Three (Article 5 #3)(106)

Tucker fell forward, and his knuckles turned white as they gripped the metal bar against the wall behind him. I grabbed him just as he was sinking to the ground, the thin fabric of his borrowed scrubs ripping in my fists.

Wallace walked toward us.

“I should have listened to you from the beginning,” he said to me. “You told me he would turn us in. I didn’t listen.” There was a strange, absent quality to his voice, like all the life had been sucked out of him.

“Tucker?” I whispered.

I couldn’t hold his weight, and soon we were both on the ground. His head lay on my knees, his fingers scratched uselessly at his throat, as if an invisible hand were choking him.

“Tucker,” I said again.

He choked, sputtered, red blood brightening his lips. Then a shudder. Then a stillness, like a long sigh before falling asleep. When his eyes found mine I wasn’t sure what they saw, but he smiled, just a soft, subtle tilt of his lips.

“Guess I was too late,” he said.

And as the life left him, as his body went limp and his hands fell to the floor, I did what I never thought I’d do. I cried for him.

The doctor awaited Wallace’s approval before tentatively approaching. He pressed two fingers against Tucker’s neck, just for a few seconds, then shook his head.

I looked up at Wallace. “What have you done?”

His brows furrowed in confusion, as if the answer should have been obvious.

They took Tucker’s body to the back parking lot with the others who had died after reaching the clinic. Three had separated the area in two; on one side, the soldiers were thrown, their bodies discarded like sacks of garbage. On the other were the prisoners and members of Three who had fought to take down the Charlotte base. They were covered with sheets and laid side by side.

I didn’t know what would happen to either side, but I made the freed prisoners carry Tucker’s body to the side with the rebels. I wiped his face clean and covered him with a sheet myself. It was the least I could do after all we’d been through.

As I stood over him they brought out Dr. DeWitt, and laid him beside Tucker. One bad turned good, one good turned bad. In the end it didn’t matter. We were all the same.

Chase and I stayed through the following night. As the hours passed, the clinic was flooded with rebels who’d survived the battle. The hall was soon overwhelmed with injured fighters, some badly burned, some with broken bones, many—too many—with gunshot wounds. The hospital staff ran from patient to patient, and for a while I helped where I could: passing out bandages, holding people still while the nurses and doctors stitched them up or made them comfortable enough to pass without pain, all the while feeling that aching pressure inside of me to move on.

The doctor told us about an old woman who lived nearby who was friendly to the cause. Before dark on the second day, one of the orderlies helped me move Chase and three other injured rebels to her home, a nearby farm with a collection of hand-painted signs lining a privacy fence that stated: BEWARE OF DOG. For six nights we hid in her basement while Chase recovered. She brought us food and water, antibiotics the doctor could spare, and word on the resistance.

At night we listened to Faye Brown’s reports.

By the end of the first week, nine bases had been overrun by civilians. The soldiers that survived the riots had fled, were turned, or simply disappeared. And in every city where a base had fallen, hijacked Statute circulars were found, clutched in the fists of those who fought.

The old president came down from his hiding place in the mountains and began making speeches—Faye even got a special interview with him. The FBR’s days were numbered, he said. It was time they laid down their weapons and accepted the inevitable. Democracy would return to the United States. The Statutes were history. We would rebuild again. All things that sounded good, but had yet to happen. He didn’t condone the violence, but didn’t lie about knowing Three, either. He sounded a little different on the radio than the man who’d showed me his son’s favorite books. Stronger maybe. Not like an old man.

On the seventh day I was helping Chase into the passenger side of the MM van when a beat-up silver car pulled through the gate into the back of the farm. The man who unfolded himself from the driver’s seat looked to have aged ten years since the Charlotte base had fallen. His ratty hair was now clean, tied by a shoelace at the back of his neck, but more gray around the temples.

“I heard you’re leaving without saying good-bye,” said Wallace, leaning against the side of the blue van. His fingers tapped a rhythm against the metal beside his hip.

I wasn’t sure how he’d found us. In the past week I’d been careful not to use either of our names, nor give any information that might indicate who we were.

“We’re leaving,” I confirmed.

“Don’t suppose I can convince you to stay. There’s still a lot of work to be done.” He looked up to the sky, like someone might after feeling a raindrop.

“We can’t stay,” I said. Chase’s hand slid into mine, a move Wallace noticed.

“Yeah,” said Wallace. “Well, if you change your mind, you’ll always be welcome in my camp.”

I almost asked where that would be, but guessed that he probably didn’t even know yet. He was the last remaining leader of Three, a soldier of the cause, something I now realized I might never truly understand. I did know this, though: the blood on his hands—Tucker’s blood, and Billy’s, too—would never wash away. He would carry it the rest of his days, and maybe for that reason alone he could never stop fighting. It was the only thing left that could make his actions make sense.