Zac staggered. Gripped the corner of a shelf. His vision tunneled, gray around the edges, as his chest closed up.
“Hey,” the man said. “Hey, man, are you sick?”
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
“Danny, go get Miss Tiana.”
“Where?”
“Behind the front counter. Go get her now.”
Pattering footsteps receded.
“Hey, can you hear me? Are you okay? Do you want me to call an ambulance?”
Can’t get a breath, not a single breath, someone please help.
“Zac.” Tiana’s voice. Static on a walkie. “David, I need you, aisle three.”
More static. “Be there in a moment.”
“Now, David. I need you now!”
“I’m calling 911.”
“No. Please don’t do that.”
“He’s having a heart attack.”
“He isn’t. Please, I know him, and—”
A third voice. “Ach. Zac.”
“Mr. Galloway, I really think I should call—”
“Thank you, but it isn’t needed.”
Hands fit under Zac’s arms and lifted him from his bowed posture.
Another voice, this one female. A stranger. “Is that Zac Wilson?”
And David, snapping, “Please move aside. Thank you.”
The hands guided him to the back room where he’d just been, but now the closed space, no windows—he balked, and something like a whimper escaped his throat.
“It’s okay, Zac.” Tiana’s voice, not David’s. “We’re just going to hang out in here for a minute to keep you out of sight. I know you don’t want the customers gawking.”
She propelled him forward as she talked. The door shut behind them, further shortening his breath.
“If you can give me a sign, that would be great. But if you can’t, I’ll keep talking until David gets the store cleared out and then we can figure out what you need. Sound good?”
She squeezed his hand. He clung in return. Tactile anchor. Thank you, Tiana. Please don’t let go.
“You can hear me?” she said.
He squeezed again.
“Good. Let’s talk about … um, I guess the topic doesn’t matter as much as my voice? How about the weather; there’s a classic. It’s sunny today. The trees don’t have many leaves left, but their branches are sort of pretty. I always picture them shivering though. Wishing they had their coats back. Or how about the dunes? I know you’re partial to them.”
She talked on about the beautiful dunes. About the water of Lake Michigan that washed up on the sand at the end of Valerian Street. He tried to see it in his head, but his inner eye kept glitching on mud and night and blood and bodies pressing in on him.
“How is he?”
“I’ve never seen him like this.”
“Let’s get him outdoors.”
“O … kay?”
“He’s claustrophobic, Tiana.”
“Oh. Oh Zac.”
“Come.”
“He’s never reacted like this in the store before.”
The air changed. Chilled. Zac tried to drink it in, but his lungs refused to open. They were holding him up, a hand under each of his forearms. He could see the parking lot and his own car, the naked trees and the sky, but he’d fallen so far into the panic he might never claw his way back out.
Claw his way. Through the mud and the bodies.
They grew hushed, the voices of the friends he knew were here with him. Friends who hadn’t been there in the mud, so he wasn’t in the mud either. Except he was.
“Jesus, please be close to us right now. Please let him breathe.”
“Place Your hands on him, Lord God. Bring Your peace to the war in his mind. Bring him back to us now.”
Their voices overlapped, murmured agreement with one another. The terror and the memory receded, inch by inch, and Zac felt hands on both his shoulders, his arm, his back. They were hemming him in with their touch and their prayer. He leaned, he didn’t know into whom. Exhaustion left him limp. The past still pressed so close. If he opened his eyes, he might see the trees and the sky and his friends. Or he might see the pit and the corpses, the pools of blood soaking the earth around him. He shuddered and drew a gasp. The hand on his back began a slow circular rub, so that was Tiana.
“Zac?” she said.
He opened his eyes.
He was slumped against David. They had seated him on a bench behind the bookstore and were sitting on either side of him. He tried to straighten, but he was so tired.
“Sorry.” He shut his eyes. Somewhere in Ohio, Lucas might be dying.
“What happened?” Tiana said.
“Um, panic attack.”
“Uh-huh.” Her hand moved from his back to his shoulder and squeezed. “We noticed.”
“I’m good now.”
“Zac, why did you panic?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it does.”
He planted his palms on the bench and sat up, away from David’s support. Tiana watched him, while David gazed off across the street. Zac drew in a full breath and let it out, and his chest didn’t lock up. In a minute he’d have his legs back, and he could get out of here.
“Something’s going on with you,” Tiana said.
“Well, life’s been stressful lately.”
“Do you know what I do when life stresses me out? I watch too much Star Trek.”
“Is that a prescription?”
“That’s a compare and contrast.”
“Try surviving a world war or two and maybe we won’t contrast so much.”
Silence. He met her eyes. She was gazing right at him, right into him. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” He bent and planted his elbows on his knees, scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I’d rather forget this fiasco and leave you guys to reopen the store. David, what do I owe you for that book?”
“I hadn’t priced it,” he said.
“Let me know when you do.”
“Zac, why are you claustrophobic?”
He lifted his face from his hands. David asking too. “Look, I’m working on it. I don’t see why the why matters.”
“Who does know?” Tiana said. She hadn’t removed her hand from his shoulder.
“Simon and Moira, obviously.”
“They know you struggle with your war experiences?”
“Experience. Just one really, relating to—all this.” He gritted his teeth. Shut up, Wilson.
“Okay, then they’re the ones you need to talk to. I get it. We’re still getting to know each other.”
He ducked his head. Let her assumption stand. Continue with the deflection he excelled at. The idea of getting up and walking away, the memory still locked inside him, felt like the safest thing he could do. Safest and loneliest and maybe most terrifying. He shuddered, and Tiana’s grip strengthened on his shoulder.
“What is it?” she said.
“I—” The single word shattered against his mask. He looked down at his hands. They were shaking. They hadn’t been a few seconds ago.
A minute passed while he sat there. Mute. Caught in the web of every attack that had hit him in the last three weeks. He didn’t know how to start. If only she would say something else, nudge him toward the words he couldn’t reach, but no, of course he didn’t want that. Better she was quiet now.
David stretched his legs and folded his arms and leaned back against the bench.
“What’re you doing?” Zac blurted. “Waiting me out?”
“Aye.”
That word was the nudge. It came to Zac in the deepest place of his soul. The place that had curled up and withdrawn when he realized how his struggle had burdened Moira, how she had resented shouldering his weakness. The place that had frozen up the next time he tried to call Simon for help through a bad night. The place that had known better than to call Colm, ever, because best friend or not, the man always mocked fear.
“In 1917,” he whispered, “I was mortally shot.”
EIGHTEEN
The six words sounded as new to him as they would to David and Tiana. He groped for more, unsure which ones his mouth would speak until he heard them emerge.
“Through the throat. Blood and—the sound, it was that sound. In the bookstore. That kid gargling his water. I—I didn’t think about it at the time, but that’s what it was. The trigger.”
David sat utterly still beside him. On his other side Tiana watched him, but he couldn’t meet her eyes. He kept his gaze, like David’s, trained across the street.
“I regained consciousness as they dragged me to the grave. Mass grave. Hundreds. Of bodies. I stayed quiet while they—while they buried. Us. The corpses and me.”
A soft breath came from Tiana. He couldn’t look at her and keep talking. The danger of what he was doing filled his chest. They might not want this once they knew. They might go inside and reopen the store and tell him they’d see him later, only to call and say they’d thought it over and needed a break from his brokenness. From him. If he kept the brokenness to himself, he’d more likely get to keep Tiana and David.
“Zac.”
Not the first time Tiana had said his name, he was sure. Concern drew her mouth down, and David now studied him too.
“That’s all,” Zac said.
“How were you rescued?” Tiana said. “Your troop found you?”
“No one found me.” Not God, despite his pleas. Not anyone else either.
“Then how …?”
“It had rained for weeks, everything was mud. I dug myself out. The second day was sunny. That was my mantra. Find the sun. Keep breathing and find the sun.”
“Zac.”
He risked a look at her.
Tears stood in her eyes. “I am so sorry this happened to you.”
The emotion in her words hit like a summer downpour on his parched soul. She wasn’t retreating. He wasn’t inconvenient. He didn’t have to silence how it hurt to lie beneath the dead, some of them his friends, to breathe the stench of their decay and taste their blood in the mud that filled his mouth. How it hurt to scream for God to save him, please save him from this grave, and to be left to dig his own way out.
But he had to be clear so they understood. He wouldn’t continue to be the burden he was now.
“It’s been okay for a long time. I mean, there’s a bad night once or twice a year. But I don’t live like this.”
“Right now you do.”
Her gentle words clobbered him. Heat flooded his face. “It won’t last.”
“When did it start?”
“The night after we buried Colm.”
She nodded as if that meant something to her. And shoot, David was nodding too.
“What?”
She said, “Don’t you think there were things to remind you? Sounds, smells?”
Turned earth’s rich scent. Dark hole he helped deepen. Shovels clinking. Zac forced his legs to hold him as he stood and paced. A little wobbly, but he had to move.
“What do you think?” David said, watching him.
“The man is dead. He was dead when we put him in the ground. I don’t see why there’s some connection in my head.”
“But perhaps there is a connection?”
He stopped and pushed shaking fingers through his hair. “I … yeah. Maybe.”
No maybe about it. For proof he needed only take stock of his body right now. Adrenaline spiked his pulse, and his legs began shaking like his hands. As if all of him had been waiting for his stupid brain to put the pieces together, and now … He sank back onto the bench between them and gripped his knees.
“Knowing the source might help you through it,” Tiana said.
“How?” If being on the outside of the mess let David and Tiana see clearly … “What do I have to do?”
“I can’t answer that one,” Tiana said.
David’s eyes were steady on him. “You know the answer, friend.”
His fingers curled into loose fists, but he had no inclination to use them now. “This has nothing to do with God.”
“All things have to do with Him.”
“So if I don’t repent and surrender, I spend the rest of my life like this?”
“That’s not—”
“You’re not listening, David. I just said I’ve been fine for the last hundred years.”
“And has it been so long since you’ve walked with Him?”
Zac was on his feet without a conscious decision to get up. He met David’s eyes and let his mouth twist into the hint of a sneer.
“To the day,” he said.
Tiana laced her fingers together and wrapped them around her knees. “The day …?”
“If He would ignore a prayer like ‘Please don’t let them bury me alive,’ then He clearly wasn’t going to hear anything else I said.”
“But Zac—”
He paced away from them. He’d said too much. “No. Just stop. I mean it, Tiana. Stop.”
She was silent while he paced. He swiveled to jab a finger at David. “I’m going to talk to Cady and Finn about Lucas. See if they’ve ever done it, and how old the mortal was.”
“And if they have?” David said quietly.
“Then I’m going to make him well, David. And no one is going to stop me.”
David held his gaze, and Zac stared back, until David shook his head. “It’s a terrible mistake you’ll be making, friend.”
Don’t call me that. He almost said the words aloud. He didn’t know where they’d come from, only that David’s dogged use of the word made him want to hit things.
“Whatever,” he said with a flippancy that was the last thing he felt. “I’ll go now. I know you two can’t wait to start praying for me to come to my senses.”
When Tiana flinched, the remorse nearly choked him. He kept his face impassive and left both of them sitting on the bench. He got back into his car and texted Cady.
ARE YOU AND FINN AROUND TOWN? WANT TO ASK YOU ABOUT SOMETHING.
She responded after he’d driven no more than a block. WE WENT TO THE DUNES. ABOUT HALFWAY UP ONE AT THE MOMENT.
CAN I CALL YOU?
GIVE ME FIFTEEN MINUTES.
He could drive out there. He’d prefer to talk to them face-to-face. On the drive he could breathe deeply and absorb the country around him. But he didn’t have time. He needed the answer now. He needed to start driving to Ohio. Now.
He gazed out the windshield across the street. The maples lining the sidewalk were bare or holding on to a few dry leaves. Just as Tiana had described for him.
Friends. That’s what they were. They deserved to be treated as such.
Or he might be wrong about them too. He’d known them a month.
And what he’d just told them was something no one else knew. In the years after the Great War, a soldier didn’t put his memories into words. But the last few decades had birthed an oversharing culture, and these friends hadn’t known him in those days. Was that the only reason Zac had spoken of it at last?
Didn’t matter. As long as he didn’t blunder like that again.
After eighteen minutes, Cady had not texted again, but customers were beginning to fill the bookstore lot. David must have turned the sign back to OPEN. On faith, Zac went to a gas station and filled up. He pulled away from the pump and parked in one of the spaces in front of the little snack mart. Then he texted Cady.
IS NOW A GOOD TIME?
After less than two minutes, she responded. SURE.
He dialed, his mouth dry with the possiblity of hearing from them what he’d just heard from David.
“Hi,” Cady said.
“I need some information.”
“What’s up?”
He stretched his back, tipped his head up to stare at the sky, tinted by his moonroof. Didn’t need to close his eyes to see Lucas in a hospital bed and Nate ignoring his phone because the kid was …
“Zac?”
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Are we talking, um, privately?”
“We’re sitting on one of the stone benches at the top. I’ve got you on speakerphone, but nobody else is coming over here because we’re occupying the only bench.”
He could picture their exact location; he’d climbed there often enough. They were safely secluded. “I need to know if you’ve ever turned anyone before. With your blood.”
In the quiet, a gust of wind over the phone roared in his ear.
“No,” Finn said.
“Have you tried it?”
More wind. Zac fidgeted in his seat.
“Zac, you can’t just make more of us.” Cady’s voice held a new edge.
“That’s not what I’m trying to do.” And how she could think him that callous … Well, she didn’t know him yet. He threw open the car door and got out. He slammed it shut. They’d heard that, no doubt. He paced the length of the front bumper. “Just tell me what happened when you tried it.”
“Nothing,” Finn said. “They died anyway. Our blood’s ineffective.”
“Whose blood was it? The same person’s? How many times—?”
“Sean tried it once, and I tried it. Once.”
“And?”
“They died anyway, Zac.” Cady’s voice was downright frosty now. “Our blood has no healing properties. None whatsoever.”
He bowed over the hood, braced himself up with one hand, and held the phone away from his mouth as a ragged breath left him.
“I’m sorry,” Finn said.
“Yeah.” His voice sounded like some other guy’s. Some guy who’d just lost his footing and landed at the bottom of a canyon. “Thanks.”
He hung up and shoved his phone into his jeans pocket.
He paced and tried to think. There had to be another chance. Another hope. He tugged his phone back out and called the only person left to call. The phone rang twice.
“Hey,” Simon said.
Zac leaned into the bumper and ducked his head. “Hey, man.”
“What’s going on?”
“Did you ever try again, after Melissa? To change someone?”
This pause was longer than Cady’s had been. So long Zac checked to see if the call was still connected.
“One other time. It doesn’t work.”
The recipient wasn’t the problem then. “Maybe your blood doesn’t. Maybe mine would.”
From Sky to Sky Page 14