I bet they had found my presence unpleasant but was somehow just too disinclined to say it out. Feeling like being swathed in an expanding vexatious atmosphere, I was forced to move away. I didn’t know what I should do then, but one thing was clear. I couldn’t get along with no one in this place. Realized all of them, all four of them, didn’t want me here, my desire to get out of this place then prodded me to go up the stairs to where Kriss had gone because at least, she was willing to talk to me.
But as I was inching like a turtle toward the staircase, I heard a heavy tread of someone bouncing down the stairs so urgently that I could tell there was a change of plan just by hearing that.
When she came into our sight on the staircase, she gasped, rushing down, with a mobile phone grasped in her hand, “Guys! Guys!” she said when she reached level ground, with her hands on bent knees, breathing unrhythmically. “Change of plan! They are in trouble. I just got a message from Jack saying they are now under attack and that we should act before they are captured. We have to go now, before they find out about us. Agree?”
“They are under attack!? Shouldn’t we go to help them?” Frederick suggested, and it startled me as I didn’t know he was suddenly somewhere close behind me.
Then as I sidestepped to avoid standing in his way, I saw him bridging up his eyes with his left hand, his right hand holding Ciara’s tighter than before, and continued, giving a grimace of pain, “Forget about what I said. I say we should just go without them. We have to finish what we have started.”
“Well, Ryson? What do you two think?” Kriss questioned with stabilizing breaths.
“You’re the boss, Kriss,” Ryson answered.
“Mack?” Kriss shifted her focus onto the Asian.
“You’re the boss.”
“Good. Ready to go now?” Kriss said.
The fact that she didn’t ask my opinion like I wasn’t part of the team was slightly upsetting, but anyway, even if she had asked, I wouldn’t have objected, so that’s fine to me.
CHAPTER NINE
The five of us then calmly walked out of House Heaven. And when I was about to shut the door close behind me, I happened to catch a glimpse of a black silhouette scurrying rapidly past through in between my feet, skidding into the house.
When it became clearer in my eyes, “A rat in the heaven,” I flinched a bit and muttered, and regretted for not closing the door faster as two more of its fellows then slipped into the house quickly, same speed, same route, but of course, unlike that house, there are no rats here in this house I’m living in.
“Hurry up,” Ryson whispered to me from a distance as though his voice would expose his identity as a freedom-pursuer even though we were alone on that quiet pavement, and I closed the door and hastened over.
With Kriss leading the way, we veered left and continued trudging up in the same direction as before until the steep slope winding right ended at the edge of a flat plateau. From there, where I was sure I could have feasted my eyes on the impressive view of almost half of the city if not for the veils of poor air – the closer to the ground, the poorer the air was – hugging the ground, I squinted and had my eyes swept through everything I could distinguish, like the hissing streams of billowing dark smoke that was escaping the hotel from every openings it could find, making it look like a giant chimney with leaking holes.
“There, at the fountain. The park is over there,” Kriss said, pointing, presumably, to the prominent fountain I had once seen, distracting me, and I was then stunned by the keenness of her eyesight because I literally couldn’t see anything that was shorter than the hotel.
“Why is it so important for us to get to the park?” I asked.
“Because there lies the only entrance of the tunnel,” she said and walked off. “Let’s not waste another minute standing.”
And I hurried up until I walked at her side, then she picked up her pace again, but I wasn’t going to let her win this time because I wanted to make sure she really had a feasible plan. So I tried my best to catch up with her constantly changing pace. “Where does that tunnel lead?”
“It’s an underground tunnel connecting the border areas and the center of the country. It’s the only possible way to smuggle you out safely.”
She seemed annoyed by my persistence as she stopped altering her walking speed soon. “What about after we reach the border areas? We can’t just walk past the borderline assuming the border patrols won’t spot us.”
She raised one corner of her mouth, making a half smirk. “Yes, we can’t.”
“Well then, what?”
Raised another side of the corner of her mouth, she made a subdued but extended full smirk. “We can’t walk past it on land, but there will be nothing stopping us if we are in a boat,” she said.
She sounded like she had underestimated the difficulty of getting past the coastal defense forces without being noticed.
So I frowned. “What about the coastal defense forces? Won’t they be able to detect us?”
“Don’t worry. The small armed patrol vessels that have the greatest access to the shallow shoreline areas have all been sent out on a mission to defend an outlying island. They are not going to be a threat to us as long as we sail with care and avoid bumping into one of those big ships with big guns mounted on it.”
“How do you know they have all been sent out? Aren’t you—”
She broke in. “As I’ve told you, there are many of us.”
It sounded like a plan if her intel was reliable. So, after thinking it over and over again in my head, “Sounds like a plan,” I agreed, with an unusual deep-set tone that I rarely adopted, though there was an unknown uneasiness developing within. “But there is one thing truly perplexing. Why are you helping us? I mean I appreciate everything you guys have done for me and I know I might have already been dead without your help, but why? I just don’t understand.”
Then, an embarrassingly thorny moment of unwanted silence emerged. I thought she would eventually say something. I was wrong. No one spoke a word like I’d asked the most difficult question in the world and I guessed maybe they just wanted to help without a particular reason – this is not true as she has explained later that she’d only remained silent because my question seemed daft. And that awkwardness wasn’t torn apart until we heard some whining engine sounds of some kind of a large group of bulky vehicles. It was like there were thousands of racing cars speeding up at the same time and was so deafening that it was like the continental itself was drifting. At that time, I had no idea what we were facing, but it was beyond doubt something unimaginably bad.
“What is happening?” I said, frantically. “An earthquake?”
“It isn’t an earthquake,” Kriss replied coldly, with placid eyes and deep breaths, and I remember she had intuitively ceased blinking for a minute or two before she continued. “It’s much worse.”
“What could have been worse—” I kept my lips sealed when Kriss motioned me to look in her direction she was gazing at.
So I turned away from her and immediately saw the barrel of a tank attached to the front of the turret of a tank covered with urban camouflage paintings. It was climbing up a steep road on the other side of the plateau, where the street began sloping down back to the boulevard. And I was sheerly astonished, didn’t know what to say or what to do, feeling like the world had abandoned me.
As the tanks were still climbing up with their upper front plates skyward, Kriss jolted me out of my panic, just like what she had done to me at the airport, and said, as I lurched forward, “I need you to walk. Walk behind Ciara and Frederick. They will be walking in front of you. Bear in mind that you have to pretend you don’t know them. Walk like you haven’t noticed anything out of ordinary. Walk like a local. Do you still remember how indifferent the locals are? Do not draw any attention. Do not show fear, and most importantly, do not interfere no matter what happens. Can you do that for me? Can you?”