Three (Article 5) (40 page)

He was staring at Tucker.

“He was in on it,” he said between clenched teeth. “At the mini-mart. He knew.”

“I know,” I said.

“Did he really let you go?”

“Yes.” I waited a beat, then pressed him back down. “Chase, keep talking.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I think…” Tucker swerved up onto the highway, following a sign with a white H for hospital. “I think maybe he’s trying to make things right.”

Silence.

“Chase?”

His eyes rolled back. Closed.

“Chase!” I screamed.

CHAPTER

26

I PACED
through the small hospital room, ignoring the wet hair that dripped onto my borrowed scrubs. Tucker leaned back in an orange padded chair against the wall, his eyes drifting shut. Every time his head fell to the side, he jolted awake and rubbed his eyes.

“The doc come back?” He asked this every time he woke up.

I shook my head. For the twentieth time, I retied the waistband of my oversized pants. They were huge and wouldn’t stay up.

Five hours had passed since we’d burst into triage of the small medical clinic demanding care. Four hours since the doctor on call, a man about Jesse’s age with thinning hair and serious eyes, had performed surgery. I’d stayed in the room the entire time, convinced they might try to hurt him. Convinced they would just let him die. Even after the doctor showed me the three parallel scars on his shoulder.

Two hours ago they told me Chase would pull through and placed him in a recovery room. I’d finally agreed to take their clothes, clean myself off in the sink, and let a nurse dress my wounds. The doctor had given me a shot of penicillin in case any of them got infected. I’d never left Chase’s side.

The rebels had taken over the clinic. Men and women I recognized from Endurance kept guard around the perimeter, while many of the prisoners kept watch inside. Tucker told me the staff was patching up MM officers—men Three would later make prisoners and use as collateral. He stayed close after that; he’d traded his uniform for scrubs and thrown the jacket in the trash. I thought maybe he’d make a run for it, but he hadn’t.

DeWitt had yet to show up. Neither had Wallace. I wasn’t hopeful either had made it.

While I watched Chase sleep, the slow, consistent beep of the monitors measured his heart rate. I kept one ear tuned to the hall, and when footsteps pattered by our room I tiptoed to the cracked door. Four rebels—the doctor who had completed Chase’s surgery included—were gathered around an old black box radio in front of a window, where outside the sun was just beginning to rise.

I lingered in the background, ready to unhook Chase and move us on if I had to.

“Rumors of a massive explosion at the Chicago base have been confirmed,” reported the familiar voice of a woman who liked to annunciate her words. “The detonations, which occurred just after midnight, were originally claimed as accidents—a misfiring from the base’s weapons storage—but soon after, the prison and rehabilitation hospital also reported explosions, leading our sources to believe that this was in fact the work of rebels. The base has since been overrun with people carrying what look to be the Moral Statutes. The same is said to be happening at the FBR base in Knoxville, Tennessee, which fell less than an hour later.”

I leaned back against the wall, mouth agape. Civilians overtaking the bases. Carrying Statute circulars. My story had reached people in time.

Jesse’s words returned to me from Endurance:
“When a government becomes destructive, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”
It may have been my name on those Statutes, but it was the people who took action. A revolution had begun, and for the first time I finally felt as if my part in it was over.

“Since the attacks, former president Matthew Stark and members of his administration have released a statement calling for current political leaders to relinquish their power so that it may be rightfully returned to the citizens. He demands that officials explain their stance on the Expungement Initiative, a government protocol intended to reduce noncompliance by the execution of innocent civilians imprisoned for Article violations. President Scarboro has yet to comment on these accusations, or the recent claims that the late Chief of Reformation, Chancellor Reinhardt, offered bribe money to the insurgents during the War in exchange for acts of terrorism. Stark asks that citizens demonstrate tolerance and patience during this precarious time until peace can be established. With more on these stories as details emerge, this is Faye Browne.”

I pictured the narrow woman with short, curly hair and wondered where she’d landed. I hoped she didn’t plan on using her real name in public. That kind of thing could get you killed.

I snuck back into the room, pulling the chair close to the side of Chase’s bed. Gently, I threaded his fingers through mine. Too cold. Normally he was like a furnace, but since we’d arrived he’d been unable to warm up. I pulled the blanket higher over his bandages, careful not to put too much pressure on his chest, and kissed his shoulder.

Tucker was chewing his thumbnail and staring at his boots.

“I never gave my C.O. those posts,” he said quietly. “I gave them Knoxville and Chicago. I told them where to find the sniper, then told all of you she was dead. I even gave them the safe house when we were in Greeneville. But after the bombs in those tunnels, I stopped. They thought I was dead anyway.”

He scratched his short hair down over his forehead, and I thought of how distraught he’d been after we’d survived the bombs in Chicago. He’d probably never thought the MM would take the place down with him still in it.

“I thought I had to. I thought, I don’t know, I was doing the right thing.”

I snorted at this.

“The right thing,” I said, listening to the beep of Chase’s pulse on the monitor. “What’s that again?”

Raised voices in the hall drew our attention, but lowered a few seconds later.

“What happens for you now?” I asked Tucker.

He dropped his hands over his knees. “Not sure.”

I regarded him carefully. He wasn’t the same guy I’d first met at my house during my mother’s arrest, what felt like years ago. He didn’t even look the same. His green eyes weren’t as sharp as they had been, and he slouched as though he could barely hold up his shoulders. He was beaten, lost, and on his own. But despite that, he felt real, more real than I’d ever seen him.

I didn’t know what that made us, but that didn’t scare me anymore.

“Welcome to the other side,” I said.

He looked up at me, over Chase’s still body, mouth twisting in a small smile. Before I could think about it, I smiled back.

The plastic pillowcase cover beneath Chase’s head made a crinkling sound. He drew in a long, deep breath, blinking, and then turned his face to me. I waited out each torturous second as the confusion passed. There was much to tell him—about Jesse, about what I’d just heard coming from the radio—but we would talk about that later. For the first time in a long time, later felt like a real thing.

His hand, still in mine, rose to my cheek, an IV tube trailing after it.

“Welcome back,” I said. “We’re in a clinic. I’ll get the doctor.”

Tucker jumped up. “I’ll go.” He rubbed his hands on his sides as if not sure what to do with them, and then turned and left the room. His gun was left on the orange chair.

“I guess we made it.” Chase’s voice cracked, and he licked his chapped lips. “All of us.”

Hearing him speak made my heart clench, and a small yes was all I could manage.

His hand lowered down my neck, to the place on my collar where the shirt couldn’t cover the corner of white that stuck out from the V-neck. The heat of his palm pressed through the bandages, and I held it there, close to my heart.

“How’d you get your scars?” he asked.

The tears rose within me like a soft rain—quiet at first, dampening my face, making tracks down my chin to finally fall on my borrowed shirt. And then they came heavier, drenching my insides, muddying every memory into one painful pool and then finally washing me clean.

He pulled me closer and I curled up beside him on the bed, careful to stay clear of his wounds. He stroked my hair and kissed my brow, and I promised myself that nothing could ever come between us again.

A second later I heard the shot.

I bolted from the bed, instinctively dropping low. Behind me, Chase was trying to push himself up. The monitor beeped faster, catching up to my own jagged pulse. As a commotion in the hall raised, I snatched Tucker’s gun and flattened myself against the wall just within the door. Ears ringing, I glanced around the corner.

At first it looked as though Tucker was leaning against the wall, head drooped forward as if he was still nodding off, and for a split second I wondered if I’d made up the sound. But then Tucker’s hands, folded high on his chest, opened, and I saw then the dark red stains on his palms.

I ran toward him, following his shocked gaze down the hall to where Wallace stood, a team of men and women crowded behind him. They stared at him, as if waiting for orders.

Tucker fell forward, and his knuckles turned white as they gripped the metal bar against the wall behind him. I grabbed him just as he was sinking to the ground, the thin fabric of his borrowed scrubs ripping in my fists.

Wallace walked toward us.

“I should have listened to you from the beginning,” he said to me. “You told me he would turn us in. I didn’t listen.” There was a strange, absent quality to his voice, like all the life had been sucked out of him.

“Tucker?” I whispered.

I couldn’t hold his weight, and soon we were both on the ground. His head lay on my knees, his fingers scratched uselessly at his throat, as if an invisible hand were choking him.

“Tucker,” I said again.

He choked, sputtered, red blood brightening his lips. Then a shudder. Then a stillness, like a long sigh before falling asleep. When his eyes found mine I wasn’t sure what they saw, but he smiled, just a soft, subtle tilt of his lips.

“Guess I was too late,” he said.

And as the life left him, as his body went limp and his hands fell to the floor, I did what I never thought I’d do. I cried for him.

The doctor awaited Wallace’s approval before tentatively approaching. He pressed two fingers against Tucker’s neck, just for a few seconds, then shook his head.

I looked up at Wallace. “What have you done?”

His brows furrowed in confusion, as if the answer should have been obvious.

They took Tucker’s body to the back parking lot with the others who had died after reaching the clinic. Three had separated the area in two; on one side, the soldiers were thrown, their bodies discarded like sacks of garbage. On the other were the prisoners and members of Three who had fought to take down the Charlotte base. They were covered with sheets and laid side by side.

I didn’t know what would happen to either side, but I made the freed prisoners carry Tucker’s body to the side with the rebels. I wiped his face clean and covered him with a sheet myself. It was the least I could do after all we’d been through.

As I stood over him they brought out Dr. DeWitt, and laid him beside Tucker. One bad turned good, one good turned bad. In the end it didn’t matter. We were all the same.

Chase and I stayed through the following night. As the hours passed, the clinic was flooded with rebels who’d survived the battle. The hall was soon overwhelmed with injured fighters, some badly burned, some with broken bones, many—too many—with gunshot wounds. The hospital staff ran from patient to patient, and for a while I helped where I could: passing out bandages, holding people still while the nurses and doctors stitched them up or made them comfortable enough to pass without pain, all the while feeling that aching pressure inside of me to move on.

The doctor told us about an old woman who lived nearby who was friendly to the cause. Before dark on the second day, one of the orderlies helped me move Chase and three other injured rebels to her home, a nearby farm with a collection of hand-painted signs lining a privacy fence that stated:
BEWARE OF DOG
. For six nights we hid in her basement while Chase recovered. She brought us food and water, antibiotics the doctor could spare, and word on the resistance.

At night we listened to Faye Brown’s reports.

By the end of the first week, nine bases had been overrun by civilians. The soldiers that survived the riots had fled, were turned, or simply disappeared. And in every city where a base had fallen, hijacked Statute circulars were found, clutched in the fists of those who fought.

The old president came down from his hiding place in the mountains and began making speeches—Faye even got a special interview with him. The FBR’s days were numbered, he said. It was time they laid down their weapons and accepted the inevitable. Democracy would return to the United States. The Statutes were history. We would rebuild again. All things that sounded good, but had yet to happen. He didn’t condone the violence, but didn’t lie about knowing Three, either. He sounded a little different on the radio than the man who’d showed me his son’s favorite books. Stronger maybe. Not like an old man.

On the seventh day I was helping Chase into the passenger side of the MM van when a beat-up silver car pulled through the gate into the back of the farm. The man who unfolded himself from the driver’s seat looked to have aged ten years since the Charlotte base had fallen. His ratty hair was now clean, tied by a shoelace at the back of his neck, but more gray around the temples.

“I heard you’re leaving without saying good-bye,” said Wallace, leaning against the side of the blue van. His fingers tapped a rhythm against the metal beside his hip.

I wasn’t sure how he’d found us. In the past week I’d been careful not to use either of our names, nor give any information that might indicate who we were.

“We’re leaving,” I confirmed.

“Don’t suppose I can convince you to stay. There’s still a lot of work to be done.” He looked up to the sky, like someone might after feeling a raindrop.