The Capture

What could it possibly be? Hope wonders, darkness clouding her thoughts.

Whatever the answer, Gallingham returns it to the bottom of the box, fastens and reattaches all the clasps, and presents the steel box itself to the chancellor like a Wise Man presenting frankincense or myrrh.

Chancellor Maddox takes it, walks back to her vehicle, and climbs inside. Both Humvees return in the direction from which they came, the sound of gravel crunching beneath the tires growing more and more faint until, at last, the night returns to silence.

5.

WE MADE OUR WAY back without speaking. Although a part of me wanted to know where we stood … another part absolutely didn’t. The woods slipped by without a word between us.

When we stepped into camp, we woke the others. Everyone moaned as they rubbed the sleep from their eyes, but once we told them what we’d seen, they woke up in a hurry. The Less Thans had had little contact with Chancellor Maddox, but we’d heard about her—our friend Frank in the mountains had told us she was a beauty queen turned congresswoman turned leader of the Western Federation. According to him, it was her idea to scrap the Constitution. Her idea to label us Less Thans.

As for Dr. Gallingham, once Hope mentioned his name, I swear I could see the blood draining from the Sisters’ faces.

“What was it, Book?” Twitch asked. “What’d he give the chancellor?”

“We couldn’t see. But you could tell from the way they handled it that it was valuable.”

People threw out guesses, but Hope and I just shrugged. We could only speculate like the rest.

“What do we do now?” Flush asked.

I could feel the others’ stares directed toward me. After all, it had been my bright idea to cross back from the other side of the fence. If it hadn’t been for me, we’d all be safe and sound in the Heartland. It was my job to get this group to Camp Liberty and back.

“We need to leave. Tonight.” A few people grumbled, but I kept going. “It’s not safe being this close to a road. We’ve got enough food and weapons for a while, right?”

I gave a glance to those who’d been carving arrows and drying jerky, and they returned my look with unenthusiastic nods.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s pack up and get out of here.”

People were just beginning to step away when four shadows drifted in my direction. Dozer, Red, and two of the Sisters: Angela and Lacey.

“What makes you think we can t-t-take on the Brown Shirts?” Red asked, with his tendency to stutter. “They’ve got g-g-guns.”

The question startled me in its bluntness. We’d been here a whole week and there’d been no discussion like this at all. I got the feeling these four had been talking.

“Red’s right,” Dozer said, and it was obvious he was the instigator. Dozer lived to stir up trouble. “And not just the Brown Shirts. How can we hope to fend off the Hunters with these?” He gestured to the primitive slingshots, the clumsy crossbows, the recently whittled arrows.

I understood his point. It took little effort to remember the armor plating on the Hunters’ souped-up ATVs, the Kevlar vests, the M4s.

We had long ago made the decision to stick with what we knew: crossbows, spears, slingshots, bows and arrows. Not only were we proficient with those weapons, but they were quiet and light and allowed us a stealth that heavier automatic rifles wouldn’t. Also, we could make our own ammunition for slingshots and bows and arrows. Not so with M4s.

“We don’t need their weapons,” I said. “We didn’t in the Brown Forest, and we don’t now.”

Dozer took a bullying step toward me.

“Okay, then what I want to know is how’re we gonna release those Less Thans. Even if we do make it to Liberty—which is doubtful—how’re we gonna spring ’em?”

Everyone was quiet now. Even the crickets and frogs. I longed for Cat to back me up, but his eyes were fixed on the ground. I had no idea what was running through his mind.

“I don’t have a strategy just yet,” I said.

Dozer’s eyes widened in surprise. “No strategy at all? Great plan, Book Worm,” he scoffed. “That explains a lot.”

He looked around at the others. A couple of them obliged with laughter. I felt my face burning red.

“You agreed to go back to Liberty,” I said. “You didn’t have to.”

“That’s when I thought you had a plan. Now I know otherwise.”

“All I know is we have to do this.” Despite my efforts, I could feel my chest tightening.

“Oh we do, do we? And why is that?”

“Because it’s the right thing.”

Dozer laughed. A loud, mocking laugh. “And killing us in the process? Is that the ‘right thing’?”

My fists clenched, and Dozer leaned forward until our noses were actually touching.

“Well?” he asked. I nearly gagged from his sour breath.

I turned to move away, but his meaty hand grabbed my shoulder and whipped me back around. “Well?” he asked again.

Although I wanted nothing more than to take a swipe at him, I knew I wouldn’t stand a chance. Dozer was a big, barrel-chested guy with a thick neck, and even though one of his arms was slightly withered from radiation, he more than compensated with his other. If I attacked him, it’d only prove his point that I was reckless and not a real leader.

So I did nothing, said nothing, just turned and walked away. Behind me, I heard Dozer making clucking sounds.

There wasn’t anything I could do about Dozer. I’d just have to live with the situation—and him.

We marched through the night and into the morning, as the sun chased away the stars and made invisible the moon. There was little conversation, and Hope and I kept more distance between us than ever. She didn’t want to talk to me, and I had no desire to talk to her.

But it hurt to lose her. Cat, too. Ever since I’d snuck up on them, he’d avoided looking at me. I felt betrayed, as though someone had taken a shot to my gut and I hadn’t seen it coming.

I tried to focus on other things. Like what on earth had we witnessed between Dr. Gallingham and Chancellor Maddox? What was so precious that it had to be exchanged in a secret meeting in the middle of the night? We were utterly exhausted by the time we set up camp the next evening, but I was craving conversation. No, not just conversation: companionship. I needed a friend.

I found Twitch sitting cross-legged on the ground, his tall, gangly form folded in on itself. If there was ever a person who reminded me of a stork, it was Twitch.

He didn’t seem to notice when I sat down next to him. His fingers gripped a stick as though it was a pencil, sketching a series of loops and lines and mathematical equations in the dirt.

“Oh, hey,” he said, when he finally saw me, his cheek rising and falling in a facial tic. Even though Omega happened a good four years before we were born, the radiation from the bombs had done a number on his central nervous system. Of course, at this point, his twitches were just a part of him. Like my limp. Or Four Fingers’s missing finger.

“What do you think about our decision to return?” I asked. After last night’s confrontation with Dozer, I couldn’t help but feel that it was me versus everyone else. All the excitement we’d first experienced after crossing back from the fence seemed a thing of some distant past.

Twitch took a bite of squirrel jerky and chewed a moment. He was the kind of guy who liked to consider an issue fully before voicing an opinion—unlike his counterpart, Flush, who blurted out whatever popped into his head at any given moment.

“On the one hand, Dozer’s right,” he said. “It’s the most foolish decision we’ve made.” His facial features jerked as he chewed.

“But?” I prompted.

He finished chewing and swallowed. “We need to rescue those Less Thans. And that trumps logic.”

Without meaning to, I sighed in relief. All day, I’d had the feeling I was waging an uphill battle against the others.

“Not that that means we’ll succeed,” he added, and my happiness evaporated.

“You don’t think we’ll make it?”

“Are you kidding? We don’t stand a chance.”

I looked at him in disbelief. “But you’re willing to go along anyway?”

He shrugged. “No one else is going to rescue those Less Thans—might as well be us. And who wants to miss out on that?”

I loved Twitch for that—that he knew the odds were stacked against us but was willing to go along anyway.

I pointed to the drawings in the dirt. “What’s all this?”

His eyes lit up. “Ever heard of a zip line?” When I gave my head a shake, he used the stick to walk me through the drawings, telling me how—in pre-Omega days—people used to stretch out long wires and ride them down mountains. For fun.

“Where’d you hear this?”

“Read about it in some old science magazines.”

Figured. “So what’re you saying?” I asked.

“The enemy’s always coming at us from the ground, right? So I say we build our own zip line and attack them from the air.”

The point of his stick landed on a series of lines and semicircles, and he told me all about inertia and acceleration and other things I only partly understood. As he spoke, his facial tics decreased. It was as though the more passionate he became, the less his face twitched.

It seemed impossible, of course, finding the materials to build such a line, but I loved his enthusiasm. He would do his best to make this work, even though we had “no chance” of succeeding.

Now if I could only convince the rest of them.

6.

THEY SHIVER THEIR WAY westward, sloshing through ankle-deep mud under leaden skies.

Hope’s mind is a million places at once, darting back and forth between Book and Cat and what they witnessed on the darkened road … and her own past.

Just seeing Dr. Gallingham brought it all back, and it’s as if the injections are happening all over again. Her body goes clammy, perspiration dots her forehead.

I’m not sick, she has to tell herself. I am not sick.

It feels like just yesterday that she and Faith were submerged in vats of ice, their body temperatures lowered some twenty degrees. It was a long forever before Hope recovered. Faith never did. Hope can still see her face, blue and lifeless, her unseeing eyes cutting into Hope’s soul.

The tears press against her eyes, but she’s damned if she’s going to give in to them. Live today, tears tomorrow, her father always said.

Her father.

Dr. Gallingham claimed they’d worked together, that her father had somehow been involved in those experiments. Known as the Butcher of the West. Ludicrous to even think about.

And yet the notion lingers. Something Hope needs to find out for herself. It’s one of the reasons she crawled under the fence and joined the others. A search for truth.

She is woken from her reverie when a herd of deer goes bounding past. Everyone looks up and watches them go, their white tails raised as they gallop away. It’s a beautiful sight.

Then a flock of birds flies past, the flap of their wings making ripples in the air. Hope begins to wonder. When a dozen chattering squirrels leap through the trees above, the wonder turns to alarm.

“Cool,” Flush says, admiring the nature parade.

But Hope knows animals don’t just run in herds—at full speed, in the same direction—for the fun of it. Something’s going on.

An instant later they hear a booming crash that shakes the ground beneath their feet. They stand there listening, afraid to speak. There’s another crash. The earth trembles.

“What is it?” Flush asks. His voice is barely a whisper.

“Whatever it is,” Twitch answers, “it’s coming from over there.” He points to the north.

The noises come regularly now: thunderous, splintering booms that rattle the ground. Hope clutches her spear and races forward, the others right behind her. They dart through the woods, ducking beneath branches, skipping over a carpet of dead leaves.

They come to a sudden stop when they spy the crown of a tree swaying forward and backward as though pushed by a violent wind. And then it comes crashing to the earth. Whoompf! They feel the vibration from where they stand. The throaty rumble radiates up their feet.

A moment later, another tree does the same, wobbling in one direction, then the other, before arcing through the air and slamming to the ground. Thwump!

What’s going on? Hope wonders, her body rigid with fear. How can a forest be collapsing on itself? What could be ripping trees from the earth?

All at once, they hear another sound: engines. But different than the Humvees from the other night: louder, gravelly, hulking. And now the biting smell of diesel.

Cat motions them forward, and at the top of a ridge they look down and see a sight they can’t quite believe: enormous bulldozers knocking down trees, clearing out a swath of forest, creating an ugly, barren scar in the middle of the wilderness.

On the sides of the vehicles is a symbol they know too well: three inverted triangles. The insignia of the Republic of the True America. And the drivers of the bulldozers are none other than Brown Shirts, clad in their customary black jackboots, dark pants, and brown shirts.

The Sisters and Less Thans watch, mesmerized. A building project—in the middle of nowhere! It makes no sense. As trees tumble to the ground and great shovelfuls of dirt are ripped from the earth, the Less Thans and Sisters can’t begin to understand it.

What are they building? And why here?

When they finally tear themselves away, Hope feels her heart hammering against her chest. She knew they’d run into soldiers—she just didn’t think it would be so soon. But it’s more than that. It’s the mystery of not knowing what they’re up to that disturbs her most.

“Come on,” Cat says. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

They march the rest of that afternoon and evening, sleep little, and march all the next day, trying to put as much distance as possible between them and the Brown Shirts. When they stop the following night, the few words they speak are colored by exhaustion and anxiety.

“Are we safe here?” Helen asks.

“Should be,” Hope answers. “That wasn’t a search party. It was a construction project.”

“For what?”

She shrugs.

“Whatever it is,” Twitch says, “they want it hidden.”

“Great job leading us to safety,” Dozer says to Book, magnifying an eye roll. A few others laugh in support.

They drift away and prepare for sleep, and Hope and Cat exchange a glance. Not tonight, her expression says.

As Hope lies down on a bed of weeds and pine needles, she remembers her conversation with Book—about what they intend to do after freeing the Less Thans. What she didn’t tell him was that, yes, she does have something in mind. In fact, it’s the other reason she didn’t stay in the Heartland. She has unfinished business—that she knows for certain.

Colonel Thorason. Chancellor Maddox. Dr. Gallingham.

The camp overseer. The ruler of the territory. The sadistic doctor.

She doesn’t care what order; she doesn’t care how it happens. But she will see to it that they pay for what they did to her sister.

7.

THE NIGHTMARE WAS THE same: the hollow, vacant stares of Less Thans imprisoned in the bunker. They gazed at me with oozing sores and pleading eyes and begged me to do something. To free them. To get them out of there.

They reached for me with their bony fingers and I jerked awake. But it wasn’t the dream that woke me, it was sound. I’d heard something.

I lifted my head and looked around. Everyone was fast asleep … except a lone figure tiptoeing through the woods. I couldn’t tell who it was—just a fuzzy silhouette in passing moonlight—but I figured it was probably someone going off to take a leak. Guys did it all the time in the middle of the night, and now that there were Sisters with us, we had to travel a little farther to find some privacy.

I lowered my head and had nearly dozed off again when it suddenly occurred to me: who would be tiptoeing? Who was that considerate? Normally, when guys had to whiz, they just tromped off into the woods, did their business, and tromped back. No one tiptoed.

I sat back up. Argos was awake, a low growl rumbling in the back of his throat. The two of us peered into the dark.

A moment later I saw fireflies, tiny white dots etching circles in the black. They hovered and swooped and I was mesmerized by their movements.

But as they grew closer I realized they weren’t fireflies at all—and my heart nearly exploded from my chest. At the very top of my lungs I yelled the first and only word that came to mind.

“Ambush!”

We scrambled to our feet, simultaneously grabbing weapons and shouting questions.

“What’s going on?”

“What do you see?”

“Who is it?”

It was like we’d never been in a battle before. Cat was the smoothest of all, of course, nocking an arrow before the rest of us were even standing.

In no time, bullets were whistling past our ears, the headlamps poking through the woods. Headed straight in our direction.

A flare rocketed skyward, bathing the night in eerie luminescence, and I got my first glimpse of the attackers. There had to have been at least fifty of them. Two bullets bit the earth at my feet. I did a little dance and stumbled to the ground.

I was just pulling myself up when I heard a sharp whistling sound, growing steadily louder. A moment later there was a huge explosion. Dirt and rocks and shrapnel sailed through air, throwing everyone off their feet. Whoever was standing next to me went flying, as if some giant hand had swatted him aside.

More mortars followed, but even scarier than that was the sight of Brown Shirts, surging toward us like a tidal wave. The flare’s green light made their silhouettes flicker like monsters’.

“Douse the fire!” I yelled. As long as there were even smoldering coals, the soldiers would have no trouble picking us off. Someone threw the contents of their canteen on the embers, and white smoke billowed up.

I scrambled to find the person who’d been hit. His moans led me to him, and even by weak moonlight it was clear who I was looking at.

Cat.

His left arm was like spaghetti, an explosion of red sinews and dangling muscles. He’d already lost a ton of blood and was barely conscious. At the sight of it—his limp arm and ashen face—I grew suddenly clammy. The horizon tilted. It was all I could do to keep from passing out.

I felt a pull and realized Flush was tugging at my shirt. “What do we do?!” he shouted.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to calm myself. Steady breaths. Steady. And suddenly it wasn’t Cat I saw, but the woman from my dreams—the one with the long black hair. She was kneeling on prairie grass, hands atop my shoulders, her eyes locked with mine.

“Book!” Flush screamed, and my eyes popped open. “What do we do?”

Flares exploded in the sky and mortars exploded on the ground. These Brown Shirts meant to kill us then and there.

Meanwhile, the Less Thans stood in a half circle staring down at Cat, their expressions vacant and disbelieving. The sight of him gasping for breath stopped us in our tracks. It was as if we’d lost the power to act. Lost even the ability to think straight.

Without knowing what I was saying or why I was saying it, I began barking out commands. “Twitch and Dozer, lay cover with your arrows. Hope, spread out your best shooters and hammer the Brown Shirts from the sides. Red and Flush, pound them with rocks. The rest of you, get back up that ridge ASAP.”

Everyone went into motion.

“Who’s got Cat?” Twitch asked, nocking his first arrow.

“Me,” I said, and before anyone could object, I grabbed Cat’s good arm, hoisted him over my shoulder, and began carrying him up the hill.

It made no sense, of course. I was the weakest of the bunch with a permanent limp, but at that particular moment I could’ve lifted all the LTs. After all, it was Cat—my friend Cat. Sure, I didn’t know what he was doing with Hope behind my back, but I knew it was up to me to save his life.

It was a mad scramble up the steep slope, everyone making for the woods at the crest. Bullets zinged around us, digging up the earth and embedding themselves into trees. Adding to the chaos were the flares washing the night in shades of eerie green, turning the world into a lurid nightmare—as vivid and terrifying as hell itself.

“Twitch, get out of there!” I yelled.

He nodded but didn’t stop firing, pulling one arrow from his quiver after another. It was like he was a man possessed, and I saw at least three Brown Shirts lying on the ground, arrows protruding from their bellies like flags. Twitch had done his job, and then some. Frank would’ve been proud.

“Twitch!” I yelled again.

But too late. A mortar screamed from the heavens, landing not far from where he knelt. The explosion catapulted him into the air. Red and Flush raced to his side and grabbed ahold of his hands. They began dragging him up the hill.

The only thing that saved us was the dark. Each time the flares faded, the soldiers were shooting at shadows.

“Drop me,” Cat moaned.

“Like hell,” I said.

By the time we made it into the trees, I was breathing so hard I thought my lungs might explode. I lowered Cat to the ground and examined his wound. It was bad. His left forearm was a shredded mess of tissue and muscle, skin hanging like a loose flap. I ripped off my belt and tied a tourniquet above his elbow. Then I tore off his shirt and pressed it on the wound, trying to stanch the flow of blood. I hated that I was getting good at this.

I noticed everyone had made it to the trees, including the two guys with Twitch. They hovered over him frantically.

“They’re a hundred yards away!” Dozer cried.

A flare hissed and sizzled, illuminating Brown Shirts tromping on our campsite.

I looked down at Cat’s face; it was growing paler by the minute. He was mumbling incoherently.

Red appeared by my side. “T-T-Twitch can’t see,” he said.

I looked over and saw Flush crouched by Twitch’s side. He was wrapping a strip of fabric around his good friend’s face. Four Fingers hugged himself and rocked back and forth, keening wildly, a string of drool rubber-banding from his mouth.

“Twitch!” he cried to the stars. “Twiiiiiiiitch!”

Everything was happening too fast—it was all out of control. Bullets whistling, mortars screaming, flares hissing. And now the Brown Shirts were making their way up the hill, their shadows dancing like ghosts in the green light of the flares.

“Spread out!” I yelled, but even as I said it, I knew it was useless. Though the Sisters were bringing down their share of Brown Shirts with crossbows, we didn’t stand a chance. Not with so few of us. Not without Cat. Not against fifty.

My hands were a sticky mess. The balled-up shirt was a sopping, bloody sponge. Cat’s face was ashen.

“Come on,” I begged him. “Stay with me!” Both a prayer and a command.

I jammed the soggy shirt into the wound. But even if I managed to stop the flow, what then? Without any medical supplies, the situation was hopeless.

I cursed the woman with the long black hair. She’d led us here. If I hadn’t listened to those damn dreams, we’d all be safe and sound in the other territory. But it was too late. We were about to be captured … or shot dead on the spot.

“They’re getting closer!” Dozer shouted.

The soldiers kept advancing. There was nothing stopping them. A hail of bullets snapped small saplings in two.