Resist (16 page)

I pull it to left and the piston lets out a gentle puff. Then I haul myself up onto the roof and sit low in case a patrolling guard spots me. Down in the cabin, Song and Bruce are helping Silas. His two hands appear at either side of the opening and then he’s pulling himself up through it. He sits on the opposite side of the hatch. “It might not be true. About Bea,” he whispers into the night.

My stomach heaves. “I think it is.

“Well, let’s wait until we talk to Quinn,” he says. “We can’t know that anything these people say is true.”

I don’t want to dwell on it. What’s the point? What does thinking ever change? I crawl to the edge of the roof and turn onto my belly. I dangle a moment before letting go and land awkwardly. No floodlight is activated, and I crouch in the stillness. Silas lands next to me with a thud seconds later.

We stay hunched and sneak behind the cabins. As clouds cover the moon, we’re bathed in complete darkness, and I feel Silas hold on to the tail of my jacket to make sure he doesn’t lose me. When we reach the last cabin, and our eyes have fully adjusted, we stop. The annex is to our right, in front of the main house, the other outbuildings to our left. Between the outbuildings and us is an expanse of open land, and if it’s protected by motion sensors, we’ll be discovered.

The clouds shift, and the moon dispenses a little light. Silas looks quickly from left to right. “That must be the lockup. Narrow windows,” he says, pointing to squat building in the distance. He’s about to speak again when we hear low voices. We flatten ourselves against the wall as Vanya and Maks come into view. I breathe as slowly and quietly as I can.

“I’m sorry about your daughter,” Maks says.

“She was dead to me a long time ago,” Vanya responds.

“Well, maybe she isn’t. I don’t trust any of them,” he says. “They’re too clever.”

Vanya smiles. “So what? How many brainy traitors have we buried?”

They are tittering when the area erupts in light. I pull my face around the corner and instinctively take Silas’s hand. He puts a finger to the blowout valve of my face mask. Like he has to warn me to be quiet.

“What are those idiots doing?” Vanya says. “Go and shut down the floodlights.” Maks gallops away.

“It’s Vanya,” a new voice says.

“What are you playing at? What if someone sees you?” Vanya hisses, and the floodlights dim to nothing. I poke my face around the corner. Silas stands over me and does the same. In Maks’s place is a pair of men carrying a long object wrapped in plastic. They put down their load and stand panting.

“The buggy broke down,” one of the men tells Vanya. “Had to carry it ourselves.”

“Just get this garbage out back where it belongs. And if I ever see you two trying something like this again, it’ll be you rolled up in plastic.” Vanya kicks the load violently and strides away, the men watching her go.

“Hormonal or what,” one whispers. The other snickers. As they reach down for their bundle, Silas pulls on my elbow. “We have to follow them,” he says.

“What for?”

“Do you want to guess what’s in that plastic or shall I?” he asks.

“What about Quinn?” We need to make sure he’s okay, and find out what’s happened to Bea.

“What if that
is
Quinn?” Silas asks. I stare at the bundle. If Silas is right, then it doesn’t matter what Abel says; we can’t stay one more day.

“You don’t think that,” I say.

“He wasn’t at dinner.”

“Let’s check it out.”

We follow the men at a distance, stooping low and sticking as close to the outbuildings as we can. They chat, back and forth, and groan under the weight of the load. “Should’ve waited ’til tomorrow,” the one says.

“Best get it over with.” Eventually we reach the back wall marking Sequoia’s border. Like the front, the top is garnished with broken glass. With a sigh, the two men drop the bundle and stand huffing and puffing. “Need air,” one says, coughing.

“Too right. Soon as we’re done with this, I’m gonna set up camp next to an oxybox.” He roots in his pocket and pulls out a heavy, jangling set of keys, which he inspects in the moonlight. “Got it,” he says, and shuffles to the wall with a tiny steel door built into it. He rattles the key in the lock, and the door opens.

The two men let out long breaths as they bend down to retrieve the bundle, and once they have it, they scoot through the door, one walking backward, the other directing from the opposite end.

We spring at the door as quickly as we can, glance around it to make sure the men have moved on, and creep out of Sequoia.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “Quick,” Silas whispers.

The men are already way ahead, plodding along the uneven ground and sidestepping heaps of junk abandoned on this side of the wall, where no one has to see it. The moon disappears again, which is fortunate, because there are no buildings to hide behind, only the odd boulder or rusting car, and if the men were to turn, they’d surely see us.

They stop for the final time, and we drop behind an upended, rotting wooden table. Silas nudges me. I lift myself up beside him. There is another figure next to the two men now: a scrawny man with a long beard and wearing a face mask. “The hole doesn’t look big enough,” one of the men complains.

“Gimme a look,” the bearded man grumbles, and knocks the bundle with the handle of a shovel. The men let it drop to the ground and unwrap it.

I lift myself higher to see, sprawled on the ground before us, lifeless and stiff, the body of a man. His head is swollen and his eyes are bulging. I slide back down behind the table and cover the blowoff valve in my mask with my hand.

Silas’s eyes reflect a sliver of light. “Not Quinn,” he whispers, which makes me feel a little better, but not much.

“He’s too wide,” the bearded man says. The shovel hits the ground as he digs a wider hole. “I’ve another spade over there,” he says.

“You do your job, Crab, we’ll do ours.”

There’s a pause and one of the men speaks again. “Hungry?” he asks the other. We hear something being unwrapped and slobbery chewing. I gag. How can they bury someone and eat at the same time?

And that’s when I notice the ground: it isn’t naturally uneven—it’s become that way from the bodies buried here. And though some mounds have already been concealed by rocks and debris, and are almost flat, others are still, the earth barely sunken in next to the body.

I poke Silas. “Graves
everywhere
,” I whisper.

“Who the hell are they burying?” he says. We stare at each other, not knowing what else to say.

“There you are,” Crab says. We peek over the edge of the table and watch Crab throw his shovel onto the ground.

The two men who carried the body throw aside what remains of their food and stand. “You take that end,” one tells the other.

“Why should I touch the head?” his workmate barks.

“He won’t bite.”

“You take the head then,” he says, and the other man is forced to swap ends.

“One, two, three,” he says, grimacing, and they lift the man by his arms and legs, swing the body, and launch him into the hole where he lands with a crack.

Crab twirls the end of his beard around his finger. “Shall I fill it in?” he asks, nodding at the grave.

“Well, we don’t want it stinking.”

“Doesn’t seem much point if you’re gonna have another delivery for me any day.” Crab picks up his shovel and sticks it into the heap of loose earth.

“Not your place to keep track of these things, Crab,” one of the men says. Crab snorts and covers the dead man with earth. The two deliverymen head back.

“We should’ve run from Sequoia ages ago,” Silas whispers.

“The back gate gives us an escape route. We didn’t know about it until now.”

Silas rubs his head with both hands. The two men are out of sight. If we want to catch them and make it through the door before them, we have to run.

We pick our way through the junk, veering to the right to bypass the men. It’s so dark it’s difficult to see where we’re going, and we’re sprinting so fast, I stumble several times and my shoes clank against old metal pipes. Finally the wall appears, and we slam against it, almost knocking ourselves out. I use my hands to feel for the door. Silas points at the open door about fifty feet away, but we’re too late. The men saunter out of the scrub and seconds later slip though the door, slamming it behind them. We run and I try the handle. “Locked. We’ll have to climb over the wall,” I say.

“I’m not sure it’s possible,” Silas says, and I’m about to argue when there’s a bang and he crumples to the ground.

I scream and jump just in time to dodge the gravedigger who is aiming his shovel directly for my head.

“Drifters!” Crab yells, grappling for my face mask. I kick him in the chest with both feet and knock him to the ground, giving me a few seconds to grab his face mask. I pull it so hard the tubing comes away from the air tank, and he lashes out. But he isn’t as adept at breathing as the others, and after a few seconds he stops fighting, hacking instead, as the sinewy atmosphere attacks his lungs.

“Give me my mask, you dirty br-brat,” he sputters.

I dash to Silas, refit his face mask, and shake him violently. “Wake up.” I lift his head to see if he’s been injured, but I can’t see much in the dark, and suddenly there’s a rustle behind me and my own face mask is pulled off. I jump up and turn, and as I do, Crab, who looked done for only moments before, puts his hands around my throat. His eyes bulge as he squeezes.

Neither of us has enough air, and together we crumple to the ground.

His hands are clamped so firmly there’s no way he’s letting go. It feels like he might snap my neck. I dig my nails into his hands and scratch his face, fighting, fighting for life. And then a shadow appears above us.

Silas.

Crab releases me and tries to scurry away but Silas has the shovel. Crab covers his eyes with his hands, as though this will protect him, and Silas smacks the shovel against Crab’s head. Crab doesn’t utter another sound and drops to the ground. I shudder and stare at Silas.

Silas throws me his face mask, then retrieves mine and puts it over his own mouth and nose. “He’s dead,” I say.

Silas lifts Crab’s head. “Yes,” he says. A dark, thick liquid oozes from his head onto the earth. A stabbing of regret trickles into me, but I sweep it away: it was him or us. Right?

“No one can find him,” Silas says. He pulls me to my feet.

“What does it matter?” My throat is still stinging.

“They’ll suspect us. I don’t want to be next.”

I bend down and lift Crab’s legs. Silas takes his arms. Blood drips from the gravedigger’s fractured skull.

Quickly, we carry Crab to the hole he dug himself and throw him on top of the other body. “I’ll get the shovel,” Silas says. I stare down at Crab, lying cheek to cheek with the other dead man, their limbs bent all out of shape.

Silas begins filling the hole as soon as he returns, and when his muscles ache, I take over. We work like this until we’re done. “We’re murderers,” I say, wiping my sweaty hands on my trousers.

On our way back we use stones and loose earth to cover the track of Crab’s blood. “Let’s stash the air tank. We may need it later,” Silas says, leaving me by the wall for a few minutes while he finds a good hiding spot.

We still have the problem of how we’re going to get into Sequoia. There don’t seem to be any cameras at this rear exit, and there’s the glass on the wall; it won’t go unnoticed if we turn up to breakfast gashed to pieces from climbing over it.

“Alina,” Silas mutters. He’s on his knees. “A way in. Or out,” he says. I squat next to him and look.

Someone has furrowed a narrow tunnel underneath the wall.

“Can you fit?” I ask.

Silas answers by crawling into the tunnel headfirst. He has to wriggle from side to side to get through, but he does it, and soon after I am through, too, covered from head to toe in dirt. “Hopefully the flood lights are still off,” Silas says.

Tonight we have achieved nothing more than killing a man, and as we head for the cabin, one word repeats itself in my head:
Murderer. Murderer
.

That is what I have become.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

32

QUINN

I’m awoken by arguing. “Quit nudging me!” the boy groans from his cell.

“But you won’t stop snoring,” the girl says.

“I can’t help it.”

I turn over on the hard slab of concrete. They’re standing face-to-face and grappling with each other through the bars. The girl sees me watching and stops.

“What did
you
do?” she asks. I stand up and dust myself off.

“Nothing,” I say. “But seems like that’s enough here.” The girl squeals with laughter. She hits the boy as she continues to titter. It’s not a genuine laugh: she’s hysterical. “Is there a way out?” I ask. There’s a sliver of a window by the roof, but that’s about it.

“I wouldn’t try to escape, if I were you,” the boy says. He pulls up his shirt to show me his chest, which is covered in bruises.

“Maks?” I ask.

He nods and puts his hands between the bars to pull up the back of the girl’s shirt. Her skin is crisscrossed with red welts. “He beat me and whipped her,” he says. “Because we stole an air tank. That was it.”

I dry heave. I miss Bea, but thank goodness I didn’t bring her here.

Keys rattle in the lock and Maks pushes open the door. The boy and girl scuttle to the backs of their cells and watch as he approaches me. “Exciting news. Vanya’s forgiven you, which means you have a busy day of exams ahead.”

“Exams?”

“Just get a move on,” Maks says, pulling open the cell door and grabbing me by the back of the neck. I don’t struggle, because I could be in for if I do. Besides, I have a better chance of finding Alina and getting out of here and back to the pod if I’m not locked in a prison cell.

The boy and girl watch me go. They look afraid.