Strike (12 page)

“Tie that dog up before she gets shot,” are his first words to us, but they're spoken less like an asshole and more like a country boy who would feel really bad if Matty got hurt. I nod and tie her leash around a tree. She promptly starts rolling around on a mushroom.

“Now, y'all gather up over here, and keep your hands off your guns.” We crowd up around him. The preppy kids are clustered together and snickering, as they always do when they think they're
going to have to listen to someone who doesn't have as much money as they do. “I just need to see how good a shot y'all are. We don't want to waste bullets, and you're going to have to repack 'em later anyway, so just step up when I call your name and take five shots. Easy, right?” Everyone nods.

“What if we don't have a gun?” a hot Asian emo kid asks—the one who called me a badass. He looks to be alone, like Bea.

“Maybe you can borrow one from a girl,” says the lead prep.

The hot emo kid gives a little snort of a laugh and barrels into the prep kid, taking him to the ground and basically pretzeling him around until he's got the kid in some sort of choke hold. The prep kid is turning purple and sputtering and flailing, and his friends don't know what to do. Guess they don't have guns either. Brady watches the scene and pulls a notebook out of his back pocket to take notes.

“Fight! Fight! Fight!” Chance shouts, and Gabriela smacks his shoulder.

“Tap my arm if you're done.” Hot emo kid isn't even out of breath, but the prep kid frantically flaps his hand against the kid's shoulder and is released. Hot emo kid stands up with a sly grin. “That's called jiu-jitsu, dick. And it means that I don't need a gun to kill you.”

The prep kid stands, his face red. His polo is askew, the collar no longer popped. Giggles ripple through the crowd. It's nice to
see a douchebag laid low, new world order or not.

Brady gnaws on his pencil. “What's your name, killer?” After a pause, he points a finger and adds, “Your new name. Nobody here wants your birth name.”

Prep kid looks like he wants to respond but can't speak. Of course, no one cares about his name.

The emo kid gives an amused grin and tosses his hair. “Rex.”

I know it's a fake name, but it suits him. Rex looked cool as hell before he choked the prep kid out, but now there's a certain deadliness to his ease. His hair is dark and shoulder-length, his shirt black, and his jeans faded gray and slim fitting in the way that only certain rock stars can pull off. His boots ride the line between face stomping and fashion, and I suspect the brown stains on the worn leather are blood. As if sensing the up-and-down I'm giving Rex, Wyatt slides his arm around my waist. But Gabriela sees it too and mutters, “Meow,” under her breath.

Brady scribbles some notes and points at the prep kid. “And you?”

Prep kid's finally got his voice back, but it's raspy. “Tyler.”

Looking down at his notes, Brady smirks. “Oh, good. Tyler Durden. That's pretty cute. Let's see if you can live up to that name.”

“I'm out of bullets,” Tyler says. “So . . .” He looks around like we're going to offer him ammunition.

“This is stupid.”

The quiet girl, Bea, steps past him, whips the black revolver from under her hoodie, and fires five rounds at the line of targets. Five Coke cans jump off the board. It's funny—the sound of gunshots doesn't even register anymore.

“Can I leave now?” Bea's voice is flat. I'm pretty sure she's actually a reptile.

Brady eyes her up and down. “What's your name, sugar?”

She points the gun at him, casual as you please. “My name's not ‘Sugar.' It's ‘Bea.' ”

“Fine. Bea.” The big redneck shrugs and grins when she lets her gun fall to her side. “You can leave if you're done. But you'll need to report to the house at lunch. Leon's got a little job for all of y'all. Unless you have any questions about how things are run in Crane Hollow?”

Bea's smile curls into itself like a dead bug. “I do have a question, actually. What sort of justice system do you have?”

I realize I'm holding my breath, because she's acting really goddamn creepy, and I can feel it in the air. Wyatt's arm tightens, pulling me to his side.

“Somebody steals from you or threatens you, you can kill 'em. But make sure you have proof or witnesses. Ain't a single Crane on the property that ain't armed to the teeth. Why?”

Bea raises her gun and, as if in slow motion, ever so casually shoots Tyler in the chest. We're all perfectly still and silent as he drops to his knees and his face lands in the dirt.

“Because I hated
Fight Club
,” she says. “And that boy grabbed me on my way to the latrine last night and said he wanted to fuck me.” She pulls back her sleeve to show a fresh bruise about the size and shape of a boy's hand. “Is that fair?”

Brady just nods and scribbles in his notebook.

She turns and walks away.

“What do we do?” one of the prep kids asks, all cockiness gone.

Gabriela hurries over, drops to her knees, and starts pumping the kid's chest, but . . . it's clear that he's dead. After a few tense moments, she stands, shakes her head, and tucks herself back into the crowd between me and Chance.

“There's nothing we can do,” Brady says. “He's gone. This is a good lesson for y'all about how things work around here. You do bad things to anyone on our side and bad things are gonna happen to you. For now we're going to shoot, because that's what we were told to do. You got a problem with that?”

“Yes, I have a fucking problem with it! He was my friend, and you're just going to let that little tease shoot him and walk away?” The prep kid is crying, his lip trembling. He looks barely sixteen, and in his terror and fear I see what I must've looked like standing outside Wyatt's door, waiting for his dad to answer my knock. This kid—he wasn't a Valor kid. Whatever test they used to determine who to choose . . . he wouldn't have passed it.

“Yeah, I am,” Brady says. “Unless you know for sure he didn't touch her.”

In response, the kid whips out Tyler's gun and holds it, outstretched and shaking, pointed sideways at Brady. In one fierce, hard move, Brady smashes the gun to the side and drives the kid to the ground, where he sits on the smaller kid's chest and slaps him, hard.

“You done, son?”

The kid just blubbers, his eyes squeezed shut like he hit the end of his rope a long time ago. Tyler's gold-stamped Glock is on the ground, and Brady picks it up and checks the clip, which is empty. “That's what I figured,” he mutters. And then he hands the gun to Rex.

The crowd murmurs and looks around. I suspect they're all as concerned as I am that they might lose their guns. Now, in this world, my gun feels like an extension of my body, and I don't want to see it just handed to somebody else. Again.

Brady stands up. “Enough fooling around. Y'all line up and start shooting. Bullets are in the box. If your gun ain't a forty-five, let me know. We don't have time for this shit.”

The prep kid stands up and moves to whisper with what's left of his friends, who look decidedly less brave.

Wyatt and I line up at the far side. He hits cans with four of his five shots, which makes sense, as one of our earliest conversations revealed that he knew what to do with a gun. I hit two. I guess
I'm better at closer range. I let Gabriela borrow my gun, and she reloads it and returns it after hitting one of the cans. Some of the other kids are pretty hopeless, their hands still shaking like they're on Valor duty. Chance hits three. His hands don't shake, and he handles his Glock like a pro. Rex is decent, getting three shots out of five with his new gun. The prep kid misses all five of his shots, probably because he can't stop looking at Tyler's body, which has been left on the ground, staring up at the blue sky.

“Can . . . ? Can I at least close his eyes?” I ask.

Brady nods. And I don't want to touch this kid, but I do. Not because I feel sorry for him or feel that his death was unjust. Because I can't stand the sounds of the flies.

I'm glad when Brady says it's time to leave the gunpowder hangover of the field. After what we've been through with Valor, I feel exposed out here, sure that so much gunfire will draw attention and helicopters. When Rex stops to stand over Tyler's body, Brady steps beside him and lifts his hat to rub his hair.

“He wasn't gonna cut it anyway. Kid was already pushed to his limit.”

Rex nods thoughtfully. I shiver. Where is my limit? Where is Wyatt's?

In the kitchen, they serve us cheap sandwiches—white bread, processed cheese, and bologna. Bags of off-brand potato chips gape on the cracked counters. An industrial-sized box of Moon Pies waits
at the end like the Holy Grail. We serve ourselves on Styrofoam plates, and Brady herds us into the living room like a flock of dumb chickens. Wyatt and I sit on a fake leather couch, our hips glued together on the sprung seat as I sneak my bologna to Matty. I realize that until today I hadn't eaten anything in a week that wasn't fast food or Pop-Tarts or stolen from someone who's now dead. My stomach turns, but I eat anyway. It's just another new skill in my repertoire. Everything tastes like dust anyway.

“Welcome, citizens.”

Everyone looks up, their jaws frozen mid-chew. It's Leon Crane, all dapper and dangerous in black jeans, a black vest, and a striped button-down shirt. He looks like the lab-made love child of a hipster, a preacher, and a serial killer.

“Did you enjoy your morning on the range with Cousin Brady?”

“Until my friend got shot,” the prep kid says. His food is untouched and his red eyes leak despite his best effort not to cry.

Leon's smile is stunningly warm. “An unfortunate incident that should remind us all to keep our hands to ourselves. But I do believe we can all continue in our shared ambitions without ongoing enmity—wouldn't you agree?”

“Do you mean I'm just supposed to forget that bitch killed Chad?”

Leon is in the kid's face in a heartbeat, his fist balled up in his polo shirt.

“Why, yes, son, I do expect you to forget that. It might be a Valor world outside, but in Crane Hollow, we respect our women. When everyone is armed, such problems take care of themselves, as you've seen. Now, can you move on or not?”

The room is dead silent but for Rex crunching on fake Ruffles.

The prep kid shakes his head once and looks up, eyes steely. “When's the funeral?”

Leon's smile is cloying, but he steps back, arms wide. “We don't do funerals in Crane Hollow, or else we'd have no time to fight back. You want to do your friend honor, you complete your mission today. We have a common enemy, and that enemy is Valor. So let's strike back at the real foe.”

“So what are we going to do?” asks a beefy kid in camo through a mouthful of sandwich. “Like, hold up a bank?”

Leon steps back and sits in a wingback chair that kind of makes him look like the Godfather. He crosses his legs and regards us coldly and bemusedly. “Son, what good would holding up a bank do?”

“I don't know. We could take over all the banks and show Valor who's boss.”

“Now, let's have a little economics lesson. You know who works in banks? Nice folks who need jobs to feed their families. Tellers and loan officers and a policeman who's too old and slow to work the streets. Now, why would we want to go hold up those innocent, hard-working people?”

“To get the money out of the vault?”

“The vault?” Leon throws his head back to laugh. “Shit, son. All the money's digital now. This is not a comic book. The vault is not full of bags of gold coins stamped with a green money symbol. And the piddly peons working behind the bulletproof glass are not the enemy.”

God, his voice grates on me. I sit back and mimic Leon's posture. “Then why are we even here? What are we supposed to fight?”

Leon leans forward and steeples his hands. When he looks up, I can see the veneer of respectability spread too thin over a pissed-off country boy who's still wearing prison tatts on his knuckles.

“You fight who I tell you to fight. Jesus H. Christ, kid. This isn't
Red Dawn
, okay? We're not some plucky group of losers that's going to take on the government and win. Do you even know what a bank is today? It's not one building run by one person with a big front door we can blow up and an easily recognized villain stroking a cat behind a mahogany desk. A bank is . . . a damn hydra. Executives, lawyers, managers, cables, servers. It's a million computers connected with shadows, each wire as well hidden as the second-smartest guys in the world can make it. That's the secret. There's nothing to fight. Nothing to rally against. No common enemy. No face you can put on the monster. Even their executive board, the people in charge—they go by code names and move around frequently so we can't track them down. We can't target their homes, their families, even if we
wanted to hurt civilians. You can't hold a coup against an invisible monster. So we're doing what we can: making it damned unpleasant for Valor to keep on being Valor. They want to make money? Great. We can stop that. They want more capitalism? We'll knock off its cap. They want us to get more into debt? We'll cut up our credit cards and demagnetize every person we walk by.”