Justice won’t bring him back.
“After I lost my sister … I couldn’t do that ever again. I wouldn’t do that again … now, here I am.” I sob and roll into his chest, away from death and my siblings’ arms.
“You can survive this.” Jack embraces me in a protective blanket of flesh and muscle. “Yes, it’s going to be scary. Yes, living will force you to endure terrible and amazing things you can’t even imagine yet. It will be hard, but I swear, you’ll survive.”
What were the last words I said to Jon and my parents? I can’t remember. It’s funny how trivial things never matter until they’re the only things that matter.
“Listen to me.” He tilts forward and strokes my face with a strong touch, as if testing to see if I’m as fragile as I appear. “We’ll get through this together. Whatever you can’t do, I will.”
His eyes are bluer than my imaginary sea and offer an invitation to a different fate. He’s here. He can help. When I’m weak, he’ll be strong. When I break, he’ll fix me. Jon did all of those things, but Jack can do more. He wants to do more. And I want to let him because if life is terrible and amazing, I’d like to experience the ups and downs with someone who might one day love me. I’m not sure if I’ll live long enough to see that day or if I even want to, but I do know I want him. Now.
I pull his face against mine. Our lips fit together like puzzle pieces and before I can stop myself, I kiss him hard. It’s not romantic or magical, more awkward and sloppy—a casual exchange of saliva. Mouth against mouth. Entangled limbs. Why isn’t he kissing back?
Jack detaches and looks at me with his eyes wide, muscles stiff. My breath must smell bad. Oh, gosh, I haven’t brushed my teeth in a week.
I twist onto my stomach and hide beneath the sheets. A single tear drips from my chin.
What a stupid waste of a first kiss.
****
Cold sweat breaks across my forehead when gunshots sound. Sniper. Blood bubbling from my stomach. Sirens and screams. Pain gnawing at every fiber of my being like a ravenous dog.
They’ve found me. They’re here to kill me. Run. I need to run.
Smack—I dive into plywood where the only blood drips from my busted nose and the landscape is composed of a shriveled cockroach and the metal legs of my cot. Great. I’ve turned into a spaz.
Tremors pulse through my dissolved muscles. I claw at the bedframe, almost topping over when I loosen my grip. Not long ago I was racing along the Battery. What happened to those legs that could take me anywhere, hold my weight without complaint?
Death and gravity don’t mesh well.
A single light stream escapes from a crease in the blinds and blazes into my brain. I squint, stagger toward the window, and then lift the plastic panel. Where am I? What is this place? Charleston has been exchanged for rocky slopes and lush treetops. Mountains. I’ve never seen mountains before. They bite the pale sky and cascade their green fur into the valley where the earth is hard, uneven and without hope for salt and sand. Miles from home. Memories floating deeper into the recesses of the past.
I slump against the wall and hyperventilate, heaving, gasping for substance. I’ve seen the unfamiliarity, sunk my eyes into the view from someone else’s window, a new world as different from mine as the moon is to the sun. And I hate it more than bad coffee and dull books.
Beyond the windowpane is an overgrown yard dotted with weed-infested flowerbeds, rusting lawn chairs, and trailers, all dilapidated and decaying from obvious neglect. People stand waist-deep in the grass. Some sprawl on the ground, shooting at a single dummy mounted on a distant tree trunk. Jack is among them. He lies in the dirt with his head tilted, finger on a trigger.
Not once does he miss his target.
Too much. I can’t handle this. Jon tells me to survive with Jack—No, I’m done, finished with the heartbreaking pain and depression, the secrets and intense change. Accept me into the waves. Grasp my hand when I reach out. Let me float into the pool of light where I can be whole again.
Food waits on a repurposed filing cabinet—an egg sandwich smothered in mayonnaise. Disgusting. But my stomach screams with hunger. If I eat, I’ll feed my life. One bite won’t stop starvation, only slow it. Okay, just one bite.
I cram the sandwich into my mouth and once it’s swallowed, I wipe my greasy fingers on my bare thighs. Stupid. Now I’m covered with egg and oil.
Levi sniffs my skin when I climb into bed. He gives a hungry look.
“Sorry,” I whisper. “You’re a nice dog and if I wasn’t dying, I would’ve shared. I’ll make it up to you, though. Next time Jack brings food, you’ll get half.”
Nausea plows me over like a truck. I hang off the mattress and puke into the toilet bucket. Cramps twist my insides into knots. Acid shoots up my esophagus, lava from a volcano, and burns. I must’ve eaten too fast. It’s been a while since I had a meal—maybe my body has adjusted to the concept of dying early and is doing me a favor by rejecting the egg, bread, and mayonnaise. Ugh, Jack will trash the chunky vomit—another reason for me to hate him and him to hate me.
The screens slide apart. Jack enters wearing a bulletproof vest. His dead lips form a straight line when we make eye contact.
“Get out of bed,” he says.
“No.” Would it be mean to laugh at him?
“I’ve been considerate and allowed you to mourn for long enough. You need to know what’s going on.” He folds his arms. “Get out of bed. I won’t be nice anymore.” Finally. Maybe he’ll shut up and leave me alone for more than a few hours. Better yet—maybe he’ll stop trying to cuddle.
“You’re not my dad or Jon. You’re nobody … so don’t tell me what to do.” I sink deeper into my avalanche of blankets and grip the bedposts. “Give up and let me die.”
“Not a chance.”
I raise my knees to kick him when he rips away the sheets. He moves like a charging bull and grabs my ankles. I scream as he yanks me toward the edge of the mattress. Why was I attracted to him? What made me love a controlling backstabber with an insane savior complex?
“Let go,” he shouts. With a swift motion, he unravels my hands and drags me off the bed. I land hard on the floor. A throbbing ache pulses down my spine. I dig my fingernails into the wood and crawl toward the space beneath my bed, but his arms swoop me up.
“Stop,” I squeal as he moves out of the enclosure and into the main room, which is filled with cots and ragged furniture. This is a new place. I don’t want to be in a new place. I like the familiarity of my stinky sheets and hazy window. “Take me back!” I squirm, but his hands bind my legs to his chest. I kick and punch. His vest absorbs my beating fists.
Is the armor meant to protect him from bullets or from me?
“Abram, open the door.”
A man rises from the bunker’s far corner. He’s built like a TV wrestler and has a shaved head, espresso-colored skin. With a grunt and eye roll, he opens the door.
“Don’t scream unless you want to embarrass the crap out of yourself.” Jack carries me into an outdoor corridor composed of camouflage tarps and stacked branches. People with rifles pass us in a hurry when a siren sounds from somewhere in the sea of mobile homes.
What is this place?
“If you don’t stop, I’ll bite you again.” I try to sink my teeth into Jack’s neck, but he twists me forward so my head dangles. If his grip slips, I might be able to nip his wrist, maybe an artery.
“Don’t be an idiot. It’s embarrassing enough to make me haul you through camp like an angry toddler. Biting the sergeant would only blacklist you as the crazy, vampire chick.” He snickers. “Hot panties, by the way.”
Heat spreads through me like a wildfire, igniting my toes, singeing the tips of my ears. I want bite him and yank down his jeans so everyone can laugh at his underwear. Knowing my luck, he’d probably be wearing designer boxer-briefs, and people would congratulate him on his good looks instead of blacklist him as emotionally unstable. Life should’ve come with an escape
hatch so I could disappear during moments like this when I’m completely mortified and angry enough to kill.
“You’re a jerk.”
“I’m pretty sure we’re not in elementary school anymore.”
“Bastard.”
“Better.” He smiles.
The passageway widens into a tent-like plaza filled with wooden tables, electric heaters and laundry lines. Soldiers recline against the damp furniture, eating stew from metal bowls and talking in loud, obnoxious voices. They stand up straight when Jack walks past. Their eyes are on my ninety-percent naked body—I must be the queen of memorable first impressions.
Jack takes me into an adjoining trailer—a communal bathroom. Someone gutted a mobile home and installed every cheap urinal and toilet they could find, along with several mildew-infested showers. Yuck. How can these people bear to live in such filth?
He turns on a shower and dumps me beneath the searing, pluvial downpour. I whimper as the torrent burns my skin, my soul, every square inch of me. The sting is boiling water against cool skin, but the pain comes from within, not the showerhead.
“Stop acting like a kid. You’re an adult, so grow up,” Jack yells. “This isn’t an easy world, and it’s about to get a whole lot harder for you. There are people who want you killed and if you’re not willing to fight for your life, you will lose it. Understand? Jon is dead. You can’t change that. The only thing you can do is move forward and deal with your lot.”
“Screw you. I’m strong and grown-up, but I lost my brother. My brother. Whom I love. So don’t you dare criticize how I cope. Don’t you freaking dare.” Coughing, I crawl into the corner to avoid the steady stream. It’s hot like blood. Jon’s blood. “You have no idea how strong I am…”
“You’ve been trying to die, not cope.” Jack adjusts the water’s temperature and crouches at the shower’s edge. He touches my knee. “Strong people don’t lie in bed for a week, hiding from their problems. Strong people get up and keep moving no matter how much it hurts.”
“The pain won’t stop,” I wheeze. “Why won’t it stop?”
Jack climbs into the shower and pulls me against his chest. Water beats on his shoulders, rolls down his face. “The pain … it won’t leave you alone,” he whispers. “You’ll miss him forever and nothing, not time or good days or closure, will heal the wound losing him caused. However, you will find that by living your life, remembering him on those good days, the pain becomes a monument … and you’ll learn to treasure it like you once treasured him.” He squeezes my convulsing body. “You have to wake up and face the world again.”
Please wake me up from this nightmare.
I close my eyes to sketch the feeling of him on my memory—his scratchy cheek against my forehead, the breeze of his breath, how the water divides and unifies us in a steady stream. Do I really have a world to face? Yes—Jack’s confused, complex world as different from mine as the moon is to the sun. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”
“Because,” he says, “I care about you.”
It’s as if we’re children at recess and he accidentally dropped the f-bomb. Care, love, feelings—in the adult realm, they’re curses in their own right.
“Losing you would break me, so you have to live.” He rubs his lips—maybe he’s remembering our awkward, wet, one-sided kiss. “Promise you won’t try to kill yourself.”
Jon and Sybil float across the ocean until they disappear. The waves curl back from the shore. I race after the foaming surf, calling out to those lost in the endless pool, but Jack pulls me back and builds a new home around us. He makes me want to give life a try.
“Okay.” I drag my thumb along his jawline, onto one of his dimples. Butterflies fill the hole in my chest. I’m his family as much as he is mine.
“Be outside in thirty minutes. Charlie will escort you to the Command Center.” He stands and snatches a towel from the floor. “There are extra toothbrushes in the closet. I’ll leave some clothes by the door and another sandwich since you puked up the first one.”
A puddle of discolored water forms beneath me. I peel off what remains of my clothes, pump shampoo and lather my hair into a bubbly wad.
Here, beneath the showerhead, my old self is washed away.
Chapter Eight
“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Eyes dissect and examine me when I emerge from the bathhouse. Does everyone want to look at the crazy little sister of deceased Lieutenant Stryker? What are they saying? Jack left me a nicer pair of underwear. I trashed the red puppy panties. Eyes. So many eyes. That say I’m a freak.
I’ve stepped back into high school.
Air is plaster inside my lungs, hardening as I half-walk, half-trip through the outdoor mess hall. I tug at the hem of Jack’s baggy t-shirt and unstick my boots from the mud. Knees buckle. Legs tremble. An older soldier snickers when I slam against a stack of crates—I try to shield my face with wet hair, but there’s nothing where something used to be. A precious body part decided to take a vacation.
Since conditioner couldn’t unravel the knots caused by a week of lying in bed, tossing and turning, and poor hygiene, I cut off the matted mess. Now my hair is damp, wild, and wavy, cut short. Instead of falling over my chest in loose curls, it hangs at my shoulders.
Short hair. No makeup. No sundress. Another change.
“Hey, Julie.” A wiry boy with tattered clothes jogs from an adjoining breezeway. He grabs my hand and gives it a firm shake. “I’m Charlie Coker. Welcome to the Underground.” He’s British, but the TV said people don’t travel between countries, that everyone is content in their hometowns. If he was content in England, why did he leave?
“The Underground?” I lean against a worktable to catch my breath. Hunger pains swirl within my heart, starving for a bite of home. One mouthful. A whiff of gardenias. A coffeemaker’s gurgle. A red dress against my skin. “What is this place?
“The Vestige’s headquarters.” His teenage face is smeared with mud. “Jack wants to answer your questions. We’re supposed to meet him at the Command Center.” Charlie leads me to the entrance of a tunnel and lifts its wooden door. He climbs into the chasm, vanishing.
“What’s down there?”
His dilated pupils glint in the darkness. “We’ve built an underground road system. The Scavs fly over frequently and we can’t risk being seen. Come on.”
If I had a dollar for every question I could ask right now, I’d be filthy rich.
Electric lights brighten the shaft. Scrap metal, concrete blocks, wooden planks and plastic slats—the makeshift thoroughfare stretches in all directions, a lethal maze of pipes and crawlspaces.
It’d be easy to get lost down here.
“Pardon the smell. Some of the tunnels gather leaked sewage.” Charlie kicks a discarded soda can and snatches headlamps from a rusting coatrack.
Graffiti covers the walls, floor, and ceiling— We choose to see the unseen. Truth is a dangerous thing. Remain aware of their lies.
A shiver wiggles up my spine, giving me a serious case of goosebumps. Did Jon live with these people? Was he a part of the Vestige? What truth did he discover that proved to be so dangerous?
Lights flicker, trapping us in second-long intervals of blackness. Electricity whispers a strained buzz. The generator rumbles as Charlie and I head into the largest tunnel, an old drainage tube trailing off into the complex labyrinth.
Mom and Dad—they’re my ticket back to paradise. I’ll find them, get rid of whoever wants me dead, and go home to bury my brother, return to the place I should’ve never left.
“Here.” Charlie fishes a laminated notecard from his pocket and gives it to me, along with a headlamp. “It’s a map of the tunnel system. Pretty straightforward.”
Grime turns my fingernails black. Metal grooves bruise my knees. “Are you a soldier?” I tuck the notecard beneath the flap of my right boot and crawl inches from his m
ud-caked soles.
“Nah, I’m an apprentice engineer. I work for Nash. He’s the tech genius here.”
“Did you know my brother?”
“Jon? Yeah, I knew him.” Charlie slides into a smaller, mold-infested tunnel. His slender frame navigates the narrow space like a worm or mole, squeezing and ducking with ingrained agility. “We better move fast before someone decides to head this way. Traffic jams are not fun.”
“Were you friends with him?” I straddle suspicious puddles and rust patches—it’s a good thing I got a Tetanus booster vaccine last month. Darkness becomes too thick for my headlamp to penetrate. Cockroaches chirp from somewhere in the hole, and immediately, my skin starts to itch.
“Yes. He was a good guy.” Charlie moves deeper into the maze, winding right and then turning left at a fork. The duct tapers until I can’t crawl without dragging my hips along the walls. At least now I know I’m claustrophobic—that’s valuable information I wouldn’t have known unless someone forced me to stuff myself into a Boy-Scout-made shaft.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie says after several minutes of silence, “about what happened to your family.” Filthy bandages bind his palms, soaked with what appears to be oil.
“How’d you hurt your hands?” I bite my lip to cage a swell of sobs and power forward into the shrinking abyss. Of course he knows what happened. Everyone must know.
“Eh, I got some nasty blisters while doing maintenance work yesterday. Nash is always creating new contraptions for me to fix, and they seem to get progressively more dangerous to maintain. Here, all work is dirty work. We don’t have many luxuries. Our food is bloody awful, we live by the bare minimum, and make-do should be our moto.”
Terrific.
The tunnel spits us into a cavern-like room with gas lanterns and scaffolding stacked with canned food. Survival gear hangs from the stone ceiling. Not a normal military camp. A rebel base maybe. Or some sort of apocalyptic resort where vacationers come to role-play.
“Hey, it’s Coca-Cola.”
Two boys who look to be around Charlie’s age sit on crates in the corner, rewiring a pair of radios. They stand and amble toward us, feeling my body with their black, shark-like eyes.
The Vestige Page 9
