UnDivided (12 page)

“I heard it,” Jeevan says, taking a few steps closer. “I heard all of it.”

Hayden takes a slow silent breath before he speaks. No point in mincing words now. “Are you going to tell Starkey?”

Jeevan doesn't answer. Instead he says, “We're going the day after tomorrow, did you know? The next harvest camp attack. There are kids betting on how many of us will get killed this time. Whoever gets closest to the actual death count wins. Unless they're one of the ones killed, of course. Then it goes to the next closest who actually survived.”

“Did you bet?”

Jeevan shakes his head. “No. Because if I'm right, I'll somehow feel I was partially responsible.” For a moment Jeevan seems much younger than fifteen. And much older at the same time. “Do you think that's stupid?”

“If it is, Jeeves, it's outweighed by a far greater stupidity than yours.”

They both look at the computer screen and the Norman Rockwell image that seems simultaneously innocent and sinister. “The Juvies will find that podcast, you know,” says Jeevan. “They won't be able to trace it, but they'll take it down before it has the chance to spread.”

“I know,” says Hayden. “But if just a handful of people hear it, I'll be happy.”

“No, you won't. You want
everyone
to hear it. It's just not going to happen, though.” Jeevan shivers a bit, and holds his arms. Only now does Hayden realize how cold the night has gotten. “You need to find a way to make it kill-proof,” Jeevan says. “You know, make it reproduce and shift locations on the web so that they can't take it down.”

“Kind of like digital Whac-a-Mole.”

Jeevan takes a moment to process that. “Oh yeah, right. Whac-a-Mole. Funny.”

“So . . . can you make that happen?”

“Maybe. Or maybe you need to do an old-fashioned radio broadcast. They can't shut that down until it's already out there.”

The idea of a real broadcast is appealing to Hayden. The trick would be getting a signal that's far-reaching enough.

“You haven't uploaded it yet,” Jeevan says.

Hayden shrugs. “Yeah, well, follow-through has always been my weak point.”

Jeevan looks at the screen. Hayden is usually good at knowing what people are thinking, but tonight, he has no clue what's in Jeevan's head. Well, whatever he's thinking, it must resonate with Hayden's thoughts, because Jeevan reaches out and does what was so hard for Hayden. He clicks on “send.”

They both watch in silence as the podcast uploads. In a few moments it's done. A click of a button to change the world, or end his life, or both.

A gardener by trade, he took the job because it was a job. The pay was decent, there were good benefits, and it included room and board. “You'd be an idiot to turn it down,” his wife had told him. “So what if it's at a harvest camp? I won't mind living there if you won't.”

Without a degree in horticulture, a steady job at a well-funded institution was probably the best he could hope for.

“And anyway,” as his wife had pointed out, “it's not like
you're
unwinding anyone.”

That's true enough. In his five years working at Horse Creek Harvest Camp, he's had very little contact with the kids. The camp is too regimented for that. The Unwinds are always being efficiently shuttled from one activity to another. Sports activities to gauge their physical prowess and to build muscle mass so their parts will be more valuable. Intellectual and creative endeavors designed to measure, and improve upon, their mental skills. The Unwinds of Horse Creek are kept far too busy to notice a gardener.

The tithes, who have a little more freedom, will talk to him on occasion. “What kind of flowers are those?” they'll ask, their bright innocence in stark contrast to the other Unwinds whose desperation radiates from them like a toxic field. “They're pretty—did you plant them all yourself?” He'll always answer politely, but rarely will he look at them, because he knows their fate, even if it's a fate they accept. It's his own personal superstition: Don't look into the eyes of the doomed.

He's not the only gardener, but his skill and success with planting has earned him the distinction of head groundskeeper. Now he gets to pick and choose his tasks, and assign work to
others. He takes care of the heavier planting: new trees and hedges, and the design of the larger, more impressive flower beds. He loves to plant those himself. The largest of these is right in front of the place the kids call the Chop Shop. He's particularly proud of this year's fall theme: pumpkins growing within the swirling colors of toad lilies, monkhood, and other autumn-blooming flowers.

“You should be proud of what you do,” his wife tells him. “Your flower beds are the last bit of nature these kids will see before they're divided. It's your gift to them.”

For this reason he takes great care to place every growing thing in the Chop Shop flower bed personally.

He's troubled by the recent added security measures and the influx of “protective personnel.” These new guards are not just the typical camp security staff, but tactical teams supplied by the Juvenile Authority. They carry assault weapons and wear thick, bulletproof clothing. It's all very intimidating. He's heard of the recent attacks on harvest camps, but there are so many camps, and the others that were attacked are far away. What are the chances that their little camp in rural Oklahoma will be singled out of all the harvest camps for a Stork Brigade attack? As far as he's concerned, this paranoid security serves only to make everyone worried for no good reason.

He's with a coworker, shaping a dragon topiary, when the attack comes, destroying the tranquility of a bucolic day. He doesn't see the first explosion—and he feels it more than hears it. It comes as a shock wave that, had he not been kneeling behind the topiary, would have knocked him over backward. A chunk of concrete the size of a basketball tears a hole in the heart of the dragon, but not before tearing through his coworker. The groundskeeper throws himself to the ground, splattered with the blood of his dead comrade, and when he looks up, he sees that the administration building is gone. All
that remains are jagged fragments of walls. Pieces of the building are still coming down all around the grounds of the camp.

Staff and Unwinds alike all run from the scene in a panic. A second blast takes out a guard tower designed to look like a rustic windmill. Shredded timber tears through everything and everyone in its way, and from behind it, where a steel-reinforced fence used to be, floods an army of kids wielding weapons the groundskeeper has never seen the likes of before. The air is now filled with the
blam-blam-blam
of repeating rifles, the earsplitting
rat-tat-tat-tat
of machine guns, and the mournful shriek of a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher delivering its deadly payload to the staff quarters. The rocket crashes through a corner window of a second-floor apartment—the nice one overlooking the gardens—and an instant later, all the windows of the building blow out in a fireball from the explosion within.

He suppresses a scream, hunkering down in the dense ivy at the base of the topiary. He knows if he's spotted he's a dead man—he knows if anyone happens to spray their weapon in his general direction, he'll be dead as well. All he can do is lie low, belly to the ground, trying to disappear into the greenery he so painstakingly planted.

The Juvenile Authority's SWAT team, for all their training and weaponry, are ill prepared for an assault of this magnitude. They raise their ballistic shields and try to advance on the marauding throng of kids, taking some of them down, but not many. Then, from out of the crowd of kids races a single unarmed girl running toward them with her hands up.

“Help me, help me! Don't shoot!” she cries.

The SWAT team holds their fire as she approaches, ready to shield her, and save her from the crossfire. Then, as she nears them, she swings her hands together.

The instant her hands touch, she's gone.

The explosion is so powerful it sends the entire SWAT
team flying like bowling pins, their bodies twisting and burning in the air.

Another unarmed kid, frail but determined, hurls himself, arms wide, at the side of the SWAT team's armored truck, and as soon as he connects with it, the explosion tears the truck in two, sending half of it cannoning through the front gate and the other half tearing through the Chop Shop garden.

“They've got clappers!” someone yells. “My God, they've got clappers!”

And now the groundskeeper knows this is about more than just freeing the Unwinds here. This is about exacting pounds of flesh from all those complicit in unwinding. There will be no mercy for him if he is caught. Never mind that all he did was beautify the grounds.
You watched hundreds of kids taken into the Chop Shop, and you did nothing,
the Stork Brigade will tell him.
You dined with the men and women who held the scalpels and you did nothing,
they will say.
You took a place of nightmares and hid it behind flowers,
and his only defense will be,
I was just doing my job
. For that, they will gun him down, or blow him to bits, or kick out the chair from under him. And all because he did nothing.

Don't move, you fool,
he knows his wife would tell him.
Play dead until it's all over.
But he knows she won't be telling him anything anymore. Because one of the perks of being the head groundskeeper is getting that corner apartment on the second floor of the staff house. The nice one overlooking the gardens.

“You need to see it, Jeevan. You need to be a part of it. As a member of the Stork Brigade, you have to share in the fight so
you'll truly feel the power of what we're doing. So you'll get the importance of it.”

This is how Starkey couched the news that Jeevan was to be a foot soldier in the attack on Horse Creek Harvest Camp. “Until now you've just been behind the scenes, in the background. But today you become a warrior, Jeevan. Today is your day.”

“Yes, sir,” was Jeevan's response, as was always his response to Starkey.

But when the first rocket takes out the administration building, and the storks around him begin firing their weapons at anything that moves in the smoke, Jeevan knows that he should never have allowed himself to be here. There are kids around him who are bloated by the power of their weapons, turned maniacal by Starkey's skillful stroking of their most violent sides. There are also those who hold their weapons reluctantly, knowing that this couldn't be right, no matter how wrong unwinding is—but they are swept along in the powerful current and don't know how to resist.

None of these other kids have been as close to Starkey as Jeevan has been. None of them have been part of the planning, or have witnessed his temper tantrums, or have seen behind the curtain of his eyes to know the show that goes on behind the show.

Starkey believes he is invincible. He believes he is more than just destined for greatness, but that greatness is owed to him, and every one of these “victories” makes him believe it more and more.
The Stork Lord.
Hayden's epithet is more on-target then even he realizes, for Starkey truly does see himself as royalty reaching for divinity. A chosen one with the pride and privilege of a god.

When you believe in yourself that strongly, it attracts the belief of others. The more storks believe in Starkey, the more
they want to, and the more fervent that belief becomes. Jeevan was one of those. He would have died for Starkey in those first days. Now he finally realizes the blindness of that faith, just in time for him to actually die for it.

As Jeevan's team races into the fray, blasting weapons with enough recoil to blow them backward every time they pull the trigger, Jeevan prays only to survive.

“Today you are a warrior,” Starkey told him, clapping him on the shoulder like a brother when he said it. But Jeevan knows the truth behind the words.
Now you are expendable
is what Starkey meant—because with the power and resources of the clapper movement behind him, Starkey no longer needs Jeevan to work his computer magic. All the hard-core hacking for this operation was done elsewhere, and on hardware far superior to anything they've had until now. Jeevan is a redundancy. And so today, he is a warrior.

The battle rages around him, so one-sided, he could almost laugh if bullets weren't flying past him, if people weren't dying left and right. The camp's beefed-up security force is no match for the Stork Brigade.

Jeevan's orders are to shoot anyone over seventeen. Like many others, though, he's just been firing high, letting loose a battle scream, so it seems like he's killing, when all he's really doing is making a lot of noise. He stays away from open spaces, where he's a target, and finds himself standing amid topiary hedges that have been shredded by explosions. Then he sees motion—someone crawling through the ivy.
Shoot anyone over seventeen.
Is Starkey watching? What if he is? What if he sees Jeevan failing in his new role as a foot soldier in the Stork Brigade? What will Starkey do when he decides Jeevan is entirely useless?

Jeevan aims his machine gun at the crawling man, but when the man sees it, he rises and hurls himself at Jeevan.
The machine gun tumbles to the ground. Desperately the two scramble for it in the ivy.

The man, a gardener, swings a pair of garden shears at Jeevan, the blades connecting above his left eye. Blood spills forth from the gash, much more blood than such a small gash should bring. It clouds his vision. Jeevan grabs the machine gun, but his hands are slick with blood. His fingers slip, and the gardener grabs it away from him. He stands over Jeevan in the snarl of ruined hedges, aiming at him, finger on the trigger, and Jeevan knows that he's made a crucial error. He should have shot the man without hesitation the moment he saw him—because it's kill or be killed. Starkey has left no room for anything in between.