Tom Isbell - The Prey

Hope rips the bottom off her shirt and hands the filthy wad to Faith. “Here. Now go.”

Faith scuttles to the cavern’s dark recesses.

Hope takes her father’s hand. It’s rough and callused, more like sandpaper than skin. She studies his left foot, now nearly twice as big as his right. It’s purple and inflamed, with red lines shooting up the calf. All because he stepped on a jutting nail, its tip scarred with rust and radiation. After all they’ve been through, to have it come down to something as simple as a little infection.

Which has grown into a big infection.

She stares at the cave’s entrance, still not sure if she heard something. Drifting clouds obscure what little moon there is.

A voice startles her.

“Go easy … on your sister.” Her father, his words gravelly.

Hope grows suddenly defensive. “I do.”

Her father grunts. “She tries, you know.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes not hard enough.”

He forces a smile, the wrinkles creasing beard stubble. A corner of his black mustache angles up. “Sounds like my words.”

Of course they’re his words. Where else would she have learned them?

His eyes close. Then he whispers, “You’re your father’s daughter. And she’s … her mother’s daughter.”

It’s true, of course—no denying it—and it always strikes Hope as odd that two siblings, born mere minutes apart, can be so utterly different. It’s obvious that she and Faith are twins. Both sport matching black hair, identical brown eyes, the same tea-colored skin. The only physical difference is weight; Faith is perilously thin … and getting more so by the day.

But in all other respects they are wildly different. Faith is shy, introverted, afraid to take chances, while Hope is just the opposite: fearless, athletic, bold to the point of reckless. As far as Hope’s concerned, they may as well have sprung from separate mothers entirely.

Hope remembers the day they raced sticks in the stream behind the house. What were they then, five or six? Although it was obvious Faith would rather have been inside attending to her dolls, she agreed to play, and they ended up shouting with delight, rooting for their tiny twigs tumbling down the mountain creek.

But when the soldiers showed up and the sound of bullets echoed off the surrounding hills, Hope and Faith forgot racing sticks. Forgot how to smile and laugh. The girls’ last memory of that childhood home—and their childhood itself—was their mother lying dead, blood pooling from her forehead onto the warped boards of the front porch.

Hope dragged her sister to a hollow log and there they stayed for two whole days. When their father returned from a hunting trip, the three of them took off, not even daring to return home to bury their mother or pack supplies. They feared the Republic’s soldiers were staking out the house.

That was ten years ago. They’ve been on the run ever since, rifling through abandoned houses, living in trees and caves. They even spent one winter in a grizzly’s den, praying the bear wouldn’t return.

Out of necessity, Hope has grown more tomboyish with each passing day, learning how to start fires, how best to throw a spear. Her only vanity is her hair, which is black and long and silky—resembling her mother’s. A way of honoring her fallen parent.

“One thing,” her father says. “You have a choice to make.”

Hope stares down at him. What’s he talking about? “All we’ve been doing these last ten years is making choices,” she says.

“This one’s different.” His voice is a raspy whisper. “There’s a reason the government’s after us.”

“Yeah, because you didn’t sign the loyalty oath.”

He gives his head a shake. “That’s just part of it.”

What is he about to tell her? And why does she feel a sudden dread?

“Go on,” she says.

“You’re twins.”

Hope sighs in relief. “Gee, I had no idea.”

He continues, “And the government wants twins.”

Hope cocks her head. Where’s her father going with this? Is he delirious with fever or is this for real? “I don’t get it. What’s so special about twins?”

He grimaces. “You have a choice to make. Either stay together … which means you’ll be hunted the rest of your life …”

“Or what?” she dares to ask. She realizes she has ceased to breathe.

“Or separate.”

His words are like a thunderclap. Separate? It’s true, Faith can be irritatingly slow and often holds them up. But separate? The thought has never crossed her mind.

She peers toward the cave’s interior; Faith is wringing water from the rag. Her skeletal silhouette looks ghostlike. Draped around her shoulders is their mother’s pink shawl. It’s tattered and torn, singed from fire.

“Why would we do that?” Hope asks her father. “Faith wouldn’t last a day.”

“If they catch you … neither of you will.”

Hope wants desperately to find out what on earth he’s talking about—but at that moment Faith returns. She places the damp cloth on her father’s forehead. His eyes close and he’s asleep within seconds.

“What was he saying?” Faith asks.

“Nothing,” Hope answers a little too quickly. “Just nonsense. Fever and all.”

Hope crawls back to the cave’s entrance, staring into the dark through a curtain of dripping snowmelt. Her father’s words bounce around her head. Separate from Faith? Abandon her? What an absurd idea.

As the black night presses against her, Hope can only pray it’s a decision she’ll never have to make.

I TYPED UP MY report using one of the camp’s bulky typewriters. Although we’d heard of cell phones and computers and something called the internet, all that was fried by the electromagnetic pulse that accompanied the bombs.

Omega, they called that day. The end of the end.

One enormous burst of electromagnetic radiation and everything that was even remotely electronic was fried to a crisp. Computers became the stuff of legend. Most cars were no longer drivable. And although I’d read about them, I’d never seen an airplane in the sky. And figured I never would.

Not that Camp Liberty was without luxuries. Every Friday night we gathered in the mess hall to watch movies, the film projector powered by the camp’s generators. The problem was, only a handful of movies survived, all oldies, and so we saw the same ten films all year, every year. Stagecoach , Shane , To Kill a Mockingbird , that kind of thing.

I stripped the paper from the typewriter’s roller. For obvious reasons, I neglected to mention the boy’s whispered message. I walked the report over to Major Karsten’s office and left it with Sergeant Dekker.

“Slice slice,” he said with a sneer, enjoying the in-joke that—thankfully—only a couple of us understood.

My face burned and I got out of there as fast as I could.

Days passed. Rumors flew. Some claimed the boy in the black T-shirt was a convict on the run. Others said he was no outlaw, merely an LT from an adjoining territory.