The Last Uprising (Defectors Trilogy) (26 page)

It’s not,
I thought.

“When did the headaches go away for you?” I mused. I could hardly remember the last time I’d felt that shooting pain in the back of my head.

Amory shrugged. “The last bad one I remember happened when you were about to go into the Infinity Building.”

I strained my memory to recall the time he was talking about, but that was still a little fuzzy. I remembered Greyson warning me about Mariah, Amory’s goodbye, Mariah handing us over to Aryus, and Jared falling onto the marble floor. He had tried to save me, and they had shot him.

“I still get a twinge now and then,” Amory continued. “Like this morning . . . any time I’m really afraid.”

“That’s not when I get them,” I said slowly. “For me, they came on whenever the feelings started coming back . . . like when Greyson talked me out of leaving and when you —” I broke off. I did not like remembering myself that way.
 

The time I had not known whose side I was really on had been dark and lonely. And even though I knew it was the result of World Corp’s brainwashing, I hated myself for it.

“So . . . when you’re feeling
love
?” Amory asked. The way he said the last word sounded very shy, as though he were testing the waters.

I smiled. “Love . . . sometimes. Or compassion, I guess.”

“That fits.”

I shifted in his arms so I could look at him. “Why do you say that?”

“I remember when Sector X fell. The way you felt about killing a carrier . . . I thought that guilt would end you. Even though you thought their humanity was gone, you still hated ending a life.”

I thought hard for a moment, trying to remember any of my World Corp training, but that time in my life was a completely blank canvas. I had no idea what simulations they had put me through or how they had tried to tamper with my brain.

“The pain is the result of conditioning, right?” I asked.

“I suppose. That’s why they made adjustments to your CID. As your pain tolerance grew —”

“But why would we have a ghost response to two very different things? Unless they were trying to prevent us from feeling those emotions while we were there. Fear and compassion . . . those are completely unrelated.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe that’s what they saw as our greatest weakness. That’s what they needed to stamp out of us before we would make good soldiers.”

I jerked my head around to look at him.
 

Amory was staring straight ahead, his face pale. He had figured it out, and it sent a horrible chill throughout my whole body. World Corp’s manipulation had been more sophisticated than I had thought if they could condition us to reject compassion, reject fear, reject love — whatever threatened their mission.

Just then, I heard an inhuman wail, followed by a strangled, familiar scream. It had come from the edge of the woods around the field.

Roman.

Amory and I jumped to our feet. Another howl drifted across the field, but Roman was silent.

My mind conjured up horrible images of carriers tackling him to the ground and tearing into his flesh. No carrier had ever gotten the jump on Roman. He had to be outnumbered.
 

The horde we had feared had been laying low, just waiting for the right opportunity to attack.

“Go back to the house!” Amory yelled, taking off toward the woods. “Get help!”

I shook my head, not wanting him to go out there on his own. But I hadn’t brought a weapon with me. How stupid.

I turned and ran to the barn, pounding on the huge sliding door. “Get up!” I yelled. “Carriers!”
 

I kept banging on the door until a woman with frizzy hair answered my frantic knocks. I ducked inside and felt desperately along the walls for the old rifles Logan always stowed there. Nothing.
 

A few rebels had awoken and were grumbling. Others had gotten out of bed in alarm to see what the commotion was about. When somebody lit a lantern, I saw a dull knife lying on the shop table.

“Get the others at the main house!” I yelled at them. “Roman’s been attacked!”

I shrugged off Ida’s coat, stuck the knife in my boot, and tore out of the barn in the direction Amory had run.

It was an inky starless night — impossible to see anything around me. I worried I would collide with someone — or something — in the dark, but there was nothing but open field between me and the woods.
 

I was sure everyone within a mile could hear my feet crashing through the flattened skeletons of corn stalks, but I didn’t care. I was ready to fight.

As I drew closer to the tree line, I heard low growls and scuffling. Then there was a wounded cry like the sound a dog might make.
Carriers.

My blood pounded in my veins, and all thoughts and emotions seemed disconnected from my body. I wasn’t afraid of anything anymore. For a moment, all I could see was the cloud of my own breath, but then I caught movement in the trees.

As I entered the woods, the growls of the carriers grew more pronounced. More than a dozen were lumbering toward me in the shadows, but when I squinted, I could see them everywhere: carriers clawing out of the ravine, carriers lurking under trees, carriers staggering around looking for food.

Roman
had
stumbled upon the horde, though I knew it hadn’t been there yesterday. Panic gripped my entire body. Amory was nowhere to be seen.

I staggered backward, away from the swarming carriers, and my boots connected with a body. I tripped, and the body groaned.

“Roman?”

No answer.

He was slumped beneath a tree, limp and motionless. I squinted at the ground, where three dead carriers were sprawled in the dirt.

“Amory,” I hissed, not daring to shout.

Something moved on the other side of the tree, and then Amory was at my shoulder. “Haven!” he whispered, brushing his hand up my arm. “Why did you come alone?”

“The others are on their way. Where did all these carriers come from?”

He shook his head. “The Burns family must have turned and joined up with what was left of that horde.”

My stomach clenched remembering Hank and Denny, their foul breath and rotten teeth.

“Haven, get Roman out of here. Now!”

I bent down and felt my way up to Roman’s face, but my hands were covered in blood before they reached it.

“Oh my god. Amory . . .”

“I know,” he growled. “They must have jumped him. That’s as far as he got before he collapsed. Get him out of here.”

I didn’t want to leave Amory, but Roman was in bad shape. If I didn’t get him back to the house and stop the bleeding, he would die.
 

Ignoring the warm blood seeping through his sweatshirt, I reached under his arms and pulled. I waited for him to struggle into a standing position, but he was practically unconscious — dead weight. My back screamed in protest, but I couldn’t shift him.

“He’s weak,” I whispered. My voice was shaking. “I can’t carry him. You’ll have to take him.”

“I won’t leave you.”

“Can you shoot them?”

Amory shook his head. “Once I start, they’re going to swarm. I can’t take them down fast enough.”

I tried to breathe, but my lungs wouldn’t expand fully. We didn’t have a choice. We had to fight them.

I bent down to retrieve the dull knife from my boot and straightened up, standing shoulder to shoulder with Amory.
 

“Let’s go.”

We flew at the mob of carriers, and I sank my knife into the deteriorating flesh of the nearest one’s shoulder, just missing her heart. She cried out in agony, and I yanked the knife out for another go.

The carrier threw out an arm, catching me across the face with such force that I staggered backward. I squinted to find my aim, but the moon was behind the clouds, and there was no light.

This time I aimed lower, and I felt the satisfying gush of hot blood as my blade sank into the carrier’s stomach. I yanked it out and elbowed her in the side of the head, and she collapsed onto the ground.

It wasn’t a clean death, but I would take it.

Another was lumbering toward me, and Amory was struggling with two others just feet away. He was fast, and his knife was sharp, but these carriers were early stage four. Their humanity was gone, and they still had their strength.

The second carrier I stabbed put up a fight, lashing out at me with his fists. I avoided one hit purely on instinct, but the other connected with the side of my jaw. I staggered backward, feeling my face starting to swell, and bumped into another carrier that was wandering over to Roman.
 

I turned around and shoved my blade into her back, hoping I had somehow pierced her heart. The carrier cried like a banshee, and I pulled the knife out.
 

It was much more difficult to work with a dull blade, and my shoulder was already aching from the extra force required for each stab.

Footsteps were approaching from the field, and relief washed over me. There seemed to be a never-ending supply of carriers emerging from the woods, and we would need all the help we could get.

Logan and Greyson stood at the front of the crowd. Logan looked ready for a fight with an enormous knife in each hand, but her face paled when she saw the great swarm of carriers lurching through the woods. We had to contain them before they reached the farm.

I swiped at one carrier that was encroaching on my space, and he stumbled backward, bumping into a tree.

“Greyson!” I yelled. “Help Amory take Roman back to the house. He’s losing too much blood.”

Greyson gave a shaky nod, but Amory looked over his shoulder with reluctance.
 

“I won’t leave you,” he growled, slicing his knife viciously across the throat of a carrier he was holding in a headlock.

“You have to. You’re the only one who can help him.”

The look on his face said he knew I was right, and I jumped between him and the next carrier so he could get to Roman.
 

Roman groaned loudly as Amory and Greyson pulled him up, and they staggered back up toward the house with his huge form hanging between them.

In the few minutes I hadn’t been paying attention, the carriers seemed to have multiplied. I took up the knife Greyson had left and plunged it into the heart of the nearest one. The strangled scream echoed through the trees, and a heavy shudder rumbled through my gut and out my throat.

The other rebels were fighting like cavemen with whatever they had found up at the farm. They were taking out carriers with the sharp edges of shovels, rakes — even a hammer. It didn’t look effective, but their blows had so much force and fury that they were mowing them down faster than I could with a proper weapon. It was a grisly scene, and more than once, I felt the overwhelming urge to vomit as blood spattered my face.

After a few moments, tunnel vision set in. My shoulder was burning, I was out of breath, and my hair was plastered to my forehead with a sticky mixture of sweat and blood.
 

Suddenly I felt a shooting pain in the back of my neck, and cold fear clamped down on my chest as something heavy overtook me.
 

Teeth — human teeth — were digging into my skin.

I lashed out, trying to buck the carrier off me, but his teeth were embedded in the flesh between my neck and shoulder. His nose was buried in my hair, sniffing the dinner I had cooked. He was starving.

I jabbed my elbow back as hard as I could, and the carrier jerked away. But in the moment I’d been incapacitated, another carrier had stumbled up to me. I swiped my knife at him, but the carrier behind me wrapped his arms around my neck, pulling me backward and latching on to my shoulder. I felt the flesh being ripped from the bone, and I screamed.

I stomped down on the carrier’s instep and jabbed my elbow back again with as much force as I could muster, skewering the second carrier in the abdomen. He fell away, but the carrier behind me stumbled, pulling me down with him.

Pain shot up my side as I hit the ground, and the carrier who’d bitten me clambered onto my chest. His putrid breath filled my mouth, and I gagged. I squinted desperately at his mouth. It was covered in blood — my blood — but I couldn’t see any sores.
 

The bites in my neck and shoulder burned as the carrier pushed me into the ground, grinding dirt and dead leaves into the wound. I swung out my fist, knocking him back for a moment, and I felt along the ground for my knife.

Nothing.

The other carrier was elbowing in, trying to fight off the one that had me pinned. I swung at him as hard as I could, but my hit was weak. I was exhausted and defeated, with no fight left in me.

The first carrier was hunkering down, the saliva coating his bloodied mouth in dripping ropes. His yellow eyes flashed across my face. He knew I was weak, and he could smell the food.

I was going to die, and he would still go hungry.

Then, in a daze, I watched the flash of a blade glide across the carrier’s throat. A disembodied boot swung out of nowhere and connected with his skull. The same knife dispatched the second carrier, and he collapsed beside me in a pile of rags and rotten flesh.
 

I looked up for my savior and saw a rugged-looking man wielding a switchblade. He was pale with a shaved head and a dark, dirty scruff obscuring his expression. He held out an arm, and I took it, eyeing the sleeve of tattoos snaking up under his leather jacket.

“Thank you,” I gasped, trying to catch my breath.

“Thought I would give you a hand,” he muttered. “You were doing pretty good on your own, but once they had you on the ground, I knew you was a goner. You’re too small.”

“You’re right.” I tried to stand up straight, but the pain from my wounds was spreading down my back.

“Did that one have the sores yet?”

I shook my head, knowing my savior was referring to the carrier that had bitten me. “I don’t think so. It could have been a lot worse.”

He gave me an approving look and turned back to the knot of carriers shuffling toward us.