Swarm

by Lauren Carter

  The boys reached me—Eric’s eyes big in his head, Graham holding two fists in front of his chest. I didn’t want them to be hurt, but I knew something important was happening so we followed Marvin, walking carefully but quickly, our eyes on the distant cone of light spreading from his hand. Graham’s fingers tightened around mine and then Eric let go of me and raced ahead. Where the road curved north, we heard another blast coming from the lighthouse and the sound of Jack shouting. The baby crying, screaming into the night. A relief to hear her, lungs functioning, alive. My heart pounded. We cut through the woods.

  “Come on, Graham,” I coaxed as we picked our way through the thin branches that snap back like whips. Through the trees I saw light glowing in the windows of the lighthouse as if it were a fully functioning home. We broke into the clearing, Graham and me, tripping over the remains of a wire fence at the edge of the yard.

  “Sandy,” Marvin shouted, and when I looked up my gaze met the hollow eye of a shotgun, pointed at my head.

  “You and the retard,” said Shannon, her hair a wild cloud around her face.

  I felt my bladder weaken, but I held it. From behind, Graham clutched at me, his hands picking at my waistband. I reached one hand back to still him. The gun came closer. My voice stuck in my throat as I tried to force her name out.

  “Shannon.”

  The gun still stared.

  “Put it down,” said Marvin from across the clearing.

  I swallowed, felt the barbs of my fear. “We can help.”

  Shannon laughed. “How can you help?” she said and laughed again. A cold chortle, cracking like the ice breakup in the spring. Graham started to wail. A soft mewling that grew gradually louder. I squeezed his elbow, held on. The gun hovered, then shifted toward the lighthouse and came back. Like a creature, a heron, searching the water for fish. My mind worked to think of something to say, to try to stop her. I imagined all of us dead, her suicide. The season changing. Our bodies buried in snow, thawed out, finally discovered, and the townspeople gathering to take what had been ours.

  “Where’s your baby?” Shannon turned to the lighthouse. Through the window, I saw the recycling bin they used as a crib set on the table and next to it, the infant lying on a quilt. Bending over her, a girl. You. All that I wanted. Right there.

  “See,” Shannon said and aimed the gun at the window, at you. My hands lifted to my face, horrified, at the same time as Jack lunged across the bullet’s path. A shot. The glass shattered. A girl’s scream. Jack on the ground. It felt like minutes passed, stretched into hours, before my mouth opened and I screamed Shannon’s name. The gun swivelled my way. Regret roared in me and a buzz of yearning—I do not want to die—and then she was down. Marvin sprawled over her, pinning her to the ground. My own legs collapsed. The sting of gravel on the heels of my hands. Eric and Samuel ran to their father. Graham turned in circles, his hands over his ears. I grabbed his leg, pulled him down, and held him. Marvin pried the gun out of Shannon’s arms. She lay on her side, her knees to her chest like she was in pain. Dressed in black jeans and a dark red sweater, she reminded me of a leech, undulating back to the deep after feeding.

  “Are you all right?” Marvin asked, crouching beside me. I nodded and nodded and finally said, “Yes,” realizing he couldn’t see me in the dark. He handed me the gun and left to help Jack. The light from his flashlight revealed a slow seep of blood. Marvin kneeled, pressing both hands hard on Jack’s left leg.

  “Get the first aid kit,” he shouted, and Samuel broke away from us, running down the weedy laneway, heading for their house and the kit we’d each received from the supply ship.

  “Is he dead?” Shannon asked me, but I didn’t answer, and her voice rose into a trembling wail.

  I spent a long time with Shannon while Marvin tended to Jack and Eric went inside to help with you and the baby. I wanted to see you, to go to you, but I didn’t know what to say so I stayed, sitting cross-legged on the ground. Shannon lay beside me, curled like a closed shell, calmed after a while by my hand stroking her hair. The gun was on my lap and I suppose I felt it gave me power, the ability to say whatever I wanted, because I started talking. I told Shannon everything I’ve told you, Melissa. First I said that Thomson was dead and then moved backward into the whole entire story of my first meeting with Marvin. I told her about the people who had died, the travel agent, even Walter. Margo’s life forever altered. I wasn’t sure if she was listening until I saw a glint where her eyes were and took it to mean she was crying. And then I told her about Phoenix, who I’d loved.

  When I finished, the baby was screaming again and I looked up to see you through the shattered window. You wore a red plaid shirt I’d seen before on Shannon. Patches on the elbows. Jeans, rolled up at the ankles. Dirty white shoes. Fear on your small face.

  “You see,” Shannon hissed. “You see how she took everything.”

  “She’s a girl,” I said as I stood. “She’s just a little girl.”

  Samuel held the flashlight while Marvin worked on Jack’s wound, searching for the scattered bits of shot as small and black as mites. At the soft edge of the light, Eric comforted Graham. You stood just inside the lighthouse door, the baby crying in your arms, a red flag flapping wildly. Finally, I crossed the yard.

  On the kitchen counter, Marvin’s and my preserves stood in a neat row. Candlelight gleamed on the walls of the jars. Your small face looked stunned, in shock, as your eyes followed mine. It all bubbled out in a blur of words I didn’t understand, like you were speaking another language. I stepped forward. Beside the cupboards, your tangled hair crackling in the uneven light, I held you. The baby between us. Your body stronger, older than I’d imagined.

  When you calmed, I stepped back and said, “My name is Sandy.” When you didn’t answer, I said, “Melissa,” and you looked up at me. Tears hung on your eyelashes.

  “Is that her name?” you asked, lifting the infant. Your first intelligible words to me, spoken with the tiny fingers curled around one of your own. I didn’t answer. I slipped an arm around your slender shoulders and together we looked down at the baby’s face, half covered with the marking of that wide-open wing.

  26 City

  Phoenix did not have a burial. This story is her only tombstone. She can’t disappear, like one of those frightened Natives, driven from their home, still hidden in the caves. So I will tell you what happened next. Marvin and I left the dark zone. We went through the fence single file, threading past the sharp ends of the cut chain-link. It was cold so I pulled my hands into my sleeves, burrowed them into my pockets. We walked quickly, moving through the litter of sagging tents and soggy piles of ash in the empty field between the dark zone and the city’s edge. We moved under the highway overpass and into the maze of tall buildings, down alleys, heading east. Wet snowflakes stung my cheeks.

  “After this is over,” I said and started to tell him that I thought we should leave, the four of us. Find our way across the map’s green width and settle against an edge of blue. But he didn’t respond. He marched like we were military, moving steadily toward the smoke drifting up from the occupied parkland that surrounded the shiny glass dome. And I followed.

  We heard the drums from a mile away. A constant, hollow beat. The sound filled my head, stirring my anxiety, and I hated it. Since I’d been there last, the shantytown had expanded. Blue tarps were strung between tree branches. People hunched in circles around fires built in rusty tire rims. Snow piled gradually on the roof of a collapsing screen tent. Ahead of us, the dome of the botanical garden was fogged, like an eye overgrown with cataracts.

  We worked our way through the crowd, weaving past a knot of people passing a joint. I read some of the banners, held by people and nailed onto trees: FREE ENCAMPMENT, PRIVATE LAND FOR PUBLIC USE, PEOPLE BEFORE PROFIT. Marvin told me about the park, how the police were threatening to evict the squatters who had been there for years, acting on the request of the bank that owned the gardens.

  A few people waved at
Marvin as we walked but he ignored them, sharply swivelling his face away. He gave them a wide berth and I followed suit, tugging on my hood to more fully hide my face. A woman who looked like Margo—blond hair, dressed in tight jeans and a denim jacket—stood on the other side of the road. I gave her a second glance before remembering where Margo really was—in the hospital, her world gone blank. I wondered what would happen to her. As we got closer to the gardens, the crowd thickened and Marvin reached his arm back. I grabbed his hand.

  Four guards stood in front of the main entrance, cradling their rifles. The crowd leaned toward them, shouting to be let in. Marvin led me around the side of the building where a rectangular greenhouse jutted out. A tall hedge ran along its edge. He looked to see if anyone was watching and then pushed into the space between the structure and the thick cedar and I followed. Our cheeks slid against the cold glass as we worked our way through the narrow space. As we went, hidden from view by the thick bushes, I heard hooves clomping, horses whinnying, the sound of an arriving force. Marvin moved faster, grunting as he held back the branches with his forearms. Eventually, we came to a blocked-off door. Marvin wrapped his coat around his elbow and smashed the pane, and we slipped inside, listening for an alarm but none came. We had scratches on our hands and faces, thin lines of blood like the written beginnings of the story that the day would come to be.

  There was no one inside. “All the security guards are out there,” Marvin said as we moved past the case of epiphytes. The trail led past the pond and into the palm room. The windows were blurred by a fog of condensation. We stood under an arch of fronds.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “Sandy,” I heard. The harsh whisper of my name from behind us. Marvin and I stared at each other, scared, until I turned and saw Phoenix standing on the other side of the jungle.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She came to me, her hand out. “You don’t have to do this. It’s not your fight.”

  “We do,” Marvin said.

  “Don’t speak for her,” she snapped. An ivy vine snaked over her shoulder and she pushed it off.

  “Because you will?”

  “Stop,” I said. “Go,” I told Marvin as I grabbed Phoenix’s arm. I told her what was happening, Walter’s plan, that we were there to search for the bomb. She listened, arms crossed, as Marvin moved in the distance, shoving foliage aside, an urgent rustle.

  “This was Marvin’s plan,” she said, her eyes climbing up to the greying glass dome. It was nearly dusk. “The final show. He always said it was selfish, this place. All for the sake of beauty. No function, only form.” She plucked a dead yellow leaf off an African violet. “He doesn’t understand ecology. He sees himself as separate.”

  “We don’t have time,” I told her and led her deeper into the gardens. Together we dug into the underbrush, beating aside palm leaves and other plants. Any second the whole place could go up, Walter dialling in from outside. Sweat tingled under my arms, slid down my back. When Marvin shouted out for us, I jumped. We followed his voice to the desert room. A fat coffee-table book called Civilizations lay on the low stone retaining wall that held a garden of sandy soil and cactus plants, some blooming papery yellow flowers and others stubbled with short thorns. Marvin slid a blade out of his jackknife and looked at us once like a diver stepping off a boat.

  From outside, I could still hear the drums. A constant rhythm dulled by distance and the green world between. Like a child, I put my fingers in my ears. Phoenix stood close to me, her arm pressing against my elbow, while Marvin carved the resin-sealed book open and worked his fingers into a nest of wires. Carefully, he detached the cellphone and held it up with a look I hadn’t seen before. Victorious. Admitting his ravenous attachment to life.

  He threw the phone and it landed softly in the sand. Split open, emptied, the book sat beside the globe of a barrel cactus. Phoenix bent over, pressed her hands against her thighs.

  “Shit,” Marvin breathed, kneeling in the dry sand. Phoenix sat on the stone ledge. I realized my armpits were wet with sweat so I took off my coat and sat beside her. Her palm was clammy when I picked it up and I understood how scared she’d been.

  Right then we should have left.

  We should have hurried south to our safe home.

  Instead we stayed. Like sightseers, we wandered down pathways, giddy in that glassed-in island of spring and summer where red and orange tulips were blooming. Phoenix touched everything: the rubbery leaves and tree trunks, a white flower she lifted with gentle fingers to show us.

  “My grandmother grew these,” she said, and both Marvin and I leaned in and smelled the perfume that mixed with the lavender scent of Phoenix herself. Together we moved through the succulents, where the loamy soil was spotted with fuchsia and scarlet petals. We pushed up the sleeves of our sweaters, carried our heavy load of coats. Outside, the crowd grew louder, batons smashing against plastic shields. I heard the hot neighing of a horse, imagined steam snorting out of its nose. A booming voice shouted, “Get back, get back, get back.”

  Marvin looked at the front doors, listening. I waited to see what he’d do, expecting to see him burst out from inside, break into the centre of the action. But he came with us as we walked back toward the secret door.

  At the pond, our faces rippled across the water’s surface. Copper pennies shimmered on the reflections of our lips. A stone smashed through the roof, then another, their shapes pounding into the soil around us, the glass a weird sparkling rain. We hunched over and ran and when we reached the back door, Walter was there. “I knew you’d pussy out,” he said to Marvin. I turned around, but Marvin looked only at Walter. I felt tired: one more lie, piled on the rest.

  But Marvin defended himself. “These people are on our side,” he said, his arm sweeping backward to the blur through the windows. “They want what we—”

  “All they want is an easy life.”

  “So we kill them?” Phoenix asked.

  Walter turned to her, as if he’d just noticed she was there.

  “Your highness,” he said and pretended to curtsy. His lips stretched into a sneer that suddenly vanished so he was glaring at all of us. He taunted us when he spoke, like a cruel teacher explaining elemental things to confused students.

  “This is metamorphosis. The old is destroyed to make way for the new. You don’t pick and choose.”

  None of us knew what to say.

  “It’s simple. You don’t have the balls for what has to be done.” He stepped closer to Phoenix, his voice vicious. “You’re alone. You only care about yourself.”

  I was afraid. I could see how far gone he was; how his pupils had turned into fat black stones.

  “Walter,” Phoenix said and lifted her hands as if to show him that they were empty.

  “Passive resistance,” Walter mocked as he slung his backpack around and unzipped it. I could barely breathe as we waited to see what he’d pull out. A plastic water bottle. Insanely, I felt relief, thinking he was just thirsty. But then he screwed it open with his good hand and flicked it toward Phoenix. The liquid splattered at her feet.

  Gasoline. Behind me, Marvin lifted his hands like a conductor about to cue the show. “What the fuck are you—”

  Walter interrupted. “You get the last word, buddy. E-mail’s set to go at midnight. Signed and sealed with all our names.” Like a wizard’s wand, his metal hand swept over all of us, stopping at Phoenix. “Even yours, although you don’t fucking deserve it.”

  He didn’t move right away. He stood there, the point of a triangle, Phoenix and Marvin each a corner of its base. Me, an incidental object, detached. All of us uncertain what was happening so we were surprised when Walter upended the bottle over himself, drenching his shirt and pants, the liquid darkening the colour of his clothing. Simple clothes. A pair of khaki pants, a faded red polo shirt. The vapours stung my eyes and sent sharp pains darting through my head. I tried to speak, but all I could say was what the others had begun shouti
ng—No, Don’t, Stop—a rush of urgent denial even as Walter bowed his head almost elegantly and ignited himself, turning rapidly into a flaming pillar that flew toward the front window and crashed through the glass.

  Outside, the crowd slumped into silence. Like a weapon, he quieted them. Then he started to scream. I remember that, with a horror I can’t describe, can’t put words to, won’t.

  Marvin followed Walter. He jumped through the window’s jagged hole and then reached back for me. I stepped over the ragged edge of glass on the sill. Phoenix was slower, her eyes scanning the crowd outside with Walter on its edge. Spinning flames. She seemed frozen, hugging herself with both arms.

  “Come on,” Marvin shouted at me, and I reached back for her. I put my arm through the empty window, bunched the sleeve of her shirt in my fist, and hauled her out of the jungle. She stumbled on the sharp edge, straddled it. I heard her cry out, but I assumed it was fear and I pulled her harder, doing what I thought was right. Trying to get her to safety.

  We shoved through the circling crowd. No one knew what to do. As we left, I saw the mass split open, police breaking through, riot shields drawn up to push Walter to the ground. But then we were gone, slipping into the dark streets. The snow cold and blunt against our bare skin. Whenever I moved my head, glass fell from my hair, made a tinkling sound in my ears. I looked at my hand and my fingers were red. Phoenix leaned crookedly as we ran. We headed south, toward the dark zone, that block of blackness where we knew we could hide. I saw the broken yellow pawnshop sign. THE SALVATION ARMY SHELTER. The soot-black travel agency, its insides dug out. The street smelled of wet ash and garbage. My throat burned from running. Strangely bent, Phoenix hung between Marvin and me. She grabbed at our elbows, shoulders, upper arms, like a climber looking for a handhold.

  “I’m all right,” she kept saying as we tried to keep moving, even thought we weren’t asking. We could still hear the sounds of the protest behind us, shouts and screams and glass breaking. People ran by us, their feet slapping down the centre of the street. Phoenix was too slow so Marvin stopped and like a fireman, he slung her over his shoulder as if he’d pulled her from a burning building. Blood ran down her leg. Coming quickly, coming so fast.