Feed (20 page)

“A few days, at least, chiquita,” said one girl, nodding, her face round enough that it could almost be considered pudgy. She wore a gray wool sweater and camouflage shorts, despite the cool temperatures.

“No guarantees, though, right Bridget?” Her companion said, tossing her dreadlocks back and running her hand over them. Her nose was pierced with a tiny pink gem and she had brilliant blue eyes set in a face with high cheekbones and a narrow jaw. Blythe watched, marveling at the embodiment of the hippy stereotype displayed in their language and dress. “We should be ready for an ambush at any time. That’s what William said.”

An ambush? So they were taking the possibility of attack seriously?

“Amanda, please. I have two AK’s and six hundred rounds in my tent. I’m not worried. Plus, I keep my nine millimeter with me all the time.” The girl in camouflage, Bridget, sounded confident.

Blythe couldn’t help but raise her eyebrows at this admission while looking over the girl, wondering where she hid the gun.
Hippies? With guns?
She guessed stereotypes could be contradicted.

“Good. We should stay close to our tents, just in case. Too risky to be caught out of reach of them, right?” Amanda answered, filling her mug. They dawdled, pouring in cream and sugar, taking test sips and glancing over the rim of their mugs at Blythe.

“Definitely, that’s good advice. William again?” Bridget asked. 

“He said word came down from Bethany.”

Suddenly, they were staring at Blythe. “You’re with him, aren’t you?” Amanda said. It sounded like an accusation.

“Excuse me? Him who? I just want a cup of coffee.” Blythe shuffled sideways past them and started filling her mug with the light roast. 

“The father of the feeds,” they answered, almost simultaneously, glancing at each other in surprise. Blythe looked over her shoulder at them, pausing.

“That was creepy,” Bridget said with an awkward laugh. She blew onto her coffee, creating ruffles in the steam. “We’re not creepy, though, I promise. Right?” she nudged her friend.

“Right, no, no, of course not. We’re not,” the other answered. 

“Father of the feeds? Is that supposed to be Ramone?” Blythe resumed filling her mug.

Amanda nodded.

“And you say you’re not creepy? I beg to disagree,” she finished filling her mug, turned, and began gesturing with the spoon she was using to stir in the sugar. “Running around a camp with a gun, two AKs in your tent, calling a perfectly harmless, no, angelic, man, ‘The Father of the Feeds’? Sounds creepy. Do you even know him? Do you know that he wasn’t the one who created the feeds? No, I get it. There was a time when I wanted to blame Ramone for the disaster my life had become
because
of the feeds, and I did. I put on my boxing gloves and took him down, so to speak. I realized later that I was wrong. Ramone was not to blame. He merely developed the technology that led to the feeds. So, yes, while I’m grateful for the hospitality, you lot and all your weirdness are sort of creepy,” she paused and took a satisfied breath. “You were saying?”

Maybe Blythe should be concerned about spewing out her opinions like that, but she wasn’t. A part of her wondered if Marci was rubbing off on her but another part of her realized she no longer cared about her own safety. She felt like calling things the way she saw them. Telling people they were being crazy. Stepping out of a tent looking like death-warmed over. Throwing out her heels and flats and wearing hiking boots. Perhaps even kissing someone just because she felt like it. No holds barred. No impulses un-acted upon.

“Um, well, uh,” stuttered Bridget, her cheeks reddening.

“Having guns doesn’t mean we’re creepy, you know, right?” answered Amanda. She’d lowered her mug to her side, blindly using it to look for a table to set it upon.

“I agree. It’s the other stuff,” Blythe said.

“If we didn’t have them, our hospitality wouldn’t amount to much,” she went on, seeming to ignore that Blythe had said she agreed. “We’d have been overrun by Enforcers months ago.”

“So you think it’s the guns holding them at bay?” Blythe asked, puzzled. She thought their camp was invisible to the Organization.

“For a while, anyway,” Amanda said. The other girl still seemed to be recovering from Blythe’s tirade.

“A while?”

“They’re coming for us. Didn’t you hear? That’s what we were talking about when you came in.” Amanda regarded Blythe with an incredulous look.

Blythe suddenly felt sick. “Yes, well, thank you, but right about now, I have to go—back to the Father of the Feeds,” she said that title in her best booming voice, hurrying out before Bridget could recover or Amanda could say anything more.

Trying her best not to spill her coffee, Blythe made a beeline back to the tent where she’d slept and presumably where Ramone and Ghosteye were talking. She didn’t even have time to regret the conversation she’d abandoned before she found herself standing at the entrance to the tent. Throwing the flap aside, she ducked inside. The window-flaps were rolled up and tied, giving the room enough natural light that it only took her eyes a moment to adjust. Seated at a card-table in the center of the tent, Ramone and Ghosteye conversed in hushed tones. They looked up when Blythe came in. Ramone rose half-way and gestured to her to join them. Ghosteye glanced over his shoulder and nodded. His crutches were leaned against the table next to him. Marci was nowhere, Blythe noticed. Probably still trying to sleep.

“I just heard,” Blythe announced before they could say anything.

“Heard what?” Ramone asked, sitting back down as Blythe pulled a rickety chair up to the table and sat, placing her mug carefully on the table. Ramone rubbed his hands together, then pushed them through his hair.

“That the Organization is coming. Here. For us.”

“We discussed this, I thought. I told you they’d probably come here, following that Enforcer, Elliot,” Ramone said, his voice catching slightly on Elliot’s name.

“But you didn’t say they would, for certain, Ramone. This sounds certain. I overheard a conversation between two apparently heavily armed female hippies. They’re getting ready for an all-out war, Ramone. Ramone? They have assault rifles and guns and other guns. Galore. Ramone.”

“Yes, yes, I hear you, Blythe. What do you want me to say? I told you this might happen,” he said, looking distracted.

“Well, actually, we didn’t know for certain until I showed up with my message. These broken fingers, to be exact. They know the camp is here. And they’re coming. That’s what the message said. I told Beth last night. Never to be outmaneuvered, she has a plan. That’s what I was just telling Ramone,” Ghosteye said, smiling broadly.

Ramone looked up from the reverie he’d fallen into and nodded. “Yes, her plan.” Ramone said it in a tone of disgust. “Can’t say that I blame her.”

“What?” Blythe said, looking back and forth between them, picking up on the undertones and feeling panic settling in her chest. “What
is
her plan?”

Ghosteye laughed. “Nothing much, just to basically turn Ramone over to them as a bargaining chip.”

“No. No. I won’t let her,” Blythe said, shaking her head vehemently, before she could stop herself. She didn’t even regret the emphatic display. Regret was a luxury she could no longer afford.

“It’s ok,” Ramone said, reaching out to touch her forearm calmly.

“I’ve given up too much to let that happen as well, Blythe,” Ghosteye put in, tilting his chin down to regard her with a serious expression. The smile was gone. His eyes bored into hers.

“What’s wrong with her? She’s
your
girlfriend,” Blythe responded, irritably.

He laughed mirthlessly. “Until last night, well, I hadn’t seen her in a long time. She’s not exactly the woman I remember. Maybe the pressure of being a leader? I don’t know.”

“What then? What’s the plan?” Blythe leaned her elbows onto the table, her coffee all but forgotten and cold in front of her.

“Aha, that’s where I come in. Well, sort of, you know, pretty much,” Ghosteye answered, lacing his fingers together, twisting his hands and cracking his knuckles. “Pure genius. Mostly.”

Ramone smiled softly at Ghosteye, then turned to Blythe. “We’ll go over it in a moment. Do you mind waking Marci up? I thought she’d have joined us by now. I guess she was extremely tired—all that intensity takes a toll.” He laughed quietly. Blythe felt her mouth drop open. That was the first smile she’d seen on him in days. Was it only days? It felt like it had been years.

She couldn’t help but return the smile, while nodding. She rose and went to rouse Marci.

Chapter 16

Bethany hiked through darkness, leading Chance, William, and five others along a narrow, overgrown trail. Things were falling into place so well. In fact, she never imagined it could really turn out this way. She had her soldiers, her bargaining chip, and her opponent would be showing up any time. She always assumed she would have to go to them. Not so. It was simple, the way everything was turning out. Almost too simple.

Whatever happened, she would be ready.

Behind her she heard the others breathing loudly between broken bits of conversation. Occasionally one of them would laugh, but it was the high-pitched nervous laughter of a rookie before a big game or a dancer before opening night. Bethany felt battle-worn, veteran, even though she’d never done what she was about to do quite in this manner.

“We almost there, Beth?” William asked, his deep voice almost unintelligible coming from behind Chance.

“Almost. I haven’t been up here in the dark, but if I’m right, it’s just two more switchbacks or so.” The trail skirted the cliffs after winding up a ravine. In the daylight, the view was gorgeous; in the dark, the path treacherous. But worth the risk. Beth felt it was necessary to go in the dark, what with the numerous visitors to her camp. Following someone in the daytime through the woods was difficult enough, but in the dark, without light, it was nearly impossible.

Overhead the Milky Way glowed, a glittering mother-of-pearl diagonal slash across the dark sky. The moon wouldn’t rise for another three hours. That was how long she had to get to the cache and back to camp.

Soon, they rounded a sooty black outcropping of rock, beyond which stood a concrete bunker with a narrow door. Upon the door, a wheel latch.

“What the hell is that?” Chance proclaimed, a barely detectable quiver touching his voice, though Beth heard it, trained as she was at such things.

“An old storage facility for the mines that used to be around here. The mines are still here, but the people have all gone. There are a few other bunkers like this around,” Bethany answered, stepping up to the door and twisting the wheel-latch with a couple involuntary grunts. She could have asked the men to do it, but that would appear weak—not that straining to open it looked strong. It squeaked rustily as it resisted the force, then it gave in and turned in jarring starts and stops.

“How’d you find it?” William put in. The others remained silent. Usually Bethany only spoke to her seconds, keeping the structural order among the camp by delegating tasks to the underlings through the command chain. William and Chance were just below her in rank.

“Long story. This one’s the closest to our camp.” She pushed the door open an inch, reached her hand in, feeling along the wall until she found the string. Following the string blindly with her fingers, careful not to pull it tight, she located the fishhook and released the knot connecting string and hook.  It was designed to be easy to undo with one hand. That done, Bethany pushed the door open and flipped on a nearby lantern.

Her companions filed in, looking around uncomfortably. A few of them glanced up at the wall beside the door and noted her booby trap: a shotgun hanging with the muzzle pointed down at the opening. Beth noticed one of the girls shivering visibly. That was to be expected of civilians, those with weak stomachs.

“Bags,” Beth said, gesturing to a pile of black duffle bags beneath a dusty old table. She motioned to the rows and rows of guns. “Guns. RPGs. In each bag, I want an RPG and five PGs, an AR-15 or AK, and two boxes of ammunition for whatever rifle you take.”

They just stood there, staring, mouths gaping. “Beth,” Chance gasped, “Where’d you get this stuff?”

“Does it matter?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “We do what we have to do. Now get packing.” She picked up the top duffel, slapped the dust off, pulled a rifle off the upright gun rack and fitted it into the bag. After she collected a few magazines, William finally stirred, taking an RPG down and gently placing it in a duffel. The others followed his lead, though Bethany caught them shooting glances back and forth.

Silence reigned but for the sound of metal weaponry clicking against each other and the scraping noises of ammo boxes sliding across plastic surfaces.

Bethany sighed. “I was in the marines before I became . . . what I am today,” she said. “And that’s all you need to know.”

“Fair enough,” William said, nodding his head like a horse tossing its mane. His dreads flopped about. “We all have pasts. Some better than others.”

“Thanks. Procuring this sort of firepower isn’t exactly easy these days. But it’s for a good cause. That’s why all of you are here, right? The cause?” She glanced over them individually. Most of them paused and looked at her. Their faces appeared thoughtful, their eyes darted around them, as though searching inwardly for motivation. A boy with very dark hair and tan skin met her gaze and nodded. He couldn’t have been older than nineteen. Guilt stabbed at Bethany and she wondered if the cause was worth his life. Or William’s life. Or Chance’s. Those two were older, but neither of them had lived their lives completely. Still single. Or divorced, in William’s case. Still, childless. Their fortunes and futures partially unwritten. Nothing set in concrete except their pasts, which were all colored and half un-lived because of the feeds. That was why they joined her. To find a way to reclaim the trajectories of their lives, having deemed a life determined by a force other than nature to be no life at all. “Is it?” she asked again, prodding them. “Because if you think it’s not, then you best leave now. See what we’re doing? We have weapons. Extremely dangerous firepower. Things may get very, very ugly. Hideously ugly.”

She didn’t know what she would have done if one of them said he or she wasn’t ready. Both girls nodded, shouldering their duffels. Full, they were heavy. But the cases were made to fit on like backpacks, and that’s how the girls wore them. The men carried two. No one backed out. Bethany made sure to meet the eyes of every one of them, verbally reassuring them that they could change their minds. And she thought she meant it, though she wasn’t quite sure. Not yet.

*****

Ramone picked his way through the dark along a path back to camp after spending a few hours at the pond he’d found earlier in the day. The time alone cleared his mind, preparing him for whatever the next few days delivered. He could feel something looming on the dark, invisible horizon. Something monstrously big and unpredictable.

The path back to the camp was fairly straightforward, but in the dark there were many ways to lose his footing: large, half-buried rocks, roots, and sudden drops where the path was rain-eroded. He stumbled several times, cursing under his breath and remembering that he belonged at a drafting desk, thinking up brilliant machinery, not hiking through nature.

But the time at the pond allowed him to reflect. The night sky overhead exploded with life—the arm of the Milky Way, a thick band of glowing dust and brilliant starlight slashing the dark dome in half, and the many constellations, their stars so luminescent, it was too easy to pick them out, even for him, a man who didn’t memorize every constellation. There was Cassiopeia in the north, the queen’s chair revolving around the North Pole, and Orion began to rise before he went back to camp, and he knew the Pleiades weren’t too far behind. These last two star-groups always reminded him that winter was well on its way. The sooner they rose, the closer the cold season. Old friends, each of them, marking out his long life like fence posts along a dusty dirt road, each season a field ready to be sowed, harvested, or turned.

When he arrived back at camp, his friends—he laughed, thinking of them as friends, what next?—were seated around a campfire that was now rather familiar. He passed them and waved, heading to their tent. The day was long when one rose before the sun. Blythe sat up straighter as he passed by and he wondered what she thought of his refusal to sit and socialize. She understood, he hoped.

In their tent, he turned on the battery-powered lamp, closed the tent flaps, and settled on his cot. He still wasn’t quite used to the lackluster accommodations, and only considered for a moment heading back outside to brush his teeth with the cheap toothbrush Blythe had picked up days before. He was too tired. It could wait till morning. He bent over to untie his boots. As he pulled them off, he heard someone unzip the tent flap and enter.

“Who’s there?” he asked quietly, concerned the Enforcers had caught up already. His heart began to race.

“Just me,” Blythe said, standing beside a stack of boxes that separated their sleeping area from the part of the tent used for conferences. Or interrogating Enforcers.

Ramone rose awkwardly, feeling his palms break into a sweat. The canvas of his pants didn’t soak up the moisture as well as the wales of his normal attire, the corduroy. “Blythe,” he breathed. “I was just—just going to bed. I’m exhausted. I would normally sit by the fire with you, but I woke up before dawn. And tomorrow’s going to be a big day. Or maybe it will be the next day, I don’t know. I—”

“Shh,” she said, cutting off his hasty explanations and moving closer. She switched off the lamp with one hand, and with the other, touched his lips gently.

Before he could say anything more, she kissed him. A sob nearly spilled out and ruined the kiss. He held it in, and let himself melt into her arms, pulling her close to him—harder than he intended, but how could he hold back any more than he already had?

She tasted like rain, like the sweetest fruit he’d bitten into. Breathing her renewed him. The galaxies, the constellations, the brilliant heavens he basked in before returning to camp seemed to burn in him as he lost himself in her embrace. The resultant gashes in his psyche from his experience with Elliot, the weight of Marci’s attentiveness, the burden of responsibility he felt for Ghosteye and others like him who waited for a savior—the wounds sealed up and faded, the burdens vanished; he was healed. He was new.

And no one but Blythe was there to see it.

*****

Marci stared into the fire, hunched down in her camp chair, fiddling with a penny in the pouch of her hooded sweatshirt where she kept both hands for warmth. Flames danced in the slight, chilly breeze, enthralling her. She almost expected to feel a dribble of drool running down her chin she was so captivated, so out-of-body.

Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe Ramone is wrong. Maybe in a few days we’ll be able to drive out of this camp and go back home, to how things used to be.
Even as she thought it, she knew it wouldn’t happen. At some point in the past few days, Marci had unwittingly crossed a point of no return. Or maybe she’d been aware of it at the time and hadn’t cared because . . . because she was going for Ramone. He’d changed her.

She hadn’t lied about that, what she’d said to Ramone the other day when he lamented that the feed of him being tortured didn’t do anything—something changed for Marci. She crossed over, from being a silly little girl who only cared for fame and the instant gratification of the feeds to being a woman. Like Blythe, just not as bitchy. Yes, a woman. A woman who cared about big things. Things like justice. And integrity, whatever that was—it sounded good and decent and very adult. It sounded like her parents. Oh lord. She was turning into her parents. Already?

“This seat taken?” a voice asked at her side. She put a face to it before turning. The Editor. Ghosteye.

“No—well, Blythe was sitting in it earlier, but I think she’s gone to bed. Take it. Before she comes back and rains on my mood.”

He laughed and hopped around the chair, holding his crutches in one hand, nearly toppling before Marci caught his leg. Thigh, to be exact, to help steady him. “Sorry,” she said, pulling her hand away quickly when he’d regained his balance. His pale complexion reddened.

“Thanks,” he said, ignoring the apology. He laid the crutches in the dirt and began staring into the fire.

Several minutes passed with neither of them speaking. Marci slipped her hands back into the sweatshirt pouch and continued to fiddle with the penny while watching the flames. Across the fire a few others stared into fire, their expressions looking grim and tense. It was like the Depression in the camp lately. She’d seen the black and white pictures in history class and yes, this was exactly how she bet it was. Everyone walking around looking like their cat had been run over.

Ghosteye cleared his throat. Marci glanced at him. Even his normally spiky, chipper hair seemed depressed. He looked at her then looked away quickly. “Yeah? What?” she asked.

“So, where’s Ramone?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care,” she muttered.

“Ah, OK,” he said.

“Look, I know you must have seen, Mr. Editor,” she said, emphasizing his title. “You must know, then, that Ramone has very little regard for me.”

“As Beth always used to tell me, I can see what’s on the outside, but I know less about what’s on the inside, of—of the subject,” he said awkwardly, inhaling on the word subject like he wished he could take it back.

She chuckled, hearing the sarcasm in it. “Subject. That’s hilarious.”

“Sorry. I’ve been using it for several years. It’ll take me awhile to un-learn that stuff.”

“Why are you even here?” she asked, watching as two of the other campfire-lovers rose, adjusted their clothing, and left. Ghosteye glanced at her, his eyes appearing dark in the dim light from the campfire. He ran an unsure hand through his hair, some of the strands sticking up like he normally styled them.