The Other Side

by Joshua McCune

  I take my few sips, then start my silent count. One scale chaser, two scale chaser . . . In sixty scale chasers, the sprinklers shut off. My shivering lasts another several minutes. Afterward, I struggle to find the relative peace of nightmares.

  “We will hurt someone you love,” Interrogator said. They need time to collect collateral to ensure my cooperation. What’s taking so long? Who will they torment me with?

  Though sometimes it seems like they’ve left me here to wither, I’m sure they’re monitoring my emotions via the CENSIR, and I want them to know that fear does not top my list.

  I glower at the invisible cameras that are surely watching me and think about Mom and how the Green that killed her was part of a secret army project to control dragons, a project they later forced me to partake in.

  I think about Dad, once powerful, broken when the military came to Mason-Kline to kill Baby and the other dragon children.

  I think about Sam, that wild-haired, wild-eyed kid in a Prius, the brother who loved me before the government convinced him I was a traitor.

  I think about Allie and the video those guys showed me in that Dillingham diner.

  I think about Baby, another child tortured and rolled out in front of the cameras, all in the name of ending this war.

  And I think about James, the boy who loved dragons like my mother loved dragons, the boy I never really got to know. The military didn’t kill him, not in a flesh-and-blood, Mom sort of way, but what’s the difference?

  I’m wondering what would have happened if we’d met in a better world . . . when the sprinklers start up again.

  Already? It was only minutes ago that they turned off, no more than an hour, I’m sure of it.

  One scale chaser, two scale chaser . . . but the rain doesn’t stop when I reach sixty, nor a hundred, and soon I’m soaked and shivering.

  And then it does stop, and a strange mechanical noise echoes from afar. The chain connected to my shackles retracts, pulls me into tiptoe standing position.

  It’s time. Now they’re going to activate the thinscreen. “We will hurt someone you love.” Dad. It’s gotta be Dad. They used him against me before. They know how important he is to me. Confess, or he dies. Would they actually kill him?

  I don’t know, but if I see him, I will break, so I squeeze my eyes shut. A stalled breath later, a sharp brightness shines through my eyelids; an uncomfortable warmth envelops me. I squeeze tighter.

  Minutes pass. My CENSIR remains dormant. Nobody comes on over the speaker system. All I can hear is the fast drip of liquid onto metal as I twist on my tiptoes, the chain above me spinning back and forth in calm gyrations. My shoulders burn.

  I peek out between my eyelids, am blinded momentarily. When my eyes adjust, I see that the thinscreen’s off, that the illumination stems from a row of floodlights along the ceiling. My scrubs aren’t the black, prison-camp issue I envisioned. White once, they’re now stained scarlet.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  Nobody answers.

  I look for the cameras, find them in the corners. Not invisible at all. You can find similar models in department stores, the ones you sometimes wave at and wonder if there’s someone on the other side watching. . . .

  With sudden horror, I notice how the lights, so bright, converge on me.

  Spotlight me.

  I’m the one on display.

  Beneath my scrubs, now semitransparent and clinging to my skin, I’m naked save for the wrapped bandages around my stomach. Bedraggled, dripping blood, I’m in a macabre peep show.

  I try to remember Keith and Baby and everything I need to protect, but they are the merest shadows to the horrid image fixed in my head: Dad, trapped in his wheelchair, made to watch me suffer.

  “Keith and Preston are—”

  My CENSIR delivers a sizzling shock. Four more, and I’m screaming and writhing. I’ve barely quieted to moans when nozzles emerge from the wall and pummel me with geysers of blood rain. Feels like someone’s digging through my stomach to yank out my spine.

  I close my eyes as the world spins, struggling to recall what my captors want. A location. A city. What city?

  “Ann Arbor . . . Mason-Kline . . . ,” I blurt between gurgled screams. “Chicago . . . Arlington . . . Charlottesville . . . Manassas . . . Topeka . . . Wichita . . . Kansas City . . . both of them. Saint Paul . . . Rapid City . . . Montego Bay, Montego Bay, Montego Bay! Georgetown . . . both of them. Dallas . . . D, D, D . . . Dillingham! Dillingham! D, D, D . . . Detroit . . . Michigan . . . Ann Arbor . . . Chicago . . . Dumpster . . . D, D, D . . .”

  I black out.

  I’m revived with low-voltage prods from my CENSIR. The geysers are off, but it hasn’t been long, because I’m still drizzling everywhere.

  “Are you okay?” Interrogator asks seconds later. Did I hear him right?

  “Please let him go,” I say.

  “Answer the question, Twenty—” He stops. Several seconds later: “Answer the question.”

  “What question?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” I say. “I love you. I’m sorry.”

  Abruptly, the lights shut off. I’m lowered to the ground.

  I curl into myself, tuck my tears into my elbow so Dad won’t see, and eventually sleep.

  I’m awakened by a raging fire in my shoulders. I’m upright, already in torture position, and back in the spotlights, but my clothes are stiff and dry. And opaque.

  “Denver,” I say before the nozzles change that. My voice comes out weak, so I repeat myself. “They’re in Denver.”

  Interrogator ignores me.

  “What do you want?” I shut my eyes. It’s all I can do not to cry. “What do you want? I don’t know anything else! Let Dad go.”

  The speakers crackle to life. “We do not have your father,” Interrogator says.

  “Who do you have?”

  “Nobody of your concern.”

  Then why am I strung up like this? “Who do you have?”

  “Quiet now, Melissa. Behave, and this will all be over soon.”

  Melissa? In Georgetown, they only called me Melissa when they wanted something from me, something they couldn’t wring out with threats or torture. But I have nothing to offer anymore.

  I gasp. Maybe it’s the person on the other end of the camera feed who has what they need, a boy who knows what it’s like to flinch when you hear anybody, anybody at all, mention the numbers twenty-five or twenty-six.

  “James?”

  I’m ignored.

  “You can’t trust them!” I shout. My CENSIR delivers a string of sharp electrical bursts that set my teeth chattering. And I know I’m right. James is here.

  “We will not tolerate your disobedience,” Interrogator says.

  “I’ll be okay,” I say, lifting my head and giving my bravest smile for the cameras. “Don’t tell them anything. Don’t worry about me—”

  These jolts come faster. Electric fire fills my lungs. My vision clouds, dark floaters hopping everywhere.

  A bang echoes from the speakers.

  The jolts cut out, and I’m dropped to the ground. I spasm. A warm sensation floods my head, and the clang of metal sounds nearby. Through the floaters and the haze, I notice a flash of silver on the ground. My CENSIR, I think.

  “I’ll be there in a second,” someone says. Not Interrogator.

  Gunfire erupts far away. Pistol shots respond, these closer, some just outside my cell. The battle grows louder, but more sporadic. And then the gunshots cease altogether.

  Muffled footsteps click my way.

  The door bursts open.

  I can’t see much, but I can see enough to know it’s a soldier. Dragon camos, a rifle or machine gun slung over one shoulder. He’s here to finish me off. That’s what they did in Georgetown.

  Another step and he’s in the spotlight, almost close enough for me to touch. He crouches in front of me, comes into focus.

  The soldier is Colin.

&n
bsp; 21

  He removes my handcuffs, plunges a needle into my arm. “This is Dilaudid. It will help with the pain.”

  He gently probes my body, wincing when I wince, apologizing when I cry out. In between cataloging my injuries beneath his breath—abrasions, bruised or broken ribs, possible internal bleeding—he informs me that we’re in a Bureau of Dragon Affairs office in Indianapolis, that it’s been two weeks since Chicago, that he’s sorry for leaving me.

  There are things I need to tell him, but I can’t remember what they are.

  He prods at a grouping of welts along my forearm, asks if they injected anything into me. I give a weak shrug. “What about food? Did they give you anything? We have to make sure they can’t track you.”

  I attempt to speak, manage a moan that only deepens the worry etched in his eyes. I jab a shaky finger at the nearest puddle of blood rain. He relaxes a hair.

  After cocooning me in a jacket that smells of sweat and him, he scoops me up as if I’m nothing, pulls me to him as if I’m everything. He carries me into a hallway lined on either side with narrow steel doors. Black-suited BoDA agents lie slumped everywhere. For a second I’m back in Mason-Kline. Getting shot in that bivouac by the D-man. James carrying me from the wreckage into carnage.

  James!

  A couple of blinks later, we’re at an elevator. Colin leans me against the wall and presses his hand to the imprint scanner. As the door slides open, I work through the ache strangling my throat and murmur, “James. I think he’s here.”

  The concern in Colin’s features vanishes. “No, Melissa. It’s his fault.”

  Colin picks me up and moves into the elevator. He presses the up button on the control panel.

  “Please,” I croak. “Help him.”

  “He’s the big fish they want,” Colin says. “Anyway, he’d want you safe. That’s why he came back, wasn’t it?”

  “Please.”

  He clenches his jaw, shakes his head. “There’s a shift change soon. We don’t have time.”

  “Allie,” I say. “He knows—”

  “He doesn’t know,” Colin says, softening a hair. “He doesn’t know where she is, Melissa. They were asking him when I entered the control center. I’m sorry.”

  The elevator dings.

  “Quiet now,” Colin says, setting me in the front corner.

  In one quick motion, he draws his sidearm, mounted with a silencer. The door slides open to a drab lobby. A man in a black suit’s leaning over a curved desk to talk with the woman behind it.

  The woman’s eyes widen. She blanches as Colin lifts his gun and, with a whistled whoosh, nails the agent in that place where brain stem meets neck. Kill shot. He turns the gun on the secretary, and she swallows her scream.

  “Don’t even think about that panic button,” Colin says. He presses the stop button on the elevator panel, then steps into the lobby. “What’s your name?”

  “Buh . . . Buh . . . Becca.”

  “You have kids, Becca?” Colin asks with another step.

  “A son.” She swallows. “Jeffrey.”

  “I had a friend named Jeffrey growing up,” Colin says. “I liked him. He died in the war. He was only sixteen. Do you know who I am, Becca?”

  Becca gives a furious shake of her head, smoky lines of makeup tears streaking down her cheeks.

  “And you won’t press that button when we walk out,” Colin says with another step.

  “I won’t press it. I promise to God I won’t. Please don’t hurt me.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you. But you need to calm down.”

  If anything, her sobbing intensifies. The noise masks the sound of my clumsy crawling. Colin’s another step away, coaxing her with words, his gun never straying from her head, when I struggle up to my knees and limply throw my palm against the stop button.

  As the elevator doors slide shut, I see Colin spin toward me.

  As I hit the down button, I hear Becca scream.

  And then I hear a gunshot.

  The elevator hits bottom; the doors slide open. Bio-print scanners control access to each cell. There are plenty of hands in the hallway. Will dead ones work? Even if they would, I’d have to lift somebody up to put their hand in position.

  I’m not sure I can even lift myself.

  In nae. I crawl for the smallest corpse—a blonde who’d be pretty if not for the penny-sized hole between her eyes. As I grab her collar, I think of Colin and his advice back on Saint Matthew Island.

  “Always go for the kill shot.” In our ice cave, whenever it was his turn to perforate the crate, he’d knock out one or two bull’s-eyes, maybe come close to a few others. A survey of the seven or eight men and women scattered through the corridor tells me he was holding back.

  So many secrets.

  Scooting on my butt, I drag the woman inch by snail inch toward the first door. I’m not even close when Colin comes running out of the elevator. He stops short, wearing an expression that says he wants to rescue me from the unrescueable.

  I bite into my lip. “Were you . . . were you in Georgetown?”

  He crouches in front me, his face inches from mine. I look away. He unwraps my hands from the woman’s collar and takes them between his. I pull them free.

  “I’d heard of it, but I was never there,” he says.

  “James and I were,” I mumble, staring at the dead woman’s face. I feel nothing for her. She is but a broken doll. I force myself to look at Colin and decide that I will believe him. I must. “You were there, too.”

  His brow furrows. “I wasn’t. I swear to you.”

  “We’re fragments, Colin. All of us. James, too. Broken.” My head hurts. I close my eyes for a moment. “Just trying to figure out . . . how to be unbroken.” I clutch at him. “Please, Colin.”

  Colin tenses but nods. “Okay.”

  He starts to lift me, but I shake him off. “I want to walk.”

  With an arm about my waist, we trudge by door after steel door, our footsteps the only breaks in the silence. My breath remains thick in my lungs, my tongue thick in my mouth, but some coordination returns. I’m still rickety, but at least my legs don’t feel like buckling every other second.

  “How . . . how did you find me, Colin?”

  “The tracer in your arm.”

  “Keith said . . . said he removed it,” I say. I have a scar on my right bicep where they operated.

  “He couldn’t bring himself do it,” Colin says, but I barely hear him.

  Baby!

  “I caved,” I say. “I told them about Denver. . . .”

  “They evacced right after Chicago,” he says. “Standard protocol. They’re safe.”

  “I can’t reach her, Colin, I can’t reach her,” I mumble, hyperventilating. I lose my balance. He catches me.

  “Signal’s blocked down here,” he says. “They’re fine. Baby says hello and, I quote, ‘If the scale chaser doesn’t bring you back in riding condition, I am going to turn him into an ice sculpture and drop him off a mountain.’”

  I cough out a laugh.

  We pass an open door. I peek inside. Spotlights illuminate chains dangling from the ceiling, rivulets of blood rain seeping into a drain. I look at Colin. He nods.

  Two cells beyond mine—two worlds apart—Colin stops walking.

  “I have to warn you, he’s not who you remember.” He gives me a wan smile, then pushes on the door.

  The prisoner, bathed in a yellow glow from the thinscreen video feed of an empty cell that I assume is mine, sits shackled at room center, rocking himself in slow arcs. His left arm appears dislocated or broken, his right’s heavily wrapped beneath his own crimson-stained scrubs, and his face is so bloated by injury I’m not even sure it’s him.

  Not until he looks up and I see his eyes.

  “What are you doing here, Sarge?” James whispers. “You’re wasting your time.”

  Colin squeezes my shoulder. “You sure about this?”

  “We can’t leave him.”


  Colin kneels beside James to uncuff him.

  “Get him out of the CENSIR first.”

  “It stays on,” Colin says. “It’s set to passive inhibit. Nobody can hurt him.”

  “Passive slave, huh?” James rubs at his wrists, his smirk contorting into a grimace.

  Colin pulls a needle from his pocket. James’s eyes go wide. “Stay away.”

  “It’s a painkiller.” He brushes James hands aside and injects him in the shoulder. He lifts him to his feet. “Move.”

  James limps forward. Colin wraps an arm around my waist, takes a long breath that does nothing to calm the tension that so palpably suffuses him, and guides me out of the cell.

  “This all you, Sarge?” James says, surveying the carnage. He foot-nudges a gun from the hand of a dead agent slumped against the wall. He bends over to retrieve it.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Colin says, drawing his own gun.

  James straightens, glances back with that smirked grimace. “Nice work.”

  Colin tenses further, waves James forward with his gun.

  On the elevator ride up, Colin tells us his plan for escape. In the lobby, I don’t see that secretary behind the desk, but there is another bloodstain on the wall behind where her head would have been.

  We exit into a parking garage, where Colin directs us to the Humvee marked U.S. ARMY that’s parked in a handicap spot. He loads us in the back, puts bags over our heads, handcuffs us to the doors.

  We drive off.

  “This the Krakus transfer?” someone asks a couple minutes later. The gate guard, I assume.

  “King of hearts and queen of spades,” Colin says. He sounds almost jovial.

  “Treat them right,” the guard says with a laugh, and we’re on our way.

  Colin removes my hood. I look back, half expecting to find a road of bodies leading to a torture fortress, but we’re on an ordinary street surrounded by ordinary high-rises in an ordinary city.

  Everything’s so damn ordinary.

  I take a deep breath, repeat my mantras, and contact Baby. She squeals and cries and laughs. I can almost see her, body wiggling back and forth with delight, stomping around, causing a minor earthquake, and it alleviates some of the hurt. I talk with her for a few minutes, assuring her I’m very okay (though a little too warm and in need of a good frosty kiss), then ask Grackel for an update on Allie.