Good Intentions (The Road to Hell Series, Book 1) (6 page)

I couldn’t hold back my tears as I stepped forward to embrace them both.

“I love you, Pittah” Gage whispered hoarsely.

I’d assumed my brother long past those words and crying; to hear and see those things now was nearly my complete undoing. “I love you too. I’ll be back,” I vowed. I brushed the hair back from Gage’s face as Bailey squirmed in his arms.

“No one comes back from the wall,” Gage replied in a monotone that made me shiver. “If that’s where they’re taking you.”

“
I
will come back,” I vowed. I kissed Gage on the cheek before kissing Bailey’s forehead. “I love you, Stink Bug.”

He tried to grab me again, but I managed to sidestep his tiny fingers. I forced myself to move further away from them before I couldn’t. Thrusting my shoulders back, I wiped the tears from my eyes and strode toward the doorway.

I stopped before Asante. “Thank you.”

“Lisa and I will keep them safe no matter what it takes,” he vowed. “And away from your mother.”

I bit my bottom lip to stop a fresh wave of tears. “Tell Lisa I said bye and I love her.”

“I will.”

“Let’s go,” the colonel said and took hold of my elbow.

Bailey’s loud wails followed me down the stairs, shredding my heart as we walked across the front yard. The lump in my throat threatened to strangle me as we approached the waiting truck. The camouflage cover had been replaced on the truck, but the newest volunteers had their heads poked out the back of the vehicle to watch us.

I’d expected them to lead me to where the volunteers sat in the back; instead, they walked me toward the cab. I didn’t see my mother anywhere, something I was unbelievably grateful for, but more than a few of my neighbors had been drawn out by the government vehicle and curiosity.

The woman opened the passenger door for me and gestured for me to climb inside. Taking a deep breath, I gathered my courage as I stared into the unlit cab. I couldn’t embarrass myself by trying to run away from here now. I may be able to lose these two, but they’d have every Guard on the Cape hunting for me, and I had no idea what they would do with my brothers if I broke our agreement now.

My legs barely supported me when I climbed up the two steps and into the truck. I’d just settled in when I spotted Lisa running down the road toward us. Asante stepped forward to intercept her before she could reach the vehicle. I turned my head away from Lisa’s frantic gestures as her cries rang down the street. Tears slid down to fall on my hands folded in my lap.

The colonel settled in beside me and started the truck.

“Where am I going?” I inquired in a hitching voice.

“To the wall.”

“Why? What is it you want from me?”

“You’ll learn what you need to know as it becomes necessary.”

With those cryptic words, he shifted the truck into drive and hit the gas. I’d been determined not to look back, but I found my gaze going to the driver’s side mirror when we got to the end of the street. In its reflection, I could see Asante, Lisa, Gage, and Bailey. Asante stood beside Lisa, who now held Bailey. He had his arms extended toward the truck while tears streaked his face. Gage was further ahead of them, bent over with his hands on his knees as if he’d chased after us.

I didn’t care what it took. I
would
see them again.

River

The further away from home the colonel drove, the more I realized how different things were in this area compared to my hometown. Farms and livestock stretched out as far as the eye could see with houses dotting the landscape. Some of the houses sagged from years of wear and appeared to be abandoned. Others were in better repair and had a few people wandering around outside them.

Those people stopped what they were doing to watch the passing trucks driving down the road. Before we’d driven over the bridge and off the Cape, we’d been joined by fourteen other trucks carrying volunteers, one from each of the towns on Cape Cod. Along the way, five more trucks had joined us from nearby towns on the other side of the bridge.

“Do you send a truck to each town in the state on this day?” I’d inquired when the other trucks first joined us.

“No,” the colonel had answered. “We send twenty trucks out at a time until all the towns in Massachusetts have been covered.”

“Oh.”

I’d become silent again afterward, too lost in my own grief and thoughts to carry on a conversation with them. I could still smell Bailey’s caramel scented skin, still feel his warm body against mine. His broken wails, tear-filled eyes and flushed cheeks haunted me. A sob lodged in my throat as I stared at my clasped hands.

I hoped he didn’t think I’d abandoned him, that I had chosen this over him. If it wasn’t for my request to make sure they were safe and away from our mother, they would have had to drag me kicking and screaming from that house. Now I knew my brothers would both be taken care of, and I didn’t have to traumatize Bailey by causing such a scene. They would be together, and they wouldn’t go hungry, and as much as this hurt, that knowledge made it better.

My entire life, I’d known I was different from others, but I’d never expected that difference to rip me away from my family. They would be okay, I kept telling myself. Asante and Lisa would take good care of them until I could return. They would keep my mother away from my brothers. Gage was tough and he’d get Bailey through this. They’d cry, they would miss me, but they’d get through it.

I lifted my head again to stare at the farmland passing by outside the window. “Why don’t you send some of these crops and livestock to us?” I inquired.

The colonel glanced at me. “Your community is surviving on its own. These supplies are needed for those residing over the wall, the cities, and other areas where it is difficult to grow crops, fish, or raise livestock. Believe me, no community is better off than another. There is no wealth and plenty, not anymore. We all have to eat to survive.” His gray eyes burned into mine when he turned to look at me. “We are all equal in this world.”

“Just a regular old utopia of kidnapping people,” I quipped bitterly.

His clean-shaven jaw clenched at my words, forming a little dimple in the center of it. “Far from a utopia. Everything we have we’ve fought for, and in order to keep it, we must all do things we don’t want to do. Including you.”

“Maybe if I knew what it was I’m supposed to be doing, or why I was taken, I would be more willing to help.”

“If you’re meant to know, you will,” he replied.

The more and less he said, the more I questioned if I’d ever walk away from this alive. I glanced at the door of the truck and the woman sitting by my side. Maybe I could get the door open and shove her out before leaping out myself. I had no problem with knocking her out of my way, seeing that she’d had no problem with tearing my life to shreds.

The woman’s gaze was on me; her lips flattened as she seemed to guess at what I contemplated. I smiled sweetly at her in return.

“Why can’t I ride in the back with the others?” I asked.

“You know why,” she crisply replied.

“If I knew why, I wouldn’t be asking.”

My statement was met with stony silence. I glanced at the door again. If I could somehow manage to get away from these people, then what? Run into the countryside and walk the hundreds of miles we’d already traversed back home? I would do it if I thought I could make it, but they’d hunt me down, and the first place they’d go to look for me was my brothers. I had to do everything I could to keep them out of this.

“I’m not going to run,” I said.

“Not if you want your brothers to be taken care of and for them to stay free of us,” she replied.

And there it was, the confirmation they would use my brothers as leverage over me if I didn’t play nice. She’d also confirmed my dislike of her. I turned away from her before I opened the door and shoved her out, just because.

My thoughts turned back to what had happened at my house. The idea that Asante had volunteered to take my brothers in as a way for the government to know where Gage and Bailey were at all times crossed my mind. I hastily buried it.

Asante was my friend. He may be a Guard, but there had been true regret in his eyes when he’d stepped through my door. Besides, I didn’t think they’d expected me to request my brothers be removed from my mother’s house.

I focused on the darkening horizon as the sun slipped behind the land. Reds, yellows, pinks, and oranges lit up the sky as the truck rolled down the highway. I glanced over at the gages on the dash, trying to figure out which each one of them was. Some of them I knew, others I couldn’t recall, and some I’d never seen before. It had been so long since I’d been in a vehicle, I’d forgotten what the wheels on the pavement sounded like and the bouncing, almost soothing feel of them spinning on the road.

The sky was almost completely black when we pulled into a gas station and parked next to one of the pumps. Lights filtered onto the pavement from the store to the right of me, illuminating a small patch of the rutted asphalt. A man opened the glass door and hurried out to us. He said something to the driver of the truck in front of us before walking to the side of the truck.

“Gas,” I whispered in amazement.

The woman snorted before opening her door, jumping out, and walking around the front of the hood. The colonel turned toward me, draping his arm over the steering wheel to face me.

“You got a raw deal. You shouldn’t be here, but your brothers are safe and working the wall is something this country needs,” he told me.

I bit back a ‘save me the speech’
retort. The woman already didn’t like me for some reason, not that I cared; I didn’t like her either. This man wouldn’t give me any answers, but I felt starting out with both of these senior military members disliking me was a bad idea.

“Colonel…” I strove to recall his name from the volunteering earlier.

“Colonel Ulrich MacIntyre. For now, you can call me Mac.”

“Is there a lot of gas out in this area?”

He shook his head and turned back around in his seat. “This station is only for military vehicles. Most things out here are the same as where you’re from. Only less seafood.”

“And more meat.”

“But I bet many of the people out here would really enjoy a lobster or a crab leg once in a while.”

“They probably would.” I’d grown sick of seafood over the years, but now I realized I may never have it again. Tomorrow, I would not be able to wake up and go fishing. For all I knew, I might not wake tomorrow. I had no idea what these people planned for me.

“You’ll be able to write your brothers, and you’ll find your compatriots on the wall will become like family to you,” Mac said.

“Yeah,” I mumbled. At least it sounded like they planned to keep me alive for a while.

He didn’t say anymore, and I sat wordlessly as I waited for the vehicles to be filled. I didn’t know if I preferred getting back on the road or dragging this out for as long as possible. I was exhausted, but once we arrived at our destination, it would be final. My life as I had known it would be over. At least right now, I could still somehow hold out hope they would come to their senses and take me back where I belonged.

The woman climbed back into the truck, closed the door, and we pulled out onto the road again. The next couple of hours passed in silence. The stars shone in the sky, and the full moon and headlights lit the black ribbon of road before us in a ceaseless pattern that had caused my mind to go numb hours ago.

I was so used to the same old sights out here that at first I assumed I was imagining it when something began to take shape in the gloom in front of us. Leaning forward, I rested my hand on the dash as two red lights blinked into view on the horizon. As we drew closer, I noticed more and more identical lights high in the sky and stretching endlessly onward across the horizon.

“What are those?” I murmured, though I didn’t expect an answer.

“The markers of the wall,” Mac answered.

I glanced at him, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the distant wall for more than a second. Alongside the road that had been mostly barren for a few miles, houses materialized again. Livestock roamed some of the pastures in the distance, and leaves and tall grass swayed in the breeze. The closer we got to the wall, the closer the houses sat toward the road. People emerged from their homes, curious to see the arrival of the newest recruits.

Then, there it was.

My head tilted back as I craned my neck to try and see all the way to the top of the wall. It loomed above us like some kind of monstrous Goliath set to destroy us or save us all. It easily stretched a hundred and fifty feet into the air, blocking out the moon behind it. I’d heard parts of the wall were enormous, but I hadn’t been prepared for
this
.

The TV cameras didn’t do it justice, and I wondered if they had been avoiding this section of wall just as they avoided the more hastily assembled ones. Whereas the sections made of debris looked weak, this looked like overkill and would have people dreaming of King Kong-sized monsters lurking on the other side. Much like I was doing right now.

As we drove closer, the blinking red lights cast an eerie red glow across the cab of the truck and the people sitting on either side of me. I half expected an alien spaceship to rise over us, to drift down and say hi, or to suck us up and have us for dinner. Instead, it was only lights, which I now realized were set out at certain points and connected by a wire stretching another twenty feet into the air. I’d bet anything no blackouts affected this wall.

I went to sit back in my seat when a low, grinding noise caught my attention. Sitting forward again, I couldn’t hold back the startled
puh
I emitted as what I’d believed was a solid section of wall now had a crack spreading across the bottom of it as it began to rise up before us to give us entry to the other side of the wall.

Before the war, I’d seen the movies
Jurassic Park
and
King Kong
; neither one of those movies could have prepared me for the sight of the wall sliding up from the ground before me. I’d expected the truck to pull to the side of the road and park near one of these houses to unload us, and then we would find a doorway through to the other side, or maybe stay in this town for the night. Instead, we drove straight on through the large opening in the wall.

For the first time, I felt more apprehension for myself than I did for the family I’d been torn away from.