Madelyn's Nephew (23 page)

“It’s not the time, Elijah. Once I get out there, I’m going to be on a mission. What if I have to choose between saving you and going after Harper? What if I choose Harper?”

Elijah stopped walking.

Madelyn walked a few more paces and then stopped. She refused to turn and look at him.

“What?”

“This is my fuel. You want my fuel? I’m coming with you.”

“I’ll go on foot.”

“Then I’ll use the truck to run you down.”

Madelyn laughed. For once, merry Elijah didn’t join her.

“Fine. But we’re not stopping at the storehouse. They’ll be on us in an instant. Trust me—I know what I’m talking about.”

“I can go with what I have on me. I’m resourceful.”

“You’re going to have to be.”

E
LIJAH
WAS
NOT
A
carefree passenger, like Jacob had been. As they drove up into the hills, he was more nervous and fidgety than she had ever seen him.
 

“I told you not to come,” Madelyn said. “Now you’re stuck with me. If I let you out, those things would find you and tear you apart.”

“I’ve heard that the instruments show a ninety-eight percent containment in these hills,” he said. “I’m not worried about Hunters.”

“I wish you’d sit back. There’s nothing you can do right now and your nerves are making this whole truck jittery.”

Elijah leaned back against his seat. She could still see the tension in his muscles.

“Maybe I’ve grown too accustomed to the city,” he said. “All this empty space around me makes me nervous.” He tried out a little laugh. Madelyn cut a glance over to him. He took a deep breath and then let it out while he closed his eyes. His shoulders dropped. It almost looked like he was forcing himself to relax.

Madelyn returned her eyes forward when Elijah turned to look at her.

“What is it that you’re not telling me?” he asked.

“How do you mean?”

“We’re probably headed towards danger. Tell me everything.”

Madelyn thought through all the things she had held back in their conversations. She considered the problem carefully before she answered.

“There’s an old town near my cabin. It’s where we’re headed now. The place was called Circle Poke. It was empty even when I was a kid. That’s where Harper and I left this truck. When I went back for the truck to come down to Fairbanks, someone had moved it. They did a pretty half-assed job of hiding the truck with some brush. I never figured out why.”

“Where is Circle Poke with respect to where you think Harper and Gabriel were staying?”

“My cabin is roughly in between Harper’s camp and Circle Poke. There’s a trail that used to go to the lake camps, but it has been impassable for years.”

“So if she were running for her life, she would have gone to your cabin before she went to the truck?”

“I would assume so. I can’t be sure of the timing of all this,” Madelyn said. “Gabriel didn’t say when he got injured, so I don’t know if it was before or after I left.”

“Why did you come down to Fairbanks after all these years?”

This was the question that Madelyn really didn’t want to answer.

“I got lonely,” she said. She wanted to look at him, to see how this idea landed. She forced herself to keep looking forward so she wouldn’t weaken the lie.

Madelyn gave the old truck a little more speed. After so many years of traveling exclusively on foot, she was amazed at how normal it all seemed. Even in her grandmother’s day, when the roads were maintained and a person could pick up fuel at a dozen stations, they had never commuted so often between the cabin and Fairbanks. Then again, the weather had been much tougher back then. Madelyn could remember a season of snow that lasted for months. That was back before the sun had turned.

“I moved north bit by bit,” Elijah said. “My brother was always preparing for a war that never came. He expected looters and starving bands of criminals to storm our house at any moment. After my father died, we made his stash mobile and began to follow the sun.”

Madelyn thought she should ask a question to be polite. Elijah continued before she got the chance.

“He discovered that the Hunters were tracking on heat signatures long before it was on the ether. Saul had a couple of thermo suits. They were built to defeat night vision scopes, but they worked well enough on the Hunters back then. If they got too close, my brother had a collection of grenades and land mines that would throw them off. If you’re being chased and you don’t care about what’s behind you, toss a grenade as far as you can in your wake. It’s a decent last-ditch measure.”

Elijah smiled at a memory.
 

“We were up in the mountains. We had staked out a decent territory to inhabit. Of course this was before the really deep snow came. Saul had a theory that the Hunters moved slower in higher elevations. I don’t think he was right, but there certainly seemed to be fewer of them up there. The two of us stayed mobile. Someone had set up some air traps here and there for water. We trapped a lot of meat for food. I swear we had it all figured out. Saul heard a rumor that the Hunters were only going to clean for five years. It was going to be tough, but we thought we could make it.”

“How long ago was this?” Madelyn asked.

“Maybe twenty years ago. We got sloppy and stopped moving around so much. Saul had a monitor that showed a big mule deer in one of the traps. I don’t know what we thought we would do with all that meat, but it was too enticing. We went to collect the bounty. It was halfway butchered when the first alarm went off. I told him to leave it. He had a different idea.”

Madelyn noticed that their speed had dropped. She was so engrossed in the story that she had let off the accelerator.

“The trap was in a terrible place. There was basically nowhere to go but over a cliff. The drop must have been a couple of hundred meters at least. Saul looped a rope around the feet of the buck, tied the other end to a stump, and tossed it over the edge. He intended to follow it.”

“Over the cliff?”

Elijah nodded.

“There were caves there. He thought maybe we could wait them out. The Hunters don’t like cliffs.”

“I’m aware.”

“It seemed like a terrible idea, but I didn’t have a better one. We used a grenade, but the important part of that trick is you have to have somewhere to run. On the edge of a cliff, the grenade just gave us enough time to get over the side and find the best place to start our descent. We didn’t have time to secure new lines. I’m a pretty good climber. Saul had more guts than skill. I struggled to keep up as he climbed down the face of the cliff. He called to me after a bit. I wanted him to shut up before they keyed in on his voice. That’s when I realized that I couldn’t even hear the Hunters up there. We had descended far enough to evade them I guess.”

Elijah surprised her when he laughed again.

“Saul called to me again. He had found a ledge under an overhang. I still remember how it felt. I was so amped up that I could hardly catch my breath. Saul was pulling stuff out of his pack. I asked him what he was looking for, but he didn’t answer until he found it. He had a couple of body sails in there.”

“What’s that?”

“Rich people toys,” he said. “You probably heard of them and then immediately dismissed the idea as crazy. The government banned them as soon as they came out. They were like a cross between a hang glider and a parachute, but it was self-propelled. I told him he was crazy. I asked him what happened to the idea of waiting them out. He just shook his head and told me that I was the crazy one if I thought that waiting them out was an option. The body sail had a built-in tutorial. We watched it a dozen times. Maybe if we had practiced on a sand dune, like it said. Maybe if we had at least a hundred BASE jumps under our belts, as they recommended. I argued every way I could think, but Saul wouldn’t be dissuaded. He wanted to get off of that cliff before night fell. That was the one thing we could agree on.”

Madelyn checked their speed again. She studied the rearview mirror. Even thinking about Elijah’s story made her feel like they were being chased. Maybe they were.

“I kept saying we should wait an hour, climb back up, and then run. We could even take some of the deer steaks with us so the endeavor wouldn’t be completely wasted. My brother wouldn’t hear it. I think he cared more about adventure than survival.”

Elijah fell silent.

Madelyn and Elijah drove in silence for a kilometer or so.
 

“So he jumped?” she asked.

“Yes. He didn’t even take any of the meat with him. We risked our lives to go after that buck, got pinned down by the Hunters, and then he didn’t even get to try a single mouthful of the meat. It was tough and gamey anyway. Saul started well. The sail unfurled and he whooped as the updraft gave him elevation. He did one big turn and I could see the smile on his face. He lost control right after that. I saw him spinning towards the ground. When he disappeared around the side of the mountain, I didn’t even want to watch. The power units on those sails weren’t rated for impact. The ground shook with the explosion.”

“You didn’t see him crash?” Madelyn asked. She was looking for the twist ending, like this was a movie. She imagined Saul dropping a grenade at the last second so he could distract the Roamers. She imagined him surviving and the two brothers eventually reunited as the credits rolled.

“No, I didn’t see it. I didn’t hear a thing a few seconds later. His crash drew them all away and I was able to climb back up to safety. I spent the next three weeks hiking around in a big circle so I could safely reach his crash site. The spot was nearly inaccessible. Impaled on a tree, my brother’s body refused to die. His arms were shattered. He couldn’t find a way to take his own life. His eyes begged me to do it for him.”

“Oh, no,” Madelyn said. She shook her head. Elijah’s reality had replaced the happy ending that she had imagined. “How was he still alive?”

“I wrapped him up with everything we had. I thought that if I could stabilize him, I could get him down from the tree and carry him to safety. I suppose I had forgotten how difficult it had been to climb to his position. I had to squeeze through a crack to get up there. Getting an injured guy down wasn’t even an option.”

“How was he alive?” Madelyn asked again. She wanted Elijah to give an explanation before her brain filled in its own answer.

“My packs healed him enough so that he regained full consciousness and was able to scream. That’s what he did. He started to scream for mercy. The painkillers I infused didn’t even touch the agony. He screamed until I knew that he was putting us both at risk. I had to do something to shut him up.”

“Elijah,” Madelyn said. The man was lost in the memory. She jerked the wheel to keep them on the road.

“Elijah!” she yelled.

He was smiling and wiping away his falling tears.

“What?”

“Your brother was an Optioner?”

He didn’t answer.

“That’s why he was so bold and jumped off the cliff? He was an Optioner and didn’t believe that he could die, right?”

“He
did
die,” Elijah said. “He died when I cut out his beating heart. It takes a long time. His cells found other ways to oxygenate themselves. I saw his muscles contracting in strange ways so they could force circulation. It was amazing and horrifying at the same time. I looked him in the eyes while his body tried to compensate for the loss. Even with the terrible hole in his chest, he barely bled. His body held on to the blood as it struggled to live.”

“You knew that your brother took the Regeneration Option?” Madelyn asked. “You knew and you stayed with him?”

“He was my brother.”

They drove in silence.

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She pulled to a stop in the middle of Circle Poke and then turned the wheel. She parked the truck where Jacob had found it, hidden next to the barn. Madelyn got out and dragged her pack from the back of the truck. Now that she was so close to her objective, there was too much stuff in it. She pulled water bottles from the pack and tossed them in the back of the truck.

“What’s the plan?” Elijah asked.

She didn’t even look at him. None of her plans included spending time with a relative of an Optioner. Elijah might as well have said that his brother was a rapist serial killer. Elijah’s brother had been part of the global conspiracy that had nearly extinguished human life on the planet. And, apparently, Elijah was just fine with that. Madelyn couldn’t imagine a more disgusting thought.

“Madelyn, I’m here to help you. You want to ignore me while I just follow behind, or do you want me to be a part of this effort?”

She ignored him. With her pack lightened, she turned for the trail that led around her cabin. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see the place—she did—but she had two reasons to take the other path. First, Harper would be more likely to take that path. Madelyn might find some sign of the young woman. Second, she didn’t want Elijah to see her home. The cabin was private, and she didn’t intend to share the existence of it with a relative of an Optioner. Back in Detroit, relatives of Optioners had been strung up by their necks until their dancing feet stopped moving.
 

She struck off at a decent pace into the woods.

Elijah fell in behind her.

He hit the middle of her pack with enough force to knock her off her feet. With his arms wrapped around her, they tumbled off the path into the brush and rolled to a stop. Before she could hurl a string of obscenities at him, he put his hand over her mouth. Madelyn was quick enough to understand in time.

Elijah was on top of her and the branches of the juniper bush blocked her vision. She saw a dark shape overhead and then heard snapping branches and groaning trunks as the thing bent the trees to either side. Soon the whole sky was blocked out by whatever it was. From what she could see, it looked like an enormous face that was a cross between a goat and a man. She saw human eyes and then the snout of an animal. The size of the thing was unfathomable. It instantly brought to mind her grandmother. She had always joked about how the devil would come as a giant goat man when the world was going to end.