The Prey (32 page)

And that night, the woods parted and we found ourselves on the crest of a hill. Beneath us, in a valley not
more than a hundred yards away, was a rusted chain-link fence, topped with coils of razor wire. On each side of it the trees had been razed, leaving a no-man's-land of stumps and weeds. An enormous scar in the geography.

As we stared at the fence that stretched in either direction as far as we could see, I wondered: Was it for keeping people in or others out?

“What now?” Flush asked.

“Now we find an opening,” Cat said, walking parallel to the fence but staying hidden in the trees. His eyes remained focused on the valley below.

It was forty-five minutes before we saw a distant glow lighting up a cone of sky. The longest minutes of the entire trip. To be so close and yet so far seemed the cruelest of jokes.

We padded to a stop. There—on the other side of the fence—was the edge of a community. Houses, stores, a town square. Under the flickering glare of torches, a small band played in a gazebo, their enthusiastic strains floating through the air like smoke. Families sat on blankets while squealing children played tag and hide-and-seek. There was laughter; there was music. It was unlike anything we'd ever seen. Like we'd gone back in time—how we imagined the world pre-Omega.

We crouched in the woods, observing. Mesmerized. Some of the Sisters were moved to tears.

“There're no soldiers,” Twitch whispered.

“There's no fear,” Diana added.

It was true. There was no indication of badges or Brown Shirts or weapons. Just people—just regular people—enjoying themselves on a late-spring night. Mothers and fathers and children and neighbors, relaxing and playing. A far cry from anything we'd experienced the first sixteen years of our lives.

“So let's go,” Dozer said, rising from his kneeling position.

Cat caught him by the arm. “Not yet.”

“Why not? Let's go ask those people where the opening is.”

“Not yet,” Cat said again.

We sat there, watching, admiring,
longing
.

“Come on,” Cat said at last, and began walking. But not toward the fence—
away
from it. Back to where we'd been.

“What the hell . . .” Dozer fumed.

But Cat just kept walking. We did our best to keep up. It made no sense, of course. We'd come all this way, survived all those hardships, in search of this very place and this very moment . . . and we were leaving it.

We marched back a quarter of a mile until the lights from the town were a distant glow. Cat stopped and faced us.

“There's a hole down there under the fence,” he said.
“I saw it earlier. That's where we'll crawl into the new territory.”

“Um, why don't we just go back and ask those people where the gate is?” Dozer said.

“Because we don't know they'll let us in.”

It was a decent point. Although the people by the gazebo appeared friendly enough, for all we knew that fence was meant to keep us out.
No Less Thans allowed.

“But once we cross to the other side,” Cat went on, “we can find out where we stand.”

“And if they don't want us?”

Cat shrugged. “I'd rather be on the run over there than here.”

Although Dozer rolled his eyes and muttered something under his breath, the rest of us nodded. It made sense. And what would it hurt to stay on the side of safety?

“I'll go first and make sure it isn't electrified,” Cat said. He was about to leave when I stopped him.

“We go together,” I said. “All of us.”

“I agree,” Hope chimed in.

“Me, too,” said Red.

It was unanimous. Everyone—even Dozer—agreed to join Cat down the sloping hill to the fence.

Cat angled his face to the skies. When a cloud pulled itself over the glowing moon, we scrambled forward.

Pine needles gave way to tall grass and the
swish
of
weeds brushing against legs. Fifty yards of no-man's-land and no sign of guards, no sign of lookouts. We were going to make it. After all this time. After all we'd gone through.

Forty yards became thirty. Twenty. Ten. And still nobody.

And then we were at the fence, falling in a semicircle around a swale in the ground. Draining water had left an indentation where the bottom of the fence no longer met the earth. A small but obvious opening.

Cat tossed a branch toward the fence. We held our breath. No sparks. Nothing. Then he extended the metal cap of his canteen. Metal touching metal. Still nothing. We exhaled.

Cat burrowed his head into the ground and tried to slither through the narrow opening. His legs churned, feet kicked. A moment later he pulled back out, his face streaked with brown.

“No good,” he said, spitting out a mouthful of dirt. “Not big enough.”

If Cat couldn't manage it, there was little hope for the rest of us.

“So let's dig,” I said, and before anyone had a chance to protest I pulled out a knife. I figured we had less than a minute before the clouds rolled past the moon.

In no time we were chipping away, scratching and clawing at the hard earth, casting a small waterfall of
dirt behind us. The sharp edges of the fence bottom scraped our knuckles raw, the blood mixing with dirt to create a kind of purplish paste. Our heavy breathing fell into a chant. There was an ugly beauty in our efforts.

“Let's try it,” I said, when the hole seemed deep enough.

Cat needed no more prompting than that. He jumped back into the hole, squirming and prodding, until he managed to appear on the other side of the fence. He smiled, white teeth shining through a face smeared with dirt. Diana went next and she navigated the opening with no less difficulty. One by one the Sisters and LTs slid beneath the fence, twenty-four in all, until it was just Flush and me and Argos.

“I don't think I can do this,” Flush said with a look of panic. Clammy perspiration dotted his face.

“Of course you can,” I said. The others nodded their heads in support.

“I'm too big. Twitch barely made it through and he's a beanpole.”

I placed my hands on Flush's shoulders. “Look at me,” I commanded, and his eyes locked with mine. “You survived the Brown Shirts and the Hunters, and now you're telling me a little hole's going to defeat you?”

“Well . . .”

“You made it through the hard part, Flush. This hole's the easy stuff. Remember, you once ate maggots.”

“I was hungry.” He couldn't help but smile as he said it.

“So what I'm saying is, if you can do
that
, you can do
this
.” My gaze shifted to the hole. “All we ask is that you try. You willing to do that?”

He nodded a trembling chin. And then, like a duck diving into the shallows, he lowered his head and began to slide his way through the makeshift tunnel. It was a feat that would have been utterly impossible a few months earlier.

But Flush had changed. We all had.

My focus shifted from Flush to the line of others on the opposite side. Pale moonlight cast a crisscrossing shadow of chain-link fence across their faces.

That's when it hit me. We'd made it. We had done something extraordinary. This group of misfits. Of Less Thans and Sisters.
We few, we happy few.
We had survived the most insurmountable of obstacles and made it to a new territory. To freedom.

And yet . . .

Flush popped up on the other side and people patted him on the back. A smile the likes of which I had never seen before plastered his face. There was genuine pride there. A feeling you only get from pushing yourself beyond all boundaries. Something
earned
.

“Thanks,” Flush said, leveling his gaze at me. “I'm glad I did it.”

I got what he was saying. Not just grateful he'd made it through the hole, although that was part of it, but grateful he'd come along on the journey. Grateful he belonged. Even grateful he was a Less Than.

That's the moment I understood what the woman with the long black hair was really saying.

You will do what's right,
she'd told me, over and over, echoing in my dreams. Or my memories. Or both. And now I finally understood.
You will lead the way.

She'd been guiding me all these years and I just hadn't known it.

“Come on, Book,” Twitch said. “Your turn.”

But I didn't move. And then I said the two words that surprised me most. Words I didn't know were still a part of my vocabulary.

“I can't.”

Jaws dropped. Eyes grew wide.

“What're you talking about?” Flush asked. “
I
made it.”

“Yeah, and he's a whole lot bigger than you,” Dozer added.

After fires and deserts and Hunters' bullets, what was there about a little hole to be afraid of?

“It's not the hole,” I said. “It's something else.”

“Like what?”

I hesitated, if only because I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to say.

“The others,” I said at last.

“What're you getting at?” Dozer asked.

“Is it fair we're here and there are Less Thans stuck back at Liberty?”

“They didn't come with us,” he sputtered, suspicious and disgusted all at once.

I thought of the ones gagged and manacled in the bunkers. Thought of the ones, too, who'd be sold off after the next Rite, when they turned seventeen. “We didn't give 'em the chance.”

Even in blue moonlight I could see Dozer's cheeks turning crimson. “We couldn't've done it with hundreds! We're not frickin' Methuselah or Moses or whoever it was! We had trouble enough with just us.”

“Fine. So now we can rescue the others. Those hundreds.”

“We?”

“Okay, maybe
I
rescue them. I know how to get back, what to avoid, what precautions to take. I'll lead them here.”

Dozer laughed. A sarcastic scoff.
“You?”

“No offense, but you can't rescue all of them,” Diana said. “Not by yourself.”

“Maybe not, but I've gotta try. They're dead otherwise.”

No one could argue with me there. That's what the woman with long black hair had been telling me.
You
will lead the way.
Not to the new territory, but back to where we'd come from all along. I still didn't know who she was—but after all this time I finally understood what she was getting at. It wasn't intended for me to save my own skin, but to help the others. What was the point of surviving, if there was only a handful of us?

Even if I was lucky enough to have Hope in my life, I'd never stop thinking about the ones we'd left behind.

“So you're going all the way back to Camp Liberty?” Hope asked, trying to make sense of what I was suggesting. “Through the Brown Forest?”

“Yep.”

“Across the Flats?”

“That's right.”

“Up the mountains?”

“I don't have a choice.”

It was crazy—I knew it. We'd reached the Heartland. Had traveled halfway across the West to do so. But even more than that, I'd finally been involved in something that mattered. For the first time in my life, I actually belonged. And yet, by leaving, I was saying good-bye to all of that. Saying good-bye to Hope, too. For what?

But I knew the answer. To save the others.
To do what's right.
That simple.

I gripped the cyclone fence, my fingers curling around its metal strands like vines. “Thanks,” I said.

Several of the others placed their hands on top of
mine. Twitch. Scylla. Flush. Red. Even Four Fingers.

“Thanks for what?” Twitch asked.

“For us. Thanks for being us.”

To my surprise, Flush's chin quivered and tears streaked his dirt-covered face. Dozer was irritated beyond words and rolled his eyes. Hope looked at me, perplexed or hurt or both. And then there was Cat, sitting off to one side, shaking his head.

“You're crazy, you know,” he said.

“I know.”

“You'll never make it there alive.”

“Possibly.”

“We'll be safe and sound and stuffing our faces and you'll be tromping through the wilderness fighting off wolves.”

“True. But I seem to remember someone who risked his life to walk across the No Water because it was the right thing to do.” I pried my fingers free and took a final glance at my friends. At Hope. She could barely meet my eyes.

I started walking up the hill, Argos following at my heels. It was just him and me. Two of us, taking on Brown Shirts and Hunters, Crazies and wolves. It was a long walk up the slope, the dew-covered weeds brushing my legs.

“Wait,” someone called, and I turned.

It was Cat. But instead of trying to talk me out of
going, he was crawling through the hole.

“I thought you told me I was crazy,” I said, when he popped up on my side.

“You are,” he answered, brushing away dirt. “But I'm crazy, too. And there's no way I'm going to let you have all the fun by yourself.”

There was more to it than that, I figured. Something having to do with his dad, maybe. I didn't ask.

And then the most remarkable thing happened. Cat smiled. He actually
smiled
. I couldn't believe it. Emotion surged through me. Relief and joy and a sudden love of life.

He turned to the others and said, “Any of the rest of you Janes care to join us? It'll be the adventure of a lifetime.”

“As if what we just went through wasn't?” Twitch asked.

“That was nothing. We're talking real fun this time. The chance to free several hundred Less Thans and stick it to Westbrook all at once.”

“The Flats?” Flush asked.

“Unfortunately,” I answered.

“Crazies?”

“Probably.”

“Brown Shirts?”

“Definitely.”

“Wolves?”

“I don't see how we can avoid 'em.”