Ryan beelines for that car. “I should stay with Jack,” he says. “Plus, I want to drive.”
Molly takes the passenger seat in the other car next to Zeke. Ben takes the backseat behind Zeke and Molly, then it’s just me and Stephan.
“After you,” I say, trying to get him to take the pressure off me over whose car I get in.
He laughs and shakes his head. “No way. I wanna see who Brooke is going to choose!” He makes a kissy face.
“You’re a jerk,” I hiss, looking from one car to the other, from Ben to Ryan, torn, not knowing what to do.
Thankfully, Bree leans out the window. “Come with us, Brooke!” she cries. “Please, please, please!”
I smile. “Of course.”
I turn and clamber in the seat beside Ryan while Stephan waltzes to the other car, whistling nonchalantly as he goes. I don’t look for Ben’s expression. I don’t want to know how angry he is with me for choosing Ryan over him once again.
Once we’re all strapped in, Ryan guns the gas pedal and reverses out of the lot. Zeke does the same. At last we’re on the road, in vehicles. For the first time, the chances of us making it to Texas don’t seem so small.
“Let’s get to the Mississippi already,” I say.
Our two cars cruise along side by side, heading west. As we go, we try to avoid any of the towns or cities, cautious about how close we get to built-up areas. There’s no knowing whether they’ll be in enemy hands, crawling with slaverunners ready to kidnap us and bring us to their arenas. So we stick to the open roads wherever possible, the ones that cut straight through barren landscape.
Darkness falls like a blanket of black. We can hardly see anything beyond the hood of the car, and we certainly can’t see Molly, Zeke, Stephan, and Ben’s car behind us.
Ryan’s a careful driver but I know in another life he wouldn’t be. In another world, a world without the war that’s ravished everything, Ryan and I probably wouldn’t even get along. He’d be the cool senior boy, a bit fringe, a bit tough, driving some beat-up piece of junk and never seen without his trusty pit bull. I’d be… I don’t know what I’d be. I can’t even imagine who I’d be without all the terrible things that have shaped me.
At last, we reach the Mississippi and ride down the slope into the bone-dry riverbed.
Seeing the impact that the war has had on the Mississippi is truly awful. I hate what our species has done to the world, the ways in which it has destroyed nature. My only hope is that one day our country will recover, that the Mississippi will be the beautiful, life-giving river it once was.
“What’s that noise?” Ryan says, breaking me from my thoughts.
I strain to hear over the rumble of the engine. I can just about pick up a noise, a sort of whining. It sounds like a vehicle revving.
“It’s the other car, isn’t it?” I say.
Through the darkness, I can just make out Ryan shaking his head. My blood runs cold.
All at once, a blinding light suddenly appears in the rearview mirror. My heart clenches as I realize we’re not alone, that someone’s been following us.
Suddenly, our car’s shunted forward. I scream and grab hold of my seat as we jerk roughly around. Ryan fights to keep hold of the steering wheel, to keep control. But whatever hit us rams into us again. I can’t see through the bright light, I can’t tell what’s hitting us. But there’s no chance to work it out, because we’re hit again and suddenly we’re spinning, up and over, round and round.
Charlie and Bree are screaming as we spin. My body feels like it’s being hurled through the air.
Then, suddenly, my head slams against the window. I hear a crack. Before I get the chance to work out if it’s the glass or my skull, everything turns black.
PART THREE
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I groan. My head is pounding. I manage to open my eyes a sliver. The daylight is stark and bright, making me wince. I realize my face is against a hard cement ground covered in sand.
Memories of the car crash come back to me in a rush. I sit up, startled. As I do, I hear the distinctive clinking noise of chains.
I look all around. I’m in a bare cell filled with other people. We’re all sitting on the dusty ground, chained to the wall. There’s a window set high in the bricks, letting in the blistering sunshine. We’re definitely still south, but where exactly is a question I cannot answer.
I notice Charlie curled up in a ball opposite me. He’s covered in the sandy-colored desert dust, but other than that, he looks like he got out of the crash unscathed. Then I see Bree slumped against a far wall, unconscious. There’s crusted blood all over her clothes and matted into her hair. My heart clenches at the sight of her. An instinct in me makes me reach for her and my chains jangle loudly as I move. But they hold me back, stopping me from reaching her.
“Brooke?” I hear someone whisper.
I look left. It’s Ryan. He’s one of the few prisoners who’s awake, and must have been drawn by the sound of my clanking chains.
I’m relieved to see him alive, and glad to know that everyone from our car made it out of the crash. But at the same time I feel frantic, desperate, and distraught. We’ve been captured. Again. Once more, my freedom has been stolen from me. And I have no idea what happened to the other car, to Molly, Zeke, Stephan, and Ben.
At the thought of Ben, my heart constricts. We parted on bad terms. What if that ends up being the last time I see him alive? How could I have let him get into the other car like that, with so much left unspoken between us?
There’s no time to dwell. Though my heart aches with worry over what could have happened to my friends in the other car, I have more pressing matters to deal with in the immediate moment: escape.
“Are you okay?” I say to Ryan.
He nods but he’s gritting his teeth and I know something is causing him pain. It’s then that I notice Jack isn’t with him. His trusty best friend, who has been by his side since forever, has been taken. I look back at Bree and realize that Penelope is missing too. Rage swirls through me at the thought of what might have happened to them.
“What are we going to do?” I say to Ryan.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Wait. See what’s what then come up with a plan.”
My stomach drops. I know all too well what’s what. I’ve been in this situation before. There’s only one thing that awaits us, and that’s an arena.
Just then, the sound of footsteps comes from the other side of the cell door. Then there’s a rusted, grinding noise as someone turns a key in the lock. The door swings open and bangs against the wall, making a cloud of dust whirl into the air.
Many of the prisoners who’ve been sleeping jerk awake. One of them is Charlie. He looks around, disorientated and panic-stricken. I catch his eye and nod to him, trying to reassure him. But his large, fearful eyes keep being drawn to the figure that just entered the room, a man dressed in a long, black robe, with a large hood that completely obscures his face.
“Morning, sleepyheads,” the man says in a thick southern accent. He uses a cheerful tone but I can hear the undercurrent beneath it, one that tells me this man is anything but friendly, that he is cruel and mean. “Who’s hungry?”
People begin to moan, stretching their hands out desperately for food. The other prisoners must have been survivors before they were kidnapped, living out in the harsh desert wasteland.
More people enter the room behind the black-clad man, all in similar attire. They’re carrying buckets. The buckets are dropped in front of us, one bucket to three or four prisoners. Breakfast. But when I look inside, I recoil. They’re filled with dead cockroaches.
“Come on, slaves, eat up!” the man cries sadistically. “We gotta get y’all strong for a day’s hard labor!”
I look up at him sharply, trying to make eye contact with him through the slit in his hood.
“Why don’t you just take us to the arena and get it over with,” I bark at him. “That’s why we’re here, is
n’t it?”
There’s a pause before the man walks over to me slowly, his heavy boots clunking. He bends down at the knees and gets close to my face.
“That’s not why you’re here at all, missy,” he hisses. “We don’t have any arenas here. We’ve got much better things for y’all to be doing. You see, the other biovictims, they’re jealous of y’all, with your pretty features and your healthy bodies. All they want is to eradicate you. Not us. We know that God chose us. We’re biovictims because of his grand plan. This new world, the one that exists after his Armageddon, it’s a world made for us.”
He pulls his hood off in one quick movement. In spite of myself, I flinch. His face is horrific. It looks as though half of it is melting, with one of his eyes dropping down his face at an awful angle. His teeth are exposed on one side of his face where the flesh is no longer there, and there are places on his bald head where the skin has bubbled and burned.
“You don’t like the look of God’s new creatures, do you?” he says, so close his spittle hits my face. “Well, you listen to me, missy. This is how it’s going to be now. You all had your chance and you blew it. Literally. We’re the ones who own the earth now. And that means you gotta work for us.”
“You’re making us slaves?” I say.
The man stands at last and puts his hood back on. “God said that he put the animals on the earth for us to use. And that’s what y’all are to us, nothing more than animals. So we’re going to use y’all, just like He said we’re meant to. We’re going to work y’all to death.”
The people who’d brought in the buckets begin hauling prisoners up to their feet, locking them into a row with chains. Ryan gets yanked up and cries out in pain. I can see now that his shoulder has been dislocated, probably from the crash.
I watch helplessly as people are dragged to their feet and added to the chain. Charlie, despite his young age, is shown no mercy, and neither is Bree, who only wakes up, finally, once she’s shaken roughly to her feet. I try to get her attention, to calm her down, but she’s so frantic she doesn’t see me. I can’t imagine how frightened she must be feeling to have woken up to this horror.
Finally, I’m added to the row, right at the front. A heavy metal collar is placed around my neck. The chains weigh so much it’s hard to even stand upright.
“This way,” the hooded man says to me.
When I don’t move he gestures to one of the other robed men, who then pulls a long whip from his belt and strikes me with it. The pain is so sharp I’m momentarily winded. I gasp and feel tears spring to my eyes.
“I said, ‘this way,’ missy,” the leader snarls.
I don’t argue again. I begin to trudge through the cell, following his lead out of the prison cell, along the corridor, then finally out the cell block and into the bright sunshine.
It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. When they do, I gasp in horror. As far as the eye can see are groups of slaves, other people like me, chained together, moving heavy blocks and stones to make buildings. They’re all painfully thin and barely clothed. Many of them are bright red, sunburned from the harsh glare of the sun. I can see why our captors wear the robes now, to protect their skin from the UV glare. Black-robed slavers ride about on motorbikes, making clouds of dust fly into the air. They whip the prisoners as they go, seemingly at random.
Enormous structures like temples are dotted around, made of huge stone bricks. Some stones stand several feet high, while others have intricate patterns, statues and columns carved into them. It reminds me of pictures of Ancient Egypt that I learned about in school. The slavers are building a new city in the crater where another city once stood. It’s like being in a valley, only this one was man-made, created by bombs, bombs that were far more destructive than anything I saw in the north. These bombs have created a wasteland, a brutal landscape of desert. There’s not a tree or body of water as far as the eye can see.
“Welcome,” the robed man says in his fake cheery voice, “to Memphis, Tennessee.”
*
We trudge along, me leading the way, following the robed man. The whole time, my eyes are darting around me, taking in everything, seeking a way to break out of this nightmare. We’re so close to reaching Texas, there’s no way I’m giving up now. I’ll do whatever it takes to get out of this place.
My heart soars when I catch sight of bright ginger hair. I look over. Molly is in another chain of prisoners, being led the same direction as us. She’s gritting her teeth and limping. I let out the breath I’d been holding as I see that a few people behind her stands Ben. I’m relieved to discover that he’s completely unscathed from the crash, though there’s blood on his clothes. I scan the rest of the line but Stephan and Zeke are nowhere to be seen. I can’t help but fear the worst.
We’re led past a stack of cages filled with animals. I see that crammed inside one of the cages are Penelope and Jack. They look terrified, huddled together, shaking. My only comfort is that they have each other.
As we trudge through the wasteland, I manage to catch Molly’s eye. Silently, we try to communicate with one another. She’s looking at the bikes, same as me. We’re both thinking that they’re our only chance of escape. If we want to live to see tomorrow, we’re going to have to steal them somehow.
I gesture to the chains around my wrists. The way that we’re all connected together means that if I yank hard enough, I could get the whole line to fall. Then, in the confusion, we might be able to find a way to break free.
I look back at Ryan and hold up my chained hands, trying to communicate to him what I intend to do. I mime tugging them down and he nods in understanding. But my attempt to communicate with him doesn’t go unnoticed by the guards. A slaver zooms over on his bike and cracks his whip against my chest before roaring away. I cry out in pain and fall to my knees. Blood appears on my top.
Despite the pain making black stars flash in my vision, I know I can’t let this opportunity go to waste. I pretend to be struggling to stand up, knowing that the slaver will return and whip me again. As I slowly struggle to my knees, I quickly glance over at Molly and nod, as if to say: now. We tug on our chains simultaneously. I see her line begin to tumble, and can hear the prisoners behind me begin to fall as well. At the same time, the slaver circles back around on his bike, his whip raised high, ready to discipline me for my rebellion. I reach out and grab the whip as he cracks it down. I grip with all my strength, not letting go, then yank it toward me. The slaver goes spinning off his bike, smacking to the ground with a crunch. The bike heads straight toward a crowd of people, making them scatter in all directions.
Chaos breaks out in that moment. Slavers start whizzing toward us on their bikes, attempting to quell the pandemonium with their whips. But the rest of my group understands what is happening—they know instinctively that I’m trying to free us all—and the other prisoners catch on too. The slavers may have weapons and bikes, but we have more people and an unbreakable will to live. If I can just get my chains off, I’ll be a formidable opponent.
There’s a bike screaming toward me, and I know I have only one shot to do what I’m planning to do. It’s a crazy idea but I have no other options.
As the bike flies toward me, its rider ready to strike me with the whip, I throw my chained hands out directly in front of its tires. As the whip lashes against my back, making me scream with pain, the bike roars directly over the rusty chains, snapping them clean in half. I’m free.
I rise to my feet immediately and leap, like a cat, onto the back of the motorbike. The slaver is not expecting me to move so quickly and doesn’t get his defenses up in time. After a short grapple, I manage to shove him off the bike. He hits the ground hard and goes rolling across the desert earth.
I take control of the bike and double back on myself, heading straight for Ryan.
“Chains!” I shout. “I’m going to cut your chains!”
I see him crouch and lay his arms out, closing his eyes, unable to look. But I steer perfectly
over the chains, and they snap beneath my wheels. He’s free. Now there are two of us able to fight.
The prisoners in Molly and Ben’s chain are being surrounded by bikes, penned in like sheep, with nowhere to go. It’s up to me and Ryan to liberate them.
I slow the bike, allowing him to leap on the back.
“You’re bleeding,” he says, leaping on.
“I’ll be fine.”
He encircles my waist with his good arm, the other hanging limply by his side, and I rev the bike again. Together we race forward, plowing straight toward the group. I’m trying to call their bluff, to get them to scatter, but they’re holding their positions.
“WE’RE GOING TO CRASH!” Ryan screams in my ear.
I can see the terrified faces of the prisoners behind the line of captors on bikes. Everyone knows what is about to happen, and I’m the only one who can stop it. But I won’t. This is our one chance. I gun the bike, gaining more and more speed.
“JUMP WHEN I SAY!” I shout back to Ryan, praying he can hear me over the roaring wind.
His grip on me gets tighter and tighter.
“NOW!” I scream.
We both jump to the side, letting our bike carry on forward without us, and hit the ground hard. I roll across the parched earth, one, two, three times, then manage to stop myself. I glance over my shoulder just in time to see the bike slam into the others at full speed. The gas tank explodes and I duck down, covering my head with my arms as flames and bits of twisted metal fly into the air and rain down over me.
This is the chance the other group needed. In the chaos and under the cover of thick, billowing smoke, they’re able to scurry away from their captors, many of whom are now lying groaning on the ground or rolling around in an attempt to put out the fires ravaging them.
“THIS WAY!” I scream, leaping to my feet, ignoring the aches and pains in my body from hitting the ground.
A little way ahead, Ryan manages to drag himself up. His bad arm dangles uselessly at his side.