The Last Uprising (Defectors Trilogy) (23 page)

“Supply lines?” repeated Amory. “How?”

Godfrey raised a grim eyebrow and flopped down in Logan’s abandoned chair. “IEDs.”

“Shit,” said Roman.

“Yeah,” said Godfrey, rubbing his head. “Those fuckers mean business, but they’re getting reckless. Rulon’s forces took a hit in the carrier breach, but he created a bunch of monsters in that camp of his. Now that he’s dead, there’s nothing to stop his thugs from running amuck. They’ve split off from the revolution — vigilantes, I guess you could say — made a fucking mess for Ida and the rest of us.”
 

Godfrey removed his knit cap and ran a hand through his wiry hair. “It’s costing a lot of lives on both sides.”

“That’s just the price you pay, though, isn’t it?” said Roman.

“It’s a war,” murmured Amory.

I looked at him, sure he didn’t mean to sound so uncaring.

“Where will the people from the communes go?” I asked.

Godfrey shrugged. “I supposed they’ll stay up north, and Ida will set up a camp. They probably won’t see any combat. After the last raid we had, well . . . they aren’t cut out for battle.”

“So what will happen to them?”

“Best case scenario, we win. They head south and go home. Worst case, we lose, and they’ll get the same as you or me. I don’t imagine the PMC would have a hard time rounding up a bunch of scared city people roughing it in the woods. But they’ll sit tight for now.”

It didn’t feel right that the people from the communes should be caught in the middle of the revolution when they’d taken no part in the upheaval. But then again, I hadn’t wanted to be part of the revolution, either. I’d just been swept up along with it.

As I watched Godfrey limp up the stairs, I couldn’t help thinking he looked years older than he had a few days ago.
 

All of us looked older now — tougher. We had been hardened by all the fighting, all the death, and I doubted any of us would ever be the same.
 

I’d watched people die. I’d
killed
. World Corp had stolen my identity.
 

Everything about who I was before had been peeled away, broken, and reset like a bone. I was functional, but I’d always be able to feel the cracks and scar tissue. There was no going back.

Two days later, I awoke to the sound of frantic knocking on my bedroom door. I peeled my eyes open lethargically, still in a haze of sleep and reeling from my latest nightmare.

In my dream, I was drowning at the bottom of a shallow pool of freezing water. Aryus was hovered over me, barely visible through the ripples. Water was rushing into my lungs, and I was quickly losing consciousness. I was going to die.

Aryus’s lips moved, and I heard his voice echoing inside my head.
 

You are my greatest achievement, Haven. You can’t fight it. You will be the end of this revolution.

Trying to shake the eerie feeling that this was some sort of premonition, I shuffled across the room and opened my door.
 

I barely had time to register Amory’s panicked look and smoky gray eyes before he pushed his way into my room and pressed me against the wall. His fingers were thrumming with nerves, and his face was as white as a sheet.
 

“The workers,” he breathed. “They’re back . . . with PMC.”

I stared at Amory for a long moment. Our days of peace had reached an end, and there was still so much left unresolved. Something heavy passed between us as his gray eyes bored into mine — a silent acknowledgement of everything that had gone unsaid between us.

Not bothering to change out of my borrowed sweatpants and oversized T-shirt, I bolted down the stairs to the kitchen. Greyson and Logan were already waiting, looking grim. I stuck my head out the back door, and I could see a white PMC cruiser coming up the road through the trees.

“Drop your weapons and surrender,” boomed a voice from the cruiser’s intercom.
“Resisting Private Military Company forces is an act of treason. You are all trespassing on World Corp International land and interfering with official operations. Please put down your weapons . . . and put your hands in the air.”

I stood frozen in the doorway, watching the cruiser approaching as though this wasn’t happening to me. Blood rushed through my ears, drowning out the panicked voices of Greyson and Amory behind me.
 

I stepped outside, barely thinking clearly enough to grab my rifle. The Hoopers, the Holts, and all the other rebels were already crouched in the yard behind cars, trash cans, and other makeshift barriers, their weapons poised. I ducked behind the 4Runner, pulling Greyson down with me.

The cruiser stopped where the trees met the driveway. Nobody moved.
 

Behind the cruiser leading the convoy were three heavy-duty construction trucks. Several vehicles back, I heard car doors slam and the sound of heavy footfalls. I suspected there were two more PMC cruisers bringing up the rear.
 

“This is your last chance to surrender peacefully,”
said the officer. I could see him speaking through the windshield, but the booming voice did not match the pale, mustachioed man sitting behind the wheel. “Drop your weapons and place your hands over your head. If you do not surrender, we will open fire.”

The rebels were all staring at the officers with the same challenging expression. The officer was talking into his radio again, but no voice came over the intercom.

Then four officers from the front of the convoy got out toting riot shields, rifles pointed at the rebels nearest them. They looked vaguely surprised. Clearly, the PMC had only been expecting to defend the workers against a horde of carriers.
 

As the officers advanced, the rebels opened fire. The shots cracked through the trees and sent a violent surge of adrenaline through my veins. Two of the officers went down at once, but not before they’d hit one of our men.

More PMC were spilling out from behind the trucks. There had
not
been two cruisers in the back as I’d thought. Over a dozen men were marching toward us, and they kept coming.

I looked at Greyson, whose face had gone white. We had not prepared for PMC defense of this scale.

I raised my rifle and aimed at the officer nearest me, but it hit him in his vest. He went down, clutching his chest in agony, but he wasn’t dead. I aimed at his head, but my second shot ricocheted off his vehicle.
 

A bullet whizzed past my head, and someone behind me cried out in agony. I ducked and aimed again at the officer I’d shot. This time I hit him squarely in the forehead, and I watched him slide down the closed door of the cruiser, his eyes staring straight ahead.

Behind the line of officers, there was a strange commotion going on in the construction vehicles. Men in blue overalls were jumping out and fleeing toward the back of the caravan, but a few had picked up the fallen officers’ weapons and were using the dead bodies as shields as they shot at us.

It struck me as very odd that these men — the scared people who had been cowering in the communes since the Collapse — were rallying behind the officers who had enforced mandatory migration in the first place. These were the people Ida was trying to convert, but the look in their eyes told me they had taken World Corp’s message to heart. They truly believed we were the evil ones.

I saw one man leaning across the seat of the cruiser, speaking into the radio. I aimed and shot. The window shattered, and the man slumped back. He was still alive. I had hit him in the shoulder. He was speaking frantically into the radio — calling in backup — and I shot again. This time, he fell down across the console, a pained expression frozen on his face.

As I watched him die, a cold vise gripped my chest, squeezing the life out of me. My limbs were all pins and needles. I was just a floating pair of lungs and a cold, dead heart.

He had been one of the men in blue overalls — just an ordinary person, probably with a family back at the commune. He hadn’t truly been part of this — he had just been caught in the crosshairs.
 

And I had killed him.

I lowered my rifle. Suddenly I was looking at the others in a different light. We were the ones dressed in black. We were the ones shooting innocent people.
 

Not for the first time, I had the horrible feeling that I was doing something very wrong.

It didn’t matter. The battle continued to rage around me, and after a while, the shots quieted. Most of the officers and workers lay dead and dying in the gravel. Half a dozen workers had fled.

I looked around to our forces. A few of our men were wounded, and a small group was clustered around another man.
 

My heart sank. The PMC had come here expecting only a horde of mindless carriers, yet we’d lost one of our own already.

Looking grim, Godfrey shuffled over to the officers lying by the cruisers. I tore my eyes away, not wanting to watch him put any of the men out of their misery.
 

I set my rifle down in the gravel. My hands were shaking too badly to hold it.

“Haven! Haven!”
 

I turned around. One of our men — a man whose name I did not recall — was limping over to me with one hand over the wound in his leg.

“What should we do with Jimmy?”

“I —”

“He’s bad. They shot him in the stomach. He needs help.”

My mind was racing.
This man was dying, and the others were looking to me to save him?

I opened my mouth, unsure what I was going to say, when Roman stepped between us and put a hand on the man’s shoulder.

“Joe, take him straight into the kitchen. Amory will see what he can do.”

Amory heard his name and wheeled around.
 

I was relieved to see he was still in one piece, but I regretted the position he was in. I knew he didn’t feel ready to treat serious wounds like this — and maybe he wasn’t — but he was the closest we had to a doctor on the farm.

He nodded at Roman and squeezed my arm as he passed.

Roman ducked down to eye level with me, looking anxious. “Haven, what’s the plan?”

“What do you mean?”

“That worker you shot . . . he was in the middle of radioing for backup, wasn’t he?”

“It looked like it.”
 

“Well, we need to be ready in case they send another wave. We won’t have the advantage of surprise this time.”

I nodded. “You’re right. Tell the men —”

“I’m not telling the men anything. They take orders from you and Amory.”

“Why me?”

Roman shrugged. “They see you as a leader. You escaped Aryus and came back to our side when no one thought you would. You need me, I’m here to help. But I’m not a general.”

I stared at him. He was looking at me with those tough grizzly eyes, but for the first time since I’d known him, it wasn’t a predatory stare. Roman was addressing me with respect.

I cleared my throat, wishing my voice sounded deeper, steadier. “All right, guys. We don’t know for sure, but it looked like one of them might have had a chance to call for backup.”

The rebels let out a collective groan, and my stomach twisted uncomfortably like a wet rag. They were angry and tired, and I somehow had to get them ready to fight again.

“Listen . . .” I said, gathering my resolve and letting it build in my chest until it was a low buzz of adrenaline. “That was
nothing.
There were only a handful of officers, and they weren’t prepared to find us here. We won’t be facing a few officers and unarmed workers next time. The PMC means business. It’s up to us to defend this place and send them crawling back north.”

There was a murmur of approval from the crowd.

“If you’re wounded, get into the kitchen and form a line. Amory will treat the most serious wounds first.”

A few of the rebels limped off, clutching bleeding shoulders, arms, and legs. Some leaned on their comrades, while others toughed it out on their own, eyes watering.

As Godfrey brushed past me on his way back inside, I grabbed his sleeve.

“What should we do?” I asked. “We need a defense plan for when they send reinforcements.”

Godfrey wiped the sweat off his face and sighed irritably, as though I’d asked him to take out the trash, not save a few dozen rebels’ lives.

“I say we try Greyson’s plan,” Roman offered. “Head them off on the road if we can.”

“Sure, that sounds good,” Godfrey grunted, shifting his gaze away.

I stepped in front of him to block him from going inside. “Wait. If you have a better plan . . .”

“Go with whatever plan you want. It doesn’t really matter.”

I stared at him, so sure I’d misheard. “What?”

Godfrey glanced around to make sure no one else was around and opened his mouth reluctantly. “It doesn’t really matter what we do. Ida sent us here to be a distraction, not to single-handedly end this war.”

Somewhere inside me, the frayed thread of my nerves snapped. “
What
?”

“You heard me.”

“A distraction?”

“Uh-huh. What? Did you think she would send a bunch of kids to win a revolution?”

“So we’re just supposed to die?” I spluttered. “Just . . . accept that we’re . . . what? A sacrifice?”

“You can accept or not accept whatever you want,” said Godfrey in a low voice. “It doesn’t change the facts.”

“Ida wouldn’t do that,” said Roman. “We can fight this.”

“All I’m saying is that it was never her intention for us to win.”

“Well, screw that,” Roman snapped. “I’m not just going to lay down and —” He looked at me, his eyebrows scrunched together in determination. “I’m taking the others to set up a blockade down the road. That will give us cover and keep them from driving in.”

I nodded numbly. I was still in complete shock. Then I turned to Godfrey, looking up into his rough, terrifying face with as much resolve as I could muster. “Listen. I’m
in
this. You have to be in this, too. These are people’s lives we’re talking about. Yes, we might die, but I would much rather live. Is that understood?”