SWAB (A Young Adult Dystopian Novel)
Read SWAB (A Young Adult Dystopian Novel) Online
Authors: Heather Choate
Tags: #science fiction, #young adult, #dystopian
Swab
Heather Choate
SWAB
Heather Choate
Copyright 2014 by Heather Choate
Published by Akela Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recorded, photocopied, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are a product of the author’s imagination. Any similarity to persons living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Also by Heather Choate:
“SKYWREN” chapter book series
“META BLACKWING” young adult fiction
“FRAYED CROSSING” adult fiction
See what’s coming next at:
www.heatherchoate.com
For Jasmine, who always let me imagine.
CONTENTS
Chapter One: A Thousand Gallons
Chapter Seven: A Funny Way of Speaking
Chapter Nine: I Can Still Fight
Chapter Twelve: Yoda Questions
Chapter Fourteen: Nectar and Divish
Chapter Sixteen: Glowing and Growing
Chapter Nineteen: Double Death
Chapter Twenty-One: Not Purely Stupid
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Atrium
Chapter Twenty-Four: Welcome Blackness
Chapter Twenty-Five: Long Enough
Chapter Twenty-Six: Beauty and Chaos
Chapter Thirty-One: The Things That Don’t Change
A Thousand Gallons
The scarb got her hand cinched around my left ankle and squeezed, breaking the bones. A scream ripped out of my throat. Adrenaline pumped into my veins, and though my foot now hung limply, I could still use my arms. Using all of my core strength, I twisted out of her hold and lunged for her throat. My nails dug into the weak flesh that grew over the
armored chitin plates
of her neck, causing clear liquid to stream down her pale green-tinted throat.
Her red hair whirled like long whips against my face as she spun out of my hold. She was just too fast. Pure energy and muscle. Like a cheetah, or a missile. Something beautiful, sleek, and deadly.
The heel of her foot made contact with my stomach before I even realized she had launched a kick. All the air whooshed out of my lungs, and my body flew backward. I landed on the dirt with a thud that rattled my insides. The end of my chin dripped with sweat. My head throbbed. I pulled myself back up onto my good leg to face her for what I knew was probably the last time. Because that’s what we did. It’s all we could do. We kept fighting.
Wiping blood from my nose, I raised my chin. She stood to my right, thinner than most of the others, but that seemed only to add to her strength. I didn’t expect her to be so hard to kill. If I blinked, she could drive her barbed elbow into my sternum or my skull and that would be it.
Her expression revealed nothing. There was no twitch of a smile on her lips, no cackle of laughter as she knew I’d been defeated. If she took joy in this moment, she didn’t show it. I looked into her green eyes. Like most scarb the irises were split into multiple irises. Hers had four each. I wondered what she felt. Joy? Pleasure? Pain? Could she feel anything at all?
She leapt into the air, like a bird in flight, her body aimed like a dagger at my heart. I knew the moment had come, and I closed my eyes.
*****
Mr. Blackwell paced in front of the whiteboard, eyeing the rest of us like we were to be the next meal on his plate. “When a scarb comes at you with the barbs on its elbows, like this”—he raised his arm and sent the point of his elbow flying at a kid in the front row, just barely missing the tip of the poor boy’s nose—“what do you do?”
The kid pressed himself to the back of his chair and blinked dumbly back at him. “Uh,” was all he muttered.
Pointy-nosed Cassandra answered matter-of-factly. “You deflect it with a block.”
Mr. Blackwell raised an eyebrow. “And let the barbs pierce you to your radius? If it has acid, the poison would enter your bloodstream, and you’d be dead in an hour.”
Cassandra flipped her long auburn braid. “That’s why you wear body armor, of course.”
I could’ve told her that body armor offered some protection, but not enough. The scarb were getting stronger. Poor Cassandra had all the textbook answers, but she had never actually fought a scarb. The last scarb she’d seen had been the one that took off her mother’s head. No, I wouldn’t correct her about the body armor. Given what I’d done three weeks ago, I’d made it a point to not say anything at all.
“Maybe you could soak them in acid?” Matt said.
Mr. Blackwell shook his head, and the class continued arguing. I just leaned my head back against my seat, twisted my fingers into my long blonde hair, and looked at the clock for the thousandth time that morning. I didn’t want to sit here talking about how to fight scarb; I wanted to get out there and actually do it.
“Have patience, Cat,” Ray had told me the night before, when we were the last two around the campfire. “Mr. Blackwell and the others are only doing what they think is best.”
“Maybe seven years ago education for kids was important,” I’d protested. “But now, knowing fifty facts about a scarb isn’t going to keep it from killing you.”
The instruction course had just been implemented, and everyone in the community under eighteen had to attend daily classes. Ray was already nineteen. I was the unlucky one whose eighteenth birthday was still six months away. It might as well have been an eternity.
Morning classes were technical, a chance to study and hopefully understand more about the scarb: what they were and how to destroy them. Afternoons were supposed to be for practical applications, but Mr. Blackwell seemed to be avoiding it.
Not that sparring with these children would actually be a challenge. Most of them had never even swung an axe; I’d already smashed the plated-skulls of two scarb this year.
Ray tried to make it up to me with extra-long training sessions after evening meal. But he was usually tired from hauling lumber down from the hills all day, and I was so pent up, I went off on him like a caged animal. It’s not a very nice way to treat your boyfriend, but he took it.
Cassandra’s jarring voice brought me back to the class. “If you just bring, like, a thousand gallons of water that would get all of them.”
“Yeah,” I snapped, unable to stand their ignorance any longer. “And how are you going to do that? None of the fire trucks are working, and it’s a half-day walk to any town that might have parts. And you know what’s infested all of those towns? Scarb.” The class fell silent. No one wanted to speak. They all knew why I was there, and it actually had very little to do with my age.
My cheeks were hot. I sealed my lips, cursing myself for being stupid enough to allow them to open. The guilt I didn’t want to let myself feel crept into my chest. Again, I tried to smash it down.
It was Cassandra’s fault,
I thought
.
She shouldn’t have made such a dumb suggestion.
Five awkward minutes later, Mr. Blackwell dismissed us for lunch. We filed out of the hut that served as our classroom and into the center of our make-shift town. Beside the school hut was the Post, the largest structure, where we stored our equipment and other supplies that needed to be kept out of the rain. The spring had been rough, though, and several of the main support beams had given out in the last rainstorm. The building now had a lopsided look about it. That was why Ray was helping the other men bring lumber down from the hills.
A small walkway divided the Post from the other half of the town, which consisted of rows of shabby hovels and army surplus tents we used as homes. Officers Reynolds and May brought them to Rimerock, I think. In fact, they had brought most of the supplies we had managed to hang onto.
Beyond the hovels was the lake. In fact, the lake was there if you walked more than twelve minutes in any direction. Rimerock subsisted upon a small island tucked away in the center of a high, Rocky Mountain lake in southern Colorado.
I followed the other students to a grassy spot behind the Post where Mrs. Nistler was serving trout on rye bread. The sight of the fish made my stomach heave. Fresh food was good, but I was too upset. So, I kept walking further into the aspens until the sights and sounds of the community faded behind me. A blue jay flitted across the path in front of me. It perched up on a tree and began singing. I found it kind of sad. The whole world had completely changed and yet the bird kept singing. It was then I realized it was only our human world that had changed.