UnBound (11 page)

Zane's eyes spark red with anger, and he spins back around.

Roland grins. “Now we're talking.”

Roland knows that Zane wants to make a statement, especially with Valerie there in the bleachers. However, Zane takes in his surroundings and realizes that he's cornered, unable to start another fight in front of everyone. He shakes his head, incredulous. “I don't get you, Taggart. What hell do you get out of all of this?”

“If I win, I take your spot on the team,” Roland says.

Zane laughs it off with feigned bravado, but Roland knows at the end of the day he can't back down from a challenge, especially with Valerie watching. So Zane takes the bait and clicks his headgear on. “You ready to be humiliated again?”

Roland flashes his teeth, showing off a bloodstained smile. And he begins circling in his wrestling stance, ready to strike at any moment, closing in on his prey.

The shark missed him in the first attack, but only because it caught the edge of his boogie board instead, taking out a chunk. Now it circles, its steely fin splitting water in the distance. Roland is getting closer and closer to the cliffs. He clings to what's left of his board and kicks, his leg bleeding, having been grazed by the beast. He thinks about his sister, wondering if she's found help; about his stepfather, who's probably beaten his mother's head in by now; about his screams, swept up and devoured by the wind.

When Roland finally reaches the shale cliffs, his chest is throbbing. He searches frantically along the stone wall for divots that might help him climb, but the cliff is steep and slimy, offering little to grab hold of. Roland manages to stand on his board and pull himself up, but a wave washes him off the rock's slippery surface, and he's back in the water.

The beast is coming for him. He can feel it—and his stomach knots.

The dark mass ripples stealthily through the water, terrifying in its silence.

Roland claws the wall of shale, his fingers raw and bleeding.

The predator strikes and rips away the rest of Roland's boogie board, tearing it to pieces.

Roland clamps his eyes shut, wishing that he could snap them open and wake up, safe and warm in his bed—that this would all be just a dream—but reality hits him fast.

The shark comes around again, brushing past his side.

Roland tries the rocks once more, digging his raw fingers into the shale. And this time he pulls himself up, almost out of the water.

The shark approaches one last time, even faster than before. Roland grips the next protruding stone and pulls harder. The shale stone cracks loose, sending Roland falling, rock in hand.

Roland's heart sinks to the farthest depths of his stomach, so low he feels as if he'll be dragged to the ocean floor. Maybe that would be a better way to go. The thought of it makes him wish he were dead. And he finds himself filled with hate. He hates the ocean for plotting his demise. He hates the wall of shale that mocks him. He hates the beast. But most of all he hates himself for not being stronger.

Then something begins to grow within him, an indescribable force—a powerful surge of energy like he's never felt before. And it makes Roland's fingers curl into a fist, clenching the shard of rock in his hand.

And in a split-second decision, just a moment after he hits the water, Roland kicks off from the wall, gripping the stone shard so tightly it digs into his skin. But the pain doesn't matter, because at this moment Roland is in control. Eat or be eaten. And now Roland is the beast of prey. Within seconds he's staring into the eyes of the monster—blacker than infinity itself.

It all happens so fast.

. . . Suddenly a stabbing pain grips his ankle—pulling him deeper into the abyss . . .

. . . Roland begins to feel himself drowning in his own vertigo . . .

. . . Thrashing, kicking, stabbing with all his might . . .

. . . Thrusting his spike into a soulless eye . . .

. . . Digging deeper and deeper . . .

. . . Until eventually . . .

. . . It lets go . . .

Zane bull-rushes forward. Roland swims past him with ease. Zane shoots a double-leg takedown, and Roland dives, clamping Zane's head into a headlock. Zane tries to squirm out of Roland's vise grip, but Roland doesn't let go. Instead he flexes tighter, squeezing every breath of air out of Zane. Zane's face is turning red, and his veins begin to protrude as blood collects in his head. He gasps for air, but Roland spares him none. . . . And just before Zane loses consciousness, Roland releases.

And now Zane is bloodthirsty. He tries to stand, but he's sluggish, his motor system failing him. He swings, hitting Roland in the face. He swings again, and Roland endures them, because he knows with every swing, Zane is running out of steam. And by now they've caught the attention of the entire room. Roland lowers his hips, shoots his own double-leg takedown, more powerful than Zane's, then lifts Zane over his shoulder, driving him forward, off the mat. And in one crippling move, Roland slams him down—harder than he's ever slammed anyone before. He can hear the crunch of bone the moment Zane hits the hardwood floor.

Zane screams in pain, a shrill so earsplitting, it echoes in Roland's eardrums. Zane arches his back, convulsing in agony. It's only when Zane rolls over that Roland notices his arm snapped backward, hyperextended at such an obscene angle that it bends in the complete opposite direction.

Roland stands up, invigorated, still rushing with adrenaline as Zane kicks and screams. Within seconds everyone's there. Coaches, teammates, spectators.

Coach Pratt looks to Roland, but Roland speaks first. “He hit me again. You saw it—he kept on hitting me. It was self-defense.” And, as calculated, his teammates back him up.

The assistant coach hurries over, and attempts whatever first aid he can. Zane grits his teeth, and his eyes well up. Coach Pratt starts pacing, and as it all hits him, he buries his face in his hand and shakes his head—his star wrestler is down. “A new arm could take months to transplant. . . .”

Valerie rushes to Zane and holds him, hysterical. She looks up at Roland, screaming, “What the hell did you do?”

Roland doesn't flinch; instead he looks down, wiping blood from his forearm, revealing his tiger shark tattoo. He then meets her gaze, grinning. “I won.”

And like that Roland turns his back, smiling to himself. Because now he knows he's the ultimate predator. He knows he's the shark.

Jobe Marin isn't surprised by the unwind order.

He feels no anger, just resignation. His dad's litany still reverberates:
This isn't a free ride, son. A man has to earn his seat.
Dad sees the world in Darwinian terms—you have to fight to get what's yours—and Jobe's on the side of the dinosaurs. It doesn't help that his brother and sister are wildly successful, with Greg on his way to a basketball scholarship and Brittany on the dean's list at Wellesley College.

By contrast, Jobe has dismal grades, no awards or trophies or even friends to speak of. He's exactly the sort of son Dad
didn't
want, a nonachiever with no hobbies or interests or extramural activities. He should have seen this coming.

When Jobe gets the order and the Juvey-cops show up at his doorstep, he doesn't even try to resist them. All he feels is tired and hopeless and all used up.

“Verbally confirm that you are Jobe Andrew Marin,” says one of the Juvies. The one with the eyebrow twitch.

Jobe nods.

“I said verbally.”

“Yeah, I'm him.”

Eyebrow Twitch pulls out a card and reads from it. “Jobe Andrew Marin, by the signing of this order, your parents and/or legal guardians have retroactively terminated your tenure, backdated to six days postconception, leaving you . . .” He drones on, reading the standard litany, but Jobe isn't listening. He looks at his parents standing awkwardly in the foyer of their modest home, his dad self-righteous and his mom uncertain. With his sister off at college and his brother at a basketball tournament, it's just his parents here to witness this. He's glad his brother and sister aren't here to have to see this sorry spectacle.

At last, Eyebrow Twitch comes to the end. “. . . all rights as a citizen thereof are now officially and permanently revoked.”

An awkward silence falls. Jobe's mom starts forward as if to embrace him, but Dad grips her elbow, shaking his head. The Juvey's eyebrow twitches.

“Well, if there's nothing further, we'll be going. Thanks for your cooperation.”

“Yeah,” says his dad.

Jobe is bundled into a van, which takes him to a bus loaded with dozens of other kids like himself, all numb and listless, hardly knowing how they got here. They're driven to the Woodland Bounty Harvest Camp in northeast Pennsylvania, outside Wilkes-Barre—a sprawling estate smelling of rose and juniper, surrounded by cyclone fencing. Topiary hedges show an assortment of woodland animals. They're taken to a holding area and seated alphabetically at long tables, like it's some sort of standardized test.

“Jobe Marin,” someone calls after a short while. He's escorted down a carpeted hallway and ushered through a door marked
EXAMINING ROOM
.

“Good morning, Jobe,” says a man in a lab coat, smiling, but not offering his hand to shake. His name tag reads
DR. FRIENDL
. Jobe imagines penciling in a
Y
to make his name Dr. Friendly.

Jobe is seated on an examining table covered with sterile white paper that crinkles when he sits. It's like going to the doctor, if the doctor was planning to extract your internal organs and give them out like lollipops to the kiddies.

“This won't hurt,” says Dr. Friendly, wrapping a rubber strip around Jobe's bicep and extracting a blood sample. He sticks the vial in his pocket, says “Wait here,” and is gone for an annoyingly long time.

Jobe looks around nervously. A window shows the camp's exercise yard, where teens are playing softball, lifting weights, doing forced calisthenics. Upbeat music blasts from pole-mounted speakers, audible even through the double-paned window. Jobe wonders how he'll ever measure up, because he doesn't feel well enough for exercise.

Finally, Dr. Friendly returns with a burly orderly and a nurse carrying a tray of medical instruments. Most notably two syringes—one small and one unpleasantly large. “Standard biopsy,” he says. “Just to confirm the results of the blood work.” He prepares the first needle. “Anesthetic,” he says. “This will only sting a little.”

It stings more than a little—but that's not what troubles Jobe. What troubles him is that Dr. Friendly doesn't say anything when he approaches with the larger needle. Perhaps because this one
will
hurt. A lot.

The orderly holds him firmly to keep him from flinching. “It'll be quick,” he says.

The needle goes in. Jobe grimaces, refusing to scream, although the pain is excruciating. He wonders how much more it would have hurt without the anesthetic.

At least the orderly was telling the truth. The needle is extracted. The pain begins to subside. They let him go. “You're a trouper,” says the orderly. The doctor excuses himself and departs, carrying a sample jar labeled
MARIN, J
. His team follows him out, leaving Jobe alone.

When Dr. Friendly returns, twenty minutes later, he's smiling, but it seems forced.

“I'm afraid you can't be unwound,” he says with genuine regret. “A certain number of applicants simply don't qualify. Please don't consider this a reflection on your worth.”

“Why?” Jobe asks. “What did you find?”

Dr. Friendly offers an apologetic grin. “It's not my place to say. Someone will be along to collect you shortly.”

The door closes, and Jobe is left alone again in the examining room. He stares out the window, watching the others prepare for a procedure he won't receive—because he's not even worth the trouble of dismantling.

“We've got another one, Heath.”

Heath Calderon sighs. He's sitting in an office in the Centralia fire station—what
used
to be the fire station—with a sweeping view of the town below. But now Centralia's a ghost town. It was abandoned when a fire erupted in the coal-bearing caves under the city, spewing toxic gas from dozens of boreholes. It was deemed unsafe to live here. The entire town was condemned by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, uprooting whole families, leaving a landscape blighted with rubble and ruin.

The perfect place for AWOLs to hide, because no one gives a crap what happens here.

“Who's the new guy?” Heath asks.

His assistant—an overachiever named Sebastian—checks a hand-scribbled notebook. “Jobe something, age fourteen. He's sick. Bad. They kicked him off the unwind list because his parts weren't worth harvesting. We found him at Wilkes-Barre General Hospital.”

“How'd you get him past the guard?”

“There wasn't one. Why would they guard the worthless?”

Heath nods. “Good job, Sebastian. I think we can use him.”

Sebastian beams.
That boy takes pride in his work,
Heath thinks. Even if the work involves tracking down unwinds near the end of their natural lives and bringing them here to this backwoods hideaway. Heath has a plan for how to use them, something he hesitates to talk about, except with his most trusted allies. Not even Anissa knows his plan.

The cost of leadership,
he thinks sourly. He likes Anissa a lot and wishes he could share what he's doing with her. She's the smartest AWOL he knows. Pretty, too. But Heath's plan is secret, on a strictly need-to-know basis. Anissa—like everyone else—will find out soon enough . . .