Over the next four days, everyone in Ruby’s camp gained back at least some of their memories. It wasn’t easy for some of them—remembering the terror that they had lived through required them to live through it again. And the tea didn’t work on everyone the same way. Some of the younger people didn’t remember the back before, and a few people reported large gaps in their memories. Woolly had a theory that those people had perhaps forgotten events before the Agency memory scrubbing treatments began. Maybe, he reasoned, they’d seen or experienced things that their subconscious minds had involuntarily blotted out.
Overall, it was a happy time of tears and reminiscence. Many in the camp, like Arie and I, recognized the family members they’d been assigned, deepening their bonds. There were several people who’d known each other as friends in the back before. Everywhere in the disordered camp there were knots of excited chatter—people reuniting, sharing their stories, sharing their memories.
After a week, when nearly everyone had recovered and the moving plan was underway again, I asked Ruby: “What about you, Rube? When are you going to do it?”
Ruby looked down at the ground. “I want to make sure there’s enough of the tea for everyone else, first,” she said.
“There’s plenty left over,” I said. “More than half.”
“Good,” said Ruby. “We oughta keep a reserve, then. I can wait.”
Later that day, I followed Chase and Arie’s fresh prints in the snow to a ravine about three miles from camp where there was a good-sized stream. They’d brought along Chase’s hunting rifle in case they spotted some game, but they were catching fish after fish from the stream. It was cold but sunny. The air was crisp and clear, and the sky was a startling blue with a few lazy puffs of cloud passing by in the high-altitude winds. I perched on a tree-stump and watched, telling them about how Ruby was for some reason still waiting to take the tea.
“I don’t know how she can wait,” I said. “It’d kill me.”
Chase chuckled. “Well, you aren’t her. You’re a lot more impatient.”
“Rude,” I said.
“I’m sure she’s as anxious as anybody,” said Chase. “If she’s insisting on being the last one in the camp to take the leap, maybe you could help keep her mind off of it. Keep her company. You two could use some bonding time.”
“That’s not a bad idea, actually,” I said. “You guys all right here? I’m gonna head back.”
“You came all this way to say that, and then leave?” asked Arie.
“I guess,” I said. “I’ve got a lot of energy right now. I think I really just wanted the walk.”
“Well, if you’re heading back, maybe take my backpack with you? And maybe that rifle? With the fishing hitting this way, we’re gonna have a bunch of big fish to bring home. That’ll be less for us to carry.”
“Okay,” I said. “Sure you don’t wanna hang on to the rifle?”
“I find I catch more with the fly rod.”
“I mean if you see a deer, smart-ass. Or a bear? You do remember being attacked by one of those?”
Just then Chase hooked a fish and began playing it to the bank, but it was a large fish and it put up a tremendous fight.
“Have I told you how much I love fishing this stream?” he said to Arie.
“You may have mentioned it,” replied Arie.
When Chase got the fish close to his net, it darted away and swam upstream, taking line from the reel. Chase let the fish run, and it went downstream, making leaps from the water as it went. Chase and Arie hooted and laughed. This went on for several minutes, until the fish finally began to tire.
“Sorry, fella,” muttered Chase. “There’s no escape.”
Chase brought the fish to his net at last. It was fat and healthy-looking, flashing in the sunshine. Chase added it to the stringer of other fish, and then looked back at me and smiled.
“Nah,” said Chase. “Take the rifle back to camp, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Hey, Mom,” said Arie. “Maybe have Ruby show you how to shoot it. Seeing you with a gun in your hands will definitely take her mind off her other troubles.” He turned and winked at me.
I laughed and picked up the backpack, and then I slipped the rifle harness over my shoulder. “All right, you mighty fishermen. I’ll see you back at camp. Happy fishing.”
Chase gave me a quick hug and a kiss. “Love you, sweetie.”
“Hey, Mom?” said Arie, “Keep the safety on ’till you’re ready to fire.”
“Thanks, kiddo.”
The walk back to the camp was long and cold, but if I walked fast, I felt warm. I was content and relaxed, too. I had so much now. Chase—a man I loved and wanted to spend my future with, Arie, my smart and handsome son, and myself—my own memories. Ruby had said I could come with them to the new city they would build, far away from the Agency and their control. I guess I’d regained not only my memories but Ruby’s confidence as well. As I walked along the snowy path, I smiled. It was as though the cold sunshine was beaming through me, renewing everything. After all these years of struggle and sorrow and violence, we were ready to put it all behind us.
But as I approached the camp, an uneasy sensation stole over me. My muscles tensed, and my mind clouded. I stopped and stood still. Had I heard some sound of warning beneath the crunch of the snow and the swishing zing of my snow-pants and coat? I remembered how the bear had broke through the brush on the hilltop that day with Colonel Steele, and had moved with such astonishing speed and power. Had I heard danger at the edge of my hearing? A buzzing sound, like angry hornets? The popping sound of distant gunfire? My anxiety began to spiral upward. I looked behind me. I stared down the trail ahead. After standing still and listening for several solid minutes, I broke off the trail, climbed a small hill, and headed toward the camp through the dense woods on a southern-facing hillside. The unbroken snow made for very slow going, and it was difficult to find the way. I had to backtrack once, but after a lengthy meander through a spruce thicket, I pushed through and the camp came in to view below me.
And indeed something was terribly wrong.
I was still far away, several hundred yards, and there were thick trees masking my view, but there in the middle of the camp was a crowd of people. It was too big a gathering to be some kind of meeting or part of the exodus process. It had to be everyone in camp. And then some.
I dropped to my belly and crawled forward from tree to tree to get closer.
The Agency had arrived. The temperature of my blood seemed to drop twenty degrees.
Not a bloody attack like last time. I may have heard sporadic gunfire back on the trail, but there had been none since and there was none now. They had evidently learned from last time and launched some kind of rapid, coordinated enclosing attack through the snow and taken everyone by surprise. They had rounded up all of our campers and herded them to the middle of the camp. These Agency thugs were like none I’d ever seen. Their uniforms looked new and warm and they were all white and gray. They wore cowls that covered everything but their eyes, which made them seem more lethal, like assassins. Their weapons were likewise new and deadly looking, wrapped in strips of white cloth or tape for camouflage. My eyes swept over the snowy camp, and I saw the sleek, gray forms of small vehicles at the margins of the camp. Snow machines. I had heard the buzzing of deadly wasps. That’s how they’d done it. A smaller force had probably infiltrated early that morning, maybe a sniper or two to take out our outer guards. After an initial attack, the rest had come in on the snow machines. There’d been no warning this time, and it would have been harder for Ruby’s people to melt into the woods—the snow made it almost impossible to run, and the tracks would be easy to follow.
A few of the soldiers were frisking the campers and moving them to a second area, where they were kneeling in ranks and files. I also saw red patches in the snow, and a few casualties lying there wounded or dead. I wondered if the plan was to shoot everyone there and then. I took a chance and slid forward through the snow to the t
reeline for a better vantage.
Rachel.
Decked out in a typically smart-looking black-and-white camouflaged snow suit with a fur-lined hood was Rachel. In her hand was a pistol, and the pistol was pointed at Ruby, who sat in the snow slouching in utter defeat.
I could hear their voices now but couldn’t make out any words. Then I did hear a few rounds of gunfire, very far away, muffled by the snow, I suppose. They were probably sweeping the outer areas and the vehicle parking lot, collecting stragglers, or perhaps simply executing them.
I felt the old pang of guilt, the self-excoriation. If it hadn’t been for Chase and I bringing the tea and slowing things down, Ruby and her people would have been long gone, headed out on their exodus to a new location beyond the Agency’s reach.
But they had not seen me, and Chase and Arie were not only far away but even more paranoid than I was. If I could get back to them, we could maybe make a run for it. Chase and Arie always kept a few supplies with them these days. Chase and Arie both had sidearms, and I had the rifle. Maybe it could be like last time. We could run away and be safe with the three things I wanted, the three things I needed: Arie, Chase, and our memories.
I worried that I would hate myself for the choice I was going to make. Worried that Chase and Arie wouldn’t forgive me. But the choice was clear to me. Peter said that he was in the mountains because that was what he was meant to do. It was his purpose. He had his, and this was mine.
CHAPTER 64
There were three or four guards clustered where various trails led into the camp, but there was no one between Rachel and me. I ducked behind a large tree and unshouldered the rifle. Arie was right to tease me—I’d only fired Chase’s hunting rifle a few times, and I could barely remember how to work it. Guns simply were not my strong suit, and now I regretted not learning more. With my back to the tree I examined the weapon. I pulled back the bolt and established that the rifle was, in fact, loaded. Good. I made sure the safety was on so that I wouldn’t fumble and fire accidentally. Then I put the stock to my shoulder and squinted into the scope.
I couldn’t see a thing.
But it didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have to use the rifle. I only had to look like I could. And so I stood up, my back still to the tree and took a few deep breaths. Then I turned and passed through the treeline and onto the open ground above the camp.
“Rachel, drop the gun!” I shouted. My voice carried down the slope and into the camp where the other prisoners cowered at gunpoint. I walked forward through the snow with the rifle aimed at Rachel.
Everyone turned in my direction. The soldiers spun and wheeled, shouting orders. They trained their weapons on me, but Rachel shouted, “Hold your fire!”
“Drop the gun, Rachel,” I repeated.
“Alison,” Rachel greeted me as I approached. Her voice was calm, warm.
“Drop it!” I shouted.
“All right,” she said, her voice clear and beautiful in the cold air. “All right. Don’t get testy.” She laid her pistol gingerly on a nearby tree stump, as though she didn’t want to spoil its looks by getting snow on it. Then she stood up and stepped back. She held up a hand to keep her soldiers at bay, and then smiled broadly at me. “You know, I’ve been looking all over for you. You’ve been busy since we last got together. Come on over. It’s time we talked.”
I moved slowly through the snow to maintain at least the illusion that I was really aiming the rifle, that I was ready to gun Rachel down. The soldiers kept their weapons on me, pivoting as I came into camp. When I was only fifty feet from Rachel, I paused.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now,” I said.
“My soldiers will gun you down, for one thing,” she replied, as though she were concerned with my wellbeing.
“Tell them to put down their weapons!”
“Do not put down your weapons!” She raised her voice, but again she was completely calm—almost relaxed.
“Tell them, Rachel. I swear I’ll shoot.”
“So, it’s true what I’ve heard? You remember me? And everything else?”
I took several steps forward, pointed the rifle directly her chest. “Do it!”
“Alison, stop,” said Rachel with a playful, dismissive wave of her hand. “You’re not going to kill me. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t even know how to shoot that thing.”
“What do you want, you parasite?” I spat, my jaw clenched. “Why can’t you leave us alone?”
“I want what you have,” replied Rachel, her tone suddenly icy. “And I want it now. You have a serum or treatment that cures the amnesia.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, knowing it was the flimsiest of bluffs. Rachel and her soldiers had the entire morning to round up, disarm, detain, and question Ruby, Woolly, and others. She knew everything, obviously.
“Don’t, Alison. Don’t play games. Give me what I want, and I’ll think about not killing you and all of your friends. Don’t give it to me and I’ll find it myself and then kill all of you. Oh, including them.” She pointed behind me.
I didn’t want to look, but I knew what I’d see if I did. I glanced in the direction she pointed, but when I saw Arie and Chase coming down the trail with their hands on their heads, followed by three more of the winter-clad soldiers, I couldn’t look away. I heard a soft crunch of snow underfoot and the zinging sound of Rachel’s snowsuit. I looked back down the muzzle of the rifle in time to see her crossing the final couple yards between us. She was quick as a cat.
I pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened.
Rachel took the rifle by the barrel, swept it powerfully from my hands, and struck me on the side of the head with the stock. Down I went into the snow like a sack of dropped potatoes. I didn’t black out, but I was half-blinded with the pain. Chase and Arie called out to me, but I lay crumpled in the snow whimpering.
“You left the safety on, Alison,” said Rachel. She pulled back the bolt and ejected the round. Then with a deft motion she pressed some kind of release and yanked the bolt free of the barrel. “I knew you didn’t know how to fire it,” Rachel sneered, tossing the disassembled weapon into a snowbank.
Soon we were all assembled—Ruby, Woolly, Chase, Arie, and me. We sat in the snow with hands and feet zip-tied, guarded by two soldiers in white. The rest of the campers had been herded into a sort of pen a short way off, surrounded by the rest of Rachel’s snow soldiers. The gash Rachel left on my head with the rifle stock had bled copiously for a while but had subsided in the cold. I looked at the others. Each of us had a bloody nose or swollen eye or busted lip. Chase had a cut on the bridge of his nose and a trickle of blood coming from his ear. At least we hadn’t gone down without fighting back, I thought.
“Just give it to them,” Chase was saying. “She’s either going to wipe us or kill us, same diff. Just give her what she wants, Al. Maybe she’ll remember that she used to be a human being.”
“Agreed,” said Woolly. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Arie and Ruby nodded.
They were right. We’d stood up to the Agency and Rachel too many times and lost. I directed them to my backpack. One of the soldiers retrieved it from my tent and it was emptied out into the snow at Rachel’s feet.
“The leather satchel,” I said.
“This?” said Rachel? “This is the treatment?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a tea.”
Rachel opened the mouth of the satchel and held it to her nose. Then she grimaced and turned her face away. “Smells like a dead bird.”
“Tastes like one, too,” quipped Chase. “But it works. Now. You’ll let us go?”
“I said I’d think about it,” she replied, gazing at Chase down her nose, which had gotten red from the cold but somehow made her look even more imperiously beautiful. “
“How do I know this is really it?” said Rachel, her brow knitted. “How do I know it’ll work?”
“Ask anyone her
e. We’ve all taken it. We all remember.”
Rachel held a conference with her ranking soldiers a short distance from us. The sun was going down, and we all shivered with cold. We couldn’t hear what Rachel said to her soldiers, but some of them questioned eight or ten of Ruby’s rank-and-file campers, and within an hour, Rachel seemed satisfied that the tea was what we’d used to get our memories back.
“So, you drink the tea; you get your memories back,” asked Rachel, eying the satchel with evident skepticism. “Just like that?”
“For some people it takes more than one dose, more than one day,” I said. “For some people it takes several days and repeated doses.”
“I’m inclined to let you all go,” said Rachel. “A nasty generous streak I have, maybe. Is that all I need to know? Tell me everything and I’ll let you go.”
I traded glances with the others, who in a wordless consultation gave me to know I should explain more.
“There’s a certain mindset that seems important to the process,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Rachel wearily.
“The tea works best when you’re in a certain mindset,” I added. “Relaxed, meditative, open-minded, focused on what you want. It’s not a medicine. It’s more like a catalyst.”
“Seriously? Mindset? Catalyst? What kind of hippie tomfoolery is this, Alison?”
“It works, Rachel,” said Chase. “You win. It works. Now let us go.”
Rachel crouched down in front of us as we sat shivering in the snow. When she was eye-to-eye with us, examined us. I stared back at her.
“I believe you,” she said. Then she stood. “Sergeant,” she said, her voice gruff.
One of the two soldiers guarding us turned to Rachel. The sergeant was a tall woman and thickly built, but with the easy and lethal grace of the natural warrior. She pulled down her face mask. Her eyes were large and thoughtful. “Ma’am?” she said.
“Get your team over here.” Then Rachel pointed to me and Ruby and the others. “Get your team over here and execute them.”
Over the profane chorus of our protests, the sergeant frowned at Rachel and said, “Say again, ma’am? You want them executed? Shot?”
Among These Bones (Book 3): Maybe We'll Remember Page 29
