by Seth Fishman
I pull his hood over his head and stick my face in there with him, surprised at my own boldness. For a moment, we’re alone. There’s nothing but the sounds of our breaths and the slick of the nylon of our winter gear shifting against our bodies.
“I believe you,” I whisper and lean forward, putting my lips on his, giving a soft kiss. They’re swollen and taste coppery, and he winces, so I pull back apologetically but he puts his hand on my back and brings me closer, and I begin to shiver I’m so hot. When we kiss, I can feel the scrape of our chapped lips, and it’s been a while since we brushed, but none of that matters. I close my eyes and am lost in his warmth, and when I come up for air, he’s staring at me, his thick brows high, pushing wrinkles into his forehead. His mouth is open, and I see his teeth, white and a little crooked.
“What?” I ask, nervous.
“You’re beautiful.”
No one’s ever said that to me. Not even my dad. That’s something people say to Jo. It’s so simple, but it feels like the last thing in the world I expect to hear, and I close my eyes in delight. I want to hear more, but I just grin, stupidly, and lower my eyes and there, in the snow, I see the footprints of my friends and realize that we’re falling behind.
“I’m sorry about hurting you,” I say, my hand against his chest.
He’s tender, even with gloves on, and touches my chin, pulling me to his gaze again. His face is severe for some reason, and his lips thin. Did I say something wrong?
“Mia . . . I’m sorry too.” He pulls me in for a hug, and while I’m there, I stare into the empty woods behind us, confused about his apology but not wanting to complain. “You ready?” he asks in my ear, his breath warm.
“Yeah,” I reply and slip out of his grasp. I can still feel the lingering touch of his lips on mine. I wish I knew what just happened.
Turns out the others aren’t so far ahead, because they’ve stopped and are pretending not to watch us. We catch up, but now I’m almost ill from embarrassment. Rob mutters something. Nice one, maybe. A favorite of his. I’m not sure.
“Well,” I say, “better keep moving.” I catch Jo’s eye, and she has her head tilted, her expression set in a small grin. I make a face, and she laughs lightly, and that laughter makes me happy. It’s all I can do not to laugh myself.
“I just need to sleep,” Odessa grumbles, oblivious to it all, fading back toward the haze. She’s not just in pain from the bullet, it seems, and I wonder if the wound is infected. She takes a sluggish step, and her leg gives out. Jimmy grunts and lifts her up to his chest.
“Let’s go,” he says, his voice tight.
Jo tries to help Jimmy, but her feet sink into the snow quicker than she can move them. She sort of stumbles along behind, holding only some of Odessa’s weight with her outstretched arms when she can. It would look funny in any other scenario.
The morning arrives, gray turning into cloudy white. Sometimes I hear the crack of a gun behind us, but basically the battle seems to be over. The silence of our march, though, begins to bear down on me, and the moment of happiness I just experienced fades. If the battle’s over, then Sutton’s coming for us. Without me, he has nothing, just a rampant virus. I wonder, as I trudge along, whether I’m selfish for escaping. If I could convince my father to open the Cave, maybe Sutton would stop the virus from spreading. And that just leaves me cold, thinking of the dead back at Westbrook, of the soldiers, of it spreading slowly out into the world. This could be the beginning of an epidemic, and I’m running blindly to the safety of my dad, who, I know now, is a liar. He might have been keeping secrets from me for years. It’s not that I don’t trust him; the problem is that for the first time, I wonder if everything’s going to be okay. I glance up ahead at Jo, who’s still trying to help Odessa and Jimmy. And I realize that even if we make it through this, those three won’t be fine. The school won’t return to normal. Mr. Banner won’t come back to life. Odessa’s been shot and Jimmy’s aged. I take a deep step into the snow, and then another. We’re heading to the aqueduct, but I’m not sure anymore if it matters. I know we’re hurrying, I know we’re trying to get safe, but it might be too late to bother.
13
THE AQUEDUCT TAKES ANOTHER HOUR OF SLOW, PAINFUL hiking to get to. Each step hurts like hell, but I don’t want to say anything. Cold toes don’t mean a thing compared to a bullet wound. Jimmy can’t carry Odessa that long, so we try to take turns, but none of us can really bear her weight, so it’s more to give him a second for a break. He lifts her on his broad shoulders, fireman-style, her body slumped down, her curly hair swinging, playing with gravity.
Every once in a while, Jimmy has to cough, and he bends at his waist, Odessa still on his back, spitting blood on the bank to avoid contaminating the stream. We all watch quietly, refusing to make eye contact. Time is running out.
Rob keeps forcing us to walk for a few hundred yards or so in the shallows of a stream where our waterproof boots won’t soak through. “To throw off any trackers,” he says. I don’t remember any dogs at Furbish, but I wouldn’t put it past them. They have snowmobiles, though, and even without dogs, they should be getting close.
“There,” Jimmy blurts out, his voice desperately tired.
He’s at the edge of a clearing in the woods, his bloodshot eyes up in the air. Following his gaze, I make out a sharp hill that becomes more pronounced, bursting from the earth, one that breaks into a cliff face, a splotchy wall of dark red earth, spattered with icicle drips. And jutting from the cliff face is the aqueduct, a long brick waterslide that’s supported by hundreds of columns as it transports water from the very heart of a freshwater spring all the way to Fenton. I follow the path of the aqueduct, and from here, we can see the outline of Westbrook’s chapel. It looks burnt out, ancient.
“Do you think they can hear the gunfight down there?”
“Probably not,” Brayden says. “Gunfire doesn’t travel far through mountains.”
Fleetingly, I wonder why he knows this.
“How do we get in?” Jo asks. “I don’t see a way up there.”
She’s talking about the station, which stands at the point where the aqueduct enters the cliff. It reminds me of a lighthouse, with its cylindrical shape and circular windows. It’s high up on the cliff, seemingly perched on a small outcrop of clay, and out of a hole in the bottom of the station jut the beginnings of the aqueduct, almost like the mouth to its long and flowing tongue.
Jimmy knows this one, though his face goes a bit sheepish. “Used to smoke pot and wander this area. Sometimes we’d climb halfway up for the view. There are stairs up the back. We have to circle around.”
Like any story with a lighthouse, there is a man who works the station. A loner, known by sight in town, especially to us townies. The inevitable legends have grown over the years. Something for the students to fear, I guess—even the jocks, who go stand at the edge of the woods and piss as far as they dare in his direction, no matter that it’s miles away. His name is Wilkins, and he has a white beard, a vast flowing thing that covers his belly. I have no idea how old he is, but he’s not young. He always wears a cap pulled deep over his eyes. I’ve never spoken to him, but I’ve seen him a lot. In fact, for a while, I was sort of obsessed with him. The thing is, my father told me that Wilkins was the man who pulled me from the well. He used to remind me about him as if he was recounting the tale of a mythical hero. Dad said Wilkins came running from the woods with a shovel on his shoulder and started digging. Didn’t say a word. He moved earth like it was nothing. Like it was his own daughter down there.
I’ve seen him see me, but we’ve never spoken. He nods. I smile. That’s it. I’m nervous now to actually be meeting this savior of mine for the first time. But in some weird way, I think it’s a sign that Dad wanted us to come here. Wilkins will show us the way and protect me somehow, as I like to think he’s always doing. Like he’s doing with my father right now, protectin
g the hidden entrance to the Cave. Our guardian angel.
We all stare at the station, no one moving. “I’ll go first,” I say, because I want to. And before anyone says anything else, I step in that direction. Except that my foot makes a MUCH louder noise than I expected. I freeze, we all do, deer in headlights. I hear the sound again.
It wasn’t me.
“HIDE!” I hiss, and we all dive wherever we can go. Behind trees, a rock. Rob just lays himself as flat in the snow as possible. Odessa grunts in pain but tries to keep it quiet, and for a moment, we all close our eyes and hope for the best. There’s the noise again, a static rumble, and I glance up to see Brayden, not having moved at all. He’s fiddling with the walkie-talkie.
“Brayden,” I whisper, annoyed.
“What?” he replies, clueless. “I didn’t know what it was either at first; it scared me to death. But then when you all jumped to hide—” He chuckles. “Jo, wow, I had no idea you had that skill!”
Jo’s far away and somehow managed to bury herself deep into a snowdrift. She digs herself up and shakes off the snow. “I’m a diver.” She shrugs. Now that our hearts are out of our throats, we all gather around Brayden, who’s gone back to messing with the device. It doesn’t seem to be working.
“Can I see that?” Rob asks. Brayden hands it to him. This isn’t the type of thing you buy at Toys-R-Us. There’s a small keypad and a dial and all sorts of stuff I don’t get, but that’s what Rob does: he gets things. Takes them apart, puts them back together. A mechanic and computer geek in one. He takes off his gloves, and his fingers blur, and suddenly there’s noise, coherent noise, loud and human, and it makes us all feel exposed.
The tone of the orders on the walkie-talkie shifts from routine commands to urgent anger. The voice gets familiar, and we know it’s Sutton. He sounds an odd mix of desperate and assured. I can’t help thinking that all this is getting out of hand for him. He didn’t expect the virus to jump to his hired soldiers and spread as it did. Surely these mercenaries won’t stick around for much longer . . . unless he somehow promised them the antidote. What’s more dangerous, a bad guy with a carefully executed plan, or a bad guy with no control over his plan at all?
. . . their trail.
We had trouble getting the snowmobiles across the water, sir.
But the dogs have them?
Yes, sir. The water lost the scent, but we’re close.
Don’t lose them again.
I’m sorry, sir.
It doesn’t matter if you’re sorry. If you can’t find them, we’ll all be dead soon.
The radio goes static, Sutton’s final order being adhered to. We aren’t so cold anymore. And when we look at each other, there’s no relief that they don’t know where we are, that we have a small a head start. We all stare up at the aqueduct, this imposing gash in the rock, and try not to think of what will happen if it’s a dead end. Brayden checks Odessa’s wound, and it’s clear that she needs help. She’s grown feverish, and I can see angry streaks of red under her skin, splitting off like veins from her stitches. It smells. It’s infected. Jimmy tries to be upbeat, we’ll be there soon, but Odessa’s grim. And so am I. Brayden wipes the wound with some snow and covers it again, and Jimmy lifts her up. It’s harder for him to do, and I can’t tell if that’s because he’s been hefting her for a while now, or if the virus is starting its descent, making him weaker, older. I watch them with a stark realization: if we don’t get help, and very soon, they’re both going to die.
I’m no longer tired. It’s hard to think of sleep when your world is ending.
The spiral stairs are metal, each step ribbed with thin, jagged splits to help a climber find purchase. Even so, there’s ice pooling along the edges, dripping from one step to another. The railing is slick and cold and impossible to hold on to. We only have three stories or so to go, but each step burns my toes, and I can’t imagine the pain Odessa must be going through. Jimmy is pulling her up step by step, and they’re taking their time down below.
I’m first on the stairs, Brayden second. Below me, Rob and Jo are whispering, and I’d like to lean backward to listen in, but I’m afraid I’d slip and break my neck. Spiral staircase equals nonconducive eavesdropping locale. No one next to you, only the clanging of boots.
I keep moving and lead them to the top of the stairwell, where something of a porch appears, about big enough for all of us. There’s even a chair, metal and covered with a thin band of ice, and a small bucket filled with cigarette stubs. Wilkins’s patio.
Brayden doesn’t look at me; his hand is cupped against a frosty window. His breath adding a layer of fog he keeps swiping at. I join him at another pane.
“See anything?” I ask.
“Lots of things. Not anyone, though.”
“You think the soldiers came this way already? Does he even know they’re around?”
“Probably. But it doesn’t look like anyone’s here at all.”
Rob and Jo crest the top.
I bang my glove against the wooden door, but it doesn’t make so much noise. I pull the glove off, feeling the crisp air on my hand, and rap on the window. It shudders, wobbling the reflections of the others.
“Doesn’t he live here?” Brayden asks, chewing on his lip. It’s still swollen, and he can’t seem to stop touching it.
“I guess we’ll find out,” I say, and I reach for the doorknob, somehow entirely surprised that it clicks open. I had definitely envisioned Jimmy using his elbow to smash in a window.
Everyone steps back and looks into the gloom as the door swings wide. We can hear Jimmy and Odessa making their way up the stairs behind us. He’s whispering encouragement to her. I feel a welling of emotion, a sadness. I never knew Jimmy, or this Jimmy. He’s not too bad a guy; he clearly cares for Odessa. They finally mount the stairs, her arm draped over his shoulder, him bent way down to accommodate her height. I can’t really imagine her getting through this without him. Jimmy’s eyes find mine, then flick to the open door. He grins, and I notice now that his beard has grown fuller, more adult and complete, like a logger’s.
“We alone?”
“Not sure,” I respond.
“Hello?” he shouts. Everyone flinches.
“Why’d you do that?” Jo says, her voice more concerned than angry. I can tell by the fear etched into her skin. The etchings are getting deeper.
Odessa weakly swats at Jimmy. “You idiot. Don’t be so dumb right now, okay?” I find it oddly comforting that she can still be mean.
“I can’t help it,” he says playfully. “I got hit in the head, remember? Who goes first?” he asks. And I see Brayden prepare to go, but I step in front, again thinking of what they don’t know, of how I should be the one to explain ourselves to Wilkins, wherever he is. Jo grabs my hand and then does this thing we do when we pass in the hallways of Westbrook: we interlock fingers and then immediately let go, our palms together, sliding apart. At school it was always a familiar greeting, a reassuring hello, and here it’s doubly effective.
Inside it’s black. Pitch as night. I instinctively reach for my cell phone to use as a light, but remember that it’s dead. We’re going medieval. I stand at the entrance, blinking, waiting for my pupils to dilate, trying to steady my breath. I’ve worked hard to feel comfortable not being afraid of the dark. But I’ll be the first to admit that the dark isn’t exactly my friend. And when I can’t see anything, when I’m in a stranger’s place, when I’m being chased by soldiers . . . well, these just aren’t optimum conditions for me. My therapist, who I finally “graduated” from seeing last year, she’d call these moments “aversion tests,” and I’m pretty sure I fail them when I want to be on my knees hyperventilating. And I almost do; I even squat, my palms sweating, but then I think of everyone waiting, of how if I just keep moving, like in the lake, I’ll get there.
So I take a step, then another, ignoring my aching
toes and willing my pupils to dilate faster. And suddenly an outline of a table forms. Then of a chair. Then of a TV, an old boxy one. I’m not about to flip on a light switch as a beacon for pursuing soldiers, but this feels like a living room from a family home, not at all like a professional workstation, a thought that actually comforts me.
“Hello, Wilkins?” I call, my voice echoing metallically, melding with the running water nearby.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to do that,” says Rob, his voice close, and it’s all I can do not to scream. I turn and punch him hard in the arm.
“Ouch! What’s that for?”
“Don’t creep up on me!”
The others can hear us, and they file inside, and we all now stand, feeling useless, unable to even read one another’s expressions.
“That’s his name, Wilkins?” Odessa asks, her voice strained with pain. “I’ve always wondered.”
“You’ve seen him around town, right?” I ask. “He’s the one who pulled me out of the well.”
Everyone’s quiet for a moment. Baby Mia, who fell down the well.
“We need to separate and find the entrance to the aqueduct’s tunnel,” I say.
“Does anyone know what it looks like?” asks Jo. I can’t see her face, but she sounds tired.
No, of course we don’t. And we stand there for another moment, shivering and blind.
“Come on, guys. They’re probably getting close,” Rob warns. He’s back near the entrance, peeking out the window.
We all move forward, in different directions, but it’s soon very clear that there’s only one way to go. A hallway, a door right beyond what I now see is a kitchen. The hallway is darker than the outer area, and I run my fingers along both walls as I walk and feel door frames to my left and to my right like mini speed bumps. Who knows how many rooms there are? “Let’s split up,” I say. “Everyone check the doors.”
