SWAB (A Young Adult Dystopian Novel)

by Choate, Heather

  “Ah,” the other two said in unison, as if that explained everything.

  The tailed scarb stepped toward me. “We’ve lost loved ones, too,” he said, scratching at the pointy green stubble on his chin. “You don’t seem like such a bad swab. You probably won’t make it through your first year, but we won’t bother you.” I was relieved to hear it. “There was a pocket of humans living here,” he continued. “But I bet they headed south,” he stuck his thumb in that direction.

  “South?” I asked, hoping for something more specific than that.

  “To Arizona,” he clarified. “There’s a large pocket of human survivors in Tucson. That’s where I’d guess they are now, if they made it at all. Land’s getting mighty thick with all these blasted swab taking up every square inch. No offense.”

  “None taken,” I shook my head. “Thank you.” I headed back to the mountain shore. The three rangers didn’t follow.

  “Ray is—I mean, everyone’s probably in Arizona,” I told Nate first thing when blearily opened his eyes.

  “Huh?” He yawned

  “Arizona,” I repeated. “That’s where they probably went.”

  I explained what the scarb on the island had told me. “How can you be sure he’s there?” Nate asked, pulling himself up to sitting. His hair stuck out like a wild animals.

  “Because he’s Ray.”

  “You’re right,” Nathan nodded.

  I rubbed at a sore spot in my ribs, thinking. Derrick came over and listened quietly. “I bet he came here after escaping the colony. We’d probably already been captured by the time he got to the island. He knew what the queen’s plan was, so the safest thing would be to get everyone far away from Emerald. He must have led them down to Tucson hoping that the resistance there would offer them more safety.”

  “That means he’s still human,” Nathan said with a small smile.

  “We have to go to Tucson,” I decided.

  “Really?” Nathan leaned his arms onto his knees. “Why?”

  “To get Ray, of course,” I said and gave him a look that told him how dumb I thought that question was.

  “But he’s human,” Nathan repeated.

  “I know,” I said, getting a little annoyed.

  “We’re scarb,” Nathan stated the obvious.

  “So?” I really didn’t know why he wanted to waste my time this morning.

  “Ray left Rimerock to get away from scarb,” Nathan said flatly.

  I could see his point now, but it was superfluous. “He’s Ray. It won’t matter.”

  Nathan looked like he wanted to argue, but slowly he closed his mouth the way he always did when he knew I was bent on being right.

  “To Arizona, then,” Nate said.

  “Yes,” I affirmed. “To Arizona.”

  “Not a bad idea anyway,” Derrick said with a smile, stretching his broad chest. “Fuchsia’s sent an entire army after us. Guess she’s madder than a wet cat that you killed Emerald. Remember what happened in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy killed the wicked witch’s sister? You don’t want to mess with that kind of drama.”

  The journey would take about nine hours by car, Derrick informed us after he studied some maps left in the Post. But we had no vehicle, since all of the fire engines had been left at the colony after the attack. We’d have to walk. The fliers could get there faster, but they couldn’t carry us the entire way. If we put in a solid twelve hours a day, we would get there in two weeks.

  Two weeks. It might as well have been forever. I wanted to see Ray now. And the way wouldn’t be easy either.

  “We have to get over the mountain pass,” Derrick said, pointing at the tiny bumps indicating the steep mountains on the map.

  “And do it before Fuchsia’s armies get to us,” Iva reminded us.

  “Right,” Derrick nodded. “Once we get onto the plains, it’ll be a pretty straight shot from there. We’ll follow the old Interstate 60.”

  “Which will lead us out of Fuchsia’s territory and right into the northern part of Señora Marie’s,” Iva said, clicking her tongue.

  “Who’s she?” I asked.

  “She’s swab of southern America,” Iva answered.

  I shrugged, un-impressed.

  “She owns all of the southern Americas, from Arizona on down to Chile and Argentina,” Bram clarified.

  “The whole thing?” My eyebrows raised reflexively as I looked at Derrick’s map. Southern North America, Mexico, Central America, and South America. That was a lot of real estate.

  “Yes,” Iva said.

  “Wow, she must be really powerful,” Nathan said with a whistle.

  “She’s good at what she does,” Iva agreed. “That’s why we need to be careful. No one has touched her colony for four years.”

  I’d thought we would just make a quick dash down to Tucson, pick Ray up and see where we’d go from there. This information was like trying to digest rancid meat.

  “And then there’s the rangers to worry about,” Bram added to the slush of rottenness. “This part of the country,” he pointed to the southern part of the U.S., “where Señora Marie doesn’t patrol as much, is full of them.”

  “Of course it is,” I laughed humorously. “Ray only had to pick the hardest place in the world to get to him.” Is any place safe anymore? My determination to get to Ray was fixed, though. “We leave in ten minutes,” I told my small band of forty-nine scarb.

  That morning was grueling. The terrain was wild and untamed. And we had Fuchsia’s army to worry about. Because of the fliers carrying us the day before, we were a good seven miles ahead of them, but it wasn’t much of lead. I pushed my scarb hard, determined to keep the distance. They didn’t complain. They remained on alert even as we made the six-thousand-foot ascent over the last mountain peak of the range. Iva and Bram routinely flew ahead to scan for any trouble we might encounter. They spotted a small group of rangers and steered us away from them.

  Derrick stayed at my side the entire time. We didn’t speak. He kept his thoughts closed to me, and I was still feeling too guilty about my feelings for Ray to try to talk with him. Is he angry about it? Jealous? Whatever his emotions were, he stayed faithfully at my side. When I tripped on the slick shale that ran down the opposite side of the mountain, he caught my arm. Our eyes locked. Was that sadness I saw in him? I thanked him and smiled, trying to ease the tension. He simply nodded and looked away.

  We traveled nearly fifty miles that first day, despite the difficulty of the mountains. Using the connection, I guessed we were about eleven miles ahead of Fuchsia. Her army probably wasn’t as adapted to the Rocky Mountain conditions. Dark clouds rolled in that evening, shrouding the sky in a blanket of navy and purple. Lightning flashed, and thunder cascaded down the mountainsides like loose boulders. We camped at the bottom of that last mountain just as fat drops of rain started to fall. There was shelter under the tall ponderosa pine trees, but I chose to step out into a clearing filled with damp columbine flowers. From there I could look back and watch the storm roll in waves over the mountain peaks. Only flat plains and desert lay before us. I looked over the craggy rocks poking out of the clouds here and there like lost islands at sea, green velvety forests and thin white waterfall streaks of white waterfalls in the distance. This might be the last time I see these mountains. I didn’t want to let them go.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Fleeing

  “Cat, wake up,” Iva’s voice broke into my dreams urgently. “You need to get up, now.”

  My eyes flashed open. I’d fallen asleep beneath one of the tall pines. Derrick woke up, too. He had been asleep just a yard from my feet. Iva was standing over me, worry thick on her face. “What’s wrong?”

  “Fuchsia’s armies are within a mile of us,” she said hurriedly.

  “What? How?”

  “They must have traveled through the night.”

  Fuchsia’s one determined woman, pushing her scarb like tha
t. I had underestimated her.

  “Wake the others,” I told Iva. “Tell them to grab something to eat quickly so they’ll have strength for our journey today. Then we’ve got to get of here.”She nodded and began rousing the others.

  Derrick came over to me, his hands outstretched and holding some browned acorns. “I grilled them last night over the fire,” he said, putting them into my palm. “They’re pretty good. You need your strength, too.”

  “Thanks,” I said, but he’d already turned his back to me.

  The acorns had a bitter, nutty taste, but having food in my stomach gave my body an energy boost. I made sure to save some from Nate. We picked columbines and added those to our breakfast.

  “We’ll find more food on the way,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  But I had no idea how difficult finding food was about to become. We scrambled the rest of the way down the mountainside but barely made any headway against the army. At the bottom of the mountain, we came to the country road that would take us through New Mexico to I-60. Our progress was faster on the road, but so was the army’s.

  The day grew hot out there on the open pavement. Drenched in sweat, we must have looked like misplaced sea creatures out there in the dusty, arid land. Just the sight of us jogging down the road scared away a small group of rangers. Or maybe it was the army coming after us.

  We stopped twice for water at a river that ran along the road and once in the afternoon for food. We literally grazed through an abandoned hay field like cattle. One good thing about being scarb was that we didn’t have to stop to hunt for our food. If there were plants, we were pretty well set. That didn’t mean they all tasted good, though. The hay was tough and stuck to the fibers of my mouth. But it provided enough energy to keep going.

  By the time the sun was setting, we were exhausted. Though in good shape, jogging all day in the heat of the summer sun was demanding. We had increased our lead on Fuchsia by six miles. Satisfied with that, I told the others to make camp. Surely, the army wouldn’t travel at night two nights in a row.

  Grateful, Nate and Gray plopped down into the grassy field. They alternated beating wind into the other’s face with their wings.

  “At least the sun isn’t so hot now,” Gray sighed.

  But the next day was even worse. It seemed that with every mile we went, the land got drier, the air hotter.

  “Welcome to Hell,” Nathan said when passed the last standing tree standing for miles. Food and water quickly became an issue.

  “Eat this,” Derrick said the evening of that third day and handing me a piece of cactus. “It tastes pretty awful, but it has moisture.”He showed me how to pull the barbs out and eat the flesh. It had a bitter taste that lingered in my mouth for hours.

  On the morning of the eighth day, Fuchsia’s army turned around. We were twelve miles ahead of them and nearing Señora Maria’s territory. “Is she giving up?” I asked Iva, who was trying to shake the sand out of her hair. There’d been a wind storm the night before.

  She shook her head. “I doubt it, Fuchsia is just as stubborn as Emerald, if not more so. I’m betting she thinks traipsing onto Maria’s land with a full army wouldn’t be a wise political move.” Iva squinted as she looked north to where Fuchsia was. “I bet she’s coming up with a different strategy now.”

  I groaned. I wished the swab would just leave me alone. Somehow, I knew that was impossible. But at least her army wasn’t breathing down our necks for the moment. And so we crossed over the Arizona border, unmolested, on the ninth day. As we neared Tucson, I looked for any sign to indicate that humans had traveled that road as well, but the wind and sand must have erased any evidence weeks ago. There was no sign of life—human or scarb—anywhere in that desert. Iva and Bram didn’t bother to fly ahead any more to check for danger. We could see for miles all around us.

  It fascinated me that a human colony could exist in a place like this. “Why hasn’t Maria destroyed the resistance fighters?” I wondered aloud.

  Iva shrugged. “Some scarb are beginning to feel differently about humans,” she explained as the hot Arizona sun beat relentlessly down on us. “At first, humans were just a pest to be rid of. Now, the queens are beginning to realize that humans can be useful.”

  I tried to rub the sand out of my eye. “Like turning them into scarb?”

  “That, yes, and maybe other reasons. Either way, this group of survivors seems to manage all right. They probably aren’t threatening enough for Maria to bother with. She may control a lot of land, but much of it, like this”—she indicated the endless stretches of barren earth around us—“isn’t of much use to scarb.”

  We were less than a day’s journey from their settlement, and I was still looking forward to seeing how these humans survived. On the island, water was our greatest protection. The humans certainly didn’t have that here.

  The fibers of my mouth were sticky, like drying cotton. Derrick handed me a water flask he’d found at an abandoned ranger camp. He always did things like that, seeming to know what I needed and wordlessly doing it.

  “You must be thirsty, too,” I protested. We hadn’t passed another fresh stream since the morning before. We were nearing a canyon between two mesas. Hopefully we’d find more water there. Either way, the shade would be welcome.

  He just smiled, his lips cracking with the effort. “I’ll be fine. You take it.”He smiled again.

  I was glad to see him smiling again. I didn’t know what had broken his reserved mood, but I realized how much I’d missed that smile. I put the water to my lips. Even though it was warm and tasted of algae, it moistened the fibers of my mouth and throat. We passed into the shade of the canyon, but just as I was handing the flask back to him, I stopped, the hairs on my spine standing up. It wasn’t from the coolness of the shade. Something was wrong. I tapped into my connection, but sensed nothing. Suddenly, rangers jumped down on us like black crows from the mesas above before. We didn’t even time to scream.

  Everything was chaos. Dozens of rangers surrounded us. More poured off the rocks like ants. They sprang through the air like ravens. Their heads were covered in black cloths so only their eyes showed. They wore loose desert garb and had no shoes or sandals on their feet. We tried to fight them. But we weren’t organized. The desert scarb jumped in and out of the cliff shadows like bats in flight. Derrick and I swung madly to keep them back, but there were too many. I spun and thrashed my arms, knowing that if I stopped, they would have me. One of them got my left arm pinned. In seconds, they were on top of me and I couldn’t move.

  They didn’t kill me, although two of my scarb died in the attack. They bound me with thick cords, put one of their black scarves around my head, and marched me blinded, deeper into the canyon.

  How did we let this happen? I fumed. We’d been so careful for so long. I guess we’d gotten casual when Fuchsia’s army abandoned us, and the desert heat had made us sloppy. I’d been foolish thinking we were safe in the desert. This band of rangers was highly adapted to the desert conditions. They’d waited for us to come into the canyon where they could attack us unsuspectingly from above. What do they want with us? I could see nothing and could only hear the occasionally chatter of their teeth and the patter of their bare feet on the rocks and sand. They reeked of sweat, like they hadn’t had a bath in ages. The dust they kicked up filled my nostrils.

  We twisted and turned through the windy valley. What do you think they want with us?” I asked Iva, who was being led by the rangers just a little way behind me.

  But a stranger’s voice with a thick Latin accent answered sharply instead. “You will refrain from communicating if you wish to keep your lives.”

  I clamped my jaw shut, grinding the hinges together.

  The rangers led us, reluctantly silent, for another twenty minutes. We stopped. The wind didn’t rush by so quickly, and. I could smell and hear water trickling somewhere nearby.

  The rangers seemed to be waiting for somethi
ng, but they kept their thoughts closed to me. Again, I couldn’t sense them at all on the connection.

  “Will you please remove my scarf so I can breathe better?” I asked the rangers who held me. They seemed to take a moment to discuss it, then the scarf was quickly torn off my head. Even though the light was dim in the canyon, it still blinded me for a moment. The rock faces of the mesa surrounded us, but we had stopped in a more open area of the canyon, filled with about a hundred rangers. My eyes fell on an especially tall one that wore a dusty brown over his shaggy black hair. His gray eyes were split into seven irises each. I’d never seen a scarb with so many, and each facet of his eyes looked right at me.

  “Swab Cat,” he said, revealing yellowed teeth and black fibers in his mouth. “How lucky you’ve found us!” He lifted his arms, and all the rangers hooted and cheered.

  “What do you want?” I asked, unblinking.

  He leaned his face in closer so that his scent of musk and alcohol filled my nostrils. “For now, nothing more than to look at you,” he took off his hat, revealing a pair of long antennae. They extended as if stretching and then they were all over my face and hair. The fuzzy ends probed into my ears and itched my neck. The rangers all laughed. “She’s something, isn’t she, boys? Just look at this hair.” His antennae twisted around a lock of my hair and brought it to his sun-blackened nose. He inhaled deeply. “Smells good.” A wild look twisted itself on his face. He wrapped both antennae around either side of my head, pulling my face toward his. He brought his mouth close to mine like he was going to kiss me, but I spat into his eyes. He jerked back. “A feisty one,” he grinned, rubbing his eye. He finally put his antennae back under his hat. “Makes me kind of consider rethinking our deal with Miss. Sassy Pants up the way.” He scratched at the black stubble on his chin. “What do you think, boys?”

  Is he referring to Fuchsia? What kind of deal would she have made with these guys?

  Again, the rangers whooped and snickered.

  He looked at me, licking his lips. Then he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “Too bad a deal’s a deal,” he said with resignation. Some of the rangers booed. “Calm down, calm down.” He waved his big hands at them. “We wouldn’t want to cross that witch. We’d find ourselves in no better state than this damsel right here,” he said with mock civility and stroked my chin with his dirty thumb. I turned my head. “And that would be such a shame.”