He grabs a machine gun from one of his storks and fires it into the air until everyone is looking his way.
“My name is Mason Michael Starkey!” he announces in his loudest, most commanding voice, “and I’ve just saved you from unwinding!”
Cheers all around, as it should be. He orders them to separate into two groups. Storks to his left, the rest to his right. They are reluctant at first, but his storks wave their weapons and make the order stick. The kids divide themselves. There seem to be about a hundred storks and three hundred other kids. No tithes, thankfully. This is a titheless camp. Starkey addresses the nonstorks first, gesturing to the main entrance.
“The gate is wide open. Your path to freedom is there. I suggest you take it.”
For a moment they linger, not trusting. Then a few turn and head toward the gate, then a few more, and in an instant it becomes a mass exodus. Starkey watches them go. Then he turns to the storks who remain.
“To you I give a choice,” he tells them. “You can run off with the others, or you can become part of something larger than yourselves. All your life you’ve been treated like second-class citizens and then handed the ultimate insult. You were sent here.” He gestures wide. “We are all storks here, condemned to be unwound—but we’ve taken back our lives, and we’re taking our revenge. So I ask you—do you want revenge?” He waits and receives a few guarded responses, so he raises his voice. “I said, do you want revenge?”
Now primed, the answer comes in a single chorus blast. “Yes!”
“Then welcome,” Starkey says, “to the Stork Brigade!”
32 • Hayden
Shortly before the liberation, Hayden takes a shower—which he now does almost obsessively three times a day, trying to wash off the filth of his situation. He knows no amount of scrubbing can do it, but it feels good all the same. The other Unwinds there hate him as much as they hate their jailers because they believe he’s one of them. So smooth was Camp Director Menard in creating the spin—in making everyone there believe that Hayden had been turned and was now working for the Juvenile Authority. He would rather die, of course, than ever do anything to help the Juvenile Authority, but it’s all about perception. People believe what they think they see. No, he’ll never wash away Menard’s lies, but they can’t stop him from trying.
When he steps out of his shower today, however, he discovers that his world has completely changed.
He immediately hears the gunfire—round after round of staccato, arrhythmic blasts that seem to be coming from multiple directions. Although his lap-of-luxury suite has a veranda, he’s not allowed on it, so it’s locked. Still, he can see what’s going on. The harvest camp is under attack by a team of kids with weapons—and each time a guard falls, a new weapon is added to their arsenal. Unwinds from the camp have joined with them, turning this into a full-scale revolt—and Hayden allows himself a glimmer of hope that perhaps the date set for his unwinding might be wrong after all.
A bullet catches the corner of the sliding glass veranda door, but leaves little more than a ding. It’s bulletproof glass. Apparently the builders decided that anyone who would be invited to the visitor’s suite of a harvest camp might be the kind of person likely to get shot at. His only way out is the door to the suite, but it’s locked from the outside.
The sound of gunfire diminishes, until it’s gone entirely—and the sight of kids still running outside tells Hayden that the invading force was victorious.
He pounds on his door over and over again, screaming at the top of his lungs, until someone comes.
It’s a kid at the door, and he looks familiar. Hayden quickly recognizes him as a message runner from the Graveyard.
“Hayden?” the kids says. “No way!”
• • •
He is led by three fugitives he knew from the airplane graveyard out into the common area, where the artificial turf swelters in the midday sun. There are bodies strewn everywhere. Some are tranq’d; others clearly dead. Most are kids. A few are guards. To the left, the harvest camp workers are being bound and gagged. To the right, there are vast numbers of kids racing out the camp’s gate, claiming their freedom. But not everyone is leaving.
The rest are being addressed by someone wearing the pastel-gray coverall uniform of an Unwind transport worker.
Hayden stops short when he realizes who it is.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was holding out hope that it was Connor come to rescue them. Now he wonders if it’s too late to go back to his guest suite.
“Hey,” the kid who unlocked his door shouts. “Look who we found!”
When Starkey lays eyes on Hayden, there’s a moment of fear in Starkey’s eyes, which is quickly engulfed by steel. He smiles a little too broadly. “What was it you always said at the Graveyard, Hayden? ‘Hello. I’ll be your rescuer today.’ ”
“He’s one of them!” someone shouts before Hayden can come up with a clever response. “He’s been working for the Juvies! They even let him pick who gets unwound!”
“Oh, is that the latest news? You know you can’t trust a thing the tabloids say. Next I’ll be giving birth to alien triplets.”
Bam is there—she looks at Hayden, somewhat amused. “So the Juvenile Authority made you their bitch.”
“Nice to see you too, Bam.”
Shouts of “Leave him,” and “Tranq him,” and even “Kill him,” spread through the crowd of Cold Springs Unwinds, but the kids who knew him rise to his defense enough to spread at least a few seeds of doubt. The crowd looks to Starkey for a decision, but he doesn’t seem ready to make one. He’s spared, though, because three strong storks approach with the struggling camp director.
The crowd parts, and someone has the bright idea to spit on Menard as he passes, and pretty soon everyone’s doing it. Hayden might have done it if he had thought of it first, but now it’s just conformism.
“So this must be the guy in charge,” Starkey says. “Get on your knees.”
When Menard doesn’t obey, the three kids manhandling him push him down.
“You have been found guilty of crimes against humanity,” Starkey says.
“Guilty?” wails Menard desperately. “I’ve had no trial! Where’s my trial?”
Starkey looks up at the mob. “How many of you think he’s guilty?”
Just about every hand goes up, and as much as Hayden hates Menard, he has a bad feeling about where this is going. Sure enough, Starkey pulls out a pistol. “There’s twelve in a jury, and that’s definitely more than twelve people,” Starkey tells Menard. “Consider yourself convicted.”
Then Starkey does something Hayden was not expecting. He hands the gun to Hayden.
“Execute him.”
Hayden begins to stammer, staring at the gun. “Starkey, uh—this isn’t—”
“If you’re not a traitor, then prove it by putting a bullet in his head.”
“That won’t prove anything.”
Then Menard doubles over and begins to pray. A man who kills kids for a living praying for deliverance. It’s enough to make Hayden aim at Menard’s hypocritical skull. He holds it there for a good ten seconds, but he can’t pull the trigger.
“I won’t,” Hayden says. “Not like this.”
“Fine.” Starkey takes back the gun, then points to a random kid in the crowd, who looks to be no older than fourteen. The kid steps forward, and Starkey puts the gun in the kid’s hand. “Show this coward what it means to be courageous. Carry out the execution.”
The kid is clearly terrified, but all eyes are on him. He’s been put to the test and knows he must not fail. So he grimaces. He squints. He puts the muzzle of the gun to the back of Menard’s head and looks away. Then he pulls the trigger.