The Prey

“Can I get in there?” Hope asks, motioning toward the running water.

She’s so focused on scrubbing the dirt from her nails that when she turns around, she’s surprised to see she’s surrounded by a circle of girls, over ten of them.

Hope feels a stab of panic. While her instinct is to run, there’s no possible way she’d make it to the door. Instead, she remembers her father’s advice about not showing fear when facing wild beasts. And what wilder beasts are there than the girls of Barracks B?

Red Hair steps forward.

“Where’d you come from?”

“Out there,” Hope answers, shaking the water from her hands.

“All these years?”

“That’s right.”

“No one could evade the Brown Shirts that long.”

Hope shrugs. “We did.”

Red Hair leans in until their noses are practically touching. Hope doesn’t notice the girl behind her—not until she yanks Hope’s arms back. Hope struggles but it’s no good. The girl who has her arms is one giant slab of muscle.

“You better not be working for the Brown Shirts,” Red Hair says, sending a fist into Hope’s stomach.

Hope’s lungs collapse. Red Hair grabs Hope’s chin and hits her hard across the face. Pain explodes from Hope’s jaw and she crumples to the cold cement floor, tasting the metallic tang of blood.

Through swollen eyes, Hope sees Red Hair bending over her.

“We were just fine until you came along,” she hisses. “And don’t you forget it.”

The girls exit, leaving Hope bruised and bleeding on the latrine floor.

That night at dinner, the other prisoners seem slightly more talkative than before.

But there are two exceptions.

The stub of a girl who grabbed Hope’s arms; her bowl cut of black hair frames a permanently grim expression. And the frail sister of Red Hair. She averts her eyes and doesn’t look at Hope once.

One by one, the girls finish their meager rations and leave the mess hall. When the frail girl walks by, she drops something next to Hope’s plate. A piece of fabric. Hope regards it warily. When she unfolds it, she discovers it’s a head scarf. She fashions it atop her bald head, grateful for the covering.

Back in the barracks, it’s as though Hope and Faith don’t exist. The prisoners go about their routines without the slightest regard for them.

Everyone has climbed into their cots when they hear a loud rattling sound: Brown Shirts stripping the chains from the door. A moment later, a girl appears, haloed by moonlight. Once she’s inside, the door is shut, the chains and locks refastened.

With halting steps she shuffles forward, seemingly unaware of her surroundings. She speaks to no one. Sees no one. She has wet herself and the sharp aroma of urine fills the room.

Red Hair gets up, placing her hands on the girl’s shoulders. “You’re back here now, Diana. We’ll take care of you.”

Diana, a tall, willowy girl with angular features and auburn hair, nods vacantly.

“You’re safe now, Diana.”

“Safe?” Diana echoes.

Her voice is distant, otherworldly.

In the pale moonlight Hope can make out Diana’s eyes. They are glazed and faraway, focused on some remote horizon. It’s like seeing the shell of a person only—a human being without a soul.

Hope shudders.

Too many questions run through her mind.

What’s going on here? she wonders. What kind of world are we in?

Later that night when she uses the latrine she notices a prisoner standing in the back hallway, leaning against the wall as if keeping watch.

Stranger still is the ticking sound she hears as she returns to bed—a metallic clink. As she drifts off to sleep, fingering her father’s locket, she swears she can hear it in her dreams.

Clink. Clink. Clink.

11.

THE NEXT MORNING CAT was gone.

His bed was made, his trunk empty. There was a good deal of speculation about where he might have gone—abducted by Crazies, recruited by Brown Shirts—but no one could say for sure.

I was out on the field when Sergeant Dekker came marching over.

“The colonel wants to see you,” he said.

“Now?”

“Right now.”

For the second time in a week, I felt my stomach bottom out at the prospect of meeting Colonel Westbrook. With the eyes of every LT—every Less Than—on me, I followed the oily Sergeant Dekker to the headquarters. Instead of being led inside, I was ushered into the back of a Humvee.

“Where am I go—”

“You’ll see,” he answered, cutting me off.

Sweat trickled from my armpits as I sat waiting. Colonel Westbrook and Major Karsten emerged from the headquarters and climbed in the Humvee with me, neither saying a word. We took off. It wasn’t until we’d left Camp Liberty that Westbrook turned around in the passenger seat, his coal-black eyes drilling into me.

“We’re in search of a missing LT,” he said, “and we thought you might be able to help us find him.”

“M-me?” I stammered. “I just met the guy. I don’t know where he is.”

“So you know who I’m talking about.”

“Well, sure, I mean—”

“And that wasn’t you leaving camp with him yesterday afternoon?”

My face burned red, and it was all the answer he needed. The rest of the drive was long and silent.

The roads we followed were gravel and narrow, trailing the foothills of Skeleton Ridge and cutting through dense forests of spruce and pine. All at once we reached a clearing. There before us was a prison.

While it bore a certain similarity to Camp Liberty, there was one glaring difference: the entire site was encircled by a tall barbed wire fence. Guard towers anchored each of the four corners, with Brown Shirts poised behind machine guns.

I wondered who these inmates were who demanded such high security. I could only guess they were the most ruthless of prisoners, the most vile of criminals.

At just that moment the door opened to the tar-paper barracks and out streamed the inmates, all dressed in plain gray dresses and scuffed work boots.

Girls. Dozens and dozens of girls.

The only females I’d ever seen were two-dimensional ones from the movies. To finally see them in the flesh—and my own age, no less—took my breath away. A part of me felt like some ancient explorer encountering tribes from a far-off land.

All around me, girls in drab uniforms marched wearily from one side of camp to the other. But there was something I didn’t understand. How was it these girls—these prisoners—were so highly guarded, while the Less Thans of Camp Liberty could come and go? What had these girls done that made them such dangerous criminals?

Also, there was something about how they moved—something about them—I found oddly disturbing. With downcast eyes and feet shuffling through the dust, they seemed almost … haunted. Like their physical bodies were present but their minds were a thousand miles away.

Colonel Westbrook seemed to read my mind. “So you see, Book,” he said, swiveling in his seat, “there are places in this world worse than Camp Liberty.”

He climbed out of the vehicle.

“Don’t move,” Major Karsten added, fixing me with a skeletal stare.

He and Westbrook disappeared into the headquarters building and I sat in the stifling backseat, trying to make sense of what they had said, of what I was seeing.

Four guards escorted a handful of prisoners past the idling Humvee, marching them through a side gate to a barn on the other side of the fence. As I watched them, my eyes were drawn to one prisoner in particular. She was of medium height with light brown skin—skin the color of tea—and her hair was covered in a head scarf. There was something about her that caught my attention. It wasn’t just that she was good-looking, although there was no doubt about that. There was some undefinable quality that drew me to her. It was almost like we had something in common—like there was something about her I already knew. Even from the distance that separated us I could make out the expression on her face … and I knew that expression. Had seen it countless times staring back at me in the mirror.

If anyone could help me understand what was going on, I knew it would be her.

12.

HOPE STACKS HAY BALES in the barn’s loft. The work is hard and repetitive, but she doesn’t mind. The intoxicating scent of fresh hay reminds her of the home she left ten years earlier.

A home with a mother and a father and life free of Brown Shirts.

A flash of movement out of the corner of her eye steals her attention, but when she peers through the loft window, all she sees are trees and the jagged cliffs of Skeleton Ridge. Strange. She could have sworn she saw something. Someone.

A moment later, it’s the sound of footsteps that causes her to stop midlift, muscles straining. A Brown Shirt races through the fields.

When she turns around to stack the bale, she’s shocked to see someone standing directly in front of her. He’s about her age, with light brown skin and dark hair. The bale falls from her hands with a thud.

“Who are you and what—”

“Shh,” he whispers. “I won’t hurt you.”

She takes an involuntary step backward but there’s nowhere to go. The heels of her feet peek over the edge of the loft. “You shouldn’t be up here.” She eyes the pitchfork that lies a couple feet away. If she’s quick enough, she can dive for it, reaching it before this stranger.

“I won’t hurt you,” he says again, palms raised.

Her fists clench. “What do you want?” He doesn’t answer, so she asks again. “What do you want?”

He opens his mouth to speak, but at just that moment the Brown Shirt comes stumbling into the barn, badly out of breath. The guy—the intruder—ducks behind the pyramid of hay bales, crouching in shadows.

Down below, the soldier circles in place, then raises his eyes until they land on Hope. “Did you see him?”

“Who?”

“An LT—a boy. Came running through. Just a moment ago.”

Hope is about to speak but stops herself. She has no reason to trust this intruder—no reason at all—but she has even less reason to trust the Brown Shirts. Why should she help them? All they’ve done is make her life a living hell.

But if she covers up the fact that she’s hiding someone and the boy is found, she’ll be the one who’s punished. Why should she help him out—a perfect stranger? For all she knows, he’s the enemy. One of the Crazies her father warned her about.

“Well?” the Brown Shirt prompts.

Is it her imagination or does she feel the boy’s eyes boring into the back of her head?

“I didn’t see anyone,” she says at last.

“Then where’d he go?”

She shrugs.

The soldier does another circle, then makes a step for the ladder. “You sure he’s not up there?”

Hope spreads her arms wide. “Come see for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

The Brown Shirt stares at her, unsure whether to climb up. Finally he hurries away and exits the barn.

Hope doesn’t move. Now that the soldier has gone, it’s just her and this intruder. If she’s made a mistake—if she’s misjudged him—she’ll pay for it.

She slowly pivots in place. At first, she thinks he’s disappeared—his departure as abrupt and secret as his arrival. Then she finds him—peeking through a crack between hay bales. His eyes flick anxiously from one side to another.

“He’s gone,” she says. “You may as well come out.” Just to be safe, she picks up the pitchfork. Her damp palms grip the wooden handle.

The boy eases forward, brushing hay from his arms. He walks with a slight limp.

“Thank you,” he says. “He would’ve killed me.”

“He would’ve killed me,” she responds, not hiding her irritation.

A look of regret sweeps across the boy’s face. “I’m sorry I put you in that—”

“You shouldn’t have. I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

“I’m sorry. I just thought—”

“It’s bad enough the other girls want to kill me, now the guards will as well.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

They stand there, facing each other, saying nothing. Separating them is a slice of sunlight, dancing with dust.

“Can I just ask one question and then I’ll get out of your hair?”

She nods curtly.

“What is this place? What’s going on here?”

“Camp Freedom,” she says.

“Why are you here? Why’re there guards and barbed wire? Are you all criminals or orphans or what?”

She doesn’t know how to answer that—not in any brief kind of way.

“Look, I don’t have much time,” he says, “and I know I shouldn’t have bothered you …”

“I’ll say.”

“… and I’m sorry if I’ve gotten you in trouble, but I’m a Less Than from Camp Liberty and—”

“A Less Than?”

He waves his hand dismissively. “It’s what they call us. We’re looking for an escapee and we thought he might’ve come here.”

She gives her head a shake. “Here? Why on earth would someone come here?”

“What I’m really asking is: If someone wanted to get to the next territory, what’s the fastest way?”

For the longest time Hope doesn’t speak. Ever since she and Faith came into camp, they’ve been ignored by everyone. Now, finally, someone is talking to her. Needing something from her. And that someone is this boy, whose honest expression and probing eyes set her heart racing.

“Can you help me or not?” he asks.

That’s when she realizes what she recognizes in him. It’s not like she’s met him before—it’s not like that—but there’s something in his eyes. Kindness. Maybe even warmth. She doesn’t mean to stare, but she can’t look away.

“The Brown Forest,” she blurts out.

“What about it?”

“That’s where you want to go.”

“Where is it? How do we get there?”

Hope leans the pitchfork against the hay bales and wipes a section of floor with her hand. “This is where we are,” she says, hastily sketching a map.

He crouches next to her. She can feel the heat from his body. Smell traces of sweat and musk and woodsmoke. Masculine smells.

“You need to get east of the mountains,” she says, her fingertips tracing the outline of Skeleton Ridge. “Until you hit the Flats.”

“The Flats?”

“A white desert. Cross it and you’ll reach the Brown Forest. Somewhere on the other side of that is the next territory.”

“Have you been to the Brown Forest?”

“Once. A long time ago. My father took us.”

“Is it safe?”

“Safer than here,” she says.

They happen to lock eyes at the same moment, and Hope feels the blood rushing up her neck.

“Thank you,” he says.

She nods. Her breathing is unnaturally shallow.

“I’m Book,” he says, extending a hand.

She hesitates. A long moment passes before she reaches forward. “Hope.”

They shake. His grip is surprisingly strong, and it’s like a jolt of electricity shoots up her arm. She pulls her hand back.

From outside comes the sound of footsteps. Book shoots a glance toward the barn door.

“If we ever escape,” he says, “I promise we’ll come for you.”

“Don’t. Not if you want to live.”

A moment later, the Less Than named Book scrambles down the ladder and out the barn. Long after he’s gone, Hope can still feel the touch of his hand, the heat of his skin. For reasons she doesn’t understand, it’s the first time she’s felt alive since she and Faith were captured.

13.

ALTHOUGH THE BROWN SHIRT chewed me out for disappearing, more than anything he seemed relieved I showed up before the colonel found out. That way both of us avoided punishment.

Westbrook and Karsten didn’t say a word the entire drive back to Camp Liberty, but I swear they looked at me differently. With a new kind of suspicion.

The feeling was mutual. After witnessing the gruesome slaughter in the mountains and the inmates of Camp Freedom, I was more convinced than ever the world was not what I thought it was.

As for finding Cat, the colonel never once asked for my assistance. It was almost as if he was more interested in threatening me with what I could expect if I didn’t play along.

When we returned to Liberty, I didn’t return to my barracks—not right away. I needed time to think, to process everything I’d seen. Like the girl.

The girl named Hope.

I couldn’t stop thinking about her—especially those eyes. They were two brown pools. She didn’t so much look at me as through me.

There was something else swimming in my brain—something Cat said on the way down the mountain. Right under the Brown Shirts’ noses.

That night, once lights-out was called, I waited. When all the other LTs were snoring with a kind of clocklike efficiency, I tiptoed to the latrine. The cistern’s edges scraped when I removed the lid, revealing a lone object taped beneath it. A flashlight. Not many to be found these days, but Red had managed to sneak one off a Brown Shirt months earlier.

I snuck outside. The night was cool, the grass stiffening with frost.

I made my way to the Soldiers’ Quarters—a large rectangle of brick barracks where the officers and Brown Shirts lived, with soccer fields and a softball diamond in the very center. There was also an enclosed tennis court and an area for free weights. Barbells littered the ground, moonlight catching metal.

But there was nothing to be found—just some ball fields and workout equipment. What was Cat talking about? What was suspicious about all that? The windscreen surrounding the tennis court flapped in the breeze and I decided to give it one last look.

The door was partially ajar and I turned my body sideways to slip inside. My eyes roamed from one corner of the court to the next. It was exactly what it appeared to be: a tennis court with a frayed net and fading green pavement. There was nothing there.

I was gliding back to the entrance when my foot sent something clattering across the court. I froze, praying no one had heard.

My hands fumbled on cool pavement until they landed on something small and round. A button. A measly button.

I cocked my arm and was ready to toss it over the fence when I gave it another look. My thumb nudged the flashlight on, producing a fuzzy, weak beam. There was nothing special about the button. Small. White. Four tiny holes for thread.

But when I held it against my shirt, I saw it matched the ones on my camp uniform. There had to be a lot of shirts out there with white buttons, but still …

From across the fields I heard the sounds of Brown Shirts leaving a party. I had to get out of there before they discovered me.

I let the flashlight’s yellow circle guide me across the court. Metal caught light and glimmered back at me. A brass ring, set flush into the court. I let the light play on the surrounding area … and nearly lost my breath.

A rectangle was cut into the court, like a storm cellar door. Without thinking, I slipped my fingers beneath the cold metal ring and lifted. The door swung up, revealing a black chasm …

… and the reeking stench of BO, vomit, and urine. It nearly made me gag.

I poked the flashlight’s beam into the hole, where it caught a ladder and black concrete walls. It was some kind of underground bunker. Then the light fell on pale, upturned faces—prisoners chained to walls. Their eyes were wide with terror; rags protruded from their mouths. They recoiled at the light, blinking and pressing themselves against the wall like vampires.

I started to move the light away when suddenly I recognized one of the faces. It was Moon, a round-faced LT who’d gone through the Rite earlier that spring. Now here he was, tethered to a bunker wall, unwashed hair plastering his forehead, his pants stained and soiled.

“Moon?” I asked, kneeling by the side of the hole. He squinted into the beam. “It’s me: Book.”

“Aagk?” he sputtered through the gag in his mouth.

My flashlight swung to the prisoner next to him. His face was jaundiced, eyes bloodshot, sores covering his half-naked body. I recognized him, too: Double Wide. And next to him was Beanie. And there was Pill Boy. And Towhead and One Eye and all the other LTs who’d just gone through the Rite.

Why were they here? Weren’t they supposed to be officers somewhere else? It didn’t make any sense.

Unless Cat was right: we were nothing more than prey—raised in a hatchery for someone else’s sport.

I tried to speak but nothing came out. No words, not even sounds. What could I possibly say to ease their pain?

My eyes squeezed shut and the images returned. Dripping crimson on a tiled floor. The press of darkness. Shortness of breath.

Raucous laughter broke the spell; Brown Shirts were approaching. I lowered the door back in place and hurried away, praying I hadn’t been spotted. As I hustled back to the Quonset hut, my mind refused to let go of what I’d just seen. It was like K2’s death: I knew if I didn’t do something—soon—those faces would haunt me the rest of my life.

14.

EACH ROLL CALL IS the same: names are called in groups of two. Sometimes four, sometimes six. Always in pairs.

This morning, only two names are called. Jane F-738 and Jane F-739.

Faith and Hope.

While the others rush gratefully back to the barracks, Faith and Hope stand alone in the middle of the parade ground. Hope feels her legs go wobbly. A glance at her sister tells her she’s in a kind of shock, the blood draining from her face.

“Coming, girls?” Dr. Gallingham asks, dabbing his watery eyes with a soiled hanky.

Although it’s no more than a hundred yards to the infirmary, it feels like a hundred miles, each step worse than the one before. Hope hears a rattling sound and realizes with a start that it’s Faith. Her teeth are chattering as though it were the dead of winter, even though it’s a warm spring morning, sunlight stroking their faces.

“H and FT,” Hope whispers.

Faith doesn’t seem to hear. She shuffles forward like a sheep to slaughter.

Hope can’t take it. First there was her father’s death, then their capture. Now this. Any moment she expects to wake up from this nightmare.

The infirmary stands two stories high, with peeling white paint and bars covering the second-floor windows. Like a prison … or an insane asylum.

Dr. Gallingham leads them into a front reception area. A Brown Shirt tugs a key from his key ring and unlocks a door. Faith shakes uncontrollably as they’re herded upstairs. Before them lies a long hallway. White-coated technicians hurry from one room to the next.

Hope glances into one of the rooms and sees a dead girl lying motionless on a stainless steel table, her lifeless eyes boring into the ceiling. A man in a white coat slices through her chalky skin with a scalpel, removing organs and plopping them in a bowl. In the next room, another man is powering up a portable handsaw, preparing to cut through a corpse’s clavicle. Hope hears but does not see the scrape of metal biting into bone. The smell is like burning hair.

“Eyes forward,” Hope commands her sister, trying to spare her.

The two girls are led into a small room near the end of the hall. Water stains tattoo the ceiling. Before them are two beds, the white iron splotched with rust. Dr. Gallingham makes a grand motion with his damp hanky, indicating the girls should lie down.

“Good,” Hope says. “I wanted to take a nap.”

“And if you’re lucky,” Gallingham responds, “you might even wake up.”

As soon as they’re horizontal, two middle-aged female technicians begin attaching leather manacles to their wrists and ankles.

“What’s this?” Hope asks, fighting against the straps. “Think we’re gonna run away?”

“You’d be surprised.”

At just that moment, the techs hold up syringes and tap the plastic cylinders. Small bubbles of hazy liquid dribble from each needle’s end.