by J B Cantwell
The smile was wiped off my face as well. I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t taking him seriously, because I was. But I had to admit, it was yet another thing about having a Prime on my team that made him valuable. No, not valuable. Essential.
I forced my frozen fingers to lace with his and squeezed.
He chuckled.
“You’re so delicate.”
I smacked him on the arm and pulled my hand away.
“Clearly you have some things you need to learn about me.”
The door to the apartment closed, and he moved in, gently pushing me up against the wall.
“I like you delicate,” he said.
“Well,” I said as he put his lips to mine, “it doesn’t fit.”
“It does. But not where it counts.” He tapped his forefinger on my forehead. “In here is where the strength really is.”
I kissed him back this time, and suddenly my body didn’t feel so cold. Maybe it was just him, my friend the human furnace.
My friend. My boyfriend.
The only boy I had ever loved.
Hell, the only boy I’d ever known.
So many options, so many titles.
But of course, he was no longer a boy, and I was no longer a girl. We were two war-torn victims of other people’s intentions, other people’s inventions.
I pulled away, and tried hard to keep tears from filling my eyes.
But too late. He’d already seen. He let his thumb graze my cheek, catching the tear before it fell to my chin.
“We’re lucky, you know,” he said. “It could’ve gone so many different ways. Sometimes I wonder if we should’ve stayed with Paul up in Canada.”
I nodded “I think about that, too, sometimes. Things would be a lot different for us now if we had stayed.”
“Yeah, I guess they would be. But things would be the same back here. Out of sight, but maybe not so much out of mind.”
My teeth gave a little chatter.
“Let’s get you warmed up. Come on,” he said, holding out his hand. I took it, and he led me across toward the bedroom.
It didn’t take us long to find the spare clothes and blankets. I grabbed a couple of long sleeved shirts and some pants that looked like they would fit while Alex collected a armful of blankets.
I went into the back bathroom to change, though I could barely see anything. The sun had begun to rise, but the bathroom had no windows. I dared to keep the door open a crack. Even through all of those months back in the Service, changing clothes in front of both men and women, I had never done so with Alex nearby, and I was too shy to do it now.
I stripped down quickly and pulled on the dry clothes, which were heaven against my cold skin. Then, I peeked out into the bedroom.
For a moment, I thought he’d left me. I collected my boots and sopping socks and walked out into the living area. He was sitting on the couch, or, rather, dominating the couch.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“I thought you’d left,” I said.
“What? Why would I do something like that? I just thought, well, you know, that you might want a little privacy.”
I blushed, grateful for the dim light to hide the pink that I could feel racing from my cheeks and down my neck.
Love or no, I had never been so physically close to another human being before in my life. It was a whole new world to me, but I still wasn’t willing to be stripping down in front of him. Some things were just … special. And special wasn’t me freezing in wet clothes with a nearly-dead boy across the hall.
Though, it did seem to me that every moment we had now was special, had to be special. Because every moment could be our last together.
“We’d better get these to Jeff,” I said. I opened my arms and took the blankets from him.
“Wait,” he said. “One is for you.”
He pulled one of the blankets free and wrapped it around my shoulders, tightly cocooning me in the fleece. Then, with a tenderness I didn’t expect, he kissed me on the forehead.
I laughed.
“Is it weird for you?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re just, you’re so huge. Is it weird to lean all the way down here to kiss little old me?”
He laughed then, and for a moment it felt like the old days, with the two of us walking together down the street on our way to school. On our way away from our families. On our way out.
“No,” he said. “It’s not weird. You’ve always been short.”
I smiled. “Touché.”
My giddy demeanor followed me back across the hall. But when we opened the door, any joy I may have been feeling fell away again. Where there’d been warmth in the other apartment, back into the main space things became instantly serious.
I grabbed the clothes out of Alex’s hands and rushed to Jeff’s side.
“How is he?” I asked.
Jay took the clothes from me and pulled Jeff’s shirt over his head. What I saw there nearly made me gag.
All over his torso were wounds, long, thin gashes that could only be from one thing.
A whip.
“Oh, my God. Who did this to him?”
Melanie wrapped one of the blankets around his shoulders and pulled it tight. Then we stepped away while Jay and Alex pulled off his pants and dressed him again in soft flannel pajama bottoms.
Alex joined us in the other room once Jeff was dressed again. He shook his head.
“Could’ve been anyone, really,” he said. “I’ve seen the Champions do things like this before, and I wouldn’t put it past the Service, either. One thing’s for sure, though; he was let go on purpose. Probably by someone who knew where we’ve been hiding.”
Suddenly, I had trouble breathing.
They knew.
In that moment, it didn’t seem to matter who knew what. But someone out there knew. They had sent Jeff to us as a warning. A first shot.
I sat on the edge of the couch and tried to get my heartbeat under control. Then, I let my head fall into my hands. There was no need to cry over it. It was anger I was managing now.
“I’ll kill them,” I said quietly. “I’m going to find them, and then I’m going to—”
“We’re all with you,” Alex said. “But there’s nothing you can do about it right now. The sun is almost up. The best we can do is wait until he comes around. We need more to go on.”
The bloodlust that was filling me up was strange and unusual, a new feeling.
Maybe I should’ve stayed with the Champions.
Because wasn’t that really where people looking for violence belonged? The Champions seemed to be all about revenge, and as I looked down at Jeff, twitching and sweating, revenge seemed to be all I could think about.
“Who could have done this?” I asked to the room at large.
Nobody spoke for several long moments. The other Volunteers went silent, too.
“It couldn’t have been the Champions,” Alex finally said.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “It seems like, from the little I know about them, this would be right up their alley.”
“I know,” he said. “And you’re right. But I would’ve seen him. I know they seem like a huge organization from the outside, but really it’s only thirty people or so. They just happen to be really well trained people. Soldiers, mostly.”
“So who, then?”
Melanie was straightening out Jeff’s clothes, presumably to dry, when she spoke.
“Um, guys,” she said. She held out her hand, and we all saw she had a large stack of ration cards in her palm. “Whoever it was that did this to him seems to have a sick sense of humor.”
Bloodlust. My new friend.
Chapter Six
Chambers had said there were benefactors, that people high up the chain, wealthy people, were bankrolling each organization. The Volunteers, the Champions, and the Service.
But what sort of benefactor would’ve done something like this? It didn’t make s
ense.
Melanie lay the cards on the kitchen countertop and carefully dried them, taking care not to damage the magnetic strips on the back of each.
It might’ve been a fortune. Or a trap. If the cards were tracked, we would be in trouble. But without the money, we would starve.
It was a no-win.
“Why would they give him these?” Melanie asked as she stacked the cards back up again.
“More importantly, who?” I asked.
Jay sat down on the arm of the couch, watching all of us.
“It seems pretty simple to me,” he said.
We all turned.
He shrugged.
“You say there’s someone out there. A ‘benefactor.’”
“That’s what Chambers told me, yes,” I said.
“And you believe him?”
“I—I guess I haven’t really given it much thought. Every Volunteer I’ve met has referred to him as one of their own.”
“What if he isn’t? Or, more importantly, what if he is a Volunteer, and he still did this?”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Melanie said. “Why would he hurt one of us?”
“Maybe he wasn’t the one doing the hurting,” Jay said.
“Or maybe he was.” Alex stood leaning his back up against the wall.
We all stared.
“He was the one who was in charge of the phasing system. Didn’t seem to me that he cared about our physical pain so much as he might’ve. To him it was just about the science of the thing.”
“Yeah, but this?”
“I don’t know.”
“When I got put through my phasing, Chambers was the one to insist that I get the pain meds,” I said.
“Well, you were lucky, then,” Alex said. “Because none of the rest of us did.”
We all fell silent.
“No,” a voice came, a croak, from the couch.
“Jeff,” I said.
Jay lay his hand upon Jeff’s forehead and shook his head.
“Fever’s still high. Climbing.”
“Maybe,” Jeff said. “But I still remember.” His voice was slow and garbled, a tone that reminded me of my mother before she’d quit drinking.
Jay lay a wet cloth over Jeff’s head.
“Just take it easy,” he said. “You don’t need to talk now.”
“But I do,” he said. “Fever’s high. Breathing’s tight. Now’s the time.”
His words had a ring of truth to them, and it made me worry even more.
Jay looked around at us, then stepped away.
“Okay, then. Have at it.”
“This old guy gave me the cards,” he said. “But not the gashes. Those came from the Service.”
I stood up, suddenly alarmed.
“And then they dumped you here?” I asked, staring around at the apartment as if snipers’ bullets would materialize at any second.
“Not here, exactly. But in your part of town, yeah. I think they were hoping I’d lead them to you.”
“And you did.”
“No, I don’t think so. That old man you were talking about, he caught up with me.”
“Chambers?”
“Yeah, him. He took me in for a day, just to get me out of sight. He gave me pills.” He gestured to his wet clothes. “They’re in the coat.”
Jay opened up the drenched jacket Jeff had been wearing.
“Inside pocket,” Jeff said.
Jay found a small, hidden compartment in the coat and pulled out a tiny pill box, popping it open.
“No time like the present,” Jeff said, opening his mouth.
Jay whistled.
“This is no joke,” he said. He picked up one of the little pills and brought it over to Jeff, placing it on his outstretched tongue. “These are very powerful antibiotics. I haven’t seen anything like this in years. They’re usually reserved for the very wealthy. How did he get these?”
“Don’t know,” Jeff said. “But his apartment sure was nice. Nicer than here.” His voice was almost giddy, made strange by the fever.
“So it was Chambers that dumped you?”
“Well, he didn’t really have a choice, did he?”
“You tell us,” I said.
“The Service dumped me, but when I didn’t lead them to you,” he nodded his head in my direction, “Chambers picked me up. Or at least one of his runners did. Guy named Jonathan.”
“What?”
“Yeah. So what?”
Everyone went silent again, waiting to hear the rest of his story.
“Just tell us the rest,” I said, concerned.
“So I was wasting away in some corner of Brooklyn, just hoping Riley would cross my path, and this dude found me, picked me up in a car and took me into the city. Chambers started me on the meds, but in the end they had to let me go. Turns out it’s hard to let a sick kid stay with you in Manhattan. That guy doesn’t really have much privacy.”
“So who brought you here? Jonathan?”
“He dropped me off a few blocks up from this place and told me to wait for you,” he nodded at me. “And then, there you were, like an angel. I jumped into the water once I saw you. I was hoping for another one of those kisses.” He smiled stupidly.
My eyes bugged, and I made a quick glance toward Alex, who had pushed off the wall at Jeff’s words.
“I—I’ll explain later,” I said.
“Oh, don’t worry about it, big guy,” Jeff said, smiling stupidly. “It wasn’t her idea.”
“So you were caught?” Melanie pushed on. “By the Service?”
Jeff adjusted himself on the couch so he could see her.
“Hey! I know you,” he said. “Kitchen girl.”
“This is Melanie,” I said, grateful that the conversation had turned away from the awkward kiss Jeff had planted on me that day, a show for the cameras on the top of the burning towers. I made an effort not to look at Alex. But while the conversation was more serious than an argument over a little thing like a kiss, the topic still weighed on me.
“Yeah, so I got picked up by one of the guards, one of the few who weren’t trying to escape, themselves. They brought me back into the plant, put me in one of those cells. That kid you knew, Eric, he’s dead. I don’t know how, but when they put me in the cell next to his, he was gone. Maybe a bullet. I don’t know.”
“So they took you back inside?” I asked, appalled.
“Yep, with a gun to my back. We had to crawl over all those dead bodies, too. But when we got back to the floor, I saw that one of them was Wilson.”
Jeff smiled gleefully, and I noticed that he was missing two teeth, a permanent reminder of his interrogation.
“Man, did he have it coming. Did you do that, Riley?”
Something sick twisted in my stomach. Of course, I hadn’t even touched Wilson until after he was already near death. It had been the mob who’d beaten him, ultimately, to death.
“No,” I said quietly. With the telling of this story, the bloodlust I had felt just a half hour before was dissipating. I remembered Wilson, beaten to a pulp, still struggling for life as Melanie and I fled. The memory made me nauseous.
“What happened next?” Melanie asked, shooting me a glance. She clearly didn’t want to hear anything more about Wilson, either.
“They started bringing in the workers they’d caught until there were twenty or so of us in each cell. Then, when the whistle blew, we were taken out into the mess. They wanted us to clean up the bodies.”
He stopped talking for a moment, and I could see tears welling up in his eyes. He looked my way again.
“They passed out shovels.” He was fighting for breath now. “And turned on the conveyors.”
I stepped backward, tripping on Alex, who was standing behind me. He caught me before I hit the floor, pulling me up and putting me back on my feet. Still, I folded over on myself, certain that I was going to be sick now.
They’d burned the bodies like the rest of the garbage.
&
nbsp; For electricity.
Jeff was openly weeping now.
I righted myself with Alex’s help and walked over to the couch, kneeling before him. I took his hand.
“Do you see?” he asked.
“Yes,” I whispered. “And then they tortured you when you were all done.”
He nodded.
“But I didn’t know anything,” he insisted. “I knew you were from Brooklyn, but that was it. It’s not like you gave me your address. But they took me to your neighborhood and dumped me there. I could barely walk.”
I leaned my forehead into his hand, my tears coming freely now, too.
All that time we’d spent working side by side, shoveling the waste of previous generations, the garbage, the deformed sea animals. And it had been nothing compared to what he’d been forced to do, what they’d all been forced to do, after our little revolution was over.
“It must’ve taken you days,” I said.
“No.” He shook his head. “Just a couple. You know what life is like at the Burn. We were a strong group of workers.”
“I can’t believe it,” Jay spoke up from the kitchen table, shaking his head. “That was why, Riley. I told you I couldn’t go back.”
“Yes. I understand.”
And it was the same reason I had needed to get out, that I’d made the rallying cry that day. The same reason that I was still fighting now. It was beyond even wanting to get out now. I needed it. For all of us.
“Okay,” I said, trying to get a grip on myself. “Can you tell us about Jonathan? What did he say to you?”
“He told me you wouldn’t trust him. That it was too late. But he wanted me to tell you that it was for the money. As long as the payments from Chambers kept coming his way, he’d be playing for our side.”
I snorted and shook my head. That bastard.
“How did he seem?” I pressed.
Jeff shrugged. “I don’t know. I could barely see straight. After the Service let me go, I bashed in my chip with an old piece of broken concrete so they couldn’t find me again. I’d been hiding out behind one of the grocery stations, but I was a mess. He picked me up and took me in.”
“For the money,” I said.
“For the money.”
