The Escape Page 14

  “We leave, in the morning. We’re traveling up the coast.”

  “You can stay,” Evan said, “and you can take whatever you need. On one condition.”

  Jenna smiled. This kid had balls. Four people with four rifles and him in the corner, and he’s naming conditions.

  “What?” Barker asked.

  “Take me with you,” Evan said. “I want to get as far away from here as possible. Somewhere safe. You guys have guns, you’ll be able to keep me safe from them.”

  “From who?”

  “The army. The draft. I don’t want to be a soldier, I don’t. I was against the war before the Pulse, and I’m against war in general.”

  “Evan,” Jenna said, “you should know that these guns aren’t for show. If someone attacks us, we use the guns. People die. Every damn day is a war, didn’t you know?”

  He nodded. “I know. I just . . . I wish it wasn’t like that. I want to start fresh, someplace new.”

  “What about your parents? And your . . . your brother?” Jenna asked.

  Evan frowned. “How’d you know I have a brother?”

  “The boy’s bedroom. I just guessed. And the number four painted on the house. Four people.”

  “I’m old enough to be on my own. I think I was old enough even before the Pulse, when I was . . . in high school.” He sighed. “They’re better off together, and I’m better off on my own.”

  “You might never, ever find them again,” Barker said. “Would you really want to take that risk?”

  “It’s either that, or die in their war.”

  “If we really are invaded, no matter where we are, you’ll be expected to fight back. You know that, right?”

  “I won’t. I won’t kill anyone,” the boy said resolutely. “This is our chance to start over, to have peace. No more wars.”

  “If you’re such a pacifist, why’d you threaten Clarissa with a bat?” Barker asked.

  The boy shrugged. “Instinct, I guess. Self-preservation. But I wouldn’t have hurt her. I don’t believe in that.”

  “Oh, kid,” Jenna sighed. “I wish all the young guys were like you. Then we might actually have a future. But right now, we have to live in the reality we’ve got. We’re trying to find a safe place to live. Away from the government, away from the camps.”

  “I don’t know that you’ll find it,” Evan said. “FEMA has the authority to take over everything—everything, you know? And they’re doing it. Everyone I know is either dead or in a camp.”

  “That’s so fucked up,” Roy murmured.

  “Yeah, it is,” Evan said. “So do we have a deal? Take me with you.”

  “What have you been eating, drinking?” Barker asked. “Do you have food to take on the road?”

  Evan’s mouth thinned. “I can’t tell you that, not until you say yes.”

  “Jesus, Barker, we can’t leave the kid alone here,” Jenna said.

  “He should go back to his family at the camp,” Barker said.

  “I won’t. I’d rather die here than go back.”

  Clarissa walked up to Barker and whispered. “Listen. You’ve been taking the lead all this time. And we’ve let you. But I refuse to leave this boy here and let him die alone.”

  Barker cursed. Jenna shot him a look.

  Yes, Barker had trust issues. But Evan was clearly a pacifist, as Barker said, and had good intentions. This new generation was their future, didn’t he see that?

  “Fine,” Barker said. “Fuck it. You can come with us.”

  Evan smiled. “Thank you . . . Barker. Thank you. I’m really good at computer stuff, so when we get settled, maybe I can try to start getting things wired again.”

  “Have you been able to get anything going here?” Clarissa asked.

  “Not yet. Everything was plugged into the grid and was fried, you know? But there’s more stuff out there, electronics that were spared, like that radio. I can work with those parts. Maybe even make our own radio. We’ll see.”

  “Great.” Jenna grinned, but she didn’t really believe him. Still, it was nice to finally hear some encouraging words.

  “Can you tell us what you’ve been eating, now?” Barker said.

  “Dog food,” Evan said. “Rocky was shot by the first guys that broke in, but we’ve got a ton of dog food, and no one stole it. It’s gross but it works. I can bring some with me. I’ll share it.”

  “I’m sorry about your dog,” Clarissa said. “Do you have any edible things growing?”

  “Dunno. Can’t Google what’s good to eat or not, so I’ve just avoided it.”

  “I’ll look for dandelions,” Clarissa said. “We can make soup. You have a fireplace to boil water here, right?”

  “Sure do. And pots. I’ve been boiling water from the pool out back to drink.” Evan smiled at her. “So where’d you guys come from?”

  “Grand Central.”

  Evan whistled. “Holy shit. There are rumors about that place, even here in Connecticut, since a lot of people who live here worked in Manhattan.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “That it’s like a lean, mean, military machine. That they’ve got a strong leader.”

  “Fucking hell,” Barker said. “I suppose that’s true. But he’s—”

  “He’s not a good man,” Jenna said quietly. She’d had enough personal experience with Colonel Lanche to know that. But when he had executed Taryn, any doubt left Jenna’s mind. Lanche was a crazy dictator.

  He had to be taken down.

  Grand Central Terminal

  COLONEL LANCHE

  Lanche walked through the main terminal at Grand Central, pausing to check in with the soldier at the information booth under the large clock.

  “Are Dobson and Scar back yet?” Lanche asked. “It’s almost nightfall.”

  “No sir. No word yet.”

  Lanche frowned and nodded. He hoped the soldiers would return soon with intel about the troops he’d sent after Barker and Clarissa. And fucking hell, he wanted his damn truck back. It’s not like anyone was making more of them.

  Two women were whispering with each other, standing against the wall by the stairs down to the food court, where rations were given for dinner. But dinner had been over for more than an hour. What were they up to?

  He walked around so they wouldn’t see him coming, and waited out of their sight line so he could listen.

  “I don’t know,” one woman was saying softly. “People keep leaving and not coming back.”

  “They’re probably being killed out there,” the other said.

  Good girl, Lanche thought. That’s right. It’s a dangerous world out there.

  “But what if they’re escaping?” the first said. “Like what Taryn said . . .”

  Fuck.

  “It is pretty convenient that the Colonel chose the moment she started to talk about the radio to execute her.”

  “Poor Taryn, she never hurt a soul before. If she really shot that soldier there was a reason. They’re not telling us the truth about it . . . about a lot of stuff, I’m guessing. And now it’s a crime to even talk about it. It doesn’t seem right.”

  “Wish we could leave, too. Escape.”

  “How? How would we get past the guards?”

  “We can’t. Not unless we got a gun, I guess.”

  Lanche couldn’t stand by and listen to the women plotting against him for one more moment. He snapped his fingers at two soldiers standing guard.

  “Arrest those women,” he said loudly. “For conspiring against the safety of our camp.”

  The two women looked up in shock.

  “No, please, sir,” one begged. “We weren’t doing anything, I swear to God we weren’t.”

  “I heard you with my own ears.”

  Other citizens gathered aroun
d, and suddenly Lanche found himself in the middle of an unruly crowd.

  “We deserve to know the truth,” one man said.

  “Yeah! Where’s the radio? Why can’t we talk about the radio?”

  Lanche held his gun up, pointed at the ceiling so high above them, and the people quieted.

  “I hereby declare this to be an unlawful assembly. Go back to your quarters immediately,” Lanche shouted.

  “Where’s the radio?” someone from the back yelled.

  “Listen to me now, citizens of New York,” Lanche said. He struggled to keep his temper under control. “By executive order number 10995 all communications media in the United States has been seized since the Pulse. Any person broadcasting on a radio outside of the government is a criminal, and you can’t believe what the terrorists are telling you.”

  “So there is a radio,” someone murmured.

  “No, there is no radio,” Lanche said firmly. “The convicted murderer Taryn was a liar, bent on causing as much chaos as she could to threaten our safety. We sleep better at night knowing she has been executed.”

  The soldiers in front of him brought the women to him.

  “These women were conspiring against us all. Conspiring to kill, to steal a gun. If someone—a domestic terrorist, because yes, citizens, we have terrorists amongst us—if someone comes to you with lies, with fear-mongering, with talk of leaving the camp, of compromising the security of our camp, then you must turn them in. Or you too will be held accountable.”

  “What do we do with the prisoners?” a soldier asked.

  Lanche looked at the women’s faces, and at the crowd. He had to quell dissent where it started. Had to make these women an example.

  “Stand back. Clear the area behind them.”

  The people scattered from behind the women as the soldiers pushed them back.

  Lanche turned to the first woman and shot her in the head. She fell immediately to the ground, dead, her eyes open.

  “I have the authority to do whatever it takes, whatever it takes, to keep this camp secure,” Colonel Lanche shouted, and he shot the second woman.

  The roar of protest he expected to hear from the crowd never came. Instead, they had fallen silent, and fallen back.

  * * *

  Lanche took another drink from the bottle of homemade gin in the drawer of his office desk. After the shooting, he immediately retreated to his office. He needed privacy, not his men standing around. The painted-over window that Emily Rosen had shattered after murdering Private Andrews was now covered in plywood.

  There was still a bloodstain on his carpet.

  That was why he had to do what he did. Because if he didn’t, then before he knew it those women would have become Emilies, they would become Taryns, and Jennas. They would murder and cause chaos and escape and rise up against him. Against his camp.

  If Lanche didn’t keep Grand Central secure, who would? No one, that’s who. It was all on his shoulders.

  A sharp knock rapped on his door.

  “Enter,” he said, hiding his bottle.

  Dobson and Scar came in and closed the door behind them.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” Lanche said, standing.

  “We heard you rooted out two threats within the camp,” Dobson said.

  “I did. It’s a scary world, men. A scary world. They were going to kill a guard and steal his gun.”

  “We’ll sleep better tonight, then, sir,” Scar said, repeating Lanche’s favorite mantra.

  “Yes, yes we will. Did you find the men? The truck?”

  “We did, sir. All four soldiers were murdered, shot. The truck has sustained some damage but we brought it back.”

  The Colonel sighed heavily. “I’m glad you got the truck. But the men—”

  “I know, sir,” Dobson said. “It wasn’t the discovery we were hoping to make.”

  “This proves that Barker and the women are out there, causing mayhem, murdering at will.”

  “What do we do?”

  “We’ll warn the people. Let them know that it’s not safe out there. And that if they’re going to stay here, then they need to fall in line. There was almost a riot today about the stupid fucking radio.”

  “There is no radio,” both men said in unison.

  Lanche nodded. The soldiers all knew there had been a radio, at one point at least. It was classified information. But the people could not know. It would only cause more danger to them all, just as it had when Emily and Taryn and Jenna discovered it.

  The truth was a dangerous thing. It wasn’t meant for everyone. And so despite rumors, despite the truth, the official story could never change:

  There was no radio.

  Greenwich, Connecticut. Evan’s house

  BARKER

  Barker and the rest of them sat around the living room later that night, eating dandelion soup mixed with dry dog food that turned into mushy balls in the soup. It was gross, the kid was right, but they’d be wise to save some of their supplies while they could.

  Even though Evan said he was eighteen, which made him technically an adult—hell, legal enough to fight in a war—he looked so young, so malnourished, that Barker couldn’t stop thinking of him as an adolescent. He imagined when the Pulse hit, and the kid was in high school, like he’d said, his growing just . . . stopped. Barker remembered when he was a teenager, his mother always joked he was eating them out of house and home. Teenage boys needed insane amounts of food. Starve them instead, and you got . . . Evan.

  The fireplace was a nice comfort, and in the dim light, even with most of the furniture barricading the windows, Barker felt like he could relax and breathe. It was nice to be in a real home.

  A really fucking nice home.

  Evan reminded him of himself when he was younger—full of ideals and ideas, but unsure how to execute them. Still, he couldn’t imagine leaving his family behind. Then again, didn’t all teenagers dream about running away at some point? If the Pulse never happened, Evan was probably less than a year or so from when he would have left to be a freshman at college somewhere.

  Maybe he was in that leaving stage. But Barker didn’t think the teen understood the fact that this was real, people got separated. There was no way to find his family again once they were gone. And yet here Evan was, ready to go with them. To find a new life.

  “Evan,” Jenna said, “do you mind if we get some fresh clothes?”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “My mom’s a little bigger than you, but they should fit. You can bathe too, if you take the pool water and put it in the tub. I’ve been chlorinating since I got back and I got all the green stuff off the top of the pool, so it’s pretty clean. Or you can heat it.”

  Jenna squealed with excitement. “A bath! Oh my God, Evan, you don’t know what that means to me.”

  “Can we all bathe?” Clarissa asked.

  “Got six bathrooms,” Evan said.

  Roy whistled. “I’ll go start filling them up. Do you guys mind cold water? It’s gonna take a lot of time and firewood to boil all that.”

  “It’s fine. Maybe we could just boil some and add it to the cold water to make it more comfortable,” Clarissa suggested.

  Barker grinned at Jenna and whispered in her ear, “We could share a bath.”

  “Deal,” she whispered back. “But I have to talk to you.”

  Fuck. That didn’t sound good. Well, the shared bath sounded good, but he wasn’t in the mood for a lecture. And he had an idea what it was about. Jenna had been distant from him all day, as if he’d done something wrong.

  Was she still pissed that he’d taken Roy’s firing pin?

  “Why don’t you find us some clothes while I get the tub ready?” he asked.

  “Okay.” Jenna looked over at Evan. “Where do you sleep?”

  “In my room. But we’ve go
t my parents’ room and the guest rooms. Doubt anyone feels like sleeping in my kid brother’s bed, but that’s there too.”

  “You two can have the master bedroom,” Roy said to Barker and Jenna.

  Evan raised his eyebrows. “You’re married or something?”

  “Nope,” Jenna said simply, and Evan laughed.

  * * *

  Jenna climbed the main staircase with Clarissa again, and they went back to the master suite with the walk-in closets.

  “These are really nice clothes,” Clarissa said after she lit a candle on the dresser. “I hope she has some workout clothes or something that’s more appropriate for walking.”

  Jenna pulled two pairs of expensive jeans out of the closet. “She had bigger feet than me. The shoes won’t fit, but these should.”

  “I don’t want to try anything on till after the bath,” Clarissa said, pulling a stretchy short-sleeve shirt and a warm sweater out of the closet.

  Jenna chose a sports bra and a spandex tank top to go with the jeans before finding a sweater of their own, for cold nights.

  “Socks and panties!” Jenna said, opening a drawer. “Thank God.” She tossed a bunch to Clarissa, and set out some for herself.

  “Let’s look for the guys,” Clarissa said, opening the closet on the opposite side of the room. “Hmm. Lots of suits.”

  “Jackpot,” Jenna said, pointing to the back. “Hiking gear.” She pulled two pairs of sturdy cargo pants out of the closet, and some T-shirts that looked like they cost a hundred dollars each. For cotton. She laughed and shook her head.

  The man of the house also had some fleece zip-ups, so she took one for Barker and one for Roy. “It’ll be easier to move in these than those blazers,” Jenna said.

  “What do you think about Roy?” Clarissa asked.

  “I like him,” she said noncommittally. “Why? Do you like him?”

  “I do.” She spoke softly, and Jenna knew, despite the low light, that Clarissa was blushing.

  “You should go for it,” Jenna said. “Share a bedroom tonight.”

  “I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

  “You’re gorgeous, and he obviously likes you. I bet if you told him you wanted a warm body to sleep next to but weren’t sure where else it would go, he’d respect it.”