“So, what do we do?”
Locked in Sean’s office, I sat with the remaining New Wilderness officials, Chris and Jamie on either side of me. Adam and Eve reclined in forlorn slumps closer to Sean, and Eve had yet to stop weeping in silence, long crystalline paths cut through the dirt on her angelic face. Everyone had some kind of grime, soot, or blood on their clothes. Ethan still cradled his Armalite rifle from rallying his workers to help secure the mechanical garage, and Dr. O’Brian bore rusty-red blood spattered all over her clothes from rendering emergency medical aid to the victims, her eyes hollow with fatigue. The death toll had been much smaller than it would have been if ELSAR had actually targeted us, but it was still grim; five of our adults, two Ark River warriors, three of the Bone-Faced Whitetail, and a little boy who got caught in the collapsed Cabin 1 when it was hit. Several others had been seriously wounded but were expected to live through the night. New Wilderness was no stranger to losses, but this gave off an impotent rage that permeated everyone, a maddening inability to respond to what had happened in kind.
Sean rubbed at his face with both hands, the lines on his forehead deepening, and nodded at Ethan’s question. “With Carter dead, we have to elect a new head of the Ranger faction and hope the rest of his secret army doesn’t bother to fight. Long odds, that’s for sure.”
“More so when they find out who killed him.” Dr. O’Brian eyed Chris, and shook her head, some of the light brown hair coming loose from her rumpled bun. “You’ve really stirred up a hornets nest this time, Dekker.”
“Carter crossed the line. He kidnapped one of our own.” Chris growled from where he sat with both arms crossed.
Heat rippled over my face at their stares, and I wished I could turn myself invisible.
Jeez, it’s not like I asked to be arrested by the secret police.
“And you shot nine of your own.” Dr. O’Brian waggled a finger at him, her voice growing thin with the tension. “He might have come out and surrendered if you’d just waited. You rangers are always so trigger-happy.”
Jamie rolled her eyes and threw O’Brian a snide faux grin. “Wise words from someone who’s never had to recover a hostage.”
“Says the former interior guard who took more hostages than the rest of us.” Dr. O’Brian hissed, and Jamie’s countenance hardened into a look of barely concealed rage that would have frightened me if I weren’t so exhausted.
I tugged the ragged blue dress lower over my knees, both shoes back on my feet since Jamie had gone to find the lost one. In the hour since it happened, I’d been forced to retell my side of the events in the mechanical garage three times, and had to be careful to leave out the same details with each iteration. Chris sat to my right, and I didn’t want to look at him, for fear I might hear the accusations of Rodney Carter in my head once more. Everyone knew about the alleged spy, but I’d led them to believe Carter suspected only me, a point none of them had questioned long enough to see through my ruse.
I’m just as paranoid as him now. I can’t even trust my own friends. If I could at least say something to Jamie . . . but do I really know her any better than the rest of them?
Adam cleared his throat, and his usually kind eyes sparked with a vengeful wrath that lay dormant under a thin veneer of politeness. “May I remind everyone that we lost two of our number as well? Ezekial and Tamar were good people, and someone murdered them in cold blood. Please tell me that you’re going to focus your efforts on catching whoever did that instead of bickering with one another all night?”
“I promise you, we are going to do everything we can to find the person who attacked your guards.” Sean seemed to fall back on his police training and swept the room with his eyes. “But I think tonight made something very clear; we can’t keep infighting like this. ELSAR won’t stop until we’re all wiped out, plain and simple. The only reason we’re still here is likely because we’re more useful alive than dead, for now. We need to move while we have the good weather, strength, and numbers to push ELSAR from the north.”
Ethan sat up a little straighter, a surprised expression on his scruffy face. “An offensive? Now?”
“Yes.” Sean tapped a map in front of him with one finger. “If we can push them out of Black Oak, ELSAR will lose its main base for projecting raids into our territory, and their hold on the county will shatter. We’ll have a larger pool of civilians to recruit from, and possibly some intact infrastructure to use for manufacturing better weapons. Since Carter died before he could investigate the spy matter further, it’s a given that our mole will try to get the word out to ELSAR before our attack starts. We’ll be killing two birds with one stone.”
“That’s assuming your plan works.” Dr. O’Brian plucked at ash flakes on her gore-crusted cardigan sleeve. “The enemy outnumbers us by at least five to one, maybe more. If our assault on Black Oak falters, they could push us all the way back to the gates of New Wilderness.”
Sean gestured to the window, beyond which lay the unseen world outside our drawn curtains, with ELSAR somewhere out there, waiting for us. “So we don’t fight like they do. Carter left us a complete battery of field guns and the new line of up-armored trucks to pull them. We don’t meet ELSAR in pitched battle, we run circles around them, hit them with artillery and withdraw, until they can’t maintain a cohesive defense. Once they pull back to consolidate, we move into their old positions, and press on. Rinse and repeat until Barron County is free.”
“While that could work in theory,” Chris shifted in his chair, and I could still smell the burned cordite on his clothes from the brief firefight in the mechanical garage. “It doesn’t solve the pressing issue at hand; what on earth are we going to tell the Assembly? If it has to be done, I’ll take full responsibility for Carter’s death, but there’s no guarantee his supporters won’t riot.”
Jamie coughed and gave the group a sideways glance. “That depends on what we tell them.”
Holy cow, Jamie.
I blinked at her, as did everyone else, and found my voice at last. “What, you mean lie?”
With a practiced indifference that amazed me, Jamie shrugged. “More like ‘seasoning’ the truth to make it more palatable. The only ones who know what really happened are in this room. Everyone else ran in after the shooting stopped. If we spin it that Carter was killed by his own conspirators for refusing to launch an attack on the Assembly, we can sell his replacement as a hero instead of his killer.”
Chris stared at her, his chiseled face a mass of shock. “Wait . . . you want me to replace Carter?”
Everyone tried to speak at once, but Jamie held up her hands in stubbornness, and waved for silence. “Think about it. He’s a ranger, and aside from the hardliners, he’ll get the faction vote easily. If we pass him off as a good Samaritan who tried to save Carter from traitors, the hardliners will sympathize with him. With Chris locking down the Ranger vote, we can finally get stuff done in the Assembly to help win the war . . . and that will distract everyone else long enough for us to find our spy.”
Sanderson scratched his shaggy head and made a frown. “I don’t like lying to the people. Sounds like shady government stuff to me.”
“It is shady government stuff.” Sean watched Jamie with a stern line across his mouth. “But desperate times call for desperate measures. If this heads off a potential civil war, then it’s worth it to bend the truth.”
Undeterred, Chris turned to argue with Jamie, his tone charged with indignance, the two of them sparring verbally right over top of me. “I’m not going to win a bid for office on a lie.”
“You’re not going to win it on the truth.” Jamie snapped back and narrowed her green eyes at him in annoyance. “We’re talking about saving lives here, Chris. I think you can forgo your precious honor long enough to prevent a mass-casualty event.”
There it was again, that line of reasoning, the same Carter had used, and the same that everyone parroted like some jaded mantra. Saving lives. How many lives had already been lost in the war on ELSAR and the Breach so far? How many more would be required to win it? What would we have to do, who would we have to become, to keep the world safe from a menace it didn’t even know existed?
I swallowed, and chewed on my lower lip until I tasted coppery specks of blood.
If we’re going to do all the same things ELSAR is doing, then what, aside from the mutants, are we saving people from exactly?
Eve sniffled and cleared her throat to catch Chris’s attention. “We, um . . . we need to bury our dead, and send a rider to inform the rest of our congregation. I’d prefer to take them back to Ark River, but I don’t think that will be an option for us until the beacon is found. Will you promise our safety if we choose to stay here among your people?”
Chris’s fierce glower softened, and he nodded with an apologetic note to his words. “If I have to sleep on the ground outside your tent, I’ll do it. What happened tonight won’t happen again.”
“So you accept?” Sean leaned back in his swivel chair, weary, but triumphant, though it didn’t seem to bring him any joy.
Curious, I looked up in time to find Chris’s gaze on mine, an uncertainty there, a desperation sunk deep in those lovely circlets of sky-blue, as if he wanted to say something to me but couldn’t. “You’ve been awfully quiet, Hannah.”
All eyes turned to me, and I felt naked despite the soft dress hanging on my slender frame.
I don’t want to say something I’ll regret.
I drank in his stare and couldn’t find the will to make up an excuse. “I mean, you’d be good at it. You helped get us here, and you survived all that time out there on your own. Besides, with you running our security, we have a better chance at catching the spy.”
My heart pounded, unsure if that last line would give me away. To be honest, I truly believed Chris would be a good leader, but if Carter’s suspicions were correct, we were electing a potential spy as head of security. It couldn’t be anymore backwards, but I didn’t dare voice my concerns out loud, for fear of what might happen to Chris if I did. If he was a traitor, then it was my duty to stop him, but yet . . . it was Chris. How could I bear to watch them march him to the firing squad if it was true? There had to be some explanation, some reason for the inconsistences Carter had pointed out. I just didn’t know how to ask for it.
Chris’s shoulders slumped in resignation to his fate, and he raised a cautionary hand to Sean. “Alright. I’ll do it. But let’s keep the lying to a minimum, yeah? Just enough to do what needs to be done, no more, no less.”
The walk to the Assembly was a quiet, lonely affair, all of us lost in our own thoughts. At first Chris tried to keep pace with me, but when I kept my head down to avoid meeting his line of sight, he seemed to give up, and fell back into his own solitary stride. Jamie stayed close to me, her war belt strapped over the black dress she’d worn to the party, eyes scanning the nearby shadows for threats. I doubted she’d leave me by myself for the rest of the night at least, and while it should have been comforting, I couldn’t feel anything but a dread-soaked loneliness in my guts.
That, and the hidden object still clasped in my left hand.
Tucked between my fingers, the secret lingered, cold sharp metal with rough black cord like a snake that waited to strike. I’d had very little time to examine it, but a few glances were enough to further perplex me.
A key. A strange, square-shaped metal key, not like one for a car, or a house, but like some kind of industrial switch, thick and etched with multiple complicated teeth. On one side, a small bit of paper had been glued to the upper flat end of the key, with a series of numbers scrawled on it that had to be a set of coordinates. Where those went to, I had no idea, but for Carter to risk handing this treasure over to me, and to insist with his dying breath that it was far more important than the stolen beacon itself, meant that I was dealing with something earth-shattering. I didn’t know what to do, but something told me that I needed to find wherever this key led, even if I had to go alone.
And the alone part terrified me.
Three huge clots of people swarmed the visitor’s center parking lot, arranged in a semi-circle around a small line of tables with chairs behind them, a podium in the middle. Many of the people wore homemade cloth armbands stitched with faction slogans, or carried banners scrawled with their demands, and they taunted each other from across the demarcation lines like sports fans at a championship game. Armed guards were everywhere, their rifles at the ready to keep rowdy voters from getting too rambunctious. Tension boiled in the cool night air, and anger decorated many faces in the nearly 300 strong crowd.
The company of Ark River warriors sat off to the side some distance away, observing the proceedings with stoic curiosity. They’d rubbed their pale faces with charcoal in mourning for their two murdered companions, and as we descended through the cherry grove where they were camped, all the Ark River people watched us go with silent condemnation.
This is my fault. I brought them here, led them right into a trap. If anything else happens . . . ugh, I should have just stayed in Louisville.
Hiding behind the curtains of my loose hair, I followed Jamie into the rows of metal folding chairs where the Ranger faction was seated. Dr. O’Brian, Ethan, and Chris took up their places in the official’s seats behind the line of tables, and Chris’s appearance sent a confused buzz through the crowd.
Sean stepped up to the podium, and the murmurs died out, everyone waiting for what he had to say.
“Tonight has been a trying time for us all.” He fixed the crowd with a resolute stare, a striking figure behind the podium. Even in my self-consuming anxiety, I had to admit, it was a shame he’d chosen police work over an acting career. “Innocent people have been killed. Our fields have been shelled, our homes attacked, our animals slaughtered. Even our generous guests, who kindly brought us gifts in abundance were subjected to horrendous unjustified violence. But another tragedy occurred this evening, one that weighs just as heavily on my heart. As some of you may already know, tonight, during the carrying out of his duties as head of our brave security forces, Rodney Carter was viciously gunned down by a group of conspirators, who sought to overthrow this Assembly for their own interests.”
Cries of rage echoed from various places, more from the Ranger section than anywhere else, several of the fighting men on their feet in bellows for vengeance. The worker section also chanted for justice, while the Researchers seemed rather torn, some sitting in silence, others looking rather worried, while a few even smirked as if the whole thing amused them.
Man, they hated him bad. Then again, Carter did shoot people. I suppose the scientists have a reason to be smug, though it’s not exactly a good look.
Sean raised his hands to call for silence and gripped both sides of the podium to steady himself. “I know that many of you had mixed feelings about Carter; he and I certainly had our differences. But the man believed, as we all believe, that the collective survival of our refuge here is of the utmost importance. His death is not only an assault on the Rangers, but a direct threat to each and every one of us.”
This drew more sympathetic applause from the crowd, especially from the Researchers, who perked up at his use of the word ‘collective’. This dampened some of the enthusiasm from the militia men in the Ranger faction, but not enough to produce a noticeable lack of support.
“We are surrounded on all sides by mutants, ELSAR, and the impending grip of another cold winter.” Sean’s voice echoed across the waves of people in thunderous resonance, even without speakers or a microphone to aid him. “And this loss should serve as a reminder that no matter our differences, no matter our mistakes, we are all human. We are all American. We are all part of New Wilderness. We must stick together in these difficult moments, or our enemies will laugh as we tear each other apart. Whether you loved, hated, or were indifferent to him, Rodney James Carter was one of us. With that in mind, I would ask you all to consider a man who did his best to prevent the bloodshed that took Carter’s life, not out of loyalty to any faction, but out of heroic love for his fellow human beings. To the position of head ranger, I hereby nominate Mr. Christopher Rodrick Dekker.”
Chris stood, and the Assembly exploded in applause. It was clear he was well-liked from all the time he’d spent laboring with the various factions in the day-to-day, and the Workers were beside themselves with glee when he made a point to shake Ethan’s hand first on his way to the podium. Chris even gave Dr. O’Brian a warm hug, which won over the Researchers in a heartbeat, and exchanged another handshake with Sean.
I clapped, fighting mixed emotions of pride, loneliness, and guilt. This should have been a great victory, one I could enjoy as my friend made his way to a place where he deserved to be. But in that moment, it took everything in my willpower not to cry for how torn I was inside.
Come on, keep it together Hannah. Once you vote, you can hide in your room until morning. Just grin and bear it until then.
At the podium, Chris drew a deep breath, and seemed frozen in place for a moment. His eyes traversed the crowd, his face pale, and somehow, they landed on me, both of us staring at each other in breathlessness.
My blood became fire, not seething from any negative sensation, but a slow roasting warmth of something else, a deep yearning that tickled in my chest. In that second, Chris almost looked as lost and nervous as I felt. It wasn’t the kind of face I would expect a super spy to wear, but the anxious grimace of a man who had been shoved into a role he never asked for.
Breathe. I let myself be caught up in the moment, and mouthed the words to him, a tiny smile crawling over my lips. You can do it.
His face regained some it its color, and Chris pulled his broad shoulders back to wave at the crowd. “Thank you. Our commander is far too kind with his words; and you are all wonderful for your support. I didn’t have much time to think on a speech, so you’ll have to bear with me.”
Beside me, Jamie snorted, and a playful smirk crossed her face. “As if he has any issue talking without ceasing. He’s perfect for this line of work. If it weren’t for his stupid sense of honor, he could be in DC by now.”
Thank God for that.
I raised my eyebrows and jerked my head at the podium. “You know, you would be a good fit for the job too. You’ve been a ranger way longer.”
“I was an interior guard under Carter and betrayed his regime right before the uprising.” Jamie’s expression shadowed in melancholy, and she tracked Chris with her gaze like he was a thousand miles away from us. “A traitor on two counts. No one would vote for me.”
It hurt to see my spunky friend so downtrodden, and I bumped her elbow with mine, refusing to let her suffer in those thoughts. “I would.”
Jamie’s eyelids glistened with momentary tears, and she chuckled at me with a fond head shake, though the grin she wore could have lit up a room. “Oh Hannah. You’re too good for this awful place. All the same . . . thanks.”
It was nice to share that smile, and I turned back to Chris as he resumed his speech from under the elated cascade of human voices.
“My family ties go back to Africa, where my grandfather fought in the Rhodesian Bush War. He watched a prosperous nation ruin itself through political unrest, infighting, and corruption, all because two sides couldn’t reach agreement on how best to move forward. When everything fell apart, Rhodesia spiraled into anarchy, and now the modern nation of Zimbabwe is a shadow of its former self, with millions of innocent people left to pay the price of untold poverty. While each would say otherwise, both sides were to blame, and neither could claim the moral high ground in light of the injustices they’d committed on one another. It was a war that had no winners . . . and that is what I fear we are headed toward in Barron County.”
Everyone inched forward in their seats, drawn to his magnetic words, and Chris stared back at them with a handsome, compassionate expression that couldn’t help but garner sympathy. “Here we sit, divided into three factions, screaming and shouting at each other as if we were our true enemies. Do the freaks care what armband you wear? Does ELSAR give better prison cells to one group over another? Will the winter be warmer for you based on what ideology you hold? Just like Rhodesia, we stand upon the brink of destruction . . . and if we cannot unite, we will all be destroyed.”
He raised a pointer finger to accentuate each point, and Chris drove home his words with a passion that put a jolt in my pulse. “If elected as head of the Rangers, I will work with my counterparts not only to keep you safe, but to bring meaningful reform to end our internal divisions. No longer should arrests be made by the arbitrary decision of one official. No longer should expansion of our farmland be restricted when our new friends from Ark Rive can teach us better ways to manage our crops. No longer should scientific analysis be shunted aside for popular opinion, and no longer should our security be treated as anything other than what it is; a military crisis. It is time to put aside our differences, and rise together to end this war, once and for all.”
Wild euphoria rang through the Assembly, and almost everyone leapt to their feet to cheer. I rose alongside Jamie, and felt my heart skip a beat at Chris picking me out from the crowd with a slight nod, his cheeks flushed in relief.
“See?” Jamie half-shouted to me above the din. “A perfect fit. Let’s just hope it doesn’t go to his head.”
Ice sank through my intestines, and I tried not to let my wince show. I’d been so busy worrying about whether or not Chris was a spy, that it had never occurred to me what power could do to him even if he wasn’t. Judging by the applause, he stood a good chance of being elected to our tiny government, possibly succeeding Sean in the future with how much popularity he had right now. What would stand in his way of total control then? If Chris ended up like Carter, paranoid and convinced he needed to rule, who would be able to stop him before it was too late?
As the voting began, and long lines formed behind the multiple booths set up behind each seating area, I dragged my gritty cork shoes over the asphalt with a conflicted march. I should have been ecstatic that a riot had been averted, that perhaps real change was on the way, and an end to the war within our grasp, but I could only think of one horrible possibility that dug itself into my thoughts like an alien parasite.
If the day came when someone launched an uprising against Chris . . . who’s side would I be on?