“It’s… I…”
I can’t stop shaking my head. James puts his arm around my shoulder and pulls me close. “Come on,” he says. “We can do this.”
“I can’t. I can’t.”
“It won’t get any worse than that, I promise. That man over there in the hat,” he says, pointing to a thin soldier in front of a group of men with shovels, “he looks like he’s in charge. We should go talk to him.”
I allow James to drag me through the battlefield full of dead bodies.
He’s incredibly wrong. It gets a lot worse.
Such a horrible scene. I’ve never seen anything like it, but this is also something I never would’ve imagined. Not even in my worst nightmares could this be any more horrific.
Bodies, everywhere. Some missing arms and legs. Some missing their entire lower halves.
It’s so gruesome that I have to continually look away.
Guns lie about like matchsticks scattered on the floor. Dead soldiers are slumped over, half in and half out of giant craters in the ground where explosions have ripped house-size gouges into the damp earth.
It’s as if something, maybe the hand of God, reached from the heavens and turned a graveyard upside down.
I can’t breathe.
James’s arm around my shoulders does precious little to hold me up. When I stumble, he grasps me tighter and lifts me back to my feet.
I worry that my parents are already dead. There’s so much devastation around me that I can’t imagine anyone surviving this.
As we get closer, I can see that the man we’re walking toward is, amazingly, my friend and ally, Mosley. He survived, somehow.
He sees me and his face contorts from a look of excitement, to relief, to anger. He lifts a hand to the men around him, tells them to hold steady, and then marches toward us with his head down and fists clenched.
“Mathers!” he shouts. “Explain yourself!”
“I’m sorry, Mosley, I don’t—”
His voice cracks. “Sorry? You’re sorry?” He slings a finger back behind him, pointing out two men with large mustaches and rifles slung over their shoulders standing a hundred yards away with their backs turned. They haven’t noticed us yet, otherwise, we’d have a shovel in our hands or chains around our wrists. “If there weren’t two blackcoat lieutenants standing over there, I’d have you lined up in front of a firing squad!”
He reaches out, both hands extended as if he’s going for my throat.
James roars beside me, “Do not touch her,” as his massive tree trunk of an arm comes down and cuts across Mosley’s chest, blocking him.
Mosley hisses in pain and staggers backwards.
James says, “You will give her a chance to explain, do you hear me?”
Mosley nods and glares at me with contempt. “Out with it, then, Mathers. What happened? Why’d you abandon us?”
“Tell me where my parents are first. Have you seen them?”
“I asked you a question.”
“And you’ll answer mine, then we’ll talk. My mother, and my father. Where?”
Mosley drops his head, then lifts his chin, pointing northward with it, along the road leading into the capital. “They were taken.”
“They survived?” My God, my heart leaps a thousand feet higher inside my chest.
“Once you disappeared, your father stayed behind to help your mother tend to the wounded. Seems he didn’t have much desire to fight after you deserted your army. I guess he figured if he couldn’t help you, then your mother came next.”
“When did they leave? How long ago?” If I can catch up within a day, maybe less, they’ll still have strength to run, but I need to get to them long before the march north wears them down so we can escape.
He puts his hands on his hips, lifts his eyes to the clouds. He can’t see the sun, none of us can, but after the rains have been here for so long, most of us have learned to tell the general position of the sun in the sky by the brighter glow climbing through the clouds. “It’s, what, around five o’clock? We didn’t last long, not against their advanced weaponry, but I’d say, the last ones marched out of the gates around eleven this morning. Six hours ago, maybe a little less.”
First, I think about how it’s five o’clock. I was out for over twelve hours. Second, it’s all I can do to stay where I am instead of sprinting after the marching DAV army. As much as I want to go find Mother and Father now, right this very second, they’re following forty thousand people for two hundred miles, on foot. They won’t be moving that fast. There will be injuries, slower, elderly people, mothers with babies and children. I have to remind myself that I’ll have time.
Mosley says, “It took a while to get everyone herded through the main gate, especially when they saw this mess.” His arms go out from his sides, indicating all the death and devastation around us. “Those people had to walk by their husbands and brothers. Their children. Their fathers. What happened to you, Caroline? Why weren’t you here to stop that…that traitorous bastard you brought into our city? He was everywhere. Everywhere. Grabbing people, ripping their arms off with his bare hands. Bending gun barrels. Delivering bombs by hand. He’d be right in front of you, you’d blink, and then he was gone. Seconds later, another group of people would be screaming and blown apart. You were gone, Mathers, and now you show up, here, with a stinking group of Republicons, of all people.”
James growls, literally, and takes a step toward Mosley. I put my arm up to stop him, which lands somewhere around his waist, and it keeps him at bay.
“These Republicons are my friends, Mosley, and I don’t need to explain myself.”
He flares his nostrils and narrows his eyes.
It’s probably too much to ask for him to apologize to James, Marla, and the rest.
I have to explain everything to Mosley before he’ll stop shaking with rage. I tell him the truth, even the part about how I had fallen for Finn, and that we’d kissed, and that I had the right to feel the most betrayed out of all of us. I try not to sound angry about it, however, because as a people, we’ve all lost so much.
Life, limb, and freedom.
“And then I woke up in the forest. That’s all I know. I don’t know why Finn did it and I’ll go to my grave with the guilt. I can promise you that.”
Mostly puts his hands on his hips. “Fair enough.” To James, he adds, “You stayed to help fight?”
James nods silently.
Squirrel leans around me and points a finger around his group. “We all did, sir. We love Caroline. That’s why we’re here. She helped me when I was almost dead. We stayed because we owed it to her.”
Marla and the Blakes agree, as do the rest. It feels good to have them on my side, regardless of how much I feel like I’ve failed them.
Mosley scoffs. “So be it, but now what? What’s next, fearless leader?”
I suppose his attitude is warranted. I forgive him, for now. He’s seen a thousand of his friends and family members, his fellow citizens, slaughtered right in front of him. I’d be annoyed as well. “I’m going after my parents and then we’re leaving.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. The woods. Maybe Tennessee or Kentucky. Anywhere but here.”
“And just leave the rest of us behind, huh? Forty thousand people marching north. Not people, Caroline. Slaves.”
“Don’t you think I know that? As if there’s anything I can do about it now. I don’t have anything left, Mosley. No powers, no abilities, nothing. I’m just a girl and in fact, that’s all I ever was.”
James puts his hand softly on my shoulder. “You were hope.”
“Maybe I was. Not anymore. The only thing I can do now is use what I learned as a scout. I’ll run, I’ll catch up to them, and then I’ll slip past the guards and sneak my parents away in the middle of the night. That’s it.”
Mosley looks as if he’s empty. Slack shoulders, eyes drooping, with his lips bent downward into a frown that may never see a smile again.
“I’m sorry, Mosley. I’m done.”
He picks up the shovel at his feet. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
He turns his back to me and walks toward the people digging graves. “I don’t know why I expected anything. You abandoned us once, why wouldn’t you do it again?”
Anger flares in my stomach like a campfire catching a gust of wind. I dart over to him, grab his arm, and try to sling him around. He barely budges, and it’s then that I finally notice how strange it is for my strength, my powers, to be gone. “Listen to me,” I say. “I didn’t abandon you. I already explained myself, and I don’t need you to give me this guilty nonsense. I’ve already given all I had to give and whatever it is you had planned that may or may not have involved me, you can forget it.”
Mosley slams the shovel into the dirt. “You’re right, Caroline. We don’t have anything left. None of us do. We’ll die on the march or we’ll die in chains. We all die eventually, but let me tell you something… Before I do, before I go wherever it is up there in the sky where good people land, I’m going to do everything I possibly can to make sure that traitorous bastard Finn goes in the opposite direction, even if it means I have to go with him. He betrayed you. You can feel how much that hurts. I know you can. So all I’m asking is, don’t run away. Not yet. We’ll get your folks out. We will, I promise. But for right now, you can get me close to that little monster, and whether it happens on the road or five months from now when we’re working the factories in the DAV…that’s all I’m asking. Help me get my revenge and then you’re gone. Go wherever you want.”
I’ve already made up my mind, but I ask anyway. “What makes you think I’d help you do that? Why should I stay?”
“Take a look around you, Mathers. We owe it to these people. He dies. There’s no two ways about it. You may not have gone AWOL on purpose, but you trusted him. You let him get too close. Redeem yourself.”
“Blaming me over and over isn’t the best way to make me say yes, Mosley.”
“I’m—yeah, okay. I’m sorry.” He steps back and rests both hands on top of the shovel’s handle. “So will you?”
Before I can get the word “yes” out of my mouth, I hear one of the blackcoat guards shouting, “You there! Ho! What’re you heathens doing out of line? Get back to—” And then he recognizes that we’re not part of the original group. “Halt! All of you, stay right where you are!”
“James,” I say, spinning toward him. “You guys go, get out of here.”
James simply shakes his head. So does Marla. So do Squirrel and both of the Blakes. “Not this time, Caroline. We’re not leaving you alone again.”
“Then I’m coming with you.” Mosley begins to protest but I put my hand on his arm. “I’ll help, don’t worry about that, but I am not marching north and trying to figure out how to do it with an entire army around me. I’ll figure it out, and when the time is right, I’ll find you. Okay?”
He nods quickly and pushes me away. “Maybe I shouldn’t, but I’m trusting you. Now get out of here. I’ll handle the guards.”
My gang of Republicon allies and I run, harder than we ever have before, across the open field, the upturned graveyard, as we leave death behind.
The last thing I see before we shoot into the woods is Mosley trying to wrestle the blackcoat’s rifle away from his hands.
I can only hope that, one of these days, he’ll be there for me to find him.
Chapter 22
For days, we follow the blackcoat army, ten thousand strong, as it leads the population of Warrenville, another forty thousand or so, on the long, grueling march back to its northern territories. We stay hidden in the shadows during the day, moving with this herd of people who move as if they’re cattle grazing alongside a trail.
At night, Squirrel and I, or Marla, will steal into the camp to look for my parents. We leave James behind because he’s too large. He’ll attract too much attention.
When everyone is sleeping, thousands upon thousands of bodies are illuminated by roaring fires that are covered with tarps overhead to block the rain.
My people have to be miserable, sleeping out in the open like this, under a starless sky, getting soaked to the bone. There’s an excellent chance that many of them will die from exposure on the way back to the DAV capital.
But, I have to give the blackcoats credit; they were prepared for this. The planning it must have taken to coordinate this amount of people had to have been staggering. Supply trucks have left stations along the black roads carving through the hillsides. They’ve supplied the marchers with sacks upon sacks of rice and beans and water tanks the size of a small house for cooking, drinking, and washing.
James suggests that this is why it took them six months to begin the invasion. It takes effort like I’ve never experienced to transport this many people on foot.
We raid these stations at night, grabbing food and water for ourselves.
Now and then, we’ll run across a station that has been stocked with an untold amount of dry blankets. We grab these and hand them out to families who are too sick, frail, or tired to find it themselves.
I’m able to sneak in and out of the camp unrecognized because of the rag I tie over my face. The last thing I need is for someone to recognize who I am and begin screaming for me to use my now-gone Kinder abilities to save them. Or, worse yet, for someone to call me a traitor for abandoning them when they needed me the most.
It’s better that I stay invisible.
Just this morning, the main DAV army, more fit and well-supplied, moved on ahead, leaving only a small contingency behind to guard the marching slaves. Squirrel had been close enough to overhear one of the men say it was easier to move through the mountains once they’d trimmed the herd.
This is great for the Republicons and me. So far, we haven’t come anywhere close to being spotted by a soldier on guard, but with less guns and less eyes out there roaming around, we’ll be almost free to move about the camps each night, practically undetected.
Mother and Father haven’t been as easy to spot as I’d suspected. I thought for sure that they would be near one of the sick tents tending to injuries and the like, but so far, nothing.
Of course it’s worrisome, yet I haven’t gotten too scared or too panicked, because this is a humongous group of people.
I haven’t dared to ask, nor have I dared to have Marla or Squirrel ask, because I figured that it might arouse suspicions if some stranger was asking for Mother and Father by name. Maybe it wouldn’t, but I’m not taking any chances.
We stay away from the front too, mostly, because we’re sure that’s where Finn is hanging out with the generals and commanding officers. He’s their Kinder, their informal leader, the last of his breed, so he’s earned a spot at the head table with all of the other gray-haired old men with too many stripes on their shoulders. From the stories that James and the others have told me, he practically won the battle himself. The main army had little to do while he ravaged our forces. Most of the blackcoats hung around and watched, occasionally firing off a few shots here and there, conserving ammo and watching the damage created by Finn’s bare hands.
Between Finn and the tanks, we were done for in less than an hour.
It would’ve been so much different if I’d been able to fight back.
Something occurred to me on the first day that we began following them: Finn has always said that he could feel me when I was a Kinder, that he knew I existed simply by being drawn to me. I was worried that would still be the case, even though he stole my abilities and everything that Ellery had hoped for.
But, if he can feel my presence, he hasn’t come looking yet. If it were me, I’d want to eliminate a threat as soon as possible. Maybe he’s waiting for a better time, giving me a chance to think I have the upper hand. I can’t say.
It’s my guess that since I’m no longer a Kinder, he can’t sense me, and we can move as freely as we want.
We’re exhausted, though. A
ll of us, completely and thoroughly drained. We’ve been hiking and hiding by day as we follow the marching citizens, keeping an eye out for my parents, and subtly attempting to help those that need it when they stumble or fall behind. By night, we slip into the camp and continue our search, stealing food and dry clothes from the supply stations.
We’re now on the fourth day of our march.
The main army has left us.
That leaves approximately five hundred blackcoat grunts walking at evenly spaced intervals, monitoring their newly captured slaves.
Rain falls.
The elderly and expectant mothers lag behind.
I have to hold my tongue, and keep my rage silently contained, when a blackcoat soldier shoves an old man who can’t walk as fast as the rest.
James and I are hiding in the dense branches of a maple tree while Marla, Squirrel, and the others scout ahead. James says, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“That soldier dies tonight.”
“Yep, but quietly, in his sleep.” He winks at me.
“Horrible way to go,” I joke. “It’d be nice if that bastard had time to apologize to that old man and God only knows who else.”
“We never get to say everything we want to,” James adds.
I can tell he’s still joking, yet his deep pause hints that there’s something more to that statement. I ask him if he’s okay.
He shrugs and adjusts himself on the branch. The tree sways underneath his bulk.
The blackcoat shoves the old man again, who falls face first into the mud, and I grind my teeth so hard, my jaw hurts.
James whispers, “Looking for your folks has me thinking about mine, I guess. I know we haven’t seen hide nor hair of them yet, but they’re out there in that river of people somewhere. Mine, though, they’ve been long gone. For years.”
“Did they, um, did they…” I can’t bring myself to use the word ‘die’ because I don’t want to hurt his feelings. Among all of this death and suffering, I haven’t grown entirely bitter. Room for compassion remains.
A Pawn's Betrayal Page 15
