The Magpie's Return

by Peter Wright

  Heather leans against Kayla. Kayla’s arm around her shoulder. “I’m tired,” Heather says. “Help me back to bed.”

  The common room. The final hours before lights out. The sisters play a board game with the younger girls, encouraging and explaining, keeping the peace. Kayla by the window. The radio report—light snow, plunging temperatures and then an even colder snap, an arctic blast and warnings of frostbite. These past nights of fighting outside town. Distant explosions, concussions echoed in the building’s pipes and plaster. A lull last night, a peace that found Kayla waiting for the crack of gunfire, the next blast. They had dinner with Heather in the nurse’s office. A whispering of plans—soon, soon—Linda’s desire to join the rebels. Heather full of sighs, her eyelids drooping, asleep before the others finished eating. The fatigue she couldn’t shake. The stupor of her pills. A confession of the dreams that felt so real and a waking reality that felt like a dream.

  Cheers erupt at the hallway’s other end. The whites’ common room, a game, Kayla guesses. A special snack, some indulgence that won’t find its way to their end of the hall. Fuck it, Kayla thinks. The unfairness. The prejudice. Their board games’ missing pieces and fifty-card deck. The torn magazines and unshared sweet rolls. Kayla and Heather and the sisters will leave it all, an abandonment, an erasure. They’ll shake this place up then dissolve into the chaos.

  The cheering ebbs into the singing of the new anthem. Donna’s voice distinct even at this distance. The choir-singer’s glint, the trilling notes. These days of passing stares, and in Kayla, an emotion beyond hatred. The clear-eyed calm of indifference. A stripping of humanity. A body she wouldn’t bother cutting from the hangman’s noose.

  The Deacon strides into the common room. The board game stops. The Deacon beams. His black blazer pushed back, his hands on his hips, an exposing of his holstered gun. Down the hall, the whites launch into another round of the anthem. “Ladies, ladies,” the Deacon says. “I have news. Glorious, glorious news.” His smile widens. “The rebels have been broken. Not just in our sector but all over. Their leaders have been captured or killed, and their units are on the run.” He turns on the wall-mounted TV. A newscast, video of armored cars and burning buildings. Men with their hands on their heads. Bodies in the streets.

  Nurse Amy runs in, Heavy Metal behind her. A hiccup in the Deacon’s crooning, and Kayla sits up. A whispered conference and a hurried retreat. The Deacon pauses in the doorway and calls to Old John. “No one leaves this room until I say so.” He turns to Kayla. His lips part, but he doesn’t speak.

  Chris and Linda continue playing with the younger girls, but between rolls of the dice, they exchange glances with Kayla. The news on the TV. Tanks on city streets. Men in camouflage and armbands of red and white. Buildings on fire. Kayla stands. Within her, an unraveling—their plans, the faces in her pod. Her life ebbing from solid to liquid and so much slipping through her grasp. She pauses by the window.

  A gathering below. The front courtyard, the floodlights’ shine. The Deacon and Nurse Amy and Heavy Metal. Steam from their mouths, the snow all around. None wearing a coat. At first, Kayla believes their gazes are fixed upon her, but then she realizes their focus reaches higher.

  She grunts, the window’s warped wood. A budge, and her fingers wedge beneath the sash, a touch of snow. She calls the sisters, Chris kicking the board aside in her scramble. The three of them lift, and the window jerks up. An icy blast. Snow through the grate. Nurse Amy’s voice the first to reach them. “Heather! Heather, honey, please!”

  “Heather, no!” Kayla yells. A teetering moment before the sisters join her, their faces cramming the opened space. The steam of their breath drifts through the floodlights’ shine. The younger girls mass behind them, asking questions, some pushing their way to the adjoining windows. Kayla and the sisters’ pleas thinned by the courtyard’s emptiness, its dark and cold. Kayla screams. A culling of emotion from her hollowed chest, her vocal cords strained. She grips the window cage and shakes, her flesh sticking to the cold metal. “Heather! Heather, don’t! Heather—”

  A current passes through the courtyard figures. Words cut short. A communal reflex, Nurse Amy and the Deacon and Heavy Metal turning away. A flash outside. A white gown. A trailing of long hair. Her body turned, a pose of surrender, as if she were collapsing into a hammock. A flicker. The darkness possessed for a moment then purged.

  A smack below, brief and dull. Macadam and flesh and the fallacy of flight. The sound little more than a gasp but enough to suck the air from Kayla’s lungs. The body blocked from view, but Kayla still sees her. The thin arms and legs. The bloodied, limp form she lifted from the stairwell landing.

  She pushes through the other girls. The common room’s deserted middle, the board game’s scattered pieces. On TV, the government’s triumphant reports, men waving flags, rifles shot into the air. Kayla collapses onto the couch. Her elbows on her knees, her head hung. Voices around her, none that make sense. The surge of blood and her vision warps. Her pulse’s thud heavy in her bones and teeth. She struggles to catch her breath.

  Old John at the door. The girls ushered to their pods, the Deacon’s orders. The sisters help Kayla to her feet. The three of them mute and pale, arms around each others’ waists and shoulders. Old John at their side. His face streaked with tears.

  The lights flicker. Old John in the hallway: “Lights out, girls. Deacon’s orders.” His voice cracks. “Early bed, everyone go now.” The sisters sit on the edge of Linda’s bed. Their heads lowered, legs pressed together, four hands united. Shared whisperings, prayers Kayla can’t join. The pressure inside too great. A roiling alchemy. Shock giving way to luminous rage. A swell in her chest, a stretching of skin, and she screams—wordless, guttural—if only to save herself from bursting. Another flicker. The lights die.

  She paces. Her insides of haywire pumps and jackhammer blows. She crosses her arms, her fingers dug into flesh, a seeking of pain, a delivery from the moment’s horror. She passes through shadows and watery light. She screams again, a single, stabbing cry. The sisters look up, their wet faces. Outside, an ambulance’s siren, loud and close. Kayla at the window, the front courtyard blocked from view. The red strobe splashes the fence. The loading dock and pickup in the shadows.

  “We’re leaving,” Kayla says. Words yet more. A proclamation, their secrets about to become truth. She digs through her footlocker. She secures her necklace’s clasp and slides the silver crucifix beneath her shirt. “We’re leaving. Tonight. Now.”

  She stuffs her pillowcase. The sisters put on their coats and hats. There’s nothing left to say, not now. Their plans boiled down to a mad dash, violence over grace. So be it, Kayla thinks. She climbs atop the desk and pushes up the ceiling tile. She pockets the lighter and hammer, the broken mop handle. She tucks Heather’s notepad under her arm. The truck key last, the metal loop snug around her middle finger, the key clenched in her fist.

  Kayla slides on her coat. Her hat pulled over her ears, gloves stuffed into her coat pockets. The sisters wait by the door, their pillowcases filled. Kayla rips pages from the notepad and tosses them into the room’s waste can.

  “Should we wait until the ambulance is gone?” Linda asks.

  At the notepad’s end, the stack of loose pages. Heather’s handwriting, symbols and codes. Kayla crumples the pages for Heavy Metal and Nurse Amy, Mr. James and the cafeteria ladies. The final page the Deacon’s. She twists the sheet into a taper, flicks the lighter, and holds the flame to the paper’s end. “I’m going to pull the alarm.” The paper catches. The dancing light lifts the girls’ faces from the dark. “Get to the back stairwell and meet me at the loading dock.” She plunges the burning end into the trashcan. A crackle, smoke. A blossoming light. She tears out more pages and feeds the flame. She twists another taper and sets it to her pillow. The case burns. The pillow and blanket. The smoke grows thick and drifts into the hallway. “Don’t let anyone stop you.”

  Chris covers her mouth. “Where’re you
going?”

  Kayla hands Chris the truck key and her packed pillowcase. “I’ll meet you there. Promise. We’re getting out of here. The three of us.”

  She crosses the hallway and rests a hand on the alarm’s white lever. Smoke curls from their door, the ceiling lights dimmed. She thinks of the roof’s ledge and a step into nothingness. She pulls. The response immediate, the white strobes, the deafening wail. The sisters behind her.

  “Fire!” Linda screams. She and Chris run down the hallway, pounding on the pod doors. “Fire! Everyone out!”

  Kayla strides the connecting hallway. The commotion of the reds behind her, the whites in front. Old John hobbles past, his nose twitching. “Fire, girls! Fire!”

  Kayla crosses the centerline. All sense of boundaries gone now. The girls in white flow past, some staring, the ones in her way pushed aside. Kayla remembers Linda’s words, how one end of the world has been lifted, a pull born out in the momentum of her lengthening stride.

  The door to Donna’s pod cracks open. Kayla pulls the hammer from her pocket. Her grip locked tight, a molding of flesh and tool and will. She kicks, and the door flings back. The scent of menthols, Ashley reeling, her eyes dull and uncomprehending. Kayla reaches her in a single stride. The hammer raised then swung with the force of Linda’s upturned world. The gravity of pain and blood and fury. The hammer’s metal flashes in the strobe, a blink before its collision with Ashley’s forehead.

  The crunch of bone, the hammer’s face caught as Kayla jerks the handle. A groan from Ashley’s parted lips. Her hand twitches. She slumps to her knees then onto her side. A single motion, as if her skeleton has melted beneath her skin. Kayla steps over her.

  Donna’s gaze on the bloody hammer. “Fucking bitch,” she spits. Words barely audible beneath the alarm’s wail. She topples a bunk and tries to run past, but Kayla cuts her off. Donna retreats then charges, a leap onto a bunk, a spring forward, her hands outstretched.

  Kayla staggers back. A swing, a duck. The hammer strikes Donna’s clavicle, and again, the give of bone. Donna cries out but presses forward. She wraps her arms around Kayla’s thighs, clutching tight. With a twist, she sends them both tumbling.

  Kayla’s chest strikes the side of an upturned cot. The hammer spins across the tile. Kayla reaches, the handle just beyond her grasp. She turns and rolls on top of Donna. Her knees pin her elbows. Her hands tight on her neck. Kayla leans forward, her weight poured into her grip, the pressure in her thumbs, and beneath, the give of Donna’s windpipe. An ebbing current. Gasps dwindle to shallow puffs. Donna twitches, her hands on Kayla’s wrists.

  Kayla glances toward the door. Ashley motionless. The blood puddled around her head, her hair sopped. Kayla turns back to Donna. Each beat of the strobe brings a deeper haze to her eyes. Donna’s hold on Kayla’s wrists loosens, and her hands slip away.

  A warm night. Her father’s fingers slipping from a rope. His open eyes no longer seeing. Kayla screams and lifts her hands. She sits back, a slump of spine and shoulders. Donna rolls onto her side, gagging, spitting. Kayla tries to stand, but her legs betray her. Instead she crawls, a child spent and sick, her throat choked with bile. The broken mop handle slips from her cuff. The back stairwell, their plans. The strobe and alarm a short-circuit in her thoughts. She stands on trembling legs. The back stairwell. The truck key. Donna still on her side, her voice, hoarse and pained. “Fuck you. Fuck you and your dead, fucking girlfriend.”

  Kayla falls back upon her. A knee on her chest, a hand beneath her pretty chin. Kayla’s other hand raised. The handle brought down, and the splintered end mashes into Donna’s left eye. A twist. Donna’s mouth opens, a wordless gasp. The vibration of her breathing meshes into the machine’s hum.

  Kayla stands, straddling Donna. The handle rolls across the floor. The alarm and voices wash over Kayla, and she lets the tide carry her—half stumbles over Donna then Ashley. The hallway, her strength finding her. She runs. Old John ushers the last of the girls down the center stairwell, a feeble attempt to corral her. Kayla pushes past, knocking him against the wall.

  No strobes in the back stairwell. The alarm muffled. A scramble, the steps a blur beneath her. The light still out on the landing where she found Heather. The sisters huddled and waiting at the bottom. “Come on,” Kayla says.

  Linda doesn’t move. “There’s blood, Kayla.”

  Kayla looks down. Splatters on her coat and sleeves, and in her, a dawning awareness.

  “It’s all over.” Chris reaches out to touch Kayla’s face but draws back. “Are you OK?”

  “It’s Donna’s. And Ashley’s.” She takes the truck key from Chris. “Maybe you don’t want to be with me now. You can go back. Maybe you should.”

  Linda looks at Chris. Their silent language. She turns to Kayla. “We’re going. All of us.”

  The cafeteria alcove, a reunion with the alarm and strobes. A push of the loading dock door, and with it, another alarm, a new pitch. The cold sudden and cutting, the blood warm on Kayla’s neck and hands. The dock steps slippery, and a thin layer of snow slides off when they open the truck’s doors.

  The doors close. The dome light snuffed. The girls’ frantic breathing. The three of them crowded on the hard seat, Linda at the door, Chris in the middle. The stale stink of cigarettes. The key scratches the dash until Kayla finds the ignition.

  A breath. A moment of alignment. Her feet tap the pedals. A hand on the steering wheel, the other on the shifter. Two years ago, she had to wiggle to the edge of the seat in her father’s truck, her chin lifted to see above the wheel. Now, she feels him near. His faith. His love, and what would he think of her now.

  The key turns. A whir and grind. Chris looks at her. Kayla tries again, her foot heavy on the gas, a sputter and then a catch. The engine rattles. The radio bursts on, the music blaring, Chris turning knobs until the song falls silent. Kayla doing the same until she discovers the wipers. A sweep, a cascade of white. A view of the lights that spill from the courtyard. At the light’s fringe, a few reds. The girls bundled in their coats, a silent studying of the truck.

  Kayla presses the clutch and shifts. The engine shudders and stalls. She wrenches the key, her fear the metal might snap. One foot down, shift, the other down. The truck lurches. The rattle of the plow’s chains. The tires’ churn over packed snow. A taller form wades into the gathered reds. His face shadowed.

  “Kayla,” Linda says.

  “I see him.”

  The truck picks up speed. She has seventeen yards. Betty paced it off. Betty. Fucking Betty. Fucking Heather. Kayla feels them near too, and they’re all getting out of here. Tonight. Together in one form or another.

  The larger form breaks from the group. The Deacon in the headlights’ periphery, Heavy Metal close behind. Kayla reminded of the deer and raccoons as she and her parents drove the river road. An emergence from the brush. Their headlights reflected in squinting eyes.

  “Kayla!” Linda says.

  The plow strikes the gate. The engine revs. The spin of tires and the back end’s slip. Her foot pegs the gas. A progress of centimeters. The groan of metal. Linda screams. The Deacon’s commands to stop echo in the cab. Linda slaps the lock but not before the Deacon grabs the handle.

  “Pull it!” Kayla says.

  Linda latches onto the inside handle. A two-handed grip. Chris grabs the window crank, but they’re not strong enough to keep the door closed. One of the gate’s hinges pops. Rubbery smoke rises behind them. The passenger door opens, a framing of the Deacon’s scowl. The sisters scream. The Deacon snares Linda’s coat, the material bunched, his wide hands. Linda halfway out of the cab, her body caught in a tug of war. The Deacon on one side, Chris on the other. Kayla lifts herself from her seat and presses down on her foot. The engine whines. Heavy Metal at her window, a grip on the door’s handle, his barked curses.

  The gate snaps, and the truck lurches forward. Kayla cuts the wheel, grappling with the truck’s fishtailing end. The passenger side rakes the gate’s post. The
door slams against Linda’s body, a whiplash of metal and momentum that rips her from the cab and leaves her and the Deacon wedged against the post. Linda’s expulsion violent and sudden, a wordless moan, a gasp of frightened breath squeezed from her lungs.

  The truck swerves into the street. Kayla wrestles the wheel. Their backend slams a parked car. The bent gate draped over the plow. The passenger door hangs open, the alignment of a broken wing. The engine howls, Kayla too panicked to shift. The ferocity of it all, the vibrations in the wheel, in her meat. The schoolyard to their right. The girls turn toward them. A few break away, their fingers laced through the fence. An opening in the crowd, a space between the whites and reds. The paramedics and their rolling gurney. A sprawled body beneath the Deacon’s coat.

  Kayla stops at the corner. Sirens and calling voices, barking dogs. She glances in the rearview. Heavy Metal runs after them, the smack of his boots as he sprints down the street’s center.

  Chris turns to Kayla. “I have to go back.”

  “I know.” She reaches for Chris’s hand. “I can’t. Not now.”

  “I can’t leave her. I—”

  “I know. Go.”

  Chris leaps from the cab. Kayla watches, lost in a calculation of her life’s subtractions, thoughts snuffed by Heavy Metal’s appearance in her window. His fist pounds the glass. “Get out, bitch!”

  She wrestles the shifter. The pickup trundles forward, a slow-motion escape. Heavy Metal runs alongside, screaming and cursing, his spit dotting the window, the door handle grasped until Kayla shifts again. A breath, a fall, and he disappears, a tumbling form in the driver’s side mirror.

  The street a blur. Row homes. Corner stores shuttered for the night. The streetlights’ shine ebbs in and out of the truck. A man pushing a small cart stops and stares, the spectacle of her getaway vehicle, the passenger door hanging from its hinges, the plow topped with a section of twisted fence. Another intersection, a stop sign noticed too late, and with her passing onto another block, the realization she has no idea where she’s going.