World After (12 page)

“She can probably hear you right now.”

The man’s face turns red, making it painful to look at him. “She’ll never come back. And if she does, then she won’t be our Mary. It’ll be some abomination.” He points to a woman standing alone by a tree. “Like her.”

The woman looks fragile, lost, and alone. Even with the brown scarf wrapped around her head and the gloves on her hands, I recognize the shriveled face of Clara, the woman who climbed out of the ruins of the aerie. She wears a dull-colored coat that whispers her desire not to be noticed. I’m guessing people haven’t exactly been welcoming.

She hugs herself as if clinging to the husband and children she longs to find. All she wanted was to find her family.

Mary’s family drags her paralyzed body into the shallow grave.

“You can’t do this,” I say. “She’s fully aware. She knows she’s being buried alive.”

The younger guy asks, “Dad, do you think—”

“Your mother is dead, Son. She was a decent human being and she’ll have a decent burial.” He picks up his shovel.

I grab his arm.

“Get away from me!” He shakes me off, trembling in fury. “Just because you don’t have the decency to do what’s right for your family doesn’t mean you have any right to stop others from doing what’s right for theirs.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You should have put down your sister humanely and with love before strangers had to step in to try to do it for you.”

The older man takes the shovel full of dirt and throws it onto his wife in the hole.

It lands on her face, covering it.

I
N
THE
DARKENING
GROVE
,
Obi waves over one of his guys. “Please put Ms. Young with her mother and make sure they’re safe and secure for the night.”

“You’re arresting me?” I ask. “For what?”

“It’s for your protection,” says Obi.

“Protection from what?” I ask. “The U.S. Constitution?”

Obi sighs. “We can’t have you or your family loose and causing panic. I need to maintain control.”

Obi’s man points his silencer-enhanced pistol at my chest. “Walk to the street and don’t give me any trouble.”

“She’s trying to save people’s lives,” says a trembling voice. It’s Clara, clutching her oversized coat around her as if wishing she could disappear.

Nobody pays her any attention.

I throw Obi a look that says,
Are you serious?
But he’s busy waving over another guy.

He points to Mom’s victim project. “Why is that horrible pile of bodies still around? I told you to take them away.”

Obi’s man tells two other guys to take the bodies down. Apparently, he doesn’t want to do it himself.

The two guys shake their heads and back away. One of them crosses himself. They turn and run toward the school, as far from the bodies as they can get.

As my guard escorts me through the carnage, I hear Sanjay telling people to stow the unclaimed bodies into a van for autopsies.

I stagger away from them. I just can’t watch. Maybe these people really are dead. I certainly hope so.

I get tossed into the back seat of a police car parked on the road. Mom is already there.

The police cruiser has a metal mesh between the front and rear seats. There are bars on the back seat windows. Beneath the rear window, there are blankets and a couple of bottles of water. My foot knocks over a half bucket with a lid, complete with packets of sanitary wipes.

It takes me a minute to understand that they’re not taking us anywhere. This is our holding cell.

Great.

At least the guard didn’t take my sword. He didn’t even pat me down for weapons, so I assume he wasn’t a cop in the World Before. Still, he probably would have taken my sword if it didn’t look like a post-apocalyptic comfort bear.

I sip on a bottle of water, drinking barely enough to quench my thirst but not so much that I’ll need to pee anytime soon.

People frantically rush, trying to finish their jobs before full dark, whether their job is dragging bodies into the autopsy van or burying loved ones. They’ve been glancing at the sky every couple of minutes, but as darkness slithers over them, people begin looking behind them nervously as if worried something will sneak up on them.

I get it. There’s something horrifying about being left alone in the dark, especially with someone you think is dead.

I try not to think about what it must be like for the victims. Paralyzed but aware, left helpless in the dark with monsters and family.

When the last unclaimed body is tossed into the van, the workers slam it shut and drive off.

Those who didn’t go in the van trot across the street to the school. Then the families, whether or not they’re done shoveling dirt on their loved ones, drop their shovels and run after the workers, obviously not wanting to be left behind.

Mom starts to make animal noises of anxiety as she watches everyone leave. When you’re paranoid, the last place you want to be is trapped in a car where you can’t run and can’t hide.

“It’s okay,” I say. “They’ll be back. They’ll let us out when they cool off. And then we’ll go find Paige.”

She yanks on the door handle, then jumps over to my side to try the other one. She bangs on the window. She rattles the screen separating the front seat from the back. Her breathing becomes a pant.

She’s spiraling into serious freak-out mode.

The last thing we need is major hysteria in a space smaller than a sofa.

As the final stragglers run past my window, I yell at them. “Put me in another car!”

They don’t even glance my way as they scramble across the street into the darkness.

And I’m left stuck in a very tight space with Mom.

A
LL
KINDS
of worries swirl around in my head.

I take a deep breath. I try to shove all the worries aside and focus on being centered.

“Mom?” I keep my voice quiet and calm. What I really want to do is crawl under the seat to get out of her way when she goes nuclear. But that’s not an option.

I hold out a bottle of water. “Do you want some water?”

She looks at me like I’m mad. “Stop drinking that!” She snatches it from my hand and stashes it away below the rear window. “We need to conserve it.”

Her eyes dart around every corner of our jail. Her desperate worry shows in every line of her face, and she is the picture of anxiety. It seems there are more of those lines showing up every day between her eyebrows and around her mouth. The stress is killing her.

She rummages through her pockets. With every smashed egg she finds in her pockets, she gets more frantic. To my relief, someone has taken her cattle prod. I hate to think how much force that took.

“Mom?”

“Shut-up-shut-up-
shut-up!
You let those men take her!” She grips the metal mesh with one hand and the seatback with the other. She squeezes until all the blood runs out of her hands, turning them into white claws.

“You let those monsters do all those horrible things to her! You sold yourself to that devil and couldn’t even save your sister?” The ridges between her eyebrows mash together so hard they look nightmarish. “You couldn’t even look her in the eye when she needed you most. You were out there hunting her, weren’t you? So you could kill her yourself! Weren’t you?” Tears stream down her tortured mask of a face.

“What good are you?” She screams in my face with such intensity that her face turns crimson like it’s ready to explode. “You’re heartless! How many times have I told you to keep Paige safe? You’re worse than useless!”

She slams her hand against the mesh repeatedly until I think it might bleed.

I try to block it out.

But no matter how many times I hear her raging at me, her words still pierce through.

I curl into my corner, trying to get as far from her as I can. She’ll twist anything I say to fit her crazy logic and then throw it back at me.

I brace myself for one of her fury storms. Not something I want to experience in a jail so small that we can’t lie down. Not something I want to experience any time, any place.

If it comes down to it, I’m big enough now to beat her in a fight, but she wouldn’t stop until I had to hurt her. Best if I can just soothe her.

But I can’t think of anything to say to calm her. Paige was always the one who did that. So I do the only thing that comes to mind.

I hum.

It’s the song that she hums to us when she’s coming out of a particularly bad spell. It’s what I think of as her apology song. Sunsets, castles, surf, bruises.

She might ignore me or she might go berserk. It could soothe her or make her angrier than ever to hear me humming her song. If there’s one thing you can count on with my mother, it’s that she’s unpredictable.

Her hand whips up and slaps my face.

She hits so hard I think I’ll always carry a palm print on my cheek.

She slaps me again.

The third time, I grab her wrist before she makes contact.

In my training, I’ve been hit, punched, kicked, shoved, slammed, and choked by all kinds of opponents. But nothing hurts as much as a slap from your mom.

I remind myself that it’s been several weeks since she’s been off her medication, but that does nothing to ease the sting.

I brace myself to subdue her somehow without hurting her, hoping it doesn’t escalate too far out of control. But it turns out I don’t have to.

Her expression shifts from fury to anguish. Her fingers loosen against the metal mesh. Her shoulders stoop, and she curls into a fetal ball against the door.

She shakes as the tears take over. She cries in big, baby-girl sobs.

Like her husband has abandoned her to the monsters.

Like her daughters have been torn from her by demons.

Like the world has come to an end.

And nobody understands.

If Paige were here, she’d hold Mom and stroke her hair. Paige would comfort her until she fell asleep. She’s done that countless times, even after our mother hurt her.

But I am not Paige.

I curl into my own corner, gripping the soft fur of my teddy bear.

I
DREAM
I’m with Raffe again.

The surroundings look familiar. We’re in the guest cottage that Raffe and I slept in the night we left the office. It’s the night I learned his name, the night he went from prisoner to partner, and the night he held me in his arms as I shivered in a nightmare.

The tat-tat of the rain against the windows fills the cabin.

I look down at my then-self who is asleep on the couch under a thin blanket.

Raffe lies on the other sofa, watching me. His muscular body stretches languidly across the cushions. His dark blue eyes swirl with thoughts I can’t hear. It’s as if the sword became self-conscious after telling me so much about Raffe, and now it’s keeping his thoughts hidden. Maybe I pushed too hard when I asked about that kiss.

There’s a softness to Raffe’s look that I’ve never seen before. It’s not that I see naked longing or tender love or anything like that. And if I did, it would just be in my messed-up fantasies.