She wasn’t afraid.
Not one bit.
Crack!
Chapter 14
Brenna was struck with blinding force.
A wall of muscle plowed into her from the side, miraculously not knocking her over.
Daniel.
He grabbed fistfuls of her jacket, shouted at her to run, and half-lifted, half-dragged her alongside himself, his feet galloping over the hard earth. Her boots hardly touched the ground until they tore into the shelter of the next gaping doorway.
He pinned her against the interior wall. “Godammit, no!”
She observed him with curious detachment. His face reflected sunlight on one side, shadow on the other. His brows were furrowed, his worry intense. The sweat running down his face looked like tears. Of all the times she had seen his fear during their journey, she had never seen it so stark.
Click, she thought automatically. So much emotion.
“Sweetheart?” He gripped her elbows and gave her a small shake.
She smiled up at his wonderful, beaten, face and focused on his apprehensive blue eyes. “Hey,” she murmured, resting her palms on his broad chest. He was vibrating like a live wire. “You look a wreck.”
He groaned and pulled her against himself with the intense ferocity she saw in Kavsak when husbands and wives, parents and children, were reunited after a traumatic separation.
She slipped her hands beneath his jacket, circled him with her arms, and rubbed his back to reassure him. “I’m fine,” she said calmly. “Truly.”
He buried his face in her neck and shook his head.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the shadows shift. Ever stealthy, Jasha had slipped past and now waited beyond them.
She lowered her hands to Daniel’s narrow hips. “Jasha,” she said. “His mom.”
He reluctantly relinquished his full-body contact with her, and took her face in his hands. “This will be over very soon,” he said. “We just have to get through the next few hours, okay?”
Tch. He was so worried for her. Worry didn’t change anything. It just wore you out. She leaned into him and planted a kiss on his mouth. “My sweet Daniel,” she said, patting his chest. “A man who wants to live should never come to a place like Kavsak.”
The trenches at the far side of the building reminded Daniel of old World War I footage, except this was no helmeted, uniformed army. This was a chaotic collection of Kavsak Separatists leaning against crumbling hand-dug trenches, firing into the pall of gray-white smoke drifting over the open ground while a tide of refugees behind them shoved past with their bundles. Fleeing the territory the three of them were trying to enter.
The front lines.
Jasha led, still carrying Brenna’s camera.
Daniel crouched low, hand on the back of Brenna’s neck, making sure she stayed down. He wasn’t counting on her instinct for self-preservation.
A missile whooshed toward them.
“Get down!” he shouted, and ruthlessly pushed her to the ground. He lay atop her, covering her with his body.
The earth shook. Dirt rained from the sky, pummeled his back, stung his scalp.
Rockets, loosed in rapid succession, roared toward the trenches.
He scrambled, pulling her up. “Go! Go! Go!” he shouted, his voice disembodied in his ringing ears.
Above them, the fiery trails stopped burning.
A woman and two boys racing toward them switched direction as abruptly as a school of fish, and ran. The refugees screamed with panic. The Separatists scattered. The rockets were coming down.
Hard thumps pounded the ground behind Daniel. He was hurtled into a swirling cloud of hot smoke. He lost his grip on Brenna and fell face-forward to the ground. A body landed on top of him.
Oh, Jesus.
Panic welled up through him. Brenna! He heaved himself upward, straining to extricate himself from the dead weight. Oh, Brenna. No! His arms trembled from exertion. She was so heavy.
Wait. Not soft. Not a woman.
He got his hands beneath him and arched his back. The body atop him slid onto the ground with a hard thump. Through a break in the smoke, he glimpsed the blackened face beside him. A Separatist soldier, eyes staring blankly skyward, mouth opening and closing like a gasping fish. Not dead yet. But soon.
“Brenna!” he bellowed again. His voice was lost in the screams of the others, the popping of gunfire, the mortar explosions. “Brenna!!” He lurched clumsily in the loose dirt, found a foothold, and stood.
“Aah.” A loud groan rose from beneath him.
He looked down.
He was standing on a dying man!
He jumped off. “Fuck!” he roared. “Fuck!”
Brenna appeared out of the smoke, her hand out to him. “Such an unladylike expression,” she said, shaking her head.
He grabbed her hand—elated, dismayed, horrified.
She tugged. “Come on. You can relive the nightmare later.”
He ducked, running beside her in the smoke. “How much further?” he shouted.
“Quarter mile? Little more?”
He ran, holding onto Brenna, following Jasha. The trenches deepened and led down to a hole sledge-hammered through the foundation of the apartment building. Once inside, Daniel bent over, coughing. Brenna raked her fingers through her hair and shook out the dirt. Jasha’s face was grit-covered—and grim.
“Is this it?” Daniel asked him. “Your mom’s building?”
Jasha nodded, tight-lipped, and glanced uneasily toward the interior. Now he would find out if she had survived the night.
How horrible it would be, Daniel thought, not to know if your mom was alive or dead. He flashed on an image of his own parents, waiting for him back home in Maine, not knowing how he was.
Brenna put a hand on Jasha’s shoulder. “Ready?” She looked like she was back in form, but she still hadn’t reclaimed her camera.
Daniel took it from Jasha. “Do we go upstairs?”
“No,” Jasha answered. “My mother is in basement. Safer. Maybe.”
After a left-right jig, the corridor opened to a straightaway that ran the full length of the edifice.
It was packed with refugees, like the last one.
All eyes turned their way.
Brenna froze.
Daniel circled her shoulder with his free arm, pulled her against his hip, and stepped forward. “Hello,” he said, nodding to an old woman with a headscarf tightly-knotted beneath her chin. “Hello.” He wanted to give himself a human face, make personal connections to preclude a reprise of what happened in the previous building.
Jasha stayed close behind Brenna, similarly working the left side of the hall, speaking in Kavsak.
People nodded back, pulled their feet out of the way, dragged their bundles closer to clear a path.
Near the far end of the corridor, a man with a pinned-up shirtsleeve greeted Jasha by name, then loudly called something out in Kavsak.
A steel door just beyond him squealed open. A small thin-faced woman wrapped in a black coat stepped out. “Jasha?”
“Mama!” he exclaimed.
Her face lit up. She spread her arms. “Jasha!”
Jasha pushed past them and swept his mom up in his arms, inchoate sounds of relief catching in his throat.
Daniel exchanged a smile with Brenna.
Jasha’s mom, keeping one arm around her son’s waist, turned to Brenna, and stretched a hand out for her cheek.
Brenna leaned down and allowed Jasha’s mom to peck her. “Hey, Dr. J.”
Jasha opened his palm in Daniel’s direction. “Mama. This is Mr. Daniel Ellsworth. He is a documentary producer from Washington, D.C. Daniel, my mother, Doctor Jelena Subasic. She is a professor of Balkan history at Kavsak University.”
Daniel held out his hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Professor.”
She shook it warmly. “The pleasure is mine. Call me ‘Dr. J’, like Brenna does. I like this name. Very American. Respectful and war
m at same time.”
She made a gracious flourish, inviting her guests into her home. “Please. Welcome. I have coffee. My Jasha likes how I prepare it. I always have some when he comes.”
Jasha rested a loving hand on her shoulder.
His gesture made tears well up in her eyes. “I knew you would come.”
“I’ll help you,” her son said, following her inside.
Daniel ducked through the low doorframe into what he guessed was once a storage room. The space was a bomb shelter in thin disguise, a windowless burrow lit by a thread in a jar of oil. The walls were bare concrete, the ceilings low and criss-crossed with utility pipes. Two vent pipes crowded through a chiseled-out hole in the upper right hand corner of the room. One inhaled fresh air—he could feel its chilly draft—the other vented a small, scrap-metal woodstove. The meager pile of wood beside it looked like a splintered shipping crate.
A rough-hewn but neatly-made cot-sized bed hugged the interior wall. A long bench made of gouged planks paralleled the bed like a tea table. A battered rocking chair with a neat pile of folders beside it on the floor completed the living room ‘set.’ Two sharpened pencils and a rubber eraser rested atop the papers. Whatever academic treatise Dr. J was working on, she was doing it the Abraham Lincoln way, with pencils and candlelight.
Brenna stood at the entrance. She was eerily calm. Content, even.
And that scared the hell out of him.
People who decided on suicide often appeared happier just before they committed their final desperate act. They felt untouchable. His mom, who treated severely depressed patients as part of her clinical practice, said sometimes people moved subconsciously toward death, placing themselves in mortal danger without knowingly identifying the impulse.
They were beguiled by the promise of emotional peace.
Knocked over the edge by the attack in the corridor, Brenna was unraveling, just as Mariana predicted in the emergency room. Since Kavsak had little to offer in terms of health care, all he could do was keep her alive until morning and get her on the Herc.
“I thought we’d interview Dr. J,” Brenna said, interrupting his thoughts. “She speaks English; she’s a native Kavsak; and she’s an historian.”
It took him a moment to shift gears, to reconcile his doubts about Brenna’s psychological stability with her professional competence. “Would she do it?”
Her mouth worked over a stifled smile. “It’s pre-arranged.”
She was a pro, even when she was all but dead in the water. “Okay,” he agreed. Dr. J would be a terrific subject. But also, the familiar ritual of work might settle Brenna.
The quiet rattle of the coffee tray announced Dr. J’s return from the cooking area. “Here we are,” she said.
Jasha, just behind his mom, extended his hand toward the bed. “Please, sit.”
Dr. J set the tray with two dzezvas, hammered copper beakers that were wider at the bottom than the top and with handles on the side, and four small porcelain cups with sugar cubes in the bottom, on the rustic coffee table.
Daniel squeezed onto the small bed beside Brenna and Jasha.
“This looks fabulous,” Daniel said, tipping his head in a small bow of acknowledgement. He’d heard that, since the siege, asking for a glass of water in Kavsak was like asking for the family jewels. To be served coffee was royal treatment. “It smells delicious.”
“Can you believe, even coffee is controversial topic?” Dr. J replied, picking up the first of the cups and pouring. “Some call it kafa, others kava, or kahva. Some say this is Turkish style, from days of Ottoman Empire. Others argue with heated emotions, saying it is unique to Kavsak because of way it is served. We fight over nothing.”
The coffee she set before him—however it was named—was foamy, dark, and fragrant.
“What matters is Mama makes it best,” Jasha said, picking up his own small cup, lifting the unscarred side of his face into an openly-affectionate smile.
“Brenna tells me you’re willing to be interviewed for our documentary,” Daniel said to his hostess, his mind racing over the topics the interview should cover once coffee time was over.
“Oh, yes,” Dr. J replied. “I would be honored to be part of this. Journalists like Brenna and you serve most important function. You record history. You provide evidence. Later, no one can deny these facts, or distort them for their own political agenda.”
He smiled inwardly. Jasha must have told his mom about the attack on Brenna, and now she was indirectly trying to bolster her up. Yup. He liked Dr. J already. He wrapped his hands around the tiny, handle-less cup and sipped the strong, sweet concoction, letting Dr. J’s words hang in the air for Brenna.
The conversation meandered. Brenna finished her coffee before the others, and excused herself while she set up for the interview. She unfolded two reflectors, placing one at each side of Dr. J, then aimed her battery-powered lights into them. The light would bounce off the reflective material and softly light the old woman’s countenance, Daniel knew, but the background would remain shadowy, lending the image the quality of her subterranean life.
When she was satisfied, Brenna clipped a lavalier mic to Dr. J’s blouse, set the camera on a tripod near Daniel and framed up the shot so she could continue conversationally, without the distraction of the camera.
Brenna stood behind the camera. The tally light turned red. She was recording.
Daniel took his cue, and seamlessly shifted conversation into interview mode. Brenna hadn’t given him much prep time, so he just asked Dr. J about her experience of the war. What had her own losses been? How did it come to pass that people who were once friends now shelled each other? How had the citizenry been manipulated for political ends? What power did individuals have, in extreme environments such as war? What happened to individual morality? Were there ever just wars?
The rapport he had established with her during coffee, and Brenna’s lack of fuss, relaxed Dr. J. She spoke with emotion, eloquence, and humor. “We are completely free,” she said at one point. “Free of belongings, free of income, free of hope.”
Twice during the interview, incoming shells exploded nearby. Daniel and Dr. J stopped talking, waited calmly, then continued. Brenna let the camera run.
In closing, Daniel asked Dr. J how she stood living under such primitive conditions.
“I have no choice,” she said. “No one asked me.”
After he was satisfied that he had covered the major ideas, Brenna got Dr. J to demonstrate how she kept warm, cooked, washed dishes, and so on. Back in the edit suite, Dr. J’s interview could be superimposed over these images—especially where she spoke of the rigors of life without the basics.
While Brenna completed the pick-up shots, Daniel sat back against the cold cement wall, and rested. Just two days ago, he had been a vital and energetic man. Today, he was exhausted, severely bruised, in constant pain.
While Brenna packed up her equipment, Jasha padded up to her. “My mother and I are leaving now,” he announced.
Daniel’s eyes popped open. “Leaving?”
“Jasha’s going to take his Mom to the hotel, then come back,” Brenna explained. “You and I will go ahead to the nursery, and he’ll catch up to us there. If he doesn’t…can’t…make the rendezvous, we’ll go on to the airport.”
Daniel sat up, as shocked as if he’d been tossed out of a bobbing raft into a raging sea. He looked from her to Jasha. “Where’s the nursery from here?”
“About a mile west of here, skirting the foot of the mountain.”
“West,” Daniel said tersely. “Toward those tanks.”
“Once we complete the nursery interview,” Brenna said, ignoring his observation, “we’re finished. Done-done.”
“Don’t cut to the pot of gold, Brenna. I don’t like it.”
“So what do you suggest? That we retrace the same route we came in on? It’s not as if going back is safer.”
Daniel rubbed his chin.
“Going back pu
ts us further from the airport, Daniel. You and I are flying out at dawn tomorrow. The further west we go, the closer we are to our departure point. We can go directly there after the interview.”
“You and I,” he confirmed, “are flying out.”
“Yes. You and I.”
“And we will go to the airport immediately after the interview.”
“Yes.”
A harrowing hour later, Brenna stood under the overhang of an apartment balcony with Daniel beside her, comparing the map that Jasha had hastily sketched on a crumpled scrap of paper to the building across the street.
The front façade of the structure had been blown off. The apartments lay as exposed as pigeonholes in a postman’s sorting box, their floral wallpaper and brightly-painted walls incongruously festive. The western side of the building dangled like a severed arm in a long-sleeved shirt.
“This should be it,” she said. There were no street signs or house numbers to distinguish one socialist-style unit from the next.
“No one could possibly live here—could they?”
“Jasha said the nursery is on the second floor,” she said. “We enter there,” she pointed at a narrow break in the piled garbage lining the road.
His eyes followed her pointed finger.
She dashed across the road, Daniel hard on her heels. He plastered his back against the side wall alongside her.
The so-called staircase running up the exterior wall looked more like a rockslide than steps but a faint trail of mountain-goat footholds led upward, alongside a blood-smeared wall. Brenna frowned. There was a two-gallon water jug snagged on a chunk of concrete. And it was full. No one willingly abandoned drinking water in Kavsak.
She rested her index finger across her lips, then cupped her ear.
Daniel took her cue and stood motionless beside her, listening attentively.
She closed her eyes, consciously tuning out the constant poom, poom, poom and listened for a cough, the scratch of a shoe, the slide of a bullet into a chamber. For all she knew, the Nationalists were upstairs, waiting.
Day Three Page 21
