Donor 23 (16 page)

“No big deal.” As a sewer worker, Reck was used to rats. “Come on.”

Reck held something in his hand—paper, rolled up. Sticking to the shadows, they made their way down an alley and slipped into a building.

Kaleb’s apartment was small but nicely kept, and it had a homey feel. His grandmother, Zenobia, sat on a rocking chair, smoking her antique wooden pipe. She was one of the oldest people in the ghetto, and she looked it. Her hair, once jet-black, fluttered gray and wispy.

Kaleb unwrapped the object on the kitchen table. Zenobia shuffled to the table.

“Gran, this is a template of a poster. What do you think? I’m going to take it to the printer tonight,” Kaleb told her.

By printer, Kaleb meant a clandestine printing machine. The Alliance outlawed printing devices in the ghetto, to control the spread of information. He had unrolled a photo of Joan, taken earlier that day—it showed her right after she jumped off the boulder. Determination showed on her face, and the red stain on her shirt resembled a heart. Underneath the photo was the caption: “Remember Joan Lion.”

Zenobia studied it for a minute or two.

“So, Gran, what do you think?” Kaleb persisted.

The wise old woman shook her head.

“What?” Kaleb questioned.

She pointed at the caption.

“The Lionheart,” was all she said.

The next morning donors woke to posters of The Lionheart hanging everywhere in the ghetto. While the Alliance may not have been able to take away the hope, faith, or aspirations Joan brought the donors, they did take down the posters.

14

J
oan jogged at a slow pace along the river. She couldn’t travel fast without a shoe, but she managed to keep a steady rate. Listening to the river and the birds kept her moving. Then the birds stopped singing—silence, except for the gurgling river. She stopped and cocked her head to the side, struggling to listen. It was faint and ever so slight, but it was there—the sound of dogs baying in the distance behind her.

She took off at a speedy pace, but after a few minutes stopped to think, wincing from the pain. No matter how fast she ran, the dogs would follow and find her. The water. Dogs can’t track scent through water. She decided to swim to the other side of the river.

She waded out into the waterway. When the water reached her waist, she realized how swiftly the current moved.
Could she swim it?
It appeared to be thirty feet across. She had to try.
She waded in deeper, but the undercurrent swept her feet out from under her and pulled her down, below the surface. She came up, gasped for air, and began swimming—fighting and battling the strong flow. The powerful river tugged stronger than anticipated, swirling her in different directions.

Downriver a large tree loomed, with its boughs overhanging the water. One of its branches sagged into the river. Struggling against the flow, she angled herself in position to grab the branch. She tried but found she could only reach the thinner, leafy part. Her hand grasped it, and she tugged, pulling herself up. But the slender branches tore. She desperately reached out with both hands, clutching at a thicker part of the branch. It held. The surge yanked at her, but she held on. She began heaving herself out of the water. Her hope was to climb up the limb and onto the tree—to dry safety. She scrambled a yard up the bough, when it snapped loose from the tree. Both she and the limb dropped into the river.

She clung to it. Climbing onto it as best she could, she wrapped her arms around it, dangling in the water from her waist. With Joan hanging on, the branch drifted downriver. She burrowed tighter into the branches. On the bough, she floated rapidly, covering much more area than on foot.

When Nox arrived at the spot where Joan entered the water, the dogs waited, circling and whimpering. He gasped for breath, exhausted from the chase.

Pulling out his gun, ready for action, he asked the dog handler, “So, where is she? Why have they stopped?”

“Lost the scent. She probably crossed the river.”

Nox eyed the swift-moving river. Instinctively he stepped back. He feared water. He didn’t know how to swim. In his youth, his first draft duty assigned him to the army with a
position in a special unit. The unit’s role was to rescue outsiders from the dangers of the wilderness. The army used the word
rescue,
but at once Nox realized it was kidnapping. He took part in five rescues. All of them occurred on the ocean, grabbing people from the shore. One time a fellow soldier fell overboard. Unable to save him, Nox watched helplessly as the man slipped under the waves. He watched the man’s arm and hand sink into oblivion.

Nox equated water with death.

After hours of drifting along the river in the frigid water, Joan was numb. Her hands shook, and she couldn’t concentrate. She had to warm up. She angled toward the bank by kicking, unsure if her legs even moved. Boulders temporarily halted the branch’s progress, and Joan pushed herself off the limb toward shore, grabbing rocks along the way.

The riverbank consisted of deep, thick, and gooey mud. With her legs still numb, she crawled her way through the sludge. Once on dry land, she collapsed, enjoying the feel of the soft, warm sand.

She slipped off the backpack. As she reclined, the hot afternoon sun shone on her, warming and drying her. She looked at her hands, covered in muck, and a smile crept over her face—a fond memory.

At seven and six years old, respectively, Kaleb and Joan were fast friends. After a big rainstorm, the two of them romped through the ghetto. They were young and innocent, believing all was well and that the destiny, which came to pass for all donors, would pass them by.

Streets in the lower part of the ghetto experienced mudslides. Boards of woods lay across the streets, enabling people to traverse without stepping in the mud. Kaleb and Joan crossed one board, with Kaleb in front. Halfway across, they encountered another young boy. It was
Reck. They’d never seen him before. The board, less than a foot across, not wide enough for two, only allowed one-way traffic. Someone would have to give way. Reck was bigger than Kaleb, but Kaleb and Joan held their ground, neither budging, all too proud and arrogant to be the ones to give way.

People at either end were waiting to cross, and they began lining up and yelling at the kids.

Reck crossed his arms. Kaleb crossed his arms. They stared at each other—a standoff. All of a sudden, a loud siren from a snatcher van in pursuit of a donor pierced the air. The van was just behind the children, and it startled them, causing them to instinctively jump face first into the mud. They landed flat on their stomachs, in sludge six inches deep. The mud covered them—their hands, faces, and bodies. Looking at each other, they burst into laughter and then began a ferocious—and fun—mud fight. That was the beginning of the Three Musketeers.

With that amusing memory, Joan drifted off to sleep, and for the first time in a long time, she had pleasant dreams.

15

J
oan scowled as the pain shot up her left ankle. She had been traveling for a week now. Over the last couple days, she kept up her pace, but her foot had changed from blistering and aching to bleeding and burning. She alternated between a fast-clipped walk and a slow limp. She was doing the latter, shuffling along near the river, keeping her wounded foot on the soft, sandy part of the soil.

When the burning intensified to the point she could no longer stand it, she stopped to rest. She nibbled on an energy bar and examined her left foot. The sandal made of leaves and rope had disintegrated a while ago. Her sole was painfully blistered and scratched. She set it in the river, relishing the cool relief the water brought.

The trickling water mesmerized her, and she didn’t react at first when she heard what she thought was a human voice.
Jerking her head, she jumped up and hid herself in the bushes, trying to locate the sound. The noise came from downstream.

Quietly she crept through the forest a short ways, spying a clearing. A cabin. A woman stood on the porch, waving and calling good-bye to a man climbing into a pick up truck.
People? And cars
? This didn’t coincide with what she learned in school about the Outside.

The man drove off, and the woman went back into the cabin. It wasn’t a large cabin but appeared rustic, nestled comfortably in the clearing. Smoke lazily swirled out of the chimney. A large chicken coop sat off to the side, with several hens and three goats inside. A small water tower stood near the house. A distance away, down the path the truck had taken, was a large barn with the doors closed. Wires ran from the barn to the house.
Electricity
? she wondered.

A raised porch wrapped from the front door of the cabin around to the other side, hidden from Joan’s view. On the porch sat a pair of boots.
Shoes.
Joan gasped. She couldn’t travel much farther without some. She watched for a while longer. No other activity at the house. No other people evident. The woman may be alone. It was worth the risk. She needed a shoe, and twenty yards away sat a pair of boots. She could crawl up hidden in the grass, sneak onto the porch, grab the boots, and be on her way downstream before the woman even realized anything happened.

She watched the woman walk out the door with a rug. She took it to the far side of the porch, out of Joan’s sight. Then she returned and entered the house.

Joan took a deep breath and moved stealthily out of the forest, limping toward the cabin. Huddling down she paused at the front steps, listening to movement from inside the home. It sounded like a faucet.
Running water? From the water tower,
she guessed.

She ascended up the stairs. Silence. She kept going, step by step—slowly. On the porch she rapidly moved toward the
boots. Grabbing them, she spun around to leave. Something big and brown lunged at her from around the side of the porch.
A dog?!
The animal barked loudly and pinned her against the railing. Falling back, she realized she was trapped.

The woman came out, “Grizzly, what’s—?” She froze when she saw Joan.

“Off, boy! Off!” she said forcefully.

The dog backed down. The two women stared at each other. Joan didn’t know what she looked like, but she must have been quite a sight for the woman.

The woman looked around, “You alone?”

Joan nodded.

“From the East?”

Joan nodded again. The woman’s gaze rested on the boots in her hands.

“I needed some shoes.” Pause. “Sorry.” Joan held the boots up to the woman, who took them.

After a moment the woman said, “Come on in.”

The woman, Hazel, had brown eyes and a large nose protruding from her pockmarked face. She was short and stocky. Her hair had turned mostly gray, and coupled with her worn face, it made her appear older than her forty-two years.

The inside of the cabin was not sparse but full of knick-knacks. Oddities hung on the walls. It consisted of only one large room, with a small kitchen, a round dining table with two chairs, a bed in one corner set apart by a sheet hanging from the ceiling, a fireplace, one soft chair next to it, and end tables full of pottery. The fire burned embers. The dog settled himself near the fireplace, chewing on an object. As Joan surveyed the large room, something about it unsettled her.

“Here, sit here,” Hazel motioned to a chair at the table.

Joan did as instructed, placing her backpack beside her.

“Hungry?” Hazel asked.

“Yes, please.”

A moment later, Joan devoured food from a full plate Hazel put in front of her—stew. It was room temperature, but that didn’t matter to Joan. When Hazel set a glass of milk before her, Joan brought it to her lips, but the odor made her stop. She took another whiff of the milk and looked questioningly at Hazel.

“Buttermilk,” Hazel explained.

Joan took a sip—tangy but sweet. She drank the liquid in one gulp.

“Your people’re always hungry,” Hazel commented, as she spooned more of the stew onto Joan’s plate and refilled her glass. Seeing Joan’s quizzical look, she continued, “Yeah, we get some of you each year, runaways from your Alliance. Just so you know, I’ll give you some food to take, but after you’re done you got to skedaddle on out. Go on your way.”