Requiem

Page 29

But in the afternoon, we hear shouting in the distance. Tack holds up a hand and gestures for silence. We all freeze, and then, when Tack motions, disperse into the woods. Julian has adjusted to the Wilds well, and to our need for camouflage. One second he is standing next to me; the next he has melted behind a small group of trees. The others vanish just as quickly.
I duck behind an old concrete wall, which appears to have been dropped randomly from above. I wonder what kind of structure it used to belong to; and suddenly, I have a memory of the story Julian told me when we were imprisoned together, of a girl named Dorothy whose house spirals up into the air on the powerful surges of a tornado, and who ends up in a magical land.
As the sound of shouting gets louder and the noise of clanking weaponry and heavy boot steps swells to a pounding rhythm, I find myself fantasizing that we, too, will be whisked away—all of us, all the Invalids, the people pushed and elbowed out of normal society—will vanish on a puff of air, and wake up and find ourselves somewhere different.
But this is not a fairy tale. This is April in the Wilds, and black mud seeping up around my damp sneakers; and clouds of hovering gnats; and held breath and waiting.
The troops are several hundred feet away from us, down a gently sloping embankment and across a trickling stream. From our elevated position, we can easily see the long line of soldiers as it comes into view, a blur of uniforms weaving in and out of trees. The shifting diamond pattern of leaves merges perfectly with the shifting, blurry mass of men and women, suited up in camouflage, hauling machine guns and tear gas. It seems there is no end to them.
Finally the flow of soldiers trickles away, and by silent understanding we all regroup and begin walking again. The silence is electric and uneasy. I try not to think about those people at the camp, cupped in a bowl of land, trapped. An old expression comes back to me—like shooting fish in a barrel—and I feel a wild and inappropriate desire to laugh. That’s what they are, all those Invalids: wild-eyed, pale-bellied fishes, rolling up toward the sun, as good as dead.
We make it to the safe house in slightly more than twelve hours. The sun has made a complete revolution and is now sinking down over the trees, breaking up into watery streaks of yellow and orange. It reminds me of the poached eggs my mother used to make me when I was sick as a small child, how the yolk would seep across the plate, a vivid and startling gold, and I feel a sharp stab of homesickness. I’m not even sure whether I’m missing my mother, or simply the old routine of my life: a life of school and playdates and rules that kept me safe; boundaries and borders; bath time and curfews. A simple life.
The safe house is marked by a small wooden over-structure, no larger than an outhouse latrine, fitted with a clumsily constructed door. The whole thing must have been assembled from scraps after the blitz. When Tack heaves open the door on its rusted hinges—these, too, twisted and bent—we can just make out a few steps tunneling down into a dark hole.
“Wait.” Raven kneels, fumbling in one of the packs she took from Pippa, and produces a flashlight. “I’ll go first.”
The air is thick with must and something else—a sour-sweet smell I can’t identify. We follow Raven down the steeply pitched stairs. She aims the flashlight around a room that is surprisingly spacious and clean: shelves, a few rickety tables, a kerosene stove. Beyond the stove is another darkened doorway, leading to additional rooms. I feel a flicker of warmth in my chest. It reminds me of the homestead near Rochester.
“There should be lanterns around here somewhere.” Raven advances several paces into the room. The light zigzags across the clean-swept concrete floor, and I see a small pair of blinking eyes, a flash of gray fur. Mice.
Raven finds a pile of dusty battery-operated lanterns in the corner. It takes three lanterns to beat away all the shadows in the room. Normally Raven would insist on conserving energy, but I think she feels—as we all feel—that tonight we need as much light as we can. Otherwise, images of the camp will come pressing back, carried on silken shadow fingers: all those people, trapped, helpless. We must focus instead on this bright, small, underground room, and its illuminated corners and wooden shelves.
“Do you smell that?” Tack says to Bram. He picks up one of the lanterns and carries it into the next room. “Bingo!” he shouts.
Raven is already rifling through the pack, removing supplies. Coral has found large metal jugs full of water stored on one of the lower shelves, and has crouched down, swigging gratefully. But the rest of us follow Tack into the second room.
Hunter says, “What is it?”
Tack is standing, holding the lantern up to reveal a wall crisscrossed with a diamond-lattice of wooden shelves. “Old wine cellar,” he says. “I thought I smelled the booze.” Two bottles of wine, and one bottle of whiskey, remain. Immediately, Tack uncaps the whiskey and takes a swig, before offering it to Julian, who accepts after only a split-second hesitation. I start to protest—I’m sure he’s never had a drink before, would practically swear to it—but before I can speak he has taken a long sip and, miraculously, managed to swallow without gagging.
Tack breaks into one of his rare smiles and claps Julian on the shoulder. “You’re all right, Julian,” he says.
Julian wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “That wasn’t bad,” he says, gasping a little, and Tack and Hunter laugh. Alex takes the bottle from Julian wordlessly and swigs.
All the exhaustion of the past few days hits me at once. Beyond Tack, across the room from the lattice-shelves, are several narrow cots, and I practically stagger to the one closest to me.
“I think . . .” I start to say as I lie down, curling my knees to my chest. There are no blankets and no pillow on the cot, but still I feel as though I’m sinking into something heavenly: a cloud, a feather. No. I am the feather. I am drifting away. I’m going to sleep for a bit, I mean to finish, but I don’t get the words out before, already, I am.
I wake up gasping in total darkness. For a moment I panic, thinking I’m back in the underground cell with Julian. I sit up, heart slamming against my ribs, and only when I hear Coral murmur on the cot next to mine do I remember where I am. The room smells bad, and there’s a bucket next to Coral’s bed. She must have thrown up earlier.
A wedge of light cuts through the open doorway, and I hear muffled laughter from the next room.
Someone placed a blanket over me while I was sleeping. I push it to the bottom of the cot and stand up. I have no idea what time it is.
Hunter and Bram are sitting together in the next room, bent close together, laughing. They have the slightly sweaty, glassy-eyed look of people who have been drinking. The whiskey bottle is sitting between them, nearly empty, along with a plate bearing the remains of what must have been dinner: beans, rice, nuts.
They go quiet as soon as I walk into the room, and I know that whatever they were laughing about, it was private.
“What time is it?” I say, moving over to the jugs of water. I crouch down and lift a jug straight to my mouth without bothering to pour it into a cup. My knees, arms, and back are sore, my body still heavy with exhaustion.
“Probably midnight,” Hunter says. So I haven’t been sleeping for more than a few hours.
“Where’s everybody else?” I ask.
Hunter and Bram exchange a small look. Bram tries to suppress a smile.
“Raven and Tack went midnight trapping,” he says, raising an eyebrow. This is an old joke, a code we invented at the old homestead. Raven and Tack managed to keep their romantic relationship a secret for close to a year. But one time, Bram couldn’t sleep and decided to take a walk, and he caught them sneaking around together. When he confronted them, Tack blurted out, “Trapping!” even though it was close to two a.m. and all the traps had been cleared and set earlier in the day.
“Where’s Julian?” I say. “Where’s Alex?”
There’s another fractional pause. Now Hunter is struggling not to laugh. He’s definitely drunk—I can tell by the rash-like patches of red in his cheeks.
“Outside,” Bram says, and then he can’t help himself, and lets out a loud snort of laughter. Instantly, Hunter starts laughing too.
“Outside? Together?” I stand up, confused, getting irritated. When neither responds, I persist. “What are they doing?”
Bram struggles to control himself. “Julian wanted to learn how to fight—”
Hunter finishes for him. “Alex volunteered to teach him.” They dissolve into laughter again.
My whole body goes hot, then cold. “What the hell?” I burst out, and the anger in my voice makes them, at last, go quiet. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” I direct the question mostly to Hunter. I don’t expect Bram to understand. But Hunter is my friend, and he’s too sensitive not to have noticed the tension between Alex and Julian.
For a second, Hunter looks guilty. “Come on, Lena. It’s no big deal. . . .”
I’m too furious to respond. I grab a flashlight from the shelves and head for the stairs.
“Lena, don’t be mad. . . .”
I drown out the rest of Hunter’s words by pounding my feet extra hard. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Outside, the sky is cloudless and glittering with bright points of light. I grip the flashlight tightly in one hand, trying to funnel all my anger through my fingers. I don’t know what kind of game Alex is playing, but I’m sick of it.
The woods are still—no sign of Tack or Raven, no sign of anyone. As I stand in the dark, listening, it strikes me that the air is very warm; we must be halfway into April now. Soon summer will be here. For a moment, a flood of memories rides up, surging on the air and the smell of honeysuckle: Hana and I squeezing lemon juice on our hair to lighten it, stealing sodas from the cooler in Uncle William’s store and taking them down to Back Cove; clam-pot dinners on the old wooden porch when it was too hot to eat inside; following Gracie’s tricycle down the street, wobbling on my bike, trying not to pass her.
The memories bring, as they always do, a deep ache inside me. But I’m used to it by now, and I wait for the feeling to pass, and it does.
I turn on the flashlight and sweep it across the woods. In its pale-yellow beam, the web of trees and bushes looks bleached, surreal. I switch the flashlight off again. If Julian and Alex went off together somewhere, I have very little hope of finding them.
I’m just about to head back inside when I hear a shout. Fear shoots straight through me. Julian’s voice.
I plunge into the tangle of growth to my right, pushing toward the sound, swiping with my flashlight to help clear the interlaced path of creepers and pine branches.
After a minute, I burst into a large clearing. For a second I feel disoriented, thinking I’ve stumbled onto the edge of a large silver lake. Then I see that it’s a parking lot. A heap of rubble at one end marks what must have once been a building.
Alex and Julian are standing a few feet away from me, breathing hard, glaring at each other. Julian is holding his hand to his nose, and blood is coming through his fingers.