Into the Real Read online

  The lock busted and the door swung open. I gave the room a quick look. As far as I could tell, it was empty. But I kept my pistol drawn, just in case. The absolute wrongness of the situation was chewing away at the back of my brain. I’d just dared a step inside when I heard the familiar crack of an assault rifle . . . only it was coming from behind me. I dived inside and whipped my head around. Thompson had darted inside after me and was now crouched to the right of the still-open door, holstering his pistol and readying his rifle for action with steady hands.

  I scanned the room but saw nothing we could bar the door with. Shoving it closed, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was Caleb’s men doing the shooting . . . or one of mine. That’s the thing about betrayal. Once you experience it the first time, you spend the rest of your days on high alert, knowing that what had seemed impossible could actually happen.

  With a calm voice, Thompson said, “I’m hit, sir. It’s not bad. Hurts like a mother, but the Kevlar stopped the bullet from killing me.”

  Damn. My team was already down a man. I couldn’t afford to lose Thompson as well. I said, “How limited is your movement?”

  “That remains to be seen, sir.”

  It had always impressed me that Thompson never failed to follow my orders without question. He was twice my age, with three times my experience. But Thompson respected rank and trusted me. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Okay enough to take this outpost down despite the pansy-ass queers shooting at us.” He furrowed his brow at the expression on my face. “What is it, sir?”

  I stumbled over my response, taken aback by the insult that had left his lips so effortlessly. I shouldn’t have felt surprised—words like that were relatively common among the soldiers I knew, and as far as I could tell, no one but I knew about my recent admission to Collins. But the feeling his words had stirred within me shook me to my core. Pulling myself together, I said, “If even half the guys on my team were as tough as you, we’d have taken Allegiance headquarters months ago, Thompson.”

  His mouth stretched into a grin. “Can’t argue with that. What’s our next move?”

  “Be on guard. After I clear the top floor, I’m going to rig the C-4 and take out as many of our new friends as I can from upstairs. Once we have a window, we’re making a break for it, and blowing this damn thing all to hell.”

  Even in the semidarkness, I could see his smirk. “Roger that, sir.”

  At the back of the small building was a built-in ladder with access to the next floor. As I climbed it, I listened, but heard no one. To my relief—and surprise—the room was empty.

  My pack was full but not as heavy as it had been in the past. I wasn’t carrying the usual medical supplies or rations, but something far more important, far more valuable.

  Eight blocks of C-4, a hundred yards of detonator cord, and one detonator. Everything I needed to reduce the outpost to rubble. With steady hands, I adhered a block to each wall and connected the cord between them. It was easy, like a kid sticking really dangerous Silly Putty to the wall. We had more than a few former military members in the Resistance, and when several of them had pushed for obtaining explosives from the Allegiance, I knew to listen. We’d lucked out on locating a stash of C-4, but we’d lost three people in the process.

  There was too much death in my life. I feared I was becoming numb to it.

  The crack of Thompson’s gunshot ripped through the air. All we needed was to keep the soldiers outside at bay long enough to blow this damn thing, and then get to cover so we could advance unseen.

  I carried my pack back down the ladder and rigged the last four blocks, connecting the detonator cord so that it would all blow at once the moment I hit the button on my walkie. Channel thirteen. It was a band that neither the Allegiance nor the Resistance used, so I’d set that channel as the trigger. One click, and the walkie would send a signal that would end the existence of outpost one. I was relieved that Caleb’s people were outside. I may have become numb to death, but I hated killing.

  With every kill, I lost a bit of my humanity. What would I be when there was nothing left of me to lose? What was I now?

  “Take point and head out, Thompson. Keep them off us but try to leave them alive.”

  He cast me a rare questioning look. “Sir?”

  “Just do it. We’re out in three . . . two . . . one.”

  Thompson pulled the door open again and did a quick check for enemies. Clouds had moved in overhead, blanketing the stars. Darkness had devoured every bit of light in the world around us. It was a painful metaphor to swallow.

  He nodded to me before moving outside, with me on his six. My rifle was in my hands, ready for action. My walkie was clipped to my vest. I wanted it ready to go the moment we were clear—or if we were captured, I’d make sure to do some damage and blow the outpost before they managed to kill me.

  A bullet whizzed past my head, exploding into the wood behind me. As if in reflex, Thompson aimed and fired a return shot. Muzzle fire lit up the night as Allegiance soldiers sprayed the area with bullets. Thompson and I made a break for it, keeping low as we advanced.

  We ran into a grove thick with bushes, trees, and undergrowth. Dropping to our stomachs, we lay very still and waited for the sound of boots on the ground closing in, but it soon seemed that we were clear. I unclipped the walkie and thought about every life that Caleb’s orders had taken. My hands were shaking—not with fear, but with anger.

  I hit the trigger, and seconds later, a fiery cloud burst into life where outpost one had been. A blast wave hit me and Thompson both. My chest felt like someone had body-slammed into me, but the feeling soon passed. One after another, outposts two through four exploded. With a small smile, I pressed the button on the comm in my ear and spoke using our agreed-upon code for the mission. “The orchard has been entered, gentlemen. See you at the rendezvous point after we shake the tree, with apricot acquired. Drinks on me tonight.”

  Combined laughter came through on the comm. Lloyd followed it up with “You’re so full of shit, sir.”

  He was right. It was a running gag between us. Each of them knew I wasn’t much of a drinker. I didn’t often partake, but I could remember my very first drink vividly.

  As a movement, the Allegiance had gotten its start in small towns, with whispers, then shouts. It was when they overthrew the North Carolina state government and set up an HQ in the Raleigh capitol building that the rest of America realized they were a major threat.

  By then, it was too late. The Allegiance was already sweeping through the South and over the East Coast as if there was no one there to stand against them. Some of the major cities, like New York and Chicago, held out for a while. But eventually, even they fell under the Allegiance flag.

  Our country cried when hundreds were killed; protested when it was thousands; but when the number of dead reached millions, our voices fell silent in horror—what voices remained standing against the Allegiance, that is. By that time, the majority of people had sided with them.

  Not everyone gave up hope, though.

  Resistance groups were popping up all over the country, and by the time the Allegiance reached us in Brume, the majority of the residents here had banded together, ready to stop them before they could occupy us too. Anyone over the age of ten became a soldier. Veterans trained us how to fight. Nurses showed us how to treat battle wounds. But no one taught us how to deal with the trauma of war. No one could.

  I was just thirteen when I had my first alcoholic drink. A group of us had been on the eastern side of town, doing all we could to defend ourselves in a hardware store, where many of our supplies were being kept. The shooting and the smoke had grown so intense you could barely see, until, finally, one of our men had set off a well-placed stun grenade. The Allegiance had backed off—things could’ve turned out much worse if they hadn’t. Afterward, I’d found myself in the park, my hands shaking, tears running down my cheeks. At the height of the cross fire, I’d seen a man’s head ge
t blown in half two yards in front of me. Gore had splattered my face, sticking my hair to my forehead. If I thought about it now, I could still feel that warm, slick sensation on my skin. His blood smelled metallic, like pennies. It tasted like death.

  I was still crying when my brother, Kai, had found me. He’d offered me a bottle of whiskey, and when I’d looked at him in confusion, he’d said, “Sometimes a man needs a drink, Quinn. And you are definitely a man now.” For the next few hours, we sat outside the small cave in the park and shared swigs from the bottle. It was nasty shit, but it served its numbing purpose. We didn’t talk. I still don’t know what he was thinking in that moment, but I was mulling over what he’d said. Was I a man? What made me so? Hadn’t I been one before I’d experienced the horrors of war? Or was that really what it took?

  If so, maybe I didn’t want to be a man at all.

  That wasn’t just the first time I had a drink, or the first time I started to wonder if maybe being a man wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. That was also the last time my brother and I had a quiet moment together. Before he switched sides. Before he betrayed all that our family had stood for and pledged his loyalty to the Allegiance.

  Damn him.

  Now, silent as smoke, Thompson and I moved toward Allegiance headquarters. At one point, this building had been city hall, but no longer. Now it was draped on all sides by the “As God Intended” banners.

  Our intel said that after nightfall, Caleb would be in the northwest corner of the main building, inside his quarters. Our people on the inside had confirmed it, and Lloyd and I had worked as fast as we could to organize a plan to take him into custody.

  Thompson and I kept low, moving in on our target like fog. Intel said that a single guard stood watch outside the room’s only window, and as we rounded the corner, I saw the soldier standing there with his assault rifle in hand. The sounds of gunfire at the outpost didn’t seem to have rattled his nerves. Maybe it was the arrogance of the Allegiance filling his head, telling him that headquarters was safe. Withdrawing my pistol, I took aim, ready to prove that notion wrong. I know I said I was tired of killing, but sometimes you had no choice but to take one life in order to save thousands of others.

  Before I could squeeze the trigger, Thompson placed his hand on my shoulder, drawing my attention. I followed his eyes to a man and a woman walking nearby. They were the picture of the Allegiance—both white, him with broad, masculine shoulders, her wearing a simple gold cross on a thin chain around her neck, their hands clasped together. If one of them saw us, we were dead.

  I wondered if either of them had ever questioned whether being on the side of the Allegiance was wrong. Did they wonder if maybe they’d rather be holding hands with someone of a different gender? Did they keep secrets . . . the way I was keeping a secret about my gender identity?

  I held my breath, as did Thompson, but in moments, the couple was gone. It was time to capture Caleb and end this war.

  “Freeze!” The window guard had his rifle pointed right at us, though I couldn’t be certain if it was me or Thompson in his sights. We’d been caught.

  Thompson aimed at the guard and fired, but missed. The guard fired back, just grazing Thompson’s shoulder. Armed guards snapped their attention to us. My heart raced inside my chest. The mission had failed. Now the best we could do was survive. “Thompson, go!”

  I grabbed the grenade from my web belt and pulled the pin, tossing it toward the approaching soldiers before taking off as fast as I could after Thompson. It bounced twice and then exploded into a cloud of shrapnel. My left calf stung from a small hit, but I could still run. Chaos erupted in the courtyard. The grenade had distorted everyone’s hearing and clouded the area with the dirt and debris it had thrown into the air, limiting their sight.

  It was a miracle we didn’t get shot.

  It took Thompson and me some time, but we hoofed it to the rendezvous point. The old windmill stood sentinel as we approached. From the shadows came the rest of my team, each looking satisfied with their endeavors. One by one, I saw the realization form in their eyes that Thompson and I had failed. The supplies we’d used up taking out the outposts, the detailed planning we’d labored on, the risk of life and limb . . . they were all for nothing.

  After a head count—everyone we’d started with, minus Johnson and Collins—we hoofed it back to base, shoulders slumped in defeat. My thoughts should have been on our next move, but they weren’t. I could think only of Caleb, safe in his room, and me not being there to erase that smug smile from his face. Had the distraction I’d been plagued with lately affected this mission too? The thought ate at me. It consumed me all the way back to our base, all the way inside the double doors and into the main floor hall.

  Since the beginning of Brume’s Resistance, our HQ had been in the basement of the old high school. It had made sense at the time. It was the sturdiest building in town, at Brume’s center, with room for a few hundred people to operate from. All our strategies were planned there. All the major medical tasks were performed upstairs in the makeshift hospital before moving patients to some of the homes in the surrounding area for convalescence. It was important, they said—and I still believed—that the pain and death caused by this war shouldn’t be kept hidden from those planning actions in it. If we were sending people to fight and perhaps die, we’d better be able to look our wounded and dying in the face before doing so.

  We’d taken great pains to hide our HQ from the Allegiance. The medical facility was located on the main and top floors of the school, with HQ tucked carefully beneath it. The interior entrance to both the basement and boiler room had been walled in, so the only access point was a heavy metal door on the back of the school, hidden by a slope of grass. A sniper was assigned to the rooftop and an armed guard just behind the slope at all times. Their sole job was to protect the base entrance. As far as anyone who wasn’t involved in classified Resistance maneuvers knew, there was nothing down there but the boiler and old gym equipment.

  A few of my team members lined up for medical attention. I wasn’t really wounded—no more than my pride, anyway—so I only entered the hospital for one reason. To find Lia.

  I moved down the hall, past countless hurt, helpless people. More than once, I noticed eyes lighting up in recognition when they looked at me—the person who’d been labeled the face of the Brume Resistance. The admiration in their eyes as I passed by filled me with an uncomfortable twinge. They owed me no gratitude. All I had done in the last four years was stand up to tyranny—the way anyone with a conscience would. The way anyone whose freedom has been threatened should.

  The truth was, I was realizing more and more that I didn’t want to be the face of our Resistance. How could I be the guiding symbol for a group that, for all its talk of standing up to the Allegiance, was hardly proving much better at making room for people who were different? At least in Brume. The men on my team had made it clear they wouldn’t accept female soldiers, and the way they talked about queer people, it was obvious they didn’t want them joining the ranks either. I didn’t share or support those prejudices. But here I was, fighting for the cause, because it was better than the alternative. I hated hypocrites. And now I was one in more ways than I’d ever feared.

  Lia hurried up the hall toward me, dressed in scrubs that had once been white, but were now stained with blood, old and new. I was about to tell her that we’d failed—that I had failed—but then she threw her arms around my neck and pressed her mouth to mine before I could speak. Her lips were soft, and as we kissed, she melted into me, holding me close like she was afraid I might disappear. When we parted, she said, “I’m so glad you’re back. How’d it go?”

  “Not so good. We lost Johnson and Collins. Thompson and I were so close to grabbing that bastard Caleb but couldn’t.” I didn’t mention Collins’s betrayal. Lia didn’t need to know about that. Nobody did, as far as I was concerned. Let his family think he died a hero. It was the least I could do for them.

&nb
sp; A man dressed all in black passed by us in the hall. His hair was stringy and wet. He didn’t look like any of the Resistance members I knew, and his snakeskin trench coat certainly looked out of place next to everyone’s tech vests. He was a stranger to me. Probably visiting one of the wounded. I couldn’t know every face in Brume and certainly didn’t know his. But he looked familiar all the same.

  Lia lowered her voice. “I’m sorry. We’ll get by. We always do.”

  “Lia, we’re out of food. How are we supposed to get by without that?” My tone was sharper than it probably should’ve been. It wasn’t her fault we’d failed. It was mine.

  “We’ll find a way. You always think of something.” She must have seen the protest in my eyes, because she changed gears. “I’m glad you’re okay. I couldn’t stand the idea of you getting hurt again . . . or worse.”

  “It comes with the job, Lia. You know that.”

  “I do. But I also know that you take on too much responsibility around here. And I know you dream of a peaceful end to this war, but what if the Allegiance won’t listen, even if you’re holding their leader hostage? What if killing Caleb is the only way to end this?” Her eyes shimmered with concern. She placed her hand on my chest, as if feeling my heart beat. Her touch sent a shiver of want through me. “I know it may not be what you’d like to hear, but taking a shot at him from afar or planting a bomb may be the only route to peace. Have you thought of that?”

  “Sir?” Lloyd’s timing couldn’t have been better.

  I planted a kiss on her forehead and said, “I’ve gotta go.”

  We moved out the front doors and took a wide berth around the building, checking carefully to be sure we weren’t being followed to the basement door. The guard on duty gave us a nod in greeting. “Evening, sirs.”

  “Evening, Madison,” I said as I unlocked the door and held it open for Lloyd. Only twenty-five people knew the entry code to the base entrance, and we kept that code well protected, changing it once a week. The door unlocked both ways. You used the code to get in and that same code to get out again. “I thought Fitzsimmons was on duty tonight.”