“Khalil!” she screamed.
His head snapped up at the sound of her voice. Their eyes met. Then he looked up, and she did, too, at the helicopter that whirred above.
The bomb dropped behind him.
#OnceUponAWar
“Have you ever asked yourself—do monsters make war, or does war make monsters?”
–Laini Taylor
Pappou used to tell Lexi stories of the war. He liked to speak of the good things. The camaraderie established between Greeks and Italians. The German soldier hero named Michael who had gone against higher orders and sacrificed himself for the love of Pappou’s twin sister, Kalli. About the courage of the soldiers—Greek, Italian, and German alike—who fought at Pappou’s side and aided in his return to Mythaki. He told Lexi of his beautiful wife, Penelope.
But sometimes he did not want to speak. He walked away when Lexi asked for stories. He remembered, alone, the bombs and the plagues and the coffins. He would sit wordlessly at the kitchen table or walk out of the house and into the woods. Lexi realized that there was another side of war, a darker side, which scared Pappou.
So it scared her, too.
Lexi found him like this one afternoon, a few days after the incident with Miss Sanders. She came home, jumped off the bus, and found the front door unlocked. She walked in and followed the sound of low-pitched voices. Instinct made her hold her tongue; she peeked stealthily around the doorway, sensing that she should not be seen.
Gabriel and Anastasia sat at the kitchen table, two cups of coffee growing cold in their hands. Tears traced the crevices and craters of the older man’s face.
“She threw herself into the sea with rocks strung around her neck, and he thinks she died fighting to protect our lives,” he said, voice strangled. “Elias believes she was a hero.” Gabriel’s eyes looked at and through his daughter-in-law, as if addressing someone else. “I raised him as my own, and he grew in her spitting image. I never knew if he and I shared the same blood. I never will.”
“It would not make a difference, Gabe. He couldn’t have asked for a better father.” Anastasia wiped at his tears with the corner of her apron as if he were a child. Then she wiped her own. “You raised and loved him as yours. That’s all that matters. And after all you’d been through—the war, the Germans—no one could ever ask for more.”
“You cannot blame the Germans. They broke us apart, they destroyed us.” The old man bowed his head and rested his brow against his clasped hands. “Yet I cannot condemn monsters for preying on monsters. They never would have been able to break us if we were not already cracked.” Gabriel raised his head and looked at his daughter-in-law. “You know what ensued. You lost your mother there.”
Anastasia nodded.
“It is unbelievable, brother against brother in a country blessed by the Virgin Mary herself.” Gabriel’s eyes clouded as he raised his face, his voice soaked in disbelief after all these years. “Unrivaled in the world with its rock-strewn islands rearing from the cusp of water and foam, with its vales and hills of aromatic fruit, its vibrant wildflowers in the spring and its golden tresses of grass in the summer, with its people so primitive in their compassion and cunning—our country, so pure, punctured with such fear.”
It was as if they stood before him now: a boat full of Mythakians, huddling together as they sailed from their cursed island. Their arrival on a tiny Kefalonian beach, an ancient fisherman named Emmanuel delivering them to the two German sentries emerging from behind the shore’s boulders, their horned silhouettes choppily reflected in the rippling waters at their feet. The massacre that ensued before the Greeks, armed with knives and the desperation to survive, overwhelmed the Germans by sheer number. Four Greeks left standing, with Gabriel and Emmanuel grappling at each other’s throats.
“It was as if fear lived in the air we breathed, as if hate melted into the rocky soil and sprung from the streams we drank from.” He blinked, his eyes clearing as he focused on Anastasia. “We let it blind us. We let it eat us alive. The worst of it is: we never learn.”
Lexi tried to restrain her sneeze with all her might, but a little alien noise escaped her. Her grandfather’s eyes found her and seized her as tightly as if they physically held her own.
“Sometimes you are left with only questions,” Gabriel said. “That is what war does. It ends things midsentence. It kills people and purpose. But if you’re spared, you must keep going. Giving up is not an option.”
Lexi felt that he had just said something important. She had never seen him so sad. Anastasia looked up, too, and rose from the table.
“Lexi!” she exclaimed. “Did the bus drop you off early, sweetheart? How was school?”
Pappou stood up and walked outside. Lexi watched him go. He did not look back.
26 / Black Snow
“You can bomb a world to pieces, but you can’t bomb it into peace.”
–Michael Franti
Lexi felt the gentle kisses against her skin, something like confetti falling on her face. She opened her eyes and registered that she was lying on her back, outdoors, on the freezing ground. Black snowflakes drifted into her eyes and nose.
She struggled to sit up with limbs that took a long while to cooperate, Yang nudging her encouragingly. Pain swathed her left knee despite the ground’s icy fleece of fresh-fallen snow. Snow and ash drifted around her like a cascade of tiny chessboard pawns thrown across the sky in slow motion.
Khalil lay a few yards away, face upturned and mouth open as if catching snowflakes on his tongue. His body was half-hidden in a mound of scattered garbage, the contents of a trash bag that had consumed some of the shrapnel. His eyelids fluttered but he did not move his head. Judging from the angle of his limbs and the blood that stained the snow around him, he probably could not.
“Tastes of death,” he rasped. His breath, visible in the cold, punctuated out of his mouth as if it were spurts of his soul. “Keep your mouth closed, Aliya.”
There had been a helicopter. A bomb. The realization cut through Lexi’s shock like a bullet, dissipating the numbness.
She forced herself to stand, holding on to the wolf for support. She ran two steps before her knee nearly gave out. She hobbled the rest of the way until she collapsed next to Khalil’s body.
His eyes closed.
Lexi grabbed his wrist, her hands shaking. She mewed in relief once she felt his pulse. The trash bag had shielded him from the worst of the impact. Though hurt, Khalil lived: that was all that mattered. Lexi forced herself to turn towards the Tzami. They’d aimed the bomb directly at the building, not knowing or not caring that it always housed at least a dozen people.
“I’ll get help,” she croaked. Khalil did not give any indication that he heard. She didn’t know if he was still hallucinating, imagining himself back in Yemen with his dead sister, or if his consciousness was slipping away. “Just hang on. Hang on. I’ll be right back.”
Lexi grasped for her cellphone, miraculously still in the back pocket of her jeans. A cracked black screen stared back at her, no light or sound emitting from the device no matter how she pressed or shook it. She jammed it back into her pocket with a curse. Forcing herself back on her feet, she stumbled inside the battered building, tripping over shreds of wood and stone. Khalil had left the red door ajar on his way out; the explosion had blown it from its hinges. The metal door handle had hurled off, embedded like an arrowhead in a nearby tree-trunk.
She paused at the sight of a dismembered hand, waving up out of the snow like Thing from the Addams Family, its corpse-white fingers curled and bloodied. A golden wedding band glistened on one finger, the one tattooed with the broken arrow glyph symbolizing peace. Transfixed, Lexi could not look away.
A cold wet snout stuck itself into her hand, grounding her. Yang whined worriedly. Lexi nodded, though it took every ounce of her courage to approach the gap in the wall.
And then she was there.
The blackened stone floor was patterned with debris that belch
ed smoke and hissed beneath the slow steady snowfall. Flames licked the tapestries and wall paintings. Charred vines clung to one wall and shivered beneath the broken roof. Thick shards of the stained glass and the mirrors blanketed the floor like a field of crystal thorns. Beneath the broken pieces of the building, Lexi saw broken pieces of people. An arm jutting out from the glass. A pair of feet encased in blood-soaked sneakers. A shock of red hair.
Lexi forced herself towards them, terrified to look yet unable to tear her eyes away. Her foot caught on something and she stumbled. Pain lacerated through her body as she hit the floor, shards of glass knifing her palms and knees. She looked back at the source of her fall: a body.
Visible between the rubble, half of a disfigured face leered back at her. The other half was glued to the nearest wall. Lexi screamed.
She flung herself backwards, scrambling across the glass, the pain offset by horror. The sharp fragments sliced into her fingers. A trail of blood followed her, connecting her to the corpse. She clambered onto a charred metal barstool, the only thing left standing like a lighthouse in a sea of death, and curled her arms around her body. Her breath came in sharp gasps.
It took a moment for Lexi to realize that the strange keening noise was coming from her. She kept fighting for air. She did not know how long she sat there, crouched on a stool, watching the snow fall on corpses’ eyelids and inside their gaping mouths.
It was wrong. So wrong. She’d seen places—neighborhoods, office complexes, schools—that had been evacuated and blown up. Her own mother’s blood still tainted the porch steps and Lexi’s dreams. It all brought to mind the bombed cities and tempest-swept towns and plague-riddled villages of the war-torn countries of the world. Empty settlements, bloodstained walls, disembodied parts, screaming winds, silent corpses. The apocalyptic stuff that once belonged in the frames of a multiplex cinema or in a nation found in a different hemisphere.
No one begins a war believing it’ll follow them home.
Yang made his way through the wreckage and walked to her, his fur bristling and his fangs bared. Lexi slipped off the stool as he approached. She opened her arms and clutched the animal close to her as he nuzzled her face. In that moment, he was more dog than wolf, abandoning his curiosity of the carnage in the face of her misery. She buried her head in the softness of his fur, drinking in his musty wolf-scent of old rain and dirt and forests and life. The wolf growled, and Lexi agreed.
Time did not pause when she did.
She tried to stand and failed, fear and frustration clouding her vision. The adrenaline began to wear off; her legs refused to hold her. The fresh cuts from the shattered glass added to the knifing pain of her former wounds. She thought of Yang, trapped here with her. And Khalil, stranded outside. And she thought, then, with a fear that rattled her in its shuddering embrace, of finding Zach here amidst the carnage.
She began to crawl, pulling herself across the floor towards each body. She felt for pulses and held a broken metal ashtray beneath noses, willing to feel or see some form of life. The faces that she discerned were at once familiar and terrifyingly surreal, like friends who disguised themselves on Halloween behind bloody masks. She’d seen them before, had shared a table or a laugh or a sleepless night of studying with each of them. Here was a guy who snorted when he laughed, his unique chuckle so contagious it had the power to tickle everyone around him; shrapnel had blown off half his nose, silencing his laugh forever. Here was a sweet freshman who always ordered peppermint tea and who held her cup with her pinkie finger extended, her blue eyes scouting over the rim of her cup each time she sipped from it, shy and seductive all at once. She shared Lexi’s love for reading novels and had swapped over a dozen books with her. Lexi would never have a chance to return them.
She did not find Zach or anything that resembled him. The relief, balanced precariously on all the despair and madness surrounding her, would have ended her scavenge there. But Yang, as if herding a wolf-cub, pushed his body against hers. Lexi knew that stopping—that thinking—would bring the numbness of despair and madness. Numbness now meant death.
There were no survivors here.
She forced herself to crawl towards the open doorway, dragging the unresponsive parts of her body with her. She stopped only to pull a coat from a corpse’s arm. She’d never know if its owner’s last move had been to remove the coat or to begin pulling it on. The coat hindered her crawling. She dragged it anyway.
At last she emerged, gasping for air that did not smell of death.
Lexi vomited when she passed the dismembered hand a second time. Yang waited by her side. When she finished, she wiped her mouth with snow and continued. Khalil had not moved. Lexi brushed fresh-fallen snow from his face and covered his body with the stolen coat. In the process, her hand brushed against something small and heavy; her throat constricted as she grappled with the pockets. Her search unearthed a cellphone, intact and unlocked. It had reception. She dialed 911 and summoned an ambulance in a voice she barely recognized as her own.
Only then did Lexi give in to the full weight of her body, the fire in her limbs. She welcomed the tiredness that numbed the pain and forced her down next to her friend, Yang huddling at her back. “Aliya can’t make it without you,” Lexi rasped, recalling the name of Khalil’s sister, forgetting she had died. She rested against her friend as the snow soaked up their blood. “You must not give up. You have to keep living.”
The black snow on her friend’s face stole him from her in fragments, trying to spirit him away.
27 / Point Zero
“When you stand in front of me and look at me,
what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you
it is hot and dreadful?”
–Franz Kafka
The paramedics found the young man and woman half-frozen together in the snow; a creature that was more wolf than dog stood guard beside them. They loaded the two humans in the ambulance, took a final look at the demolished warehouse, and turned away. The dog blocked their path and tugged at their coats. It bared its fangs and snarled at them. In a surge of guilt, one of them ran into the wreckage. He emerged quickly, ashen-faced and empty-handed. His partner held his head as he vomited before they both jumped into the ambulance.
There were some things humanity wasn’t supposed to get used to.
Ten people had been in the Tzami during the attack, Khalil amongst their number. For nine of them—all but Khalil—it became their last stop before the graveyard. The bodies would be extracted, examined, numbered, and announced. The families would gather, grieve, and bury what was left of them.
Both of the survivors suffered from mild hypothermia; the doctors also diagnosed Khalil with a mild concussion. He wasn’t to move for a week, they said. After a couple days, he got up from his hospital bed when the nurses weren’t watching. Someone said he was seen hailing a taxi. The next day, the doctors dismissed Lexi, glad to be rid of her if only to be purged of the unblinking black wolf-dog that refused to leave the foot of her bed.
The temperature rose that afternoon. The snow ploughs made their rounds around the city and splashed salt onto the streets. Retrieving the pick-up, Lexi left Yang at the apartment and drove to Khalil’s home.
His driveway hadn’t been shoveled so she parked along the street curb. The snowy yard glowed, lit by sunlight shafting through a tear in the clouds. The place was as Lexi always remembered it. Two-story brick façade, dark blue shutters, azalea-flanked driveway. Except for the azaleas.
Those were dead.
By the time she made it up the driveway, Lexi could feel her legs shaking. She pressed her cheek against Khalil’s front door, her hands curled between her chest and the wood. She pulled away, took a deep breath, and knocked. The door opened.
Her heart spilled into one word: “Khalil.” She stumbled as he pushed her away. He mov
ed to close the door. Instinctively she reached out and pressed against it. “Don’t.”
The door froze ajar between them.
“It was my fault,” said Lexi.
“I know. I received your five voicemails.”
“I had to see you. I had to apologize.
The Khalil she knew was gone, his easy smile gone with him. A warrior faced her, hopeless and hardened and haunted. “Apologize?”
“I… I was coming to tell you. I never wanted—”
“They flew in without warning. A stealth helicopter. No call for evacuations, no sounds. They aimed to kill, and they did. I sometimes wish I hadn’t taken out the recycling. Nine people died in there. I heard them die. Didn’t you? Nine fucking innocent people, Lexi. Can you live with that?”
Lexi’s gut had curled up deep inside her. It hated the cold as much as she did. At Khalil’s words, it solidified into a ball of ice.
“No,” she whispered.
“So get this. You run off and live your fairytale. Okay. You deserve that. But the fairytale turns into a nightmare. And you feed the nightmare. You house the nightmare. The nightmare destroys you. And once you wake up—well, guess what, you’re back at Point A. Or actually, Point Zero. Because that’s what I am—that’s what that place and those people were to you. Nothing. Zero. Which is great for you, I guess, because now you have a metric system. It’s only going to get better from here on out.”
Lexi’s tears splintered her vision. Khalil’s face blurred before her eyes. She couldn’t see the tears in his eyes, too. She only felt the gutting of his words. They were so damn sharp, because he was so damn right.
The door closed in her face.
. . .
Lexi’s phone chirped at her on the way back to her apartment. She kept one hand on the wheel and reached for it from where it nestled next to her on the seat. Glancing back and forth from the road to the phone, she flipped it open and ran a red light. The driver on the other side of the street deafened her with his honking; Lexi jerked the wheel and swerved towards the curb to avoid him. She slammed her foot on the brakes and stopped inches from a fence that flanked the street.
The Wake Up (The Seers Book 1) Page 13
