by J. S. Carter
The radio clicked back in response. “It's what I would do,” said Badger. “So what's our move?”
She thought about it for a moment, and the very real possibility of her leading us all through four square blocks of something that she had just designated a kill zone suddenly made me intensely depressed. How far would she take eight other people just for the chance to help hundreds? Even if there was no trap, even if she was being overly cautious, we were still running out of time.
I forced myself to take a steady breathe as she stuffed her earpiece into a pocket and held the radio up to her mouth. “We know we're not alone. We can't risk it. And we don't have enough time to go around...” She met my gaze. I was the priority again. “We're falling back to the truck. Cover our backs and get out the same way you got in. If you find a—”
“There's someone out there,” said Jeremy.
“Hold your pos,” Olivia spat into the radio. She turned around and joined Jeremy's face against the window. “What do you mean?”
Jeremy plastered a finger against the glass. “I mean there's someone there. Right there. Right in the middle. Something's wrong with his leg.” He barely finished saying it before a worn voice begged for help from within the square. The pain fell on deaf ears and it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up like electrified quills.
I brought my eyes up over the hood of the car to see a ragged shape stumble past an SUV and leave a trail of blood against its white exterior. The man shouted for help again, a sharp rasp to his voice. It sounded like he had already been stabbed and someone was twisting the knife lodged firmly in his lung.
Badger chimed in on the radio. “I think we just found our mystery gunshot.”
“Roger that,” said Olivia. “Watch him.”
“Son of bitch...” said Jeremy. He wiped his section of the window with a sweaty palm while the wailing man stepped out of my sight. “Goddammit. I know him...” He took a step back and I could see how suddenly pale his face had gotten. He stood up on shaky legs and Olivia immediately grabbed his chest to bring him back down.
She shoved his back against the car door with enough force to make the whole vehicle shake. “What the hell do you think you're doing?”
“I know who he is. We can't just leave him out there—”
“If you go out there, you're both dead.” Her words were hushed, yet pointed like a pin. It was a trap and she knew it. All her fears had been realized. All the elements were there. The bait was set. All it needed was someone vulnerable enough to spring it.
Jeremy only stared at her for a moment, the visible look of pain on his face matching the sounds bouncing over the cars in front of us. I had never seen him shutdown like that. I almost couldn't believe it.
I crawled over and grabbed his arm. I had no idea who Jeremy saw or why he was important to him, but I wanted to help. I didn't want to see him hurt. “We'll come back for him.”
He eyed me for a second that felt like forever. I had given him a lie based on an uncertain truth. There was no telling what would happen once we left. He must have known it. He gently peeled my fingers off and slowly shook his head. “I can't... I'm sorry...”
Sorry for what?
He apologized again and unclipped the strap on my rifle to connect it to Olivia's before springing up and running out into the open.
Olivia tried to follow, only to painfully yank me forward by our connection and we both hit the ground in a single heaping mess. She swore and broke the straps apart while Badger tried reaching her on the radio.
“Who the hell's moving out there?”
She brought the hand-held up to her face. “Get back to the truck. Now.” She pushed me away from the car and I fell again. “Get back, Tess.”
I watched her run out of sight to chase after Jeremy, my own body hung on indecision. It was a peculiar feeling to lay on the ground and feel the earth stop spinning. My mind was blank. I could only get up and run forward or back. The more I tried to think about it, the harder the decision was to make, so I got up. I ran forward.
Olivia was almost faster than I could keep track. I followed her through the maze of parked cars and slid over a hood to run into an opening. Her gun was already up. She was yelling at somebody else to drop theirs. I joined a few feet from her side and pointed my rifle at Jeremy's back without even realizing what was going on. His hands were up and he was trying to be heard over the yelling. It still took a good second to process the sight when I took another step to the side to see the wounded man holding a revolver up underneath his own chin. He was holding himself hostage. He was crying.
He screamed at us. “You shouldn't be here!”
Jeremy tried to talk him down. “Listen to me! You don't have to—”
“Get back!” the man cried. He cocked the hammer on his gun, instantly turning it into a hairline trigger. One of his legs was covered in blood and held out an awkward angle. He took a shallow breath and it looked to pain him more than anything else. He shook his head and started again with a shaky voice as streams ran down from puffy eyes. “I'm so sorry... They have my kids...”
I kept my sights trained on his chest. If the gun underneath the man's chin even came forward an inch...
Jeremy didn't care. He took a step closer. “Then don't do this. Help them.”
The man closed his eyes and seemed to bite his tongue. When he opened them back up again, he appeared sure of everything. “I am.”
The reasoning behind his words hit the three of us before anything else, even surpassing the pull of a finger and the accompanying bullet that cracked through the air to scramble his brain right in front of us. I flinched at the sudden explosiveness of the sound, yet could only stare as his body hit the ground in a lifeless heap.
“D-Dan,” Jeremy whimpered. He put a hand to his forehead and paced forward hesitantly before dropping to the ground and lifting the body up onto his knees. “Please, don't...”
I couldn't tear my eyes off the sight. Jeremy kept mumbling like his words would be able to put the bullet back where it belonged. He leaned over the fresh corpse and I could feel my eyes start to blister to match his own.
Nobody moved until Olivia turned around to see something else to guide her gun on to, and the accompanying hesitation in her voice would prove to be yet another notch in a long line of firsts that I would soon come to meet. “Tess...”
I glanced at her to see that she had brought a hand up and behind her head, grasping at the familiar handles of the blades that were supposed to be there. I looked around to see that we were in the dead center of Maryville's square. A plethora of vehicles dotted the grounds to forcibly limit any straight movements, cutting off any exits except for the one that we had come in through. Beyond that, small shapes began to slowly emerge from behind barricades, windows, ledges, and rooftops, each one visibly armed and threatening to open fire. Dozens and dozens of people were pointing their guns down at us. We were completely and unconditionally surrounded.
We had sprung the trap.
Negotiations
I brought my rifle up to meet a new target only to switch who I planned on shooting first again and again, knowing it would be utterly pointless. I finally picked a building to focus on and starting walking backwards without even realizing it, until my shoulder blades slowly brushed up against Olivia's. The safety of our small, personal little triangle was thoroughly misleading. A sobbing man and two guns pointed out and up against thirty, maybe even fifty by my quickest guess, but it might as well have been four hundred. It kept everything inside of me and then some from shooting first. The vivid premonition of a thousand bullets riddling us with holes from every conceivable angle kept the action at bay, but they hadn't shot yet.
We're not dead—Yet.
Why?
As if to answer the question directly, a small detachment popped out from behind a barricade and began to make its way toward us. Each member had a gun in hand. I switched to follow the closer targets like it would even matter. Th
ey stopped behind the nearest line of vehicles, all except for one. Their leader, a thin and pale, middle-aged balding man, came out and met us halfway in the relative opening of the square. He was unarmed.
Nobody said anything for a few tense seconds. Only the sound of my pulse radiating throughout my neck and the rush out of the heavy, ash-laden wind made it to my ears, though it all seemed dwarfed by the massive pressure from the shear amount of firearms pointed in our direction. The man eventually opened his mouth, fully neglecting to pay the recently deceased bait and its griever leaning over it any attention.
“You came here with six others. Bring them here and we can discuss your terms.”
Nothing.
He had introduced the concept like it was Monday morning. He took a breath and tried again, his patience wearing thinner at the sound. “Bring the others so that we can discuss your terms.”
I forced myself to look back at Olivia and watched her stare the man down with cold eyes. I had no idea how powerful she was, but she must have known what the change in odds meant. She couldn't save all of us, and whoever was holding us at gunpoint knew our numbers. Whatever advantage we had before, we had lost it completely. There would be no point in faking it. She pulled the radio from her belt and started transmitting.
“Badger. Sit-rep.” A soft click followed by a few seconds of static led to the sound of his voice.
“I'm with the kids. Got a short little skid mark pointing his gun at my face over here. Says he wants to take us to you.” Another round of silence, and then: “How are you?”
It would have been amusing, like a new couple recounting their day together, except that the real possibility of everyone dying was too high for it to be funny. Olivia glanced at Jeremy before bringing the radio back up. “Do what they say. But if they start something, end it.”
“Copy that.”
She clipped the radio back onto her belt and the man merely nodded politely. He didn't seem to mind the veiled threat. And why would he? We were completely outnumbered and outgunned in the middle of a makeshift pit. Why even discuss anything?
The question continued to fester while we waited for the rest of our group to arrive in uncomfortable silence. I turned around at the sound of muffled steps to see a pair of armed teenagers leading Badger and everyone else to our cozy little death-pit. The boys leading them looked like they had no business holding rifles, much less using them to threaten anyone into compliance, though the body in Jeremy's arms with blood spilling out of its once intact head did more than they ever could to change that. He had called him Dan.
I grabbed Isabel's hand on a whim as she stopped next to me and gave her my best “It'll be okay” look. It was enough to get her to turn away from the body and refocus on me. She squeezed back with a new terror in her eyes that I knew I couldn't do anything to get rid of, but I had to try.
Badger hovered around Olivia, his rifle still in his hands but not even bothering to point it at anyone. He muttered to her underneath his breathe while staring the nearest kid down until the little shit grew uncomfortable enough to look away. “Main road's the best way out. We can cover you and the kids, but you're really gonna have to pull something out of your ass.”
She continued to look ahead. “Nobody's getting left behind.”
He oddly enough took the opportunity to check her out, as if the tight-fitting form of the back of her pants could have possibly held the source of her powers. “You got a better plan?”
She caught his gaze and a wordless story passed between the two of them on a hidden thread. It made me wonder if I was witnessing inhibitions crumble amidst the darkness of certain death. She turned back ahead and started to say something only to have her new angle fall away.
“I'll be your negotiator until Abel arrives,” the man interrupted. “I'll need one of you to represent your group ahead of time. He'll prefer a woman.”
Negotiator?
“Who's Abel?” asked Olivia.
The negotiator continued to ignore her, instead opting to walk down the line and look me over like a creep before stopping just at my side. “You.”
Isabel shuddered at the word. The man didn't care to notice. He simply stood an arm's length from her face and peered down while guns continued to point at us from every direction. He looked too pale up close, as if all the blood had been sucked from his skin.
“What are your terms?”
Terms for what?
Were we surrendering? Was he trying to make a trade? The point seemed mute as they held a grip around our group's collective, proverbial ball-sack so tight that they hadn't even felt the need to take our guns away. It also begged the question of why the hell anyone was still in the town when a firestorm continued to burn at their doorstep, the smell of which had quickly turned into a thousand campfires intensely increasing along with the layers of smoke above our heads.
I watched Isabel as every identical thought passed through her head and probably more. She managed to take a shaky breathe and collect herself, though at the loss of the strength of her own voice. “W-We need vehicles...” she stammered. “We need buses to move—”
“Buses break and gas isn't cheap,” he rebutted flatly. “What can you offer in return?”
Something held itself back in Isabel's head as she struggled to understand what was happening. She forced herself to continue, probably hoping that the man in front of her had merely decided to show force in an abundance of caution. “Food. We have MREs. High caloric—”
“That's not good enough,” the man interrupted again. “Do you have any weapons?”
She let herself lose focus for a moment and gaze at the countless number of people surrounding us who were already armed. It looked like the last thing they needed was more guns. What the hell were they prepping for? A war? “Yes, but—”
“Where? How many of you are there?”
Isabel opened her mouth to answer and stopped just as the rest of us must have realized what was happening at the same time. The man wasn't looking for a trade. He was looking for information. He wanted everything there was to know about us so that it would all be easier for the taking.
Olivia answered for her. A tense spark gleamed in her eye, a subtle sign that she was pissed to see her friends threatened and pressed for intel. “We don't care what the fuck you want. You don't need weapons. You need food.”
The man tried to say something, but this time it was his turn to wait.
“You've been cut off from supply for weeks,” said Olivia. “We need transportation and your people need food. We can help each other. All you need to do is make a small detour.”
The man grinned at her new-found teeth. It hid the truth of her argument well. “We're not going anywhere.”
She eyed that curiously, almost in disbelief while we all stood in the shade of a billowing cloud of smoke the size of a thunderhead. There was no shelter safe enough that could save them from the coming inferno. No place hidden enough to spare them from indiscriminate scorched earth. “If you stay here, you're dead.”
The man merely shook his head and took a step back to look at the evolving catastrophe, as smug as can be. “You obviously don't understand.”
“Then explain it to me.” She stared up at him intently, until he smiled and enlightened her as if she were a child.
“Those deemed impure of heart and soul will be purged by flame... while only the chosen will enter into her kingdom.” He smiled again, and I felt the sudden urge to punch him square in the face for trying to belittle Olivia with what sounded like quoted scripture. Then he let us know the truth of the matter. “Mother will save us.”
Mother...
I watched Olivia's back stiffen while my knees almost gave way.
No. No. No, that's not good.
Juno had called Knox mother. The last time the word had been muttered like that, my face had nearly been torn off and my only friend had been taken away from me. A million guns could have been pointed at my face and it still would
n't match the new fear rumbling up from the bottom of my belly. Forget the guns and the buses and the wall of fire. We needed to leave.
Fast.
“No...” the negotiator continued and walked back off towards his group. “I'm afraid that won't be good enough. We'll just have to wait for Abel for the final call. Our people deserve better. After all...” He put a hand on a boy's shoulder. “Mother would ensure that we only receive the best.”
I couldn't help but watch the kid smile back like it was a car wreck, the feeling in my stomach progressively making me sicker until I thought I was going to pass out entirely. If Emma had somehow gotten a hold of an entire settlement... I couldn't even entertain the thought. The sudden surge of jealousy made me want to peel their skin off one by one.
Olivia must have connected the dots, but she seemed to take it a lot better than me. “Who's Abel?”
The negotiator brought his attention back over to her with a furrowed brow, surprised that she even had to ask. “Abel is the Arbiter. He is the chosen one. The new prophet. Invested with mother's glory, he will show us the way. He will guide us to salvation.” He stepped back towards us and lifted a hand forward in an unfitting peaceful gesture, a smug, violence-inciting smile on his face. “In fact, he's the reason you're all here now. He prophesied your return.”
A sudden movement caught itself in the corner of my eye and I glanced over at Jeremy. He was still hunched over the man who had pressed a revolver underneath his own chin and pulled the trigger, the man who he had somehow known and cared for only to see him used as a tool to get us all out and into the open. And now that it was done—there was nothing. No hint of remorse from the strangers taking us hostage or even a mention of his cooling body. I couldn't see his face, but I could tell that something inside of Jeremy had snapped at the idea that he finally had someone to blame for a pointless death.
