The Prey Read Online Free PDF Page B

nonexistent trails until they reach something resembling an actual road.
    It’s the first time they’ve ever been in a vehicle. Well, a moving vehicle. They’ve slept in plenty of abandoned ones during their years on the run, but this one is actually in motion. Nothing could prepare them for the sheer speed of it.
    The sun sets and an eerie calm settles over the landscape. The Humvee’s twin headlights cut two jagged holes in the darkness.
    Hope wonders where they’re being taken. Every so often, the heavyset man swivels his thick head andpeers back from the passenger seat. He says nothing.
    In the distance, Hope catches a fleeting glimpse of structures. Listing log cabins, tar-paper shacks, old wooden buildings with peeling paint. All surrounded by a ten-foot-high fence, topped with an unending coil of razor wire. Anchoring the four corners are guard towers with Brown Shirts poised behind machine guns.
    Hope’s mouth goes dry. After sixteen years, ten of them on the run, she and her sister are about to be imprisoned.
    â€œCamp Freedom,” the obese man says cheerfully. “Your new home.”
    The camp’s colossal gates shriek open and the vehicle rolls to a stop. A soldier pulls open the passenger door. There are Brown Shirts everywhere, each wearing the Republic’s distinctive dark badge with three inverted triangles. But it’s the others who draw Hope’s attention.
    Girls. Scores of them. All wearing the same coarse, gray dresses that hang limply below their knees. Faded, scuffed boots adorn their feet. Based on their expressions, they seem to regard Hope and Faith as a couple of feral cats.
    A tall, stooped man with a tidy mustache and a balding pate emerges from a cinder block building.
    â€œI see you’ve met Dr. Gallingham,” he says. “I’m Colonel Thorason.” He pauses briefly, as if expecting the girls to bow or otherwise show how impressed theyare to meet the camp overseer. “Life here is very simple: you abide by the rules or face the consequences. Is that clear?”
    Hope and Faith nod.
    â€œIn that case—” He interrupts himself when he spies a woman walking their way. She is tall, with straight blond hair and enormously round cheekbones. An ankle-length coat is draped atop her shoulders. Thorason takes a deferential step backward as she approaches.
    â€œWhich one threw the spear?” she asks. Her tone is as sharp as the razor wire atop the fence.
    â€œI did,” Hope says.
    Hope waits for a reaction. A slap. A punch from a soldier. Something to teach her a lesson. Instead, the woman reaches forward and fondles Hope’s hair, letting the silky strands run between her fingers.
    â€œSuch pretty hair,” the woman murmurs. “It’s obvious you take good care of it.” The woman forces a brittle smile and begins to walk away.
    â€œDo what you need to do,” she says over her shoulder to Colonel Thorason. “But that one”—pointing her finger in Hope’s direction—“gets shaved.”
    Hope and Faith are taken to a bathhouse, where they’re stripped and showered with a white powder.
    â€œDelousing,” the female guard explains in a flatmonotone. She has a square block of a face that seems incapable of smiling. She throws two dresses at them: ill-fitting gray things. A pair of dirty combat boots finishes the ensemble. When the guard turns her back, Hope retrieves her father’s locket from her pants pocket and stuffs it in her boot. That and the scrap of paper.
    The woman turns back around, brandishing a large pair of scissors, the blades nicked with rust.
    â€œDon’t move,” she orders, “unless you want this through your eye.”
    She snips the scissors twice, then seizes Hope’s hair. Watching her long strands of hair ribbon to the ground, it’s all Hope can do not to cry.
    Live today, tears tomorrow.
    When the woman finishes, she grabs a