Dead Zone Read Free

loved the individuality of them in a sea of identical soldiers. She loved unpinning her long brown hair at night and putting on her glasses and feeling like she was a different person than who she’d been back home. But right now the lenses were spotted with drops of muddy water, and she had to keep pushing them up on her nose.
    The ditch was coming to an end, and the lambdas were climbing out onto the shore, then continuing in a line into the trees. Aubrey followed, grunting as she scrambled up.
    Everyone’s ACUs were brown and soaked from the chest down, and their tan boots were thick with mud. But they jogged, and Aubrey jogged with them—the half-defeated jog of soldiers who were too tired to disobey. At least she didn’t have to hold her rifle up anymore, and the muscles in her arms felt light when she let them down.
    Someone in front of her groaned, and Aubrey saw a wooden wall ahead. She had climbed one of these walls every single day for the last three weeks. She knew how to go at it, how to sling her weight over the top, even how to get a grip when the boards were wet—she’d done it in rain more than once.
    But not today. She couldn’t face it today.
    She disappeared and worked her way through the crowd to the other side. There was no trainer here watching. And even if there was, he wouldn’t notice her reappear—he’d just realize she was there, and his mind would assume that she had climbed.
    “Jack, forgive me,” she said with a halfhearted smile.
    She pushed her glasses up on her nose and reappeared in front of the wall as another lambda—Tabitha—landed next to her. Tabitha wasn’t Aubrey’s favorite person in the camp, but they had cots next to each other, so they had spent their fair share of time talking.
    “When is this going to end?” Tabitha said with a grimace.
    “Not soon enough.”
    As they jogged down the trail, Aubrey wondered again where Jack was. A few of the lambdas had been sent to specialized training, and even though she’d spent a few nights invisible, trying to find him in the dark, she hadn’t discovered anything more than his locked barracks. She talked to him incessantly, assuming he had to be listening at least some of the time, but she hadn’t seen him face-to-face in at least a week. She wondered if he’d graduate early, or get called away on a mission and not graduate at all.
    But that didn’t make sense. They were a perfect pair. Their powers complimented each other’s. The army had to keep the two of them together.
    “I don’t know where you are, Jack,” she said. “But stick around. I don’t want to be assigned somewhere without you. I’m serious. I want you with me.”
    The forest opened up into the base’s shooting range, and Aubrey breathed a sigh of relief. She could shoot. She could outshoot half the trainers. Even without her glasses.
    “Okay, team,” the trainer shouted. “Take a position.”
    Aubrey moved into one of the plywood frames that she was supposed to treat like cover—hiding behind the wall, peeking out only to take her shots. Targets would appear downrange at intervals between fifty and three hundred yards. Aubrey took a deep breath and raised her gun. She was still getting used to the M16A4. It was different from the guns she’d fired at home, and even different from the standard-issue rifles of the army—it was used more for special ops.
    A target—a plastic, human-shaped silhouette, painted with the outline of a man—flipped up at one hundred fifty yards. Through the scope she could see a couple dozen holes from previous bullet impacts. She let out her breath slowly, and squeezed the trigger. The board disappeared from sight.
    She’d been shooting deer every year since she was eight. Jack’s family had always invited her on their hunts. Venison had been an important part of her diet, since her dad never seemed to hold on to a job for more than a few days at a time. She’d taken to rabbit and pheasant hunting,