The Prey (4 page)

A dozen other Brown Shirts raise their M16s and target them on Hope.

“Don't shoot!” a voice cries out.

A trailing Humvee comes to a sudden stop and a man waddles forward. He is heavy to the point of obese, with thin, almost invisible lips. Unlike the men on horseback, he doesn't wear the soldier's uniform of the Republic, but a black suit with a white shirt and a thin black tie. His most striking feature is the soiled hanky he grips in his hand, which he uses to dab at the corners of his eyes.

“Don't shoot,” the pudgy man says again, and rifle barrels lower. He appraises the twins with leering eyes. His sausage fingers cup Faith's chin. “We've been looking for you two,” he says in a nasally voice. “Oh yes, we've been looking for you for quite some time.”

T
HERE WAS A FUNERAL
to attend. There were
always
funerals at Camp Liberty. Another LT had succumbed to the lingering effects of ARS. Acute radiation syndrome. It was a lanky kid named Lodgepole who'd developed a tumor in his neck the size of a softball. Frankly, he was lucky to die when he did.

I didn't know Lodge well, but had a feeling I would've liked him. Which is exactly why I
didn't
get to know him. What was the point of making friends if ARS was just going to pick them off?

Another reason why I immersed myself in books.

I read everything I could get my hands on. History, biographies, fiction. If it was on the dusty shelves of our little library, chances were I'd checked it out.

But that wasn't all. Someone was giving me books as well. It wasn't uncommon to open my bedside trunk and find some new volume. None of the other LTs got books—just me—and I couldn't figure out who was doing it.

As for Black T-Shirt, I still hadn't found out anything about him, other than the fact that he was incredible at everything athletic. Whether it was shooting arrows or kicking soccer balls, he was drop-dead good. Yet another reason he pissed me off.

Now that he wore the camp uniform—jeans, white T-shirt, blue cotton shirt—his old name no longer cut it. So we called him Cat, because he was athletic and mysterious and half the time we didn't hear him sneak up beside us.

“Lemme ask you a question.” There he was again, standing beside me at the mess hall door. “You're called LTs, right?”

“That's right,” I said.

“Why?”

“It's short for
lieutenant
. A military abbreviation. 'Cause we're the future lieutenants of the world.”

“Says who?”

“The camp leaders. Westbrook, Karsten, Dekker, all of 'em.”

Cat shot me a look of disbelief. “Seriously?”

The hair rose at the base of my neck. What was
it about this guy that rubbed me the wrong way? “Seriously,” I said.

He tried—not very hard—to stifle a laugh. “So what happens when they leave here? The graduates?”

“You mean after they go through the Rite?”

“Yeah, tell me about the
Rite
,” he mocked.

“There's a big ceremony where all the seventeen-year-olds pledge allegiance to the Republic, then they're bussed to leadership positions elsewhere in the territory. It's a pretty big deal.”

This time Cat didn't bother trying to hide his laughter. It was a harsh, mocking laugh, and I couldn't take it anymore. I brushed past him and stepped outside into the pouring rain. Cat was beside me in a second.

“You don't have to get all pissy,” he said. “I'm just trying to help.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I don't need your help.”

“Fine. Your funeral.”

Something about his tone pushed me over the edge. I turned and gave him a shove.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” I demanded.

His expression was blank. Icy rain plastered his hair to his forehead.

“I've lived here nearly all my life,” I went on, “but you're the one who acts like he knows everything. Well, screw you!”

“I don't know everything . . .”

“Well, you definitely act that way.”

“. . . but I know
some
things. Like you're crazy to think they call you LT because it's short for
lieutenant
.”

“So if you're so smart, what is it?”

“You really want to know?” His words cut through the rain like a knife. “It's short for Less Than. Which is exactly what all of you are: a bunch of Less Thans.”

I felt like I'd been sucker punched. I was too stunned to respond.

Cat went on. “When you were a little kid, the Republic decided your fate. They determined where you were going to go, what you were going to be. Soldier, worker, Less Than, whatever.”

“Then how come none of us have ever heard that?” I asked.

“Probably 'cause the Brown Shirts didn't tell you.”

I struggled to form thoughts. “How do they decide who's a . . . Less Than?” Just saying the words made me uncomfortable.

“Handicaps, obesity, skin color, politics, who knows. They don't announce the criteria, but it's pretty clear. I mean, look around.”

I thought of the two hundred or so guys in Camp Liberty. Some of it might've been true, but that didn't mean anything. Sure, I had brown skin, and Twitch and June Bug had black. Dozer had a withered arm, Red a splotch on his face, and Four Fingers, well, four
fingers on each hand. But all that was just a coincidence. Right?

“Politics?” I asked. “What kid knows anything about politics?”

“Not you, your parents. If they're dissidents, then you're branded Less Thans for sure.”

“But why?”

“Because if the normal people want to survive the next Omega, we can't have a bunch of Less Thans holding us back.”

My head was swimming. Not only was he suggesting we weren't normal but that we might not even be orphans. “This is an orphanage,” I managed.

“Who said?”

“The Brown Shirts.”

“You don't think they'd lie, do you?”

My knees felt weak. Was it even remotely possible he was telling the truth? That we'd been ripped from our mothers' arms and sent here because we were considered “less than normal”? I felt the sudden need to get away.

“What's the matter?” he called out. “Can't face facts?”

That did it. I spun around and leaped toward him and we tumbled hard on the rain-soaked ground. My fists began pummeling him. Roundhouses and jabs and uppercuts, one after another, landing first on one side of his face and then the other.

The other LTs made a halfhearted attempt to break us up, but they seemed all too happy to watch. And then I realized: Cat wasn't fighting back. He was
letting
me hit him, barely blocking my punches. It made me all the angrier.

“That's enough,” Cat finally said, and he sent a fist in my direction. I fell to the side.

I pushed myself to a sitting position, blood trickling from my nose. Cat's one punch had drawn blood; it had taken me a couple dozen to do the same to him.

“You showed him,” said Flush.

But I knew I hadn't. The LTs drifted off to the barracks.

“Why didn't you fight back?” I panted.

“I only beat up people if I have reason to. I don't have a good reason to beat you up.” He sipped a breath. “Yet.”

He pushed himself up until he was sitting in the mud, his face near mine.

“If you're so smart, let me ask you this,” he said. “What do you know about the men outside camp?”

“You mean the Brown Shirts?”

“I mean the
other
men.”

I could've bluffed my way through an answer, but I was too exhausted for lies. “Nothing,” I conceded.

“I figured as much.” Then he said, “They know about all of you. And if you don't do something about it, you'll be dead within the year.”

Although I tried to hide it, my eyes widened. “Prove it,” I said.

“What're you doing tomorrow afternoon?”

That night I couldn't stop thinking about what Cat had said, his words jangling around my head like pebbles in a tin can. When I finally fell asleep I dreamed of her again: the woman with long black hair. She existed in some distant memory of mine, but who she was and how I knew her were details forever lost. All I knew was that she'd been appearing in my dreams more and more often until I no longer knew what was memory and what was imagination.

In the dream, we were racing through a field of prairie grass, my child's hand encompassed in hers. Although she was far older, it was all I could do to keep up with her—two of my short strides matching one of hers.

Behind us came a series of sharp pops, like firecrackers. There were other sounds, too. Shrill whistles. Shouting. Barking dogs.

The land sloped downward to a hollow and we drifted to a stop. She put her hands atop my shoulders and stared at me. Wrinkles etched her face. Crow's feet danced at the edges of her eyes.

I realized the pops were bullets; I could hear them pinging off the rocks and whistling past my ears.
Someone was after us. Someone was trying to
kill
us.

Even though the woman seemed about to tell me something, I didn't want to hear it—I didn't want to
be there
—so I jolted myself awake, the blackness of the Quonset hut pressing down on me, my breathing fast.

It was another hour before I fell back to sleep, wondering who the woman was and what she was about to say.

H
OPE AND
F
AITH ARE
jammed into the back of the Humvee. The convoy makes its way across nonexistent trails until they reach something resembling an actual road.

It's the first time they've ever been in a vehicle. Well, a
moving
vehicle. They've slept in plenty of abandoned ones during their years on the run, but this one is actually in motion. Nothing could prepare them for the sheer speed of it.

The sun sets and an eerie calm settles over the landscape. The Humvee's twin headlights cut two jagged holes in the darkness.

Hope wonders where they're being taken. Every so often, the heavyset man swivels his thick head and
peers back from the passenger seat. He says nothing.

In the distance, Hope catches a fleeting glimpse of structures. Listing log cabins, tar-paper shacks, old wooden buildings with peeling paint. All surrounded by a ten-foot-high fence, topped with an unending coil of razor wire. Anchoring the four corners are guard towers with Brown Shirts poised behind machine guns.

Hope's mouth goes dry. After sixteen years, ten of them on the run, she and her sister are about to be imprisoned.

“Camp Freedom,” the obese man says cheerfully. “Your new home.”

The camp's colossal gates shriek open and the vehicle rolls to a stop. A soldier pulls open the passenger door. There are Brown Shirts everywhere, each wearing the Republic's distinctive dark badge with three inverted triangles. But it's the others who draw Hope's attention.

Girls. Scores of them. All wearing the same coarse, gray dresses that hang limply below their knees. Faded, scuffed boots adorn their feet. Based on their expressions, they seem to regard Hope and Faith as a couple of feral cats.

A tall, stooped man with a tidy mustache and a balding pate emerges from a cinder block building.

“I see you've met Dr. Gallingham,” he says. “I'm Colonel Thorason.” He pauses briefly, as if expecting the girls to bow or otherwise show how impressed they
are to meet the camp overseer. “Life here is very simple: you abide by the rules or face the consequences. Is that clear?”

Hope and Faith nod.

“In that case—” He interrupts himself when he spies a woman walking their way. She is tall, with straight blond hair and enormously round cheekbones. An ankle-length coat is draped atop her shoulders. Thorason takes a deferential step backward as she approaches.

“Which one threw the spear?” she asks. Her tone is as sharp as the razor wire atop the fence.

“I did,” Hope says.

Hope waits for a reaction. A slap. A punch from a soldier. Something to teach her a lesson. Instead, the woman reaches forward and fondles Hope's hair, letting the silky strands run between her fingers.

“Such pretty hair,” the woman murmurs. “It's obvious you take good care of it.” The woman forces a brittle smile and begins to walk away.

“Do what you need to do,” she says over her shoulder to Colonel Thorason. “But that one”—pointing her finger in Hope's direction—“gets shaved.”

Hope and Faith are taken to a bathhouse, where they're stripped and showered with a white powder.

“Delousing,” the female guard explains in a flat
monotone. She has a square block of a face that seems incapable of smiling. She throws two dresses at them: ill-fitting gray things. A pair of dirty combat boots finishes the ensemble. When the guard turns her back, Hope retrieves her father's locket from her pants pocket and stuffs it in her boot. That and the scrap of paper.

The woman turns back around, brandishing a large pair of scissors, the blades nicked with rust.

“Don't move,” she orders, “unless you want this through your eye.”

She snips the scissors twice, then seizes Hope's hair. Watching her long strands of hair ribbon to the ground, it's all Hope can do not to cry.

Live today, tears tomorrow.

When the woman finishes, she grabs a broom.

“Here,” she says, thrusting it in Hope's hand. “Clean up your mess.”

Hope grits her teeth and does as commanded, but not before running a hand over her bald, patchy head. She feels as naked as a plucked bird. But it's more than that; it's almost as if—somehow—she's lost a piece of herself. A piece of her mother.

A male guard with a jutting chin enters. In his hand dangles an odd-looking tool with a pointy end. His gaze lands on Faith.

“Right arm,” he commands.