“What makes you think we can t-t-take on the Brown Shirts?” Red asked, with his tendency to stutter. “They’ve got g-g-guns.”
The question startled me in its bluntness. We’d been here a whole week and there’d been no discussion like this at all. I got the feeling these four had been talking.
“Red’s right,” Dozer said, and it was obvious he was the instigator. Dozer lived to stir up trouble. “And not just the Brown Shirts. How can we hope to fend off the Hunters with these?” He gestured to the primitive slingshots, the clumsy crossbows, the recently whittled arrows.
I understood his point. It took little effort to remember the armor plating on the Hunters’ souped-up ATVs, the Kevlar vests, the M4s.
We had long ago made the decision to stick with what we knew: crossbows, spears, slingshots, bows and arrows. Not only were we proficient with those weapons, but they were quiet and light and allowed us a stealth that heavier automatic rifles wouldn’t. Also, we could make our own ammunition for slingshots and bows and arrows. Not so with M4s.
“We don’t need their weapons,” I said. “We didn’t in the Brown Forest, and we don’t now.”
Dozer took a bullying step toward me.
“Okay, then what I want to know is how’re we gonna release those Less Thans. Even if we do make it to Liberty—which is doubtful—how’re we gonna spring ’em?”
Everyone was quiet now. Even the crickets and frogs. I longed for Cat to back me up, but his eyes were fixed on the ground. I had no idea what was running through his mind.
“I don’t have a strategy just yet,” I said.
Dozer’s eyes widened in surprise. “No strategy at all? Great plan, Book Worm,” he scoffed. “That explains a lot.”
He looked around at the others. A couple of them obliged with laughter. I felt my face burning red.
“You agreed to go back to Liberty,” I said. “You didn’t have to.”
“That’s when I thought you had a plan. Now I know otherwise.”
“All I know is we have to do this.” Despite my efforts, I could feel my chest tightening.
“Oh we do, do we? And why is that?”
“Because it’s the right thing.”
Dozer laughed. A loud, mocking laugh. “And killing us in the process? Is that the ‘right thing’?”
My fists clenched, and Dozer leaned forward until our noses were actually touching.
“Well?” he asked. I nearly gagged from his sour breath.
I turned to move away, but his meaty hand grabbed my shoulder and whipped me back around. “Well?” he asked again.
Although I wanted nothing more than to take a swipe at him, I knew I wouldn’t stand a chance. Dozer was a big, barrel-chested guy with a thick neck, and even though one of his arms was slightly withered from radiation, he more than compensated with his other. If I attacked him, it’d only prove his point that I was reckless and not a real leader.
So I did nothing, said nothing, just turned and walked away. Behind me, I heard Dozer making clucking sounds.
There wasn’t anything I could do about Dozer. I’d just have to live with the situation—and him.
We marched through the night and into the morning, as the sun chased away the stars and made invisible the moon. There was little conversation, and Hope and I kept more distance between us than ever. She didn’t want to talk to me, and I had no desire to talk to her.
But it hurt to lose her. Cat, too. Ever since I’d snuck up on them, he’d avoided looking at me. I felt betrayed, as though someone had taken a shot to my gut and I hadn’t seen it coming.
I tried to focus on other things. Like what on earth had we witnessed between Dr. Gallingham and Chancellor Maddox? What was so precious that it had to be exchanged in a secret meeting in the middle of the night? We were utterly exhausted by the time we set up camp the next evening, but I was craving conversation. No, not just conversation: companionship. I needed a friend.
I found Twitch sitting cross-legged on the ground, his tall, gangly form folded in on itself. If there was ever a person who reminded me of a stork, it was Twitch.
He didn’t seem to notice when I sat down next to him. His fingers gripped a stick as though it was a pencil, sketching a series of loops and lines and mathematical equations in the dirt.
“Oh, hey,” he said, when he finally saw me, his cheek rising and falling in a facial tic. Even though Omega happened a good four years before we were born, the radiation from the bombs had done a number on his central nervous system. Of course, at this point, his twitches were just a part of him. Like my limp. Or Four Fingers’s missing finger.
“What do you think about our decision to return?” I asked. After last night’s confrontation with Dozer, I couldn’t help but feel that it was me versus everyone else. All the excitement we’d first experienced after crossing back from the fence seemed a thing of some distant past.
Twitch took a bite of squirrel jerky and chewed a moment. He was the kind of guy who liked to consider an issue fully before voicing an opinion—unlike his counterpart, Flush, who blurted out whatever popped into his head at any given moment.
“On the one hand, Dozer’s right,” he said. “It’s the most foolish decision we’ve made.” His facial features jerked as he chewed.
“But?” I prompted.
He finished chewing and swallowed. “We need to rescue those Less Thans. And that trumps logic.”
Without meaning to, I sighed in relief. All day, I’d had the feeling I was waging an uphill battle against the others.
“Not that that means we’ll succeed,” he added, and my happiness evaporated.
“You don’t think we’ll make it?”
“Are you kidding? We don’t stand a chance.”
I looked at him in disbelief. “But you’re willing to go along anyway?”
He shrugged. “No one else is going to rescue those Less Thans—might as well be us. And who wants to miss out on that?”
I loved Twitch for that—that he knew the odds were stacked against us but was willing to go along anyway.
I pointed to the drawings in the dirt. “What’s all this?”
His eyes lit up. “Ever heard of a zip line?” When I gave my head a shake, he used the stick to walk me through the drawings, telling me how—in pre-Omega days—people used to stretch out long wires and ride them down mountains. For fun.
“Where’d you hear this?”
“Read about it in some old science magazines.”
Figured. “So what’re you saying?” I asked.
“The enemy’s always coming at us from the ground, right? So I say we build our own zip line and attack them from the air.”
The point of his stick landed on a series of lines and semicircles, and he told me all about inertia and acceleration and other things I only partly understood. As he spoke, his facial tics decreased. It was as though the more passionate he became, the less his face twitched.
It seemed impossible, of course, finding the materials to build such a line, but I loved his enthusiasm. He would do his best to make this work, even though we had “no chance” of succeeding.
Now if I could only convince the rest of them.