He makes a motion to us.
I look at Chris. “What does he want?” I ask.
“He’s not one of them,” he answers, apparently trying to come to a decision about how to respond. Just ten feet around the corner are a bunch of death troopers…we have to play this right. “He wants us to come over there.”
I lick my lips, realizing just how dry my mouth is from anxiety.
“So?”
The man motions again, mouthing the word, “Help.”
Chris immediately takes my arm and sprints across the street without warning. Terror spikes in my system. What if we’re seen?
We make it across the street, stopping to take cover behind the alley wall. Up close the man has an ashy color his skin tone. His eyes are watery, but his expression is tense. “Thank you,” he says, a voice rough and weary with age.
“What’s going on?” Chris asks.
“What isn’t going on, son?” he shakes his head. “Look, you kids need to get off the streets. It’s too late to be wandering around.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“The curfew.” The man looks at me like I’m crazy. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
“No,” Chris says.
“Then why in…” he trails off, sounding tired. “You’d better come with me. If they catch us out here we’ll all get punished.”
A chill slithers down my spine as the man turns and starts walking down the alley. He has an obvious limp, and as we walk, I notice purple bruises on the back of his neck and arms. “Can you tell us what’s happening here?” I ask. “Why are they killing people? What’s –”
The man whips around so fast I stumble backwards and hit Chris in the chest.
“Keep your mouth shut, girl,” he hisses. “You’ll get us all killed with questions like that. Just keep your head down and follow me.”
Chris wraps his fingers around my elbow and presses a finger against his lips, indicating that we should be silent. “Can we trust him?” I mouth.
Chris shrugs.
Why not?
We follow the old man down the alley. He pauses where it connects to another street, checking each direction. There doesn’t seem to be any of those Omega guards patrolling the streets or creepy pop music going on here. Just overturned dumpsters and shattered windows.
The old man makes a quick right and stays close to a brick apartment building. There are trash and food wrappers littered all over the sidewalk. I turn my head to the left and watch a scruffy looking dog run into the street, sniff some garbage, and disappear.
The old man stops at an apartment door. It’s a heavy wooden thing, protected with metal security bars over the outside. He opens both the bars and the door with a key, ushers us inside, and locks everything behind us.
I keep a firm grip on Chris’s arm as we step into a dark, dusty stairwell. The old man says, “Watch your step,” and starts climbing the carpeted steps in front of us. It’s impossible to tell how wide the stairway is, or what color the walls are. Chris and I just follow him until we come to what I guess is the fourth floor.
We walk down a narrow hallway that smells like cigarette smoke. Not a single sound can be heard coming from any room, making the whole thing even stranger.
At last, the old man stops in front of an apartment door, opens it, and motions for us to go inside. Chris walks in first, ready to take whatever surprise is waiting for us first. I follow the old man inside, surprised to see nothing but a small apartment illuminated by the light of multiple candles.
There are books everywhere, and pictures, too. The old man locks the door behind us, takes a deep breath and says, “Now we can talk.” He offers his hand. “The name’s Walter Lewis.”
Chris shakes his hand.
“Chris,” he replies, leaving out his last name. “And this is Cassidy.”
Walter turns to look at me.
“You together?” he asks.
I feel my cheeks turn red while Chris flashes a self-satisfied smile.
“Technically,” he replies. “But I think you owe us an explanation first. Who are you and why did you bring us here?”
Walter wipes his hands on his pants.
“You were out past curfew,” he says. “You could have been shot on sight.”
He walks past me and disappears through a door, popping up on the other side of a short wall. I take a step back and realize he’s standing over the kitchen sink, looking into the living room. The curtains are pulled tight — nailed, actually.
“What’s curfew?” I ask. “What’s happening? Do you know anything about these camps? Where are those soldiers from? They were speaking all these languages…” I trail off.
Walter sighs and I hear him pouring water into something metal. When he comes back into the living room, he’s holding a coffeepot and some mugs. “They — meaning Omega - arrived here the day after the EMP destroyed everything,” he says, setting the mugs on a coffee table crowded with magazines. “Started rounding people up, sending them to the Emergency Relief Camp — that’s what they called it at the beginning.” His eyes become hooded, sad. “Most people went willingly.”
He pours some coffee into the mugs and offers a cup to each of us. I mutter thanks and close my hands around the hot glass. “Why are they killing people? And who’s Omega? I’ve never heard of them.”
Walter looks long and hard at me.
“Truthfully, I’m not really sure,” he says at last. “It’s just what these troops call themselves. Omega.”
“Come again?”
“I’ve never heard of them,” Chris replies, looking dumbfounded. And here I thought he knew everything. “What the hell’s going on?”
I look back at Walter for a deeper analysis.
“Your name was Cassidy, wasn’t it?” he asks, furrowing his brow.
I nod.
He strokes his chin, setting the coffeepot down and rifling through a stack of books near an empty fireplace. He pulls one out. “Here, Cassidy,” he says. “What’s the title of this book?”
I wrinkle my nose, disliked being talked to like I’m a toddler.
“World War Two,” I say, reading the red letters.
“Correct.” He sits down on the coffee table, so I join Chris on the sofa. Walter flips through a few pages and adjusts his glasses. “Ah. Now what’s this, Cassidy?”
I peer at the book, trying to make out the black and white images in the candlelight: candid shots of Japanese Americans staring at the camera behind a wire fence. “Internment camps,” I say, looking up.
“Yes.” Walter gets up and walks to another bookshelf. “During the 1940s, Japanese Americans were imprisoned in internment camps during the war. In Germany, Hitler sent millions of Germans and Jews alike to concentration camps where they were either worked to death or executed in a gas chamber.” He stops to take slow breath. “Around the world, periodically, the populace is overtaken by a superior power and either enslaved, killed or freed. What we have in Omega is a force that is doing the first two as fast as they can.”
I blink, all of this sinking in slowly.
“Why? Where did they come from? What country do they represent?” I say slowly.
“No country,” Walter shrugs. “You look around town and you’ll see posters advertising their presence.” I take the poster I peeled off the wall out of my pocket and smooth it out over my knee. He’s right. “They represent not one country, but all,” he goes on. “They seem to be some sort of emergency response force at first glance, but then again, their soldiers range in nationality from American to Russian. I’ve never seen anything like it.”