Fif15teen Read online

  Chapter 5

  Law 43

  Only Guardians May Tend the Corn

  He hit the ground hard, coughing and gasping. Every inch of his body ached as if muscle and bone had been compressed into a mere inch of matter and then stretched out again like human taffy. He rolled over, startled to find a large crow squawking angrily in his face. It was as if the bird was offended that there was a boy in its cornfield. “Yaa!” Akeem shouted, waving his sore arms in an attempt to shoo the bird away. This angered the bird more, and it flapped around his head, slapping him with ink-black wings before flying away. He watched it sail over the towering corn and out of sight. Where am I? Where’s Quinn and Aly?

  “Quinn?” he croaked.

  “Akeem,” came a weak voice from somewhere to his right. He ran in that direction, ignoring his sore limbs and smashing through the cornfield like a lumbering giant.

  “Where!” he shouted again. He jumped when a hand grabbed his ankle. He dropped to the dirt, so relieved to see her that a lump formed in his throat. She was lying flat on her back with her legs stretched into the corn. “Aly?” he asked.

  “Still in the basement,” she said.

  “Where are we?” he asked, but Quinn only shrugged. “I told you we should have given that cube back,” he grumbled. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “I can’t,” she said weakly, and for the first time he noticed that her leg from the knee down was stuck in a hole. “It’s some kind of trap. I think there’s another one right over there. And watch out for spikes—I almost killed myself on one.”

  “The rabbits around here must have ticked this farmer off.”

  “These traps aren’t meant for rabbits. They’re booby traps; they’re meant for people. For us.”

  “Why would anyone booby trap a cornfield?” Akeem asked, but Quinn had no answer.

  “Can you get my leg out? It kills.” She moaned. Akeem took a closer look. Her foot was wedged awkwardly between two planks of wood. Each plank was riddled with sharpened nails, barbed wire, and pieces of glass. There was even a wickedly sharpened number two pencil, which had ripped through the leather of her boot and pierced her calf. Quinn had fallen into some sort of spring trap.

  “Oh God!” Akeem snatched her cell phone from the front pocket of her shorts and slid it open. “No service.” He examined the trap again, trying to figure out the best way to free her leg. Her leather boot seemed to have taken the brunt of the abuse. It was mangled and ripped, and the skin that showed through was scratched and in some places gouged. There was more blood than he had ever seen in his life. “I think I can push the boards back down to get the spikes out of your leg, but it’s gonna hurt. That pencil looks pretty deep too,” he said.

  “There’s a pencil in my leg…Are you kidding me?” Quinn propped herself up on her elbows to get a better look.

  “Among other things,” Akeem mumbled.

  “It looks like a kid made that. I’d be impressed if I wasn’t in so much pain.” She flopped back down. Akeem smiled at her, amazed that she could joke at a time like this.

  “The pencil is in the deepest. I can’t pull it out at this angle, and if I move the boards, it might go deeper.

  “Man, it hurts,” Quinn whimpered.

  “I’ll have to break it. We can pull the other end out of your leg once it’s free.”

  “Do what you gotta do, just get me out,” she grumbled. Akeem searched through his backpack for something that could help.

  “Yes!” He had found his Swiss Army knife.

  “I think you’re the only kid in the world that actually owns a Swiss Army knife,” she teased, sweat beading her forehead.

  “Yeah, I know. It was my dad’s.” To his embarrassment, his voice cracked a little. It was the first time he had ever mentioned his father. Quinn opened her mouth and then closed it, unsure of what to say. He pulled out the small saw blade. “This is gonna hurt,” he said, changing the subject. She gripped his hand tightly and looked at him in a way that caused his heart to slow down and speed up at the same time. He wiped the sweat gently from her forehead with his thumb.

  “Just do it, I want out of here.” She huffed then grunted as she sat all the way up so she could watch. Akeem squeezed his hand into the trap. As soon as the tiny saw touched the pencil, Quinn gasped in pain. His hand began to shake.

  “Hold still!” he demanded.

  She smirked, nodding toward his shaky hands. “You hold still.”

  “Okay, here we go.” He steadied her leg with one hand and began to saw with the other. Quinn’s back arched, and she dug her fingers into the dirt. She closed her eyes and ground her teeth together, refusing to scream. Suddenly the pencil broke in half with a snap and she fell back with a gasp. He pushed down on the tips of the two boards until there was a click. Finally he pulled her leg free. Quinn yanked the broken pencil out of her leg with a savage holler that startled several crows into flight. They flew away, cawing in protest. She fell back, gasping for breath. Akeem cut the mangled part of her boot from her leg. She now had one knee-high boot and one ankle-length boot.

  “By next week, everyone will be wearing their boots like this,” Akeem joked, but all Quinn could do was moan in response. He cleaned off the wound with water from one of the bottles in his bag then he took a clean sock out of his backpack, cut it as best he could into a makeshift tourniquet, and tied it tightly around the wound. He kissed the pocket knife and sent a silent prayer of thanks to his father before slipping it back in his backpack. When he was done, he filled the trap with dirt and then pulled her into his arms and rocked her just as he had rocked Aly so many times before. Tears streamed down her face, and he carefully wiped away each one that fell. It was his first time seeing her cry, and it hurt him in a way he could never explain.