He lets me pull away enough to look up into his face. His kind, caring eyes stare back, ready to die for me. “I can’t. I won’t.”
“You have to. If I’m going to die, let me do it in battle. We’ve all got our own wars to fight. Let me fight for you and for my people, so you can go fight for yours.”
Behind us, we hear Crockett shout, “I’m ready when you are, big man. Let’s go. Hug her for the last time and be done with it.”
James puts a hand on my cheek. “You heard me,” he says. “You know what to do.” He leaves me standing there as he backs away. He pulls his blade from its sheath and clutching it, smacks a wrapped fist into an open palm. “Crockett,” he shouts, “I hope you said your prayers this morning.” He winks at me, grins, and I’m afraid it’s the last time I’ll ever see him smile.
I stay on the outskirts of the circle her men have formed. One of them tries to grab my jacket to hold me in place, but I yank free from him. “I’m not going anywhere,” I say.
“Stay where I can see you.”
I huff, cross my arms, and plant my feet. One foot points toward the center of the ring where James and Crockett circle each other. The other foot points northward. Knees bent slightly, I try to make it look like I’m watching their fight to the death, while preparing myself for an opportunity to sprint away.
I don’t want to. God, I don’t want to.
My heart is breaking.
James saved my life. I wouldn’t be here without him, nor Marla, Squirrel, the Blakes, or any of the rest of his gang. James wants to claim responsibility, yet every single instance leading up to this horrible, horrible moment right now is my fault, not his.
They followed me. They helped me lead my people. They stayed to fight during the one-sided battle at Warrenville when they could’ve disappeared into the forest and been gone forever. If they hadn’t been within the area of my encampment the day the DAV soldiers invaded, they could be somewhere hundreds of miles from here, living their lives in peace.
Instead, they’re all dead by the hands of a woman that we should’ve done away with long ago. The first time Crockett and James fought, I stopped them with my Kinder’s strength. I could’ve let it go on. She and her gang were the outsiders then. I had my powers. We could’ve easily eliminated her.
But no, here we are.
Everyone is dead. James is exhausted and frail from weeks of running and the lack of food. The nutrition bars won’t give him enough energy. He doesn’t have a chance against her.
His skin is gray and sagging. The green jacket that he never removes hangs loosely around his shoulders and his pants droop.
If he wins, he still loses, no matter what, and I see no other way out of this.
I thought there was nothing left of my heart to break after Finn’s betrayal, but this is unbearable. I can’t watch.
Crockett hisses at him, “The old ways, huh? Knife to knife? This is what you wanted?”
“You wouldn’t have had a chance with anything else,” James taunts. “I’m better than you with my fists, I’m better than you with my bow. Hell, I even piss in a straighter line than you. I’m honorable, Crockett. I didn’t want you to embarrass yourself in front of your men.” He lunges at her and swings the knife wildly, the blade slicing through the air in a fat arc that misses her throat by six inches when she swiftly jerks her head backward.
“Better, huh? How’d you survive so long in the woods with an attack like that?”
Crockett’s men laugh.
She and James circle one another, bent low at the waist, with one hand held out for balance and guard while the other clutches a knife. Nervous fingers splay out, gripping and re-gripping the handle, as they both search for an opening, a weak point in the defense.
Crockett is quicker but her reach is shorter. She drops low, pounces forward and catches James off balance as he loses his footing on a rain-soaked rock. He doesn’t go down, but the slip leaves him unguarded long enough for her to sink her knife into his thigh.
He howls and swings with a fist. Crockett ducks his first swipe but doesn’t react quickly enough when he brings that same hammering arm up and down onto her back.
She grunts from the blow and staggers to the side, pulling her blade from his leg as she goes.
James cries out and clutches the wound. It’s not much, easily survivable, if that was all there was. Instead, now he’s wounded and his lumbering movements will be more impaired. He hobbles to his right, away from Crockett, giving himself time to catch his breath and recover.
Crockett stands up straight and shifts her shoulders around as if to work out the pain from his blow. She twists her neck to the side, and I can hear the bones in her neck crackling over the rain in the forest and the excited breathing of her men.
She giggles like a child, and I want to grab her disgusting, greasy hair and pull her to the ground. My rage for this woman can’t be measured. It’s impossible. I almost charge the center of the ring. If I can tackle her, hold her down, then James can use his blade to end this dreadful battle.
I move forward a foot and make it no further before I feel a hand on my collar. I glance around and Zander, the blackcoat deserter, grins at me as he shakes his head.
“You ain’t going nowhere,” he says. I reach up to knock his arm away, and surprisingly, he lets me. Zander turns his attention back to Crockett and James, more interested in what’s happening with this fight to the death than testing wills against a teenage girl.
James hobbles from the stab wound in his thigh, but the sheer energy of the battle must be keeping the pain at bay, because he’s moving well. It’s either that or willpower. Maybe it’s both.
James feints to the left, and when Crockett moves to dodge in that direction he cuts back and swipes at her rib cage. He wasn’t close enough. The knife’s tip catches a pocket on her chest and rips part of the material free.
They lunge and dive, swinging their knives, looking for any sort of advantage. This dance of death goes on and on while Crockett’s men cheer and the rain falls. James misses with his blade again but lands another blow across her shoulders with a pounding fist. Crockett drops and rolls, narrowly escaping a knife in her heart as she flings her body to the side.
They slink, and they duck, hurling insults at one another as much as they try to slice through abdomens and necks. Blood has soaked James’s pants leg, and I can see now that the wound is starting to bother him. He limps and winces when he puts too much pressure on it.
When he trips over his own lagging leg and goes to the ground, Crockett is too far away to take advantage of the moment.
James catches my eye and rubs his nose with his right hand.
That’s my signal. He wants me to go.
“Get up,” Crockett orders. “Fight me like a man.”
“I’m done,” he says. “Too much blood. I… I can’t.”
“I’m not falling for it,” she says, stepping closer to him. “Get up,” she screams.
James stares at her and rubs his nose once more. Harder this time. Go, Caroline, he’s saying. Go, now.
I take one last look at all of Crockett’s men. They’re fixated on the action.
I turn, and I run.
Behind me, I hear James say, “I’ll just fight from here,” and with that comes a grunt, followed by the telling sound of Crockett gagging. I slow down and look over my shoulder. James’s knife is buried in her throat.
James was always so accurate when throwing a blade. I once saw him hit a quail in mid-flight.
Crockett drops to her knees and falls forward. She doesn’t try to catch herself.
James opens his arms wide, and I swear, for a split second, I think he waves goodbye to me.
I run. Arrows fly.
And I am truly alone, racing for my life.
5
It’s hard to run and cry at the same time.
I learn this early in my escape when the tears blind my vision so much that I’m running into low-hanging limbs a
nd tripping over downed branches. I’m more sure-footed than this in the forest, always, and I have to make the decision to do one or the other.
Run?
Or cry?
The choice is obvious, but it’s no lie when I say that for a moment, I consider sitting down right in the middle of the clearing I’m darting across and crying until Crockett’s men catch up to me.
A weak part of my heart wants all of this to be over.
I can’t give in to that—I can’t—so I run.
My head start was at least a hundred yards before they realized I was gone. I assume they were so upset with James for killing Crockett that they were too focused on filling his body with arrows to notice that I had vanished.
His plan worked, and I want to hate him for it. There had to be other options—something we hadn’t thought of or something we could’ve bargained with. Maybe if I had told Crockett about the dreams I’ve been having, the one where the nurse injects me with a bright blue liquid and makes me a Kinder again, the very same nurse who had made Finn a Kinder. I can’t explain how I know that it’s real, that I’m seeing the future, any more than I can explain how I saw the past in my dreams; the one where I drank blood from Ellery’s fingertip as a baby, that one was true.
The dream with the nurse, it’s real. I can feel it.
I could’ve explained to Crockett that the ability to become a Kinder still exists out in the real world. If I had told her this, perhaps she would’ve hand-delivered me to the DAV in hopes of having a needle inserted in her arm as well.
I can’t imagine how life would be with her dark stone heart beating inside a nearly immortal body with superhuman powers. She most certainly would not use her abilities for good.
An arrow makes a swishing sound beside my head and embeds itself in the white trunk of a poplar tree.
“Whoa,” I yip, ducking and covering my head. I risk a look behind me and see at least five of her men chasing after me at my six o’clock. There have to be more. I can’t think of a reason why any of them would stay behind.
They’re flanking me.
They’ve set the slowest of their group to be a part of the visible chase, out in the open, where I can see them and feel like I’m getting away while the faster ones try to get ahead and come at me from the sides. It’s what I would do and I begin looking for something out of the ordinary to my sides.
My lungs burn. My thighs throb. I don’t know how much longer I can keep up this speed.
Should I try to hide? Should I jump down an embankment and hope they run past? If I can just get to a thick patch somewhere within these unfamiliar woods, I might be able to do it. Unfortunately, as far as I can see, the forest is nothing but sparsely populated trees. Here, there’s no underbrush to clutter the open space. In places, I can see for acres across the dirty brown leaves that form a layer of bedding on the forest floor.
I have nowhere to hide, which means that anyone on my flank—
There they are.
Four of Crockett’s men on the right side, southeast of me, and on the other side, to the southwest, three more approaching.
I’m ahead of them by fifty yards but they’re gaining. I have no place to go.
Unless…
I react before thinking it through because I don’t have a choice. Waiting longer would’ve left no time for my only option to escape. I’m frail and malnourished. I haven’t slept well for a week or more while we followed the citizen-slaves on their slog northward. There is no possible way that I can outrun twelve grown men with bows, arrows, and deadly accuracy. Not here, not in this thin section of forest.
Cutting to the right at a ninety-degree angle, I scurry directly in front of the four men attempting to flank me.
They scream filthy things and, thankfully, their aim isn’t as good when they’re on the move. Arrows litter the ground and tree trunks around me, yet I keep running. I muster every last possible ounce of energy and thrust one leg in front of the other, pushing, pushing, driving myself up the eastern hill, trying to reach the ridge above.
From there, it’s a five-mile sprint back to the safety of the least likely place; I’m going back to join the walking dead.
Crockett’s Republicons certainly won’t attack in full sight of the DAV guards.
At least I hope not. They won’t be that bold, will they?
An arrow sails in front of me so near that the sharp edge of the arrowhead scrapes my hand. Surprised and terrified, I yelp and look down at the thin valley sliced through my skin.
Too close. Move faster.
My chest cries for relief but I have miles to go. It’s another hundred yards up the hillside. I can do this. I can make it. Once I reach the top, it’s mostly downhill from here on my way back to the road.
I can do it. I know I can.
Push. Push harder.
An arrow lifts the hair at my neck, gets caught and flips around so that the feathers smack me in the face. I scream and duck. How much closer can they get without murdering me?
One of them will get lucky.
I start begging God for swift legs, because it’s the only thing left that I know to do and somehow, maybe, it works. I find an extra ounce of energy and drive myself upward as hard as I possibly can until I crest the ridgeline. I risk a brief look back. Down below, Crockett’s men have all come together again and they’re huffing up the hillside.
They’re winded, tripping over each other and sliding on the wet leaves, not as graceful as the prey they’re after.
I leave them behind, dashing quickly but carefully down the other side, heading east. This is the only chance I’ll get to put distance between us.
God granted me a minute of space, maybe two, and I use every second to create a bigger barrier between my pursuers and me.
This is what a rabbit, a squirrel, or a deer feels like when it has escaped the reach of a hunter.
Now that I know how it feels, it takes away some of the thrill of the chase.
If forest creatures have even the slightest bit of understanding, I can imagine what it must be like having to live as prey and fight for your life every single day.
There’s some joy in escaping because I can feel the lightness in my chest—it’s easier to pull air into my lungs now—but the dread of always knowing the next chase is out there would be enough for me to give up. Yet somehow they do it, day after day.
It must take so much courage to simply live.
I’m lost.
At least I think I might be. Either I’ve gone the wrong direction or five miles is longer than I recall.
How could I have messed up?
I don’t know how this is possible, because I was certain that we had come directly west from the last position of the herd. During my escape, had I run so far north that I overran my target? Or did I make too many cuts and switchbacks trying to lose Crockett’s men? An hour ago, I was certain I heard them in the forest at my back, but now they’re nowhere to be seen, and I have no idea where I am.
Given the waning light, I may only have a couple of hours of daylight left. The clouds are thick and black today, so it’s hard to gauge the relative position of the sun.
I’m better than this in the woods. I know it. I’ve lived my whole life by the rising and setting of that big yellow circle in the sky. North is north, east is east. Things beyond my control have not changed merely because I am physically wasted and on the run.
Not only are my legs and lungs screaming for a break, the unrelenting pressures of fear, remorse, and stress have affected my ability to think clearly.
I have to stop, just for a moment.
About fifty yards ahead, I spot a wall of rocks that didn’t get that way by themselves. They must be from the Olden Days. The Elders used to tell stories about great cities with buildings so tall that they disappeared into the clouds overhead; bridges and roads created part of a landscape that was prosperous, but foolish.
Yet even before that, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, bac
k when our ancestors came here on ships from another part of the world, they built houses from stones and sticks. They were even more primal than we were in our encampment with our wooden shacks and metal siding.
I can hide in a place that reminds me of home.
History has come back around again.
“What was old is new again,” the Elders would say.
They drew figures in the dirt from memory, descriptions passed down from forefather to forefather, and I always had a hard time really imagining what a ship would look like, much less travel on the river near our encampment or how it could travel across water so vast and deep that you couldn’t see the other bank across the way. No matter how they worked, at this moment I would love nothing more than to be on one of those great ships, floating back to wherever the ancestors came from.
I can’t imagine the life they left would be worse than this.
When I cut around to the side of the structure, I see that time and age have helped to collapse most of it into a pile of rubble. Only a quarter of it remains standing, forming a corner that faces to the southwest. The rocks are scattered about as if they fell and no one ever tried to pick them up. If we’d had a home this strong back in my encampment, Grandfather and I would have certainly kept it livable. It seems such a waste to let this go.
I kneel down into the corner, checking my points of vision all around. From here I can see to the north, south, and east. Only my rear view is blocked, which is both good and bad. Good because I’ll be hidden from Crockett’s men chasing me, bad because I won’t be able to see them coming. I’ll have to rely on my hearing to judge their distance and location—and that’s supposing they’re still out there.
The Light of Hope Page 4
