by C. A. Gray
I froze, and just barely cocked my head to the left. I hadn’t heard a rustle in the trees, but it was there all the same. Probably 300 yards away.
Slowly I reached my hand into my cargo pocket, withdrawing the slingshot and one of the smooth stones I’d found in the stream. I needed another kill anyway, either today or tomorrow. This one sounded big.
Wait a minute… I cocked my head to the right this time, and realized there was more than one animal. It didn’t feel like they were traveling together, either—they were too far apart for that. I listened, feeling the air currents. One of them moved aimlessly; the other very deliberately closing the gap between them. This was a hunter and its prey.
I got to my feet and crept into the stream, to mask both my scent and my sound. The other hunter and I had the beast triangulated, whatever it was. But something about the way the other hunter moved led me to believe he didn’t yet know that he was not alone.
There. Through the thicket, some 120 yards away, I saw a deer munching on leaves, heedless of its danger. I scanned the trees in the circumference around it even as I fitted a stone into my slingshot and took aim. I wasn’t sure if the other hunter was human or beast, but I didn’t want it to take me by surprise. I pulled back on the slingshot and released.
The stone made contact, sinking into the deer’s forehead right between its eyes. It crumpled, but I didn’t move yet—I waited for the other hunter to reveal himself first.
“Hey!” cried a voice. “Who’s there?”
Barely twenty yards from where the deer fell, a man stepped out from the shadows. He was tall and thick, with close cropped salt and pepper hair. He wore an odd combination of flannel and animal skins, and he held a bow in his hand with a quiver on his back.
Despite the distance between us, I could tell that he did not wear the same hangdog expression I’d seen on the faces of the people in the city. I stood up.
The man’s jaw dropped when he saw me. “How did you hit that thing from all the way over there?” he demanded. Then he stooped to inspect the deer, and stood up again, adding, “With a slingshot? Are you serious?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. “I’ve done a lot of hunting,” I said as I approached him.
“I guess you have!” When he reached me, he smiled, and I saw the flesh around his eyes crinkle. I liked him immediately. He stuck out a hand and said, “I’m Nick.” He inspected my face for a minute, like he was looking for something. “You’re not from around here.”
“I just got to this country a few days ago, from Iceland. It’s—not quite what I expected.”
“I see,” said Nick, his expression still probing. He didn’t trust me, but I wasn’t sure why. “And you’re out here because?”
He wanted me to volunteer first, before he’d tell me whatever he was holding back. Well, why not? I had nothing to lose. “I’m originally from here, but I moved to Iceland as a kid when this was still the United States. I know it turned into the Republic because of the economy somehow, but that’s all I know. My mom’s letters made it sound like the Republic was wonderful. I’ve dreamed of coming back here my whole life.” I gave a short laugh. “I guess I don’t have to tell you that this place wasn’t what I had in mind.”
I saw Nick relax visibly. “I can imagine.”
“So your turn,” I said.
“Pardon me?”
“Whatever it is that you’re afraid of from me, you don’t need to be. I’m on the run, I assume same as you.”
Nick regarded me for a moment, and then relented. “Fair enough. I’m the head of the Refugee Hunters.”
“The Refugee Hunters?” I repeated.
Nick nodded. “Not like that’s an official title. We are what we are, but we explain ourselves that way to outsiders. You haven’t told me your name yet, though.”
“Jackson MacNamera,” I told him. I volunteered my last name too, just as an extra show of trust.
Nick shook my hand, and smiled. “Tell you what. If you’ll share your kill with us, I’ll take you back to the caves with me. I think we can help each other. We could definitely use another hunter like you!”
I nodded my agreement to sharing the kill and going back to the caves, though I wasn’t sure what he meant by becoming one of their hunters. Still, I was tired of being on my own.
“Tell me about the Republic,” I said, as the two of us set to work on cleaning and packaging the deer meat. “What’s going on here?”
“How much do you know?” Nick countered.
I shrugged, wiping the humidity from my forehead with the back of my hand and accepting a cleaning knife from Nick gratefully. “I already told you all of it. I’ve literally been here less than a day.”
“Okay, I’ll give you the short version,” said Nick. “When I was a young man, I worked in the finance industry actually—didn’t start hunting until later. So I had a front row seat when the United States went broke. The money in the treasury came from taxes from productive members of society, of course… but it got to the point where the government was supporting most of its citizens with handouts instead of the other way around. Fewer people were paying in, and way more people were a drain on the system than ever before. It was unsustainable. The U.S. still managed to stay afloat for a few decades by borrowing money from other countries. Then it got to the point where they were borrowing from one nation to pay their loans to another in this messed up cycle for years. Eventually the rest of the world figured out they were a bad credit risk and stopped lending to them altogether. After that, the U.S. dollar ceased to be the world currency standard, replaced by the Chinese Yuan, and the value of the dollar crashed and burned. We eked out our last few years by just printing more money, which led to such massive inflation that a loaf of bread cost thirty dollars—and let me just tell you, that was a lot. Finally the whole system collapsed on itself. Our money might as well have been toilet paper. Businesses collapsed, people lost their jobs and their homes, and couldn’t afford to buy anything—so they started stealing whatever they needed. Then the few remaining businesses went under, until all the resources were consumed and nobody had anything.
“That’s when the rioting started,” he went on. “The former U.S. Congress, or what was left of it, reassembled themselves as the Tribunal, and tried to enforce a police state. They didn't have the manpower to arrest all the rioters or the prisons to house them, so they just gunned down citizens at will.”
I’d stopped cleaning the deer, gaping at Nick and trying to make sense of this story, compared to the one my mom, aunt and uncle had told me for so many years.
“Enter Ben Voltolini,” Nick smiled humorlessly, “a smooth talking billionaire with a brilliant idea of how to enforce order and turn the nation around, and he had the money to back it. He had a two step plan—which, by the way, I didn’t learn about until I got to the caves and we all pieced together what we knew,” he added. “First, he released a genetically engineered virus on the entire nation to make everyone anemic, so they’d stop fighting. Then, he enforced mandatory brainwave screening sites around the nation. He called them ‘Liberty Boxes.’”
I closed my eyes.
Nick went on, not noticing, “In the beginning, in order to enforce the screening on a mass scale, Voltolini offered rations of food to those who came willingly, and the threat of jail to those who didn’t. A few still didn’t show. Those they tracked down—their technology can detect and locate undocumented brain waves. If they find anybody unregistered, they send an agent to hunt them down.”
“Why? What’s the point?”
Nick stopped working too and looked up at me. “You noticed something odd about the citizens of the Republic, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“They’ve been brainwashed to think they’re living in affluence. Consequently, they adore the government. Especially the Potentate.”
I blinked at him. In my mind, I heard Agent Dunne asking, “What do you see? What do you see? What do you see?
”
“These days, anyone who resists first gets another injection of the virus, to make them docile, and see if they can be rehabilitated. If that doesn’t work, they’re eliminated.” He grimaced. “It’s the Potentate’s way of quelling a potential revolution. He doesn’t know about us, of course. We’re too far out for them to pick up our brainwaves.”
I was still stuck on the first part of that story. The injection of the virus. “Does the injection… knock you out, by chance?”
Nick looked at me oddly for a moment. Then he raised his eyebrows and started laughing incredulously. “You mean they actually injected you, and you escaped?” He let out a low whistle. “The only refugees who’ve managed to make it to us are the ones who stayed one step ahead of the agents, or who got out before they were detected as traitors. I think you must be the first one ever to actually get picked up and get away anyway. How’d you do it, if I may ask?”
“Faked my death,” I said. Also—was I infected, then? I didn’t feel sick… Before Nick could ask me more details, I added, “So everybody’s brainwashed… to what end, though? What kind of system is this really?”
“It’s basically socialism… with a bit of a twist,” said Nick, sawing off a strip of flesh. “There are no private businesses—all of them are government-run. Everyone’s essentially a government employee. Higher education exists only for those who score high enough on placement exams; everyone else is funneled into trades or physical labor. And because there’s no market to determine value of a skill, everyone ‘gets’ the same hourly wage—” he made air quotes around the word gets with one hand—“but all of it goes into government coffers, of course. Then the government doles out to everyone a standard ration of food, health care, housing, and etcetera.”
“But it’s just barely enough to keep them alive,” I murmured.
Nick nodded, his face dark. “Exactly. Most people are horribly malnourished by the time we get them. But when they’re still in the system, that provides the government yet another opportunity to play the hero: they create all these widespread health problems, and then they show up and ‘fix’ them—with a treatment that costs them a couple bucks, like replacing a nutrient or two. People get better, and they’re that much more convinced that the Potentate is their loving parent.” He shook his head. “Not with everyone, though. People die of starvation all the time in there.”
I sat back from my work, unnerved, and murmured, “What really killed my mom, then?”
“Sorry?” said Nick.
“Nothing. Just… talking to myself.” I’d thought my stepfather had finally beaten her to death. But maybe she’d died of starvation—all the while thinking she was rich.
Nick wrapped up the last of the deer meat, wiped his hands on a piece of vellum he’d apparently brought for that purpose, and tucked it into his pack. There was far too much meat to fit, though, so he handed me a parcel to carry as well.
“Come on. I’ll introduce you to the rest of the refugees.” He hoisted the pack on his back and grinned at me as he added, “Thanks for dinner, by the way.”
Chapter 13: Kate
I awoke on a soft bed of heather. I still shivered, but I no longer wore the muddy ripped dress, and I nestled under scratchy blankets that felt like they were made of wool. Before I even opened my eyes all the way, I felt my forehead: it was slick with sweat.
“Shh, shh, oh, oh, there you go,” clucked a matronly voice, and I felt a cool washcloth pressing against my fiery brow.
I shifted my elbows behind me and tried to sit up, but the movement brought a pounding wave of pain to my head and I thought better of it, settling back into my former position.
I took a quick inventory of my body. I had a fever, apparently. My mouth and lips still felt parched, but slightly less so than before. Every muscle in my body ached.
My eyelids felt puffy and heavy, but I opened them, squinting at the bright sunlight streaming through the mouth of a cave. Cave? There had been no caves anywhere in the landscape I last remembered. A biting chill made me shiver and pull the blanket tighter.
The woman sponging my brow looked like she was in her mid-forties. Her face wore a hard, weather-bitten appearance, but her eyes were brown and soft, and her brown hair was streaked with gray and fastened at the nape of her neck. Her dirty calico dress looked homespun. She smiled at me, her thin lips cracked.
“You probably want more of this,” said the woman, handing me a glass filled to the brim with cool water. “You nearly died of dehydration and exposure.”
I was briefly surprised that she was so well-spoken, considering how filthy she looked—but I didn’t think of this long, distracted by the mug she offered me. My lips parted at the sight of it and I almost panted with desire. That first drink was sweet beyond description.
“Careful,” clucked the woman, pulling the mug away from me as I gulped greedily. “You don’t want to get too much too fast.” I whimpered as she set the mug beyond my reach, but she promised, “I’ll give you more in a minute.”
For the first time I noticed that there were others in the cave behind her, but I couldn’t immediately make my eyes focus on them. I tried to speak but a croak came out instead. I coughed and tried again.
“Where am I?”
A man with a big black beard stepped forward this time, wearing overalls with holes in them. His face was nearly as dirty and weathered as hers. “You’re in the last settlement of the true citizens of the United States.” I blinked at him, confused. Then he clarified, “We’re all refugees here. Just like you.” He paused and then added sharply, “You were running from the government, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” I croaked. “But I just—”
Then I caught a glimpse of the third man in the room and stopped speaking. He must have seen me looking, because he stepped into the light, as if to oblige me.
“This is one of the hunters who found you,” said the matronly woman. “He saved your life.”
“Hello Kate Brandeis,” he said. He wasn’t smiling.
I gasped. “Alec!”
I stared at Alec, trying to see in the grown-up face the boy I once knew. I remembered Alec as a skinny, arrogant fourteen-year-old. The first night I’d ever seen him came flooding back to me, when he’d crawled into our dorm room—mine and Maggie’s—through the vents. Hadn’t I hallucinated about that in the forest? That was the night when he’d told me all about the collapse of the United States, and how he’d evaded detection longer than most rebel kids only because his parents had been rebels too. But at last, he’d told me, the government had his father and mother murdered for treason, and he and his sister were sent to two different reform schools.
It hadn’t worked though—not on him. Long after I saw McCormick as beautiful and the government as good, Maggie and Alec still met in secret, discussing their plans in whispers. I never knew what they were talking about and never wanted to know. By then I thought they were both crazy.
Now the grown-up version of Alec stood before me, still tall and lanky, his red hair full of dust like the creases of his skin. The wide-set brown eyes appraised me, too. Glared at me, really.
“Never thought I’d see you here,” he said, his tone low and harsh. “Of all people.”
I wanted to ask him what that meant, but I didn’t have the strength.
“Suppose she’s a spy?” said the man in overalls.
“Oh, Uruguay, shh!” snapped the woman.
“She’s probably here to cover the story!” Uruguay continued, “The refuge of the traitors! You know what the Crone’ll say we should do with her…”
Alec looked at me, his face unchanged except for pursed lips. When he spoke, his voice was cold. “Well? Are you?”
“No!” I whispered, my voice failing me. Tears welled up in my eyes even though I tried to stop them.
“Well, I, for one, believe her!” declared the woman. “I’m Molly, honey,” she said to me, “Nick’s wife.” She said this like it should mean something
to me.
“Nick’s the other one who found you,” Alec told me. “The head of the hunters.” He approached my makeshift bed, looking me up and down. I sniffled and wiped my tears away hastily, trying to smile at him. He did not return it.
“How—long have you been here?” I asked him finally.
Alec paused, too long. “Do you remember the day Maggie and I disappeared?”
I nodded.
“Well, at least you remember,” he muttered under his breath. “We were headed for New Estonia, but we had to move slowly. We stole supplies and lived off the land, just off the grid. It was slow going, and it was just the two of us. For years. I don’t even know how many, we lost track of time eventually.
“In the end we got captured. I distracted the agents that caught us so she could get away. I hope she did.” He looked away, and then added, “I guess they were sending me to ‘special projects,’ if that even exists. But I made a break for it. I don’t really know how I managed to get away. Nick found me in the woods after that, same as you, and brought me here. I’ve been here ever since.” Then he turned back to me, his expression sharpening. “But you were one of the successful ones. What are you doing here?”
“Successful?” I thought he meant my news career.
“Successfully brainwashed.” He looked away, like he couldn’t stand to look at me. “We saw you. At the end there. Maggie and me,” Alec spat, “looking all rich and well-fed and wearing a different expensive dress every day, telling everyone about how the Potentate is so wonderful, even while killing people like us as so-called Enemies of State!”
“I say we take no chances,” Uruguay muttered to Molly behind Alec, but loudly enough that I could hear. “We ought to take her straight to the Crone and put her on trial for treason.”
Molly glowered at Uruguay darkly and hissed, “You will do no such thing to that poor child, or I swear I will have you voted off the Council so fast, your head will spin!”
