Torched (15 page)

“Really?” Seed asked in a horrified tone, and was shushed by everyone, including Liberty and Meadow. Then Seed saw me.

“Oh, my God.” She rushed over to us. “Is it true? You guys saw a lynx and a kit this morning?”

Coyote looked at me directly for the first time in hours. “It was really Sky who saw it.” His voice was sad, but no one else seemed to notice.

“Really?” Jack Rabbit punched me on the shoulder. “Dude, that is so awesome! Why didn’t you say anything earlier?”

“Did you get, like, a photo?” Grizz asked.

I shook my head, wishing again that I had thought to grab the camera.

“That is so great,” Meadow said. She gestured at the machines. “So even this hasn’t driven them away?”

Just then, Blue walked into the clearing. “Do any of you know about this?” she demanded, holding out a piece of paper. “It was stapled on every telephone pole back in town.”

I took the paper from her and read it in the circle of my headlamp. Coyote leaned over my shoulder, but I noticed he was careful not to touch me.

At the top of the paper was the MED logo, a series of linked figures encircling the Earth. I had always thought they looked like a chain of paper dolls, but the words underneath were anything but childish.

I hit the record button on my watch as Coyote read aloud.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So it was beginning, just as Richter had said.

“Who wrote this?” Coyote demanded.

“Don’t you think it’s pretty obvious?” Blue asked as the others crowded around. “It sounds just like Hawk.”

“Is that what you think, Blue?”

At the sound of Hawk’s voice, we all jumped. I wondered how long he had been watching us. Blue met his glare directly, but most of the other MED members looked at each other or the ground, anywhere but at Hawk. They were like children caught doing something naughty.

“So you’re saying you
would
hurt someone?” Blue demanded, her hands on her hips. “Don’t you know these loggers are only just trying to feed their families? Harming one of them isn’t going to accomplish anything except to turn people against MED.”

Cedar entered the clearing. “Let me see that.” He took the paper from Meadow. As his eyes quickly scanned the words, they narrowed to slits.

“Hawk,” he said quietly, “we have been over this. We cannot advocate violence. And if you are, you need to leave. Right now. We need pure hearts, especially at this time.”

“I didn’t write that!” Hawk protested. “I don’t know why everyone thinks this is from me!” Even as he proclaimed his innocence, there was still a smirk on his face. “All I’ve ever said is that we need to keep our options open. But you know what? Maybe that MEDic is right, whoever he is. There’s a lynx and a kit less than two miles from here. After thirty years, a miracle has happened, and we need to do whatever needs to be done to protect it.”

“And that’s why we’re here tonight,” Cedar said calmly. “Not to harm people, but to harm the machines. We must disable this equipment before they ruin the last, best chance the lynx have. The ones Sky saw were on the opposite side of the parcel, closest to Liberty and Meadow’s sits. When we get back in the trees, you two are going to have to try to get photos. With any luck, you might even get one tomorrow morning.”

“I already set the traps to try to snag some fur,” Blue said. “Once we hand it to the EPA, they won’t be able to deny it.”

Cedar nodded. “But that may take some time. So no matter what, we still need to give this lynx some breathing room. Jack Rabbit, I want you to patrol the perimeter. The rest of you—cut hoses, slash seats and smash gauges. Pour honey or sugar or dirt or whatever you’ve got in the fuel tanks and radiators. But do it fast. I want us all out of here and back in our sits in the next three hours. It’s more important than ever that we hold our ground.”

As I took a knife from my backpack, I found myself back in the space I had been in when we firebombed the Hummer dealership. The place where it was okay to destroy, to break every rule I had spent sixteen years obeying. Around me, I heard the others laughing as we got ready to ruin thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment.

The knife I had brought from the sit flashed silver in the moonlight. I clambered up the feller buncher, swung open the door and plunged the knife into the seat right at the greasy spot where the driver’s head would be. I dragged it down, the vinyl only reluctantly giving way. Stuffing leaked from the gash.

Meadow was in the bulldozer next to me. She unclipped the fire extinguisher from the wall of the cab and aimed the nozzle at the dashboard. White foam billowed everyplace. Meanwhile, Coyote tried to hammer the end of a screwdriver into one of the bulldozer’s huge tires. Grizz climbed into the other side of the feller buncher and crouched next to me. He had a hammer, too, and he brought it down hard on the dash, shattering it into tiny shards of plastic that pricked my face.

I jumped down from the machine. Liberty was spray painting
CUT IN HELL!
on the side of the feller buncher. I looked around for something I could still cut with the knife, which now had a broken tip. I had just decided to cut the wires in the engine when a shout tore through the night.

“Cops!” Jack Rabbit yelled.

“Run,” Cedar yelled. “Run!”

I turned off my headlamp and sprinted with my arms outstretched, trying not to slam headlong into something. As I scrambled past one of the bulldozers, Meadow jumped down from the cab. She landed wrong, and I heard her groan as she went sprawling. I hesitated for a second but then kept running. I had to dart around Seed, who seemed rooted to one spot. She had her hands pressed over her mouth, but it didn’t muffle her screams.

A voice on a bullhorn growled, “Stop! Police! You are all under arrest for trespassing.”

Still making for the shelter of the trees, I veered away from the sound. Lights from powerful flashlights sliced through the night behind me. I half turned as a dozen cops dressed in black Windbreakers ran into the clearing. Instead of eyes, they had long black telescopic lenses—night vision goggles that could see our body heat. They looked like cyborgs out of a horror movie.

Grizz ran at the cops with his hammer raised and was jumped by two of them. Another cop pulled Seed’s hands behind her. Everyone else was running, chasing or being chased. I didn’t see Coyote anywhere.

I ran faster, reaching up to switch back on my headlamp. As I did, I tripped over a root and went flying. I landed before I could get my hands out, but I was up and on my feet in a second, like a blow-up clown toy.

The next second, a hand grabbed the back of my T-shirt. “All right. You’re under arrest.” I tried to twist out from the cop’s grasp, but he yanked both my wrists behind me and bound them together with what felt like a thin plastic tie. When I twisted my wrists, it was impossible to get free.

Mumbling the Miranda warning, the cop steered me back to where I had come from. Seed still stood in the same spot, except now that she was handcuffed there was nothing to stifle the sound she was making, half scream and half sob. Cedar, Liberty, Jack Rabbit and Blue had all been cuffed and were standing in a line with Seed. A cop stood in front of them, and when Jack Rabbit started to say something, the cop yelled, “Shut up!”

I turned in a circle, looking frantically for Coyote. Had he managed to outrun them? One cop stood with his foot on Grizz’s back. His hands were cuffed behind him with another white plastic tie. Meadow sat on the ground, her face twisted with pain. A cop knelt in front of her, examining her ankle.

I groaned when another cop walked back into the clearing steering Coyote with one hand on the small of his back, the other holding a fistful of Coyote’s long curls. His eyes were shadowed, his face expressionless, but I saw how tired he was, tired and sad. Then we were both shoved into line with the others, but at opposite ends. Everyone was silent, except for Seed, who still wailed and sniffled. I was beginning to hate her.

The cop who seemed to be in charge reported in on a crackling radio. One by one, we were frisked. Those who still had knives, screwdrivers or hammers had them taken away. Meanwhile, a woman cop walked around the clearing taking pictures of the damage we had done. We hadn’t had the chance to do very much. Had we even bought any time for the lynx?

Jack Rabbit and Seed had ID on them. Jack Rabbit turned out to be Jack Granfeld. “This one is Angela Markham,” the cop who had found Seed’s driver’s license said. He rattled off a date of birth that made Seed—or Angela—thirty-one, older than I had thought.

Next he stopped in front of Cedar. “You! What’s your name?”

“Cedar,” Cedar said.

The cop snorted. “I want your real name.”

“I don’t have to tell you that,” Cedar said. “We don’t have to tell you anything.” His features looked like they had been carved out of stone.

The two men stared at each other, but it was the cop who finally looked away. He went down the line, asking the rest of us for our names, but we each followed Cedar’s lead and gave only our MEDic name.

I realized that someone was missing.

Hawk had gotten clean away.

 

 

It was a long walk out of the forest, and the cops’ flashlights did not make it much less dark. They had confiscated our headlamps, so I kept tripping over dead branches and stones. The cop in charge of me had put his goggles back on so he himself had no problems seeing. Every time I pitched forward, he would wait until the last second to grab my handcuffs and haul me back up. The pain from being repeatedly jerked upright ran all the way up into my neck.

We plodded along, heads down, silent, following the huge ruts that had been left by the logging equipment. Meadow, who could hardly put any weight on her ankle, was half carried by two cops.

After what seemed like a couple of hours, we reached a rough road. A gray fifteen-passenger van waited for us, as well as three official-looking green-and-white SUVs. Off to one side was a black Escalade with a small green
e
sticker on the bumper, marking it as a rental. As we were pushed toward the van, a man stepped down from it.

He couldn’t have looked more out of place in the forest in the middle of the night if he had been dressed as the Easter Bunny. He wore a black suit with a white, sharply pressed shirt. About fifty, he was still slender and fit-looking, with dark, straight hair, silvered at the temples, and light-colored eyes.

“Thank you, officers. On behalf of Stonix, I’d like to express my appreciation for capturing these”—his cold gaze swept over us—“these hoodlums. These people, as they have proved tonight, are nothing but sociopathic vandals, squatting on private land, holding the forest hostage.” Speech finished, he cut to the chase. “How bad was the damage?”

The head cop answered. “It’s mostly cosmetic, Mr. Phelps. Thank God we got there in time to short-circuit it.”

I stared at the well-dressed man. So this was Gary Phelps, the CEO of Stonix.

“You’re killing the forest,” Blue shouted at him. “Murdering trees that are hundreds of years older than this nation.”

“Shut up!” The cop behind her gave her shoulder a shake.

Phelps stood in front of Blue. He was so much taller than her that she had to crane her head back to look at him. “They’re only trees. They’ll grow back. They just need to be managed and harvested like any other crop.” He patted her on top of the head, as if Blue were a child. She jerked her head away.

“All right,” the head cop said. “Take them all in for booking.”

By the time we’d been booked into the local jail, it was after four in the morning. We were uncuffed one at a time and told to remove all our jewelry, belts and shoes. Our backpacks were searched, and everything—including my watch and cell phone—was cataloged and placed in plastic bags. The whole time, Seed kept up her hiccuping sobs. Other than that, there was silence. We had been warned not to talk to each other.