by Alex Irvine
There was a pop as the megaphone cut out. For a long while after that, the only sound in the room was Violet and the other children breathing. Eventually Amelia said, “What do we do?”
* * *
• • •
They didn’t sleep that night. Junie came up an hour or so after Sebastian had made his speech. “We knew it might come to this,” she said. “We’re going to have to fight. But all we have to do is hold them off until the JTF comes to help. And all you have to do is stay out of the way and safe. Come on.”
She led them down to the second floor, where there was a room with no windows just off the bigger space they used as a kitchen. “Go get anything you’ll need for the next few days,” Junie said. “We’ll find you some blankets and things that don’t have glass in them. Okay? Be quick. I’ll wait here.”
They ran upstairs, gathered the few things they owned—a stuffed animal here, a parent’s wallet with pictures, other odds and ends—and were back down in the new room in a few minutes. “Okay,” Junie said. “I’m going to leave the door open. You’ll see when it’s light. We’ll have breakfast and we’ll figure out what to do next.”
When she was gone, Violet said, “I think we should do our plan.”
“You sure?” Amelia said. “Maybe she’s right. We just have to hold on until the JTF comes.”
Saeed was shaking his head. “I bet they won’t come. Sebastian will know we’re waiting for them. He’ll stop them from coming.”
This thought hadn’t occurred to Violet. Her chest got tight again and she forced herself to breathe.
“You don’t know that,” Amelia said. Ivan was nodding, taking sides with his big sister.
“What would you do?” Saeed asked. “I mean, if you were going to attack us. Would you do it if you knew the JTF was going to come to the rescue?”
None of them could answer that.
“I think we should do our plan,” Violet said again.
* * *
• • •
Nobody had much time for the kids that morning. Junie and Mike were overseeing further defensive preparations. They were also sending people to the rooftops of the two museum buildings next to the Castle with binoculars . . . and rifles. Most of the broken glass was swept up, and some of the shot-out windows were boarded over. Some of them were now firing slits, just big enough for a rifle barrel and a narrow view of the outside.
Violet and Noah were able to get into the kitchen and get some food. They ate lunch, and then took some of the extra food with them back to the windowless room. It was eleven o’clock. They packed up the food in case they had to do the plan.
The week before, after they’d gone up to Ford’s Theatre and been turned away, Violet had gathered all of the kids together and told them they needed to figure out their own plan for getting away if things got bad at the Castle. They’d argued over the details for a while, but eventually they had settled it.
Violet had the idea to gather stuff and get out, all together, without saying anything to the grown-ups. She wasn’t sure how to do it, though, and that was where Saeed and Ivan came in. “You didn’t know about the tunnels?” Ivan said.
“Yeah,” Saeed said. “There’s steam tunnels going out of the basement.”
“Where do they go?” Amelia asked. “And what were you doing down there anyway?”
“Exploring,” Ivan said. “We couldn’t do it outside . . .”
“So we did it inside,” Shelby finished with a bright smile. She’d just lost another tooth.
“You knew about this, too?” Violet was surprised. Shelby wasn’t usually the sort to go in for adventure.
“Yeah. We were bored.”
Violet looked at Noah and Wiley.
“We didn’t know about it,” Wiley said. “At least, I didn’t.”
“Me, neither. I’ve been stuck upstairs taking care of my stupid brother,” Noah said.
“Okay, guys. So there are steam tunnels. Where do they go?” Maybe this would work, Violet thought. If the tunnels weren’t flooded or something.
“Well, we only went to the end of one of the short ones. It goes over to the basement of the Sackler Gallery.” That was the museum on the southwest corner of the Castle grounds. “There’s a long one that goes across the Mall, but we didn’t go too far into it because we got to a branch and then we were worried about getting lost.”
Just like that, they had a plan. If things got bad, they could get out under the ground . . . as long as they knew they weren’t going to end up somewhere terrible. Saeed and Ivan and Shelby held out for the long tunnel, but Violet worried they would get to a place that was locked up, and then they wouldn’t be able to come back to the Castle. So they decided to check through the shorter tunnel to the gallery and see if they could get through.
It turned out they could . . . once Noah and Wiley and Saeed had broken a lock off an old door in the Sackler Gallery’s basement. Actually it was the third basement level, way underground. Most of the museum was underground, something the kids had just found out when they started exploring to see where the tunnels went.
Upstairs an adult yelled, “Hell’s going on down there?”
“Nothing!” they all yelled at once.
That had been a few days before, when they still had a little optimism. Now, with Sebastian’s men about to attack, they didn’t have much optimism, but they did have a plan.
The shooting actually started a little before noon. Knowing they were going to have to fight, the Castle’s defenders decided not to wait for Sebastian’s men to show up and start the fight on their terms. So when the first groups of Sebastian’s men showed up, strolling down Independence Avenue like they owned the city, Castle snipers on top of the Freer Gallery and the Castle itself began firing. The approaching soldiers scattered in disarray. Another group appeared on the Mall, and people with rifles on the towers and turrets of the Castle started shooting at them. None of them believed Sebastian would spare them if they opened the gate. So none of them believed they had anything to lose.
Mike stopped by the windowless room. “Kids,” he said. “It’s starting. I don’t know what to tell you other than stay out of the way and try to keep yourselves safe. It’s going to be okay.”
He ran off again and Violet looked at the rest of them. “We better get our stuff just in case,” she said. They all got their backpacks on and made sure their shoes were tied right. Nobody wanted to trip over a shoelace at the wrong time.
They stayed in the room as long as they could stand it, as the sounds of gunfire and people shouting—in anger, in fear, in pain—echoed through the Castle’s halls and came in through its broken windows.
Then Saeed said, “I have to get a look outside.”
He left the room and turned left down the hall, toward the big hall they used as a dining room. The rest of them looked at each other. They didn’t want to be left behind. So they went, too. All of them clustered near a window that faced south toward the gate, but was far enough off to the side that it was mostly out of the way of the fighting.
What they saw scared them to death. Dozens of Sebastian’s men were shooting from Independence Avenue and the buildings across from the line of abandoned cars. Some of the cars were on fire. Inside the garden area, they saw more people shooting at each other. A woman who had showed Violet how to run strings for beans to climb shot toward a soldier coming through the gate, then spun around and fell. She tried to crawl away but couldn’t. Blood spread around her on the stones of the walkway between garden beds.
Some of the Castle defenders were down in the pavilion entrance to the Sackler Gallery, firing up at the invaders. The firefight went down into the underground levels of the museum. “That’s kind of where we want to go, isn’t it?” Amelia asked.
“Yeah,” Saeed said. “But we come out way down in the basements under there. I doubt they�
��ll go all the way down.”
“If we have to use the plan,” Noah said.
“Right,” Saeed said. “If.”
One of the invading soldiers stopped and threw a grenade down the stairs into the Sackler. A moment later, a gout of smoke bloomed on the pavilion, rising over the garden. The same soldier started to throw another grenade, but a sniper from the top of the Castle shot him. He fell, and three seconds later, the grenade went off at the edge of the garden. Violet knew it was dumb, but she was mad at the senseless destruction of the garden. They would have eaten those vegetables. Now they were all ruined.
They ran to the other side of the building to see what it looked like over there. Sebastian’s soldiers were close to the Castle, trying to kick in the plywood covering the windows. One of them got a window open and then reeled back covered in blood. The kids could smell smoke, and see it curling up the main stairwell. Adults inside the Castle ran in every direction, trying to defend the entrances while bullets punched through the boarded-up windows.
It was time.
“Guys,” Violet said. “Let’s go.” She was surprised how calm she sounded.
They went down the stairs, trying not to breathe in too much of the smoke. On the ground floor, the adults seemed calm. Violet heard one of them shout to Darryl, “We’re holding. Long as we don’t let them in here, we’ll hold. They get in the garden, that’s a shooting gallery.”
Someone else was shouting orders about more enemies coming from the east.
The kids got down into the basement and found the steel door at the entrance to one of the tunnels. “We sure we don’t want to take the long one and really get out of here?” Saeed asked.
“We don’t know where it goes,” Violet said.
“Yeah, but this one goes to the Sackler, which . . .” Saeed didn’t have to finish the sentence. They’d all seen the explosion. But if their plan went right, they wouldn’t get close to the fighting.
They ducked into the tunnel, Saeed and Violet in front, with Amelia and Ivan right behind, Shelby behind them, and Noah and Wiley at the rear. The tunnel was hot and dark, but they got to the other end with no problem and came out in the deepest level of the Sackler. There they paused to listen. There didn’t seem to be any real fighting nearby right then.
Running up the stairs, they got to the ground level. There was a big glass entrance on the south side, but it was barricaded. The other ways out would lead them into the garden, where people were killing each other. So they went the other way, down halls between displays of beautiful artifacts of Asian art, and got to the outside windows on the west wall. There was a courtyard beyond, and then Twelfth Street. The windows were boarded up, but they pried off the plywood with a crowbar Saeed had taken from the Castle basement. Then they had to deal with the metal window frames. It took a few minutes, but eventually they broke one side free, and then they kicked out the rest.
Once they’d broken all the glass out of the frames, they could climb through. Shouting and gunfire came from the other side, inside the makeshift walls they had helped to build. “We have to get out of here. Tell the JTF,” Saeed said.
“You said the JTF wasn’t going to do anything,” Amelia reminded him.
“Who else can we tell?” Saeed demanded. “The Division? You never know when they’re going to be around.”
Someone shouted from down at the corner of Independence. They looked that direction, and saw a group of Sebastian’s men. One of them pointed, and four others started trotting toward the kids.
“Uh-oh,” Ivan said. “We have to get out of here.”
“To where?!” Shelby wailed. It was a good question. They couldn’t outrun grown-ups. Not for long. And if they were caught, Violet was sure Sebastian’s men would kill them. They had refused his offer. She might have been only eleven years old, but she knew that there were people in the world who would rather have you dead than telling them no.
Noah and Wiley were still getting through the window. Wiley winced as he climbed out. He was getting better, but his wound still hurt him when he had to exert himself. Violet kept her eyes on the approaching men. What could she say to them? What would they do?
One of them raised his gun. “Stay there!” he shouted.
They froze. Amelia said what they were all thinking. “We’re kids! Help us!”
This didn’t stop the men from coming closer, but at least the one who had pointed his rifle at them angled its barrel down. “Stay right there!” he ordered them. “Don’t move.”
Violet wanted to run. She knew with a bone-deep certainty that if they stayed, they would wish they hadn’t. But she was too scared to move. Their plan had failed.
She saw movement out of the corner of her eye. When she glanced in that direction, she had a brief image of a red-haired woman with a Division backpack. The woman braced a rifle on the low wall separating the Sackler Gallery grounds from the sidewalk on Twelfth Street. She didn’t say a word. She just opened fire.
Her first burst caught two of the approaching soldiers. The other two turned and she kept firing, hitting one of them and sending the other running for cover. She vaulted over the wall and ran to the children. “Come with me,” she said. “Toward the Mall, across the street. Let’s go.”
They ran with her. She paused in the middle of Twelfth Street, all by herself, and sprayed a long burst back at more of Sebastian’s soldiers, who were coming around the corner of the Sackler Gallery. “Keep going!” she shouted. Bullets ricocheted off the pavement near her. Violet saw a street sign twitch as a shot punched through it. She ran, with all the others around her. The woman staggered, but the kids kept running.
More of Sebastian’s men came around the corner of the museum, but now the Castle defenders on the upper floors had seen what was happening, and they started shooting. Sebastian’s soldiers scrambled for cover or fell to the ground. The red-haired woman threw her rifle away and ran with the kids across Jefferson Avenue and the broad expanse of the Mall. They didn’t stop until they got to the Washington Monument. By that time they were a little ahead of her, because she limped as she ran, but all of them clustered together at the base of the monument and waited for her to catch up.
She got there and leaned against the white marble wall of the monument, slowly sliding to the ground. There was blood on the left leg of her pants. She shrugged off her pack and winced as she tried to stand again.
Violet looked back toward the Castle. No one had followed them. The battle there was still going on, but they were out of it. With the rest of the kids, she drew closer to this woman.
“Are you a Division agent?” Saeed asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m just here to help.”
“You look like a Division agent,” Ivan said.
She looked over at him and got slowly to her feet. “I’m not,” she said. “But we’re going to go find someone who is. Before we do, though . . .” She paused, breathing hard and resting against the wall. “Before we do, please tell me one of you is named Diaz.”
43
APRIL
“Actually two of us are,” one of the older girls in the group said. She pointed. “Amelia and Ivan.”
Jackpot, April thought. The pain from the wound in her leg made it hard for her to think, but she knew she had to get these kids somewhere safe. She tested the leg. It didn’t want to hold her weight. She felt the spot where the bullet had gone through, on the outside of her left thigh.
Everything I’ve been through since December, she thought, and this is the first time I’ve really been hurt.
Leaning against the wall of the Washington Monument, listening to the crackle of gunfire from the Smithsonian Castle . . . it all seemed unreal to her. But that was shock from the bullet wound talking. She still had one more thing to do. Well, two more things.
Amelia and Ivan Diaz stood together in the group of seven children.
All of them looked to her for guidance about what to do next. April looked north, toward the White House. The main JTF base in DC was supposed to be there. There was a battle going on there, too. No help would be coming from that quarter. She looked back east. Whoever was attacking the Castle seemed to be digging in. Groups of fighters were huddling together behind cover and the intensity of the fire was diminishing. She wasn’t a trained soldier, but she could tell when an attack was starting to transform into a siege. That was what it looked like.
The battle around the White House was going a little better. The JTF seemed to be holding its own there. She felt exposed, and her leg was radiating waves of pain that made it hard to think. Seven children, she thought. Where do I take them?
The important thing was to take them somewhere. “We have to keep moving,” she said. “Come on, we’ll go around the other side of the White House and find help there.”
“Wait,” the girl who’d spoken before said. She was maybe ten or eleven years old, dark hair, serious face. “Someone shot Wiley over at the pond in Constitution Gardens.”
“Where’s that?” April asked. The girl pointed. “Okay,” April said. “We’ll go up toward the White House before we get that far.”
She led the kids north across the Mall, angling toward the far side of the Ellipse south of the White House. The battle on the edge of the White House grounds seemed to be over for now. Glancing back south, she saw that the same was true down at the Smithsonian Castle. Smoke was pouring from one of the buildings near the Castle, but she couldn’t tell what was happening inside the building. All that was on her mind at the moment was getting those kids someplace safe. And relaying a message.
When they had reached the far side of the White House grounds, just south of the Eisenhower Executive Building—she knew this from signs—she paused. “Okay,” she said. “Which of you are the Diaz kids again?” She hadn’t paid attention before when the other girl pointed them out in the group.