The Defectors (Defectors Trilogy) (23 page)

Amory leaned over, nearly falling on his side. By the looks of it, he’d had more than a few from Max’s stash. He wore that easy sideways grin, and I was reminded once again how handsome he was. “You ever miss this?” He gestured around the fire.

I looked at Logan, who was leaning against Max’s side, the bottle of rum tipping in her hand. Her golden hair glowed in the light of the fire, and she looked incandescently happy. Max looked as though he couldn’t believe his luck.
 

Even Roman seemed more relaxed, talking to Mica about prohibition-era rumrunners.

I understood what Amory meant.
 

“Yeah, I do.”

Amory furrowed his brow, looking serious — an expression of his I was more accustomed to. “Do you think it will ever be like this again?”

I knew he didn’t just mean another hazy night of beer and campfires.
 

“I don’t know. Maybe someday.”

Since there was no wind, we decided it would be warmer to lay down tarps and sleep around the fire than to take shelter in the cold truck. Logan was passed out against Max already, so I laid my sleeping bag over by them. I took off my holster but kept my weapons tucked in my sleeping bag with me.

Amory settled down on my other side, and I was glad. He made me feel safer. Maybe it was the beer, but he had a spark in his eye that made something deep inside of me stir.
 

Without warning, he wrapped an arm around me and pulled me into him. Surprised, I tentatively put out my hand and touched his muscular chest through his T-shirt. I breathed in the smell of him, and warmth enveloped my chest. I snuggled closer, my heart singing, and drifted off to sleep.

An ear-splitting scream shattered my reverie. Still cradled in Amory’s arms, I struggled to get into an upright position, looking around frantically.
 

The fire was burning low, but I could see several figures moving around in the semidarkness.
 

Mariah — the source of the scream — was in the stranglehold of a carrier. Another stood over someone else’s sleeping bag, although I couldn’t see whose.
 

More were encroaching from the trees around us.

I reached into my sleeping bag and gripped the handle of the tomahawk. Roman and Amory were already up and armed, and Roman had a gun trained on the carrier holding Mariah. Even in the carrier’s sickly, diminished frame, she looked extremely small.
 

Out of the shadows, I heard a sharp crack of the carrier’s splitting skull, and he fell away from Mariah like a heavy coat. Godfrey stepped out from behind her, looking satisfied with a bloody tire iron in his grip. As if on cue, Amory shot around and thrust his knife into the gut of the one hiding behind a large tree.

I couldn’t tell how many there were, but Roman, Amory, and Logan moved with surgical precision as they fought off one after another. Roman and Amory were fierce fighters, but it was clear that Logan was truly masterful.

The carriers took notice, too. Suddenly, two were lurching for Logan, who was busy sparring with a third. I was close — so close I knew I could hit my mark. I let the tomahawk fly. It hit the carrier squarely between the shoulder blades, and she went down.

I grabbed another knife just as the second turned on me. I went for the stomach, but this one was newly infected — strong. He caught my arm, twisting it painfully. Reacting reflexively from my training, I stepped into his cloud of stinking, rotten breath and body odor until I was close enough to jab my elbow into his gut.

He grunted with pain, and I took my chance to pull out of his grip.
 

I couldn’t hesitate, or I would lose my nerve. Without thinking, without feeling, I sank my blade as fast as I could into his abdomen. It went in easily — much more easily than it should have. It was as though the carrier’s flesh was the consistency of rotten fruit.
 

Nausea instantly threatened to overwhelm me. My blade was
inside
a person! A carrier who had once been — still was
 
— a person. He yelled. It was a very human yell.

“Haven! Haven!” Logan was yelling something I couldn’t hear.

My carrier was still going, and the female who had my hatchet in her back was staggering to her feet. Logan flew at her, and before I could tear my eyes away, she brought her foot down with enormous force on the back of the carrier’s neck. Without missing a beat, she stabbed my carrier in the side of the throat, bringing him down. Blood gushed from the wound, and he made a sickening gurgling sound trying to draw a last, dying breath.

Logan was sweating, hair sticking to her forehead. She did not look like the same person I had seen earlier by the fire. We spun around.
 

There were still a few carriers left alive, but they were all on the ground seriously wounded. Rulon emerged from the bed of the truck, holding a handgun. I watched as he moved methodically from one moaning carrier to the next and shot each one in the head. With every shot, my ears felt as though they would bleed, and my heart contracted painfully, more from panic than remorse.

I looked from Amory to Roman to Max. They were all covered in blood and sweat, and they looked exhausted. Rulon was perspiring, but he looked energized, even satisfied.
 

Godfrey stood hunched over a sleeping bag, and I knew something was wrong.

Mica.
 

He was lying half out of his sleeping bag, a chunk of flesh ripped out of his throat. He looked as though he could have been asleep. He wasn’t.

“We should leave,” said Mariah.

Rulon looked at her, his expression neutral. “We must bury the dead.”

“There’s no time. Someone will have heard all that.”

“We’re burying the boy,” said Godfrey.

“Fine.”

“Do it quickly,” Rulon muttered.

“What about the others?” asked Amory.

“Leave them,” spat Mariah. “They aren’t human anymore.”

I glanced over at Logan, who was staring at the ground, completely numb. Godfrey and Roman picked up Mica in his sleeping bag, and she seemed to come back to reality. She cleaned her blade and grabbed my arm, pulling me into the trees in search of running water to wash the blood off our hands.

The shallow stream was frozen over, but Logan crouched on the bank and slammed her boot down, cracking the surface. I winced, remembering the carrier’s neck.
 

Logan pushed aside a chunk of ice and dipped her hands into the freezing water, rubbing them vigorously to get the blood off. She was shaking.

Looking down at myself, I suddenly wished I had brought a change of clothes from my rucksack. I was splattered with blood, although not as much as Logan.
 

I heard a sound like a soft sneeze, and I saw that she was crying. Bent over the stream, Logan was cradling her bloodstained hands in her lap as tears fell freely down her cheeks.

I’d never seen Logan wear an expression of such pure agony and despair. Her face was all screwed up, red and blotchy. I didn’t know what to say.
 

I’d helped kill a carrier, who had once been just another person — a living being who perhaps still
was
a person.
 

Did I feel this? This . . . grief? I wasn’t sure. I wondered if that made me a terrible person — the sort of person who could stab someone and feel nothing.

Nothing.
 

More than nothing, it was a numbness spreading all over my body.

I knelt down next to Logan and laid a hand on her quaking shoulder — a gesture that felt so completely inadequate.
 

“It had to be done,” I said.

She nodded but continued to cry. “This is why . . . I . . . couldn’t . . . make it,” she gasped between hiccups and sobs. “I’m weak. I c-can’t . . . get the job done without . . . losing it.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was afraid to ask — afraid she would unravel completely.
 

“Please don’t tell the others.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand, which was still quivering. “I don’t want them to know.”

“I think it’s completely normal,” I said. “It’s awful, what you had to do. But if you hadn’t, one of us would probably be dead. Me or Max or Amory or Roman . . .”

“No, I mean . . .” She stopped, trying to catch her breath, and looked up at me. “I have to tell you something.”

Logan sat down on the bank, crossing her legs like the Buddha.

“Before I came to the farm, I was in PMC basic training.” She took a deep breath. “My parents . . . they wanted to go north to give my little brother a chance at a normal life.

“We didn’t have the money to leave. My dad was in the army, but he lost all his veteran disability benefits when the PMC took over. My mom was laid off from her job when all the corporations started moving up north.
 

“The PMC offered a nice signing bonus. They would pay for my housing, food, training. I would have money to send to my parents. At the time, it was . . .” she grimaced, “a very appealing option.”

Logan frowned. “Then they sent me into the field. I thought I could do it. Every person we brought in was a fugitive. They broke the law. That’s what I told myself. But there were moms with their kids, homeless teenagers, and old people — people like my family who just couldn’t afford to go or were too sick to travel.

“The officers expected brutality — ruthlessness. They want to be feared, and if you aren’t willing to live up to that reputation . . . well, they try to break you. They hunt down people you used to know and make you beat them within an inch of their lives and send them to the prisons. It usually works.”
 

She shuddered. “They brought in my old babysitter once. They had her all tied up. Somebody had already taken a baseball bat to her. I was supposed to scare her into giving up her boyfriend, who defected.”
 

Logan shook her head. “I couldn’t do it. I ran away. I knew they could track down my family and make them pay, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. And my parents . . .” She broke off, her eyes glassy. “They would be ashamed if they knew the things I have done.”

“And today brought it all back,” I said.

Logan nodded. “The killing. The feeling you get from
killing.
It never leaves you. Most people, they just kill more people, hoping it will go away. But today, it just brought back all the nightmares.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling helpless even as the words left my lips. What did “sorry” even mean? I wasn’t sorry for anything I had done, and I knew the PMC wasn’t sorry for what it had done. It was pointless to feel sorry about the situation, too.

“That’s not all,” said Logan. She sniffed. “Mariah knows. I know she’ll tell them all what I used to be.”

“I know,” I confessed. “I heard you the other night.”

Logan’s eyes overflowed with tears. “And you didn’t say anything?”

“I wouldn’t. I trusted you. I
still
trust you.”

“I don’t deserve it.”
 

“How does she know?” I asked.

“She was in the PMC with me. We were friends, even. Except I could tell she didn’t feel the same way I did.” Logan looked up, as if searching for words. “She
enjoyed
it almost. Like . . . I don’t know . . . like she enjoyed
hurting people.”

“How did she end up a rebel?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she got sick of it, too. But the way she looks at me . . . It’s like she’s counting down the days.”

“Do you think she’d tell, though? I mean, she was one of them, too.”

Logan shook her head. “It’s not the same.” She looked guilty. “Haven. They never pulled my CID.” She pulled up her sleeve and thrust out her white forearm. It was completely unblemished except for a tiny raised square of flesh.

Of course I had seen Logan’s mark before, but knowing she had been part of the PMC gave it more meaning. They hadn’t deactivated her merely for crimes as a citizen; she was considered a traitor and a serious threat to national security.

“What did Roman say? Didn’t he check you?” I asked.

“That’s the thing,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. I waited and waited for them to find me . . . to come after me. I didn’t even care anymore because I figured there was no way I could live anyway after all the bad things I’d done. I couldn’t go back to my family. Even if I wanted to, I didn’t want to put them in danger if they were tracking me. So I waited.
 

“One day, I went to the market to buy some food. I’d been stealing for so long, but I decided I didn’t care if they found me. I wanted to be dead.”
 

She paused, as if it shocked her even to this day. “I didn’t register. Nothing. I’d been wiped off the grid. They stole my identity — made me disappear. That way, I’d never make it past border patrol. My family could never track me down. My money was gone, my credit cards deactivated. My social security number . . . They stole my whole life.

“When I found the farm, I should have set off the PMC surveillance alarms. Their CIDs give out a unique frequency. I told Roman everything, but no one else.”
 

She grabbed my arm. “Haven, I couldn’t stand it if they knew . . . if Max knew.”

I nodded. “Well, there is a way I think we can keep Mariah quiet.”

I told her how I saw Mariah sleeping with Rulon the night before and how she rebuffed him that morning when they were huddled together discussing strategy. Rulon was supposed to be the leader. How would it look if he was taking marching orders from a woman he was having an affair with? It would seriously damage his credibility.

“She’s controlling him,” said Logan. “That’s what she does. She manipulates people.”

“She’s planning something,” I said. “Something big that the others don’t want to be a part of.”
 

I wanted to tell Logan there was something else, something not right about Mariah, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I wondered if my hatred was compromising my judgment, but there was something about her that seemed dangerous.