“Rup!”
His anguished bark hit me like a punch to the chest. As much as I wanted to keep my arms around him, the honking horns were growing more insistent. People had begun to shout for the couple to move their car. I swept Bear up in my arms as an awful pressure built in my chest.
“Rup! Rup rup rup rup!”
The woman’s dog cleared out to the far side of the car as I laid Bear onto the backseat. Bear jumped up, barking, but I slammed the door before he could get out.
“We’ll take good care of him. I promise. Son?”
I couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t look at Bear. I ran toward the tree line to escape the sound of his claws scrabbling madly against the raised window.
“Rup! Rup rup rup! Rup! Rup! Rup!”
His barking grew louder and more broken-sounding, mixing with the angry horns of the piled-up cars. All I could do was keep moving, stabbing my boots into the unsteady gravel as fast as I could to get away, into the safety of the trees.
“RUP! Rup! Rup rup rup rup rup rup!”
The woman’s car drew alongside of me and then the engine thrummed as they pulled down the highway. Bear’s barking peaked into an anguished wail as they passed and then it faded and I was alone.
I reeled through the woods, reaching from one tree to the next to hold myself up. Without Bear, the night seemed like a hand pushing me into the ground.
I walked until I couldn’t anymore and then fell onto a mossy bank in the midst of towering oaks. Skeletal branches and black sky hung over me. I rolled onto my side, curling around a keen emptiness, a void where the heat of Bear’s body should have been. I could still feel his chest rise and fall beneath my hand and hear the little yips and barks that escaped his lips as he slept. I tried to imagine him safe and warm in the back of that car, but it was no use. How could I have let him go? How was I going to make it home without him?
Exhausted, I felt myself dragged down and I passed in and out of fitful sleep throughout the night. When I woke for the last time, I was covered in sweat. I struggled to sit up, my body feeling like it was made out of lead. My head was pounding and my stomach churned. I planted one hand in the dirt and rolled myself up, legs shaking, half bent over. I made it twenty or thirty feet from my camp, then fell to my knees just off the highway’s shoulder.
There was a pause like being held over the edge of a cliff and then my gut clenched and I vomited up the foul ditch water until I was breathless. The sickness came in waves, one after the other. When there was nothing left in me, I collapsed onto my side, spent and trembling.
The wind moved through the trees all around me, but I couldn’t feel it. A fever was smoldering in my skin and I was slick with sweat. Cramps moved up and down my body, subsiding and then flaring up without warning.
There was a grinding metallic sound and then a bright light rose up all around me. I looked down the length of the road, squinting at the intensity of the sunrise coming up between the trees. No, not the sun. Headlights. Floodlights. I scanned the roadway through bleary eyes and saw that I wasn’t alone. Bodies emerged from camps on the highway’s shoulder and from their places at the backs of pickup trucks. They all turned to stare into the ball of light down the road. I stumbled forward, drawing closer to it, shading my eyes with a quivering hand.
One of the cars started up and began to pull away from the others, but there was a sound like a string of firecrackers going off and the car exploded into an orange ball of fire. I fell onto the roadway, watching the flames and some dark writhing thing deep inside the burning.
I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move. I watched as Path soldiers stepped from vehicles and into the headlight glare, fanning out, rifles in hand. One refugee charged forward and was shot. The others drifted together into a small grouping, trapped. I saw it then. The main body of the evacuees had passed; now it was time to deal with the stragglers. A figure stepped from a Path vehicle and positioned himself directly in front of the group.
“My name is Beacon Radcliffe,” the man said. “And I am here to offer you all a choice.”
Somehow I found the strength to run. The trees and the roadway blurred, shifting into patterns of black and gray with flecks of yellow from the fire behind me. But then I felt a crash and I was on my back, staring at the stars. How did I get here? I wondered, delirious, as two sets of hands reached down and grabbed me. I thrashed senselessly, trying to pull myself out of the grasp of the dark bodies that had gathered around me, but I was too weak.
“He’s burning up,” someone said. “He’s sick.”
My back hit the road again, this time surrounded by the glare of a truck’s headlights. There were voices all around, murmuring shadows.
“What do we do with him?”
“Son? Son? Can you hear me? My name is Beacon Radcliffe.”
“Where’s James?” I moaned, barely aware of the words leaving my mouth. “Where’s Bear?”
“Give him the Choice and move on,” said a voice far above me.
“He’s delirious,” the beacon said. “He isn’t able to make a choice. Get a stretcher.”
“Sir, we don’t have room for any more. We can’t—”
“I answer to God and Nathan Hill, Sergeant, not you. Now, have one of your men get a stretcher. Once he’s better, we can give him the Choice.”
There was a thump of boots, and the beacon was beside me again, his hand heavy on my arm. I screamed as they lifted me to get the stretcher underneath my back. Every muscle in my body was filled with gravel and glass. Somehow I bit back my screams, but tears coursed down my cheeks. They got me into a troop carrier, dropping me roughly onto the deck, and then the engines started and we pulled away.
What I remembered after that came in a series of bursts as I crashed in and out of consciousness — the weary faces of the other captives in the back of the truck, their hands tied, bodies bent and exhausted; the nauseating lurch of the truck as it went from crawling to racing over uneven roads beneath the pounding of rocket fire; the way the green canvas cover above me lit up, almost beautifully, as bombs burst around and above us. When I closed my eyes to block it all out, there was still the constant shriek of machine-gun fire mixing with screams of pain and fright and the smell of smoke and sweat and fear-soaked urine.
All of this was entwined with the fierce heat of the fever that had moved into every inch of my body. It seemed to grind muscles and bones as if they were in a mortar. I turned my head to vomit onto the floor. My body wasn’t my own.
Time slipped and lurched. Along with the present, the past was there too. I could feel a lake and trees and the winds moving through the flowers of home, like a hand brushing through someone’s hair and then letting it fall. I was lying in the hammock late at night, happily sleepless, with James below me.
Then I was nine and in school, tiny behind my big plastic desk, so much smaller than all the other kids in my class. I felt the weight of the textbooks in my hand, their glossy pages and the rough grocery store paper-bag covers. School let out and I ran out the doors and met James. We found our way down to the creek, where we would leap from boulder to boulder, the slate-gray water coursing just beneath us.
But now it wasn’t only me and James; Bear was there too, barking happily, his tail up and wagging, hesitating at a boulder’s edge until we coaxed him to leap toward us. He would land, his sides shaking with fright at what he had done. James or I would scoop him up and tell him he was a good boy and brave, and we would carry him down the trail until he wriggled out of our arms and took off, leading us on.