Free Rebirth by Sophie Littlefield Page A

safety of her arms, she imagined the words of the letter already fading from her mind, and soon the sentences and paragraphs and finally Smoke’s entire meaning would be as lost to her as the man himself.

09
     
    SAMMI RODE IN THE BACK OF THE TRUCK WITH the others, pretending to sleep, too afraid to speak. The men who rode back there with them—when did they sleep? Because every time Sammi opened her eyes, their eyes were there, too, dark and unreadable as they waited and watched while the rest of them huddled together for warmth.
    Her mother was dead. Jed was dead. Everyone who resisted—even a little—dead, dead, dead. The only reason Sammi was alive was because her mother’s last words were Go with them, Sammi —her name was still on her lips when she’d gone down, blood pouring from the slice in her neck.
    Jed had earned a bullet. He’d pretended to go along, helping his brothers support their parents as they were herded up into the truck, holding them up by their arms so they wouldn’t stumble. Stumbling got you killed—at least, that was what had happened to Mrs. Levenson, who didn’t have time to get her cane when the Rebuilders burst into the burning school. She tried to keep up but she kept twisting her hip and falling, making little “oof” sounds when she landed on the ground, and the third time one of the Rebuilders had hit her on the head with his black stick and she twitched and lay still, making no sound at all. Sammi had seen the Rebuilder—a woman, how could a woman do such a thing?—wind up for the swing, and Sammi had played softball, so she knew, from the way the woman brought the stick back and around and down with a crack everyone could hear, that the force must have crushed poor Mrs. Levenson’s skull.
    And that was before they were even loaded on the truck.
    There had been sixteen of them, in the end. Sixteen alive and thirty-four dead or dying in the burning school. Sammi was numb with horror as the truck ground out of the parking lot and onto Highway 161. Two of the Rebuilders, both men, both young, rode in the back with them. The one with his back to the cab and another who sat on a box, flipping a blade and catching it. It was the same blade he had used on Sammi’s mom and on the others, too, the ones who tried to keep the Rebuilders out of the common room.
    An older man drove, and then there was the woman—the woman who had killed Mrs. Levenson. The guard who stared at her, the one with a tiny triangle of beard and a cap with a cartoon picture of a dog embroidered on it—he had made her sit near him and Sammi wondered with a sickening feeling if it was so he could look at her. Because he just kept looking at her. Jed and his family had been made to sit on the other side of the truck bed, and Jed mouthed words at her whenever the guy on the box wasn’t looking, he said I love you and other things Sammi could not understand, and after a while her vision blurred with tears and she couldn’t see his mouth forming words. In between were the rest of the survivors. Arthur. Mr. Jayaraman. Terry and her kids. The ones who were too old, too young, or too cowardly to fight or who, like Jed’s brothers, had someone to protect.
    Her mother had died trying to protect Sammi. They hadn’t even wasted a bullet on her death; they’d dropped her to the ground like a sack of garbage and stepped around the pooling blood as though it was distasteful. Her mother’s body was left behind in the burning building; Sammi hoped it burned all the way, to the bones—and that the bones burned, too. She didn’t want the birds to get to her mother’s body; she’d seen what the birds could do, the big black ones that had showed up a week ago and feasted on the carcass of a fat raccoon the raiders had caught and left out in the courtyard for skinning. Better that her mother disappear from earth as Sammi wished she herself could disappear.
    Through the long night in the truck, Sammi shivered and wished