Rebel Nation

by Shaunta Grimes

  “Pardon?”

  “Leave.”The guard looked genuinely confused. Like one word was too much for him to understand. No wonder everything had gone to shit.

  “I said ‘leave.’ Get the hell out of my office.” The guard hesitated one more moment, like he still wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. When his hand was on the doorknob, Bennett added, “Send Adam Kingston in.”

  “I don’t know—”

  Bennett shot the guard a hard, scathing look and he finally got the message. If he didn’t know where Adam Kingston was, he could damn well find out. The guard left, fast, closing the door behind him.

  Jon wanted him to take care of things here? If he was going to put all the weight of every problem on Bennett’s shoulders, then Bennett was damn sure going to do what needed to be done. He stared at his phone, defiantly not picking it up to dial Jon, until his door opened again and the headmaster came in. He must have been in the hallway.

  “Langston, I’m driving up to Virginia City myself. If Bridget is there—if that boy has—”

  Bennett waved a hand to stop Kingston, who had somehow gone from being a nervous little yes man to a full-blown father on a mission. Not what Bennett needed right now. Not at all. Bridget Kingston was rotting in a hole, and if he heard one more word about her, he was going to do something regrettable.

  “We need to beef up security around here,” Bennett said.

  Kingston looked at him a long moment, and then said slowly, “I don’t have anything to do with security.”

  “You do now.”

  “I’ve got all I can do, worrying about my daughter and running the Academy.”

  “I can hire a new headmaster, if that would help you.”

  Kingston opened his mouth, then closed it again, two or three times. Like a fish. His forehead broke out in sweat. “That’s not necessary. It’s—”

  “We need to beef up security.”

  “What exactly do you expect me to do?” Kingston finally said. “I don’t know anything about security.”

  A burst of anger shot through Bennett and a spark of pain erupted behind his right eye. He rubbed it with his fingertips and said slowly, evenly, “I don’t have time for this, Adam.”

  Kingston’s whole posture changed. He straightened and some of the milquetoast aura went out of him. “I need to find my daughter.”

  “Don’t you think I’m sending people—trained guards—to Virginia City? If your daughter is there, they’ll bring her home.” Bennett forced himself to breathe, to calm down, to ignore the pain in his head.

  Kingston stared at him, his body tight and stiff. Bennett was prepared to kill him. In fact, he longed to do it. Anything to release some of the pressure building inside him. But Adam turned on his heel and left.

  But if the spirit of America were killed, even though the Nation’s body and mind, constricted in an alien world, lived on, the America we know would have perished.

  —FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT,

  THIRD INAUGURAL SPEECH, JANUARY 20, 1941

  “We have to bury him,” Leanne said. “West, you know we have to. And soon.”

  West closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. His head pulsed with pain. “Maybe we should take him down to the wall, leave him near the gate. He probably has family.”

  Leanne didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. They’d gone around and around with this. Not just the two of them either. For the last twenty-four hours, he’d heard his father, his sister, Isaiah, Jude, Marta, Christopher, and several of the Foster City kids, who he still barely knew, tell him their opinions.

  James thought they should burn the body, to keep away scavenger animals. Clover suggested leaving him in one of the houses, far from the part of town they occupied. Most everyone else wanted to bury the dead guard.

  He was so young. West recognized him and knew the guard had been two or three years ahead of him in primary school. Old enough to have a wife, maybe a kid, but just barely. Young enough that if he had surviving parents, they would be beside themselves by now. Isaiah knew his name was Paul, but not a last name. They’d never worked together.

  Only Jude understood West’s hesitance to bury or burn the body. Maybe because his own brother, Oscar, was gone. A ghost—not dead or alive for Jude. Just gone. Dead would be a relief, Jude had said to him. I’d know. At least I’d know.

  West thought about not knowing if his sister was dead, holding on to tissue-thin hope, for years, that she might be alive. He agreed with Jude. If she was dead, he’d want to know. He’d need to know.

  Paul was someone’s brother or son or grandson or nephew or husband or father. He was someone.

  “We don’t have time to worry about that boy,” Leanne said, finally. “We need to start thinking about leaving here.”

  He had thought about little else besides the dead guard and how he was going to get all of these people farther away from the city, away from Bennett, away from the retribution that was surely on its way. They’d been fools to think they could defend themselves here.

  “We should already be gone,” he said.

  “Clover thinks we should go south, where it’s warmer, where we might be able to scavenge some food. Into California, maybe.”

  “Southern California is uninhabitable.”

  “She doesn’t think so, and if she’s right, no one will look for us there.”

  Southern California. Clover was either brilliant or dangerously delusional. How would they get there? They could find plenty of cars here, but it would take too much time to retrofit them for biofuel, and they didn’t have enough fuel to move more than just themselves that far anyway.

  They wouldn’t be able to bring much in the way of supplies. They’d have to hope they’d find what they needed when they got there. Like taking a flying leap off a cliff and hoping to find something soft to catch them at the bottom.

  Maybe they weren’t such fools after all.

  “We could take a stand here,” he said.

  “West.”

  “No, listen. We only need to make it through the winter. In the spring, we won’t have to worry about the cold and we can grow our own food. We can—”

  Leanne reached out and put a hand on his bicep. “We have to go. We can’t go up against the whole Company. Bennett will never stop coming.”

  West paced the small room. The pressure of so many people depending on him was a physical force, pressing into him. He felt it even in the way his limbs moved. There was no right answer. No good answer, at all.

  It seemed impossible that there was a time when keeping his sister fed was his biggest problem.

  Leanne’s hand slid up his arm to his shoulder, then all the way down his arm until her fingers slid between his. “Breathe,” she whispered. “We’re going to figure this out.”

  He was drawn to her, leaning down, inhaling the scent of her clean hair. She tilted her face up to him at the same moment that the door opened.

  “We cannot wait any longer,” James said from the doorway. He hesitated, his eyes moving from West to Leanne and back again. “We have to leave. Now.”

  West sighed and turned from Leanne to his father. “I know.”

  “We found a trailer that will hitch to the van. We won’t be able to bring everything, but enough to get us through until—”

  “Until?”

  “Until the next thing.” James ran a hand through his hair, making it stand on end. “I can’t believe the whole guard isn’t here already. We’re loading as much of the Mormon rations as we can into the trailer. We got the water barrels in, too. The younger kids are bringing water up from the pump to fill them. We should be gone already.”

  This didn’t feel right. They’d be a huge, slowly moving target on the highway. No other vehicles. Bennett would pluck them off the face of the planet when he found them.

&
nbsp; “Bennett doesn’t think we have anywhere else to go,” West said.

  “Let’s prove him wrong.”

  “He thinks that killing that guard is going to give us some kind of false hope.”

  Leanne sighed and sat on the edge of a desk. “West, you can’t know what he’s thinking. We need to go. Now. The sooner the better.”

  “We can use his overconfidence against him.”

  “We’re twenty-six people, half are younger than twelve—”

  The schoolhouse bell rang, and West’s mouth filled with saliva. He was going to be sick. They’d waited too long. He’d waited too long. He’d killed these children. He’d taken most of them out of Foster City and he’d killed them.

  “Breathe,” Leanne whispered as she took his arm and tugged him toward the door.

  The door opened, wide, banging against the wall behind it, and Clover, Jude, Mango, and three of the Foster City kids pushed through.

  “They’re here!” As overwhelmed as West was, he knew when his sister was on the verge of a breakdown. She was nearly coming out of her skin. “West, they came. They’re here.”

  West grabbed Jude by the upper arm. “Get her to the attic.”

  “West,” Jude said, and tried to pull his arm back.

  “Please. Get her to the attic. Take the rest of these kids with you.” West let go of Jude and turned to James.

  Clover and Jude were still standing there, staring at him like he was the one who’d lost his mind. He was about to insist, harder, that they get their asses up to the attic, when the door to the classroom museum opened again and the doorway filled with faces he didn’t know.

  His heart thumped like it was trying to jump-start itself. He was going to die, right here, and the guard was going to take his sister and the others and there was nothing—nothing—he could do to stop it.

  “Maggie!” Clover left Jude’s side and went to a woman who had pushed her way to the front of the small crowd gathered at the door. West watched in confused horror as his sister came to a stop, steeled herself, then took a breath and stood there while the woman wrapped her in a short, hard hug.

  “Maggie?” Leanne’s voice sounded small and far away. “Oh, God. Alex. Is that you?”

  “It’s me,” a man said.

  “Leanne!” The woman who had hugged Clover started to come toward Leanne. West stepped forward and the man, Alex, stopped her.

  “How did you get here?” Leanne asked. “What in the hell are you doing here?”

  “We drove,” Alex said. “And honestly, I’m not sure what in the hell we’re doing here myself.”

  “Who are you?” West asked.

  “They’re the people from New Boulder,” Clover said. “They came to help.”

  She sounded so sure.

  Strange details came to West one at a time, in sharp focus. The woman who had hugged his sister, Maggie, was pregnant. Leanne looked at her and the man beside her like they’d just hatched from a pair of eggs. None of the people he didn’t know wore guard uniforms, or any uniforms at all. Clover knew them. Jude seemed to as well. And Leanne. Mango pushed his broad, flat head against the palm of a tall, lanky guy who looked about West’s age, and who reminded him of Frank.

  “West, this is Maggie, and Alex, and Frank’s son Xavier,” Jude said, slowly, like he was trying to talk someone off a ledge. “And some others from New Boulder.”

  “We’re going to be okay,” Clover said.

  —

  “Who, exactly, did you want me to send?” Bennett paced in front of his window. He couldn’t look out it, at the city sleeping, oblivious. “I told you. When the walls were going up, I told you.”

  “What did you tell me, Lang? You told me that you could handle this. Now that you have the chance to prove that you can, you’re folding?” Jon’s voice was an octave higher than usual. His older brother, the most powerful man the world had ever known, was whining like a mosquito in his ear.

  “I told you that we needed more security,” Bennett said.

  “There’s never been a problem before. Overkill wouldn’t have—”

  “Shut up.” The silence on the other end of the phone was so thick, Bennett could almost taste it. It went on long enough to erode some of the indignation that had built in him. “Jon.”

  “You will fix this.” The whine was gone.

  Jon hung up without offering any advice, at all, about how to “fix this.” Bennett looked at his handset for a minute, anger bubbling inside him until it finally boiled over. He slammed the receiver down, then picked up the phone, yanked the cord out of the wall, and threw the whole thing against the window.

  It bounced off and landed with a sad clank on the thick carpet. Of course. Bennett picked the phone up again and smashed the receiver into the push buttons until he’d worked off some of his frustration. He walked out of his office, down the hall to where his secretary sat at her desk.

  “Karen,” he said, “I need a new phone.”

  She opened her mouth, maybe to ask why, but he just shook his head. Her lips narrowed to a thin line and she nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “I need—”

  She picked up a pencil and tapped the perfectly sharp end against a small, white pad of paper. He couldn’t think of what to tell her, though. What did he need?

  He’d already waited long enough to act on the confirmation that Clover Donovan was probably in Virginia City that she probably wasn’t there anymore.

  “Sir?” Karen asked.

  “I need to see Adam Kingston again. As soon as possible. And I need that phone, now.”Karen must have sent one of her minions running, because Bennett had just enough time to pick up his broken phone and put it in the trash can before there was a knock on his open door. A young man, barely more than a boy, stood there with an identical phone clutched in both hands. Karen reminded Bennett that it was the middle of a school day when he called to bark at her about where Kingston was.

  “I’ve left the message for him,” she said. “Would you like me to send someone down to collect him?”

  Bennett put a hand over his mouth to contain the bitter anger that threatened to boil out. Karen never did anything he didn’t ask her to. That was why she was his secretary. Right now, though, he could have throttled her for it. “Immediately.”

  Immediately took an hour. A solid hour of pacing and looking out the window and spinning ideas around in his head for how to fix his problem. When there was finally a knock on his closed door, he felt the tension flow out of him in a rush that left him a little light-headed.

  He yanked the door open. “Well, Jesus Christ, it’s about time—” Karen stood in the hallway. She looked small and fragile and very old. “He’s not on campus, sir.”

  Bennett tried to wrap his brain around that. “But it’s a school day.”

  “Louise said—”

  “Who the hell is Louise?”

  “Mr. Kingston’s secretary reported that he has not returned to campus since his appointment with you this afternoon.”

  Bennett’s heart stopped beating. He felt it stuck somewhere between his throat and his stomach, choking him.

  “Mr. Bennett?” Karen asked, her voice cracking with concern.

  “Did someone go to his house?”

  “I can send someone, now.”

  He put a hand up, then dropped it again when she cringed away from him and he realized he’d lifted a white-knuckled fist to the old woman. “No. I’ll go.”

  He thought about walking, to burn off some of the sticky, pulsing anger that coated him on the inside. In the end, he took one of the cars parked in front of his building. He couldn’t allow himself to take the extra time.

  He knew, as he pulled into the driveway of the Kingston Estate, that Adam Kingston was not there. The house had an empty feeling to it. The horses that grazed in the
expansive front yard, a ridiculous extravagance for a dead girl, snorted when he got out of his car.

  The front door was unlocked. Because who locked their doors anymore? The city was safe. Bennett made sure the city was safe, damn it, and he walked right into Kingston’s house without even knocking first.

  “Kingston?” he called out, then louder, “Goddamn it, Adam!”

  The house was indeed empty. Bennett left again and went out to the garage. The little white car Kingston drove wasn’t in it.

  Kingston had disobeyed him. He’d gone looking for his daughter. Bennett felt it in his gut. He’d gone to Virginia City. Of course, she wasn’t there. Bennett had broken her neck with his bare hands.

  Bennett bent at the waist, his stomach suddenly twisting in sharp, stabbing pain. He moaned in anger and utter frustration, until the sound grew and deepened into a growling scream. He reached out and picked up a heavy crystal bowl from the table in front of him. Kingston probably dropped his car keys into it at the end of his day. Bennett hefted it, then threw it, as hard as he could, into the tile floor, causing a satisfying crash and a shower of crystal and ceramic shards.

  —

  West looked at Adam Kingston. The headmaster sat in a chair, tied to it with rope. He had sweated through his button-down shirt, despite the fact that it was genuinely cold in the schoolhouse’s old, defunct kitchen.

  “I want to see my daughter,” he said “Bring her to me, now.”

  Isaiah struck like a snake, his hand darting out and cuffing Kingston on the left cheek. The whole room went silent after Kingston gasped.

  West was as alarmed by Isaiah’s behavior as he was by having the headmaster as a prisoner of war. This was war, on however small a scale. There was no fooling himself that it was anything else, but Isaiah was letting his anger, and his concern over Bridget, take the lead.

  Most alarming of all was that Kingston was genuinely distressed about his daughter. Bridget was missing. She wasn’t in the city, at least nowhere that her father knew about, and she certainly wasn’t here. If she’d left Reno looking for him, she wouldn’t know where to go. She could be anywhere. West tried to focus. To make a plan. “We need to drive down to the ranch. If Bridget somehow managed to get there on her own, she wouldn’t know where we’d moved to.”