by J B Cantwell
Oh! Alex! I had been so distracted by my pain that I had forgotten him and his terrible injury. They could be putting a bullet in his brain right now, and here I was telling the enemy all they wanted to know.
“Pink,” she said, her tone harsh. “Why did you run?”
“I killed someone,” I said. My eyes stung as they filled with tears.
“That’s normal in a state of war, is it not?”
I nodded, staring at the ground. The dog took a step in my direction and I moved away. It whined a low, sad sound.
“I guess I just wasn’t— I didn’t expect it to feel like that.”
My lids were getting heavy, and I longed to lie down on the lumpy mattress.
When she asked me the next question, I found that I just didn’t care anymore. The military, my military, had betrayed all of us. It had promised a prize that would be nearly impossible to reach. And to those that were the strongest of us, they had grown them into contorted, controllable monsters. I no longer cared who knew what. I was dead either way.
“How did they find us?” she asked. “One moment they were locked away in their precious base. The next moment they were upon us. How did they do this?”
There was no longer any reason to hold back. All I wanted was to answer her and sleep.
“Tunnels,” I said.
Her face changed in an instant from severity to awe. She turned to the group that had congregated around where I sat.
“They’re finally starting to use their minds,” she said. “We will have to come up with better counter attacks. Either that or give up the land that they’ve advanced upon.”
“Do you know where the tunnels lead? Where they come out?”
“No, not really,” I said. “I saw a map of it before we left. It was in my lens, but …”
“We have your lens now,” she finished, irritated. “Do you remember what it looked like? How many?
“Lots,” I said. “I think they said twenty. They spread out like a spider’s legs. Some went a mile away, others just a few hundred feet.”
The woman sighed.
“We’ll need to retreat farther,” she said to her people. “Just for now.” She turned back to me. “Are they coming today?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They were taking shifts before, to guard the new land.”
“And how many?”
“I don’t know.”
My head was swirling again, and I fell to my side. More questions came, but they sounded muffled, far away. I closed my eyes and willed the throbbing to stop. That didn’t work, but my exhaustion was enough to overcome the pain. The information I had given would just have to do. For now.
Chapter Nine
He was shaking me again. Sam.
“Hey,” he said. “You should get up.”
He held a small wooden bowl with a spoon sticking out the top.
I groaned, but then the smell hit my nostrils. I was confused.
“What is that smell?” I asked. “It smells like … like something I’ve never smelled before.”
“It’s venison stew,” he said.
I sat up and stared at the bowl of the strange stuff. He handed it to me and I took another deep sniff. Unexpectedly, it made my mouth water.
“This is food?” I guessed.
His brow furrowed.
“Yes, obviously,” he said. “What else would it be?”
I spun the spoon around in the bowl. Several different items made up the stew. A sauce, some chunks of orange stuff, small brown pieces.
“Is this meat?” I asked, spooning some, holding it out for inspection.
“Have you never eaten meat before?” he asked, concerned.
“Nutrition squares,” I said. “And mash if you’re in the Service.”
The look of astonishment on his face changed instantly to pity.
“Try some,” he said. “I bet you’ll like it. But be careful. It’s hot.”
I looked down at the spoon, at the little chunk of meat. I blew on it and took a bite.
I couldn’t remember ever being so surprised. It was warm and salty. The meat dried out my mouth as I chewed it.
“Try having it with a little more sauce,” he said.
I did, and my whole mouth was flooded with pleasure. Next, I picked up one of the orange disks. It was soft and mildly sweet. I dug into the bowl as if I had never been fed in my life. Maybe I hadn’t.
“Wow,” Sam said. “You’ve never had meat before? Or carrots?”
“What’s a carrot?” I asked.
“The orange pieces,” he said.
“No,” I said, scooping up another mouthful.
“No wonder they want our water,” he said. “I’ve heard that things are pretty bad down in the States, but I didn’t believe it until now. Nutrition squares? I don’t even know what that is.”
“It’s what it sounds like,” I said. “They’re like a cracker with all the vitamins you need. We just eat a few and drink some water and it keeps us fed. They’re not nice though, the squares. They taste bitter compared to this.”
I was almost done with the bowl. I tried hard not to lose control and lick it clean. When I was finished, I handed it back to him. Bear, who was standing nearby, drooled excessively until Sam put the bowl in the dirt for him to lick. I frowned.
“That’s disgusting.”
“You hear that Bear?” he said. The dog’s ears pricked to his name. “She says you’re disgusting.”
When he had finished clearing out the bowl, the dog strode right toward me. I moved away a few inches, but I was curious. I held my hand out for him to smell as I had been directed to do before. His long, warm tongue licked my fingers. It was both gross and nice at the same time. I put my hand under his chin and scratched. He stuck out his chin with pleasure, and right when I hit the perfect spot, his back leg started thumping, just as it had with Sam.
“See?” Sam said. “You’re fine with him.”
His fur did feel nice on my fingers. It was soft and a little stiff at the same time. He let out a little whining sound, and I snatched my hand back again. He looked at me and whined again. Then, before I knew it, he was on all fours and practically on top of me. He knocked me back and I screamed in terror.
The sound of Sam’s laughter bit through my fear, and I realized that the dog was licking my face now.
“Yeah, he definitely likes you.”
“Get him off,” I said, breathless.
“Come on, Bear,” he said. He grabbed the long belt of leather that was tied around Bear’s neck and pulled him away.
“Go on, then,” he said, shooing the dog. “Plenty of other bowls and faces for you to lick.”
I sat up again, and realized with relief that the pounding in my head was starting to go away. I took in the group as they crowded around the fire where the large pot of stew was cooking. There were twenty, maybe thirty of them.
We had killed so many. And the other units had, too. We had probably taken their numbers down by half. But there was a stubbornness to the group. They didn’t seem like the type that was going to retreat anytime soon.
The woman who had questioned me was waiting in line for her bowl of stew.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Margaret,” he said.
“And she’s in charge?”
“Basically. It was her husband before, but he was taken out a couple months ago. She just sorta picked up where he left off.”
“Is this your whole army, then?” I asked.
Sam looked down at his feet. “We’ve had a lot of losses.”
I suddenly realized that any criticism about the size of their army would be one of the meanest things I could say. I had almost laughed just a moment before.
“How many have you lost?” I asked.
“Well, we started out with about a hundred,” he said. “At least in this part of the region; there are camps all over to protect the water. But it’s only taken a year out here to bring down our
numbers. We don’t get a lot of communication from the other camps.”
“So why do you stay?” I asked.
“Because it’s our water. If your country wants it, they should pay a fair price for it. They’re already sucking the Great Lakes dry, and now they want our little piece of water, too. But you aren’t the only ones who need to survive. And besides, what would happen if we were to run? Maybe we’d end up in the city, like you. Montreal or Toronto. But that’s awfully close to an enemy that is always hunting you, looking for your weak spots.”
He paused for a long moment.
“Are you going to go back?” he asked.
His question surprised me.
“Would you let me if I wanted to? Would she?” I nodded at Margaret.
He shrugged.
Until this moment it hadn’t occurred to me that I had much of a choice. I was captive here, no matter how friendly they might seem. I suspected that if I tried to run home, they would be after me.
Margaret put down her bowl and walked in our direction. Sam started to stand to let her sit, but she waved him away and sat down cross-legged on the ground before us.
“So, what do I do with you?” she asked.
My heart pounded as I stared into her oddly friendly face. She seemed already to have an answer to her own question, and I was about to hear it.
“Well,” she went on. “You are away from your unit now. If you go back to them they might likely kill you. You’d have to explain your story very carefully.”
“What, would you want me to say?” I asked.
“There are a million stories you could tell, but only a handful that they might believe,” she said, ignoring my question. “And I still don’t know anything about your intentions. I have no reason to trust you whatsoever. So, then, convince me.”
I stared. Should I talk? Should I tell them the Service’s secrets? That could end with more deaths on our side, even my own if I were to be allowed back in.
“I’m not sure what to say,” I said.
“Tell me the truth,” she said.
Truth. That was the easiest way. Lies wouldn’t sound genuine anyway.
“I come from Brooklyn,” I began. “I had to leave home, and I did on my seventeenth birthday, the first day that I could get away and join the Service.”
“And why did you leave?” she asked.
I looked down at my feet.
“My mother,” I said. “She’s a drunk.”
“Ah,” Margaret said. “Go on.”
“I have a friend who was going to join with me. He needed to get away, too, but he would have rather run away from the city than take our chances in battle.
“I wanted the money, though. They give you so much money if you get through the three years. And the ads they show in your lens … they make it all seem possible.”
“So where is this friend of yours now?” she asked. “Did he keep his promise to join with you?”
I nodded, and tears started welling up in my eyes.
“He joined, yes,” I said. “But they’re … doing something to him.” Silent sobs filled my chest. “I don’t know what it is, but in boot camp they looked bigger and bigger every day. And he forgot who I was.”
How was that possible? A question I had asked myself again and again.
“Since then I’ve been trying to get closer to him, but it’s hard because they mostly keep us separate. When I do see him, he seems confused, like he’s trying to remember, but can’t.”
“Tell me how you came to be here,” she asked.
I thought back to the shooting I had done just a couple days ago, filled with guilt once more.
“I … I think I killed someone,” I said. “I had never done that before. And I was so scared.” I paused, then. “I ran away.”
“They won’t take kindly to that, you know,” she said.
Tears streamed down my cheeks.
“Is it your intention to stay away from your military now? Or must you go back?”
“I don’t know,” I said, looking around at the camp. I realized now that we our conversation had many listeners. “This place is different from where I’m from. I like it. I like it that the chip is gone, too. It was so busy inside my brain. Now I feel like I can experience things I couldn’t before.”
“So do you plan to stay?” she asked again.
Stay?
An invitation to join the enemy seemed unbelievable.
“Wouldn’t you worry that I would end up as a spy or something?”
“Levi,” she called. “Can you come over here for a moment?”
“Sure,” a young man’s voice responded.
“Tell her how you came to be here, if you don’t mind,” Margaret said.
Levi smiled.
“Started out in the Service. I did what they told me to do. Never made it to Special Infantry, but I’ve seen what they do to those who get in, what they do to the Primes. They’re huge by the end.”
“Why did you leave?” I asked.
“Why did you?” he countered.
I paused.
“I killed someone,” I said. “I got scared and ran.”
“Well, my story’s a little different,” he said. “I was one of the left-behinds.” He pulled up his loose pant leg and showed me a long scar along his calf. “Lucky for me, this crazy group found me.”
He smiled back to the other men and women behind him, everyone listening now.
I thought about it for a long moment. This would be the perfect place for me and Alex. We could live with these people. Or maybe we could avoid the war altogether. We could go farther north. There were plenty of small villages that we could try to talk our way into. Or maybe we could just make a home of our own.
My brain quickly stopped buzzing as I realized what I was thinking of. Alex. Me. A home together. I thought about that kiss in the tunnel, his lips warm, but unresponsive.
Was all of that what I truly wanted?
Margaret frowned at me. “It seems you must go back.”
I nodded.
“Yes,” I said. “I have to try to save him.”
“You realize that your chance for success is minuscule.” “My chance at living for the next three years is minuscule, too.”
She laughed, and the change in her face was unexpected. I bet that she had been one of the friendlier people in the group, at least before her husband died.
“That is very true,” she said. “Stay for now. Let your head heal. Then do what you must.”
“Why did you want my chip, anyway?”
“Active chips are hard to come by,” she said. “But around here, when half of your team gets shot and is left out in the cold, it’s easier to find them.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why do you do it?”
“Little girl,” she said quietly. “If you think I will tell you all of my secrets, you are quite mistaken.”
She rose to her feet and walked away, back toward the fire.
“Sam,” she said over her shoulder. “Keep an eye out, would you?”
Sam’s eyes were immediately on me.
“No problem, Maggie,” he said in return, and I realized it was a tease. She chuckled as she walked away.
Chapter Ten
I had the deer in my sights. Sam must have been crazy to hand me his rifle, but I knew how to use it well enough, and I wanted to do something useful for the group. I guess all my crying and whining had convinced him and the others that I wasn’t a real threat to them.
I pulled the trigger.
The deer went down, it’s large summer antlers smashing to the ground.
“Good,” Sam said. “Where’d you learn to shoot like— oh. Yeah.”
He looked at his feet and his face flushed pink.
“Well, it was a good clean shot, right in the head. It’ll be easy to butcher him. He approached the deer and pulled a long butcher’s knife from a tool belt wrapped around his waist.
We were out in a part of the country th
at was not being contested between the two sides of the war. Not yet, at least. It was so breezy and beautiful that I had a hard time moving forward after him. There was just too much to look at.
Including the deer. When I saw it, I knelt down and stroked it’s beautiful neck. There was nothing else I could do. If I wanted to help feed the group, this was it.
With my help, Sam tied the animals back legs and hoisted him up beside a tree trunk. Then he took the knife and began cutting. As he butchered the pieces into usable sections, I helped load them into the backpacks we had brought. He stopped for a moment and looked up.
“It’s quiet today,” he said. “No gunfire.”
I listened intently to the world around me. All I heard was the faint buzzing of insects and the occasional tweet of a bird.
I felt like I had been without water for my entire life, and now I was finally able to drink.
But Alex. I knew I couldn’t stay here. Maybe we could come back here after. After I … what? Rescued him?
“So is this what you do every day?” I asked.
“Most days,” he said. “I’m not much of a shot, at least at humans.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He smiled.
“But with deer and ducks and anything else wild, I’m pretty good. So yeah, it’s usually my job to hunt.”
“If it’s your job to hunt, why were you in the woods the other day?”
“Oh.” He paused, holding the knife, now dripping with the blood of the deer. “A small group of us were sent to try to bring back our dead. Or to help anyone that was injured. They figured they needed an extra pair of hands. We lost one that day. Everyone else got back. We found you, instead.”
He looked up at me, his eyes both curious and untrusting.
A cold knot took over my stomach. I had been the one to kill that man, their man lost. It was amazing that I hadn’t done more damage in my wild rampage through the woods.
“I know you don’t believe my story,” I said.
“I didn’t say that.” He paused again. “What’s life like? Back where you’re from?”
I stared at the dead buck hanging from the tree, blood running down its neck and onto the ground.