We hadn’t passed through any gates or enclosures of any kind, nothing to indicate that we’d entered their camp at all. As far as I was concerned, we were still in the middle of the desert.
“Busy,” a boy I couldn’t see answered, and a round of laughter rumbled through the group. I wasn’t sure why, but for whatever reason, we were the butt of some joke, like our very presence was somehow amusing.
“Not too busy for us,” Simon said. “Make sure Griffin gets word that Simon and Thom are here.”
The girl pushing Simon along gave our two camp leaders the once-over. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to be one of the boys with her hair cropped close like that, or if she just liked the way it looked. Her scalp was visible, but even that wasn’t enough to make her pass as a guy, not with such delicate features and thick, black lashes. Somehow, she managed to make a shaved head look good. “I knew I recognized you,” she spat, playing up her whole macho routine. “How you even gonna show your face here?” She looked around at the others—her cohorts. “Dude used to be one of us. But he couldn’t cut it here, so he had to start his own camp,” she explained before turning back to Simon. “These your pussy soldiers, leader boy? You thought you could take us in our own house?” She snorted, and so did the rest of them, laughing at us again. “Joke’s on you, isn’t it?”
“You come up with that theory all on your own?” Simon popped off. “You really think we came here to attack you?” He turned to Thom. “Nah. That can’t be right. Griffin wouldn’t let ’em think on their own.” His skeptical gaze turned back to the girl. “That’d be dangerous. You don’t wanna hurt that pretty little head of yours, do you, darlin’?” He winked at her then, which was definitely a mistake.
Her dark blue eyes flashed and she came at him. “I’m not your darlin’, you piece of . . . ,” she grunted as she rammed the butt of her rifle into his face.
Simon didn’t even try to defend himself. I flinched as I heard that sound—which wasn’t so much the sound of bone crunching as it was the surreal sound of Simon’s nose as it dislocated when the base of her weapon smashed into it from the side.
He crumpled to the ground in front of her, falling on his hands and knees, while she stood poised above him, panting and looking satisfied with herself. Blood pooled into the sand beneath him.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away as I waited for one of them to move first. Either for Simon to retaliate, or for her to decide she hadn’t satisfied her bloodlust just yet.
But they both stayed where they were. Eventually, Simon spat a mouthful of his own blood into the dirt. “The thing you haven’t figured out yet is, Griffin’s truth is twisted. The Returned should be working together, not turning on one another.” His words came out mumbled, but we could understand him all the same.
Except no one cared what Simon had to say, and he was hauled to his feet once more, his face a bloodied and mangled mess.
“Move it!” the boy next to me said, pushing me in case I got the wrong idea and thought I had something to say too.
“What is this place?” I pressed my hand against the dirt-smeared window and looked outside.
This camp was nothing at all like sleepy Silent Creek. This was more like boot camp, with tents everywhere. Only these weren’t the fun camping kind you slept in during summer excursions with your family. These were the heavy canvas tents of war. The ones with beat-up Humvees, or maybe even tanks, parked out front.
There were obstacle courses, too. Tall rope walls, and orange cones set up at regular intervals, and rows of tackle dummies—similar to the ones the football players used at my high school during practice. And even at this hour, several people were running in formation, their paces perfectly timed, military-style.
We were so not in Kansas anymore.
Thom’s voice came from behind me as I stared out to the field beyond, watching the predawn drills. “To the outside world, it’s one of those camps for troubled teens. The kind of place parents spend a small fortune on when they think their kids are doing drugs or being delinquents. Utah has a ton of those places since the laws are more lenient here for that kind of thing.”
I moved out of Jett’s way when he nudged me aside so he could pry yet another faceplate off one of the outlets, this time the one beneath the window where I’d been standing. He was on a mission to find some way to tap into their communications system. So far he’d pulled apart every outlet, wall plate, and even the overhead lights, trying to find the right combination of wires he might use to get a message out to the Silent Creekers so we could let them know we might be in over our heads here.
“It makes it easy to hide a bunch of teens in the desert,” Thom went on. “Plus, no one ever questions why a group of minors always has cash for supplies when they do have to go into town.”
“What about the guns?” I asked. “No one questions that either?”
Simon stopped pacing the creaky floorboards long enough to answer. “The kind of people they buy weapons from don’t care where they get their money.”
Good point.
“How much longer do you think they’ll hold us here?” All of us except Willow had been confined to a room with two army-style cots, a sink, and a toilet that sat smack between the two cots with absolutely nothing to shield it from view. As in, zero privacy.
It was suspiciously like being in jail, minus the bars and the supersweet orange jumpsuits. No one would tell us where Willow had been taken, and we were in no position to lodge a complaint.