The Capture (27 page)

H
OPE DOESN
'
T KNOW HOW
long she's been passed out. All she knows is that she's awake now, her wrists cuffed behind her back and strapped to a drainpipe. When she gives a tug, the plastic bindings cut into her flesh. She winces.

Even worse is the stinging that radiates from her cheeks. When she looks down, she sees a splattering of red on snow. Blood. So it was no dream: Chancellor Maddox really did carve up her face.

The pain is awful, the sense of violation worse. The fact that someone went to the trouble to
brand
her makes her sick, and she leans forward and retches in the snow. She lets her head hang there until the nausea passes, wiping her mouth on her shoulder.

Gunshots grab her attention. They come not from the parade ground but from the same direction as before—only closer. Is it possible Book is still alive?

She looks around. Chancellor Maddox has disappeared. So too the Brown Shirt. If she's going to escape, it has to be now.

She cranes her head. There's a place where the metal is speckled. Rust spots. The weakest part of the drainpipe.

She straightens and lifts her arms. Her shoulders pop. She gives a yank against the pipe. Nothing. She tries again. Still nothing. There's no give whatsoever. Her body slumps forward in defeat.

I can't do it,
she realizes.
There's no way I can free myself.

She resigns herself to death.

I'm coming, Mom and Dad. See you soon, Faith.

But when she thinks of Book, the tears begin, spilling from the pools of her enormous brown eyes and cascading down her cheeks, mingling with the trails of blood. The warm tears caress her lips and remind her of the kisses, Book's kisses . . . and she can't give up. She will join her parents and Faith—but not now. Not if she can help it.

Shifting her weight, she positions the plastic tie against the rust spots. She has to stand on tiptoe, and her fingers flail blindly behind her.

“Okay,” she says aloud, “let's get to work.”

She begins sawing through the plastic. Her arms are grotesquely twisted, and the sweat runs down her neck and back. She's making progress, but how much? How much further does she have to go?

A muffled, faraway explosion raises her head.
The signal.
Her mouth goes dry. The hairs rise on her arms.

It's too late. There's not enough time. Game over.

Her head tilts back and she releases an ear-shattering scream—a primal cry that rises from the very depths of her soul and carries with it all the sorrow and anger, all the grief and pain, the sound filling the night and rising to the heavens themselves.

Good-bye, Book,
it says.
I love you. . . .

T
HERE WERE FOUR FUSES,
each heading to a separate clump of dynamite, but as I held them in my hands, I realized the problem: they weren't long enough. I could
maybe
survive the explosions . . . but definitely not the aftermath.

I glanced around me. Far off to one side was a massive red cedar—it must have stretched a good seventy feet into the air. It could possibly be my salvation, but there was no way for me to climb it. Its lowest branches were twenty feet off the ground.

Distant gunfire told me I couldn't wait, even if it meant sacrificing myself. Just as Four Fingers had sacrificed
him
self.

I nudged the flames to the fuses, and the sparks
slithered across the snow. If I remembered right, these fuses burned at a rate of ten seconds per foot. In other words: no time to waste.

I pushed myself through the snow. Any moment the fuses would reach the explosives and the world would change.

A blue spruce stood just uphill of the cedar, its boughs dipping with snow, and I began hoisting myself up—slipping, stumbling, scrambling my way up the tree. I was still a good ten feet short of where I wanted to be when I heard the first explosion. Buried in layers of snow, it gave off the sound of a muffled pop. A second explosion followed. Then a third and fourth.

And then all hell broke loose.

I heard the avalanche long before I saw it: a deep bass rumble, a sound so low and loud and
throbbing
that it took my breath away. It sounded like the planet itself was being formed, as though molten lava was spewing from the earth's core. My body shook. My teeth rattled. It took every bit of strength I had to hold on to the branches.

The snow coming down the mountain was a moving wall of sound—not just the rumble of the avalanche but also the shriek of trees as they were splintered to pieces. The snow destroyed everything in its path, wiping it clear, obliterating the landscape.

The spruce I was on snapped in two, and I went
sailing through air . . . smashing into the cedar. My hands clung to the cedar's side, clawing into the bark itself. The tree bent and swayed, vibrated and shook, but it was too thick, too massive, to be pushed over entirely. I pressed myself against it and held on for dear life.

The sound was overwhelming—like some beast letting loose the most horrible yell from the darkest corners of its miserable soul. The sliding snow created its own wind, and gusts tore at me, tugging at my clothes. All around me, trees were being toppled, either torn in two or ripped from the earth itself.

And then it wasn't just trees, but Camp Liberty as well, and new sounds: the groan of nails wrenched from walls, the violent
thwump
of buildings being flattened, and even—I was certain—the horrific screams of Brown Shirts, as a wall of white slammed into them with the force of a moving train.

Whoever was corralled in the center of camp had little chance of surviving, and I could only pray that Flush had taken the Less Thans far enough into the No Water to escape this raging tsunami of snow.

Finally, the roar ceased. All sound died away. There were a few trailing noises, of course—a tree falling to the ground, final snowballs rolling downhill, the squeak of settling snow. But the quiet that followed was the loudest silence I'd ever heard. Deafening.

Although the cedar I clung to was now leaning downhill like an old person straining to hear, it was still standing. It—and I—had managed to survive.

Now I had to find the others.

It was like walking across an ocean of snow, and I knew that buried beneath me were the shipwrecks of trees and Brown Shirts and Camp Liberty itself. Here and there, treetops or shards of buildings poked through the snowy surface like frozen waves, but in general the world was white as far as I could see.

There was one exception: the fiery pit. The volcano of flame was alive and well; plumes of steam hissed upward as though erupting from hell itself.

As we had counted on—and Twitch had calculated—the bowl-like shape of Skeleton Ridge sent the avalanche careening straight into the very middle of Camp Liberty. It was hard to imagine that everything—the barracks, the mess hall, Major Westbrook's headquarters—was all entombed beneath tons of hard-packed snow.

I veered west, and the snow grew more shallow until I was out of the snow and onto the high desert. The morning sun turned the eastern clouds bloodred.

I found the others at the base of a sandy hill, not far from where we'd first discovered Cat those many months before. The few LTs who had strength enough came running when they saw me, their faces lit with
gratitude. We greeted one another with handshakes and awkward slaps on the back.

“Well?” I asked.

Cat merely nodded. “No sign of Brown Shirts.”

“None of 'em?”

“If they were in the camp, they didn't stand a chance.”

“And the Hunters turned back once they saw the avalanche,” Flush chimed in.

The news was too good to be believed, and I felt like collapsing into the arms of my friends. Emotion tugged at me.

I told the others about Four Fingers and together, we shed a few tears.

Still, we had made our difficult return, enduring traitors and Crazies and weeks of captivity by the Skull People. And now, finally, we had achieved our goal.

We had freed the Less Thans. We had done what we set out to do. We had done what was right.

“Did any get away?” I asked.

“Too soon to know,” Cat said.

But even the possibility that some might have escaped couldn't dampen my happiness.

Diana joined us, and I was about to thank her for all she'd done, when I suddenly realized . . .

“Where's Hope?” I asked.

Diana shared a look with the others. “She's not with you?”

I felt the blood drain from my face. “I haven't seen her since Cat rescued us from Dekker.” I gave a panicked look to the others. “Seriously, where is she?”

“We don't know, Book.”

My heart began to race; my knees went weak. “Well, where was she last?”

“She heard the gunshots and went looking for you.”

A cold, firm hand gripped my heart. Hope hadn't reached me, so that meant exactly one thing: she was somewhere in the bull's-eye of the avalanche. I could imagine the lethal weight of it pressing down on her, flattening her like a leaf between the pages of a book. No way in the world to survive it.

I don't know if it was sorrow or exhaustion or a broken heart, but my legs went out from under me and I collapsed. I fell to the desert ground, convulsed by shoulder-racking sobs and a steady stream of tears. Just when it seemed the crying would stop and I could regain my breath, I remembered I'd never gotten the chance to tell her how I felt about her . . . and the weeping began again.

Although we knew it was hopeless, we formed a search party, poking through the snow with branches, hoping to make contact with a living, breathing Hope. Scylla, too, was missing, buried by the avalanche, and we spread out in a line, edging our way from one side of
camp to the other. No one said a word. We were mourning Four Fingers. Mourning Scylla. Mourning Hope.

Whenever we saw part of a body wearing Brown Shirt clothing, we fell to the ground and dug with an anxious frenzy, remembering Hope and Scylla were wearing those uniforms. But in each case they were actual soldiers, dead from suffocation or arrows or maybe both. We kept searching.

We spent the entire day crisscrossing every inch of what had formerly been Camp Liberty. There were no survivors.

“Come on,” Flush said, tugging at my sleeve. “You should eat.”

I shook off his hand. “Just let me search a little more,” I insisted.

“Okay. But not too long.”

As he walked away, I realized all the others were gone and it was getting dark, an orange moon sliding up from the eastern horizon. It was just me and Argos amid a sea of snow. He let out a whimper.

“Just a little while longer,” I told him.

Only later, when I collapsed on the snow—from hunger, from exhaustion, from
grief
—did I finally admit it was time to give up. No person could possibly survive this long buried beneath the snow.

Argos and I headed back to the makeshift camp. Cat brought over some food, and everyone gave me
a respectful distance. They knew no words of comfort could possibly erase my pain, and they had sense enough not to try.

The next morning, it was decided to build some shelters. Although we wanted to leave immediately, we knew that wasn't possible—not until the Less Thans got their strength back.

We spent the day hauling debris to our temporary camp. I was in a daze, tugging at pieces of corrugated tin, yanking at fence posts, carrying armloads of branches back for fires. My body might have been present; my mind was somewhere else.

I blamed myself for Hope's death. If we hadn't kissed, maybe she wouldn't have come running for me. Maybe she would've gotten away.

But Hope had come running, and the avalanche swept her away and swallowed her up. I was filled with despair, with anger, with the deepest sorrow.

When I finally nodded off to sleep, I dreamed of her again—the woman with the long black hair. My grandmother.

The dream started out as it always did: running through the prairie amid whistling bullets and a gunpowdery haze, my grandmother pulling me to the ground and then—poof!—she was gone. But this time, the dream repeated itself—prairie, bullets, smoke, grandmother, prairie, bullets, smoke, grandmother—
until it wasn't a dream but a nightmare, a whirlwind of images sped up to a terrifying blur.

I startled myself awake. All around me lay the still forms of the sleeping Less Thans, their thick snores cutting through dark. As my eyes took in their emaciated bodies and hollow, sunken cheeks, it hit me.

I nudged Cat and Flush awake.

“She might be alive,” I said.

Their expressions went from blank to pity as I began sketching in the sand. With a trembling index finger I traced the outline of Camp Liberty. When I finished, I drew a dotted line from the storehouse—the last place Hope had been seen—to the pit.

“What do you see?” I asked excitedly.

Flush and Cat shared a glance that I wasn't supposed to catch.

“Tell me,” I insisted.
“What do you see?”

By now, some of the others had woken as well.

“Uh, our camp,” Flush said, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

“What specifically?”

“Some buildings.”

“
Which
buildings?”

Flush bent forward to get a better look. “Well, the mess hall, and the storehouse, and the Soldiers' Quarters.”

I began nodding wildly, and my finger landed in the
middle of that rectangle of buildings.

I took off before the others finished getting dressed.

A part of me knew it was hopeless, but I couldn't help myself. The odds of her surviving were flat-out terrible, but maybe,
maybe
, she had done what my grandmother always did in my dreams: vanished into thin air. And the only place in Camp Liberty where Hope could have vanished to was the hidden bunker beneath the tennis courts—the pit where the LTs were imprisoned after going through the Rite. The very place I'd been haunted by ever since I stumbled on it.

The hard part was finding the tennis courts buried under snow. There were no markers left from Camp Liberty, and it was a guess as to where things were. We walked around blindly, searching for clues, lining up our location with Skeleton Ridge.

When we had it narrowed down, we began to dig. I fell to my knees and used an old tin plate, scooping up heaping platefuls of snow, which I cast to the side. Everyone else was doing the same. The sun rose and amber rays bounced off the white surface and we kept at it.

I reached the ground—bare earth. Not a tennis court at all. I shifted fifteen feet to one side and started over. My clothes were wet with perspiration. It occurred to me I had never shown Hope the bunker, of course, only talked about it. She knew it was beneath the tennis courts . . . but that was it.

“We've got something!” Diana called out.

She had reached a patch of faded green cement. Everyone jumped to her side and began expanding the hole. When the tennis court's white lines appeared, we were able to imagine the layout, and I paced off a few feet in one direction.

“Over here,” I said, and we went at it again, clearing away snow, debris,
anything
in our way. In no time, we'd created a small mountain behind us.

When we reached the court, the others stepped aside. I found the brass ring set into the cement, and my fingers—red and blistered and numb from cold—pushed away the snow and wedged themselves beneath the curve. I took a deep breath . . . and then yanked upward.

The bunker was pitch black, and even with the sun angling in from one side, painting the black walls with light, it was as dark and impenetrable as a cave. We stared down into the chasm. There were no movements, no cries of salvation—nothing to indicate a person's existence. Argos leaned in and barked, but there was no response. Just echo.

We had found the bunker, it was true, but it seemed utterly empty. With trembling legs, I lowered myself onto the metal ladder and descended into the dark.