Exodia (9 page)

“
Do you think Dalton’s going
to make a difference?” he asked Lydia. He looked down, afraid his
tone was too accusing. He was already apprehensive about how she
felt, but something made him ask anyway.

“
Of course.” Lydia kept her
eyes forward. She hadn’t looked at Barrett since leaving Dalton
with Vinn and Carter. Barrett had watched Lydia and Dalton shake
hands goodbye. He had to turn and walk away when he saw how she
looked at Dalton. Anger had enveloped him and he didn’t like the
feeling. The emotions that warred in his belly had him totally
confused. He chewed at his lip.

Lydia spoke with conviction, “I
absolutely believe that Dalton Battista will, you know, change
things. Make the Reds equal to the Blues. Maybe even do away with
all the segregation stuff. Change the laws of the
Ninety.”

Barrett stole another
glance.

“
What do we do in the
meantime?” he asked.

Lydia didn’t even hesitate. “We keep
spreading the word.”

They reached the outskirts of the
slums, picked their way around heaps of garbage, and ambled down
the center of what once served as a busy boulevard. There was no
homecoming comfort in seeing the Exodia sign.

Suddenly Barrett thrust his left arm
out halting Lydia in line with his own abrupt stop. He stayed like
that with his arm stiff, head cocked, eyes darting right and left.
In a muted whisper he warned her of approaching danger.

“
Soldiers?” she
guessed.

“
Sounds more like a parade.”
He dropped his arm. “Something’s not right. If they were going to
go house to house hunting for Dalton they would’ve started here and
worked their way inward, right?” He took a step off the road and
crossed over to a row of broken billboards where litter grew taller
than weeds. It crossed his mind briefly how this used to be a great
place to hunt for glass and plastic. “Look,” he said.

One of the few boards that
still worked no longer glowed with the face and slogans of the
Executive President; now it flickered messages that chilled their
blood:
Curfew enacted. Youth registration
required for all Reds over twelve years of age. Water regulation in
effect. Residential reversion to 2080 census.

She didn’t mean to, but Lydia gripped
Barrett’s arm. “We’ve only been gone a couple days. What’s
happened?”

Barrett gave the expected
shrug.

Lydia let go of his arm and asked,
“What else can you hear? Shouldn’t there be people around
here?”

“
Yeah, right. But I don’t
hear anyone. It’s like they’ve taken everyone away.”

“
Not a parade … a death
march.”

As fast as Barrett ran Lydia still kept
pace as they scrambled through streets and yards.

They bee-lined through the slum
following the tramping sounds that at first only Barrett could
hear. They got ahead of the marchers and hid behind a pile of
rusted machinery. From there they watched the Exodian guardsmen
herd a sizable number of men and women toward the capitol. It came
as a relief actually that there were only a few hundred people and
not thousands being herded like sheep.

“
Do you recognize anybody
from our streets?” Lydia asked.

Barrett frowned then cursed leaving no
doubt as to the answer. Lydia didn’t want to believe it. She
zig-zagged back toward Bancroft Street thinking only of her mother
and the two young kids in their charge. Barrett let her lead the
way.

The street was almost deserted; two
young kids played a quiet game of tag in the road.

“
Where is everybody?” Lydia
shouted.

The older of the two, the one who had
received the first stolen orange when Dalton had come to their
street, stared at her, and took his time with the simple answer.
“It’s Wednesday.”

* * *

Fifty-one families and nineteen single
men and women were assigned to live in the sprawling building that
had formerly been a super-school. The grounds around it had long
ago been hand-tilled and re-purposed as co-operative gardens. Food
was grown, shared, guarded.

Classrooms had become homes, offices
were made into tiny apartments, and the gymnasium made the perfect
gathering place for social and political forums. Lydia and Barrett
headed there as fast as they could. But they were too late; the
weekly Wednesday meeting finished early. They stood under a broken
basketball hoop and watched as Red after Red, men, women, and
children, left the gym. Lydia didn’t see her mother, but she
spotted two teens, friends who had been involved in spying,
stealing, and sabotaging, and waved them closer.

“
What did we miss? What’s
going on?” Lydia said to one.

“
Hey, you’re back. You
missed a lot. Not that old Timothy Teague’s rantings aren’t
something worth missing.”

“
Teague? He’s useless. We do
more for the cause than he does.”

“
Yeah, well, you’re gonna
love what he had to say about you and Bear.”

Barrett moved closer.
“What?”

Their friend snorted, looked up at the
statuesque Lydia and then down at Barrett. “You moved too fast.
Technically, according to Teague, you’re grounded.”

The lines on Lydia’s brow
knitted closer together. “Grounded? Like no more missions? But we
just got
the
Dalton
Battista out of here … out of certain death.”

“
Yeah, well, like I said,
you were too fast. He didn’t need to go.”

Barrett hissed, “But there was an order
for his execution.”

“
Automatically rescinded,”
said the other kid.

Lydia rolled that bit of news around
her head for a few seconds. An executive order could only be
rescinded if the one charged died before capture. She couldn’t
think of any other reason. She clutched at the first boy’s elbow.
“Tell us.”

“
Bryer Battista is dead. No
one is looking for Dalton because the one in authority now is the
President of Defense.”

The news shocked both Lydia and
Barrett. They looked at each other, their faces changing from
astonishment to elation to puzzlement.

“
But
–
” Lydia could not form the question.
She shook her head as if to jar something out. “You
mean
–
”

“
Nobody knows what would’ve
happened. The new Executive President might’ve let him stay in the
capitol with his mother or put him in the army. But he would’ve
been here, and Teague said he would’ve been in a better position to
inspire, lead, and fulfill the prophecies.”

Now Barrett shook his head. “No, don’t
believe it, Lydia. We did the right thing. There’s a reason we had
to get Dalton out of here. Ronel will train him. Everything will
work out.” He turned to the other teens. “Screw Teague. He can’t
ground us.”

“
Maybe not, but he can put
you in the same group of subversives that the President of Defense
just ordered incarcerated.
They marched off
two hundred men, seventy-six women, and four kids our age–girls–to
be re-educated at the old factory south of town. Re-educated. You
know what that really means.”

#

Jamie’s father allowed him to visit his
mother once a week. She lived in the valley district where life was
several levels better than in the Red Slum. Populated solely with
upper-class Blues, the former Mrs. Truslow lived a pampered yet
fearful life. Jamie’s father would often show up unannounced and
he’d demand a reenactment of her role as submissive, and abused,
wife.

Jamie, with his lopsided grin and the
same bashful eyes as his mother, sometimes witnessed his father’s
inexcusable behavior. Slowly the atrocious behavior seemed less
awful.

“
Hey, mom,” Jamie said as he
entered through the front door.

“
Jamie!” She jumped up from
the sofa and looked beyond her son expecting the larger figures of
a capitol guard and her ex-husband, the President of Defense.
Seeing no one else she visibly softened, hugged her son, and pulled
him into the dining room. She had set out for him a bowl of small
strawberries she’d grown herself.

“
These are for you. I pick
them every day hoping you’ll come by.”

“
Don’t lay a guilt trip on
me.”

“
I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I
just don’t get to see you enough. I’m working nightshift now, so I
sleep days, but don’t let that stop you from coming.” She watched
him scarf down a handful of berries. “So … what’s new?”

Jamie made a satisfied humming sound as
he chewed. He stuffed several more in and spoke with his mouth
full, “Drink?”

His mother flew to the
kitchen.

Jamie swallowed and called after her,
“I think I’ve found the right girl.” He took a couple steps toward
the kitchen, visualizing the beautiful girl his father probably
wouldn’t approve of.

“
It won’t be cold,” she
said, handing him a glass of something warm and brown.
“Refrigeration has been down for several days.”

Jamie took a gulp. The bitter liquid
burned away the sweet fruity taste of the berries. “This is awful,”
he yelled. He smashed the glass on the floor and slapped the hope
off his mother’s face.

* * *

“
I’m so glad this is the
last one.” Kassandra held the top edge of the car door frame with
both hands, keeping the whole thing upright as Katie dug out a
narrow trench. Together they lifted the make-do barrier and placed
it as straight as they could in the trench.

“
Not deep enough.” Kassandra
lifted it out by herself while Katie grabbed the shovel.

Both girls were decorated with far too
much mud. They’d worked on this project for hours. There never
seemed to be a lack of rusted car parts to be re-purposed into
things–things that would have been more simply made if the world
hadn’t begun to destroy itself after the Suppression. But Kassandra
and her sisters didn’t know any different. A fence was a fence,
whatever it was made of.

“
There. Try it now.” Katie
jammed the shovel into the mud and helped her older sister wrestle
the awkward door into the hole. She retrieved the shovel and tapped
globs of mud into the open spaces until the suction took hold. Like
the other doors they had grappled with, this one stayed
upright.

“
Do you think he’ll like it?
I bet he won’t.” Katie’s face fell to her customary
frown.

“
If he can’t find any lumber
to buy I think he’ll love it.”

Their father had left after the
earthquake to see what he could find. It was pretty obvious that
they would need materials not just for a new and pathetically
smaller windmill, but also for a fence. Deandra had come up with
the idea of using car doors almost as soon as he left. Their mother
thought it would be a good solution since already a few of the
sheep had discovered their freedom. All of them set right to work
on it. But one by one they found easier chores to do until only the
oldest sisters worked on finishing the job. Now the other five
girls had the flock back on the south slope while their mother had
walked to town.

“
Yeah, he’ll love it. I just
hope it holds up when it rains.” Katie looked up, checking for her
own personal black cloud. She had a natural lean toward the
pessimistic.

Kassandra gasped. “I hadn’t thought of
that. Wait. What about that stuff, that hardening stuff, that Mr.
Andrews sells? We could use that.”

“
I suppose. What’ll we use
for trade?”

“
Good question. Maybe a
certain younger sister?”

Kassandra didn’t even smile at Katie’s
joke; she wasn’t entirely sure it was a joke. She could see the
flock coming down the hill in the distance. The cute little lambs
tried to keep up with their mothers. Her sisters spread around the
sides. She watched them with pride.

“
Here they come. Prepare for
a muddy mess,” Katie said.

The pond was reduced to half its size.
The herd would have to muck through yards of mud to get a drink. It
would be difficult to get them all watered, rounded back up and
corralled into the enclosure. How much longer they’d be able to
drink here was anybody’s guess.

It was a long walk to the monument, but
there was a well and pump there with an old pool where, if they had
to, they could water the flock. It was the only idea Kassandra had.
She couldn’t let her sheep die of thirst. But there were certain
dangers in traveling so far. Alone. Just girls. If only her father
wasn’t a priest. They were probably the only family without
weapons.

She felt pretty safe most of the time,
but there was no lack of stories about the Blues. A single Blue
man, trained as they were in warfare, could be a huge threat to a
young girl. What if they went to the monument and ran into one of
them? Or two?

What if they were kidnappers? Or
rapists?

Or murderers?

Chapter 7 Lions and Lambs

From the third page of the
Ledger: