Jeff Hirsch - The Darkest Path

It looked like a bulletproof vest except it was larger and the fabric was far too thin. The man circled Nat, tightening straps until the vest fit snug against her body. When he was satisfied, he reached into the crate and set another box at Nat’s feet.

When he pulled out what was inside, a sick chill ran through me. I understood what it was that Nat was wearing.

The gray bricks he took out of the box looked like blocks of modeling clay, but the explosive power in each one of those slabs of C-4 was enough to demolish a small car.

He fit the bricks of explosive into slots that had been sewn into the canvas vest Nat was wearing. Two in front, two in back, and one on each side under her arms. Then he took a small battery out of the crate and ran wires from it to each of the bricks. The wires were gathered into one cable and concealed in a channel built into the vest. At the end of the cable he attached a trigger that was about the size of a small lighter.

Once Nat was wired up, the rest of the men moved around her, critiquing the bomb maker’s work and making adjustments. When they were done, the vest hugged her body so tightly that her companion’s robe was sure to conceal it. No one would notice what she was wearing until she pressed the trigger.

The men gathered into a circle while Nat stood before them. They murmured among themselves, then returned to Nat, slowly removing the vest and packing it into an ordinary-looking backpack. Nat slung the pack over her shoulder and was led out of the warehouse by the two men who had brought her.

The men with the flashlights spoke for a moment more, then went their separate ways. A door below opened and then whispered shut. The warehouse was perfectly dark and silent.

I lay on the edge of the catwalk, a dull buzz in my head, too stunned to move. It wasn’t possible. Surely I hadn’t seen what I thought I just did. Nat would never—

An engine cranked outside, shocking me out of my daze. I scrambled up the catwalk and to the door, stepping onto the landing just as the truck pulled away, retracing its steps back to Kestrel.

The ground trembled as the nightly barrage of artillery fire began. I turned toward the front, imagining soldiers on both sides of the border running in a hundred different directions with a hundred different concerns — certainly the least of them would be one raggedy-looking kid slipping across the border. Every muscle in my body was taut with anticipation, ready to run, but the image of Nat standing in that warehouse — motionless as those men dressed her — wouldn’t fade.

Far up the road the pickup truck accelerated, turning deeper into the warren of crumbling buildings. In seconds it would be gone. I took a last look at the front and then followed.

Nat slid out of the pickup’s bed at the same corner as before and set off through the streets, the backpack around her shoulders.

She took a different route back, veering from the warehouses into a winding suburb of abandoned houses. She dipped in and out of patches of moonlight through overgrown yards and cracked driveways. I trailed her around the fenced-off edge of a drained swimming pool, but when I came around to the other side, she had vanished.

I stood panting amid a wall of hedges and scanned a trio of houses across the street, trying to see into the woods behind them. Nothing. Everything was gray and still. My heart was pumping hard, on high alert. Where did you go, Nat? Where — A branch cracked near the middle house. I took off after it but the second I passed the row of hedges, I knew I had made a mistake.

Something slammed into my back, knocking the wind out of me and sending me sprawling to the ground. My cast hit an exposed root and I nearly screamed from the pain. Nat emerged from the bushes, a thick branch cocked over her shoulder like a bat.

“Nat, wait — it’s me!”

She paused, her face lost in the darkness. The branch didn’t move.

“Who else is with you?”

“No one,” I said. “It’s just me.”

Nat checked down the street and in the dark between the houses. “You followed me?”

I nodded.

“Plan on running to your friends in the Path and telling?”

“I told you. They’re not my friends.”

“You didn’t look too upset digging latrines for them.”

“I was captured. What did you expect me to do?”

Nat threw the branch into the bushes. “Nothing.”

I pushed myself off the ground and followed as Nat crossed the street, heading for the dark woods behind a track of houses.

“This is insane. You can’t do this.” Nat ignored me, head down, striding away. “Do you think your dad would want you to do this? Or your mom?”

Nat whipped around to face me. “I don’t think it matters what they want anymore.”

Her glare was cold and blank. The breath froze in my lungs and I couldn’t meet her eyes. “I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to — But killing a couple Path officers…”

“It won’t be a couple.”

“A hundred, then. A thousand. It doesn’t matter. They have the West Coast. At this point—”

“He’s coming here, Cal.”

“Who?”

Nat stared back at me.

“No. There’s no way he’d—”

“We hooked up with a Marine unit not long after we left you,” she said. “They were doing border raids into Arkansas and we decided to help them out. One day we came across a courier. Just one guy traveling alone. No phone. No radio. All he had was a satchel filled with encrypted messages. Once we broke the encryption, we were able to read them.”

“What did they say?”

“Hill knows this is the last battle,” she said. “He says God wants him to give a speech to the troops before it starts.”

“So tell the Feds,” I said. “If they know Hill is there—”

“We took it to them,” she said. “But they think as soon as the Path realizes the courier is dead, they’ll decide he was compromised and cancel Hill’s plans.”

“They’re probably right.”

“You know they aren’t,” Nat said. “If Hill believes that God is telling him he has to come here, do you think a lost message is going to keep him away?”

I searched for an argument, but she was right. If Hill thought coming here was his path, nothing would stop him.

“When?”

“We think tomorrow night,” she said. “In the Lighthouse. They’re already getting set. Flying in supplies. More security.”

“No,” I said, shaking the idea out of my head. “The Feds can’t make you do this.”

“No one is making me do anything,” Nat said. “I volunteered.”

Half in the moonlight, Nat’s skin was smooth and gray. She was thinner than I had last seen her, making her cheekbones stand out in thin ridges. Her eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. I reached out to her but she pulled away from me.

“There’s a soft point in the Fed line three and a half miles to the west,” she said. “That’s how my people got through. The password of the day is streetcar . Say that to a sentry and you’re on your way home.”

“Nat, wait.”

“Go on,” she said. “Mommy and Daddy are waiting.”

Nat turned her back on me and there was a whisper of grass beneath her feet as she slipped into the dark. A flash of sickly light came from the front, throwing Nat’s shadow across the trees and the abandoned houses. There was a deep rumble beneath us and when it passed she was gone.

The house in front of me was two stories with a soaring front porch and large picture windows, all of which were shattered. Its door hung limp on its hinges. I climbed the stairs and pushed it open. The floorboards creaked as I moved from the hall to the dining room and into a kitchen.