Anna's face grimaces, "No stop.
You're opening the bags. Just give me a second to move them."
I am vibrating. I can't wait. I want out.
I want out now.
The weight of them is crushing me. I
never noticed but as they are lifted off, I feel relief.
My upper body is freed first. I sit up
and use the two dead women next to me to push my legs free. I kick and scramble
until I am out of the clutches of the black bags. I see the light of the bright
sunny day and the brown of the borderlands. I have never been so grateful to
see old hay and dead crops. The green of the forest off to the left side wakes
my heart up. We are driving very quickly. We need to get out of this truck
before it takes us to the body dump. The drop at the one I saw was huge. It was
a canyon. Bodies were splayed along the canyon walls and ground.
Anna is breathing hard and sweating.
Sarah is crying.
I point to the back of the truck,
"We need to jump."
Sarah shakes her head. I grab her face
and focus it on mine, "You need to trust me. You need this. Think about
the swimming hole. We will be there in three days."
She sobs with her eyes closed. Her little
face trembles. She feels like she did the first day I met her in the dark.
Frightened and tiny against the massive world that wanted to destroy us. It
feels like nothing will ever change.
I scramble over the bags of death. I
don’t think about what I'm touching or doing. I climb to the edge of the filthy
truck. I try not to imagine the diseases that linger on this metal ledge.
"Don’t touch your face or anything
until we can wash."
Sarah sobs. Anna nods and watches Sarah.
I sit on the ledge and feel the wind whip
around me. If I close my eyes I am in the back of the truck and my dad is
driving. We are on a gravel road in the middle of nowhere and he lets me ride
in the back.
I grip the ledge and look back,
"Climb on here with me."
They listen and move quickly.
We sit on the ledge together. Gripping
the metal and waiting.
"When you feel the next sharp corner
we jump. Tuck your arms and legs and try to roll for the ditch. The truck will
slow for the corner."
The truck is moving fast. Not fast enough
that we will die but fast enough we may be injured.
I feel the brakes hit hard and jerk us
forward, as the truck veers and I shout, "Now." My fingers try to
grip but I force them to let go. I roll from the truck.
I hear the screams faintly in the
background of the pain and ringing noise. My body bounces on the gravel. Dust
is everywhere. Sharp pains cover me. I feel my body come to a stop but my head
feels like it's still rolling. Hot liquid is seeping from above my eyes. When
it covers my vision the world turns red for a moment.
Through the blood I see a dusty haze.
Sarah is picking herself up and pulling at Anna's arms. Anna shakes her head to
straighten her vision out. They hop down into the ditch. They're shouting at
me. My vision is clouded for a second. I see their faces screaming. I look
behind me and see another ball of dust coming our way.
It's another truck.
I stand and run into the ditch. I dive
between the thick grass and pull it over me. The truck roars around the corner
spitting rocks everywhere.
I can barely hear it over the ringing in
my ears.
I turn on my belly and throw up. Blood mixes with my vomit.
I'm not going to die here. I force my trembling and twitching body to crawl out
of the muddy ditch. I drag myself up the bank and climb over some dead fallen
trees.
"Emma this way." Anna is waving
an arm at me. I can hear her but she sounds like she is shouting in a can.
I turn and stumble to where they are
sitting behind some trees and bushes.
Sarah has a cut on her face that looks
like road rash. It's not deep.
"Can you move everything?"
She nods.
Anna has no wounds I can see but she is
favoring her right arm. It hangs funny.
She looks terrified, "I think it's
broken."
"Okay we need to get going. They can
fix it at the camp."
It's going to take us days to get back to
the camp.
"Can you walk?"
She nods, "I have to walk Emma. It's
not if I can or not. I'm not going back there. We need to bandage your head.
It's bleeding bad."
I nod and watch her tear at her scrubs.
She ties a dirty white bandage to my forehead. It stings.
"Okay. I think it'll hold."
I offer Sarah my hand. She takes it and
we start the long trek back to the building we've just left. I need to get my
bearings and the trail back to the camp.
I look around for a sign of them but find
nothing. I knew they would leave me but I never imagined they would leave me
empty handed.
They took my backpack even. I see the
broken branches and can't help but smile a little. They may have left me but at
least they make the walk back obvious.
I point at the hillside in front of us,
"It's this way."
Sarah moans.
I look at her and try not to snap,
"We walk till dark. That’s the rule okay?" My head hurts and it's
making me a little mean.
She slumps and starts walking. We are
filthy in our white and pale blue clothes that are now stained and torn. Dirt
cakes our faces mixed with the dried blood. The cut above my eye needs a
stitch. It's not going to get it. I'm going to have a deep scar there.
It's hard to care when I made it out
alive. I never died there. I still block out the images of the torn bags and
the things I saw in there. My little cut is nothing.
My feet ache. The slippers are bad for
hiking. I slip a few times. Anna is cautious. Her arm still looks funny.
It takes all of our second day to get
back to the place where I camped with Will and Jake and we roasted the hare. I
lick my lips and think about the hare.
Somehow remembering the hare makes me
miss Meg. Her nattering took up the free air where my brain liked to roam while
we walked. She stopped my thoughts and drove me insane in a different way than
the hunger that is gnawing at my belly does.
Sarah and Anna are like me. They're
quiet. They think a lot.
"I could go for a piece of the lemon
meringue pie." Anna whispers the worst thing I've ever heard. My stomach
grumbles. I can taste all of the food. The hunger is driving us all insane
obviously.
"I could go for the spaghetti from
the first day." Sarah rubs her belly.
I laugh, "No the pancakes, bacon and
sausage breakfast."
Sarah moans, "Ohhhh cook always
whipped me up something she called hollandaise, secretly, to eat my home fries
dipped in."
Anna laughs, "You're
disgusting."
We pass the camp and the small charred
fire that they tried to cover over. I roll my eyes when Sarah points to it,
"Hey look a campfire."
"Three guesses who hid that one when
we camped here."
Anna laughs, "Oh god I miss
him."
Sarah looks confused as she climbs over
an old log, "Was it Jake?" We've told her enough that she knows he
isn’t great at survival.
"Yup. The branches are leading this
way."
We make it into the valley just below the
camp by nightfall. We have walked non-stop. I know we are hours from the camp.
I see the exhausted looks on their faces and cringe, "We need to keep
going. Anna that bone is going to set wrong and you'll never have a range of
motion with it."
I don’t know how to set it. It almost
looks dislocated. I tied it a sling with strips of my pale blue scrubs, which
now comes up to my midriff.
Sarah sniffles a little, "Em I'm so
tired."
I rub her arm, "I know. But we have
to keep going. We'll be at the first camp in like a few hours. We will get food
and a bath."
Sarah looks defeated. She slumps and we
continue walking. We look like the infected. We are covered in blood and dirt
and our clothes are torn. We even walk like them. I'm going to be pissed if I
walk all the way to the camp and end up getting shot.
The forest grows dark. I would be scared
if I had even an ounce of common sense left in me.
I have a fever. I know I do. The chills
of the soft breeze make my skin hurt. My head is no doubt infected from the
filth on the bandage.
I push myself on. One foot in front of
the other. Anna is stumbling almost now. I have my arm around her and am
pulling her up the hill. My legs burn. My chest aches. I'm coughing from the
sickness starting inside of me. My body wants to fight the infection. It's
strong from the weeks at the breeder camp but I'm exhausted.
I feel my legs giving way and am about to
collapse. My head lifts to the sky and I see an angel of mercy. He is pointing
a gun at my head from a bird perch in a tree.
"Halt."
My dry throat barely makes out the
slightest of words, "Help. Help us." I hear the croak of it.
He is waving his arms suddenly. The
forest comes alive. Torches are brought and arms reach out for me. Anna is
gone. Someone is carrying her. Sarah stays at my side. I grab her arm firmly,
"You're safe. Find Will and Jake."
Her blue eyes fill with terror as I
collapse. I feel fingers grabbing at me but their faces fuzz out. I slip into
the darkness.
I hear things. Sometimes it's Sarah and
sometimes it's people laughing. I think they're laughing at Sarah. She never
leaves my side as far as I can tell. My body isn’t ready to wake up. Something
is withholding the waking world from me.
Weird confessions float in the air around
my head. Strange things like, "I should have killed you when I had the
chance."
"Emma I love you. Please be
okay."
"You saved her Em. You did it."
I don’t know if the voices all belong to
one person or if they are figments of my imagination. At one point Leo is
beside me. He is reading a book sitting in a chair with glasses on. When I look
at him he smiles his wolf smile and says, "You never should have left me
Emma."
The blackness takes me. It's like I'm on
a roller coaster and we keep going in tunnels where I can hear but not see.
I feel something bite into my arm and I
scream awake. I'm sitting up and covered in cold sweat. My clothes are gone and
a bandage is across my chest. No one is in the tent with me. I look at my arm
and nothing is there.
I feel a cold shiver. My arm still hurts.
I can't help but wonder if it’s the ghosts of the dead girls. They're pinching
me and telling me that I've slept long enough. It's time to wake and stop the
breeder farms.
I grab a robe next to my bed and pull it
around me. I am thinner again. I sigh. All that eating was for nothing.
I stumble out of the tent. My legs are
weak. They feel like sticks. My feet are sore. I look at them surprised.
They're covered in bandages. I lift my foot and touch the bandages. My feet
sting.
"You were bleeding from
everywhere."
I look up to see Will sitting outside of
my tent on a chair.
His eyes meet mine and I feel like he
knows everything. He can see my soul.
I put my fingers up to my head and wince
when I touch the thick bandage I find there.
He stands and walks to me. His body
towers over mine.
"You made it back." His words
are a whisper suddenly. It's as if he was terrified he would never speak the
words and even now they scare him.
I nod once and try to fight the tears
that fill my eyes.
He wraps his body around mine and lifts
me into him. I feel like it's the safest place I've ever been in my life. My
father, my grandparents, my mother, no one has ever made me feel like I do in
his arms. It's the safest place in the world.
"You never do that to me again
Emma." His words sound wet in the crook of my neck. He's trembling.
"You never do that again."
I shake my head. I can never leave him again.
My legs buckle. Partly from lack of
strength and partly because I'm emotional. I don’t know where to put all of the
emotions. They're everywhere.
He compensates for my lack of strength.
His strength becomes mine. He holds me up.
I sob. I sob for the women and girls in
the black bags. I cry for the people who have no idea what's going on. The ones
who think they're family members are living in a condo and have forgotten about
them. Children who have been left to believe their own mothers are living it up
with air conditioning in the city, instead of suffering in the woods with them.
I sob because a small shallow part of me
misses the food. I will never eat like that again.