take advantage of an incredibly powerful secret weapon: fourteen-year-old Mathilda Perez.
5. TICKLER
Where’s your sister, Nolan? Where’s Mathilda?
As our squad continued to travel west toward Gray Horse, we met a wounded soldier named Leonardo. We nursed Leo back to health, and he told us about hastily built forced-labor camps placed just outside the larger cities. Massively outnumbered from the start, it seems that Big Rob leveraged the threat of death to convince huge numbers of people to enter these camps and stay there.
Under extreme duress, Laura Perez, former congresswoman, related this story of her experience in one such labor camp. Of the imprisoned millions, a lucky few were bound to escape. Others were forced to.
I’m standing alone in a wet, muddy field.
I don’t know where I am. I can’t remember how I got here. My arms are scarred and bony. I’m wearing filthy blue coveralls that are close to rags, ripped and stained.
Shivering, I wrap my arms around myself. Panic stabs at me. I know I’m missing something important. I’ve left something behind. I can’t put my finger on it, but it hurts. It feels like there’s a piece of barbwire wrapped around my heart, squeezing.
Then I remember.
“No,” I moan.
A scream rises up from my gut. “No!”
I shout it to the grass. Flecks of spit fly from my mouth and arc away into the morning sunlight. I spin in a circle, but I’m alone. Utterly alone.
Mathilda and Nolan. My babies. My babies are gone.
Something flashes from the tree line. I flinch instinctively. Then I realize it’s only a hand mirror. A camouflaged man steps out from behind a tree and motions to me. In a daze, I stumble toward him through the overgrown field, stopping twenty yards away.
“Hey,” he says. “Where did you come from?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Where am I?”
“Outside New York City. What do you remember?”
“I don’t know.”
“Check your body for lumps.”
“What?”
“Check your body for lumps. Anything new.”
Confused, I run my hands over my body. I’m surprised that I can feel each one of my ribs. Nothing makes sense. I wonder if I’m dreaming or unconscious or dead. Then I feel something. A bump on my upper thigh. Probably the only meaty part left on my body.
“There’s a bump on my leg,” I say.
The man begins to back away into the woods.
“What does that mean? Where are you going?” I ask.
“I’m sorry, lady. Rob’s bugged you. There’s a human work camp a few miles from here. They’re using you as bait. Don’t try to follow me. Sorry.”
He disappears into the shadows of the woods. I shade my face with one hand and look for him. “Wait, wait! Where is the work camp? How do I find it?”
A voice echoes thinly out of the woods. “Scarsdale. Five miles north. Follow the road. Keep the sun to your right. Be careful.”
The man is gone. I’m alone again.
I see my own set of staggering footprints in the muddy grass, tracking north. I realize the clearing is really an overgrown road, on its way back to nature. My stick arms are still wrapped around me. I force myself to let go. I’m weak and hurt. My body wants to shiver. It wants to fall down and give up.
But I won’t let it.
I’m going back for my babies.
The lump moves when I touch it. I find a small slice in my skin from where they must have put it in. But this wound is farther up my leg, close to my hip. I think whatever-it-is is moving. Or at least it can move if it wants to.
Bug. The camouflaged man called it a bug. I let out a snort of laughter, wondering how literally I should take that description.
Pretty literally, as it turns out.
Snatches of memory are coming back to me. Faint pictures of clean-swept pavement, a big metal building. Like an airplane hangar, but filled with lights. Another building with bunk beds stacked to the ceilings. I don’t remember what
After an hour and a half of steady walking, I spot a cleared-out area in the distance. Smoke is rising in gentle puffs from it. Sunlight glints from a broad metal roof and short chain-link fences. This must be it. The prison camp.
A weird sliding sensation in my leg reminds me that I’m carrying the bug. That man didn’t want to help me because of it. It stands to reason that the bug must be telling the machines where I’m at, so it can catch and kill other people.
Hopefully, the machines didn’t expect me to
I watch the pulsing lump under my skin with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. There’s no way I can keep going with the bug under there. I’ve got to do something about this.
And it’s going to
Two rocks, flat. One long strip of fabric torn from my sleeve. With my left hand I press one rock into my thigh, dimpling the skin just behind the lump. The bug starts to move, but before it can go anywhere I close my eyes and think of Mathilda and Nolan and with all my might, I slam the other rock down. A knot of pain flares in my leg and I hear a crunch. I bring down the rock three more times before I roll over onto the ground, screaming in pain. I lie on my back, chest heaving, looking at blue sky through tears.
It’s maybe five minutes before I can bring myself to check the damage to my leg.
Whatever it is looks like a blunt metal slug with dozens of quivering, barbed feet. It must have cut through my leg on the first hit, because part of its shell has been mashed into the pulped outside layer of my skin. Some kind of liquid is leaking from it onto my leg, mixing with my blood. I wipe my finger in it and bring it to my face. It smells like chemicals. Explosive chemicals, like kerosene or gasoline.
I don’t know why that is, but I think I might have gotten very lucky. It never occurred to me that whatever it is might be a bomb.
I don’t let myself cry.
Forcing myself to look at it, I reach down and gingerly pull the crushed thing out from under my skin. I notice that it has a cylindrical shell on the other side that isn’t broken. I toss the thing on the ground and it lands limp. It looks like two rolls of breath mints with lots of legs and two long wet antennae. I suck my lower lip into my mouth and bite it and try not to cry out as I wrap my leg with the strip of blue fabric.
