The Line Book Two: Walled Page 10

  Pendulums.

  Her glasses had broken and were dangling from her face.

  I felt my sweat turn to ice and my tongue tasted sour. She looked as if she’d been shot and then trampled. There was an imprint from a boot on her cheek.

  Ric met them in the middle of the street, but there was nowhere for him to examine her. If they put her down on the pavement, they’d be in the middle of the stampeding crowd. While Bubbs still held her, Ric lifted his fingers to her neck and put his cheek up to her nose. “Still breathing,” he said. “Come on.”

  Ric waved at me to follow as he walked straight through the gate to East. Just on the other side was the double-wide trailer the guards had used as a base. Ric kicked in the door, and we followed him inside.

  There were two desks, a stockpile of weapons stacked neatly in one corner and a large table with someone’s lunch still sitting out in the open. Ric knocked the food aside.

  “Here,” he said.

  Bubbs put Minnie on the table. She didn’t make a sound. Her entire torso was pooling with thickening blood.

  “Find me a first aid kit and flashlights,” Ric ordered, his voice laced with panic.

  I went about searching the room, upturning cabinets, dumping out drawers, scuttling across desktops. Finally, I found a red tin box with a sideways X on the front and brought it over to Ric. There were two large black flashlights hanging on the wall by the exit, so I grabbed those, as well.

  In the meantime, Bubbs stood there and stared at Minnie. She barely breathed.

  Back at the table, Ric ripped Minnie’s shirt open, then stood there gaping. There was blood everywhere, on his hands, his arms, his forehead, her chest, on both their pants and now pooling underneath her on the table. There was so much I could hardly believe it.

  “Bubbs,” Ric said, waving his hand to try and catch his attention. “Hand me those towels over there. Quick!” He meant the ones inside the bathroom, on the other side of the room, but Bubbs was holding his bloody hands out in front of him as though they were toxic and he couldn’t take his eyes from Minnie, who had turned deathly pale and hadn’t moved.

  “Naya?” Ric pleaded, and I burst into action, bringing him the towels. He didn’t take them, however; instead he pressed my hands into Minnie’s bullet-ridden abdomen. “Keep the pressure on the wounds.”

  “Where’s Sonya?” I asked.

  No one answered me. Ric was digging in the first aid kit and then on the floor for something. Bubbs continued to gawk at Minnie.

  “Bubbs, where’s Sonya?” I asked again. I had visions of her lying bloody on the street, but Bubbs looked too dazed to speak. He blinked twice and finally looked at me.

  “I need someone to hold a flashlight. Bubbs, come here,” Ric said. “Bubbs?”

  He nodded, then stepped forward, touched his bloody fingers into Minnie’s hair, turned and marched straight out the trailer door.

  “Hey!” Ric yelled after him. “No, wait! I can’t do this by myself.” He stood from the floor, watching him leave. He then dropped his gaze back to Minnie and blinked away the sweat that had dripped into his eyes. Wiping his face on his sleeve, he turned away from the first aid kit. He held a metal clamp in one hand and a steak knife in the other. That must have been what he’d been searching for on the floor—from the dinner plate left behind.

  “Alright,” Ric said, his eyes darting back and forth. He’d gone pale. “Forget the flashlight. You’re going to have to hold her down if she regains consciousness.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Just grab them.”

  I let go of the sopping towels and skirted around him, taking both of Minnie’s hands in mine and pulling them up over her head. She felt cold to the touch, but I could still see her chest moving up and down. Just barely.

  Ric peeled away the blood-soaked towels, swabbed the wounds with a disinfectant wipe from the first aid kit and used the knife to cut slits across the two bullet holes, one just under her ribs and the other by her navel. Then he took the clamp and dug around inside the wounds.

  He cursed under his breath. “I can’t see a thing. Forget the arms, go grab that flashlight.”

  I let go. Minnie moaned and moved slightly, making the clamp slip out of Ric’s hand.

  “Damn it!” he cried.

  The trailer door burst open. It was Sonya and Bubbs. She paled at seeing Minnie, but Bubbs looked away.

  “You two,” Ric begged. “Grab her arms, please? Hold her still. I have to get these bullets out and see if there’s organ damage. Naya, the flashlight.”

  Sonya swallowed thickly. “Organ damage?”

  “Just grab her arms!”

  “Is she breathing?” Sonya asked, still transfixed at the trailer door.

  I snatched the flashlight and shone it on the bullet wound Ric was working on. “Yes, she’s breathing. Come on,” I said.

  Sonya held her position, and what came out of her mouth next made my jaw drop open. “You should let her go.”

  “What?” It was Bubbs. He was gazing at Sonya with such a venomous look I almost took a step back. “What did you say?” he repeated.

  Sonya’s face softened at Bubbs’s expression, but she didn’t waver. Her jaw set and her teeth gnashed. “She’s too far gone, and she won’t make it to the wall in that condition.”

  Ric peered at Sonya, an odd mixture of disbelief and determination on his face. “No. But we have to try and save her.”

  “She’s already dead,” Sonya said.

  “She’s still breathing!” I snapped.

  “If we don’t get to the wall then we’ll never get out of Auberge,” Sonya said, a hint of coldness in her voice. “We have to leave her here and take advantage of this mob while we still have them. They’re scattering like cockroaches out there.”

  “Do you even hear yourself?” I gasped.

  “Forget it, Sonya,” Ric said, turning his attention back to the bullet wound. “I’m not leaving her. Naya, the light.”

  I shone the light at the wound, and he probed again with the clamp.

  Minnie moaned, and he froze, but she didn’t move again. Ric’s head bent low as he went back to work.

  “We’re wasting time,” Sonya said. “Just leave her.”

  “Shut up, Sonya!” Ric barked.

  “Look,” she pressed. “Minnie understood the risks involved in this mission when she signed up for it. She’d want us to take the wall. There’s still a long way to go before we get there, and she’s not going to make it. Listen to me. Doc!”

  “Go to hell,” Ric said. He pulled out the first bullet and dropped it on the floor of the trailer. It landed with a metallic thud, and he kicked it under the table with the tip of his boot. “Naya, the light.”

  I reaimed the flashlight at the second bullet hole, but Ric stopped just short of dipping the clamp into the wound. He paused, looked up into Minnie’s pale and still face, then felt her neck again with two fingers.

  His shoulders slumped.

  A cry sputtered from Bubbs’s lips.

  Ric pitched the clamp across the room. It clattered against the wall with a crash. “Fuck!”

  I watched Minnie’s chest. She’d stopped breathing.

  Sonya had the decency to not say a word, but I saw her nod as I flicked off the flashlight.

  Ric recovered from his tirade, cupped his hands together and pumped Minnie’s chest. “When I say blow, you blow air into her mouth. Okay?”

  “Come on,” Sonya said, and she turned toward the door. “It’s time to go.”

  Ric kept pumping. “And blow. Come on. Blow!”

  I shook my head. Minnie had gone bone-white and the pool of blood underneath her was so large, blood ran across the table and dripped onto the floor with sick, wet splats.

 
She was gone. Long gone. There was no way of saving her. Even I knew that.

  I put my hand on Ric’s arm, and he stopped pumping. He looked confused at first, but then pressed his lips together, flushed to his ears and took his hands up from Minnie. Then he spun around and kicked the wall behind him so hard, a framed picture fell and shattered at his feet.

  “Motherfucker!”

  “It’s time to go,” Sonya said. She sounded so callous.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Her words hit me like a punch in the gut. “We can’t just leave her here,” I said. “Shouldn’t we bury her or something?”

  “And what would be the point of that?” Sonya asked.

  “Sonya!” Ric bellowed, and I saw a flicker of shame move across her face, but only for a moment. It was quickly replaced with a cool calculated stare.

  “As I said, we have to get to the wall,” she repeated. “Before we lose momentum.”

  For a moment, all I could do was stand there in shock, my eyes widening as if somehow I would be able to see her better. “You know it’s not right,” I said. “Abandoning her like this.”

  Bubbs agreed. “She deserves better.”

  “Just doesn’t feel right,” Ric said.

  Sonya’s eyes flared and her face flushed crimson. “Would the three of you shut up? Of course none of this feels right. It’s a fucking war! Would I like to stay behind and bury Minnie? Yes. Absolutely—it’s the right thing to do. But this isn’t about what’s right. Is it? It’s about making Auberge a free state. And people are going to die. Have you seen it out there? The ground is covered with bodies! Minnie knew the risks. She’d want us to keep going. Now come on, we’ve got to move before security forces come down from Central and kill us all.”

  I’d never seen her so enraged. Her eyes bugged out and her fists clutched at her sides. Sonya looked like a totally different person.

  How was this the same Sonya I’d known before?

  I fought the urge to cross the room and shake her by the shoulders. Instead, my fists clenched and I felt my shoulders rise higher toward my ears. “What the hell happened to you?” I blurted. “I don’t understand you at all.”

  “I hate to break it to you, sister, but this is me, this has always been me, and now I’m telling you to get your ass moving and let’s get the hell out of here, or we’ll all end up like her.”

  “Her name is Minnie!” I shrieked, losing control of my voice. “And she was your friend. And she just died! Show a little compassion.”

  Sonya’s whole expression contorted at this. She clicked her neck to one side, as if I’d just slapped her in the face. But when she looked back at me, her eyes were filled with angry tears. She bared her teeth like a fierce animal and took a step forward, pointing her finger at me.

  “Compassion? You want me to show a little compassion? Is that it, Naya? Well, fuck you! You hear me? Fuck. You. You know what compassion got us last time? We rescued those girls from the Line, only to have them slaughtered—slaughtered—like fucking sheep by those waiting guards. Remember that? How we handed over fifty girls to get massacred? And why? Because we were too stupid being compassionate to realize that’s what Auberge wanted us to do!”

  “Sonya...” Ric interrupted.

  “Some of those girls got away,” I protested.

  “No!” Sonya shouted, clenching her jaw as her eyes bugged wide. “Not enough! It’s our fault we got those girls killed. Her fault!” She pointed at me again, and I felt my insides burst into flames and scatter like ash. “So don’t stand there and tell me how feeling compassion is the way to go. Compassion only gets people killed faster. It’s using your fucking brain, and thinking, planning, strategizing, that’s going to end this war. It’s following your goddamned mission and not getting distracted! And guess what? People are still going to die. So go ahead, stay behind and bury Minnie because it feels right. Choose the fate of hundreds of thousands of people based on your fucking feelings.”

  My mouth gaped open. Speechless, all I could do was swallow the lump that had grown in the back of my throat and stare at her. I felt naked, disemboweled, as if she’d found my softest underbelly and slashed it open for all to examine and ridicule.

  She was right.

  “That’s enough,” Ric said to her. His face was tight and purple with rage.

  “Fuck you too, Doc,” Sonya continued. “You spend so much time pussyfooting around poor Naya’s feelings you can’t even see what she’s done to you.”

  “Stop it!” he snapped. “That’s enough!”

  “You’re right about that,” she agreed, and then she was gone, out the door of the trailer, leaving Bubbs, Ric and me to gawk after her.

  We all stared at the door, too astounded to speak for several moments.

  “I don’t even know who she is anymore,” Ric finally said. His shoulders slumped and he took a step back to lean against the wall. He was still covered in Minnie’s blood.

  Without a word, Bubbs adjusted the straps of his backpack and exited out the door, leaving Ric and me alone with the body.

  Ric dropped his head, looking exhausted. I put the flashlight down and before I had thought it through, I scooped him into an embrace.

  He gasped and tried to pull away, but I held tight. His arms were stiff, like boards, and he patted my back as if I was a child. Then I remembered how I’d ruined us and between that sorrow, and losing Sonya, and Minnie’s body beside us, I started to cry.

  Ric patted me again, but I couldn’t feel his warmth. It was gone. Spent. He had nothing left to give me.

  I stepped back, and he looked at me quizzically, but there was no tenderness, no concern about what I was going to do next.

  “Maybe she’s right,” I sniffed. “We should get to the wall.”

  Ric swallowed and nodded. Words played on the edge of his lips but he didn’t speak. Instead, he shuffled off toward the bathroom and washed Minnie’s blood from his hands.

  Chapter Eleven

  We compromised. Ric found a tarp in one of the cabinets. We laid it over Minnie’s body on the table.

  Insufficient.

  But it would have to do.

  Ric stuffed the first aid kit into his leather satchel, and then we went back out into East sector. For the first time since we’d busted through the gate, I took the opportunity to look around.

  Sonya hadn’t been kidding about the bodies. There were at least a hundred, and they were everywhere. Most of them were on the Central side of the gate, but on the East side, there were the bodies of guards too.

  We stepped over them, around them. Ric checked the pulses on a few.

  It was pointless.

  We moved on.

  I tried to concentrate on the scenery around me. I knew I’d been in East before, yet nothing seemed familiar. My memories were vague at best.

  I had lived there with my family when I was very young, before I’d been sold. At the time, I remembered thinking how Central was made of cement and stone, versus East being made of wood and brick—but beyond the small interior of our tiny apartment, I recalled very little of the landscape.

  As it was, the streets of East that were closest to Central were still lined with trash and piles of burlap sacks, and there were a few cars abandoned on the sides of the roads. One to two blocks in, there didn’t appear to be much difference between the sectors at all.

  The longer we walked, the deeper we went. Farther away from the gate to Central, the sector evolved. For one, there was no traffic. At all. Not a single car moved down the roads, and given the state of the streets, they probably hadn’t been able to in a while.

  In Central, there was so much traffic, weeds and plant life couldn’t grow in the cracks of the broken sidewalks and streets—they were crushed before they even had a chance to sprout. But in
East, the greenery flourished, popping out of every crack and crevice, every gutter and storm drain teamed with vegetation. It gave the area a wild, overgrown, almost desolate appearance.

  Plus, the housing situation was unique too.

  Instead of large, tightly packed apartment buildings and brownstones like in Central, East sector had row upon row of single-story houses, square and identical. The houses had tiny lush yards in the front and what were probably, at one point, cement driveways leading up to separate single-car garages on each property. Now, the driveways were full of weeds, or broken and gone altogether to reveal the dirt below. Quite a few houses used the area as a garden. I saw vegetables and berry bushes wrapped in skinny octagonal wire sheets. Or in some cases there was no garden at all. Instead they had a group of chickens scratching at the dirt, or just a burning trash pile. With a single front wooden door, and a window overlooking the front yard, I noticed faces inside, watching our passage.

  Families.

  Scared families.

  There were a great many. East residents were doing their best to guard their property by standing on their porches with shovels and gardening implements, or axes and chainsaws, and cursing at us “Central folk” to keep moving, get off their street or to move along. Oddly, it seemed to be working.

  For some reason, the people of Central left the Easterners alone. While they’d looted the stores and markets and murdered the guards in their own sector only an hour ago, I was surprised to see them leave the homes of East alone. Surely they would be easy targets. There were so many windows and doors to each place. So many soft spots to bust in and take everything.

  But instead, the mass of Central citizens walked along the weed-ridden street in the midday sun like a herd, keeping off the properties and looking straight ahead, toward the wall, off in the distance.

  While some stood guard, there were other East families who didn’t come out to intimidate or protect their homes. Instead, they peered out their locked front windows and doors in awe and fear, unable to move. I found myself squinting at their peeping faces, hoping I’d recognize someone. A neighbor? A relative? Anyone. Perhaps even my parents. But my memory of my time in East was so vague, I had no way of gauging if what I saw was a memory or just wishful thinking.