.

  The soldier looks up at the one holding me and says, “He’s one of ours, isn’t he?”

  “Yep,” says the voice behind me. “I think we caught ourselves a deserter.”

  I don’t even try to break free. It’s useless, and I’m too shocked by the scene in front of me.

  The Center has become a graveyard.

  9

 
This is what happens during war: people die.

  And often, it’s not the people you want to die or the people who should.

  I don’t know how many from my encampment made it out safely, but I take a small measure of consolation in the fact that it looks to be more than those that didn’t. Still, this doesn’t change the fact that many of my friends and their families are on the ground. It’s a horrible, ghastly sight, and I can’t look away. Some of them I’ve shared meals with, hunted and fished with. We played Catch the Rabbit together and counted stars at night, got burned by the sun back when the skies were clear.

  Elder Thomas and Elder Choal. Jacob and Edgar. Helena and Evelyn. There are too many to count.

  Up ahead, in the heart of The Center, I see something that creates such a feeling of betrayal that I’m unable to breathe properly. Hawkins stands there with his hands in his pockets, laughing, talking to a DAV officer with stripes on his arms, just like the one Finn killed back in the forest.

  Hawkins looks at me; his face is smug and confident. Now I understand. Now I know why he didn’t immediately give the order to retreat, why he sent me back into the woods. Now I understand why he was calmly fixing himself lunch when I returned with Finn.

  He was stalling. He knew it was coming.

  He betrayed us all.

  Inside me, that flicker of strength that I’d lost back in our shack stands up and dusts itself off, preparing for whatever comes next.

  Hawkins won’t get away with this.

  I won’t let him get away with it. I’ll find a way. Somehow.

  Finn stumbles along beside me, bleeding from his nose and mouth. Dirt coats one side of his face from where they had him on the ground. He doesn’t look over at me. He stares straight ahead and marches, obeying our captors’ commands, beaten and broken.

  We approach Hawkins and the officer. Hawkins looks at me with a combination of pride and scorn, and says, “This one,” pointing at me, “she’s trouble. Keep her close. Good scout, though, one of the best we’ve ever had. It’s almost a shame.”

  Somehow, the compliment makes it worse. They didn’t tie me up like Finn, but the soldier behind me has such a tight grip that there’s no chance of getting loose and clawing at Hawkins’s face like I want to. I hated him before, but now, he absolutely disgusts me.

  How long has he known? Who told him and when? He rarely left our encampment, preferring to sit on his porch and eat while the rest of us made life possible. When did he turn, and why?

  I peek over at Finn. Was it him? Has he been sneaking into the encampment at night, secretly delivering messages to our betrayer?

  No, it wasn’t possible. Aside from the fact that it’s unlikely he would’ve gotten past any of the scouts, Finn saved my life and risked his own to be here, to free himself of the DAV confines. It couldn’t have been him. Before, I wasn’t so sure, but now I refuse to believe it. I have to have something true in my life.

  The officer standing beside Hawkins is short, not much taller than me, but he’s older than me by decades. His skin is wrinkled and saggy around his cheeks and neck. His cap is tipped to the side, and underneath I can see a thick swath of gray hair. His jowls wobble when he speaks. “You think she’ll do it?” he asks Hawkins.

  Hawkins tilts his head back and examines me. He sighs and says, “Doubtful, but it won’t matter if she doesn’t have a choice.”

  “Do what?” I ask.

  “Captain Tanner here would like to make you an offer.”

  The aging officer steps over to me, slowly, with his hands behind his back. He looks down at my boots, and I follow his eyes all the way upward until they meet mine. “Your name’s Caroline?”

  I don’t answer. He already knows what my name is and doesn’t deserve a response.

  “I suppose I already know what your answer will be—and it’s a pity, really—Mr. Hawkins here—”

  Hawkins interrupts him with a falsely polite, “General Chief Hawkins…”

  “Do not interrupt me, sir.”

  Hawkins hangs his head and takes a submissive step back.

  “Now, Caroline, my guess is you’ve heard the phrase, ‘Death before dishonor.’ Is that correct?”

  I shake my head. “But I can figure out what it means.”

  “Right. Your friend here,” he says, glancing around at Finn, “is a defector, so there’s no hope for him. But you, my dear… Hawkins speaks very highly of your talents, and I hate to waste good resources. They’re so rare these days. What I can offer you is this: join the Democratic Alliance of Virginia as an enlisted scout, and you’ll live. You’ll be fed three times a day, provided with a tent and a warm blanket, and the best part is, you’ll be paid for your efforts. Have you ever even seen money, Miss Caroline?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s quite fun when you have enough of it. That’s my offer. Join us and be spared, or refuse and die. It’s a simple choice, really, though I’d prefer you answer in the affirmative, given the circumstances as they are. Rarity of talent, as it were.”

  I lean forward, straining against the soldier’s arms holding me, and bare my clenched teeth. “Look around you,” I say. “What do you think my answer is?”

  Captain Tanner smirks and scans the muddy Center, looking at his handiwork. “Say I find it somewhere in my heart to let you live. Say God came down from the heavens and commanded me to set you free. You look around. You have nothing left, my dear. Pretty soon, the torches will arrive. I don’t imagine things will burn so well in all this rain, but we’ll make it happen. You’ll have no home, no family, no friends. And we’ll catch everyone else, you can be sure of it. You’ll be a ship without a harbor, a car without gas, a poet without a muse. You’ll have nothing.”

  “If you let me live, it’ll be the last bad decision you ever make.”

  Captain Tanner laughs—it’s a big laugh from such a small man—and says to Hawkins, “Confident, isn’t she?”

  Hawkins nods. “Too confident.”

  Captain Tanner rubs the stubble on his cheeks. “How old are you, Miss Caroline?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Interesting. I wouldn’t have thought so young. You’re clearly wise… wiser than any fourteen-year-old girl I’ve ever met. But are you wise enough to understand the generosity of my offer? Option one, life. Option two, death.”

  “You know my answer. I would rather die than serve a murderous bastard like you.”

  “And thus, death before dishonor. Suit yourself. What’s the loss of a single pawn, huh?” Captain Tanner addresses the two soldiers behind us. “Gentlemen, you’re free to have some fun with these two, but make it quick. We can’t let the lemmings get too far into the forest.”

  Arms tighten around my neck and my chest. The soldier pulls me away, and the other one does the same to Finn. We only make it a couple of steps before a third one, a boy around my age, wearing a loose-fitting uniform and a hat that’s so large on his head it pushes his ears down, struts into The Center.

  Poor old blind Ellery teeters along in front of him. Her white hair, once curly and sprouting from her head like a dandelion gone to seed, is matted against her scalp. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her outside, and the first time I’ve ever seen her without the dark glasses she uses to hide her eyes.

  The DAV soldiers that have been meandering around The Center, pillaging the bodies and stealing from the empty shacks, stop what they’re doing and move toward her with their mouths open.

  As they come closer, everyone pauses and stares. I feel like, somehow, they know that she may be the last.

  When she gets close enough, I can see the milky white of her irises, and if I didn’t know what a sweet woman she was, she’d be a frightening spectacle. The thin material of her plain white dress is soaked through, and I can see her underclothes beneath it. She’s not wearing boots, and her frail feet squish in the mud.

  The young soldier says, “Captain Tanner, sir. Found her two rows over, hiding in a goat pen. Is she�
�I mean, do you think…”

  Captain Tanner whistles and removes his cap.

  Finn looks at me questioningly.

  Hawkins bows his head, maybe in shame, maybe in phony respect, and shuffles to the side.

  Captain Tanner says, “Yes, she certainly is. That’ll be all, son. Step away slowly. Leave the lady right there… Nice and easy, Mr. Walker. Nice and easy.”

  Walker looks confused, but he does as he’s ordered, as if Ellery will explode like a bomb from the Old War.

  They act like they’re afraid of her, afraid of this fragile old woman whose bones break as easily as the twigs we step on in the forest. If she’s a Kinder, which I doubt, maybe they should be.

  Captain Tanner approaches her, softly, with a hand held outward. I can see it shaking. “Captain Tanner, ma’am,” he says. “With the First DAV. I suppose you knew we were coming.”

  Ellery leans on her cane, wobbly and weak in the legs. “Not just you. War.”

  “I must say, it’s quite an honor to meet… to be in the presence of… of a Kinder.”

  Captain Tanner knows? He recognizes her?

  “Heathen,” Ellery says. “What have you done?”

  “I—We—It’s a matter of necessity, ma’am. I’m sure you understand.”

  “No one understands war, not even the men who create it.”

  Captain Tanner takes another step closer to Ellery. He motions with his hand at two large soldiers behind her, tilting his head, signaling for them to approach her. He says, “We’ve heard tales about you and… your gifts. Are there many more left like you?”

  “I feel two,” she says. “They’re close.”

  “Two? No, that can’t be.”

  I share the same thought with him. The Elders teased that she was the last.

  But Ellery knows. She always knows. Past and present. The future. Her words are always cryptic, however, and it’s difficult to figure out what she means.

  She croaks, “Time has not treated us as well as they’d hoped, Captain Tanner.”

  “I can see that. How very unfortunate. But tell me, where are the other Kinders?”