The Volunteer

by J B Cantwell

  Chapter Two

  Once underground, he picked up a small, stashed flashlight off the floor and started walking away through a tunnel I could barely see.

  The path through the concrete had been hewn by hand, I realized. I wondered what sorts of tools they had used to break through the unforgiving Manhattan Wall.

  Soon we were down on our hands and knees, moving slowly through the tiny tunnel. I was grateful I’d had some experience with such claustrophobic tunnels back when I had been assigned to battle. I took deep breaths as I followed him, step by painful step as my knees ground into the concrete below.

  Then, the water came, sitting stagnant for the last half of the journey. My knees, feet, and hands were soon wet with cold, polluted seawater.

  Jonathan gave no guidance. No reassurance. He just continued on, me trailing him, anxious now to make it to the other side.

  Then, the tunnel suddenly opened up, and we were able to stand again. The water sloshed at my boots, but it didn’t help the fact that I was now drenched.

  A metal door stood before us, barely visible in the beam of his small flashlight.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Ready for what?”

  “Ready to see what this is all about.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know. How could I know if I was ready? Really ready?

  He grimaced. “I don’t know why they picked you.” His tone was harsh. He turned and slid the door open.

  This time it wasn’t another tunnel, but the stairway of a building. There were no lights, just his flashlight bobbing along through the darkness.

  A few steps up the stairway and the passage was dry. We went up and up, four flights. Five. I was glad for the single round of phasing I’d been forced into back at the Ontario base. I could take the stairs easily, two at a time if necessary. But I held back now, not willing to see what awaited us at the top on my own.

  Finally, he stopped climbing at the eighth floor, and when he opened the door, the light from the windows was so bright I had to shield my eyes.

  I suddenly realized where we were, and my emotions floated back and forth between amazement and panic, even though I had expected it all along.

  I’d be dead for sure if I was caught back here.

  The Stilts.

  Outside the windows I could see the ocean waves buffeting against the side of the building, and for a moment it was hard to catch my breath.

  “The downstairs is all flooded,” he said, turning back. “But there are places in some buildings where the water has not found its way through. Here, the doors to the staircases remain shut and sealed, and it keeps the water out.”

  I took another deep breath and followed him through the building. It was as if the occupants of the office had never left at all. Desks, chairs, antiquated computers, the occasional framed pictures of loved ones. The children in those pictures were adults now, far along on their way to the grave, maybe gone already.

  At the edge of the office we came upon a locked door. Jonathan pulled out a ring of keys from his pocket and slid the right one into the lock. It turned with a quiet click, and the door opened before us.

  Nothing could have prepared me for what was on the other side.

  Children. Squealing, happy children, smiles wide on their faces. When they saw us, they stopped and gathered around, wonder spreading now in their eyes.

  “Jonathan’s back!” one of them exclaimed. “What did you bring us?”

  “Nothing this time, my little loves. Only her.” He indicated me, and their smiles quickly faded.

  I took a few steps into the enormous room, amazed at what I was seeing. My boots squished with water

  Several of the cubicle walls were still standing, though many had been taken down and laid up against the glass on the far side. As I walked by, I saw that many of the cubicles were used as makeshift bedrooms, various blankets and sleeping bags spread out on the floor of each one.

  The children followed us as we made our way deeper into the room. Several adults stood as Jonathan and I walked across the floor to the bank of windows on the other side. I gazed out at the sea of buildings beyond, what was left of west Manhattan, now drowned in the ocean water. No wall was there to protect them.

  “Who is she?” one of the children asked quietly.

  “This is Riley,” he said, turning me around to face the room again. “She’s going to help us.”

  Now, it wasn’t just children who were gathering around, but adults, too. I noticed that most faces were gaunt, and I wondered how they were able to get their food, suddenly grateful for my nutrition squares and mash. There must have been a different entrance near a grocery store. Something.

  But no matter. These people were alive, hidden from the government.

  “This is the one who took Lydia,” one man said as he walked toward me.

  “It was Chambers’ order,” Jonathan said. Whether he liked me or not, he wouldn’t go against the decisions of his superiors. “There’s no going against it. She’s on the inside. She can help us.” He turned to me. “Your assignment for the next year had been made, but then changed by someone else, his rank higher than yours on the inside. You won’t find yourself in battle anymore. You’ll be at a facility that builds bombs. Dangerous, maybe even more so than battle. But you’ll learn things that none of us here knows about.”

  “But why should she?” one woman asked, coming forward. “What does she have to gain by helping us?”

  Jonathan looked over at me, and for the first time I noticed his scar, a deep depression in his skin right where a chip must have once been. I shuddered, hoping that removing my chip wasn’t on their agenda.

  “I don’t want to be part of this anymore,” I said. “Part of the Service. I want out.”

  “And who’s to say she’s not a spy?” another man asked.

  A quiet mumble erupted through the small crowd.

  “I’m not—” I began, but the people weren’t listening. I raised my voice. “I’m not a spy!” I finally called loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I’m here because of Lydia. She told me to come here, to meet Chambers. That’s all I know. Is he here?”

  A couple of the adults laughed at this question.

  “She expects an audience with Chambers!” one of the women said through a fit of giggles.

  I frowned. “That was what Lydia told me.”

  “Yes.” A tall man moved forward. I noticed he was hunched over as he walked to me. And when he was standing right in front of me, I recognized the bloodshot, cloudy eyes of someone who had worked at the burning plants. “But why would you follow her directions?” he went on. “She hated you, you know.”

  My breath caught. Had she? “That might’ve been true. But she trusted me.”

  “And why should we trust you now? There’s no Lydia here, and that’s on you.”

  I remembered kneeling in the dirt behind a bale of hay, just another soldier caught up in the firing squad. Had the sergeant known then? That Lydia and I were conspiring? I could still feel the click of the gun that was pointed, threatening, to my head as I leaned over, readying my rifle with shaking hands.

  Then I took her life, trading hers for my own. There was no escape from that.

  The Fighters I’d met in the forest were innocent bystanders, but their deaths were not on my shoulders. The only person who I really had to take responsibility for was Lydia. I remembered her spitting at me on our first day in the Service. She had hated me, at least in the beginning.

  “I don’t need to explain to you how or why Lydia was executed. It could’ve been any one of us with the live round in our guns.”

  “You should have stopped. You should have said no.”

  “There would’ve been no purpose to that,” the woman chimed in. “Then we’d have two dead Volunteers on our hands, not one.”

  Volunteer. Was that what my status was now?

  The room fell
silent, and I stood, waiting for the verdict. Gradually, the crowd moved away, scowling, while the children stood staring. Eventually, just Jonathan and I stood at the bank of windows.

  “They hate me,” I said quietly.

  “Of course they do. What did you expect?”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but nothing came out

  I hadn’t expected this.

  Jonathan turned to face the water again, this time his face falling slack, sad. “We brought you here to help us. We need more than just a couple people on the inside. Even letting you in here goes against what our people believe in.”

  “And what do they believe in?”

  “A future. One without war. One with enough food for all. And no chips to monitor us.” His hand went absently up to the scar behind his ear, touching it gingerly, as if the wound was still fresh. “And you’re a soldier. They don’t trust you. Lydia was born here but raised on the inside so that her chip could develop. She knew from the very start of her life that she would be instrumental to the Volunteers.”

  “What happened to you?” I asked. “To your head?”

  “I tried to get into the Service. It was before I knew about any of this.” He gestured to the room around us. He stood silent for a moment, then, “I ran away. I went to a building in the city while I was on leave, just like you. They took out the chip.” He grimaced at the memory. “Just like they took out yours.”

  So he did know my history.

  “I never went back after that. I was led to another break in the wall, came out here, to a different building, to see what it was all about.”

  “There are others?” I asked.

  “Hundreds.” He gestured to the tall buildings that surrounded us. “All spread out across this sea of skyscrapers.”

  My eyes wandered from building to building, searching.

  “Oh, you won’t see them. Their living quarters face the river, not the city. And the buildings all go black at night. A little light isn’t worth the risk of being caught.”

  “Have any of you been caught? How safe is it?”

  “Once, in the beginning, a group of Volunteers were rounded up and executed. They called them terrorists, but all they were trying to do was to survive outside the wall. They didn’t want their lenses. They didn’t want to be tracked and followed. That’s why none of us here have one. They can’t track what they can’t see.”

  “But they can see me. Or they could if they knew what to look for.”

  “No, they’ll see Kiyah, not you. She’ll go to the normal places you might go. Around town. Back to Brooklyn to imitate you going to see your mother.”

  My eyes widened, and my stomach dropped. My mother?

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. She won’t go inside.”

  He looked back out at the sea of buildings, his eyes glazing over for a moment.

  “Every once in a while a patrol boat will come through, but we have lookouts for that. When they do, everyone lays flat on the floor to avoid being seen. It’s worked so far, though I don’t know how much longer it will. The government knows that we’re out here, they just don’t know where or how we get up into the buildings. Short of a barrage of bullets, we’re mostly safe.” He shrugged his shoulders. “At least as safe as we can be.”

  I looked out across the landscape of buildings, what used to be the west side of Manhattan. How many refugees were out there now, waiting? And waiting for what?

  I remembered the last time I was out on the ocean, on our way from base camp to Boston. We had spent our days shoveling fish guts and ocean garbage into a trawler. The contents were on their way to the Burn, and us soldiers were on our way to war.

  “But enough of that,” Jonathan said. “You need to meet with Owen, the leader of our building. Come on and follow me. He’s been waiting for you.”

  Chapter Three

  Jonathan led me back to the stairwell and up two more flights. This time when we came out into the room, there was nobody there but for one man, gazing out the windows just as I had done moments before.

  Jonathan walked briskly up to him. “I’ve brought her,” he said. “Riley. Is this a good time?”

  Owen turned around to look at me and crossed his arms over his chest.

  I’d thought their leader would be large, fit, maybe even a Prime. But that wasn’t him. He was a short man, barely taller than my wispy frame at five-foot-six. Gray streaks of hair peppered his head, and on his face he wore a beard and a grimace, not unlike Jonathan’s.

  He walked toward us.

  “So, this is her,” he said, his voice calm, almost like we were friends already. But with no smile. “What do you think?” he asked Jonathan.

  Jonathan shrugged. “I don’t know yet. She’s not what I expected.”

  Owen considered me for a moment, looking me up and down, sizing me up. Did he think I wasn’t worth the trouble? That I was nothing more than a murderer, just like the people thought downstairs?

  He turned. “You can go now,” he said to Jonathan. “I’ll send her back down when we’re done here.”

  Jonathan’s face dropped. He had clearly been hoping to be part of the audience, but now he was dismissed.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “You don’t have to call me ‘Sir,’ Jonathan.”

  “Oh … right.” He turned and left the room. I heard the stairwell door slam shut, and it was just me and Owen, who turned again to look out the windows.

  “They probably hate you,” he said. “But you don’t have to worry about that. I’m new to them, too. I came from a different building after their leader was lost, so they don’t know me around here. They may blame you for Lydia, but I don’t. I know what it’s like out there in the Service.” He stopped, then pulled back a few strands of his thinning hair to reveal his own scar.

  “I don’t know what you think I can do for you,” I said. “I don’t have any rank higher than a basic soldier.”

  “Actually, that is no longer true.” He turned to look at me, his blue eyes piercing. “We were able to hack into their system and change your status from Infantry to Special Infantry.”

  “You can do that? How did you get away with it?”

  “They are not the only ones with computer abilities. And no one will dare question it. They will think that the command came from someone higher in rank than them. And in the Service, you don’t ask questions. Not even those with power dare to question their orders or where they come from.”

  My heart dropped into my stomach as I realized the truth of his words. Where were they sending me? Of course, no one would second guess it, at least not publicly. They would assume that the orders were legitimate. I could just imagine Holt, his hands rolled tightly into fists, anger stretching a scowl across his face.

  “I’m sure Jonathan told you, you’ll be heading off to a new facility to learn how to make, detonate, and defuse explosives.”

  “But why me? I’m no whiz with that sort of thing. I barely survived my first year. And I’ve never been close to any bombs. Well, if you don’t count hand grenades. Don’t you have others here who could learn those techniques? You know, don’t you have access to online instructions?”

  “You’re the only one in the infantry who can take on this task. The others are at different posts, gathering different information. And no, instructions for such things are no longer allowed on the internet. The instructions needed to create and detonate bombs are now closely guarded. Freedom of speech is long gone, no matter what they tell you.

  “That’s where you come in. You may not be a whiz with explosives now, but you soon will be. Those Service tests you took on your first day didn’t lie. Your scores were high in both intelligence and valor, two of the highest rated categories, a combination perfect for our needs.”

  I remembered back to that first day. I had been so scared, so filled with terror as I had walked into the testing room, my lens going blank for the first time ever in my life. It was a safety measure for the Service, to ensu
re that no soldier could read another’s designation. After all, who would want to help a Red, a convicted criminal, during a battle? Or, in my case, a Green? Both Reds and Oranges had treated Greens with disdain, but I’d known even then that the lack of designation would help things, even though it made me feel as blind as someone emerging from their assignment at the Burn.

  Lydia had been an Orange.

  “So you really don’t hate me? You know, because of Lydia?”

  His face fell, and he looked at me skeptically.

  “I didn’t know Lydia,” he said, starting to pace the floor, eyes following the pattern of the thin office carpeting as he walked. “From what I understand, she was a valuable asset we had on the inside. But the truth is that she was still a criminal waiting for her time as an Orange to expire. She would be free again at the end of her service, you see, a Green once more, if she survived that long. But she was little use to us on the inside while she was still an Orange. They’ve never let the Oranges or Reds move up in the rank, no matter what they tell you. It’s plain old infantry for them. Or the Burn.

  “But, though her abilities were limited, she did have something very useful to offer us. You. She’d had a choice between you and Hannah Murphy. Soldier Murphy was a Green, no matter what she might’ve told you during your time together.”

  I thought about Hannah. If what Owen was saying was true, most of what Hannah had ever said to me had been lies. This might have surprised me three months ago, but not anymore.

  “Soldier Murphy rubbed Lydia the wrong way, came across to her as a someone not to be trusted, which turned out to be true. So Lydia, with a little, or, well, a big nudge from Chambers, chose you. There was a hope that she would also be able to get to Alex. The thought at the time was that your involvement with him would be enough to get him to follow you to the Volunteers. Sadly, the Service got to him first. And you know how he is now.”

  I stayed silent for several long moments. I knew.

  “Where is Chambers?” I asked, finally. “Lydia said that I would be meeting him here.”