UnWholly (Unwind Dystology 2)

What comes next? thinks the gate guard. An elephant?

When the running kid realizes there’s no way he’s going to catch up with the party crashers on foot, he spots the guard and runs toward him. The guard reflexively raises his rifle but realizes that like an idiot, he’s holding it upside down. By the time he rights it, the kid is there, ripping it away from him.

“Don’t be stupid, I’m not the enemy,” he says. There’s something familiar about his face. Like maybe he’s seen him before, but with shorter hair. “You have a Jeep or something?”

“Behind the trailer . . .”

“Good. Give me the keys.”

And this younger kid’s voice is so commanding, the guard obeys, reaching into his pocket and handing him the keys.

“Listen to me,” the kid says. “There’s a girl outside the gate. She’s been tranq’d. I want you to get her and run. Take her someplace safe. Do you understand?”

The guard nods “Yeah, sure. Someplace safe.”

“Promise me you’ll do that.”

“Yeah, yeah, I promise.”

Satisfied, the kid gets into the Jeep and drives off toward the main aisle, where gunfire can already be heard. Clearly he doesn’t know how to drive, but that really doesn’t matter much when there’s no road, only hardpan desert.

Once he’s gone, the guard takes a moment to look at the remains of his fallen comrade, then bolts. Somewhere in the bushes just outside the gate is a tranq’d girl. He doesn’t care. Every man for himself in a Juvey crackdown. Every girl, too. So rather than even looking for her, he takes off running as fast as he can, and leaves the girl to the Juvies, or the coyotes—whichever come first.

67 - Connor

With his volunteer defense force fully armed—about sixty kids in all—Connor dispatches half of them to hide behind Rip, the largest boys’ dormitory. It’s a C-130 cargo plane with its wings ripped off and a belly slung so low to the ground that a small militia can hide behind it. “You’re the left defense flank,” he tells them. “Do what you can to draw the Juvies’ fire and keep them in the north end of the main aisle.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky for once,” one kid says. “Maybe the Juvies won’t come after all.”

Connor tries to offer him a reassuring smile. He doesn’t know the boy’s name. He tried his best to learn as many names as he could, but there was only so much he could do. If this kid gets killed, or worse, unwound, who will remember him? Who will remember any of them? He wishes he could have been wise enough to have had each kid carve his or her name into the steel of the old Air Force One, as a testament to the fact that they existed. Even if no would ever see it, at least it would be there. But now it’s too late.

Connor takes the rest of his fighting force to the Rec Jet, directly across the main aisle from Rip. “We’ll set up a barricade beneath the wings,” he tells them, “and shoot out from behind it.”

“Where will you be?” a girl asks.

“Right beside you, Casey,” Connor tells her, happy to have remembered her name.

“No,” says another kid. “The king should never be on the front lines. In chess, I mean.”

“This isn’t chess,” Connor points out. “It’s our lives.”

“Yeah,” he says, “but I kinda like to picture myself as a knight.”

“Well, you got the horse face,” says Casey, and everyone laughs. That they can laugh in the face of this says more about their courage than anything else.

Connor and his left flank fighters race to push couches, tables, and arcade machines into a barricade. Then, while Connor’s upending a pool table, Hayden’s voice blares in his earpiece.

“Connor, something’s wrong. I can’t raise the guards at the gate—no one’s responding.”

“It can’t be! We’re not ready!”

Then the horse-faced kid says, “We’ll never be ready. So I guess that means we’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”

Connor climbs to the hatch of the Rec Jet and looks north across the dark desert to see a wall of approaching headlights fanning out . . . getting wider. “Sound the alarm,” he tells Hayden. “Here we go.”

68 - Vessels

To look at an airplane head on, one might get the uncanny feeling that it has eyes. No doubt the planes of the Graveyard have witnessed many things, and perhaps they are the only ones with a clear perspective of fight and folly on the day the Juvenile Authority invades.