Three (Article 5) (3 page)

It went on for miles.

I fought the urge to vomit; the bile in my throat tasted like rotting things. I imagined what it must feel like to choke on oil. How it would slosh in my lungs and coat the walls of my stomach, sleek and poisonous. A warning to turn back shook through me, but all that remained behind us was more death.

I glanced over to Chase, who stared forward, and I could feel his pity for all these living things lost.

“Sick,” whispered Billy.

We stood in reverent shock for only a moment more, and then with a deafening roar of thunder, the sky broke open.

*   *   *

IF
there were tracks in the sand they were swept away by the storm, so we moved inland and scoured the brush and trees beside the beach in search of bits of torn clothing, campfire remains, anything to show that someone had passed through. But the raindrops fattened, and it didn’t take long before our clothing was drenched. The clatter drowned out the noise. It wasn’t until Chase was standing before me, pellets of water bouncing off his bare arms, that I noticed he was trying to tell me something.

“I said Rebecca’s falling behind again,” he repeated as I checked the red blinking light on the radio for the umpteenth time. “Sean’s got to take her back to the mini-mart.”

He was the only one besides Sean and I that kept tabs on Rebecca. At first the others had given her wide berth, like she was bad luck, but now her presence was starting to wear on them. She wasn’t as mobile as the rest of us, which made her a liability. Most hadn’t even bothered to learn her name.

I glanced back the way we’d come, sore because he had a point—Rebecca should have stayed back, despite how much I wanted to keep her in my sight. The last time we’d been apart she’d been hurt, and this was the only way I could guarantee her safety. Still, though searching was slow work, her speed was half ours, especially through the brush and knotted roots off the beach. She wasn’t going to be able to keep up much longer.

When I turned back Chase was gone, having disappeared through the mist. A frown tugged at my mouth; he was clearly worried. Somehow Rebecca had become his responsibility, too.

Billy was nearby, and I grabbed his sleeve to get his attention.

“Have you seen Rebecca or Sean?”

He glanced around impatiently. “They were behind me earlier.”

The water ran in rivulets from the tips of my hair, and I shoved it back from my face and held a hand up like a visor above my eyes. Only gray surrounded us; the low light made even the trees lose their color.

I shoved through the underbrush back the way we’d come. The mud puddles deepened in the gaps between the trees and every sloshing step soaked my socks. The beach was to my right; surely Rebecca hadn’t waded through the oil and dead animals. To my left the grass grew tall and thick, and it struck me that any number of things could be living within it.

Rebecca could be hurt within it.

“Becca!”

Sean’s call drifted over the slimy, wet field. Sweeping both hands in front of me to clear the way, I surged forward.

“Sean! Where are you?” I was glad the rain was still loud. Though we hoped to find survivors, we didn’t know who lurked in the evacuated Red Zone. For the past few days we’d stayed as quiet as possible so we wouldn’t attract unnecessary attention.

Finally I saw him—head and shoulders above the grass that tickled my neck. He spun frantically, still calling for Rebecca.

“What happened?” I asked when I reached him.

“She was right behind me,” he said, a muscle in his jaw bulging. The water matted his darkened hair and streamed down his face.

We pushed forward ten more feet, then twenty, until the grass gave way suddenly to an open, single-lane street. Rainwater cascaded down thick cracks in the asphalt, and weeds, some as tall as me, grew from the potholes. Boarded-up houses, all with a similar brick front, lined the opposite side.

Before I could make myself move, Sean had yanked me down into a crouch. Anyone could be hiding in those houses, aiming a shotgun through one of those busted windows. Maybe even one of the survivors we were tracking.

I searched the windows first, then the spaces between the buildings. Every door was marred by a Statute posting. Even the rain couldn’t peel them from the wood.

“There!” Sean pointed up the road to where a solitary figure stood on the center yellow line. Before I could stop him he was running, and with one final glance around I followed, eyes trained on the houses for movement. As we neared, the staggering gait became familiar, and two silver crutches came into view.

Sean didn’t slow as he hauled Rebecca out of the street. A short scream of surprise burst from her throat, and then she was fighting him, falling in a heap in the wet grass. Mud splashed over her clothes and freckled her face.

“What’s wrong with you?” Sean yelled. “We’ve got to keep off the roads, I told you that.”

Rebecca pulled herself up into a seated position, legs splayed out before her. She’d lost her crutches in the fall, and where they usually fastened to her forearms were raw, bleeding patches of skin. I bit back a cringe.

“Afraid I’ll get hit by a car?” She stared at him defiantly, cheeks stained, arms open to the empty street behind us.

“Yeah, Becca. That’s what I meant.”

“Stop it,” I said, inserting myself between them. “You never know who’s hiding in places like this. That’s all he’s trying to say.”

“He’s trying to say I’m a child.
That’s
all he’s trying—”

“Maybe if you’d stop acting like—”

“Sean!” I turned on him, pointing up the road. “Go find the others. We’re right behind you.”

Sean laced his hands behind his neck, then slammed them down in frustration. “Fine.” A moment later he disappeared through the grass and rain.

A deep breath to summon patience, and I squatted beside her.

“Let me see your arms.”

She kept them locked to her body, gaze still pinned in the direction Sean had taken off. Her lower lip quivered.

I rubbed at the tightness in my chest. “He’s just worried about you.”

“He hates me,” she said, so quietly I almost missed it.

I grabbed her crutches, needing something to busy my hands. Rebecca didn’t have to say it, but I knew she blamed us for her misery. I told myself for the hundredth time that she was better off with us than the FBR, that we wouldn’t cart her around or put her on display to dissuade citizens from corruption. But seeing her sitting in a mud puddle, arms bright with sores, not even attempting to shield her face from the rain, I couldn’t help but doubt myself.

That didn’t mean I was going to let her quit.

“Get up,” I told her. “Enough with the pity party.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. Get up.”

She balked, and when I didn’t back down she snatched the crutches from my grasp. Barely a wince came from her lips as she fastened the braces around her forearms.

“That’s not exactly easy in case you haven’t noticed,” she said.

I knew it wasn’t. I knew it was killing her and I ached to fix it, but I also knew if she was going to survive out here she couldn’t give up.

I fought the sympathy eating away at my insides and cocked an eyebrow. “Neither is sneaking out of a locked facility every night to fool around with a guard.”

Her ice blue gaze widened. “Ember…”

“You have to go back to the mini-mart.” I shifted. “Sean will take you.…”

“
Ember
.” She pointed to the trash bag I’d set on the ground beside us. “The radio!”

The red light was flashing green—the mouth of the bag had opened when I’d set it down and now the box sent a pale jade reflection onto the black plastic. Instantly, I snatched up the whole package, flooded with the need to answer, but knowing I couldn’t. The rain would ruin the machine.

“Come on.” I only took a second to weigh the consequences, and then sprinted toward the nearest house with the radio latched tightly to my chest, unwilling to miss this first connection with Tucker’s team. As far as we knew, they were the only ones who could tell the posts what had happened to the safe house.

Once under the shelter of the stone entranceway, I hurriedly removed the silver box from the bag then set it on the dirty cement. Beads of water gathered on the top of the metal and I tried in vain to wipe them away with my wet shirtsleeve.

Rebecca arrived, huffing. Unaccustomed to moving that fast with crutches, she bumped into the wall, but held on before falling.

“Do you know how to use that thing?”

“Yes.” In theory. I wished one of the others were here; even though Chase had walked me through the steps I’d never actually used a CB radio before.

“Then answer! Hurry! You’re going to miss it!”

“Keep a lookout,” I told her.

I unhooked the black handheld microphone, untangling the coiled cord from around the handle. The light stopped flashing.

“No.” I made sure the knob was dialed to the frequency we’d agreed to use and pressed the button labeled
RECEIVE TRANSMISSION
, praying I wasn’t too late.

“Hello?” I tried. “Are you there? Hello?”

“What happened?” Rebecca asked.

“Come on.” I pressed the button to accept the call again. Again. “Please be there.”

“Take your time, why don’t you,” came the muffled voice of my mother’s killer.

I sat back on the damp pavement, exhaling in one hard breath. A deep scowl had etched into Rebecca’s face.

“Well it took you long enough to call.” My throat tightened, as it always did when I spoke to Tucker Morris. “Everything going all right?”

“Yeah.” He hesitated. “So far so good. Sorry I couldn’t call earlier. Had some trouble getting a connection.”

There was heaviness in his tone, telling me that something bad had happened. We couldn’t discuss it over the open radio. Even though this was an old frequency the MM didn’t use anymore, it wasn’t secure. They could always be listening.

“So how is it out there?” I doubted much had changed in the few days we’d been away from the cities, but if anything big had happened, we wouldn’t have known. Our CB radio wasn’t strong enough to eavesdrop on any FBR frequencies, and there wasn’t a news station reporting close enough to pick up a signal. It was easy to feel disconnected out here in the Red Zone.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “No one wants to starve in peace and quiet. They’ve all got to moan and groan about it.”

“Then maybe they should come with you,” I said. Join the resistance. Stop complaining and do something.

“Ha,” he said dryly. “Then what would they have to whine about?”

The truth was few people fought the MM because they were scared. It took something big—something like reform school, and losing your mother—to push through the fear to anger. That was when you could fight back.

“We went through this place yesterday, though that was different,” Tucker continued. “They had a sign at the front of the street that said, get this, it was a ‘compliant neighborhood.’ It was like they were proud of it or something. The place looked good—what we saw of it anyway. Nice-looking houses. We even saw a bunch of little kids in school uniforms.”

A compliant neighborhood? I wanted to gag. I wondered if they were bigots or just liars. How could a community embrace the Statutes? It baffled me, got under my skin. If everyone knew the MM was executing people for violations to their precious moral rules, they wouldn’t be so quick to boast their pride. Unless they were scared of course.

I changed the subject. “How are the others? Tired of driving?” The carriers used aliases, but I wouldn’t risk saying even those aloud.

“Fine. They’re just … visiting with old friends. We should get to Grandma’s house tomorrow. We already crossed over the river.” He snorted. “Now we just have to get through the woods.”

Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go.

I smirked at his chosen code name for the first post and sagged against the wall. They’d made it over the Red Zone border. At least that much was going right. Rebecca, who’d turned to watch the street, glanced back over her shoulder.

“My mom used to sing that song,” I said. She’d loved the holidays. For a moment, I could smell the pungent pine air fresheners she would spray around Christmastime to make the house smell “festive.”

I didn’t know what I was thinking, bringing her up now. If not for him, she’d still be here.

“Mine too,” he said.

I wrapped the coiled cord absently around my finger, picturing a woman singing to a young boy. It was tough to imagine that someone had loved Tucker like my mother had loved me. I wondered if she was alive. If she was proud of him. If she could forgive everything he’d done because he was her son. I stared at the radio, wishing I’d missed the call after all, but somehow unable to end it at the same time.

“What about you?” he asked. “Find what you were looking for?”

The concern in his tone took me by surprise.

“Not yet,” I said, stifling the sudden urge to tell him I was beginning to think we were wasting our time. “We’re going to keep looking.”

He was quiet for a while.

“I’ll call back tonight around curfew. We should be at Grandma’s by then.”

Curfew was at dusk. He was farther west than us, but it should have been around the same time.

“We’ll be here.” I clicked the button one more time. “Be careful.”

“You too.”

The light switched from green to red.

*   *   *

BY
the time we caught up with the others, they’d cleared the main drag of the next small town and had begun their initial search of the area. We entered the street behind a two-pump gas station that had been closed in the War, and took shelter from the rain in a small diner that had been stripped clean and now served as a home to a family of raccoons. The radio felt like it weighed a hundred pounds over my shoulder. I was ready to pass it on.

The seating area had been almost completely cleared out, and what was left showed evidence of riots. Only charred skeletons remained of the booths along the walls, and the vinyl floor was blackened and heaped with shattered glass and firewood. It had been a long time since I’d been to a restaurant—during the War, before my mom had lost her job. I couldn’t remember what kind of food we’d eaten, but whatever it was they’d brought too much, and we’d sent back half. Such a waste.