Vagrancy

by Stacey Mac

  “You’re okay. Keep moving.”

  The trees that circle Resolute look unfriendly, threateningly; but we run as though they will swallow us in their embrace, protect us.

  We pass Base again, running the perimeter of the open space, once a hub, now a graveyard.

  The forest’s edge stretches, pulling us towards it.

  We sprint for it. Omar and Dean’s widening steps carry them away quickly. Adriel passes me, and Bryce and I run side by side, our rifles tucked to our chests.

  The boys are faster and they disappear into the trees ahead. My bare feet, damaged and raw, slow me; the pain finally making its way into my adrenalin-soaked brain.

  “STOP!”

  One of many things impregnated in me during my training was to - under no circumstances - stop when the enemy yells, “stop.” For the same reason that you wouldn’t oblige if they asked you to shoot yourself.

  But I stop. Because I know the voice.

  Vincent. My best friend. Why wouldn’t I stop?

  My heard jerks to him. He and Delilah hold their assault rifles ready. They recognise me at the same time. Their eyes widen, their rifles lower slightly.

  There aren’t any other seconds in which we can speak to one another; Vincent and me. If there was, I would thank him for hesitating to shoot. I’d tell him I was sorry. I’d tell him that he is good, all the way through to the bone.

  Bryce appears at my side again.

  Everyone, but me, raises their firearms.

  I scream, lunging at Bryce. But he shoots first.

  Vincent falls. Just like they all do: slowly, like a tower of cards.

  I crash into Bryce before he can shoot again and we tumble downwards.

  “Tessa? Tessa!”

  Dean’s feet skid to a stop in front of me, and I hear him pull his hand gun.

  “STOP!” I scream. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  And miraculously, he doesn’t.

  I gather myself up and rush towards Delilah, not thinking about her gun, which hangs limply at her side. I reach her and turn to Dean.

  “Don’t shoot her. She’s coming with us,” I pant.

  Dean’s expression is incredulous. “Tessa, come here. Now!”

  “She’s coming with us.”

  “Back away from her!” he calls to Delilah, his gun raised. “Back away!”

  “Dean! I said she’s coming with us!”

  Delilah whimpers behind me, her rifle hitting the dirt.

  I plead silently with Dean. I know that I’ll put myself in front of Delilah if I have to. I know that I’ll let Dean kill me if he tries to get to her, I’ll let him live with the guilt for the rest of his life.

  He spits, swearing, and then lowers his gun. Running forwards, he collects Delilah’s rifle from the ground, and then turns to her. Roughly, he pats her down, taking a knife and a pistol from her belt.

  “Let’s go! NOW, Tessa!”

  He takes Delilah’s arm and shoves her in front of us. “Run for it, kid. If you slow us down, I’ll shoot you.”

  Together, but in pieces, we disappear into the trees.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  That’s how we make it out of Resolute: bare-footed, under-dressed, bleeding. Alive, but only some of us.

  Ahead of Dean and I, Delilah runs the way one might sleep-walk; limbs dragging, stumbling, barely here. Every so often I have to place my hands on her back and shove her forwards, begging her to move faster.

  Besides the frantic huffing, the snapping of forest debris, we hear only the distant echoing of gunfire, and nothing else. There is no enemy chasing us. We’re just running to put distance between us and the awfulness.

  Omar and Adriel are leading us through the labyrinth. Though the forest roof is dense, the black becomes dawn, even here.

  “Stop right there!” a voice in the distance calls.

  Our strides halt. With the deep voice, a shock rips through me, like a bullet.

  Adriel and Omar already have their guns raised, pointing them into the dimness ahead; to shapes that I can identify as human, but no further.

  “Galore or Resolute?” The shadow drawls. “GALORE OR RESOLUTE?”

  “You first, asshole!” Adriel calls back, the back of his dark neck strains.

  “Adriel?”

  We hear footsteps crunch along the ground, and then a face begins to form from the dark. The man, his obscene nose preceding him, steps into the grey.

  “Ares!” Omar gasps, his rifle swooping down to his side. He leans forwards, hands on his knees. “Thank fucking Jesus.”

  Ugly has a name: Ares, and is fortunately not a Galore soldier, and unfortunately alive.

  Behind me, I hear Dean lower his rifle, too. “We weren’t followed Ares. Who else is with you?”

  Ares turns his head, whistles through his teeth, and the other shadows come towards us.

  Jeb, Rooks, and in her arms, Julie.

  Julie.

  When she sees us, she strains against Rooks until her feet touch the ground and she bolts. Her small face, grimy and tear-streaked, her eyes swollen. She runs past us and clutches Dean around the middle.

  Dean ducks, picks her up, wipes her face with his even dirtier hand.

  His face seems to sag. His eyes close and he breathes through his mouth.

  And I crumble for him. For her.

  “Wait a sec,” Ares says suddenly. “Who the fuck is that?”

  He butts the barrel of his rifle to Delilah, who has fallen to her knees beside me, panting wildly.

  Within the same second, I swing my rifle onto my shoulder, and take two steps towards Ugly. This pathetic man with a big fucking ego and not a lot else. “Don’t touch her.”

  “Woah, woah! Tessa, take it easy!” Adriel says, coming to stand between Ares and I. “Seriously Ares, you lunatic. Dean and I know her. She’s with us now. It’s okay.”

  Ares smirks. “I don’t think so, son. How many of your brothers and sisters do you reckon she slaughtered back there, huh?”

  At that, Delilah vomits onto the ground in front of her.

  Jeb steps towards Ares, places a hand on his shoulder. “There has been enough blood spilt tonight,” the old man almost whispers. “Let it go. The girl comes.”

  Yesterday, I was hoping that relocating might equalise me with their militia.

  Guess I got my wish.

  *

  We ran until our bodies protested beyond ignoring. I don’t know how Dean did it. Julie refused to let him go, and he had to piggy-back her, shoulder the weight of the machine gun and ammo, all with a bullet in his arm.

  Past the ability to speak, when we reached a river bank, Dean nodded to Jeb and Ares, and we all sank to the wet earth in unison.

  Now, silence isn’t silence. It’s punctuated by heavy breathing, trickling water, insects clicking. If we cared enough to be smart about it, we’d put someone on watch, in case Galore came looking. But we’re immobilised, weary to completion.

  Dean leaned back against the bank a while ago, his eyes scrunched shut, and he hasn’t moved yet.

  “Dean? We’ve got to fix your shoulder.” My voice is barely above a whisper.

  He nods once. Doesn’t open his eyes.

  Julie is asleep against his legs, and I move her carefully, rolling her onto her other side. She shivers slightly. The only thing she is wearing is an oversized dress that covers her knees, a pair of socks and shoes, nothing else.

  “Here,” Delilah says, a cracked murmur behind me. She hands me her jacket – Galore black – and I lie it over Tilly’s kid-sister.

  I retrieve Rooks, and we drag over a pack she managed to haul out. She wipes the wound on Dean’s bicep with brown-stained gauze. I kneel on Dean’s other arm, holding my body weight on his chest while she digs out the bullet.

  And Dean, bless him, doesn’t make enough sound to wake Julie. He goes from purple to white, and tears fall down to collect in the shells of his ears. But he doesn’t wake her.

  “It will
be infected in no time unless you keep it wrapped and dry, Deano. And I haven’t got anything for you if that happens. Understand?”

  He nods again.

  I watch his taut, pale face a while longer. I watch his tears slide and slide long after Rooks leaves. This is what happens to good people in a war. The ones that feel. The unlucky ones.

  I feel it cracking again – my heart, and anger overwhelms me. Delilah, the only Galore-loyalist in the vicinity, will have to take the blow. “Why the fuck did this happen?” I shout at her.

  There is a simple answer to this question and I already know what it is. I’ve known it from infancy. We attacked them because we were scared. Because they are not us. That is all.

  Today, though, it isn’t fucking good enough. And Delilah has to give me more. She needs to give me justifiable cause. There has to be one, because a few hours ago, an entire sector was annihilated and I need to hear that there was some pure, unarguable force that couldn’t be stopped.

  There won’t be. What reason could there ever be for murdering so many? It’s just bad blood.

  “Tell me, why did Snare do it?”

  Jeb speaks, “Contessa, lower your voice.”

  “Tell me, Delilah!”

  She shakes, cries. “He told us that Resolute broke the alliance, that they were planning an attack.” Tears mingle with the snot and mud and blood on her perfect skin. “He said there were bombs, big enough to blow us all to hell.” Her voice trails into sobs.

  I rake my hands through my hair, wanting to tear it away from me. At least I’d be hurting something.

  “They lied,” Jeb tells her, observing her with a sadness. “Resolute, nor anyone else, has the resources to build mass destructors of that magnitude. There simply is nothing left.”

  “That’s not true,” Dean says distantly, quietly. “Galore does. Galore has bombs.”

  All of us, Dean and Jeb excluded, reel back.

  “What?”

  “They do,” Dean says. “We found them, in a council bunker. It isn’t Resolute that’s planning an attack, Delilah.”

  “That’s what lit up Base, idiot,” Ares sneers to Delilah.

  “Then, why?” Delilah asks.

  “Yes, why?” I face Jeb when I say it, because it is clear to me now that he is withholding everything, that he knows what I need to know. “What does Snare want?”

  Jeb’s face turns skyward, his eyes closing. “Supremacy,” he says. “What else?”

  I wait impatiently, close to explosion.

  Jeb sighs. “Ares, why don’t you explain? You made the discovery, after all.”

  “What?” I spit. “Discovered what?”

  Ares, for once, doesn’t look like an arrogant prick. He has the grace to look dejected, tired. “A few of us went on a recon mission a month ago. We went to Scarce.”

  “Scarce?” I ask. “Why? It’s a wasteland.”

  I’m not speaking from experience. No one does. No one goes to Scarce. There isn’t anything to find other than your certain death. Nothing to take, nothing to gain. You go only far enough to stop them coming to take from you.

  That is when Ares sighs, and says something the throws me off course for the rest of my life. Dean, too, and we will never get back on track again. But he tells us anyway. “That’s where you are wrong,” he says, “Scarce is a fucking metropolitan.”

  Dean sits up, hissing between his teeth at the pain of it.

  “What?” Delilah interjects. “No, it’s not. It’s barren. They have no resources. The people there are savages.”

  “Or so they would have us believe. What we found were roads, houses, farms, warehouses, even; as well as a shitload of Scum soldiers.”

  I don’t know what to say. None of us seem to.

  “It seems that Galore infiltrated and took over a long time ago, without anyone knowing, even their own militia. They’ve enslaved it, but they’ve rebuilt it, too. It’s not a crumbling city anymore. Well, at least the parts we saw, weren’t.” He shakes his head. “It’s…thriving.”

  I try to think my way through, fit the pieces together, turn it into sense. “But the campaigns. Mission Retrieve. If Scarce lost control a long time ago, how have they been fighting a war against us?”

  Now, Ares smirks. “They haven’t, princess.”

  Jeb speaks. “We believe Snare has been hiding his true mission from his people, under the ruse of vendettas and border protection and such. Instead, he has been gradually sending more and more soldiers into Scarce.”

  “And when they don’t come back, they tell us that there were casualties,” I breathe.

  Jeb nods sadly. “It gives Snare a reason to mount more campaigns. Send more of the population to manage Scarce.”

  Supremacy. It’s why Snare smacked me down in front of my father that day. It’s why children are turned into soldiers. It’s why the whole wide world fell apart to begin with. It sounds exactly right. Of course controlling Galore is not enough for Snare. He’s a tyrannical dick. Tyrannical dicks throughout history have always taken it all.

  Our group slumps. It inundates as in waves, all of it. The revelations turn over and over inside us, swelling and crashing, swelling and crashing.

  Eventually I turn to Dean, and find him already looking at me. Waiting.

  “My parents…?”

  His eyes are dull pits. No light. The fact that he bothers to put any inflection at all in his voice when he speaks tells me how much he loves me. “Yeah, maybe.”

  The turning in my stomach quickens, aches. “We have to go and see,” I tell him quietly. “I have to check.”

  He doesn’t even bother to argue, my sweet Dean. He doesn’t warn me about how dangerous the passage to Scarce will be, about how unprepared we are. He knows my insides enough to know that I’m going anyway. That I’d go alone.

  “I’m coming with you,” Delilah says to me. “If you’ll let me.”

  Without turning completely, I reach out and grasp her hand. We lost our best friend tonight. I look to Julie, curled up under Delilah’s jacket, her dark hair fanned along the muddy bank. I imagine the way she might be made whole again, if I could give her back her Aunt. Maybe she would stand a chance in this awful place.

  Adriel must see the resolve we have come to, the three of us, because he says. “I’m in.”

  “We’ve been sitting on our hands doing fuck all for weeks,” Ares spits. “We let them walk right in and tear the place down. Ain’t no way I’m hiding out in the woods while that Scum is still breathing.” He turns to Jeb. “We got to find him, Jeb. We got to cut his throat out. For our families. For Resolute.”

  Jeb’s head shakes slowly. “It doesn’t bring them back, my friend.”

  “No,” says Ares. “It fucking doesn’t.” He stands. “I’m going. Anyone who wants to come is welcome to follow.”

  Bryce and Omar nod at him. Neither have opened their mouths to speak for hours.

  “Slow down, big boy,” Rooks says to Ares, “No one’s going anywhere today. We’ve got wounds to tend to, and plans to make. And by the way, no one is voting you in as the leader of this group of leftovers. Whatever we decide to do, we’ll decide it together, just like we always have.”

  We fall silent after that, everyone settling back into varying degrees of brokenness upon the cold bank. As the sun reaches its climax beyond the diseased sky, our eyes drift shut.

  *

  I hold Dean’s hand as we walk through the trees together, looking for food. No one follows us, and I’m thankful.

  Every few seconds I feel Dean wince, his fingers clench, and I worry about his arm. I worry that the hole the bullet made is like the one carved into my middle, and that the edges will fester and never re-join.

  I know that I’m asking too much of him again. But I have to ask it. I can’t go to Scarce alone.

  He stops when we reach the skeleton of a train.

  A carriage, half on-half off its track, sits rusted within the break of trees. I pull him towards it, lif
ting myself up and into its open doorway, my legs hanging off the side. I help Dean into the space beside me.

  The seconds string along, one after the other, and we say nothing. We don’t look at one another, only ahead.

  I hear his breaths when they become heavier, I hear the cells that he is made of vibrate with the anguish building inside him.

  And finally, I look at him. “Dean? A genius once told me that we shouldn’t waste time if an outburst is imminent.”

  I expect him to scream and curse, like I would. Instead, he drops my hand abruptly, and begins punching the nearest tree trunk, over and over.

  His knuckles open up on first contact, the bark swallowing his blood. After a few seconds I try to stop him, but I can’t. Maybe I shouldn’t. I don’t know. I don’t know how to help him. I don’t know how to help us.

  Eventually his grunts slow and his head falls to the bark once, twice, and I wonder if he’ll knock himself unconscious. Perhaps it would be kinder if he did.

  When he stills, I wrap my arms around him carefully, my head between his shoulder blades.

  “We’re alive,” I tell him, over and over again. “We’re alive. We’re alive. We’re alive.”

  When standing becomes too tiring, we fall to the hard ground. He lets me crawl into his lap, my legs on either side of his hips, and I hold him.

  His head is buried into my hair, my neck when he breathes. “What the fuck do we do?”

  I unwind my arms from his neck to see his face. “That’s obvious. We start our own militia, dummy.”

  Miraculously, he grins. It is only a ghost of the grin I fell in love with. “What will we call it?”

  I give the obligatory answer. “Roam.”

  Dean’s eyes crease in the corners, studying me for a while. He places his hands on either side of my neck, his fingers cold, blood-stained.

  I’ve learnt something about life and death in the last few months. I know that our lives, the lives of our people, are entangled; like thread. I’ve been fraying for a small while.

  But today, Dean unravelled.

  Tears fall down my face, and my lips come over his, moving them. He kisses me back, fiercer than any time before, trying to absorb me. I wish I could let him take some of me away. But my own strength stores are already deficient. We will have to mend each other.