“How’d you do that?” she asked, blinking her green eyes. Her hooded, fur-lined jacket framed her face and made her look like a well-groomed cat.
“Spider bite,” I grunted.
She pursed her lips. “Ooh, must have hurt a lot.” Like hell. Her forehead creased as she investigated me like a body to be autopsied. She moved her hand and pointed a finger at the top of my heart surgery scar. “And this one?”
My scars were not something I cared to notice or talk about. They were signatures of the past. Things we’d moved away from. Under her hands, her gaze, I was captive and I didn’t like it. I wanted to say, stop touching me, but she saved my life. So I guess I had to be polite.
“Open heart surgery,” I muttered. “Performed by Matt.” I pointed to Matt, who was walking on the other side of my stretcher.
Sensing my discomfort, he changed the subject. “So did you see our operative Gwen last year?” Matt asked as they talked over the top of my stretcher.
Elise shook her head. “No. They didn’t even make it past the second gate before they were captured. I’m sorry; I wish I could have done something.” She sounded genuinely sad.
Matt reached over me and patted her shoulder. “It’s ok, Elise. It’s not your fault.”
I closed my eyes and tried to pretend they weren’t there. I just listened to the frozen leaves grazing each other. Tried to boil my feelings down to simple things. The sun warming my body. The light stinging my eyelids. The blood pumping… faces, dead, scraped faces.
My eyes snapped open again. Elise placed a cool hand on my forehead.
“You all right?” she asked.
Her light hair fell down over her eyes as she leaned over me. From here, with the sun behind her head, I could barely make out her features. I squinted and replied in terse a tone, “I’m fine.”
She took off her jacket and shaded my face. “Is that better?”
“That’s not necessary,” I grumbled. “You’ll get cold.”
“I don’t mind,” she chirped.
I do mind, a lot.
I groaned and rolled to the side, shifting my weight and causing the men carrying me to stumble. It hurt like I’d been burned all over.
“I’ll just be happy when I can get off this stretcher,” I said. I thought, Happy? What a joke.
“One more sleep and you can,” she said, smiling, talking to me like a patient. It was a tone I had used many times myself.
After hours of walking, we left the dirt and the trees and descended, the rock rising higher on either side. We passed through a corridor carved from stone like someone had taken a log splitter to the earth and cracked it open. Tiny pines clung to little pockets of dirt in the cliff face. Sunlight streamed down from overhead as it was the middle of the day. I enjoyed the real warmth while it lasted because soon it would be freezing cold again.
Pelo stopped abruptly in front of us and leaned against the wall with his angular shoulder. Some of his movements were so like her because they were unpredictable, forceful. It was hard to watch. Pulling his reader from his pocket, he checked the time. He looked to Gus, who nodded. Everyone stopped moving and waited. Pelo switched on the GPS and immediately, it made a bell sound. A foreign sound. He held it away from his face, his eyes, her eyes, focused on the message. I propped myself up on my elbows and waited.
He cleared his throat.
“Get on with it man!” Rash snapped from his cross-legged position on the ground.
Olga waddled over to him eagerly. “Yes, Pelo, dear, tell us what it says,” she asked, pressing close to him and straining her neck to see the screen. Her eyebrows rose and her mouth quivered. I braced for bad news.
“Right. It says around three hundred men, women, and children breached the wall of Birchton. Soldiers have lost control. Chaos. It’s working … and…” Pelo paused, his eyes becoming wet. He blinked his dark eyelashes and swiped his face to clear the tears.
“And what?” someone asked.
His hand shook. Olga gently pried the handheld from his thin fingers.
“What does it say?” Rash asked impatiently.
Olga bowed her head as she registered the words. “It says: Praise Rosa.”
Everyone bowed their heads. Except me. I looked to the sky. The clouds moved fast, creating dark shadows that blasted over the top of us and then revealed the sun again. I wasn’t going to cry in front of them. I wasn’t going to mourn her. Not yet.
Elise bowed her head with a puzzled expression.
Rash said what I wanted to say. “She’s not dead. Stop bowing your heads like morons. Write back and then switch it off!”
Pelo oozed sadness. He was as dark as those clouds.
“What do I write?” he asked, sounding uncharacteristically unsure.
“Tell them to recruit able-bodied people to meet us at the designated place,” Gus said gruffly. “And er, tell them good work.”
“What place is that?” Olga asked, and Gus either didn’t hear her or ignored her.
“What about the others?” I shouted, my voice bouncing off the rock walls.
Gus shook his head. The man needed a shave; his beard was starting to look pretty caveman-like.
“We’ve started the fire, now they need to feed it.”
Pelo tapped out the message as I put my hand to my own face. I needed a shave too. He turned off the handheld quickly. We could only communicate once a day. Everyone got up and resumed walking forward.
Elise nudged me playfully with her elbow. “Cheer up, Joseph, it’s only one more night,” she said perkily. “Who’s this Rosa anyway?”
I didn’t answer. She was everything. She was mine. She was none of Elise’s business.
Matt answered for me as he took over carrying the stretcher for a while. “She’s one of us. This mission was her idea.”
They launched into a discussion about the mission and about Rosa’s brilliant idea. One more night stuck in conversations I didn’t want to be in. I sighed and closed my eyes.
At least tomorrow, I would see her face again.
They marched all day as I lay staring at the sky, watching the weather and wishing I were somewhere else. I was a burden. They scaled a slim path that led out of the ravine and into the valley where Radiata sat. The snow had melted under the glare of the sun but was fast building up now that it had disappeared behind the rocks and the clouds had gathered like conspirators.
We retreated into a cave, high above the town. From my position, I could see the sweep of torchlight, scanning the flat terrain around the outside of the wall fervently as darkness gathered. It seemed they were expecting us.
“We better just blow the wall and forget about the video,” Gus said, slapping the wall and wiping the pigeon blood from his hands on the rock in a grotesque finger painting. The bird crackled in the pan as the hollow sound of a gas cooker echoed through the tunnel.
“No,” I said. Not really knowing how to explain myself because I had selfish reasons for wanting them to play it. Everyone turned to me.
Gus paused for a moment but then turned away and started talking to the Survivors who were supposed to enter Radiata tomorrow. I propped up on my elbows and said, “Gus, listen, it’s not enough… you have to… she wouldn’t want it this way.”
Elise laid a hand on my arm, stroking back and forth with her thumb. I was exhausted, and I was too tired to fight her.
“What if you blew the wall and then planted the video amongst all the chaos? The explosion will draw people towards the outer wall. You could plant it near there so you don’t actually have to go inside the town,” she suggested.