She dropped the phone and started sobbing into her hands. Paola quietly picked it up and continued scrolling through the article with trembling fingers.
‘Holy shit,’ Paola murmured. ‘They got our pictures here and everything. Screenshots from Whatsapp conversations that we didn’t even have. Fake Facebook messenger conversations too. Damn, I never said any of this stuff! They just straight up typed this up in Photoshop or something. They … they framed us. They hacked our profiles and framed us.’
‘I’m sorry, kids,’ the woman said, ‘but when I told y’all your lives were over, I wasn’t joking.’
‘Wh-, wh-, what are we gon’ do?!’ Daekwon gasped.
‘Like I said, kid,’ the woman answered, ‘we’ll do what we can to help y’all. We can get fake IDs and passports easily enough, and it won’t be too hard to get y’all out of the country. Y’all will need to get haircuts, serious makeovers, anything you can do to change your appearances as drastically as possible. As for your friends and families … it’s probably better if they think you’re dead.’
Chloe’s face fell, her shoulders slumped, and it looked as if consciousness was about to flee any second from her.
‘Think we’re … think we’re dead?! What the fuck, what the actual fuck?!’
‘That’s how the Huntsmen operate, kid. I’m sorry, but that’s just how it is. If they don’t catch y’all in the next couple days, weeks maybe, they’ll make it look like they did. They have to win, you see … they always have to win, by whatever means necessary … even if they didn’t really win. They’ll set up something juicy for the media to feast on, for the public to enjoy, for a good ol’ vicarious dishin’ out a’ vengeance. They’ll make it look like y’all were cornered in an abandoned house in, say, the desert in Arizona. There was a firefight. A brave SWAT team member took a bullet, yeah, but they got y’all in the end. There’ll be bodies, oh yeah, there’s gotta be bodies. Gory footage, lotsa blood, the worst bits blurred out for the news an’ the sensitive eyes of America’s nuclear families of course, but the uncensored pics will show up in the usual dark corners of the internet. Your families will grieve, they’ll be torn apart with shame and guilt; they thought you were such good kids. They had no idea. What did they do to y’all, or what didn’t they do, where did it all go wrong? They’ll blame your friends, the internet, school, video games, music … but most of all, they’ll blame themselves. They’ll have sad, quiet funerals, hopin’ that nobody comes along to spit in your coffins or piss on your graves, an’ make their terrible pain even more acute. Somebody like that probably will show up at your funerals, though; the Huntsmen’ll make sure of it. And someone will be there to capture it in all its disgusting glory, of course; maybe the hearse driver, maybe the gravedigger. He’ll just happen to have his phone camera ready at the exact moment that the “patriot” wearing an American flag as a cape, or a red cap or some shit like that gatecrashes your funeral and pisses on your grave, or throws his diarrhoea all over your coffin as it’s lowered into the ground. It’ll go viral, and people will cheer while your families weep. Justice for the terrorists, they’ll say … true justice for those who hated America. Maybe y’all will become memes. Your faces will be jokes that the rest of the world laughs at, your names used as curses. When I told y’all that your lives are over, did you think I meant anything less? I ain’t one for hyperbole, kids, remember that about me. When I say something, I always give it to you straight, I tell it like it is. And everything I just said, that’s exactly how it is. I’m sorry, it’s bad, it’s real bad … but y’all, like so many innocent people throughout history, were in the wrong time at the wrong place.’
All of the teenagers were in tears now, even Daekwon. Even beings like the beastwalkers, whose lives spanned centuries, and whose life experience extended across countless human generations, were psychologically and emotionally ill-equipped to deal with the collapse, in an instant, of their entire world, their whole existences … and these teenagers, whose life experience was but a blip compared to these beings, could do nothing but weep hysterically when confronted with this tragedy of gargantuan proportions.
As tough and crabby as she came off as being, the woman had a deeply empathetic heart buried within the tough folds and coils of scar tissue in which she was entombed. She pulled the final shard of shrapnel from Zakaria’s back and then sighed, her own eyes glistening with tears, and sidled over to Paola, who was closest to her.
‘I’m sorry, kids,’ she murmured, unbridled emotion adding a raspy edge to her voice. ‘It’s a real shitty situation you’ve found yourselves in. I won’t lie to you an’ say it’s gon’ be all right, because I don’t know if it will be, or if it ever can be for y’all after today. But I will say this: my friends and I, we’ll do whatever we can to help you, an’ we’ll do our best to fix what we can of this.’
Daekwon was the first to speak.
‘It might h-, help a lil’,’ he said, ‘if y’all told us your n-, n-, names, an’ who, or uh, wh-, what y’all really are, an’ just … just what the f-, fuck we stumbled into.’
‘Fair enough,’ the woman said, her tone softening substantially. ‘This tiger here, his name is William. The gorilla, he’s Zakaria. The man who saved your friend, he’s called Lightning Bird, or at least that’s how you say it in English. It ain’t an exact translation of his Chimariko name, but it works, an’ we’ve been calling him that ever since I’ve known him. And me, my
