Forty Leap (10 page)

“Hey!” Jennie shouted, her voice
reverberating off of the empty buildings. The man she had
identified as her target was moving with the crowd. I was amazed at
the efficiency with which Li’s agents were able to traffic all of
those people off of the street. It was a testament to their skill
because the people themselves were obviously untrained. Tiri’s use
of the word
herd
had been extremely accurate.

No one acknowledged her outburst, but she had
cleared the worst of the street rubbish now, climbed atop a pile of
wreckage, and got right in his way. He tried to move past her very
casually, as if he believed she had put herself in his way by
mistake. But she cut him off again.

“I’m talking to you, raper!”

What I saw in his eyes was a quick switch
from passiveness to instinctive wrath and then back to forced
confusion. Li was four steps away and I was five.

Jennie brandished the pipe and, to me, looked
as if beating the pulp out of someone with it was not something she
hadn’t done before.

“Before I beat on you, you tell me what
happened to Reesha.”

In his defense, the poor man looked genuinely
confused at the mention of Jennie’s friend’s name. By now, the
street was almost empty. It was Jennie and the man and me and Li.
The wispy man clung to the entrance of an office building, not only
waiting for his own exit, but making it clear to onlookers where he
had taken the group.

“
Reesha!”
Jennie screamed at the boy.
“You beat on Devon and you took Reesha!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he
said, but for a flicker of an instant the truth shone in his eyes.
He remembered. Maybe he had learned her name before…

“Where is she, you pig?”

“I don’t…”

“
Where?!
” When Jennie swung the pipe
it was with expert precision. It collided with the tip of his left
shoulder bone making a cross between a
clank
and a
crack.
Tears practically leaped from his eyes and he went to
his knees screaming obscenities.

Li rushed forward and grabbed Jennie around
the waist with one great arm, taking the pipe from her with the
other hand. Though she struggled, her ninety plus pounds were no
match for his strength. He tossed her aside like a piece of litter
and she half fell, half scrabbled down a hill of rubble. At the
sight, I rushed forward. I was going for Li, but the gang man was
already on his feet, his injured arm dangling at his side, but his
other hand curled into a fist. He had come down the hill on the
other side and was moving toward her. The look in his eyes was
venom and I grew very afraid. Clumsily, I changed direction and
almost toppled as I came down the side of the hill. He didn’t even
notice me until I crashed into him and the two of us tumbled into
the street getting scraped and bruised by broken stones and glass.
As I tried to regain my footing, I noticed that no one had gone
into any basement. Through the gaping holes and windows, all of the
people in the group had stayed to watch.

“
Killer!”
Jennie’s fury had not
lessened. She had found a second length of pipe, this one shorter
than the first and jagged on one end. It would probably have not
been as effective a swinging weapon, but it would have been an
effective weapon just the same. Her advance, though, was halted by
Li who stepped into her way.

“Get out of my way, cop,” she ordered,
holding the pipe up.

“We don’t do this here,” Li said. “Take it up
with the police when we get out.”

I could almost feel her skepticism. She was
fifteen years old and she had no evidence against him. No one was
going to listen to her word. He would walk away. I wonder if Li
thought she was going to give in because her muscles did relax. But
if he did, he misread her intentions. Loosening up her body, she
quickly sidestepped him and threw the pipe straight at the gang
man. Again, I was amazed at her precision because the pipe flew end
over end and smacked him right in the temple with a potato chip
crunch.

His eyes rolled into his head and he dropped
to the street.

This was the only time in my life that I ever
experienced what I would describe as the collective gasp. I had
read about it in books and seen it in movies, but I never thought
it was possible in reality. Everyone watching had exactly the same
reaction and the breath that left their mouths was identical.

Sparing just one insolent look for Li, Jennie
marched over to the fallen man and looked down on him. She toed him
with her worn shoe just to make sure and then she spat on his dead
face.

“Who’s the murderer now?” Li asked. He
signaled once again to his crew and they began bringing everyone
out of hiding. “Don’t follow us,” he said to Jennie.

I stood there as it happened, watching the
crowd pass by the scene, every person trying to get a look. As if
they hadn’t seen enough death in the previous months. When the last
person had gone by, Jennie turned and began to march off in the
other direction. I stood and watched. I watched Li go one way and
Jennie go the other way.

And I stood.

“Cristian,” Li called back. I looked up at
him. “Are you coming?”

I shook my head.

He seemed perturbed, but turned away just the
same. He certainly wasn’t going to beg.

I turned to look back at Jennie and saw that
she had stopped in the street. She was still turned away from me,
away from everything. Her head was down and she looked as if she
needed to fall down. With one last glimpse at the group of people
disappearing behind wreckage and around a corner, I went to Jennie
and put a hand on her shoulder. When she turned there were tears in
her eyes and a defiant twitch at the corner of her mouth.

“I’m not sorry,” she said.

“I didn’t ask you to be,” I replied.

Then she collapsed into my arms, buried her
face into my chest, and sobbed out all of her grief.

That night she came to me, not as a child,
but as a woman. We had decided to sleep where we slept the night
before, but chosen not to sit on the stone shelf that was the
eighteenth floor. At first, I thought she was simply curling up
next to me the way she had in the past. We always slept close,
maybe for protection, maybe for comfort. But as she slowly began to
kiss my face and rub the back of my head, I understood the
difference.

I was graceless as I panicked and pulled
away. I offended her.

“What?” she shouted, much like the child she
was. “Why not?”

I made a face. But the
why not
was not
as simple as it seemed.

Throwing her arms into the air, she stood and
stalked away. Then she calmed, the maturity she had displayed those
past weeks returning. “Things ain’t the same,” she said. “I’m not a
kid.”

She was right of course. She had seen too
much and had to survive on her own for too long to be a child any
longer. And I didn’t think of her as a child. She was too much my
companion, wholly my equal if not my better. Yet something stopped
me. I’m not sure what it was because I think I loved her, even
then, even with the distance in our age and our lives. I think I
realized it when I had awakened that morning and felt that she was
gone. The feeling that had replaced her had been one akin to the
feeling of losing Livvie after abandoning her at the train station.
Akin, but not the same. This had been stronger, more painful.

But I remained steadfast, unwilling to fight
the growing fear that a physical relationship would damage
something that had become so vital to me. My heart beat in my chest
as adrenaline pumped into my veins. The terror was so real that I
couldn’t even hope to fight it. I could not explain this to her. It
would have sounded empty and false. No matter what I said, she
would have believed that I looked at her only as a child. For the
second night in a row, she slept away from me.

And the next morning I was gone.

I awakened in the same building, with Jennie
sleeping a few feet away. I looked at her with what must have been
longing, wondering if my decision of the previous evening had been
the right one. Stretching, I moved out of sight so that I could
relieve myself. Suddenly I was surrounded by the sounds of heavy
machinery and loud voices and saw that I was urinating on a
half-finished wooden floor. I remember thinking that I would never
go to the bathroom again, because I was dreadfully embarrassed and
then frightened as rough hands grabbed me by the shoulders and
hauled me backwards. It was all I could do to zip up my pants.

The men who grabbed me were clearly of Middle
Eastern descent. They wore yellow construction helmets and angry
scowls. They began shouting at me in a language I didn’t understand
and several signaled to others a short distance away. It was
difficult for me to get my bearings. They were shoving me and
turning me around. Hands groped at my clothing and I felt my
wallet, phone, and journal stripped away. I was pushed up against a
wall and, though the smell of paint and dust was strong, I couldn’t
focus on any of the visual details except the men shouting, now at
each other, and gesturing toward me.

Finally, one man spoke to me. He was a heavy
man, bearded, with dark skin. I couldn’t understand what he was
saying, but he raised two leathery hands and made himself clear
with a gesture. I was to stay put. So I did.

I was still on the fifteenth floor of the
same building in which Jennie and I had spent two nights. It was
daylight now, instead of dawn. The hot air of late June had been
replaced by cooler air. The sun shone high above and the weather
was nice, but it felt like fall. For an instant, hope blossomed. If
I had only skipped a month or two, then perhaps finding Jennie was
not an insurmountable task. Of course, if I had only skipped a
month or two then I doubt the progress that had been made would
have been made. Though the building was under heavy construction,
the rooms empty, some of the walls exposed while wiring was being
repaired, it did not compare to the rest of Manhattan. Stealing a
glance out the large windows I could see that almost every building
in view was swarming with workers. There were black drapes over
some buildings, but most were in current progress. Some were even
complete. Through their windows, I could see people going about
office business. The streets below were clean and repaired. Though
traffic was light, there was traffic.

Three men in uniform appeared and came
forward, pushing their way through the throng of workers that had
gathered to watch me. I did not recognize the uniform. One of them,
clearly the leader, also began speaking to me in that
incomprehensible language.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Ah,” he replied. “English. You are American.
I could not tell under all of that filth.”

It was a great joke. A couple of the men
laughed, betraying their understanding of English. I said
nothing.

“Where did you come from?” he asked,
completely ignoring the chuckles behind him.

“I don’t know,” I replied simply, it being
both the truth and a lie at the same time.

“Do you understand that you are on United
Arab soil and, therefore, suspect of espionage?”

“What day is it?” I asked quietly.

This seemed to take him by surprise but his
recovery was quick. “You will be taken to a police house.”

He said nothing else. A single gesture had
the other two men grabbing me by the arms and hauling me forward.
As I passed through the work areas, I could see that really only a
few of them were Arab. Most of the workers were American. They
looked healthy, but sad, these men and women. My appearance was
like a wave as I was taken through the rooms. People stopped work
as soon as I came through and turned to see me.

“He looks like a refugee,” one woman
whispered. The man next to her responded with a sound of
disbelief.

We stopped in front of a bank of elevators
and waited for one to arrive. The men in uniform were armed and
they kept their hands very close to their guns. I couldn’t decide
whether it was I who caused them concern or they just kept a
natural state of readiness. We moved into an elevator that smelled
of wood polish and rode down to the street without incident. I was
then ushered through a grand lobby and into the street, where a
police van was waiting for me. They shoved me into the dark rear
and locked the door behind me. It occurred to me that I had not
been handcuffed.

I was able to look out the back of the van as
they drove me downtown. It was certainly Manhattan, but not the
Manhattan I remembered. Most of the structures that had survived
the invasion had been repaired, but there were many others that had
been replaced. All of the new ones displayed signs of Middle
Eastern architecture. The lettering on most of the shops and signs
was Arabic. There was some English, but most of it took the form of
rules and warnings. To be American in New York was to be clearly
second class. Once again, I wondered how much of my world was gone.
Did the United States even exist anymore? Previously, as I had
wandered the city with Jennie, I had learned very little.

I was taken to what I would describe as a
precinct house. I had never been inside of a police station before
so I don’t know how this one compared with others. It certainly
looked different than the ones I had always seen on television. The
flooring in the lobby was white marble and there seemed to be a man
constantly cleaning it, an American man. There were several large
desks which allowed their occupants to tower over anyone who
approached. High above, great chandeliers added to the sunlight
that beamed in through the windows. We ignored and were ignored by
the workers in the building, my guards escorting me straight to the
rear and into a long corridor. Using stairs this time, I was
ushered downstairs where I was stripped of my clothing and
showered. They then shaved my beard and buzzed my head. Despite the
fact that none of it was voluntary, it felt good to be clean and
groomed. I was handed a pair of loose grey pants and a blue
T-shirt.