Run For Cover (5 page)

I turn my gaze to the prison. Now would be a good time to try to shake Drew and take off on my own, but I’ll be able to get closer if I’m disguised as a fellow soldier. So I wait until he comes scurrying back with two jackets, two pairs of pants, and a hat. We struggle into them, and of course they’re too big, although he clearly chose the smallest ones he could find. On the plus side, that means I can put them on right over what I’m wearing. He tosses me the hat.

“In case they make the girl soldiers cut their hair,” he explains, pointing to my long dark hair. I twist up my hair and tuck it under the hat. Fine, that was smart thinking. But I’d have come up with it myself; I don’t need him.

“Let’s split up,” I suggest. “I’ll go that way.” I nod toward the prison. “You see what’s going on in the other direction.”

He gives me a weird look. “The only thing that way is the prison. Let’s follow the fence and see if we can find a front gate to this place.”

“Okay, great idea. You do that,” I say. “I’ll catch up to you in a minute.” My gut says to stay with him and keep an eye on him, but I can’t fight how much I want to check that prison. I know it’s crazy. There’s a part of me that knows, logically, that there must be plenty of Alliance prison camps. What are the chances Wren will be in this one, where I happen to show up? But if I can find out anything about her … Knowing
something,
anything at all, would be better than the last three awful years of knowing nothing.

Drew studies me, and now he looks like Ivan again, but in the way Ivan’s know-it-all look could suddenly turn understanding. Ivan looked at Wren that way whenever she told him about her dreams of saving the planet — the protests she wanted to organize, the petitions and poems and videos, the evidence she wanted
to take to the people in charge so they’d actually do something about all the homes that have been destroyed by the superhurricanes and earthquakes and rising oceans.

When Ivan looked like that, it was impossible to imagine he wasn’t on our side.

But I know better now. I’m not going to fall for a sympathetic expression again.

“What is it?” Drew asks. “What do you think you’re going to find over there?”

“No one,” I blurt, and his eyebrows shoot up. “I mean, nothing. Look, just do as I say. We don’t have time for arguing.”

I pull the hat down so the brim shades my eyes and I march out of the guard hut before he can say anything else. I try to walk past the front of the dormitory tent like I belong here. There are enough uniforms wandering around that I should be able to get by if nobody stares at me too closely.

There’s a cold wind whipping through the tents, even though the sun is bright overhead. I’m glad for the thick khaki jacket over my hoodie, and the heavy khaki pants over my still-damp jeans. My sneakers are finally starting to dry, but they’re still uncomfortably chilly as I stride across the patchy grass.

Two soldiers stand guard outside the prison door, chatting to each other. There are about fifteen prisoners out in the prison yard, most of them stamping their feet or rubbing their arms to stay warm. None of them are talking to one another. I slow down and study each of them hopefully, but disappointment washes over me as I realize they’re all men. Either there aren’t any women in this prison, or they exercise at a different time.

Still, they might know something. There’s only a tall chain-link fence between me and them. If I can stand next to it without the guards noticing, and if I can get the prisoners’ attention, hopefully I can talk to one of them, at least for a minute.

I’m walking past the guards, carefully not looking at
them, heading for the fence, when somebody suddenly takes my elbow in a firm grip and marches me straight past the prison. Fear makes my head spin and my muscles tense.

The Alliance has caught me!

A
ll I can think is,
What will happen to the others? Can they escape without me?
I hope Evelyn doesn’t do anything risky. I hope Maddie can keep it together. I hope Louisa doesn’t worry about me. I hope the boys don’t wreck everything for them.

Then I’m shoved into another small guard hut, next to another tall gate and just as empty as the first one. I spin around and find myself face-to-face with Drew. He looks mad, but I guarantee he’s not as mad as I am.

“Are you crazy?” I nearly yell. I’m so furious I could kick him, but I’m also shaking with relief. I pull off the hat and rub my face, trying not to scream.

“Are
you
?” he asks, closing the door behind us. “What were you going to do? Talk to the prisoners? You really think no one would have noticed?”

“Maybe,” I shoot back. “You don’t know. You didn’t have to barge in and ruin it and give me a heart attack.” I sit down in the rickety chair, fold my arms, and glare at him. I don’t care that I feel like a teenager arguing with her annoying dad. It’s an improvement over the feeling I had a few minutes ago, that everything was over for good.

“I was saving your butt,” Drew snaps.

“Who asked you to?” I say. “I can handle this. It’ll be worth it.”

“What will?” he asks. “What’s worth taking a risk like that?”

I press my lips together. If I haven’t even told Louisa about Wren, why would I tell stupid Drew?

His face changes, the scowl vanishing like his forehead has swallowed it up. “Come on, Rosie. Tell me. Who are you looking for?”

Then again, if I don’t tell him, we’re apparently never going to get anywhere.

I sigh and lean my elbows on my knees. “My sister, okay? And don’t you dare tell the others.”

“I won’t.” He crouches beside me. “Why do you think she’s here?”

“She has to be somewhere.” I glance out the window and see the line of prisoners filing back inside. Oh, great. Now I’ve missed my opportunity, and it’s all Drew’s fault. Angry, I turn back to him. “This is the closest we’ve ever gotten to Alliance prisoners. Do you know how much money my family has spent looking for her? And for nothing! No one knows anything! We don’t even know for sure if they have her. And maybe I could have found out — maybe someone could have told me — maybe she’s even here —” I run out of words and have to shove my hands against my eyes, forcing myself not to cry.

I’m not going to cry until I see her again. That was what I promised myself three years ago. I’m going to be all thorns and no roses, tough and prickly. Wren used to
tease me about that whenever I was mad or sulking. “What did you say your name was?” she’d joke. “Thorny?”

But after the tsunami, after we lost everything, or thought we had, she hugged me and said my thorns would keep me strong until we found a home again.

Then she left, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as home without her.

“How did they get her?” Drew asks, and I’m glad he doesn’t pat my shoulder or tell me it’ll all be okay.

“She ran away,” I say. “With this guy Ivan, her boyfriend.” I leave out the part about our town being destroyed. That would invite too many questions, like
What town was this, exactly?
Wren thought she was running away to make a difference in the world, to stop things like that tidal wave from ruining any more lives. But Drew doesn’t need to know that.

I shake my hair back and twist it under the hat again. “She left a note that they were going to join the Resistance. She said Ivan was one of them, that he would take her to
them. But we think he gave her up to the Alliance instead.”

“Because the Resistance isn’t real,” Drew says. “No, they are,” I say. “Sorry — you lose that argument. I’ve met some of them.” He doesn’t need to know how, or where, or, most important, why. “They’d never heard of Ivan. And they said Wren never found them. We have no idea what happened to her after she left us.” I point out the window. “But I have a pretty good guess. And I’m going to find a way into that prison, no matter what you do to try to stop me.”

He’s already shaking his big fat head. “It’s too dangerous,” he says. Mr. Cliché. I really can’t stand this guy. “I get it, okay, Rosie? I get that you want to find her. But if they catch you, they’ll catch all of us.” “Not necessarily,” I say.

“Remember what you said to Evelyn?” he says. “Nothing risky. This is way too risky. Stay alive first; do crazy brave things later.”

All right, I do kind of like that he calls me brave …
even if it comes paired with crazy. But I don’t care about his clever points or how many of my words he throws back in my face. He’s not going to change my mind. I’m about to point this out, when a strange coughing rumble interrupts us.

We both freeze, listening. It sounds like the bus that took us to CMS, but with more of a deep mechanical rattle. It’s definitely some kind of vehicle. I scramble up and lean out the window.

“It’s a truck!” I whisper back to Drew. “A
huge
truck!”

A gigantic, wheezing monstrosity, half off-white and half rust, is chugging along a dirt road through the woods on the other side of the fence. As I watch it bump and bounce over the path, I realize it’s headed for the gate near the trapdoor.

Then I spot the NutriCorp logo on the side.

“The boxes!” Drew and I yelp at the same time.

“They’re not going into the tunnel at all!” I say.

“That truck is taking them away,” he says, and I can tell his brain is galloping along right next to mine. It is
awesome that I don’t have to spend an hour explaining my new plan to him.

“Probably back into the States,” I say. “Right across the border.”

“Think there’s room for seven smugglers in there?” he asks with a grin.

I’m tempted to observe that it would have been much easier to stash four people in there instead of seven, but he looks so pleased that I decide now is not the time for a fight. “We have to get back to the others,” I say, standing and reaching for the door.

“What about the prison?”

I stop, one hand on the handle.
Stay alive,
says one side of my brain.
Find Wren,
says the other.

This could be our only chance to escape.

This could be my one chance to find my sister.

The others will never make it to Chicago without me.

But maybe they will… . Louisa is a lot more capable than she realizes.

It’s the thought of Louisa that makes up my mind. I
guess maybe I like her more than I knew I did. One thing’s for sure: I can’t abandon her. I can’t leave Maddie or Evelyn, either. I know how I felt when I woke up and Wren was gone. I’m not going to do that to my roommates.

I turn and glare at Drew. “Fine. Forget the prison. We escape, now. Do
not
give me one of your smug faces about this.” I fling the door open, and we hurry around the back of the prison and the dormitory tent, following the line of the fence together.

The truck is just backing through the fence as we sneak between the hanging laundry on the clotheslines. Two soldiers have pulled the gate open, and two others are standing by the boxes with their sleeves rolled up, ready to load the cargo. I catch a glimpse of a pale face in the window where we left the others — I’m guessing Maddie — before she ducks out of sight.

A stocky woman in a navy blue jumpsuit gets out of the truck with a clipboard and starts talking to one of the soldiers as the other three roll open the back and begin
transferring the boxes inside. We don’t have long; it’s a job that won’t take them more than half an hour. But how can we get them away from the truck long enough for us to sneak into it?

“If I had a rifle,” I whisper, “maybe I could shoot something and they’d have to go investigate.” I glance at the back of the tent beside us, wondering if there are any rifles in there.

“It has to be something that’ll get all of them to leave,” Drew whispers back. “Do you think they’d all chase me if I ran past them? I mean, if I take off the uniform?”

I shake my head. “Not all four of them. Definitely not the truck driver. And besides, what would happen to you then?”

“My mom’s kind of important,” Drew says. “Once they figured that out, they’d probably be pretty welcoming.”

I wonder who his mom is. I also wonder if he’s volunteering like this because he wouldn’t mind getting caught,
since he’s really on the Alliance’s side. Is this his chance to turn us in? Did he stop me from going to the prison because there’s something going on he doesn’t want me to know?

I have to stop thinking in circles like this. Drew hasn’t done anything obviously untrustworthy yet. It’s just a gut feeling I have, and I know that’s mostly because of how he reminds me of Ivan. But it doesn’t mean I’m wrong. He could be trying to win our trust for some larger purpose. Maybe he’ll call in the Alliance to get us later, once he gets some useful information out of us. I really shouldn’t have told him about Wren.

“Hello?” he says, waving his hand in front of my face. “Anyone in there? We have to do something, and quick.”

“I know. I’m thinking,” I say. “I vote no on making them chase you.” I look around, wishing again for a rifle, or better yet, a grenade. We learned about all kinds of homemade explosives at CMS. But there aren’t exactly a ton of ingredients within reach.

“BLEEEEAAAAAGG!”

Drew and I both jump as a loud, peculiar noise sounds right next to us. I lift aside a flapping bedsheet and find myself staring at a furry nose and sharp black eyes. The goat regards me solemnly from inside her pen. Her face practically says,
Seriously? You didn’t think of me right away?

I glance at Drew, who is grinning — an entirely new expression on him, and one that doesn’t look half-bad. Not that I care or notice or whatever.

“Perfect,” I whisper.

“You get the gate,” he says. “Then go for the others. I’ll freak out the animals.”

He unclips the bedsheet and heads off to the back of the pen with it. I follow the chicken wire around until I find the spot where the handlers must go in and out. There are a few twisty-ties holding the door shut, and that’s it. I glance around, but no one is looking my way. Quickly I untwist the ties and peel back the wire until there’s an opening big enough for an ostrich to run through.

A couple of the chickens immediately strut over to see whether I have any food, but the goats and the ostrich ignore me. That part’s up to Drew.

I hurry away from the pen and stroll around the front of the buildings so the soldiers by the truck won’t notice me. They’re all too busy loading boxes to see me slip into the cabin where I left my roommates.

“There you are!” Evelyn explodes as I close the door behind me. “We’ve been totally freaking out!”

“Well, some of us have,” Louisa says, rolling her eyes.

“We’ve got a plan,” I say. “But we have to move fast.” I cross to where Maddie is looking out the back window. There’s still no movement from the animal pen. Where is Drew?

“Where’s Drew?” Ryan asks, echoing my thoughts.

“Working on something. Everyone grab your packs and get ready to run. As soon as the coast is clear, we’re getting in that truck.” I point out the window.

“Whoa,” Alonso says. “I get it. Like fugitives hiding from the law in one of those old movies!” He bumps fists
with Ryan, and I think to myself that he can’t possibly have a secret like mine, or he wouldn’t be able to joke about stuff like that.

That’s when I notice that Evelyn is clutching a sheaf of papers to her chest. “Uh-oh. Did you actually —”

“I did!” she says, her dark eyes sparkling. “You should have seen me, Rosie! I was so brave! Like you! Alonso saw the guy leave, so I ran in there, grabbed everything that looked important, and ran back out. Check this out… . It’s a map, and I think it might show where all the secret training camps are! See, that’s CMS —”

I hear a shout from outside and have to interrupt her. “That’s totally amazing, Evelyn, but we need to go. You can tell me about it later.” It
is
kind of amazing that she managed to do that without getting caught, and if she’s right, that would be really valuable information to the Resistance.

Then again, as soon as that guy comes back and finds important papers missing, it’s going to set off all kinds of alarms. We could be in a lot more trouble than we were
before. But it won’t do any good to tell her that. Better to make her feel proud of herself. Our team will work better if we can avoid sulking, worrying, or blaming one another.

I check out the window. Seven goats are galloping toward the men with the boxes, bleating furiously. Right behind them is the ostrich, flapping its fluffy wings and squawking. The bedsheet Drew took is tied around one of its feet and whipping around behind it, which seems to be making the giant bird totally crazy. It keeps spinning and stomping on it and nearly falling over and trying to attack its own tail.

The soldiers practically leap out of their skin when they see the animals running toward them. Two of them take off after the ostrich, grabbing for the sheet and ducking away from the bird’s angry, stabbing beak. The other two run for the goats, trying to herd them back to the pen. They’re shouting for help, but most of the other soldiers in camp are out on the training field or too far away to hear them.

The animals scatter with the soldiers in pursuit, and I see Drew sprinting from the animal pen to the truck.

“Time to go!” I say. I do a quick scan out the door, then send Louisa and Maddie out first. Drew reaches the truck at the same time as they do, and he and Louisa throw Maddie inside and then scramble in behind her. The three of them start rearranging boxes at top speed, making a tunnel to the back.

“Okay, Ryan, you next,” I say, beckoning to him. He runs to the truck with Drew’s backpack slung onto his other shoulder. Alonso gives Evelyn’s hand a quick squeeze before he runs after them. She stuffs the papers into her pack and then stands beside me. I wait a moment until it’s hard to see the other five behind the rearranged boxes.

“Let’s go together,” Evelyn says, taking my elbow. I don’t know if she’s scared, but it gives me kind of a dumb warm, fuzzy feeling that she wants to stick with me.