Page 27 of Trade (After the End #7)

Men leap from the trucks—rough, unkempt, mismatched men—old and young, bare chested and bundled in ragged layers, bearded and bald and tattooed, skinny as a beanpole and burly as bears, each one armed to the teeth with blades and a few with guns in their hands.

The men from the bunker scramble to take the rifles from the guards lying in limp heaps on the ground.

The Outsiders have more than just rifles. I see a variety of pistols and a big weapon that looks like a missile with a handle and trigger. Is that a rocket launcher?

Are they here to attack the bunker? They have bullets. I have no doubt.

My eyes sweep the ground nearby for a weapon of my own, one of the chunks of asphalt, anything. I led the women out here into this.

And then a loud, clear voice booms out. “Damn, Glory. Did you forget me already?”

Dalton.

He’s standing right in the middle of the Outsiders, grinning. Same pants with bulging pockets. Same gray shirt. Same sparkling eyes and perfect teeth and calm assurance and scuffed, muddy boots.

The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

I run to him. He strolls forward and scoops me right off my feet. I wrap my legs around his waist. He kisses me, and my heart takes off like a flock of starlings. He smells like sweat and woodsmoke and everything good in the world, and he’s alive, alive, alive.

This is how happy feels. It’s as big as the Outside.

He spins me around and around, and I lean back, baring my tear-streaked face to the sun while he laughs. “I was coming to get you, woman. Did you get impatient?”

“You were coming for me?” I gaze down into his smiling, gorgeous, perfect face. There are shadows under his eyes like bruises.

“I said I would.”

“I busted out myself,” I say.

“Of course you did.”

“Well, I had a little help,” I admit and suddenly remember the rifle butt to the head. “Your noggin!” I comb through his hair, and he ducks away from my questing fingers, laughing, walking me backward so he can prop me against a faded green military vehicle.

“It’s fine. I’ve got a thick head,” he says, chasing my mouth, kissing me again and again like I’m oxygen, and he’s been holding his breath this whole time—the same as me.

“I was afraid you were dead. That I left you for dead.” I burst into a fresh bout of tears.

He scrubs them away with the heel of his hand. “I was afraid I was going to have to scoop you out of that mountain like a snail.”

“A snail?” I sniff.

“Hey, I like snails. They’re delicious.”

“You eat snails?”

He’s too busy kissing me to answer, and when we come up for air, I wind my arms around his neck, holding onto him with all my might while I watch my people venture farther out of the bunker into the sunshine, mumbling in awe.

“Oh, boy. Oh, wow.”

“My goodness gracious.”

“Holy shit.”

“Do you see the trees?”

“It’s all green.”

“Look at the sky.”

“Was it here this whole time?”

“Was it like this all along?”

With her head tilted toward the sky, squinting, Mrs. Reedy is the first to wander off the asphalt.

She carefully lowers herself to her knees, digs her fingers into the grass, and bursts into tears.

Others follow her—kneeling or sitting or lying down, cheeks pressed to the ground or flat on their backs, arms wide, bathing in the sun.

By and large, the Outsiders have stayed in their line with their weapons lowered. The grunts have lowered the rifles they confiscated from the guards, but they’re holding onto them tightly.

Cecily has gotten herself a rifle, too. She stands behind Amy and Gina, her neck craned, her lips curved as the sunshine glows gold on her brown cheeks.

An Outsider, a man about my age, breaks from the ranks. With his palms raised to show he means no harm, he approaches us. I tense. Despite the gesture, he’s a big, rough-looking man. Dalton turns to see what’s worried me.

“That’s Sturge,” he says reassuringly. “He was one of the first to say he’d help. Didn’t need to trade him nothin’ for it. He’s all right.”

Sturge stops a few feet away from my friends and murmurs something to Gina. Gina flushes and glances down, but then she sneaks a peek at him from under her lowered lashes. It seems they know each other, and there’s only one way that’s possible.

He offers her a drink from his canteen. After a moment’s hesitation, she takes it.

When she finishes, he gestures for her to pass it on to Amy.

When Gina came back with her broken jaw, it was so painful for her to get down the tea I brought her.

She whimpered after each sip. This man, Sturge, obviously didn’t do that to her. Our own people did.

Others are venturing Outside now, their steps more tentative. This second wave keeps close to the outer bunker walls. I see several people I know. I’m most surprised when Meghan leads a hesitant Paul Andrews out of the bay doors.

That shock immediately pales when Neil Jackson limps out, held up by Gary Krause on one side, and Bennett on the other. Susan Jordan and a few other heads file out behind them, shading their eyes. They’re flanked by guards looking more than a little worse for wear.

Neil holds out his hand. Someone passes him his bullhorn.

He raises it to his mouth. “Fellow citizens—” he begins in that voice, that arrogant, condescending, patronizing voice that knows it all and makes all the calls and understands everything better and sees everything more clearly than the rest of us while he lords above us from a creaky, cracked plastic chair in his stale office buried under the ground like a grave.

Something inside me snaps.

“Dalton, let me down.”

He does, reluctantly. For a few moments, I stand by his side, listening as Neil ramps up into a new version of the speech he gives at every Assembly.

“It is now, now more than ever before, that we must remember what we were called to do. We were chosen, spared from annihilation, and tasked with a solemn, sacred duty to the future of human civilization. We must not fail now, at the eleventh hour.”

A bird flying high overhead lets out a high-pitched, raspy scream and dozens of heads whip upward. A red-tailed hawk soars across the blue sky. The crowd gasps in unison.

Neil booms louder into his bullhorn. “What would the generations before us say to see us falter at this point when they paid the ultimate price to ensure the continuity of government?”

Everyone forces their attention away from the hawk and back on our leader. I do, too. We’re so used to listening to him that it’s muscle memory.

“You mean they lived and died in a tomb,” a grunt says with a snort. The people standing around him shift uncomfortably. No one talks while the Head Administrator is talking.

“I know what you think you see, but I am here to tell you it’s a lie.

This—all of this—is a mirage, a deadly mirage.

Do you think our forebears would have made the sacrifices they made if it wasn’t necessary?

Do you think your leaders would ask such sacrifice of you if it wasn’t a matter of the very survival of the human race? ”

People are murmuring now. Paul Andrews’ eyes flick back toward the bunker, and he tugs Meghan in the direction of the doors, but she won’t budge. The grunts fold their arms and mutinously clench their jaws.

Neil smells an opening. “I assure you, those of us who trade with the Outsiders have all been seduced by the false promise of this mirage, too, but soon enough, we were all confronted with the truth—what we knew in our hearts—that the Outside is poison. Turn back, friends, before it’s too late.

Turn back before this false utopia is the last thing you see before you die. ”

I watch Meghan look from Neil’s face to the trees to Neil’s face again. Paul draws her back toward the bunker again. This time, she lets him.

She’s afraid. She’s eighteen years old, and all she knows is what she’s been told by men who say they care about her, say they love her. And some of them do love her.

What choice does she have but to believe them?

What weapon does she have to fight with?

I walk forward, very slowly, as if pulled forward by a string, until I’m standing a few feet from Neil and Bennett. Dalton grumbles under his breath—he doesn’t like it—but he stays by my side and doesn’t make a move to stop me.

Bennett’s eyes bead, hard and mean, as he sizes Dalton up.

Bennett sneers, but Dalton doesn’t know him, so he takes no notice.

I watch as Bennett gauges Dalton’s height and the breadth of his shoulders and diameter of his biceps.

I watch Bennett subtract. I see the exact moment he calculates the difference and comes up short. I stand a little taller.

“Do not be led astray,” Neil continues into the bullhorn.

“Do not waver. Now is the time to honor the sacrifice of the generations who came before and the sacred trust they put in us. They knew the mortal peril you face now, at this very moment, the silent poison that destroys from the inside out, the corruption that will decay your very souls!”

I turn my head—slowly, deliberately—and scan the rows of Outsiders. I rake my eyes over their bodies, tilting my head to note their height, letting my gaze linger on broad chests and thick thighs.

I leer. “Poisoned, you say? For people decaying from the inside out, they look good to me.” I project my voice so it can be heard as far into the bay of the bunker as possible.

The Outsiders snicker. A few outright guffaw. I don’t have to look over. I know Dalton’s smirking.

Neil narrows his eyes at me. “You see the contamination before you,” he bellows into the bullhorn.

“Gloria Walker. We all knew her father, Don, God rest his soul. Don was a good man—a great man—dedicated to our purpose, to our people. He knew that this sacred project could not be entrusted to her, and he was right! In her depravity, she drove her husband away, and now she wants you to follow her into destruction.”