The Fall of Crazy House, page 14
“How do you know my name?” I demanded.
He didn’t answer my question. “People here call me the Loner.”
77
CASSIE
I LET MY BREATH OUT in little pants, following Tim as we walked along the road. My whole right side was soaked with blood and I couldn’t feel or use my right arm. My rifle was slung over my left shoulder, but we both knew I probably wouldn’t be able to use it one-handed. Not fast enough to make a difference, anyway.
We’d left the car roughly two hours before at daybreak, though it felt like at least twelve hours. Tim had filled a backpack with the paper files about Becca’s mission, the map of the city, the directions that should lead us to the Loner, and all the supplies he could carry, but it wasn’t much.
We were headed downhill. At first he had tried to walk beside me but as time passed he’d started walking ahead, then farther ahead. I’d tried to keep up but I was getting light-headed from blood loss. Now he was so far ahead I could barely see him. He turned back as if to look for me, then leaned against the rock wall that bordered this mountain road.
When I finally reached him, his face was tight, and for some reason that made me mad.
“It wasn’t my fault an elk committed suicide while I was driving,” I said.
“I know,” he answered, but I could tell that part of him believed that if he had been driving, the elk would have waited another ten minutes before charging across the road.
“Go on,” I said coldly. “Leave me here. I know you want to.”
“Becca would kick my ass!” he snapped.
So he really did want to leave me behind. It would be hard for me to survive without him, even for a little while. Knowing that made my blood boil. Usually I only got this mad at Becca.
“Leave, then!” I spit at him. “But you need me more than I need you! Unless you think you can read all the signs yourself!”
“I can!” he shouted. “I’m not stupid!”
In a way that used to infuriate Becca, I raised one eyebrow. It had the same effect on him and he stomped over to me, eight inches taller and outweighing me by at least fifty pounds.
Gritting his teeth, he snarled, “At least I didn’t run into the world’s biggest deer!”
“You couldn’t have read the ‘Warning: Elk Ahead’ sign!” I yelled.
“There was a freaking sign and you ignored it?” He stormed away, tearing at his hair.
“No, you idiot!” I shrieked. “There was no sign! I would have read the goddamn sign!”
“Don’t you call me an idiot!” he roared so loudly that his voice echoed back at us.
That was what it took to instantly shut us both up. Knowing that we were giving away our presence and position shocked us into silence.
At that point, I realized I was about to faint. There was a convenient boulder and I sank onto it, then put my head between my knees.
“Shit,” he said quietly.
78
I DIDN’T RESPOND.
I heard him walk away, but he’d left our packs by my feet, so I knew he planned to come back. My head started to clear but I felt awful—and even worse, was trying not to cry. I would have happily bled out right there before I let him see me cry.
His footsteps returned. “Hey,” he said softly.
“Mm,” I said, not looking up.
“This is the bottom of the mountain,” he said. “And you won’t believe what’s on the other side.”
I did glance up then, and on his face was a mixture of confusion, wonder, and fear. Not a good look.
Very slowly I stood up, relieved to find that my faintness had passed. Wordlessly he pointed past the rock wall. I walked past him, and it was as he said: the mountain ended abruptly, and on the other side was… desert.
I looked back at where we’d come from: mountain. Now we were suddenly at the edge of a desert. I stared at Tim. “Oh, my God, have we been heading west all this time?” I cried. “The deserty parts of the United are in the west, right?”
Double-checking, Tim looked up at the sun. “No, we’re definitely heading east. But there shouldn’t be a desert here, for damn sure.”
A desert. Surprise #428 of our list of surprises so far on this journey. Without another word, he retrieved our packs. I let him continue to carry mine, out of spite. With effort I hitched my rifle up onto my left shoulder, and we headed down the slight slope toward the desert. I looked around, shielding my eyes from the setting sun, and saw nothing but sand, a very few small plants, and some tumbleweeds that spun in the wind like someone was playing invisible soccer with them.
We had plenty of water—he was carrying it, and I smirked at the thought—but I wasn’t sure how smart it was to set off across a desert without knowing how wide it was or where it led. All I knew was that we were still headed east, the sun setting behind us. Then I saw some shadows on the sand. I traced the shadows and saw… two yellow arches? Poking up out of the sand, maybe eight feet high?
“What in the world are those?” I asked, pointing.
He’d already seen them. “No idea,” he said. “But—I’ve seen them before. I know I have.”
Now that I thought about it, they seemed familiar to me, too. Yellow arches. Two yellow arches…
He snapped his fingers. “They were on that little cardboard box, in one of the piles! Those arches were printed on the box!”
“Right, right,” I said, remembering. “It said… McDonald’s French Fries.” I looked at the buried arches again. “So this was his house, I guess. But—what made all this sand? Where did it come from?” I whirled to look at him. “Is this a beach? Have we gone so far east that we’re near the ocean?”
He frowned. “I don’t think so. Those old maps made the ocean look much, much farther away.”
“So basically we still have no freaking idea where we are,” I said.
“Basically,” he agreed, and I wanted to punch him.
79
BECCA
THE GUY HAD A—GET THIS—RED cloak draped around his shoulders. He was huge, well over six feet, but skinny and his back looked slightly bulky, as if he had a thin backpack on underneath. Without looking at me, he sat down in front of a big roll-top desk.
“Your mother named you the Loner?” I asked sarcastically.
The Loner gave me that half-smile again. “I never had a mother. But enough about me—your mother named you Rebecca.”
Again I demanded, “How do you know that?”
Meeting my eyes, he went on calmly. “You’re from a dinky farming cell hundreds of miles southwest of here. Your parents are dead. Helen Strepp sent you here, to the capital. And luckily, Ansel sent you to me. Do you know why?”
For the first time, I felt a tingle of fear. He knew too much. Ansel had known these rebels would find us. Had his whole “rescue” been an act? In that case, there were six dead United soldiers who hadn’t been in on it. But what had seemed so random and unplanned now looked like the inevitable conclusion to a much bigger plot I wasn’t aware of. What had Strepp done to me?
“Who are you?” I asked, trying to keep my voice strong, my face blank.
“I told you. I’m the Loner. I’ve been waiting for you.” The look he gave me wasn’t exactly kind, but it didn’t seem too hostile, either. “Strepp sent you to me—by various methods. You’re the one who’s going to carry out the mission.”
My head was whirling. “So you and Strepp—and Ansel—are working together?”
He started stacking pens in a little square, hardly paying attention to me. “It’s not that formal of an arrangement.” His little square was four pens high. “We know about each other. We have skills that can help each other.”
I crossed my arms across my chest, feeling like he was speaking in riddles. “Okay, her skills are forcing people to do things they don’t want to do and basically scaring the shit out of kids. What are your skills?”
The guy smiled, a private smile at an inner joke. “Well… I like to blow things up.”
I hadn’t expected that—didn’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t that. His little pen square was maybe ten pens tall now, looking like a log cabin with no windows or doors.
“I always have,” he explained mildly, “even as a kid. Mostly I stay hidden here in the capital and every once in a while I blow up a key bridge or an important United building. It throws a wrench into their system and gives me… a thrill. Win-win.”
This guy was creeping me out—but at the same time he didn’t actually seem evil.
“Why am I here?” I asked clearly.
The Loner smiled. “You’ve been trained to be an assassin. Strepp sent you here to fulfill your destiny. We’re depending on you. You’re the Chosen One. Now that I’ve seen you, I agree with her assessment. You’re here to complete the mission.”
“What. Freaking. Mission?” I asked, letting irritation sharpen my voice.
He looked up at me again. “Your mission to kill the President of the United.”
80
WE WERE BOTH SILENT FOR several minutes. The Loner—what a dumb name—was playing with his pen log house on the desk as if I wasn’t there.
Several thoughts raced through my head: 1) Strepp had known about this mission but chose not to tell me. 2) This was probably the most important thing anyone in the Resistance could do. 3) No one could kill the President of the United and live to tell about it. 4) Strepp had knowingly sent me and my squad on a suicide mission. She had expected to never see us again. 5) She had knowingly separated me from my sister, and from Tim. Forever.
Maybe Strepp was doing anything she could for the greater good of cellfolk, but she was an asshole, all the same.
I looked over at the Loner, who was still occupied. The desk lamp shone on his shaggy, pale blond hair, his fair skin, his slender arms, long, graceful fingers. This guy was a weirdo.
“Huh,” I said, and he looked up. “My mission is to kill the President. Of the United.”
“Yep.”
“Where’s my squad?”
“They’re no longer your responsibility,” he said mildly, dismantling his pen structure.
My entire being stiffened, getting ready to beat the info out of him. His blue eyes suddenly became alert and his long fingers tensed. So he knew enough to pick up on danger signals. And man, I was sending danger signals out of every cell in my body.
“I’m afraid I disagree,” I said politely, my fingers itching for a gun. “I will need to see my squad immediately.”
He started to say something but I interrupted him. “The only answer here is, ‘Sure, Becca.’” My voice was heavy with steely ice and he tensed as if he was about to spring out of his chair.
“They’re needed for other missions,” the Loner said.
“I will see them now.” My voice had never been so hard.
He hesitated for a moment as I calculated angles of attack, then punched a button on his desk. “Bets? Becca wants to see her squad. Can you come get her?”
When he looked back at me, his blue eyes were just as icy as mine, and his lean face had hardened into bone. “I’ll see you back here in twenty minutes.”
Bets came to get me as ordered, and we walked down several flights of winding stairs. Finally she stopped in front of a heavy wooden door. I didn’t know what to expect; didn’t know if my squad had been imprisoned, tortured, disposed of. They were probably terrified, wondering what had happened to me.
Bets opened the door and there they were: Bunny, Jolie, Mills, and Nate. They were sitting at a big, old-fashioned table that had all kinds of food on it, and they were happily stuffing their faces.
“Becca!” Bunny said, waving a drumstick at me. “Look at all this stuff!”
Bets turned to leave. “You have twenty minutes.”
81
CASSIE
I HOPED MR. MCDONALD WASN’T still down there, buried beneath all this sand. It was a creepy thought. Ahead of us we saw more shapes, more shadows in the deepening dusk, and we plodded toward them. Without my asking, Tim made sure I’d been drinking enough, to help make up for all the blood I was losing. Now I was starving, but I refused to ask to stop for food before he did.
“That’s a chimney,” he said, kicking sand at a tall stand of bricks.
“There’s another one,” I said. “This must have been a street.”
A much bigger shadow loomed in front of us and we walked steadily to it. It was dusk, I was feeling faint, and we needed shelter for the night. It had already dropped at least fifteen degrees since the sun had gone down.
It was a big, two-story building, completely dark, its wide picture windows broken, some boarded up. The roof was flat and the store’s name was still right below it in big yellow script: CABELA’s.
He pulled out his handgun and motioned me to be quiet, since I obviously had just fallen off a turnip truck and had no idea how to act in times like this. I rolled my eyes at him. Silently he stepped through one of the broken windows and did a few minutes of recon before coming back for me. I’d maneuvered my rifle into position and was ready to back him up, but he shook his head No and reached for my hand.
“Everything look okay?” I asked, stepping over the broken window.
He nodded. “Nothing here. No rats, no birds, no bats. But…” He grinned. “It has everything else you could possibly want.”
“A hot shower and then a banana split with everything on it?”
“No,” he said, frowning. “Normal things.”
“Like what?”
He waved his arms around. “Whatever a normal person would want!” He strode over to a staircase. “And look!” He shone his flashlight downward and I saw that there were two floors below the sand as well as another floor above us.
Even just standing here, I saw canoes, tents, bicycles, weird machines that looked designed for torture, where you put different weights on them.
I smiled at him for the first time in a long time. “It’s paradise,” I said, and he grinned back.
“Can you hold your flashlight?” he asked, and I nodded. It was understood that I would continue to carry my rifle. I tried to flex the fingers on my right hand and could move them a tiny bit. It was a good sign—maybe the elk’s antlers hadn’t done any permanent damage.
At first we stayed together, starting at the top and working our way down. We hadn’t seen a living creature since the formerly-living elk, but as Strepp had drilled into us a thousand times: You never know. There could be squatters hiding here, there could be wild animals—anything could happen at any time.
“Oh, my God, clothes!” I said, forgetting to keep quiet. There was a huge section of women’s clothes, annoyingly colorful but blood-free and clean, except for the dust. I carefully pulled off my blood-stiffened coat and Tim’s shirt, and he muttered something about not being into fashion, and left.
He was back sooner than I expected, when I was in front of a mirror, staring with horror at the mangled hole in my chest, right below my collarbone.
“I found a shitload of great stuff,” he said, and set up a little camping lantern that surrounded us with an almost cozy glow.
From a large Cabela’s shopping bag, he pulled out medical supplies, field kits, boxes of pain medication. I realized with surprise that he’d been able to read the labels.
He ripped open a package of wet wipes with his teeth. They were dry, of course, but he’d found bottled water.
Ten minutes later, I was de-blooded, dressed in warm, dry, slightly sandy clothes, and was contemplating a wide array of unappealing camper food.
“Expiration date: 2040,” he read, and opened an envelope of freeze-dried beef stew. Mixed with water and heated with canned fuel, it was bearable.
“Oh, geez,” I said, looking around with sudden understanding. “It was the plague. Everyone here died.”
“But what happened with the weather?” Tim asked, opening a can of something. “It wasn’t always a desert.”
“I don’t know.”
After we ate, I felt 70 percent better. I could flex my whole hand and didn’t feel as light-headed. We grabbed some sleeping bags and hunkered down in a corner of the store. Just as I was falling asleep, I put out a hand and touched Tim’s arm. “Thanks for not leaving me behind,” I murmured.
He didn’t say anything, just stared up at the ceiling.
82
I WAS DREAMING—IT HAD TO be a dream. Ma was inside, making dinner. Pa was outside with our oxen, Ed and Ned. This was before he got his secondhand tractor. The huge animals were gentle and slow as they plowed Pa’s fields, and I loved them. In my dream I was feeding Ned a carrot, but instead of carefully lipping it up, he was growling at me. Growling?
I blinked awake slowly without moving, as we’d been taught. It was still mostly dark, but a dim light came from the left. I blinked again, controlling my breathing, staying completely still. My shoulder was killing me, throbbing and burning with pain, worse than before. Very slowly I turned my head and saw nothing. Stifling my groans, I sat up and glanced over at Tim to see if he’d heard the weird sound. My heart stopped.
He wasn’t there. He’d been lying next to me when I’d fallen asleep, but now there was no sign of him—his sleeping bag was gone, his pack was gone, his weapons were gone. Oh, my God—instantly I was wide awake, my pulse throbbing in my neck. He’d left me. He’d waited till I’d fallen asleep and then he’d left me. Hot tears filled my eyes—I was furious, but also couldn’t blame him. He’d made the right choice, the choice Ms. Strepp would have approved of. I was holding him up. We’d both known it. Oh, my God. Quickly my brain turned to survival: I could find useful stuff, could even maybe just stay here till my shoulder healed up. Then I could head east alone. Maybe meet up with him somehow. Brain him with a rock or something.
