Savage Run (3 page)

“
I’ve told you before, you
little tramp. I don’t want you talking to anyone who comes to the
door! What do I have to say to make you understand?” He lets go of
her hair, but grips her arms instead, shaking her so roughly that
her head bops. “I’ll kill you, you little rat! And I’ll get another
one just like you who is smart enough to comprehend and follow my
rules!”

“
I’m sorry, I was just…”
Gemma says.

Master Douglas’s daughter comes outside
wearing her swimsuit. “Dada, I want to go swimming now.”

“
Hi sweetheart. Go back
inside while I punish Gemma for disobeying me,” Master Douglas
says, his hands still clasping Gemma’s arms, his tone of voice like
the purr of a cat.

She pouts. “But I want to go now!”

“
Do as I say, child. Gemma
needs to learn her lesson, even if I have to beat it into
her.”

Master Douglas’s daughter stomps back inside
and slams the door shut. I can’t get over how indifferent she seems
to how her father is treating Gemma, though I hardly should expect
anything different from the offspring of such a man.

“
You don’t deserve to work
here!” He tears Gemma’s shirt open, exposing her shoulders and
chest, and then he throws her to the ground so she lands face down.
When she lifts her head, blood flows from her mouth and she’s
crying. The white floor has spots of red. He undoes his belt
buckle, draws his belt out of his pants and strikes Gemma with it.
The belt makes a sharp cracking sound as it hits the skin on her
upper back.

“
Please, please,” she
pleads, lifting her arms up to cover her face. But he keeps
whipping her.

Something snaps inside of me and without
really thinking, I hop the fence, and charge toward Master Douglas.
What I’m about to do goes completely against the laws in our
society where Laborers must at all times—even in life or death
situations—maintain respect and remember their inferiority to their
superiors.

I don’t care.

He doesn’t see me coming until after I’ve
lifted the knife above my head. But before I stab him, I hesitate.
I don’t want to kill him, just injure him enough so I have time to
take Gemma with me. I jab the knife into his shoulder, and quickly
pull it out. But it’s not enough. He grabs me by the shoulder and
slams me to the ground, my head hitting against the marble surface.
I drop the knife.

“
Heidi!” Gemma says, her
mouth dropping open.

Master Douglas clamps his hand around my
neck and squeezes tightly so I can’t breathe. I kick my arms and
legs trying to free myself, but he only pushes harder. I start to
see stars in front of my eyes.

Suddenly, I hear a thump, and the next thing
I know is that Master Douglas falls on top of me. I gasp a few
times to catch my breath, and then with all my might I push his
lifeless body off me. There stands Gemma with a rock in her right
hand.

“
Is he…dead?” she
says.

He moans.

Still feeling the pressure from his hands
around my neck, I stagger to my feet and pick up the knife. “Let’s
go!” I grab Gemma’s hand and pull her with me toward the wall. But
there’s no tree to climb up on this side. I head for the mansion
instead—desperately hoping the delivery truck hasn’t left yet. If
it has, then the gates are closed. “The front door.”

We sprint through the sliding doors, across
the living room, and into the foyer with the marble floors.
Frantically and panicking, I open the front door. Outside, the
truck driver is talking to the Unifer, waving his hands and
laughing.

Clutching the bloody knife, my eyes steal to
the gates. Relief washes over me when I see them wide open. I take
Gemma’s cold hand in mine and we slip behind the truck. The truck’s
door slams shut and the engine starts with a roar. Exhaust spews
out in front of me just as we pass the back end and out the gates.
Once outside, I curse myself for leaving my bike behind the house.
But even though it will take an extra minute to get it—and those
few extra minutes might be what will make or break my plan—we need
the bike in order to have any chance of escaping.

I pull Gemma behind the hedge, the leaves
scratching my arms. “Wait here.” Tearing into the forest, I get my
bike, and throw the knife in the basket. Before I know it, I’m
pedaling hard, zigzagging my way among the trees, adrenaline
coursing through me like a fiend, my body rising into a frenzy.

Gemma steps out from behind the hedge with
fresh tears on her cheeks. She’s gripping the front of her dress,
gathering the material where Master Douglas ripped it apart. The
right side of her mouth is even more red and swollen than before,
but it’s not as bad as the despairing expression in her eyes. I
help her get on to the back rack of the bike, and within seconds,
I’m in my seat and we’re flying down the hillside, the wind
straining against my body. Only a few moments later, I hear a dog
barking.

“
He has dogs?” My throat is
dry—parched. I’ve never heard them before, despite having been here
hundreds of times.

“
Two,” Gemma
yells.

The Rottweiler catches up quickly, running
alongside us, barking and snarling. Its gums are peeled back from
his teeth. I pedal faster, and Gemma’s thin arms clutches harder
around my waist.

Suddenly she lets out a loud shriek.

“
What?”

“
The dog bit
me!”

The dog snaps its teeth at me, and I swerve
quickly in an attempt to get away from it. A sudden shift in
direction feels unnatural with the extra weight of Gemma. When I
hit a thick branch—the road still slick from the rain—I lose
control and crash into the ditch. I feel sharp pain several places
on my body. I have no time to really feel it because the Rottweiler
dives toward me. I kick the animal in the snout, but just as soon
as it falls to the ground, it springs back onto its feet. My
father’s kitchen knife lies on the ground right next to my foot,
and just as the dog charges toward me, I pick up the knife and stab
it in the chest. It keeps growling, so I pull the blade out and
stab it in the chest again. And again.

Finally, it whimpers and retreats down the
road, and falls lifeless to the ground.

There’s blood smeared across my hand and my
whole body is quaking. Still clutching the knife, I notice that my
palm stings. I open my hand, letting the bloody knife fall to the
ground, and when I look at my palm, I see blood and grime
compressed beneath my skin. My right knee hurts, too, and the hole
in my pants have blood around the edges. There’s no time to sit
here and cry.

“
You okay?” I ask Gemma.
She’s still on the ground and has twigs tangled in her blonde hair
and dirt on her white dress.

She doesn’t answer.

I help her to her feet, and we hop onto the
bike again.

“
Come back here! Or I’ll
send my Unifers to shoot you dead!” Master Douglas bellows. He must
really think I’m an idiot if he believes I’ll do as he says. I
start pedaling.

Speeding forward, tears blur my vision, and
all the way down the hill, I keep looking behind me, afraid that
Master Douglas will come after us in one of his fancy
transporters.

* * *

The shortest distance to Sergio’s is of
course straight through downtown Culmination. I’ll take my chances.
Riding by the lavender field, we come to the fresh food market that
borders on downtown—canopy tents with tables lined up along Main
Street. These shops are owned and operated by Advisors, like so
many other small businesses in town. The main difference between
them and Masters is that they can’t vote, they can’t hold political
positions, and they can’t own property. Most Advisors run
businesses, like these, become teachers or work in the service or
hospitality industry.

Riding past the Culmination Justice
Building—a structure built in the same fashion as the Parthenon,
but made of nothing but glass— I see Savage Run protesters camped
out on the stairs. I recognize several of them—Masters I have at
one point or another delivered medication to.

Laborers shadow behind their Master,
carrying groceries or their Masters’ personal items. Just as we’re
approaching Michelangelo Street, we bike past a Master beating her
Laborer with a Palka—a short, flexible iron rod commonly used to
remind us of our place. Another Master Douglas. I feel the iron
against the palms of my hands, but like anyone else passing by, I
don’t interfere.

I steer down a dark side alley: our first
safe place. I can hear glass breaking beneath my tires, but it’s
difficult to avoid. The overhang is making the whole passageway
really dark. We pass an abandoned transporter, and I jump when I
think I see a rat scuttling deeper into the darkness. The closer we
get to the dumpsters, the stronger the smell of rotten fish and
moldy bread becomes, and the harder it is to see even the large
pieces of trash in my way.

Gemma’s muffled sobs echo against the gray
concrete walls. Once I reach the dumpsters, there’s a narrow ray of
light that shines from above. I stop the bike, and hop off.

“
Your hands,” Gemma gasps,
climbing off the bike. “And your leg!” I look down at my leg and
the bottom half of my black pantleg is saturated with
blood.

“
I’m fine.” I stoop down
beside her to look at her wound. The bite isn’t too deep; I’ve seen
much worse than this one. From the looks of it, she probably won’t
need stitches. Not that we’d be able to find a doctor for her. “We
just need to clean it, or it could become infected. Are you hurt
anywhere else?”

She shakes her head as she wipes a tear from
her bruised cheek.

“
We’ll be fine.” I say with
a thin smile. I don’t know what possessed me to say such a thing
because I really don’t know that at all.

“
No, he’ll kill us!” She
buries her face in her hands and moans.

I wrap my arms around her, noticing that
she’s a mere ghost compared to before, so thin, so fragile, so
weak. When Gemma lived at home with her mother, she was sturdier
and carried a constant smile on her face. Her hair was thick and
golden, but now it’s thin and matted and her cheeks are
sunken—pallid. “The worst is behind us.” But I get a sinking
feeling that we’ve only seen the first of many evils.

I open my mouth to tell her what I have
planned but words fail me. Gemma has always been the type of person
who knows exactly what to say—just like how she knew what to say
the first time I met her.

That day I had been delivering medicine for
my father. I was ten, and new to the job. And I didn’t really
understand all the crazy long codes or colors or different types of
bags. Though my Pharmaceutical Scantron did help a lot. Don’t get
me wrong, the training was extremely thorough—a Master would never
send out anyone to another Master without it being up to standards.
Impossibly high standards. Keeping up with all the biking and never
receiving enough food to have the strength when I needed it, I felt
like I was falling farther and farther behind. Yet, there was
simply no other choice than to keep moving and hope—pray—for the
best. If I asked too many questions, I’d receive an angry reprimand
from my supervisor. If I, heaven forbid, was late for a delivery,
and my father heard about it, he’d bring out his Palka the second I
walked in the door and use it on me, the iron stick thrashing
against my ten-year-old palms. He would deliberately hit the
insides of my hands so that no one else would see. “Can’t be
looking like that delivering to our superiors, now, can we?”

On the day I met Gemma, I had been working
at the hospital for six days. It was in the dead of winter, and the
snow was coming down like a solid white curtain. Biking around kept
me from freezing to death, but my knuckles and toes were
numb—frozen stiff. I had just finished delivering thirty-one
deliveries—the most I’d ever had. Returning to the hospital well
after dark, the snow coming down hard, my legs felt like
overstretched elastics and all I wanted was to sink myself into bed
and get warm. But just as I was leaving to go home, an emergency
delivery came in on my Pharmaceutical Scantron for Mistress
Johansen—the chief surgeon’s mother. Of course I couldn’t go home,
but I wanted to, oh, I wanted to. Dragging my feet to the pharmacy,
my PS stopped working—I think the battery ran out. I told the
apothecary I was there to pick up the prescription for Mrs.
Johnson. Coincidentally, there was a prescription there for that
very person. Since the names were so similar, and I was exhausted
and hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, I didn’t notice
that I had pronounced the name wrong. The apothecary said she knew
about the delivery, and she handed me the prescription. I rode all
the way to the very uppermost house on Mount Zalo, delivered the
medicine, and returned to the hospital with the old lady’s
signature. When I came back, there was a different apothecary. He
noticed the mistake almost before I had walked through the door,
and contacted Mrs. Johansen right away. Thankfully, she hadn’t
taken the drugs yet. Not that it mattered. It would only have
knocked her out for the night with no damage done. The apothecary
was nice enough about it, letting me off with only a few harsh
words. I hopped on my bike and headed home. But the closer I got to
the Laborer sector, the stronger the nervous gnawing feeling grew
in my gut. I knew that my father would find out sooner or later, if
he hadn’t already. I waited outside the entrance to our sector,
tall steel gates guarded by Unifers twenty four seven. I couldn’t
go home. I knew what was in store for me, and I thought it might be
better to stay out here and die than face what was coming. But a
Unifer noticed me hiding behind the bush and fired a couple of
shots in my direction so I’d come out. He didn’t hit me, but it
scared me half to death. Grabbing me by the arm, he escorted me
home.