Wouldn’t that be a lovely sight?
No, he had to just be careful. He stood on the tips of his toes, balancing precariously on the grainy wood of the window. He was glad this was an old house; there was something to stand on, rather than a more modern window that would have been flush with the wall. He reached up and nearly fell; grabbed for the window above and missed. His arms swung about wildly as he searched for something to grab. His fingers curled under a piece of siding, which snapped off easily and he nearly fell.
Panic swarmed his mind as his arms twirled like twin windmills and he waited for someone who just heard the sharp crack of the board to throw open a window and see him. Maybe they would have a gun and he would be dead before he hit the ground. At least that way he wouldn’t have to suffer. They couldn’t take him and throw him back down in the basement dungeon. Maybe he would finally see all his old friends and family. His mother would call to him, beckoning him to her at the pearly gates. His brothers would be smiling, and there would be no end to the food he could enjoy all day long. Maybe he would get lucky and Elizabeth would come join him, and then he would have everything he needed.
But that would mean she would be dead too, and David broke from his reverie in disgust and slapped his hands against the building. He screwed his eyes shut as the sound reverberated through the silence of the night. Knowing he had to act quickly, he jumped up to grab onto the desired windowsill. Iron fingers clamping onto the wood, legs curled back so they wouldn’t hit the house, he swayed back and forth a few times, listening for any sound that someone had heard him. There was a guard out front, after all, though he hadn’t even gone to see what had made the noise he heard when David threw those rocks. He had just taken a few steps and come back, shaking his head. He was a villain’s favorite kind of guard.
David pulled himself up so his chin rested on the ledge in his claws. The muscles in his chest and arms screamed out, but he ignored them. One of the fingers on his right hand inched forward, every inch a mile, every mile a tremendous effort. His yellow fingernails connected with the shutter, and he realized with a pang of irony that he hoped they opened inward. He gave it a push, a microscopic shove. It did not budge. He gritted his teeth and slid his hand up farther, refusing to give up. Nothing.
He tapped the chipped wood with his nails, wondering what to do now. He looked down and saw the ground was a solid fall below, aware that his knee was skinned and bruised from the rocks growing out of the dirt. It would have been throbbing if not numb from cold, and he worried what would happen if he let himself fall. He would have to, and try to get in the front door. That was the only way. His hands were cramping and he could not stay like this forever. He slid his left hand closer to the edge as he prepared to drop.
His breath caught in his throat as the shutter exploded open above him. He stifled a shout as the pane scraped the top of the fingers on his left hand. Any closer and they might have been broken. He looked up and could see the outline of a face poke out into the night. Elizabeth’s face pulled back inside as some other noise sounded from within the house, though this one sounded more like a full-sized door slamming against a wall. At least he had the right window. He could feel a warm trickle crawling over his fingers, bloody from the shutter scraping his skin as well as the sharp ledge he hung from biting into his fingers as they supported his weight. He did his best to block out the pain and focused his attention on whatever was happening inside the room.
Elizabeth was shouting then a man’s bass growled back. They went back and forth like this a few times, David unable to catch more than a handful of words as they were thrown in a hushed tone, not enough to carry out into the night. The words that escaped were fragmented and unhelpful. He waited in agony, wishing they would hurry their bickering along.
There was a decisive grunt and the door inside slammed once more. David heard laughter and pulled himself up, reluctant as his muscles were. The room was lit with a handful of candles, crude cones of wax, the room aglow with the warm light spilling onto his face as his head cleared the windowsill. Elizabeth was sitting on her bed, head in her hands. She was not laughing but sobbing. David wanted to comfort her, wanted to reach out a hand and wipe the tears away that were falling down her soft cheek. He rested his chin on the wood in front of him, saw his crimson hands, and pulled himself up.
At least it felt for a moment like he was pulling himself up, though his muscles could do nothing but hold him there like a fly stuck to the wall.
“Help,” he whispered. She did not hear him, and went on wetting the palms of her hands with her pitiful sobs.
“Help,” he repeated, a little louder. He did not know if there was anyone on the other side of the door, or hidden somewhere in the room, but it didn’t matter. Either she would hear him and pull him the rest of the way through the window, or he would fall and go limping back to the Outliers, worse off than when he had set off.
She brushed the back of her hand across her cheeks and opened her face back up to the world. She glanced around the room to the window, on him, then past him to the far side of the room. David was preparing to scream at her. He knew he was dirty but how could she be so blind as to miss a face in her window? Just then she whipped back around to meet his eye, and screamed herself, a short yelp.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, still seated on the bed. Apparently the pain on David’s face was not obvious enough.
“Help,” he grunted once more.
She sprang up from her bed and grabbed his hands. Pain seared his skin as she grasped him and he nearly dropped, but he winced through it, took the help she was offering and threw a hand into the room, grasping blindly at the wall, while she tried feebly to hoist him in by the arm. He was so close, so close now, but she wasn’t strong enough, and he was going to fall. His hand slipped along the smooth wall, grabbing only paint chips and smearing blood. He tried to throw his leg over the edge and it slipped off but she caught it and dragged him into the room, where they collapsed in a heap together on the floor.
David was panting, his muscles pinching and contracting, hurting worse than they had while he hung. He kissed the floorboards worn smooth from countless feet over years pacing over them and waited for his breathing to return to normal. Elizabeth scurried out from under him and regained her place on the bed, wide-eyed and silent. Her own breathing was labored and he could see dark swaths streaking her arms, and he felt very guilty. How pitiful he must look and how strange his appearance must seem, he realized. When they had met in the woods, he had surprised her as she flitted through the trees, a shadow ambushing a shadow, but now that it was his turn, he flopped onto her floor in a bloody mess.
It didn’t seem quite fair.
He sat up and brushed his hair out of his face, fingers sticking to the rogue locks. Elizabeth jumped up and grabbed a rag from the top of a dresser next to him and dipped it in a pot of water. She approached his ugly form and wiped his face and hands clean. He refused to look into her eyes, embarrassed and unsure why he had even come. He wanted to know what she had found out, but would sneaking into the Base when attempting such had ended with so many deaths not seem unnecessary? It dawned on him, now that he had ravaged his body breaking in, that the people of the Base should recognize him and would probably have let him come in if he had asked nicely. Oh well.
“What are you doing here?” she asked again as they sat there on the floor, soiled rag in her lap, legs tucked underneath her body. She wore a forest-green skirt that revealed the first few inches of her milky thighs. He blushed and looked into her eyes instead, her emerald eyes that cut right through him, and settled on her mouth. He could at least focus on what she was saying if he kept his eyes there.
“I needed to see you. Have you found out anything about the man who died? Who it was?”
“David…” Her eyes were wide and David saw that it was not only with surprise; there was fear there, as well.
“What is it? Was it someone important?”
“If it was someone important, I would have known who it was right away. There aren’t that many of us, you know.” Her words were calm and nonchalant as ever, but her voice held none of the unspoken laughter it had previously been rich with. David’s blood chilled.
“David, the Mayor wasn’t lying when he told Mitch that no one in the Base had died,” she whispered. He leaned in closer, waiting for her to go on, but she only lowered her head.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean,” she raised her head, heavy with grief and wet with despair, “no one has died, David.”
Confusion sent his head reeling as he tried to decipher the reason that would make her so morose. No one died, that was a good thing, right? Why the tears, then?
“No one died…? Is that bad?” he asked, mimicking her hushed voice.
“No one died, but that’s not what the Mayor has been saying,” she said. “He keeps telling everyone that members of the Base are dying. When you look around, it’s easy enough to see who it is. He gave me the names, and sure enough I couldn’t find them. But there was one name that didn’t make sense. Pat. The Mayor said Pat was one of the casualties, that he died over a month ago. But I saw him after that. One night, I was in the kitchen after everyone had gone to sleep. I was getting some bread to eat because I couldn’t sleep. He came in with a big pack. I said hello to him, but he just smiled and ran through the door. He’s not dead, at least he didn’t die that way.
“So I started asking around. Men have been dropping off, but everyone was so angry it was easy to believe the Outliers killed them. Now that I had the names, I started asking around. I found one other person who had seen Rick, another one who was supposed to have died. They saw him hopping the south wall early one morning. They’re not dying. They’re leaving. I don’t know why, but that’s what’s going on.” David cocked his head skeptically. “And when they were buried,” she went on, “no one saw their bodies. There was a hole being filled in, by the Mayor or one of the guards, but no one ever saw them being put into the hole.
“I tried asking the Mayor what that was all about. He sent me here to my room and told one of the guards to watch the door and make sure I don’t leave. I guess he forgot only one of the shutters is nailed shut though.” She looked over at the shutter hanging open and rose to shut out the night while David’s head whirled.
“So no one has died?” he repeated. “It wasn’t just this last guy that wasn’t real, it’s all of them?”
“The most recent ones, at least. I know some people did actually die in the beginning, but that was before the wall went up and before the Outliers formed into one group. I think when Mitch arrived, that put an end to most of the raids, at least for a while. In the last few months, they’ve started up again, as you know.” Her voice was still hushed, but grew even quieter as she finished. “I think the Mayor has been lying about the Outliers.”
“You don’t think they’ve been killing anyone inside the Base?” David realized he must sound like a parakeet, but so many questions were buzzing around his brain they dominated the outflow traffic. “But why would the Mayor—” He stopped mid-sentence as the gravity of her words sunk in. She was staring expectantly at him as he cracked the code. The Mayor was turning the people of the Base ever more against the Outliers, while the Outliers were breaking themselves against the wall and reducing their own numbers.
How had Mitch not seen this coming? He was always brash and overconfident, David thought, the fire that tempered the steel of David’s caution. He had dug himself quite a hole this time. But was it just a hole, or a grave?
“They’re going to kill them tomorrow,” David breathed.
“Tomorrow?” Elizabeth asked.
“Yes, tomorrow. I overheard through the windows,” David told her. “The Mayor is going to march on the Outliers’ camp. And Mitch is going to see it as an escort, all the men coming out, a sort of summit. He’s going to make all the Outliers leave their weapons and welcome the men of the Base, and the Mayor is going to smile and embrace them, and then he is going to slaughter them. How could we not see this coming?” His hands reached up into his hair and tugged the damp strands desperately. He thought he had more time, he was supposed to have at least another week, and it was supposed to be the other side that he was concerned about starting the hostilities. This was all wrong.
David rose and stepped back toward the window.
“Where are you going?” Elizabeth asked him from the floor.
“I have to go back, I have to warn them. The Mayor is going to march in the morning, and they’re going to have no idea he’s coming. They have watchmen, which makes more sense to me now, so they might have a little notice, but they’ll be expecting a ‘welcome to the Base’ committee, not an army. But that’s what they’re going to get, and they’re all going to die. Mitch has been telling them nothing but the best about the Base, and most of them believe it, I think. I have to help them, Elizabeth.”
Uncertainty plagued her features as she looked at him, ready to leave her.
“You have to go,” she agreed with a whisper. He strode back over to her and pulled her to her feet. “What are you doing?” she asked. “You have to go. Now.”
He smiled a knowing smile as he gazed at her bright emerald eyes, floating above troubled freckles on a milky sea. He placed a grimy finger on her lips and led her to the window.
CHAPTER 36
They made it over the wall in a few minutes. Elizabeth knew the best place to sneak over just as Mitch knew the worst place. On the opposite corner from where the lumberjacks had tried their luck, there were almost no guards watching over the wall, and the one that was there and should have been covering the corner was clearly asleep, head propped up on a blunt log of the palisade. Elizabeth had to help David over the wall as his hands were close to useless. He had not realized how jagged the edge of the windowsill really was, but when he went to lower himself from her window he found out. They had been delayed by Elizabeth’s insistence that they bandage his hands before setting off. He wanted to get to the Outliers right away, but she argued that would never make it there if he couldn’t use his hands to get over the wall, and if he cried out in the attempt, they wouldn’t even live to see the morning. He acquiesced, though he could not put much pressure on the wounds despite the rags wrapped around them.
Once over the wall, they rushed across the open grass to the trees. They did little to hide their escape on the plain, but once in the trees they slowed down and resumed their stealthy flight as they circled around the Base. It wouldn’t do to be caught now, not tonight. Not together.
It was still late in the night, and the darkness swallowed up everything around them. The sky was pitch black, a starless sheet of obsidian. Even the moon was hidden. Their eyes were well-adjusted to the gloom by the time they made it to the trees, though it was still hard-going. At one point they stepped out into the grass by accident, and David nearly soiled himself.
They trekked on and on, speaking little, Elizabeth following behind David despite the fact that he had almost no idea which direction the Outlier camp lay in. Wandering for a while, they finally stopped when David tripped and put his hand out against a wizened old tree to save himself, only to have pain go ripping up his arm. He bit his lip until it bled to keep from crying out, not that it would make any difference if they were alone in the wilderness.
Maybe that was just the thing to do, yell and hope one of the roving Outliers found them. They would know which way it was back to the camp, despite the oppressive darkness. But they would also see Elizabeth, and David feared what their reaction might be. He didn’t want to have to kill one of those he was trying so hard to save. He loosened the revolver in his pants and wrapped his hand around the grip, curling his finger as if it were on the trigger, just to be sure he could still use it.
They continued after resting for a minute. Elizabeth asked if he knew where he was going, and he admitted that he was lost. She followed along anyway,
telling him that she was just as lost as he, that she could barely see her hand in front of her face.
After a while David heard the crackle of a boot on dead pine needles and they crouched down. David could hear the sounds of approach and a host of butterflies took up residence in his gut. Whoever they had run into was coming closer and closer, and would be on them before long. David turned around and held a finger up to his lips and gestured for her to stay where she was. Elizabeth nodded, and even in the scant light, David could see her shaking.
He stood and zigzagged through the trees toward the unseen stalker, gun drawn. “Who’s there?” he shouted when he guessed they were perhaps a hundred feet away.
“Who wants to know?” a gruff voice said defiantly.
“Mort?” David asked, thinking it sounded like the leathery rasp of the gnarled second in command of the Outliers. There was a pause. “Mort, it’s David. I’m lost out here. Which way to camp?”
Mort came shambling out of the darkness, speaking not a word until he was in sight. He had a formidable shotgun propped against his shoulder, the sight trained on David’s heart. The gun dropped when he got closer, but only to his hip, and the muzzle was still staring at David’s chest.
“What are you doing all the way out here, boy?” he asked.
“I—” David realized he had no real response to that, especially considering he had no idea where he was. Why would he be out here? Might as well go with the truth. “I was at the Base. Something’s gone terribly wrong. I need to get to Mitch now. It’s so damn dark out here, I got turned around. Which way back to camp?”
Circles in the Dust Page 25