eleventh chapter

His body begged him to sleep for even a little bit, but Minho couldn't close his eyes the entire night. He kept watch over his two boys, one laying as motionless and feverish as before by Minho's feet, the other cradled up underneath Minho's arm against the wall. Jorge and Brenda slept in the opposite side of the basement, the man on a squeaky fold-up bed and the girl on a mattress brought down from the house. The loaded gun lay on the floor by Brenda's head, but Minho was certain that she was asleep which meant that they trusted the new arrivals to some degree. It was hard for Minho to admit, but he trusted these people too. Kind of. After all, without them there was no telling where he and his friends would have been sleeping tonight, and if they'd have food, water and medicine working wonders in their beaten bodies.

More than anything, Minho had them to thank for Newt's health. They'd propped him full of every fever-breaking painkiller there was, and Jorge had even said that they'd make a house run the next day to look for more. Minho hoped that they'd find some penicillin to battle the infection still crawling up Newt's leg.

Thomas shuddered in his sleep, and Minho started to mindlessly stroke his hand up and down his friend's arm. His other hand was entangled with Newt's fingers. Having them both this close, especially the blond, made Minho feel safe and strong. He'd watch over them, he'd keep them safe.

The hours passed by and Minho drifted in and out of half-sleep until Thomas started moving by his side. He yawned and stretched a little, not moving away, then looked up into the eyes of the young man whose arms he'd slept in.

"Good morning," he said, not facing away even though their mouths were literally only fifteen centimetres apart. "You sleep at all?"

"Nah," Minho said, shrugging with a light smile. Then he turned serious again. "I don't trust them."

Thomas turned his head to look at their hosts sleeping quietly by the far wall. He rested his head against Minho's chest and let his tired eyes close for a while. "Me neither. We can try to leave if you want to, but I don't think we'll make it very far."

Minho knew what he meant — Newt. They'd have to wait and see if he'd heal and regain enough strength, then they had a chance of getting back on the move again. Until then…

"I'll go with him today," Thomas said. "See what's out there, try to find some more medicine and supplies."

A lump formed in Minho's throat. "With Jorge? No way."

"Why not?"

"You just said you don't trust them, now you wanna go off alone with one of them?" Minho saw the flaws in his argument even before Thomas pointed them out, but stood firm anyway.

"That's exactly why," Thomas said quietly, willing Minho to keep his voice down. "I'll make sure to really look for something for Newt. The sooner he's on his feet, the better. Then we run."

Minho couldn't argue with that last part. He didn't have to like the terms. He glanced at Newt's sleeping form, the steady rise and fall of his chest, and suddenly another feeling tightened his throat. It wasn't his intention to act on it, but the words slipped out before he had a chance to think them through.

"Did he kiss you yesterday?" Instant regret filled him.

Thomas tensed, and for a moment he was back in the complete darkness of the sewers. Too tired back then to have reacted to it, he felt the tender touch of dry lips above the corner of his mouth.

Thanks, Tommy.

Newt had kissed him. Thomas had no idea how he felt about that. He hadn't considered the idea, the sheer possibility, of it. Well, yes he had, but not with Newt. In the dark and lonely nights he could sometimes think about the softness of Minho's skin, the pulsing of his muscles or the mystery in his eyes. But Newt had kissed him.

"No, what are you talking about?" was Thomas's answer. He hated himself for lying.

Many minutes ticked by in silence, and it made Thomas feel absolutely horrible when Minho removed his arm from him. Eventually Brenda stirred and woke up. She turned around underneath the covers to look at the boys, then rose up and put on some more clothes without a word. The boys watched her discreetly as she went around lighting new candles, hooked up the small, portable boiler to a car battery and began heating up two cans of pasta soup. When it was done and the wonderful smell of food filled the small space, she took a bowl from a shelf, scooped herself a big helping and sat back down on her mattress.

She eyed Thomas and Minho as she drank form the bowl. "I won't serve it to you, if that's what you're waiting for."

After hesitating defiantly, Minho started rising but Thomas put a hand on his knee. "I got it."

He grabbed two bowls from the shelf, then a third when he heard Minho trying to rouse Newt from his fever slumber. Thomas filled the bowls carefully, feeling the eyes of Brenda burning on his skin the whole time. He simply couldn't dislike her the way Minho did, but she sure was something else.

Newt was still out of it, feeling worse now than last night after dinner. He propped himself up against the corner wrapped in blankets, shuddering from high fever, and drank slowly from his soup while Minho and Thomas tended to his leg. It hurt worse now, he said, but when his friends saw the wound it looked ten times better than it had down in the sewers.

"How's your back, Tommy?" Newt asked once his leg was re-wrapped, then nodded to Minho. "And your side?"

Even before either of them could open their mouths, a loud clap sounded and they turned to see Jorge on his feet after having looked sound asleep just a moment ago. All conversation seized as the man went over to the portable boiler, grabbed the saucepan and drank from its steaming contents. He looked at all of them in turn, even Brenda, who gave him a slight rise of her eyebrows as if asking something telepathically. It really bothered all three boys how the two of them could communicate so secretly. Then, after a loud slurp of the soup, Jorge smacked his lips.

"Oh, don't mind me. Go on talking."

The boys just eyed each other, not able to believe this man. Something was very obviously bothering him, and it got on Minho's nerves very quickly.

"Why are we here? Why are you 'keeping' us?" he said, putting his chin out. Newt rolled his eyes in annoyance, but Thomas was beginning to feel the same exasperation Minho was.

"Can't a guy show some mercy to a few kids in need? Ungrateful little brat, you are."

"Not you," Minho pushed, directing his words at both Jorge and Brenda. "You're all shoot first, ask later. What's in it for you?"

"You tell me," Jorge said. "I hear you plan on hauling ass out of this mess. And where to then, huh? The North? Acaand? The LIA?"

Thomas was confused. "We're leaving the city, not the country."

Then Jorge did the last thing the boys expected him to — he smiled, sadly and earnestly. "This ain't a war the West can win, kiddo. It never was."

"What are you talking about?" Newt asked for the three of them.

Jorge didn't respond, only rubbed the top of his head as the smile faded away, then turned and walked over to the workbench to tinker with something. Brenda stood up instead, sought eye contact with Jorge, then looked at the three boys. Or rather Thomas in particular.

"Get moving, we don't have all day," she said, so little emotion that it took him a moment to process her words. "You wanted to scout for medicine, now's your chance."

Thomas shook his confusion away, realising that she must have overhead his discussion with Minho earlier, and that he would be going with Brenda and not Jorge. He stood up and straightened his clothes, careful with his hurting lower back.

"What?" This came from Newt, who wore a more than a little worried expression. Thomas had a hard time concentrating on anything but his lips when he looked at him.

"Don't worry, I won't be gone long." He looked to Brenda for confirmation, getting none.

Minho was on his feet now as well, and as if his moving toward Thomas started a chain-reaction, everyone was at an unarmed stand-off. Jorge moved up next to Brenda and Minho took his place by Thomas' side, arms a little out from his body as if ready to strike anything that dared approach him.

"Hey, son, two of you ain't going out there," Jorge said with warning in his voice.

"Not your son, not taking orders from you," Minho replied.

"Cut it off, all of you!"

Everyone turned to Newt, who was halfway out of his blanket bed, white like a sheet but still carrying the most authoritative posture out of all five of them. He looked at Minho in particular, gave the tiniest shake of his head, then turned to Thomas.

"Just… be careful. Don't die."

Thomas nodded. He didn't really want to think about the possibility of dying today, although the risk was off the scale compared to his normal everyday life. He took one last look at Minho, then at Newt, and then he focused on Brenda. The girl grabbed a backpack hanging from a hook on the wall, and threw another one at Thomas.

"Let's go," she said, and then they were off up the stairs.

Brenda's way of scouting was stressful and exhausting, although executed with a sort of grace that left Thomas wondering just what kind of girl she was. They sprinted from one house to the other, spending as little time as possible out in the open. She told Thomas multiple times to stay out of sight, although there wasn't a living soul to be seen for miles. When he'd questioned her methods, saying she was being unreasonably careful, she had pulled him into a garden and pushed him into the leaves of a bush. She shushed him, staring straight into his eyes at barely twenty centimetres distance, and pointed toward the sky with one finger. Thomas heard nothing, then a bird, then nothing. The rustling of a few leaves. Then he noticed. Far, far into the distance, he heard something very familiar — the beating propellers of helicopters.

"They. Are. Everywhere," is all she said.

Two hours later, Thomas had still not grown tired again of sneaking from house to house, doing it all Brenda's way. Once the sounds of helicopters grew louder, they hid wherever there was a roof to protect them from eyes in the sky. Brenda brought him several blocks away before they started actually breaking into places. She moved past several houses, saying only that there was a trick to knowing which ones still hid frightened families refusing to show themselves. The ones they did break into were bountiful. Thomas packed his duffle bags and backpacks full of preservable food, medicines of all sorts, bandages and other life-saving utilities. Brenda was a bit more of a nitpick, going for more specific things like rechargeable batteries, dietary supplements in pill form and toilet paper. Thomas guessed they already had much of the most necessary stuff back in the basement. That didn't stop him from trying to create his own little collection for when he, Minho and Newt went off on their own again.

They continued, black after block in the same manner, not speaking much at all. Thomas observed the skies while Brenda used her ears to allow her eyes more time to focus on potential ground threats. Both soon noticed that they were heading into territories that had been more heavily bombed in the earliest attack. Brenda kept telling Thomas that they were still far away from the nearest Safe Zone, heading for the suburbs of the city.

The sun edged closer to the horizon, the city which was still sending smoke spires toward the clouds.

Thomas sat sideways in the driver's seat of a car standing only a few metres from a bomb crater in the street. Whoever had driven the car had left the key in the ignition, and a whole lot of baggage in the trunk. Brenda finished off scavenging through the wares and closed the trunk, and Thomas looked at her when she walked round to his side.

"I can't carry anymore now," she said. "Sun's going down to, I'm up for some hot food."

Thomas wanted nothing more than to return to his friends, and some cooked food didn't sound bad at all. He hadn't found any penicillin though, but had packed his duffle bags full with every kind of painkiller and disinfectant he could fit.

"Yeah," he sighed.

They didn't move, just looked at each other and their surroundings for a bit. There was silence now, nothing but wind blowing the endless amount of propaganda papers around, the same messages dropped over Thomas's home.

Brenda opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again. She pulled the straps of her backpack to hoist it, then flung her own duffle bag over her shoulder and clicked the safety on her gun.

"Come on," she said and gave Thomas a light kick on the shins. "Let's get moving."

This time, as they walked they did not stay as much to the house walls and trees. Brenda lead the way in the open street, and as Thomas followed her, he felt a strange feeling of normalcy. Apart from the smell of things burning, the constant walking around craters, the complete lack of cars and people altogether, it felt like he was just walking home after lacrosse practice or school. The hunger for food and the bag over his shoulder only added to the sensation.

"Who are you? Like, really are, not just since the bombs fell."

Brenda's question caught Thomas off guard. She hadn't turned around to face him, but she slowed her steps until they were walking side by side.

Thomas swallowed, suddenly fighting the urge to spill everything to this girl he hardly knew. "Just… normal, I guess. What do you wanna know?"

"Normal, huh?" Brenda said, smiling. "Normal doesn't get his two best friends out of the middle of an invasion alive."

"It wasn't me. Minho damn near carried me half-way."

"He seemed like the strong one. Muscular, all attitude and please-give-me-a-reason-to-punch-you kind of guy." She said the last sentence in a mocking manly voice.

Thomas couldn't help but smile, especially at the word muscular. But his mind flew back to when Minho had been crying his eyes out in Thomas' arms, sitting in the ruins of his family home.

"What did normal do to pass time when he still had a life, then?" Brenda asked, brushing the images from Thomas' mind.

"Study, mostly. Some sports now and then." He silenced for a moment, struggling to match Brenda's sudden and inexplicable cheerfulness. "I play video games a lot. Middle War Kidz… and Seeker's Keeper."

"You study for something special or..?" Brenda pressed.

You studying for something? Like, a doctor or something?

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. For just a moment, Brenda had sounded like somebody else entirely, and it made Thomas' heart itch with longing and despair. Teresa, wherever she was, might be dead for all he knew, and he had been about to talk to this girl, answer her, as if she was Teresa. It made him realise that he was trusting her too fast. Or trusting them too fast. Jorge was the biggest problem, but Brenda had something sneaky about her too. Her being all nice and talkative all of a sudden made Thomas feel like he was putting his guard down.

He decided however that his collage dreams weren't necessary secrets. "Biology. I want to become a psychology-biologist, studying brain patterns and how the psyche works, you know, physically speaking."

"Sounds impressive," Brenda said, but nothing more.

"And you?" Thomas asked. "You and your father don't seem to come from around here." He realised how bad it sounded and added, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," Brenda said, her tone now three levels graver. "We're both from Shicoma, or the South, depending on who you ask. And he's not my father."

Thomas furrowed his brows, recalling the first conversation they'd had with Jorge. "He called you his daughter."

"It just makes it easier," Brenda sighed. "In truth I don't really know what he is. He's just always been there. My parents were—get down!"

Brenda hurled herself over Thomas, knocking them both to the ground. A split second later, a gunshot rang out and a bullet passed over their heads and hit a wooden fence behind them. Brenda was quick to answer the fire with several shots of her own, but her aim was so off that Thomas figured it was more of a sign to their attackers that they were armed as well instead of trying to kill someone.

"Come on! Stay low!" Brenda shouted, pulling Thomas to his feet and shoving him in the direction of the closest house while still firing her gun. Several more shots were fired from the opposing side, none hitting its mark but most of them too close for comfort.

"Holy shit!" Thomas exclaimed as he tried to swallow his heart back down into his chest. He jumped over a dog fence, crept close to the facade of a blue-painted villa and stopped behind the corner on the backyard. Brenda tried to push him on, but stopped when a voice echoed in the street through a megaphone.

"Come out with your hands above your head and the gun where I can see it!" The voice was male, raspy but not very low. The megaphone intensified the edge the voice had. "Deadly force will only be used if you do not comply immediately."

"To hell with that, they just shot at us!" Thomas hissed. Brenda slapped him across the cheek and held a finger in front of her mouth, warning Thomas not to make another sound.

The megaphone man continued. "Come out with your hands and firearms above your head. I will not repeat myself a third time."

Thomas moved passed Brenda, who tried to pull him back, and sneaked a glance around the corner. He saw only the front yard, but through fences and bushes he saw several somebodies moving forward in synchronised fashion down the road. They pointed about them with stick-like metalware—shotguns—and seemed to wear black military armour.

"They've cut us off," Thomas hissed. "We can't get back to the house."

Brenda whacked Thomas across the back of the head. He looked at her with fire in his eyes, but she held her hands up like he was an idiot and pointed to something behind them. There was a hedge separating them from the neighbouring house. Through the leaves they could see an empty driveway and, of course, another street. Thomas felt stupid.

They waited until the man with the megaphone started speaking again, then Brenda fired her gun at a window across the street, just in front of the marching, black-clad soldiers. Their attention flew that way immediately, and Thomas and Brenda used the moment to scurry across the exposed backyard and crawl through the thankfully quite permeable bushes.

"Come on, run!" Brenda called between closed teeth.

She darted down the driveway, Thomas at her heels, both holding on to their duffel bags for dear life. Their escape had not passed unnoticed, but there was still two houses between them and their pursuers. The man with the megaphone called out for them to halt, his voice growing more distant. They'd made it half a block when the soldiers started firing their weapons at them again. One, two, three bullets sizzled by Thomas's ears. He ran like he had never run before, using the backpack as protection behind the back of his head, as if he actually believed it could stop a bullet.

"In here!" Brenda called behind him. He'd ran past her, and now she was hurling herself down a side street leading up through a park and into a small forest. There was a playground football court with worn-down goalposts lining on side of the dirt path, and the front yard of a clubhouse on the other.

"What were you thinking!? This is open ground!" Thomas yelled.

"I'm sorry!" Brenda called back.

Just then, after a few seconds of silence, another shower of bullets rained down over them. Thomas saw his last few days of survival lose their meaning completely before his eyes. He saw it all come to an abrupt stop and end in nothingness—all with the hit of even one of these deadly projectiles. Then he heard a grunt unlike any other and watched as Brenda tumbled to the ground, a spray of blood painting the ground where her left foot had just touched down.

Thomas skidded to a halt and hovered above Brenda on the ground, stunned and helpless. The gunshots seized. The trampling of boots came closer. Brenda spasmed in pain by Thomas's feet, holding her left ankle as blood soaked her pants and the sleeves of her dirty, grey shirt.

Thomas looked behind him. There were two soldiers running toward them, each with their weapons hot and aimed. They yelled for the teenagers to stop. At the moment, they weren't firing.

Only two of them. Thomas acted fast, without thinking. He threw himself to his knees, grabbed Brenda's gun which has been thrown from her hand into the gravel, and fired several rounds at the oncoming soldiers. To his great surprise, one of them dropped backwards at the second shot. When his comrade turned around to look, Thomas's fifth shot hit him clean in the back of his head.

The soldier went down, the weapons falling from his hands. For a moment, Thomas could not see what he had done and fired another round into empty air.

With too much adrenalin running through his system, Thomas threw the gun aside and pulled the straps of his backpack back onto his shoulders. He stood up, then crouched down to try and lift Brenda onto his back. When he figured out that he couldn't lift her like that he resorted to pulling her off the path and across the front yard of the clubhouse. She didn't help much, but she didn't fight him either. He pulled her by the arms around the building, hoping against hope for a cellar door to break open. What he found was a wooden porch, supported with poles about three or four decimetres off the ground.

He didn't stop to think if this was a good plan or not, but went to his knees and started rolling Brenda in underneath the porch. There were weeds and dirt and insects, but he kept going, crawling in after her and pushing her body until they hit the wall of the house. The wooden planks of the porch were tightly set and let no light through, putting their hiding spot in complete blackness. Brenda groaned in pain. Thomas put his hands over her mouth and listened, but there was no sound apart from his own racing heartbeat and their breathing.

As the first minutes of what would be a long, long time of waiting ticked by, the first coherent thought hit Thomas like a runaway train. It left him feeling unreal and rotten to the core. He'd held a guns before, but never actually fired one. But today he had not only fired a gun, more than once.

He had killed someone with it.