The Liberty Box Trilogy

by C. A. Gray

“Go to hell,” I told him.

  His face darkened. “What’s that?” He took a few threatening steps toward me. “I believe I heard the Crone say we would not tolerate insubordination.”

  I took an involuntary step backwards. Behind me, Brittany’s little girl Janet burst into tears. I glanced at the Crone for help, but she had her back to us.

  The guard took another step toward me, closing the distance between us. “That means you have to do what I say.” He reached for my shirt, fumbling with the buttons.

  Click.

  “I don’t think so,” said Nick as he stepped out of the shadows, aiming the barrel of his gun at my assailant. Right behind him, Will, Alec, Jacob, and Roger Dunne also emerged, all of them armed.

  The bodyguard stepped back, his hands in the air, and I ran to Will’s side in relief.

  “What is the meaning of this?” the Crone snapped. “Put down your weapons at once!”

  “Your boy here was just trying to feel up my fiancee, that’s what,” Will snapped at her, looping an arm around me. “Not exactly the kind of ‘leadership’ we were hoping for.”

  “Well then, he was acting without my consent and he shall be punished. And so shall you be for your rebellion! Where are the other Council members? Where did you get those weapons? I assure you that you do not wish to defy me!”

  “Oh yes,” Nick growled. “We sure do.” He looked at the rest of us and announced, “The hunters are going to Beckenshire. It will be dangerous getting there, potentially dangerous staying there, and what we plan to do afterwards will most likely get us all killed. With that full disclosure, anyone who wants to come along is more than welcome. But you must decide now.”

  I kept turning, scouring the shadows. Where’s Jackson?

  “Have you murdered all of my Council members?” demanded the Crone.

  Brian stepped out of the shadows next, also bearing a weapon and aiming it at the Crone. “Nope,” he said, “they’re all alive, just bound and gagged, and most of them, unconscious.”

  Pete emerged beside him next. The hunters formed a semi-circle, all with weapons drawn. Molly let out a joyful sob. “When we leave,” said Pete, “we’ll give you specific instructions of how to find them all.”

  The Crone watched the hunters for a silent moment, before she muttered, “This was the boy from Iceland’s doing.”

  Nick ignored this and shouted again, “Anyone coming with us, choose right now!”

  I grabbed my satchel of food, and moved toward them. Will grabbed my shoulder and pulled me behind him when I was in range. Molly moved with me. So did Rachel, Jean, Brenda Halfpenny, Nelson Armstrong, Sam and Violet, and a few others—those I had already identified in my head as rebels. The rest stayed put, wide-eyed and fearful.

  “Brittany!” I hissed, signaling her to come. She looked at me, and looked at Janet, who now seemed too frightened to cry. But Brittany didn’t move.

  “Brittany!” I insisted, “for heaven’s sake!”

  She looked paralyzed in terror. But she looked at the Crone. I had the impression that most of the other mothers with children were waiting for her decision to see what they should do, too.

  “She’s… trying to take us to safety,” Brittany said at last. “I—I don’t want to risk any more than I have to!” She burst into tears.

  “But you have no hunters, and no weapons now!” I told her. “Without them, the plan doesn’t stand a chance!”

  “No matter,” the Crone fixed her glare upon me. “The plan will change according to our—shifting resources. But I assure you, Ms. Brandeis, that we shall survive, while those who oppose me shall perish. Count on that.”

  Last of all, Jackson emerged from the shadows. My heart leapt with relief when I saw him, and Will’s grip tightened on my shoulder.

  The Crone’s beady eyes flashed when Jackson appeared, and for once her calm demeanor crumbled to reveal her anger.

  “I will make you a deal,” she murmured, though it was unclear to whom she was speaking. “I will allow the rest of you to leave, in exchange for him.” She pointed her bony finger at Jackson. “Just him.”

  Nick laughed, and even Jackson suppressed a smile.

  “First of all,” called Jacob, “not sure if you’ve noticed, but you’re not exactly in a position to deal. And second, if we left him, you’d be sorry in a hurry. Guarantee it.”

  “He will not pose a threat with every Council member watching him at once, if they are alive as you say!” she snapped. “We need him. We need his mind. The rest of you be damned!”

  She turned back to Nick, and her tone changed to butter. “I understand that I am not in a strong bargaining position right now. But if you do not agree to this request of mine, and if we are caught on our journey, we shall betray your plans to the authorities. You will all find yourselves before the firing squad.” She raised her eyebrows. “Give me Jackson. If you will not do it to save the lives of all of your comrades here, then do it to save your own.”

  I expected Nick to laugh in her face again, but he didn’t; he frowned, and said nothing.

  “Like hell we will!” I shouted. “We need Jackson more than you do!” Again, I expected the others to back me up. But nobody did. “He’s one of us!” I insisted. Will tightened his grip on my shoulder even more.

  “You cannot possibly be considering this?” I demanded of Nick. “He just saved all of you out there, didn’t he? Now you’re going to leave him behind, with them?”

  “I’m not considering it,” said Nick, “I’m considering how best to prevent her from betraying us later.”

  Several of the other young mothers began to cry. One of them shouted, “If you hurt her, then you sentence us all to death!”

  “I realize that, hence my dilemma,” murmured Nick.

  “Kill her, and then they can all come with us!” shouted Alec.

  “Against their will?” said Nick, and shook his head. “No. With or without her interference, chances are high that we will all end up before the firing squad anyway.”

  “I say we turn him over to them!” shouted Rachel, whirling on Jackson. I gaped at her, horrified, as she shouted, “At least it gives us a better chance of survival, doesn’t it?”

  “You think we’d survive better without him than with him?” demanded Roger Dunne. “Think again, girl.”

  Nick stared at Rachel, contemplating her with his jaw locked. At last, he said, “You are no longer welcome here. Go back with the others.”

  Her mouth fell open, and her eyes filled with tears. “But—I was just saying—”

  “You were just trying to save your own skin at the expense of one of our allies, and we cannot have traitors among us. You are not welcome.”

  The tears spilled over Rachel’s cheeks now, and she wept in earnest.

  “Let her come,” said Jackson quietly. “Who knows what the Crone will do to her for siding with us, if we leave her behind.”

  “I am not a murderer, boy!” the Crone rasped at Jackson, pointing her bony finger at him. “You are the murderers!”

  Jackson ignored her, still speaking to Nick. “Let her come. For Kenny’s sake.”

  Nick looked at Jackson, pursed his lips, and nodded. “I’ll do it for your sake,” he said. Then he turned back to the Crone.

  “We’ll leave instructions on how to find your Council members along the edge of the ravine about half a day’s journey in the direction of Beckenshire. That way you’ll have to backtrack to collect them, and even if you wanted to follow us we’ll have quite a head start. Also, we have all your weapons now, and Jackson here overpowered every one of your Council members even when they were armed and he was not. So I wouldn’t recommend you come after us anyway. It won’t end well for you if you try, I can promise you that.”

  “You’ve signed your own death warrants as well as ours!” the Crone shouted after us, as we disappeared into the forest.

  Chapter 6: Jackson

  From
eight hundred, to eighty, to twenty, I thought, looking around as we walked along the edge of the cliffs by the light of the moon. The odds just keep getting better and better.

  I fell into step beside Nick and Molly, who held hands. Molly’s brassiere backpack leaked nuts and berries every few steps. Under different circumstances it might have been funny.

  “So,” I said, just trying to break the silence.

  “So,” said Nick, looking across Molly and giving me a tired smile.

  “The Crone was a baroness,” I said. They both nodded. “Why come here then? Why didn’t she just stay in New Estonia?” I thought I knew the answer even as I asked, though—probably New Estonia had heard the same rumors I’d heard in Iceland, about the prosperity and opportunities in the Republic.

  “She emigrated to the United States as a girl,” Nick told me. “At the time, the United States was the world superpower, and New Estonia was still small and underdeveloped. The only reason she had the opportunity to come was because by New Estonian standards, she came from privilege. She had more title than money. Her family thought she’d be better off in the States.”

  “Was she?” I asked.

  Nick shrugged, and Molly answered. “She didn’t talk much about those days. All we know is that she settled on the east coast of the United States, in the former state of Massachusetts. I guess other New Estonian immigrants came because of her, so in addition to her own kids and grandkids who were already here with her, she became the uncontested leader of all the other immigrants and their families too.”

  “I gathered there were a few hundred immigrants in their little enclave at the time of the Crash,” said Nick. “Most of them died in the rioting, or died of starvation. Not surprising, since some seventy percent of the United States population died from one or the other. That’s why there are so many ghost towns now.”

  “Why didn’t she just go back to New Estonia then?” I wondered aloud.

  “She probably couldn’t get there,” said Nick. “The international trading stopped, so it wasn’t like there were ships coming in or going out. Until things calmed down, she was stuck. And by then, the cave community had sprung into existence, and she’d essentially re-created her former situation—just without the family and cultural connection she’d had before.”

  “You said most of her family died,” I said. “But some didn’t?”

  “Some of them stayed in the Republic and got brainwashed,” said Molly. “She disowned them. But I’m pretty sure those bodyguards that follow her around are related to her in some way.”

  “Ah,” I murmured. “I’d wondered.” After a long pause, where the only sound was the crunching of our collective feet on the ground, I said, “Do you think she’ll really sell us out?”

  “Not if she somehow manages to survive and not get caught,” said Molly. “She won’t risk her own life or those of the group to get revenge. She’s much too practical for that. But if she’s going down anyway, you can bet she’s gonna take us with her if she can.”

  “Not a woman you want to cross,” Nick said with a bitter smile.

  I felt guilty about this, but couldn’t decide whether it had really been my fault or not. I wished I could ask Grandfather… although I smiled as soon as I thought this, because I knew what he’d say. Even if it was your fault, what can you do about it now? No sense dwelling on the past.

  He’d be right, of course. Like always. Guilt was not productive. But I knew it would be easier for me to reject it if I had a logical reason to do so, so I rehearsed what I knew one more time.

  Fact: The Crone had become a dictator and was using violence and even the threat of execution against those who opposed her.

  Fact: Most of the refugees still trusted her to lead them to safety, crazy as her scheme may be. And frankly, the path she chose was far more treacherous than it needed to be. Had she chosen to go through the forest on foot and avoid the Republic altogether until the very end, they likely wouldn’t have needed my training to survive at all.

  Well, not true. Even in that scenario, many of them would probably die in the last leg of the journey before boarding the cargo ship overseas to New Estonia. They’d still encounter agents at that point, and those agents would still be armed, real bullets or no.

  So ultimately that meant that yes, the other group of refugees would likely die because their minds were still untrained. Because I chose to abandon them.

  But they could have come with us. Every one of them had that choice.

  And what if I’d abandoned the group I was with now? The hunters weren’t fully trained either, and whatever we had planned would no doubt involve them going back onto the grid frequently.

  Besides, fundamentally I believed that the right thing to do was not to flee for safety, but to stay and fight—for those of us who were able.

  Had I gone with the Crone, it would not have been a free choice, but manipulation. The Crone made her choice. The people with her made theirs. But I could not allow them to make my choice for me. I simply could not have lived with myself.

  I took a deep breath of fresh night air, closing my eyes as I did so. For the first time since we’d left, I felt free.

  Nick cast a sidelong glance at me. “Work something out?”

  I nodded slowly and smiled.

  “So Will told me he has an idea,” Nick changed the subject. “Remember our speculation that the reason Brenda and Nelson and the others started waking up was because the control center signals got interrupted? Turns out we were right. Will wrote the program that did it.”

  “He—?”

  “Wrote the program,” Nick confirmed. “While on the Potentate’s watch, no less. He says it only interrupted the signals for about a minute, because he wanted to test the idea out without getting discovered. But he plans to disrupt the signals for longer and longer intervals, until they stop altogether. I want him and Jean to sit down and work on it as soon as we get to a stopping place and get some rest.”

  “So…do we have to get to anywhere special for him to be able to do that?”

  “I got the impression he thought he could do it from any net screen,” Nick told me.

  I fell silent for a few moments, pondering this and glancing at Will once over my shoulder, walking side by side with Kate.

  Some part of me didn’t particularly want to like Will—but the more I learned about him, the more impressed I was.

  “Pretty resourceful guy,” I said at last. “So we basically repeat the run we did with Jean, and get a team to protect him while he does his thing?”

  “Once he and Jean have worked out what the code should be, yeah.”

  “And how are they going to do that?”

  “In Beckenshire, there should be all kinds of abandoned houses that have never been touched in any raids or riots,” said Nick. “I doubt they’ll have any working net screens, but they should at least have pencils and paper. He said that’s all he’d need for now.”

  I’d have to take their word for it.

  Judging by the position of the moon, it was around three in the morning when we finally left detailed descriptions of each Council member’s location under a rock beside the cliff. They were written on the last of the parchment made from animals the hunters had skinned and cured themselves, and with the ink from wild huckleberries on the point of a twig.

  While I dictated the instructions for Molly to write, most of our party sat or lay down, closing their eyes. Nick looked around, frowned, and announced, “Don’t get comfortable. I know you’re all tired, but we have another hour to go before we make camp.”

  “Yes, Madam,” said Brian sarcastically.

  “Hey!” said Nick so sharply that everyone woke back up again to see him pointing a bony finger in Brian’s face. “Never compare me to her again, do you hear me? I’m trying to keep us safe!”

  “That’s what she said too,” Brian muttered sullenly, clutching his wounded arm to his chest.


  “And for how long?” put in Violet, Sam’s pregnant wife. “You said we’d all most likely die anyway, no matter what you do!”

  The group started to mutter at this. Nick tried to quiet the protests, but I could see that he was losing control. I straightened, and shouted, “Listen!”

  It worked, better than I’d anticipated. Everyone fell silent at once, looking at me. I didn’t intend to say anything else, but now that I had their attention, the words just came out.

  “All of you chose to come with us because you value truth and freedom, and you believe that every human being has a right to those things. Right? What’s happening in the Republic, and what was happening under the Crone, are both a violation of those principles. We must fight against them—not only for ourselves, but for anyone who wishes to be free! That’s why Nick said coming with us may cost you your lives: because we’re not planning to just find another place to settle and stay out of sight. We are going to fight, any way we can. But if we go down, we don’t want it to be from ambush before we’ve even done anything important—I don’t know about the rest of you, but if I die in this war, I want to do it setting as many captives free as I possibly can. To do that, we’ve got to listen to Nick and give him our allegiance, even when he tells us to do something we don’t like.”

  Nobody spoke for a long time after I finished. Brian and Violet both looked a little sheepish. Kate’s blue eyes shone at me in the moonlight. I looked away.

  Will finally broke the silence. “But all of us won’t be fighting.” I saw him glance at Kate, and she stiffened. “Some of us will have to stay behind.”

  Nick answered, calmer now as he faced Will. “I would love to keep Molly safe too,” he told him, glancing back at his wife, who had finished writing the instructions. “I never intended for everyone to come with us on our actual raids. But in all honesty, survival requires community out here. If most of us die in the Republic, those who stay behind will eventually die of starvation.” He pursed his lips, his gaze now lingering on Molly, even as he spoke to Will. “If there’s a way around that, I’d love to hear it.”