Into the Fire (14 page)

“I don't know,” I told him, though I had a really bad feeling.

I was about to try for the little guy once more, at least to get him out of the line of fire, when the pick-up suddenly mounted the sidewalk and drove straight at me, lights blazing, while automatic weapons were indiscriminately discharged. I thought they were going to run Arturo over and maybe settle with me, but the driver screeched to a halt, the passenger door was thrown open, and someone reached down and grabbed Arturo's body. He gave this cry of triumph as he dragged it inside like he was landing a prize fish or something.

Then they were gone, accelerating away into the smoky night before I even got to my feet—but I did catch a glimpse of the sign on the back:

“What happened?” asked Gordie, suddenly appearing at the top of the wall.

For a moment I just stood where I was, in a state of shock, again recalling Yoshi's warning about people coming for us in the middle of the night. “They took him,” I said dazedly.

“Kidnapped?” he said, scrambling down the wall, staring at the pool of Arturo's blood.

I didn't know how to reply. In the end, I knew he would demand the truth so I just came right out and said it. “No . . . They took his body.”

For a moment I thought he was going to cry, but he was a tough little guy and even at a time like that, not the sort to let himself go. “You sure?” was all he managed.

I nodded. I've seen death enough times over the years to be able to make a positive identification. “Yeah.”

Don't ask me why, but we both turned and stared into the smoke where the truck had disappeared, stunned by the brutal suddenness of it, I guess. Only minutes ago, a few hundred yards away, we'd been listening to Arturo telling us what animals he'd have as pets in the country. Now we couldn't bring ourselves to walk away from the spot where he'd been killed.

“Why did they take him?” Gordie asked.

“I dunno,” I replied. I'd been asking myself the same question. Why did they?

His bottom lip started to quiver and I wondered if he was going to lose it after all. “What's Delilah going to say?” he wailed, as if he was only upset on her behalf.

God, yeah—what was Delilah going to say? Jeez, I couldn't begin to imagine . . .

It was an irony, but just as we couldn't bear to leave, soon we couldn't bear to stay. With one last look at that pathetic pool of blood, all that remained of Arturo, we silently walked away.

It was beyond all comprehension . . . Gone. Just like that. Arturo, everyone's favorite, our mascot, our talisman, didn't exist anymore. I found myself thinking about that transfer—Mickey Mouse—and the first of what I knew would be many tears came to my eyes. It'd been so typical of him: wanting to be a little hard man—at times
having
to be—but inside he'd been just a normal, everyday kid.

Gordie was right: Delilah was the one who was going to be hit hardest. She loved that little guy more than life itself, and I can't tell ya how much I was dreading giving her the news.

Slowly we descended the stone steps of the crypt, our hearts so heavy it was all we could do to bear them. Jimmy had wound up a camping light, I guess 'cuz no one could bear to be in the dark anymore.

“Clancy!” Lena cried, noticing the blood on my shoulder where I'd been winged.

“It's nothing,” I said. “Plaster'll fix it.”

Delilah peered around us, waiting for one more person to come trotting down those steps. When he didn't, it was like these shadows started erupting out of her. “Where's Arturo?” she asked, slowly getting to her feet.

There was a long and deathly silence. I couldn't bring myself to meet her gaze.

“Clancy?” Lena asked.

All I could do was to shake my head. I couldn't say the words.

“Dead,” Gordie told them, like he wanted to prove he was man enough to say it, but his voice cracked as the word left his mouth.

Delilah just stood there, her mouth slowly falling open, her eyes filling with a pain that almost hypnotized me.

“Oh no—” Lena moaned.

“They got this new form of ‘entertainment,'” I told them. “Call it ‘Cleaning up.' Looks like people pay to get drunk and shoot as many ‘undesirables' as they can.”

“
Why did you take them?
” Lena wailed, her restored sight fixing me with a look that cut right through me.

“He
didn't
!” Gordie told them. “We followed him.”

But everything was lost after that: there was no more conversation, no more questions or answers; everything was drowned out by Delilah collapsing to the ground and weeping so loudly and with such pain it was all you could do not to turn and run from it. It filled that crypt to overflowing, and though there must've been all manner of grief expressed for the dead there over the years, I doubt any of it compared. Delilah howled with such force, such complete abandon, it made me fear for her frail old body.

“Lile! Lile!” Jimmy begged, trying to get a hold on her as she writhed from side to side, but within seconds he too was crying—not so much for Arturo, I didn't think, but 'cuz he simply couldn't bear to see her in so much pain. Hanna started to weep too, as silent as ever, the very opposite of Delilah, just sitting in the corner, her head in her hands, not making the slightest sound as tears ran out through her fingers and fell to the floor.

For a moment Gordie stood there, staring, then he turned and ran up the steps.

“Be careful!” I shouted after him.

Lena went to Hanna and squatted down, comforting her, all the while holding my gaze. For the first time in our relationship we were able to exchange consoling looks, and I wished to God we hadn't had such a reason.

“I hate this place,” I told her, “more than anywhere I've ever known.”

“Why don't we go?” she suggested.

“As soon as Dr. Simon gives the all-clear.”

“I can see; it's improving already.”

I was tempted, but for the matter of a couple more days, it didn't seem worth it, not with something so important. “Give it 'til Friday. Then we're gone. No matter what.”

Suddenly Delilah stopped wailing, raised her head and looked at me with strained and bloodshot eyes. “Where is he?” she asked.

Jesus. That was the other question I'd been dreading her asking. “I don't know.”

“What d'you mean?”

“They took him.”

“
What?
”

“I don't know why.”

“I want to see him!” she protested.

“Lile!” Jimmy said, again trying to put his arm around her, but getting pushed away.

“I want to see him!” she repeated, even more desperately.

“He's gone, Lile,” Jimmy told her, and she resumed her sobbing, though this time she did allow him to put his arms around her—or maybe she was just oblivious to anything else.

There was nothing anyone could say. That was our world, both out on the Island and here on the Mainland; nothing and no one was permanent, anyone could disappear, just like that, and it was up to each individual to decide how to deal with it: keep everyone at arm's length, 'cuz feeling for them was merely an invitation to pain? Or dive in and take whatever might be going?

In a way, it was a bit like getting drunk. You could be the loud guy, laughing, singing, living every emotion to the fullest, pulling down the walls and saying all the things you always wanted—or you could just sit there, quietly sipping, never overdoing it, never willing to risk any kind of hangover.

You gotta move on; in your mind, in your heart, if you don't, sadness will nail you to the floor, crush you wherever you choose to lie. Mind you, that's easy for me to say, I never spent as much time with Arturo as Delilah did. She cried right throughout the night while Jimmy tried to comfort her, but no one could ease that pain. The rest of us just lay there helplessly, hearing every word but pretending we didn't, not reacting or commenting, as if that gave them a degree of privacy.

Occasionally Lena would bury her head deep into my chest, maybe to shut out Delilah's grief or to seek some comfort for her own. It was the suddenness as much as anything: just a few hours ago this place had been echoing to the sound of Arturo's laughter, Delilah chasing him around, the pair of them screaming in excitement until she finally managed to tug him into an embrace. Death might be the most natural thing in the world, but it's the hardest to accept.

Not a word was spoken in the morning as we stirred, one by one. The only sound was Delilah's usual early-morning hack, and even that sounded grudging, as if she just didn't want to make the effort.

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Arturo's sleeping bag. I stared at it for a while, sickened by its emptiness, then, with the others still dozing, slipped over and grabbed it. I was gonna take it across the street and toss it on the fire, but with the way the world was it seemed like an awful waste. In the end, I took my secret path through the thorns to that empty space alongside the back wall where no one else went but me and hid it there.

When I got back, Delilah was staring at the space where the sleeping bag had been. She looked at me with a hint of betrayal as I entered, but never said a word.

“Sorry,” I muttered, but she remained silent.

The rest of that morning was one of the longest and saddest of my life. No one really knew how to react or what to say. Tell the truth, it got a bit much for me. As lunchtime approached, I remembered how little food we had and suggested Lena and me went out to look for some.

She paused when we got to the churchyard gate. The fire across the street had burned down to almost nothing, and yet there was still something fueling those flames.

“In a terrible way, that's a beautiful thing for me,” she told me.

“Guess so.”

She wandered across to get a better look. “I see what Jimmy means,” she said, when it flared up again.

“Are you all right getting this close?” I asked, remembering Dr. Simon's warning about the smoke and her eyes.

She nodded, but I pulled her away anyway, just in case, and we both walked slowly on, heading up toward the Square.

The further we went, the more I started to wonder if maybe I'd been wrong to suggest she came with me; actually seeing all the destruction was very different from being told about it. On the way back from Dr. Simon's most of the City had still been intact. Here it was nothing but destruction and burned-out buildings, with the occasional twisted corpse left lying for everyone to see. But she took it all well—almost too well—'til I began to wonder if maybe, as she hadn't been able to see, her mind had conjured up something even worse. Though that was a pretty hard thing to imagine.

We didn't have to go that far in the end: by exploring the more unfashionable-looking streets we found an area where a few stores and restaurants were still functioning and did our previous trick of rummaging through the garbage. I'm not sure what sort of food it was—Asian, maybe Vietnamese or Korean—but business obviously wasn't that good 'cuz we scooped out enough to last us several days.

I would've liked to have kept going, to have shown her more, but we were both feeling guilty about leaving the others for so long, so we headed back.

“Do you think it's getting better?” I asked, referring to her sight.

“Yes. Things are becoming clearer all the time.”

“That's a shame,” I said, kinda teasing myself.

“Clancy!” she groaned wearily.

“Only joking!” I said, grabbing her arm and pretending to restrain her fist in case she took a swing.

“I'm not laughing.”

“Okay, okay, fine,” I said, putting her hand back at her side with the care of a loaded weapon.

We wandered on, both of us trying to be as normal as possible, to wordlessly withstand the crushing weight of Arturo's death, or maybe just beginning to learn to live with it.

“So is that it then?” she finally asked. “Now that I can see my own way you're not going to hold my hand anymore?”

I chuckled and immediately took her hand. “You don't get rid of me that easy.”

“Clancy,” she said, stopping for a moment to face me, “you have no idea how wonderful it is to actually
see
you.”

I smiled at her, grateful for the reassurance, but also delighted to indulge in the simple pleasure of gazing into each other's eyes.

And there, in the middle of the sidewalk, with passers-by staring as if there had to be something wrong with us, we stood and held each other for several minutes, letting the world go by and the pain subside, knowing that, as long as the doc gave the okay—and we could find a way through the fires—by this time the following day we'd be away from all of this.

The following morning, Lena and me took what was becoming a familiar route up into the foothills to Dr. Simon's clinic. Both of us were feeling this odd mixture of optimism tempered by sadness; we were excited at the prospect of going to the country, but oh-so-painfully disappointed that Arturo wouldn't be with us.

This time we were shown straight into the doc's office, though he didn't appear for a good twenty minutes. When he did, he looked unusually flustered.

“So? How is it?” he asked Lena, immediately booting up his computer before scanning her eyes with this scope attachment.

“Fine. They're improving by the day.”

“That's good,” he said, obviously pleased with what he was seeing on the screen. “No pain or discomfort?”

“No, none.”

He studied her eyes for a few moments longer, taking in every detail, then pushed the attachment away. “Fantastic. You can see again,” he announced.

“That's it?” Lena asked, a little surprised.

“Yes. Everything's fine.”

“But the rejection?” I asked, wanting to get it straight in my mind. “That could happen at any time, right?”

“Well . . .” he said, as if dismissing the thought as one of no consequence, “in theory, you're never free of that possibility, but it's minimal. A serious bump might do it, some kind of violent disturbance, but that could happen to a normal-sighted person.”

For a moment Lena just sat there in silence, as if with this final confirmation that she really had regained her sight, she was only now allowing herself to take it in.

“Thank you . . . thank you, thank you!” she said to Dr. Simon, and after a moment, as if she'd been considering it, she jumped up and gave him a hug.

“It's my pleasure,” he told her, looking like a man who didn't like being touched—or maybe he just didn't want his suit creased. “Now, there's just a couple of final tests, and something I want to
give you . . . Will you excuse us a moment, Clancy? Then she's all yours. You won't have to come back again.”

The news that we were finally free to go had prompted as big a smile on my face as it had Lena's. In fact, left alone, and despite being the clumsiest old big guy in the world, I was tempted to leap up on the doc's desk and do a little dance. All we had to do now was find a way out of the city—a corridor, maybe, where the fires had burned themselves out and we could slip through and out into the wilds to somewhere altogether sweeter.

I can't tell you how good that sounded. For sure it would've sounded a whole lot better if Arturo had been coming with us—and I knew his shadow was gonna be there for a very long time—but I reckon he would've been as pleased as anyone to know we were about to go free.

Five minutes waiting for Lena and Dr. Simon to return became ten and I started to pace a little, becoming impatient. I wanted to get going, collect the others and find a way out of that shithole, but I told myself it was only right that the doc should do everything necessary.

I went to the window and took a look out at the garden, noticing how some of the manicured vegetation was starting to feel the effects of the smoke; even the obviously expensive and well-tended plants were becoming a little brown and withered. It was just as I went to turn and resume my pacing that I saw Dr. Simon being driven away in his limousine.

I was too surprised to react—I couldn't get my head around it at all! It couldn't have been—No way! My eyes must've been playing tricks on me. For a moment I just stood there, watching the limo disappearing down the drive, my face frozen in a frown . . .
What the hell?

I rushed to the door and took a look out. “Hello!” I shouted down the hallway, but nobody came. “Hello!”

I started opening other doors, finding room after room empty. What was going on here? Had there been some kind of emergency?
Had he had to leave in a hurry? Is that why he'd been so preoccupied earlier?

“Lena!” I shouted. “
Lena?
”

I found a kind of laboratory, the sort of place where you might've expected her to be, but again there was no one. I was just about to head out to look somewhere else when I noticed an empty syringe on the floor.

What kind of doctor does that, just leaves a syringe lying around? Weren't there rules about that kind of thing? I squatted down, picked it up and studied the couple of drops of clear liquid left inside as if I could tell what they were. Finally, I slipped it into my pocket. I was starting to get a really bad feeling about this.

I went to stand up and found my stiff old joints a little reluctant to straighten. Only at the very last moment did I hear this kind of low swish behind me.

I started to turn but never made it, colliding with something that hit me with real uncompromising force, propelling me straight out into the center of a dark universe and leaving me there to perish.

I came to slowly, blearily, as if all the life left in me was trickling out of one barely open eye. I was in the dark—I didn't know where, but it certainly wasn't the crypt. The space was far too small. One thing was for sure, wherever I was really stank. In fact, the stench was so overwhelmingly obnoxious, it made breathing difficult. At first I thought it was fish—bad fish, old fish, left to putrefy in some forgotten corner, then I realized it was something else, something far worse: the smell was rotting flesh. Rotting
human
flesh . . .

I started to pant. I desperately needed fresh air, but something was on top of me: a sprawling, inert, suffocating weight—in fact, it wasn't just on top of me; I was surrounded on all sides. It was only when I tried to move, to force myself free, that I realized what my cheek was pressed up against, and I tell ya, I damn near threw up.

I was crammed into the middle of a pile of corpses. There were bodies all around me, layer upon layer of dead people. That was the weight I could feel pressing down and from all directions. They
weren't quite decomposing yet—though those at the bottom were obviously well on their way—but fluids were leaking out, dripping down onto me. Blood was everywhere: I couldn't see it, but for sure I could smell and feel its salty stickiness.

Again I tried to move, wriggling and pushing this way and that, all the while trying not to panic as I battled this overwhelming feeling that I was locked into some ultimate nightmare—but I couldn't. It was as if I was jammed into this big tin can, sealed in with as many bodies as could possibly fit in with me. I pushed again, as hard as I could, trying to give myself some space to maneuver, and then—Jesus, the worst thing of all—I gave the body next to me a real shove and my hand disappeared inside. I wrenched it back out, feeling a broken bone, a rib maybe, scratch my skin, and I realized I'd pushed through into nothingness—that body was empty.

My fear must've generated some sort of primitive instinct 'cuz I pushed upward as hard as I could, trying to shift those on top of me, and at last there was a squeak somewhere, the grinding of metal, and just for a moment I saw a tiny slither of the smoky night sky. Then whatever it was—and I guess it was some kind of lid or door—slammed back down and I was entombed once more.

It was that metallic clank that made me think about what I was inside—I knew that sound, it was really familiar. And finally it hit me: it was a dumpster, a big industrial one, by the feel of it, and Jesus, you wanna talk about karma? I'd dumped the odd body in a dumpster myself in my time. I'm not proud of it, and I hope for their sake they hadn't still been alive like me, 'cuz it was about as a bad a fate as I could imagine anyone suffering.

There was no way out of there other than by sheer brute force, focusing down into the very deepest depths of me and mining whatever was left to push and shove, fighting my way through ruptured bodies, torn flesh, discarded organs, things I didn't dare think about, ignoring the blood and bile and slime and feces that coated my body, until finally I managed to punch my way through to the top of the pile and heaving the lid back, gasped in something closer to fresh air.

God only knew what I must've looked like as I tumbled out of that thing. Thankfully, there was no one to see me. I found myself in a deserted service alleyway at the back of some empty buildings, and by the look of all the crap around, it was a favorite dumping place for locals. I spotted some old paint drums nearby filled with murky rainwater, and believe me, nothing could've been more welcome. I tried to rub my face clean before rubbing myself down, but eventually I just poured every drop I could find over me, anything to remove that noxious slime.

What the hell happened? How in God's name had I ended up in a dumpster? Did I die? Or did someone think I was so close it was only a matter of time? And where had all those bodies come from? Women, men—and though it sickened me to say it, there were kids there, too. How'd they died? For sure some had been operated on . . . just thinking that reminded me of that sickening feeling when I'd plunged my hand through the ribs into that empty cavity . . .