The Release

He stands there, trying to come up with a plan. More than anything, he needs to see. From far behind him, he hears the sound of a scuffle. He can only hope Sunshine subdued the other soldier, leaving just this one.

His body folds in on itself as he lowers himself to the ground. Lying flat on the concrete floor, he removes an arrow from his quiver and nocks it. He reaches out to the side walls and gets his bearings, determining the tunnel’s direction. The fingers of his artificial arm hold the bow in place as he slowly draws back the string, aiming down the center of the tunnel. At the last moment, he alters where he points, so that when he releases the bowstring, the arrow travels no more than fifty yards before it hits a side wall.

“Shit!” the soldier cries, and takes off running.

Cat nocks a second arrow and sends it flying, then hears the satisfying sound of arrowhead entering flesh. The soldier stumbles to the ground, his gun clattering. Even in the dark, Cat is able to race forward and find the wounded soldier lying sprawled in the middle of the tunnel. Cat drags him back to the others.

When all three Brown Shirts are trussed up, Hope interrogates them.

“What’s going on here?” she asks.

The soldiers sit on the floor, wrists and ankles tethered together. They don’t answer her.

“Where’s your camp? Where’re you taking those crates?”

The Brown Shirt with the arrow jutting from his shoulder blade actually laughs. “Why should we tell you?” he says. “The only reason you’re still alive is because my gun jammed.”

He begins to turn away, but Cat grabs the soldier’s nose with his wooden pincers. “She asked you a question. Now, are you gonna answer her or not?”

His face goes pale. He tries to squirm free, but Cat’s grip won’t allow it. “The Eagle’s Nest,” the Brown Shirt sputters.

“What’s that?”

“Headquarters.”

“For who?” Again, the Brown Shirt tries to pull his nose free. Cat just pinches harder. “For who?”

“Chancellor Maddox. Who do you think?”

The hair rises on Hope’s arms, and although she knows it’s her imagination, it feels like both her scars itch at the mention of the chancellor’s name.

“You can say good-bye to those plans,” Sunshine says. “You’re not going there ever again.”

“Actually, they are,” Hope corrects him. “And they’re taking us with them.”

11. (#ulink_aadde47f-e2fc-53ff-b9da-d914e3529350)

THE LADDER GROANED BENEATH my weight. My guess was that this was one of the escape tunnels Goodwoman Marciniak had told us about. Except instead of escaping, we were using this tunnel to enter. A nasty habit we kept falling into.

When my feet landed on solid ground, I whistled for Flush and Red to climb down. Argos stayed up above.

The three of us began feeling our way around in the dark, trying to get a sense of where we were and how we could reach the heart of the Compound. Along the wall, a torch sat perched in its holder, as cold and lifeless as the winter itself. We could have lit it, but a fire would only announce ourselves.

Waving our outstretched hands like branches in a breeze, we let the wall guide us forward. It was slow going, made worse by the smell. We pulled bandannas over our mouths and noses, and every so often we stopped to spit—as if that could rid us of the foul stench.

Finally, we noticed a far-off glow. We moved faster now, aided by the distant light. Although I knew there were soldiers up ahead, I also thought about the food we would find. I could imagine the countless jars of green beans and blueberry jam, the strips of dried meat hanging like icicles in the smokehouse. The more I envisioned them, the more I could practically taste them.

I was thinking so much about my next meal that I stopped paying attention to where I was going. I tripped on something and went flying. When I reached down to push myself up, my hand went squish. I tried with my other hand, but it went squish as well. Then I realized why.

I’d landed on a person.

A dead person.

Many dead persons.

I was elbow deep in decaying corpses, and only the possibility of being discovered by Brown Shirts prevented me from letting out a horrified scream. I clamped my mouth shut and tried to steady my breathing.

“Oh … my … God,” Flush said. “Are those what I think they are?”

I nodded dumbly.

Easing to a standing position, my eyes peered into the dark, head swiveling first one direction and then the other. We were smack-dab in the middle of a burial ground, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of lifeless, bloated bodies.

Although we wanted to turn around—wanted desperately to get the hell out of there—we knew we couldn’t. We had come this far; we had to see it through. So we inched forward, tiptoeing around and over the piles of bodies.

What I couldn’t figure out was what it was supposed to be. Was this a cemetery—some sacred place of honor—or just a dumping ground? There was no way to tell.

We headed for the faint glow at the end of the tunnel, hoping to get as far away from the bloated corpses as possible. But of course, just when we thought we’d cleared the last of them, there were still more—piles of bodies stacked like firewood stretching as far as we could see.

“Who are they?” Red asked. I understood what he was getting at. He hadn’t been with us when we’d been imprisoned in the Compound. He didn’t know what Skull People looked like.

But when I bent down and tried to examine the dead bodies in the dark, I suddenly wasn’t so sure myself. On the one hand, it seemed their clothes were leather sandals and wool robes and toga-like garments, which made me think Skull People. But right next to them were men wearing rags, their beards long and matted, which made me think they were Crazies. I couldn’t figure it out.

A noise from farther down the tunnel grabbed my attention. Perhaps the very Brown Shirts whose footsteps we’d been following.

The more we tiptoed forward, the brighter it got … and the more we tried to avert our eyes. It was bad enough we were traipsing through this grisly graveyard—no point making things worse by staring at the corpses themselves. And yet, I caught myself glancing down from time to time, looking for people I might recognize. Like my grandmother. Or Goodwoman Marciniak.

Or Miranda.

It didn’t help that every corpse’s expression was the same—one of horror and fear.

In the near distance, torch flames caressed the cave walls with strokes of flickering light. Flush pulled to a stop, and I followed his gaze … to the bloated face of the chief justice.

My heart gave a lurch. I had no reason to feel any sympathy for him. After all, he was the one who’d sentenced us to thirty years’ imprisonment. But he was also the man who’d changed my sentence from the Wheel to the library—and was Miranda’s father.

So maybe she was here as well. My eyes roamed from one face to the next, and while the bodies were discolored and disfigured, there wasn’t one that looked remotely like the girl who’d kissed me as we watched the setting sun.

I breathed a silent sigh of relief.

We moved on. The only sounds were the quiet shuffle of our feet, a persistent dripping from the ceiling, the steady huff of breathing through our mouths.

When we reached a high-ceilinged chamber at the end of the tunnel, we expected to see the soldiers, but they weren’t there. No living person was. Just hundreds of scattered corpses.

“Where’d they go?” Flush whispered, but I didn’t know. I wondered the same thing.

Red pointed to the side. “Was it always like that?”

He was referring to an enormous rock pile that blocked a far entrance, boulders strewn in every direction. I gave my head a shake. “The Crazies were blowing up the place as we were leaving. Guess that’s what happened.”