Broken (17 page)

"Yeah." He found himself with nothing else to add. Silence returned, this time to stay until dawn.

* * *

Broken ate like a horse. The men gathered around her watching, open-mouthed, as she inhaled a vast pile of potatoes, a bowl of unspecified vegetables, a bit of chicken, a gallon of milk, half a block of cheese, and most of a loaf of bread.

When she was done, she let off an enormous belch. The men applauded.

"Damn," said the guy who had first spoken to her, "You’re an eater."

"I was hungry," she said. "Sorry."

"No trouble. I guess there’s no more for us, though, right, boys?" They laughed. "Okay, but serious time. You gonna answer questions like you said?"

"Yah," she agreed.

"Okay. Now. What were you doing out there?"

"Jumped out of a hopper."

They exchanged glances. "Don’t lie."

"It’s true," she said.

"And you’re okay? That makes no sense."

"…Parachute?" she tried.

"Where is it, then?" another man asked.

She shrugged. "Don’t know. Fell off."

"Hang on." A new man, who had a jarring combination of dark skin and radioactive green hair, entered. "What kind of hopper?"

"Black Bands," she said. "But I got away."

The green-haired man leaned closer. "How do you know we won’t turn you in? Huh?"

"You don’t seem like Black Bands," she said simply. And it was true. They didn’t. She’d been around long enough to know who generally fell on which side. These guys weren’t going to be wearing black armbands with VHLS initialed on them any time soon. It wasn’t that they seemed disorganized and purposeless—though that was true. They just had a certain look in their eyes.  They looked
hunted
.

They moved off and talked in hushed tones for a minute. She caught some of the conversation. "Banders… come back… flight path… next house…" They all looked at her and came to some sort of decision.

"Okay, we’re going to go on to the next place. You can come with us, but we got to scan you first."

"Scan away," she said. "I’m not carrying anything."

They scanned her with three separate instruments, and found nothing.

"All right. Come on."

"Hey," she said, regretting it almost as soon as she opened her mouth. "How do you know
I’m
not one of them?"

They laughed again. "You're not the type," said Green Hair. "You just some crazy lady. You can’t be one of them and look like you do."

Fair enough. She did look pretty bad, she was sure. Her clothes were caked in blood, her silver hair was matted and unkempt, and her face… was her face. She was used to it. She rose and followed the men outside.

* * *

There were six men in this outfit, whatever it was. They had taken her guns from her, which she figured was fine since they weren’t hers to begin with, and added them to a big stash in a mag-van parked in a dirt driveway.

"Okay," said Green Hair, who seemed to be the leader. "Everybody get in. We goin’ now." Green Hair’s English was a little strange, almost lilting; he sounded like he might be from the Caribbean, or maybe South America. The men piled into the mag-van, which started up with a deafening roar. The ground engine was an old internal combustion relic. She wondered what they were using for fuel. It sure stank, whatever it was.

Broken sat on one of the seats next to two leering, mostly drunk men. "Hey, gran’ma," one slurred. "Taking a ride?" His companion found this hilarious and giggled wildly.

 “Not your grandma,” she snorted. Her hair fooled a lot of people into thinking she was older.

"You look like you been through hell," a more sober man said, squinting through the darkness. "That blood on there?"

"Yuh," she assented.

"Yours?"

"Most. Some belongs to a Black Band, I think."

The men clapped and shouted, obviously disbelieving.

She smiled back. She didn’t care what they thought of her; she knew what she’d done.

The van strained and groaned, then rolled forward on heavily treaded tires.

"Keep off the main roads," Green Hair said. "Can’t hit a checkpoint."

"Yeah, yeah," said the driver, an old white man in his sixties. "We’ll be fine."

The van bumped and jostled down the driveway. "Turn on the headlights," Green Hair said mildly.

"Oh, right," the old man said, and pulled a switch. The road ahead was illuminated—badly. One light must be out, Broken reasoned.

The main road was about half a mile down the dirt driveway, after which Broken, still full of food, was starting to feel a little sick.

"Where is it?" the old man asked.

Green Hair sighed loudly. "Turn left." As they nudged onto the main road, the county magnetics took over, and the van lurched  a few feet off the ground. Broken could hear the wheels retracting with a horrible screech and a scrape, and then there was nothing but the quiet hum of the electromagnetic generator. The van hesitantly powered forward and picked up speed.

"Keep going on this road, then go right at the old post," Green Hair said. "You know the one."

"Yeah, yeah," the old man grumbled.

The van sped soundlessly through the New Jersey night. Broken forced her dinner back down (she remembered now, she always got carsick) and tried to focus on not throwing up.

I hope Michael is doing better
, she thought. To her right, the first rays of dawn were beginning to appear.

[CHAPTER 17]

T
o Michael’s consternation, the sun rose directly in front of them. They were heading southeast—back towards the river.

"We need to head the other way," he said. Monica groaned.

 "You can see the future, but you can’t even tell which direction we’re going in?” She was teasing. Mostly.

He shrugged gamely. “I don't do directions.” She snorted, half-smiling. Ian started to make a fuss, and Michael smelled something foul. "Can you change him?" he asked . "I did it the last three times."

"He doesn’t like me," Monica said, looking at Ian. "He gets it—" she swallowed hard, "He gets it
all
over
me."

Michael laughed. "He does that to everyone."

Ian was now starting to really get going. He howled and screamed, as if someone was sticking him with pins. "I’ll do it," Michael volunteered at last. He didn’t want to drive Monica away again.

 "Oh, I’ll help," Monica said huffily. "Damn it! He is
loud
." Michael rummaged through his pack for diapers while Monica fought with Ian’s diaper.

'Hey, Michael?” she asked.

“Yeah?” he said, withdrawing a new plastic poop catcher. He hated these things.

“When... when you look at me, what do you see?”

He glanced up at her, startled by the question. She had that old lopsided smile on her face; he hadn’t seen it in too long.

“Maybe you can tell my fortune,” she said, green eyes mischievous.

“Um, well,” he stammered, and met her gaze.

—Monica walked alone, across a desert. She carried a baby. It wasn't Ian.

—There was a room, in the city on faraway Calvasna, where she waited for her husband to come home. When he did, she was overjoyed, but afraid at the same time. Did the man look familiar? Michael almost recognized him.

—There was a green field, and Monica, dressed in blue, hiked through it towards a huge ramshackle house. Two people flew above it in graceful, sweeping arcs.

—Monica sat in a blooming garden, surrounded by her grandchildren.

—She waited in a cell. She'd be there for the rest of her short life.

“There's a lot of possibilties,” he said. “But one... I saw you in a meadow, walking towards a big house. I think your friends were there. And another... I saw you married.”

“To who?”

“No idea.”

She smiled crookedly. “It's good... to think I have a future, no matter what it might be. At least we won't be here forever.”

Snap. Click
.

Their heads shot up at the sudden sound. Michael started as he found himself looking down the barrel of an old-fashioned machine gun.

"Stand up," commanded the machine gun’s owner. "Slowly."

Four men, each holding an identical machine gun, gestured at them. Their faces were covered; they wore camouflage from head to toe. Where had they come from? "Let’s go. Nice and easy."

Michael and Monica stood up. Ian, almost as if he realized the danger, had become eerily quiet.

"Hands high," one said, gesturing. They held their hands in the air, palms open. "All right. Put ‘em behind your head. You’re prisoners."

Michael’s mouth was dry. He’d seen these guys in a few visions, but he hadn’t really expected them, at least not just yet. He’d been hoping not to see them at all.

"Hey, what are we prisoners for?" Monica demanded. "Who are you guys?"

Two of them trained their weapons on her, impassive behind camouflage bandannas. She shut up.

A vivid memory struck Michael. He had been nine years old, and he had looked in the mirror one morning.

A man in camouflage just like these men had a gun pressed to his head. "Start over, traitor! Start all over again!" Michael started again, but the first word came out all wrong. The man in camouflage shot him in the head.

"Follow me," the leader said. "We have you covered from behind. Try anything, we shoot you." He seemed very matter-of-fact about it. Michael believed him. The leader marched off into the forest.

"The baby?" Michael hesitantly asked, looking back. But one of the men had grabbed the pack, baby and all. Ian mewled, confused, frightened, and diaper still full of shit.

* * *

The woods opened into a clearing, in which stood a rundown cabin. A trail of smoke curled out of a slender stovepipe. Michael could smell the pleasant tang of wood burning.

The four men tramped up to the door, keeping their muzzles trained on Monica and Michael. The leader went inside for a second, then reemerged.

"Inside," he barked. They obeyed, stepping onto the wood porch and through the heavy oak door into a darkened room where an old wood stove sat, radiating warmth. Two men sat behind a table, reading what looked like newspapers. Behind them hung a familiar yet shocking sight: a flag with thirteen red-and-white stripes, and a blue, star-filled canton. The old flag of the United States, banned since the end of the Last War. They’d seen it only in textbooks and movies about the war, for the most part—

Joe held the old piece of cloth reverently. "We worshiped it when I was a boy. I took up a gun to try and defend it. Can you believe that? But I saw the end coming." He tapped his head. "So I deserted my post. I took this with me, though. It used to stand for something a lot better than what it ended up standing for." He sighed. "But they don’t tell you that. To the Australians"—Joe always referred to the Confederation government as “the Australians”—"it’s just a symbol of evil, of the wickedness of Greenleaf’s administration. My own dad hated Greenleaf. But he loved this. It’s hard to say why, really, but they were two separate things to him."

He put the old flag away. "I suppose it
is
just a thing, and that’s that."

—
but every once in a while… they’d seen it somewhere else. Like most people of their generation, Michael and Monica had never seen anyone display one freely. So they did what Americans their age did when they saw that old flag; they gaped, and a little shiver ran up and down their spines.

One of the men saw where their gaze lay. He grunted. "Calls to something in the blood, don’t it. I know the feeling."

"That flag’s illegal," Monica declared flatly. The men laughed a short, mirthless laugh.

"Yeah, so it is. So are we. So are you, most likely. UNP?"

Monica flushed. "
I
am," she said defiantly.

"Thought so. Why else wander around the woods, lost, in the cold, with a baby crying so loud the dead will come back to life? How ‘bout you?" The man behind the table pointed at Michael.

"They want me for other reasons," Michael said.

The man nodded. "Fair enough, right? I’m Colonel Wayne." He extended a hand. Michael took it gingerly; the man had a grip like iron. He did not offer his hand to Monica. "This is the 1
st
New Jersey Regiment of the American Liberation Army." The men surrounding them nodded, still keeping a hand on their weapons. "You are our prisoners, I’m afraid."