The Fortress of Clouds

by J. A. J. Peters

  Ben could not let him disagree in silence. “And what’s so stupid about my plan, Thomas?” he asked.

  Thomas smiled to himself. “She’s not going to be there, Ben.”

  “And why not?”

  “She’s met some guy, I bet, and she’d rather start a new life than have to worry about us.”

  “How can you say that, Thomas?” said Alison. “She’s cared for us our entire lives. You think she could just walk away from us?”

  “Maybe it’s like how she finds better jobs every year or so,” said Thomas. “Maybe she found a better life.”

  Ben took the glowing twig from Alison and thrust it to Thomas’s face. “Okay, well, what is this thing then?”

  “Some souvenir she picked up years ago. When she was traveling in South America. You know, the photos on the wall back in the apartment. It’s just some piece of crap she bought in the airport in Peru or something.”

  “Thomas, I swear, unless you shut up about your stupid ideas, I will punch you so hard--”

  “Ben, stop shouting!” Alison pulled Ben back as he was motioning towards Thomas with his fist. Alison breathed deeply and continued in a calmer tone that barely contained her frustration. “Okay, Thomas, you’ve drawn some sort of map here. Where are we?”

  It was dark now and not much of the map could be seen. Thomas rummaged around in the now near-empty backpack and produced a small flashlight. “I think we’re about here,” he said as he pointed with a stick. “So the airport should be over that way.” He motioned with the flashlight to the direction of the setting sun, the same direction they had headed since meeting the Scottish man in the Hawaiian shirt. Ben felt relieved. Maybe they had miraculously been heading in the right direction all along.

  “Okay, Thomas,” said Alison, “I want you to climb up this tree here as far as you can and see if you can see the airport.”

  “Good idea,” said Thomas. He started pulling himself up the branches and was soon out of sight in the darkness.

  “Are you sure that’s all you know, Ben?” asked Alison.

  “Yeah. I’m positive.”

  Hannah made whimpering sounds in her sleep as if she was about to cry. She tossed herself awake. “Alison, what’s going on?”

  “Nothing, Han,” said Alison in a soft, warm voice as she brushed the dirt from Hannah’s hair. “We’re going to meet Mom tomorrow out at the airport. We’re going on a trip.”

  “That sounds strange,” she considered. “And fun!” she added as an afterthought. “Can I have another cookie?”

  “Sorry, Han,” said Alison. “No cookies. We’re out of food.”

  “Because Ben didn’t get us out of there in time,” said Thomas from ten feet up the tree. “That’s why there are no more cookies. We could have packed proper food.”

  Hannah didn’t seem to care much about this comment and instead decided that there was something else she needed just as much as a cookie. “Tell me a story, Alison.”

  “Okay, Han,” said Alison. “That’s a good idea, even if you are getting too old for this.” They were the exact same words their mother had used. It was like Alison was trying to pretend that everything was normal, like they were all back in their apartment. “Which one would you like?”

  “The one about the giant bird with the ruby eyes behind the waterfall and the . . .” Hannah dissolved into Alison’s arms in preparation for the story.

  Ben looked at the thing he wished he didn’t have. Something small and sinister in the recesses of his brain told him that whatever it was, whatever was going on with their mother and those silver men, was bigger than he wanted to know and would ever be able to fix. He put the glowing twig back into his pocket to stop himself from thinking about it.

  For as long as Ben could remember, Alison had been more mature, more collected, and more intelligent. And then there was that familiar guilt: she seemed to actually care for her siblings, but most of the time Ben couldn’t care less. Why had their mother decided to give him the twig, to give him the responsibility of telling the others? He had obviously failed at that, so why hadn’t she just explained everything to Alison in the first place? He tried to force himself to stop thinking and listen to the story he had heard hundreds of times before.

  The tale of giant bird that lived behind the waterfall was like a warm blanket for Hannah. Hearing its familiar elements--the way Alison almost sang the words, like their mother used to--was a reminder of something that no one wanted to tell Hannah might be gone. Ben watched as Hannah squinted her eyes and smiled. It was like they were still back home hanging off their dirty old couch.

  Thomas reappeared out of the tree, seeming to just drop out of the sky. “Yep, the airport’s over there. I could see the spire and the planes landing.” He shook some leaves out of his hair. “About ten miles.” He sat down between Ben and the girls, and the four of them listened to the rising symphony of night insects. Before long, the flashlight showed Hannah and Alison asleep and leaning against each other. Thomas reached out and turned it off.

  “Guess we should save the batteries,” said Thomas. “Just in case we’ll need it again.”

  “Right,” Ben said, trying not to think what Thomas meant by this. They were going to meet their mother the next day, so why would they need the flashlight again? Ben set the twig thing in front of them, its glow almost like the cartoon nightlight back in their apartment.

  Thomas was scratching in the dirt with a branch. “Ben, I’m, uh, sorry,” he said. “About those things I said earlier. I didn’t mean them.”

  “I know you didn’t,” lied Ben. Thomas clearly had meant them at the time, but Ben suspected that Thomas was now, possibly for the first time in his life, feeling what it was like to be scared and lonely.

  “Hey, Ben, when we get back home, you know, after we meet Mom at the airport tomorrow? We’ll have to remember to go check out those voices in the basement.” The light of the twig pulsing was enough to see Thomas’s face. There was a sad, pleading look in his eyes. Ben couldn’t decide if he was incredibly frightened, or incredibly stupid, or both.

  “You bet, buddy. We’ll do that. That’ll be fun.” Until that very moment Ben would have said those words with brutal sarcasm.

  Thomas crumpled up on top of his backpack and was soon asleep, but as usual Ben’s head was alive with worry and wonder. Why was it that day that the silver men had come to find their mother? When they had to move apartments when their mother lost her job every few years, were they actually running from the silver men? Who was their mother? Was she, as that evil and twisted Mrs. Brodksy had said, some sort of tramp who appeared caring only to her children? What was she mixed up in?

  The night sky was tinged orange off in the distance. A refreshing, cool breeze swept over the grasses of the park. Ben watched the ghostly homeless people sleeping under tarps and newspapers next to small fires.

  Thomas was right. Ben wasn’t smart enough to be leading them. If he was, he would have had the courage to get them out of the apartment before the silver men arrived, and they would have had time to grab food and water. And those stupid vitamins--Ben had forgotten those. As if those mattered in their present situation. Never did he imagine that one day he would crave the security of their dingy little apartment.

  But Thomas was also wrong. Their mother hadn’t found a new, better life. She would be there tomorrow at the airport, waiting with huge hugs. Everything would be explained and they would catch a plane and run away from this mess.

  The previous night Ben had sat awake, mad at his mother and sure she was lying about their father. He had vowed to run away, to the one place they were now trying desperately to get to. Twenty-four hours ago he had felt invincible. It had all seemed so easy then. Now, curled up in the dirt, his heart just felt caved in and raw.

  Chapter Eight: Calling from the Abyss

  When they awoke in the morning the park was empty. The bedraggled people in the tattered clothes had somehow packed up their belongings into their
shopping carts and left without any of the kids waking. Drops of dew balanced on blades of grass and the air shook with the expectation of heat. A thin white mist hung just above the ground, but it soon disappeared as the sun began to glow behind the glassy buildings and over the dusty mountains at the far end of the city.

  Without saying anything, since there was nothing to say, or since what they wanted to say was beyond words, the four of them picked the dirt from their clothes and left the safety of their little tree enclosure. They began the remaining walk to airport, Thomas guiding them according to what he had seen from the tree top, and Hannah still rubbing her eyes and clinging to Alison’s arm. Hannah mumbled some dreamy story as she drifted in and out of sleep, and every ten seconds or so she would trip and catch herself. Despite having slept from the moment they arrived at the park, Hannah looked anything but rested. As they crossed a trash-lined street of small stores with bars across their windows, Hannah emitted a moan of exhaustion and Ben saw Alison shoot him a worried, helpless glance. Hannah looked older, as if the stress of the last twenty-four hours had caused her to feel the grief of a few years. And maybe it was also because sitting on the counter back in their kitchen were the bottles of multicolored vitamins that their mother forced them to cram down their throats each day. Maybe they were important, Ben thought.

  After a few minutes of zombie-like stumbling, Ben’s stomach reminded him that Thomas’s snacks were all gone. He half-wondered if they shouldn’t go back to their apartment to get food before walking the rest of the way to the airport, but he knew none of them had enough energy to do that all over again. Maybe they could find a fruit tree, or someone willing to give them something to eat. Or maybe they should have accepted help from that Scottish man with the blue Hawaiian shirt and the orange cat. As weird as the man looked, he was the only one who had offered them any help at all.

  Thomas, seemingly immune to the gut ache and uncertainty of their situation, proudly led them on through countless empty blocks of warehouses and non-descript buildings. The signs attached to them--RGT Holdings, TayMax Incorp, W7 Industries--gave no hint of their purpose. The corrugated walls and roofs made the buildings look like giant, hollow, metal shells that had washed up during the night. The street ahead of them disappeared into smoggy nothingness. At first the only movement around them was the ordained blinking of the street lights changing, but soon more and more cars appeared on the road, and then, as gradually as the heat started its assault, other people began to sprinkle the sidewalks. They were rough looking figures with tired eyes, shuffling lifelessly and without destination.

  A huge woman with a sunken jaw and sagging skin stopped them with a grunt. Her eyes looked right past them, and her words croaked out of a mouth empty of teeth.

  “Whatcha need I got it all,” she grumbled.

  “I’m sorry?” said Ben.

  “Got hype . . . jet . . . hansa . . . drone . . . whatcha need I got it all.”

  “Um, what exactly are those things,” asked Thomas.

  Ben, who quickly realized that the woman was selling various sorts of drugs, grabbed his brother and pulled him away. “That’s okay--thanks very much anyway,” said Ben cheerfully. The woman merely resumed her slow crawl down the sidewalk, like a dazed soldier wandering the wasteland of a battlefield.

  A little later, a huge, gleaming black car stopped beside them at a traffic light. The man behind the wheel stared at them like a lion sizing up a gazelle. Either the four kids were the most exotic things he had ever seen, or he was considering having them for breakfast. His webglasses hid his eyes, and his lower lip stuck out in expressionless disdain. The car was a seamless mass of black glass and steel, the music coming out of it so loud that the ground thumped in mini earthquakes. A voice cried out plaintive, yearning lyrics at odds with the random artillery of the heavy background bass:

  I’m cold calling from the abyss

  And baby this is a call you can’t miss

  It’s cold out here wit out choo

  An I feel like such a fool

  Fo leavin you

  Baby, it aint cool

  Baby, it aint cool

  “Thomas, don’t look at him!” Alison said out of the side of her mouth.

  “But--”

  “Just pretend he’s not there, Thomas. Just keep looking straight ahead.”

  When the light went green, the man turned his attention back to the road and the car accelerated away, its stereo making the street shudder with war-like booms.

  “Alison, I’m scared,” whined Hannah. She sounded younger and squeakier, even though she now looked older and wizened.

  “I know you are, Han. We all are,” sighed Alison.

  “How much longer do we have to do this?” asked Hannah.

  Everyone looked to Thomas.

  “Oh, geez, I dunno,” said Thomas as he scratched the back of his head.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” said Ben. “Don’t you always know everything?” As he said these words with a familiar antagonistic sting, Ben remembered what Thomas had said to him the previous night, the only time Ben had ever heard Thomas apologize. Thomas stared at Ben for a second, as if to remind him of that apology.

  Thomas cleared his throat. “Well, we obviously have to travel due west to the airport, and I think we’re definitely doing that, but these buildings don’t look like what I think I saw last night from the top of the tree.”

  “Well, what should the buildings look like?” said Alison.

  “I guess it should be houses all the way to the airport.” Thomas pondered the boarded-up stores and blank-faced buildings around them. “Hmm. Now that I think about it, maybe we should be trending right a bit.”

  “Maybe?” asked Ben.

  “Yeah . . .” Thomas sauntered off without waiting for the others to agree. No one seemed to have a better idea than following him.

  The sun reached the apex of its arc and felt like it was only a hundred feet above them. Everyone’s hair was smeared against their faces with sweat and their eyes were red slits. Ben could feel his brain shutting down. He was noticing less and less, and started tripping over his own feet. Every few minutes something like an itch kept making him look back down the street behind them. There were no surveillance cameras on these buildings, but any police car could easily pick out four kids walking down the sidewalk on the wide streets.

  And Alison noticed Ben’s anxiety. “What is it, Ben? Are we being followed?”

  “No, I don’t think so, but I just have this weird feeling . . . like we should be.”

  “By whom?”

  “Those silver men, I guess. Or the police.”

  “Nobody’s following us,” said Thomas over his shoulder.

  “I bet those silver men are,” said Hannah in a weak voice.

  “Okay, stop,” commanded Alison. Behind her, a six-foot high wire fence protected a lot of dry dirt. “What are we doing here, Ben? This is dumb. We don’t know where we’re going, and you know, I gotta say, I’m getting a little scared.”

  “Alison, we’re all scared,” said Ben.

  “I’m not scared,” boasted Thomas. “You might be, but I’m--”

  “Okay, fine, Thomas,” snapped Ben. “I’m scared too Alison. But what else are we supposed to do?”

  Alison’s eyes were welling up like she was about to cry. “Well, maybe we should try to find the police, Ben. Maybe they can take us to the airport to meet Mom.”

  “The po--” stammered Ben. “But they were coming to take us away . . . because of Mrs. Brodsky.”

  “Look, if we told them what was going on, that we’re supposed to meet Mom at the airport, they’d obviously help us.”

  “Al, I dunno,” groaned Ben.

  “Look, Ben, if we’re not at the airport in a few hours, or if Mom isn’t there, we’re going to find the police, okay?”

  “Okay. I guess.” It seemed like an acceptable backup plan, Ben admitted to himself.

  “Okay then.” Alison exhaled
slowly and seemed to regain her composure with this arrangement. “And if we see those silver men, we’re giving them that stupid amulet so we can get Mom back.”

  “What? Absolutely not. That’s not what Mom told us to--”

  “We need help, Ben!”

  Ben felt a familiar frustration tensing his arms. He looked, but there was no wall to punch here.

  “Let’s go, Thomas,” said Alison. She grabbed Hannah’s hand and left Ben standing there with his mouth open and his fists clenched.

  It was late afternoon when they first caught a glimpse of the airport spire rising above the rows of dim and dusty houses. They were tired and hungry, but looking at his siblings and the faint smiles forming on their lips, Ben knew they were going to make it.

  “I don’t think we’re very far now,” Thomas stopped and said the obvious from between dry breaths.

  Most of the low-slung houses were deserted. Windows were either boarded up or smashed in, and scraggly trees and vines were growing from between the siding boards. Some of the houses were half-burned down, while others were so long abandoned that most of the paint had flaked off. The sight of exhausted children tripping down the sidewalk drew a quizzical, semi-interested curiosity from the few people they saw. But there were no other kids around. In fact, thinking back on the last two days, they hadn’t seen a single person under twenty since running from their apartment.

  “I wonder why we haven’t seen any kids,” said Ben.

  “This must be a school day,” said Thomas.

  “I wonder what it’s like,” said Alison. Her voice was kind and soft, and Ben guessed that she felt a small elation knowing that they were going to make it to the airport.

  “What what’s like?” asked Ben.

  “School. I wonder what it’s like to know scores--hundreds maybe--of kids your own age. To go to the same place each day . . . it’d kinda be like another home, wouldn’t it?”

  “I guess,” said Ben. If it involved the same sort of work that their mother made them do each day, then Ben didn’t exactly see what Alison found so alluring about it.