by Scott Sigler
“Oh, no,” she says. “Yong! Lie flat, let me see the cut!”
Yong’s hands clutch at his belly. The hands are mostly hidden by his thighs, but not enough that I can’t see the blood covering his fingers.
He lets out a long, low moan. His eyes stay squeezed shut.
Spingate’s hair hangs down, gets in the way. She rubs madly at her thighs like she doesn’t know what to do with her hands, then slaps a palm hard on Yong’s shoulder.
“I said, lie flat!”
Bello leans in, her cheeks glistening with tears. “Stop hitting him! Do something!”
Spingate shakes her head, again rubs hard at her thighs. She looks up at me.
“Em, don’t just stand there, come help!”
The knife falls from my hand and clatters on the floor. Dust instantly clings to the blood that streaks the blade.
I kneel behind Yong’s back.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Help me make him lie flat,” Spingate says, her voice still rushed but now calmer that someone is doing this with her. “We have to put pressure on the wound.”
She reaches under Yong’s shoulder and his leg and lifts, while I grab a shoulder and a knee and pull. We roll him to his back. He’s still curled up tight, the curve of his spine like the curve of an egg, and I have to hold him in place to keep him from flopping over again.
Yong starts to sob, the vibrations shaking his whole body. His mouth is wide open; a string of spit gleams between his lips.
“It hurts,” he says. “It hurts.”
Spingate puts a hand on his cheek, rapidly pets his black hair away from his forehead.
“Yong, listen to me,” she says. “You’ve been stabbed. I have to look at the wound.”
He shakes his head, as if to force her hand away.
“No, no it hurts! Make it stop!”
Spingate reaches up and backhand-flips her red hair behind her. She glares at Bello and Aramovsky.
“Come here and help us!”
Aramovsky rushes over, puts his hands on Yong’s knees and gently pulls, trying to open the boy up.
“No,” Yong says. “It hurts. Go get my mom…please go get my mom!”
He’s pleading for something we can’t give him. His voice sounds wrong: words like his belong to a voice that is higher and thinner than what we hear.
I feel wetness on my knees—his blood, spreading across the floor.
Spingate’s upper lip curls in fury. She shakes Yong’s shoulders, leans in and screams in his face.
“Relax your legs! Relax them!”
Bello reaches in, yanks at Spingate’s arm.
“Stop it, Spingate! You don’t even know what you’re doing!”
Spingate whips her left arm back without looking, trying to brush Bello off, but her elbow cracks into the smaller girl’s mouth. Bello’s hands fly to her face. She turns, half bent over, and stumbles away.
I don’t think Spingate even knows she hit her.
Aramovsky is patting Yong’s knees as he pulls. “Open up,” the tall boy says in a voice that’s both deep and patient. “Open up.”
Yong lets out a long moan, one that’s chopped up into short bits by his chest-rattling sobs. His eyes are squeezed so tight. Snot drips from his nose, runs down his left lip and cheek.
He finally relaxes his legs, lets Aramovsky and me gently move them out of the way. He is flat on his back, body twitching slightly. His blood-drenched hands remain pressed hard against his stomach. From the chest down, his entire shirt is red.
Spingate grabs at Yong’s neck, pulls off his tie and hands it to me.
“Press this against the wound when I get his hands out of the way,” she says. “We need to stop the bleeding.”
I take the tie.
Spingate again leans close to Yong’s face.
“You have to move your hands,” she says. “Okay? Move your hands.”
Not knowing what else to do, I start petting his head like Spingate did, sliding my palm from his eyebrows back. Blood on my hand smears across his circle-star, gets into his hair.
His skin…it’s cool, clammy, and not just from the blood. He’s sweating.
I look at Spingate. “Do something!”
She tugs at his hands, trying to pull them away from his stomach. “I’m trying,” she says. “Can’t you see that I’m trying?”
Yong’s hands won’t budge. Spingate leans over them, pulls harder, but his hands stay in place, clutching so tight I wonder if his fingertips are punching through the skin, causing even more damage.
“Aramovsky,” she says, “help me here.”
He does as he’s told, his black-skinned fingers wrapping around Yong’s blood-covered wrists, pulling them gently but insistently, overpowering Yong’s resistance. Yong’s fingers clutch at open air.
“Mom…it hurts.”
Not as much energy in his words now. The mom comes out as a long, broken word: maa-aaa-aahm.
Spingate rips Yong’s shirt open, sending buttons flying. His tan skin is a sheet of smeared red. She wipes her hands down his muscled belly, shoving away the blood, making him almost clean for a moment.
But only a moment, because red wells up out of a stab wound slightly above and to the left of his belly button. Gush, flow…gush, flow…
Spingate slaps my shoulder.
“Em! The tie!”
I shove it against the wound, so fast he cries out like I punched him there. I press the tie firmly, hoping it will do what Spingate said it would do.
Yong looks at me with unfocused eyes.
“Mom? Please…make it stop.”
The words are weak. His hands relax, shift from clutching talons to limp fingers.
His eyes close. Did he pass out?
Spingate shakes him again.
“Yong! Wake up!”
The tie is already soaked, a wet washcloth that needs to be wrung out, but I keep it pressed in place.
“If he’s asleep, he won’t fight us,” I say. “Why don’t you want him to sleep?”
She looks at me, confused. “Why? I…I don’t know. Just because.”
Aramovsky glances at me, his eyes full of doubt. He doesn’t think Spingate knows what she’s doing. She doesn’t, clearly, but none of us do.
Yong’s entire body relaxes. His head tilts to the left. Aramovsky lowers Yong’s hands, puts them on the floor next to his hips.
Spingate is breathing too fast. She shakes her head. “I’m twelve,” she whispers. “I’m twelve.”
She rubs at her thighs. I see tears dripping down her cheeks.
“Stop it,” I hiss. “Crying doesn’t fix anything. Help him!”
Spingate looks at me, a fast glance where she catches my eyes, then her hands go back to work. She places them flat on Yong’s belly, one on either side of the tie.
“Em, lift it away, slowly,” she says, and I do.
The blood burbles out suddenly, like we’d filled a balloon and then opened the end. The brief gush flows down his side….
The gush that follows is much smaller.
I wait for the next one, but it doesn’t come.
The bleeding has stopped.
I look at the tie in my hands: red fabric soaked with red, red that drips down onto Yong, onto my legs, onto the floor. Yong’s blood has turned the dust beneath my knees from powder gray into a crimson slush.
Spingate blinks, like she just remembered something. She presses two fingers firmly to Yong’s neck.
He doesn’t react.
Aramovsky and I stare. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Bello coming closer, hand over her mouth, eyes wide, head shaking slightly.
Spingate moves her fingers, tries another spot. A pulse—that’s what she’s looking for, a pulse.
She moves her fingers again, to below his jaw, pressing them in so deep the skin and muscle of Yong’s neck billow up on either side.
He doesn’t move.
My eyes drift to the stab wound, the wound that
I made.
A thin line of blood lies in it, pooled there, unmoving.
Spingate pulls her shaking hand away.
“He’s…he’s gone.”
The word turns Yong from a person into a thing. I fall to my butt, scoot away, leaving a wide, smeared path through the red slush until my back hits the wall and I can go no farther.
I stare at the frightened little boy who wanted his mother.
Yong is dead.
I killed him.
TWELVE
I don’t know how long we sit there.
Spingate is crying. So is Bello, and this time I don’t think she’s being weak. I wonder if I should be crying, too, but no tears come.
Yong’s blood is all over my shirt, my plaid skirt. Spingate is blood-smeared as well, with two prominent streaks on her ribs where she tried to wipe her hands clean after he died. I know it’s not her own blood, and I know it’s not the right way to think about it, but I’m almost glad she’s finally dirty.
Aramovsky’s shirt is spotless. Not a speck on it, not even a wrinkle.
“It’s not your fault, Em,” he says. “It was an accident.”
“Of course it was,” I snap.
But…was it?
I was so mad. Those feelings of hate, roiling through me. I wanted to hurt Yong. But if he hadn’t rushed at me, if he hadn’t tried to hit me, I wouldn’t have done anything. So Aramovsky is right—it’s not my fault.
Aramovsky stands, walks over to O’Malley, gently tries to wake the fallen boy.
I stare at Yong. I’m waiting for him to move, like this is a game and I’ve been tricked. He’s going to sit up and smile, and everyone will laugh because they are all in on it.
But no one is laughing.
And Yong doesn’t move.
Aramovsky helps O’Malley to his feet. Blood runs from O’Malley’s nose, and more trickles from a cut over his right eye.
He stares down at Yong.
O’Malley looks at all of us in turn, as if he, too, is waiting for someone to tell him this is a game. I see his eyes flick from Yong to the bloody knife, back to Yong, and then to me.
“Em, what happened?”
I glare at him. He would know what happened if he hadn’t got knocked out. Come to think of it, if he hadn’t got knocked out, none of it would have happened at all. He can defend me with words, it seems, but not with his fists.
O’Malley doesn’t look so beautiful anymore.
Aramovsky puts his hand on O’Malley’s shoulder.
“Yong attacked Em,” Aramovsky says. “She protected herself and stabbed him.”
I’m on my feet so fast I don’t recall trying to stand.
“I did not stab him! He ran into the knife. It was an accident, Aramovsky. An accident!”
My shouts bounce off the walls. Both Aramovsky and O’Malley lean back a little bit, away from me.
“An accident,” Aramovsky says to O’Malley, and nods. “It was obviously an accident, like Em said. I suppose if Yong hadn’t put you down, he wouldn’t have attacked Em—he’d still be alive.”
O’Malley winces. Did it hurt him to hear that? Good, it should hurt him.
“Spingate tried to save him,” Aramovsky says. “The cut, it was very deep. There was nothing anyone could do.”
O’Malley’s expression remains blank. He stands there, bleeding. He steps to Yong, kneels in the crimson slush. He stares at the body, but talks to us.
“Why did he attack us like that? He went crazy.”
No, he wasn’t crazy—he wanted to lead. He wanted it bad enough that he had no problem hitting to get his way. Yong was a bully.
O’Malley stands. He brushes slush from his pants. He sniffs…he’s crying. Not the noisy sobs of Bello and Spingate, but he doesn’t try to hide the tears that line his cheeks.
“This is horrible,” he says.
Then he looks at me. “So, Em…what now?”
Is he joking? I’m the leader who took us nowhere, who didn’t find food, who put a knife in Yong’s belly, and O’Malley still thinks I should decide?
Spingate is also looking at me. So is Bello, and Aramovsky.
They are all waiting.
Yes, I am the leader, and I should be. I’m the one making the decisions. I’m sorry Yong is dead, but that wasn’t my fault—it was his.
“We go straight,” I say.
I reach down and pick up the knife.
“No,” Bello says, the word almost a scream. “I told you the knife was a bad thing. Leave it, Em, just leave it.”
I ignore her. My skirt is ruined anyway, so I wipe the blade clean against it, first one side, then the other.
Spingate’s stomach rumbles. She hangs her head, her face hidden by thick red curls.
I take a few steps down the hall, until my feet are once again on untouched gray.
The others hesitate.
“Let’s go,” I say. “We have to get moving.”
O’Malley tilts his head down at Yong. “What about him? Do we carry him? Or maybe take him back to the coffin room, so he’s not on the floor?”
The question makes our situation hit home: Yong is dead, and I’m going to leave him here. We don’t know how far we have yet to walk. We have no food and no water. Our mouths are so dry our lips are starting to crack. We’re already exhausted—we can’t afford the energy needed to carry a dead body.
He’ll be lonely here.
I try to chase away that thought, because it is the thought of a silly little girl. Yong is gone. I didn’t like him, but he was one of us. Abandoning his body is wrong, I know it in my heart, but what choice do we have?
“No,” I say. “I’m sorry, but we can’t take him with us, and we’re not going back. He’s dead. He stays here.”
O’Malley looks down at Yong, as if he wants to argue with me and his reasons for doing so are right there, somewhere on the body. He stares for a long while, thinking, then nods slowly.
“I guess you’re right,” he says. “But…I don’t know, shouldn’t we bury him or something?”
Spingate stands, flicks red slush from her clothes. “That would be a neat trick, O’Malley. Want to dig right through the floor?”
O’Malley wipes his face with the back of his hand, clearing off both blood and tears.
He looks down the dark hall.
“I can see an archway door,” he says. “It looks open. There might be empty coffins inside.”
I’d forgotten about that archway, just at the edge of the hall’s dim light. O’Malley wants to put Yong in a coffin. I suppose that’s better than leaving him here.
“All right,” I say. “Do it quick and come right back.”
He glances at me, questioning at first, then understanding. I can’t touch Yong. I don’t even want to be near him.
“Sure, Em,” O’Malley says. “Aramovsky, will you help me?”
The taller boy nods.
“We should say a few words first,” Aramovsky says. “While everyone is here with him.”
Spingate huffs in disgust. “The dead don’t care what you say.”
She walks to me, stands by my side and waits.
Aramovsky presses his hands together, holds them near his chest. He closes his eyes and tilts his head back. There is something familiar about the gesture, another thing from our past that our memories won’t reveal.
Spingate crosses her arms. “We’re wasting time.”
Bello points at her. “You shut up, Spingate. You think you’re so smart, but you couldn’t save Yong, could you?”
Spingate turns away as if Bello had slapped her.
“I tried,” she says. “I tried.”
O’Malley, Aramovsky and Bello are looking at me, waiting for permission.
“Make it quick,” I say.
Aramovsky’s hands drop to his waist.
“We’re all afraid,” he says. “Yong didn’t choose to be here any more than the rest of us did. We will never know why he attacked us. No one meant for
him to die. Today…today was his birthday.”
The words themselves are meaningless. The way Aramovsky says them, though, the smooth, calm tone of his voice…his words are comforting.
We still have no idea what’s going on, and this nightmare keeps getting worse, but like the rest of us, Yong was a twelve-year-old kid. It isn’t my fault he’s dead. Now that I think about it, it isn’t his, either—the fault lies with whoever put us in those coffins and abandoned us in this dungeon.
“Thank you, Aramovsky,” I say.
Bello can’t stop crying. Her eyes are puffy and red. She kneels next to Yong. Her body trembling, she touches her forehead to his. She stays there for a moment. It’s heartbreaking to watch. It almost brings me to tears.
But still, no tears come.
She stands. Head hung low, Bello moves past me.
Yong lays alone in a trampled, smeared ring of crimson slush. Now he’s just like the Grownups we left behind: a victim of violence, dead because a knife punched a hole in his body.
I wonder how long it will be before he crumbles to dust.
There is nothing else we can do here. I look at O’Malley, tilt my head toward the dark hall.
O’Malley grabs Yong’s wrists. Aramovsky takes his ankles. Together, they walk down the dim hall, the dead boy a shallow curve between them, his head hanging limply and jostling with every step.
They carry him away.
Bello, Spingate and I wait. It doesn’t take long. O’Malley and Aramovsky come back—without Yong. I don’t know if they left him in a coffin, but they left him, and I feel relieved.
The two boys join us. Aramovsky still doesn’t have any blood on him, but his expression is different. He’s seen something that frightened him, disturbed him.
I look to O’Malley. He won’t meet my eyes. I know what he and Aramovsky saw—more murdered children.
“All the coffins had been torn open,” Aramovsky says. His voice sounds different, like the last bit of breeze before a gust of wind fades away completely. “We found one where the lid still moved. We put Yong inside and pushed the lid closed. It clicked shut. He is at rest.”
I wonder if they put him on top of a skeleton, or moved the skeleton to the floor so Yong could lie alone. I decide I don’t want to know.
“Time to leave,” I say.
I turn and move down the hall. The others follow. This time, O’Malley stays with them.