Strike

  Wyatt and I line up at the far side. He hits cans with four of his five shots, which makes sense, as one of our earliest conversations revealed that he knew what to do with a gun. I hit two. I guess I’m better at closer range. I let Gabriela borrow my gun, and she reloads it and returns it after hitting one of the cans. Some of the other kids are pretty hopeless, their hands still shaking like they’re on Valor duty. Chance hits three. His hands don’t shake, and he handles his Glock like a pro. Rex is decent, getting three shots out of five with his new gun. The prep kid misses all five of his shots, probably because he can’t stop looking at Tyler’s body, which has been left on the ground, staring up at the blue sky.

  “Can . . . ? Can I at least close his eyes?” I ask.

  Brady nods. And I don’t want to touch this kid, but I do. Not because I feel sorry for him or feel that his death was unjust. Because I can’t stand the sounds of the flies.

  8.

  I’m glad when Brady says it’s time to leave the gunpowder hangover of the field. After what we’ve been through with Valor, I feel exposed out here, sure that so much gunfire will draw attention and helicopters. When Rex stops to stand over Tyler’s body, Brady steps beside him and lifts his hat to rub his hair.

  “He wasn’t gonna cut it anyway. Kid was already pushed to his limit.”

  Rex nods thoughtfully. I shiver. Where is my limit? Where is Wyatt’s?

  In the kitchen, they serve us cheap sandwiches—white bread, processed cheese, and bologna. Bags of off-brand potato chips gape on the cracked counters. An industrial-sized box of Moon Pies waits at the end like the Holy Grail. We serve ourselves on Styrofoam plates, and Brady herds us into the living room like a flock of dumb chickens. Wyatt and I sit on a fake leather couch, our hips glued together on the sprung seat as I sneak my bologna to Matty. I realize that until today I hadn’t eaten anything in a week that wasn’t fast food or Pop-Tarts or stolen from someone who’s now dead. My stomach turns, but I eat anyway. It’s just another new skill in my repertoire. Everything tastes like dust anyway.

  “Welcome, citizens.”

  Everyone looks up, their jaws frozen mid-chew. It’s Leon Crane, all dapper and dangerous in black jeans, a black vest, and a striped button-down shirt. He looks like the lab-made love child of a hipster, a preacher, and a serial killer.

  “Did you enjoy your morning on the range with Cousin Brady?”

  “Until my friend got shot,” the prep kid says. His food is untouched and his red eyes leak despite his best effort not to cry.

  Leon’s smile is stunningly warm. “An unfortunate incident that should remind us all to keep our hands to ourselves. But I do believe we can all continue in our shared ambitions without ongoing enmity—wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Do you mean I’m just supposed to forget that bitch killed Chad?”

  Leon is in the kid’s face in a heartbeat, his fist balled up in his polo shirt.

  “Why, yes, son, I do expect you to forget that. It might be a Valor world outside, but in Crane Hollow, we respect our women. When everyone is armed, such problems take care of themselves, as you’ve seen. Now, can you move on or not?”

  The room is dead silent but for Rex crunching on fake Ruffles.

  The prep kid shakes his head once and looks up, eyes steely. “When’s the funeral?”

  Leon’s smile is cloying, but he steps back, arms wide. “We don’t do funerals in Crane Hollow, or else we’d have no time to fight back. You want to do your friend honor, you complete your mission today. We have a common enemy, and that enemy is Valor. So let’s strike back at the real foe.”

  “So what are we going to do?” asks a beefy kid in camo through a mouthful of sandwich. “Like, hold up a bank?”

  Leon steps back and sits in a wingback chair that kind of makes him look like the Godfather. He crosses his legs and regards us coldly and bemusedly. “Son, what good would holding up a bank do?”

  “I don’t know. We could take over all the banks and show Valor who’s boss.”

  “Now, let’s have a little economics lesson. You know who works in banks? Nice folks who need jobs to feed their families. Tellers and loan officers and a policeman who’s too old and slow to work the streets. Now, why would we want to go hold up those innocent, hard-working people?”

  “To get the money out of the vault?”

  “The vault?” Leon throws his head back to laugh. “Shit, son. All the money’s digital now. This is not a comic book. The vault is not full of bags of gold coins stamped with a green money symbol. And the piddly peons working behind the bulletproof glass are not the enemy.”

  God, his voice grates on me. I sit back and mimic Leon’s posture. “Then why are we even here? What are we supposed to fight?”

  Leon leans forward and steeples his hands. When he looks up, I can see the veneer of respectability spread too thin over a pissed-off country boy who’s still wearing prison tatts on his knuckles.

  “You fight who I tell you to fight. Jesus H. Christ, kid. This isn’t Red Dawn, okay? We’re not some plucky group of losers that’s going to take on the government and win. Do you even know what a bank is today? It’s not one building run by one person with a big front door we can blow up and an easily recognized villain stroking a cat behind a mahogany desk. A bank is . . . a damn hydra. Executives, lawyers, managers, cables, servers. It’s a million computers connected with shadows, each wire as well hidden as the second-smartest guys in the world can make it. That’s the secret. There’s nothing to fight. Nothing to rally against. No common enemy. No face you can put on the monster. Even their executive board, the people in charge—they go by code names and move around frequently so we can’t track them down. We can’t target their homes, their families, even if we wanted to hurt civilians. You can’t hold a coup against an invisible monster. So we’re doing what we can: making it damned unpleasant for Valor to keep on being Valor. They want to make money? Great. We can stop that. They want more capitalism? We’ll knock off its cap. They want us to get more into debt? We’ll cut up our credit cards and demagnetize every person we walk by.”

  “Then why the guns?” Wyatt asks. “Why were we at target practice?” He’s practically vibrating by my side, his food forgotten, which is a big deal for him.

  Leon eyes him as if for the first time and nods. “Because we like to get a feel for the raw materials we’ve got to work with. Who has a gun, who can shoot, who’s going to blast a kid in the chest and who’s gonna blubber like a baby. We need to know who’s cool as a cucumber.” He nods at Rex. “And who’s got a problem with authority.” He nods at me. “In short, we need to know who’s smart, who’s dumb, and who’s dangerous. Now, where on that spectrum do you fall?”

  Wyatt shifts toward me, his shoulder touching mine. “Smart and supportive.”

  Leon nods and grins. “Good man. What about your girlfriend? Can you control her?”

  Wyatt sucks in a hiss. Before he can say anything about whether or not I’m actually his girlfriend or knock the bullshit cherry off Leon’s misogynist sundae, I put down my cheese sandwich and say, “Nobody controls me. I was told that if I did an errand, I could see Clark, the kid y’all have upstairs with a gunshot wound in his leg.”

  “Ah. So despite your bad attitude, you’re determined and stubborn. I used to have a hound dog like that. She was a damn fine beast before she got rabid and had to be put down. Now, can you be trusted without a leash?”

  I don’t blink. “I can do what needs to be done.”

  “Well, Zooey, your friend Clark is doing just fine, and you can see him this evening after you’ve performed a fairly simple task on behalf of the Citizens for Freedom.”

  My blood runs cold, right down into my feet, and Matty whines and leans more heavily against my leg. “Do I have to kill anybody?”

  With a hearty laugh, Leon leans back and slaps his knee. “You misunderstand our function, Miss Zooey. As I said, we don’t want to kill anyone. We want to disrupt capitalism. So you’re going
to distribute these little babies.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a cardboard box about the size of a double-decker sandwich.

  “What is that?”

  “This is just a little something our tech people cooked up. I know we might look like a bunch of beer-bellied, Confederate-flag-flying rednecks, but that don’t mean we’re dumb. We call it a Wiper.” He opens the box to show us a machine that kind of looks like a homemade bomb, all wrapped wires and cylinders. There’s a red button on the side, and he points at it. “All you do is press this button, and the Wiper starts churning out an electromagnetic field for about fifty feet in circumference. You know what that means?”

  “It wipes credit card strips,” Wyatt says, sounding impressed.

  Leon tips an imaginary hat. “That’s right. So each of you will be given ten of these, a grocery list, enough cash to cover those supplies, and a ride to a particular destination. As you walk around the store, deposit these devices in hidden places and press their buttons. Once you’ve got your list and have activated all ten Wipers, you pay for your groceries and leave, easy as pie.”

  “And you don’t think a store will notice a nervous teen in a hoodie hiding shit behind the mustard?” Wyatt asks.

  Leaning in, Leon looks deadly serious. “I guess you’d better be careful, then, huh? The police ain’t answering their calls, but they’re sure as hell protecting capitalist interests in the big box stores that can still pay for protection. You go to jail, and we don’t know you. You lead them back to us, and you’ll leave jail in a dozen chunks. And, of course, we’ll have to keep your dog for you while you run your errands. And you’ll want your buddy Clark to be safe.”

  “If you’re on our side, why do you keep threatening us?” I say, almost without thinking.

  Rex clears his throat, and everyone else looks terrified at having the elephant in the room called out.

  “I’m not on your side, Zooey. You’re on my side. I need soldiers, and just like all triumphant armies of old, I will keep you here through gifts or intimidation, whatever works better. We told you to pick a side, and you picked ours. Now, if you want to survive, you’re going to be a good soldier, shut your mouth, and do what your general says. Succeed, and you’ll get to keep everything you have, plus see your friend.”

  “And if I fail?”

  His smile is a chasm. “Then you’ll have a sad boyfriend and a dead dog.”

  After Leon is gone, everyone stares at their plate. No one eats. There are eight other kids here, and I know the names of only five of them. Considering that none of us might live through the night, I don’t really want to get friendly with anyone else.

  In the past week I’ve gotten disgustingly accustomed to walking up to someone’s door and shooting them dead. It didn’t get easier so much as I became numb. My hands still shook every time. I came to believe that between me and one other person, I could pull the trigger and leave alive, if less so than I’d been before. But walking into a store with a bag of dangerous-looking boxes requires a different kind of cool, one I don’t know if I possess. When you’re supposed to kill someone anyway, it doesn’t really matter how bad you mess up. They die; you move on. Same end result.

  But a task like this has so many variables, so many tiny, stupid things that could go wrong. And I won’t have Wyatt by my side. As Leon said, we’re each being given our own assignment. So on top of worrying about doing my job, I have to worry about Wyatt doing his job. And about Matty and whether Tuck and Hartness will feed her bad hot dogs or take her out back like Old Yeller and put one in her sweet, fat skull.

  “Fuck it.” Wyatt stuffs an entire sandwich in his mouth.

  I tear mine up into tiny pieces and feed them to Matty. I need a milk shake, not this trashy lunch-bag food. Even the fake Coke in its Styrofoam cup is gross. Thank heavens I bought those Pop-Tarts.

  “You scared?” Chance asks.

  Gabriela snorts. “We’re all scared, dumbass. At least you’ve got a gun.”

  “It’s going to be fine.” Chance puts a hand on her shoulder and looks weirdly serious. “We can do this. And then we can check on Kevin and go back to our tent.”

  “And then what?” I say. “First this assignment, then another one. It’s not like they’re going to just let us leave the compound and wish us well. At least Valor gave us the hope that we could earn our freedom.”

  “A very false hope.” The tears in Chance’s eyes remind me that his house got burned down. I start to think about my mom, my house, and push it right back down.

  Repress, repress, repress.

  I can’t look in his eyes anymore. It’s too raw. “But still. We had hope.”

  No one else is speaking. When I look up from our circle, everyone is trying not to stare at us hungrily. I guess even this little amount of friendship is enviable right now.

  “Okay, nerds. What are your names?” Gabriela asks, looking around the room.

  “Well, I’m—”

  The boy in camo doesn’t get to finish. Heather swoops in and interrupts him with a waved hand. “You’re going to need to finish your lunch so we can get on with the mission. Security is slowest in the afternoon and goes up after dark. You’ve got five minutes, and I wouldn’t waste it talking.” No one obeys, and she adds, “We can have a campfire singalong later, if you’re successful.” She points at the grandfather clock in the corner. Its ticking fills the room. “Five minutes. Dump your plates in the trash and meet me out front when you’re done.”

  When she leaves, we continue not eating. I swear I didn’t hear the clock ticking before she pointed at the damn thing, but now it’s Edgar Allan Poe–style maddening. Even Matty’s wagging is in time with the insistent tick-tock. I feed her my cheese and try to drink the warm soda, but it makes me choke and cough as the minutes count down. The prep kid bolts up and runs from the room, and soon his retching echoes down the wood-paneled hall.

  We all look at one another, my crew. Wyatt picks up his last sandwich and holds it up. Chance picks up his, and they do a weird sort of toast.

  “To stupid assignments,” Chance says.

  Wyatt snorts. “To stupid singalongs.”

  “To Kevin,” Gabriela adds.

  I add what’s left of my floppy white bread to the mix. “To people not threatening to kill my damn dog all the time.”

  Rex walks over to us and adds his half a sandwich. “To the fact that there’s still homework in a capitalist dystopia. Who knew?”

  I can’t swallow. I drop my bread for Matty, who’s been eyeing it and drooling. At least one of us still has hope.

  The clock strikes, and we stand like old people too tired to go on. Out the door we file, dumping our plates and cups into the trash can. Crane women line the halls, going silent as we pass. The screen door squeaks, and we’re on the front porch. The day would be beautiful, but it’s not. We have a job to do. We have no choice. We have nowhere else to run. Wyatt takes my hand and holds it like he never wants to let go. When Tuck walks up and whistles, Matty surges toward him like she’s forgotten I ever existed.

  No, that’s bullshit. She’s just a dog, and he’s holding a biscuit.

  I let go of her leash, and he takes it, and then Heather is pointing me to a beat-up hatchback with a stranger at the wheel, the first in a long line of shitty, idling cars. My mind flashes back to my mom kneeling, introducing me to the topic of stranger danger and telling me that even if I thought a guy might be my dad, I shouldn’t get in the car with him. I didn’t believe her, though. I was possibly the only kid on earth who wanted a stranger to pull up and say sweet things. My dad never showed up, and not a single stranger ever tried to kidnap me. But now my danger sense is tingling.

  The stranger driving my car is in his twenties and tapping on a phone. He has the bug-eyed, nervous look of a skinny Crane. I don’t want to get in the car with him. There is no chance that it can end well. I cling to Wyatt, arms tight around his waist, face buried in his band shirt. His arms wrap around me, too, his chin
over my head. He strokes my hair and murmurs, “It’s going to be okay. You can do this. We’ll be eating Pop-Tarts in our tent by dinnertime.”

  He says nothing of whether or not he can do it, of whether Gabriela and Chance will be there with us later, keeping us from hitting second base in a too-large tent. One day, maybe, we’ll learn how to talk about the future. All we have right now is the past. The dude honks the horn, and Wyatt kisses my head and whispers, “Good luck.”

  I’m going to get in the backseat, but the guy opens the front passenger-side door instead. The car smells like cigarettes and spit-out gum, the heater turned up too high. I lean down to flick the lever and push the seat back from the dash, but I still feel crowded as we drive down the bumpy gravel road. Am I supposed to say hi? Everything feels gross.

  The guy doesn’t even look at me. “Uncle Leon says you’re mouthy. That I better keep an eye on you.”

  I say nothing.

  “So how many people have you killed?”

  I turn my head and stare out the window, and he snorts, his hand tapping on the gearshift like he wants to slap me.

  “Suit yourself. See those two bags? One’s stuff to wear, and the other’s got your Wipers. You got any questions?”

  I open the paper bag at my feet and find a pink cardigan, a blond wig, and a pair of hipster glasses that probably came from the dollar store. When I pull down the mirror, I look like I’m forty, my skin angry from a week of neglect with huge purple bags forming under my eyes. My hair is a mess, greasy and scraggly. The wig, at least, seems new, and I put it on, tuck my bangs under it, and try to arrange it to look as natural as possible. I don’t want to take off my coat with this dude giving me the side-eye, much less take off the seat belt when he’s driving, but I don’t have a choice. God, I feel so rumpled and wrong. We’re on the highway now, and it’s a highway to hell, which is what’s playing on the fuzzy radio.

  “Where are we going?” I finally ask.