Warchild: Pawn (The Warchild Series) (5 page)

CHAPTER ● SIX

Brandon yanks an arm free from the
younger soldier’s grasp and reaches out, latching onto the captain’s ankle.

He trips, but doesn’t fall, and
looks down at Brandon, trying to kick his leg loose.

It’s not much of a distraction, but
I have enough time to react, spin my knife around, grab it by the blade, and
hurl it. Years of hunting small game, like squirrels and rabbits, have given me
deadly accuracy, even with a moving target. The blade slices through the air
and buries itself into the bearded man’s chest.

He howls and falls to the side.

I move.

The younger soldier drives an elbow
into Brandon’s temple, stunning him, and then climbs off, lunging for the
captain’s gun. I get there first, but instead of grabbing the ancient
weapon—I’m not entirely sure how to use it—I grab my knife by the hilt, pulling
it free from the captain’s chest, and then I dive forward, shoving it deep into
the younger man’s side.

He cries out as I slam into him, our
bodies meeting, shoulder to shoulder, and I use my legs to shove him over. He
lands, rolls down the embankment, and I’m not far behind. Once we come to a
stop, I feel an emptiness in my hand. The familiar weight of my knife is gone,
and I look behind us. I’ve dropped it, and I can’t see where.

There’s no time to hunt for the
knife. The younger soldier holds his side with one hand and reaches for me with
the other. His face is twisted in fury and agony. He bares his teeth like an
angry dog, snarling as his hand swipes through empty air, missing. I scramble
further away while he tries to get up.

As I’m crawling, under my hand I
feel the slick surface of a rock, big enough to use as a weapon. I claw at it,
easily ripping it free from the loose, wet earth, but it’s bigger than I
thought and as I clamber to my feet, I have to pick it up with two hands. My
first impulse is to throw it at him—he’s wounded, in pain, and not moving fast,
but what if I miss? What then? He’s alive—his legs still work—and I can’t risk
leaving him there or giving him the chance to make it back to his army.

It’s heavy, but I manage to lift it
over my head, take two steps forward and then fall with all my weight, and the
rock’s weight, driving it down with everything I have at his head.

The crunching sound of his end makes
me sick to my stomach. I spin away from him, leaving the rock and the blood
behind, and try not to vomit. My heart races. My head pounds. My eyes water.

I sit back, gasping, tasting the
vileness on my tongue, and then push myself up to my feet.

Brandon
, I think, and look up at him. He’s
coming to, barely, and flips onto his back. He tries to get up and falls to the
ground, holding his head. I scramble to him, patting his cheek, trying to lift
him, to help him up, but he’s too big.

He squeezes my arm, saying, “I’m
fine, just give me a second.”

I wait until he’s ready and then
stand when he does. I hug him and cry into his chest. My shoulders shake while
I sob—shaking from the result of my actions, shaking from relief.

I’ve taken three lives, but we’ve
done it. We’ve bought ourselves some time. Who knows how long.

Brandon glances down at the younger
soldier lying on the ground. “That’s—” he says, and then stops, unable to find
the right words. “You saved my life.”

Seconds later, I learn that’s not
true, and that I’ve only taken two lives.

A sharp
crack
, louder than
thunder, louder than anything I’ve ever heard, fills the woods around us and
Brandon lurches as if he’s been hit in the back with something large and heavy.
Another
crack
and he lurches again, falling toward me, his eyes wide
with shock. Blood trickles out of his mouth. He coughs, stumbles, and says,
“What was that—” before he lands on the ground.

I scream, “Brandon!” and whip my
head around to see the captain sitting up, holding his hand over the wound
where my knife had been, aiming at me.

He smiles and to my left, up the
valley, I hear the drums start up again.

Boom, boom, ba-boom. Boom, boom,
ba-boom.

I don’t have time to think about why
they’re on the move again, so soon, before the man says, “You hear that,
sweetheart? That’s the sound of war.”

He raises the gun higher and
instinctively, I jump to the side. Another ear-piercing
crack
envelops
everything around me, but I feel nothing. He misses.

I roll, roll, roll, grabbing a
handful of dirt, slinging it in his direction. It scatters, hits him in the
face, filling his eyes and sends him reeling backward. He fires wildly, blindly,
shot after shot.

Crack, crack, crack
.

Dirt kicks up around my feet after
the first two and the third slams into the tree behind me where it splinters
and sends shards of bark and oak wood down onto my head.

How many shots was that?
The Elders taught us these
things—useless as they were at the time—but I’m having trouble remembering.

The drums chill my skin.

Boom, boom, ba-boom. Boom, boom,
ba-boom.

I climb to my feet, unsure of what
to do next. I’m too far away from him. I’ll never get there fast enough. He’ll
drop me, like Brandon, before I have a chance to try anything.

He climbs to his knees and tries to
get up, but can’t. He grabs his chest, wincing, grinding his teeth together,
and then points the gun. I back up a step, another, and then the massive oak
stops my retreat. I’m trapped. There’s no room, no time, and nothing for me to
do. I’m out of options. I’m dead. I know I’m dead.

“Please,” I beg. “Please don’t.”

He laughs. It’s a cluttered sound. Raspy.
Evil.

And before he squeezes the trigger,
something flies past my head and finds its mark, just to the left of where my
blade had been.

It’s another knife.

The captain drops his gun, looks
down and reaches for it, fingers trying to wrap around the hilt, and then he
tumbles to the ground. Writhing. Dying.

It’s over. I’m safe, but I can’t
stop my bottom lip from trembling.

Where did it come from? Who threw
it?

Behind me, I hear, “Caroline?”

“Finn!” I shout, whipping around the
tree. He’s only a few feet away and I’m so happy to see him that I fall into
his arms.

He catches me, pulls me close. “Are
there more?” he asks. “Caroline, are there any more?”

I tell him no, grab his shirt with
both hands, twisting the material, resting my face in that spot between his
neck and his shoulder. I cry harder than I ever have. Not when Mother and
Father left and never came back. Not when Grandmother died of pneumonia. I cry
more tears than the rain falling around us.

Finn holds me, but Brandon’s gone.

Gone. The word isn’t strong enough,
but I can’t make myself say
dead
.

The boy I’d promised myself to, the
boy who didn’t know.

Over my sobbing, I hear the drums
repeating their menacing rhythm.

Boom, boom, ba-boom.

“Let’s go,” Finn says. “They’re
moving again.” He tries to pull me with him, but I refuse.

“We can’t leave Brandon.”

“We have to. We can’t carry him.”

“I’m not leaving without him.”

Finn shakes my shoulders. “Look at
me—look—listen to those drums. Do you hear how close they are? That’s the
vanguard. They’ll send an even smaller group ahead because they know it won’t
take much to destroy your encampment. We’ll never make it. They’ll catch us and
we’ll die, Caroline. We have to go.”

I pull free and run over to
Brandon’s body. Leaning down, I kiss him on the cheek and touch his hair. I
never got to do that when he was alive. “I’m sorry. Maybe in another life,
okay?”

Finn grabs me under my arms, jerks
me off the ground, away from Brandon, and reluctantly, I leave him behind. We
can’t take him away, but nature will, over time.

We run, looking over our shoulders,
looking for any signs of the DAV forward parties, seeing none.

Finn and I reach the lake trail. I
grab his arm at the fallen pine, the one where the path dips on the other side,
remembering this time to go carefully over it, and then we’re running again,
down the slippery hill.

“I didn’t see them,” I say between
gasps of air.

“Who?”

“Your army. I didn’t see them for
myself. Hawkins—he’ll—”

“I’ll tell him,” Finn says, slowing
down. “I’ll tell him exactly what’s coming.”

“He’ll kill you. You’re part of the
DAV.”

“No he won’t. Not if he wants to
know what I know before it gets here.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know
anything?”

“I know enough to stay alive.”

I ask him a question that’s been on
my mind since he killed the captain. “How’d you get free?”

“My knife. You guys aren’t very good
at taking prisoners. You should’ve checked.”

“Were you going back?”

“Where?”

“Home. To the DAV.”

He stops in the middle of the trail.
“What? Why would I do that?”

I try to pull him, to keep him
moving. He won’t budge until I answer. “I don’t know. You were heading in that
direction.”

He shakes his head, chuckles a
little. “I cut myself free just to show you guys I could do it. I wanted to
sneak up on you—scare you—and then I saw those two dead soldiers and heard
gunfire. That’s when I started running. I saved your life.”

Finn was so close to the opposite
side of the oak tree. He had to have seen what happened to Brandon. “Why didn’t
you save Brandon?”

“I wasn’t close enough.”

“Did you see what happened? Did you
see that soldier pointing the gun at him? Huh? Did you?” Part of me knows it’s
not Finn’s fault—yeah, maybe he was too far away to do anything about Brandon,
but I’m not ready to trust him again. Not yet. He was so close. My rage over
Brandon’s death has to go somewhere. I can’t keep it inside me, and Finn is the
nearest target. I shove him, and he tries to stay solid, like a tree, but I
have the strength of rage on my side, and he topples over when I shove him
again.

He splatters on the ground and pops
back up again, holding his hands out, trying to grab my flailing arms. “Stop
it,” he says. “Stop. We don’t have time for this.” Finn moves closer, wraps his
arms around me—something like a hug, something like an attempt at containment. “I’m
sorry. Stop, stop. Hold still. I saw it, okay? I saw it, but I couldn’t do
anything for him. The knife was the only thing I had, and if I’d missed, all
three of us would be dead. All three of us. Do you understand that? I—Caroline,
hold still—I had to make a decision, and I’m sorry, but I chose to save two
lives instead of losing three. That’s…that’s the truth.”

I struggle to break free. “You
didn’t
want
to try…you wanted him dead.”

“That’s not true. It’s not.”

“Brandon,” I say, then give up. I
rest my head on Finn’s shoulder and allow him to hold me.

“He was my friend, too.”

I’m not sure I believe him, but what
choice do I have? I take a deep breath, and Finn lets go of me. I step back,
wipe my eyes, and turn toward the sound of the drums echoing through the
valley. “They’re getting closer.”

“Yeah, and that’s just the vanguard.
If they sent a forward party, they’ll be right behind us.”

If he’s right, if he’s telling the
truth, no one back home will be safe. There won’t be any time. We’ll never get
them moving fast enough. The longer we stand here fighting over Brandon, over
what might’ve been, the less of a chance everyone will have.

Brandon’s gone, and I don’t want to
be responsible for any more lost lives.

With the minutes we’ve wasted
standing here, I probably already am.

“Move,” I say, ordering him. “Go.”

CHAPTER ● SEVEN

We reach the camp. It’s quiet. The
Center is now empty, and everyone is inside their shacks. I see some of the men
peeking out windows, watching to the north.

Nothing is happening. It’s as if
they’re all waiting to die.

Or they’ve been
ordered
to
wait.

And die.

It makes me angrier than I already
am. Hawkins knows about the war drums. He knows the DAV army is coming.

He knows we aren’t capable of
defending ourselves against something like this. We’re trained to fight—and
fight well—against small bands of Republicons, but an entire army? We don’t
stand a chance. Why, why,
why
did he send me back with Brandon to get a
better look? It was such a stupid decision. If I were General Chief, I would’ve
trusted my scout and made preparations to leave, to retreat, to abandon this
collection of shacks we call home.

If Hawkins had trusted me, Brandon
would be alive, and the hundreds of people that are now hiding inside these
ramshackle, mini fortresses would be at least a couple of miles away. Maybe
safe, maybe not, but there would be more room between us and the DAV army.

I haven’t had time to grieve over
Brandon’s death. That will come later. Now, though, I can feel the anger
lighting something inside. Maybe something that’s been there all along—the
thing that Grandfather swears I have, and I’ve never believed to be true.

Strength.

Finn runs with me past the homes,
through the soggy, muddy space where friends and families meet and trade, where
they talk about their children and what neat piece of history they managed to
find on a salvage mission. Where we live our lives.

And unless we can get everyone
moving, it’ll be where we all die.

I smell the smoke from their
chimneys, but hear nothing other than the sounds of our footsteps and rain
splattering against rooftops. A young boy, Billy Akers, runs out of his front
door. He’s laughing, looking over his shoulder as Elder Akers darts from their
front door. He grabs his son around the waist, lifts him off the ground, and
then looks at me, saying, “Is it true?”

“Yes,” I yell as we race past. “Tell
the others we have to run.”

“But Hawkins said—”

“Go!”

We don’t stop to see if he listened.
None of the Elders are used to taking orders from a scout, let alone a girl my
age, but I hope, for once, this fact doesn’t matter. We’re all conditioned to
blindly follow whatever the GC says; it’s how things have always been, but in
this case, doing so will get them killed. All of us.

I may be younger than Elder Akers by
thirty years, but I know when it’s necessary for logic and reasoning to
overstep the bounds of authority.

We reach Hawkins’s shack, and I
expect him to be outside, waiting for me. Or delegating tasks—something,
anything productive—but I don’t see him anywhere. His shack is much, much
larger than the rest of ours. Kind of like how I imagined the White Home must
have been in the Olden Days. He has multiple rooms and a porch with columns
that he forced the others to build. Hawkins took when he should’ve given or
shared, and right now I hate him for it.

The man is abhorrent. Abusing his
privilege, his power. Ridiculous decisions that bettered his life and made it
harder on others, the people he’s supposed to protect. I never will, but if I
had the chance, I’d do things differently.

Using the side of my fist, I pound
on his door, hard enough for his walls to shake. “Hawkins! Where are you? Hawkins!”
My voice screeches in desperation. I pound on the door until my fist hurts, and
when he finally opens it, I push it to the side and shove past him, into his
home. It’s an invasion, impolite, no matter what the circumstances, and I can
tell that he’s momentarily offended.

The sight of Finn, an unfamiliar
face, is enough to distract him from my rude intrusion. “Who’s this?”

“I’m Finn, sir.” Finn holds out his
hand to shake and Hawkins narrows his eyes.

Hawkins says, “Caroline?
Who
is this?”

I smell the scent of cooking goat
meat, and it infuriates me even more than I already am. Hawkins has been hiding
inside his home, fixing himself lunch while the lives outside his doors get one
drumbeat closer to the end. “You’re eating?” I shout.

“I asked you a question, scout.”

“It doesn’t matter. We have to—”

Hawkins grabs my throat and slams me
to the wall. Shelves rattle as my head bangs against the wood. “You bring a
stranger into my house, and it doesn’t matter? Explain yourself!”

His hand squeezes tighter around my
throat, and I can’t answer him. He’s cutting off my wind, and I struggle to
breathe as he chokes me.

Finn is smaller than Hawkins by at
least a hundred pounds, but he’s quick, agile, and strong from years spent in
the woods. He lunges, wraps an arm around Hawkins’s fat neck and yanks him
backward, away from me. “Do it again, and I’ll bury my knife in your heart.” He
drags Hawkins over and throws him down onto a rickety chair as if he’s
punishing a misbehaving child.

No one treats a General Chief this
way—no one ever has—and Hawkins’s face goes red with contempt. He tries to
stand. “I am your General Chief, and you will do—”

Finn shoves him back into the chair,
points a finger at him. “Shut up and listen.”

Hawkins stays seated, but he
persists. “Young man, I don’t care who you are or where you come from, but I do
not
take orders from PRV underlings such as yourself.”

I rub my throat. It hurts, and hurts
worse when I speak. My words come out in a croak. “He’s not PRV.”

“What? So help me, Caroline, if you
brought a Republicon into this encampment, I will have your badge.”

Finn stands guard over Hawkins as I
move closer to them. “You’ll have my badge? You’ll have
my badge
? I
don’t care about your stupid badges.” I slap his cheek, hard enough to leave a
bright red handprint, and for a moment, I’m amazed that I had the nerve to do
it.

Hawkins is, too, but he stays silent
as he touches the welts my fingers left.

“Brandon is dead.” The words are
painful, but I have to say them.
Need
to say them so he’ll understand. “They
killed him, and unless you shut your mouth and let us explain what’s up there,
we’re all dead. Do you understand me,
General Chief
?” I’m mocking
Hawkins, and he knows it.

But, he nods and doesn’t speak. Wise
man…for once.

“This is Finn. He’s a scout from the
DAV—sit down, Hawkins! Do not try to get up again or I’ll let him put his knife
where you don’t want it. You sit there, and you listen to what he has to say. Thirty
seconds, Finn, hurry.”

Finn moves a step closer to Hawkins.
“I’ve been a DAV scout for three years, and I know you won’t believe me, but
you’ll just have to trust that I’m on your side. About a mile north of here,
maybe more—they’ve already crossed Rafael’s Ridge, at least the vanguard has. Five
hundred troops on foot, and behind that, down in the valley, there are ten
thousand more just like them ready to march all the way through the PRV. Maybe
more. They’ll capture your people and burn anything in their path.”

“Tell him about the tanks,” I say.

Finn glances at me, surprised that I
already know.

“Tanks?” Hawkins says, fearful and
disbelieving at the same time. “They were supposed to get rid of those with the
Pact. That was part of the—”

“It doesn’t matter what they were
supposed to do, Hawkins. How many, Finn?”

“Twelve.”

“Twelve?” Now it’s my turn to be
shocked.

“They probably won’t be able to send
them through the forest.”

“They’re not,” I confirm. “I
overheard the soldiers say they’d have to send them around the flanks, along
the roads where it’s open.”

“Why?” Hawkins asks. “Why’re you—”

“
They
,” Finn reminds him.

“Why’re
they
invading? Why
now?”

Finn hesitates to give an answer. He
told us he didn’t know, back in the woods when we had him tied up, and if he
answers truthfully, he’ll reveal that he lied to us. At this point, I care, but
I don’t. I’ll deal with him later. We’re already wasting too much time
answering questions when we should be telling the others. I’m anxious, antsy,
and I want him to get on with it. “Answer him, Finn.”

“Difference of opinion.”

“What does that mean?”

Finn steps out the door, looks
toward the north. “They were renegotiating the Peace Pact.”

“When?”

“I don’t know—about a month ago.”

“Why?”

“Shut up, Hawkins, let him finish.”

“We—
they
need…workers. The
DAV is growing too fast for our workers to keep up, and our president told
yours he wanted to renegotiate. He said that if the PRV provided him with a
bunch of servants—”

“You mean slaves?” I ask, barely
able to grasp what I’m hearing. The idea is unthinkable.

Finn nods, reluctantly. “President
Crake told Larson that if he handed over a number of workers, he wouldn’t
invade and take them. Your president dared him to try.”

“Slaves?” Hawkins asks,
disbelieving.

“Yes.”

“Good God.”

“Unless you get your people out of
here, right now, prayer might be your only option. Now, do we have your
permission?”

I’m so dumbfounded by the idea of
slavery that I don’t wait. I can’t let that happen to my friends, the people in
my extended family. To Grandfather. If he’s free, if we can find medicine, he
might have a chance at survival. But as a slave, he’s as good as dead. I say,
“I don’t need his permission. Not anymore. Let’s go, Finn.”

I grab his arm, pulling him with me
out the front door, leaving Hawkins behind in the chair. I should ask—
tell
—him
to help, but it won’t do any good. The moment we’re out of sight, he’ll run
like a coward. I know he will. It’s useless to waste my breath on him.

We step off the porch into the
continuous downpour. The rain smacks against my face as I look left and right,
my wet hair slinging around. I point to the row of shacks across from us. “You
take that side, I’ll take this one, but you’ll have to lie. Tell them Hawkins
said to do it, or they won’t listen. Tell them to take nothing but food and to
run. They have to stay light, or they won’t be able to move fast enough,
especially the ones with children. It doesn’t matter how they get there, they
just have to get back to the capitol and warn as many people as possible along
the way. Got it?”

Finn nods, pushes his hair from his
eyes and sprints across to the other side. We knock on doors, warning the
Elders and their families, screaming for them to hurry, to go, to run as fast
as they can. Some of them question me at first, asking why Hawkins gave the
order to retreat, and I yell at them, tell them there’s no time to explain, and
to do what I say. I move onto the next, and the next. Other families further
down the line of houses hear the commotion and come outside their shacks,
holding babies and small children. They stare at us and wait.

It’s easier to tell them all at
once. I run to The Center and raise my voice as loud as possible. I scream my
orders until my throat burns. To my left, Finn is darting from person to
person, saying something, pointing at me. I can hear him begging for them to
listen.

Thankfully, they do. The shacks
empty and The Center fills with people shoving, scrambling, and falling into
the mud. Children are crying, and parents hurry by with worried faces and packs
of food slung across their backs.

The realization of my mistake comes
too late. I’ve created a mess. Complete chaos.

If they try to travel like this, in
a fumbling horde of bodies, it’ll slow them down. I climb up on the pedestal
that Hawkins uses to deliver his ridiculous speeches about how wonderful he is
and begin shouting for them to split up, to travel in smaller packs so they can
move faster. Some of them listen and break off, cutting through the spaces
between the homes they’re leaving behind.

Some don’t, and I begin counting
them as losses already.

I scan the writhing crowd of bodies,
looking for Grandfather’s stringy white hair. He should be easy to spot. He’s
taller than most, at least half a head above everyone else, but there’s no sign
of him anywhere.

I scream for him and get no answer.