The Light of Hope

by Ernie Lindsey

  “Your stash? We claimed this two years ago.”

  “Funny. I didn’t see you here guarding it.”

  “Laws of the forest, Crockett. It’s ours and you know it. Republicon code, right?”

  She cackles with laughter. I can’t see where she is—the brush is too thick in her direction—but it’s a worrying sound. It’s as if some unidentified beast of the forest is howling before going in for the kill. Honestly, that’s likely not far from the truth. “How long you think it’s been since I lived by any kind of code, idiot? The only things we use around here that stick to the old ways are the land markers, and something tells me you didn’t see those three trees on all four points.”

  James had mentioned it briefly once we left the PRV horde behind this morning, saying he wasn’t sure if this was claimed territory or not. By the time we began our westward journey, I think we were all so maddeningly hungry, we forgot to check.

  James curses under his breath and rubs his big bear paw of a hand across his face. “Okay, we’re coming out. No weapons. Just get that fool with the bow to drop his hands and we’re good.”

  We hear a sharp whistle and when I check, Darwin has moved completely from behind the tree. The bow is at his waist, another arrow ready, but at least he’s not aiming between our eyes.

  “You’re good,” Crockett says.

  James looks back over his shoulder. I follow his gaze. The remainder of his Republicon clan peek out from behind the storage shed’s open doorway. They look worried, and it’s a weird feeling. They are smooth, quiet, elite marauders of the forest, the top of the food chain, but they know that Crockett and her men are unpredictable and dangerous, and we’re all at a disadvantage.

  Squirrel, Marla, and the others have their weapons—slingshots, knives, and crossbows—but if we walk out of here showing them, Crockett won’t hesitate to show us whose land this really is.

  Frustrated, James growls and pushes himself through the tangled limbs and leaves. I follow him in the large open space he leaves behind. The others don’t have quite the easy journey. They struggle, shove, and curse the branches and briars that poke at their skin and get tangled in their hair.

  When James and I break through into the clearing, we immediately see that it’s not just Crockett and Darwin. She wasn’t lying when she said we were surrounded. Her gang of surly men forms a circle around us to the north, south, east, and west.

  Twelve men—she’s picked up a couple of new members—glare at us with arrows drawn to their ears.

  Crockett smiles, showing blackened, rotting teeth. “This should be fun,” she says.

  4

  James motions for me to get behind him. When I don’t immediately comply, he grabs my arm and yanks me to cover. I’m not sure that it makes a difference, considering Crockett’s men are all around us. James fixes this by asking the rest of our little crew to circle me, forming a wall of bodies.

  “I don’t need to be protected,” I tell him.

  “Hush now,” he says, without looking at me. “That’s what we’re here for. You’ve got bigger battles to fight.”

  “James, I—”

  Crockett interrupts me. “Let ‘er out, James. Let’s see if the Kinder can live up to her promises before we put an arrow through her eyeball.” She’s really tempting fate, overly confident, because if I hadn’t lost my abilities—or had them stolen from me—all thirteen of them would be dead before they could let go of their bowstrings.

  I wonder if we should even tell her. Should we go on letting her think I’m still almost immortal? Would that give us an advantage?

  If she thinks I’m a Kinder, then it’s likely why she hasn’t ordered her men to kill James and his Republicons where they stand. That call for James to let me out…she’s just posturing. She might actually be scared.

  Good. This is good.

  We could get out of this alive, all of us, if we play it right. I’m praying that James is thinking the same thing.

  And then it’s all ruined when Squirrel says, “She ain’t a Kinder no more, Crockett.”

  James hisses for him to shut up, glaring at him with anger and disappointment for revealing the truth. The look on his face tells me he was thinking the same thing I was.

  Squirrel mumbles an apology. Marla smacks him on the back of the head.

  Crockett hooks her thumbs in her belt loops and rocks back on her heels. “Well, I’ll be. That so, young lady?”

  I don’t reply. Maybe if she thinks Squirrel is trying to trick her, it could work. It’s not all lost yet.

  “I asked you a question.”

  Again, I stay silent.

  Crockett points at a man to her left. He’s wearing dark slacks and a dark jacket with a single red stripe on his shoulder. His infantryman’s cap sits angled on his head and the weeks of scraggly beard growth gives him the look of a young man who’s trying too hard to look older. He’s a blackcoat soldier, a deserter, and I’m not surprised he’s taken up with Crockett’s gang. They probably found him wandering lost and alone in the forest, promised him a hot meal and a cut of their spoils.

  Crockett says to him, “Zander, please show them how serious I am.”

  Sometimes, I forget that I no longer have my Kinder abilities. I watch him release the arrow, and I move, thinking I can bend time, duck around the arrow, and grab it in mid-air. In my mind’s eye, I can see this happening, just like this: I grab the arrow, I snap it in half, and then I jam the arrowhead deep into the side of his neck.

  But, before my foot touches the ground, the arrow zips by my shoulder and penetrates Greely’s throat with a sickening thud. He groans, gurgles, and blood pours out of his mouth as he desperately claws at his neck with slick red fingers. He staggers backwards, falls through Squirrel’s outstretched arms, and lands facing the canopy above. It all happens so quickly that we hardly have time to react.

  James screams, “No,” and rushes for him. I scream too and do the same, but before we can bend over to do something, to help somehow, another arrow slams into Greely’s twitching body, sending us scrambling backward, falling away and landing on our rears.

  Crockett erupts in laughter and compliments Zander on his aim. She asks us, “Believe me now?”

  James surges to his feet and starts for her. “You…you…” He balls up his fist and cocks his arm.

  “Don’t,” I beg, grabbing the hem of his coat. I yank hard and try to pull him back.

  “What’re you gonna do, big man? Call me names?” Crockett spits on the ground, puts her hands behind her back, and bends at the waist. She juts her chin out and says, “It’ll probably hurt my feelings less if you just punch me. Go ahead. First one’s free.”

  She’s taunting us. She knows James will never have the chance. Any one of her men will drop him before he gets within five feet of her.

  “James, stop!”

  He must realize how hopeless our situation is, because he stops suddenly enough for me to run into his back. He reaches for me, grasping at my shoulder, as he pulls me close into his body. He uses his large frame as a shield again and retreats, back to the false safety of our little circle.

  Greely croaks one last time and dies. I can hear Marla sniffling behind me.

  James says, “We don’t need to do this. We can trade, leave, do something, Crockett. I’m sorry we crossed through your land, okay? We’ve been trailing the DAV army for days with little food, and we weren’t thinking. Let’s forget it happened. You can have the food in the shed. We don’t even want it.”

  “If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re trying to let me have what’s already mine?”

  “I didn’t mean it like—”

  “You stole some of it already,” she interrupts. “It ain’t never coming back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry won’t fill our bellies, big man. You’re on our land, you’re stealing our food, leaving dead bodies behind that the animals will get to.” She points at Greely and shrugs as if it’s our f
ault he’s dead.

  In a way, she’s right.

  While she pauses for effect, I take another look at his body. He’s been around for a few weeks now, always hanging around Hawker, hardly opening his mouth to say much. I didn’t know him that well, or at all, truthfully, but the fact that he died trying to protect me is almost too much for my heart to bear. I can feel my throat closing. I’m not going to cry, though. I won’t give Crockett the satisfaction.

  James takes a step closer and tells her, “Listen to me. Please. We’re only passing through and if we’d known—if I had thought to check for markers, we wouldn’t be here. It’s my fault, and I can’t… I can’t say it any other way than that. Let ‘em go, and you can have me. How’s that sound? I’ll join your crew, whatever you want, but just let my family go. We’re all Republicons together. Have a little compassion for your kind because we meant no harm. We were hungry, we knew there’d be food, and that’s that. I’ll run with you until I work off the debt. That’s all I can offer.”

  She seems to consider this as she tilts her head to the side and stares at him with one eyebrow raised. “You’re just passing through, huh? Where you headed?”

  “North,” I answer, deciding to reveal the truth. Crockett is worked up about having something stolen from her, so perhaps she can understand that I’m trying to get something back that belongs to me, my people, my life, my freedom.

  And it only just occurs to me that if we can’t get ourselves out of this mess, I may never see my parents again. I’ll never have a chance to rebuild what was destroyed so many years ago.

  Crockett and James never got along, not a bit, but in hindsight, during the short time she was with us during the retreat, we had formed a small level of respect for each other. We had stood tall and firm as female leaders, even if our relationship had been less stable than a house built on rolling stones.

  “Heading north for what?” she asks me.

  “Five miles east of here, the DAV army—his army—” I say, pointing at Zander, the blackcoat coward, “is marching back to their land and their cities with my people.”

  Zander scoffs, smirks, and shakes his head.

  “You knew this was coming, Crockett. You ran with us for a few days, and it finally happened because we couldn’t fight back. Remember Finn, the other Kinder with us?”

  “So what if I do?”

  “He betrayed us all. He was working for the DAV the entire time, spying on us.”

  Crockett chuckles. “I had a feeling about that boy. Something was off about him. Matter of fact, that might’ve been part of the reason we got gone before things could get bloody.”

  “You knew about it?”

  “That he was spying? No. Gut feelings, nothing more. Can’t change it now, though, huh? Deed is done, and your people are slaves.”

  “Not if I can help it. I’m going to fight. I’m going to free them.” I’m not that convincing. Even I can sense the shakiness in my voice. I had all but given up because my mood was so low, but considering I’m fighting for all our lives, I can feel some of the old fire coming back.

  Small victories, right? Many battles make up a war and you only have to win one more than the other side.

  Crockett crosses her arms and studies me, then she glares at James, then she looks over each of my Republicon friends, one by one.

  She waits so long to speak that James gets fidgety and can’t stand still.

  She says, “I understand where you’re coming from, little lady. I get it. I do. I feel bad for your people, and that’s the honest truth, being all tied up in those DAV chains. I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes because Lord knows, Zander here ain’t nothing but a rotten grunt. If the rest of those blackcoats are anything like this bastard, your people got a long road ahead of ‘em. But, that don’t change the fact that y’all are on my property without permission, stealing my food. James knows the rules of the Republicon code. ‘Sorry’ is just a word, and if I grant y’all mercy, rumors might get around, and then we’d be wasting more arrows on intruders than deer meat.”

  James holds up a hand and says, “Wait—”

  “Let ‘em fly, boys!”

  “I invoke Fifth Right,” screams James.

  Whish, whish, whish.

  Arrows fly. James reacts, grabbing my arm and yanking me to the ground; the flying instruments of death miss us by inches.

  The others aren’t so lucky. I hear the thuds and yelps as the arrowheads pierce clothing, skin, bones, and organs. I hear Marla cry out, followed by Squirrel’s wail.

  A second round of arrows flies before they fall. James and I roll away from each other. Two arrows slam into the soft forest floor where we lay a half-second earlier.

  James bellows, “Fifth Right, damn you. I invoke Fifth Right.”

  In return, Crockett shouts, “Hold. Hold.”

  I look behind us. Every single member of James’s Republicon family is writhing on the ground, arrows protruding from wounds I know they won’t be able to survive. Lungs, hearts, throats—it’s not a compliment when I say that Crockett’s men have deadly accurate aim.

  I’m in too much shock to react.

  I’m simply…numb.

  I stare, motionless.

  James screams, “No!” as he looks at the bodies of his family, their inevitable deaths only minutes away. “I called for Fifth Right, damn you.”

  Crockett strolls over and stands above him, hands on her hips, grinning. “Didn’t I tell you we don’t conform to the old ways much around here? Then again, maybe if you’d called it sooner, your people might’ve had a chance.”

  “I said it soon enough,” he growls between clenched teeth. “They shot anyway. Now you’re honor bound.”

  “You think any of these harebrained fools know what Fifth Right is? I’m lucky they can feed themselves.”

  “What’s Fifth Right?” I ask in a daze.

  “Your friend here wants to fight me for control of this territory. Republicon ways—codes, laws—that go back a hundred years or more. Fifth Right says any leader of a clan can challenge another one for land rights.”

  “How?”

  James pushes himself to his feet, answering, “In a fight to the death, Caroline.”

  Crockett smirks, makes a sweeping motion with her arm from left to right. She says, “If you’re stupid enough to try, then so be it. Let’s do the dance.”

  I remember ten years ago, back when I was barely five years old, we had an argument in my encampment. Two Elders, Elder Lovell and Elder Mattingly, were continuously at war with one another—something about fighting over a tiny strip of land, or maybe it was about some cured goat meat. Both memories seem possible.

  The Elders’ arguments were so explosive that I can actually remember them yelling at each other in The Center.

  This was back before the rains came. I have this distinct image of them in my mind, standing across from each other on a hot, sunny day, shouting loudly enough to scare babies ten shacks away.

  Elder Lovell reaches for Elder Mattingly and misses. He falls to the ground, grabs a handful of loose, dry dirt, and slings it into Elder Mattingly’s face. Then they’re rolling, throwing punches, and dust billows up around them.

  I remember Grandfather pulling me away and back toward home. I remember feeling disappointed that I didn’t get to see the outcome.

  I wanted to know who won.

  Now, however, I can’t think of anything I want to see less.

  If Crockett wins, that means James is dead.

  If James wins, it means that he is dead, because there’s no way her minions are going to allow us out of here alive, not after killing their revered leader.

  He stands with me off to the side, wrapping his hands up in shredded shirt material, rain dripping off his beard. His breath smells faintly like the nutrition blocks back in the shed when he says, “I have to do this. It’s the only way.”

  “They’re going to kill you if you win. Can’t you see that?”

&nb
sp; “Not if they’re good Republicons.”

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Are you insane? What on earth gives you the idea that her bunch of heathens are good Republicons who follow the laws, or rules, or—or the rights, whatever they are? Think this through. Please.”

  “It’s the only way,” he repeats, more insistently this time.

  “No, I can’t let—”

  He grabs my shoulders and spins me around, facing him. “Look at me. Look me in the eyes, Caroline, and understand me. They’re not good people, they’re not good Republicons, and we know that. You know it, I know it, but I have a plan, and you have to trust me. We can get out of here alive.”

  I see a flicker of doubt in his eyes. “You don’t really believe that.”

  “I do.”

  “No, you don’t. I can tell. I can see it in your face.” My bottom lip trembles. “Why? Tell me why you’re doing this.”

  He remains silent. He squeezes my shoulders tighter. He chews on the side of his bottom lip.

  And then he hugs me, pulling me close to his chest before I can see his tears fall.

  “I got us into this mess. It was my fault,” he whispers. “I wanted to come here. I made us come here.”

  “For the food,” I say, trying to nudge away from him. He holds me tighter.

  “It doesn’t matter. I brought us here, and I got careless. I forgot to check for markers. It’s all my fault. I should’ve… I should’ve checked. I messed up. Even if I’d seen any sign of her being around, maybe we could’ve grabbed some of the food and disappeared. We didn’t have to hang around. We didn’t have to come here. They’re all dead. My family is dead.”

  “Not everyone.”

  “Caroline, you know—”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “Stop. Don’t even try to convince me. This was my mistake, and I’ll go to my grave knowing that.”

  “You can’t make it better by dying for them, James.”

  “I know. It’s not for them. Not now. I know I’m not getting out of here alive. I’ve known it since the moment she had us surrounded. There’s no mercy in her heart. It’s a cold, dead rock. So here’s what you need to do—when the fight begins, you run. Her men will be watching us, and you might have a chance. Wait until we’re on the ground, something, anything. Wait until they’re cheering and not watching. You run as hard as you can, but don’t go in a straight line. Make yourself hard to hit. Be a rabbit. You’ve been in the woods your entire life, and you were an excellent scout in the worst zone imaginable for hundreds of miles. You can hide. You know how to hide. I’m not leaving here with air in my lungs, but you can do it. You’ve got a war to fight, Caroline. Save your people, and don’t let my family’s deaths be for nothing.”