Breaking Point (38 page)

Tucker kicked back in his seat. “What a rush. I get why you like it.”

“Shut up,” said Chase coldly.

“Come on, Jennings,” he said, obviously unfazed by the impenetrable tension in the car. “I thought we were pals again.”

“Shut up!” Chase roared. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

I felt a sob bubble up in my throat.

No. Not yet.

We passed a line of supply trucks, all blue with the FBR logo and motto on the side. So much blue. Blue everywhere. Watching.

“Where are we going?” My voice trembled.

“To the waterfront.” Chase tapped the radio on his belt. “Truck is waiting.”

My heart took a momentary leap from its fear. If ever we needed a safe house, it was now.

*   *   *

THE
bruised sky was high, leaving the air beneath chilly. In the morning light it was easier to see the devastation from the War. Most of the area looked like the airfield. Piles of debris and obtuse rebar, mountains of cinder blocks, and everywhere, the fuzzy peach-skin dust. My eyes drew to a thirty-story building behind the tunnel exit that was somehow still standing, even though it looked like a giant monster had taken a bite out of its waist. It went on like this for miles, until the lake consumed the horizon.

I had the sudden recollection of talking with Chase so long ago, listening to his story about when the bombs had hit Chicago. He’d been evacuated with the other students, and then hitchhiked to a town outside the city limits to meet his uncle.

The uncle who’d later abandoned him.

The uncle we would soon see if we made it to the safe house alive.

We all watched vigilantly for shadows, but no one had tracked us from the base. It seemed insane to me that we’d made it this far without being followed, but with so many uniforms around it was easier to melt into the crowds.

Chase took a hard left and the van descended into a dark abandoned parking garage. The tires sloshed through the water coating the floor. In the headlights I saw the FBR two-ton truck that had made its return from the Indiana checkpoint last night.

There were only eleven people left. Truck was outside, waving giddily. Jack and the supply boy with the almond eyes were among the others. I was glad not to see anyone who had been suspicious of us earlier.

Chase parked, and I stepped out into ankle-deep, freezing flood water.

“Change of heart, Sniper?” Truck asked me. The others were staring at us with a mixture of awe and concern. The medic had told us the rehab facility was bad luck, and as I touched the pendant around my neck, I couldn’t balk. Superstition was an acquired skill in the resistance.

“We’ve got to get out of town,” Chase said before I could answer.

They didn’t ask if we’d been followed, or why we had to move. They knew what it was like to be hunted. With businesslike intensity, they began loading into the back of the truck. It was then that I noticed that Sean and Rebecca were still in the car.

I splashed back toward the van, Chase just behind me. They were just as we left them: staring blankly, straight ahead.

“We’ve got to get in the truck, Rebecca,” I said. “We’re going to take you somewhere safe. You won’t have to worry about the MM anymore.”

I hoped she couldn’t hear my doubt. I hadn’t been to the safe house. I didn’t know what it was like, or if we’d truly be protected. It was a place of hopes and dreams, and for all I knew, nothing but a fairy tale.

Neither of them moved.

“We have to go,” pressed Chase.
“Sean.”

Sean’s hands gripped the seat in front of them. He looked at Chase for a long moment and nodded.

“Becca,” he said, without turning her direction. “Do you want me to take you back?”

What was he doing? We couldn’t go back now. We couldn’t stay in this town another second.

Rebecca didn’t answer.

“We’re not far,” he said. “If you want me to, I’ll take you back. But you need to know that I’m not going to leave you there alone. I’m not leaving you again.”

A soft whimpering came from Rebecca’s side of the car.

“I’ve got a brother, Becca. Matt. He was nine when I joined up. I never told you about him because I left him there, in St. Louis, in this two-man tent my dad got for us when we were kids.” Sean’s voice broke. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “He was sleeping when I left. My dad had been gone over a week, and I knew he wasn’t coming back this time, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take care of him. So I enlisted. I went back once, but he was gone. A caseworker got him, is what the neighbors said. Put him in foster care. I told myself it was better than him dying with me, but that was a lie. He was my brother, and I left him, and I’m not going to make that mistake again.”

I felt Chase’s eyes on me.

“Just give me an answer,” said Sean. “We’ll go to a safe house together, or we’ll go back to the hospital together. Which is it going to be? Do you want to go back?”

He wasn’t kidding himself. He knew exactly what would happen if he went back to that hospital. But he didn’t care.

I felt a hot, guilty tear slide down my cheek.

“No,” whispered Rebecca.

Too quickly, Sean grabbed her, and pulled her into a hard embrace. She fought him, writhing within his grasp, but he didn’t release her, even when she punched his burned back. I meant to intercede, but Chase pulled me away from the car. His arms encircled my waist and I sagged back into him, hating that she was hurt and hating that I couldn’t fix it.

After a moment, the punching stopped. I glanced up hopefully, but saw that Rebecca had simply succumbed to exhaustion. Her head hung slack against Sean’s shoulder.

He took that moment to lift her in his arms, like a child who’d fallen asleep on the couch. He carried her to the truck and set her delicately on the tailgate. When he was inside he lifted her again, and carried her into the dark interior.

I looked around at the faces from Chicago, daring someone to laugh, even crack a smile, but nobody said a word. It could be any one of us, and they knew it.

There were no boxes to sit on inside, and the metal floor was serrated and unyielding. I sat close beside Rebecca, and Chase sat close beside me.

“Nighty night, ladies,” said Truck as he slammed the rolling door down.

Like when we’d traveled in the back of the Horizons delivery truck, I felt my brow dew with sweat and a sudden panic sear my lungs. But for the first time it wasn’t because I thought Tucker might attack me. There were now bigger things to worry about than my mother’s killer.

The truck jostled and bumped, and we all grabbed one another to keep from sliding. Someone was praying in Spanish. I could hear Jack mumbling that we shouldn’t go. There were still people in the tunnels. People we could save.

We had nothing. Not a change of clothes, not the letters I’d written Chase, or my mother’s magazine; they’d all been lost along the way. We would start a new life with only what we carried.

I felt through the dark for Rebecca’s hand, and then Chase’s, on the other side.
My family
.

And then Rebecca’s head fell to my shoulder, and I wept.

*   *   *

“YOU’RE
going to love it, you know.” Mom zipped up my backpack, having checked to make sure my lunch pass was tucked safely in the inside pocket. “Seventh grade is a big deal.”

I wished she’d stop saying that. I knew it was a big deal. All new kids and all new teachers and a school I’d only been to once before. I shuffled my feet to the door when the knock came.

Chase stood outside, skinny as a pole and almost a foot taller than he had been at the start of the summer. His black hair had grown shaggy again, and he pushed it back with one hand. Though he was starting high school today, he didn’t look nervous at all. He never looked nervous.

They said their good mornings, and Mom told him he looked handsome in his new shirt, which I was pretty sure she did just to embarrass me. I couldn’t even look at him after that.

“You’ll walk her all the way to the front doors?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Chase said seriously. We were meeting Beth at the corner; she and I could handle walking to school ourselves. But for some reason I didn’t tell them so.

Mom leaned down and kissed me on the forehead. I hugged her then, for a long time. After school seemed a long ways away. But when we separated, she smiled, and it wasn’t so hard to say good-bye.

“I’m proud of you, baby. I’ll be here when you get home.”

*   *   *

WE
stopped at a checkpoint in Indiana, a small farm, where we reconvened with the remaining Chicago resistance. The elderly couple that ran the place greeted us with buckets of fresh scrambled eggs and canned meat, which we passed around in famished silence. I tried not to think about the fact that if they were caught, they’d be executed for an Article 9 violation alongside us.

Rebecca was still wearing the yellow scrubs from the hospital, but had finally agreed to place her braces on beneath them. They allowed her to walk independently, though she relied heavily on the two canes, not yet accustomed to the spacing and weight distribution of each step.

She denied my assistance at every turn. It was better than her despair, but it made me feel useless. When I told Sean this he just smiled.

“That’s Becca,” he said. “Only worry if she starts asking for help.”

I began to object, but he said, “We got her out, Ember. The worst of it’s over.”

I hoped he was right. Before we could talk more, Rebecca stumbled on her way to the food line and he jumped up to give her a hand. When she shot him down the same as she’d done to me—with a glare and a sharp “I’m fine”—he turned back to me and winked, and I couldn’t help but feel encouraged.

We weren’t there long before help arrived. It was a smaller truck, less than twenty feet long, but blue like its brother, with the FBR logo painted on the side. I choked on my water when I saw the carrier greet Truck like an old friend.

Tubman wasn’t wearing his loud Hawaiian shirt—he was still in the uniform Riggins had traded him back at East End Auto. The puckered scar on his right cheek drew my gaze from ten feet away. The last time I’d seen him, he and Cara were leaving the Knoxville checkpoint for the safe house.

“Well, well, well,” he said, giving me a devilish smile as he approached. “Sounds like you been up to some trouble.”

From out of the back of his truck jumped a lanky teenager with a greasy mat of hair hanging in front of his eyes. A laugh bubbled up as I pushed by the carrier.

“Billy!” We collided, my arms wrapping around his bony shoulders. “You made it.”

“Marco and Polo took me to another checkpoint to see Tubman,” he said. He backed up a step, scratching his head when he saw Tucker. “He didn’t turn us in?”

“No,” I said, watching Tucker interact with a few of the Chicago guys. “He’s … all right.” I couldn’t believe what I was saying.

Billy looked confused, but let it go. “You haven’t heard anything about Wallace?”

I shook my head.

A grin spread from ear to ear. “He’s at the safe house then. He has to be.”

I didn’t disagree, because maybe he was right, maybe we would find Wallace. If we could pull Rebecca out of rehab, and find Billy after all we’d been through, anything was possible.

We loaded the trucks—a tighter fit even with Tubman’s storage capacity—and moved on toward the Red Zone.

*   *   *

WE
drove through the night.

Truck’s compartment, which had seated only ten before, now held almost thirty, with the back area dedicated to Rebecca, the medic, and the other injured soldiers. The rest of us took turns standing and sitting, sleeping, and passing around water and bland cookies the woman had baked us. We smelled wretched, like body odor and antiseptic.

In the darkness it was impossible not to think about the tunnels, and the crushing weight of the landslide that had buried me under the table. Claustrophobia tightened our anxiety. Tensions rose, like the mercury on a thermometer, and then returned the speculations about the bombings: who had been followed? Who, as some were brave enough to mutter, betrayed us?

Only Sean, Tucker, and I knew the truth: that someone had sold out the resistance. Someone internal had tipped off the MM. I wondered if he’d already been completed in some jail cell, or if he, like Mags and so many others, had died in the tunnels.

Or if he were in this truck right now.

Some broke the pressure by talking about the safe house. A few of them had been there, and nearly everyone had sent family that direction.

“If every other person’s mama lives there,” asked someone from the other side of the compartment. “How big
is
this place?”

“Big,” said someone.

“Real big,” said another.

“It’s a town, man. They’ve taken over a whole town.”

At first I struggled, trying to place something like the Wayland Inn or the tunnels in the context of a beachfront property. But then my mind relaxed, and I saw houses on stilts, like I’d seen in pictures long ago. Homes filled with people, bustling with life. A soup kitchen line, like at home, where rations were given out. Yellow sand and the ocean, deep and everlasting.

Marco and Polo had suspected it wasn’t just refugees that inhabited the safe house, but the mysterious Three as well. Would their presence make us safer? Or put us in more danger? Finally the vehicle jostled to a stop, and we all braced for what might wait outside.

Trees. That was what I saw first. Tall and leafy, overgrown with ivy and spindly webs that reflected the face of the moon. The air seeped into my pores, so much fresher than the suffocating interior of the truck. My whole body lifted. We were going to be safe at last.

I listened as hard as I could, but couldn’t hear the waves. Some of the people from Chicago had talked about that—hearing the ocean, smelling the salt. But I couldn’t.

I couldn’t hear soldiers either. We were far away from the road, far away from any bases or patrol cars. Miles and miles from the FBR.