Kristen Simmons: Breaking Point

I squeezed Chase’s bicep, feeling the muscles flex beneath my fingers. His grip eased, and finally released.

Riggins smiled before sending Wallace a no-problem-here wave.

“Come on,” said Sean. He grabbed my elbow, towing me down the hall toward where the brothers were distributing dry cereal for breakfast.

Riggins leaned close as I passed. “You actually gonna do something useful today? Or just disappear again?” When I turned around he was sauntering toward the west exit, chuckling to himself.

My whole body burned.

It was no secret that Chase and I hadn’t left the motel since we’d escaped the base, but I didn’t know anyone had noticed that sometimes, when the fourth floor grew too confined, I’d escape to the roof to clear my head. It wasn’t like I was hurting anyone, and we pulled our weight where we could. We passed out rations, and Chase took shifts securing the building, but it wasn’t the same as pounding the pavement, holding up supply trucks or helping those in danger. Riggins and I both knew it.

It wasn’t like I didn’t want to do more. I did. I wanted to make a difference, to help someone, the way no one had been able to help my mother. The MM may have thought we were dead, but I remembered too well what it felt like to be wanted. First as a Statute violator when my mother had been charged with an Article 5, then as a reform school runaway. Chase had been charged with everything from his AWOL as a soldier to assault. Sometimes I could still feel the MM breathing down our necks.

But those things didn’t matter to people like Riggins. He hadn’t trusted me since Sean had brought us here for shelter. And hiding while he and the others risked their lives did nothing to prove my dedication to the cause.

Fury stoked through me, sudden and sharp. I’d survived the MM’s unforgiving rules, escaped execution, and come here, to the resistance, where we were all supposed to be on the same side. I didn’t need Riggins making me feel weak, or anyone else doubting me.

I shook out of Sean’s grasp and spun around—right into Chase, half a foot taller and broader even with his shoulders hunched forward. Quite a pair they were, like my own personal bodyguards. I should have been grateful for their help, but instead felt small, too in need of their protection.

“I’ll talk to Riggins,” said Chase. “He doesn’t know when to quit.”

“It’s fine. He’s just messing around.” My voice was too thin to be believable, though, and I could feel the terror and the emptiness pushing back from behind my thin veil of control. It had been this way since I’d learned of my mother’s murder. Sometimes the wall felt thicker, sometimes I felt stronger, but it was all an illusion. It could break through at a moment’s notice, just as it was threatening to now.

Chase took a step forward. “Look,” he said, leaning down so that our eyes were level. “We don’t have to stay here. We can catch the next transport to the safe house. Put all this behind us.” His voice was filled with hope.

“Not yet. You know that.” We had to find Rebecca first; if I hadn’t blackmailed her and Sean into helping me run away, they would still be together, and she wouldn’t have been hurt. I could still hear the baton coming down on her back as the soldiers dragged her away.

“You guys go on. I’ll catch up later.” I cleared my throat. My walls were cracking. Chase sighed, and after Sean’s prompting followed him down to breakfast.

Before the despair could take over, I fled down the corridor toward the supply room. It didn’t matter if I skipped rations; the hollowness inside had nothing to do with hunger. It wasn’t until the hallway was quiet that I remembered that Wallace had assigned Chase to clear the empty office building next door, that he was leaving the Wayland Inn without me. Even if he would be off the main streets, the thought of him out there alone made me sick.

BYmidmorning I’d rearranged the boxes of used clothing and boots to clear space for the new shipment. I’d stacked the toilet paper into columns and consolidated ammunition into four large cardboard boxes. The small silver cartridges I’d learned belonged to our stolen 9MM’s were running low, and I made note to remind Wallace of that later.

The uniform boxes stayed against the back wall, untouched.

“You put the cans in alphabetical order.”

I jumped back when Billy appeared in the doorway, brows arching beneath his shaggy hair, a Horizons bottle of bleach and a shredded sponge in each hand. I pointed him toward the metal rack where I’d moved the cleaning supplies. He’d recently switched hand-me-down jeans to a pair that was too big, and I spun away as the waistband dropped below his hips.

When I turned back, he was attempting to tape them in place.

“Stop,” I said, unable to hold back a laugh. “There’s a belt. Over there. By the uniforms.”

“You put the clothes in alphabetical order, too?”

I grinned. “Give me time.” I sobered as he made his way over to the crates, one hand holding his pants in place.

“Um, Billy?” I stayed back a few steps. “I heard there might be rats in there.” I was pretty sure Riggins was just being a jerk, but it couldn’t hurt to see if he’d been lying.

“There are,” said Billy. “Why? Did one bite you?”

I cringed. “No, I just… thought I saw one, that’s all,” I lied.

“Oh, hang on.” He backed out the door, smiling broadly. The hall was quiet—the night shift was sleeping, and most of the day shift was out on assignment. Billy’s feet slapped obnoxiously all the way down to his room.

He returned a few minutes later holding Gypsy, the mangy stray cat he’d pulled out of the stairwell last week. She was mostly black with missing clumps of hair on her hindquarters, but less emaciated than before.

“She’s letting you hold her.” She’d done nothing but hiss and scratch for days, and on cue she began to meow furiously until Billy dropped her on the floor.

“Rats, Gypsy,” he said. “Yummy rats.”

Gypsy didn’t look so different from a rat herself, and when she curled around my calf I stifled the urge to jerk away.

“She likes you,” he said.

I offered a weak smile.

Other footsteps came from the hallway, these slower and heavier, and I rushed toward the door hoping Chase and Sean had returned from clearing the building next door. Instead, I came face-to-face with Wallace, the handheld radio now tucked in his front pocket. He must have seen my face fall because he cocked his head to the side and said, “Don’t look so happy to see me.”

“No word from next door?” I asked as Billy joined us. The new belt worked wonders.

Wallace shook his head. “Did you want to go check?”

Yes . The word was simple, the building was only next door, but the word stuck on my tongue. As Billy offered to escort, I shifted from foot to foot. The thought of Chase in danger, or even Sean, forced my decision, but before I could answer, Wallace had moved on.

“Billy, if you’re done scrubbing the toilet I need you on the mainframe.” Though his mouth was set, Wallace’s eyes betrayed his pride. Billy had assembled a makeshift scanner from pieces the guys had picked up outside the base’s incinerators. A small television screen had been rigged to show the MM bulletins and lists of Statute violators in cryptic black-and-white type—it was the most use I’d seen out of a TV since the end of the War.

“Right. I’m searching for news on the sniper,” Billy told me importantly.

Outside on the street, a dog barked. I chewed the inside of my cheek.

Someone had murdered two FBR soldiers last month, in March, and then disappeared without a shred of evidence. Two weeks ago the sniper had struck again in Nashville: a soldier outside a Horizons distribution warehouse. Wallace was trying to find out his identity so that we might protect him, but I didn’t like the idea of bringing such a high-profile criminal back to the Wayland Inn. Not when the MM was on a manhunt.