"I don't understand."
"Because of me. Of what I am, what I was."
"Huh?"
"Before, during, after. Whatever."
He continued to rummage in the box, emotionless now.
"But why'd they rescue us if...?"
"Like you said so many times. They're hunters."
"But what about the..."
"Girl? I guess she was just... Never mind..."
"What?"
"I saw you with her."
"Oh."
"It doesn't matter now... Although I am curious did you tell her, did you tell her where we were, how many of us there were?"
The boy did not answer. He couldn't answer. Something was burning deep inside him, as if sparks from the fire resurfaced in his belly and began to smoke and spit. He looked over to the door. He slid off the bed and walked to it.
"Well did you?" his father said.
He put his fingers around the handle, he took its heat, it took his. He turned the handle softly until it stopped. He pulled. He pushed. The door shook in the frame but did not open.
"You think I didn't try that?"
The boy put a finger into the odd-shaped keyhole, that looked like the outline of a skull, running it around the rough wood on the inside, and onto the cold music-box mechanism of the lock.
"It won't do any good."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The boy crawled over to the boxes his father had found under the bed to see what was in them for himself. The first seemed to be a strange assortment of random things, the sort of objects that he kept rattling around in his bag, like books of matches, torn notebooks where the ink had run and paper turned to dust, plastic toys, cars, bandages, and a compass. He didn't look through this too hard. The other one was more interesting. It was filled with magazines and comic books. He started to take them out, to look at them. The covers spoke of rocket ships and bug-eyed monsters with bright plumes of laser smoke and glowing trails of explosions all outlined in black. His eyes widened. He put one down by his feet but was then distracted by the next. The bugs became robots, became wolves in the centre of the moon, in a colony, in a space station, in an intergalactic war, a black hole, a star turned inside out, a virtual machine.
"Look at this!" he said. "Oh wow."
"There isn't time."
His father's face had elongated and his brows rolled up. He was angry, but at the same time he was scared, his eyes darting around.
"Maybe there's something in one of these stories that can help?" the boy said.
"This is serious, don't you get it?"
The boy stopped and let the page he was holding flap in the air.
"I get it. We're stuck here until... What exactly?"
"Until we find a way out..."
"We've looked everywhere else..."
"You're right."
"But we could push the wardrobe across the door still?"
"You don't understand... They don't want to come in here, at least I don't think... They want to wait."
"For what?"
"There are these things I have to take, to keep healthy. Like medicine, you know. And I don't have any... I think they want to wait. They want to know for sure."
"What kind of medicine?"
"Pills. I take them to control it... It's, it's bad, alright."
"Tell me."
"The pills... The medication. It only suppresses it. It doesn't get rid of it..."
"So?"
"No one knows how it works. We never meant... We never meant to..."
The boy took hold of his father's hand. It reminded him again of the difference in size between the two of them. His fingers seemed to barely wrap around even now, though he knew that they should, it was as if his body wanted to defer, to be small, to stay crouched down in stature rather than walk those trails. So he let his fingers hang in his father's palm as if it was impossible to loop them all the way around and back, impossible to cross all but two of the three lines of blue veins that raised up out of the skin like hills, backed by the ridges of tendons that he could feel tensing.
"You never meant to what?"
"Forget it."
"I can't."
"Well... Your mother and I. We... We just wanted you to be safe. However that was." He pulled his hand away and used it to hide his eyes.
"What do you mean?"
"It doesn't matter..."
"Could I have it too?"
"I don't think you do."
"How will I know?" the boy said.
"If you have it?"
"Yeah."
"I don't know."
"But what does it feel like?"
"That's the thing. I can't remember... I just remember the light..."
"The blue light?"
"I just remember the light coming over me like a haze. And then, and then... I must have done some terrible things." He ran his hands over his arms as if he was cold.
"But what does it do?"
"You lose control of yourself. You just act, I guess. You can't turn anything off. You can't stop. It doesn't mean you do wrong. It just means you do what your body wants you to do... I guess that's what anyone does any time now anyway?"
"I don't understand."
"It's like falling asleep, you know, dreaming. At least, that's what they say... It's hard to explain -- I guess often there are things you might do that you stop yourself from doing, you know; or there are things you might not want to do that you make yourself."
"Like looking people in the eyes?"
"Right. Just how you are doing it now."
"But maybe I want to, now. Maybe I got better. Maybe you can too?"
"Maybe... But like I said with the pills it is fine. It is manageable. Your mother can get them... Like with the eggs."
"And that's why we can't go to the cities?"
"Yes."
"But why'd they make the pills? Why'd they try to treat it if they don't want it?"
"To keep it under control. Doesn't mean they are happy about it.."
"Oh... I'm sorry."
"Look, it's why I brought you out here, or so I thought. To tell you."
"Only I spent all the time away with her."
"Yeah. It's ok."
"How long?"
"I don't know. Until midday? Could be sooner. I must have sucked a ton of that smoke down my lungs. I can feel it in my throat." He tried to cough but the sound was weak, as if it stuck part way and then hit against an obstruction, fell back to his stomach. "They were probably trailing us the whole time," he said.
The boy turned away. He didn't want to hear it. He didn't want to have to think about it. The shadow of the edges of his feet moved gently around as the minutes passed, until the sun began to snake behind clouds of chloroform regret.
He could smell the burn outside, from the fire, or was it not in the room, perhaps the bleach used to clean the bones of any other victims, any others who had woken up and found themselves trapped, who had fallen in love, like insects hardened by the blast of ultraviolet, white skin turned black, furnaced and furnished with the outsides of a bitter shell of a cannonball fired through smoke and heat and spinning until it impacted in the dirt, the centre of an eye on fire, caught on a string.
The man pulled open the small drawer by the bed and rattled the contents around before pushing it shut. The drawer slid but did not close. He did not bother to push on it any more. He tipped the lamp over and inspected the bulb instead, shielded his eyes, turned it off, and then on again, unscrewed it and lifted it out of the cage that surrounded it, wrapping his hand in his shirt to hold onto it. He took the bulb over to the windowsill and started to gently tap it against the side, rolled it around. He pushed his hand down on top of it. Then he raised it back to shoulder height and swung it so that it popped and crumpled into pieces.
He worked the filament out with his fingers and twisted it. The wire was a spiral shape, made out of coils that began to unfold the more he pulled it out, turning into a long lengt
h that he stretched between his arms and pulled across his chest, moving his fingers along slightly so that he could get a better grip, wrapping the trailing lengths around his hand and pulling it tight one more time so that the line in the middle gleamed.
"What are you going to do with that?" the boy asked.
"There's a way it could work... I'm going to wait for them."
"But..."
He sensed the long death that this method entailed. The wire would wrap around the neck and it would get tight. Circumspection. A sawing motion. A red line that would begin to drip, and drips that would run down to the chest and then on, until the skin was cut, until the muscle was cut, and the arteries split, until perhaps the head came off, all the time with the air running out and the tongue poking around like a straw. He shuddered and couldn't look.
"I want you to go to the door," he said. "I want you to call out for help. Tell them that I am sick. Make like you're trying to get out. Rattle it in the frame. Really make like you're trying to open it and think it's locked in a mistake."
"But... What if it is?" the boy said.
"It isn't... But you make out like it is. And when they come in... I'll stand behind here. See? Put that pillow across the bed, under the blanket. And I'll be out of sight and you just back away and let them come, follow you a few paces, that's all I need. Then I'll throw this around one of their necks, turn them, take them by surprise and push them up against the door so it closes. I'll get one of them at least. Hopefully. If I put enough pressure on."
"But what if there's more?"
"I don't know."
The boy turned away again. He shook his head. He walked over to the window and put his hands on the veil of the net curtain so that his hand went white behind the thin fabric. He wiggled his fingers and watched the waves spread across, and then he pushed it to the side and stared down through the glass, down to the ground, with peat brown and a few flakes of grass, spattered red mud quickly running away to the trees. One of the branches there had a rope tied around it that hung down. It swung gently back and forth, long spiral snakes turned around and around on it, white like angelic hair that had been entwined within itself. Perhaps the rain had softened the ground. Perhaps he could force the glass. He knew it was locked, but it would shatter; that had to be better. His father had said that the noise would alert them, and they'd simply wait for them to fall. He pushed into the sill and then the wall underneath. How much give was there. He pushed into it and felt sure the plaster began to flex before turning to solid steel. He sensed his father was watching so he took his hands off and turned around so that he leaned against the windowsill, arms behind his back, secretly pushing it, nudging it, unable to get as much of a purchase on it.
"We have to do this soon," he said. "Don't think about it ok? Look at my eyes. Focus on doing your job and that's it."
The boy inched along the wall rather than stepping across the room, as if he could barely walk. He shuffled this way until he was in the corner, stepping behind the chair, pausing to crouch and check underneath again, though he had already. He put his hands on the wall again, until they slid into a patch of sun, and then shade, and he moved this way all the way along to the door, fingers inches from the handle.
"You ready?"
The boy nodded. He reached out to turn the handle, cleared his throat, ready to scream and shake.
"Hey, wait a second," his father said.
"What is it?"
"Down there, by your feet."
The boy followed his finger to something that hadn't been there before: a thin metallic stick attached to a plastic grip with a hole in it. Someone must have pushed it under the door. He looked at the window.
"We can unlock it," the boy said, picking up the key and rushed across the room.
"It's still too far to fall."
"But no look, wait," the boy said.
"What is it?"
"The girl."
His father ran over to the glass and pulled the boy out of the way.
"Don't let her see you," he said.
"Why? She's trying to help."
"How do you know?"
He moved back to the wall where he put his hands around the now broken bedside light as if to use it as a club.
"Just trust me," the boy said. He looked through the window glass and tried to catch the girl's gaze, she was stood almost out of view, behind the bottom most section of glass, where scratches caused by spider legs seemed to move down from the centre, where they became webs, stuck to the outside corners of the window and flapping in the breeze, with long trails pointing down to the ground.
She was looking at the house, but much lowers. Occasionally she turned away and kicked her legs. Behind her the ground looked cold and twinkled with frost. The rocks bucked and seemed almost to roll around. The mud was grainy like wood. Her feet had not made any tracks as they had come out there, tracks that might allow her to be tracked to the spot where she stood. At last she looked up to see him and smiled nervously. It looked like she'd been crying.
The boy beckoned for her to come up there. She shook her head, looked to something beneath the window again and then motioned for him to come out to her. Did she know what was happening? Did she know what her father did, about him, about them, about what they must apparently represent, walking bodies fit to fire?
"What's going on?" his father said from back by the bed.
"I don't know."
"I don't think we can trust her."
"She's saying for us to come down there... She must have passed us the key. What other choice do we have?"
"God knows."
He slid the key into the slot. "We could get your pills."
"It won't work."
"You said until midday right?"
"But they already know."
"It's worth a shot... I'll have her take me to the camp. I'll explain. We can get there and back... Maybe?"
"You'll break your neck with the fall."
"Will not," he said, turning the key. "I can climb it."
"Wait."
"What?"
"We should both go."
"Both."
"You'll climb onto my back and I'll take us down the side of the house."
"But?"
The girl had walked away from view. The boy tapped on the glass without thinking, out of frustration, out of fear.
"Don't!" his father said.
"Sorry."
"I doubt the coast is clear."
"Should we wait for her to come back?"
There was a shout from somewhere below them in the house, an angry yell. "No, come on," he said. "That might be a distraction... We have to do this now."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"Run!" she said as she grasped at his hand and then found it. She pulled him hard as she turned, so that his arm bounded at the socket and jerked. She did not stop, sprinting for the first trees as the red mud piled beneath her feet in furrows, pulling him as he pulled her, as if they were ploughs, carrying him along, not on her back, the way his father had, but as if she held a sled behind her the shape of the bed where they had awakened and now tugged, the thin luminous wire that wrapped around his heart and formed a boy. His feet picked up as she put her shoulders down hard, and pointed them at the sun. His feet picked up with each step that she took, as if tied too, with her wish.
He had no time here to look back, nor to wonder why from a choice of the pair who had fallen down the side of the house at the last gasp, tumbling like stars; why, out of the two of them, she had picked him to carry away like the tide, why she had pulled him up like a first crop, sliced his connection to the ground, with all of the action of a scythe, why she had lifted him by hand, and not his father.
He had no time to think this through, and yet had nothing but time in front of him now as they ran. Time had become an open expanse, a great plain below that mountain that they must both walk while they had left behind the sound of the opening door, the sound of the men calling out in rage, s
tirred from the crash they had caused, calling out in frustration as they tripped over their own stairs, their own affairs, as they went, guns scraping the floor, and then pushing through the air, ready to shred the atmosphere.
Did she pick him because she already knew? Whatever it was his father had said that was within him, whatever disease, whatever thing the man held? That perhaps all men held. Did she pick him because he knew? How much did she know? She had known about the pyre. So she knew more than she had said.
His fingers no longer tried to curl around hers as he thought, and yet their hands held together because she had wrapped her hand around his and clung on the way he had clung on when they descended that hill, as if all of the adrenaline acted as a sponge to soak up memory, offering just fragmented drips that formed on the basin and fell, that glance to the right where he had defied his father's plea to keep his eyes closed, where he had glimpsed the side of the house they were in, built out of mottled bricks the colour of soil and stone, a sudden arm of rusted metal that jutted out as if to support the roof further over from where they were, near to where the slates had stripped off the roof leaving behind wooden ribs, where birds seemed to flitter in and out, in his mind, for a moment, in the blink, in the drip, or at least their feathers did, to where the long distant tail of a comet might have drifted along, looking like a white boxing glove unwinding into white plastic strands as if caught in gorse.
His arms around his father's neck, pressing his face into his hair, knocking back and forth as he made his way down and then got stuck searching for a route, hanging on, holding on, to those same bricks, in the mercy of them, under them at the same time as above, within them, within their stone, at the same time as being outside. Swinging.
The boy did not look back to see as she dragged him, could not. Yet he heard it all. He heard it as they passed behind the first tree and took a sharp turn as if to vanish from view, as the drumbeat of their feet was joined by the sound of struggle outside the front of that house, where the Land cruiser sat with its glass coated in soot, as if it no longer wished to observe.
He had no time to picture the struggle before a hunting rifle cracked fists with the sky, made a sudden snap that tore through time, the sound of a box of all those faded photographs stored in a box in the loft ripped up all at once. He knew what it was. What it meant. But not where that first shot had fallen.
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