Requiem (10 page)

Only Alex isn't standing. He's squatting, quickly and methodically repacking his backpack.

“All right.” Raven speaks quietly, but the urgency there commands our attention. “Let's look at the facts. We have a dead regulator on our hands.”

Someone whimpers.

“What are we doing?” Gordo breaks in. His face is wild with panic. “We have to
go
.”

“Go where?” Raven demands. “We don't know where they are, what direction they're coming from. We could be running straight into a trap.”

“Shhh.” Dani hushes us sharply. For a second there is total stillness, except for the low moan of wind through the trees and an owl calling. Then we hear it: from the south, the distant echo of voices.

“I say we stay and fight,” Pike says. “This is
our
territory.”

“We don't fight unless we have to,” Raven says, turning on him. “We don't know how many regulators there are, or what kind of weapons they have. They're better fed and stronger than we are.”

“I'm sick of running,” Pike fires back.

“We're not running,” she says calmly. She turns back to the rest of the group. “We're going to divide. Spread out around the camp. Hide. Some of us can head down to the old riverbed. I'll be watching from the hill. Rocks, bushes, whatever looks like it will conceal you—use it. Climb a tree, for shit's sake. Just stay out of sight.” She looks to each of us in turn. Pike stubbornly refuses to meet her gaze.

“Take your guns, knives—anything you have. But remember, we don't fight unless we have to. Don't do anything until my signal, okay?
Nobody moves.
Nobody breathes, coughs, sneezes, or farts. Is that clear?”

Pike spits on the ground. No one speaks.

“All right,” Raven says. “Let's go.”

The group breaks up, quickly and wordlessly. People blur past me and become shadows; the shadows fold themselves into the dark. I push my way to Raven, who has knelt down beside the dead regulator and is checking him for weapons, money, whatever might be of use.

“Raven.” Her name catches in my throat. “Do you think—?”

“They'll be fine,” she says without looking up. She knows I was going to ask about Julian and Tack. “Now get out of here.”

I move through the camp at a jog, find my backpack heaped next to several others at the edge of the fire pit. I sling my pack over my right shoulder; next to the rifle, the strap digs painfully into my skin. I grab two of the other packs and swing them onto my left shoulder.

Raven jogs past me. “Time to go, Lena.” She, too, dissipates into the darkness.

I stand up, then notice that someone unpacked the medical supplies last night. If anything happens—if we
have
to run, and can't come back—we'll need those.

I remove one of the backpacks and kneel down.

The regulators are getting closer. I can pick out individual voices now, individual words. I am suddenly aware that the camp has been totally cleared out. I'm the only one left.

I unzip the backpack. My hands are shaking. I wrestle a sweatshirt out of the backpack, begin stuffing it instead with Band-Aids and bacitracin.

A hand clamps down on my shoulder.

“What the
hell
are you doing?” It's Alex. He gets a hand under my arm and hauls me to my feet. I just manage to zip up the backpack. “Come on.”

I try to wrench my arm away, but he keeps a firm grip on me, practically dragging me into the woods, away from the camp. I flash back to the raid night in Portland when Alex led me like this through a black maze of rooms; when we huddled together on the piss-smelling floor of a storage shed and he gently wrapped my wounded leg, his hands soft and strong and strange on my skin.

He kissed me that night.

I push the memory away.

We plunge down a steep embankment, sinking through a rotten layer of loam and damp leaves, toward a jutting lip of land that forms a natural cave, a hollowed-out spot in the hillside. Alex pilots me into a crouch and practically pushes me into the small, dark space.

“Watch it.” Pike is there too: a few glistening teeth, a bit of solid darkness. He shifts slightly to accommodate us. Alex slides beside me, knees drawn to his chest.

The tents are no more than fifty feet away from us, up the hill. I say a silent prayer that the regulators will think we've run, and not waste their time searching.

The waiting is agony. The voices from the woods have dropped away. The regulators must be moving slowly now, stalking us, drawing closer. Maybe they're even in the camp, threading their way past the tents: deadly, silent shadows.

The space is too narrow, the darkness intolerable. The idea comes to me, suddenly, that we are wedged in a coffin.

Alex shifts next to me. The back of his hand brushes up against my arm. My throat goes dry. His breathing is quicker than usual. I go stiff, perfectly rigid, until he withdraws his hand. It must have been an accident.

Another agonizing stretch of silence. Pike mutters, “This is stupid.”

“Shhh.” Alex hushes him sharply.

“Sitting here like rats in a trap . . .”

“I swear, Pike . . .”

“
Both
of you be quiet,” I whisper fiercely. We lapse into silence again. After a few more seconds, someone shouts. Alex tenses up. Pike eases his rifle off his shoulder, jabbing me in the side with his elbow. I bite back a cry.

“They've cleared out.” The voice floats down to us from the camp. So they've arrived. I guess now that they've found the tents empty, they don't think they need to be quiet anymore. I wonder what their plan was: surround us, mow us down while we slept.

I wonder how many there are.

“Damn. You were right about the shots we heard. It's Don.”

“Dead?”

“Yup.”

There's a faint rustling sound, as though someone is kicking through the tents. “Look at how they live out here. Packed together. Mucking around in the dirt. Animals.”

“Careful. It's all contaminated.”

So far, I've counted six voices.

“It smells, doesn't it? I can
smell
them. Shit.”

“Breathe through your mouth.”

“Bastards,” Pike mutters.

“Shhh,” I say reflexively, even though anger has gripped me, too, alongside the fear. I hate them. I hate every single one of them, for thinking that they are better than us.

“Where do you think they're headed?”

“Wherever it is, they can't have gone far.”

Seven distinct voices in all. Maybe eight. It's hard to tell. And we are about two dozen. Still, as Raven said, it's impossible to know what kind of weapons they're carrying, whether there are reinforcements waiting nearby.

“Let's wrap it up here, then. Chris?”

“Got it.”

My thighs have started to cramp. I ease my weight backward to get some relief, pressing up against Alex. He doesn't pull away. Once again, his hand brushes my arm, and I'm not sure if it's accidental, or a gesture of reassurance. For a second—despite everything else—my insides go white and electric, and Pike and the regulators and the cold zoom away, and there is only Alex's shoulder against my shoulder, and his ribs expanding and contracting against mine, and the rough warmth of his fingers.

The air smells like gasoline.

The air smells like fire.

I jolt into awareness. Gasoline. Fire. Burning. They're burning our things. Now the air is popping and crackling. The regulators' voices are muffled behind the noise. Ribbons of smoke stream down over the hillside, float into our view, writhing like airborne snakes.

“Bastards,” Pike says again, his voice strangled. He starts to rocket out of the hollow and I reach for him, try to pull him backward.

“Don't. Raven said to wait for her signal.”

“Raven's not in charge.” He breaks away from me and slides onto his stomach, holding his rifle in front of him like a sniper.

“
Don't
, Pike.”

Either he doesn't hear me or he ignores me. He begins inching up the hill on his stomach.

“Alex.” Panic is filling me like a tide. The smoke, the anger, the roar of the fire as it spreads—all of it is making it impossible to think.

“Shit.” Alex moves past me and starts to reach for Pike. By now, only his boots are still visible. “Pike, don't be a goddamn idiot—”

Bang. Bang.

Two shots. The noise seems to echo and amplify in the hollow space. I cover my ears.

Then:
bang, bang, bang, bang.
Gunshots from everywhere, and people screaming. A shower of dirt rains on me from above. My ears are ringing, and my head is full of smoke.

Focus.

Alex has already pushed out of the hollow and I follow him, trying to wrestle the gun off my shoulder. At the last second I shrug off the backpacks. They'll only slow me down.

Explosions from all sides, and the roar of an inferno.

The woods are full of smoke and fire. Orange and red flames shoot between the black trees—stark, stiff-necked, like witnesses frozen in horror. Pike is kneeling, half-concealed behind a tree, shooting. His face is lit orange from the fire, and his mouth is open in a roar. I see Raven moving through the smoke. The air is alive with gunshots: so many of them that it reminds me of sitting at the Eastern Prom with Hana on Independence Day and watching the fireworks display, the rapid staccato and the flashes of dazzling color. The smell of smoke.

“Lena!”

I don't have time to see who calls my name. A bullet whizzes past me and lodges itself in the tree directly behind me, sending off a spray of bark. I unfreeze, dart forward, and position myself flat against the large trunk of a sugar maple. Several feet ahead of me, Alex has taken refuge behind a tree as well. Every few seconds he pokes his head around the trunk, fires off a few rounds, then ducks back into safety.

My eyes are watering. I crane my head cautiously around the trunk, trying to distinguish the figures grappling in the dark, backlit by the fire. From a distance, they look almost like dancers—pairs swaying, wrestling, dipping, and spinning.

I can't tell who is who. I blink, cough, palm my eyes. Pike has disappeared.

There: I see Dani's face briefly as she turns to the fire. A regulator has jumped her from behind, has an arm thrown around her neck. Dani's eyes are bulging, her face purple. I bring my gun up, then lower it again. Impossible to aim from here, not as they stagger back and forth. Dani is twisting and bucking like a bull trying to shake its rider.

There's another chorus of gunshots. The regulator withdraws his arm from Dani's neck, clutching his elbow, shouting in pain. He turns toward the light, and I can see blood bubbling between his fingers. I have no idea who fired or whether the bullet was aimed at Dani or the regulator, but the momentary release gives Dani the advantage she needs. She fumbles at her belt for her knife, heaving and gagging. She is obviously tired, but she moves with the dumb persistence of an animal being worked to death.

She swings her arm up toward the regulator's neck; metal flashes in her fist. After she stabs him, he jerks, a huge convulsion. His face registers surprise. He totters forward onto his knees, and then onto his face. Dani kneels next to him, wedges a boot under his body, and uses the purchase to bring her knife out of his neck.

Somewhere, beyond the wall of smoke, a woman screams. I track my rifle helplessly from one side of the burning camp to the other, but everything is confusion and blur. I have to get closer. I can help no one where I am.

I break into the open, staying as low as possible, and move toward the fire and the chaos of bodies, past Alex, who is tracking the action from behind a sycamore.

“Lena!” he shouts as I dart by him. I don't respond. I need to focus. The air is hot and thick. The fire is leaping from tree branches now, a deadly canopy above us; flames braid themselves around the trunks, turning them a chalky white. The sky is obscured behind all the smoke. This is all that is left of our camp, of the supplies we gathered so carefully—the clothing we hunted for, scrubbed in the river, wore to tatters; and the tents we mended so painstakingly, until they were crisscrossed with stitches: this hungry, all-consuming heat.

Fifteen feet from me, a man the size of a boulder has brought Coral to the ground. I start toward her when someone tackles me from behind. As I'm falling, I jab hard behind me with the butt of my rifle. The man spits out a curse and pulls back several inches, giving me time and space to roll onto my back. I use my gun like a baseball bat, swinging it toward his jaw. It connects with a sickening crack, and he slumps sideways.

Tack was right about one thing: The regulators aren't trained for combat like this. Almost all their fighting has been done from the air, from the cockpit of a bomber, from a distance.

I scramble to my feet and sprint toward Coral, who is still on the ground. I don't know what happened to the regulator's gun. But he has his hands coiled around her neck.

I raise the butt of my rifle high above my head. Coral's eyes flick to mine. As I'm bringing the rifle down on the regulator's head, he whips around toward me. I manage to graze the side of his shoulder, but I'm carried off balance by the force of my swing. I stumble, and he sweeps an arm at my shins and sends me sprawling flat. I bite down on my lip and taste blood. I want to turn onto my back, but suddenly there's a weight on top of me, knocking me flat, crushing the air from my lungs. The gun is ripped from my hand.

I can't breathe. My face is pressed to the dirt. Something—a knee? an elbow?—is digging into my neck. Bursts of light explode behind my eyelids.

Then there's a
thwack
, and a grunt, and the weight is released. I twist around, sucking in air, kicking away from the regulator. He is still straddling me, but he is now slumped sideways, eyes closed, a small bit of blood trickling from his forehead, where he was hit. Alex is standing above me, gripping his rifle.