by Ryan Schow
“He lost a wife and two girls,” I tell her.
“He told me.”
“Don’t let him wonder about you for too long,” I say.
Now she squares up on me and says, “What does that mean?”
“In America, we have a saying, it’s called playing hard to get. If you want him, tell him. If you want to be with him, then be with him. Don’t play hard to get, because when you’re not looking, if he’s still wondering, maybe he finds another woman who makes her intentions clear.”
“Is that how you got together with Adeline?” she asks.
“That’s how I got together with her, but that’s also how someone else nearly took her from me. So, like I say, let him know.”
She seems to think about this, but now I’m thinking about all these young girls. There’s no way all of them can stay. There must be a dozen of them here. Maybe more. Looking from face to face, most of them have that thousand yard stare, like they’re not sure where they’re at, or how they’re even still alive.
I want to ask if they’re hurt, but they’ve been starved and had God-knows-what happen to them, so really the only person I talk to is Eliana because she’s right next to me and not one of them.
“So what’s the plan?” I ask.
“We need mattresses, water, food and things like toilet paper and toothbrushes. At least, that’s what Xavier says.”
Just then Adeline joins me and Eliana heads over to talk to Ice.
“How well do you know her?” Adeline asks about Eliana. “Because you two seem to be hitting it off pretty good.”
“We are.”
She looks at me with a frown. That’s when five or six girls who have been looking at me decide to finally come over. They move one of the girls my way, the spokeswoman. She looks up at me with big red eyes and chapped lips. In broken English, she says, “We want to thank you for saving us.”
There’s something about the way she’s looking at me with those big eyes—how they’re all looking at me—that touches me somewhere deep, somewhere that’s been inaccessible for so long now.
“You’re welcome,” I say, looking them over.
“You and your brother saved us. Eliana, too,” another one of them says.
The one in front of me, she can’t be more than eight years old, she steps forward and hugs me, and then they’re all hugging me and that hard thing inside me cracks wide open and I find my emotions soaring.
From the crowd of appreciative girls, my eyes find Adeline’s. God, she’s so beautiful. She’s taking this all in and I can see what it’s doing to her.
When the girls let go and go back to talking amongst each other, she says, “Remember how I said you no longer did anything for me?”
“Yeah, that one hurt.”
“It’s not true. But just then, seeing all those little lives you’ve saved, it makes me remember you before you lost that softer side, that side that cares about something bigger than yourself.”
“I’ve always cared.”
“I see that.”
This time, when she reaches for my hand, I don’t pull away. The connection sparks something in me, and I look at her and I remember, too. When we first met, when I first laid eyes on her, I stopped thinking of anything rational. All I knew was I had to be with her. Now all I want is to get our kids back and be with her again.
Looking around, no one really knows the miles we just traveled together, but I don’t care. I just know she’s letting me back in. This, above all else, makes me want to try harder.
“Let’s go help Ice and Xavier get these kids settled, then we’ve got some demon spawn to deal with.”
“Did you hurt them?” she asks, tentative. “Diaab’s boys.”
“Not yet. I’m going to need some gardening shears. You know, the kind you use to cut twigs off the more stubborn brush and trees.”
“Why?”
“That’s what works best on fingers and toes.”
Chapter Seventeen
Xavier, Eliana and Adeline got all the kids organized, a task that should not have been so difficult. Nevertheless, everyone was safe and happy to be alive and free. And really, we didn’t expect any different. Xavier does not speak Spanish; the girls did not speak English, with the exception of Carolina, who speaks some.
Adeline is fluent and helps the rest of the girls get showers while Ice and I go house to house, seeing who’s there and who isn’t. We meet some skittish people, but find three houses that are empty with no signs of post-drone strike occupants.
For these three homes, my brother and I do some light recon, which is basically breaking and entering through the back doors and clearing the space. Both of us are strapped and ready to roll, but we also know that if people aren’t home by now, they won’t be home at all.
When we got back to Xavier’s home, Xavier and Eliana were working on “The List” together. This is the master list of everything we think we need to survive in a grid-down scenario, which is looking more likely by the day.
Something else has my attention though, something far more important. I see the way my brother is looking at Eliana. He used to look at Holly like that. This gives me pause. It stops me and it also makes me very happy. When Ice’s wife, Holly, was killed, along with Harper and Isabelle, I didn’t think Ice would ever come back from that.
After he went on a 5150 killing spree at the cartel’s shop, then came after the lieutenants at their own homes, I was sure he wouldn’t recover. I never imagined he’d kill our old man, or that Rock would shoot him.
Now everything has changed. Ice is alive! Not only is he alive, he’s here, with us. And Eliana.
Seeing them interacting together the way they were warmed me but chilled me to the bone as well. My grief is now crawling out of the well I dropped it down the day everyone died. I don’t want to think about Holly, or how she was the sister I always wanted, or how Harper used to dance crazy to 80’s pop while Isabelle was more refined in her music tastes, but just as swept away by Chopin or Tchaikovsky as Harper was by Duran Duran.
My heart not only broke, it withered and died that day. I lost me when I lost all of them. It was one line of delineation that tore at the fabric of mine and Adeline’s marriage. The second line came when Xavier invited me to leave the force and join the DEA. If my heart was broken before, it withered and turned black while I was undercover.
My brothers and I were tight. Maybe because Dad was so tough on me and Ice in the early years. Rock loved our dad because he’d figured out how to be halfway decent father by then. Rock didn’t know him the way Ice and I did. When I told Rock what our father did, how he was helping the cartel to supplement his pension and feed his gambling problem, all of Rock’s illusions about the old man were shattered and he left not only the force, he left Chicago and us—the last of his family.
After that day, we had no one. Just each other and our ghosts.
Now I’m seeing my younger brother coming back to life again and it gives me some small measure of hope. Then again, I feel like I’m coming back to life, too. My eyes find Adeline. They linger a bit too long. That harsh and bitter edge that’s come to define my very existence is wearing down. Adeline is brushing a young girl’s hair and conversing with her in Spanish. She sounds so sweet, not angry or bitter or resentful at all.
I remember what it was like when I’d come into the bedroom in the morning and find her brushing Brooklyn’s hair.
Brooklyn…
I check Ice’s phone, but see no missed calls. If I need to keep good on my word, can I really hurt those boys?
Quietly to myself, in response to such a preposterous question, I let a small but personal harrumph go. The answer is easy. I cannot do that. No way, not at all! I may be many things, but I’m not a freaking psychopath and I don’t kill kids!
Then again, anyone who has seen what I’ve become lately would totally disagree. I did hurt a few kids. Then again, technically, those kids hurt Brooklyn, so maybe I was just being Biblical…you know, an eye fo
r an eye?
I’m not insane, just practicing religion.
Taking a deep breath, I savor the moment, then perk up when I see Xavier walking over with a small bag of ice cubes. I smile as he hands this to me.
“Your eye,” he says.
“Thanks X,” I say, pressing the thin bag of cubes to my eye.
“What happened to you?” he asks. Shamefully, I fill him in on everything. Then I tell him about the unusual activity with the drones and he says he’s seen some of them, too.
“Were yours armed?” I ask.
“Not that I could see.”
“Well at least there’s that,” I say, moving the ice down to my lip.
“If those are scout drones,” Xavier says, keeping his voice low, almost conspiratorial, “then that means we’ll be getting hit shortly.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Can you think of another explanation?”
“This is a very nice neighborhood, boss,” I tell him with a wink and a friendly pat on the shoulder.
“You think that’s funny?” he asks, deadly serious.
“A little.”
“It’s not. It makes me wonder what we’re supposed to do then.”
“All we can do is build that list,” I say, pointing to the paper he’s holding. “We’ve got several houses we can start with. But at some point in time we’ll have to figure out how to feed all these mouths.”
“I’ve been thinking about that.”
“Hard not to,” I say.
Eliana calls everyone together. The girls come into the great room as Adelina finishes putting the young girl’s hair into a ponytail.
When all eyes are on Eliana, a small girl of no more than five years old walks up to her and reaches for her hand. The Guatemalan woman looks down, taken aback but pleased. Her hard edges are softening, too, I think.
But is that a good or a bad thing?
Looking at Eliana now, I almost don’t recognize her. It’s hard to imagine she pressed her gun to a man’s head and pulled the trigger. It’s equally hard to believe this woman possesses the survival skills and the lady balls necessary to travel up through hell into Chicago and do what she did.
Yet, to see her with this group of girls, you wouldn’t be able to merge the two and see them as the same woman.
This is the beauty of women, I can’t help thinking. Incredible strength and fortitude matched with boundless stores of patience and love.
They really are the best of the genders.
Eliana looks right at me, almost like she knows what I’m thinking, and I see her smile. Her expression is so unexpected and warm it all but tames the animal in me. Thinking of this cold, hateful creature I’ve become, it makes me wonder if others will see me the same way I see Eliana. Will they not be able to rectify the two sides to me? Will I suffer the same inability?
My eyes go right to Adeline who sees this connection forming between Eliana and me, and she smiles, too. As disarming as Eliana’s smile is to me, Adeline’s grabs me by the heart. She always had a way of doing that. I walk over to her and take her hand into mine, then lean over and kiss her on that soft spot just below her ear.
She turns and looks at me, surprised but not turning me away.
Eliana is now telling the kids they get to go on a scavenger hunt with the five adults. She hands out the lists, of which she and Xavier created three. I take the one assigned to Adeline and me. Ice and Eliana have one, as does Xavier.
X is going with the older girls to get mattresses, bedding, towels and toiletries. Adeline and I are tasked with finding the supplies necessary to build emergency toilets in the event that the power goes out, which we all feel like it will. It wasn’t just that the power has been glitchy lately, a storm front is moving in. Lately they’d been rather severe. Back in January, it was so bitter cold, we had to set the train tracks on fire in some of the railyards just to stave off catastrophe.
Yeah, it was that cold.
So with the assault on the city ongoing and the potential for some really cold, really nasty weather, we’re not taking any chances.
Adeline and I look our list over: three five gallon buckets, as many thirteen gallon garbage bags as we can find, cat litter, hand sanitizer pumps and a handheld garden trowel to scoop dirt and cat litter over our business when we’re done. We’ll also need some bath towels and a box of heavy duty rubber bands to hold the rolled towels together. This is our super comfy toilet seat since no one wants to dump in the cold sitting on a quarter inch rim made of frozen plastic. After that, we need to find something hard to act as a lids, and a few spray bottles with disinfectant. Either one hundred percent alcohol or Clorox will do.
That leaves Ice and Eliana on food detail.
“What you don’t see on the list are some of the most basic things,” Eliana says now that we’ve all had a chance to peruse the lists. “Any bottled water or water storage containers we find we will be taking. Make sure you alert the adults when you find larger stores of water, and you will. I’m told that because of the cold, many of the residents of this city have at least a week’s worth of food and water on hand. We will need everything we can get.”
In survival mode, a human can go somewhere between three to three and a half weeks without food before they die. Conversely, without any water whatsoever, they won’t last more than a week, some people even less depending on how much water they have in their body to start with. The problem isn’t the lack of water, it’s the amount of bodies we need to care for.
I start to do the math, which makes me pucker.
A normal human can stay healthy with a gallon of water a day, but when I look around at all these kids, when I get an accurate count, that puckering becomes the start of a full-fledged panic attack.
Adeline sees this in me, puts her hand around my bicep and says, “Relax, we’ll figure it out.”
Will we?
If the power goes down, if we have to survive without power, how long will we be able to go before we starve to death? Freeze to death? Die in a drone assault? The size of this group doesn’t help any. We are many targets. Even worse, we’re weaker when we’re together. Why? Because I think we will really start to care about each other and so seeing even one of us die will be debilitating.
I lean over and say to Adeline, “These kids are going to have to pull their weight if they want to live.”
Looking sideways at me, she frowns. She doesn’t get it. I don’t blame her, though. No one ever expected this, ever.
This…
Like saying a mass assault on this city, on the country, on humankind is a thing. Something you can touch or measure, something you can quantify.
How the hell do you measure something like this?
This whole situation is so surreal I find myself questioning my own sanity. But it is real. I’ve started to accept it. The way I figure, the sooner I do this, the better off I’ll be. It’s like establishing a baseline. A way to acknowledge something horrible without dwelling on it.
Best to dwell on solutions, not problems.
And the faster we work to protect ourselves and our people, the more Ice and I can focus on finding Brooklyn, Orlando and Veronica.
“The other item we need,” Xavier says to the adults, “is a generator, or generators. A gas generator is okay, but solar generators are preferable because they’re quiet and we won’t need gas. I’m not sure how long this attack will carry on, or if there’s a way back from this, but if we start thinking about planning as far out as possible, I think we’ll have the right idea.”
“Do you think it will last that long?” Adeline leans over and whispers to me.
“I don’t know.”
“Take a guess at least,” she says.
“Yes, maybe longer.”
She turns and looks at me, like she was hoping for a different answer.
If I’ve learned anything from Adeline’s most recent behavior, it’s that she has no fear of honesty. Apparently this is a new thing. M
aybe that’s what happens to you as a couple when you’ve been together long enough—you get tired of trying to keep the peace and you just say what’s on your mind, repercussions be damned.
“Have you checked the phone again?” she asks.
I check again.
No calls.
I look at her, shake my head.
“Do you think he won’t call?” she asks. “Because he has to call, right? We have his kids.”
“Yes,” I say, my nerves dancing at this point.
“How am I supposed to go on doing such mundane things when our kids are being held by this madman?”
I refuse to tell her Diaab traffics in young kids because if I can barely handle the thoughts rolling around in my head, these thoughts will certainly crush her. So maybe I’m only honest about a few things. Just not this. Dishonesty by omission is a burden I choose to carry for the sake of sparing my wife the ugly truths I don’t want her to endure just yet.
Eliana begins calling out the names of the girls, separating them into groups of three. To Xavier’s group, she gives detailed instruction because X speaks no Spanish just as the girls speak no English but for a few common phrases. By Eliana’s estimation and my own, this might be the only way to combat the language barrier.
“We need to move fast,” Eliana says in Spanish, “because we will not be the only people with these ideas. Plus the weather is turning cold and damp, which I’m told could mean many things. We need to prepare for the worst weather.”
“Not to mention the masses leaving downtown,” Adeline says. “I can’t imagine anyone trying to ride out the destruction of the inner city.”
This stops me. This stops a lot of people. Ice and I exchange looks, then we both turn to Xavier. He’s wearing the exact same look.
She’s right. I didn’t even think of this!
If all the survivors leave the city in a mass exodus, they will overwhelm the outlying areas. Areas like ours.
“We really need to move now,” I say.
We break up and spread out. Each group takes the houses Ice and I identify as being vacant. Xavier and the older girls take the first house looking for mattresses, Eliana and Ice’s group takes the second house looking for food and Adeline and I take the third home looking for buckets and garbage bags and whatnot.