“For a while it was great. Ticks were dropping dead all over. But they”—he gave a shrug that seemed part shiver of disgust—“they got smarter. Or maybe only the stupid ones ate the tainted blood. After a couple of weeks, they stopped coming to the feeding stations. Then for a while we rotated the clean blood and the poisoned blood, but they always seemed to know and pretty soon, they stopped coming altogether.”
I looked at Ely. “Do you know if any other Farms are putting out tainted blood?”
Ely shrugged. “Hard to say for sure. My man Zeke here is the only Collab I’ve talked to about it. If I had to guess, I’d say there are four or five other Farms doing it. That’s based only on the number of abandoned feeding stations I’ve seen.”
“Any close to here?”
“At least one in Colorado.”
“Shit. That explains why they’ve started hunting up here when they used to avoid the area.” That meant things at Base Camp could get bad, fast.
“Exactly. And that’s not even the worst.” Ely nodded to Zeke again. “Tell him the rest.”
“About a week ago, we heard there was a new plan.”
“To get rid of the Ticks?” I asked.
“Yeah. But this time it’s super hush-hush. Only the Dean and maybe three or four other guys know what’s going on, but whatever it is, it’s not good.”
“Why do you say that?”
“For starters, the Dean shipped all the Breeders to another Farm.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. They just loaded them all up in about twenty cargo vans and shipped them off. Then they shipped off about half the Greens. And most of the Collabs went with them. We used to have close to two thousand kids, now we got less than a thousand.”
“It sounds like they’re shutting down the Farm altogether.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Ely said.
But Zeke interrupted him. “But they’re not, because last week, they stopped moving people around and they switched out the shots they give the Greens. They used to give them a daily shot of Procrit to help increase their red blood cell count, but, they stopped doing those. Instead, we started getting shipments of Diazepam.”
“Valium? They’re sedating Greens? Why?” Sure, I could see the advantage of having the Green population as calm as possible, but outright sedation seemed a bit extreme. “Are they just trying to calm everyone down?”
“At first I didn’t get it either, but then they bought a huge shipment of tranq darts. I mean, huge: two thousand, three thousand of the things.”
I frowned. “I thought the darts had a use-by date on them. That they were only good for a month or so.”
Zeke nodded. “They do.”
Which meant whatever the Dean was planning to do with all these tranq darts, he was going to do it soon.
“If you think you know what’s going on, go ahead and tell me now. Stop beating around the bush.”
Zeke blew out a breath. “Okay, I think they’re planning on doping the Greens, then letting the fences drop. All the Collabs they’ve left on the Farm, we’re all good shots. Once the Ticks get doped up on blood, we shoot them with the tranq rifles.”
“And theoretically the combination of the Diazepam and the tranquilizer in the dart would be fatal to the Ticks.”
“Exactly. It’d be like shooting fish in a barrel once they’ve consumed a heavy hit of Valium.”
“Oh, it’s a great plan,” I muttered. “Unless you’re the bait.”
My mind was reeling from everything Zeke had told me. From the horror of what he’d described. From the crushing weight of responsibility. How the hell could I go save those people? How could I abandon the people here at Base Camp to go save the Greens in San Angelo?
With attacks from Ticks on the rise, the threat to Base Camp was very real and imminently dangerous. Leaving Base Camp now would leave nearly a hundred people vulnerable. But ignoring the threat in San Angelo could cost nearly a thousand lives.
It was an impossible choice.
Why the hell was I the one in charge of making it?
In what kind of screwed-up world was an eighteen-year-old kid responsible for the lives of thousands? And yet, I was undeniably the one in charge here, because Zeke was just standing there, waiting for me to . . . do what? Give him orders? Lead the charge into battle? What exactly did he expect from me?
Crap.
I needed time to think. To process what he had said without him and Ely standing there watching me.
I gave a stiff nod in Zeke’s direction. “Thanks. You can go now.”
He looked like maybe he was about to say something else. Like he wanted to ask a question or something, but that was one good thing about dealing with Collabs. They were good at taking orders. So Zeke just closed his mouth and left. Which left Ely standing there. Still waiting for some kind of response.
And here I was with no damn idea what to say, let alone what to do.
So I pushed myself away from the wall and walked over to the punching bag.
I threw a couple of punches before Ely asked, “So you’re just going to ignore that? Just beat the shit out of that punching bag and pretend this will go away?”
I whirled around. “What the hell do you want me to do? It’ll be a fucking bloodbath. None of those Greens will make it. I can’t go rescue a thousand kids. Even if they were still alive when we got there, even if we could get them out, how the hell would we get them back here? How would we feed them when we did? How the hell do you transport a thousand kids across a thousand miles in the middle of winter, through Tick-infested middle America?”
Ely stormed forward and got right in my face. “That’s why you don’t want to go? Because it’s going to be too hard?”
“We’ve got just over a hundred people here.” I felt a burst of raw anger, hot and caustic in my chest. I realized I was yelling again. “And we’re surviving. Do you have any idea what it takes to keep a hundred people alive? It’s not too hard to rescue those thousand kids. It’s impossible.”
“Okay, so don’t rescue them.”
I just stared at Ely, but before I could ask what the hell he meant, he kept on talking.
“Go lead them so they can rescue themselves! Those kids are terrified. Or they would be, if they weren’t drugged into not caring at all. They believe that outside those fences are unstoppable monsters they have no chance of killing. When those fences come down, they’re not going to put up a fight at all. They are just going to roll over and die. But you know differently. You know how to kill the Ticks. And you found Lily, right? That’s what the other Elites said”.
Ely eyed me. “Is she the real deal?”
I didn’t want to answer, but I’d told this lie so often, it came out easily now. “Yes.”
“And it’s just like Sebastian said? She can control what people feel? Fear, terror, courage, hope?”
“Yes.” The power of the
Maybe it was the stress. Hell, maybe it was just straight-up terror at the thought of Lily down in San Angelo, facing down fifty armed Collabs and hundreds of bloodthirsty Ticks. Whatever the reason, I hauled off and punched Ely. He blocked my punch and swung back. I danced out of the way, but brought my fist up to his ribs. He moved fast enough that the punch barely grazed him. And, just like that, it was as if we were back at Elite Military Academy, in the boxing ring, with Edmunds, the PT coach, teaching us to fight. Edmunds had been a good teacher, but he’d bailed early in the Tick outbreak. All the teachers had. When the world was ending, no one gave a damn about a couple hundred troubled kids.
No one had fought for us except Sebastian, and even he had had ulterior motives.
