CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Amelia
They shot him! Oh my God, he’s not moving!
My blood pounds in my ears as one of the soldiers stoops over the guy I knifed. He glares down at me. “You could have killed him!”
“Let me go, you son of a bitch!” I struggle against the grunt who’s dragged me against his chest and is trying to cuff me. I squirm too much for him to get a good grip. No one pays any attention to the only man I will ever love, and blood spreads out in a pool around him. “He’s dying. Help him! You’ve got to help him!”
The one who’s trying to cuff me bends to speak in my ear. “It’s what he gets, bitch.”
“He didn’t do anything! I did it!” My heart is racing, and the whole thing seems unreal.
He spins me around and belts me in the face. My head snaps back, but I don’t go down.
“Please! I’ll do anything. Get him to a doctor!” I wrench myself free and go for Jackson, but the guy just pulls me back.
“Who the fuck do you think you are, giving orders? We ought to just kill you here.”
“You can’t do that!” But he can; he definitely can.
“You’re just some scrap. No one will ever notice you’re gone.”
“Oh yeah?” The voice sounds familiar. All heads turn, including mine, and I spot an older blond guy in jeans and a parka. “If she’s nothing, then why did the commander tell Martell this morning that he wants this girl?” He indicates me with a flick of his head.
“Who the fuck are you?” demands the one trying to staunch the fallen soldier’s blood.
“Captain Michael Bjorn.”
“Sir!” The men snap to attention, including the one holding me. “Our orders were to capture the scrap hiding in Martell’s apartment and bring her in. That’s all.”
“Did they tell you to bring in a corpse?” The captain angles his head toward the one with the bloody hands. “Now get on the horn and alert the commander we’ve got the girl.”
I did knife that soldier. I shouldn’t have done it, but it was instinct. When I was in that cave all those months with nothing but food and a book on survival, I spent months trying to master the techniques outlined there. I practically memorized the entire manual. Now there’s a knife sticking out of the upper right chest of a man. I shudder and bite my lips.
“What does he want me for?” I ask, swinging back to the captain.
“I’m not in on the big picture.” There’s an apology in his expression.
The pug-nosed soldier with the bloody hands pulls the communication unit from his head. “They say if she cooperates, they’ll maybe—maybe—allow her into their labor class.”
“I don’t care about your labor class. I don’t want it.” I stomp on the kneecap of my captor. He releases me with a howl, and I dart to Jackson’s side. His eyes are barely slits, but I think he sees me. I bend to his ear. “I meant it. I love you.”
“That’s the offer,” warns the bloody pug guy.
“Get him to a doctor!”
“That’s not the deal.”
“Then you tell whoever you’re talking to this: I won’t give you anything—anything—unless I see him in a hospital bed, bandaged up, with tubes sticking out of him all over the place. And he’d better be breathing.”
Pug narrows his eyes. “We can always kill you.”
I flick my chin at the captain. “Not until after I’ve been questioned, apparently.”
I realize now the captain is the voice I heard, warning Jackson to get me out. What’s his deal?
Pug Face gets back on his walkie-talkie. A moment later he grits his teeth. “They’re sending in a medical unit. Come with me.”
I squeeze on to Jackson’s hand like I’m locking us together. “I’m not giving anybody anything until I see he’s been stabilized.”
I stroke back his hair, and I swear his eyes are focused on me. “Jackson, sweetie, it’s going to be okay. They’re sending help.”
My original captor attempts to pull me away.
“I’ll chew your dick if you don’t get away from me,” I spit.
Captain Bjorn sighs. “She’s not going anywhere. Let the commander deal with her.”
It feels like hours before a big Jeep-like truck pulls up. I didn’t realize they had actual vehicles. I mean, anywhere. But I’m glad, because Jackson’s loaded into the back, and an IV of blood is already hooked up to his arm. I get in back beside him.
“Captain Bjorn,” I call.
He turns his head.
“Feed Charlie!”
“Who’s Charlie?” he returns.
Before I can answer, we’ve already pulled out.
They drop Jackson off at what looks like a small hospital and escort me into a lighted office building in the center of those single-level buildings they threw up a few months back. I’m left seated at a table in an electrically lighted room with no windows. It’s a scene I’d have imagined in a cop show on TV, except there’s no two-way window. I study the corners and spot a coin-sized black dot. A camera? If they have Jeeps and electricity, I’ll bet they have cameras.
My knees shake, and I rub my arms. I know things don’t look good for me, but Jackson has to live. Whether he took me or not, I’d never have reached my twentieth birthday. I don’t have to like it, but those are the facts. Jackson had prospects. If you ignore the slightly nutso part of him, he’s smart, compassionate, and funny. Every night he told me about something new just because I asked. He tickled me and made me food. My need for him is basic and elemental. I cannot face any type of future without him.
It isn’t an act. I love him.
These people don’t care about him. To them he’s just a grunt. What I do now will determine whether Jackson lives or dies.
The door swings open, and a slender blonde woman, in her thirties, I’d guess, enters and takes a seat opposite me.
She bends her arms on the desk and leans toward me. “You injured one of our soldiers.”
“Yes.”
She straightens. “Why?”
“I thought he was arresting me.”
She nods. “He was. It was your duty to submit.”
I snort. “No, it isn’t. I’m not a subject of the Arc. I’m a free survivor, and there are no laws for us.”
“There are now. I have some questions for you.”
“Fine.”
“I’m glad you’ve seen reason. I was told you wouldn’t cooperate.”
“I’ll answer five questions each day, and after each set I want to see Jackson. If I don’t find him alive and well, I won’t answer any more questions.”
A hint of a smile crosses her lips. “That’s not how it works.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Listen here, Miss…what is your name?”
“Is that question number one?”
She presses her lips together, gathers her files, and stalks out of the room. When she returns half an hour later, she sets a single sheet of paper in front of her and asks her first question. She wants to know about how I survived.
I tell her about the cave I found in the wilderness where some survivalist stashed his stuff. I tell her about memorizing the book there on survival since I was only thirteen and I had no idea what to do. I tell her about Greensboro, Ashville, and finally my home in the basement. When she asks what I ate, I tell her how I scrounged for food, grew plants, and hooked up LED lights. I tell her about the batteries I made. When she asked about meat, I refuse to answer.
“You’re out of questions,” I say when she scowls.
After she leaves, two guards take me to the hospital building and allow me to look at Jackson through a window. He lies in a bed wearing a hospital gown, and he’s hooked up to an IV of blood and something else with clear liquid in it. He doesn’t open his eyes, but his chest rises and falls, and a heart monitor shows a pulse.
They let me pee, and they escort me to another building where a six-by-six room awaits me. The only thing in it is an electric bulb, a plastic chair, and a narrow spring frame with a thin mattress on it. I’m sure they think of it as a cell, but if I’d had this before they came, I would have thought I’d struck gold. There’s a tray of food sitting on the chair. I give it a sniff. Meatballs and gravy over mashed potatoes. The gravy touches the peas. I drink the bottle of water and leave the rest.
The pillow they’ve given me is thin as a pot holder, so I peel off several layers of the clothes Jackson put on me and use them to cushion my head. I can’t sleep, though. I told him I loved him a million times, at first because it was something he wanted to hear, something that got him off. At the time they were just words. I’m not sure when the words became truth, but tonight when I told him I loved him, I meant it. In the three months I spent with him, he never said I love you once. Tonight was the first time it hurt.
When I finally do fall asleep, the shelling is as loud as it always is. Matthew’s head gets smashed, Mom dies again, and her frozen eyes stare at me just as they always do, year after year after year. This time there’s no one to calm my screams.
The following day, Blonde Bun-Head Woman returns for more interrogation. This time she wants details on how the cannibals operate. I’m more than willing to tell her. Personally I’d die before I ate human flesh, and those who do are without souls. But she’s already used her five questions when she asks me how I learned to identify who’s a cannibal and who’s not.
“I can’t answer that.”
“Why?”
“That’s your sixth question.”
“You know, you’re really not in a good position here. How you behave now will determine your future here.”
“I don’t intend on having a future here.”
She raises her brows. “Then where do you picture yourself in five years?”
“That’s question number seven.”
She grits her teeth and leaves. Five minutes later two guards come in, cuff me, and take me to Jackson’s window. He’s still unconscious, but there’s more color in his cheeks and he’s still hooked up to tubes.
There’s a doctor just exiting his room.
“Is he going to be all right?”
She flicks a look to the guards and then at my cuffs. “I can’t share that information with you.”
Heat mottles my face, and my hands ball into fists. I peer up at my guards. “Make sure you tell the blonde woman that tomorrow she gets four questions.”
I should be scared of these people, I guess, but I’m not. I’ve faced cannibals who wanted my flesh and survivors who would kill me just to get my boots. These people are nothing.
The taller of the two soldiers frowns down at me. I hold his stare.
Dinner consists of what looks like chicken breast, green beans, and rice. I eat the green beans and rice.
Like last night, I wake up panting, sweating, and convinced I’m thirteen and I’ve just watched my mother die. No one comes to comfort me.
On day three, when Blonde Woman takes her seat, she wears this pinched look on her face.
“You only get four questions today,” I tell her.
“So I hear.”
“If the doctor gives me an honest update today, tomorrow you can have six.”
She leans back in her chair and frowns. “You’re awfully self-assured for someone so young.”
“Age means nothing when there are no calendars. I dare you to go out there and try to survive for one week. Just one week. You won’t make it. I did it for years. I’m the strong one, not you. What’s your first question?”
She passes a hand over her forehead and avoids my eyes.
We continue on about the cannibals, how they hunt when they’re alone versus in packs, how they stalk their prey, and the fact that they don’t eat the ones who died in the initial bombing.
“They wouldn’t,” I tell her. “Those are graves.”
“Graves?”
“It’s indecent. Everyone has loved ones who got murdered when the government killed Charlotte. The bodies in the rubble are the fallen, and they’re sacred. No one touches them. The cannibals didn’t go after the people in the towers either. Although those ended up being taken away.”
“The towers?”
“That’s question number five.”
She heaves a sigh. “What about the towers?”
“The National Guard encouraged everyone to get to the towers because they could hold more people and they could defend them better. Then someone set off poisoned gas through the air ducts and killed everyone in all twenty-five buildings. The National Guard soldiers died too.”
She twists her lips. “Nonsense.”
“Don’t be an idiot. Every survivor here knows about it. Witnessed it. Even the cannibals. Is that the real reason you’re killing us? So we can’t tell?”
She cocks her head to the side and frowns. She works her jaw like she wants to say something but can’t figure out what. It occurs to me that she really doesn’t know.
“I snuck out of Charlotte a week after the bombing stopped. I tried to find another town that would take me, but no one would. They only wanted people with skills. Engineers, doctors. Ballet prodigies and junior high students weren’t on their list.”
“How long were you gone?”
“I don’t know. Months. Not a year, though; it was less than that.”
“And then what?”
“By the time I returned, the towers were empty. There were hundreds of thousands of bodies when I left. It wasn’t the cannibals eating them. If you only look at it like they were poisoned meat, you would see why. They still wouldn’t have, though. Eating the tower people would have violated their code. Everyone’s code. No one disturbs the fallen. No one goes inside the towers either. Someone took the bodies away, but they’re all still tombs.”
She shakes her head like I’m lying. “How do you explain how they got rid of so many bodies?”
“I don’t know. We don’t talk to each other. It’s too dangerous. Before Jackson I hadn’t spoken to another person in years.” I deliberately leave out Charlie. Who knows what they’d do to him?
Blonde Hair blinks at me and sets down her pen. She clears her throat. “I think that’ll do it for today. Thank you.”
She gets up and leaves, and it occurs to me that this is the first time she thanked me.
That afternoon when they take me to Jackson, he’s alert and they let me into the room.
I fly to his side. I squeeze his hand and clap my other hand over my mouth. “Oh my God, you’re awake!”
Just barely though. “Hello, little dancer.”
“You’re going to be okay. I made sure they’d help you.” My eyes water as I kiss his cheek. I sniff. “I refused to answer their questions until you’re on your feet again.”
He shakes his head and gives my hand a feeble squeeze. His lips are dry and flaky, and when he tries to speak, his voice is weak and raspy. “The best chance you have is to give them what they want.”
“I’m giving them some, but I’ll only answer a couple questions a day.” I smile, but it’s not a happy smile. “Then I stop until they let me see you’re still alive.”
The corners of his lips lift, but he closes his eyes. I think he’s fallen asleep, and I’m about to let go when he opens them again. “They’re not good people, babe. They’re food and protection, though. Answer their questions and act like you’re happy to help them. It’s your only chance.”
I scrape my nails across my palms. “But what about you?”
“I’ll be all right. Just some healing.”
I pick at my hangnails. They’re super short, but I do it anyway. “Jackson, I meant what I said. I—”
“I’m sorry it had to end this way,” he interrupts. “It was time, but I wanted to do it nicely, not like this.”
My stomach churns. “You were going to break up with me?”
He shakes his head, and his eyes are sad. “It was never a relationship. I took you, and I used you like I said I would. It was time to let you go.”
“Oh.” Cold sweeps through me, and my stomach turns to ice. I swallow back the world that grinds to pieces in the back of my throat. “You got bored.”
He squeezes my hands again. “Don’t worry, little dancer. They’ll take care of you. Just give them what they want.”
He drifts off to sleep then, and the guards take me back to my cell. They bring me food again. It looks like ham and sauerkraut. I eat the sauerkraut, but then I throw it up again.
He was planning to get rid of me. He let me feed him strawberries, and the whole time he was thinking how he no longer wanted the little girl from the gutter.
I don’t dream at all that night. I don’t sleep either.
Blondie comes in on day four and plunks a thin folder down on the table. She takes her seat with a sigh, draws her finger down her list of questions, and frowns.
She looks discouraged. I don’t know why I care. Misery loves company is my best guess. “When I think about you, I call you Blondie. What’s your real name?”
She straightens her spine and frowns. “Why are you asking me that now?”
“I guess it doesn’t matter.” Nothing matters. I trace my hand along the wood grain. “It just seems rude calling you that.”
Her lips soften. “Elizabeth VanTyne.”
“Are you in their army?”
She shakes her head. “I’m part of the screening process for the survivor intake program.”
I nod. “The internment camps.”
She presses her lips together and refocuses on her sheet of paper.
“Is that all the questions you have?”
“I only get five,” she answers acerbically.
I stare off for a moment. “That was just so you’d give Jackson medical attention. I didn’t want him to die.”
“What are you saying?”
“He’ll live.” I fiddle with a lock of my hair. “That’s all I cared about.”
She stares at me with furrowed brows.
“Ask me your questions,” I tell her. “I don’t care anymore.”
Her eyes go intense, and she sits up straight. “Give me one moment.”
She leaves and returns a few minutes later with a recording device and several pages of questions.
She sits down and offers me a bright smile. “Okay then, since you’re cooperating now.”
I shake my head. “I always cooperated. So did you. That’s why we’re here now.”
Elizabeth scowls and clears her throat.
“This first set of questions concerns who you were before the event.”
“You mean before the Ash.”
“If that’s what you call it.”
“It’s what everyone calls it.” These people know nothing.
She narrows her eye. “Occupation?”
“Seventh grader.”
“I guess that answers the second question, education,” she says with a wry twist to her mouth.
“British American School here in Charlotte, sixth and seventh grade. Fourth and fifth grade I went to school in Japan.”
“Japan?”
“My dad had to go there for his job.”
She ducks her head and takes down some notes. “And before that?”
“I went to school in Atlanta.”
She nods. “What was your last address before the event?”
“My parents got divorced. My dad went back to Atlanta. My mom, my brother, and I lived here in Charlotte. The house doesn’t exist anymore. I think the entire neighborhood’s gone.”
“Fair enough. Do you know where others like you are?”
“You mean survivors?”
“Yes.”
I rock my head. “You’re not supposed to follow others to their homes. It’s taboo, and whoever you followed will probably kill you.”
She shoots me a wide-eyed look. “Why?”
“The only reason to follow someone home is because you intend to kill them and take their things.”
“Oh.”
“I thought this was supposed to be Pre-Ash stuff?”
With a sigh, she flicks a glance at her list of questions. “Date of birth?”
“June 12, 2005. Lucky day, huh?”
For a moment she hesitates, but she writes it down.
“Okay, place of birth.”
“Boston.” I shake my head. “I just don’t get why this is important. Nothing exists anymore.”
“You exist,” she reminds me.
I swallow and pick my thumbnail. “I exist. She doesn’t.”
She squints. “What do you mean by she?”
“The girl I was before the Ash. Before they killed my family.” Before Jackson.
She shifts in her chair and swallows. “Father’s name?”
“Look. My entire family’s dead. They have been for years.”
“What was his occupation?”
“This is just stupid.”
She sighs. “You said you’d cooperate.”
Fine. What does it matter, anyway? All I really care about are Charlie and Jackson, and apparently he doesn’t want me. I’ll answer their stupid questions, but I’m leaving the first chance I get.
“Dad was a molecular biologist at first. My uncle died, though, and he had to quit so he could run the family business.”
“What’s this family business?”
This I can’t answer. “It was a company. I was a kid. I have no idea what they did.”
She exhales and marks that down. “Mother’s name?”
My chest goes cold. I can still feel her hand in mine as it goes limp. “Harper Littleton.”
“Did she work?”
“Yes. She was a psychiatrist.”
She raises her brows and nods. “How about any siblings?”
“My brother, Matthew. He was in high school, but like I said, he died when they bombed Charlotte.”
After ticking off a number of check-boxes, she pauses. “You still didn’t tell us your father’s name.”
Oh. “Carleton Wester.”
Her pen freezes over the paper. Her face goes red at first, and then she goes white. I mean, white.
“And what’s your name?” Her voice is shaking. What’s up with her?
“Amelia Littleton Wester.”
She sucks in a breath through white lips. “Can you prove this?”
I spread my hands and shrug. “Why?”
“Answer the question!”
“Sure. Let me go get my birth certificate.” Kiss my butt, Arc lady.
So much for cooperating, but really, these questions are pointless.
Elizabeth swallows. Her hand shakes as she runs her finger down her list of questions. She slumps, looks up, and lets out a shaky breath. “Excuse me.”
She grabs her stuff and hurries from the room.
Wow. What triggered that? I mean, my dad was somebody before the Ash, but he’s dead. You’d think I said I was Princess Charlotte. With the trust fund I had, I was probably richer than a princess, but the banks all collapsed. It’s like Jackson said; I’m just some homeless girl living in the gutter.
Now if my dad was General Barry, I’d be worth something.
The guards come and return me to my cell. I’m picking the tuna away from the rest of the casserole when my door opens. “Miss Wester?”
My visitor is a heavyset woman wearing scrubs and a parka. I haven’t seen a fat person in years, and I can’t help staring at her.
“Yes.”
“Please come with me.” I push the disgusting food aside and follow her into the hallway. “Do you have a coat, dear?”
“No.” I shrug. “This is fine.”
She eyes me up and down and frowns.
“I didn’t have time to stop at L.L. Bean.”
She looks away and sniffs. “This way, then.”
There are no guards. What’s up with that? She leads me outside, across campus, and into the hospital building.
My heart pounds. “Is Sergeant Martell still here?”
“I don’t know. In here, please.”
She waves me into an examination room, the kind I remember from when I was a kid. Everything looks fresh and shiny. It blows my mind.
“Please step on the scale,” she tells me.
I step up, and even though I’m wearing my boots and about five layers of clothes, it tops out at ninety-seven. Shoot. I think I weighed more than that when I was thirteen. I wonder what I weighed before Jackson started feeding me?
She jots the number down and shakes her head. “You young girls. Your BMI is far too low.”
I control my temper with effort. “Well, there weren’t a lot of raccoons around, so I spent a lot of time just imagining food.”
I’m gratified when she pales.
She has me sit down, and she takes my blood pressure. I have no idea what those figures mean, so I don’t ask. She does the stick-down-my-throat thing, the stethoscope-to-the-back-cough thing, and checks my reflexes. Then she flips to a new page on her clipboard and takes a seat on the rolling stool.
“First menstrual period?”
I blush. “It was after I turned thirteen; I know that.”
She glances up.
“It was after the Ash, so I don’t know dates.”
Her eyes flare with something like pity.
“Date of last period?”
I twist my lips. “It’s just different out here. There aren’t any calendars. There aren’t any seasons or clocks either. Time is yesterday, today, or tomorrow. It’s soon or a while ago. I guess you could say my last one was a while ago.”
She winces. “Can you be a little more specific?”
I suck in my lips and think. “I don’t know. A couple of years?”
She shakes her head.
I shrug. “It’s not the healthiest world out there. You probably won’t see many babies among the survivors.”
She darts a look at my bony hands and shakes her head. “You’re half-starved. How long were you on your own?”
“Since I was thirteen. My family died, so I had to fend for myself.”
She lowers the clipboard to her lap. “How did you survive?”
She’s the first person who’s looked at me like I’m a human being since I got here. She’s a little stupid and uninformed, but I guess that’s what happens when you don’t have to live through the apocalypse.
“You either do or you don’t. At first I scavenged. There was still some canned food out there for a while. For a couple months I lived in some survival nut’s cave. Apparently he never made it there, but when I found it, I sure was happy. I ate real food for like months. But that was a long time ago. He had some seeds, and I took them with me back to Charlotte. I made some batteries and rigged some lights, so every week or so I’d have a squash or some kale. And there are always rodents.”
She looks at me like I just told her I ate poop.
I sigh inside. They have no idea. After she takes a couple vials of blood, she leaves. A moment later a single guard comes in and escorts me to my cell. There’s a steak and a baked potato waiting on the chair.
“Hey,” I call before he can close the door.
He hesitates.
“I don’t eat meat unless I see the actual animal die, get butchered, and handed to me. Do you want this steak?”
He frowns. “That’s a perfectly good steak.”
“How do you know it’s not some guy they shot last week?”
He tucks his chin. “Because it isn’t.”
“You don’t know that.” I shove the plate in his hands. “First lesson. Cannibals will eat meat if you offer it. Survivors won’t. Unless, as I said, they see the animal die, get butchered, etc.”
He blinks at me and then closes the door behind him.
The potato is cold. It’s not at all like the ones Jackson makes me with the cheese melted in the middle. As soon as I take a bite, I start to shake. I can barely swallow it, and I set the potato back on the chair. Just a week ago I thought I was happy. I had everything I dreamed of—a safe place to live, food to eat, and a guy who made me feel good and seemed to care for me.
They’re probably going to kill me when they’re done with me. Once Jackson’s healed, they’ll either discipline him or demote him. Who knows? He’s probably lying there kicking himself for taking me. Jackson, my sick, obsessive stalker. His obsession faded, though, and he’ll probably find some other girl to take. My chest goes tight, and I can’t breathe.
I don’t even want to.
Everything that matters is gone. I curl up on my bed and hug the thin pillow to my chest. I don’t cry, but the ache is so deep I can barely move.