The Doctor shows me his hands. “Look what you’ve done,” he tells me. “Who will kill the Worm now? Who?” All the fight has leaked out of him.
I turn away and run for the door. I throw it open and bolt outside, and, without looking around, I run for the river. I haven’t run far when I hear the door slam open behind me.
“Come back!” The Doctor cries after me. “We need you!”
But I don’t listen. When I reach the edge of the bank over the river, I launch myself into the air over the river, my heart beating free and alive inside me as I twist and fall through the air.
143
When I climb out of the river, coughing up water, I pause for a moment to listen. Although the current is not nearly as fast as it had been when Eric leaped into it, it’s still fast enough to get me down river pretty fast. I listen carefully for noises of pursuit, but I don’t hear anything. I don’t have time to wait. I have to make it to Cairo, to see if I can find Pest and Eric, to know if they’re still alive. I spring to my feet and, turning south, I begin to run.
Feeling my heart beat and my legs stretch out and my lungs fill with cool, springtime air, I am filled with relief. I duck under branches and leap over logs. I control my breathing and fall into a rhythm, running through the woods, finding the paths of least resistance, even if I have to move in long loops. Not only do I have to put space between me and the crazies behind me, but now that I’m free, now that I'm not about to die, I am full of anxiety about Eric.
I imagine the scene in Cairo. In my mind, I see them unwrapping the plastic oatcakes, eating them without knowing the poison they contain, the poison Randy fed to them. A day later, they start to get sick. First one, then another, then a dozen. The fear turns to panic when the sick begin to cry tears of blood. The panic turns to rage when the first die. The rage turns to violence when they have to kill the first one that turns. The village blames Eric and they blame Pest for bringing him. Pest is no idiot, he hides in the church. He goes down into the basement and barricades the doors. The people of Cairo try to get in. They bash at the door.
What happens next, I can’t imagine. I can. I can imagine it, but I won’t.
If they’re dead, all of this has been for nothing. All of this was meaningless suffering. I can’t think of that. I won’t even imagine it.
It is best to keep running, to lose myself in fatigue and pain and the constant rhythm of my feet striking ground. If I stop, I will think, and if I think too much, I will lose my mind.
It is better to run.
144
I run for hours. I hit my pace about an hour into the run. I don’t feel my legs at all or my arms. I feel as light as the air around me. I’ve always been skinny, I know that, but now, after all I’ve been through, I am not much more than bones and long, thin muscle. It is as if I’m floating through the forest, not running. I leap and duck and jump over and under branch, without losing my rhythm, without losing this weightless feeling I have. There is pain. In my legs. My lungs. Sometimes my feet. But the pain is removed from me, somehow distant, at arm’s length, not outside myself exactly, but a curiosity. It is a pain that is almost theoretical. I recognize it as mine, but it’s not a part of me somehow.
For hours I run in the rhythm. The pounding of my feet. The beating of my heart. The slow intake and outtake of breath. The feeling I could go forever, effortless as a cloud.
The rhythm of it all, the lightness of my entire being, they make it impossible for thoughts to connect to me. My mind is too slippery for thoughts to grasp. They just slip away before I can understand them. After a few hours, even the images in my mind become inexact, muted, like something bleached by the sun. My memories cannot haunt me. My thoughts cannot disturb me or shove me into despair. They are slow, feeble things that cannot exist long enough to solidify, that do not have the strength to latch onto my mind and demand attention.
I am grateful for the run. I am grateful to be alive.
145
I run until the evening gets too dark and then I continue south and west on a road I find, running by the light of the moon. If I see lights, I tell myself, I will go back to the woods and hide. But there is no light, there are no pursuers, or if there are, they are not here. I continue running in the opalescent light.
In the calm of the road, when I don’t have to keep constant awareness of my surroundings or get knocked down by a branch or tripped up by a fallen tree, my thoughts find root in me. I begin to dream as I run. Images, faces, conversations, they brush by me or pass through me. Anxieties come fearfully , stopping my heart, and then blur by me. Nothing is constant.
I feel like I’m running out of my own life. Running straight into a strange land where I am newborn, empty of history, ambivalent as the night sky.
146
There is the rhythm of my feet. The pounding earth under me. Sometimes it is not I who moves, but the earth itself, rising up to hit my feet and then bouncing away from me. We are two beings caught together, I realize. We need each other.
147
I see them dead. Burned and left on a heap of other bodies. Eric and Pest both.
I see them alive. Sheltering together under the church.
“You can make it,” my father tells me. I turn to him as I run, but his face begins to break apart as if he was smoke and fog. My mother sings to me. I can feel Lucia’s hands in my hair, braiding them, speaking to me in a language I am only beginning to understand. My mother sings. I see Artemis climb from the wood pile where they burned her. Her hair is smoking, but she brushes the ashes off her dress and then bounds over to me and hugs me. I smell her burning hair. I see Eric, his face pressed into the corner, in his cell under the church. He is dark and covered with filth. Anxiety reaches out to me sometimes with its skeletal hands. The coldness tells me that if I don’t run, if I don’t reach them, they’ll die. They need my help. They need me.
But when my heart cries out in pain, I know it is I who need them.
148
I reach familiar roads. Houses I’ve seen before, as if in a dream. I see myself in the landscape now, hiding with Pest. I see myself hiding, slouching, pulling Eric along with me. I follow roads and paths without realizing what I’m doing. I’m too exhausted to realize what I am doing. I am just moving, just running, just putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes they are with me. Mostly I am alone, in a blurring world.
Then I feel a spinning emptiness. I’ve fallen.
I get up and the world sways.
Then I smell grass and I feel leaves in my hair.
My breathing seems so loud.
I think I am crying.
149
A noise awakens me, a rumbling roar, a sound I have not heard for many years. An engine. I blink awake into a cutting sunlight. My whole body throbs with exhaustion and pain. I sit up, groaning.
Below me, from the ridge where I collapsed the night before, I see Cairo and the broken asphalt road leading up to it. At first, I see nothing, and then I rub my eyes. Soldiers and trucks are moving toward the town. The roaring sound that woke me up is not just trucks. It’s a tank, rolling slowly up the hill toward the town, its diesel engine howling and grinding like a furious beast, its heavy steel tracks tearing up the earth as it moves toward the flimsy gate. The whole column moves slowly toward Cairo.