Strike (19 page)

I can almost feel Wyatt thinking as he absentmindedly rubs me, and then he jumps up and heads for the closet, where he holds up a can of spray paint.

“I've got it!”

“You've got what?”

His grin is insanely manic, and it reminds me that I have a heart. “You know what's faster and more explosive than yarn bombing? Graffiti.”

“C'mon, Wyatt. You want me to become a graffiti artist?”

“No,
you
want you to become a graffiti artist. It's the same thing you were already doing: making a public statement with art. Making people think. But instead of working on it for four days with needles or whatever, you do it out in the real world in thirty seconds. Bigger. Bolder. Faster. Comes with an automatic power high.”

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

He gets that adorably sheepish look he gets when he talks about his bad-boy days. “Me and Mikey used to do a little tagging. You know that pink cow on the electric box by the church?”

“Oh my God. I love that cow.”

“I totally drew that cow. I was high as hell, but it was done with love.”

“That's . . .” I grab his hand and yank him down beside me on
the bed. Possibilities are slamming through my head. “That's brilliant. I already had all these ideas for cross-stitch. ‘Debt Sweet Debt' and ‘Kill Your Valor' and ‘Pay or Die.' But your way . . . it's better. We can say whatever we want.” I pause, thinking. My voice drops. “Even warn people about what the CFF really is. Keep people from coming to the meetings and getting stuck or getting shot.”

“But . . . the CFF might be different in other places. Like, we have no way of knowing if every cell is insane, or if that's just Leon being Leon. For some people, the CFF might be their best shot at safety. The point is: You get to choose what you say. And you already have everything you need.” He puts the spray paint can on the dresser. It's bloodred—perfect for anti-Valor sentiment.

I pull him into a hug, because he's just given me the best gift. This is what I need to do. This is how I make myself useful and keep being the old Patsy instead of the new Zooey, although I don't know how much that name matters if Leon already knows my real name, already has my mom.

But where is she? I untangle myself from Wyatt, stand up, and twitch back the blinds to look at the lights shining from the big house. The trees obscure my view, but I can see people moving back and forth, lots of people. Maybe they had another meeting at the high school for new recruits. Or maybe they had a family reunion. Or maybe this is just dinner for those who haven't been ostracized.

“Do you think my mom is up there, at the house? That that's why they don't want me up there?”

Wyatt's standing behind me now, and his arms wrap around me, pulling me to his chest. “They should understand you well enough by now to know how stupid that would be. You don't let anything stand in your way when you want something.”

I soften and spin in his arms, looping them around his neck and going up on tiptoe to murmur against his lips, “Is that a good thing?”

He kisses me gently, and his breath smells like mint, all the blood scrubbed away. “It is to me.”

Soon my back is against the flimsy wall and my nails are scratching up his spine under the clean shirt. His thumbs plot my dimples, his hands big and warm, cradling my face, holding it just so. I arch my back into him, and he runs his fingertips down my shoulders, my back, my hips. With his fingers through my belt loops, he walks me to the bed, never breaking the kiss. He sits, and for once I'm taller, bending my neck down to kiss him. His hands rove up and down my legs, skimming over my skinny jeans, teasing up my thighs. He kisses down my neck, unzips my hoodie, licks my collarbones, and just starts to kiss under my shirt, toward my bra. All my horrible thoughts are gone, and there's nothing but him and me and closed doors guarded by garage-sale coffee tables, and I wish I'd put my backpack closer to the bed, because I don't want to break contact, and this is seriously hot, and there's a reason I bought condoms at the store.

Just as I'm pushing him onto his back and crawling on top of him, Matty lurches up and runs to the door, barking. Wyatt and I break apart—not with guilt this time, but with anger. Who the hell thinks they can interrupt this, interrupt us? I don't want to shoot someone else tonight, but I will if they keep me from Wyatt again.

“Knock-knock, lovebirds.”

It's Chance. Of course. I zip up my hoodie with a sigh, and Wyatt rearranges his clothes and stands, looking adorably rumpled and flushed.

“I'm getting really sick of that guy,” he mutters.

I shove the table aside and open the door to give Chance a death glare. But Gabriela's by his side looking happier than I've ever seen her, so I just sigh and step back to let them in. Chance immediately flops down on the flowered couch, and Gabriela goes straight to the Pop-Tarts on the kitchen counter.

“So Kevin's going to be okay, I take it?”

She nods as she chews. “Yeah, they said I got the right stuff. We should know by tomorrow if it's going to work. There's a small chance that he'll be allergic to whatever antibiotics I got, but we'll see a reaction fast if that's the case. He seemed pretty jazzed to have the food, too.” She takes another bite of her red velvet Pop-Tart.

I perch on a recliner. “So that's one less thing to worry about.” Wyatt sits on the arm, leaning against me. Things almost feel normal.

“What else is there?” Gabriela says. “We did their little hazing trip. Was that not enough?”

My jaw drops at her naïveté. “Oh my God. Are you joking? Do you seriously think these douchebags just wanted us to pass some test, and then we'd be honorary Cranes with full bathroom privileges? Hell no. They're going to use us like Valor used us. Leon already said we'd have a new assignment in the morning, and the way he said it made it sound dangerous. We're young. We're expendable. We've got no parents to stand up for us. There are no police, no laws. We're like those little kids in shoe factories in third-world countries. They are going to use us until we're dead.”

I'm crying again, but I can't stop it. I keep seeing blood bloom on that guy's belly, his friend going down in a hail of bullets. It occurs to me that when he burst out shooting, I cared more about killing him in a haze of rage than I did about keeping my own body alive. There are holes in the wall behind the door. From my gun. And I need to reload in case I have to do it again. The walls of this trailer may feel safe, but they can't stop bullets. Sure, it felt cozy for a while, me and Wyatt behind a locked door, but it's all just a big joke. There is no safety.

Gabriela points her Pop-Tart at me. “Wait. Is that a new assignment for you guys tomorrow, or for everyone?”

I know my smile is wrong. “Funny, but Leon didn't say.”

Chance puts his feet up on the couch, but it's not my couch, so I
don't care. “And if we're supposed to be earning our keep, what are all those other people in the tent city doing? The middle-aged ones and old ones? Because they sure as hell didn't get sent out to plant Wipers.”

When I think on it, he's right. There's got to be more than a hundred people outside of our group who live here, but I've never seen them do anything except line up at the house for food and showers. But I haven't really watched them closely, either, and we haven't been here long. I've been too busy just trying to stay alive. They're not out of their tents a ton, though, which makes me wonder if Leon's got them doing something quiet, masked by nylon walls, or if maybe they're doing something out in the woods, where I know the Cranes have other buildings. But the thing is—they're doing something for Leon, for the CFF.

Because in this world, nothing is free, is it?

“I guess we'll find out tomorrow,” I say. “Now, unless you want to bring up any more conspiracy theories, can we please go to sleep?”

Gabriela smacks Chance's feet off the couch. “Come on, bro. I think they want to get it on.”

Chance hops up and smacks Wyatt on the back. “Love in the time of capitalism?”

Wyatt turns red and shoves Chance away. “A man's got a right to be tired after a fistfight and a gunfight in one day.”

Chance and Gabriela look at each other, break into laughter,
and swagger toward the front door muttering, “A man's got a right,” and, “I punched a man for looking at me wrong,” in their best cowboy voices. I smother a giggle but am glad to close the door on them and slide the table back in place.

“Can we go to bed now?” Wyatt asks, rubbing his eyes.

I hook my thumbs through my belt loops and drawl, “A man's got a right.”

He picks me up, tosses me over his shoulder, and throws me on the bed.

Not that anything exciting happens in the freshly made bed. Like all our days together, this one feels as long as a week, and it's easy to forget that I was in a store being interrogated by a cop just a few short hours ago. We stare at each other, grinning, but neither of us makes a move. At the very least, I want to brush my teeth and put on my pajamas, because I feel beyond gross, so I roll off the bed and head for the bathroom with my backpack.

I look like crap, but that's become normal. My eyes are bloodshot from crying, and my hair's a filthy mess. But I'm standing in front of a shower, so what the hell? I close the bathroom door, turn the shower on hot, step out of my clothes, and lose myself in scalding-hot water. Maybe if I stand here long enough, I can wash
all the grit and roughness and sadness off my skin. Unlike my last shower, stolen from Château Tuscano, the only shampoo here is the kind of crappy two-in-one that guys use to smell like angry werewolves. But I want to be clean, so I use it anyway. My armpit hair is out of control, but I doubt Wyatt's going to complain. In just a week, the stubble on my legs has grown lush, and I poke it, wishing I'd bought razors. I always figured that when the apocalypse hit, body hair would come back in style, quick.

When the hot water starts to run out, I feel a little guilty for using it all, but I guess it'll recharge if Wyatt wants a shower later. I step out and fumble for a towel, hurrying into my new pajamas. Such luxury, really, to get to change for bed, and while standing up with overhead lights. I wipe off my face, put on moisturizer, floss, brush my teeth, add deodorant, and rub in lotion. All the little luxuries that make me feel less like a murderer living in a stolen trailer and more like a girl who doesn't want to gross out the boy she's about to sleep with.

Wait. Not
sleep with
sleep with. Sleep beside. Because I don't know how to sleep alone anymore. I don't want to remember how. The nightmares are too dark.

My hair is a wet mess, but I run the new brush through it and scoot my bangs to the side. There's no hair dryer, because why would three dudes need one? I fetch my mom's rosary out of my jeans and slip it over my head, where it dangles down to my belly, a strange
feeling against my skin. When there's nothing left to do, I step out into the bedroom. Wyatt's sitting on the bed, doing a crossword. The lighting is better in here, and he's not wearing his shirt, and there are bruises all over him. I don't know if they're from today's fight with his driver, from something else, from the way I smacked my fists against him jokingly when he picked up me. I hurry to sit beside him, touching the purple smudges.

“Are you hurt?”

He shrugs, as if the question makes him uncomfortable. “Not really. Still amped up a little. Fights do that to me.”

I find ibuprofen in the medicine cabinet and bring Wyatt a glass of water and two brown pills. He swallows them, carefully sets down the glass, and takes my hand in both of his.

“Thank you.”

“No big deal.”

“No, I mean . . . for everything. I was just sitting here, staring at the page, thinking about how if you'd just killed my brother, you could've had a chance at a normal life. You could've just walked away.”

I sit back against the pillows, still holding his hand. “I don't think that was ever an option. Look what they did to Chance's family. I don't think I was supposed to live through that. None of us were.” A few beats later I add, “And neither were our parents.”

“You think Leon really has your mom?”

I drop his hand. “I don't know, Wyatt! How could I know?”

“Do you want to drive by your house tomorrow? See if she's there?”

And that reminds me.

“Hey, don't you have that guy's phone?”

Wyatt nods, gets it out of his crumpled jeans. I just now noticed he's only in pajama pants, which reminds me of that time I didn't shoot him because he had a pajama boner, which reminds me that we are alone in bed behind a locked door, which makes me very much not want to call my mom at this exact moment, but that's what I'm going to do.

He hands me the phone, and I dial my house. My hands are shaking so hard that I actually mess up the number and have to backtrack. I press the green button and wait. After a moment, it rings. And rings and rings and rings. No one picks up, and the answering machine doesn't answer, and that's the scariest thing of all, because the answering machine always picks up. I should be hearing my voice right now, but all I get is ringing.

“No answer?” Wyatt asks softly.

I shake my head and end the call.

“Did you try her cell? Could she be staying with your grandparents or something?”

I stare at him like he's an idiot, because he keeps forgetting that I was broke-ass poor. “We could only afford one cell, and
mine's gone. There's no one else. Just me and Mom.”

My eyes are burning, and I wind back my arm to throw the phone at the wall, but Wyatt catches my hand and uncurls my clenched fingers. He puts the phone on the bedside table and pulls me close, and now I'm the little spoon and he's stroking my wet hair like it's actually pleasant to touch.