by J. S. Carter
I jumped off the bus without paying Grey any attention. There were so many things that I wanted to ask him, but I was too scared to hear the answers. He had been right, anyway. There would be time for that later.
I quickly forgot what I was supposed to be doing once I took a few steps onto the freshly-minted concrete. Small, muffled voices came out from the new buses as Olivia kept a keen eye on the men inside. The sky had appeared to grow suddenly dark while specks of lit embers floated past like silent fireflies. Behind us, the wall of fire that had once seemed incredibly far away, was now unbelievably close. The sight of an illuminating glow and an endless supply of smoke spread out enough to leave a bad taste in my mouth. It felt like I was sucking on the wrong end of a cigarette, but that wasn't what had gotten my attention.
The grounds around us were otherwise clean, fully bullet-hole free and seemed deathly quiet compared to the square—except for a faint sobbing noise that I couldn't place down for the life of me. I looked back at the bus, though I knew it wasn't coming from there. The sounds had to be coming from a crying kid. I half expected to see one everyone I turned, though the only one I found was Nick. It didn't surprise me to understand that he cursed instead of showing his emotions in any other way.
He stopped in front of me and let his rifle hang to the side, lifting his bandaged arm up for me to see as if saying, 'See? I told you.' “Can you fuckin' believe this shit?”
I looked at his arm, but the sound was still there. Somebody was crying. Or I was crazy. “Do you hear that?”
He gave himself a moment to shatter the rest of my sanity. “Hear what?”
I glanced back towards the school. It was coming from inside. I looked around to make sure that Olivia was still busy and then prodded him on the shoulder with my knuckles. “I'll be right back.” Then before I almost forgot: “Don't leave without me.”
“Where the hell are you going?”
I have no idea.
I tried the back door first, and surprisingly enough, it opened. I stepped inside with my rifle up at the ready and suddenly wished I had been smart enough to bring a flashlight. The interior of the school looked dark and cold, the lack of any functional lighting not helping the matter. It couldn't have been past the early afternoon, but the increased amount of smoke obscuring the sun from any adjacent windows led to a darkness that quickly began playing tricks on me. I would turn a corner and brush my finger up against the trigger of my gun only to back off a split second later once I recognized I had been looking at a particular mean spirited shadow.
I forced myself to take a deep breath and readjusted my grip. I had just survived my first real firefight and it still hadn't quite dawned on me that I was still standing. Although I couldn't name any of them, I knew that a severe chemical imbalance in my body would be to blame for me seeing and hearing things that didn't quite exist. It didn't stop me from continuing forward.
The subtle sound of someone crying in the dark persisted, and it pulled me forward by an undertow. I began to feel it on the surface of my scalp as an unreachable itch more than anything else. I used it to orient my body like a compass. I couldn't explain it, yet I didn't want it to be explainable. For something so hidden and small to lose its peculiar mystique would be to lose its mysterious influence. After all, who was I to find something normal in the dark?
I stopped at the start of another hallway and turned to face the looming darkness while it stared back with impunity. The sound had stopped, but the feeling was still there, now stronger than ever. I took tentative steps into the black with my gun low and pointed at the ground. If the feelings were real, then they belonged to someone, and the last thing I needed to do was shoot their owner by accident.
I delved deeper into the unknown and could barely see my own gun in front of me. Small, metal lockers lined the expanse on either side with occasional opening for a door, but other than that there was nothing. Just silence. Darkness. And then a label to the emotion.
Sadness.
I stopped on the front of my heels and listened in the dark. The source was close. I could start to make out the intricacies in the web.
Vulnerability.
And all of a sudden I was back in Arrino. I was in the school. I was in the classroom and I was looking at Ellie before I knew who she was, what she had gone through, and I recognized the last feeling because it was too familiar, because I had felt it before.
It was despair.
A shape in the dark screamed at my side and threw me into the lockers. The pain in my hip flared like no other and my vision faded even further than it had to. I lost the grip on my gun in sudden panic and felt it tumble through the air until it landed on the floor, the sound echoing down the hall. I tried to reach out into nothingness when something solid hit me in the gut and I doubled over. I could hear the metallic slide of a pistol being primed to fire in front of my face and I dove at the source.
A round went off over my head and for a split second I saw everything. The light had bounced across the floor and the lockers, and I remembered where I was. I wasn't just reacting anymore. I was thinking, fighting someone in an abandoned school because they were trying to kill me. And they were winning.
It had to have been a man. I couldn't see his face, but he was taller, wider, and stronger than me. He picked me up by the waist as if I was nothing and transplanted my back into the opposite lockers with a hearty war cry. The blow knocked the air out of me in an instant. I began to feel dizzy and my ears were ringing. I wouldn't be able to do anything except die after being disoriented like that. At that moment, all I wanted was the man to get as far away from me as possible.
I built on the thought and held my hand out in a last ditch effort to push on the air in front of me. I could feel a weak pressure wave glance across the side of his body and he spun through the air until he hit a pair of lockers with the side of his face. The sound was unmistakable. So was the grip of his gun.
I kicked his pistol across the floor and then fumbled in the dark until my fingers curled around the familiar shape of a grip. I pointed it towards the sound of a painful groan and completely missed my chance as soon as it went quiet. Something knocked my legs out from underneath me and the back of my head hit the floor, the pain in my hip never too far off.
I tried to bring the gun up, but the man was already on top of me. He got his hand around my own and shoved a finger underneath the trigger, screaming out in pain no matter how hard I tried to shoot him. I struggled to push as hard as I could. Another hand got underneath my jaw and started choking me. I reached up to push against his face, but he stayed put. I could feel the whiskers on the side of his mouth, the breathes of hot air as he panted in frustration to squeeze the life out of me, the wetness of his lips.
Someone hit the release on the pistol and the magazine slipped out to hit me in the face. I could barely feel it. I couldn't breathe. My entire face felt like it was blowing up like a balloon to swell into a hallway three million degrees above normal. I could barely make out the warmth of blood running down my wrist until I realized it wasn't mine. I had been cutting up his finger while he continued to keep the gun from firing. Which meant it was still there. I quickly torqued my wrist as hard as I could to hear a sharp snap in front of my face, and the gun was free.
I pulled the trigger.
The man shuddered. The sound had almost been muffled by his flesh, but a minute explosion has sent a piece of lead into his gut. The grip around my throat instantly loosened and I had just enough energy left to push him off of me before curling into a ball and coughing my lungs out. My neck continued to feel incredibly constricted as if I was sucking through a bent straw. It stung to wheeze uncontrollably, but the air made it through. I could breathe. I was alive.
I let my cheek lay flush against the cold tiled floor and relished the sensation of it seeping the warmth away from my skin. It felt familiar, though for some reason I couldn't remember where I had done it last. I stared into nothing for a few moments, until
the sound of someone else trying to breathe and grunting out in pain reminded me I wasn't alone. I forced myself up to my feet when I really didn't want to, and I found my rifle. I found the magazine that had fallen out of the pistol and loaded it back in with a smack, knocking the slide back to load a fresh bullet towards the barrel.
I followed the sounds of pain and I got closer. I knelt on his chest and he moaned in protest.
“Please...” he begged with a wet rasp.
Whoever I had shot didn't sound good. I had no idea who they were. As far as I knew, I could have just shot Zach in the middle of a darkened, empty hallway, but it wouldn't have fit. Ever. He would have never guarded the door to a classroom filled with a dozen teenage girls held hostage, just as helpless as the ones in Arrino had been. I didn't have to look inside to know. I didn't have to hear one of the girls brave enough to slowly turn the door knob at my side and squeeze through the doorway to peer into nothingness.
I could hear her stumble to bring out any words. She summed up the courage regardless, and I effortlessly shoved it back down without any forethought. “Get back inside.” My voice felt foreign. It was strained, no doubt from the bruising, but I hadn't expected it to sound so hurtful. I tried again, softer this time without ever seeing the girl's face, though I knew she was still there. “You're safe. I'm gonna get you out of here, but I need you to get back inside. Can you do that?” She didn't say anything after a moment, so I added, “Please?”
The door gently closed in response.
Good.
She didn't have to experience the next part.
I leaned down and pressed the tip of the pistol against the man's head. I didn't think I would be able to hit him unless the shot was point blank. He whimpered at the sensation of a barrel being pressed up against his forehead, but otherwise stayed silent. He would undoubtedly suffer a slow and painful death from his wounds if the fire didn't get to him first. I could put him out of his misery. I had to. I might have even owed it to him. Regardless of whether or not he had hurt any of the girls in the room, he had attacked me. He had taken the chance to kill me and he had lost. I had the obligation to end it there and then.
I could feel the unseen stranger's body shake against my leg as I continued to lean into him. His breathes were shallow, but he was trying his best to calm himself down. I pushed the pistol deeper towards his skull and kept my hand stiff. My finger rubbed against the tip of the trigger. For a split second, I was on top of Kyle again in the middle of an empty auditorium. I had a choice.
I waited on the edge, the eventual whisper slipping past my lips as if it were nothing. “I'm sorry...”
False Prophets
The bus ride back to Tent City felt like home.
There was something about the way the bullet holes filtered specks of light all along the sides of the vehicle like aluminum Swiss cheese. The way the shattered windows let the breeze roll in unconditionally and pulled my hair back as we sped down another dirt road. The way I could drag a boot and feel spent casings roll underneath the heel. Hear the way the brass chimed against pieces of glass. Smell the faint odor of blood and firearm residue smeared against the torn, fake leather seats.
Or maybe it was simply the fact that we weren't there anymore.
Maryville had been a test for all of us. It had been a trap, of course, but it had also been more. Somehow, someone knew that we would arrive there out of desperation. They knew that we would be a loose group thrown together underneath an unforgiving time restraint. They knew that we would make rushed decisions. They knew exactly what they would need to bring us out into the open and they knew that we would be defenseless to stop it. They had laid a trap miles from our position and we had walked straight into it. It was easy to remind myself why I was still alive.
I glanced up above the seat in front of me and watched as Olivia sat near the front of the bus, staring out the side as the rest of the world passed us by. Grey was driving and I kept to myself near the back. It was just the three of us and nobody said a word. I was pretty sure I preferred it that way. After I had brought fourteen scared, teenage girls out of their entrapment and into the openness of the parking lot, I didn't want to hear or say anything.
The look on everyone's faces as they went from angry and panicked as they sought me out to suddenly dumbstruck was almost worth it itself, minus the hurtful bruising that had been required to get the girls out. They had been loaded onto a new bus and the rest of our group had been divided amongst itself to bring the vehicles back. I probably should have stayed with the kids. It might have comforted them to stay near, but I had not wanted to. I belonged on the bus that looked more like a long strainer than anything else. I should have died on it back in Maryville. The very fact that I didn't seemed to me that it also had a part in saving my life. Maybe it would do it again.
I glanced up again as Olivia got up from her seat and made her way back down the aisle. She stopped in front of me and bounced in reaction to the bus rolling over something bumpy.
She tilted her head up. “That seat taken?”
I scooched over without answering and looked outside. The long, dry fields of vegetation that rolled off into the distance would all soon be scorched earth. Behind us, three more school buses comprised our short convoy as it ran away from a wall of fiery death. Against all odds, we had accomplished what we had set out to do and then some. So why did it feel like we had failed?
Olivia cleared her throat next to me but stayed silent. I pretended to pick at something on the rifle in between my legs and gave her an opening to speak whenever it would fit. I had accidentally felt her trepidations just as we had arrived in Maryville. She probably knew we had been walking into a trap more than anyone else. If it weighed heavily on her, I would help. She didn't deserve to bear it all by herself. I would find a way to help her piece by piece until the load would be split evenly.
It wasn't long before she decided to shift in her seat and hold out something for me to take.
My journal.
I grabbed the small book and pressed my fingers into the leather binding. The cover had gotten scratched, but it was otherwise in good shape. I looked to her for an answer about its appearance.
“You dropped it.” Then: “I didn't take it again. Promise.” She smiled a bit and I let myself match it.
My body felt bone dry. I was sure I could have fallen asleep the moment the bus had pulled out of Maryville, but I didn't want to close my eyes until we had picked up what was left of Tent City and were on our way towards the rendezvous point. Even then I was worried if I would actually be able let myself slip away. I was incredibly drained, though the vibrations of my gun going off in my arms and the sight of blood spurting out of a screaming body seemed too fresh to garner any sleep. I wondered how long it would last. I played with the frayed blue ribbon around my gun. Would Sarah have understood what I did?
Olivia must have felt the same way, at least in part, because she had only said a few words to Grey during the entire ride and she continued to keep our own conversation light. She nodded at my journal. “Did you think of a title?”
I stared at the blank cover, unsure. I had almost forgotten that I had written my memories as a story. The thoughts came easier that way. It was weird to think that eventually someone might read it. I made a mental note to change the names of the people and places mentioned inside if that ever happened. Better safe than sorry. They all deserved their own privacy.
I flipped the book in my hands, still uncertain, and repeated the thought. “I don't know...” If my story deserved a title, then it had to fit the content. It had to belong to an event. A turning point. It had to mean something. I flipped through the pages to see that about two thirds had yet be filled out. I hadn't really gotten a chance to do so. Even if I could fit everything that had happened since Chris' death, I was pretty sure the last few pages wouldn't sit well on their own. I was a fan of the big and unexpected, yet there I was sitting on a bus. Not much of an ending.
&
nbsp; “You did a good job.”
I looked at Olivia to see a soft, reassuring smile that I couldn't bring myself to.
Maybe.
Maybe I had done better in Maryville than either of us had expected, but it had been too close for me to be okay with. Most of our group would have scars to tell stories over. I couldn't even think of what Isabel would have to go through. And Conner had given his life so that we could make it out. All because I was too afraid to stand up. I looked down at my journal and promised myself that I would include them no matter how much it hurt. I would write Hayes' propaganda editorial piece. Whatever it took. What had happened in Maryville had been a massacre. People needed to know about the sacrifices that others had made for them, on both sides. It was the least I could do.
I let my next batch of words out without realizing they hadn't been restrained to my head until it was too late. “I don't know if I can be what you want...” The thought was cut off. I glanced at Olivia to see that she understand without me having to finish. I was flattered to have her offer me an apprenticeship—honored, even—but I wasn't sure if I was strong enough for it. If I went through with the process, I wouldn't be able to go in halfheartedly. There was still something that was holding me back. I had promised Olivia that I would follow her to the Order, but I still needed to find my family. If they were still alive, then I needed to help them.
If.
It hurt to think like that, though I knew it was the only way that would lead to the truth. I needed to follow the path wherever it led. I barely had any good leads: a name, a face, an event. It was enough to start. After witnessing Arrino and Maryville first hand, the thought of my family being attacked by a monster or feeling vulnerable enough to fall victim to empty promises left my blood feeling thin.
