Chapter 5 Heartless
Heartless
The day you stop feeling remorse over taking life is the day you no longer have a heart.
— CHRISTOPHER REEVES, THE FATHER OF SOPHIA REEVES
Tires shriek as the Humvees skid to a stop. Hunters pour from their innards, dressed in black fatigues, like a swarm of spiders.
“You!” one shouts. “Stop!”
Fear takes me in a vise grip. My thoughts scatter like the broken shards of an icicle as it crashes to the ground. We’d only been escorting these people to a safer area! We weren’t doing anything wrong.
“Take the kids!” yells my squad mate, Rodrigo.
“You, there!” the Hunter says again. “On your knees!”
Tekqua and I usher the children toward another squad mate, Daniela.
“Go!” Tekqua hisses to her.
Nodding, Daniela lifts the smallest child and takes off at a run, urging the kids and their mothers to follow.
“Get behind us,” a sergeant commands as his combat squad forms a barricade in front of us.
“What do we do?” I whisper.
“If we run, they’ll chase,” Rodrigo says.
“If we don’t run, we’re theirs,” I reply. My hand brushes the gun holstered at my hip, the cold metal as foreign and unpleasant as the hate in those Hunters’ eyes.
Their leader bears down on us, face hidden by his combat helmet. “On your knees, I said!”
My heartbeat clogs my throat.
“On my mark, you run,” says our sergeant. “Zigzag through the neighborhood. Force them to split up.”
“Lower your weapons and get on your knees!” the Hunter shouts.
A shot blasts through the sky.
I choke on a startled gasp. Was that a gun? Was it ours or theirs? Is anyone dead?
My ears ring.
“Now!” Sergeant yells. “Run!”
Tekqua grabs my wrist and yanks. I trip in my effort to keep up. The others fan out, but Tekqua and I stay together.
More gunshots pop behind me. Beside my head, a burst of disturbed air has me ducking. “Shit! Did you see that?” Just a few inches to the left…
“Come on,” Tekqua says, dragging me into the neighborhood.
The large front yards in this older area of town—now abandoned to the war—bloom with stately oaks and budding poplars, fantastic for hiding. Parked cars and hedges provide cover as we dart for safety.
Footsteps pound behind us, and a smattering of gunfire rents the once placid air.
Six houses down, Tekqua’s hand curls around the handle of an SUV. It speaks to the previous wealth of this area that the owner hadn’t bothered to lock it. The door wedges open, providing us cover so I can catch my breath.
Shouts of Go right! and Behind you! play a harmony to the gunfire.
Firearm in hand, Tekqua creeps into the SUV’s backseat, her gaze on a pair of Hunters jogging our way. She raises her pistol.
If it had been me, I would have missed.
Tekqua’s bullet lodges in one man’s neck. The Hunter’s partner bellows, his head whipping toward us. Arm raised, his bullets dart toward us like lightning. The windows of the SUV shatter, little bits of Plexiglass pelting me and catching in my hair.
Tekqua scrambles out of the car and grabs my elbow.
“Come on! Keep your gun up.”
I yank it from its holster, trying to recall how to hold it, how to fire, but my brain can’t remember—probably since the breath in my lungs is composed singularly of fear instead of oxygen.
I follow Tekqua like a lifeline.
Ducking low, we dart through grass and flowerbeds, weaving between trees and picket fences.
“Get out here!” the Hunter behind us screams.
Endless streams of bullets chink against the metal of cars or burrow into wood as we run. How many guns does he have? He has to run out of ammo eventually. We’ve been set upon by a predator, and this guy isn’t stopping until we’re dead.
“What do we do?” I whisper as we pause behind a dried-up cement fountain.
She looks up the street. It curves to the south. “We have to lose him.”
“I don’t think we can outrun him.”
We edge our way to the next driveway and duck behind a diesel truck. A bullet ricochets off its roof.
Tekqua peeks around the truck bed.
“There she is!” the man calls, and she pulls back quickly.
“Fuck! There’s two of them now.”
I sneak to the other end of the truck and inch my way toward the front bumper. A Hunter stands alone beside a tree, catcalling Tekqua.
With a thunderous boom, a hole tears through the Hunter’s chest from behind. He slumps to the ground, wheezing and clutching at the wound.
Who the hell did that?
A thump draws my attention back to Tekqua.
She’s pinned to the truck by another Hunter, a gun pressed to her temple.
“You dare kill my man, bitch?”
All thoughts flee my brain, and I react on instinct alone. I stand from my crouched position, raising my pistol.
Click. Click. Boom.
The Hunter sinks to the ground, lifeless.
And something wrenches hard inside my chest.
I just killed a man. I’ve never killed anyone before.
Shaking, Tekqua stares down at the dead man. “Holy shit.”
Two of our men run past. “Come on!” one shouts. “They’re backing off now. We’ve got to get out of here.”
Tekqua takes my hand once more, and we sprint the half mile to the safe house. She drags me to the downstairs bathroom, where I collapse onto the edge of the tub.
She leans over the sink. “Shit just got real.”
I stare ahead, seeing only that man’s profile in my mind’s eye. “I killed him.”
“You saved my life.”
I glare at my hands. Murderer’s hands.
Tekqua bends over to take a deep breath, dropping her forehead to the sink’s edge. “We’re soldiers now.”
Yeah. Soldiers on the front line, afraid and unprepared, hoping those taking aim at us would miss.
We allow ourselves five minutes of panic time before rejoining the others to help organize the families.
Mahmoud’s group has already arrived with their charges, and they’re dividing up rooms in this large house.
Rodrigo is last to arrive, speckles of blood marring his face like some morbid Jackson Pollock painting.
“We lost three men,” is all he says before disappearing into the bathroom.
A woman from one of the houses we’d vacated rushes forward, a frantic gleam in her eye. “Jeremy? Did Jeremy make it back?”
One of the combat soldiers takes her aside.
In seconds, her wail fills the home.
It’s like the fine edge of glass, that howl—so sharp I don’t realize I’m bleeding until much, much later. Her agony oozes into my soul and haunts my thoughts. I’m not even sure how I make it back to headquarters, but somehow, I’m sitting on my bed, Dad perched beside me.
I won’t look at him.
I can’t look at him.
I killed someone.
“How was your first mission?” he asks.
I shrug. “How was yours?”
“Successful,” he says. Nothing further.
I stay quiet for a time, contemplating that.
He strokes my hair. “Is there anything you’d like to talk about?”
“No,” I say.
“Alright. Then just listen.”
I shift on the bed so I can see his face.
“Sometimes we reach a point in our lives where we’re faced with a choice between two terrible options. Neither choice is good. Today, you chose between taking a life or letting a life be taken. When you make a choice like that, it changes you, Sophia.”
I say nothing. Tears swell in my throat.
“Remorse is a symptom of a healthy mind,” he says.
“It feels awful,” I choke out, unable to hold back the sobs.
“Yes, but it’s proof that you understand your decisions are not just black or white. There is subtext and nuance in every choice we make. When you decided to kill that man, you saved an innocent life.”
“Or maybe he could have gone on to solve world hunger.” My tears soak the pillow beneath me, but he continues to stroke my hair, the same way he had when I was still little, and my tears spilled over innocuous things like bad grades or mean girls.
“Exactly,” he says. “It’s healthy to have remorse. It keeps you human. The day you stop feeling remorse over taking life is the day you no longer have a heart.”
I woke from the dream gently, indulging in the deep hum of my father’s voice.
The memory of his words, however, was what stuck in my thoughts like a piece of gristle between my teeth.
The pitiless indifference in Lucas Scott’s countenance as he killed his own men stole over my senses.
I’d suffered such guilt over killing someone to save Tekqua’s life, but Lucas had been remorseless.
Apathetic. Their lives mattered so little to him, he couldn’t even be bothered to crease his brow.
The memory made me shiver, and I curled into myself, refusing to open my eyes. He’d killed, yes, but he’d also saved me, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about it or what it meant. Still, I’d have to meet him again and again, fully aware of what he was.
Because if my father was to be believed, Lucas’s detachment proved he wasn’t just cold-blooded.
He was heartless.