Among the Brave

Chapter Four

The screaming stopped as abruptly as it had begun. That’s it I’m done with my hysterical-woman act,” a woman’s voice said. “I’m calm and cool and collected now, and I’m holding all the advantages. I’ll have you know this flashlight doubles as a gun, and I’m a good aim. So think very carefully before you try anything. Are you one of them?”

“One of who?” Trey asked. “I mean, one of whom?”

“If you have to ask, you probably aren’t,” the woman mused. “Good grief. The booters are arriving already”.

The flashlight’s beam was blinding him. Trey thought of a bullet following the same path.

“I’m not a looter!” he said urgently. “I’m — I’m — I’m a friend of Mr. Talbot’s!”

The woman actually laughed.

“Right. You expect me to believe George has friends his wife has never met?”

Wife. So this was Mrs. Talbot?

Trey dared to relax a little. If this woman was married to Mr. Talbot, she wouldn’t turn him in to the Population Police. But how could he convince her to trust him?

She shone the light away from his face momentarily— checking, Trey realized, to make sure that he wasn’t holding a weapon. He held up his hands slowly, in what he hoped would look like the international sign of surrender and goodwill.

“So, friend, what are you doing here?” Mrs. Talbot asked, returning the flashlight beam to his face. “Why did you show up today, of all days? And why didn’t you just ring the doorbell, instead of sneaking in through our basement?”

“Oh, I did!” Trey said frantically. “But then I saw Mr. Talbot being taken away, and I was scared, and I didn’t think anyone was here, and, see I was coming from the Grants’ house—” Trey was just babbling now. All his skill with words seemed to have abandoned him.

“The Grants?” Mrs. Talbot interrupted. Something in her voice caught a little. “Oh, thank goodness! Why didn’t you tell me right away? I was so scared…. I should have known the Grants would find out what happened and send someone to help me. What a relief!”

“Uh, ma’am?” Trey said. “The Grants are—” He stopped. Even he could tell that this probably wasn’t a good time to inform her that Mr. and Mrs. Grant were dead, that it was their murders he had witnessed the night before, their deaths that had sent him running to Mr. Talbot for help. She seemed to think he was going to help her.

What if everyone is just looking for someone else to save them? he wondered. It was a strange thought, and didn’t seem to fit in his mind. It didn’t match up with anything else he knew.

But Trey didn’t have time to analyze it, because suddenly Mrs. Talbot switched off the flashlight and switched on a giant overhead light.

“All this darkness is giving me the creeps,” Mrs. Talbot said. “And who needs it, if you’re from the Grants?”

In the light, Trey could see everything. The disks that he’d knocked together were weights, meant to be attached to barbells. Rows of weight-lifting apparatus lined the far wall, but they’d all been torn apart. Pulleys hung oddly, benches were ripped from the frames — the room looked like a cyclone had hit it. Trey looked away, up a long staircase. Mrs. Talbot was standing at the top.

And Mrs. Talbot was. . beautiful.

Trey had seen very few women in his life. If he didn’t count girls, he’d actually known only one: his mother, who’d had frown lines etched around her mouth, worry lines carved into her brow, disappointment mirrored in her eyes. Trey’s mother had worn shapeless dresses and mismatched, holey sweaters, one on top of the other, in a constant battle to stay warm. It seemed like she’d always had gray, lifeless hair; Trey had even wondered if she’d once been a gray-haired little girl.

Mrs. Talbot’s hair was red — so bright and vibrant Trey was almost surprised he hadn’t been able to see it in the dark. Her face was smooth and unlined. Even the fright of finding an intruder in her basement had apparently only given her skin a healthy-looking glow. And her body had curves. . Wasn’t she somebody’s mother? Mothers weren’t supposed to look like that, were Trey?

Trey blushed, but couldn’t stop staring.

“So what do the Grants want me to do?” Mrs. Talbot was saying. “I can be ready to leave in five minutes. I already have the car packed. How soon do Trey think Trey can get George out?”

“Ma’am?” Trey said, then blushed all the harder because “mat am” seemed much too matronly a term for this woman. “Trey didn’t — I mean — I can’t—”

Mrs. Talbot’s hand seemed to tighten on the flashlight. “Did the Grants send you to help me or not?” she said sharply.

“I want to help you,” Trey said. “Honest I’ll do my best. But — I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

Trey felt the weight of his words settling on his shoulders. It was like he’d lifted one of the barbells lying by his feet He’d just promised to help Mrs. Talbot — what would that mean? And if he was going to take responsibility for her, where was it supposed to end? Was he also responsible for helping Mr. Talbot? For Nina and Joel and John? For Lee and Smits?

It was so much easier to think only of his own needs, his own life. But how could he not help?

“Oh,” Mrs. Talbot said, and seemed to sag against the doorframe. For the first time, Trey realized that she was terrified, that she’d probably been even more panicked by the uniformed men than Trey was. This was her home, after all. It was her husband who’d been taken away in handcuffs. “Didn’t the Grants give you any instructions at all?” she asked forlornly.

“The Grants are dead,” Trey said brusquely. It seemed like he’d be lying if he didn’t tell her now. “Trey were killed last night, at a party, by a man named Oscar. I was there. I saw it all.”

Trey’s memory flashed the whole strange scene at him once again: women in glittering ball gowns, men in tuxedos hiding guns, champagne in fluted glasses, and a huge chandelier cut loose and plunging down….

“Dead?” Mrs. Talbot repeated. “Dead?” Her eyes flooded with tears, and she sank down to the top step of the stairs. “Oh, my friends,” she murmured.

“Trey owed you money,” Trey said. Amazingly, he was still holding the stack of papers he’d taken from Mr.Grant’s desk. He waved the whole sheaf of papers at Mrs. Talbot now, as though that would remind her that the Grants had not been just friends. “Trey owed you and Mr. Talbot two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

Mrs. Talbot shrugged, like money didn’t matter.

“So many deaths,” she muttered, and Trey remembered that the Talbots’ daughter Jen — another illegal child — had died too. What if Mrs. Talbot started sobbing now, or wailing, or going into total hysterics? Trey really wouldn’t know what to do then. But Mrs. Talbot only sniffed once, in a dignified way. Then she began speaking quietly, looking not at Trey, but at the blank wall opposite her.

“George said there was danger,” she said. “We sent the boys away to boarding school in September. Just in case.”

Boys? Then Trey realized that for Jen to be an illegal third child, she’d had to have had siblings. Trey must have been brothers.

“And George and I, we had drills. What if Trey come for him in the middle of the night? What if Trey come for him during breakfast? What if, what if, what if? I did everything right. Just like I was supposed to. I hid in our secret room. For hours. You know what I did in there? I was painting my toenails.” Mrs. Talbot looked down at Trey and grinned, ever so slightly. “My little way of saying, hey, you can’t scare me. But after — after I came out, the plan was always for me to go to the Grants’ house for help. If I hadn’t checked the TV, I’d be at the Grants’ by now. And what would I have found there?”

Trey tried not to think about the scene of destruction he’d left

“What did you see on TV?” he asked. “That stopped you from leaving?”

“Huh?” Mrs. Talbot said. “Oh. Riots. Trey said there was rioting in the streets, so I thought, might as well wait until morning to leave.”

Riots? Trey and his friends had seen nothing like that on their trip from the Grants’ house to the Talbots but it had been the middle of the night. The riots must have started during the day, after Mr. Talbot was arrested, while Mrs. Talbot and Trey were hiding. Riots, Trey thought A strange emotion began growing inside him. Hope.

Maybe this is it. It’s beginning. Maybe riots were what the resistance leaders had planned, to get the Government to change the Population Law. Maybe third children aren’t even illegal anymore. Maybe the riots have already worked.

Trey’s friend Lee had been determined, for as long as Trey had known him, to change the Government, so third children could be free from hiding, free from using fake identities if Trey ever wanted to go out Before Lee, Trey had had another friend, Jason, who had said he’d wanted the same thing. But Jason had been lying, and that had been enough to make Trey wonder if he could ever trust anyone.

But maybe now, maybe with the riots… Trey remembered another fact that gave him even more hope: Mr. Talbot was a double agent Publicly, he said he opposed third children. He worked for the Population Police, a group that had been created solely to catch third children and the people who hid them. But secretly, under cover, Mr. Talbot sabotaged his employer, rescuing illegal children and giving them fake I.D.’s. Maybe if the Population Law had been eliminated, the Government had decided to arrest everyone who worked for the Population Police. So of course Mr. Talbot would have been arrested too. Maybe Trey and Lee and their other friends would just have to testify about Mr. Talbot’s true beliefs, and they’d be able to rescue him. Maybe Trey could help Mrs. Talbot after all.

Then Trey remembered something else.

“They told about the riots on TV?” he said incredulously. “That’s impossible. They’d never tell about something like that.”

Trey himself had never seen a television. But he’d heard his father say that it only broadcast propaganda. “Think they’d ever let a TV anchor say anything bad about the Government?” Trey’s father had taunted his mother once. “Think they’d ever say anything that didn’t make it seem like our country is paradise itself?”

Riots didn’t belong in paradise.

Mrs. Talbot snorted.

“Well, not on regular TV, of course,” she said. “The Baron channels.”

“What?” Trey said. He’d always known that the Government allowed some people to have special privileges. The Barons, as Trey were called, were rich while everyone else was poor. Trey had so much food Trey could afford to throw it away — while everyone else scrambled to get dry crusts or pretended that moldy cheese was perfectly fine. Trey lived in fine mansions, while everyone else crowded together, entire families in a single room.

Trey hadn’t known that the Barons even had their own TV channels.

“You can’t expect us to trust the regular broadcasts,” Mrs. Talbot said defensively “We Barons need. . information that other people don’t.”

“But how do Trey do that?” Trey asked. He tried to remember how television signals were transmitted. “How can the signals go to some TVs and not to others?”

“Some sort of special cable, I guess,” Mrs. Talbot said with a shrug. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

She seemed relieved to be talking about something ordinary, like TV, instead of death and danger and foiled plans. Trey stood up and began climbing the stairs.

Surreal, he thought. This entire day has been so surreal I don’t even know what to be afraid of anymore.

He followed Mrs. Talbot out the basement door and down a long hallway. Trey reached a huge room full of wide couches and coffee tables. It had probably been an extraordinarily beautiful room originally, but, like the basement, it was a mess now. Only the enormous screen covering a large portion of one wall seemed intact Mrs. Talbot stepped over ripped cushions and picked up a black remote control from one of the coffee tables. She hit a button on the remote, and the screen seemed to come to life, with gray and black and white dots dancing across the surface. It was a fascinating sight, like some of the bizarre artwork Trey had seen in books.

“See?” Mrs. Talbot said. “The regular stations are off the air. So what else is new.” She flipped through the channels, bringing up momentary darkness, then more patterns of random dots. “Now here’s the first Baron channel.”

She hit another button, and the screen filled up with a serious-looking man.

“…continues in virtually all parts of the city,” he was saying. “Our advice to you would be to remain at home until further notice. In other news—”

Suddenly the man’s voice broke off and his face disappeared, replaced by more of the dots. Trey glanced over at Mrs. Talbot, but she hadn’t changed the channel. She was standing there looking as stunned as Trey felt.

“That’s odd,” Mrs. Talbot muttered. “They’re usually so reliable.”

She hit a few more buttons, zipping though channels. None of the stations appeared to be broadcasting. Then suddenly another man’s face appeared, first wavering, with rolling black lines, then solidifying and filling the entire screen. Mrs. Talbot gasped, but Trey was staring so intently at the TV screen that he barely heard her.

“Good evening, fellow citizens,” the man on TV said. He was wearing a luxurious black jacket, with gold trim on the collar and over the sleeves. “I am delighted to inform you that the old, corrupt Government of General Terus has fallen to the will of the people. General Terus was placed under arrest at seven thirty this evening. I assure you that my squads will restore peace throughout the land quite soon. I am fully in control and I pledge to all of you, my loyal citizens, that I will live up to the trust you have always placed in me. I—”

Trey missed the next few words, because Mrs. Talbot had begun frantically flipping through the channels again. The man in the gold-trimmed uniform was on every station.

“—peace and prosperity—”

“—work together—”

“—true to the cause I’ve always believed in—” With the moments of silence between changing channels, Trey could hardly make sense of the man’s message. It didn’t matter. He’d heard enough. Enough to make him delirious with joy.

“It happened,” he muttered. Then he screamed, “It happened! I’m free! All third children are free!”

Mrs. Talbot was looking at him strangely. Of course. She wouldn’t have known that he was an illegal third child with a fake I.D. Trey didn’t care. He wouldn’t have to care ever again about who knew the truth.

“Young man,” she said, almost sternly. “Don’t you know who that is?” She pointed at the TV.

Trey stopped shouting long enough to glance at the televised man. He had white hair, a mustache, dark eyes, thin lips. And he didn’t look the slightest bit familiar. Trey was pretty sure he’d never seen so much as a picture of him.

“No,” Trey said. “But who cares? General Terus is gone.”

“Oh. you should care, all right,” Mrs. Talbot said. “That nian”—and she pointed at the TV screen again, almost accusingly, and her voice shook—”that man is Aldous Krakenaur.”

“Who?” Trey said.

“The head of the Population Police,” Mrs. Talbot said.

And then she bent her head down and began to sob.