A Pawn's Betrayal

by Ernie Lindsey

  “Don’t be shy!” Hale encourages me with a waving hand and a false smile. I can see the annoyance in his eyes.

  Finn nudges my shoulder and leans over. I can almost feel his lips on my ear. “They love us. It’s okay. Go.”

  “Yeah, but what do I say?”

  “Tell them we’re going to win the war.”

  “But what if we don’t?”

  He moves closer. His lips definitely touch my earlobe. My skin tingles. “They need hope, Caroline. Not honesty. Not right now.”

  I glance at him. Our eyes meet. I can see that he’s serious. I’ve never been one to outright lie—and if I have, I haven’t enjoyed it—but I don’t have a chance to argue because Hale quickly steps over and wraps his arm around me, then practically drags me over to the podium.

  He says, “You can’t blame her for being shy. You people are animals!”

  Fists again go into the air. “Animals, animals, animals!”

  “They’re all yours,” Hale whispers. He backs away and stands beside Finn with a combination of a glare and a grin on his face. If I could read his mind right now, he would likely be thinking, Don’t mess this up.

  I lean in too close to the microphone and say, “Hello.” It squeals and I see some hands go up to cover ears. Everyone smiles and looks at me expectantly, however, and I can see that they’re waiting on me to say something profound like a great leader should. What I want to say is that I can’t promise them anything, that all I can do is have a positive attitude and try my hardest; the DAV army is massive and they could easily run right over all of us; that our best chance at true freedom might be death before they clamp chains on our wrists.

  I want to tell them to be realistic, but I don’t.

  Finn winks at me and mouths one single word: “Hope.”

  I clear my throat and it echoes throughout the building. This isn’t going well. “Hale is right. Finn and I are Kinders. We’re the last two on Earth.”

  Someone in the back shouts, “Show us something!”

  “I will, but on the battlefield, where it matters, I promise, but for now…this is what I have to say. Finn and I…we didn’t even know we were Kinders until a couple of weeks ago. Well, he knew a long time before I did, but that doesn’t matter—I guess what I’m trying to say is…”

  Good grief, pull it together, Caroline.

  I’m completely aware that I sound—and I’m behaving—like a teenage girl who doesn’t have confidence in herself.

  You saved a thousand lives. You’re a Kinder. You were a leader. A hero. Act like it.

  Give them hope. Give yourself hope. You can do this.

  I clear my throat and pause, giving my heartbeat time to slow into a normal rhythm.

  I push a strand of hair behind my ear and say, “This war is not about me. It’s not about you. This war is about something bigger than everyone in this room. It’s about life. It’s about freedom. It’s about having a choice in what happens to you and those that you love. They took that away from you—they took that away from all of us. I’ve met President Larson and he’s a nice man…” Boos interrupt me, but I hold my hand up to quiet them. “Let me finish. You may all know him better than I do. I met him for a few minutes earlier this evening. He threw Finn and I in prison—he tried to stop us from helping you—but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a horrible person.”

  More boos.

  I chuckle. “Okay, maybe it does, but the way I see it, he’s misguided. He’s missing the point in all of this. He told me that if we fight back, that it won’t concern the DAV one bit if they kill a thousand of us, or ten thousand of us, because they’ll still be able to capture the rest as slaves. That may be true, and maybe he’s right, but at least we tried. And we’re not just going to try, we’re going to win!”

  Cheers and more cheers. The stage vibrates under my feet.

  I keep going. “For most of my life, I grew up hunting in the woods for our meals. We didn’t have warm food on our plates every night. We had to fight for survival. There would be days where all we’d have was the little bit of meat from a squirrel or two, but I knew that there was something bigger out there. Deer and bear. Big things with a lot of meat that could feed us for months. They were out there, and all we had to do was keep trying. And you know what that taught me? That all you need to keep going in this world is hope. If you wake up every morning knowing that there’s a chance for something better out there, it’ll fill your bellies more than despair. If it doesn’t happen that day, you swallow as much hope as you can and you live to wake up another morning. So that’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re willing to fight. Finn and myself, we’re here to fill your bellies with faith. And you know what we’re going to do, what we’re all going to do? We’re going to march outside those gates in the morning and we’re going to put an arrow through the heart of that giant bear that’s waiting for us!”

  Screams of joy and exhilaration erupt throughout the warehouse. The crowd is completely out of their minds with excitement. They push and shove up to the stage, begging to shake my hand. I glance over at Finn and Hale. They’re both smiling.

  Hale says, “Excellent work, Mathers.” He moves over to me and admires the frenzied gang of soldiers and volunteers. “You’ve got them so riled up, who wants to wait until morning, huh? Let’s go start a war right now, what do you say?”

  I shake his hand. I’m caught up in the moment, too. I know we’re probably not prepared to walk out the front gates and take down the DAV army, but why wait? I tell him, “One thing they taught us back in my encampment was to never wait to shoot the bear. I’m ready if you are.”

  Chapter 14

  As Hale’s “generals” organize the soldiers and volunteers, who buzz like bees with excitement, Finn and I are off to the side, having a discussion with Hale about our, or his, plans.

  “But I don’t understand,” Finn argues. “You have way more ammunition and weapons than your numbers here can possibly carry.”

  Finn has been hounding Hale about their stash of weapons, their training, the quantity of ammo they have, all sorts of stuff that I wouldn’t think to ask. I’m glad he’s here because it helps me to grasp the more militaristic aspects of this whole setup, but it’s getting to the point where even I can see why Hale is getting annoyed.

  Hale spits, “I don’t expect you to understand. You haven’t been working on a plan of this scale for the past six months. You’ve barely hit puberty.”

  Finn rolls his eyes at the cheap shot, but lets it go.

  “Anyway,” Hale continues, turning back to the giant map on the table in front of us, “I figure we’ll send you two right up the middle. Take out as many of those tanks as you can first thing. With your speed, Finn, and Caroline, if you can really bend time like you say, it shouldn’t be too big of a task to take them all out at once, correct?”

  “I can be in and out before they blink,” I say. “Then again, I’ve never tried to disarm a tank, and I really have no idea what I’m talking about.”

  “We’ll show you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Show me some confidence. You’re a Kinder. You can do this, right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Don’t think…know,” Hale reminds me. “Can you or can’t you?” He crosses his arms, waits expectantly. It’s an empty gesture because he knows I won’t answer negatively, especially not after I told him off earlier.

  “I can.”

  “Good. That’s what I like to hear. We only deal in absolutes around here. How about you, Finn?”

  Finn salutes, partly serious, partly in jest. “You said you’ll give us bombs to plant on the tanks?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind?”

  “What does it matter?”

  Finn crosses his arms this time. “I like to know what I’m working with.”

  “You ask a lot of questions that you don’t need the answers to, young man.”

  “Sorry…sir.”

&nbs
p; I move closer to the table and pretend like I’m examining the map, as if I know what I’m doing or what I’m looking at. “I’d like to know, too,” I say, if only to back Finn up. I don’t know why he’s asking, nor do I care, because I figure he has more knowledge about stuff like this than I do. If he’s asking, he has a rational reason.

  Hale eyes us. He knows we’re on his side, but whether it’s the corrupt history of the Kinders, or his untrusting nature in general, he’s wary to disclose the information. He relents, though, and tells us, “They’re B-147 Tunguska bombs.”

  Finn whistles.

  I have no clue why this is significant, but I whistle as well. I need to keep up appearances.

  Finn says, “I thought the Tunguskas were outlawed with the Peace Pact.”

  “There were a lot of things that supposedly happened because of the Peace Pact and you can see where that’s gotten us.”

  “Like how the entire army has been training in secret?”

  Hale takes a step back and raises an eyebrow. “You said Larson told you that?”

  I say, “He did,” and I can sense a war of whose got the upper hand coming on. We’re all on the same side here, and I hope it can stay that way. It’ll have to, if we have any chance of success.

  “I’m surprised he admitted it.”

  I can sense Finn getting ready to ask the next question, so I jump in ahead of him to maintain my role as temporary peacekeeper. “Why weren’t you able to convince more soldiers to help if they’ve been training for this sort of thing? I mean, you said they were loyal and wanted to stay that way, but why?”

  Hale pulls a silver flask from his back pocket, unscrews the cap, and takes a small swig. He offers a drink to the both of us and we politely decline. One, I hate the taste, and two, I’m not sure I want to put my mouth anywhere near where Hale’s has been. “Suit yourself,” he says, taking another pull from the flask. He screws the lid back on and then shoves it into his pocket. “I hate to admit it, but we’ve outlined a lot of our battle plan on the wings of what-if. It was too risky to approach every single soldier with our intent. As we’ve established, we’ve known the blackcoats were coming for months now, so President Larson had the army secretly training to give the public the illusion that we were planning to do something about it.”

  “Oh my God. Nobody knows that he’s actually planning to surrender?” I ask. “What a—a Judas!”

  Finn adds, “They don’t know they’re going to be slaves?”

  Hale scowls. “Not if we can help it. We’ve had time to discretely build our own little contingency here with those we trusted, and even then, there could be some among us that’ll run straight to Targon or Larson the moment we set foot outside these walls. There’s a small percentage of the enlisted men who are absolutely loyal to Larson, no matter what he says. You may have seen them out and about. They’re the ones running patrols, making sure that the stragglers are obeying the curfew. It’s hard to be sure who is who, though, so we’ve steadily increased our numbers over time instead of doing a blanket recruitment run.”

  Finn holds up a finger to interject. “What’s your plan if someone tips off the soldiers who are loyal to Larson?”

  “We’ve posted lookouts near the president’s home and where his trusted commanders are. Anyone goes within ten feet of those bastards before we get outside these walls, they’re full of more holes than a fishing net.”

  Satisfied, Finn flattens his lips together and dips his chin, understanding.

  Hale continues, “What we’re hoping is that the remaining army, the ones who don’t know we’re doing this and who aren’t terribly loyal to Larson, will see us fighting and join the battle.”

  I don’t know much about military tactics—I’ve only been trained in the art of scouting undetected—but even I can grasp how stupid and wishful this plan appears. “Wait,” I say, “all you’re doing is crossing your fingers that they’ll join in? What happens if they don’t, huh? What happens if they decide to stick with Larson and they march on us from the rear? We’ll be hit on all sides, Hale. This whole thing will be over with before it gets started and you’ve wasted all these lives for nothing.”

  Finn says only, “I completely agree,” to show his support.

  Hale’s face goes turns a shade of red that can only match leaves in the fall. He pounds the table with a fist. Pencils bounce and roll off. The toy army men they had been using to indicate the regiments and their potential movements scatter and tumble over each other, some of them landing on the floor beyond the pencils. Spit foams in the corner of his mouth when he says, “I will not stand here and have a couple of children tell me how to run my army. We’ve discussed this. We’ve discussed every possible angle of this plan for months. Don’t think you can just step in here and break it all apart in five minutes.”

  “But it’s a stupid plan,” I say.

  “I think so, too,” Finn adds.

  “Then, by God, if you can come up with something better, I’m all ears.” He checks his watch. “And by my count, you have thirty minutes before we’re out the door.”

  I don’t have the slightest idea what we might come up with, but I tell Hale that we’ll try anyway. “And,” I add, “what were you planning to do with a thousand people? March them through the streets and out the front gates? There’s no way the loyalists wouldn’t notice an entire division of soldiers marching outside to fight.”

  Clearly flustered and frustrated with us, Hale throws his hands in the air. “Oh, give me a break—give me some credit, at least. I’m not the bumbling fool you think I am.”

  “Then how?” I ask. “Impress me.”

  “You dim-witted girl—” Hale stops himself before I can interrupt. Whether he knows it’s an insult to call me a girl—I don’t mind the dim-witted part as much, funnily enough—is another matter. “We’re about to start a war here and I’ll say it again, I don’t need a lowly scout telling me what I should be doing thirty minutes before we march on the gates.”

  Finn reminds him, “You can’t force us to fight for you, you know. We’ve volunteered and if need be, we can just as easily walk away. Your guns, your fists, your bombs, they will not stop two determined Kinders.”

  Hale lets that settle a moment. Squinting eyes boring holes into us as he seethes. Finally, he seems to grasp that Finn is right and says, “Okay. If you must know… Come closer, let me show you.”

  He waves Finn and me over to the map again. He readjusts it on the table, sliding it in front of us, and then points to a location not too far from where a bright red X marks our current location in the warehouse. He says, “We’ve been trying to figure out how to get around this since the beginning, and we were quite positive that there was no way around it, that we would have to march right through the middle of Warrenville and risk having to fight off the Larson loyalists. But you see here? This location we’ve marked along the wall? It’s a weak spot.”

  “So?” Finn says. “Oh, you mean weakly guarded? Like you’re going to put ladders up and climb over?”

  Back behind us, the crowd cheers and when I look over my shoulder, I can see them holding Mosley up on their shoulders. He’s laughing and telling them to let him down.

  Hale grins and shakes his head. “Somebody must’ve told them that I promoted Mosley up to number two. Anything happens to me, you make sure they turn to him, okay?”

  Finn and I agree, then Finn says, “So, ladders over the wall?”

  “No, takes too much time. If we’re unlucky enough to have a traitor in our midst, and he happens to slip by the lookouts, they’d be on us before a tenth of our numbers got over.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s weak structurally.”

  Now I understand. The mental imagery of a bomb blowing a hole in the huge, forty-feet high wall, and then a thousand soldiers and volunteers racing through works its way into my mind. The plan is sound, I suppose, though I won’t admit to Hale that I’m actually impressed.

  �
��Tunguska?” Finn asks.

  “We can spare a couple to make the gash, plus have enough left over to turn the tanks into puffs of smoke.”

  “Sounds strong. Maybe we should be apologizing.”

  Hale waves him off. “You get used to it when you’re in charge.”

  I think, Boy, don’t I know it.

  The only thing that remains is figuring out how we’re going to get the other soldiers—the ones who aren’t loyal to Larson—to learn about what we’re doing and to fight with us. From the numbers Hale mentioned previously during Finn’s barrage of questions, it could easily double, if not triple our current forces.

  And I think I may just have an idea.

  Hale is showing Finn exactly how they’ve planned to break through the wall, and what their formations will look like once they breach. I tap him on the shoulder and he glances up at me, annoyed, but expectant. “Your soldiers…have you ever trained them in some of the military tactics from the Olden Days, like the old ways of communication?”

  He tilts his head to the side, curious. “It’s part of the standard curriculum. Why?”

  “And they all know what the various patterns for the flares mean, right?”

  “What’re you onto, Mathers?”

  “We never actually had flares in the encampments but we knew what they were. I don’t think anyone had seen one in, oh, a hundred years or more, but before we took our oaths as scouts, part of our training required us to memorize what the signal flares meant in case of emergencies. The scouts always preferred to run because who had time to build a fire and send messages up with flaming arrows? Plus, the smoke would give your position away if you were trying to warn everyone about approaching Republicons.”

  I realize that these signals would’ve helped so much on the day the DAV invaded our encampment. If it had made any kind of sense to do it—if I’d had any time at all to build a fire—then I would’ve. It was dangerous and took too much effort to keep the fire stoked during the never-ending rain and choking humidity.

  However, here in the city, where they have the luxury of available flares, or even dry wood and ceilings where they can build a fire, it’ll work. It has to work.