Some recognized me, and those that didn’t followed those that did. They believed me when I told them Truck, the carrier, would be ready to transport them to a nearby checkpoint. They believed me because they thought I was the sniper, and how could the sniper lead them astray? But my confidence was as hollow as my identity. I was deceiving them even now, when they were most frightened. I didn’t know if any of us would live through the night.
I moved toward the cave-in that blocked the mess hall from everything behind it, and raised the lantern I’d picked up off the ground. The sight before me stole my breath.
The way was blocked completely by a wall of concrete and pipe. Water sprayed from one corner. On the opposite side, several guys were struggling to put out a fire, but every time they got close, the rock base they climbed upon gave way, and they all crashed back into one another. Those that were digging nearby had to abandon the area on account of the heat.
A boy about Billy’s age was screaming. His leg was trapped beneath a hollow pipe with a greater circumference than his core. Sitting against the wall in the shadows I spotted a tall, slender man and shouted my plea for help. He stared into space, unmoving.
“Clear!” shouted someone. The call was infectious. “Clear! The exit’s clear!”
I wanted to run, follow them toward the tunnel that led to the lake, but couldn’t. Not with this boy here, staring at me through pain-glazed eyes. Trapped, as I had been.
Sean, having been close at the cave-in, came sprinting toward me. He assessed the situation with a tight grimace and bent down to help.
I planted my shoulder against the pipe, favoring my sore wrist against my chest.
“On three,” he said.
The boy began to pant. “Wait,” he begged. “Just wait…”
On three we pushed. The boy passed out, but we got the pipe off of him. His leg was bent at an awkward angle. A sharp piece of bone from his shin stuck out through his denim pants.
I covered my mouth, biting back the bile climbing my throat. Sean hoisted him over one shoulder. The boy’s head bobbled limply to the side.
When I hesitated, Sean glanced toward our exit. “We’ve got to go.”
I caught sight of Chase then, digging into the rock with his bare hands, calling out orders to those around him. Something about the desperation in his movements finally brought reality home. The MM had done this. They weren’t just skulking around prison cells taking out defenseless individuals. They were attacking on a large scale now. Like with the fire, they meant to destroy us all. Today, they’d done a pretty good job.
Get out, I heard with each thump of my heart. Get out, get out, get out.
Sean followed my gaze. “Hurry up,” he said, and took off.
I limped toward Chase, but on the way tripped over a man’s long legs, splayed out from where he sat against the tunnel wall. His arms were down loosely at his sides. His face was almost completely blackened by dirt.
“Jack?”
I touched his knee, unsure if he was dead or in a trance.
“Jack!” I shouted. He clawed at his ears, smearing the trickle of blood that veined down his neck. He couldn’t hear me.
I moved closer to his face. “Jack! It’s me, Ember. We need to go, okay? We’ve got to get out of here!”
He blinked. His mouth was moving slightly. I leaned close to hear him.
“Run,” he whispered. “We’ve been hit. Mags is down. Run.”
I touched his hand. It was ice-cold. Vaguely, I recalled someone once telling me this was a sign of shock. I rubbed his arms rapidly, hoping this would help. My swollen wrist sparked with pain. I pulled him to a stand and he sagged back against the wall.
Finally a sound interrupted his mumblings. He began to laugh. It was a highly disturbing sound given the shouts and moans of pain.
“The sniper,” he said. And then laughed again. “The sniper, from Knoxville.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. It’s hilarious.”
He stopped laughing and shook his head as if to clear it. “We need to evacuate.”
“Yup,” I said, shoving him down the hallway. “I’m two steps ahead of you.”
* * *
WORD traveled fast down the tunnel. Thirty minutes after I’d emerged from the rubble, a scout up top radioed down a sighting of soldiers on the airfield. They were combing the area looking for a safe entrance to the tunnels. The signal didn’t need much interpretation: they knew how we got in, which meant that someone had snitched, like Truck had said, or been followed. I hoped that it had not been us.
After I’d sent off Jack, I went for Chase, but he was already barreling in my direction. He grabbed my uninjured hand, and I could feel the slick sweat and blood between our palms. Without another word we ran, hearts in our throats, fate on our heels. His grip never faltered.
The way became less cluttered by rock and debris as we approached the barracks and the exit route, but the ceiling had begun to rumble again. Another collapse was imminent. We could not move fast enough.
A crash came from behind us—an aftershock of the original bombing that had weakened the whole infrastructure. The roar of the rock and hiss of broken pipes shattered my eardrums, the repercussion reverberating in my chest like the smack of a bass drum. The floor trembled, then seemed to lift and pitch, and we were on an ocean of sand and rock, clinging to each other, fighting to stay upright.
I willed myself not to look back, but I knew the landslide was coming. It swallowed each remaining lantern, until behind us was only black, and all that remained ahead was the wreckage that appeared in the bouncing beams of our flashlights.
Finally the barracks came into view, and Truck darted through a metal door that said BOILER ROOM—EXIT. Sean had been waiting; he motioned us to hurry. We passed him, colliding into the bodies that were stacked inside.
“Stop! It’s this way!” I heard Sean yell behind me. I turned in time to see Tucker staring farther down the hall, toward the airfield exit where we had entered the tunnels, a desperate look on his face.
Sean grabbed his sleeve and jerked him back toward us, just as the cave-in reached the barracks. The crunch and squeal of the medical car dissipated in seconds beneath the rubble; any visual of the tunnel was suddenly blocked behind the slamming metal door. Tucker stumbled, pale panic stretching his features thin.
This hallway was damp and dark, and my eyes watered from the acrid fumes of gasoline. I remembered the flames beside the cave-in; there were probably multiple gas leaks. My breath felt dense and palpable in my throat as the tunnels outside collapsed.
“Eyes open!” Truck yelled, and ran on.
He shoved through a door on the opposite end of the corridor to a stairway and we ascended five levels, exiting into a room filled with rusted pipes and human-sized cobwebs. Rats scurried across the floor. For the first time in my life, I welcomed the sight of them: we were heading toward the living. Below us, the collapse had halted, and though we knew the reprieve wouldn’t hold, the air wafted with the shudder of one collective breath.
We emerged on the other side into a women’s restroom, like those in the old department stores we’d visited when I was a kid.
“No joke,” Truck laughed thinly. “My biggest nightmare in high school was accidentally walking into the girl’s bathroom.”
Chase’s hand came around the back of my neck. “You okay?” He was breathing hard.
I nodded, checking him and then Sean for injuries.
“Where are we?” asked Tucker.
“Near the lake. We’re on the dark side of town—there’s no standardized power over here,” Truck said. “The Bureau doesn’t come out this way. The worst we’ve got to watch for is flooding.”
“They never replaced the levee after the War,” Chase explained at our blank looks.
When Chicago had been bombed, the flood walls had been destroyed, bringing Lake Michigan’s shore a block farther inland. The fallen buildings had pushed the waterline even higher. On th
e news I’d once seen a woman’s furniture floating away with the current.
Truck led the way into an open lobby, where at least thirty people were crammed onto the left side of the broken tile floors. The ceiling on the right half had collapsed. Broken wires, fluorescent lights, and fluffs of insulation hung down to the damp linoleum.
I’d thought the underground had looked bad. In our urgency, I’d temporarily forgotten what the War had done to the top half of the city.
It was past curfew, but only just; I felt like I could finally breathe when the muted colors and shadows became decipherable through the cracks in the ceiling. If I never went underground again it would be just fine by me.
The medic was triaging those most injured, giving his approved list to Jack, who boarded them into an FBR supply truck outside. From the looks of it, he’d come back to his senses, but now seemed too embarrassed to acknowledge me.
“What are they doing here?”
I stiffened. My eyes found the boy who’d been crushed beneath the pipe. His leg was wrapped now with a wool blanket tied off with bungee cords, and he slouched against the back wall, clearly a recipient of a high dose of morefeen.
“Shut up already,” grumbled Jack. “They weren’t followed.”
So this wasn’t the first time this boy had made this accusation. I hoped no one else shared his views.
“You think we did this?” Sean asked.
“Odd timing,” the boy slurred. “Sniper shows up and they bomb the tunnels all to Hell.”
“We didn’t have to roll that pipe off your leg, you know!” I wanted to confess everything then, to tell them I wasn’t the sniper, Cara was, and now that she was dead, there was no sniper. But those people in the tunnels had listened to me because they thought I was important, and maybe that had saved their lives. I couldn’t take it back.
On some level I understood that Chicago needed someone to blame. But we were the last to leave the tunnels. We had sweat and bled beside them. Didn’t that mean anything?
Chase seethed beside me. The indecipherable muttering from the survivors rose in volume.
Truck, who had gone outside to check the vehicle, returned and cut the tension with his trademark missing-tooth grin.
“Sit tight, ladies,” he said. “Checkpoint express is pulling out of station. I’ll be back as soon as I can to get the rest of you.”
A communal groan. At least half would be left behind, some badly injured.
“I’m not going.”
All eyes turned toward Tucker, mine included.
“I won’t be further trouble,” he continued. “If they meant to smoke out the sniper like that kid says, we’ll be putting the convoy in further danger. I’ll stay back. Draw them away from the transports.”
What a hero, I thought.
“We’ll all stay,” said Chase, a wary eye on his ex-partner. “We came here for someone. We’re not leaving without her.”
My heart pounded in my chest. Beside me, Sean exhaled.
* * *
THE first batch left for the Indiana checkpoint, and though I’d made my decision to stay, I couldn’t bring myself to watch them leave. For the first time since I’d learned the truth about my mother, I wanted to go to the coast. I wanted peace.
In Truck’s absence, a grim anticipation settled over us. It thickened, until someone finally joked about how a guy named Stripes had cried like a baby when the bombs went off.
“You think that’s bad,” a bald man with a goatee responded, “you should have seen Boston sprint for the exit. You’d have thought his boots were on fire.”
Some nervous chuckles.
They called one another girls’ names. Sally. Mary. They laughed about who pissed their pants and who broke down. It was sexist and crass, but I didn’t even care. You said what you could to pull yourself out.
I thought of how Jack had laughed in the tunnels after the blast, and wondered if he’d had it right. When things got really bad, the horror came full circle, and even violence got to be funny again. It didn’t have to make sense.
We inventoried the supplies, ate salvaged rations of crackers and canned mix-meat, and waited for cover of darkness to sneak to Rebecca’s rehab. In our quest to stay, we’d been granted a break from the accusations and were donated fatigues, rations, and two handguns. The boy from the supply room, still lightly dusted and streaked with sweat, approached me shyly and handed me a Sister uniform he’d salvaged from the supply room.
“Thought you might need this again,” he said, face filled with hope.
I paid him a guilty thank-you, knowing it was far too late to say anything to the contrary.
* * *
THERE were two water drums from the delivery truck that were brought inside the hideout to make more room, and since the water was too dirty to drink, we used it to clean the grime and blood from our bodies.
As I waited in line, Chase’s presence pulled at me, drawing my attention to where he and Sean had removed themselves from the others. Against the wall, behind a ripped curtain of gray insulation hanging from the ceiling, they conspired. Though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, Sean’s movements were animated, as if he were trying to make a point, and curiosity had me leaving my place in line to see what had set Chase’s shoulders in a defensive hunch and his thumb tapping against his thigh. Before I reached them, Chase broke the conversation and stalked away.
“What was that about?” Sean’s head jerked up as I spoke. He glanced after Chase, then, in a low voice, explained how we were to break into the facility.
When he was done, my head was throbbing even harder than before.
No one removed a patient from the premises without the presence of a Sister, so Tucker and Sean would claim that they were assisting me with transporting Rebecca to a Sisters of Salvation home, where she could dedicate her life to service. Tucker knew the soldier managing the facility and felt confident he’d let us through. Just as long as he hadn’t heard about the dishonorable discharge.
Chase was not going to be coming in with us.
“It took twenty seconds for an AWOL to make him,” Sean tried to reason. “Don’t you think there are soldiers at the base who still remember him?”
So now Chase was the liability, and the rescue plan depended on me.
He was going to love that.
Without a word, I sought refuge in the women’s bathroom. The minutes lost their meaning as I stood before a sink, knees locked, eyes unseeing. A blank expression fixed itself onto my face, and it was no lie. I felt nothing. Not rage. Not despair. Nothing. I’d placed a bucket of water in the bowl, and absently washed my hands, my arms, my hair, now crunchy with dried blood, and watched as droplets of red and black splashed the old, forgotten porcelain.
The mirror before me was marred by black, mutated roses of corrosion, and within one of them something moved— a reflection from the empty stalls at my back. I spun, and the world spun with me, forcing me to grip the sink behind with white knuckles.
Tucker sat on the floor, his legs bent at sharp angles, his hands clasped between his knees. He leaned back against a stall door, shrouded by shadow and so still he could have been a fixture in the room. Still, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed him.
We stared at each other for a long moment, until I finally asked the question ringing through my skull.
“What are you doing here?”
His shoulders rose with a long, drawn-out sigh, but his voice was weak. Defeated. “Same thing as you. Taking some much-needed me time.”
“What are you doing here?” I repeated. And when he didn’t answer, I asked again.
He looked down, and his legs fell straight.
“I don’t know.”
He crumbled forward, folding over himself like a discarded marionette, and began to shake. At once, conflicting desires rose within me. To leave. To force him, however I could, to tell the truth. To crouch down, and lower my voice, and say something soothing. And because they were all equ
ally strong, I didn’t dare let go of the sink.
He is a liar.
He was with us in the tunnels.
I slowly dropped down, careful that I could rise quickly if necessary.
“Tell me something you do know then.”
He looked up, his eyes red and his face stained, and for a moment he looked so young I barely recognized him. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
“They cut me,” he said with a weak laugh. “I was everything they wanted, and they cut me.”
“The FBR,” I realized.
“Every test. Every level. I was perfect. But all they saw was Jennings. They wanted him. He screwed up everything, on purpose, and they still wanted him. It was unbelievable.”
Chase had told me he bucked the system trying to get home, but that had made his officers even more intent to break him. When he finally did comply, it was for my protection. It was unsettling to hear Tucker speak of it now.
“You know I enlisted early? Before my senior year,” he continued. “The first day I could. I was waiting for that day. I’d been waiting since I was nine years old.”
“What happened when you were nine?” I found myself asking.
“The War,” he said bitterly. He rolled his ankle in a slow circle, winced. “My dad managed a grocery store. It was a small place, not one of the chains, one of the first to go under when the economy tanked. We lost everything.” He looked up. “My dad’s car. Then our stuff. The house. My mom lost her job, too. We had to get rations vouchers and stand in lines for food we used to sell.”
My calves were falling asleep, and reluctantly I kneeled, feeling a strange connection to his story.
“It takes a toll,” he said, and his jaw twitched. “That’s what my mom used to say. It takes a toll, Tuck. That’s why he drinks so much. That’s why he beats the crap out of us. Because it takes a toll.”
I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t want to feel sorry for him, of all people.
“And then the soldiers came to town.” He was wistful now. “And Dad got a job with Horizons, and things got all right after that. His boss knew a recruiter, and he’d come over to the house and talk to me about joining up. It made sense, you know? This officer, he had everything we used to have. Cars and a house and nobody screaming at each other. I made up my mind right then that that’s what I was going to do.”
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