Kristen Simmons: Breaking Point

“Anything new come up?” I asked.

“Nothing.” Wallace looked past me, out the dirty window behind the uniform crates. “Local news says the FBR is close to solving the case, but they’ve been saying that for weeks.” The radio reports we monitored made it clear they were chasing their tails.

“There’s nothing new on your friend either. I looked this morning,” Billy added, cheeks flaming. He’d been helping Sean and me search the mainframe for any rehab centers in Chicago where the MM might have sent Rebecca, but our searches kept coming up blank. Even Chase, who had trained there during his time as a soldier, could not recall such a place. I was seriously beginning to doubt that the tip I’d gotten in the Knoxville holding cells had been reliable.

“Go,” prompted Wallace. “And it’s about time you got a belt.”

Billy turned to leave, grumbling, but before he did he spun back and playfully swatted Wallace across the face. A second later he was sprinting down the hall, cackling.

My mouth fell open.

“Little bastard,” said Wallace affectionately, rubbing his stubbly jaw. I doubt he would have responded the same to Houston or Lincoln, or anyone else for that matter.

Gypsy hopped onto the crate of uniforms below the window and curled into a ball, assessing us with her yellow eyes. In the silence, I became acutely aware that Wallace and I had not spoken alone in weeks.

“I… I think we’re low on bullets,” I said. “I put what we had in these boxes….”

“Come talk with me, Miller.”

Wallace turned without another word and left me trailing him toward the stairway door. The moment came when I thought he was testing me, leading me outside to see if I’d really go, but he didn’t; he shoved through the exit and went up, boots clanging on the metal steps.

Worry gnawed at me. I tried to anticipate the reason for this meeting; I didn’t know any more about the sniper, and I hadn’t been the only one to voice my doubt about Sean’s new recruit—Riggins had spoken up, too. Surely I wasn’t in trouble for that.

My thoughts turned to the MM base. There was no way I knew to break back in; we simply didn’t have the manpower to take the entrances, and soldiers—even those in disguise—couldn’t pass through the exit by the crematorium where Chase and I had escaped. Wallace knew this. He and I had beaten the topic into the ground, until the conversation had stalled and left us both disappointed.

Was that what he wanted to talk to me about now, my lack of contribution? My failure to save the others in the detention center? Because I knew I’d let them down. Wallace, the resistance, those prisoners I’d left behind. They haunted me, and maybe I deserved it. I’d saved Chase and myself, knowing others in the neighboring cells would die.

I tried to swallow, but my throat had tied in knots.

Wallace shoved through the heavy metal door on the tenth floor, flooding the shadowed interior with light. It wasn’t a bright day, but on the fourth floor we kept the curtains drawn, and my eyes took several moments to adjust. When they did I scanned the familiar cement patio, empty but for the cave-like entrance to the stairs and the park bench behind it, and the resistance guard overlooking the streets to the west.

The air wasn’t fresh, but it wasn’t stagnant like inside. Breathing it raised my awareness, made me feel exposed. Being here with Wallace didn’t feel as safe as when I came up here alone.

He strode toward the edge at the front of the building, to the elevated lip of red brick that stood like a battlement from an old-time castle. I followed him into the shadows, glancing up at the towering empty office building adjacent to the Wayland Inn. Though the structures didn’t touch, they were close, and I wondered if Chase could see me now from one of those high, dark windows.

“Look, out there on the freeway,” Wallace said, pointing around the neighboring building past the slums that had once been a college to the raised highway by the river. A few scattered cars traveled there, but the haze made it impossible to tell if they were cruisers.

“There are people in those cars who can go anywhere they’d like. People who aren’t starving and freezing like the folks in the Square. Men that still have jobs. Girls that still go to school.” He leaned down to rest his elbows on the ledge and glanced my way.

I felt a sudden trembling in my chest, cracked with a blow of all those things I’d been trying to shut out. Home. Beth with her wild red hair. I’d be a senior this year, graduating in June.

“Sometimes I come up here and watch them. I don’t know, I guess I come up here to feel sorry for myself.” He sighed. “I never knew how good I had it, back before all this. How easy it was to walk down the street without worrying someone might turn you in.”

“Yeah.” I kept my eyes on the cars.

“You know what I always realize?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“I feel sorrier for them.”

A siren cut through the air, drawing my attention to the alabaster fortress, crouching within its high stone walls twenty miles to the east. The FBR base.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“My house may not look like much, but it keeps my family safe. I’ve got food in my gut and a roof over my head.” He lifted his arms out before him, like he was holding something precious. “But more importantly, I’m free, Miller. All those poor folks who follow the rules are trapped in a prison of fear.”

“You’re not free,” I said, frustrated. “You’re trapped, just like they are. I don’t like it, but it’s the truth. The only way you’re really safe is if you’re compliant.”

But the words suddenly sounded hollow. How many hours had my mother and I spent applying for meal passes, doing paperwork to apply for the mortgage freeze? Bending over backward because every job in the city discriminated against my mother’s tarnished record? And what good did it do? They took her, they killed her, anyway.

“ Safe, ” Wallace repeated. “That’s the same thing Scarboro said when he became president.” When he sensed my concern he smiled. “Don’t worry, more than half the country believed him. It’s what people do when they’ve been through war.”

A memory filtered through from another time. My mother, balking at the television while the man on the screen promised safety through unity. Freedom through conformity. That traditional family values and a streamlined faith would restore our country to greatness.

I rubbed the heels of my hands into my forehead, feeling like I had so many times over the past month: too full of something, too empty to name it. Whatever small part of me believed that I still belonged in the same world I’d grown up in, the world with Beth and school and home, had been cut loose. I could never go back.

“What do I do now?” I asked feebly, twisting the gold ring—the fake wedding ring Chase had stolen for me—around my ring finger. I didn’t need to wear it if I never left, but I did anyway.

Wallace sighed. “You figure out what matters. And you do something about it.”

THEfield team returned to the Wayland Inn late in the afternoon. From the back stairway window I watched three men who’d left early yesterday in ragged street clothes emerge from the cab of a Horizons distribution truck in taupe, one-piece uniforms, complete with the Horizons logo spanning the widths of their shoulders, and efficiently unload boxes from the back. The engine never stopped running, and they drove away the instant the task was completed.

Cara, having stowed away in the back of the truck with the boxes, was the first to return to the fourth floor. She carried nothing, breezing in with a satisfied smirk, tugging the kinks out of her dyed black hair. I knew she kept it braided in town as an attempt to appear more conservative, but I doubted it worked; Cara could never, even in jeans and a men’s sweatshirt, be accused of looking plain. It didn’t take listening to the running commentary of thirty males to pick up on that.