The Lost Village

by Sten, Camilla

  My mouth tastes of blood and salt. I can hardly see her anymore. The sobs sit like a tremor in my body, an approaching earthquake I do all I can to keep under control.

  “I didn’t hate you,” I choke, the words so thin and strained that they twist out of shape. “I don’t hate you. Or maybe I did. Once. Because I hated myself. And because I was so lonely. When you disappeared I had nothing left but myself. No one.”

  I dry my eyes again, roughly; push my fingers up against them so I can rest in darkness for a few seconds.

  “That’s why I can’t leave her there. Don’t you see? It’s not that I want to be the hero, to run in and save the day, it’s that she’s out there all alone. And you’re right—it is my fault. I’m guessing she stopped taking her meds so she could take painkillers, because she saw how much I wanted her to stay. It’s my fault she’s sick again and I can’t … I can’t just leave her there.”

  Something in my chest has slackened. Old scar tissue, hardened and petrified. I’m not sure if that means it’s bleeding or healing. Emmy closes her eyes, then opens them again. The green in them flashes brighter when they’re red with tears.

  “OK,” she says. “Then let’s do it.”

  “You don’t have to come with me,” I say.

  Emmy gives a faint smile.

  “Yes,” she says, “I do. And you can’t stop me.”

  “I probably could,” I reply, smiling back at her with trembling lips. “If I tried.”

  Emmy opens the door.

  “Come on,” she says. “Let’s get our boys and go.”

  I walk up to her and stop.

  This isn’t a movie. In a movie we would have hugged and been best friends again, now and forever. That’s never going to happen. I think I’ll be living with this dull pain for the rest of my life. I’ll never get back what we used to have.

  But maybe that doesn’t have to be such a bad thing.

  Maybe we can still live with each other, in some way, shape, or form.

  “I’m glad you didn’t drown with me,” I say.

  She nods slowly.

  “I’m glad you didn’t drown,” she replies.

  NOW

  The square hits me as a shock, even though I know what to expect. The blackened car parts and sooty, withered greenery are an open wound in the silent village, a postapocalyptic vision in the middle of a tattered postcard.

  The smell of ash and burning metal still hangs in the air. The school looms like a monster on the short edge of the square. The explosion was clearly the last straw for one of the doors, which seems to have fallen off its hinges completely.

  We stop at the bottom of the front steps.

  “Wait,” says Emmy.

  She steps forward and stands completely still. Listens intently.

  I do the same. Try to hear something, anything.

  Footsteps.

  Laughter.

  Breaths in the darkness.

  Not a sound.

  Emmy looks around.

  “We’ll stick together,” she says. “No one goes anywhere alone. No one goes off to look around. Not even in pairs. OK?”

  I look her in the eye and nod.

  “OK,” I say.

  She gives me a quick, closed-mouth smile, surprisingly sincere.

  “Then let’s go,” she says, and I follow her up the steps and into the school.

  It’s warmer in here than outside—inexplicably so, given all the empty window frames and open doors. Beyond the pat of our soles on the broken glass, it’s so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

  When we open the door to the first classroom, it swings open quietly, no arguments. The classroom looks like it did the last time I was here. With Tone. The desks in neat rows; the alphabet posters on the walls, with letters in capitals, lowercase, and cursive; a slightly smaller chart of times tables next to the blackboard at the front.

  Empty.

  We move on through the other classrooms without saying anything. They’re almost the same as the first, only with different charts on the wall.

  When we reach the last classroom, Emmy stops abruptly in the doorway.

  Suddenly I’m struck by an image of Tone crouching under a desk, stony-faced, her head twisted to one side and her wild eyes fixed on us—or else hunched on a desk, her back bent, eyes glimmering under a dirty fringe, like something dangerous and alien. A monster.

  I hate myself for thinking it, and even more for the fear that those crystal-clear images inspire within me; how they make my heart race and my mouth dry.

  I can’t let myself fear Tone.

  “What is it?” I ask Emmy quietly.

  I swallow down my acrid fear and look past her shoulder. Someone has tossed the chairs around and flipped the desks. One of the little wooden chairs is completely destroyed.

  Emmy takes a few steps into the room. She stops by the smashed chair, then turns. When I follow her eyes, I see a mark on the wall. It’s dark and uneven, a browny-red sweep over the peeling light yellow paint. It looks recent.

  A slender, writhing chill plants itself at the pit of my stomach. My eyes sting.

  What has she done to herself?

  It’s impossible to fend off the image that pops into my head; of Tone, her ankle wounded and bleeding, her eyes empty, clumsily smearing throbs of blood over the wall.

  Emmy turns to look at me. I clench my teeth as hard as I can and just nod.

  None of us says anything, but we keep much closer together as we walk back along the corridor to the classrooms on the other side. We try to dodge the shrapnel on the floor, sneaking through as quietly as we can. There’s still no sound to be heard, beyond our own anxious breaths.

  The rest of the classrooms seem untouched. But I start to notice something. The way the glass is lying on the ground looks almost as though somebody has already walked on and through it: some shards have been crushed and trodden down into the ugly green linoleum floor; others lie swept to one side in piles. Together they make an almost invisible, meandering trail.

  I say nothing. I’m not even sure what I’m seeing.

  We get back to the entrance and stop at the bottom of the staircase. The hole that Tone fell through sits, big and ugly, halfway up. The rest of the steps still look somewhat stable, but it’ll be hard to get past there.

  “I’ll go first,” I say. “I’ve done this before. And you guys don’t have to come up with me. I understand.”

  Emmy shakes her head.

  “No, me first,” she says. “I’m the smallest. It’s best if I test them.”

  Robert and I both start to protest, but Emmy shuts us down.

  “Honestly, you both know I’m right,” she says.

  I look up at the staircase again. The steps are wide and flat. The light, splintered wood looks OK, except for the part that has fallen in.

  “If you stick to the sides…” I say, doubtfully.

  “We’re going together,” Emmy says. “Follow in my footsteps. Like walking on ice.”

  She ties her hair up into a high, messy bun and nods at us.

  “OK,” she says. “Follow me.”

  She puts her foot onto one of the steps and cautiously tests it. It neither creaks nor breaks.

  Taking a firm hold of the brass railing, which, with its sturdy bolts in the wall, looks considerably more trustworthy than the steps, she cautiously starts to climb. I follow her slowly. Despite the cool day, the sweat beads on my neck. I imagine I can feel the wood bending beneath my feet, but so far it doesn’t worry me too much.

  When we pass the hole, I don’t let it out of my sight. Out of the corner of my eye I see Max edging up behind me nervously, his jaw clenched, and behind him Robert with a furrowed brow.

  Now I’m two steps above the hole, Emmy four. Only five steps until the second floor.

  I turn my head to tell the others to tread carefully around the hole—both Max and Robert are much heavier than Emmy and I—but my voice is drowned out by an overwhelming crash.

 
; The ground disappears beneath me, leaving me hanging in the air for a dizzying split second. A thousand thoughts run through my head, none of them connected. For a second it’s as though I’m trying to run in the air, and when I lurch forward to try to grab the step in front of me, that one disappears, too. I fall.

  I hear someone make a short, surprised yelp, the sort of instinctive cry that’s gruff and throaty rather than high-pitched or light, and I can’t tell if it’s coming from me or someone else. My body is weightless. Then I land hard on my back, so hard that the breath is knocked out of me and I see black and red flash before my eyes.

  In a few seconds my vision contracts to a single white point. Breathe, I have to breathe, but my lungs don’t want to cooperate, and my rib cage won’t move. I feel sick, and lie there opening and closing my mouth like a fish.

  And then a lick of breath slips inside me, delicious and not enough. I gasp for air, pull it in again and again, until my throat begins to open and my rib cage expands.

  Then I roll onto my side and retch. Thin saliva and honey, sweet and watery.

  It slowly sinks in that I’m lying on the broken remains of the steps, my back in dazzling pain. We’re inside what used to be the staircase, the hole above us an open chasm through which the cracked paint on the ceiling gazes down at us. The staircase can hardly be more than splinters now; the entire thing has collapsed.

  I dread looking at the others, but I have no choice. I pull myself up to sitting and look around.

  Max is struggling up to all fours only a few feet away from me, his face frozen in a pained grimace. His nose is bleeding, and the blood is running down his chin. Robert is lying on his back, one leg bent, unmoving. My heart skips a beat, but then I see him start to move with a groan.

  I look around.

  Max. Robert.

  Where’s Emmy?

  NOW

  Robert rolls over onto his side with a low groan. Max pulls himself up to sitting and wipes his nose, inadvertently smearing the blood across his face. He blinks his dazed eyes in shock.

  “Emmy!” I shout. My voice swings up toward the ceiling, but dies out before it takes flight.

  Could she have been thrown out of the door somehow?

  I scrabble over the debris of rotted wood and out onto the hard stone floor, both hoping and dreading to see her there. But there’s no one.

  This time I manage to suck the air right down into my lungs and shout:

  “EMMY!”

  And then it comes, like a blessing, thin and small up above.

  “Here. I’m up here.”

  The relief swells over me, temporarily subduing the throbbing pain in my back.

  “Emmy! Where? Where are you?”

  It takes a few seconds, and when it does come, her voice sounds choked as it drifts down toward me.

  “Upstairs.” And then, a few seconds later:

  “Jumped when the steps fell.”

  By now Robert has emerged, and he shouts, too:

  “Are you OK?”

  His red hair is covered in splinters, and there’s a nick in his eyebrow. The blood has already started to dry.

  The pain in my back has started to sharpen, a dull stab to the time of my heartbeats, but there’s no time to think about that.

  “Broken ribs,” Emmy says. “I think. I landed on them.”

  Her voice is strained.

  “Don’t move!” Robert shouts, his voice surprisingly shrill. “We’re coming up to get you!”

  I hear something that sounds like a cross between a laugh and a moan, and I feel like I can almost read her thoughts:

  How will we get her down?

  But right now that doesn’t matter. The important thing is to get up there.

  Robert turns back and starts jogging down the corridor in long strides, and Max follows him, his arm pressed to his bleeding nose. As Robert runs, I see him limping slightly on one foot.

  He looks around, then turns back.

  “Shit,” he spits.

  “Is there a supply shop or something?” Max asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Not so far as I know.”

  Max nods. Robert looks out of the window. The muscles in his neck look tensed, and a small vein has appeared on his temple.

  “Come on,” I say. “Let’s look outside. There might be some way to climb up. We’ll get up there, don’t worry.”

  When we step outside I squint up at the sun, which has passed the midday point at the top of the sky. It’s after twelve. Less than twenty-four hours until the police arrive.

  This helps to loosen the hard knot that has formed in my chest. I can almost breathe again.

  One day. We can make it.

  We just need to get Emmy down, then carry or drag or support her back to the church—it’s not far, it should be fine—barricade the doors again and wait it out. We have water and honey. We can do it.

  I can’t even think about Tone right now.

  Max has walked straight out onto the cobblestones, and he studies the building up and down. What he sees doesn’t seem to encourage him, and I soon realize why: the façade, gnarled and ugly as it is, offers nothing to climb.

  “Around the back,” he says. Robert just nods and sets off at a trot, with me hard on his heels.

  I can’t even look him in the eye right now. I know what he must be thinking.

  If only I hadn’t insisted on coming here, if only I’d just listened to them, if only I hadn’t persuaded Emmy to come with me … Then none of this would have happened. Then Emmy wouldn’t be lying hurt up there right now.

  But I can help. That has to mean something.

  As we round the corner I run straight into Robert’s back. He’s stopped abruptly at the start of the alley.

  The back of the school plot is small but strangely sweet, a square patch of land that was presumably once trampled down by games and sports. The skeletons of four neat picnic tables stand in a row next to the building. The wood has shriveled and contracted down to their metal legs, which have rusted into a deep red and started to disintegrate.

  But it isn’t the tables Robert’s looking at.

  It’s the fire escape behind them.

  Of course. Obviously there had to be a fire escape.

  Robert starts heading toward it, but I stop him with a hand on his arm.

  “It won’t hold you,” I say.

  “It’ll hold,” he says sharply, but I don’t let go. I shake my head.

  “Look at it,” I say, “it’s rusted. You must weight what, a hundred and seventy pounds? A hundred eighty?”

  At first Robert doesn’t answer, but I see his shoulders droop slightly.

  The steps on the ladder are rusty, but they don’t look broken to me.

  “I’ll go,” I say.

  I give myself a quick shake, try to force myself to focus as I step up to the fire escape. It looks less stable up close. Some of the steps are thin as pencils.

  It’s OK. It’ll be fine.

  Behind my back I hear Robert shout:

  “EMMY! We’ve found a fire escape! We’re on our way!”

  I pull myself up onto the first step, expecting it to snap under me, but it holds. Then the next. That one holds, too.

  My heart is pumping in hard, powerful thuds. It’s just like the bridge again, only crystallized into something else, something smaller, weaker, worse. The water coursing beneath me.

  I’m trying not to look down, but my feet have already passed the first row of windows. A faint breeze against my back stirs up my sweaty, ruffled hair and makes the small hairs on my neck stand on end. I stop.

  My breaths are coming in short, sharp stabs, but whether that’s the exertion or the fear talking I can’t tell.

  “Alice!” Max shouts below me. “Are you OK?”

  I don’t reply. My mouth is dry.

  “Alice!” he shouts again, louder this time. “Do you want to come down?”

  That’s all I want to do.

  I can a
lready feel it: the step cracking beneath me, the first split second of shock. The fall, short and frozen and beautiful, and then the smack of me hitting the ground, that absurd shift from speed to stillness. The crack of my skull as it smashes against the stones.

  But Emmy’s up there and she can’t get down. Emmy, who held me when I would cry until my whole body shook, who picked up the phone again and again and again, who listened to me and looked after me and loved me, until me and my anxiety wore that love down to nothing. Emmy, who’s lying up there all alone, her ribs broken, because I asked her.

  “It’s OK,” I shout back, my voice shaky, and then I start climbing again.

  I take the last steps faster, refusing to think about the height or the rust on my fingers. When I come level with the next window, I see it’s already completely free of shards. A small blessing.

  I grab hold of the window frame and heave myself in over it. The relief is greater than the effort it takes, and I manage to pull myself into the room and get my feet down onto the floor reasonably smoothly.

  I dry my palms off on my jeans, leaving ugly rusty marks on my thighs, and look around. It isn’t hard to figure out where I am. It’s the school nurse’s office; that tall, empty room with the bed in the far corner.

  “I’m in!” I call out of the window to Max and Robert, and then I call inside:

  “Emmy? It’s Alice! I’m here!”

  I stride across to the big, stately doors, which are already slightly ajar.

  I open them.

  Emmy is lying flat on her back by the door to the science room. The gaping hole where the stairs once were comes as something of a shock to the system.

  “Emmy?” I say, walking over to her.

  She’s staring up at the ceiling, I see as I come closer. She isn’t looking at me. Is she angry? That wouldn’t exactly be surprising.

  “I’m sorry,” I begin, now beside her. “We’ve found a fire escape. We’ll get you down some—”

  I stop short.

  She says nothing.

  In fact, she isn’t reacting at all; she’s lying completely still.

  Her chest isn’t moving.

  Her eyes are empty, the whites strangely bloodshot.

  “Emmy?” I try to say, but my voice sounds odd, as though coming from far away. “Emmy, can you hear me?”