Unbreakable

by Will McIntosh

  Celia gasped.

  “One time it was grizzly bears the size of trucks. Another, these eyeless things with mouths full of razor-sharp teeth that burrowed underground. The worst were the ones that looked like people. There were these bony white faceless things. If they caught you, they could cut you apart without quite killing you. They built things out of people who were still crying—”

  Celia clapped her palms over her ears. “Stop.” He was right, she would never get those images out of her head. She’d wanted to know, though, and now she knew.

  “That’s why I think we’re part of a big experiment.” Anand’s voice was thick with emotion. “Why else would you do that to people? Someone was watching while they did different things to us to see how we’d react. I don’t know why—”

  “Engines!” Beaners screamed.

  The only cover in sight was a tree line a quarter mile away, uphill. They headed for it.

  Even with his arms locked behind his back, Beaners passed Celia and Anand before they were halfway. His gait was absurd, his big feet swinging madly, but he covered ground.

  Celia heard the rumble of engines. She glanced back at two red jeeps bouncing over the hilly terrain. She was sure they’d been spotted. How could they not, out in the open like they were?

  A gunshot rang out, followed by the soft thump of a bullet striking the turf to Celia’s left. More gunshots followed, their sharp sound breaking over her gasping breath. Her lungs were on fire, but she kept going, keeping pace with Anand.

  They reached the trees and kept running as the jeeps skidded to a stop behind them. Celia heard orders shouted. Ahead, she glimpsed bright yellow and blue through the leaves. Beaners was waiting for them.

  “Cut me loose.”

  Anand had the cuffs off Beaners in seconds.

  “Keep going.” Anand pointed deeper into the woods, then ran right, perpendicular to the Redsuits. He scooped up a thick branch before disappearing through the brush. Beaners took off to the left.

  Celia ran straight into the woods, tearing through bushes that clung to her as if trying to hold her back. As she ran, she thought of that hill of bodies. She felt sure these people were planning to add her to it.

  Off to her right, the direction Anand had gone, a gunshot rang out. Celia stumbled and nearly stopped running. Anand had circled back to try to slow the Redsuits down with nothing but a branch. She wanted to turn and help him, but what could she do? Hold her breath for a long time?

  “She’s over here.” Celia heard the crunch of boots on dead leaves behind her. She knew it would only slow her down to glance back, but she had to know how close they were. If she was about to get shot in the back, she didn’t want the pain to be a surprise.

  A man in a red uniform was fifty feet behind her and closing. As he tore past a low tree branch, she got a good look at his face.

  She stopped running, all the fear draining out of her. “Max?” He wasn’t in that giant pile, he was here, and as soon as he recognized Celia he’d make everything all right. Their eyes met. Celia waited for that moment of recognition when he’d cry out her name and run to her with open arms.

  But Max only looked sad, or disappointed, as he returned Celia’s gaze, as if he’d known it was her all along. He raised his rifle. Two shots tore through the foliage over Celia’s head.

  Before she could turn to run, a branch whacked Max in the side of the face from behind, knocking him to the ground.

  “Max!”

  Beaners stepped into view, the branch raised over his head.

  “Wait!” Celia lunged to stop Beaners. She wanted to shout to him that Max was on their side, had to be on their side. But he’d shot at her.

  Beaners brought the branch down on Max’s head. There was a crack as the wood snapped in half. Beaners dropped the stub he was clutching and ran.

  “Celia!” Anand came tearing through the foliage, heading toward her. “This way.” He angled left.

  They reached a downslope that grew steeper, until they were forced to cling to the trunks of trees to keep from tumbling, the ground mossy and slick. She didn’t understand what had just happened. She’d been close enough that Max must have recognized her, and it had looked like he’d recognized her as he’d leveled that rifle. She might never know what he’d been thinking, because Beaners may well have killed him.

  The ground leveled out and grew boggy. They managed another few hundred yards before they were forced to stop at the edge of a swamp.

  “Go around?” Celia didn’t hear sounds of pursuit. She was half-hoping Max would appear, and they could figure this out together. Surely if he knew how sick Janine was, he’d help Celia.

  Anand squatted, hands on thighs, trying to catch his breath. “I hurt one of them pretty bad. At least some of them will have to take her to get medical attention, but some could still be after us. I think we should cross this thing. In the long run, rifles beat sticks every time.”

  Celia pinched her temples. “Damn it.”

  “What?”

  “This is taking too long. I’m no closer to reaching the outside than when I left, and now I have to cross a swamp.”

  Anand leaned forward, and for a moment Celia thought he was going to reach out and give her a hug, a squeeze on the shoulder. Something to comfort her. “We’ll go as fast as we can.” He unlaced his boots.

  Celia pulled off her hiking shoes, which were already covered with mud, and followed Anand into the thigh-deep muck, which squeezed sickly between her toes. She hoped the lack of birds and bugs also meant no water snakes or leeches.

  “Anything in your pack that can’t get wet?” Celia asked. “I have room in the plastic bag where I’m storing my phone.”

  Anand pulled the sketch pad from his pack and handed it to her. “Thanks.”

  After taking a few more unsteady steps into the swamp, Celia turned and scanned the rising landscape for glimpses of red among the trees, but there was no sign of their pursuers. No sign of Max.

  Max was a Redshirt. It made sense, because he’d always been a leader, a figure of authority in Record Village. How could he try to kill her, though? Max loved her.

  Even though she suspected there were no snakes in the water, Celia kept imagining things wriggling under her toes as they sank into the soft mud.

  “We may have finally ditched the clown,” Anand said over his shoulder.

  “I think he saved my life back there.” Celia told Anand what happened. Anand didn’t ask how the man Celia trusted more than anyone could try to kill her. Celia appreciated that.

  She noticed Anand was holding his side. “Are you okay?”

  Anand slowed and lifted his shirt. An angry bulls-eye shaped bruise was blooming on his rib cage. “The woman I injured shot me. Point-blank. It hurt like hell—I thought I was dying.” He dropped his shirt. “She did too. I could see how shocked she was when I started fighting back.” He shook his head. “When it was over and I had a chance to look...I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t. Maybe the bullet ricocheted off a rib?”

  Celia thought of Max, taking aim at her, then missing high. “Unless they’re trying to capture us instead of killing us. Wouldn’t they want to know how Beaners and I escaped? If there’s a weakness in their walls, they need to know what it is.”

  “Let’s hope that’s it. But if someone points a rifle at you again, don’t count on it.”

  Celia grunted a laugh. “Don’t worry.”

  Chapter 13

  Celia discovered some crumbs stuck to the lining of her soaked pocket. The mud hadn’t gotten in there too badly, so she dabbed them out on her fingertip one by one and ate them as she pushed through the black water. The boughs of trees were just barely visible as strips of pitch black on a gray-black background. She was getting better at detecting the deep spots before plunging into them, so there was that, anyway.

  There was nowhere to sleep, nothing but water and trees. Celia decided to pretend she was trying to break a record. Most steps taken in a swa
mp after having nothing to eat for three days except a pocketful of deli leftovers. To keep her feet moving, she imagined New Orleans was on the other side of this swamp. The Big Easy, which she could picture vividly thanks to a dozen movies she’d seen that were set there.

  As she imagined a life in New Orleans, she kept seeing Anand. There he was, sitting across from her eating beignets at Café Du Monde, stumbling down Bourbon Street with her on Mardi Gras. She glanced at Anand, his face hidden in deep shadow, then away quickly. She felt confused and a little embarrassed as a flood of emotion hit her. How had these feeling snuck up on her? This was not a good time to fall for someone, especially someone who hadn’t even wanted to hug her. Bad timing or not, hopeless or not, the feelings were there, and now that they’d surfaced they were so overwhelming it was hard to breathe.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been this tired,” Anand said.

  “We need a distraction.” She needed one, anyway. She pulled her phone from the waterproof bag.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea? If you stumble and fall, no more phone.”

  That was true, it was a huge risk to take, but she really needed a movie right now. Plus it felt like a way to let Anand into her world, to get closer to him.

  “I’ll be careful. What do you want to watch? Something upbeat.”

  “I don’t know movies. I spent most of my free time drawing.”

  Celia put on Winners and Other Losers, a newish romantic comedy about a financial planner who goes to a tiny town where almost everyone has struck it rich in a lottery ticket pool organized by the mayor. She falls in love with one of the few people in town who isn’t rich, because he didn’t buy into the lottery pool.

  They couldn’t really watch while they walked and simultaneously avoid deep spots, but she turned up the volume and they listened. The bluish light from her phone pushed back the darkness, which was as comforting as the movie itself.

  Before long, they reached one of those weird scenes. The financial planner and the lottery loser were in a pizza parlor, and that painting was on the wall. The painting—the one Celia kept seeing. She paused the movie and stopped walking. “Look at this for a minute.” She showed Anand the scene. “You see that painting? That same painting is in dozens of movies.”

  Anand watched intently. “The exact same painting?”

  “That’s right.”

  He pointed at the screen. “Look at that.”

  “What?” She studied the screen.

  “Show the scene again.”

  Celia backed up the feed and replayed the scene.

  Anand pointed. “Right there. There’s a jump to the next scene, like something was cut out.”

  Celia played it again. She’d never noticed it before, but he was right. The actors were sitting there talking, then, as the lottery loser looked up toward the painting, the scene just cut off.

  “Can you show me some of the others with the painting in them?”

  They were wasting precious time, but they could use a break from walking, and Celia was excited to have someone to share her obsession with who didn’t make her feel like she was doing something wrong. She pulled up scenes from other movies that had the picture, and in the third one, which starred her favorite actor, Paul Francis, Anand spotted another choppy scene-jump.

  A few minutes later, they found a third.

  “It always happens when they look at the painting,” Anand said. “And why are they looking at the painting? Why would you suddenly turn to look at a painting that’s been hanging on the wall the whole time?” He made a face. “Especially one as bland as that.”

  It was bland. It was as if someone went out of their way to choose a painting no one would notice.

  “Play it again?” Anand asked. They watched Paul Francis flick his hair out of his eyes, then look toward the painting. “Something’s been taken out.”

  Standing in that swamp in the dead of night, the words chilled Celia. “What?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe there’s something about the painting we’re not supposed to see, or...” Anand shrugged. “Something.” He let out a breath. “We should keep moving.”

  Celia pushed on, her thighs and calves aching as the mud sucked at her feet.

  “What if there’s no outside world?” Anand said, his figure a silhouette in the darkness.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if all those big cities, and dogs, and airplanes in movies are made up somehow, and this is all there is?”

  It was the most bizarre idea she’d ever heard. Celia felt vaguely nauseated even contemplating it. “How would they make the movies, if all of those things don’t even exist?”

  “I don’t know. Ignore me—I’m just thinking out loud.”

  #

  It was mid-morning when they reached solid land. Celia dropped her pack and sank to the ground. She couldn’t sleep—they had to keep going until they reached civilization. She let her cheek press against the loamy soil and closed her eyes, just for a minute.

  #

  A sickeningly familiar whistling snore woke her. She sat up, astonished.

  Beaners was sleeping nearby, his knees drawn up to his chest.

  “He’s like a barnacle.” Anand was leaning against a tree, sketching. Celia really wanted to see what he was drawing, but Anand was sitting at a distance, as if he wanted privacy.

  “They’re going to keep after us, you know.” Anand didn’t look up from his sketch pad.

  “How do you know for sure?”

  “There were two vehicles. If they just happened upon us while they were patrolling, there would have been only one.”

  They. Them. The people who would rather kill them than let them find out what was going on. “Maybe they spotted us while we were in that town.”

  “Luckytown,” Beaners said without opening his eyes.

  “What?” Celia asked.

  “It was called Luckytown. I overheard some people.”

  “Okay. So maybe they spotted us when we were in Luckytown.”

  “That may be,” Anand said.

  Celia flashed back to Max, taking aim at her. She couldn’t get the image out of her head. Janine would be devastated. It would break her heart if she found out. Max was supposed to be building a cabin in the country somewhere, preferably by a lake, waiting for Janine to get the call and join him. She would spend her days reading on the porch, he would fish from a little rowboat.

  Anand closed his sketchbook and set it down.

  “Can I see?” Celia asked.

  After hesitating for a moment, he picked up the sketchbook and brought it over to Celia.

  Celia looked at the drawing he’d just finished, a view of the swamp that was so remarkably vibrant, so bursting with life it made Celia’s fingertips tingle.

  She looked up at the swamp itself and only saw an ugly bitch—a muddy, filthy hole filled with twisted, deformed trees.

  “Is this really how you see the swamp?”

  “I’ve walked past the exact same trees, the same weeds, my whole life, and then suddenly I see this.” He gestured at the landscape. “Isn’t it incredible?”

  She flipped to the top page, which was a sketch of a knight with a lance on a charging horse, obviously from Medieval Village. The plume on the knight’s helmet, the horse’s mane, were convincingly whipping in the wind. The horse was clearly in flight, moving fast yet straining mightily under the weight of the knight’s armor.

  Next was a drawing of the audience cheering at some event, their bodies animated, but their eyes bored, smiles stiff and pasted on. Perfect.

  Flipping through the drawings was like catching up on the past few months of Anand’s life. A group of snappily-dressed audience members playing cards in a storeroom cluttered with boxes; people huddled around a map, maybe a group from Treasure Town; the audience on the trail in the woods, watching two women fight; a portrait of a grinning young guy who Celia guessed was Clay.

  Toward the end she came to one of Bean
ers that was devastating. He was examining the wound he’d gotten clutching the shard of glass, his half lidded eyes brimming with their usual contempt and rage. Only, there was something else in his eyes. Loneliness? A scared little boy, hurting because no one cared that he was bleeding?

  This wasn’t a hobby, this was what Anand was meant to do. He was an artist; he made that stubby pencil sing. The drawings were astonishing; they filled Celia with aching, with joy, with energy.

  “Wow. I know how you can make a living on the outside.”

  Anand looked surprised. “I wouldn’t sell them. I like giving them away to friends sometimes, but selling them would be different.”

  “But you’re good. I think you’re good enough to be famous.”

  His smile reminded her of how he’d smiled at her the night she tripped down the stairs. “Maybe I could break the art record.”

  “What—” She was about to ask what the art record was, then realized he was kidding. “Are you suggesting I’m driven and competitive?”

  He shrugged. “There’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s what makes you happy. It wouldn’t make me happy, though. I’d like to slow down and have time to really look around. I don’t want to be anything—I just want to see. A tornado. A pyramid. An ant. That’s what would make me happy. That, and maybe someone to share it with.” Usually when their eyes met, Anand quickly looked away. This time he held her gaze. As Celia looked into his eyes, she wondered if she’d somehow misread what he was feeling, because he was not looking at her the way you look at a buddy.

  When their gaze had drawn out to the point where they either had to kiss, or look away, Anand finally looked away.

  The second-to-last drawing was of Celia. She studied it, her pulse racing, tilted it so the light hit it at different angles, drew it closer, then pulled it back. It was her, but it wasn’t, because the face he’d sketched was lovely. Strange, but lovely. Not hamster-like at all. More a deer, with big eyes and a delicate mouth—a deer staring into headlights and thinking, Come on, car. I can take you. She could feel her face getting red. “I don’t understand how you did this. It looks like me, but at the same time it doesn’t look like me at all.” She handed back the sketch pad.