Zoe's Tale (Old Man's War, #4)(41)

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"I've had better days," he said, and something flat and tired in his voice made me decide not to press the matter any further. I gave him a hug and told him I was going to visit Gretchen and would be over there for a while, in order to stay out of his hair.

Night was falling as I stepped out of our bungalow. I looked out toward Croatoan's gate and saw colonists streaming in from their homesteads; no one, it seemed, wanted to spend the night outside the walls of the colony village. I didn't blame them one bit.

I turned to head to Gretchen's and was mildly surprised to see her striding up under full steam. "We have a problem," she said to me.

"What is it?" I said.

"Our idiot friend Magdy has taken a group of his friends into the forest," Gretchen said.

"Oh, God," I said. "Tell me Enzo isn't with him."

"Of course Enzo's with him," Gretchen said. "Enzo's always with him. Trying to talk sense to him even as he's following him right off a cliff."


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The four of us moved as silently as we could into the forest, from the place where Gretchen had seen Magdy, Enzo and their two friends go into the tree line. We listened for their sounds; none of them had been trained to move quietly. It wasn't a good thing for them, especially if the creatures decided to hunt them. It was better for us, because we wanted to track them. We listened for our friends on the ground, we watched and listened for movement in the trees. We already knew whatever they were could track us. We hoped we might be able to track them, too.

In the distance, we heard rustling, as if of quick, hurried movement. We headed that direction, Gretchen and I taking point, Hickory and Dickory fast behind.

Gretchen and I had been training for months, learning how to move, how to defend ourselves, how to fight and how to kill, if it was necessary. Tonight, any part of what we learned might have to be used. We might have to fight. We might even have to kill.

I was so scared that if I stopped running, I think I would have collapsed into a ball and never gotten up.

I didn't stop running. I kept going. Trying to find Enzo and Magdy before something else did. Trying to find them, and to save them.

"After Gutierrez left, Magdy didn't see any point in keeping our story quiet anymore, so he started blabbing to his friends," Gretchen had told me. "He was giving people the idea that he'd actually faced these things and had managed to keep them off while the rest of us were getting away."

"Idiot," I said.

"When you parents came back without the hunting party, a group of his friends came to him about organizing a search," Gretchen said. "Which was actually just an excuse for a bunch of them to stalk through the forest with guns. My dad caught wind of this and tried to step on its head. He reminded them that five adults just went into the forest and didn't come out. I thought that was the end of it, but now I hear that Magdy just waited until my dad went to go visit yours before gathering up some like-minded idiots to head off into the woods."

"Didn't anyone notice them heading off?" I asked.

"They told people they were going to do a little target practice on Magdy's parents' homestead," Gretchen said. "No one's going to complain about them doing that right about now. Once they got there they just took off. The rest of Magdy's family is here in town like everyone else. No one knows they're missing."

"How'd you find out about this?" I asked. "It's not like Magdy would tell you this right now."

"His little group left someone behind," Gretchen said. "Isaiah Miller was going to go with him, but his dad wouldn't let him have the rifle for 'target practice.' I heard him complaining about that and then basically intimidated the rest of it out of him."

"Has he told anybody else?" I asked.

"I don't think so," Gretchen said. "Now that he's had time to think about it I don't think he wants to get in trouble. But we should tell someone."

"We'll cause a panic if we do," I said. "Six people have already died. If we tell people four more people - four kids - have gone off into the woods, people will go insane. Then we'll have more people heading off with guns and more people dying, either by these things or by accidentally shooting each other because they're so wired up."

"What do you want to do, then?" Gretchen asked.

"We've been training for this, Gretchen," I said.

Gretchen's eyes got very wide. "Oh, no," she said. "Zoe, I love you, but that's loopy. There's no way you're getting me out there to be a target for these things again, and there's no way I'm going to let you go out there."

"It wouldn't just be us," I said. "Hickory and Dickory - "

"Hickory and Dickory are going to tell you you're nuts, too," Gretchen said. "They just spent months teaching you how to defend yourself, and you think they're going to be at all happy with you putting yourself out there for something to use as spear practice. I don't think so."

"Let's ask them," I said.

"Miss Gretchen is correct," Hickory said to me, once I called for it and Dickory. "This is a very bad idea. Major Perry and Lieutenant Sagan are the ones who should deal with this matter."