Читать книгу The Release - Tom Isbell, Tom Isbell - Страница 8

THE NIGHT WAS COLD, and each time I breathed out, my mouth released a haze of frost. I squinted past the cloud of white, peering into the dark. They were out there. It was just a matter of time before they showed themselves.

A tap on the shoulder made me jump. Diana, come to relieve me.

“My turn,” she said.

“Already?”

“Unless you want to stay longer.”

“Nope, I’m good.”

I pushed myself up from the snow and stretched. My toes and fingers were numb. My joints creaked. Argos uncurled from my side and also stretched, extending his back legs.

“Anything?” Diana asked.

“Some yellow earlier. Nothing recent.”

“How many?”

“A dozen. Maybe more.”

She nodded grimly. “They do anything?”

“Just circled.” Then I added, “They came closer than last night.”

We shared a look. Diana knew what I was talking about without having to say the words. Yellow meant wolves, the color referring to their eyes. The more yellow, the more wolves. Lately, the numbers were increasing, and the packs had started coming closer. The only thing that kept them at bay was an enormous ring of fire we’d built around our camp. We stoked it day and night like some primitive tribe from centuries past. So far, no wolves had dared go through it.

We intended to keep it that way.

The avalanche had wiped out all of Camp Liberty, flattening buildings, vehicles … and several dozen Brown Shirts. Their decomposing bodies released a sickening aroma of rotting, putrefying flesh. Just the thing to attract roaming wolf packs. Each night the wolves materialized from the mountains, alternately ripping at the corpses with their razor teeth and sending piercing cries to the starry sky.

As if the wolves weren’t bad enough, just days after the avalanche, howling swirls of snow came racing down Skeleton Ridge and descended on the No Water, wreathing our shantytown in five-foot drifts. What was cleared away one morning was buried in snow the next. Between the snow and wolves, we were prisoners in our own camp.

Diana took my place on the ground, folding her willowy body behind the barricade. She pulled her auburn-colored hair back into a ponytail and readied a bow and arrow. I found some logs and tossed them onto the nearest bonfires. Five hundred embers danced to heaven. I was about to go but found myself lingering, wiping the bark from my hands.

“What?” Diana asked, noticing I hadn’t left.

It was a long time before I answered.

“How’s Hope?”

Diana gave a small sigh. “She’s fine, Book.”

“She’s really okay?”

“No better or worse since the last time you asked—which was last night.”

“Have you seen her?”

“Hardly anyone sees her. You know that. Now get out of here.”

I started to leave.

“And Book?”

“Yeah?” I turned to her, hopeful.

“Stop thinking about her.”

That was what Diana told me every night. Stop thinking about her. There was little chance I could follow that advice.

I shuffled back through the snowy labyrinth of Libertyville. That was the name we gave our makeshift town of rickety huts. The buildings were an unsightly collection of recovered pieces from Camp Liberty. Bits of planking here, corrugated metal there, tree branches acting as joists and beams. A ramshackle village whose blue-tarped roofs dipped low from snow. Temporary housing.

Although we often talked about marching out of there, it would have been mass suicide. It was the dead of winter, and there were still Less Thans so emaciated they could barely walk. We’d rescued seventy-five of them from the Quonset hut that night two months ago, but malnutrition and sickness had taken the lives of four the first week alone. The long winter claimed three others. We couldn’t be on our way until all sixty-eight of them regained their strength—whenever that was.

Argos and I stepped into the shack that we called home. It was nearly as cold inside as it was out.

On the floor were seated Twitch and Flush, bent over a sheet of paper. Flush read a series of numbers out loud.

“Any progress?” I asked.

“There’s gotta be a pattern,” Twitch answered, tapping the paper with his fingers. “I just can’t figure it out.”

“And you’re sure they’re not random numbers?”

“Two people with the same series of thirteen numbers? Not likely.”

Back when we had been digging through the snow looking for building materials, we’d come across Colonel Thorason’s body. In his front shirt pocket was a slip of paper. On it was written a long string of numbers.

4539221103914

When we uncovered another Brown Shirt and found the exact same numbers in his shirt pocket, we figured it was a code of some kind. So far, we’d had no luck translating it.

“I keep hoping it’s a letter-number cipher,” Twitch went on. “Those aren’t so tough to crack. But if it’s a letter shift cipher, then things get tricky. You gotta create a whole grid to solve it.”

Leave it to Twitch to know all this. He’d been blinded by a mortar when the Brown Shirts ambushed us last summer. Although it slowed him down physically, it didn’t faze him a bit when it came to problem solving. The code was just another puzzle he was determined to break.

In addition to Flush and Twitch, Red was also in the room, carving a cedar branch. Like Flush and Twitch, he had been in that original group of Less Thans who escaped Camp Liberty. His shame for abandoning us in favor of Dozer was as easy to read as the radiation splotch on his face. There was never a moment when he wasn’t making arrows or tending to the survivors.

“Anything?” he asked. The same question we asked one another every night.

“Some yellow a couple hours ago.”

“More or less than last night?”

“Definitely more. And getting closer.”

It was not the answer anyone wanted to hear.

I tossed some wood into the stove and poked the logs. As I stretched out before the flames, pinpricks of heat danced up my toes and fingers. Argos circled and lay down. He was practically fully grown now, the scars from various wolf attacks pockmarking his fur like badges of honor.

Cat entered and we went through the same series of questions. Any yellow? How many? How close? That kind of thing.

The fact was, we were fixated on wolves—could think of little else. They circled us each night, taunting us with their howls, their greenish-yellow eyes poking through the dark like devil fingers. There was never a time when they weren’t on our minds.

“How much longer?” I asked, absently petting Argos.

“Till what?”

“Till they finish off the corpses?”

Cat shrugged. “Another day. Maybe two.”

He bent down and picked up two rocks—one quartz, one flint—and began knapping them together, making arrowheads. He held the flint by wedging it between his armpit and artificial limb. His movements were so effortless, you almost got the feeling he’d been missing an arm his entire life. Typical Cat.

“And when they’re done with the corpses?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I guess they’ll look somewhere else.” The fire crackled and Cat knapped the rocks. Then he turned to Flush and asked, “We’re still waiting for spring?”

“As soon as the snow melts,” Flush said.

“We can’t leave any sooner?”

“Not as long as there are LTs who can’t get out of bed.”

“We could build a sled and drag them along.”

Flush shook his head. “Better to wait until we can all walk on our own.”

I knew what was going on in Cat’s mind. It wasn’t just wolves he was thinking about. We had seen for ourselves the realities of the Republic of the True America: Hunters tracking down Less Thans, experiments on Sisters, Brown Shirts locking up LTs and letting them die in their bunks.

Since Chancellor Maddox had somehow escaped the avalanche—Dr. Gallingham, too—we knew we couldn’t remain in Libertyville a second longer than necessary. Our only salvation—and curse—was the snow, which kept the Brown Shirts away … but also kept us captive.

To lift people’s spirits—and also celebrate a year’s worth of birthdays—we’d decided to throw a party the next night. It wouldn’t solve our problems, but maybe it would get our minds off wolves and a dwindling food supply—at least for one evening.

When I climbed into bed, Cat continued to strike rocks, and Flush and Twitch were still poring over numbers. As I settled into sleep, it wasn’t wolves or Chancellor Maddox or Dr. Gallingham I thought about.

It was Hope. I hadn’t seen her since we’d rescued her from the bunker. For the past eight weeks, she had spent her days hunting game in the foothills, returning only when the sun was setting and she could cloak herself in darkness, closeting herself in her tent on the far edge of Libertyville. I wondered when I’d see her again.

If I’d see her again.

My eyes drifted shut and I fell into a deep sleep, only partially aware of the wolves’ haunting howls from the other side of the ring of fire.