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14 • Groundskeeper
A gardener by trade, he took the job because it was a job. The pay was decent, there were good benefits, and it included room and board. “You’d be an idiot to turn it down,” his wife had told him. “So what if it’s at a harvest camp? I won’t mind living there if you won’t.”
Without a degree in horticulture, a steady job at a well-funded institution was probably the best he could hope for.
“And anyway,” as his wife had pointed out, “it’s not like you’re unwinding anyone.”
That’s true enough. In his five years working at Horse Creek Harvest Camp, he’s had very little contact with the kids. The camp is too regimented for that. The Unwinds are always being efficiently shuttled from one activity to another. Sports activities to gauge their physical prowess and to build muscle mass so their parts will be more valuable. Intellectual and creative endeavors designed to measure, and improve upon, their mental skills. The Unwinds of Horse Creek are kept far too busy to notice a gardener.
The tithes, who have a little more freedom, will talk to him on occasion. “What kind of flowers are those?” they’ll ask, their bright innocence in stark contrast to the other Unwinds whose desperation radiates from them like a toxic field. “They’re pretty—did you plant them all yourself?” He’ll always answer politely, but rarely will he look at them, because he knows their fate, even if it’s a fate they accept. It’s his own personal superstition: Don’t look into the eyes of the doomed.
He’s not the only gardener, but his skill and success with planting has earned him the distinction of head groundskeeper. Now he gets to pick and choose his tasks, and assign work to others. He takes care of the heavier planting: new trees and hedges, and the design of the larger, more impressive flower beds. He loves to plant those himself. The largest of these is right in front of the place the kids call the Chop Shop. He’s particularly proud of this year’s fall theme: pumpkins growing within the swirling colors of toad lilies, monkhood, and other autumn-blooming flowers.
“You should be proud of what you do,” his wife tells him. “Your flower beds are the last bit of nature these kids will see before they’re divided. It’s your gift to them.”
For this reason he takes great care to place every growing thing in the Chop Shop flower bed personally.
He’s troubled by the recent added security measures and the influx of “protective personnel.” These new guards are not just the typical camp security staff, but tactical teams supplied by the Juvenile Authority. They carry assault weapons and wear thick, bulletproof clothing. It’s all very intimidating. He’s heard of the recent attacks on harvest camps, but there are so many camps, and the others that were attacked are far away. What are the chances that their little camp in rural Oklahoma will be singled out of all the harvest camps for a Stork Brigade attack? As far as he’s concerned, this paranoid security serves only to make everyone worried for no good reason.
He’s with a coworker, shaping a dragon topiary, when the attack comes, destroying the tranquility of a bucolic day. He doesn’t see the first explosion—and he feels it more than hears it. It comes as a shock wave that, had he not been kneeling behind the topiary, would have knocked him over backward. A chunk of concrete the size of a basketball tears a hole in the heart of the dragon, but not before tearing through his coworker. The groundskeeper throws himself to the ground, splattered with the blood of his dead comrade, and when he looks up, he sees that the administration building is gone. All that remains are jagged fragments of walls. Pieces of the building are still coming down all around the grounds of the camp.
Staff and Unwinds alike all run from the scene in a panic. A second blast takes out a guard tower designed to look like a rustic windmill. Shredded timber tears through everything and everyone in its way, and from behind it, where a steel-reinforced fence used to be, floods an army of kids wielding weapons the groundskeeper has never seen the likes of before. The air is now filled with the blam-blam-blam of repeating rifles, the earsplitting rat-tat-tat-tat of machine guns, and the mournful shriek of a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher delivering its deadly payload to the staff quarters. The rocket crashes through a corner window of a second-floor apartment—the nice one overlooking the gardens—and an instant later, all the windows of the building blow out in a fireball from the explosion within.
He suppresses a scream, hunkering down in the dense ivy at the base of the topiary. He knows if he’s spotted he’s a dead man—he knows if anyone happens to spray their weapon in his general direction, he’ll be dead as well. All he can do is lie low, belly to the ground, trying to disappear into the greenery he so painstakingly planted.
The Juvenile Authority’s SWAT team, for all their training and weaponry, are ill prepared for an assault of this magnitude. They raise their ballistic shields and try to advance on the marauding throng of kids, taking some of them down, but not many. Then, from out of the crowd of kids races a single unarmed girl running toward them with her hands up.
“Help me, help me! Don’t shoot!” she cries.
The SWAT team holds their fire as she approaches, ready to shield her, and save her from the crossfire. Then, as she nears them, she swings her hands together.
The instant her hands touch, she’s gone.
The explosion is so powerful it sends the entire SWAT team flying like bowling pins, their bodies twisting and burning in the air.
Another unarmed kid, frail but determined, hurls himself, arms wide, at the side of the SWAT team’s armored truck, and as soon as he connects with it, the explosion tears the truck in two, sending half of it cannoning through the front gate and the other half tearing through the Chop Shop garden.
“They’ve got clappers!” someone yells. “My God, they’ve got clappers!”
And now the groundskeeper knows this is about more than just freeing the Unwinds here. This is about exacting pounds of flesh from all those complicit in unwinding. There will be no mercy for him if he is caught. Never mind that all he did was beautify the grounds. You watched hundreds of kids taken into the Chop Shop, and you did nothing, the Stork Brigade will tell him. You dined with the men and women who held the scalpels and you did nothing, they will say. You took a place of nightmares and hid it behind flowers, and his only defense will be, I was just doing my job. For that, they will gun him down, or blow him to bits, or kick out the chair from under him. And all because he did nothing.
Don’t move, you fool, he knows his wife would tell him. Play dead until it’s all over. But he knows she won’t be telling him anything anymore. Because one of the perks of being the head groundskeeper is getting that corner apartment on the second floor of the staff house. The nice one overlooking
the gardens.
15 • Jeevan
“You need to see it, Jeevan. You need to be a part of it. As a member of the Stork Brigade, you have to share in the fight so you’ll truly feel the power of what we’re doing. So you’ll get the importance of it.”
This is how Starkey couched the news that Jeevan was to be a foot soldier in the attack on Horse Creek Harvest Camp. “Until now you’ve just been behind the scenes, in the background. But today you become a warrior, Jeevan. Today is your day.”
“Yes, sir,” was Jeevan’s response, as was always his response to Starkey.
But when the first rocket takes out the administration building, and the storks around him begin firing their weapons at anything that moves in the smoke, Jeevan knows that he should never have allowed himself to be here. There are kids around him who are bloated by the power of their weapons, turned maniacal by Starkey’s skillful stroking of their most violent sides. There are also those who hold their weapons reluctantly, knowing that this couldn’t be right, no matter how wrong unwinding is—but they are swept along in the powerful current and don’t know how to resist.
None of these other kids have been as close to Starkey as Jeevan has been. None of them have been part of the planning, or have witnessed his temper tantrums, or have seen behind the curtain of his eyes to know the show that goes on behind the show.
Starkey believes he is invincible. He believes he is more than just destined for greatness, but that greatness is owed to him, and every one of these “victories” makes him believe it more and more. The Stork Lord. Hayden’s epithet is more on-target then even he realizes, for Starkey truly does see himself as royalty reaching for divinity. A chosen one with the pride and privilege of a god.
