by Melissa Faye
Camp members were clustered in groups or running after the retreating fighters. The people in gray uniforms, though, marched quickly away from the camp towards a line of trucks just short of the horizon. People started calling back the camp members who were still on the hunt; we needed their help caring for the injured.
One of the campers refused to turn around. Three other men chased him down, grabbing his arms as he ran and pulling him backwards. He fell to the ground and struggled to get up, skirting away from the other camper’s arms. He shouted something at the people in gray to no avail. They were too far away, and they didn’t care. The man was pulled back towards the camp by the three men, shouting and cursing at them while trying to evade their grasp. As he got closer, I saw that it was Breck.
The three men could barely contain him, so another man and a woman went to help. Breck was still screaming. He caught my eyes and tried to run towards me. The campers let him go now that he was at least headed towards the camp and not away from it. Breck sprinted at me so fast that I almost fell over as he grabbed my shoulders.
“They have Hope!” he screamed. “They took her! They took my daughter!”
Chapter 6 – Charlie
Breck cursed out Harvey, a former medical intern, for trying to dress a gash on his forearm. He tried to stand up from the bench someone had sat him down on, but kept getting pushed back down. I could see him lose steam as his yelling turned to muffled cries. He no longer tried to get up, but collapsed into himself.
I felt something wet and sticky on my face but since no one was ordering me to do anything else, I went into the dining tent to find Etta and Yami.
I found Etta at the door. “Breck?” she said as soon as she saw me. Her face was pale and her pants had ripped at the knee, but otherwise she looked okay. “Breck? Where is Breck? Where is Hope?” I stared at her face, blinking hard. Yami always said she was innocent and fragile, but I saw it more as a quiet stoicism. Or like a very calm lioness who wouldn’t bother you until you messed with one of her own. Now I thought she was wavering between the two.
“Charlie!” she shouted when I didn’t respond. “Where is Breck? Who has Hope?” Her face swam before my eyes; I squeezed them shut. When I opened them, Etta was still there, staring. I nodded behind me towards the bench where Breck’s gash was being treated. She ran towards him.
A moment later, I heard Etta’s scream. I couldn’t bare to hear it. I went into the tent and found Yami sitting at the far end of the room next to Etta 2. Yami’s left eye was swollen and pink, with a yellow and black patch of skin that trailed down the side of her face. There were some scrapes and bruises on her arms. She didn’t seem bothered by any of it. Instead, she sat with her arm around Etta 2’s shoulder, watching her sob.
“Teo!” Etta 2 said his name over and over again. I made my way across the room towards them while Etta 2’s cries pierced the whole area. “Teo! Where’s Teo?” Yami squeezed her shoulders gently while someone else brought her a glass of water. Etta 2 was disheveled. She had obviously scuffled with someone, and there was another camper looking her over. I saw how her leg formed a strange angle at her knee. It was broken, and badly. She seemed immune to the pain.
Another woman approached Yami at the same time I did. “They need you outside. There are a few...injuries. They want a doctor.” Yami nodded and let the woman slip into her place, comforting Etta 2. Yami finally realized I was there. She looked directly at my face and gasped.
“What happened to you?” she cried. “Where is Etta? Where’s Breck? And Hope?”
I was lost in a daze and couldn’t answer right away. Yami and I walked outside, where I finally let myself sit down on a bench. I could see Etta and Breck fifty feet off and turned away. Yami focused on my face.
“What did you do?” she said. “Your nose is broken. You could have broken your...everything, by the looks of you.” I gave her a goofy grin. “This is going to hurt,” she said. I braced myself. She held my nose on either side with her thumbs and pressed my cheeks with her other fingers. “Ok, ready?” She didn’t wait for my nod. “One...two...”
I screamed in pain; she snapped my nose before I expected it. The pain was intense but quick. A moment later I felt my face. It was still covered in blood, but my nose was exactly where it should be. Yami smiled pitifully, then disappeared and returned with more supplies.
“Who did this to you?” she asked as she cleaned off my face. “Where did Breck and Hope go?” She was working too hard and talking too fast for me to answer. “Did you see they took Teo? Did they take anyone else? Why take a kid like that? Unless...”
She dropped the bottle of antiseptic and gauze on the ground and looked around for the source of the wailing that was growing quieter, but not less sad. Etta and Breck hung onto each other while Harvey tried to treat Breck’s arm.
Yami sat down on the bench next to me and leaned over onto my lap. I felt her chest rise and fall quickly as she cried, and placed my hand on her back. I felt my daze lift as I saw Yami with a little more clarity now. She didn’t know it, but she was one of the kindest people we all knew. She sobbed in earnest, but the volume was hushed as she buried her face in her lap. I put my arm around her and felt my own eyes well up.
“Why would they take the kids, Charlie?” Yami said when she caught her breath. “Who would do something so disgusting?”
“I only knew one person really capable of it,” I said. “But he’s back at Young Woods, isn’t he?”
Chancellor Lorenzo, the leader of our old community, had done all he could to track down Etta and Breck and experiment on them and the baby before she was born. He had fired Yami from her job, he had blamed her for a bombing she didn’t commit, and he had sent Yami’s mentor Alexis and mentee Vonna out into the noncomm by themselves. He knew where we were. We’d hoped he would wait longer to come find us since we had incriminating evidence on him. Apparently our head start was officially over.
“But how would he know about Teo?” Yami said with a frown. She turned towards me and gasped; she must have forgotten about my face. She gathered her supplies from the ground and went back to cleaning me up. I gritted my teeth. There likely wasn’t a lot of pain medication left, and I could manage.
“What about all those people in gray?” I asked. “Who were they? Their insignias...Black and silver. Why would anyone sign up for that job?”
Harvey came running over to us. “We really need both of you –“ He paused for a moment when he saw my face. “Charlie, if you’re ok, that is. There are a lot of people who haven’t been treated yet.”
“Is anyone...” Yami couldn’t finish the sentence.
“I don’t think so,” said Harvey. “Matana was hurt badly, though. And a few people were shot. I’ve never seen that before. How did anyone find guns? Why were they even here?”
We didn’t answer as we followed Harvey towards a group of injured camp members. Matana was laid out on a blanket, unconscious, while someone bandaged what looked like a sprained or broken wrist.
Someone stopped me to get help with a bullet wound. I didn’t know the man. He was in his forties with straight brown hair that hung past his ears and stuck to the sweat on his forehead. He’d been shot in the leg. I grabbed a few long strips of cloth from someone running around with supplies and tied off his leg above the injury. It looked like the bullet was still inside his leg. I poured antiseptic over the wound; the man howled in pain. Two people came to hold the man steady while I pulled the bullet out with tweezers. It wasn’t lodged too far into his leg and hadn’t hit any major arteries. He was lucky. If any of this could be called luck.
I stitched up the gash. “Keep that clean,” I told the people holding him down. “Get him some pain patches and let someone know if he develops a fever. I’ll check on him in a little while.”
I understood how Harvey felt about the injuries we were treating. I treated bruises and scrapes, breaks and sprains, and helped ease pain and suffering in the elderly, but I never saw injurie
s like this. Without better equipment, I knew whatever we did wouldn’t be as good as the care the ACers would get in a community. But there was no one out there we could trust enough to help us.
The woman I saw earlier with a gun pointed at her lay on the ground nearby and I hurried over when I saw she wasn’t being helped yet. She had been shot, but the bullet must have just grazed her. Her shoulder needed to be cleaned up and treated to prevent infection, but there was no bullet and no exit or entry wound. She cried hysterically while I looked her over. Another woman crouched next to her and stroked her hair while I dressed the wound.
I looked around the camp. People were either laid out, groaning in pain, or running around to help. The camp wasn’t like Young Woods because there weren’t any color assignments and there was barely a leadership hierarchy – Matana’s leadership was accepted and Sven helped her out, but Matana maintained a democracy. There weren’t clean buildings and there was no updated technology. Supplies were always low. But just like at Young Woods, the people here were a community. They protected their own. I felt lucky to be a part of that.
“WE’RE ALL JUST GLAD that no one was killed,” Sven said. He had gathered everyone who was healthy enough or who wasn’t actively taking care of someone in the meeting tent. A terrible silence filled the air and felt almost worse than the cries and screaming from a few hours earlier. It was pitch dark outside, but lights were lit all over the camp to help the medics. “There were at least a dozen major injuries that our medical team was able to treat for now. The bullet wounds were not serious, but we are running low on supplies to prevent infection. There are some broken limbs. There was one critical injury. And the people in gray suits took both of the biological children, Teo and Hope.”
Campers turned to one another in shock. A few people started to cry again. The sense of loss was palpable, and people stayed quiet with their grief.
“Did you see Etta 2’s leg?” Yami whispered. “It’s definitely broken. Maybe in more than one spot. She was trying to grab at Teo and someone smashed into her. She fell to the ground with her leg in the wrong place.” I remembered what it looked like. I had seen breaks before, but that one was extreme.
“Someone made her a splint, but I don’t know how long it will take to heal without a CasterPad.” Yami wrung her hands in her lap. I had no idea what would happen either. We lacked the basic technologies any community Med would have access to. Sven was right: we were lucky no one was killed.
“Matana was hit hard over the head,” Sven continued. “She’s still unconscious, and Torrice is with her now. We’re not sure if she will wake up.” Sven paused and choked up, clearing his throat and wiping his eyes. He was Matana’s second-in-command, unofficially, and from what I could tell, they had been very close. Yami sat up straight, watching Sven closely.
Someone raised his hand. “Who were they? The gray suits?”
“We don’t know,” Sven said. “No one recognized them. They came on trucks and left with the biological children. They trampled the garden area and ransacked the kitchen. We think they destroyed our food supply to slow us from chasing them down.”
“They said something about the kids not being safe,” I announced. “I don’t know that they meant.”
Sven nodded. “They were trained, but not as well as they could have been. Several people were able to wrestle their guns away. Whoever these people are, they’re new to armed attacks.”
Yami raised her hand. “How can we find Teo and Hope? If they have guns, and we don’t know where they went...what’s the plan, Sven?”
“I have no plan as of yet,” he replied. “I’ve heard rumors before of other children, and with that I’ve heard rumors of children stolen. I thought the rumors of pregnancy and children were just stories until I met both Ettas. Now it seems like the other story is true as well.”
“Then we have to go after them!” I called out. “They left just a little while ago. It’s not too late to catch them!”
“It’s far too late,” said a man I didn’t know. “We only have one truck. We can’t see any tracks in the dark. And by morning it will be too late.”
I leaned towards Yami. “We have to try, don’t we?” I whispered. “We can’t just sit here.”
Yami shushed me, but she took my hand in hers. She would want to go, too, but we didn’t have enough of the community’s trust to push back.
People asked more questions about injuries and treatments. Many ACers were worried that the Gray Suits would come back, and wanted to find better ways to defend themselves. Everyone was worried about Matana. They had questions about her injury that no one could answer; head injuries were hard to assess. Matana was the camp leader, and had always solved problems calmly and rationally. She might have already had a plan for defending ourselves or going after the kids. Or she would have led a conversation to help us make a plan. Sven was a good leader, but Matana’s loss was significant. People were more concerned with getting her treatment than with finding the kids right away.
Sven ended the meeting. There wasn’t much else to do, and everyone would need sleep before the morning, when we would need to rebuild the garden and restore the kitchen area. Yami and I walked back to the tent slowly.
“Should we check on Breck and Etta?” I asked.
“Look, they’re not in their tent,” said Yami. “They must still be in the medical tent with Torrice.” I saw Yami’s face in the lights that lit up the camp. I couldn’t face Breck and Etta, and neither could see.
“We’ll wait for the morning,” I said with tight lips.
I lay awake in the tent and rested my head on a pile of blankets. I could hear Yami breathing quickly, so I rolled over and took her into my arms. Her breathing slowed just a bit. We couldn’t sleep. There wouldn’t be much sleeping for any of us that night.
Chapter 7 – Yami
I woke up to find Charlie’s arm draped across me possessively. A few months ago I would have been furious with myself for letting him take care of me like that. Now it felt more comforting. I wanted to get up to find Etta and Breck, but didn’t want to wake Charlie. Instead, I took out my TekCast to message Omer about the attack and the abductions. Maybe he would know more about the Gray Suits, or maybe he had heard about kids going missing.
I sat up to type, completely forgetting about Charlie. His arm was thrown off me to the side, and he woke up, grimacing with pain. The bridge of his nose was black and swollen. It would take at least a week for it to heal. He had two black eyes. I had the one, and felt the side of my face to see how it was doing. It was puffed up, and my eye didn’t open all the way. But that wasn’t important now.
Omer was disgusted by the news.
“Never heard of missing kids,” he wrote. “Never heard of other kids though.”
“Can you ask around? See if anyone else heard about either?”
“I will ask around. No promises. Underground growing. Plans being made.”
I closed my eyes and exhaled. Omer was a strong advocate for community change, and the growing Underground membership was a good thing. But I couldn’t help feeling annoyed about what felt like almost an indifference to the fertility solution and the biological kids.
I messaged Vonna. I knew she would at least show more understanding.
“Someone took Hope,” I wrote. “The camp was attacked and she was stolen along with the other Etta’s son.”
“What? Who took them? Why? What are you going to do?”
I didn’t know what we were going to do. Charlie and I hadn’t had any time to talk about it, but I knew we both wanted to get out of the camp as soon as we could and find Hope and Teo. But I had no idea where they might be or how to get there. And I had no idea how to fight off a whole army of Gray Suits.
“We’re going to find them,” I typed. “Can you find out where you are? I want you to come here.”
“I’m fine. You worry about Hope.”
I clicked the TekCast shut. I swore loudly, and Charlie laughed. He
was still half awake and muttering to himself while he rubbed his eyes. I showed him the messages.
“She probably doesn’t want you to bug her now that she’s out on her own. You gave her a big job, she managed it, and she’s proud of herself. That’s good, isn’t it? I bet she’s just got an inflated ego is all. The ACers at her camp will keep her from causing trouble.”
“She’s making me worried again. She always does that,” I grumbled. “Who knows where she is or what trouble she could be getting into? I want more information.”
WE TOOK TRAYS OF FOOD from the dining tent to the medical tent where Breck and Etta were mourning over Hope. I didn’t know what to say. My heart was heavy – for Hope, for Teo, for their parents – and every time I let myself imagine them, wherever they were, I felt a stirring of anger deep inside me. Hope was taken for a reason. That’s why Teo disappeared too. If someone wanted them that badly, they wouldn’t hurt her. It was the only positive thing I could think of, and I wasn’t going to share it with Breck and Etta. It wouldn’t make them feel any differently.
“The gardens were destroyed, and the kitchen is a wreck,” Charlie said as he handed them fruit and protein bars. “This is all there is for now. Someone’s organizing a resource run.”
Etta’s eyes were puffy and she clung to Breck. I suddenly noticed Etta 2 sitting by herself in the corner, and nudged Charlie. He offered her the rest of our food and invited her to join us. Someone had fashioned her a splint for her leg and a crutch to help her move about. I saw what happened the night before. With multiple breaks, the splint wasn’t going to help much. Healing would take three times longer than it would at Young Woods.
Etta hobbled towards us. The crutch helped, but she still scrunched up her face with every step. She clearly needed bed rest and a lot of pain killers. Like my Etta, her eyes were puffy, but there was also a gray pallor to her face that worried me. She carried anger from more years of fear than we had experienced. If her leg wasn’t in such terrible shape, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she took off in the night to chase down the Gray Suits on her own.
