Battle Cry (Freedom/Hate Series, Book 4) Read online

  Still, the bastards broke her arm. She had to return to the Underground and look Mek in the eye. She had to explain to him that she once again failed to defend her left side, because she was always so focused on fighting with her right.

  She preferred guns. She loved guns and fast cars. Hand-to-hand combat felt sloppy and lacked poetry. There was no accounting for wind or the movement of the target. No moment of bliss as she struck a man down from a dozen yards away. No wind in her hair. No gliding through a sharp turn. Hand-to-hand was all grunting and thrusting. It was animalistic. Sweaty.

  Okay, when she put it in those terms it didn't sound too bad.

  Licking some extra hot sauce off of her hand, Rose turned and started to scan the room. As much fun as it was to celebrate with her buddies, she wanted to celebrate with her best friend.

  “You have a little sauce on your mouth,” came the voice that she was hoping to hear.

  She turned around and was immediately met with a kiss. It was a long kiss, which caused the rest of the world to melt away. For as long as she was in that kiss, Rose didn't care about the war.

  When it was over, Paul pulled back and smiled at her, “I think I got it.”

  “Much obliged,” she smiled back.

  Rose moved into Paul's arms and closed her eyes. They'd been together for just over two years, and engaged for seven months, but this never got old to her.

  It hadn't been easy getting to this point. For years, Paul would inch closer and closer to Rose, only to pull back at the last second. One minute, he would be smiling with her and finding reasons to put a hand on her arm or wipe a smudge of dirt off of her face. She would begin to feel as though a bolt of electricity would arc between them at any moment, and then he would disappear. When she saw him again, he would avoid being alone with her. He would see her across a room and turn in the other direction.

  Paul would make Rose feel like the most important person in the world one moment, and then turn around and make her feel worthless in a way that only he ever could. He hurt her more than once, and that pain was made worse by the fact that she knew he felt something for her. He wasn't playing games with her. He wasn't trying to hurt her. She was just caught in the crossfire of whatever battle he had going on in his head.

  For years, she tolerated this. She would get her hopes up each and every time he would swing back around to her, only to be left behind once again. But things changed once they were both relocated to the Underground. At some point, there was no avoiding each other. They weren't simply standing around, twiddling their thumbs anymore. They were fighting real battles, with real guns. They were a part of the same team now, and the only way that he could avoid her for any long amount of time would have been if one of them were injured or killed.

  That thought was what finally changed things for Rose. The idea that they had spent years doing this dance, wasting precious time. They never knew which day would be their last, and she would be damned if she were going to die a horrible, bloody death without ironing out their issues.

  One night, after they had just returned to the Underground from a long and intense car chase through the city, Rose asked Paul if he could help her clean a wound on her shoulder. She took him back to her room, locked the door behind her, and then as tenderly as she possibly could, she pulled a gun on the son of a bitch. Technically, she didn't point it at him, but she held it in a way that got her message across.

  He had no idea what she was doing at first. He just reminded her that she shouldn't point the gun at him if she didn't intend to put him down.

  At this point, Rose hadn't really made up her mind as to what she planned to do with the gun, so she held it at her side while she thought about it.

  That night, she refused to let him leave without talking to her and explaining himself to her. It took a while. Rose wasn't even sure that Paul knew why he did the things he did. They spent hours talking, after she put the gun down.

  Finally, Rose realized that the world had taken its toll on people in different ways that weren't always easy to sum up or resolve.

  Paul's parents were members of Freedom. He had two brothers, both older than he was. He could remember being a child, visiting a Freedom base and feeling safe in a community of people.

  When he was six, his parents were arrested. He was separated from his brothers. He lost contact with Freedom. At that point, his life seemed to be a game for the authorities. They would give him a place to stay, and pull him out as soon as he started to feel comfortable. They would let him make friends, only to move him to the other side of the city so he could never see them. Paul never knew what comfort felt like. The only constants in his life were the system and their need to take everything that he ever cared about away from him. He had grown up knowing how powerless he was. How unloved.

  Maybe they wanted to make him feel as though they were the only thing that he could rely on, in an attempt to undo whatever influence Freedom had over his childhood. Maybe they were just cruel. Either way, the damage was done. The pattern was set, and now Paul contributed to the pattern just as much as they did, by refusing to allow anyone in. He kept people at a distance, so that they couldn't be taken away from him.

  It might not have been rational. Paul wasn't even doing it on a conscious level. All he knew was that the closer he felt to someone, the more dread he felt in the pit of his stomach.

  Honestly, hearing Paul talk about his childhood and realizing how damaged he was changed the way Rose saw him. She'd always seen him as the guy who threw caution to the wind and ran into dangerous situations. She'd always seen him as brave and strong, and now there was another side to him—a side that was just as broken and damaged as most of the people that she knew.

  There was a conversation that they once had where Paul told Rose that, even though he didn't know Libby Jacobs all that well, he felt like he understood her. He said that Libby had lost everything. Her entire life was taken from her, and she never had any say about it. Collin Powers was sacrificed for her, and she never had any say about it. She was pulled into Freedom, whether she wanted it or not. She fought for her mother, only to be slapped in the face for it. And there was the Mayor, offering Collin Powers' life for hers.

  Rose wanted to stop Paul right there. She didn't want to hear anything about Libby wanting to kill herself. But that's not what Paul was saying. He said that maybe Libby did want it all to just be over, somewhere deep down inside of her, but that wasn't what drove her out there that night. He said that he thought Libby was tired of being a pawn in someone else's game. She was tired of everyone around her deciding who she would be, and where she would be. She was tired of running. She was tired of trying to make sense of things that would never make sense. He told Rose that he thought that Libby just wanted to have a choice, for once in her life. She wanted to prove to herself that she was more than the product of the system. She went there so that she could feel alive.

  Everyone in Freedom had an opinion on why Libby would have gone out there that night. To some, she was a hero. To others, she was weak. In Rose's experience, most of those opinions were a reflection on the person expressing them more than Libby herself. What Paul was saying revealed something about him, even if Rose didn't entirely understand it.

  As nice as it would have been for that breakthrough to change everything overnight, it took a while for Rose to get Paul to a place where he could trust that she wasn't going anywhere. After a lot of hard work, she finally convinced him that she was already a part of his life, and the only person taking her away from him was him. She convinced him that he wasn't helpless anymore. He wasn't subject to the will of the system. He was the guy who was putting bullets in the system's head.

  She kissed him, and there was no going back. If he chose to walk away after that, it would have been the end of them. But he didn't. He kissed Rose back, and the two of them had been fighting the world together ever since.

  There was a lot to be angry about when it came to the way things were
and the war that was being fought. To step back and look at everything that needed to be accomplished was beyond daunting. Just thinking about the enormity of the task at hand caused Rose's heart to race. But within the horror that they dealt with on a daily basis, there was an island of calm. There was a place for Rose to go where she could close her eyes and breathe freely. Where she knew that someone had her back.

  The act of starting a life together was another form of rebellion. They were going to get married, and the authorities had no say in the matter. They were going to spend the rest of their lives together. Rose would finally have a family that wouldn't turn on her.

  She pulled Paul to a clear area of the floor and wrapped her one good arm around him, moving to the beat of the music that was playing around them. He smiled at her as he watched her dance, and leaned in for another kiss. Another victory, small as it may seem in the grand scheme of things.

  The party raged on. The music played loudly. Rose closed her eyes and for that one moment, in between stretches of pain and chaos, life was good.

  4

  Collin stood back and looked at one of the TV monitors on the wall, staring at the old sitcom that had been playing on every channel for the last ten minutes. Something was wrong. He had a sixth sense for picking up on when the authorities were pulling strings and twisting truths, but this situation didn't require special insight. The game of the year was supposed to be on. All eyes were supposed to be glued to the big event, yet here he was, watching Mayor Mindy, a show about an adorable nine-year-old girl who accidentally gets assigned to a job in the Mayor's office of some fictional town where all of the citizens are well fed and look beautiful in their pristine clothes.

  “Do we have anyone at the game?” Collin asked as he turned to Tracy, who was holding a clipboard in her hand. She scanned the list and shrugged.

  “Nobody that I know of, but I could check around and see if any of the other bases have anyone,” she replied.

  The days of 'no cross-pollination' were over. In order to fight this war, Freedom needed to be united and work together. The night that Collin was rescued from HAND, none of the bases knew what the others were planning. People died due to lack of communication. It was bad enough that they couldn't make simple phone calls without being monitored. They wouldn't make matters worse by isolating themselves from each other. Communication was slow, but better than nothing.

  “See if we have anyone. If not, have someone get in touch with Mek,” Collin told Tracy, who didn't waste any time before running off to do her job.

  Once she was gone, Collin walked to a computer station on the other side of the room and leaned over the shoulder of one of the media monitors, Kenny.

  “Did we record the beginning of the game?” Collin asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Bring it up. I want to see the last few seconds, just before the feed cut out.”

  Kenny nodded and clicked through several screens on his computer, bringing up the video of the game. Once the video was all set, he played it for Collin.

  Collin leaned closer, narrowing his eyes as he watched Tash Parsins gush over the Mayor and Governor.

  “Garrison's here,” Kenny commented. The fact was probably important on some level, but Collin didn't know what it meant yet.

  Next, Tash introduced a little girl named Mandi Hollinger, to recite the pledge. Collin looked at the expression on Mandi's face and the way she was looking off to her side as she recited the pledge. She was nervous, but that wasn't unexpected.

  “I pledge allegiance to the flag, of the United States of America,” Mandi said on the screen. “T—To those who lead us. To those who protect us. To those who give us food. I pled—um—I pledge my life to uphold its laws and to keep a watchful eye. I...”

  Mandi stopped talking and glanced to her side once again. She looked as though she were about to continue speaking, but the video cut out before she had the chance.

  “What happened?” Collin asked under his breath.

  Kenny shrugged, “There's a seven second delay. If something happened in the stadium, they would have had time to cut the feed before it went out across the country.”

  Collin knew this, but he didn't mind having it repeated to him. He needed to think about what could have happened from every angle. He needed to think about what he would do next.

  Kenny's reference to the rest of the country seemed wrong somehow. Collin wasn't used to thinking in national terms. He'd never been outside of the city. There was very limited communication with those who lived outside of the city, and that communication was carefully monitored. Sometimes, Collin wasn't even sure that there was a world outside of the city.

  “Rewind it. Show me the last few seconds again,” Collin ordered Kenny.

  With a few clicks, Kenny played the end of the video again. Collin watched the little girl's face as she recited the pledge, rather than listen to her words. The poor girl was on the verge of tears. She was terrified.

  “Do you want to see it again?” Kenny asked.

  “No. There's only so much we can get from what they're willing to show us. Just let me know when Tracy gets back.”

  Kenny nodded.

  Collin turned and walked away from the computer station. He passed a bookcase on his way to the door, and his eyes skimmed across the dozens of books that lined its shelves. These books were published by the Campus. They were written by Freedom members and distributed around the city, under the noses of the authorities who would kill anyone caught with a copy of any one of those books. Comic books, novels, history, philosophy, religion... Collin's goal was to give the people of the city some sort of culture to call their own. To give them different ideas to explore, beyond those which were approved by the Federal Education Authority.

  When he exited of the office and entered the main hallway, he was surrounded by more shelves with more books. Hundreds of them, pulled from the library that had been stored in the blood of countless people across the city, printed and bound by Freedom. This was the past that they had been denied for so long. This was where they came from. More books were being printed every day. More documents were being read through and cataloged. They'd stumbled across everything from court rulings to technical schematics. Norman Teller, the man who invented the library decades earlier, must have crammed everything that he could find into his experiment. Maybe he just wanted to see how much information he could store in human DNA, or maybe he knew what was happening and he felt a need to save the past for the sake of the future. Collin couldn't decide if the man was crazy, evil or heroic, but whatever he was, it meant that these documents would never be taken from the people again. After so many years spent smuggling 'hostile content' around the city, Collin never got tired of seeing those books. He loved watching the shelves grow more full with the passing years. He loved knowing that copies of those books were circulating around the city.

  Things had changed so much since this all started. Freedom was no longer confined to a few bases, scattered here and there. There were smaller pockets now, where even non-members sometimes found themselves listening to a religious sermon in the basement of a rundown apartment building, or a lecture on the founding fathers in the back room of a food market.

  There was a time when most of the citizens of the city were oblivious to what was happening around them, but now it was hard for people to ignore. They all had to make a conscious decision between asking the hard questions or going along with the system that was already in place.

  There were times when Collin felt as though he hadn't slept at all since the day he was pulled out of HAND custody. He was always thinking of the next article, or the next book, or the next plan to push their message out to the public. Sometimes it didn't seem like they'd done enough, but when he looked at those books, he was reminded of what life was like before. Before he knew about Scarlett O'Hara or Queequeg. Before Tom Sawyer or Odd Thomas. Before Starl—

  “Collin!” Mig called from behind Collin as he walked down
the hall. She hurried to catch up to him, holding a folder full of papers in her hand.

  When she was walking next to him, she said, “We need to talk about next month's publications and get a final list on the books we want printed. Our ink supply came up short this month, so we might need to cut back on the number a little bit.”

  Mig took a piece of paper from her folder and handed it to Collin. He looked over the list of books that they'd pulled from the library, checking to see which ones they hadn't yet printed.

  There were so many, it was hard to choose. Collin hadn't read a fraction of the books available and he was never sure whether he should go with the centuries-old classic literature, or the books from just before the world fell apart. Which would resonate more with the people?

  “I've been busy reading through articles and editing next month's Rebellious. Have you had a chance to read any of the options?” Collin asked Mig.

  Technically, the final call would be hers anyway. Collin wasn't the leader of any base. Mig organized supplies and could dictate what got printed, with the exception of which articles went into the Secret Citizen. The paper was Collin's to run. Mig led everything else, but relied on Collin's input because he had a good track record of getting the message out to the people.

  “Honestly, I've been reading through the horror stories,” Mig replied, sounding somewhat guilty about it.

  “Anything good?”

  “You'd be surprised how appealing a zombie attack sounds after some of the stuff we've dealt with.”

  Collin shrugged and said, “Go with the zombies. There's usually a good amount of humans uniting behind a single cause in those, right? Maybe throw in some of the smutty stuff that Tracy likes. Give the people some variety.”

  Collin handed the list back to Mig and asked, “Have you seen Dor around?”

  “She isn't back yet?”

  “No. And something isn't right out there.”