“What’s that?”
I get to work on the lock. It feels good to surprise him with a talent that angels don’t have.
Click.
“Voila.”
“Talkative, but talented. Who would have thought?”
I open my mouth to make a smartass comeback, then realize I’d only be proving his point, so I stay quiet, just to prove that I can.
We sneak out into the hallway and stop at the back door.
“Can you hear the guards?”
He listens for a moment. He points to eleven o’clock and five o’clock. We wait.
“What’s in here?” I ask, pointing at the closed doors.
“Who knows? Supplies maybe?”
I start for one of the doors, thinking of venison or even guns.
He grabs my arm and shakes his head. “Don’t get greedy. If we raid them on our way out, they’re less likely to just forget about us. We don’t want trouble if we can avoid it.”
He’s right, of course. Besides, who’d be stupid enough to store guns in the same place as their prisoners? But the thought of venison makes my mouth water. Oh, I should have bargained for that stew while I had the chance.
After a few moments, Raffe nods and we slip out into the night.
~
We make a run for it, Raffe and me. My heart flip-flops in my chest as I pump my legs as fast as they will go. The air frosts from my mouth. The smell of soil and trees beckons us toward the forest. The trees rustling in the wind masks the sound of our pounding feet.
Raffe could run much faster, but he stays close.
The moon disappears behind clouds, and the forest turns dark. I slow to a walk once we’re inside the canopy, not wanting to smash into a tree.
My breathing is so heavy, I’m afraid the guards will hear it. The adrenaline rush of a run for freedom drains, and I’m back to being scared and tired. I pause, bending over to catch my breath. Raffe puts his hand on my back, urging me to keep going with gentle pressure. He’s not even out of breath.
He points deeper into the forest. I shake my head and point to the other side of the camp. We need to go around to retrieve his wings. My pack is replaceable; the wings and sword are not. He pauses, then nods. I don’t know if he knows what I’m after, but I know that his wings are never far from his mind, the way little Paige is never far from mine.
We skirt around the camp, going as deep into the forest as we can without losing sight of the camp. This gets tricky several times since the moonlight is so dim now, and the camp itself is mostly under canopy. I have to rely more heavily on Raffe’s night vision than I like.
Even knowing he can see, I can only go so fast without walking into a branch or losing my footing. It takes a long time to navigate the forest in the dark, and even longer to find my stash.
Just when I see the tree hiding our goods, I hear the distinctive click of a gun’s safety latch behind me.
My hands are up in the air before the guy can say, “Freeze.”
CHAPTER 18
“Just for interrupting my night, you’re getting latrine duty.” Obi is clearly not an early morning guy, and he doesn’t bother to hide that he’d much rather be sleeping than dealing with us.
“What do you want with us?” I ask. “I told you we didn’t kill those people.”
We’re right back where we started—Raffe and I sit tied to our chairs in what I’m starting to think of as our room.
“It’s now more about what we don’t want. We don’t want you telling others our numbers, our location, our arsenal. Now that you’ve seen our camp, we can’t let you go until we move.”
“How long will that be?”
“A while.” Obi shrugs noncommittally. “Won’t be too long.”
“We don’t have a while.”
“You’ll have as long as we say you have,” says Boden, the guard who caught us. Or at least that’s what the name on his uniform says. It could, of course, just be a uniform that he took from a dead soldier that already had that name on it. “You’ll do everything the resistance movement says. Because without it, we’d all be doomed to the hell those angelic motherfu—.”
“Enough, Jim,” says Obi. There’s enough weariness in his voice that I’m guessing that good ol’ Jim and maybe several of the other soldiers have repeated these exact same lines a million times over with the zeal of the newly converted.
“It’s true,” says Obi. “The resistance founders warned us this time would come, told us where to go to survive, galvanized us while the rest of the world was falling apart. We owe the resistance everything. It’s our greatest hope of surviving this massacre.”
“There’s more than just this camp?” I ask.
“It’s a network that’s all over the world in pockets. We’re just becoming aware of the others, trying to organize, trying to coordinate.”
“Great,” says Raffe. “Does this mean we have to stay until we forget we ever heard of this resistance movement?”
“That’s the one thing you should spread,” says Obi. “Knowing about the resistance brings hope and community. We can all use as much of that as possible.”
“Aren’t you worried that if word gets out, that the angels will just destroy it?” I ask.
“Those pigeons couldn’t take us out if they sent their entire chirping flock,” Boden scoffs. His face is red and he looks ready for a fight. “Just let ‘em try.” The white-knuckled grip on his rifle is making me nervous.
“We’ve had to detain a fair number of people here since the cannibal attacks started,” says Obi. “You’re the only ones who managed to make it out. There could be a place for the two of you here. A place with meals and friends, a life with meaning and purpose. Right now, we’re fractured. They have us eating each other, for God’s sake. We can’t make a stand if we’re bashing each other over the head and killing each other for cans of dog food.”
He leans toward us in earnest. “This camp is just the start, and we need everyone to pitch in if we’re going to have a chance in hell of taking back our world from the angels. We could use people like you. People with the skills and determination to be humanity’s greatest heroes.”
Boden snorts. “They can’t be that good. They stumbled in a big semi-circle around the compound like a couple of dildos. How skilled can they be?”
What dildos have to do with it, I have no idea. But he did have a point in that we did get caught by an idiot.
~
It turns out I don’t really get latrine duty. Only Raffe gets that honor. I end up with laundry duty. I’m not sure that’s much better. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. You know the world has ended when manual labor in America is cheaper and easier than using machines. Men can seriously grime up jeans and other heavy clothes when they’re out in the forest. Not to mention unmentionables.
I have more than a few “eww” moments during the day. But I do learn a few things from the other laundry women.
After a long stretch of wary silence, the women begin to talk. A couple of them have only been at the camp for a few days. They seem surprised and still mistrustful of finding themselves unharmed and unmolested. There’s a wariness about them in the way they keep their voices low and their eyes scanning their surroundings that keeps me from relaxing even when they begin to gossip.
While working our butts off—or more accurately, our arms and backs—I learn that Obi is an absolute favorite among the women. And that Boden and his buddies should be avoided. Obi is in charge of the camp, but not of the entire resistance movement. There’s apparently talk, at least among the women, that Obi would be a great worldwide leader of the freedom fighters.
I love the idea of a leader destined to lead us out of our dark times. Love the romance of being part of something good, and right, led by a group of people fated to be heroes.