The Wounded (The Woodlands Series) (13 page)

“Just do this
favor for me. You
warn
Pelo that if he doesn’t stay out of my business, he’s going to be sorry.”

Joseph face settled into seriousness.
“You know, you really should give him a chance.”

I crossed my arms angrily. “He had his chance. He threw it away.” I could feel unwanted tears brimming and teasing my eyelashes. “Just tell him, ok?”

Joseph grabbed at me with both hands and swept me into an awkward embrace, my back pressed into the armrest. “Ok.”

We had to leave
, all three thousand of us, minus those lying in the crater. But now I didn’t want to. My body was reluctant, juiceless. I’d been squeezed too hard, and I wasn’t sure what was left. Joseph dragged me along. I walked, carrying Orry, next to Pelo, trying to see what my father was, and what was underneath all the energy and scatty movements, but I came up with very little. I thought about to giving him a chance as Joseph had asked, but I didn’t know how.

I trailed my
hand along the filthy, graffiti-covered wall. The black loops and straight brush strokes were hypnotic and a good distraction from the anticipation of sliding on my belly along the collapsing concrete incline.

We
stopped when we hit a wall of people in front, and someone at the front cried out. “Babies!”

People muttered
, “Babies, babies,” and someone reached for Orry.

I snatched him to my chest and looked to Joseph. He smiled down at me kindly and nodded
. “It’s all right, this is how they did it when we arrived.”

I let hands pull me to the front of the line. Hessa was being passed up into the concrete
pipe, another person’s arms stretched out ready to receive him, and then he disappeared into darkness. He was quiet but for a little squeak. It sounded as if he had lost his voice.

A woman with kind eyes and
thick tendrils of red-brown hair fixed into long, looping plaits smiled at me. “You go up, dear, and we will pass Orry to you.”

I felt small and warm, cradled by these people
’s compassion, but still scared to let Orry go.

The woman beckoned with her fingers and tugged at Orry’s
hand-knitted cardigan. “Go,” she said, gently but urgently.

I placed Orry gingerly in her arms and hoisted myself into the pipe.

*****

Inside was a network of interlacing torchlight, all held between grimacing
mouths as people lay on the concrete slab with their feet atop of each other’s shoulders.

I followed their light, wiggling up, getting a shove or a hand pulling me up as I went. If this were the Woodlands, people would just go. There was no thought, no conceiving of
others’ needs. But here they were, forming a human ladder to help me up, to help Orry.

When I
reached the top, I turned around and waited, arms stretched into the darkness, my fingers longing for the weight of my baby. I watched as Orry was carried with so much care, like he was as delicate and breakable as a thin, shelled, sugar egg. They talked to him as they passed him, muttering unintelligible words of comfort, until he was safe in my arms. With Orry in my arms, I looked down, feeling like I might cry. The ladder was laden with more helpers, waiting to bring him safely to the ground, to join Hessa in the alley.

Sometimes I worried that bringing Orry into
their world was a mistake, that the pain and violence he has had to witness would damage him in some way. But when I saw these people, the way they treated him as precious, the kindness and strength they exuded with their actions, I knew he would be ok. If we could pull this together, he would be better off for knowing life here with the Survivors.

*****

It was a different feeling, walking away from the car park. Thousands of words clashed and ground together in the air. The wind was still strong and biting, with tiny teeth of ash and grit, but we were louder and stronger. We poured in and out of the buildings, with scarves and masks over our mouths, holding onto each other when one threatened to topple over the edge, heading home with a purpose.

When we hit the first tangle of bodies, now buried deeper in the black soot
but still painfully visible, it went quiet. Words were ripped from our mouths as the wounds that were delicately gauzed over reopened.

Pelo was
the first.

He turned away from
us, tugged at a vine still bumpy and budded, not ready to show petals, and pulled it from the earth. Solemnly and deliberately, he threw it into the crater. We all followed its arc and gasped when it landed, clumsily draped over a jeaned leg. Hysterically, I waited for the leg to move. It didn’t.

The sound of hundreds
, and eventually thousands, of hands ripping at the sparse flowers nestled in between ropey tree trunks and peeking shyly out from under slabs of broken road was strange. Stranger still was the sound and sight of them whizzing through the air and landing on and in between the bodies. It was beautiful and heartbreaking. There would be no burial for these Survivors. This was the best and the only thing we could do.

I gazed down at one long-
stemmed flower lying over a small, delicate hand, facing palm upward, almost as if it were holding it. I stared long and hard, willing those fingers to close around the stem. Joseph put a hand on my shoulder and said, “We have to keep moving.”

I lifted my eyes slowly, casting
them over each and every lost Survivor. I wouldn’t forget them. I took a step forward, bending my toe awkwardly over a loose section of asphalt. I pitched forward onto my hands, managing to stop myself from falling face first into the hole with Orry, my hand sunk deep into the insubstantial ash.

“
Rosa!” cried Joseph as he put his arm under me and helped me up. I was lifted off the ground like a crab from the water, my arms and legs dangling in the air.

My eyes caught s
and pouring, moving like a cascade of water over a person’s back.

“Stop!” I said sharply, still hanging in the air with Orry gripped to my chest. “Look over there, what’s that?”

Joseph hung me there as he searched the edge of the crater. “Oh my God.”

I could feel his arm shaking from my weight and scrabbled to put my feet on the ground.

I sat down and shielded my eyes. The morning sun created a flat and angry shadow that ran like a knife through the center of the crater. “Is that a…?” I didn’t want to say it. Hope clawed its way out of my throat. It kind of stung, because it didn’t seem possible.

“It’s a person. Look! Look!”
Pelo yelled as he tugged on peoples’ sleeves and directed them to where we were looking.

Joseph
smiled, and I grinned until my face hurt. A Survivor. Someone had managed to claw their way out.

It was so far away
that we couldn’t tell if it was a male or female. It was right on the other side of the crater, close to where the town began. But it was a definitely a moving, living person, gradually and doggedly scaling the cliff.

We were still, watching closely
, gasping as the person slipped and rolled back down a few meters, like they were climbing up a waterfall slick with moss. They gained a little ground but kept skidding down.

E
veryone moved faster, a sea of excited people pushing, pulling, and bringing each other closer. I was separated from Joseph; he seemed on a mission to get to the front. I watched as his head floated further away, striding with force through the mass until he vanished. I slipped and stumbled, trying not to get knocked over by the swell of anxious people. A hand grabbed mine and pulled me in from the edge.

“Don’t let go
of me,” Pelo said. I didn’t. I held on tightly as we made our way back to the edge of town.

We
got to the other side ahead of most of the others. Just in time to see Joseph sprinting around the edge to where we had last seen movement. Now there was none.

Alexei bound
ed behind him, a thin, white streak against the dark green trees.

Through the wind, through the screeching, the dust sticking to our throats like talcum powder
, his scream cut through.

“Apella!”

Something struck in me like a match. Ap
ella, Apella, Apella. A song. A sound. Hope. Life.

I dropped Pelo’s hand and face
d him.

“Can you take Orry home
?”

He seemed surprised and
flustered by this request. “I… I don’t know where you live,” he stuttered. “Where are you going?”

I p
atted his arm. “They know,” I said as I gestured around me. Someone nodded behind me.

I glanced back at Joseph. He had stopped running and was squatting down by the edge.
Once they hit the town side, others had started to run towards Alexei and Joseph perched on the edge. We couldn’t all go. I had to get there. I had to see if it was her. I had to help.

I handed Orry to Pelo and pressed both my hand
s against them, wrapping them together. “Please do this for me. My family is over there.”

He looked
upset, left out, but his face forced a smile. “Of course. Of course. You go.”

Orry
whimpered a little in the arms of a stranger. Pelo held him tightly as he watched me run away.

*****

Heat glanced off my back as my steps pressed desperately into the slurry ground, although the sun was a presence rather than a force. The heat was my fear and hope burning into my skin. I slammed into the scaffolding propping one of the ramshackle buildings up, as I spun sharply towards Joseph and Alexei.

Quickly and without
warning, the trees took over and I was winding my way in and out of thick, rough evergreens and crunching down on pine needles, the smell of sap and dirt slowing me down. The thought that it wasn’t her slowed me down further.

When I reached the place, about fifty people
had crowded around the spot we’d last seen movement.

“Where’d they go?” o
ne man said.

“Maybe it was a trick of the light.”

Joseph’s voice rang out above the many bobbing, searching heads, and I followed it. “No. I saw her.”

Alexei s
tood next to Joseph, his eyes skimming back and forth. People were starting to pull away from the powdery ash edge as they gave up.

I pushed my way
to Joseph and sat beside him, scanning, looking for some sign of movement.

Everything was b
lack, black, black. Where did they go?

Black… black… pinkish white…

I lifted my hand and pointed shakily. There, cutting through the black, was the thinnest sliver of pink-white. It stretched up, the ash sifting and spilling over it like water. A slender white hand. A tattoo on the wrist.

I
gasped rather than spoke, “Apella.”

Alexei was hysterical. Fear and excitement
made a mess of his thoughts and actions as he danced back and forth across the bank