Never Fade (38 page)

I think Grams liked the story because she got to play the hero. She’d mobilized the neighbors into a search party and used her truck to haul my parents’ car back onto the highway.

“It’s just life for you, Little Bee,” she told me years later. “Sometimes you’re the one speeding along in a panic, doing too much, not paying attention, wrecking things you don’t mean to. And sometimes life just happens to you, and you can’t dodge it. It crashes into you because it wants to see what you’re made of.”

Despite how terrifying the story was to me as a kid, I still loved winter growing up; the cold didn’t bother me, because I knew that in the span of months, weeks, days, the season would change again. It’s easy to ride out the coldest of days with nothing more than that promise and the warmth of the people around you.

But this chill, the one I felt now, sank down to my bones; it was a numbness that wasn’t about to be shaken off. There was no escaping it.

The ground slid under my back, patches of mud gave way to ice, and then again to rocks that dug into my tailbone and ripped up the length of my spine. I heard the crackle of frostbitten leaves as they passed by my ears, felt the sharp tugging as my hair caught on something. One hand tried to close around a passing root, to anchor myself against the river of dirt, but I was moving too quickly. The sun flashed red behind my eyelids, stabbing through the pounding pain inside my skull. I couldn’t feel my right leg—I actually couldn’t feel much of anything on my right side. It wasn’t until the light receded and I could open my eyes that my mind finally made the connection that I was moving, not the ground.

The sky overhead was blue behind the patches of towering white clouds. I could just make it out through the naked gray arms of the trees. I drew my brows together, taking in the sharp stink of body odor. There was a grunt of effort as a large, rough surface passed under my back. Then it was smooth earth, a dip that came quickly, without warning, like the initial dive of a descending airplane. My stomach and eyes shifted down.

The man wore a deep red puffer jacket, one that had been worn and frayed by the decades. The hem by his hip was torn, the white stuffing pushing through the hole. His jeans were too tight. They protested every time he turned to get a better grip on my leg.

“D-Don’t—” My voice was gone. I tried to bring my other leg up to kick his grip off, but none of my limbs were responding.

The man must have felt me strain, because he glanced back over his shoulder. “Awake, are you?”

I was seeing two of him, then three, then four. Focus, I ordered myself. The guy looked about as threatening as a mall Santa—he wore his beard long and patchy, but the gut was there. Dad used to read me books that talked about the twinkle in Santa’s eye and his rosy red cheeks. Well, this one’s eyes were glinting, all right. With dollar signs.

“Try anything funny and I’ll snap that neck of yours. You hear me?”

Move.
I tried to lift my hips. Instructor Johnson had taught me how to break out of a hold like this, several times over. I tried feeling for a rock I could throw at the tender spot where the base of his skull met his neck, for the Swiss Army knife that was no longer stashed in my boot. My body wasn’t responding. I had hit my head—not that hard, right? The night before was cast in shadow. I remembered the long walk, Jude resetting the security system, all of those boxes and crates stamped with flags and strange languages. And Knox. Knox had been there, hadn’t he?

The headache exploded behind my eyes, and I squeezed them shut again. The sun was shining—why was I so, so cold?

“There’s someone here who’ll be
super
interested in meeting you,” the man continued. “Came nosing around this morning askin’ questions ’bout whether or not we’d seen any kids. Said there was a big bust up by the airpark, a few might have gotten away. And I thought to myself, Joe Hiddle, this man could be crazy or he could be right. So I went out hunting, like usual, and what do I find!”

I dropped my hips, trying to create as much drag as possible going down the next hill. Maybe I couldn’t fight back, but I wasn’t going to make it easy on him.

“What,”
he began, twisting my ankle at an unnatural angle, “did I just say?”

I used what little mobility I had in my neck to crane it forward as we came down that last hill. Tents, more than I had even seen back at the warehouse. Most were white or printed with the words
PROPERTY OF THE U.S. ARMY
. A jolt of terror went through me, powering one solid kick to the back of the man’s kneecap. The burst of pain that ripped down my right side was nothing compared to the man kicking me square in the ribs.

I went quietly because I had to. That barest hint of energy I had felt dripped out of me, and I could almost imagine it trailing behind us like a smear of blood.

“Sandra!” the man shouted. “Sandy, that guy still here?”

There were feet and faces around us from the moment we entered the line of tents. The smells here came in bursts—smoked meat, dirty laundry, stale water. It was all mud around the entrances of the tents, but inside were rugs and candles and piles of old mattresses and bedding.

“Joe, is that…?” someone began.

“Back off, Ava,” Joe warned. “I found her.
Sandra!
”

“He just left,” came another woman’s voice, her accent almost undecipherable. “I’ll go see if his truck is still on the highway. You—you just keep that one here.”

My sweatshirt had pulled up in the back, and the mud there felt as slimy as it was freezing. Something—someone—touched my left hand with the side of his foot. “Is she… Is that kid…”

A middle-age woman’s flushed face leaned down close over mine. She pulled one of her mismatched gloves off and started to put the back of her hand to my forehead. Joe all but growled at her, forcing her back a step. My eyes drifted shut again, and by the time I had worked them open, there were other faces in place of hers. It was a gallery wall of unrestrained emotions. Portraits of weary fear, landscapes of sadness, miniatures of curiosity. I tried shifting again, but I couldn’t ease the gripping pain in my head.

“She’s shaking,” one of the men said. I saw his yellowing Nikes, not his face. “Let me get her a blanket.”

“Is she sick? She’s so pale!” A woman this time. “God, she can’t be older than sixteen—
look
at her, Joe. You’re going to give her to that man?”

Here’s the thing about guns—they were like the talking stick my first grade teacher used to pass around during class. Whoever held it was the only one allowed to speak. “Get back to your damn tents.” Joe’s gun was a shiny silver revolver, and no one was willing to test to see how many bullets were left in the cylinder.

A woman—Sandra—let out a shriek of “Here he is! Here he is!” and it was carried straight to us by the wind. The unmistakable sound of a car engine followed, the growl of its engine louder and louder as it drove around the sunken perimeter of the tent city.

I licked my chapped lips, trying to drag in a deep breath that wouldn’t come. This man, whoever he was, was like a stone thrown into a lake of still water. Even the people who had questioned Joe scattered. My leg was dropped back to the ground. The blood that rushed back into it felt like it was filled with glass.

“And
my
money?” Joe was saying. “I wanna know how I’m getting reimbursed by Gray. He sure as shit didn’t do anything when the river took everything I owned!”

“Your name goes into the skip-tracer system. They find you. I’m just transport. Hold her there, will you?”

The fog ripped back from my brain. A foot came down on my wrist, pinning me.

“No!”
I choked out, eyes searching the tent fronts for a sympathetic face, an indecisive one—anyone who wasn’t Rob Meadows.

They watched. All of them, every single person in that tent city. Their anxiety pawed at the air and stirred in my mind. But their silence—that was deafening.

Opening my eyes again would make it real, but that was the way he wanted it. His hand fisted in whatever was left of my ponytail, tightening and wrenching my head back to get a better look at me. He smiled.

“Hiya,
Gem
,” Rob snarled. “Been a while.”

I choked on the word
no
.

“Here.” Rob absently shoved a tablet toward the man. “Type in your name and social security number—reward is split sixty-forty.”

“Sixty-f-forty!” Joe sputtered. “That’s—holy
God
…that figure’s right?”

“How much?” someone shouted from down the way. “Don’t forget I let you borrow my gun—you owe me for last month’s rations!”

“
Hold
her!” Rob barked. “She needs proper restraints!”

My hands were drawn together and kept there, not by plastic but by the press of metal. I heard the chain rattle and felt him lift my head, sucked in the scent of leather.

I screamed. It was a ragged, ugly noise that shattered my throat.
“No,”
I begged, tossing my head, twisting my neck to get away. Rob’s knees dropped onto my chest, and my next breath came out as a sob.

“Oh yeah, you remember
this
, don’t you?”

“No!” I sobbed. “Please—”

In the end, all of that training came to nothing. I could shift and cry and try to scream, but my ribs felt like they were caving in. The whole world was collapsing, crushing, and dissolving the faces of everyone who stood there watching. Rob snapped on a pair of thick rubber gloves before shoving the muzzle over my mouth and tightening the strap behind my head, and I was a little girl again. I was the monster of the story.

My breath was hot, steaming. Joe passed the tablet to Rob and took several steps back. He looked at the white-haired woman to his right and said, “God, if I’d known…I wouldn’t have touched the thing at all.”

Rob bent and tried to haul me out of the mud by the chain that connected the handcuffs to the muzzle. I got no farther than my knees; the rest of my body still hadn’t solidified under me. With an ear-scorching curse and a grunt of disgust, he picked me up and carried me under one arm, letting my feet drag and bounce along the ground. I reared back, trying to knock my head against the knots of muscles in his arm, but he only chuckled.

“I don’t always get the world,” he said. “But sometimes it treats me right. That look on your face when you saw me—I tell you, that was something else.”

I twisted as he dragged me up into the back of his old red Jeep.

“I knew if I watched the skip-tracer network, you’d screw up eventually. I’d get to ask you myself about the real reason you dodged out of the Op—what Cole and Cate have to do with it. I wanted to be the one to pick you up, to drive you straight back to that little camp of yours and watch them drag you in.”

I screamed into the leather, kicking at the back of the seat.

“You and me?” he said, pulling a long strip of plastic from the backpack he was wearing to bind my feet. I tried to kick, which earned me another laugh. “We’re gonna have such a fun trip back to West Virginia. I won’t even ask for the reward.”

The door slammed shut on my face, finally blocking me from the cluster of adults that stood in a single line in front of their homes, watching. The car rocked as he opened the driver’s door and sat down.

“You wanna know why I killed those kids, bitch?” he called back. “They weren’t fighters. None of you are, but you’re the ones with all the power in the League these days. You get to overrun us, decide the Ops, turn Alban into a worthless pile of cooing shit. But you don’t understand; none of you does. You don’t get what this world has to be if we’re going to survive this. Even these skip tracers, they just don’t understand that you’re worth a lot more to this country dead than alive.”

Rob was speeding despite the Jeep’s shuddering protests, blasting ZZ goddamn Top as loud as the stereo would go. He shouted back that he was tired of hearing me snivel and sob. What a coincidence. I was pretty damn tired of “La Grange” and the smell of exhaust.

I tried everything I could think of to get the muzzle off. The strap around the back of my head wouldn’t budge. He’d tightened it to the point of pain and, from the sound of it, had used a smaller plastic cable tie to reinforce it. I grunted, shifting to try to get to my boot.

Something pulled at my lower back, and there was a feeling like a tear. I bit my lip, ignoring the warm flush of liquid soaking into my jeans.

Michael. I’d forgotten about him getting the jump on me. No wonder it felt like I’d been dragged under a truck. I’d seen the blade—it had been small, about the size of the one on my Swiss Army knife. I needed to push through the pain—keep riding the adrenaline to keep from passing out again.

The space was tight and almost too narrow to work, but I could be small when I wanted to be. I slid my fingers past the laces into the tight leather. I curled myself around my knees to better my reach before remembering there was nothing to get—I’d never gotten my Swiss Army knife back. I hadn’t been able to find it in the supplies. I swallowed hard.
It’s okay. It’s okay. Don’t panic
—but I was. I could feel it bubbling up in my chest, and I knew if I let it get out of hand it would suffocate me.
You’re okay
.

The song finally—
finally
—faded out.

“Preparations for the Unity Summit are ongoing,”
came President Gray’s eerily calm voice.
“I look forward to sitting with these men, many of whom I greatly respect, and—”

Rob punched the station off. “It’s funny, isn’t it?” he called back. “That the president all of a sudden is that much more revolutionary than Alban? That he wants something
new
?”

Yeah,
I wanted to say,
hilarious
. The guy had the misfortune of heading up an organization that had gone and grown itself another head, one with sharper teeth.

“It took Alban forever to see what a mistake it was to bring you in, and he still sent you shitheads out to do jobs
any
of us could have done. He can have his past, but he’s not going to change
my
future.”