Rebel Nation

by Shaunta Grimes

  “What good is a lookout that doesn’t do anything when they see something?”

  Jude left without answering. Mango stayed with her, pushing against her leg, shaking almost as hard as she was.

  “Goddamn it.” Clover went up the stairs. Someone had removed the shutters from one of the attic windows and moved away the boxes and chairs, leaving a space for Clover to stand, watching the street below.

  Smoke billowed from the south, close, because the schoolhouse was on the south end of Virginia City. They’d moved two cars across the road, and someone had lit them on fire. Anxiety tightened in Clover’s stomach. If the flames lit the brush or the trees, if the fire got out of their control—

  Clover paced away from the window and nearly tripped over Mango. Was everyone in the schoolhouse? Was someone counting heads? She couldn’t just sit there, waiting. She felt like her heart was going to explode.

  She moved around the dog, who followed on her heels, and stepped toward the staircase. Before she got far, though, Leanne was there. Her steps were loud, off balance. She came all the way to Clover, took her arm, and steered her back to the window.

  “Have you seen anything yet?” she asked.

  “Fire,” Clover said, pointing toward the smoke. “Someone lit it. I don’t know what we’re going to do if it spreads.”

  “No, I saw the way it was laid. They cleared a circle around it. . . .” Leanne went stiff next to Clover. “Oh, God, here we go.”

  Clover pushed closer to the window, trying to see out of it without touching Leanne. She finally saw what Leanne had seen. A car came from the direction of the city. The wrong direction. Jude said the boys saw a car coming from the south. Why hadn’t the other fire been set?

  “It came from the wrong direction,” Clover said. “Why did it come from the wrong direction?”

  Leanne didn’t answer right away. She took Clover’s arm and didn’t let go when Clover stiffened, not even when she tried to pull away. The car drove up Main Street, slowly, and passed by the school without stopping.

  There was nowhere for them to go. Clover had a mental image of the fire. She knew what it looked like, crossing the road, blocking the way out of Virginia City. The car would have to turn around and come back.

  Clover stood there, still, some internal clock ticking the minutes. Five, ten, fifteen. Too long. They should have been turned back from the fire by now.

  “Where are they?” Clover left the window. “I’m going downstairs.”

  “West wants you up here,” Leanne said without looking away from the window.

  “I don’t care what West wants. I can’t just sit here!”

  Leanne finally looked at her. “Jesus, Clover. We have to do this. Someone has to do it.”

  “You do it.” Clover turned back to the stairs, and almost tripped over Mango again. “Goddamn it!”

  Untangling herself gave Leanne time to say, “Listen to me. That car is going to reach the fire and have to turn back. If they stop to look in the buildings, we need to ring the bell. Isaiah and your dad and Christopher and West need to know.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Out there! We have to watch.”

  “Fine.” When Leanne didn’t turn back to the window, Clover walked there herself. Twenty minutes, the clock in her head said. When it reached twenty-three, which might as easily have been thirteen or thirty-three, the car came back. It drove past the schoolhouse and stopped across the street from the restaurant. Four men in Company guard uniforms got out of the car. It occurred to Clover that one or two of them might have been the people that the lookouts had seen coming from Carson City.

  Clover’s stomach was in sick knots. It would be obvious, once the guards walked into the restaurant, that someone had been in there. Food was stored, tools were lined up. The dust of sixteen years had been cleaned away.

  “Shit,” Leanne said under her breath.

  “Should I ring the bell?”

  “Not yet. Maybe it’ll be okay.”

  “Where’s my brother?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Clover watched another minute, glued to what she was seeing. Leanne grabbed her arm again and pulled her attention back to the attic. She yanked away, then, and moved toward the stairs. “I have to find my brother.”

  She had no idea where West was, but she thought starting in the classroom museum, where Bethany had the younger kids under the desks, seemed like a good bet. If he was in the schoolhouse at all. She kept her head down and took the stairs quickly, suddenly wanting to see that West was safe.

  “Clover!”

  She came up short and missed her next step. Her hand was already on the railing, which made her fall backward, sitting hard on the step behind her, rather than forward. “God, Jude.”

  He was at her side, pulling her up. “Are you okay? What did you see?”

  “The car went through town, then it must have turned around at the fire. They came back. They went into the restaurant. Where’s West?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” Clover started down the stairs again. “He’s probably with Bethany in the classroom.”

  “No.” Jude got ahead of her, stopped her without touching her. “He’s not here. He went with Isaiah. They—”

  Clover’s knees were weak. “Oh. Oh my God, Jude. Are they in the restaurant?”

  “I think West and Isaiah are probably at the Bucket of Blood.”

  West and Isaiah. “Where’s my dad?”

  Jude put his arm around her. “Come on. Clover, let’s go back upstairs. I’ll—”

  She pushed past him, down the stairs. She thought about ringing the bell, to pull the men from the city away from the restaurant before they walked into it. Jude must have seen her look toward the rope because he threw himself between her and it. “Clover, slow down. Think! If you ring that bell, you’re going to bring those men into this building. Right here, with all of these little kids.”

  “How could we be so stupid?” She passed in front of the door, trying to figure out what to do. “What if my dad is in that restaurant? Where’s Christopher? And Marta, where’s Marta?”

  Jude started to say something, but Clover couldn’t hear. She couldn’t see. “I can stop them. They won’t hurt me,” she said. “They’re looking for me.”

  “Clover, don’t even think about it.”She opened the door and went outside, onto the wide front porch. A gunshot rang out. Just one, but it froze her in place, long enough for Jude to come stand beside her and whisper, “Jesus.”

  “Oh, God. My dad.”

  Jude grabbed her arm before she could even make it down one step. His grip was hard enough to bruise, and the abrupt stop made her cry out. Mango barked from inside the building.

  “No.” Jude yanked her, dragging her toward the door. She struggled, then went limp. He sat with her. “Clover, don’t do this. Don’t—please, please, we need to get inside.”

  Her brain wouldn’t cooperate. It focused on the wrong things. On Mango barking, on Jude’s iron grip on her arm, on the cold concrete under her, on the way the wind felt wrong, blowing directly into her face.

  She looked toward the restaurant, where the shot came from. Just one. She rocked, her hip banging into him over and over. Bang, one, two, bang, one, two. The rhythm helped. The door opened and uniformed men came out. Jude made a desperate noise next to her, but she couldn’t move. Bang, one, two, bang, one, two.

  She counted them as they came out. “Three.”

  “Clover,” Jude whispered in her ear. “Jesus, Clover, get up.”

  “There are three. That’s not enough—”

  More gunshots, from the north side of town, and screaming. Clover threw her hands over her ears and fought hard to stay aware, to not let herself dive down into the place where the noise would go awa
y. Jude stood up and put his arms under hers, his weight into pulling her back into the building. He couldn’t lift her, not from his position. And then she knew what to do.

  “No, wait. Jude, let go!” He did, and she stood up. “We need to make some noise. Something that sounds like gunshots—”

  Once she was standing, he had leverage to get her inside the building, and he used it. When she tried to resist, he put his shoulder against her and hoisted her onto it. It was only six or seven steps to the door, and she didn’t have time to react enough to keep him from bringing her in.

  “Put me down!” She kicked, finally, but it was too late. He dumped her back to the ground. “You—you don’t do that. Ever!”

  “I’m going to carry you into the museum if you don’t go on your own. And I’ll tie you under a—”

  “Listen to me!”

  The door to the museum opened, and Marta was there, wide-eyed, panicked. She ran to the door, then stopped and turned back to them. “We heard shots.”

  “We need to make some noise,” Clover said. Having a plan centered her enough to remember that West wasn’t in the restaurant. West was shooting from the north. Making noise. She was sure of it. “Come on, help me.”

  They didn’t have time to go searching for something to make noise with. It had to be something here. Something fast.

  “The pots and pans,” Marta said.

  They’d gathered things from the basement kitchen to take to the restaurant, but they were still in boxes in the schoolhouse lobby. Jude and Marta dragged them into the classroom and passed them out.

  “Hurry!” Clover threw open the windows, yelling over her shoulder, “Over here!”

  She picked up a pot and banged it against the windowsill and screamed. The scream came from somewhere deep inside her and the end of it was like a sob.

  “Are you out of your mind?” That was Bethany. Clover screamed again, and banged.

  She heard Jude behind her, urging the kids to pick up pots and pans, to help her.

  “We need them to think we’re prepared. We need them to get the hell out of our city,” she said, then screamed again, this time with other voices joining hers.

  She counted, three. Definitely three, hunkered near their cars, talking to each other, looking alternately toward the gunshots still coming from the north and toward the building where she was screaming at the top of her lungs. She wished she could hear them. Number four could have been the first gunshot. Clover’s heart clenched. Who had fired it?

  The whole group of children were screaming and banging now, and Clover’s breath caught. She put her own pot down and covered her ears. Mango was there, tight against her, urging her to back up, to get away. She slid to the floor, which was the best she could do, her back against the wall under the window, hugging her knees.

  “They’re leaving,” Jude said, loudly, over the noise. “Clover, it’s working!”

  “How many?”

  “What?”

  She rocked back, banging the back of her head against the wall. “How many left?”

  Bethany and Jude started to try to quiet and calm the children. They’d gone over into full banshee mode, and it wasn’t easy. It took everything Clover had in her not to crawl out of the room. It felt like days, but was only minutes, before the noise finally stopped.

  “How many left?” she asked again.

  “I don’t know,” Jude said.

  Clover stood up, kept one hand on Mango’s head to keep him calm, and looked out the window. The car was gone, completely out of sight, and West and Isaiah were running toward the schoolhouse. She pushed her way out of the crush of kids and Jude followed her to the front door.

  She came up short when the door opened and her brother was there, a rifle in one hand, his face dead white. The relief was almost as painful as the noise had been. More than her brain could process.

  “We heard a gunshot,” West said.

  “From the restaurant.” Jude stood close but didn’t touch her. If he touched her, she would come apart.

  Isaiah was behind West. As soon as he heard that, he turned and went back down the stairs. West followed. Jude hesitated, staying close to her for another second.

  “We have to go,” she said. Her voice shook and she felt a fine tremor all through her, like her nerves were humming. “I’m okay.”

  They went together down the stairs and across the street. She heard a contingent behind them, but didn’t turn to look. Marta ran past them.

  Christopher was outside, bent at the waist near the side of the building. He’d vomited and he looked like he’d aged twenty years in the last twenty minutes. He was alive. James stood near the road, looking toward where the car had disappeared. He was also alive. Neither of them looked like they’d been shot.

  “I only saw three,” Clover said.

  Jude left her and went to Christopher, with Marta. Christopher stood up, shook his head, but let Marta wrap her arms around his waist. Her head fit against his chest, and as soon as she was there, Christopher sagged, wrapping her tightly against him.

  “Jude,” Clover said, louder. “I only saw three guards. Where’s the fourth?”

  “I shot him,” Christopher said, quietly. Clover barely heard him. “I—I think I killed him.”

  “They came in, and he shot,” James said without looking away from the road. “They’ll be back. The whole fucking guard is going to be here. We shouldn’t have let the others leave.”

  “Okay,” West said. “Jesus. Okay, we need to go look—”

  “I’ll do it.” James walked past West, into the restaurant. Everyone else seemed to freeze where they were. Even the small kids, who’d worked themselves into a frenzy in the schoolhouse, were quiet.

  When he came back outside, the truth was on his face, clear enough for even Clover to read. “He’s dead.”

  Christopher sank to the ground, taking Marta with him. She held his head in her lap while he cried.

  —

  “I’m sorry,” Bennett said. “Are you telling me that your men left Virginia City, because of some noise?”

  “There were gunshots.” Bennett turned to look at the man who spoke. He didn’t know his name, and didn’t care. He was young, and defensive. “We lost a man.”

  How in the hell was this even happening? “Tell me exactly what you saw.”

  “There was a miscommunication. Two teams ended up in Virginia City, one from each end. We came from the north and saw smoke from the south.”

  “Fire? Why am I just hearing of this now?”

  The guard stayed quiet until Bennett exhaled and waved him on.

  “There were two cars across the road. They were burning. Two guards were able to get past the fire but could not bring their vehicle past it. We took them with us in ours and we went back to the town.”

  “Did it look like there were people there?”

  “Honestly, no. We stopped at a restaurant, because it looked—”

  Bennett waited, and then fisted his hands to keep from throttling the other man. “It looked?”

  “It looked too clean. And we smelled food. It was hard to tell, because of the fire, but we thought we smelled food.”

  Bennett had already heard the rest, so as this idiot guard told him about walking into the restaurant and being fired on, he stood in front of his window and looked out over Reno. His city was falling apart, and he didn’t know how it had happened.

  “What stopped you from firing back?” Bennett asked without turning.

  “We weren’t armed.”

  Bennett laughed. The noise wasn’t joyful. It was slightly hysterical, which matched perfectly how he felt inside. He turned to face the guard. “You went looking for fugitives, unarmed.”

  The guard didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. Bennett knew, with a sick surety, that this was no
t the nameless guard’s fault. It couldn’t be placed on the shoulders of any of the guards.

  This was Jon’s fault.

  Bennett had told him, in the beginning, that the wall wouldn’t keep people in or out without a strong military presence. Jon insisted that fear and love would keep people in their cities. The fight and flight have been scared out of them, Jon said. They need us. They won’t go against us, as long as we keep them feeling that way.

  “How many people do you think there were in Virginia City?” Bennett asked.

  “Two in the restaurant. We didn’t see the others, but they made a lot of noise. A dozen, I’d say. At least.”

  “A dozen.” Bennett rubbed a hand over his chest and wondered if he could be having a heart attack. “How did they get out of the city?”

  “Honestly?” the guard asked.

  Bennett turned to look at him. “Yes, honestly.”

  “They could have just walked out. We got two guards at the gate. Nothing ever happens there, especially at night, so—”

  Clover Donovan was gone. West Donovan was probably still alive. The boy who was guarding Bridget Kingston had gone AWOL. Leanne Wood had disappeared, somehow, right out of the city lockup. James Donovan had gone missing with her, which made Bennett’s skin crawl.

  The Kingston girl was buried in Bennett’s backyard, and her father was desperate to leave the city to look for her himself. It wouldn’t be long before Bennett would have to do something about him, for his own sanity.

  And he was going to have to talk to his brother soon.

  Jon would expect him to just come up with an answer. To make all these problems disappear. He wouldn’t even want to talk about how. He’d offer no solutions of his own. He came to the city once a year, for the spring celebration of the end of the virus. He waved from a car during the parade, gave a speech that was recorded and broadcast to all of the cities, and then went back to his hidey-hole.

  “Screw that,” Bennett said, louder than he meant to.