She keeps the bat—the baseball bat Slade played with—by her bed. She carries it with her to the top of the staircase. She leans over the railing and looks down into the dark, and sure enough, a voice spirals faintly toward her. She descends the stairs.
The various hallways and chambers offer noises that are distant and vague and melt into other sounds, the sounds of the nighttime city. Moonlight streams through the windows, and the shadows crisscross the floor. It isn’t until she pads all the way down the stairs, creeping into the basement, that she can make out the words to the song—“Yesterday,” the Beatles—belted out, full throated, by some phantom tenor.
She snatches a lantern off a hook and lets out the wick and continues into the dark with a shroud of light to guide her. The voice grows louder and louder—until she enters the storage room, where the voice goes suddenly quiet, as if someone dragged a needle off a record.
She pauses among the heaps of boxes, her ears pricked to pick up every sound. The wick of her lantern sputters. A cobweb seems to breathe. There is a breeze. The air moves down here, drawn to some source. She navigates her way through the shadowed maze until she comes upon a clearing where the ground slopes toward a grate.
Her eyes are immediately drawn there because the grate is glowing, like the door of an oven. She can hear something moving beneath it, breathing and clambering upward. She sets down her lantern in order to grip her bat better.
Then the gate lifts, the rusty maw of it moaning outward, and something is rising from below, what appears to be a glowing ghost. She screams and so does the ghost, their voices pitched high.
She sees then his face—the face of a boy—colored orange and warped by shadows thrown by his own lantern. But only for a moment, as he jerks away from her and loses his purchase and drops back into the hole from which he climbed. The grate clangs behind him, shaking the air and nearly masking the noise of his body thudding, the lantern shattering.
She creeps to the edge of the grate. Fifteen feet below, in the dying light of his lantern, he lies on his side, beetled by a backpack. She calls out to him—“What are you doing sneaking around down here?”—but he doesn’t answer, biting back a scream.
Only then does she notice the bone showing whitely through the meat of his forearm.
Chapter 12
FOR A LONG TIME, they stand on a bluff looking out at the blackened fangs of high-rises and broken-backed bridges and the shadows that cling to walls even in full sun. The air smells like burned plastic. They can see two craters, each a half mile wide, from which everything seems to lean.
“This is from a missile?” Lewis says.
Paper is precious, so Gawea writes in the sand with a stick. Yes.
“Do you know of many other cities in the same condition?”
Many.
Right then, Clark remembers the bullet her brother shot into the sand and tries to imagine the size and sound of what caused this, tries to imagine the windows shattering and roofs peeling upward, the people who barely had a chance to scream before their hair caught fire and their skin crisped and ashed off their bones. Closing her eyes doesn’t help. She still sees the city: the afterimage of the sun shining off mangled metal and molten puddles of glass making blue and white networks on her eyelids.
“Are we in danger?”
Gawea writes: Maybe. Goblins. Moov on.
“Goblins? What do you mean by goblins?”
She underlines Moov on with the stick.
They lead the horses down the bluff and into a neighborhood where the houses are husks and the trees nothing but charcoaled sticks that smear their flanks blackly when they ride past. They pass a mailbox that has lost all its letters but one, Z.
Something skitters out of the underbrush. Something they see only briefly and cannot identify. York says it looks a little like a human head covered in bristly fur. They see other things too. White ants. A two-headed squirrel. Mutations.
Goblins, Gawea writes again in the sand. Soon after that they pass a trampled circle of grass splashed with blood.
Lewis tells them how radiation will cling to the place for thousands of years, so they give the city wide berth, arcing away from the river for fifty miles or so before returning to it.
That night, around the campfire, everyone is jittery, hollow eyed, ready to curl up in a ball or walk into the woods and offer themselves up to whatever might prey on them. At least then the pain will end. It doesn’t help matters when Reed asks, “What do you miss?” He is looking at everyone, his sunburned face peeling so badly that the firelight playing off it makes him appear aflame, burning alive. “About the Sanctuary. I mean, you have to miss something.”
Clark says, “I don’t know if that’s the kind of conversation we should be having.”
“Why not? What’s wrong with missing something?”
“We don’t need to be looking back at a time like this.”
He pokes the fire with a stick and a spiral of embers rises in the air. It seems that no one will respond until Lewis says, “I miss my books. My desk. Stillness. Aloneness.” He opens his silver tin and scoops out a sniff from it.
“Me,” York says, “I miss the ladies and the laughter.” He smiles and bobs his eyebrows. “What about you, Reed? Since you asked, what do you miss?”
“Oh, I just miss certain people, I guess.”
“Like who?”
Reed glances at Clark and then away. “Just the people who used to fill my days.”
York says, “Gawea? You miss anybody back home? Anybody special waiting there for you?”
She shakes her head, no.
“Well, that’s good. Because I’m all the man you need.”
She does not respond except to stare into the fire.
The doctor smiles warmly at Clark. “I don’t miss a thing. Anything is better than that place. I couldn’t be happier than where I am right now.” A lie, of course. But a good one, a necessary one. They need lies like it to get them through the months ahead.
“Me too,” Clark says.