Warchild: Pawn (The Warchild Series) (6 page)

CHAPTER ● EIGHT

Shoving through the crowd, trying to
make it back to our shack to find Grandfather, I’m met with elbows and flying
arms and terrified, panicked faces. There’s no order to this. It’s madness. I
try not to blame myself, but it’s hard. There was no time for a coordinated
exit, and it’s likely that even if we had the chance to plan how we would
deliver the order to retreat, the result would’ve been the same.

We’ve lived in fear of hearing the
war drums for as long as our stories have been told. This lunacy I’m swimming
through would’ve happened no matter what. I stop rationalizing, and instead, I
focus on getting home. I’ve lost Finn. I can hear his voice over the cacophony,
shouting instructions, but it’s impossible to pinpoint his location.

I catch a finger to my eye and wince,
trying to wipe the sting away. Half-blind now, looking through a haze of tears,
I keep pushing, pushing, fighting my way home, back to Grandfather’s pitiful
shack where I’ve lived since the day Mother and Father left.

It was Harvest Day and I remember it
well. Mother had amazing blonde hair that almost looked yellow in the setting
sun of autumn. Father’s hair was black, and I remember thinking that when they
stood side by side, their heads looked like two stripes on a bumblebee. I was
young enough to think that things like that were important.

They smiled when they left me with
Grandfather. Their last words were, “Be good for him, okay?” And then they
left. In a way, I wish they were here, but I’m also glad they’re gone. If they
didn’t want me, I don’t want them, don’t need them. Grandfather has been the
only family I’ve ever needed.

And the thought of losing him, along
with Brandon, is more than I can bear.

I reach our shack and fling the door
open. I run inside and call his name. He’s on the floor, asleep. Shaking. I
bend and grab his shoulder, then roll him onto his back. He mumbles something
and opens one eye enough to see me.

“Caroline,” he says. His voice is
weak and hoarse. “Did you tell Hawkins?”

“We have to go. Can you walk?”

“What’s happening? Why are you—” He
collapses into a fit of coughing and groans.

“Where does it hurt?”

“Everywhere.”

I feel his forehead. It’s as hot as
our fireplace in the middle of winter.

“I’m cold.”

“You’re burning up.”

“No. Cold.”

“Grandfather, we have to go. There’s
an army coming. They’ve declared war.”

“I—I can’t,”—coughing, coughing—“I
can’t make it. You…you go. Leave me.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“I won’t make it.”

“You have to. You have to!”

“How close are they?”

“Half a mile, maybe less.”

“Then
you
can escape. Go,
Caroline. Listen to your Elder.” He takes my hand and kisses my fingers. “Use
your strength. She gave it to you for a reason,” he says, and then he rolls
away from me, wrapping his arms around his sides, shaking.

“She gave it to me? Who—what?” I
don’t know what he means. He’s never mentioned someone
giving
me
something before.

“Run,” he says.

Before I can protest, before I can
ask him what he’s talking about, I sense someone behind me and turn to see Finn
standing in the doorway. He looks over his shoulder, northward, and motions for
me to hurry.

“I can see them coming,” Finn says. “Maybe
twenty, and not everyone’s gone yet.”

“Run,” I tell him. “Go with the
others.”

“I’m not leaving you here.” Finn
glances out the door again. “Thirty seconds, Caroline. Hurry.”

“And I’m not leaving
him
here,” I say, pointing at Grandfather.

First Brandon, and now this. I
absolutely
can not
abandon the only family I have left.

“Let’s go! Now!” Finn rushes forward
and grabs my upper arm, then tries to pull me away.

I plant my boots on the wooden floor
and hold my ground. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll die with Grandfather if it
comes to that. “No,” I scream. I jerk myself free and crawl over to the
sweating, whimpering man that raised me as his own child. I lean down and put
my lips on his forehead, feeling the heat on his skin.

Finn runs back to the door,
panicking, looking out and then back in at us. “Fifteen seconds.” His voice is
high and panicked.

Grandfather coughs and grabs my rain
jacket. “You were always my little girl,” he says and his body goes limp as he
collapses to the floor. His eyelids don’t close. His chest doesn’t move. He’s
gone. There will be no saving him.

And it’s too late to save ourselves.

I scream at the ceiling, my muscles
straining and fists clenched into tight rocks of flesh and bone. I should’ve
traded my shifts for the past week. I should’ve gone on a salvage mission to
look for medicine. But all these years later, would there have been anything
left? It doesn’t matter. I should have tried.

When I look to my left, Finn backs
away just as a DAV soldier runs toward the entrance. Finn slams the door shut
and drops the thick piece of wood we use as a bar into its metal slot.

I stand, listening to the pounding
outside as the man shoves his shoulder against the door, again and again,
trying to break inside.

Grandfather and I never had the
luxury of a rear entrance in our shack like some of the others. There are no
windows either. Finn and I are trapped. We only have my slingshot and two
knives. It’ll never be enough to take on twenty men.

Or even one with a gun, if he’s
armed.

I stand and retreat to the far wall.
Finn joins me, both of us watching the door rattle and the bar bend. The metal strains
and soon, the latch will splinter free from the wall.

In the seconds I have remaining, I
look around the room at our pathetic beds and our meager possessions, trying to
recall the memories attached to each one. I want to remember. The memories are
all I have left.

I see the metal bucket that
Grandfather and I found together last summer. Grandmother’s dress hangs limply
on the wall. It’s white with blue flowers. It was always too big for me, so it
hung as a reminder of what little time we had together.

As a community rule, we’re supposed
to share—
required
to share—and the dress would’ve been perfect for Elder
Keryn and her bulky frame, but Grandfather refused. Hawkins fined him, and
Grandfather told me that keeping the dress was worth more to him than the five
pounds of cured deer meat that we lost.

I see something else we kept in
secret. Grandfather’s second pair of salvaged boots that never fit but he
refused to part with because maybe one day, we’d need to trade them for
something valuable like food or a new dress for me on my wedding day—now a day
that would never come. I get angry with him, knowing that they sat wasted all
those years. We could’ve used them so many times for so many things.

The soldier slams against the door
and I hear the first crack of wood. It won’t be long now. Outside, out in The Center,
I hear screaming and gunfire. The pops are sharp, and I wonder whom they’ve
gotten; I wonder if it’s any of my friends, if it’s Brandon’s family or if they
forced Hawkins up against a porch column and executed him.

My legs shake and nearly buckle. The
wall splinters again.

I look up at the shelves near the
front door, the shelves that Grandfather and I built together two years ago. Sitting
on them are random items we collected, like a pair of baby shoes and a jigsaw
puzzle that makes a picture of the ocean I’ve never seen and never will. Grandfather’s
reading glasses and a stack of books, a candle holder that hasn’t held a candle
since I was five years old.

These items, with so many memories
attached to them, rattle and bounce with each pounding shoulder on the door. They
dance around, skitter close to the edge, and fall.

Finn takes my hand. Our fingers
close together, and he squeezes.

He says, almost lightheartedly, “Any
last words?”

If he’s feeling what I’m feeling,
it’s a mixture of fear and disbelief that
this
is how it actually ends. I’ve
always been convinced that I would die an old woman—meet my fate from pneumonia
like Grandmother or eat a piece of spoiled meat and visit the afterlife with a
stomachache. It was to be something simple, something unfixable because we
didn’t have the supplies or something to trade.

Never did I imagine that I would die
at the hands of an invading DAV army.

I squeeze back and say, “I wish it
would stop raining.” It’s a pointless thing to say, because we all wish the
same, but I can’t think of anything else. I already miss Grandfather. I miss
Brandon. I could say that, but I want to keep it to myself. I want to keep that
for
me
.

We wait, and I’m surprised that the
door has held this long. The soldier outside curses and slams against it one
more time.

Beside me, I hear Finn gasp and feel
him let go of my hand. He drops and scrambles over to Grandfather’s bed, then
reaching under it, he pulls out the axe that I’d completely forgotten about. Grandfather
had taken to keeping it inside recently after someone within the encampment had
been accused of stealing and hoarding things.

Hawkins never caught the thief, yet
I have a feeling that he, or she, will get the appropriate comeuppance at the
hands of the DAV soldiers outside. Eventually.

Finn points at me and whispers,
“Stay right there, let him see you. Don’t move, and don’t look at me, no matter
what, okay?”

I can barely hear him over the
pounding of my heartbeat, the pounding at the door, but I nod. I understand.

Finn scoots against the wall,
flattening his back to it, hiding, waiting, holding the axe tight to his chest.

The latch finally gives and explodes
in a shower of splinters as the door swings wildly open and slams against
Finn’s side.

I shriek as the DAV infantryman
barrels through the door, off-balance from the door swinging inside, his weight
and momentum carrying him ahead in a couple of wobbly, staggering steps. He
regains his footing and stops in the middle of the room, eyeing me. A look of
realization flickers across his face, but only for a fraction of a second. I’m
not the boy he saw.

Before the soldier can move, Finn
shoves the door clear, lifts the axe, and swings at the man’s legs like he’s
chopping down a tree. The sound of the blade burying into thigh flesh works its
way into my gut, and I feel my insides swirl. It’s too much. Too violent.

And when he screams and falls to the
floor, howling, holding his hands up at Finn to beg for mercy, I cover my face.
I don’t want to see what happens next.

There’s another dull
thunk
. I
swallow my disgust.

The screaming stops but I keep my
eyes closed.

I feel Finn’s sweaty palm on my
wrist, and he’s pulling me. I go with him, eyelids still jammed shut. My foot
kicks something, a body, but I keep blindly moving until we’re outside my
shack, until I can feel the rain on my face.

When I open my eyes and see the
aftermath, I wish I’d kept them closed.

I wish I’d kept them closed forever.

What I see leaves me with such an
overpowering feeling of rage and sadness, hate and guilt that I double over. Everything
goes numb.

Finn says, “Oh my God.” He doesn’t
move. It’s too unbelievable. We’re stunned to the point of inaction.

I hear a loud, unfamiliar voice say,
“You there, stop!” and feel a rough hand around my neck and another on my
chest. Grabbing, clamping around me. I look to my side and watch Finn hurtling
downward, a DAV soldier on top of him, yanking Finn’s arms behind his back and
tying them together with a short rope.

The soldier looks up at the one
holding me and says, “He’s one of ours, isn’t he?”

“Yep,” says the voice behind me, “I
think we caught ourselves a deserter.”

I don’t even try to break free. It’s
useless, and I’m too shocked by the scene in front of me.

The Center has become a graveyard.

CHAPTER ● NINE

This is what happens during war:
people die.

And often, it’s not the people you
want
to die or the people who should.

I don’t know how many from my
encampment made it out safely, but I take a small measure of consolation in the
fact that it looks to be more than those that didn’t. But, this doesn’t change
the fact that many of my friends and their families are on the ground. It’s a
horrible, ghastly sight, and I can’t look away. Some of them I’ve shared meals
with, hunted and fished with. We played Catch the Rabbit together and counted
stars at night, got burned by the sun back when the skies were clear.

Elder Thomas and Elder Choal. Jacob
and Edgar. Helena and Evelyn.

There are too many to count and then
an overwhelming thought occurs to me: I’m the last scout left alive.

Up ahead, in the heart of The
Center, I see something that creates such a feeling of betrayal that I’m unable
to breathe properly.

Hawkins stands there with his hands
in his pockets, laughing, talking to a DAV officer with stripes on his arms,
just like the one Finn killed back in the forest.

Hawkins looks at me; his face is
smug and confident. Now I understand. Now I know why he didn’t immediately give
the order for retreat, why he sent me back into the woods. Now I understand why
he was calmly fixing himself lunch when I returned with Finn.

He was stalling. He knew it was
coming.

Hawkins betrayed us all.

Inside me, that flicker of strength
that I’d lost back in our shack stands up and dusts itself off, preparing for
whatever comes next.

Hawkins won’t get away with this.

I won’t
let
him get away with
it. I’ll find a way. Somehow.

Finn stumbles along beside me,
bleeding from his nose and mouth. Dirt coats one side of his face from where
they had him on the ground. He doesn’t look over to me. He stares straight
ahead and marches, obeying our captors’ commands, beaten and broken.

We approach Hawkins and the officer.
Hawkins looks at me with a combination of pride and scorn, says, “This one,”
pointing at me, “she’s trouble. Keep her close. Good scout, though, one of the
best we’ve ever had. It’s almost a shame.”

Somehow, the compliment makes it
worse. They didn’t tie me up like Finn, but the soldier behind me has such a
tight grip that there’s no chance of getting loose and clawing at Hawkins’s face
like I want to. I hated him before, but now, he absolutely disgusts me.

How long had he known? Who told him
and when? He rarely left our encampment, preferring to sit on his porch and eat
while the rest of us made life possible. When did he turn and why?

I peek over at Finn. Was it him? Had
he been sneaking into the encampment at night, secretly delivering messages to
our betrayer?

No, it wasn’t possible. Aside from
the fact that it’s unlikely he would’ve gotten past any of the scouts, Finn
saved my life and risked his own to be here, to free himself of the DAV
confines. It couldn’t have been him. Before, I wasn’t so sure, but now I refuse
to believe it. I have to have something true in my life.

The officer standing beside Hawkins
is short, not much taller than me, but he’s older than me by decades. His skin
is wrinkled and saggy around his cheeks and neck. His cap is tipped to the side
and underneath, I can see a thick swath of gray hair. His jowls wobble when he
speaks. “You think she’ll do it?” he asks Hawkins.

Hawkins tilts his head back and
examines me. He sighs and says, “Doubtful, but it won’t matter if she doesn’t
have a choice.”

“Do what?” I ask.

“Captain Tanner here would like to
make you an offer.”

The aging officer steps over to me,
slowly, with his hands behind his back. He looks down at my boots, and I follow
his eyes all the way upward until they meet mine. “Your name’s Caroline?”

I don’t answer. He already knows
what it is and doesn’t deserve a response.

“I suppose I already know what your
answer will be—and it’s a pity, really—Mr. Hawkins here—”

Hawkins interrupts him with a
falsely polite, “
General Chief
Hawkins…”

“Do
not
interrupt me, sir.”

Hawkins hangs his head and takes a submissive
step back.

“Now, Caroline, my guess is you’ve
heard the phrase, ‘death before dishonor.’ Is that correct?”

I shake my head. “But I can figure
out what it means.”

“Right. Your friend here,” he says, glancing
around at Finn, “is a defector, so there’s no hope for him. But you, my
dear…Hawkins speaks very highly of your talents, and I hate to waste good
resources. They’re so rare these days. What I can offer you is this: join the
Democratic Alliance of Virginia as an enlisted scout, and you’ll live. You’ll
be fed three times a day, provided with a tent and a warm blanket, and the best
part is, you’ll be paid for your efforts. Have you ever even
seen
money,
Miss Caroline?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s quite fun when you have
enough of it. That’s my offer. Join us and be spared, or refuse and die. It’s a
simple choice, really, though I’d prefer you answer in the affirmative, given
the circumstances as they are. Rarity of talent, as it were.”

I lean forward, straining against
the soldier’s arms holding me, and bare my clenched teeth. “Look around you,” I
say. “What do you
think
my answer is?”

Captain Tanner smirks and scans the
muddy Center, looking at his handiwork. “Say I find it somewhere in my heart to
let you live. Say God came down from the heavens and commanded me to set you
free…
you
look around. You have nothing left, my dear. Pretty soon, the
torches will arrive, though I don’t imagine things will burn so well in all
this rain, but we’ll make it happen. You’ll have no home, no family, no
friends. We’ll catch everyone else, you can be sure of it. You’ll be a ship
without a harbor, a car without gas, a poet without a muse. You’ll have
nothing
.”

“If you let me live, it’ll be the
last bad decision you ever make.”

Captain Tanner laughs—it’s a big
laugh from such a small man—then says to Hawkins, “Confident, isn’t she?”

Hawkins nods. “Too confident.”

Captain Tanner rubs the stubble on
his cheeks. “How old are you, Miss Caroline?”

“Fourteen.”

“Interesting. I wouldn’t have
thought so young. You’re clearly wise…wiser than any fourteen-year-old girl
I’ve ever met…but are you wise enough to understand the generosity of my offer?
Option one, life. Option two, death.”

“You know my answer. I would rather
die than serve a murderous bastard like you.”

“And thus, death before dishonor. Suit
yourself. What’s the loss of a single pawn, huh?” Captain Tanner addresses the
two soldiers behind us. “Gentlemen, you’re free to have some fun with these
two, but make it quick. We can’t let the lemmings get too far into the forest.”

Arms tighten around my neck and my
chest. The soldier pulls me away, and the other one does the same to Finn. We
only make it a couple of steps before another one, a younger boy around my age,
wearing a loose fitting uniform and a hat that’s so large on his head it pushes
his ears down, struts into The Center.

Poor, old, blind Ellery teeters
along in front of him. Her white hair, once curly and sprouting from her head
like a dandelion gone to seed, is matted against her scalp. It’s the first time
I’ve ever seen her outside, and the first time I’ve ever seen her without the
dark glasses she uses to hide her eyes.

The DAV soldiers that have been
meandering around The Center, pillaging the bodies and stealing from the empty
shacks, stop what they’re doing and move toward us with their mouths open.

They come closer and everyone pauses
and stares. I feel like, somehow, they know that she may be the last.

When she gets close enough, I can
see the milky white of her irises, and if I didn’t know what a sweet woman she
was, she’d be a frightening spectacle. The thin material of her plain white
dress is soaked through and I can see her underclothes beneath it. She’s not
wearing boots and her frail feet squish in the mud.

The young soldier says, “Captain
Tanner, sir. Found her two rows over, hiding in a goat pen. Is she—I mean, do
you think…”

Captain Tanner whistles and removes
his cap.

Finn looks at me questioningly.

Hawkins bows his head, maybe in
shame, maybe in phony respect, and shuffles to the side.

Captain Tanner says, “Yes, she
certainly is. That’ll be all, son. Step away slowly. Leave the lady right there…nice
and easy, Mr. Walker. Nice and easy.”

Walker looks confused, but he does
as he’s ordered, as if Ellery will explode like a bomb from the Old War.

They act like they’re afraid of her,
afraid of this fragile old woman whose bones break as easily as the twigs we
step on in the forest. If she’s a Kinder, which I doubt, maybe they should be.

Captain Tanner approaches her,
softly, with a hand held outward. I can see it shaking. “Captain Tanner,
ma’am,” he says. “With the First DAV. I suppose you knew we were coming.”

Ellery leans on her cane, wobbly and
weak in the legs. “Not just you. War.”

“I must say, it’s quite an honor to
meet…to be in the presence of—of a Kinder.”

Captain Tanner knows? He
recognizes
her?

“Heathen,” Ellery says. “What have
you done?”

“I—we—it’s a matter of necessity,
ma’am. I’m sure you understand.”

“No one understands war, except for
the men who create it.”

Captain Tanner takes another step
closer to Ellery and then looks at two large soldiers behind her, motioning
with his hand, tilting his head, signaling for them to approach her. He says,
“We’ve heard tales about you and…your gifts. Are there many more left like you?”

“I feel two,” she says. “They’re
close.”

“Two? No, that can’t be.”

I share the same thought with him. The
Elders teased that she was the last.

But, Ellery knows. She always knows.
Past and present. The future. Her words are always cryptic, however, and it’s
difficult to figure out what she means.

She croaks, “Time has not treated us
as well as they’d hoped, Captain Tanner.”

“I can see that. How very
unfortunate, but tell me, where are the other Kinders?”

“Closer than you think.” Ellery’s
bobbling, shaky head turns in my direction. She smiles a toothless smile and
lifts a fragile arm, her hand flapping at the end of it like one of the fish we
catch in the nearby river.

What’s she talking about
, I wonder. Me? Is she trying to
distract them? I can’t imagine why. It serves no purpose. I have no special
abilities. I can’t see the future. I can’t run faster than a deer. I can’t
climb trees like a squirrel or jump forty feet across the river. The stories
we’ve been told about the Kinders have mentioned amazing things—foresight,
incredible physical feats. Speed and agility. Regeneration. And up until today,
I thought immortality was one of them, but if what Ellery says is true, then
maybe that’s all they were. Stories.

Stories made up to give children
hope and something to dream about. A chance to pretend that they have more than
what we’re given by nature and circumstance.

When I was little, not so long ago,
I dreamed of becoming a Kinder. I wanted to do what they did—seeing the future,
running, jumping, climbing, flying, I wanted to live forever—but Grandfather
said no, that back in the Olden Days, Kinders were used for war, that they
weren’t nice like the Elders claimed when they sat around our campfires and
shared what they thought they knew.

I don’t have any special abilities. Not
like them. I can shoot a hopping, sprinting rabbit with my slingshot from fifty
feet away, but that’s it. The ability to aim well, to hunt, to anticipate my
prey’s next move comes with years of practice. It’s not a skill that was given
to me by someone the Elders called a “scientist.” I’m not entirely sure what
that word even means, or what a scientist did before the world ended. They only
told us what their Elders had told them.

Ellery knows this. Ellery knows I’m
not like her.

Ellery knows that Finn and I aren’t
going anywhere. We’re incapable of doing anything against this group of men. Ellery
is blind, but sees everything, and she has to know that we’re outnumbered, that
it’s not like she says.

Doesn’t she?

This is
our
end, not theirs.

The two large soldiers creep up
behind Ellery, inching closer with their arms out, ready to grab her, take her
prisoner, and then what? What will they do with, or
to
, the last
remaining Kinder?

If she’s not immortal like the
Elders claimed, does she feel pain?

My heart aches for the old woman as
the two large soldiers advance toward her, approaching slowly, cautiously. What
have they been told? What stories do they know that we don’t?