by Pike, JJ
“There are things I have to do. You have to help me…” She couldn’t tell them her plan to go outside and rescue the marooned Downers. That wasn’t a thing you discussed with children. “I have to do some grown up things.” She tried to keep her voice soft and kind, but she might as well have been firing nails into the wall with a nail gun. She’d gotten used to giving orders (other people’s orders, not her own) and being heard. She sounded like she was issuing orders because that was what she was doing: Issuing orders. Any adult would have understood that to mean, “Get out of my way and let me do my job.” The children either didn’t understand or didn’t give a hoot. No one stepped to. There were no minions here. She was just a lady on a hospital bed. Not a teacher. Not a parent. Certainly not Alistair.
“What grown up things?” Theo had hold of her drip stand and was applying enough pressure to let her know he was going to resist her attempt to leave her bed.
“You wouldn’t understand…”
“Miss Erlichman says that people who say that are sloppy thinkers.” Tamsen was grinning, happy to reprimand one adult with data from another.
“Tamsen’s right, with one correction,” Theo wasn’t grinning, but he was enjoying himself. “Miss Erlichman said that people who use ‘you wouldn’t understand’ as an excuse for not explaining themselves are shortchanging the future by not talking to young people like people but rather patronizing them and forcing them to fear the worst rather than being informed.”
That sounded like Charis.
Theo had a reputation for quoting people verbatim. Abbie said he had a mind like a steel trap. Nothing ever got out and he used what he heard to his best advantage. He was probably 100 IQ points smarter than she was. How could she reply? What was she supposed to say? They waited while she gawped and gaped.
Theo stepped closer making it impossible for her to pass. “Make us understand.”
Jacinta didn’t want to scare them. They’d already had enough shocks for one day. Their teacher had been shot in front of them. “It’s complicated…”
“There’s a flood.” Theo’s voice was even and cool. The kid would make an excellent leader one day. “Or there will be a flood if we don’t do something about it. Triple-H told us.”
Jacinta pushed her hair back off her face. It was lank and greasy. How long had she been asleep? Not that long, surely?
“There’s going to be a flood if we don’t do something and that means we’ll drown. There’s more water than places for the water to go in a hurry.”
The towheaded kid with the teddy bear, almost half a foot shorter than Theo and barely old enough for school, began to cry. Crying was like yawning. It could catch on. She needed to nip it in the bud.
“It’s a rumor, not a verified fact.” She swung both legs over the side of the bed and took the IV stand forcibly from Theo. That one small action gave her the spins. She had to pause and let her brain catch up with her body. “There are small leaks in a couple of places but we’re evacuating people. If we need to, we’ll close off those areas…”
“What does ‘if we need to’ mean?”
Sheesh. He wasn’t going to cut her any slack. “If the leaks get worse.”
“If there’s a flood?”
She nodded.
“No one has ever tested the system. Triple-H says it’s one of the great failings of this administration and the last. We have storm doors which are supposed to seal, but they’ve never been deployed.”
‘Deployed’ was a big word for someone so small. He had to be parroting Triple-H. Fascinating that their resident kook was talking to children this way.
What else had Theo heard that might be useful? She couldn’t help herself. She had to ask. “What does your mother say?”
Theo had an arm around the little kid with the teddy bear. He patted his shoulders and stroked his hair. He knew how to placate the little ones, the product of being the eldest of three no doubt. Jacinta wouldn’t have minded someone offering her some solace, but Theo’s face was pure steel. “About what?”
She didn’t dare say, ‘About me. Does Abbie Prosser think I am an effective leader?’ Instead she went with: “About this administration?”
“She says there needs to be less talk and more action.”
Abbie wasn’t wrong. Jacinta needed to act. She knew that. She was trying. Had been trying. Had been bumped off course by Dominic Casey. Rats, where was he? The last thing she remembered was Patrice holding a gun on him but she never would have, would she? No. Patrice wasn’t a killer. She was a nurse. That meant he was still in play. She peered into the gloom beyond the door. The lights had been turned off. There weren’t many places they could have stashed him. He wasn’t with her and the kids. They wouldn’t have taken him to the surgical suite. That meant he was either back in Down or just a few feet away, tied up in the dark, listening.
Or dead.
It came back, him spinning improbably.
She’d shot him, not Patrice.
Was he in the next room?
“You’re absolutely right, Theo.” She raised her voice. She wasn’t shouting, but she wasn’t talking in her normal voice either. She wanted Dominic to hear her. “As is your mother. We need to take action. And we’re going to. As we discussed earlier, we’re going to vote tomorrow. Depending on what the people decide, we may go outside and retrieve Liam and the other Downers or, if the vote goes the other way, we may stay put and deal with the leaks as they emerge. It’s all about the will of the people. I’m just setting the stage. Getting us ready. Doing what needs to be done so we can go outside if that’s the will of the people.” She had no idea how much time they had left, but if Abbie was right and Jeff’s people were going to attempt to overthrow her tonight, she needed to sow disinformation. Even at this late hour. Even when she was doped up and had one hand literally tied behind her back. She still had a mission. She could do it. She pushed herself off the bed, using Theo as a walking stick.
Theo took that as an invitation to keep talking. “Mom says that Jeff Steckle and his ilk will ruin us. That he doesn’t believe in democracy. That he’s an autocrat in training and that he will take us backward, rather than forward.”
Jacinta could just see Abbie sitting at her dining room table, talking to Paul, Theo hovering in the distance soaking up every word.
She aimed herself at the door and raised her voice another notch. “I think they’re a bunch of low-life upstarts who have nothing better to do than tear us down. I don’t think they have the power to ruin us. Wolfjaw is an idea more than anything else. I won’t let them take it away from us. From you.” She’d managed to take three whole steps in the span of her speech. Yippee. She couldn’t move faster. The world was spinning and her legs threatened to buckle. She needed Triple-H. And Abbie. She needed her friends.
Theo leaned in close. “Mom said Jeff Steckle is infected with rampant individualism. That he shouldn’t be part of Wolfjaw. That if she had her way he’d be put out the hatch and not allowed back in.”
That sounded more like Paul. Abbie wasn’t a “put them out of the airlock” sort.
Jacinta leaned against the wall, the sweat pouring down her back and her breaths coming fast.
Her entourage—ten to fifteen kids, ranging from about five to thirteen—moved with her like a shoal of eels. She couldn’t see where one ended and the other began. Apart from Theo. He stood apart.
“So?” He folded his arms and blocked her way out of the room.
Jacinta was caught off guard. “So, what?”
“What are we going to do?”
“I just told you…”
He waved a hand in front of her face, a gesture both imperious and a million years older than his thirteen years. “Triple-H was blasting the door. You weren’t going to unseal it and wait. That was a lie. You were going to open it, weren’t you? You weren’t even going to wait for a vote.”
“Where’s Dominic?” she whispered. They couldn’t talk freely in front of the enemy.
<
br /> “Over there. Tied up.” Theo pointed toward the main exit to Down, out of earshot.
“We have to go out now, buddy. We can’t wait. If there are real leaks, your mother’s right, we aren’t equipped to deal with them. But there’s someone out there who is.”
“You’re not a democratic leader either.” Theo didn’t budge in spite of her stepping closer to the arch. “You were going to make a unilateral decision.”
“Holy smokes, Theo. Where did you learn a word like that?”
“Triple-H has classes. We go every night and talk about political systems and history and philosophy and all the interesting stuff no one here talks about.”
Jacinta wanted to applaud and vomit. Was it treasonous to talk about political systems? Well, no. Not if you were a real democracy. But…they weren’t. They hadn’t been since Alistair overrode the election of 2003, “For the sake of continuity and the good of Wolfjaw Down.”
“We can vote.” Tamsen took her place beside Theo. “Us. Here. Now.”
Jacinta felt the world tilt on its axis. “How do you mean?”
“We live here. We should be allowed to vote in place of our parents.”
“I…”
Theo pumped Tamsen’s hand. “Good idea.”
Children voting? It wasn’t a good idea. How could they possibly weigh something that had divided the adults of Wolfjaw Down and come to a sensible decision? Downers weren’t just divided into “open the doors” and “don’t open the doors” factions. It was far more complicated. Open the doors and THEN WHAT? Who do we let in? Who do we keep out? How do we do that? The threat of violence? Real violence? Guns? Shovels? And what of the people that are left out in the cold? Are we murdering them if we don’t pull a literal trigger? Can we, in good conscience, go out there and find the one man who can slow the progress of a leak (if there is a leak) and leave the others behind? Jacinta’s knees gave out and she slumped against the wall.
“Everyone sit.” Theo held out his hand and lowered it slowly. He was like a mesmerist, controlling the children in his circle. “We’re going to talk about whether we should open the door like Triple-H said.”
“No,” said Jacinta. “This isn’t a good idea.”
“You need to get back into bed.”
Good grief. Was she taking orders from a child now?
Tamsen fussed and bustled and steered her back to the cot in the back of the room.
“This is our home.” Theo waited for a few nods. “But we didn’t choose it, did we?” He shook his head, encouraging the smallest children at his feet to do the same. “We do what they tell us to do and live with the consequences.”
“Your mother loves you, Theo.” She couldn’t stay down and let this happen. What next? Was he going to take up arms or commandeer the blow torch?
“That’s immaterial,” said Theo. “All your mothers and fathers love you. They do what they think is best for you. But are you happy?”
“I’m not.” Carl bounced from one foot to the other. He was incapable of staying still. “I want tacos and burgers and French fries and I’m never allowed them.”
A murmur traveled through the packed room.
“I miss my Xbox.”
“I miss the sunshine.”
“I miss going out hunting with my dad.”
“It smells funny down here.”
“And it’s boring. We’ve been everywhere and done everything and the mushroom palace is a joke.”
“Miss Erlichman says we need to broaden our horizons.”
“But she wants us to do what she says all the time. If we answer back, we get detention.”
“I miss dogs.”
“I want to go home. I don’t like this.”
The tone was turning querulous. Theo couldn’t have meant to unleash all this nonsense. How did that make his point?
“Exactly,” he said. “They don’t listen to us, even though they say they want us to be happy. But, we tell them exactly what we want, and they do what they want instead…”
“If we open the doors we don’t get to go outside and stay there,” said Tamsen.
Jacinta had a feeling the girl’s job was to make sure the ranking adult in the room didn’t bolt for the door. The kid had very cleverly positioned herself in front of her making it impossible for the former leader to get off her bed without a struggle. Damn. She was already thinking of herself as being deposed. This was a new low.
“I know a lot of you want to go out and stay out. I hear you,” said Tamsen. “You want Taco Bell and Burger King and pizza delivery. But it’s dangerous out there and we don’t know if pizza exists. Not really. Not for sure. If we leave we will have to go a long way before we’re safe and my father says we have no way of knowing that there is anywhere else left in the world.”
The small kids started to sniffle again. Tamsen was a worrywart and needed to stop talking. Jacinta opened her mouth, but Theo beat her to the punch.
“That’s not what we’re talking about, Tamsen. We’re talking about whether we are safe right now. Here. In Down. I think we’re not. I think there are serious problems with the infrastructure…” Pure Abbie, right there. He was quoting his mother again. “…And we need to address those problems. To do that, we need the engineers who built Wolfjaw Down to plug all the holes and reroute the water supply...”
Wow. They really had been talking out of school. Was that Abbie he was quoting or Triple-H? Jacinta had never been witness to anything so surreal in her whole born days.
“Question one: do we open the doors and let Liam back in?” Theo paused for a second. “If you want to let Liam in so he can fix the leaks, raise your hand.”
Every kid in the room raised their hand, Tamsen included.
“Listen carefully now, because this part is going to be hard for some of you to understand. There are some sick people outside the doors.” Right to it. The kid had the argument down cold. “Do we let them in, too?”
Tamsen folded her arms across her chest. “If they stay outside they die. From the fallout and from MELT. We can’t leave people to die. It’s not humane.”
“If they come inside, we could die,” said Theo. “That’s Triple-H’s argument. They come in, we might die…”
“Maybe,” said Tamsen. “But if we don’t invite them in aren’t we kind of dead? On the inside?” That sounded like Charis. So the kids had been hanging with the teacher and her boyfriend debating this issue for who knows how long.
“I think Triple-H is wrong,” said Theo. “Kind of…”
Every nerve ending in Jacinta’s body fired at the same time. Theo was disagreeing with his mentor? It hadn’t occurred to her that kids this young would have opinions of their own. She saw them as receptacles, not people in their own right.
“If we let them in, we might get sick and die. That part is true. But if we don’t let them in, we’re gambling with almost-certain death.”
“How do you mean?” Tamsen was engaged. The two of them were talking like real humans.
“We might get sick with MELT, we might not. The little girl got better.” He looked back at Jacinta. “No offense. I don’t want you to die or anything…but the little girl got better. Maybe kids do better than grownups when they get MELT?”
Jacinta was thunderstruck. Was he arguing that the children would possibly beat MELT so they should take that risk? They had data on one child which barely counted as data.
“But we’re here. Underground. Young and old alike. Water flowing all around us.” Theo bent down and put his hands over Peter’s ears. “We could drown in our beds. If we open the doors and a new disease comes in, well, we have a 50-50 chance of dying. If we don’t open the doors and we leave the engineers outside, we have an 80-20 chance.”
It was one of those plate-tectonic moments in Jacinta’s life. They took themselves seriously. They didn’t think of themselves as babies. They thought of themselves as creatures who deserved to be heard. Her heart ached for the decades she’d spent fighting
the fact that she didn’t matter. In a few short minutes these kids had made themselves matter. This was it. Time to say what she meant. She searched for something to say but was at a loss.
Theo held up his right hand. “I say we open the doors and invite anyone who wants to come into Down inside.”
Tamsen nodded.
“All those in favor, raise your right hand.”
All hands were raised. The vote was cast. They were going to open the doors and talk to the people on the other side. In the shortest meeting Jacinta had ever attended since Wolfjaw Down had been founded, democracy—or something very like it—had been restored.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MARCH 2022
Hedwig held both hands in the air, pissed beyond belief that she’d allowed herself to walk into a trap. Her Pig alarm had been right. Stuart was one of the bad guys. Not thirty percent. Not fifty. One hundred percent. He’d been playing her all along. Why had she ignored her own intuition? She knew why. Barb had said He would prevail. She had trusted Barb. No. Present tense, she trusted Barb.
Then again…she had a gun mashed into the small of her back…
What if Him prevailing didn’t include her making it out of this jam in one piece? What if she was collateral damage? That wasn’t happening. Couldn’t happen. She wouldn’t let it. Paul was counting on her. In the final analysis—conducted under great pressure in less than a minute—it didn’t matter what His plan was, if it meant her getting splattered. She was going to make a run for it the minute she got the chance. God would have to get on board with her plan. She winced but she meant it. She was not going to let her people die because of some dude in a stolen uniform and a fake doctor doing who knows what.
She definitely wasn’t going to let these lowlife, scum buckets prevail.
No way that was divinely ordained.
The penny dropped, clattering into the well of her mind.
She was supposed to step up.
