Steve puts a hand on my shoulder. “Oh, shit, Hana. Are you okay?”
“I said, don’t touch me.” I push roughly past him, careening into the next room, which is now so packed with people I can barely force my way toward the stairs. I hear Steve call my name only once. After that, he either gives up or his voice is drowned in the coursing swell of sound. It is hot; everyone is slick with sweat, lost in shadow, as though they’ve been floundering in oil. Even when my vision clears, I feel unsteady on my feet.
I need air.
I need to get out of here. There’s a roaring in my head, distinct from the throb of the music—a distant, high-pitched scream knifing me in two.
I stop moving. No. The scream is real. Someone is screaming. For a second I think I must have imagined it—it must have been the music, which continues screeching on—but then all at once the scream crests and becomes a huge surge, coasting over the sound of the band.
“Run! Raid! Run!”
I am frozen, paralyzed with fear. The music breaks off with a crash. Now there is nothing but screaming, and I am being pushed, shoved by the waves of people around me.
“Raid! Run!”
Out. Out. I need to get out. Someone elbows me in the back, and I barely manage to right myself. Stairs—I need to get to the stairs. I can see them from where I am standing, can see a surge of people fighting and clawing upward. Then suddenly there is a tremendous splinter of wood and a crest in the screaming. The door at the top of the stairs has been shattered; the people behind it are falling, tumbling into the people behind them, who are tumbling, tumbling down . . .
This isn’t happening. It can’t be.
A man is silhouetted huge in the great, gaping mouth of the shattered door. A regulator. He is holding a gun. From behind him, two giant shapes rocket forward into the crowd, and the screams swell in pitch and become the sounds of snarling and snapping.
Dogs.
As the regulators start forcing their way in, my body at last unfreezes. I turn around, away from the stairs, into the thick mass of people, all shoving and running in different directions: openmouthed, panicked. I’m hemmed in on all sides. By the time I force myself out of the main room, several regulators have made it down the stairs. I glance behind them and see them scything through the crowd with their nightsticks.
A huge, amplified voice is booming, “This is a raid. Do not try to run. Do not try to resist.”
There is a small ground-level window set high in the room with the dingy mattresses and the couch, and people are crowded around it, yelling at one another, fumbling for a latch or a way to open it. A boy springs onto the sofa and swings hard at the window with his elbow. It shatters outward. He stands on the arm of the sofa and hoists himself up and through it. Now people are fighting to get out this way. People are swinging at one another, clawing, fighting to be first.
I look over my shoulder. The regulators are drawing closer, their heads bobbing above the rest of the crowd, like grim-faced sailors pushing through a storm. I’ll never make it out in time.
I struggle against the current of bodies, which is flowing strong toward the window, to the promise of escape, and hurtle into the next room. This is where I stood with Steve and asked him whether he liked me only five minutes ago, although it already seems like the dream from a different lifetime. There are no windows here, no doors or exits.
Hide. It’s the only thing to do. Hide and hope that there are too many people to sniff out one by one. I pick my way quickly around the enormous pile of debris heaped against one wall, over broken-down chairs and tables and old strips of tattered upholstery.
“This way, this way!”
The regulator’s voice is loud enough, close enough, to be heard over the chaos of other sounds. I stumble, catching my shin against a piece of rusted metal. The pain is sharp and makes my eyes water. I ease down into the space between the wall and the pile of junk and slowly adjust the metal sheet so that it blocks me from view.
Then there is nothing to do but wait, and listen, and pray.
Every minute is an hour and an agony. I wish, more than anything, that I could put my hands over my ears and hum, drown out the terrible soundtrack that’s looping around me: the screaming, the thud of the nightsticks, the dogs snarling and barking. And the people begging, too, pleading as they are hauled away in handcuffs: Please, you don’t understand, please, let me go, it was a mistake, I didn’t mean to . . . Over and over again, a nightmare-song stuck on repeat.