Oasis

by Eilís Barrett

  ‘I know where it is, and if they have hostages, I figure that’s where they’re holding them.’

  Mark runs a hand over his face, trying to sort through what Kole is saying, but when he looks up the hope on his face is evident.

  Kole starts nodding. ‘We need to go now.’

  Mark stares at him for a second. ‘I’ll get the others,’ he says, and he walks back into the house.

  ‘We’re going to find them,’ Kole says, looking back at me, and I don’t say anything.

  It takes us less than an hour to get ready and leave, but Kole stands in front of the house the entire time, restlessly pacing the length of the building. I insisted on checking on Lauren upstairs, who was conscious but only barely.

  I’m not sure she’s fully lucid, so I can’t do anything other than make sure someone stays to keep an eye on her and hope she’ll be okay until we get back.

  Now that we’ve left and are heading into the forest, Kole is moving through the trees like hell is on his heels, his gun gripped so tightly in his hands, his knuckles are turning white.

  We move further into the forest this time, travelling for so long I wonder if we’ll be able to find our way back, but Kole keeps his eyes locked ahead, as if he knows exactly where he’s going, and I have to trust that he does. We’ve been walking for hours when we hear someone shouting angrily in the distance.

  Kole pauses only for a moment before taking off, leaving the rest of us to try to catch up.

  I hear gunshots, but I don’t slow down. I keep my eyes glued to Kole’s form, a blur in the distance as he runs so fast we don’t have a hope of keeping up with him. That’s when we see him.

  He comes crashing through the forest, a bruise marring one side of his face, his eyes widening at the sight of us. He slams straight into Mark, catching him by the shoulders as his breath comes in gasping heaves. The bruises blooming across his face make him look like deranged art, some kind of fierce sculpture of marble and granite.

  Mark holds him up. ‘Jay!’ he shouts.

  They swarm around him, asking questions so rapidly I can’t discern one from another, the voices pouring over each other until it’s just a rush of sound, like a waterfall. Jay tries to say something, but I don’t get a chance to hear it because before I know what I’m doing, I’m grabbing the gun from the person on my left and taking after Kole, towards the sound of gunshots.

  This camp is huge, set inside an enormous clearing, with tents pitched in a perfect circle, and I can see flashes of Officer blue between the tents. I duck behind a tree and aim the gun at an Officer squatting behind a tent. From the angle I’ve found he can’t see me, but my line of sight is clear as I try to steady the gun in my hands.

  The sound of gunshots starts ringing in my ears, and I can feel the others running out of the trees around me, finally emerging into the sunlight as Officers begin to fall in front of my eyes, hitting the ground as the spray of bullets disperses among them.

  I try to focus, to slow my heart down, to stop the trembling of my arms as I line up my shot with the Officer in front of me. But my mind is being split in half, the images in my head not of Officers but of him.

  Of Aaron. Of his humanity falling away from him so easily.

  How was I so stupid?

  I try to pull the trigger, but my finger slips off, and my breath is coming to me uneven and rasping as I retake my aim.

  How did I not see it coming?

  I try to fire again, but the bullet lodges itself in a tree about half a metre from the Officer I’m aiming at, and if it weren’t for the cacophony of gunshots surrounding us, he would have seen me.

  I throw the gun from me in frustration, pulling the long, thin knife from my boot as I take off, shaking the images of Aaron from my mind. I don’t know where Kole is, or where the others are, or anything else, other than this feeling that’s overtaken everything else.

  Survival. It seems to be the only thing I’m good at.

  I keep low and stay quiet around the perimeter of the camp, until I see an Officer with his back to me. I don’t think. I don’t hesitate. And part of me wonders why.

  I plunge the dagger into his back, and only stay long enough to hear his gurgled scream and to pull the knife back out, just before I see another Officer advancing towards me.

  I try to steady myself, to find my balance again, but before I can he knocks the knife from my hand, and I watch it fly from my hand, terror gripping my insides. He launches himself at me, one of the few Officers who is unarmed, and his fist connects with my face with a crack. I fall backwards, scrambling on my hands and knees towards my knife as the world swirls around me. He catches my heel before I can reach the knife and drags me back towards him, his fist crashing into my face again and again.

  Blood pours into my mouth, and I cough and splutter as I try to breathe, my vision swimming as I try to shake the impact of his fists from my muddled brain.

  For a moment I don’t feel anything. I am suspended in half consciousness. Then I blink away the blood in my eyes enough to see the barrel of a gun and my heart stops. Because he’s found a weapon, and it is pressed to my forehead and this is it.

  This is how it ends. In a battle that is only half mine, bloodied and bruised with a gun to my head.

  I watch as he opens his mouth to say something, but before he can get the words out a gunshot rings across the campsite and his weight falls forwards. I try to pull myself out from underneath him, but he’s heavy, dead weight, and I can barely move.

  A figure comes up beside me, pushing the Officer’s body off me with a black boot, and when I look up, I see Jay, his hand reaching down to help me up. He pulls me to my feet, but takes a quick step backwards once I’ve balanced myself, grabbing my knife from the ground and handing it to me silently.

  ‘You dropped this,’ he says, gesturing towards the gun in his hand, which I now recognise as the gun I abandoned outside the camp. ‘Mind if I borrow it?’ There is a smile in his words but not on his face, and I nod numbly because I don’t know what else to do.

  He winks at me before taking off, ramming the butt of his gun into an Officer’s face and shooting him in the crown of the head as the Officer falls to his knees before him.

  I fall back a step, wiping the blood from my eyes as I watch the battle rage around me. There are only a few Officers left, but they keep appearing out of nowhere, bursting out of tents, bristling with guns. I watch as three Officers fall one after another, like dominoes, and look up to see Kole adjusting his aim smoothly as he takes down another and another and another, until the battlefield is cold.

  It is there, hot and bloody, the fear filling the air like a physical presence, and then it is gone.

  The world goes quiet, and we become still, watching each other as we wait for a next wave that will never come.

  33

  ‘Kole,’ I growl, as he pushes my hair from my face to dab at the cut on my cheekbone. The water is cold, taken from water canisters and poured onto strips of cloth he found I don’t know where and I don’t want to know, but he insists on doing it.

  ‘You won’t do it yourself,’ he murmurs dismissively, and I grit my teeth against the pain.

  ‘How’s your side?’ he asks, holding my gaze.

  ‘Better. Hurts still, but it’s healing.’

  ‘Good.’ He nods, packing up the supplies.

  I think about asking him where he learned to fight like that, but I hold myself back. I’ll ask him later, when things have quietened down. He’s more likely to give me a straight answer then.

  ‘Kole.’ A rough voice comes from behind us, and Kole swivels in his crouch, looking up to see Jay standing behind him.

  ‘Jay,’ Kole says, and his voice has turned into something I can’t speak of, like pain and grief and regret and guilt and, somewhere beneath the mess, joy. He hugs him, the kind of hug that’s so tight, it’s mostly there to make sure the other person is real.

  I am silent, and I can’t help thinking of Aaron.
He used to hug me like that, like he worried about me when I wasn’t with him. My throat feels tight.

  Kole finally releases Jay, and turns to face me.

  ‘Jay, this is Quincy.’

  ‘We’ve met.’ Jay smiles at me, and his smile looks like my knife when it catches the sunlight, transfixing and violent.

  ‘Thank you,’ I blurt out, my mind forcing images into my head so fast I can’t process them.

  I can barely see him from my left eye, which began to swell almost immediately, but what I can see in him is dangerous. I remember Lacey saying he was reckless, and I can’t help feeling she must have been right. His dark hair is cut tight to his scalp, his eyes sharp beneath his perpetually drawn down eyebrows, his thin lips curled up at the corners. He is tall and muscular, but with none of Mark’s broadness. Everything about him is harsh, and something about him reminds me of the street dogs in Oasis, weatherbeaten and wary of everyone and everything. But he masks it better. Acts like he’s not always ready to attack again, forever waiting for the next fight. I can’t decide if I should be scared of him or not.

  Kole gives us a questioning look, but lets it go.

  ‘If it weren’t for Quincy, we wouldn’t have found you,’ Kole says, like a confession, his words slow, a measured release.

  Now it’s Jay’s turn to shoot Kole a questioning look.

  ‘She wanted to fight back against the patrol Officers. It was her who led the team that found the radio that led us here, to you.’

  Jay looks back at me and lets his eyes drift over me, sizing me up. Eventually another one of his knife smiles appears, and he offers me his hand.

  ‘I guess it’s me who should be saying thank you, then.’

  ‘You were escaping anyway,’ I say with a shrug. ‘I was there for the Officers.’

  He releases a bark of laughter and looks up at Kole as if to say, ‘are you seeing this?’. Kole just closes his eyes, shaking his head like he can’t believe me.

  We strip the Officers’ campsite of anything we might find useful and then start walking back towards the base. We won’t make it back tonight, but no one wants to stay in that camp any longer than we have to.

  Eventually, as the sun starts to set, we settle down in a small clearing, only wide enough for us all to lie down. The minute we sit down, Jay speaks up.

  ‘I want to keep going,’ he says.

  ‘Jay, I am going to sleep now, and you better not try to stop me,’ Mark says, pointing a threatening finger at him as he gives him a slightly mad look.

  We’ve been up since dawn, and everyone is exhausted.

  Jay laughs. ‘I don’t mean keep walking home. I mean with the raids. I want to keep ambushing the Officers.’

  ‘Jay …’ Kole begins, but I cut him off.

  ‘We are. We’ve already taken down two. We can keep taking them down.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Jay says, sitting up straighter. ‘If we take down enough, they’re going to retreat back to Oasis. They have to.’

  ‘Or they could redouble their attack and kill us all in the process.’

  We ignore Kole.

  ‘We need to regroup, first. You guys need to heal up, and we need to train more, but once we’re ready, we can get back to work,’ I say excitedly, timelines flashing in my mind, trying to work out how long it will take us to get back on our feet.

  ‘Yes. Someone needs to teach you to shoot,’ Jay says, seriously.

  ‘Hey,’ I murmur in protest, but I’m so tired there’s nothing behind it.

  Kole releases a sigh that sounds like it’s coming from the depths of him. ‘If you’re serious,’ he says, ‘then I’m coming with you.’

  That catches my attention.

  ‘Seriously?’ My voice is pitched high with surprise.

  ‘Yes. But we are training first. You need to know how to fight. All of you.’

  I meet Jay’s eyes, and the excitement in them mirrors my own. Kole is our best fighter, everyone saw that today, and if we have him on our side, fighting, we might actually be able to do this.

  ‘But,’ he says firmly, ‘no more random ambushes.’

  He looks directly at me, and I feel something fluttering at my throat.

  ‘If we’re doing this, we need a plan.’

  34

  I sit across from Kole and Jay late at night, three days after the rescue. Kole is biting his lip as he bores a hole in the table with his thumbnail, a nervous gesture showing his discomfort as Jay explains his plans.

  We rescued six people from the Officers’ camp, including Jay, and all of them needed medical attention. The bruises on Jay’s face are only now beginning to fade to a sickly greenish colour at the sides, but he doesn’t seem to be bothered by it at all.

  My face, on the other hand, still looks like I was hit by a truck.

  ‘But we can use the radio to track them!’ Jay argues, rolling a knife between his hands.

  Lauren is awake now, but won’t say a word. I spent three hours with her yesterday, trying to coax something out of her, any piece of information that might be helpful to us, but she wouldn’t utter a single syllable. In the end I got frustrated and stormed out.

  I don’t know why, but I feel like she knows something. If she was attacked by Officers, she must know something.

  ‘Or they could use the radio to track us. Jay, you’re not thinking.’ Kole sounds calm, but I can tell by the way his hands won’t stop fidgeting that he’s uncomfortable.

  ‘We won’t use it, we’ll just listen to them.’

  ‘And what if they have a tracking chip inside the device? What then?’

  Jay growls, flipping the knife into the air. I pull my hands from the table, afraid of the sharp tip on that blade, making my own frustrated sound.

  Kole glances up at me, cocking his head to the side.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ he asks, causing Jay to turn to me too.

  ‘I’m thinking that that radio is the least of our worries. We need to stop going around in circles and start moving forward.’

  ‘And what do you propose we do?’ Kole asks, placing his elbows on the table as he leans forward.

  ‘We need to start training,’ I say, snatching the knife from Jay when he’s not paying attention.

  He gives me a curious look, but I ignore him.

  ‘Anyone who can fight needs to be ready. We’re gaining ground on them, and I’m not letting them take it back.’

  Kole’s face twists, and it takes me several seconds to realise he’s fighting a grin.

  ‘What?’ I growl.

  ‘Nothing.’ He shakes his head, standing to get a drink of water.

  ‘I agree with Quincy,’ Jay says, looking back at me. ‘We need to start moving again.’

  ‘You’re not fit to train yet, Jay,’ Kole mutters, sitting back down at the table.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Jay scoffs, pulling the knife deftly from my fingers and flicking it into the air, shooting me a smile when it lands back in his hand.

  ‘And what about the others? The people who won’t fight?’ Kole asks, ignoring Jay.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I sigh, rubbing my hands across my face. I’m getting tired. These last few days have been exhausting, even if we haven’t started training yet. The third floor was turned into an impromptu infirmary, and I’ve been trying to keep up with Lacey, who’s been tending day and night to the survivors with the worst injuries.

  My interactions with her are short and formal, and I can tell she’s angry with me. Of everyone in the base who is against the rebellion, Lacey hates it the most. Other than asking me to hand her scissors or more bandages, she hasn’t said a word to me since I led the first attack against the Officers.

  Kole is still staring at me, waiting for an answer.

  ‘I don’t understand what their problem is,’ Jay cuts in. ‘You’re not even making them fight with us.’ The tone of his voice suggests they would be, if he could make them.

  ‘They just want peace, Jay, not more war,’ Kole say
s quietly, and he sounds just as tired as me when he says it.

  ‘Well they’re not going to get it,’ I say, pushing away from the table, suddenly restless. ‘None of us are. Not while Oasis is sending Officers out here to hunt us down.’

  Kole squeezes the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes, frustration in every line of him.

  ‘I know you’re right,’ he says. ‘But I don’t think they’re going to see that.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. We need to keep moving forward. We’ll start training tomorrow morning, and if they join us, great. And if they don’t …’

  ‘That’s their loss.’ Jay smiles, flipping the knife through the air again, catching the blade between two fingers. ‘So that’s the plan then? We start training, then systematically take out every patrol unit outside of Oasis?’

  I make eye contact with Kole across the table, and he nods once.

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  35

  Kole wants us to train with weapons and without them, so he sets up a rota of classes. Clarke has been working on her archery, and after a little coaxing from Kole has started taking small groups out hunting in the morning to let them practise. Jay takes a training session in the morning for knife fighting, but I don’t need the class, so I hang out by the door, watching them move across the clearing. I’m surprised that Jay is handling it so well, guiding a dozen people through drills calmly, nodding when people get it right, but not even reacting when they make mistakes.

  ‘You should be training,’ Kole says, coming up behind me.

  ‘I don’t need to. I know how to use a knife.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s basically what every idiot says, just before they get stabbed.’

  ‘Did you just call me an idiot?’ I ask, raising an eyebrow at him threateningly.

  ‘Never,’ he says, with exaggerated horror.

  Did he just make a joke?

  ‘How’s Lauren?’ I ask. Kole is up with her almost as much as I am, and he went up to check on her a while ago.

  ‘She said hello to me,’ he says, surveying the training session in front of us.