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Bam locks eyes with him. “Do you want to go out there and gun them down?”
The question leaves Garson speechless. He looks at his weapon, as if really seeing it for the first time. Bam looks to the whole group. “How about the rest of you? Anyone who wants to go out there and murder them, be my guest.”
There are no takers. Not a one.
So they stay hidden in the trees as the men and woman run past, panicked and out of breath, some crying—and then out of nowhere comes a kid that Bam doesn’t know. He has black hair hanging in his eyes, bad acne, and is emaciated in a radiation-chic kind of way. He stands in the middle of the road, holding his hands apart and tilting his head back like a flower opening for the sun.
The running people see him, but they’re so terrified of what they’re running from, they don’t even consider what they might be running toward. Just before they reach his position, the dark-haired boy swings his hands together in a single powerful stroke.
The force of the explosion throws Bam and her team to the ground. And when she gets up to look, the trees on either side of the road are on fire, there’s a crater in the asphalt, and there’s no one there anymore. No one at all.
The other storks are silent for a few stunned moments, listening to the sound of flames, settling debris, and gunfire from beyond the Chop Shop loading dock, trying to deny the charred smell that has just reached their nostrils.
“They were unwinders,” Garson says, his voi
ce shaky. “They deserved to die.”
“Maybe,” says Bree. “But I’m glad I wasn’t the one who killed them.”
Bam’s team waits out the battle, making no move to join it, and no one argues anymore. Not even Garson who seems hateful of the whole situation, probably thinking himself a coward, and blaming Bam for it.
It is only when the battle is over that Bam leads her team past the smoking remains of the Chop Shop, and into the battle-torn grounds of Horse Creek Harvest Camp.
Starkey has already gathered the liberated Unwinds in a grassy common, now strewn with bodies and wreckage. “My name is Mason Michael Starkey,” Bam hears him announce to the gathered Unwinds, “and I have just freed you.”
The crowd is too shell-shocked to cheer their liberation. The scenes of death and destruction surpass anything Bam has seen before. It’s worse than the carnage at the Graveyard. The harvest camp has been burned to the ground. There are no living adults visible. Bam doesn’t know if any escaped Starkey’s dark vengeance against the world.
“What’s he going to do with the tithes?” asks Bree. Bam turns to see several armed storks guarding a cluster of tithes, who are in the process of being taken captive, since they aren’t taking well to freedom.
“Who knows,” Bam says. “Maybe he’ll turn them into slaves. Maybe he’ll put them in the stew.”
“Gross,” says one of her team members, a tousled-haired kid whose name Bam doesn’t know. “You don’t think he’d really do that, do you?”
The fact that the kid can ask that, as if it’s a real possibility, tells Bam that she’s not the only one who thinks Starkey is out of his freaking mind. Yes, he has a tight core of loyalists who seem to suckle all the vengeance and vitriol he can feed them—but how much doubt is there among the others? How much support would she have if she were to challenge his leadership? Probably just enough to get her and her coconspirators executed as traitors to the cause.
To her right she sees Jeevan stumbling out of a ruined hedge, his face bleeding. Bam looks down and tears out a pocket in her khakis, giving it to Jeevan to blot his bleeding forehead.
“Your team’s looking well rested,” Starkey says when he sees her. He offers Bam something that resembles a grin, but not quite.
“You’re the one who told us to take the loading dock,” she tells him coldly. “There wasn’t much action there.”
He has no comment to that. “Load up, ship out,” he orders, and strides away.
There are nondescript trucks waiting just down the road. The drivers, all supplied by the clapper movement, will take varied routes to deliver them back to the power plant, many hundreds of miles from the scene of the crime.
Hayden, along with Starkey’s little harem and all the other kids who did not take part in this attack, was left there to wait for a triumphant homecoming. Bam finds herself anxious to unburden on Hayden everything that happened here today. She must tell someone—must confess her feelings about it. How strange that Hayden has become her confessor.
Load up. Ship out.
The windowless truck that brought them here, and now takes them back, doesn’t feel all that different from an unwind transport truck. The lack of control over her own freedom is every bit as oppressive as incarceration. Bam checks to make sure that all weapons are disarmed and piled in a corner of the truck as they begin their journey, so they don’t become playthings. She listens to snippets of conversations around her. There aren’t many.
“Do you think there are clappers who didn’t clap and they’re in the trucks?”
“I get carsick when I can’t look out a window.”
“Austin Lee! Did anyone see Austin Lee? Please someone tell me you’ve seen him!”
“Starkey says we’re getting better. Next time will be easier.”
