The Capture (8 page)

H
OPE WAITS ANXIOUSLY.
B
UT
when there's no sign of Book, she can't stand there any longer, and she races alongside the track, imagining the worst. First Mom, then Dad, then Faith. She cannot add Book to that list.

When she finally catches sight of him, crouched over Argos, it takes everything in her power to stifle sobs of relief. “Are you okay?” she asks.

Book nods. “Had a little run-in with Dozer,” he says, his hands shaking. Her eyes drop to Argos, who favors a back leg. When Book scratches him behind the ears, Argos pants as though everything is fine.

Hope notices a thin line of blood on Book's neck and can't help reaching for it, dabbing it with her fingertips. Book recoils slightly, and for a moment their eyes meet.
They've touched before—they've kissed—but this gesture feels profoundly intimate. Hope pulls her fingers back.

“I guess we'd better go find the others,” she says. Her words sound stiff and formal, even to herself.

“I guess we'd better,” Book agrees. They stay there a moment longer, alternately looking at each other and afraid to look. She feels her body leaning in. Book, too.

“Book! Hope!” a voice calls out. It's Flush, looking for them. The two of them lean back, dropping their eyes.

“Right,” Hope murmurs.

They get up and follow the train tracks, walking in silence, their arms brushing slightly. Each time, Hope remembers the softness of his lips, the kindness of his eyes, the feel of his hands when they pressed against her back. She's ashamed to feel a pang of sadness when they meet up with the others.

Their friends are banged and bruised. Diana sports a long scrape on her forearm; Helen, a bump on her forehead; Flush, a gash on his leg. But Four Fingers took the worst hit of all. He rolls on the ground, grabbing the bottom of his leg.

Book kneels by his side while Helen undoes his bootlaces. A knot the size of an egg sprouts from the outside of his left ankle.

“Hey,” Book says, patting him on the shoulder, “it's
all right. Just a sprain. Doesn't change anything.”

“Doesn't?”

“Heck no. We'll take turns letting you lean on us. It's no big deal.”

A smile spreads across Four Fingers's face, and they help him to his feet. Book can only hope he's telling the truth.

“So,” Twitch says. “What now?” Remarkably he made the jump unscathed, even without sight.

“Same plan as before,” Book says. “We free the Sisters, then the Less Thans after that.”

Hope nods in appreciation. She has her own addition to that plan, of course, in the form of three names: Thorason, Maddox, and Gallingham. But no one knows that except her.

Scylla points to the glow of coming sunrise and they realize they need to get going. They don't want to be on the tracks when daylight hits.

“We're not going through town, right?” Flush asks. He doesn't need to mention the word
Crazies
for everyone to know exactly what he's thinking.

“Don't worry,” Hope says. “We'll stay on the outskirts.”

As they walk the narrow path between train tracks and cattails, Hope dwells on their new reality. Although they've escaped from Dozer and can make decisions on their own, their numbers have dwindled to just eight.

Doesn't change anything,
Book said, but Hope isn't so sure.

They head north on a two-lane road, in the direction of what they hope is Camp Freedom. They come across an old sign, pitted with bullet holes.

WELCOME TO BEDFORD

Population 2,143

They skirt the far edges of town. Trudging past vine-covered houses, they realize this is less a town and more a disaster area. Weeds overwhelm the potholed streets. Trees sprout through rooftops. Debris is scattered everywhere. There's something terribly wrong about it all. How could it come to this?

But they know the answer to that. Omega. The day the bombs fell.

They're nearly past the town when Four Fingers crumples to the ground like a sack of flour. Everyone gathers around him. Even in scant light it's easy to see his face is pale, his eyes glassy. Dehydration.

“He needs water,” Helen says, crouching by his side.

“Yeah, but where?” Flush asks.

Hope wants nothing more than to get out of here. Avoid the Crazies, reach Camp Freedom, worry about food and water there.

But they don't have that luxury.

“We'll find some,” she says.

“Where?” Flush asks.

“Wherever they store water around here.” She tries to keep her voice calm, to make it sound like it's no big deal. She knows that's far from the truth.

“I'll come with you,” Book says.

“You don't have to—”

“I want to.” Despite herself, Hope feels a tingle of relief.

They gather up the canteens, and Argos scrambles to Book's side. Bad leg and all, he's intent on joining them.

Just as they're about to leave, Helen reaches behind her neck and undoes the clasp of a tarnished chain. “Here,” she says, presenting a locket to Hope.

Hope recognizes it, of course. It's the locket she found in her dead father's pocket. The one that contains the miniature photos of her parents. She gave it to Helen as a good-luck charm, right before they swam through the flooded tunnel during their escape from Camp Freedom.

“You might need it,” Helen says.

Hope fastens it around her neck and gives Helen a quiet nod of thanks. “Come on,” she says to Book. “Let's get back here before the sun comes up.”

They take an anxious peek toward the east and head out.

Despite the crumbling houses and buckled roads, there is something oddly pleasing about it all. The
geometry of streets. The precision of intersections. Hope finds it nearly impossible to imagine what it must have been like in pre-Omega days—people strolling down sidewalks, riding bicycles, watering lawns—but it makes her think of her mother and father.

She shakes away the sentiment; no time for that now.

Live today, tears tomorrow.

Glances into the houses tell her they were ransacked years ago. Empty shelves. Cupboard doors dangling from broken hinges. No food here. No water either. They hug the shadows and move on. The eastern sky is graying.

Houses give way to shops. Then bigger shops after that. Before they know it, they're behind a brick building on what must be the main street. There are noises here: raucous laughter, whooping and hollering, the crackle of bonfires.

They come to the building's edge and peek around the corner. It's a street full of Crazies—hundreds of them—huddled around trash-can fires, cooking foul-smelling chunks of meat. The men sport long, ungainly beards and the women's hair is tangled and matted, their faces smudged with dirt. Large gaping holes in their mouths mark the absence of teeth. Even from this distance, Hope can smell their rancid stench. It's all she can do to keep from gagging.

She and Book stand pressed against the shadows,
mesmerized by chaos: Crazies gorging and drinking and belching and farting and roaring with laughter. Every so often a fight breaks out and two of them tumble to the street, trading punches. There's a sickening sound of fist on flesh.

A man who appears to be some kind of town leader steps forward toward the latest fight. He is short and compact and wears an oversize cowboy hat, and though his beard is full, it appears less greasy than those of his counterparts. Groups part as he strides forward.

“That's enough now,” he says. “Break it up.”

The two Crazies stand, blood streaming down their chins. They grunt and heave for breath like beasts.

“Let's find some water and get out of here,” Book whispers.

Hope gives a nod as though released from a spell. They edge backward through an alley.

One street over is a pickup truck, splotched with rust. Jutting from its bed is an enormous plastic tank, cylindrical in shape, with a small spigot at one end. Above it, scrawled in black paint, is the formula
H
₂
O
.

They unsling the canteens from their shoulders, and Book begins to fill them. Hope keeps a lookout. Argos sits on his hindquarters beneath the faucet, licking stray drops straight from the asphalt.

Book has just finished filling the third canteen when they hear a thundering rumble. Book freezes, and water
spills over the canteen. A growl catches in the back of Argos's throat. Hope gives them both a confused look.

“What is it?” she asks.

“Let's get out of here,” he says, and starts to move away.

“But we haven't finished—”

“No time.” He screws the lid on the canteen, grabs Hope's hand, and pulls her down the street.

Hope doesn't understand his sudden hurry—they have five more canteens to fill—and she's about to ask again what's going on when the drone of engines grows suddenly louder. The sidewalk trembles beneath their feet. They stop and push themselves against a building . . . and watch as ATVs go rumbling past.

Hunters. She remembers them from the Brown Forest.

Of course, that was just two dozen. This is an
army
, vehicle after vehicle, the Hunters straddling their souped-up four-wheelers. Hope has difficulty catching her breath.

The Crazies seem just as freaked. Like cockroaches caught in the light, they scramble and duck for cover and try to make themselves invisible.

At the very end of the procession is a man who wears blaze orange. He has no helmet, no Kevlar vest, just camo pants, an orange vest, and a baseball cap. One side of his face is disfigured, withered from fire. Hope
remembers him from before. The leader.

The other ATVs disappear from view, but the Man in Orange loops back, stops his vehicle, and climbs off. He is greeted by a lone Crazy: the mayor with the full beard and cowboy hat. They shake hands and begin to speak. Hope and Book are too far away to make out what they're saying.

Hope looks at Book. Giant beads of perspiration dot his forehead.

“You okay?” she asks.

He nods but says nothing. At just that moment, the Man in Orange steps away from the bearded leader and swivels his head sharply to one side . . .

. . . and stares right in their direction.

Book and Hope gasp, pushing themselves against the wall. The Man in Orange continues to look their way, shielding his eyes to get a better look. It's like he knows they're there. Like he can sense their breathing. Can sense their fear.

After a short eternity, the Man in Orange smirks to himself, climbs back on his vehicle, and rides off to join his friends.

For the longest time Book and Hope seem unable to catch their breath. They only need to look at each other to know they're both thinking the same thing.
Let's get the hell out of here.

W
E DASHED BACK THROUGH
town and met up with the others. A gravel road snaked north from town and we followed it, hugging the shoulder. Tired as I was, my mind was racing. I couldn't figure out the connection between the Hunters and the Crazies. Why were the Hunters even there? And why were their leaders speaking? It made no sense.

There was something else I wondered, too, and I hurried to Hope's side.

“How're we going to do it?” I asked.

“What?”

“Free the Sisters.”

She shrugged. “How else? The tunnel.”

“Even though it's flooded?”

“Guess we'll have to swim again.”

“And how many Sisters did you say there were?”

“A hundred and twenty-five. Give or take.” Then her gaze grew distant, her face tight. “The number was always changing.”

Before I got a chance to ask her what she meant, she quickened her pace, and I was walking by myself again. That was the thing about Hope—that haunted look in her eyes never went away. I hoped to someday find out what it meant.

We took a nap late that afternoon, folding ourselves in thick blankets of underbrush. When we woke several hours later, we foraged for food. There was an eerie calm as we performed our chores, everyone focused on the coming mission: freeing over a hundred Sisters from Camp Freedom without the Brown Shirts noticing.

“We four will go into the tunnel,” Hope said over a dinner of mushroom and scallion soup, pointing to the other three Sisters. “We'll sneak into camp, round up the Sisters from the other barracks, and bring them back through the tunnel.”

“And us?” Flush asked.

“You four will stand watch outside camp.” I was about to protest, but Hope explained. “If you went in, you'd only freak them out.”

“What happens if things go wrong?” I asked.

Hope hesitated before answering. “Get away from here as fast as you can.”

A quiet fell over the group.

When darkness came, we set back out, sticking to the dense shadows of the woods. We marched through the night, not stopping until guard towers cut a jagged silhouette against the purple black of the sky. Crawling to the crest of a ridge, we looked down at the camp, and I could tell the mere sight of it made Hope and the other Sisters tense.

A thin slice of red and orange announced the dawn. We lay and watched, waiting for the camp to come to life. The calm was oddly unsettling. Like a snake before it strikes.

But nothing happened. The sun rose and the sky brightened and there was no movement. None. No curling tendrils of smoke from the kitchen. No guards peering from the guard towers. No prisoners being marched from one building to another. All was silent and still.

At first we didn't speak of it, in part because we couldn't believe our eyes.
Any minute now
, I thought,
Sisters will march from the barracks to the mess hall, and from the mess hall to roll call. Just like what we saw before.

But it didn't happen. There were no Sisters. No Brown Shirts either. It was as if they'd all mysteriously
disappeared. Vanished into thin air.

I suddenly remembered the letter we'd uncovered.
Leave no trace.
My heart began to pound.

“You think they've been killed?” Flush asked.

No one had an answer to that. It seemed unlikely, if only because there were no slumped bodies, no decaying corpses strewn about the ground. Instead, everything just looked . . . empty. Utterly deserted.