As Jeevan’s team races into the fray, blasting weapons with enough recoil to blow them backward every time they pull the trigger, Jeevan prays only to survive.
“Today you are a warrior,” Starkey told him, clapping him on the shoulder like a brother when he said it. But Jeevan knows the truth behind the words. Now you are expendable is what Starkey meant—because with the power and resources of the clapper movement behind him, Starkey no longer needs Jeevan to work his computer magic. All the hard-core hacking for this operation was done elsewhere, and on hardware far superior to anything they’ve had until now. Jeevan is a redundancy. And so today, he is a warrior.
The battle rages around him, so one-sided, he could almost laugh if bullets weren’t flying past him, if people weren’t dying left and right. The camp’s beefed-up security force is no match for the Stork Brigade.
Jeevan’s orders are to shoot anyone over seventeen. Like many others, though, he’s just been firing high, letting loose a battle scream, so it seems like he’s killing, when all he’s really doing is making a lot of noise. He stays away from open spaces, where he’s a target, and finds himself standing amid topiary hedges that have been shredded by explosions. Then he sees motion—someone crawling through the ivy. Shoot anyone over seventeen. Is Starkey watching? What if he is? What if he sees Jeevan failing in his new role as a foot soldier in the Stork Brigade? What will Starkey do when he decides Jeevan is entirely useless?
Jeevan aims his machine gun at the crawling man, but when the man sees it, he rises and hurls himself at Jeevan. The machine gun tumbles to the ground. Desperately the two scramble for it in the ivy.
The man, a gardener, swings a pair of garden shears at Jeevan, the blades connecting above his left eye. Blood spills forth from the gash, much more blood than such a small gash should bring. It clouds his vision. Jeevan grabs the machine gun, but his hands are slick with blood. His fingers slip, and the gardener grabs it away from him. He stands over Jeevan in the snarl of ruined hedges, aiming at him, finger on the trigger, and Jeevan knows that he’s made a crucial error. He should have shot the man without hesitation the moment he saw him—because it’s kill or be killed. Starkey has left no room for anything in between.
The man wails in anguish. He tightens his finger on the trigger aimed right at Jeevan’s face. Tightens. Tightens. Then he falls to his knees, dropping the machine gun. For a moment Jeevan thinks the man’s been shot in the back, but he hasn’t been. The gardener’s wailing drops an octave into sobs.
Another explosion rocks a building to their right, and both Jeevan and the man drop down to their bellies in the Ivy as pieces of glass, stone, and brick fly past them, shredding the topiary beyond all recognition. And lying there, blood still streaming into his eyes, Jeevan does something. He doesn’t know what possesses him to do it, but he is so terrified, so disconnected, that he is driven to find some sort of connection. He reaches through the ivy and grabs the hand of the gardener, now caked in both mud and blood. He clasps the man’s hand tightly. And the man clasps his back.
He can’t see the gardener’s face—leaves are in the way—but in the midst of this chaos that clasped hand is an oasis of comfort. For both of them.
“We’re not all evil,” the man says.
“Neither are we,” Jeevan responds.
And they wait there in silence hiding in the ivy, hiding to stay alive, until the sounds of gunfire fade and Starkey, the triumphant general, enters the theater of battle to claim his victory.
16 • Bam
When the battle begins, Bam and her team of twenty-five storks are positioned at the camp’s back entrance. Their view is of the loading dock behind the Chop Shop, where medical vans haul away coolers of life, ready to be transplanted to those deemed more deserving. Or at least those whose pocketbooks or insurance can afford new parts. A single van is parked by the loading dock today, ready for the next shipment.
Bam’s team—“Marabou Squad,” as Starkey has called them, since he insists on naming each assault team after some kind of stork—waits outside the electrified gate, hidden by a dense oak grove, its branches filled with the oversize leaves of late September, just beginning to yellow. They have explosives to take out the fence. Bam is determined not to use them.
When the explosions begin on the other side of the harvest camp. Bam’s team gets anxious. They remove the safeties from their weapons—weapons that they’ve only been minimally trained to use. The slighter kids can barely hold them, much less use them.
“Put the safeties back on!” Bam orders.
A meek, wide-eyed girl named Bree looks at her, almost more terrified by her order than by what lay ahead. “But . . . if we keep them on—”
“You heard me!”
All around, Bam hears the clicks of the weapons being returned to the safe position. She takes a deep breath. Another explosion from somewhere beyond the Chop Shop shakes the ground beneath their feet and dislodges a hail of acorns. From this angle, all they can see are trees and the loading dock. Debris flies over the Chop Shop, landing on the loading dock. Small chunks of concrete pummel the roof of the medical van.
“We should go in!” says Garson DeGrutte. He’s a muscular kid with painfully piercing gray eyes and a jarhead haircut. Clearly he wanted to be a military boeuf, and must see the Stork Brigade as his chance to live out his dream. “We need to go in now!” Garson shouts.
“Quiet!” yells Bam. “We’re the second wave.”
That’s a lie, of course. Starkey adheres to an “all in” strategy: Hold nothing in reserve. Do or die. But Bam is determined to save these kid’s lives. Today that is her personal mission.
“Look!” Bree says, pointing.
People in medical whites and scrubs burst out of the back door of the Chop Shop. Surgeons, nurses—the people who do the actual unwinding. Bam feels a surge of hate rage within her as the medical staff desperately tries the doors of the van, but can’t get in. Another explosion blows out some of the Chop Shop’s windows. The medical staff abandons the van and runs toward the gate. One of them hits a remote, and the gate begins to open.
“We’re in without wasting explosives!” says Garson. “Pretty smart, Bam.”
“Just shut your freaking mouth!” Bam growls at him. She glances to see the safety is off his weapon again and she burns him a glare that makes him click the safety back in place.
The medical workers, about seven or eight of them, race out of the gate.
“You’re just letting them go?” Garson asks, incredulous.
Bam locks eyes with him. “Do you want to go out there and gun them down?”
The question leaves Garson speechless. He looks at his weapon, as if really seeing it for the first time. Bam looks to the whole group. “How about the rest of you? Anyone who wants to go out there and murder them, be my guest.”
There are no takers. Not a one.
So they stay hidden in the trees as the men and woman run past, panicked and out of breath, some crying—and then out of nowhere comes a kid that Bam doesn’t know. He has black hair hanging in his eyes, bad acne, and is emaciated in a radiation-chic kind of way. He stands in the middle of the road, holding his hands apart and tilting his head back like a flower opening for the sun.
The running people see him, but they’re so terrified of what they’re running from, they don’t even consider what they might be running toward. Just before they reach his position, the dark-haired boy swings his hands together in a single powerful stroke.
The force of the explosion throws Bam and her team to the ground. And when she gets up to look, the trees on either side of the road are on fire, there’s a crater in the asphalt, and there’s no one there anymore. No one at all.
The other storks are silent for a few stunned moments, listening to the sound of flames, settling debris, and gunfire from beyond the Chop Shop loading dock, trying to deny the charred smell that has just reached their nostrils.
“They were unwinders,” Garson says, his voi
ce shaky. “They deserved to die.”
“Maybe,” says Bree. “But I’m glad I wasn’t the one who killed them.”
Bam’s team waits out the battle, making no move to join it, and no one argues anymore. Not even Garson who seems hateful of the whole situation, probably thinking himself a coward, and blaming Bam for it.
It is only when the battle is over that Bam leads her team past the smoking remains of the Chop Shop, and into the battle-torn grounds of Horse Creek Harvest Camp.
Starkey has already gathered the liberated Unwinds in a grassy common, now strewn with bodies and wreckage. “My name is Mason Michael Starkey,” Bam hears him announce to the gathered Unwinds, “and I have just freed you.”
The crowd is too shell-shocked to cheer their liberation. The scenes of death and destruction surpass anything Bam has seen before. It’s worse than the carnage at the Graveyard. The harvest camp has been burned to the ground. There are no living adults visible. Bam doesn’t know if any escaped Starkey’s dark vengeance against the world.
“What’s he going to do with the tithes?” asks Bree. Bam turns to see several armed storks guarding a cluster of tithes, who are in the process of being taken captive, since they aren’t taking well to freedom.
“Who knows,” Bam says. “Maybe he’ll turn them into slaves. Maybe he’ll put them in the stew.”
“Gross,” says one of her team members, a tousled-haired kid whose name Bam doesn’t know. “You don’t think he’d really do that, do you?”
The fact that the kid can ask that, as if it’s a real possibility, tells Bam that she’s not the only one who thinks Starkey is out of his freaking mind. Yes, he has a tight core of loyalists who seem to suckle all the vengeance and vitriol he can feed them—but how much doubt is there among the others? How much support would she have if she were to challenge his leadership? Probably just enough to get her and her coconspirators executed as traitors to the cause.
To her right she sees Jeevan stumbling out of a ruined hedge, his face bleeding. Bam looks down and tears out a pocket in her khakis, giving it to Jeevan to blot his bleeding forehead.
“Your team’s looking well rested,” Starkey says when he sees her. He offers Bam something that resembles a grin, but not quite.
“You’re the one who told us to take the loading dock,” she tells him coldly. “There wasn’t much action there.”
He has no comment to that. “Load up, ship out,” he orders, and strides away.
There are nondescript trucks waiting just down the road. The drivers, all supplied by the clapper movement, will take varied routes to deliver them back to the power plant, many hundreds of miles from the scene of the crime.
Hayden, along with Starkey’s little harem and all the other kids who did not take part in this attack, was left there to wait for a triumphant homecoming. Bam finds herself anxious to unburden on Hayden everything that happened here today. She must tell someone—must confess her feelings about it. How strange that Hayden has become her confessor.
Load up. Ship out.
The windowless truck that brought them here, and now takes them back, doesn’t feel all that different from an unwind transport truck. The lack of control over her own freedom is every bit as oppressive as incarceration. Bam checks to make sure that all weapons are disarmed and piled in a corner of the truck as they begin their journey, so they don’t become playthings. She listens to snippets of conversations around her. There aren’t many.
“Do you think there are clappers who didn’t clap and they’re in the trucks?”
“I get carsick when I can’t look out a window.”
“Austin Lee! Did anyone see Austin Lee? Please someone tell me you’ve seen him!”
“Starkey says we’re getting better. Next time will be easier.”
Then, loud and defiant, Jeevan says, “I miss the Graveyard.”
That brings silence from everyone. And now that he has their attention, Jeevan says, even more loudly, “I miss the way Connor did things.” It is brave; it is foolhardy. Bam didn’t know that Jeevan had it in him.
No one responds for a few moments. Then a voice from the back says, “So do I.”
Bam waits to see if anyone one else voices an opinion, but no one does. Still, she can tell from many of their faces that they agree. They’re just afraid to say so.
“Well,” says Bam, “maybe it can be like that again.”
She pushes it no further, because she knows that some of the kids in the truck are the kind that worship Starkey, which means word of this conversation will get back to him. Even now, Garson DeGrutte is eying her bitterly. She takes a deep breath, and lets it out, then tries to offer Jeevan a comforting smile, but there isn’t much comfort in it, because she knows the next war may not be at a harvest camp at all.
17 • Argent
Many miles to the north, Argent Skinner continues to ride shotgun beside Jasper Nelson in a U-Haul van, having added a fifth AWOL to their catch. According to Nelson, five healthy AWOLs can bring twenty, maybe thirty thousand dollars. Although math was never Argent’s forte, he’s already figured that a haul like this once a week could bring one-point-five million in a year and still leave time for vacation.
Their destination is a Canadian border city called Sarnia, which has the dubious distinction of being the most polluted city in Canada, what with the remains of old petroleum companies and the Chemical Valley corporations that still spew mysterious waste into the water and air. Some might consider Divan Umanov to be part of Sarnia’s pollution—but to Argent, the mysterious black-market dealer could be his personal savior.
“So, what do we call him?” Argent asks Nelson when they cross the bridge into Canada. “Does he have a title or anything?”
Nelson sighs, as if to telegraph how put out he is by the question. “I’ve heard people refer to him as a flesh lord, but he doesn’t like that. He’s a businessman. He calls himself an independent supplier of biological upgrades.”
Argent laughs at that, and Nelson returns a frown that cancels out anything jovial. “He takes his profession very seriously. You’d be wise to do the same.”
• • •
Divan is not there when they offload the five AWOLs at the Porsche dealership that serves as a front for his operation.
“He spends, now, much of his time ‘camping,’ ” they are told by an employee of undefined eastern European background, whose English skills are marginal at best. Nelson explains that “camping” is code for time spent overseeing his harvest camp. It’s a place that not even Nelson has ever seen.
“He flies in, he flies out,” Nelson tells Argent. “It’s not my business to know where he does his unwinding, as long as I get paid for the AWOLs I bring him.” And although Argent has a curious streak, the last thing he’d ever want would be a tour of a black-market harvest camp.
“You will please be his guests at his private residence until he should return,” they are told, and are given the keys to a dealership Porsche to make the drive. Argent’s the one who grabs the keys from the man’s hands, but gives them to Nelson, knowing the alternative would be getting tranq’d again. Shocking the monkey has apparently paid off.
“Sweet ride, but isn’t he afraid we might steal it?” Argent asks Nelson as they take to the road. Nelson laughs at the suggestion and doesn’t dignify him with an answer.
• • •
The residence turns out to be a simple A-frame cabin on a wooded bluff overlooking Lake Huron, four hours north of Sarnia. The cabin appears unremarkable and indistinguishable from all the other woodsy A-frames in the area. Argent is profoundly disappointed.
“He lives in that thing? We drove all the way here for this?”
The first hint that things are not as they seem is the butler who greets them. Argent finds it odd that a structure this small would require a servant. Then, once they enter the “cabin,” all of Argent’s perceptions and assumptions take a dramatic shift.
The angular A of the cabin is
very literally the tip of the iceberg, because its ever-widening base extends underground for three more stories, creating space within the structure at least ten times its appearance from the outside. Inconspicuous windows are carved into the stone of the bluff, giving the “cabin” a glorious view of the lake, and the décor could match the ritziest of mountain lodges. Everything’s crafted from fine polished wood. The walls are festooned with the mounted heads of a tiger, a rhino, a polar bear, and a dozen other extinct species.
“So Divan hunts?” Argent asks the butler as they descend a grand staircase into the expansive living room.
The man turns up his nose, offended. “Hardly. He collects.”
There are other staff members to round out the crew. A maid who seems to endlessly dust, and a chef about as intimidating as an executioner, but who prepares a dinner for them that tastes better than anything Argent has ever eaten. Never in his life has he experienced this kind of first-class treatment or seen this kind of wealth. He concludes that for Divan, business must be very good.
• • •
They are given the white-glove treatment for four days.
Four days of leisurely living with no sign of the master of the house. Nelson, who has, by and large, been able to avoid contact with Argent except for meals, now becomes increasingly impatient. Maybe even a little bit nervous.
“He knows I was coming—he’s never kept me waiting for this long,” Nelson comments over lunch. He’s barely able to sit for the meal, pacing, looking out of the windows at the windswept lake.
“Maybe he’s just busy. A guy like him’s gotta prioritize, right?” But Argent knows what Nelson is thinking. Divan is punishing him for showing up without Connor Lassiter. Well, thinks Argent, if hanging here is punishment, then make me suffer!