Tom Isbell - The Prey

“Politics?” I asked. “What kid knows anything about politics?”

“Not you, your parents. If they’re dissidents, then you’re branded Less Thans for sure.”

“But why?”

“Because if the normal people want to survive the next Omega, we can’t have a bunch of Less Thans holding us back.”

My head was swimming. Not only was he suggesting we weren’t normal but that we might not even be orphans. “This is an orphanage,” I managed.

“Who said?”

“The Brown Shirts.”

“You don’t think they’d lie, do you?”

My knees felt weak. Was it even remotely possible he was telling the truth? That we’d been ripped from our mothers’ arms and sent here because we were considered “less than normal”? I felt the sudden need to get away.

“What’s the matter?” he called out. “Can’t face facts?”

That did it. I spun around and leaped toward him and we tumbled hard on the rain-soaked ground. My fists began pummeling him. Roundhouses and jabs and uppercuts, one after another, landing first on one side of his face and then the other.

The other LTs made a halfhearted attempt to break us up, but they seemed all too happy to watch. And then I realized: Cat wasn’t fighting back. He was letting me hit him, barely blocking my punches. It made me all the angrier.

“That’s enough,” Cat finally said, and he sent a fist in my direction. I fell to the side.

I pushed myself to a sitting position, blood trickling from my nose. Cat’s one punch had drawn blood; it had taken me a couple dozen to do the same to him.

“You showed him,” said Flush.

But I knew I hadn’t. The LTs drifted off to the barracks.

“Why didn’t you fight back?” I panted.

“I only beat up people if I have reason to. I don’t have a good reason to beat you up.” He sipped a breath. “Yet.”

He pushed himself up until he was sitting in the mud, his face near mine.

“If you’re so smart, let me ask you this,” he said. “What do you know about the men outside camp?”

“You mean the Brown Shirts?”

“I mean the other men.”

I could’ve bluffed my way through an answer, but I was too exhausted for lies. “Nothing,” I conceded.

“I figured as much.” Then he said, “They know about all of you. And if you don’t do something about it, you’ll be dead within the year.”

Although I tried to hide it, my eyes widened. “Prove it,” I said.

“What’re you doing tomorrow afternoon?”

That night I couldn’t stop thinking about what Cat had said, his words jangling around my head like pebbles in a tin can. When I finally fell asleep I dreamed of her again: the woman with long black hair. She existed in some distant memory of mine, but who she was and how I knew her were details forever lost. All I knew was that she’d been appearing in my dreams more and more often until I no longer knew what was memory and what was imagination.

In the dream, we were racing through a field of prairie grass, my child’s hand encompassed in hers. Although she was far older, it was all I could do to keep up with her—two of my short strides matching one of hers.

Behind us came a series of sharp pops, like firecrackers. There were other sounds, too. Shrill whistles. Shouting. Barking dogs.

The land sloped downward to a hollow and we drifted to a stop. She put her hands atop my shoulders and stared at me. Wrinkles etched her face. Crow’s feet danced at the edges of her eyes.

I realized the pops were bullets; I could hear them pinging off the rocks and whistling past my ears. Someone was after us. Someone was trying to kill us.

Even though the woman seemed about to tell me something, I didn’t want to hear it—I didn’t want to be there —so I jolted myself awake, the blackness of the Quonset hut pressing down on me, my breathing fast.

It was another hour before I fell back to sleep, wondering who the woman was and what she was about to say.

HOPE AND FAITH ARE jammed into the back of the Humvee. The convoy makes its way across nonexistent trails until they reach something resembling an actual road.

It’s the first time they’ve ever been in a vehicle. Well, a moving vehicle. They’ve slept in plenty of abandoned ones during their years on the run, but this one is actually in motion. Nothing could prepare them for the sheer speed of it.

The sun sets and an eerie calm settles over the landscape. The Humvee’s twin headlights cut two jagged holes in the darkness.

Hope wonders where they’re being taken. Every so often, the heavyset man swivels his thick head and peers back from the passenger seat. He says nothing.

In the distance, Hope catches a fleeting glimpse of structures. Listing log cabins, tar-paper shacks, old wooden buildings with peeling paint. All surrounded by a ten-foot-high fence, topped with an unending coil of razor wire. Anchoring the four corners are guard towers with Brown Shirts poised behind machine guns.

Hope’s mouth goes dry. After sixteen years, ten of them on the run, she and her sister are about to be imprisoned.

“Camp Freedom,” the obese man says cheerfully. “Your new home.”

The camp’s colossal gates shriek open and the vehicle rolls to a stop. A soldier pulls open the passenger door. There are Brown Shirts everywhere, each wearing the Republic’s distinctive dark badge with three inverted triangles. But it’s the others who draw Hope’s attention.

Girls. Scores of them. All wearing the same coarse, gray dresses that hang limply below their knees. Faded, scuffed boots adorn their feet. Based on their expressions, they seem to regard Hope and Faith as a couple of feral cats.

A tall, stooped man with a tidy mustache and a balding pate emerges from a cinder block building.

“I see you’ve met Dr. Gallingham,” he says. “I’m Colonel Thorason.” He pauses briefly, as if expecting the girls to bow or otherwise show how impressed they are to meet the camp overseer. “Life here is very simple: you abide by the rules or face the consequences. Is that clear?”

Hope and Faith nod.

“In that case—” He interrupts himself when he spies a woman walking their way. She is tall, with straight blond hair and enormously round cheekbones. An ankle-length coat is draped atop her shoulders. Thorason takes a deferential step backward as she approaches.

“Which one threw the spear?” she asks. Her tone is as sharp as the razor wire atop the fence.

“I did,” Hope says.

Hope waits for a reaction. A slap. A punch from a soldier. Something to teach her a lesson. Instead, the woman reaches forward and fondles Hope’s hair, letting the silky strands run between her fingers.

“Such pretty hair,” the woman murmurs. “It’s obvious you take good care of it.” The woman forces a brittle smile and begins to walk away.

“Do what you need to do,” she says over her shoulder to Colonel Thorason. “But that one”—pointing her finger in Hope’s direction—“gets shaved.”

Hope and Faith are taken to a bathhouse, where they’re stripped and showered with a white powder.