SWAB (A Young Adult Dystopian Novel) (30 page)

“No,” I whispered and ran toward the main street. It was just as empty. The Post had been torn down and stripped of all useful materials. Just a few unsteady beams remained. I put my forehead
against one of them. Everyone was gone. The reality sunk into me like a stone dropped into the lake. I was too late.

Thick weeds grew everywhere. The people must have left weeks ago, maybe right after our attack had failed.
What made them go
?

I noticed fresh boot prints in the dirt along the far side of the Post. Someone
was
here.

“Ray!” I shouted as I walked down the main street, my eyes darting to the ruins of the community on either side.

I passed Mrs. Weatherstone’s little herb house, and a figure stepped out at the end of the street. Then another, and another. There were three people left.

I jogged to greet them, but I soon stopped. Something was wrong. They weren’t human. Two long, thin spears protruded from the skull of one of these strange scarb. Another had a tendril swooping from his back so long that it could’ve been considered a tail. The last was large and bullish.
How did I not sense them before?
We’d been constantly checking the connection for signs of other scarb, but I hadn’t noticed these three on the island.

“What are you doing here?” I asked them cautiously. I could take three scarb, but these three looked like rogue scarb, “rangers” Iva called them. She told me rangers could be more dangerous than colony scarb because they had nothing to protect, nothing to fight for other than life itself. She explained that once a scarb went rogue, they left the connection to Origin and joined a lesser one that connected only the rangers to each other.
That must have been why I hadn’t sensed them.

“Shouldn’t we be asking you that same question,
swab
?” The scarb with the tail asked with a slurred accent. I wasn’t sure how they knew I was a swab, but that hardly seemed to matter at the moment. “We don’t like being bothered much, you see, and we don’t like self-centered
swab like you.”

I put my hands up. “I don’t mean you any harm. Can’t the feeling be mutual?”

“Swab,” the tailed scarb spat. “They think they can order everyone around.”

“What can we do with a lone little swab?” the largest of the three turned and asked his companions with a lick of his purple lips. “I bet she has a pack of dummies close by. I bet they would pay nicely to get their queen back.”

I was tempted to call Derrick and Iva for help, but I immediately decided against it.
What kind of queen am I if I can’t handle three rangers?

“I just came to see if there were any humans left on the island,” I quickly told them.

“Hungry for more little scarbies to join your cause?” the one with the tail assumed, but the third one with the spikes answered for me, his eyes narrowed, reading my thoughts.

“No, she’s looking for one of
them
. A male.”

“Ah,” the other two said in unison, as if that explained everything.

The tailed scarb stepped toward me. “We’ve lost loved ones, too,” he said, scratching at the pointy green stubble on his chin. “You don’t seem like such a bad swab. You probably won’t make it through your first year, but we won’t bother you.” I was relieved to hear it. “There was a pocket of humans living here,” he continued. “But I bet they headed south,” he stuck his thumb in that direction.

“South?” I asked, hoping for something more specific than that.

“To Arizona,” he clarified. “There’s a large pocket of human survivors in Tucson. That’s where I’d guess they are now, if they made it at all. Land’s getting mighty thick with all these blasted swab taking up every square inch. No offense.”

“None taken,” I shook my head. “Thank you.” I headed back to the mountain shore. The three rangers didn’t follow.

“Ray is—I mean, everyone’s probably in Arizona,” I told Nate first thing when blearily opened his eyes.

“Huh?” He yawned

“Arizona,” I repeated. “That’s where they probably went.”

I explained what the scarb on the island had told me. “How can you be sure he’s there?” Nate asked, pulling himself up to sitting. His hair stuck out like a wild animals.

“Because he’s Ray.”

“You’re right,” Nathan nodded.

I rubbed at a sore spot in my ribs, thinking. Derrick came over and listened quietly. “I bet he came here after escaping the colony. We’d probably already been captured by the time he got to the island. He knew what the queen’s plan was, so the safest thing would be to get everyone far away from Emerald. He must have led them down to Tucson hoping that the resistance there would offer them more safety.”

“That means he’s still human,” Nathan said with a small smile.

“We have to go to Tucson,” I decided.

“Really?” Nathan leaned his arms onto his knees. “Why?”

“To get Ray, of course,” I said and gave him a look that told him how dumb I thought that question was.

“But he’s human,” Nathan repeated.

“I know,” I said, getting a little annoyed.

“We’re scarb,” Nathan stated the obvious.

“So?” I really didn’t know why he wanted to waste my time this morning.

“Ray left Rimerock to get away from scarb,” Nathan said flatly.

I could see his point now, but it was superfluous. “He’s Ray. It won’t matter.”

Nathan looked like he wanted to argue, but slowly he closed his mouth the way he always did when he knew I was bent on being right.

“To Arizona, then,” Nate said.

“Yes,” I affirmed. “To Arizona.”

“Not a bad idea anyway,” Derrick said with a smile, stretching his broad chest. “Fuchsia’s sent an entire army after us. Guess she’s madder than a wet cat that you killed Emerald. Remember what happened in
The Wizard of Oz
when Dorothy killed the wicked witch’s sister? You don’t want to mess with that kind of drama.”

The journey would take about nine hours by car, Derrick informed us after he studied some maps left in the Post. But we had no vehicle, since all of the fire engines had been left at the colony after the attack. We’d have to walk. The fliers could get there faster, but they couldn’t carry us the entire way. If we put in a solid twelve hours a day, we would get there in two weeks.

Two weeks
.
It might as well have been forever. I wanted to see Ray
now
. And the way wouldn’t be easy either.

“We have to get over the mountain pass,” Derrick said, pointing at the tiny bumps indicating the steep mountains on the map.

“And do it before Fuchsia’s armies get to us,” Iva reminded us.

“Right,” Derrick nodded. “Once we get onto the plains, it’ll be a pretty straight shot from there. We’ll follow the old Interstate 60.”

“Which will lead us out of Fuchsia’s territory and right into the northern part of Señora Marie’s,” Iva said, clicking her tongue.

“Who’s she?” I asked.

“She’s swab of southern America,” Iva answered.

I shrugged, un-impressed.

“She owns
all
of the southern Americas, from Arizona on down to Chile and Argentina,” Bram clarified.

“The whole thing?” My eyebrows raised reflexively as I looked at Derrick’s map. Southern North America, Mexico, Central America, and South America. That was a lot of real estate.

“Yes,” Iva said.

“Wow, she must be really powerful,” Nathan said with a whistle.

“She’s good at what she does,” Iva agreed. “That’s why we need to be careful. No one has touched her colony for four years.”

I’d thought we would just make a quick dash down to Tucson, pick Ray up and see where we’d go from there. This information was like trying to digest rancid meat.

“And then there’s the rangers to worry about,” Bram added to the slush of rottenness. “This part of the country,” he pointed to the southern part of the U.S., “where Señora Marie doesn’t patrol as much, is full of them.”

“Of course it is,” I laughed humorously. “Ray only had to pick the hardest place in the world to get to him.”
Is any place safe anymore
?
My determination to get to Ray was fixed, though. “We leave in ten minutes,” I told my small band of forty-nine scarb.

That morning was grueling. The terrain was wild and untamed. And we had Fuchsia’s army to worry about. Because of the fliers carrying us the day before, we were a good seven miles ahead of them, but it wasn’t much of lead. I pushed my scarb hard, determined to keep the distance. They didn’t complain. They remained on alert even as we made the six-thousand-foot ascent over the last mountain peak of the range. Iva and Bram routinely flew ahead to scan for any trouble we might encounter. They spotted a small group of rangers and steered us away from them.

Derrick stayed at my side the entire time. We didn’t speak. He kept his thoughts closed to me, and I was still feeling too guilty about my feelings for Ray to try to talk with him.
Is he angry about it? Jealous?
Whatever his emotions were, he stayed faithfully at my side. When I tripped on the slick shale that ran down the opposite side of the mountain, he caught my arm. Our eyes locked.
Was that sadness I saw in him? I thanked him and smiled, trying to ease the tension. He simply nodded and looked away.

We traveled nearly fifty miles that first day, despite the difficulty of the mountains. Using the connection, I guessed we were about eleven miles ahead of Fuchsia. Her army probably wasn’t as adapted
to the Rocky Mountain conditions. Dark clouds rolled in that evening, shrouding the sky in a blanket of navy and purple. Lightning flashed, and thunder cascaded down the mountainsides like loose boulders. We camped at the bottom of that last mountain just as fat drops of rain started to fall. There was shelter under the tall ponderosa pine trees, but I chose to step out into a clearing filled with damp columbine flowers. From there I could look back and watch the storm roll in waves over the mountain peaks. Only flat plains and desert lay before us. I looked over the craggy rocks poking out of the clouds here and there like lost islands at sea, green velvety forests and thin white waterfall streaks of white waterfalls in the distance.
This might be the last time I see these mountains.
I didn’t want to let them go.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Fleeing

“Cat, wake up,” Iva’s voice broke into my dreams urgently. “You need to get up, now.”

My eyes flashed open. I’d fallen asleep beneath one of the tall pines. Derrick woke up, too. He had been asleep just a yard from my feet. Iva was standing over me, worry thick on her face. “What’s wrong?”

“Fuchsia’s armies are within a mile of us,” she said hurriedly.

“What? How?”

“They must have traveled through the night.”

Fuchsia’s one determined woman, pushing her scarb like that.
I had underestimated her.

“Wake the others,” I told Iva. “Tell them to grab something to eat quickly so they’ll have strength for our journey today. Then we’ve got to get of here.”She nodded and began rousing the others.

Derrick came over to me, his hands outstretched and holding some browned acorns. “I grilled them last night over the fire,” he said, putting them into my palm. “They’re pretty good. You need your strength, too.”

“Thanks,” I said, but he’d already turned his back to me.

The acorns had a bitter, nutty taste, but having food in my stomach gave my body an energy boost. I made sure to save some from Nate. We picked columbines and added those to our breakfast.

“We’ll find more food on the way,” I said. “Let’s go.”

But I had no idea how difficult finding food was about to become. We scrambled the rest of the way down the mountainside but barely
made any headway against the army. At the bottom of the mountain, we came to the country road that would take us through New Mexico to I-60. Our progress was faster on the road, but so was the army’s.

The day grew hot out there on the open pavement. Drenched in sweat, we must have looked like misplaced sea creatures out there in the dusty, arid land. Just the sight of us jogging down the road scared away a small group of rangers. Or maybe it was the army coming after us.

We stopped twice for water at a river that ran along the road and once in the afternoon for food. We literally grazed through an abandoned hay field like cattle. One good thing about being scarb was that we didn’t have to stop to hunt for our food. If there were plants, we were pretty well set. That didn’t mean they all tasted good, though. The hay was tough and stuck to the fibers of my mouth. But it provided enough energy to keep going.

By the time the sun was setting, we were exhausted. Though in good shape, jogging all day in the heat of the summer sun was demanding. We had increased our lead on Fuchsia by six miles. Satisfied with that, I told the others to make camp. Surely, the army wouldn’t travel at night two nights in a row.

Grateful, Nate and Gray plopped down into the grassy field. They alternated beating wind into the other’s face with their wings.

“At least the sun isn’t so hot now,” Gray sighed.

But the next day was even worse. It seemed that with every mile we went, the land got drier, the air hotter.

“Welcome to Hell,” Nathan said when passed the last standing tree standing for miles. Food and water quickly became an issue.

“Eat this,” Derrick said the evening of that third day and handing me a piece of cactus. “It tastes pretty awful, but it has moisture.”He showed me how to pull the barbs out and eat the flesh. It had a bitter taste that lingered in my mouth for hours.

On the morning of the eighth day, Fuchsia’s army turned around. We were twelve miles ahead of them and nearing Señora Maria’s territory. “Is she giving up?” I asked Iva, who was trying to shake the sand out of her hair. There’d been a wind storm the night before.