The man snatches the wafers out of Nathan's hand. He shoves them into his mouth. Crumbs take up residence in his beard. He never breaks eye contact with me.
Nathan begins to walk again. I take a step with him. The man reaches out and grabs my hand. I can't shake him off as easily as Nathan shook me off earlier.
"Give me your ticket," the man says. He says it quietly, but people are looking at us now.
"It doesn't work that way," Nathan says, speaking under his breath. He's shifting ever so slightly, side to side. I wonder if he's nervous.
"Give me the ticket." I look at Nathan for help. "Goddamn it, girl." The man is squeezing my hand now, hard. It's nothing like the way Nathan squeezed my hand yesterday. My knuckles scrape together and abandon their sockets inside of his grip.
"Jesus, Cassidy," Nathan says, and I realize he's been using his toe to scratch his ankle. The signal to run. But I can't run. The bearded man is holding me in place, and so is my own fear. I don't know why I'm so afraid, but I am. I'm terrified.
"I'll give you the ticket," Nathan says. A woman is approaching us now. I see her over the shoulder of the Beard. She has a child under her arm and a mean look in her eye. All of her features are blue and sunken in.
Nathan reaches into his robe. He takes out a yellow envelope. The Beard is still holding onto me. He sees the envelope and his eyes well up; they turn to glass in an instant.
I think of Adrienne, witty one minute and bawling like a baby the next. I miss her already, and I just saw her an hour ago.
The man doesn't let go of me until he's got the envelope in his grubby hand. I can hardly be relieved, because in the blink of an eye, Nathan has flung me over his shoulder and is bashing through the church doors, probably giving me a good bruise as he goes.
He runs. There are people on the street who watch him, wondering why he's in such a hurry.
"Why are you running?" I say. "You gave him what he wanted. You gave him my ticket!"
"Your ticket's in your pocket, Cass," Nathan says. "That was just an empty envelope."
"TICKET!"
The Beard is through the church doors before they've finished banging shut behind us. "TICKET!!" he yells. "They've got a ticket!" He takes off after us. I realize he's running faster than we are.
"Put me down!" I beat my fists against Nathan's shoulder blade. He can't expect to outrun this guy with me on his back, and if he goes down, so do I.
"TICKET!" The man is still shouting. I can't believe he's got that much breath in his lungs. He's not the only one chasing us now. He's rallied up two more men. They've got beards as big as his, as big as continents, and they're all on our heels.
Nathan ducks around a corner. There's an alley ahead of us. "Tuck and roll," he says, and then I'm flying. Mid-air, I can't believe he's thrown me, literally thrown me, as far as he can into the alley.
I don't tuck and roll. I don't even register what he's said to me until I've hit a dumpster with my entire left side. I catch it with my shoulder, but the impact knocks my head against the steel casing. I fold my body up into the fetal position. I clutch my rib cage with one hand and my throbbing head with the other. I decide I won't move again until my ears stop ringing.
But then I hear the voices of the Beard and his friends. I think if I don't run now they'll be on me in seconds. I don't know what will happen if they catch me. I don't want to know.
I push off of my hands, spring-boarding onto my feet and listing severely to the left as lights shoot up in front of my eyes. I feel my way along with my arms stretched out in front of me until my vision clears.
When I can see again, I'm three feet from a fence. Nathan's on the other side of it. I don't know how he got there.
"Let's go," he says. I reach out and grab onto the rusty, octagonal wires. But I've let go of them in an instant. I stare at my palms. They're covered in bright red, pin-point pricks. "Cass!" Nathan says.
"It's barbed wire!" I say.
"I know," Nathan says. I stare at him, and he stares right back at me like he can't fathom what my issue is. "Look," he says, "You've got a long reach. It'll take you fifteen seconds to scale this fence. It's gonna hurt like hell, but it's only going to hurt for fifteen seconds. Just count to fifteen. Climb and count."
I brace myself. I take a deep breath. But my feet don't move. "I can't do it," I say. It pains me, literally pains me, to say it.
"Yes you can," Nathan says. "Just pretend I'm a nun."
"Hilarious," I say.
"One," he says.
"One." I take a breath. "One," and I grab on. "Two, three, four Mississippi, five." I stop counting out loud and start counting in my head. I chomp down on my bottom lip till it's as bloody as my hands.
The sharpest wires are at the top. They're springing out all over the place like shorted electrical cords. "Come on, Cass," Nathan says. I close my eyes. I can hear shouts entering the alley behind me. I don't think the Beard can see me yet, not with the dumpster blocking his view.
"You're so close," Nathan says. I clutch onto the top rung of the fence. I can't help it then, I scream. I swing my legs over with such a flourish that my hands go too. I'm falling and I can't convince myself to latch back onto that horrible fence, so I think I'll die this way, or be horribly disfigured by the pavement below.
Nathan catches me. It feels like he's lassoed me right out of the air. He whips me around and hits the ground. He's on his back and I'm on top of him. He clamps a hand over my mouth when I moan.
"Don't move," he whispers. We're surrounded by great, big bags of garbage. It's another alley and it smells awful, worse than the church.
Nathan has a piece of broken glass lodged in his cheek. I want to say something about it, but the bearded men are nearly at the fence now and besides, I couldn't talk through Nathan’s hand if I tried.
Nathan reaches out with his unoccupied arm and grabs the handle of a garbage can lid. Our tumble must have knocked it onto the ground. He chucks it away from us. It lands with a terrible clatter near a dark street lamp at the opposite end of the alley.
The bearded men have stopped. There's four of them now, I think. "Cut around," one of them says.
They all shove off, lumbering out of the alley the same way they came, like they think the sound of the garbage can lid was us.
I stay silent for as long as I can, breathing in through my nose. When I can't take the stench of garbage anymore, I shove Nathan's hand aside and suck in air.
Nathan grins. It's the first time I've seen him without a frown.
"You did that on purpose," I say. "You could've let me breath.”
"You could've kept your eyes on your feet."
He’s still got one arm strapped around my waist. Behind my ear, his heartbeat makes an even thump. I wonder if he can hear mine, pattering with the quickness of a hummingbird’s pulse.
I hasten out of his hold, scraping my knees on the gravelly tar in my rush. I kneel in the shadows with my eyes on the street, pretending to recover my breath. It’s no business of Nathan’s how fast my heart is beating, or how flush my cheeks are with blood. Now that my panic has subsided, I can make an estimation of exactly how many mortifying minutes I spent lying in the street on top of him, aptly restrained by the solid bulk of his arms. I don’t want him to know how embarrassed I am.
Blood seeps out of my palms. It makes an imprint of my hand on the street.
Nathan takes a small vial out of his satchel. "Give ‘em here," he says.
I scramble up and back away from him. I hold my hands against my chest. "What is that stuff?" I say.
"It’s chlorhexidine," he says. He plucks the glass shard out of his cheek. Then he dampens his cuff with blue liquid from the vial and dabs his face.
I feel silly for doubting him. I hold my hands out, palms-up. They're worse than I thought they were. Nathan's face scrunches up when he sees them, all the bloody, shredded flaps of skin striping my palms, but he recovers quickly. He pours the blue stuff right onto my cuts. It doe
sn't burn the way I expect it too, but it makes a sizzling sound.
He's got a roll of white gauze in his satchel too. He uses it to wrap my hands up tight. "Alright, soldier," he says when he’s through. "Let's carry on. Hood up." I do as he says. "Right side. Eyes-"
"I swear to God,” I grumble, “if you say eyes on your feet one more time, I will strangle you."
"Good luck strangling anyone with those hands," he says.
I roll my eyes and bow my head and we move out of the alley.
Chapter Ten
There's so many people in the street. It's so late, I can't imagine what they're all doing outside, why there are people asleep in the middle of the road. I wonder how anyone could feel safe out here with the Beard and his comrades lurking about.
I'm careful not to lift my head, but I can see a lot out of the corner of my eye. The buildings which stand behind every curb are mostly sagging and decrepit. Missing windows are patched up with burlap and sometimes, whole roofs are gone from the tops of houses. I guess sleeping indoors doesn't make much of a difference when the roofs are gone and the windows are out.
The streets are dirty, the sidewalks are overgrown, the people have tar on their clothes and dandruff in their hair. I think of all the chores I hate to do in the bunker, scrubbing the steel walls and tucking in my bed sheets. Now I'm happy the nuns make us keep ourselves and our spaces so clean.
We see fewer people, the farther we get from the city. We reach a clear edge where the pavement ends and the desert begins. Sacks of sand are stacked, one on top of the other, to keep the sandstorms at bay. Ironic, I think. Sand standing in the way of sand.
Nathan has me beat for height by a few inches, but even he has to jump to catch the top of the sand-sack barrier with his hands. He hoists himself up, then he reaches down to help me.
I can't ignore him this time. There's no way I can jump as high as he jumped. If I turn around and run now, I won't get far. And where would I even go? Back to the city where the Beard is sure to be looking for me?
I latch onto Nathan's hands with the tips of my fingers, the only place where my skin hasn't been slashed by barbed wire. My stomach does a little spin, like a top whirling on its head. It's the same feeling I got when we shook hands yesterday, before he gave me the yellow envelope, before I said all of my goodbyes, before the church and the Beard and the barbed wire fence. It seems like a long time has passed since I met him. I remind myself that it hasn't.
Nathan lifts me up by my wrists, making my arm sore at the socket, stretching apart my bruised rib cage. I want to cry out, but I keep my mouth shut. I don't want Nathan to know how much I hurt.
At least he's mindful of my shredded palms. The gauze he's wrapped around them is stained through already with black blood. I can't remember the last time anything made me bleed.
The sight of blood makes me nauseous, it always has. I’ve seen so much of it in the past hour, and without incident. Inwardly, I applaud myself for not retching onto my shoes. But now the adrenaline is out of my veins, and my iron stomach has softened, too. Bile rises up in my throat. I do my best to swallow it down.
I think my cheeks must be green, so I keep my chin low. I can’t help myself; I heave. I try to muffle the sound with my sleeve.
Nathan’s gaze flickers sideways, but he doesn’t chastise me this time. “Buck up, champ,” he says. “We’ve got a long night ahead.”
He jumps off of the barrier, into the sand below, so I jump, too. He lands more gracefully than I do, with his legs precisely splayed and his knees dipping slightly. He's like a cat, jumping and landing that way with so much self-assurance.
When I land, my knees hit the sand. I catch myself on my hands and pain shoots up into my elbows. Grit blows into my eyes. I blink until I've washed it all out. I shove an arm across my face so Nathan won't see any of my tears.
Nathan takes off his robe and drapes it over his neck. I do the same with my habit. He starts walking, so I follow him. After a while, I stop wondering where we're headed. All I can see for miles is more sand.
Above us, the sky is beginning to change. Daylight scurries off like a mouse into a mouse hole. Clouds infused with sunlight tumble together. Beneath them, my skin is stained orange and gold.
I don't realize I've paused till I feel Nathan's eyes on me. He's watching me with a furrowed brow and a stiff lip. I think he must be trying very hard not to hurry me along.
My jaw is slack. I buckle it up tight. I quicken my pace, closing the long gap between us. I don’t want Nathan to think that I’m foolish. But I can’t adhere my gaze to the miles of plain, brown sand in front of us. It strays, once again, to the sky, and sticks there like a fly to flypaper, inextricably fastened to the fiery ceremony overhead.
I can hardly remember ever seeing the sunset look like this, without anything to filter it, even though I must've seen it just this way when I was small, before Brant brought me to the bunker. Even the black of night, when it comes, is breathtakingly black. I can almost feel how lush it is, how velvety soft, how different from the black skies of the past eleven years.
The air is different, too. I take a breath and it's like filling my lungs up with honeysuckles. I never thought the air was stale inside the bunker, but it was nothing like this. I want to keep this clean, sweet air locked up inside my chest forever.
I wonder if Nars remembers the way the air tastes on the outside. He must remember more than any of us do. I wonder if every breath he takes reminds him of his life before the bunker.
When it's almost too dark to even see the sand, I look at Nathan instead. I want to think he's ugly now, as ugly as his attitude, but he's still so handsome. Even looking at him from behind makes my stomach pitch.
He's bigger than Nars, I think, and more filled out, like he's eaten as much in a single meal as any of us bunker kids eat in a day. He's got a square frame, with big arms and big shoulders. All of the places where Nars is lean and soft are protruding and solid. I haven't seen a boy that looks quite like him before.
His hair is cut short, so it's hard to tell if it's red or brown. He doesn't have as many freckles as Nars has, but he does have a lot of scars, little nicks on his knuckles and neck and even on his face that have healed over into clean, white lines.
I have scars, too, scrapes I incurred between my father's house and the convent, although I can't remember how I got any of them. I wonder if I've ever been here before, if Brant carried me through this desert, if I would recognize the black, windswept arcs of sand if he hadn't made me swallow those little white tabs.
I'm glad Nathan hasn't given me a sleeping pill. I can only imagine how humiliating it would be to have him carry me the way Brant carried me when I was six years old. To toss and twitch in his arms in the midst of a nightmare. To give him a real reason to patronize me.
I wonder how I can know for sure that this, Nathan and the Beard and the envelope, isn't all just a nightmare. Maybe I'll wake up from all of this and remember nothing. Maybe I'll remember everything and tell Nars and Adrienne all about it.
It's a wistful thought. Can I really be certain that it's not more than that?
I snake my hand under the hem of my shirt. There's a scar there, to the right of my naval. A long, clean line. Adrienne has a scar just like it. All the girls in the bunker do, but none of us knows how we happened upon them.
I trace its elevated edge with the pad of my thumb. Something about the motion makes me calm. This tidy, raised scar is a souvenir of my life in the bunker that can never be snatched away. No matter how much my life is disrupted henceforth, I'll always retain this one, familiar thing.
"Hey," Nathan says, "we're almost there. Hop to."
I look past him. Something looms in the darkness ahead, a structure like a big canister.
"What is that?" I say. A space ship? I think. It's a puerile thought. I bite it back in nick of time.
"It's an RV," Nathan says. His tone is so matter-of-fact, so temperate. It makes me feel silly.
"Are we driving somewhere?" I know about cars, but I didn't see any in the city. I don't think there's any working vehicles anymore.
"Nah, it won't drive," Nathan says. "Come on."
He opens the door with two small keys from his satchel. Inside, it's mostly empty. It's musty, too. The air is like a sludge. I ache to be outside again almost as soon as I've entered the RV behind him.
Nathan pulls a rug away from the floor. There's a trap door there, hidden among the planks, distinguishable only by an iron lock drilled into the wood. Nathan has a key for that, too.
He pulls up the hatch and lifts a cooler out from beneath the floorboards. The ice inside it is mostly melted. He scoops up some water and slurps it out of his bare hands.
"Can I have some?" I say.
"What do you take me for?" he says.
I could tell him exactly what I take him for, I think. But then he might not be so eager to share.
I sit next to him with my knees folded up underneath me and mimic his technique, shoveling water out of the cooler with my fingers the same way I shovel up dirt in the green house with a spade. I hold my lips very close to the brim of the cooler to keep from spilling a single drop on the floor. There's a funny taste, like copper, probably coming off of my bloody gauze. Even so, I can't scoop water into my mouth fast enough.
"Save some for tomorrow morning," Nathan says. "We still have half a day's hike, and it's going to be hot."
He pulls two plastic packets, each the size of a sheet of loose leaf, out of his satchel. He tears off a corner on one, then the other.
"Space rations," he says, and gives one of the packets to me.
I copy what he's doing, even though its mortifying. I put my mouth on the torn corner of the packet and squeeze cardboard-flavored pudding into my mouth. I'm too hungry after all that walking to grouse about the taste.
I think Sister Nanette would faint if she ever caught me eating this way. She's a stickler for table manners. Nars and Adrienne would probably laugh; I can almost hear them giggling now.
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