by Ilsa J. Bick
Please, God. As Ellie’s wagon rumbled past, he raised a hand. He thought Ellie shouted something, but her words were drowned by the clop of horses’ hooves and the creak of wagons and the few excited huffs of dogs. Please, keep her safe.
In another moment, the moon hid its face, thick shadows swallowed the wagon, and Ellie was gone from him, again, lost to the dark.
106
“How long are we going to stay here?” Cindi asked the guard. She curled against Luke the way he remembered his cat used to: warmth-seeking behavior, his mom called it. Luke used to hate how much that cat shed, but now he really missed the dumb thing, not to mention his parents. Slipping an arm around Cindi’s shoulders, he pulled her a little closer. A half hour after Finn’s men and their Chuckies had streamed into camp, two more men had trotted up, leading a mare. When Luke spotted her and an ashen Chad astride the horse, he’d made an idiot of himself, twisting away from Mellie and capturing Cindi in a bear hug: I thought you were dead, I thought you were dead!
“S’up to the boss,” the guard said, tipping coffee into a camp mug. Half a smoke was glued to the guard’s lower lip. Exhaling a gray jet, he sipped, sighed, pulled in another drag, and said, in a strangled voice, “Wouldn’t mind some decent sleep when this is done, though.”
“So we’re at Rule?” Luke waved away fumes. The way these guys smoked, they should chew burnt logs and get over it already. This particular old guard sported a ratty moustache so saturated with nicotine it was dirty orange. “Are we staying here? What about the kids in Rule?’
“You ask too many questions, you know that?” Turning away with a lazy shrug, the mustachioed guard hooked a thumb under the carry strap of his Uzi. “If I was you kids,” he said, sauntering toward a much larger fire and the other three guards, all of them sucking cancer sticks, “I’d get some sleep instead of freezing your asses. Gonna be light in about an hour.”
From his place opposite Luke, Chad muttered, “Yeah, well, it’s my ass to freeze, butt-face.” Sighing, he stirred a steaming MRE, listlessly chewed a mouthful of macaroni and cheese, then dropped the spoon into the pouch. “Stomach’s too jumpy.”
To Chad’s left, Jasper piped up. “You going to finish that?”
“How can you eat?” Cindi asked.
“I’m hungry.” Jasper shoveled in a huge mouthful. “Too wired to sleep,” he said, his voice clogged by cheesy noodles. “This has to be it. I mean, he took all the Chuckies.” He gestured with the spoon to a large stainless-steel animal cage, standing empty on a flatbed slotted in with the other wagons. “Even those guys.”
“So if this is Rule,” Cindi said, “and those kids are still there, what will they do with us now? Do you think they’ll … that they might …”
“No,” Luke said, and put both arms around her. He wanted to say something movie-tough, like Finn’s guys would have to get through him first, but the words just wouldn’t come.
“But we should make a move.” Chad tossed a look over his shoulder to check for the guards, then leaned closer. “We’re the three oldest. There’s four of them, three of us.”
“Hey,” Jasper said around a mouthful of macaroni. “I’m here.”
“You’re ten. Keep eating.” Chad rolled his eyes. “If we can get guns …”
“Yeah, well, if is a pretty big word right now,” Luke said.
“But we’re just sitting here.”
“I don’t see that we can do anything else.”
“I agree with Chad.” When Luke looked down at her, Cindi continued in a whisper, “Except for those guards, everyone else is gone. We’ll probably never have a better shot.”
“And go where, Cindi?” Luke asked.
“Anywhere. Luke, we could raid the supply wagons, grab some guns and food, and go.”
“Cindi, we have thirty kids. Us three and a couple other guys can handle a gun, and that’s it. How would we move everyone and all the stuff we need? We can’t outrun Finn.”
“But I don’t like waiting around for Finn to decide what happens next.” Chad jerked his head at the transport cage. “You want to end up in one of those?”
“No, I don’t,” Luke said to Chad. “But staying alive beats dying.”
“Not if we end up like Peter,” Jasper said.
After five days with Finn and his weird Chuckies, who were exactly like the girl Tom had fought weeks ago, Luke had a queasy sense of what was in store.
Peter was too old to be a Chucky, older than Tom for sure, by a couple years. But his eyes were raving red, and God, he ate what the Chuckies did: thawed slabs of frozen oldsters stacked like cordwood in a special Chucky chuck wagon. Which meant that Finn had probably given Peter the same crap Tom figured someone fed those Chuckies in white. Only it hadn’t worked on Peter, who spent half his time in his cage screaming—let me go, let me go, let me go go go—and the other half trying to get at Finn. Sometimes Finn hurt him pretty bad. Never laid a hand on Peter, but wow, a couple seconds with Finn and that creepy Davey, who followed Finn everywhere like a dog, and Peter was moaning, howling, clutching his head.
“It’s like he hears something.” When Luke turned his gaze away from the transport cage, Cindi said, “You know? When Peter starts up with the let me go stuff? But how? He’s only … half a Chucky, you know?”
“But crazy,” Chad said.
“Not all the time,” Luke said. “All this stuff, the go go go, that usually starts up whenever Finn moves out.”
“Telepathy?” Cindi asked.
“Can’t be straight telepathy.” Swallowing the last of the mac and cheese, Jasper licked the plastic spoon. “At least, not like the movies or what you’re thinking.”
“What else could it be? You were at the barn.” What had happened when Finn’s Chuckies descended on their camp scared Luke silly: how they broke formation, half going left and the rest like a marching band at halftime, streaming to the right. Then, the Chuckies had done … nothing. Only waited, staring, their concentration utterly complete. It was so quiet that Luke could hear the crackle of the fire and the jangle of hardware as horses tossed their heads. It was the weirdest thing, but Luke sensed that the Chuckies were being … held back? Yes, they’d wanted him. They’d wanted Mellie. What they’d most hungered after was all those juicy kids huddled in the barn.
But they weren’t allowed. They were like … puppets? That wasn’t quite right. It was as if something or someone held them back on invisible leashes: this far and no farther.
“Yeah, but have you ever tried following your own thoughts? Real complicated.” Smoothing the empty MRE pouch on his thighs, Jasper began rolling the plastic into a tight tube. “Plus, you have the problem of signal strength and complexity.”
Luke and Cindi looked at each other. “What are you talking about?” Luke asked.
“Thoughts are, you know, jumbly,” Jasper said.
“Okay. So?”
Jasper gave him a duh-hello look. “What does Peter do? Does he talk about a gazillion things? No. He keeps saying the same thing over and over again: go, go, go, let me go.”
“Yeah, but he’s crazy,” Chad said.
“Not all the time.” Jasper peered through the tube he’d made like a pirate with a spyglass. “He’s worse when the Chuckies are on the move. Other times, he’s normal.”
“He eats people,” Cindi said. “His eyes are weird.”
“Okay, not normal-normal, but not all Chucky either. Whenever Finn does take him along, Peter’s either tied up or with a couple guards.”
“Probably because Finn can’t control him very well?” Luke said.
“Or all the way, yeah. And the times Finn’s left him here? Peter’s not as loud and crazy. He gets better the longer Finn’s gone. I think it’s a cumulative exposure and distance thing, like, you know, Wi-Fi.”
Wuh? “So?” Luke asked, and then as Jasper swiveled, still with the tube to his eye, added, “Would you quit that? It’s annoying.”
“Fine.” Jasper heaved a long-su
ffering sigh. “I don’t think Peter’s saying let me go, like get me out of this cage so I can go home. He might mean, let me go go go after them. Go go go is the command. Maybe all Finn does are simple commands piggybacked on other signals.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” Cindi said.
“Yeah, the Chuckies aren’t radios,” Chad said.
Radios. Luke turned that over. Wi-Fi. Something important there … something Jasper said about signal strength, not just distance but something else.
“Guys. What do you think a thought is?” Jasper said. “Electrical impulses, that’s all. The body’s full of electricity. You’ve got gradients across your skin and ion flow in cells.”
“What?” Cindi said. “So how does that work in this situation?”
“Well, thoughts are chemical and electrical … I don’t know.” Jasper’s shoulders rose and fell. “Look, I can’t tell you how Finn’s doing it, but he can’t be slinging real complicated stuff around, or if he is, only a couple Chuckies get the whole thing. Maybe even just one Chucky.”
“Whoa. Wait a sec.” Cindi sat up. “He’s right. Two groups of Chuckies, the ones in white …”
“And everybody else,” Chad said. “Like, maybe it doesn’t work with every Chucky?”
“Or he doesn’t need a ton to get the job done,” Luke said. “But he’s limited by distance, like when your Wi-Fi drops out when you’re too far from a network.” He kept thinking: signal strength; signal strength and a network …
“Okay, I buy that. But …” Chad threw up his hands. “So what? We’re still stuck.”
Luke didn’t see how this helped either, but his head felt like he’d spent all night cramming for a test he was sure to bomb. Sometimes when he walked away from a problem, the answer popped into his head. “I’m going for water.” As he stood, all four guards perked up. “Water,” he said, holding up his canteen and giving it a shake.
“Hold on.” Heaving to his feet, the mustachioed guard lumbered over. A lit cigarette jutted from his mouth. “All right, let’s go,” he said, handing over a flashlight.
“It’s not like I’m going to run anywhere,” Luke complained, but the guard only grunted and made a get going gesture with the Uzi.
The stream was beyond the kids’ tents and a short distance into the woods. Following his flashlight, Luke ducked into the trees, where the light was worse and the shadows thicker. Ahead, he heard the churn of water over stones. The final twenty feet to the stream took a sharp drop. “I ain’t going down there. Bad for my knees. Make it quick,” the guard said, as the orange coal of his smoke danced. “Freezing my ass.”
Oh, bite me. Carefully picking his way over stones and scrims of ice, Luke fanned the light over the sparse snow along the stream’s edge, looking for a safe spot where he wouldn’t wind up wet. As the beam flickered past a splotch of slush, he spotted something that only registered when his light had already skimmed past. Puzzled, he turned the beam back and saw two things: snow heaped around a rock where all the rest nearby were still covered, and a trio of animal prints. Probably an animal had disturbed the snow as it stepped past. From the prints, at first glance, he thought: wolf. Huge, too. That print was bigger than his hand, and fresh. As in, not long ago.
Considering that, all of a sudden, he was glad for the guard and his gun. Make this quick is right. The last thing he needed to run into was a hungry wolf. He had enough problems. Heart pounding, he swiveled right, dragging his light over a curving meander—and froze when two green coins flared alongside the silver oval of a face.
The green eyes belonged to a honking huge gray-white wolf.
But the face belonged to a girl.
107
Luke was so freaked, a scream fizzed into his throat that he just as quickly bottled behind clamped teeth. The impulse to turn and run was so strong the flashlight jittered from a sudden fit of the shakes.
The wolf didn’t move. But the girl did, raising a warning finger to her lips and then crooking her hand the way Morpheus had to Neo: not bring it on but come here.
For a split second, he thought, Oh, you got to be kidding. This was like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. Get near a strange kid who was just the right age to be a Chucky? Hell no. Then he considered that this girl was a) hiding and b) with an animal, and that except for Finn’s weirdo Chuckies, all the ones he knew were the kind who snacked first and asked questions later.
“Kid, what the …” The mustached guard’s voice was lost as the guy hacked, then hawked up something from deep in his chest. He spit and then croaked, “Damn coffin nails.” Louder: “What’s the holdup?”
“Uh …” Luke dragged up his voice from his toenails. The girl was shaking her head. “There’s a lot of ice. Be up in a couple seconds.”
The guard muttered something, and Luke thought the guy might come down after all. But then a flame leapt as the guard lit up a fresh smoke. Turning, he saw that the girl was now only a foot away, her wolf—or maybe a really big husky or something—at attention by her side.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
“How many guards?” she murmured. Now that she was closer, he thought she must be around seventeen, eighteen, and decked out in a funky, fluttery camo-jacket, the hood cinched down tight, accentuating high cheekbones, a narrow nose, and strong jaw. The sharp dash of a widow’s peak was just visible high on her forehead, but he couldn’t tell what color her hair was. Her eyes, though, were an intense, deep emerald green, as bright as the wolf’s. From her clothing and roughed hands—not to mention that Springfield she was packing and the sheathed knives strapped to either leg—he thought she’d been in the woods, on her own, for a long time. She looked like a wild wolf-girl.
“Four. One here, three back at the tents.” He paused. “Are you from Rule?”
She shook her head. “Weapons?”
“Uzis, and they all have pistols.”
A deep wrinkle formed between her eyebrows. “Can you handle a gun?” When he nodded, she said, “Get the guard to come down.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask what she was going to do, then he considered how that was just dumb. Nodding, he stood and called, “Hey, I need some help down here? I … I …”
“What the hell,” the guard said, bored, no question in his tone at all. “What happened.”
Luke injected a note of misery. “I fell in,” he said, then plunged his hand into ice water and splashed around. “And my boot came off. I can’t find it and …”
“Aw, Jesus.” An exasperated sigh, followed by the clop of heavy feet. “Hang on.”
“Thanks.” Luke managed a pathetic note. He risked a quick peek with the light, but the girl and her humongous wolf or dog or whatever had vanished. Swiveling, he pegged his flashlight beam to the guard, who was working his way down in a crabbing sidestep. Too late, he remembered: Shit, I’m supposed to have lost my boot. “Hey,” he said, then dropped to his knees, angling his light until the beam splashed directly into the guard’s face. “Over here.”
“Jesus, kid.” Squinting, the guard put up both hands to shield his eyes. A fresh cigarette was screwed into his mouth. “Move the light, you’re gonna—”
Luke saw the girl, who must’ve scrambled higher until she was well above the guard, suddenly rear into view like an actor caught in the flare of a full spot. Her elbows were cocked, and then she was jabbing fast. The butt of her Springfield hit the guard’s skull with a loud thock. The old man grunted, a short huh; his cigarette shot away from his mouth, the orange eye streaking like a comet. The guard’s feet tangled, but he was already unconscious, completely limp, only his momentum tumbling him face-first to a skidding stop just short of the water.
Whoa. For a stunned second, Luke could only stare as the girl swiftly stripped the guard of his Uzi and passed over the handgun to him. Standing, she let out a loud cough at the same moment she cranked back the Uzi’s bolt, the metallic crick-crack lost in the noise. “I really don’t want to risk shots,” s
he whispered, then suddenly winced. A hand snuck to her temple, and she swayed as if from a sudden shove. “The sound will …” She broke off with a harsh grunt.
“Are you okay?” He reached an automatic hand but reconsidered when the wolf, obviously sensing the girl’s discomfort, whined and then nosed the girl’s thigh. She looked like someone had just clocked her, but her expression was eerie, something he’d seen before. Then he had it: she looked a little like Peter when Finn lobbed one of his brain-bomb things. Luke let his hand drift back to his side, suddenly unsure she wouldn’t go just as ape-shit. Maybe she was a Finn experiment who’d escaped.
“I’m fine.” A tight smile died midway to her mouth. Sprawled at their feet, the felled guard snored. Kneeling, she turned the old man’s head until his breathing quieted.
“Who are you? Where’d you come from?”
“Been following you the last two days,” she said. Her wolf was, he thought, some kind of half-breed, a cross between a wolf and a malamute or huge husky. “Had to wait until they moved out. Buck.” Turning, she patted her leg and the wolfdog eeled to her side. “All right,” she said, jerking her head toward the slope. “Get as many down here as you can.”
“How do I do that?”
Now, a true smile, as fleeting as a swift high cloud, touched her lips. “Panic.”
“Help, help!” And then while Cindi was still digesting that, Luke followed the cry with a screech that raised the hairs on her arms and neck.
“Oh!” Heart cramming into her mouth, she jumped up and cast a wild look in the direction from which Luke’s screams had come. “Luke?” she called. “Luke, what—”
“What’s going on?” Chad cried. He and Jasper had bolted to their feet. Weapons drawn, the three guards were hurrying over just as Luke clawed his way out of the grainy half-light. His eyes were shiny as headlamps.
“What is it, kid?” one of the guards demanded as Luke stumbled over. “Where’s—”
“By the stream. I think he … he had a heart attack or something. He just kind of grabbed his chest and—” Luke’s face crumpled. “I don’t know CPR!”
