by Katie French
But no one comes. Finding the floor, he steps down. He feels with one hand until his fingers bump into a wall, cold and metal. Palming it, he waits.
If this were a trap, someone would have jumped out by now. Standing in the dark, the wall at his back, he’s wondering if there is anyone down here, if there’s ever been anyone down here, but he remembers the hot stovepipe, the fresh garbage.
Above, someone slowly comes down after him. Bear or Darby, forced into it by the others. One by one, he hears his companions tiptoe down the stairs. When he can sense all four of them together in the small, dark space, he tries a whisper. “What do we do?” he breathes.
A hand grips his shoulder and squeezes. It’s a signal to shut up. The hand pulls him forward. He’s afraid, but he goes forward anyway. Gunslinger Rule Number One—Keep moving. Keep your guns up.
Pressed together, the men shuffle forward. They still can’t see, but to flick on a light with no knowledge of who might be awake is a death sentence. Clay tries to hear over the pounding of his heart, but there’s nothing. The underground room feels empty. Whoever was here is now gone.
A giant, red flare blossoms in front of them. Then a wave of sound vibrates through the enclosed space. A gunshot. It lights up the whole room. He sees Darby fly backward. It goes dark.
Gunshots erupt everywhere. Clay dives to the ground, smashing into something at waist height and sending it toppling.
How can the men fire? Clay barely knows up from down. He feels like he’s swimming in a deep, dark ocean, no up or down. And all around him, explosions shake the space. He grips his gun like a child does his mother.
Boom. There’s a flash of light and gunpowder. Johnson fires, his long hair flying back.
Boom. Across the room, a boy no older than Clay fires a shotgun. He squints as the blast illuminates his face.
Boom. The flash from Bear’s gun lights him up, his beard. He looks like a warrior—tight lips, wild eyes, shooting from the hip.
Across the room, someone screams. Someone else is moaning.
Clay holds his gun out. He has no idea where to shoot.
There’s a fumbling, and then a light begins to glow from the corner. The scene is gruesome. Darby has been shot through the face, birdshot making him a bloody Swiss cheese. Across the room, two people lie bleeding. One is the boy Clay saw during the fight. He’s younger than him, maybe twelve, with cropped hair and a pale baby face. Clay thinks of Cole and immediately regrets it. He tries to press the thought down, but it’s stuck like a chunk of food in his throat.
The man who turned on the gas lantern is also bleeding, but he’s alive. He looks over at the boy. “Benjamin!” He crawls to his son, leaving a smear of blood on the dirt behind him. “My boy.”
Clay can’t help but feel sorry. He knows these people tried to kill them, but, oh God, the man is weeping, pressing his face into his dead son’s chest. Clay wants to comfort him. He wants to make Benjamin stand up, embrace his father, but Benjamin is lifeless.
Johnson walks over, puts his gun to the man’s forehead, and pulls the trigger.
Clay pinches his eyes closed too late. The image burns.
With both men subdued, Bear and Johnson check on Darby, but there’s really no point. He’s dead as a doornail. As Johnson begins a search of the cupboards, gun out, Bear comes over to Clay.
“You okay, boy?” Bear’s face is pale. No jokes or songs right now. Clay’s glad for it. “You were brave to go down first. Your pa will be proud when we tell ’im.”
Clay looks over at the dead father and son. He wonders if Pa would ever cry out for him like that.
They search through the one-room bunker, looking for the women. The small space is ingenious in its construction. The room is twenty-five-feet long and ten-feet wide, semi-circular like half a buried metal tube. On the far end, four industrial-style bunks fill up the wall. Along the sides is storage—food, boots, tattered sheets, batteries, a frying pan. A bucket throws up the stink of human waste in the corner. Along one side, there’s a plastic food-prep table and a small, four-burner stove. Clay’s eyes travel up the exhaust pipe. It runs all the way to the surface. This is what drew them down here.
Bet they wish they’d used a small cook stove, Clay thinks morosely.
“Over here!” Bear motions for Clay and Johnson, and they oblige, squatting next to him. Bear wipes away dirt until he uncovers another latch and another trapdoor.
Johnson smiles. He motions for Bear and Clay to draw their guns. Slowly, he pulls the hatch open. Giant eyes blink up at them, and then the sharp flash of a knife blade as it jabs up.
“Whoa there!” Johnson says, stepping back. “You watch where you’re brandishing that knife, little lady.”
From the bowels of dirt, a face appears. It’s a girl slightly younger than Clay, fourteen or fifteen, with dark eyes, short, black hair, and thick eyelashes. She reminds Clay of a fox the way her gaze darts from face to face. Her arms are slender, and the fist around the knife is sure. Her chin does not tremble as she takes in the three men who’ve just stormed in to liberate her.
Behind her, another shape materializes. A little girl, smaller than the first, eight or nine years old. She has dark eyes and hair like her sister, but she’s petite, with a round face and pouty lips. Her chin wobbles as she tries to hold back tears.
Clay lowers his gun, even though he knows he’s not supposed to. He can’t aim at these two tiny creatures. The little one clutches the bigger one’s baggy shirt like a lifeline as they slowly climb up the ladder.
“It’s okay,” Clay says. “We’re here to save you.” He smiles and offers his hand.
She keeps the knife on whoever comes closest.
“You can put that down,” Clay says, holstering his gun, an act of trust. One he hopes she’ll mimic. He can’t imagine what those men have done to these girls. Just thinking of it turns his stomach. Suddenly, he’s glad they’re dead. “It’s okay. Those bad men are dead.”
Both girls’ eyes go wide. The smallest bolts up the ladder.
“Papa!”
Chapter 4
Clay helps load the girls into the back of the van, but it feels like a dream. He can’t believe what he’s done. What he’s been a part of. The little girl wailed and wailed at the sight of her dead family. The older girl stared numbly at the men, at Clay, like she could kill him with her eyes. Johnson finally wrenched the knife away from her and bound her wrists. She bit him, and he slapped her. Clay turned away, ashamed.
While Johnson and Bear ransack the underground bunker, Clay walks out beneath the stars. Each star feels like a searchlight pointed directly at him. Like God himself has Clay in his sights.
He leaves the bunker’s yard, walks down the weed-filled driveway and into the street. Picking up a chunk of busted concrete, he hurls it. He wants to break the world into small pieces. It’s already broken anyway.
“Clay!” Bear calls, but he doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know if he ever will. He doesn’t want to go home. He doesn’t want to see any of them. Above is the Big Dipper. Or is it the Little Dipper? Who gives a shit, anyway? Constellations and poems and art. All that died with civility a hundred years ago.
Bear puts his hand on Clay’s shoulder, but he doesn’t look up. He stares at Bear’s boots, flecked with blood.
“We didn’t know,” Bear says. “I swear, Clay. We didn’t know they were the girls’ kin. We knew the same as you, which was jack shit.”
“Did my pa know?” he asks, his voice trembling. “Did he know and send us anyway?”
Bear grips both of Clay’s shoulders. “Son, listen, I don’t know what yer pa did or didn’t know. But I know he’s a man of integrity. I’d guess that nobody had any idea that a family was down there.”
“Even if Pa did know they were family, he woulda sent us anyway. He loves Breeders’ money.”
Bear shakes his head. “Nah, son. You can’t think that way. Your pa is a good man.”
Clay looks into Bear’s face. “M
y pa can rot in hell.”
Bear winces, but he doesn’t disagree. Instead, he pulls Clay closer to him with one arm. “We don’t get to pick our kin. Best we can do is learn what we can from ’em.”
Clay says nothing, just lets Bear hug him with one arm.
As they walk back, a burning smell is overpowering. Great billows of acrid smoke pour out of the hole that leads to the bunker. Johnson has set the place on fire.
“Ashes to ashes,” Johnson says, dusting off his hands. “What would Darby say if he were here?”
Bear looks at the smoke and ponders. “He’d probably say, ‘Where’s my whiskey?’”
Johnson gives a weak smile. “I burned his Bible. Figured he’d want it that way.”
Then they drive.
The front of the Armadillo feels empty. What was once a group of five is now three. No, that’s not quite right, Clay thinks. He thinks about the girls chained to the benches in the dark. It’s hell back there. Those girls have just lost their family, their home, and their freedom.
“When do we meet the Breeders for the handoff?” Clay asks.
Johnson turns around in his seat and regards Clay. “We have a rendezvous point. Breeders will come tomorrow to pick the girls up.”
Clay nods and falls silent. A day of knowing this awful thing. A day of darkness and suffering. “And when the Breeders take ’em, they’ll be nice to ’em and feed ’em?” Clay asks.
Johnson nods, but he doesn’t meet Clay’s eyes. “They’ll be taken care of.”
“Will they make the little one have babies?” Clay asks.
Johnson takes a deep breath. “Do I look like a Breeders’ doctor? How the hell do I know what they’ll do?”
Bear looks at Clay in the rearview mirror. “Them girls’ll have a good life. Don’t you worry.”
But Clay does worry. He thinks of the girls’ brown eyes, wide and frightened. He thinks of darkness. He thinks of chains.
They drive through the night and part of the next day. The going is slow because the roads here are a mess of sand, cracked pavement, and overgrown brush that wriggles out of cracks that grow wider with time. Only once did Bear stop and let the girls out to pee. Johnson ordered Clay to stay in the Armadillo.
But now, as Bear pulls the van into the most stable-looking warehouse in a row of abandoned buildings, Johnson turns to Clay. “We’ll be here for the night. Need your help getting the cargo secured.”
Clay realizes Johnson means the girls. He numbly nods.
He goes with Johnson around to the back of the van. Pulling out his gun when Johnson indicates, he stands guard as they help the girls out of the back.
They look like drowned rats. Both girls are soaked through with sweat. Their hair clumps at their foreheads and sticks to their necks. Their clothes cling to their bodies. The littlest may as well be a boy with her stick-straight figure, but Clay can’t help looking at the older girl’s curves as she jumps down. He hasn’t really seen girls his age. When her eyes lock on him, he looks to the dirt.
They take the girls to a desolate back room, picked over and stripped of drywall and copper wiring. The ceiling is collapsing in moldy clumps. Johnson kicks the debris away and finds two chairs with cracked leather seats. He pushes the girls toward the chairs and binds their wrists with plastic ties.
Clay watches this all with his gun vaguely trained on their captives. What chance do they have of escape? And even if they did, they’d never survive. There’s nothing but slow death for hundreds of miles. Plus, they’re female. Clay realizes he’s audibly sighing.
“Get him outta here,” Johnson tells Bear, looking like he could wring both of their necks. Bear grabs Clay by the arm, leads him out of the office and back to the Armadillo. He clambers into the back and motions for Clay to do the same.
They open up storage containers and pull out what’s left of their food—two packets of pork jerky, three mealy apples, a sack of granola, and four slices of bread Martha baked before they left. It’ll have to be split between the five of them. Clay thinks about giving all his food to the girls.
With his arms full, Clay manages to climb down without dropping their meal. They set the food up buffet-style at the edge of the Armadillo’s back, along with three jugs of water Bear has produced.
Bear looks it over and shakes his head. “It’s not a lot.”
“Never is,” Clay says.
Bear presses both palms onto the Armadillo’s bumper. “Listen here. You wanna do what’s best for them girls?”
Clay looks at Bear, frowning.
Bear strokes his braided beard. “You think moping and feeling sorry for ’em is gonna help? That’ll only make ’em more terrified. Put on a smile. Tell a joke. Make like everything’s gonna be okay.”
Clay grips an apple in his palm and squeezes it. “But that’s a lie.”
Bear puffs his cheeks and blows out a big breath. “There comes a time when you have to pick between truth that hurts and lies that help. And I’d rather help than hurt, wouldn’t you?”
Clay chews his lip. He has no answer.
Bear nods at the food. “Get ’em some grub, won’t ya?”
Clay makes two small meals out of the apples, granola, and bread. He saves the jerky for the men. In the back room, Johnson is gone. Both girls look up from where they sit strapped to the chairs. The little one’s been crying, but the older one watches him like she’d enjoy ripping out his throat.
“Brought you dinner,” he manages, nodding to the food in his hands.
The girls say nothing, but the little one’s eyes widen. He knows that look of hunger on her face. He walks over to her first. “This apple ain’t much, but this bread is ’bout the best you’ll ever taste. My house woman, Martha, she makes it from scratch. It’s better warm, but—”
“Don’t eat it,” the older girl says to the little one.
Clay looks at the older girl. Her face makes him feel weak, drained. She’s beautiful in a rugged sort of way. Her hair has fallen into her brown eyes, round and bright as orbs, and it softens them somehow. He wants to reach out and brush the hair behind her ears, let his thumb linger on her earlobe.
“It ain’t poisoned,” he says, nodding to the food. “You must be hungry.”
The little girl nods, chin-length curls bobbing. The older girl shoots her another warning look. “Don’t, Hannah.”
“Hannah, is it?” he says, turning to the little one. “Hannah’s a pretty name.”
She smiles.
“Don’t talk to her,” the older one says.
Clay squats down, still holding the food, and stares into the older girl’s eyes. “Then I’ll talk to you. What’s your name?”
The older girl turns her face away.
“Jess,” Hannah says, answering for her sister.
“Jess,” Clay repeats. “Jess, you ain’t punishing any of us by not eatin’. I know it’s been a God-awful day, but there ain’t no sense in makin’ it worse by starving yourself.” He watches her face and sees the flex of her jaw as she considers his words. “Look. What if I feed Hannah first? Then you can decide what you wanna do.”
Jess narrows her large, round eyes. “You take a bite.”
Clay does, taking a small bite of Martha’s bread. It is thick and spongy. Martha does not disappoint. He stifles a groan of pleasure. “See? It’s fine.”
Jess watches him swallow and finally nods.
Clay walks over and kneels before Hannah. The little girl has big, round cheeks and a tiny, pink mouth that makes her look four years old, though he knows she’s seen more summers than that. He smiles as he rips up pieces of bread and feeds them to her.
“It’s good, right?”
Hannah’s eyes go big as the flavor fills her mouth.
He feeds her the bread and the apple, which she eats down to the seeds. Then he moves over to Jess. Her jaw remains locked.
“Here,” he says, holding out the bread. She looks at it, unable to hide the longing in her face. Slowly, she pa
rts her lips and opens her mouth. Clay can’t help but look at her pink tongue as he slides the bread in. He knows he shouldn’t entertain thoughts like this, but she does something to him, twists something inside him like a knotted hose. Deep in his chest, the pressure is building. Even her smell is deep, earth and sandalwood. As he feeds her the rest of the apple, his heart is pounding.
“You’re not like them,” Jess says after she’s swallowed the last of her meal.
Clay bristles a little. She means it as a compliment, but it hits at the heart of his fears. He clears his throat. “I’m like them enough.”
She shakes her head. “They’re empty inside.” She looks deep into his eyes with her big, brown ones. “I see it. There’s still some light in you.”
He looks down at the trash-covered floor. “I can’t let you out of here, if that’s what you’re getting at. They’d kill me.”
She picks at the ties around her wrists with the opposite hand. “Breeders are coming?” she asks.
He nods.
She sucks in a breath and flicks a glance at Hannah. “For both of us?”
Clay keeps his eyes on a crumpled wad of paper. Something red is stamped on it. Either the word detained or detached, he’s not sure which. “It’s for the best.”
“‘It’s for the best.’” Her tone is cold, mocking. “It’s for the best that we become science experiments?”
He meets her eyes. “Breeders take good care of girls.”
She laughs dryly. “That’s what they tell you?” She nods out the door, indicating Johnson and Bear. “They tell you your shit don’t stink, too?”
“Now wait a minute.” Clay stands up. Hannah, who’d been quietly listening, watches him like he might hurt her. He softens his posture and his voice. “You can’t go home with us. It ain’t safe for girls where I’m from.”
Jess clenches her jaw, unshed tears forming in her eyes. “You want to tell me what’s safe and what ain’t? We were safe until you barged in and killed our kin.”
He stares into her face. Her words carve into him, core him out like an apple. He looks between Hannah and Jess. Glancing to where Johnson and Bear wait for him, he says, “There’s nothing I can do.”
