Article 5

  “She’ll help you until her trial.”

  Delilah nodded submissively. Tucker pulled me aside before turning to go.

  “I’ll be down the hall at that office. Come see me when she’s done with you.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  He chuckled as he walked away.

  “Grab a brush. We’re scrubbing floors. And then it’s cleanup of another kind.” Delilah wasn’t much for small talk.

  We went room by room, cleaning the floors, making the beds, scrubbing the toilets. Only two of the rooms were occupied, and those we did not enter immediately.

  While I was working, a handcuffed man with sallow skin and bruises on one cheek slumped down the hall. He was accompanied by four guards, one of whom carried a silver briefcase. They pushed him roughly into an empty room. A few minutes later, all four guards disappeared the way they had come.

  “Just gone to trial,” commented Delilah. I wondered morbidly what the outcome had been.

  When we were finished, I followed Delilah downstairs to the cafeteria, where we picked up two trays of gray mush from a soldier wearing a hairnet. I watched as several soldiers were cleared in and out of the building’s main entrance by a guard behind a thick plate of glass. Every time the door opened, a spine-curdling buzz spiked my eardrums.

  Back upstairs, Delilah used a key hanging on a thin metal chain around her neck to open the door.

  The man inside was curled into a ball on the back side of his bed. He wore a canary yellow jumpsuit and rocked back and forth pitifully, muttering something to himself.

  “Food,” Delilah said, laying the tray on the opposite side of his bed.

  She shut the door, and marked the checkbox beside MEAL on the clipboard hanging from the handle.

  In the next room, a man with olive skin leaned against the wall, biting his nails.

  “You got a blanket or something?” he said quickly. “Oh. Hey there,” he added when he saw me. I stared back at him curiously.

  “Food,” Delilah said again, leaving the tray on his bed.

  A guard passed by, heading down the stairs.

  “Where’s he going?” I asked Delilah.

  “Rounds. They walk the halls every thirty minutes.”

  “It seems like there should be more security for a jail.”

  She shook her head. “This is a small detention center. Only holding cells. Temporary stays. It’s minimum security. The prison’s in Charlotte.”

  Delilah was very matter-of-fact.

  “Hope you have a tough stomach,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Now it’s time for the real cleanup.”

  I followed her to a storage room, which held supplies. Bleach. Gloves. Prisoner uniforms. Towels. Blankets. I thought she would grab one for the man in the cell, but she did not. Instead, she retrieved a deep laundry cart with a metal cover. Then we headed toward the third occupied room, the one holding the soldier who had just completed trial.

  I looked at his clipboard. In large letters was written one word: COMPLETE.

  There was a fleeting moment where I remembered a conversation between Rebecca and me at the reformatory. Sean had told her that he had heard the term complete used for the Article violators. That was when I’d naïvely thought my mother had been sent to rehab.

  I knew when the door swung open why Delilah had asked me about my stomach.

  The man before us was lying twisted on the narrow bed. His knees were stacked on the mattress while his shoulders faced the ceiling. His brown hair was still tangled, and a bruise still blackened his pasty cheek.

  But he was now dead.

  My mind conjured an image of the man who had starved in the square. How thin and fragile his body had looked. How I assumed he had fallen asleep, when really he had wasted away.

  This was different. This man looked dead. Not peaceful. Not sleeping. But ashy and cold and tortured, as though his mind had been taken by death before his body was ready. I knew then why people close the eyes of the dead. Those lifeless globes tracked me like the eyes of the Mona Lisa.

  I took a step back before my knees began knocking. Within seconds, my whole body was shaking. I couldn’t stop staring at the dead man. My brain morphed his face into Chase’s face. His dark, probing eyes gone dim. If caught, this would be his fate.

  Even now, I didn’t want Chase to die. I hoped he was far away. That he’d run once he’d found me gone.

  Delilah heaved the body into a seated position. I felt the bile scratch up my throat. Deliberately, I swallowed. She rolled the body sideways into the laundry cart, and it thudded against the metal base.

  I felt ill. I forced my mind to focus. To magnetize some semblance of strength.

  “You still upright?” Delilah asked as she pushed the cart down the hall, the opposite direction of the stairs.

  She wasn’t looking at me, but I nodded, trailing behind her slightly. I watched my feet, one after another. It was the only thing I could focus on without vomiting.

  “It helps if you don’t think of them as people.”

  Yes. I imagined that would help.

  At the end of the hallway was a freight elevator. It was black and greasy and had poor lighting. She pushed the cart inside, and I tried to tell myself that there wasn’t a body within it.

  We got off at the bottom floor and exited through an unguarded door, which Delilah unlocked with the same key from around her neck. She pushed the cart down a narrow back alley until we reached a high fence with rolls of barbed wire cresting its ridge. There was a gate there, manned by two soldiers in a guard station. They saw the cart and let us pass without a second glance.

  “I guess they know what we’re doing,” I observed.

  “You gonna help?” Delilah asked as she began to labor. I slid beside her, checking my nausea, and grabbed one side of the slick metal handle. Together, we pushed the cart up a steep asphalt embankment lined by flat-topped hedges that curved around the back side of the station. I was sweating by the time we reached the top.

  A single cement building, flat and square, came into view. It was surrounded by lovely drooping trees, a contrast to the black factory smoke puffing from the chimney. The air reeked of sulfur. The driveway arched into a teardrop before the entrance.

  “Just over to that door there.” Delilah pointed. I helped her push the weighted cart to a side exit with a canvas shade awning. She rang a buzzer. Then, without waiting, she walked away.

  “We just leave him—it—here?” I asked.

  She nodded. “The crematorium.”

  My stomach churned.

  They took my mother somewhere like this. I was flooded with so much horror I could barely stumble behind her.

  The sickness numbed, and I was able to follow Delilah weakly back to the highest crest of the hill. Here she paused. I tracked her gaze, feeling my feet stabilize under me for the first time since we had entered that third room.

  Before us stretched the FBR base. The buildings all matched, gray and drab, some with stout additions, others slender. All variations on the same deathly theme. Little manicured lawns cropped up between them, and white walkways bounced from entrance to entrance. It reached on for miles, surrounded by the high steel fence that we had passed through below. In the distance I could see the river and the hospital where we’d left the car. The square would be nearby, as would the Wayland Inn, where the resistance plotted.

  Oh, the information I could offer Wallace. The layout of the detention center. How many guards roamed the halls. The geography of the base. I’d doubted my use to the resistance before. I didn’t now.

  I felt a flame flicker inside of me. A feeling, almost unrecognizable.

  Hope.

  What if I could find a way to tell Wallace? Even if I was doomed to die, the information I had might save others. Innocent people like my mother. It physically hurt to think that the information I now had might have helped someone save her.

  I turned around and saw the remains of an aban
doned town. Probably some residential offshoot of Knoxville. Twisting asphalt avenues were lined by crowded duplexes and condos. From the distance, their tiny yards did not look overgrown or weed eaten. The tagged walls and broken windows were too far away to see clearly.

  An old sign posting fuel prices reached up atop the horizon, drawing my attention. A main street ran down the left side of my view; a straight line away from me.

  “Is that all part of the base, too?” I asked.

  “No. The base is just over there. This side of the city is evacuated. A Red Zone.”

  I felt my brows draw together.

  “Do you mean that we’re not currently on the base?”

  “You’re a bright one,” she mocked.

  Anxiety shimmered through me.

  “How often do you come out here?” I asked.

  “Every time I have to take out the trash.”

  I grimaced at her analogy. “And you’ve never thought to just keep walking?”

  “I think it all the time.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  She looked at me, her face tired.

  “If there was anything for me out there, I’d be gone.”

  She looked at me in judgment, sizing up my intentions. Apparently, my thoughts were as transparent as her eyes.

  Beth was still out there. Rebecca was in danger. Wallace and the resistance could use me, and after my mother’s murder, how could I not help them? There were too many people like me who didn’t know just how lethal the MM was. Too many people dead, while their loved ones remained hopeful for a reunion.

  I had to do something, no matter how small. Something. For my mother.

  If I ran now, Delilah didn’t have to go more than ten feet to flag down the guard at the watch station. But Tucker had said I still had three days before my trial. If I could earn enough trust to make it outside on my own, I might be able to escape.

  “You want a bullet in your back, don’t you?” She wasn’t looking for an answer.

  She trudged down the hill. And I followed, scheming.

  CHAPTER

  15

  DELILAH didn’t speak to me for the remainder of the afternoon. As the day shift dwindled on, she tasked me to fold towels in the supply room, not bothering to conceal her annoyance that I hadn’t been returned to a cell.

  At curfew, a buzzer sounded, and the power switched to a generator. Not many were there to hear it; apart from the stairway guard, the hallway was already empty.

  Tucker was finishing some paperwork when I finally dragged myself to his office. “What do you want?” I asked.

  He slid his gun out of the holster, and I thought, This is it. He’s going to kill me. I braced for the pain that was sure to come. But instead, he deposited the weapon within a safe in the back corner, locked it, and placed the key inside his desk drawer. The breath reentered my lungs in one hard whoosh. He waited a beat, eyeing me with a strange expression.

  “You aren’t married, are you?” He said it as if he were a ten-year-old talking about broccoli.

  I felt a light flush creep over my skin, a subtle reminder that I was still a living, breathing human.

  “No.”

  “What’s with that ring?”

  I was almost surprised to see it still on my finger.

  “Nothing. It’s just something I found.”

  It was the ring Chase had stolen for me from the Loftons’. When we’d been pretending to be married. A lot of things had been pretend with him.

  Because Tucker was watching, I didn’t take it off, but it suddenly felt much too tight. His expression returned to the normal haughtiness.

  “I talked to my commanding officer. You’re sleeping up here until your trial.”

  I’d figured as much but still shuddered. Who would still be alive in the morning?

  “I saw the result of one of your trials today,” I said accusingly.

  I remembered how the soldier’s face had become Chase’s face, right before my eyes. I wondered, for a fraction of a moment, if Chase felt that same sick terror whenever I’d mentioned my mother. If the fear cut fresh with each recall. But then the feeling was gone, clouded by betrayal.

  “And?” Tucker said. As though an execution were nothing. “The quickest way to stomp insubordination is to strike fast and sure.”

  No doubt an officer had fed him that line. The hint of pride in his voice sickened me so much I almost walked out, but then I thought of Wallace and the resistance. Of Rebecca, maybe still here, in this building, and I knew I needed to stay.

  “You give them a pill or something?”

  “A shot. Strychnine. They can’t breathe. Their muscles seize up and go into convulsions. And then they die. It’s quick.” I almost thought he was trying to comfort me with his last words, but there was no inflection in his voice.

  “You do that to the girls, too? The strychnine?” I tried to look frightened, but I wasn’t. I was less averse to dying than before, and Tucker Morris didn’t scare me. He was weak. He needed the MM. He needed something to believe in, since it was probably too depressing to believe in himself.

  “Sometimes.” I knew he was thinking of my mother. I hated him for having her in his mind in any capacity.

  “Do you know if they executed a girl named Rebecca Lansing? She would have come from the West Virginia reformatory. Blond hair, cute…”

  “Great rack.”

  “I guess.” My spirits rose.

  “Nope.”

  “You just said—”

  “I can’t give you that kind of information.” His eyes glimmered with power. “Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “Well, I’d trade it to you.”

  “For what?” I asked skeptically. I became very aware of how small the office was.

  “How about a kiss? We’ll see where that takes us.” He leaned back against the wall, hips jutting forward, his cast-free arm hanging loosely at his side. His face glowed with arrogance. I couldn’t believe he would want to kiss someone he knew would be dead in less than a week.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  He laughed. “I bet he liked that. You playing hard to get.”

  My face burned. That was too close. Too personal.

  When I turned to leave the office, his free hand grabbed both of my wrists, twisting them above my head so that a jolt of pain zinged up my arms. He was fast, just as he’d been at the overhaul. I shouldn’t have underestimated him just because he’d broken his arm. He shoved me against the cabinet and pressed his body against mine. He wore superiority as if it were expensive cologne.

  Rage filled me. Nobody touched me without my permission. Not anymore.

  I wanted to fight him.

  Sure, he was bigger and stronger than I was. He’d probably win in the end. But I could at least get a couple good shots in. Especially if I let a good mad build up.

  I couldn’t believe I was thinking like this. Like Chase. I was losing my mind.

  His face was close to mine. So close I could feel his breath on my lips. His green eyes blazed with desire; such a different look than I’d known before. Chase had studied me, reading my feelings. Tucker was only trying to see his own reflection.

  Disturbing on several levels.

  “Back off or I’ll scream.”

  I knew for a fact Tucker could not risk being seen with an inmate, one who was more or less reform-school trash. And I wasn’t about to go any further with him until I was sure he was going to make good on his end of the deal.

  “Ooh,” he groaned quietly. “I didn’t think you’d talk dirty.”

  “Sir?” Delilah stuck her head into the office. “Oh!” Her face reddened, and her eyes shot to the floor. In a snap, Tucker released my arms.

  “What do you want?” he snarled.

  “I’m sorry sir. Just going home for the night. I wasn’t sure if you wanted me on the same detail tomorrow with Ms. Miller.” She said this all in one breath, obviously ruffled. I couldn’t help feeli
ng a little embarrassed myself. I certainly did not want anyone thinking that his advance had been invited.

  “Yes. Tomorrow, same thing,” Tucker said. Then he smiled slowly. “And Delilah? A little discretion if you will. I’d hate to lose you after all your hard work.”

  Delilah seemed to shrink into the floor. We both knew when Tucker said lose, he didn’t mean fire.

  I didn’t have any more time to waste. I all but shoved past Delilah in an attempt to get out into the hallway as the guard on rotation walked by. He gave Tucker a curt nod. Tucker returned the gesture and closed the office door behind him.

  Without another word, he locked me in my cell.

  * * *

  I COULDN’T sleep that night. I stared into the darkness and shivered. Tucker, in all his kindness, had given me a ratty old towel and a blanket. It was a power play, showing me he could permit me comfort even in this house of death. What a benevolent captor.

  I’d ripped the thin towel to shreds and left the blanket untouched.

  Standing on my bed I could see out the high, barred window onto the base. It was absolutely still, apart from the single security guards cutting their paths over the cement walkways. I assumed there were more civilians like Delilah working here, but they obviously still had to observe curfew. Even if I could get out now, it was suicide to try to escape at night.

  I slid down the wall and pulled my knees into my chest. I blew on my wrists, which still bore red blossoms from Tucker’s earlier grip.

  Without prompting, my eyes filled with tears.

  “No,” I said out loud. If I let one tear come, another would join it. Another and another after that. I couldn’t afford to be weak. I had to help the resistance. I couldn’t honor my mother’s murder by meeting the same exact fate.

  So I lingered on the knife’s edge, balancing between recklessness and despair.

  I tried to stop the pictures, but they came anyway. The darkness set the scene, and like a movie, Chase’s memories played before my vision.

  My mother in the cell. Alone, like I was now, but scared. Chase coming in, backed by Tucker Morris and other soldiers. Chase’s raised gun. Had she fought? I bet she had. Then fear, followed by compassion, and her whispered plea to protect me. His twisted understanding that he was trying to do just that by killing her. But he couldn’t kill her. His faceless CO did that. While he was forced to watch.