The Prey (7 page)

“He's gone,” she says. “You may as well come out.” Just to be safe, she picks up the pitchfork. Her damp palms grip the wooden handle.

The boy eases forward, brushing hay from his arms. He walks with a slight limp.

“Thank you,” he says. “He would've killed me.”

“He would've killed
me
,” she responds, not hiding her irritation.

A look of regret sweeps across the boy's face. “I'm sorry I put you in that—”

“You shouldn't have. I'm in enough trouble as it is.”

“I'm sorry. I just thought—”

“It's bad enough the other girls want to kill me, now the guards will as well.”

“I said I'm sorry.”

They stand there, facing each other, saying nothing. Separating them is a slice of sunlight, dancing with dust.

“Can I just ask one question and then I'll get out of your hair?”

She nods curtly.

“What is this place? What's going on here?”

“Camp Freedom,” she says.

“Why are you here? Why're there guards and barbed wire? Are you all criminals or orphans or what?”

She doesn't know how to answer that—not in any brief kind of way.

“Look, I don't have much time,” he says, “and I know I shouldn't have bothered you . . .”

“I'll say.”

“. . . and I'm sorry if I've gotten you in trouble, but I'm a Less Than from Camp Liberty and—”

“A Less Than?”

He waves his hand dismissively. “It's what they call us. We're looking for an escapee and we thought he might've come here.”

She gives her head a shake. “Here? Why on earth would someone come
here
?”

“What I'm really asking is: If someone wanted to get to the next territory, what's the fastest way?”

For the longest time Hope doesn't speak. Ever since she and Faith came into camp, they've been ignored by everyone. Now, finally, someone is talking to her.
Needing
something from her. And that someone is this boy, whose honest expression and probing eyes set her heart racing.

“Can you help me or not?” he asks.

That's when she realizes what she recognizes in him. It's not like she's met him before—it's not like that—but there's something in his eyes. Kindness. Maybe even warmth. She doesn't mean to stare, but she can't look away.

“The Brown Forest,” she blurts out.

“What about it?”

“That's where you want to go.”

“Where is it? How do we get there?”

Hope leans the pitchfork against the hay bales and wipes a section of floor with her hand. “This is where we are,” she says, hastily sketching a map.

He crouches next to her. She can feel the heat from his body. Smell traces of sweat and musk and woodsmoke. Masculine smells.

“You need to get east of the mountains,” she says, her fingertips tracing the outline of Skeleton Ridge. “Until you hit the Flats.”

“The Flats?”

“A white desert. Cross it and you'll reach the Brown Forest. Somewhere on the other side of that is the next territory.”

“Have you been to the Brown Forest?”

“Once. A long time ago. My father took us.”

“Is it safe?”

“Safer than here,” she says.

They happen to lock eyes at the same moment, and Hope feels the blood rushing up her neck.

“Thank you,” he says.

She nods. Her breathing is unnaturally shallow.

“I'm Book,” he says, extending a hand.

She hesitates. A long moment passes before she reaches forward. “Hope.”

They shake. His grip is surprisingly strong, and it's
like a jolt of electricity shoots up her arm. She pulls her hand back.

From outside comes the sound of footsteps. Book shoots a glance toward the barn door.

“If we ever escape,” he says, “I promise we'll come for you.”

“Don't. Not if you want to live.”

A moment later, the Less Than named Book scrambles down the ladder and out the barn. Long after he's gone, Hope can still feel the touch of his hand, the heat of his skin. For reasons she doesn't understand, it's the first time she's felt alive since she and Faith were captured.

A
LTHOUGH THE
B
ROWN
S
HIRT
chewed me out for disappearing, more than anything he seemed relieved I showed up before the colonel found out. That way both of us avoided punishment.

Westbrook and Karsten didn't say a word the entire drive back to Camp Liberty, but I swear they looked at me differently. With a new kind of suspicion.

The feeling was mutual. After witnessing the gruesome slaughter in the mountains and the inmates of Camp Freedom, I was more convinced than ever the world was not what I thought it was.

As for finding Cat, the colonel never once asked for my assistance. It was almost as if he was more interested in threatening me with what I could expect if I didn't play along.

When we returned to Liberty, I didn't return to my barracks—not right away. I needed time to think, to process everything I'd seen. Like the girl.

The girl named Hope.

I couldn't stop thinking about her—especially those eyes. They were two brown pools. She didn't so much look at me as
through
me.

There was something else swimming in my brain—something Cat said on the way down the mountain.
Right under the Brown Shirts' noses.

That night, once lights-out was called, I waited. When all the other LTs were snoring with a kind of clocklike efficiency, I tiptoed to the latrine. The cistern's edges scraped when I removed the lid, revealing a lone object taped beneath it. A flashlight. Not many to be found these days, but Red had managed to sneak one off a Brown Shirt months earlier.

I snuck outside. The night was cool, the grass stiffening with frost.

I made my way to the Soldiers' Quarters—a large rectangle of brick barracks where the officers and Brown Shirts lived, with soccer fields and a softball diamond in the very center. There was also an enclosed tennis court and an area for free weights. Barbells littered the ground, moonlight catching metal.

But there was nothing to be found—just some ball fields and workout equipment. What was Cat talking about? What was suspicious about all that? The
windscreen surrounding the tennis court flapped in the breeze and I decided to give it one last look.

The door was partially ajar and I turned my body sideways to slip inside. My eyes roamed from one corner of the court to the next. It was exactly what it appeared to be: a tennis court with a frayed net and fading green pavement. There was nothing there.

I was gliding back to the entrance when my foot sent something clattering across the court. I froze, praying no one had heard.

My hands fumbled on cool pavement until they landed on something small and round. A button. A measly button.

I cocked my arm and was ready to toss it over the fence when I gave it another look. My thumb nudged the flashlight on, producing a fuzzy, weak beam. There was nothing special about the button. Small. White. Four tiny holes for thread.

But when I held it against my shirt, I saw it matched the ones on my camp uniform. There had to be a lot of shirts out there with white buttons, but still . . .

From across the fields I heard the sounds of Brown Shirts leaving a party. I had to get out of there before they discovered me.

I let the flashlight's yellow circle guide me across the court. Metal caught light and glimmered back at me. A brass ring, set flush into the court. I let the light play
on the surrounding area . . . and nearly lost my breath.

A rectangle was cut into the court, like a storm cellar door. Without thinking, I slipped my fingers beneath the cold metal ring and lifted. The door swung up, revealing a black chasm . . .

. . . and the reeking stench of BO, vomit, and urine. It nearly made me gag.

I poked the flashlight's beam into the hole, where it caught a ladder and black concrete walls. It was some kind of underground bunker. Then the light fell on pale, upturned faces—prisoners chained to walls. Their eyes were wide with terror; rags protruded from their mouths. They recoiled at the light, blinking and pressing themselves against the wall like vampires.

I started to move the light away when suddenly I recognized one of the faces. It was Moon, a round-faced LT who'd gone through the Rite earlier that spring. Now here he was, tethered to a bunker wall, unwashed hair plastering his forehead, his pants stained and soiled.

“Moon?” I asked, kneeling by the side of the hole. He squinted into the beam. “It's me: Book.”

“Aagk?” he sputtered through the gag in his mouth.

My flashlight swung to the prisoner next to him. His face was jaundiced, eyes bloodshot, sores covering his half-naked body. I recognized him, too: Double Wide. And next to him was Beanie. And there was Pill Boy.
And Towhead and One Eye and all the other LTs who'd just gone through the Rite.

Why were they here? Weren't they supposed to be officers somewhere else? It didn't make any sense.

Unless Cat was right: we were nothing more than prey—raised in a hatchery for someone else's sport.

I tried to speak but nothing came out. No words, not even sounds. What could I possibly say to ease their pain?

My eyes squeezed shut and the images returned.
Dripping crimson on a tiled floor. The press of darkness. Shortness of breath.

Raucous laughter broke the spell; Brown Shirts were approaching. I lowered the door back in place and hurried away, praying I hadn't been spotted. As I hustled back to the Quonset hut, my mind refused to let go of what I'd just seen. It was like K2's death: I knew if I didn't do something—soon—those faces would haunt me the rest of my life.

E
ACH ROLL CALL IS
the same: names are called in groups of two. Sometimes four, sometimes six. Always in pairs.

This morning, only two names are called. Jane F-738 and Jane F-739.

Faith and Hope.

While the others rush gratefully back to the barracks, Faith and Hope stand alone in the middle of the parade ground. Hope feels her legs go wobbly. A glance at her sister tells her she's in a kind of shock, the blood draining from her face.

“Coming, girls?” Dr. Gallingham asks, dabbing his watery eyes with a soiled hanky.

Although it's no more than a hundred yards to the infirmary, it feels like a hundred miles, each step worse
than the one before. Hope hears a rattling sound and realizes with a start that it's Faith. Her teeth are chattering as though it were the dead of winter, even though it's a warm spring morning, sunlight stroking their faces.

“H and FT,” Hope whispers.

Faith doesn't seem to hear. She shuffles forward like a sheep to slaughter.

Hope can't take it. First there was her father's death, then their capture. Now this. Any moment she expects to wake up from this nightmare.

The infirmary stands two stories high, with peeling white paint and bars covering the second-floor windows. Like a prison . . . or an insane asylum.

Dr. Gallingham leads them into a front reception area. A Brown Shirt tugs a key from his key ring and unlocks a door. Faith shakes uncontrollably as they're herded upstairs. Before them lies a long hallway. White-coated technicians hurry from one room to the next.

Hope glances into one of the rooms and sees a dead girl lying motionless on a stainless steel table, her lifeless eyes boring into the ceiling. A man in a white coat slices through her chalky skin with a scalpel, removing organs and plopping them in a bowl. In the next room, another man is powering up a portable handsaw, preparing to cut through a corpse's clavicle. Hope hears but does not see the scrape of metal biting into bone.
The smell is like burning hair.

“Eyes forward,” Hope commands her sister, trying to spare her.

The two girls are led into a small room near the end of the hall. Water stains tattoo the ceiling. Before them are two beds, the white iron splotched with rust. Dr. Gallingham makes a grand motion with his damp hanky, indicating the girls should lie down.

“Good,” Hope says. “I wanted to take a nap.”

“And if you're lucky,” Gallingham responds, “you might even wake up.”

As soon as they're horizontal, two middle-aged female technicians begin attaching leather manacles to their wrists and ankles.

“What's this?” Hope asks, fighting against the straps. “Think we're gonna run away?”

“You'd be surprised.”

At just that moment, the techs hold up syringes and tap the plastic cylinders. Small bubbles of hazy liquid dribble from each needle's end.

“Now then,” Dr. Gallingham says cheerily, “is everyone ready to serve the Republic?”

“Just take me,” Hope blurts out. “Leave my sister alone.”

The doctor shakes his head. “You're missing the point. We need
both
of you. You have the same genetic makeup, so you're perfect for evaluating our drugs. You
can help us determine which ones work”—he pauses dramatically—“and which ones don't.”

“But we're not sick,” Hope says.

Gallingham's thin lips part in a hideous smile. “Not yet.”

One of the techs passes him a syringe, and before Hope can say anything else she feels the prick of the needle as it penetrates skin. Dr. Gallingham's fat thumb pushes against the syringe's plunger. “Good to the last drop,” he says with a chuckle.

Hope doesn't know if it's her imagination, but she swears she can feel the poisons invading her bloodstream, spreading up her arm, her chest, racing through her entire body.

“What if it kills us?” she asks.

“That's why we have vaccines.”

“What if they don't work?”

“Why do you think there are so many singles running around?”