The Purge of District 89 (A Grower's War Book 1)

by D. J. Molles

  “Hey!” Getty reached for him.

  Walter tucked his pilfered battlerifle close to his side, the stock of it under his armpit, and he reached out and snatched Getty’s wrist and hauled him up in one smooth, strong motion. He might not be a soldier, he might not know what “peel” meant or how to hit anything with a rifle, but he had strong arms. Strong arms that were used to hauling heavy things. And Getty was nothing but a faulty tractor component that needed to be hauled from Point A to Point B.

  He slung Getty’s arm over his shoulder in a smooth, hip-tossed movement, and he started pumping his legs. He could feel them hitting hard. He could feel the unsteadiness of the leaves shifting under his feet, but he knew these woods, oh yes he did, and it came back quick, it came back like riding a bike. All it needed was a little spark, a little something to bypass all that adult forgetfulness and access all that childhood knowledge that was hiding in the deep parts of his brain.

  Up ahead, he could see the forms of Virgil and Tria, crouched behind a tree.

  Tria was still firing. The rounds came out in bursts. The red glare pulsed in the night like a beacon.

  Get behind that. Get behind that and you will be safe.

  He realized his breath was rattling in his throat again.

  Getty was groaning, trying to help by pistoning his one good leg, but the movement was doing more harm than good, working him out of his grasp.

  “Stop moving!” Walter yelled hoarsely. “Let me carry you!”

  Getty either didn’t hear or didn’t care. He kept working that one leg.

  Walter didn’t have the air available to yell again, so he just kept moving.

  They were abreast of the tree now.

  Walter threw Getty like a sack of seed. The man tumbled into the cover of the tree, just a pace or so behind Virgil and Tria. Walter slid in behind him like a runner going for home base. He came up on his belly, looking at Tria’s silhouette, framed in red-muzzle flash.

  Virgil was locked on him.

  He was furious.

  Then Tria ducked back behind the tree.

  “Empty!” she screamed, seemed to scream it at her rifle, like it had done something to offend her. Smoke lifted from a vacant, locked-open breach. She had the rifle braced against her side and her other hand scrambled across her softarmor until it found a magazine and yanked it out. “Reloading!” she screamed at the rifle again.

  Virgil bent forward to Getty. “Gimme the rifle!”

  Getty gave it up without a fight. He was too busy trying to find that tiny little spot behind the tree where he was actually protected. But the tree wasn’t thick enough for four people.

  Virgil swept the rifle to his shoulder. He pressed his back against the tree. Pressed himself up into a standing position, standing over the three of them. “Y’all get ready to move.”

  Tria wiggled herself further into cover, yelling and cursing. The magazine was not cooperating. Then she finally got it in the well and it clicked into place. She fumbled about for the bolt-release. Found it. Sent it home. “Okay.” She said. “Okay, we’re ready.”

  “Help me with Getty,” Walter said.

  “Where the hell did Hank go?” she demanded.

  A round slapped the side of their tree, sent a spray of splinters into the air.

  Virgil twitched. “Shit! Who gives a fuck about Hank? Get ready to move!”

  “Help me with Getty!” Walter said again, working his knees under his body, trying to stay small, trying to stay in that tiny little safe area that seemed to be shrinking. His right arm throbbed unpleasantly.

  “Ready?” Virgil called. “Get ready!”

  “Hold on!” Walter called out.

  Tria was barely on her feet, barely had her hands on Getty yet, and they certainly didn’t have the man in a position to start carrying him.

  “Move!” Virgil wasn’t waiting. He leaned out of cover, just enough for the muzzle of his weapon to clear the tree and the hammering started again, although now it wasn’t so offensive, now it barely hurt against Walter’s ear drums.

  They were going numb to the sound. Or deaf.

  Walter yelled a curse that he couldn’t even hear in his own head.

  He hooked his arm under Getty’s armpit.

  Tria let her rifle fall to her chest again and grabbed Getty with both arms. “Let’s gogogogogo!” she urged.

  Walter put his back to Virgil and started running again. He got about two paces before he realized that just hauling Getty to the tree in the first place had taxed his legs to the point of failure and now they felt slow and unwieldy.

  Not good. Not good. I need to go faster.

  I don’t wanna get shot.

  Don’t wanna get shot.

  Need to go faster!

  Everything was blurry blacks and reds. His vision darkled at the corners. Fear like fireworks in his mind. The thing that lit in your brain like an overloaded circuit and it sparked violently inside of you and the only message your brain received was run like a motherfucker!

  Somewhere in the run, somewhere in the sludgy thoughts, a clear one came out.

  You need to cover Virgil.

  CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

  CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

  Virgil was still shooting.

  He was still alive.

  Still stuck at the tree.

  “Stop!” Walter gasped.

  Tria was hurting. He could hear the breath coming in and out of her in ragged gulps.

  He wasn’t any better.

  Getty was groaning.

  They staggered to a tree.

  Too small.

  Didn’t matter. It was all they had.

  Exhaustion and adrenaline clashed in his muscles.

  He thrust himself against the tree, because it was the only way he could hold the rifle steady. He took one great big breath of air and belted it out: “Set!” and his abdominal muscles roared with the effort. And then another big breath and: “PEEL!”

  Not that he knew what any of that meant.

  But monkey see, monkey do.

  And he started firing.

  Oh God, what if I hit him?

  But he could see Virgil running towards him, his mouth wide open, like the big intake port on a gunship, just below the nose, just sucking in as much air as it could. Virgil ran quick. He ran smooth. His body was better trained for combat than Walter’s.

  Walter’s wasn’t trained at all.

  He kept pulling the trigger.

  He looked out into the night as he did, hoping to see the muzzle flashes of whoever was shooting at them—New Breeds, oh my God, they’re coming for us—but he could see nothing.

  New Breeds.

  Gunships.

  Drones.

  It was just a matter of time, right? Just a matter of time before…

  “Go!” Virgil bolted passed him, reaching out a hand and slapping Walter hard on the shoulder. “Let’s go! We broke contact! Move back!”

  Chapter 14

  Walter ran through the woods. Through the darkness.

  Virgil had taken hold of Getty after a few steps, and he and Walter now hauled him along with them while Tria trailed them, constantly checking behind. But they all knew that there would be nothing to see. If the soldiers were there, they would be shooting at them, and they would not be seen until that happened.

  Just ahead, the trees ended abruptly. They’d run into the edge of this strip of forest, and out beyond those trees stood the endless hydroponics lines and tractor rails.

  The wide open.

  “Shit!” Virgil slowed their pace, looking up and down the line of trees. It was like a cliff, that line of trees.

  Hanging between Walter and Virgil, Getty let out a strangled groan.

  Tria bumped into Walter’s back, then stumbled around to the front. “We gotta keep running. They won’t be far behind.”

  “Where are the gunships?” Virgil said, looking skyward again, huffing hard.

  “Who cares where they are?” Tria snapp
ed at him, edging impatiently towards the open ground of the fields beyond the trees. “We can’t just sit here!”

  Walter found himself nodding. “She’s right. Virgil, we need to keep going—”

  “Don’t tell me what we need to do!” Virgil shouted at both of them. “Neither of you know what the fuck you’re talking about! So shut the fuck up!” he looked around hastily. “Where the fuck did Hank go?”

  Walter wanted to feel angry, but he just didn’t have the oomph in him at that moment. He was too busy sucking down air. Too busy readjusting his grip on Getty so the man wouldn’t fall to the ground. Too busy trying to ignore the ache in his arm from clinging to the battlerifle. Because he certainly wasn’t going to let that fall from his hands either.

  “Hey, guys!” a voice hissed out from somewhere in the trees around them.

  Tria jerked like she’d been stung and brought her rifle to her shoulder, swinging it in broad, rapid arcs across her field of fire, searching for who had spoken.

  A dark shape coalesced out of the rest of the shadows and then emerged into a skein of moonlight that was leaking through the canopy of trees.

  Hank’s panic-driven, sweat-glistened face stared back at them, wide-eyed, a half smile on his lips that looked incredibly ridiculous sitting there on him, and in that moment, all of the sudden Walter wasn’t too tired to get angry.

  “Where did you go!” Walter snapped at the man. Not even a question. It was an accusation.

  Walter’s mind went rolling back, taking a break from reality in the span of just a second or two—just the time that Hank stood there with his mouth working for words, blinking in the darkness like a faulty computer trying to perform a command.

  As Walter’s mind went back, he came up with some pertinent questions, like, How in the hell were you running when the rest of us were standing there staring at Merko’s arm?

  Hank pointed out into the field, his arm bobbing up and down to the rhythm of his rapid breathing. “There’s a house out there. I saw the floodlights.”

  Virgil shook his head violently. “I don’t wanna go out in the open.”

  Tria looked surprised. “I don’t hear any gunships.”

  “There could be drones.”

  “If there were drones, they’re looking at us right now!” she pointed skyward. “You think that canopy is covering all this movement? Not a chance.”

  “We can’t just run through the woods all night,” Walter said.

  Virgil whipped his head to look at him. “You shut the fuck up!”

  If there hadn’t been a wounded man hung between them, Walter would’ve taken the fight right then and there. His chest hitched with mad animal breaths, his blood ran hot like it was filled with molten lead, and he wanted that fight, he didn’t care about the consequences, he just wanted to hit Virgil, wanted to take him down a few pegs.

  “Listen, motherfucker—”

  “Guys!” Getty interrupted.

  His voice somehow managed to cool the two of them. Like water on hot coals, turning a fire to charred black.

  “We need to get inside, Bossum,” Getty said. “I need help. You can’t help me if we’re runnin’.”

  Virgil looked at his friend, then bent forward slighty and looked at the man’s leg, as though he was, for the first time, coming to grips with the fact that Getty was injured, had taken a bullet to the leg, and was bleeding.

  Walter followed his gaze down to the pants leg. From the thigh all the way down to about mid-calf, his light-gray pants were glistening black.

  “Come on, Virgil,” Tria said. “We need to get in that house.”

  “We don’t know who’s in that house,” he said, but didn’t sound as staunchly opposed as he had moments before staring at his friend’s blood.

  Tria shook her head. “It doesn’t matter who’s in that house. Loyalists or supporters, we’re the ones with the guns. We’re gonna use that house and there’s nothing they can do about it. Desperate times, Virgil.”

  Somewhere in the distance, a gunship growled through the night.

  That decided him.

  Virgil started moving forward. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  ***

  The house was on the other side of a slight rise in the field. The moon hanging overhead cast the hydroponics lines and tractor rails like veins of mercury exuding up from some rich basin of ore somewhere below the dirt.

  The five of them struggled through loose-packed soil that squelched beneath their shoes as though it was just from a hard rain, but it was just all the soil conditioner they’d pumped into the fields. Walter could smell it, a smell like metal and bleach and fertilizer.

  Hank took Walter’s spot at Getty’s side to give him a breather. They stepped over the hydroponics lines easily, but the tractor rails were higher off the ground and they stumbled over them and grunted and breathed heavily as they got Getty over.

  Getty tried to stay quiet as his leg banged the side of the rail, but sometimes he would clench his teeth and hiss, sending a fine mist of spit spraying into the air.

  Virgil asked hurried questions as they went: “Did it hit the bone?”

  “I dunno.”

  “How bad are you bleeding?”

  “I don’t know!” Getty was irritated. “Haven’t had time to look at it!”

  “Aigh’,” Virgil was patient with Getty. For the briefest of glimpses, Walter saw the respect the Virgil had for him, and along with that respect, a deep fear of losing him. That fear brushed the corners of Virgil’s eyes and mouth, like a filter on a photo, subtly changing the colors.

  Watching Virgil in that moment, Walter saw a level of fondness and mutual respect that surpassed anything that Virgil had ever felt for Walter. Virgil had had those feelings for Roy, too. But never Walter. Despite all the time they’d known each other. Despite everything that had happened in the last decade. Despite all of that, Virgil would never have any respect for Walter.

  And Walter had to wonder, even in the breathless, terror-drenched moments as they ran through open fields like exposed antelope in lion country, and they heard the far-off rumble of gunships like threatening storms on the horizon, he had to wonder if it really was because Virgil couldn’t see the real Walter, or was it because Walter was truly flawed in ways he himself could not see?

  Perhaps Walter was weak.

  And maybe Virgil saw that weakness, and disdained it.

  “There it is,” Tria whispered loudly.

  They were at the top of a slope. Walter huffed hard and cast a knowing eye over the wide-open space that was set out before them. It had to be a section of about a hundred acres. The land dipped down from where they were, down to a little swale, and then up again onto another hill, and on the peak of that other hill was the house. It was a small farmhouse, not unlike Walter’s.

  From where they were, they could not see the highway due to a skein of blocking trees, but they could see the dirt road that led off of it, cutting a narrow swath across the fields straight to the house. It branched once, off in a direction further away from them, and Walter assumed it was probably to another nearby house.

  The house was dark, except for a single set of floodlights on the corner of the house overlooking a gravel parking pad where sat a battered brown truck and a small, solarcar that had seen better days.

  Walter felt his stomach sinking as he looked at the two vehicles. He wasn’t sure why, but after a moment and two more breaths standing there and looking at them, he thought that maybe he had hoped they were third-shifters. Farming was a 24-hour job in the Districts. And if they’d been third-shifters, then Walter and the sweating, blowing, injured group he was with would be able to hole up there without conflict until at least five in the morning.

  But that was not the case.

  Someone was home.

  Probably, everybody was home.

  Two vehicles?

  Who owns two vehicles?

  Families with lots of incomes.

  Probably five adults in th
at house.

  He realized that the others were moving out towards the farmhouse. None of them had looked over their shoulder to tell him to come on with them. He started and trotted after them, his tired legs protesting.

  He wasn’t weak.

  He’d simply made choices. He made the choice not to fight. He’d made the choice to have a family instead, and be left alone. And Roy had been a fighter, but look where he had ended up. And Getty was a fighter, and look at him! Was that the price of Virgil’s respect?

  And why do I care in the first place? It was an indignant scream in his own mind.

  I don’t care about his respect.

  Some people had that power over you. Like being around them drew you back, inexorably, into some previous version of yourself. Maybe a version that you were not fond of. And when you were apart from them next, you looked at yourself with a measure of disgust, as though you’d been drunk and not thinking clearly. Why had you let them drag you back?

  Walter shook his head as he jogged after them towards the house.

  No more. He needed to start thinking clearly.

  His wife had been disappeared. The CoAx had their District shut down. His life was hanging by a thread. A clash of personalities was so low on the totem pole of things to consider, that he almost laughed at himself, but didn’t have the wind for it.

  “What are we going to do when we get in there?” Tria asked between gulps of air.

  “We’re gonna hope they’re friendly,” Virgil said.

  “What if they’re not?”

  “Then they’re gonna have problems.”

  As they got closer and closer to the house, Walter had the increasingly uneasy feeling that all the lights would come on, and out of the house would pour a platoon of New Breeds, and that would be the last thing he saw before a bullet crunched through his skull and obliterated his brain.

  It’s not a trap, he told himself. That’s ridiculous.

  They shied from the lights on the corner of the house and they moved for the front. A big, oak door, painted white. No screen door. No windows in it. There was a small porch, a series of brick steps leading up to it. A window looked down at them from the left side of the porch as they approached. It was black and empty. Walter kept staring at it, kept expecting to see a face in it.