by Anne Tibbets
I squeezed Ric’s hand. He looked at me with grave concern, and I planted a wet kiss on his cheek.
“I’m going to help them,” I said. “It’s what I need to do.”
Ric’s face fell. To his credit he didn’t argue. “Okay,” he breathed, looking pale and scared, his eyes wide. “Then I’m coming with you.”
And I knew better than to argue with him.
* * *
The moment the first car started to roll, so did the bullets.
Ric and I immediately ducked and made a mad dash toward Sonya and Bubbs, who were helping a batch of men with the second car, but there was nowhere for Ric and me to hide, nothing for us to use as cover. Panic rose within me like boiling water and I felt my heart pound so light and fast I thought it might quit.
We ran full throttle. The dirt at our feet exploded with gunfire, and we had no choice but to dodge and weave across the field, skirting over fires and crashing through makeshift tents. I stifled my screams. Ric let go of my hand, and I followed him, zigzagging. I knew our luck wouldn’t hold for long.
When we reached Sonya, we crouched behind the second car, drew our weapons and returned fire, but we were too far away to hit anything with a pistol and stopped after only a few rounds. The guards from the base of the wall and the ones in the watchtowers took aim with their long-range rifles and mowed down men all around us within minutes.
I screamed as the man standing on my right took a bullet to the head and dropped dead at my feet. I touched my face and my hand came back with blood splatter.
This was more than a mistake.
This was a massacre.
Additional men dropped dead, left and right. I fought the urge to run, but I knew out in the open I was as good as dead too. I heard the cries of the wounded among the hail of fire and smelled the gunpowder in the wind and felt sickened, curling behind the trunk of the car and tucking my head low. I prayed for it to stop.
I was no solider, but I was going to die like one, this I knew.
I remained crouched behind the second car and watched as Ric fought along with the others, rocking the vehicle to try and make it move. It didn’t have any tires, and the metal rims were stuck in the dirt. Finally, it inched forward, and I flipped around and grabbed a piece of metal from the bumper. I pushed along with the others, still gripping my gun in my other hand. The car moved forward, and I heard Sonya cheer.
Ahead of us, several meters away, sat the first car. All the men who had been pushing it were dead and flattened on the dirt around it. The car stood motionless, surrounded by bodies and blood. They were only a few feet away from the wall.
So close!
Sonya and Bubbs, who had been pushing the second car by way of the driver’s side door, released it and, in tandem, sprinted and then stooped behind the first car. They used it as a shield to return fire through the broken windows. They hit a few guards directly in front of the car’s path. Other men from the second car followed them to the first, taking up positions by the trunk, and around the other doors, and firing at the guards above.
They were clearing the area.
I felt a ripple of hope.
Back at the second car, we stood stagnant and abandoned. Without enough men to push the car, we were stuck. Bullets ripped through the air, whizzing by my face, narrowly missing my cheek. A few others from the crowd gathered around the vehicle and instead of pushing, shot at the guards, trying to help the first car through.
Bodies fell on both sides.
Guards on the ground splattered the wall with blood then dropped to the dirt in a heap. Soldiers from the watchtowers were struck and slunk from view or fell over the railing, landing on the field with a sickening splat. But more guards took their place, and when the citizens died there were no more people to take up their arms and continue.
My hope faded as I realized any progress we made was quickly compensated for with more guards.
I kept firing at the wall. What choice did I have? When I heard my gun click empty I knew my time was over.
We were running out of ammunition.
We were hopelessly outnumbered.
We were doomed. When most of the rebels around the second vehicle had been wounded, or shot dead, I knew the battle was over. My only choice was to see it through to the end, whatever that was.
I picked up a few guns from the bodies around me and kept firing at the wall, wounding one guard, missing others.
Ric shouted my name and then moved. I followed him. He scrambled away from the second car and ran up behind the first vehicle’s driver’s side backseat door. I took up position behind him, at the back bumper.
We both aimed at the soldiers on the wall and unleashed. I tried to aim carefully and managed to hit one guard at the base of the wall, and then I wounded another. But there were so many I hardly knew where to concentrate.
Soon, Ric was out of ammunition too. I heard him cussing and clicking an empty magazine. And then I saw Bubbs. He squatted to the left of Ric and reached out, handing him another clip. In an instant he took a bullet in his chest and twisted in midair. Bubbs hit the dirt like a brick and landed on his side. He never moved again.
“Bubbs!”
His eyes remained open, unblinking. I knew he was already dead, killed on impact.
Ric bent to help Bubbs, the dirt all around him exploding with gunfire. He pressed his fingers to Bubbs’s neck then pushed his hands to his chest wound. Ultimately, there wasn’t anything that could be done. Ric had no choice but to duck back behind the car door, or risk getting shot himself. He took the magazine clips from Bubbs’s hand, then slung Bubbs’s backpack over his shoulder. Then he turned back to the wall and continued firing.
Our demolitions man was dead.
Who was going to blow up the wall now? Ric?
The thought burned a hole in my gut.
It was suicide to run at the wall now, with so many guards within range. But how else were we going to blast through?
It would have to be me. Ric was valuable. He could help the wounded. Sonya was the leader. She needed to stay in command. Bubbs was dead. So was Minnie.
That left me.
I signaled at Ric. “Gimme the backpack!”
He didn’t hear me. He was too busy firing at the guards. I cast a glance at Sonya, who crouched by the driver’s window.
She turned her head and screamed over her shoulder, “Doc! Hand me the backpack. I have an idea!”
Without question, Ric peeled off the backpack and slid it under his door. Sonya scooped it up with one shoulder then shoved it inside the car.
“No, wait!” I shouted. “Wait! Give it to me!”
Ric cast a glance over his shoulder at me, hearing but not comprehending.
“Push!” Sonya cried.
“Wait!” I shrieked. No one listened.
The car moved again. Ric, Sonya, two men on the passenger side and the guy next to me at the trunk all stopped firing their weapons and leaned into the car, shoving it forward.
I followed the car along as it moved ahead, then placed my palms on the bumper, helping. The man on my right took a bullet and went down, leaving me alone at the trunk. The car continued to slide forward, and we kept rolling, picking up speed.
“Ric, give me the backpack!” I hollered.
“What?” he shouted back.
“I said gimme—”
My arm whipped back. A searing pain pierced my skin and sliced through my flesh like a hot knife.
Knocked from my feet, I saw the gray sky rise above me and felt the ground swallow my back and then white, blinding pain opened my mouth. I screamed to let it out.
I’d been shot.
My ears filled with other screams.
Ric was bellowing Sonya’s name, then my name, then Sonya’s
again.
I lay on the dirt, spread-eagle. The ground beside my face exploded with another bullet. I tried to move my left arm to get up, but it was numb and dangled limply from my shoulder. I couldn’t move my fingers. Pushing off from my other arm, I rolled onto my side and blinked back the pain, trying to focus.
I saw Ric on the ground a few feet away from me. He was gripping his leg at the knee and screaming, “Sonya! No! Sonya!”
I followed his gaze. The car we’d been pushing was in flames, rolling toward the wall like a firebomb. Guards in front of the cinder block wall ceased fire and scattered as the car barreled at them, picking up more speed.
I searched the scene for Sonya and then I saw her. She was in the driver’s seat of the burning car, steering straight for the wall as it rolled down a slight embankment. She was being pelted with bullets and shook with each violently penetrating blow. Her screams of rage and pain echoed off the insides of my ears. And then the car hit the wall, and Sonya and the vehicle exploded.
Chapter Fourteen
My ears were ringing. All I could hear was a high-pitched wail. Everything else was muffled, as if I was trapped inside a glass jar with the lid closed tight.
The bullets had stopped, at least momentarily. I was covered in debris, lying in the dirt.
Stagnant.
My right arm wouldn’t move and pulsed with blinding agony.
What happened?
I blinked and fought to see. There were piles of burning trash scattered on the ground all around me. My eyes focused on an object to my right, a smoldering side mirror from a car, and then I remembered.
Sonya.
Oh, my God.
“Ric?” I said, although it sounded foreign and distant in my ringing ears.
I rolled over on my side and saw a body a few feet away. It wore a leather satchel.
“No,” I gasped. “No, no, no, no...”
Stumbling on my knees, I scrambled to the body. Ric. He was still breathing but was covered in burning debris, and he’d been shot in the leg just under his left knee.
I slapped all the scorched garbage off him and grabbed his face with my good hand. “Ric! Wake up. Please!”
His eyelids fluttered opened, and relief sputtered from my mouth.
Suddenly aware how we were out in the open, exposed, I slung his arm over my shoulder and dragged him to his feet. “Get up. Come on. We have to go.”
Ric moaned and struggled against me, but the more his feet moved, the more awake he became. Within a few steps he was limping on his own, although a stream of blood ran down his leg and soaked into his boots, leaving a trail.
I pulled him forward.
He shook his head as if to clear it and gaped at the wreckage. His eyes shot wide with a thought, and then, at the same time, we looked up to where the wall had once been.
There was a jagged hole, a large one. Between two watchtowers, an entire section of the wall was missing. Gone. A burned and blackened edge marked where it had once been whole. Half inside the gaping opening lay the skeleton of a scorched car frame. Anything inside the car had been eviscerated.
Sonya.
“Oh, God,” I muttered. “Sonya.”
“I gave her the backpack,” Ric said. “If I’d known. I thought she was— If I’d known...”
Unable and unwilling to process my current emotions, I pulled him along. “Keep walking.”
We did.
Wounded guards, garbage, chunks of rock from the wall and singed people lay scattered all over—most were dead, some were bleeding or dismembered. They sprinkled the area around the wall opening, in front and behind us, making us weave and curve around them. There were too many to count.
Survivors, like us, stood staring at the hole in the wall, disbelieving, blood coming from their ears. I saw a guard standing nearby drop his rifle and run through the gaping chasm, into the outside. Then another.
And another.
Then more.
With my good arm clinging to Ric’s wrist, balancing over my shoulder, we half walked, half dragged each other toward the opening.
A couple of guards gawked as we went by. No one moved to stop us. We were all in shock, in awe, of what this moment meant.
Sonya had succeeded.
Auberge was no longer whole. One hundred years inside these walls, and it was over.
Ric and I squeezed around the car frame, through the hole, our eyes transfixed on the view. A piece of rock dropped on my head as we passed under the newly created archway, but we didn’t falter.
Through the opening and on the other side there was dense forest. Thick greenery stretched as far as the eye could see, for miles. Trees as tall as buildings and a thick ground cover of green bushes and grasses blanketed the earth.
It looked ancient. Untouched. Unblemished. Unoccupied.
Vast.
I felt an inch tall. Tiny, compared to what lay ahead.
A citizen in charred clothing bolted past us and disappeared into the curtain of trees.
We followed, limping along. On the ground, large branches grew out of the dirt, tripping us and making it hard to walk. We inched on. Step by step.
We stumbled deeper and deeper into the darkness of the forest, leaving the wall and Auberge behind. Inside the forest, the sun faded under the shade of the treetops as the brush swallowed us. I half expected to be shot in the back by one of the guards, but they only stood by, shocked into inaction.
“You’re bleeding,” Ric said hoarsely, looking at my limp arm.
“So are you.”
“We’d better stop and patch ourselves up or we’ll bleed to death out here.”
“But we’ll die free. Can you smell that?” I sniffed and tasted blood. There was a tinge of something else playing on the tip of my nose. “What’s that smell?”
“Wet dirt, I think.”
“It’s the leaves,” I mused, inching forward, unwilling to stop. “I think we’re smelling the trees.”
Ric stopped walking, and I lurched to a halt. He took his arm off my shoulder and limped toward a rock covered in thick, green, slimy patches. Ric touched the stuff, smelled his fingers and then sat on it with a grunt.
“I can still see the wall,” I said, gazing through the forest and back toward the exterior of Auberge’s wall. The exterior. I could just make out the remains of the gray barrier. It looked like a distant screen behind all the trees and brush. But I knew it was there. Funny enough, the outside wall looked about the same as the inside. It was a world’s difference just because of the proximity of where we were.
Outside.
We were outside!
The whole concept was ridiculous, yet it was true. Nobody had been outside Auberge in over a hundred years. Or so we’d been told.
As far as anyone knew, there could be species of aliens, dangerous tribes of feral men or stampedes of wild animals controlling the region.
Even if Auberge knew, they dared not tell us the truth. The only stories we’d heard were when insurgents from the outside would breach the wall and attack the laboratories and power plants in East.
What if the people on the outside shot us dead the moment they found us?
Still, I thought, we’d die free.
I only wished the girls were here to see it.
“I don’t want to stop walking as long as I can see the wall,” I said.
“Come here,” Ric said, and he pulled the strap of his leather satchel from his shoulder and fumbled around, coming up with the first aid kit we’d taken from the double-wide trailer. He set it on the rock next to him and popped it open.
I went over and offered him my arm. He took it with gentle fingers, helped peel off my jacket and checked the bullet wound.
“You’re lucky it’
s a through and through,” he said. “No bullet to dig out.” He cleaned my arm with wet squares of fabric he pulled from paper packets, then wrapped my wound in a long strip of cloth he ripped from his shirt. “I’d offer to close you up but I don’t have enough adhesive for both of us, and I need it more.”
“That’s fine. It hurts, but I’m fine. Really.”
“Can you move your fingers?”
“Not at first, but now, a little.”
“Good.” Ric handed me the flashlight from his bag. Then he produced the steak knife and clamp. “You’d better hold the light.”
I nodded and took the flashlight, ignoring the ache in the back of my throat. I watched as Ric pulled up the leg of his pants and dug the bullet from his calf. He grunted and swore and swayed, but he got it out, then flicked the bullet into the forest. He closed the hole with the last of the medical bonding tape and ripped another strip from his shirt, wrapping it around the wound. He then dropped his pant leg back down and tried to stand, grimacing. I reached to balance him. He tipped to one side, barely staying on his feet.
My hands felt warm against the smooth contours of his body and I stepped forward, burying my face into his chest. His arms encircled me, enveloping me, and I cried.
And cried.
And cried.
After a moment, we both did.
* * *
With every step we took away from Auberge, my mixed emotions swelled to the point that I almost couldn’t breathe.
We were outside. It smelled like mud, and leaves, and wet wood. There were a great many birds I’d never seen or heard before. Their songs filled the air. It was gorgeous, and I wanted to enjoy it. But my children were inside. Back where it smelled of garbage, smog and sewage.
It wasn’t right that those two beautiful girls should be in a place like that when something so fresh and clean was only miles away.
Ric and I discussed our plans as we limped along, through the forest. If we went back, we could be killed, that was most likely. Eventually, word would reach HQ that the wall had been breached. Our only hope was that Shirel and the girls would make it out before they repaired the hole.
