The Watch (The Red Series Book 1) (17 page)

Except for Marta, the other Watchers were nodding.

“The people are sufficiently cowed,” the Voice said. “And confused
as well. They have lost the war without most of them ever realizing there was
one.”

“That one city meeting didn’t go as we expected,” the very
old man said, his tone querulous. “The little boy who confessed wasn’t the one
who was supposed to die. Who’d have thought he’d be so brave?”

“He served our purpose well enough,” the Voice said. He
looked up and down the table; all eyes were on him. “Our last city meeting will
be the one involving the cook.”

“That one was my idea,” the short-haired plump woman said
happily. “It can’t go wrong.”

I was beginning to really, really dislike that woman.

“This is the best way,” the languid woman said to Marta,
reaching out to pat her hand. Marta moved hers away.

“Truly,” the languid woman said. “It makes perfect sense.
City meeting first, and then we can proceed to the euthanizing. You know quite
well that’s the only way we’ll make it through the winter. And then, once we’ve
survived until the next growing season, we can reassess our long-term goals,
though even you must admit they’re probably irrelevant at this point. That’s
something we must learn to face. It isn’t easy, I know, to see one’s life work
come to naught.”

Marta didn’t respond.

The Voice went on to summarize their plans. A group of
people would be collected in the Watcher compound—people too old to do
hard manual labor, people who had been in the infirmary more than twice in the
past year, people who had suffered injuries that continued to limit their
labor, and people who didn’t meet certain weight requirements.

“That will dispose of our heaviest burdens,” the Voice
concluded. “The old, the ill, the injured or disabled, and those with
inefficient metabolisms.”

The very old man nodded, his face pleased. “And if she’s
still around, that will take care of the emotional redhead. One way or another,
she’ll be out of the way.”

The languid woman raised a warning finger. “Euthanasia isn’t
punishment, remember. It’s mercy. A good death instead of a slow and miserable
starvation. Some people might survive this winter’s strict rationing. People
like the problematic redhead wouldn’t.”

Meritt
muttered something under his breath.

 
“And do we have
statistics yet?” the round man was asking. “How many will be euthanized?”

“One hundred and twelve who are dead weight,” the Voice
said. “Another sixty whose productivity does not compensate for their needs.”

They were going to kill me, me and a whole host of other
people who didn’t meet their strength criteria—including my old people,
the ones who’d had time for a lonely little girl.
Mariella
,
who took me for walks. Estelle, who talked to me about cooking as if I’d
someday have a chance to try it myself. And Louie—he’d escaped once, but
he wouldn’t escape this time.

 
“So a bit over
ten percent of our population . . .. Is that sufficient for the
rest of us to survive the winter?” the long-faced man asked.

“We believe so,” the Voice said.

 
“The productive
citizens might be a bit unnerved,” said the long-faced man. “But it’s easy
enough to recover from a done deed. And they’ll know, by then, how necessary it
was. They’ll see that they survived only because the others died, and they’ll
thank us for saving them. They’ll thank us for bearing the weight of the
decision ourselves.”

“And by then we’ll have the angelic
Meritt
,”
the languid woman said, and
Meritt
leaned closer to
the screen. “He’ll distract them. They’ll be meek as lambs, seeing that one of
their own is on the city commission. Such a good idea—we should have
thought of it earlier.”

“We did,” the Voice said. “But there are, as you well know,
considerable risks.”

“Has he been approached?” the very old man asked.

“Yes,” the Voice said. “We have been pursuing that option
and are pleased with preliminary reports.”

“In other words, he’s smart enough to see he has no viable
alternative.” That was Marta.

“He’ll virtually eliminate the possibility of any future
uprising,” said the plump woman, just as the very old man said, “He’ll minimize
the possibility of trouble from other quarters.”

“Indeed.” The Voice sounded bored. “That is the plan. But
negotiations are not complete. As we know, he has divided loyalties. He will
have to make an unmistakable gesture of good will before we concede anything.
He will have to bind himself to us irrevocably. Once he does, however, he will
serve our purposes well enough.” He looked around the table. “Other business?”

No one spoke.

“Meeting adjourned,” he said.

Meritt
began
disengaging whatever he had set up. “Well, it worked,” he said, keeping his
eyes on the screen. His face was very white against his dark hair. “Farrell
Dean can be proud.”

The present danger flooded back. “Farrell Dean—” I
began.

“He installed the final components in the Watchers’ conference
room when he repaired their heating a couple of days ago. Did it perfectly.
It’s not so far out of his skill set, of course. He’s a great mechanic, and I
explained to him how—”

I cut him off. “Farrell Dean is downstairs,
Meritt
. He’s the one they were beating.”

Meritt
stared at me. “We’ve got to get out,” he said, and began keying still more
rapidly, his fingers flying. “He knows too much.”

“He won’t tell them anything,” I said. “But we have to help
him—they were beating him. They might kill him.”

Meritt
shot
one glance in my direction. “He won’t want to talk. But even the best of us can
be broken.”

I shook my head. “Not Farrell Dean. Not when it comes
to— ”

“Not when it comes to you?”
Meritt
laughed shortly. “Moot point, Red. Farrell Dean doesn’t know you’re up here. He
only knows about me. And if they catch me, they catch you.”

“He won’t give you away, either,” I said. “We have to help
him.”

Meritt
stood
up, went to the sleeping warden, and began dragging him back over to the desk.
“Everything’s negotiable, Red. Farrell Dean might not trade your life or mine
to save his own, but what if they stack the deck?”

“He won’t tell.” I went to help him prop the warden at the
desk, shifting his arm so he wouldn’t have a crick in his neck when he woke up.

Meritt
laughed softly, but his face was wry. “Do you have half the faith in me that
you have in Farrell Dean?”

“More,” I said, looking straight into his eyes. “You know
that.”

For a heartbeat
Meritt
looked as
if he would say something, but then he shook his head, turned, and headed for
the doorway. “Come on,” he said. “Hurry.”

Silently we raced down the stairs. At the bottom we paused,
leaning against the wall by the door, listening, hearing nothing.
Meritt
opened the door a crack; the hall was empty. I could
see the door to Farrell Dean’s cell. It was bolted now, and no light shone from
under the door.

“Let’s go.”
Meritt
took my hand
and pulled me along with him. When we got to Farrell Dean’s door I dug in my
heels and wrenched my hand away. By the time
Meritt
regained his grip on me I’d unbolted the door.

“We can’t help him right now,” he hissed. “He’ll be chained
to the wall.”

“We have to try,” I said.

Voices stopped our argument, voices and footsteps. They
weren’t close yet, but they were coming from the direction of the way
out—the only way out.

Meritt
shut
his eyes. He looked pained, not terrified. When he opened his eyes his face was
resolute.

“My turn,” he said, pulling open Farrell Dean’s door and
shoving me inside. “When it’s quiet again, get out of here. And Red—” his
voice sounded strained—“We can’t be seen together anymore. It’s too
dangerous.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but he leaned over me and
kissed me. Then the door swung open, swung shut again, and he was gone.

 
“Rhoda?” I heard
him call. “Is that you?” His voice faded; he was walking away from me.

Rhoda. Was she the blonde Warden?

“What are you doing here?” a man said.

Meritt
said—calmly—“Let go of my arm.”

“I’ll let go when I feel like it. Answer the question. Why
are you here?”

“I’m looking for Rhoda.”

 
“Now? Past
midnight?”

Meritt
gave
a grim laugh. “You’d rather I came at noon? Announcing to the whole city that
I’m talking with the Watchers? No wonder
Optica’s
in
trouble. You telegraph every move.”

Another voice said something. His tone was concerned, but I
couldn’t catch his words. I hoped they were far enough away not to notice that
Farrell Dean’s door was unbolted.

“All right then,” the first voice said. “Come with us.”
Footsteps moved away down the corridor. I could hear
Meritt
talking, his voice fading as they moved away.

My heart pounding, I hesitated by the door.
Meritt
would want me to get out now, as soon as he had the
wardens out of the hallway, safely distracted. But I couldn’t go yet, not
without checking on Farrell Dean. Maybe
Meritt
was
wrong and he wasn’t chained; maybe I could get him out.

It was pitch black in the cell. The thin line of light
coming from beneath the door seemed to make the darkness thicker. Keeping one
hand on the wall I began to edge my way around the room. I could hear someone
breathing jaggedly, painfully. The air smelled coppery, like blood.

“Farrell Dean?” I whispered. No one replied.

I edged a little further. My foot bumped something and I
knelt to touch it. A foot. It didn’t move at my touch. I felt along him, trying
to get oriented. He seemed to be lying on his face on the floor. His right leg
was stretched out—the one I’d bumped—and his other leg was bent. He
was shirtless and waves of heat came off his skin, as if he were radiating
pain.

Careful not to touch his back, I found his arms. The left
one was chained to a metal ring in the wall. His face was turned away from me.

I stepped carefully over his chained arm and made my way
around him, so we’d be face to face. “Farrell Dean?” I found his hair, smoothed
it back. It was wet—whether with sweat or with blood, I couldn’t tell,
and through all my fumbling, he hadn’t moved. “Farrell Dean,” I said again.
“It’s Red. Can you hear me?”

He drew a jagged breath, shifted slightly beneath my hands.

“I’m here,” I said. “We’re going to help you.”

“Get out,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “It’s not safe.”

“I’m going, but I’ll be back. We’ll get you out of here.”

He didn’t answer.

“Farrell Dean?” My blood was pounding in my ears; I couldn’t
hear him breathe, couldn’t feel any movement except what might have been my
own. I felt for his neck, tried to find a pulse. He was so warm but I couldn’t
find a heartbeat, and his neck was slick with blood, it had to be blood, there
was too much for it to be sweat.

I took him by the shoulder and shook him. “Don’t die,” I
said, and it came out a sob. “Don’t die, Farrell Dean, please don’t die.”

 
His right hand
came up and grasped my wrist. “Red,” he said. “I’m not dying. It just hurts
like the dickens. Stop jolting me all around.”

Weeping now, I found his cheek and kissed it. He sighed
heavily.

“Go,” he said. “Go
now
.”

“I’m going. But I won’t let them kill you, Farrell Dean.
Meritt
won’t let them. We’ll get you out.” He didn’t reply
but his hand moved on my wrist, letting me go. I kissed him once more, then did
what both he and
Meritt
wanted me to do. I left.

Outside the watchtower I huddled
in the shadows, trying to think clearly. Adrenaline was coursing through me,
and anger. So they’d beat Farrell Dean bloody, would they? They’d twist
Meritt
, use him for their own ends. They’d kill us off,
Skye with her cough, sweet old
Mariella
, all my old
people, anyone who wasn’t strong and compliant.

We’d see about that.

It was very late, but there was no way I would go back to my
dormitory and to bed. I hadn’t saved
Rafe
the night
he’d been arrested—I hadn’t even known he needed saving until it was too
late. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. I wasn’t going to go back
to my dorm to discover later that Farrell Dean was the next city meeting
victim.

But who could help me get him out? Cline was his closest
friend, but I couldn’t get into the boys’ dormitory without being caught. And
even if I could, he might not come with me. He didn’t like me or trust me. And
even if he’d come, he couldn’t get Farrell Dean out of the prison, not with the
wardens there, not with the chains. No one could.

Without coming to a conscious decision I started moving
silently through the dark streets of the city. Every building was dark, even
the laundry, though hot mist billowed hazily from its vent pipes, vanishing
quickly in the crisp clear air. It had turned colder, less humid. The blue
lights were free of their usual blurry halos, and the white spotlight cut
cleanly through the streets.

I reached the end of the buildings and made my way through
the dark meadow. I could see the shadowed forms of bee hives clearly enough on
this cloudless night, and it was chilly enough to make the bees sleepy. Even so
I slowed, went cautiously.

Beyond the bee fields, in the orchards, the ancient twisted
apple trees threw wild shadows. On the ground a few rotting, wormy apples
spread a surprisingly potent
scent. Sometimes deer
came in through the gap in the outer wall to eat the fallen apples, but even
they wouldn’t want the mushy nubs left on the ground now.

When I reached the gap that opened onto the wasteland I
hesitated, just for a moment. Then I thought about
Meritt
and Farrell Dean, about my old people, and I stepped out into the exposed space
and crossed the pale thin grass to the edge of the trees, where again I
stopped.
 

I’d never been outside the wall on this side of the city. As
far as I knew, no one had. Not only did I have to go into these trees, I had to
keep going and bear north, toward the
wilderland
.

My heart began to pound. Despite my best intentions, I
couldn’t lift a foot to step into the trees. The Guardians weren’t just
stories;
Meritt
said so. If I went into the woods, I
might well get killed, by them or by something else.

But I was going to get killed anyway, soon enough. And I
knew what I had seen: the gap behind the Watcher compound had been open once,
and now was sealed. Surely that indicated first an alliance—the Guardians
supporting the Watchers, as we’d always been told—and then a
disagreement. I had to focus on the slim possibility that the Guardians were
intelligent beings, unhappy with the Watchers, and willing to help us overthrow
the Watchers, or at least make them listen to reason. I had to focus on getting
help for my friends.

I could do this; I could. I just needed a moment to compose
myself.

The night was silent and still, and the stars shone calmly
overhead. But the trees didn’t feel welcoming, like they had the first time I’d
ventured into them, over on the other side of the city by the slaughterhouse. I
hoped I was imagining the menace; I hoped it wasn’t something real, something
waiting for me in the woods. The thing that had called my name, or something
else. If the Guardians killed me, fine. That was a risk I was willing to take.
But I didn’t want to get killed by a wolf, or by some crazed chicken-vandal,
before I’d even found the Guardians.

The ominous feeling didn’t abate, but nothing jumped out at
me, and I couldn’t stand there at the edge of the wasteland forever.
Meritt
was in trouble; Farrell Dean was chained in prison;
Rafe
was dead.

Taking a deep breath, I plunged into the darkness between
the trees.

I
half thought a voice would start
calling my name, but in the
woods the world felt quieter still, hushed.
The ground was uneven beneath my bare feet, strewn with fallen limbs, rocks,
and sharp-edged pine cones. Before I went any further I bent and, feeling
carefully so I wouldn’t cut my hands on a sharp twig or razor-like bramble,
found five or six egg-sized rocks. I stuffed most of them in my pockets and
kept one in my hand, a small weapon, but better than nothing.

It was hard to go quietly. Drifts of dead leaves blanketed
the ground, rustling underfoot. I avoided them as best as I could. The tops of
the trees obscured the sky, but I thought the moon must have risen, for though
the trees were growing more closely together, I could see a little more
clearly. Or maybe my eyes finally had adjusted to the darkness.

For an hour or so I picked my way through the woods. I
walked long enough that I actually began to feel tired instead of terrified.
The ground out here wasn’t as level as the ground inside the city, and the
repeated uphill, downhill trudge made my legs burn.

Then a sound—or not so much a sound as a shift in the
air—made me freeze. Was something there?

And then I saw it—ahead of me, just over a small rise,
the silhouette of a creature on all fours, larger than a dog, larger even than
I thought a wolf should be. It slunk around a tree and disappeared, then came
back into sight a few yards from where I stood paralyzed. There it paused and
sniffed the air.

The hair on the back of my neck prickled. Should I run? But
then it would surely chase me, and I doubted I could outrun it. Should I stand
still and hope it wouldn’t notice me? Could it climb trees?

It lowered its head to the ground, sniffed, and then raised
its face in my direction. The night was so dark I couldn’t get a clear look at
it—wolves were large wild dogs, distant relatives of the dogs the cattle
workers used, but something about this creature didn’t feel dog-like. The shape
of its head seemed wrong and I couldn’t see a tail. I tried to remember what I
had been taught about bears. Weren’t bears either black or dark brown? This
thing was definitely light in color.

After a long moment I thought might kill me from
fear alone, the creature shook itself as if awakening from a dream, stood up
on its
hind legs, and sniffed the breeze again. When its face turned away from me I
threw my rock into the underbrush. In a heartbeat the creature dropped to all
fours and was gone, pounding after the sound. I hurried in the opposite
direction, quickly but as quietly as I could.

How long I ran I don’t know, but it was long enough that my
legs grew shaky. Finally I stopped and listened so hard that I forgot to
breathe, but I heard nothing. I started walking again, still listening, but the
only sound was an occasional hoot-owl, the first so close I nearly jumped out
of my skin. Maybe I’d startled it before it startled me.

The trees were now thickly matted with undergrowth. Large
rocks, boulders really, began cropping up time and again whatever path I took.
I had to go slowly, circling those boulders, squeezing through low-slung
branches, stopping to untangle my legs from clinging vines. If there had ever
been a path, I’d lost it long ago. All I was pretty sure of was that I was still
bearing north, or at least northwest, away from the city and toward the
wilderland
. Maybe I was already in the
wilderland
;
I didn’t know. All I knew was that I had to keep pressing on in the same
direction or risk going in circles all night long.

Eventually I found myself confronting an enormous fallen
tree, its top twice as high as I was tall. I couldn’t go under it—dense
undergrowth filled the space. To the left was a mass of twisted blackberry
bramble, and to my right was a large boulder and more dense growth.

I’d have to climb over the tree. But in the middle of the
night, exhausted as I was, it seemed too daunting a task.

I decided to rest for a bit before tackling it. I thought
again about the strange wild creature and wished I could climb a tree and rest
up there, but the trees around me were either giant, their lowest branches
unreachable, or young striplings with branches too thin to support even my
weight. And anyway, for all I knew, the thing could climb.

Huddling down at the foot of a tall pine, hiding in the
shadows of the undergrowth, I leaned back and shut my eyes. The wind rustled
some dying leaves nearby, and the thought came to me that if I lay down here
and didn’t rise, soon enough I’d be buried under autumn leaves, hidden by the
forest. Vanishing without a trace wouldn’t be so bad. It would be clean,
somehow, my blood on nobody’s hands but my own.

For a long time I sat there, resting my eyes or opening them
on the dark. I was too tired by then to feel afraid, too tired to feel sorry
for myself, too tired to think or even to listen for creatures in the night. I
merely sat there, feeling the wind on my face, smelling the piney trees.

Soon I would get up and go on; I would keep trying. I’d go
still deeper into the woods, on and on as long as it took, until I found the
Guardians. If they didn’t kill me before I could say a word, I’d ask them to
help us.

In my exhausted state I’d actually begun to drift into sleep
when something jerked me awake—a voice, saying my name.

“Red?” it muttered.

I held very still, not even daring to breathe.

A form had clambered
onto the
fallen tree from the other side, and now stood perched on top. It was larg
e
and there was something wrong about it, something deformed.

“Red,” it said again. “Red, red, red, red, red.”

It had a man’s voice, but the cadences were sing-
songy
and blurred, like those of a small child.

“Redder . . ..redder . . .” it
said. Then it snuffled and leapt down from the tree, landing only a few feet
away from me. I couldn’t move. There was only one clear thought in my head:
Coming to the woods had been a very, very bad idea.

“Redder . . .redder . . .redder . . .reddest!”

The thing leapt at me—it was a large man with a long
tangled beard. He grabbed at me and then I moved, shrieking and scooting away,
avoiding his hands, crawling on my hands and knees, trying to get my feet under
me so I could run, but he caught me around the waist and lifted me off the
ground. He was strong, and so large, and in a heartbeat I had been flung over
his back and was gasping for breath, his shoulder digging painfully into my
stomach.

As he hauled me over the fallen tree I raised up, struggling
against him, but he gripped me tightly around the legs and tipped me further
back so that I banged my chin against his lower back and bit my tongue. He
stank of smoke
and muck, and the rough fabric of his
shirt scraped against my face as he began to move faster, in a sort of
staggering half-trot. I cried out again but he gave me an impatient shake, and
I imagined how easy it would be for him to swing me around and slam my head
against a boulder. I could imagine all sorts of horrible deaths—and
anyway there was
no point in calling for help out there in the lonely
woods.

My more immediate danger was that, as he loped along, I was
jolted with every stride, hard enough that at this rate I’d be too dazed to
take any useful action by the time he stopped. There was no good position, but
I found
that by bending myself against him, crossing
my arms over my chest and holding my head in my hands, I could minimize the
damage.

The dark woods went by in a blur, sideways and upside down,
rocks and trees and thick patches of undergrowth. I don’t know how long he
carried me, but it felt like I’d been dangling over his back forever when we
came to a clearing and he stopped, and with no warning he swung me off his
shoulder and dumped me on the ground, putting one heavy foot on my stomach to
hold me in place. My head swam—the clearing circled dizzily around
me—but finally it stilled, and there in the clearing, in the light of the
waning half-moon, I finally got a good look at my captor.

He stood crookedly, with one shoulder dipping down and the
other rising high, and when I saw his face any hope I had of appealing to his
better nature vanished. Behind his wild beard his mouth hung open loosely, and
his pale eyes were vacant. He must be another luckless soul, driven insane by
whatever it was in the woods that had driven Rosella mad, the difference being
that this one didn’t drift around helpfully warning people to stay out of the
wilderland
, or harmlessly warbling unhinged melodies about
lost love.

After a moment of staring vacantly ahead, he raised his chin
and bellowed, “Red! Red redder reddest!” I had a horrible feeling that he was
calling his friends.

Then he looked down at me, lifted his foot from my stomach,
and prodded at me with his toe. I didn’t know why he was doing that, but when
he kicked harder and began to make frustrated sounds, I rolled to my hands and
knees. He grabbed my arm and yanked me to my feet. Then, holding tight to my
arm, he began to slap at me, not hard but hard enough, patting at my legs, my
chest, my back, turning me this way and that, his hot foul breath in my face.