I didn’t think I would be able to sleep, but I felt sure now that we’d have the antidote, soon, or at least eventually.
Antidote.
I didn’t even really know what it was. Was it a drug? Some kind of brain-stimulus treatment? Maybe a psychological technique. The details didn’t seem important. What mattered was that this was not just another plan to survive better or to find a new and safer place to subsist. This was an actual antidote for everything that was wrong with our lives, our world. I didn’t think I would be able to sleep that night with all of this running through my brain, but I’m almost sure that before five minutes had passed, I was fast asleep.
CHAPTER 7
I woke up early. The air was crisp and cool and even though it was still late summer, there in the mountains the mornings were getting cold enough so that you could see your breath. I sighed and a tiny cloud billowed up into my tent.
Most of the camp was still sleeping, but the birds in the trees were awakening. I lay on my cot staring at the roof of my tent, sleeping bag pulled up to my chin. Had it been five days now, or six?
Soon I heard cook pots clanking and a few distant voices. The breakfast crew was up and working. I heard their laughter, muted and muffled by the distance. I got up, rinsed my face, and got dressed.
I wasn’t on kitchen duty or any other duty that day, but I joined the others and found the coffee and filled the scorched, blue-enamel percolator and set it on the fender of the main fire-pit. I don’t know why, but it felt better just to be near other people, even if I didn’t speak with them or interact.
After a few minutes, the deep-brown coffee was bubbling up into the glass button at the top of the pot, and a steady stream of water vapor issued from the spout. I filled my cup and cradled it in my hands, the warmth radiating up my wrists and into my arms.
Chase wasn’t back yet. Every day when I got up, I checked his tent first and then looked around down at the vehicle yard. Two vehicles were missing—an F-150 we’d recently acquired and the old Taurus that seemed to have been around forever. Chase didn’t tell me those were the vehicles he and his small team had taken, but I assumed, and I ached to see them parked there again.
The kitchen staff was making grits with eggs, and it would have smelled wonderful if I’d been hungry. I pulled up a chair and sat in front of the fireplace. I’d brought my unzipped sleeping bag with me and I sat there with it wrapped around my shoulders.
The steam from my coffee mug curled up. I took a sip, and just then I heard a soft commotion from the tents. I turned to see Ruby stumbling out of her tent with apparent difficulty. Another charlie-horse, by the look of it. She limped back and forth in front of her tent, kneading the back of her thigh, punching it with her balled-up fist.
It was no secret that Ruby was in frequent pain. She would sometimes mention her bum knee or the effects of getting old, but more than that, it was most evident in the way she’d plant herself somewhere and have everyone come to her. Once she got comfortable, the other officers and anyone needing to speak to her would have to line up and wait.
Even with her new walking stick, she struggled to get up and down, and there were certain areas there on the mountain that she simply could not access. Although there were nicely worn paths, most of which were easy to walk, in most ways the camps were still very much wilderness and there were many paths that were steep, rocky, uneven, or strewn with cobbles. And when it was dark, Ruby required an escort just to go down to the latrine or cross from the command tent to her own.
I worried all the time that one misstep could put Ruby out of commission for good, but then again in other ways she seemed indestructible, like she could stand up against a tank. God knows she would almost surely try if it ever came to that. And when her physical body sometimes failed her, her unflagging mental toughness compensated.
Like when she contracted walking pneumonia the previous spring. She had horrendous coughing fits—I heard once that you could hear her at the remote guard posts—but in some ways she was more productive than ever because she didn’t have to take a break from working to walk across camp for meals or do anything for herself.
But there were other times she surprised everyone—she was often the first one up and about in the morning, especially when the weather was dry and warm. And if there was a major operation to complete, she’d stay up long after everyone had gone to bed. She had some bad days with her health and her knee and all the rest, but she had good days, too.
I sometimes thought about what Ruby might have been like when she was my age. At first I pictured a younger and sexier version of herself—kicking ass and taking names and never backing down from an adventure. Had she been in the military? A rough woman-warrior who’d seen combat? Or a merchant sailor? Or maybe she’d been part of some criminal element before Year One, too. Maybe she had always been a ringleader like the one we all knew—boosting warehouses and running rackets.
In the end I thought maybe the opposite were true. What if Ruby was a UPS driver back before, or a waitress, or something completely innocuous, and she’d only taken on the persona we knew after the world had gone to hell?
I loved Ruby, we all did, but mingled with that love was more than a little fear. I’m not sure what we were so afraid of—even the slowest of us could easily outrun her on her best day. I think it was more about wanting to please her and impress her and the fear of letting her down.
I was painfully unlike Ruby. I wasn’t a natural-born leader, nor was I particularly adventurous. But I hoped that she saw some value in me, and I took pride in knowing I was much more like her than I had been when we’d first met.
And so I was careful about what I did and said around Ruby, and I often felt like I was faking it until I made it—pretending to be like her until someday I would be. I wanted her respect, but more and more I felt that my efforts fell short of that aim. It seemed like I either wanted too much or too little. I was too complacent or naively ambitious.
All of this was in sharp contrast to people in the camp like Chase, who had many skills and abilities that were valuable in a place and time like this. If it came down to choosing one or the other of us, Ruby would pick Chase in a heartbeat. Still, I tried. Even as it seemed like we might be nearing some new and better chapter of our life outside the Zones, I still wanted to win Ruby over.
Ruby labored up the path in my direction, still clutching at the back of her thigh where I knew a muscle cramp was knotting up and spasming. She winced and muttered as she came along. When she came near, she nodded at me but didn’t say more, and when I realized she was joining me at the fire pit, I hopped up and got a chair ready for her. She limped past me and collapsed into the camp chair, then nodded at me again by way of thanks. Then she sat there panting.
The kitchen staff must have detected her presence because one of them, a girl of about Arie’s age, almost immediately brought her a coffee. She hadn’t caught her breath and so she nodded at the young lady to thank her. Then she scowled into the fire pit, her expression one of deep annoyance and exhaustion.
Today would be one of her bad days.
She looked somewhat like a cat might look after being doused with a garden hose. I could tell that she was in no mood to talk, but the silence was just too much for me.
“Sleep okay?” I said. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I was thinking.
Ruby looked in my over at me without turning her head. Then she looked at the fire pit again.
“I haven’t been sleeping well, either,” I went on. “Can’t seem to get warm these days. I’m thinking I need some new wool socks, but I can’t think of what I might trade for some.”
Ruby nodded her head almost imperceptibly, but said nothing.
“Smells like grits and eggs for breakfast,” I rambled. “I wonder if there’s any bacon this morning. We haven’t had any in so long. And I hear we’re running low on coffee.”
“Al,” she said.
This time it was my turn to nod and s
ay nothing.
Then, there came a sound from the upper half of the camp. A low rumbling and a high, keening sound. The sound of an old truck engine and of tired old brakes squealing to a halt.
We both sat up straight in our chairs and looked in the direction of the vehicle yard. The sound of another approaching engine drifted up from that direction. I stood up and threw off my sleeping bag.
“Where ya goin’?” Ruby drawled.
“It’s Chase!” I chirped. “They’re back! Finally!”
“Yah,” she returned. “I know that. But you ain’t sposed’ta.”
I sat back down.
“Chase was s’posed to’ve told you he was going on some routine business to the lower camps. But I guess you got the real story out of him, huh?”
Ruby rocked herself back and forth and then rocked up out of the seat and onto her feet. I stared into my coffee mug like there was something amazing inside it.
“Now you listen here,” said Ruby. “You stay away from them this morning. I know you and Chase’re tight and all, but I get the sense you already know much more than your sposed’ta. And there’s nothing you can do right now to help anyway, so stay out of it.”
I didn’t dare say anything back to Ruby, especially not on one of her bad days, but I watched as she hobbled toward the vehicles.
I followed a little ways behind, hoping Ruby wouldn’t look back. I had to see. Through the trees and underbrush, I glimpsed Chase, and a man with a pillowcase over his head and his hands tied behind him.
We had kidnapped the man, and I couldn’t say that fact sat very comfortably with me. In fact, I felt awful about it—kidnapping and interrogating seemed beneath us. We were trying to avoid being forced into doing things against our will, and yet here was a man who was almost certainly minding his own business a few days before and now here he was a prisoner and his fate a complete mystery to him. We were supposed to be the good guys.
Still, there was no doubt in my mind that this was something that had to be done. We needed that information. Ruby had pointed out many times in the past week that, even if there was some kind of medicine or technique that could bring our memories back, all we’d really gain was more to lose if we were captured again by the Agency.
And she had a point—it didn’t matter if you woke up in the Agency infirmary after having lost one year’s worth of memories or thirty-six years—you were still a walking shell of your former self.
But I was hoping she was wrong. Something inside me said that if just some small portion of us could regain all of our memories from back before, something would change. The world would somehow change back.
And after that, perhaps we could work on making it up to each other—to Bellington and all the other Bellingtons who’d been punched in the head and tied up and thrown into a truck.
I saw Chase gesture to Bostwick and Thompson, and they led Bellington to the command tent. A couple guards were posted as Chase and Ruby spoke outside for a moment. Chase nodded at something Ruby said, and then they both went in the tent.
Woolly walked up beside me.
“What’s all the excitement?” I asked. “Do you know?”
He gave me a sideways glance. “Don’t even try it,” he said. “I know you know way more than me about what’s going on over there.”
I shrugged. “Thought you might know something I don’t.”
He stuck out his bottom lip and shook his head slowly. “I know what I know and that’s all I need to know.”
Sometimes I wished I could be more like Woolly, too.
“What about the notebook? Anything new you can tell me?” I looked up at him and gave him a sheepish grin. “All this knowing about stuff just makes me want to know more.”
Woolly took Ruby’s chair and looked at the fire.
“Arie wrote a lot about the memory effects and his theories about why the memory loss was occurring,” said Woolly. “Pretty technical for a kid that age, but not particularly revealing or useful or even interesting. Plus, Arie apparently started using an entirely different encoding system about halfway through the notebook. That set us back a day or two. We don’t know if it was extreme paranoia, or if the notebook might have been written through not one but two memory scrubs. But we’re still working on it. We’re kind of into a rhythm now. Won’t be long before we’ve got the rest of it decoded.”
I nodded. Arie was busy and Chase was back in camp. It might not be a great day for Ruby, but things were looking up for me.
“They got the guy in there, huh?” Woolly gestured with his chin at Ruby’s tent. “What’s his name again? Bellingham?”
“Bellington.”
“Right. They got him, huh?”
I nodded. “Yep.”
“Ruby told me they’d canceled that trip, and that Chase was heading to the lower camps to trade for coffee and bacon.”
“And you believed her?”
“No. Especially after I realized Thompson was gone, too—our best driver—and Bostwick; our best grab-and-bag guy.”
“I’m just glad they’re back,” I said.
“Yeah,” Woolly nodded. “Think this Bellingson will help us?”
“Bellington,” I said. “ton. And yeah, I hope so.”
“Think he’ll want to?”
“I dunno. Our best grab-and-bag guy just bashed him on the head a few days ago.”
“True. But Ruby has a way of getting people to talk.”
“That’s true, too,” I said.
Woolly tipped his head back and closed his eyes. “Not like the Agency does though,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Not like the Agency. I mean she has a way of showing people how things could be better. I don’t know how to say it.”
“According to the journal,” Woolly said, “the memory cure they were working on could at the time restore a test-subject’s memories to the point just prior to the last time they were dosed with the serum. It differed from subject to subject, apparently. Wanna know something funny, though?”
I nodded.
“I think I remember some things. Things you don’t remember. Like you and Chase debating about if the serum was really necessary and deciding that it wasn’t. I think I remember that.”
“How can that be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Even just that,” I said, “I’d be so thankful to remember. Chase has memories of me, of us, that I don’t have. It makes me feel like I’m missing something. Like he knows me better than I know him. Or something like that.”
“Well,” said Woolly, “maybe someday we’ll remember.”
CHAPTER 8
I did my chores that day. I carried water from the stream to camp several times. I helped harvest garlic and asparagus. But I was in a haze the entire time. My mind was on the man held captive in the command tent. We brought water up from the river in five-gallon jerry cans mounted to backpack frames. They were terrifically heavy, and it was one chore I didn’t like very much. Usually, it wore me out completely, and I could only make two trips. This time I made three, and all I can remember was getting to the top of the hill and to the place on the trail where I could see the command tent. I don’t know what I thought I’d see-it’s not like they’d bring him out or something. I never saw anyone come in or go out at any point. Not even to use the latrine, apparently.
I was sure that few people in camp even knew about the new prisoner, and if they didn’t know, I didn’t want to tip them off and get in hot water with Ruby, so I found Woolly. He was in the wood pen splitting logs.
Woolly was large, his arms like great slabs of meat, and he was known throughout the camp as one of the best at chopping wood. The big maul we used for splitting was nearly too heavy for me to swing, but Woolly wielded it like a flyswatter, and when it came down on an up-ended log, the two resulting halves flew around the pen like bowling pins hit by a speeding ball.
“You again?” he said with a chuckle. He brought down the maul and a stout log burst asu
nder. “I suppose you’re here to gossip.”
“Is that okay?” I winced.
“Sure. I was just starting to get bored.”
He leaned down and picked up one of the split hunks of wood. I picked up the other.
“How about, you crack ’em, I stack ’em?” I said.
“Sounds good to me. The cracking is my favorite part. The stacking, not so much.”
“I can barely lift that thing.”
Woolly set up another chuck of pine, stepped back, and swung the maul. It was less like the cord-wood was being split open and more like it was detonating. The flying pieces even sounded like scattering bowling pieces. I picked up the pieces, stacked them.
“What do you think is happening?” I asked, craning my neck to see the command tent.
He shrugged and set up another chunk on the block. “I would theorize that they’re trying to establish whether the information in the journal is accurate, but without letting Bellington know that they don’t know. You know? It’s very important in these situations to manage what the prisoner knows about what you know. If he detects that he knows something that they have no way of knowing he knows, things get difficult. If I said that right.”
I shrugged.
The maul came down in another detonating blow. The wood flew apart and tumbled across the pen. I thought for a moment about how I would not want to be on the receiving end of Woolly swinging that maul, or anything else for that matter.
I stacked the resulting firewood and said, “So, you don’t think they’ve discovered anything yet? They’re just, what? Probing?”
“Most likely, yeah. You know. It’s a dance. It’s all about finesse. Speaking of which, watch this,” said Woolly. He set one small log on top of a large one and swung the maul again. When he brought it down, it split both logs, wood flew in all directions.
“Now you’re just showing off,” I said.
“Just a little trick I’ve been working on.”
Among These Bones (Book 3): Maybe We'll Remember Page 5
