Among These Bones (Book 3): Maybe We'll Remember

by Luzzader, Amanda

  Rachel reached up and grabbed the sergeant by the front of her snowsuit, then pulled the sergeant’s face down to her own. “Yes, Sergeant, that is what I want. Shoot them,” Rachel growled. “The rest we’ll take back for processing. But these I want dead.”

  As we continued to holler and struggle against the zip-ties that held us, the sergeant hesitated, glanced at us, her large eyes blinking. But then she whistled loudly and yelled, “Second squad! To me!”

  Six soldiers broke from their places guarding the campers and hustled through the snow to join the sergeant.

  “These prisoners are to be executed,” she said, her voice loud but with a halting, hollow quality.

  Now protests erupted from the rest of the campers. Many of them stood up and moved toward us.

  “If any of them interfere,” Rachel commanded, her voice shrill now, piercing the air and carrying in the icy air, “shoot them, too.”

  I couldn’t see the prisoners behind us, but there was shouting and the sounds of rough treatment. One of the soldiers fired a warning shot into the air.

  “Sergeant, now!” raged Rachel pointing at us again.

  The soldiers looked at their sergeant uncertainly. The sergeant chopped a line into the snow with her boot heel. “Stand on this, uhm, line,” she said. “Stand here. Ready your—weapons. Fire on my command.”

  The soldiers leveled their weapons at us. I stared into the tiny round blackness of six machinegun muzzles. I turned to look at the Sergeant, waiting for her to say give the signal that would end my life. My heart beat hard. But when I looked at her, I had a sudden recollection.

  “Sonja?” I said. The Sergeant looked at me, her eyes wide.

  I chuckled a little. “Sonja! I know you! You were a preschool teacher. You taught my son, Arie. There was a song you always sang: Good Morning Sun.”

  She took a step back, keeping her eyes on me, but there was a softening in her presence.

  “Fire!” shouted Rachel. “Shoot them now!”

  The soldiers shifted, but the sergeant held up her hand. “Wait,” she commanded.

  There was movement behind me. Something jostled me. I chanced a look over my shoulder. It was Woolly. Although he was bound hand and foot, he was struggling to rise. He had gotten to his knees, and then with a surprising deftness, he rocked onto the balls of his feet and stood upright.

  The soldiers’ weapons remained trained on us.

  “Cal!” shouted Woolly at the soldiers. He tottered a little but remained standing.

  One of them lowered his weapon just slightly.

  “Calvin Peter Roberts,” Woolly shouted, louder. His voice boomed across the snow.

  “It’s me, Woolly. We used to play Halo in your mom’s basement. You drank Mt. Dew by the gallon. You planned to join the army.” Woolly paused a moment. “Looks like you kinda did.”

  “Fire!” hollered Rachel.

  We couldn’t see the man’s face because of his mask, but his eyes twitched with confusion, conflict.

  Another cry rang out behind us. “Tamara Rodriguez! Don’t shoot! It’s Richard! Your brother-in-law! I married your sister, Valerie!”

  And then others.

  “Oscar!”

  “Franklin Pavithran!”

  “Hey, it’s me, Oscar! We were roomies at Nevada State!”

  “I know you! You lived down the block from me!”

  I rolled onto my knees, wheeled around. The soldiers were stepping back, lowering their weapons. One of them unharnessed his machinegun, hurled it to the ground, and staggered back, tripping and falling into the snow.

  “Fire!” Rachel was shrieking. “Fire on them now!”

  “Don’t do it,” Chase said hastily to the line of soldiers. “Ignore her! Join us. We’ll help you remember.”

  The sergeant looked at me, her thoughtful eyes searching, questioning.

  “It’s true,” I told her, nodding. “You can all remember.”

  Rachel grabbed the sergeant roughly again, but the big sergeant brushed her aside with an almost thoughtless sweep of her arm, and Rachel flew sprawling in the snow like an elegant doll.

  “Stand down,” said the sergeant to her squad, holding up a hand. The soldiers obeyed.

  I looked around again, amazed. An old lady had her arms around one of Rachel’s soldiers, who accepted the embrace with a mixture of delight and total shock. Soldiers were shaking hands with prisoners. I heard laughter.

  Rachel shrieked unintelligibly at the sergeant, but the sergeant lifted her weapon and let fly a cautionary burst of gunfire into the cold, darkening air.

  “No ma’am,” said the sergeant. “No more. We’re done.”

  Like a cat, Rachel sprang to the tree stump where she’d laid her pistol. The sergeant lunged toward the stump but Rachel was there first, and the pistol was in her hand. She fired. The round caught the sergeant in the chest and she fell lifeless into the snow.

  The rest of the squad turned their machine guns on Rachel and opened fire. It was all over in one very short, very loud moment.

  CHAPTER 65

  That night, we built the largest bonfire I’d ever been a witness to. A few dead trees were felled, their trunks were sectioned into logs four feet long, and these were tented like the campfire of a giant. Once the fire was blazing, we had to move back almost twenty feet to avoid being singed, but it nevertheless took me another hour to feel warm again after sitting so long in the snow.

  Some of the soldiers joined Ruby’s camp on the spot, eager to get away from the Agency and its atrocities, but also very interested in the hallucinogenic tea that was purported to restore memories. However, most of them had families and a few of them felt the need to stay loyal to the Agency. No one made them stay, and they left peacefully.

  Sonja, former preschool teacher and former sergeant of Rachel’s strike team, recovered. She’d been wearing a ballistic vest and suffered some nasty bruising, but she cavalierly laughed this off. Arie could not have been more amazed to meet up with her. He said he had hazy, fond remembrances of her, and he followed her around the camp offering his help.

  They buried Rachel where she’d been killed. I was grateful to the soldiers who handled her body with such deference and respect, because as they laid her to rest, I felt my hatred for her melt away, leaving me feeling lighter and more free even than I’d felt before.

  The bonfire burned through the night. The last reserves of anything resembling wine or spirits were produced and there was laughter and singing.

  Some of us were still snuggled together under heaped-up blankets as the sun came up. We’d talked all through the night, moving our chairs and seats progressively closer to the bonfire as it burned lower and collapsed. It still gave off a great deal of heat as the night’s final chill clutched at us, but as the sky turned rosy with the dawn, coffee pots and pans of water appeared on the periphery of the coals and soon we had warm cups to drink from.

  Sonja threw off the blanket she was huddling beneath. She stood and went to the fire and held out her hands to warm them.

  “I take it none of you have been to an Agency facility in a while.”

  “We broke into one not long ago,” said Chase, hiking up his shoulders flippantly, “but we weren’t exactly treated as guests.”

  “I remember,” said Sonja. “I was part of the fast-response unit that night, though I wasn’t on the team that apprehended you.”

  “Why’d you bring it up, though?” asked Ruby.

  “The Agency is—struggling, changing, shrinking. It’s caving in on itself. Defections practically every day. Zones are being evacuated and collapsed as more and more people escape. And you saw what happened here yesterday. I volunteered for this detail half-expecting something like this to happen.”

  “So, what are you saying?” I asked.

  “Well,” said Sonja, “I’m not sure.” She winced and pressed her hand to her bruised ribs. “I guess I’m saying that there’s not as much for you all to be concerned about anymore. Rac
hel was really the last of what we called ‘the big-game hunters,’ the last of those in the Agency who are interested in rounding up folks like you, maintaining order at all costs. Most of the higher-ups are just desperately trying to carve out a decent existence for themselves and any family they have left.”

  Ruby nodded slowly and stared at the coals of the bonfire. “That actually makes me kinda said,” she muttered.

  “You think it might be time for a new strategy, Rube?” Chase asked.

  “I dunno,” she said softly. “We been dreamin’ about this moment so long, when we could finally break free and move far away, it’s almost like I want to go through with it just because we always said we would.”

  We nodded and murmured our assent.

  “But I also been thinkin’ about what Al and Arie always said. That it ain’t right to leave all them people in the Zones when we know how to help ’em. And now we got this magic tea. Think about it. We sneak this here tea in. Not just to them in the Zones, but the goons, too. The soldiers, the management, everybody. Can ya imagine?”

  “It’d be one hell of a party,” said Woolly.

  We all chuckled.

  “We’d need more tea,” I said.

  “At first, yeah,” said Woolly. “But maybe Peter could teach us how to cultivate it, too.”

  “So there’s no more exodus?” I asked. “No new settlement?”

  “Maybe not,” said Ruby. “Or maybe the exodus goes back where we come from. Maybe it’s time we went home and started rebuilding.”

  “And what about you?” Chase asked Ruby. “How are you feeling?”

  She rubbed her knee. “Well. I feel pretty good, now that I think about it. Thanks for askin’. But maybe it’s time I take some a’ that tea and think about retirement. I got my whole leadership team back. And maybe a couple new helpers.”

  Ruby nodded in Sonja’s direction. Sonja nodded back.

  Ruby had been our leader for so long, it was hard to think of her not bossing us around.

  “Let’s not kid ourselves,” said Woolly to Ruby. “You’re not gonna retire just like that.”

  “I never said I was, ya big galoot,” Ruby barked, “but maybe it’s time someone else drove the bus for a while.”

  When every other person in the group professed to having their memories restored, Ruby finally drank the tea herself. Arie and I assisted her, making her comfortable in her tent, but she was so worried about what she would remember, it felt rather like a solemn, almost funerary ceremony.

  “What if I’m awful person,” she protested as we prepared the tea. “What if I don’t like who I used t’be?” It took half the day to get her settled and calm.

  Early in the morning two days later she burst joyously from her tent.

  “Hey y’all,” she hollered, “come hear about me. I was a grandma! I am a grandma!” She hurried to the main firepit. A crowd of us gathered around her and heard the story of her life. There was a renewed sense of youth about her. I realized she didn’t have her walking stick. Her face glowed as she told about her children. “Six of them! Can ya imagine?” said Ruby, “Four boys and two girls.”

  “No wonder you’re so good at running camp and keeping us all alive,” said Woolly. “You have experience with children.”

  Ruby chuckled. She missed them, of course, and cried for them, wondering mournfully where they might have ended up, but gone from her eyes was the abject weariness I had seen before. Her eyes sparkled with new life and a new happiness.

  “I’ll track ’em all down,” she resolved, “track all ’em kiddies down and add them to the rest of my family here,” said Ruby with a wide grin. And I had no doubt she would do just that.

  Later that afternoon, I found a peaceful hillside to watch the sun go down again.

  Arie found me and sat next to me.

  “I remember,” he said. “The Ferris wheel. The Sky Dreamer. You and dad and me.”

  I nodded.

  “I miss him,” Arie said.

  “I do, too. But I missed him before, before I remembered. It’s better to know.”

  Arie nodded. Then he scooped up a handful of snow and threw it down the hill. It struck a tree trunk with a loud pop.

  “Mom?” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you.”

  I grabbed his hand. “I love you, too.”

  Arie looked embarrassed. “Okay, well, this has gotten a bit mushy. I think I’ll have a game of chess with Woolly.”

  Just then I saw someone else coming up the hill.

  “You don’t have to go,” I said.

  Arie smirked. “I know. But I’m gonna anyway. Someone wants to talk to you.”

  It was Chase approaching, coming up the snowy hillside. His beard and hair had been trimmed, and as he got closer, I saw that he was wearing a vest, suit coat, and a tie. Where did he get those?

  Arie walked down the hill and as he passed by Chase, they shook hands.

  “Good luck, man,” said Arie.

  Chase took a deep breath and nodded. Arie continued in the direction of the camp. Chase came closer, one hand behind his back.

  “Look at you,” I said, standing up. “Handsome.”

  Chase grinned sheepishly.

  “I’ve come to ask you something.”

  “No,” I said. “Me first.”

  He looked puzzled.

  I took his hand in mine.

  “Chase, I love you. No matter how hard I’ve tried not to or how hard they’ve tried to erase you from me, I love you. And I feel like we are meant to be together. I want to spend my life with you. I want the rest of my memories to include you. Will you marry me?”

  Chase laughed. He brought his arm forward to reveal a golden ring. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  A week later, just before our rag-tag convoy got underway westward, Ruby married us beneath a tall spruce tree as it snowed. The flakes were like shimmering particles of glitter falling around us in celebration.

  Today I sometimes marvel at how old I’ve grown to be. I never thought I would be this old, but I never knew I could be this happy, either. It amazes me that Chase and I lived this long, and that he’s still by my side. We have grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The world is better now than it was when I first met Chase and Woolly and Ruby. And it’s getting better. We have made a million memories since those days. Wonderful, precious memories that we never will forget.

  THE END

  CREEP FACTOR

  by Amanda Luzzader and Chadd VanZanten

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07J3X1CM5

  It’s the feeling that something isn’t quite right. The glance of a stranger that lingers too long. A coworker who appears out of nowhere. Creep Factor is thirteen deeply creepy short horror stories that explore the awkward, unnerving, and the terrifying. From backstabbing roommates to vicious pets, from murderous spirits to soul-wracking nightmares, Creep Factor covers the savagely weird to the merely ghastly.

  Middle Grade Adventure

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  middle grade adventure.

  Coming late 2020.

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  About the Author

  Amanda Luzzader writes upmarket science fiction, horror, and middle grade books. She is a self-described ’fraidy cat. Things she will run away from include (but are not limited to): mice, snakes, spiders, bits of string and litter that resemble spiders, most members of the insect kingdom, and (most especially) bats. Bats are the worst. But Amanda is first and primarily a mother to two energetic and intelligent sons, and this role inspires and informs her writing, which frequently involves mothers and women as main characters. As Amanda likes to say, “Moms are people, too.”

  Amanda has worked as a technical writer and a professional editor and is currently employed as a grant writer for a Utah nonprofit organization. She was
named Writer of the Year for 2019 by the League of Utah Writers.