The Light of Hope

by Ernie Lindsey

  The needle feels like a small poke from a thorn bush if you dared to get too close and not quite as painful as a bee sting. Oddly, the sensation is both sharp and subdued at the same time when the liquid first enters my vein, like someone is resting a heavy rock in the crook of my arm.

  Then, the burning. Oh, God, the burning. Red-hot coals glowing in the center of a roaring campfire would not feel as bad if they were shoved underneath my skin. I open my mouth to cry out, but Tanner lunges forward and silences me with his bark-skinned hand. He shushes me. “It won’t hurt a bit, I promise.”

  Tears well in the corner of my eyes. I whisper, “Liar.”

  He glowers, eyelids pinching nearly closed. “This is how it works, Mathers. Your pain, my retribution. Your life as a Kinder, my forgiveness. I respect you, but we will always be enemies.”

  And with those words, the burning begins to fade away, molding into a gentle coolness, as if I’m slipping into the river after a hot day in the sun. I can’t remember the last time I did that, not with the constant rains, but I recall the sensation.

  The release of my old self, the embrace of my world as a Kinder comes with the sensation of a breeze across my skin. The pain disappears. I can almost feel the bones mending inside my body.

  Tanner removes the needle from my vein and I can feel it sliding out, freeing itself from my skin. I am warm, slightly dizzy, and acutely aware of the cotton sheets against my skin. My pulse thrums in my ears. I risk sitting up, expecting crackling, horrible pain to sear my vision. Instead, I’m feeling almost weightless, free and alive, as the bruises on my wrists fade away, replaced by the color of my normal skin.

  Tanner edges away from me when I swing my legs around. The thought, however short, crosses my mind that if I’m truly a Kinder once again, I have the power to overcome this generous enemy. I could pick him up like the battered doll I found months ago and sling him through the window where he’ll fall hundreds of feet to his death.

  I consider this, then I grasp how trusting he must be. “Should I kill you now or later?” I ask without a hint of cheerfulness in my expression.

  Tanner pushes himself up from the chair and backs away, palms out and hands shaking. “What? But I gave—”

  “Relax. I’m kidding.” I yank all the wires loose, every single one that’s attached to me, no matter how, pain or no pain, and then stand up from the bed.

  The machines begin to beep and wail as if they’re signaling some kind of danger.

  Nurse Lilly rushes into the room, sees me standing, and moves in my direction. Tanner steps forward and holds up an arm in protest.

  “By orders of the military, your patient is now under my control.”

  “But-but-but,” she stutters, “I’ll need to tell the doctor.”

  “No, you don’t. It’s already been cleared,” he lies.

  “Are you sure? I thought—”

  “Young lady, do we need to discuss this with your superiors? Because I would be more than happy to tell them about your unwillingness to cooperate.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then off with you and stop interrupting important military matters.”

  Nurse Lilly gives me one last look of concern and I lift a corner of my mouth, trying to show her everything will be okay.

  I ask Tanner, “So what happens now? Won’t Finn be able to find me?”

  “Not for twenty-four hours.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “For everything I know, yes. Your job is to get far enough away that he won’t care anymore.”

  As I search the room for my clothing, Tanner begins to explain his plan for freeing my parents. My own clothes, the ones that I’ve worn soaked and ragged, are nowhere to be found. Instead, hanging in the closet, I find a long-sleeved shirt, a pair of jeans, socks and boots. There’s even a jacket in there.

  He’s saying, “They’re in the old schoolhouse on Himley Road—” when I realize he’s looking at me with expectant eyes.

  “Turn around.”

  “What?”

  “Turn around so I can get dressed.”

  “Oh. Oh, right.” He faces out the window, but I can see my reflection, so I reach up and pull the curtain hanging between the beds. Tanner continues, “As I was saying, they’re in the old schoolhouse on Himley Road. It’s lightly guarded because now that your people are within city limits, the powers that be feel that your kind don’t have enough gumption to attempt an escape. However, it doesn’t mean there aren’t armed guards stationed at intervals throughout the building. It only means there are fewer of them. Now…”

  I lose focus, and his voice fades from the forefront of my mind as I remove the hospital gown and slip on the shirt and jeans. I’ve been in a warm, cozy, soft hospital bed for who knows how long, but being able to wear real clothes that are dry, that fit properly, that don’t sag and slump around my shoulders and hips—well, it’s a sensation I haven’t experienced since I was a young, young child. I’ve been wearing a hand-me-down army uniform for ages, one sewn for a male much larger than me, and it’s been soaked through since the rains came. Even when I tried to dry everything by the fire in our hut, with Grandfather, my clothes were never truly without moisture.

  These clothes—shirt, pants, socks, and boots—fit in all the right places and they’re comfortable. Grandfather used to tell me, “You’re young yet, Caroline, but soon you’ll learn to appreciate the smaller things in life. It’s hard to see the beauty under our noses when we’re filled with lofty dreams of escape and becoming someone bigger than who we are now. But let me tell you this, nothing can replace the joy you’ll get from seeing a child’s smile, or smelling the first flowers of spring, and especially fresh socks warmed by a fire on a cold winter’s day.”

  This was years ago, and of course I didn’t understand him then. Socks are socks, right? Now, though… Now I understand as I pull them on and wiggle my toes underneath the white material.

  Small things, Caroline. You’re alive. Mother and Father are alive. You’ll see the sun again one day. Small things. I see, Grandfather. I really do.

  It’s not until I’m lacing up the boots and pulling the strings tight that Tanner catches my attention again. “Mathers! Are you listening?”

  “I’m sorry, what?” I stand and slide the curtain out of the way. In a small bucket of items on the bedside tray, I spot a brush. And, oh, how amazing it is to run that thing through my hair, until I hit so many knots that I have to give up.

  Tanner’s gaze lingers and he says something I don’t expect. “You look good, Mathers. Healthy. Reminds me of my daughter at that age.”

  “Um, thanks?”

  When he says, “She passed away when she wasn’t much older than you,” I have to wonder if that’s why he’s really helping me.

  We think of “enemies” as these units of destruction on the other side of the line, hell-bent on destroying us.

  And, just like when the battle had begun outside the walls of Warrenville and I thought about the men in the tank and their families, it always hits the hardest when you realize your enemies have lives, too.

  20

  Tanner’s plan is a simple one, and he says it’ll only work if he goes with me. I’m confident that I could pull this off myself, but he insists it’ll be safer and give him more of an alibi—a defense, he explains—if he delivers me as his prisoner.

  We sneak out of the hospital, not entirely undetected—a janitor spots us, and ignores us—and now we’re walking along the city streets in a light sprinkle.

  Thankfully, the storm has moved on, which I take as a good sign, and we’re peppered with nothing more than flecks of rain in our faces. My hands are tied behind my back because part of our cover is for me to be his prisoner. I haven’t tested my newly returned Kinder abilities yet, but I wouldn’t need them with how loosely tied the ropes are. A little wiggling, and I’d be free.

  Blackvale is massive compared to Warrenville. Tall buildings that seem like mountains compared to the h
ill-like structures of my own capital. Poles with lights on the end of every corner and spaced in between.

  Red lights, blue lights, orange lights flash in windows, telling people they’re open and that they have something called a “Ladies Night” on Thursdays from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Or they’re going out of business. Or they have a twenty percent discount on all mattresses and dining room tables.

  Why do these people need so much?

  Tanner sees me gawking and answers before I ask. “There are those who aren’t as staunch as we’d like them to be. Every society has its laggards, Mathers. We can’t all be perfect.”

  The sad part is, I can’t tell if he’s joking or not.

  Cars, cars, and more cars, everywhere, hurtle past on wet roads, kicking out rooster tails of water when they splash through deep puddles. One of them narrowly misses another and a large blaring sound, like a donkey beaten by a whip, comes from the front of it. When I jump and ask what the noise was, Tanner gives me a baffled grin and explains what a horn is used for.

  “Sometimes,” he adds, “I forget just how backward you were down there, at least in your neck of the woods. You would think life stopped outside the limits of Blackvale and then picked up again at the walls of Warrenville.”

  On the same level, I’m thoroughly amazed at how…advanced all of this is. A few days’ walk away from my village with no electricity or running water, where we had to hunt for food and scavenge for supplies, lays a thriving city that buzzes like a beehive. I ask questions, and though Tanner seems to get annoyed by them all, he dutifully answers as we walk.

  To do so in silence would invite doubt, I believe, and too much room to question what he’s doing for the enemy. So, and I don’t know how I know this, it could be part of my new abilities in being able to feel his intent, he humors me.

  I ask him all sorts of questions about things the Elders used to tell us were myths, like phones and swimming pools, electronic books and some grand invention called a television. Did a man really walk on the moon? They’re all questions I wish I could’ve asked while I was in Warrenville, but there had been no time.

  Tanner answers as best as he can, explaining things to me in terms I can comprehend.

  I tell him, “It sounds like it’s all stuff that makes life easier.”

  “It was designed that way,” he says, holding up a hand to stop an approaching car as we cross the street, “but all it really ended up doing was tightening the chains more and more. Part of the DAV philosophy is to get away from that mentality, but it doesn’t stop people from wanting convenience, no matter how much they’ve tried to breed it out of us. There’s a wider net to deal with and I wouldn’t give it up to chase a deer through the woods with a pocketknife, but some days, I envied your people.”

  “You mean before you stole their freedom.”

  He ignores my mockery and says, “You all had different things to worry about, like getting eaten by a bear or where your next meal was coming from, or if you could find enough outdated medicine to cure a festering wound, but you were free from things like hoping your car had enough gas to make it to the station, or if you had enough money to pay for your daughter’s nail polish.”

  Tanner laughs when I say, “Why would you polish nails? To make your outhouse shinier?”

  Pointing to his fingertips, he corrects me. “These nails. Women here, particularly the younger ones, like to paint them colors.”

  “I see.” I don’t really, but Tanner changes the subject before I embarrass myself further.

  “There it is.” He points to a large building in the distance, only two stories high, and it’s wider and covers more area than if I had put three of my encampments together.

  We had some schooling in a single room shack. We learned our letters, how to read—some but not much—and how to add and subtract. Minor things that the Elders thought we should have as a matter of tradition rather than common sense. I had wondered, when am I ever going to read anything in the woods? When will I ever need to combine numbers? I wanted to learn how to catch trout like Elder Parkins. I wanted to shoot a bow like Elder Wimbly. I wanted to grow tall corn with fat ears like Elder Wade.

  This school—Gunderson Elementary, the sign reads—is so overwhelming that the very idea of packing enough children in there to teach them things makes me feel sorry for the ones who were forced to go.

  The windows are tall and clear. The brick walls are a light color of brown in two tones, some angled in different directions for decoration. There is no grass close to it, only black hardtop with straight lines painted white. Nearby, to the east, is a small, open field with a diamond shape cut into the grass. A metal fence rests behind one corner. Off in the distance, near the northwestern edge, I see a set of swings resembling the ones we had tied to tree limbs hanging over the river back home. When there wasn’t work to be done and when the sun was still shining, we used to swing out as far as we could, let go, and sail into the deep area where the river pooled. Those are some of my best memories of a summer that actually existed.

  I look at the swings before me, hanging on metal chains attached to red bars and think that they can’t be much fun without a river to jump into. Who wants to swing back and forth over plain old grass?

  I’m so deeply lost in my memories that it takes me a second to notice that Tanner is giving me instructions.

  “—and then when we get to the door, keep your head down, and do not look them in the eyes.”

  “Who?”

  “The guards, Mathers. Stay with me. There are two at the front door and one stationed at each exit. Another ten or so are monitoring the thousand citizen servants inside.”

  “I thought you said they weren’t heavily guarding the slaves.”

  “Servants.”

  “Slaves.”

  Yes, it’s childish of me, and Tanner recognizes this. He grasps that it’s a battle he’s not going to win, especially if he had a teenage daughter. Instead of fighting over the proper word, he says, “We’re not, by our standards. People from the PRV are more submissive by leaps and bounds than others we’ve had.”

  “What others?”

  He shrugs. “Small groups from the bordering states up north and to the west. Don’t look at me like that. We’ve been busy turning the wheels of progress while you were skinning rabbit carcasses. We took what we needed. Sure, mistakes were made, but we learned from them. The West Virginians were remarkably combative. In the end, they weren’t worth the trouble, and we sent them all back.”

  “And what if I rallied everyone from the PRV and did the same? Would you send us back?”

  “Mathers, you can give an automatic rifle to a sheep, but it’s still going to be a sheep.”

  “Maybe not if it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

  “I sincerely believe that you are the only one of that kind we’d ever have to worry about.”

  I think about Hale and Mosley and the others who wanted to fight. I think about how passionate they were about saving the place they called home, and I know that Tanner is wrong. At least he was wrong a few weeks ago. It’s possible that all the wolves are gone, and he’s right in that I’m the only one who remains.

  No, I refuse to believe that.

  “We could do it, you know. If they had someone to lead—”

  Tanner grabs my upper arm, squeezes it hard, digging his fingers into my flesh, but it doesn’t hurt. There’s no pain, only pressure. If that’s a benefit of the new Kinder serum, that’ll be a plus. He yanks me hard to the side, underneath an overhang, and I stumble along with him. “Are we going to have a problem? I gave you your life back. I made you a god again, and now you’re talking of betrayal?”

  I turn to the side, yanking my arm away from him. “I’m only making a point. And now that you’ve made me a god again,” I say between gritted teeth, “maybe you don’t want to make me an angry god.”

  His nostrils flare. He steps close to me, and I can smell a clean, unnatural scent on his skin. When he
breathes through his nose, the hot air washes over my face and neck. “Do not test me, Mathers.”

  I hear a muffled click-click, and though I haven’t heard the noise many times in my life, I know exactly what it is. He shoves the gun’s barrel into my ribs.

  “You may be a Kinder, but you can die like the rest of us.”

  This is ridiculous. Am I gaining anything by testing his limits? I say, “Okay.”

  “Okay what?”

  “We’ll get my parents, and I’ll take them away. You win.”

  “I didn’t win anything. You and I are not at war. Think of it as a birthday party. Your rebirth as a Kinder is a gift that I’m giving you. You are accepting it, and then you go home to play with your new toy.” He lifts the gun up until the barrel buries into the fleshy spot underneath my chin. He pushes so hard that my tongue touches the roof of my mouth. “Are we going to have this conversation again?”

  “No,” I hiss.

  “Good, because I don’t want to think that my generosity was a mistake. Do not forget, I will not die for you. Everything has to fall in place as it should, or so help me God, I won’t hesitate to pull this trigger and claim you attacked me and were trying to escape. End…of…discussion.”

  I lower my eyes, but only to show him that I’m giving in. I’m not afraid of him, not now that I’m a Kinder again, and he knows that I have no reason to be. But, we can only have this argument so many times. “Fine,” I mumble. The gun barrel shoved underneath my chin makes it hard to get the word out clearly.

  “Good. Let’s go. Remember what I explained back in the room about when we approach the door guards. Most, if not all of those birdbrains will have no idea who you are. Our dear leaders have failed to send out an update regarding the status of the mighty PRV Kinder, and I doubt they’ve ever seen a picture of you. So, once again, you’re in my charge, and I was ordered to bring you here.”