The Release

Copyright

HarperVoyager an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2017

Copyright © Tom Isbell 2017

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Tom Isbell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007528264

Ebook Edition © February 2017 ISBN: 9780007528257

Version: 2016-12-21

Dedication

To Paul and Mary Isbell, who loved unconditionally. And to Pat, always.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One: Enemies

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Part Two: Allies

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Part Three: Release

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Also By Tom Isbell

About the Publisher

PART ONE

ENEMIES

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

PROLOGUE

FROZEN SLOPES STRETCH THEIR icy fingers to leaden skies, and winter gales sweep clean the vast, white prairies. Though captured, he escapes. Though beaten down, he rises, even as the mountains rumble and the waters rush and roar.

But enemies persist. The dead and dying litter the long road to freedom, and many more must perish.

My beloved …

1.

THE NIGHT WAS COLD, and each time I breathed out, my mouth released a haze of frost. I squinted past the cloud of white, peering into the dark. They were out there. It was just a matter of time before they showed themselves.

A tap on the shoulder made me jump. Diana, come to relieve me.

“My turn,” she said.

“Already?”

“Unless you want to stay longer.”

“Nope, I’m good.”

I pushed myself up from the snow and stretched. My toes and fingers were numb. My joints creaked. Argos uncurled from my side and also stretched, extending his back legs.

“Anything?” Diana asked.

“Some yellow earlier. Nothing recent.”

“How many?”

“A dozen. Maybe more.”

She nodded grimly. “They do anything?”

“Just circled.” Then I added, “They came closer than last night.”

We shared a look. Diana knew what I was talking about without having to say the words. Yellow meant wolves, the color referring to their eyes. The more yellow, the more wolves. Lately, the numbers were increasing, and the packs had started coming closer. The only thing that kept them at bay was an enormous ring of fire we’d built around our camp. We stoked it day and night like some primitive tribe from centuries past. So far, no wolves had dared go through it.

We intended to keep it that way.

The avalanche had wiped out all of Camp Liberty, flattening buildings, vehicles … and several dozen Brown Shirts. Their decomposing bodies released a sickening aroma of rotting, putrefying flesh. Just the thing to attract roaming wolf packs. Each night the wolves materialized from the mountains, alternately ripping at the corpses with their razor teeth and sending piercing cries to the starry sky.

As if the wolves weren’t bad enough, just days after the avalanche, howling swirls of snow came racing down Skeleton Ridge and descended on the No Water, wreathing our shantytown in five-foot drifts. What was cleared away one morning was buried in snow the next. Between the snow and wolves, we were prisoners in our own camp.

Diana took my place on the ground, folding her willowy body behind the barricade. She pulled her auburn-colored hair back into a ponytail and readied a bow and arrow. I found some logs and tossed them onto the nearest bonfires. Five hundred embers danced to heaven. I was about to go but found myself lingering, wiping the bark from my hands.

“What?” Diana asked, noticing I hadn’t left.

It was a long time before I answered.

“How’s Hope?”

Diana gave a small sigh. “She’s fine, Book.”

“She’s really okay?”

“No better or worse since the last time you asked—which was last night.”

“Have you seen her?”

“Hardly anyone sees her. You know that. Now get out of here.”

I started to leave.

“And Book?”

“Yeah?” I turned to her, hopeful.

“Stop thinking about her.”

That was what Diana told me every night. Stop thinking about her. There was little chance I could follow that advice.

I shuffled back through the snowy labyrinth of Libertyville. That was the name we gave our makeshift town of rickety huts. The buildings were an unsightly collection of recovered pieces from Camp Liberty. Bits of planking here, corrugated metal there, tree branches acting as joists and beams. A ramshackle village whose blue-tarped roofs dipped low from snow. Temporary housing.

Although we often talked about marching out of there, it would have been mass suicide. It was the dead of winter, and there were still Less Thans so emaciated they could barely walk. We’d rescued seventy-five of them from the Quonset hut that night two months ago, but malnutrition and sickness had taken the lives of four the first week alone. The long winter claimed three others. We couldn’t be on our way until all sixty-eight of them regained their strength—whenever that was.

Argos and I stepped into the shack that we called home. It was nearly as cold inside as it was out.

On the floor were seated Twitch and Flush, bent over a sheet of paper. Flush read a series of numbers out loud.

“Any progress?” I asked.

“There’s gotta be a pattern,” Twitch answered, tapping the paper with his fingers. “I just can’t figure it out.”

“And you’re sure they’re not random numbers?”

“Two people with the same series of thirteen numbers? Not likely.”

Back when we had been digging through the snow looking for building materials, we’d come across Colonel Thorason’s body. In his front shirt pocket was a slip of paper. On it was written a long string of numbers.

4539221103914

When we uncovered another Brown Shirt and found the exact same numbers in his shirt pocket, we figured it was a code of some kind. So far, we’d had no luck translating it.

“I keep hoping it’s a letter-number cipher,” Twitch went on. “Those aren’t so tough to crack. But if it’s a letter shift cipher, then things get tricky. You gotta create a whole grid to solve it.”

Leave it to Twitch to know all this. He’d been blinded by a mortar when the Brown Shirts ambushed us last summer. Although it slowed him down physically, it didn’t faze him a bit when it came to problem solving. The code was just another puzzle he was determined to break.

In addition to Flush and Twitch, Red was also in the room, carving a cedar branch. Like Flush and Twitch, he had been in that original group of Less Thans who escaped Camp Liberty. His shame for abandoning us in favor of Dozer was as easy to read as the radiation splotch on his face. There was never a moment when he wasn’t making arrows or tending to the survivors.

“Anything?” he asked. The same question we asked one another every night.

“Some yellow a couple hours ago.”

“More or less than last night?”

“Definitely more. And getting closer.”

It was not the answer anyone wanted to hear.

I tossed some wood into the stove and poked the logs. As I stretched out before the flames, pinpricks of heat danced up my toes and fingers. Argos circled and lay down. He was practically fully grown now, the scars from various wolf attacks pockmarking his fur like badges of honor.

Cat entered and we went through the same series of questions. Any yellow? How many? How close? That kind of thing.

The fact was, we were fixated on wolves—could think of little else. They circled us each night, taunting us with their howls, their greenish-yellow eyes poking through the dark like devil fingers. There was never a time when they weren’t on our minds.

“How much longer?” I asked, absently petting Argos.

“Till what?”

“Till they finish off the corpses?”

Cat shrugged. “Another day. Maybe two.”

He bent down and picked up two rocks—one quartz, one flint—and began knapping them together, making arrowheads. He held the flint by wedging it between his armpit and artificial limb. His movements were so effortless, you almost got the feeling he’d been missing an arm his entire life. Typical Cat.

“And when they’re done with the corpses?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I guess they’ll look somewhere else.” The fire crackled and Cat knapped the rocks. Then he turned to Flush and asked, “We’re still waiting for spring?”

“As soon as the snow melts,” Flush said.

“We can’t leave any sooner?”

“Not as long as there are LTs who can’t get out of bed.”

“We could build a sled and drag them along.”

Flush shook his head. “Better to wait until we can all walk on our own.”

I knew what was going on in Cat’s mind. It wasn’t just wolves he was thinking about. We had seen for ourselves the realities of the Republic of the True America: Hunters tracking down Less Thans, experiments on Sisters, Brown Shirts locking up LTs and letting them die in their bunks.

Since Chancellor Maddox had somehow escaped the avalanche—Dr. Gallingham, too—we knew we couldn’t remain in Libertyville a second longer than necessary. Our only salvation—and curse—was the snow, which kept the Brown Shirts away … but also kept us captive.

To lift people’s spirits—and also celebrate a year’s worth of birthdays—we’d decided to throw a party the next night. It wouldn’t solve our problems, but maybe it would get our minds off wolves and a dwindling food supply—at least for one evening.

When I climbed into bed, Cat continued to strike rocks, and Flush and Twitch were still poring over numbers. As I settled into sleep, it wasn’t wolves or Chancellor Maddox or Dr. Gallingham I thought about.

It was Hope. I hadn’t seen her since we’d rescued her from the bunker. For the past eight weeks, she had spent her days hunting game in the foothills, returning only when the sun was setting and she could cloak herself in darkness, closeting herself in her tent on the far edge of Libertyville. I wondered when I’d see her again.

If I’d see her again.

My eyes drifted shut and I fell into a deep sleep, only partially aware of the wolves’ haunting howls from the other side of the ring of fire.

2.

AFTERNOON SUNLIGHT BOUNCES OFF the snow as Hope field dresses a squirrel. Her hands and knife move in an acrobatic flurry. She’s done it so many times, it’s become a kind of dance. Knife in the underside, tug at the skin, slice off the front legs, remove the skin, dig out the entrails, chop off the head, cut the back feet, pull out the organs—done. She can do it in her sleep.

Hope does all this in the privacy of an aspen grove. Anything to hide herself. While she’s never considered herself a vain person, there is something about these scars—these twin Xs on her cheeks—she finds disgusting. Repulsive, even. They’re like brands for marking livestock, as if she were someone else’s property. The thought sickens her.

It’s why she keeps to herself. Why she wears a hoodie and pulls the drawstrings tight. Why she avoids the stares of well-meaning friends.

Why she avoids Book.

Hunting is her refuge. It not only lets her provide food for the others, it gives her an excuse to get away from camp. And the fact is, she’s good at it. Setting traps and tracking prey have always been her specialty. She can thank her father for that.

It’s the only thing she can thank him for. Now that she knows he collaborated with the enemy, working alongside Dr. Gallingham and injecting patients with experimental drugs, she finds it best not to think of him. Yes, she’ll use the skills he taught her, but that’s it. No more honoring his memory.

She plops the skinned squirrel in her pack, resets the trap, and notices the late-afternoon sun sneaking past the tree trunks, announcing the coming dusk. Time to return to Libertyville. Skeleton Ridge is no place to be after dark.

Her lips purse and she gives a sharp whistle. A moment later, a whistle answers. It’s Diana, hunting on the other side of the aspens. That’s their signal to start back down the mountain.

Hope reaches back and removes the pair of skis strapped to her back—skis she made from birch planks. She slips her boots into the bindings, pulls them taut, and takes off down the mountain.

Her hair is longer now, black and flowing, and the crisp winter wind sails through it. It’s not as long as her mother’s was, but it’s getting there. Closer to how it was before Chancellor Maddox ordered it chopped off way back when.

Partway down the mountain, something catches Hope’s eye: two dark objects, not much bigger than her hand, lying still and silent atop the snow. She angles the skis in that direction, shooshing to a stop. It’s obvious what she’s looking at: two field mice, their bodies stiff from death. Hope looks around. The mice aren’t from any trap, and it’s unlikely they died from natural causes one right next to the other. So what are they doing here? More importantly, why haven’t they been eaten?

She grabs one by the tail and lifts it in the air.

“What’ve you got there?” Diana asks, appearing at her side.

“Nothing,” Hope says, startled. She throws the stiff rodents into her pack. “Just a couple of mice.”

“Better than nothing. And it wouldn’t hurt for you to eat some of that.”

“We’ll see.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

It’s an ongoing debate. Diana is convinced Hope isn’t eating enough, and Hope tells her there’s hardly enough food for the sick and wounded, let alone the healthy ones.

She’s still thinking about the mice when Diana says, “Book was asking about you last night.”

“So?”

“So what I do I tell him?”

Hope pulls up her hoodie and tightens it. “Tell him whatever you want.”

“But he keeps asking and I don’t know—”

“Tell him I’m busy,” she snaps. “Tell him I’m trying to feed two Sisters and seventy-three Less Thans. Tell him someone needs to do the hunting around here.”

Diana looks down at her hands before asking, “And tonight? I can’t change your mind?”

Hope gives her head a shake and turns away. She has no interest in going to parties. Has even less interest in being seen.

“You know, you’re going to have to go out sometime. You can’t stay shut up the next couple months.”

“I get out,” Hope says. “I’m out now.”

“You know what I mean.”

Hope says nothing. The sun angles lower.

“Suit yourself,” Diana says, “but I hate being the lone girl.” Ever since Scylla was killed by the avalanche, Diana and Hope are the only two Sisters, surrounded by all these Less Thans.

“I’m not worried about you.”

“I’m not worried about me either. It’s those poor LTs I’m thinking about.” She shoots Hope a wink and pushes off.

As they ski single file down the mountain, headed for the ring of fire encircling Libertyville, Hope thinks about Book. The truth is, he can ask about her all he wants, but Hope won’t let him see her this way. She won’t accept his pity. As much as she likes Book, as much as she remembers every last detail of their time together, she knows there’s no going back. Not now. Not ever.

She zips down the mountain, ignoring the tears that press against her eyes. She blames them on the cold, on the setting sun, on anything but the truth.

Live today, tears tomorrow.

Later, after Diana has gone to the party and Hope can hear the muted, faraway sounds of laughter and music, she reaches beneath the tarp wall and sticks her hand into the snow, fishing around until she finds the two dead mice. She hasn’t had a chance to examine them since they returned, and the thought of them bothers her. At a time when every single person and animal is foraging for food, how is it that two mice died so oddly, and are left uneaten? It doesn’t make sense.

She pinches one by the tail and dangles it. It exudes a whiff of rot, and her eyes pore over the brownish-gray rodent. Although there’s no blood, she spies something she didn’t notice before: the belly puckers unnaturally, as though the two seams of skin don’t quite match up. She lowers the mouse to the table and pokes at it, revealing a razor-thin gash that runs from head to tail. An eviscerating slice like from a sharpened knife.

Or a wolf’s claw.

She examines the other mouse and finds the same. Another slit that runs the length of the tiny animal’s belly.

Okay. So a wolf killed these mice. But why go to that trouble and then not eat them?

Hope has heard the wolves at night, gobbling up the avalanche victims. If they’re as famished as the LTs and Sisters, why leave two mice to fester and rot?

Unless …

The hair rises at the back of Hope’s neck as she comes to a sudden realization. A moment later, she rushes out of the tent.

3.

GROWING UP IN CAMP Liberty, we never celebrated birthdays. The only exception was when we turned seventeen, because that was the day we went through the Rite. There was a big ceremony on the parade ground, and following that, the birthday boys—the graduates—were shipped off to become the new lieutenants of the Western Federation Territory.

Or so we were told.

The truth was that the Less Thans were sold off to Hunters to be tracked down and slaughtered like prey. A very different future than what was promised us.

But now that we were free of Camp Liberty and there were a number of us who had turned or were about to turn seventeen, we decided to throw a proper birthday party. This was going to be a genuine celebration.

A couple of the guys even made decorations out of paper they’d found blowing around in camp. Personally, I enjoyed the irony of it. I doubt that anyone ever dreamed that the official Republic of the True America stationery would be turned into party hats and paper chains.

Some of the LTs had created a stage at one end of the mess hall and were performing skits. At the moment, two guys were prancing around in an improvised horse costume, and that was getting huge laughs, especially when the rear of the horse got separated from the front.

I found Flush and Twitch sitting at a table in the very back of the mess hall, poring over sheets of paper.

“You’re missing the fun,” I said.

“Some of us are preoccupied,” Flush said, cocking his head toward Twitch.

“I can still hear, you know,” said Twitch. “I know you’re talking about me. And I bet you’re cocking your head in my direction.”

Flush’s face turned bright red, and Twitch pointed at the paper.

“Look at this,” he said. “We’ve started working out some combinations.”

I bent down and inspected the paper. An elaborate chart showed numbers along the side and letters across the top.

“If we choose the column where ‘four’ is ‘n,’” Twitch went on, “then that means that ‘five’ is ‘o,’ ‘six’ is ‘p’ and so on. So then we get something like—well, read it, Flush.”

Flush picked up the paper and tried to pronounce what they’d come up with. “Nomsllkk-mskn,” he said.

Nomsllkk-mskn. If it was a word, it wasn’t an obvious one.

“I admit,” Twitch said, “it’s nothing definite yet, but if we added some more vowels in there, who knows?”

“You might be onto something,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “Keep at it.”

Flush rolled his eyes. “Now we’ll never enjoy the party,” he moaned good-naturedly.

“When we get to the Heartland,” I said “the first thing we’ll do is throw a real party. And we’ll have those foods we’ve always read about.”

“You mean like cake and ice cream?”

“And cookies and brownies and everything else we can think of.”

Flush turned back to Twitch. “What’re you waiting for? Let’s crack this code so we can get out of here and celebrate.”