UnSouled (28 page)

The storks are spreading out. Some are going down, but more are gaining ground. Some use the counselors as human shields.

I can’t die
, Starkey thinks.
Who will lead them if I die?

But he knows he can’t stay crouched behind a boulder either. They have to see him fighting. They have to see him in charge. Not just the storks, but the kids he’s about to set free.

He pokes his head up and aims his pistol at the shadowy figure in the tower, who is now firing at kids running across the artificial turf. Starkey’s fourth shot is lucky. The sharpshooter goes down.

But there are other guards, other towers.

In the end, salvation for all of them comes from the kids of the camp itself. The grounds are filled with Unwinds going about their daily activities—sports and dexterity exercises all designed to maximize their divided value and physically groom them for unwinding. When they see what’s happening, they abandon their activities, overpower their counselors, and turn an attack into a revolt.

Starkey strides into the midst of it, amazed by what he’s witnessing. The staff running in panic, guards overpowered, their weapons pulled from them and added to the storks’ growing arsenal. He sees a woman in a white coat race across the lawn and behind a building, trying to use a cell phone—but the joke’s on her. Even before the storks ambushed the transport truck, Jeevan and a team of techies had jammed the two wireless towers feeding the valley and took out the landline. No communication of any sort is getting in or out of this place unless it’s running on two feet.

The rebellion feeds itself, fueled by desperation and unexpected hope. It grows in intensity until even the guards are running, only to be tackled by dozens of kids and restrained with their own handcuffs.
It’s like Happy Jack!
thinks Starkey.
But this time it’ll be done right. Because I’m the one in charge.

Overpowered by sheer numbers, the staff is subdued, and the camp is liberated in fifteen minutes.

Kids are overwhelmed with joy. Some are in tears from the ordeal. Others tend to dead and dying friends. Adrenaline is still high, and Starkey decides to use it. Let the dead be dead. He must focus them now on life. He strides out into the middle of the common area, beside a flagpole poking out of the artificial turf, and draws their attention away from the human cost of their liberation.

He grabs a machine gun from one of his storks and fires it into the air until everyone is looking his way.

“My name is Mason Michael Starkey!” he announces in his loudest, most commanding voice, “and I’ve just saved you from unwinding!”

Cheers all around, as it should be. He orders them to separate into two groups. Storks to his left, the rest to his right. They are reluctant at first, but his storks wave their weapons and make the order stick. The kids divide themselves. There seem to be about a hundred storks and three hundred other kids. No tithes, thankfully. This is a titheless camp. Starkey addresses the nonstorks first, gesturing to the main entrance.

“The gate is wide open. Your path to freedom is there. I suggest you take it.”

For a moment they linger, not trusting. Then a few turn and head toward the gate, then a few more, and in an instant it becomes a mass exodus. Starkey watches them go. Then he turns to the storks who remain.

“To you I give a choice,” he tells them. “You can run off with the others, or you can become part of something larger than yourselves. All your life you’ve been treated like second-class citizens and then handed the ultimate insult. You were sent here.” He gestures wide. “We are all storks here, condemned to be unwound—but we’ve taken back our lives, and we’re taking our revenge. So I ask you—do you want revenge?” He waits and receives a few guarded
responses, so he raises his voice.
“I said, do you want revenge?”

Now primed, the answer comes in a single chorus blast. “Yes!”

“Then welcome,” Starkey says, “to the Stork Brigade!”

32 • Hayden

Shortly before the liberation, Hayden takes a shower—which he now does almost obsessively three times a day, trying to wash off the filth of his situation. He knows no amount of scrubbing can do it, but it feels good all the same. The other Unwinds there hate him as much as they hate their jailers because they believe he’s one of them. So smooth was Camp Director Menard in creating the spin—in making everyone there believe that Hayden had been turned and was now working for the Juvenile Authority. He would rather die, of course, than ever do anything to help the Juvenile Authority, but it’s all about perception. People believe what they think they see. No, he’ll never wash away Menard’s lies, but they can’t stop him from trying.

When he steps out of his shower today, however, he discovers that his world has completely changed.

He immediately hears the gunfire—round after round of staccato, arrhythmic blasts that seem to be coming from multiple directions. Although his lap-of-luxury suite has a veranda, he’s not allowed on it, so it’s locked. Still, he can see what’s going on. The harvest camp is under attack by a team of kids with weapons—and each time a guard falls, a new weapon is added to their arsenal. Unwinds from the camp have joined with them, turning this into a full-scale revolt—and Hayden allows himself a glimmer of hope that perhaps the date set for his unwinding might be wrong after all.

A bullet catches the corner of the sliding glass veranda door, but leaves little more than a ding. It’s bulletproof glass. Apparently the builders decided that anyone who would be invited to the visitor’s suite of a harvest camp might be the kind of person likely to get shot at. His only way out is the door to the suite, but it’s locked from the outside.

The sound of gunfire diminishes, until it’s gone entirely—and the sight of kids still running outside tells Hayden that the invading force was victorious.

He pounds on his door over and over again, screaming at the top of his lungs, until someone comes.

It’s a kid at the door, and he looks familiar. Hayden quickly recognizes him as a message runner from the Graveyard.

“Hayden?” the kids says. “No way!”

•   •   •

He is led by three fugitives he knew from the airplane graveyard out into the common area, where the artificial turf swelters in the midday sun. There are bodies strewn everywhere. Some are tranq’d; others clearly dead. Most are kids. A few are guards. To the left, the harvest camp workers are being bound and gagged. To the right, there are vast numbers of kids racing out the camp’s gate, claiming their freedom. But not everyone is leaving.

The rest are being addressed by someone wearing the pastel-gray coverall uniform of an Unwind transport worker.

Hayden stops short when he realizes who it is.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was holding out hope that it was Connor come to rescue them. Now he wonders if it’s too late to go back to his guest suite.

“Hey,” the kid who unlocked his door shouts. “Look who we found!”

When Starkey lays eyes on Hayden, there’s a moment of fear in Starkey’s eyes, which is quickly engulfed by steel. He
smiles a little too broadly. “What was it you always said at the Graveyard, Hayden? ‘Hello. I’ll be your rescuer today.’ ”

“He’s one of them!” someone shouts before Hayden can come up with a clever response. “He’s been working for the Juvies! They even let him pick who gets unwound!”

“Oh, is that the latest news? You know you can’t trust a thing the tabloids say. Next I’ll be giving birth to alien triplets.”

Bam is there—she looks at Hayden, somewhat amused. “So the Juvenile Authority made you their bitch.”

“Nice to see you too, Bam.”

Shouts of “Leave him,” and “Tranq him,” and even “Kill him,” spread through the crowd of Cold Springs Unwinds, but the kids who knew him rise to his defense enough to spread at least a few seeds of doubt. The crowd looks to Starkey for a decision, but he doesn’t seem ready to make one. He’s spared, though, because three strong storks approach with the struggling camp director.

The crowd parts, and someone has the bright idea to spit on Menard as he passes, and pretty soon everyone’s doing it. Hayden might have done it if he had thought of it first, but now it’s just conformism.

“So this must be the guy in charge,” Starkey says. “Get on your knees.”

When Menard doesn’t obey, the three kids manhandling him push him down.

“You have been found guilty of crimes against humanity,” Starkey says.

“Guilty?” wails Menard desperately. “I’ve had no trial! Where’s my trial?”

Starkey looks up at the mob. “How many of you think he’s guilty?”

Just about every hand goes up, and as much as Hayden hates Menard, he has a bad feeling about where this is going.
Sure enough, Starkey pulls out a pistol. “There’s twelve in a jury, and that’s definitely more than twelve people,” Starkey tells Menard. “Consider yourself convicted.”

Then Starkey does something Hayden was not expecting. He hands the gun to Hayden.

“Execute him.”

Hayden begins to stammer, staring at the gun. “Starkey, uh—this isn’t—”

“If you’re not a traitor, then prove it by putting a bullet in his head.”

“That won’t prove anything.”

Then Menard doubles over and begins to pray. A man who kills kids for a living praying for deliverance. It’s enough to make Hayden aim at Menard’s hypocritical skull. He holds it there for a good ten seconds, but he can’t pull the trigger.

“I won’t,” Hayden says. “Not like this.”

“Fine.” Starkey takes back the gun, then points to a random kid in the crowd, who looks to be no older than fourteen. The kid steps forward, and Starkey puts the gun in the kid’s hand. “Show this coward what it means to be courageous. Carry out the execution.”

The kid is clearly terrified, but all eyes are on him. He’s been put to the test and knows he must not fail. So he grimaces. He squints. He puts the muzzle of the gun to the back of Menard’s head and looks away. Then he pulls the trigger.

The pop is not loud; it’s just a pop. Like a single stray firecracker. Menard crumples, dead before he hits the ground. It’s quick and clean. Just an entrance wound in the back of the head and an exit wound right beneath the chin, with the bullet itself claimed by the artificial turf. There are no exploding brain bits and pieces of skull—Starkey and the crowd seem
disappointed that an execution, in the end, is far less dramatic than the buildup.

“All right, move out!” Starkey orders, giving instructions to commandeer any vehicle for which they can find keys.

“What about him?” Bam asks, sneering at Hayden.

Starkey spares Hayden a brief glance and the tiniest hint of a superior grin before saying, “We’ll take him with us. He still might be useful.” Then he turns back to all those gathered and says in a powerful voice, “I hereby announce that this harvest camp is officially closed!”

Starkey gets the cheers and adulation he’s craving, and Hayden, looking at the dead director . . . and the dead guards . . . and the dozens of dead kids littering the grounds . . . wonders whether he should be cheering or screaming.

33 • Connor

Waiting is not in Connor’s arsenal of personal skills. Even before his parents signed his unwind order, he was impatient and had little tolerance for downtime. Back then, quiet time made him think about his life, thinking about his life made him angry, and anger made him do the kinds of impetuous, irresponsible, and occasionally criminal things that always got him in trouble.

Since the day he ran from his home, however, there has been no downtime—at least not until arriving on the Arápache Reservation. Even when sequestered in Sonia’s basement, there was a whole petri dish of viral angst to deal with. His guard had to be up at all times to protect himself, to protect Risa, and to keep an eye on Roland, who could have taken him out at any instant.

He still wonders if Roland, in the right circumstances, really would have killed him.

At Happy Jack, he had cornered Connor, pinned him against a wall, and tried to strangle him with the very hand that now is a part of Connor—but Roland couldn’t go through with it. In the end, Roland could have been all bark and no bite—but no one will ever know.

Connor, on the other hand,
has
killed people.

He fired deadly weapons in a war against the Juvies at the Graveyard. He knows some of his bullets hit their mark and took people down. So does that make him a killer? Is there any way to be redeemed from that?

This is why Connor despises downtime. All that thinking can drive him mad.

His one consolation is a growing feeling of safety. Normalcy—if anything about this situation can be called normal. The Tashi’ne family have been kind hosts, in spite of their initial coolness to him. From the moment it became public that Connor is alive, they have truly made their home his.

During the day, however, no one is there. Kele is off at school—which is a good thing because Connor has little patience for Kele’s lack of patience. Chal is off working his magic with the Hopi, Elina spends her days at the pediatric wing of the medical lodge, and Pivane, who does come over for dinner each night—is usually off hunting.

Connor, Grace, and Lev—who can’t go out for fear of being spotted—are left to their own devices.

•   •   •

It’s late afternoon a week into August—their twentieth day there. The light coming through the windows is a rich amber, reflected by the ridge across the ravine. Shadows become long quickly in these cliff-side homes, and when the sun sets, it’s gone. There’s little room for twilight in the ravine.

Grace, who is very good at entertaining herself, had proclaimed, “There’s lots of stuff here,” on their first day. Today she’s ransacked yet another closet, then reorganized it with frightening precision. Lev, still recovering from the car accident, has a mat spread out on the marble floor in the middle of the great room, doing some physical therapy Elina taught him, while Connor sits on the overstuffed sofa nearby. Having found a pocketknife that must have belonged to long-lost Wil, Connor has started carving wood, but for the life of him doesn’t know what to make, so he just ends up whittling larger sticks into smaller ones.