The Defectors (Defectors Trilogy) (3 page)

Yanking my sleeve down to cover the perfect square scar, I pulled on a warm pair of black running tights, a light waterproof jacket, and my newest running shoes. Unlike the bright neon sneakers I usually wore, I’d chosen these for the journey because they were black and nonreflective. I yanked my unruly chestnut waves into a ponytail and felt their comforting brush against the top of my spine.

I was methodical and unsentimental as I zipped up my pack and prepared to leave. I wouldn’t miss this place. After I moved in with Nora, I pretty much lived on Greyson’s couch to avoid the loud sighs and judgmental stares I got whenever he came over. Even though Greyson was like a brother to me, she’d always thought he and I were “together.” Nora took in his shaggy curls and social justice T-shirts and scowled. He wasn’t her idea of boyfriend material.
 

I didn’t care what she thought. Nora and I had never been friends exactly, but after the U.S. passed the mandatory migration bill in June, most of my real friends never returned to school, and I had no one else to live with.
 

As I left, I slammed the front door on a corner of Nora’s god-awful polka-dotted welcome mat. It was oddly satisfying. This place had felt more like a prison than home, and I was leaving for good.

There didn’t seem to be anyone else left in the building. I didn’t run into anyone in the stairwell, and the hallways were completely deserted. The dim lights along the walls flickered over peeling burgundy wallpaper, illuminating the fake gold number on each door. I reached Greyson’s apartment. There was no sign that officers had been there yet; the PMC always left its mark as a warning to others that another illegal had been captured.

I found Greyson’s spare key on my key ring and slipped inside. Although the rooms were dark, I half expected him to stride out of the kitchen in a huff about something he’d read in the paper, the way he usually did when I materialized in his living room. But the place was quite empty.

The blinds were closed, throwing very little light on the beat-up orange couch and the horrible ringed coffee table. On the way to his room, I passed the two open doors where his roommates used to sleep. The rooms were empty except for bare mattresses and the generic desks that the apartment furnished.

Greyson’s room still looked unnervingly inhabited. The bed was rumpled and unmade, his clothes strewn everywhere. The walls were papered with posters of famous revolutionaries, and stacks of worn books toppled over one another across the floor. He subscribed to more print newspapers than I’d ever heard of, and the corkboard over his desk was plastered with clippings he’d marked with runaway streaks of red, circling clues to a conspiracy and notes I couldn’t decipher. Greyson had his own horrific set of theories about the mandatory identification bill, the spread of carriers, and how it was all connected.

I upended the laundry hamper by the bed to reveal his army surplus rucksack full of food and supplies for the journey. A “Say ‘No’ to Mandatory ID” button on the strap caught my eye, and I felt a pang of loneliness.
 

While I kept my extra stores of food in the pantry, Greyson was convinced that it wouldn’t be long before people started breaking into homes to steal food. He hid it like money under a mattress. He used to say food was the real currency and that it was only a matter of time before the U.S. dollar was useless. But that didn’t stop him from withdrawing all his savings and hiding the cash throughout his room.
 

His mom once told him about the recession that happened before we were born, and he trusted banks even less than he trusted cash. As it turned out, he was wise to withdraw his money when he did; nobody could access a bank account without a CID. But then again, most stores no longer accepted cash either.

I spent more time in this room than in my own apartment, so I knew a few of his favorite hiding places. There was a wad of cash stuffed inside his old baseball glove, rolled up in socks, and even stowed away in his old toy safe from when we were kids. I wanted to take the money in case I got the chance to barter on the run. It was possible some poor illegal idiot would trade food for cash. Greyson used his lucky number as the combination: thirty-two, thirty-two, thirty-two. He wasn’t as mysterious as he thought.

I collected the rolls of cash I found and added them to the rucksack, taking a final clean sweep of the room for anything we could use. I left his sleeping bag behind. I would have a better chance of reaching him with a light load. He would just have to rough it if and when I rescued him.
 

If.
No, there couldn’t be an “if.”

Finally, I grabbed the military knife from his bedside table his father had given him and the carefully preserved photograph of his family pressed between the pages of a bible he never read. As far as I knew, it was the only picture in existence with all four of them: Greyson, his mom, his dad, and his little sister Dani.
 

I tried not to look too hard at his room as I left. I couldn’t let myself think that it could be the last piece of Greyson I ever saw. As I turned up the street, I had the fleeting thought that I should burn the place to the ground. If the PMC officers looking for me came to his apartment and saw his books and posters, they would brand him as a rebel and lock him up in Waul — or worse.
 

But since Greyson was an undocumented illegal with no record, they likely wouldn’t bother building a full criminal case against him. They didn’t have the manpower to do that for every illegal they captured. Besides, with Greyson, Nora, and me gone — the last stragglers in the building, as far as I knew — the apartment would soon be ravaged by a gang of carriers.

I decided it would be best to stick to our original route. We planned to make our way to my parents’ house and then go west, but now I had to hope my dad could help me get to Sector X out east to rescue Greyson. Admittedly, it wasn’t a very solid plan, but I couldn’t think of another way. I had no car and no idea how I would break into Chaddock.

It was eerily quiet on the street. Once a vibrant downtown district alive at all hours of the day and night, the abandoned buildings now looked shabby and dilapidated. The lights outside the indie movie theatre no longer flashed, and all the restaurants had closed their doors. Even the man who played jazz flute on the corner packed up and left weeks ago.
 

As I passed the empty parking garage at the end of my block, I heard a scream echo off the concrete walls. I ducked behind a parked car. Its meter was empty, but there were no city police left to give the driver a ticket. I strained my ears to listen, and I heard a woman’s voice — begging, pleading.
 

Cautiously, I crept out from behind the car and crawled across the sidewalk to peer over the low concrete wall on the first level. A woman was sprawled out on the ground with her arms over her head — the woman who took payments from the parking kiosk. She wasn’t wearing her reflective orange vest, but I recognized her just the same. She always wore bright pink lipstick.

Blood ran freely from her nose and the corner of her mouth, and her eye was starting to swell. Two PMC officers stood over her in their sterile-looking white uniforms, one rubbing his knuckles with relish and the other brandishing a nightstick. It was slick with blood.

“Please!” she whimpered. “I was just f-filing the plate numbers of the cars that were left.”

“We need those numbers,” one of the men said. His eyes were cold and unsympathetic.
 

“T-take them,” she cried. “P-please. They just have to go on r-record with the city for towing.”

“What about the others?” yelled the officer. “I know these buildings are infested with illegals.”

“I d-don’t know,” she whimpered. “All t-the regular tenants are gone!”

The officer brought the nightstick down hard, striking her across the shoulder blade, and spit on her face.
 

Anger and fear coursed through my veins. I couldn’t just sit there and watch this happen.

“Don’t lie! We know there are still illegals living here.”

“I wouldn’t know!” she sobbed. “I just monitor the garage!”

The officer struck her again, and I heard a sickening crunch as if he’d broken her collarbone.

“Please!” she cried. “I’ll tell you anything.”
 

“Where are they?” the man yelled, kicking her in the gut.

She moaned, curling into the fetal position to protect herself.

I couldn’t take it anymore. A sickening hatred was bubbling in my stomach like poison, and I felt sick. I backed slowly down the sidewalk, thinking hard.
 

It didn’t matter what she said. They were going to kill her. Those men with their nightsticks and their cold eyes — they knew she didn’t have information, but they were torturing her for sport.

I stumbled into the grass, and the landscaping around the garage caught my eye. The once well-tended bushes had plastic bags and bits of trash caught in their branches. The mulch, which was mixed with old fast-food bags and gum wrappers, was contained by a row of bricks. I grabbed one, looking around for a white PMC cruiser.

It was parked just around the corner: a white SUV with enormous wheels and a polished chrome grill guard. My heart thudded against my ribcage. I couldn’t believe what I was about to do.
 

Mustering all the strength I could, I brought the brick crashing down against the passenger window. The glass shattered, and I felt the broken shards slash the side of my wrist. The car alarm screeched loudly, cutting through the woman’s screams. I winced as the blood ran down my wrist, dropped the brick, and took off running around the garage.
 

 
I cut across the street to avoid the ID rover mounted over the stoplight at the intersection. Running down the narrow alley between the abandoned yoga studio and the dark diner, I made my way around the block, toward the park at the end of the street where the wooded walking trail picked up.
 

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I knew the officers weren’t following me, but I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder every few paces as the entrance to the trail came into view. I just hoped the distraction would give the woman a chance to escape. It was a long shot, but it was all I could do.

It wasn’t safe for an illegal to travel on any of the main roads or highways anymore. Every major intersection and overpass was equipped with an ID rover to gauge traffic flow and track citizens who had not migrated north. Some U.S. workers and students were granted special permits for late migration, but if your location data indicated that you weren’t attending work or school, the PMC assumed you were engaged in illegal activities.
 

Greyson and I solved this problem long ago when we made our plan to go west. If we couldn’t go by road, we would use the trails. We knew every trail around Columbia by heart and ran them every day until, one by one, they were closed off. The PMC said this was to keep out carriers, but Greyson and I believed it was because the trails were too far from the traffic rovers.
 

Even so, most people avoided the woods without the discouragement of barricades because the forest was a notorious hotbed for roving gangs of carriers. Driven out of the city by the PMC, they foraged in the woods for food and fed on the rotting carcasses of dead deer, squirrels, and opossums. They were never fast enough to catch live animals, but every few months, you’d see a story on the news about a pretty, young jogger from the university who’d been killed. Carriers were known to lurk in packs among the trees and attack humans for the food they might be carrying. It just wasn’t worth the fresh air anymore for most people.

Running in the final weeks before the last trailhead was blockaded, Greyson and I knew we were pushing our luck. I only kept going with him because I sensed that the trail was the only place he didn’t feel the constant suffocation of the rovers and the PMC.
 

Even with the carriers, we decided the trails would be the safest route to take when we left for good. Carriers you could at least outrun if you were fast.
 

Without even looking back, I hoisted myself over the low concrete barricade and entered the dappled shade of the woods. The soft gravel felt inviting under my feet, and my muscles hummed with anticipation. I breathed in deeply, savoring the earthy smell of autumn decay, and began to run.

The luminous canopy of red and golden leaves enveloped me and offered protection from the prying PMC satellite rovers. I fell into my rhythm, and the limestone dust began to coat my new sneakers in a satisfying way.
 

I felt my jacket pocket for the folded square of the map we marked with our route to my parents’ house. The winding lines were burned into my brain, but it made me feel as if Greyson were there, taking the lead as he always did. Even though I had the better sense of direction between the two of us, running in the shadow of his cadence felt natural.

The run I was prepared for. Greyson and I ran a marathon together before the mandate, and we gradually built up our mileage week by week to prepare for the forty-mile run to my parents’ house. But after a few miles, my pack began to weigh heavily on my shoulders. This was one aspect of the run we had neglected in our training. Combined with the soreness in my legs from sprinting back home after the grocery store, my body felt sluggish and leaden.

Maybe it was also related to my mental fatigue. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the woman from the parking garage out of my mind, and I kept imagining the officer standing over her with that nightstick. After a while, the image of her being beaten changed into Greyson. I saw his face twisted in pain, and my stomach hurt imagining what the PMC could be doing to him.

The humidity that usually hung trapped in the woods had finally lifted after the long summer, and as the sun sank lower beneath the trees, the air started to feel crisp and cold. October was arguably not the best time to start a journey like this, but hopefully I could make it to Greyson before winter set in.