Beau nodded.
This represented a complete change in military strategy, from ‘make you miserable’ to ‘coming to get you.’ It put the city in the direct path of Cavic’s accelerating war machine. The blood drained from her face. Daniel. And the next Herc didn’t land until daybreak tomorrow.
Beau grasped her inner elbow, steadying her. “That’s right, darlin’. The General’s done pickin’ at Kavsak. He’s coming full force.”
He walked a few more steps with her. “Don’t let the Nationalists capture you, my deah. I shudder to think what retribution Cavic might concoct for you. In fact, if you have a way out of here I suggest you take it.”
A frisson of fear ran up her back.
He gave her a small squeeze and released her elbow. “Well,” he said, spotting his stills photographer. “Off to the wars.”
She lugged her backpack up the three steps to the bar area and scanned the tables for Jasha. He was sitting at a table beyond the bar, her camera and gear bag at his feet, his scarred face distraught, the bowl of oatmeal in front of him untouched.
“Any news of your mother?” she asked, pulling out a chair and sliding the backpack off her shoulder in a single smooth motion. There wasn’t any phone service in Kavsak, but he knew people with technology.
He shook his head, his feelings stuffed down his throat. He had to be frantic. His mom was his last living family, his anchor, his reason for living—well, her and this god-forsaken city. Dr. J was in her sixties, a history professor who’d lost her husband, three of her four sons, and the gracious home she had once lived in. Through all that, she still managed to stay sweet.
“I’ll go with you, Jasha. We’ll stop at her apartment before we head to the nursery, and check up on her.” I’ll go in first and see if she’s in pieces. I’ll catch you if you fall.
“Are you ordering breakfast?” a scratchy-voiced waiter asked behind her.
No, she wanted to spit. I can’t eat now. I feel like puking. But when she turned, hoping she could fashion a less caustic response, she saw it wasn’t a waiter.
It was Daniel. “Shit,” she hissed. Just the dear man she didn’t want to see.
He rested his hand on her shoulder and calmly pressed a kiss against her temple. “Good morning to you too, sweetheart.” He pulled out a chair and sat beside her as sedately as if she hadn’t just cursed his arrival. He was freshly-washed, his hair wet and combed, his face lined with exhaustion.
She put her elbows on the table and dropped her head into her hands. How was she going to tell him he had to stay behind?
He nodded amiably at their fixer. “And what about you, Jasha? Do you think we should extend our stay?”
Jasha nodded gravely. “Perhaps we get rooms on top floor.”
A waiter came and Daniel ordered a round of fresh coffees and a basket of warm rolls, along with sandwiches and bottled water for them all for later. She didn’t like how congested his chest sounded.
“Did you get the down comforter I had the bell boy take you?” She’d thought of it after he left but hadn’t delivered it herself. Too risky. She would have ended up in bed with him.
“I did, thanks, but—”
“You needed the warmth more than I did,” she interrupted. “I think you’re developing pneumonia from all the stuff you inhaled when the windshield blew out. Did you sleep?”
“Woke up coughing a few times. Woke up with the shelling. Woke up worrying. You?”
She shrugged. “Yeah.”
The waiter returned and set hot coffees, a basket of rolls, and bread plates in front of them, and told Daniel the to-go food was coming shortly. Daniel inspected the tab and paid up.
She took a roll, placed it on her dish, and pulled off a morsel. She brought it partway to her mouth, then set it down again. “Daniel,” she said. “I don’t want you to come with us today.”
Jasha shot a glance at Daniel.
Daniel paused, his coffee midway to his mouth, then set the cup onto the saucer again with a small clink. “If I can’t get you to stay here, then I’m going with you. There’s no negotiation.”
“There’s no point risking both of us. I’ll get the footage, and—”
“We’re not arguing.”
“Please, Daniel. Please. I beg of you…” She felt such an awful dread.
He leveled his gaze at her. “I’m not leaving you alone.”
“Then I’m going without you. Jasha, would you please bring the car?”
Jasha didn’t move. “No,” he said. “Daniel is right. You are fragile. If…If it happens to you like yesterday, we need him. I will not drive if he does not come, too. Out of respect, Brenna. Because you are good woman. My friend.”
His answer stunned her. In two and a half years of working together, he had never denied her any request, no matter how dangerous or crazy. She stared at him in disbelief. Saw his determination. She shifted her gaze to Daniel. Saw his.
“You two are colluding.”
“Ayup,” Daniel said, using the vernacular of his home state.
“Fine,” she said. “There are other fixers.”
“But I need my friend to go with me,” Jasha said. “To find my mother.”
Jasha tossed the gear bag and backpack into the front seat. Brenna scooted into the back seat behind him and set the camera across her lap. Daniel got in beside her and pulled his door closed.
Jasha revved the engine, picked up speed, and shot up the garage ramp. They would drive west on Sniper Alley for three miles —exposed as they drove beside the river—then hook south around Mt. Kavsak into the Separatist-held neighborhood where Jasha’s mom lived, where the nursery was located, and where the airport and its mile-and-a-half-long runway sprawled out across the flatlands south of them.
Daylight flooded the car. A blast of frigid air invaded the car through the missing rear window.
Brenna closed her eyes.
Bad sign, Daniel thought. Photographers never closed their eyes. Unless, he guessed, they had already witnessed all they could bear. Her hands were fisted around the camera handle, clutching it for dear life. He lay his hand over hers.
Jasha swerved out of the parking lot, engine screaming at the top of its range, and lurched north onto the open boulevard. He stomped on the gas and streaked between car-sized shell craters like a downhill skier on a slalom course.
Beside them, mortar shells flew out of the dense pall of smoke on the mountainsides and dropped into the city.
The speedometer needle quivered at the hundred-twenty kilometer mark. Dull thuds splattered the trunk and doors of the car. Bullets. The car flew, thumping over the pitted road, rocking unsteadily, buffeted by the air it displaced.
Daniel squeezed Brenna’s hand. She looked grim, deathly-pale.
Downtown blurred past, giving way to apartment buildings. The Golf sped over the Bridge of Peace and Brotherhood where the river veered northward, and continued west toward the heavy shelling and the columns of black smoke rising against the lifeless sky. Mt. Kavsak loomed on their left. This was where they would hook around the jutting mountain.
Jasha braked with force, spun the wheel, and careened onto an off-ramp, picking up speed again as he curved southward.
And then he slammed the brakes. Rubber scorched the road, trailing white smoke, and the car slid sideways, flinging its passengers like crash dummies. Daniel instinctively threw his arm out to protect Brenna. The Golf came to an eerie standstill.
Daniel righted himself. Stared, disbelieving, out the window.
“Jesus,” Brenna whispered.
Two slate-blue T-55 Nationalist tanks. Parked at the curve. Turrets aimed at them.
Jasha roared, and thunked the gearshift into reverse. The turrets swung, fine-tuning the car in their sights. Twisting in the driver’s seat, Jasha grasped the back of the passenger seat, nailed his eyes on the road behind them, popped the clutch, and floored the gas. Tires squealing, Jasha twisted the steering wheel, snaking the car, avoiding a direct line
of travel.
The first tank fired, recoiling, raising a cloud of dust from the ground. A flash of fire belched from the turret.
The shell landed ahead of them, short of its mark.
Jasha over-steered and hit the concrete barrier on Daniel’s side.
Daniel jumped, pulled his elbow away, and scrambled toward the center of the car, keeping his head low so Jasha could see past him. The car screeched along the barrier, metal on concrete, unable to break free.
The second tank fired. The shell went long, landed on the road behind them.
The car broke free of the barrier, caromed into the swirling dust. The cabin filled with a thick cloud of churning debris. Daniel squeezed his eyes shut and lifted the front of his shirt over his mouth and nose, coughing, trying to filter the air.
Brenna cried out. Heart pounding wildly, he shot his left hand out across her back.
Up front, Jasha gasped for air. He’s driving blind. Had to be. No way Jasha had his eyes open with all the crap swirling inside the car. Never letting up on the gas, Jasha twisted the wheel hard left, then right again. The car swung, turning direction, then shot forward.
Suddenly, miraculously, fresh air flooded the car. We’re out! Daniel squinted. Clear road. Albeit they were speeding down a one-way road on the wrong side. But out.
In the lee of Mt. Kavsak, Jasha did the unprecedented.
He pulled over.
And sagged over the steering wheel.
Daniel, racked by coughing, eyes streaming, wiped the grit off his face with his sleeve.
Brenna did the same. Her face was black, her hair matted with dust.
Jasha pounded the steering wheel. “They are trapped! My mother. The nursery. The neighborhood. This is only road!”
Brenna took a steadying breath. “What about the trenches? We could cut through on foot.”
“Trenches?? Hah!” Jasha spat. “That’s dangerous.”
“There’s a series of hand-dug trenches that cut around the other side of the mountain,” Brenna explained to Daniel. “The Separatists hold them. At least, they did before last night.”
“Well, hey,” Daniel said. “May as well stretch our legs a bit.”
Jasha retraced their route, blurring alongside a complex of dreary industrial-looking apartment blocks separated by expanses of beaten dirt and parking lots. They looked like a low-rise version of the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects of Chicago. An intersection appeared ahead. Jasha jammed the brakes, ripped the steering wheel right, and entered the development along a broad boulevard. Rusted-out cars littered the road like locust husks. Weaving between waist-deep shell holes, Jasha drove westward again, through a labyrinth of identical-looking streets. A narrow service alleyway appeared on their right. He turned into it and crept forward, easing the car over heaps of garbage, past the carcass of a small black dog, and into a sheltered loading dock. He parked and killed the engine.
After a couple moments of silence, Brenna sighed and touched Jasha’s shoulder. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go find your mom.”
Jasha straightened, pulled the key out of the ignition and pulled the handle on his door. His face was rigid with apprehension. Lord knew what he’d find at his mother’s.
Daniel slid along the back seat toward Brenna’s door. There was no way his crumpled door was going to open—much less close again if it did.
“We will go through this apartment building,” Jasha told Daniel. “Run across the field to next one, then trenches start and we go to my mother’s building. The nursery is through more trenches beyond that.”
They took the steel steps up the loading platform. A stick jammed in the hinge propped the receiving door open. Brenna and Daniel followed him inside. The slash of daylight from the slowly-closing door revealed a small, denuded office with spray-painted graffiti on the right, and a long corridor directly ahead, with sets of gaping steel doors. Storage rooms, Daniel guessed. Or maybe mechanical rooms.
The door closed, casting them into shadow. Jasha led on, stepping carefully around the garbage and detritus of neglect littering the passageway. He found a staircase door and pulled it open.
“Baka!” A child’s voice called out from above.
They clattered rapidly upward, opened the landing door and stepped into stale air. Daniel froze. Brenna plowed into him from behind, not expecting him to stop.
Refugees. IDPs—Internally Displaced People, as the aid workers called them. Women, children, and old or injured men. A hundred or more hushed ghosts huddled in a dim corridor, clutching ragged bundles. Their fear-filled faces all turned in their direction.
A little stick of a girl in a bright pink coat stood bewildered among them, crying “Baka!”
Halfway down the hall, an ancient woman with a scarf tied around her weather-beaten face labored to her feet and pawed the air, signaling the child. “Rahela!”
Rahela raced to the woman and hid in the folds of her skirt.
Brenna squeezed past Daniel, hoisting the camera onto her shoulder. A craggy-faced man with a missing leg glared at her and hissed what could only be an obscenity as she stepped past him. She moved forward, taping, ignoring the insult.
Daniel squelched the impulse to grab the man and shake the hell out of him. He stepped over his crutches and followed her, watching in astonishment as others took up the theme, uttering curses and gesturing scornfully as she passed.
Two young boys ran alongside her, aiming their fingers at her like pistols, and fired point-blank. She stopped, perplexed, and zoomed in on their bald-faced hatred. The larger boy, who had a jagged scar snaking across his shaven scalp, shoved her.
With lightning speed, Daniel grabbed the kid by the back of his shirt, lifted him, and set him down where he couldn’t reach her. “No,” he said firmly. The boy stood there, seething, his fists clenched at his side, another militant in the making.
Brenna moved onward, out of the boy’s reach. Daniel gave the boy a warning look and released him.
“Buzzard! You feast on our misery!” A stringy-haired woman yelled out.
In English. This was an educated woman, Daniel thought, sitting in a squalid hallway with two somber-eyed, rail-thin girls nestled against her hips.
Brenna’s knee hitched.
“What have your precious pictures changed?” the woman screeched, sitting up to shake a chapped fist at Brenna. “Nothing!”
The camera drooped, still recording. Brenna tipped her face away from the viewfinder, and turned, bewildered, to her accuser.
“You sell our agony and it feeds you. Clothes you. Shelters you! You leave when you have had your fill!”
Brenna stared at her with such raw intensity that the woman shrank back, sweeping her whimpering children behind herself.
A hush fell over the hallway.
Brenna pulled the camera off her shoulder. With measured deliberation, she squatted in front of her, studying her as if the answers to life were written on her face. She parted her lips to speak—
—And the woman lunged.
Her hand flashed out and slapped Brenna across the face so hard her head whipped sideways.
Brenna cried out, her cheek emblazoned with a hand-shaped welt.
Daniel leapt forward and caught the woman’s flailing hands.
“What?” the woman shrieked at Brenna, as she fought Daniel. “What could you possibly say?”
Brenna stared at her, dumbfounded.
Jasha took the camera out of Brenna’s hand and steadied her elbow. “Come,” he said, helping her up again. The gentleness in his voice rebuked the violence hanging in the air.
The woman sobbed, her crying daughters’ skinny arms wrapped like twine around her body.
Daniel waited for Jasha to get Brenna out of harm’s way, then leaned into the woman’s face. “You have no idea.”
Jasha hustled Brenna past the silent throng and threw his shoulder against the staircase door. It flew open and crashed against the wall. Daniel came up behind them and shu
t it with an angry bang.
Brenna stood there, stunned, checking her mouth for blood. She looked brittle, on the brink of shattering. She’d risked her life, made their story the core of her existence. The physical and mental toll on her had been extreme. And now she was being vilified by the very people she sought to serve.
“It’s not you,” Jasha told her. “You represent the world that has abandoned them.”
Brenna pushed off the wall.
She flew down the staircase, gaining speed, a headlong pressure building inside her—filling her like a scream she couldn’t contain or pain she couldn’t withstand. A wild drumbeat drove her fleeing feet down the stairs, two at a time, three—faster, faster.
What have your precious pictures changed?
She turned right at the bottom of the stairs and ran raggedly down the corridor, stumbling, catching herself, ignoring Daniel’s calls behind her.
The exit door lay ahead, propped open by a chunk of cement with twisted reinforcement bars protruding from it. Beyond the door, sunlight reflected off the eighty feet of open ground between this building and the next.
She ran out, into the open field between the apartment buildings.
Crack.
A clod of dirt spat up from the bare earth beside her. A sniper bullet.
She stopped.
Just stopped, and stared at the little gouge in the earth.
Time pulled away. It meant nothing that a sniper could chamber the next five-inch round in his bolt action rifle, aim, and fire again in as little as fifteen seconds.
“Brenna!” Daniel’s voice sounded as distant and inconsequential as the peep of a bird in a howling storm.
She lifted her face and circled, surveying the destruction surrounding her. What had her pictures changed? What war had ever been shortened or prevented because photographers took pictures?
“Nothing,” she mumbled. “None.”
“Brenna!”
That woman was right. This quest was bullshit. She did this because she didn’t know what else to do. Not because it changed anything.
She turned in the direction from which the shot had been fired and closed her eyes. The bullet would penetrate her skull in a lightning burst and a vast white bliss would follow.
Day Three Page 20
