“How could you protect her?” Apollo asked when he had enough breath to speak. “Emma killed my baby! And you protect her!”
The pressure against his legs and back became lighter, little by little, as each woman rose. They turned him over. One of his hands stayed gripping a root in case they tried to pull him back into the water again. He looked up at them. They watched him silently. He couldn’t make out their faces because the moonlight was behind them. Four faceless figures loomed over him in the dark.
“You’re Emma’s,” one of them said.
A second looked up at the sky and groaned. “Of course he is. She was a pain in the ass. Why wouldn’t her husband be one, too?”
“Quiet with that,” the first one said sharply.
One of the others leaned close and pawed through Apollo’s pockets. She came out with his keys. She turned and stepped into the water. The sounds of faint splashing could be heard, and then she returned.
“His wallet fell out in the river. Just a bunch of cards and stuff floating around.”
“Bury them,” the first one said. “What about his cellphone?”
“I didn’t see it in the water.”
“Check him again.”
Two of the women lifted him, and a third checked every pocket and ran her hands along his legs, inside the waistband. No phone. Now the women let the chair legs dangle down from their wrists, gripped the handles, and stepped four paces back from him. He stood, at risk of tipping over, but they didn’t help him.
“Cal will want to see you,” one woman said. She pointed to the path they’d just come down. “You know the way.”
Apollo wobbled as he walked, but none of them offered support. It was only on the trek back that he had the presence of mind, the calm, to look around and realize he was alone with these women. They’d caught him but not William. He felt as if he had one last card lying facedown on the table. One last card to play. What would William Wheeler do?
THEY LED APOLLO back but it took awhile. You don’t just rebound from the kind of beating he’d taken. He looked as if he’d been flogged, which, in fact, he had. When they reached the courtyard, a deep silence met them. The fire that had been burning was extinguished; only the electric light in the School remained on. Apollo had the feeling that the entire Nurses’ Residence had been emptied. The same with the Doctor’s Cottage. He imagined the entire population had been ferried out while they’d been trying to murder him at the river. Maybe they had bomb shelter protocols, tornado basement procedures, places they went when a force of great destruction arrived. He imagined all those women and children tucked into some dark, airless bunker and wondered at the idea that they’d fled because of him. This didn’t make him feel powerful. Instead it gave him a different perspective on what had just happened. A strange man showed up in the middle of the night screaming that he was a god, demanding vengeance on his wife. Why wouldn’t these women and children be terrified?
Two of the women took him by the arms and guided him toward the School. The lighted room on the second floor looked even brighter now that there were no other signs of the living. Two of the women walked through the front entryway ahead of him, and the other two followed. They moved down a long hall whose walls slumped distinctly to the left. The walls and the ceiling showed decaying, flaking white paint and underneath that graying drywall. The floors were covered in a layer of dust that showed their footprints as they moved. There were half a dozen rooms on this floor. Most of them looked like small, long-defunct offices. The sounds of their feet scuffing through the dust echoed up to the ceiling. As they climbed the stairs, the shuffling echoed, too.
Cal told me what to do. But I don’t know if I can do it.
Apollo heard the woman from the church basement now, just as clearly as he had then. Maybe he reacted in some way to the memory, made some kind of sharp movement on the stairs, because one of the women behind him snapped him with her club on the right shoulder. He had to stop and catch his breath. The pain returned him to the moment and reminded him the guards were there.
At the top of the stairs they found another hallway that led off into another series of long-unused rooms. A bright light shone out of a room halfway down. The women led him to the room. This one had a door. Two words were stenciled there.
PRINCIPAL’S
OFFICE
A woman stood alone inside, her back to Apollo as he entered. She stooped over a long table covered with materials, varied blocks and shapes he couldn’t make out. There was another desk, clearly salvaged, stacked high with papers and a very old word processor, a gray block that took up a third of the desktop. The plug for the processor ran down to a red 3,000-watt Honda Super Quiet Generator. The generator sat tucked up against one wall that had a large hole in it, and it chugged its exhaust out into the night air. Apollo hadn’t heard the generator even when he’d been in the hallway. In here it sounded as if someone was running a small lawnmower far out in the courtyard.
Two standing lamps flanked the table where the woman stood, still with her back to him. Two of the corners of the room were left in darkness, but compared to the rest of the island, this might as well have been the Eiffel Tower lit up at night.
Apollo stepped into the room.
One of the women who’d led him here entered quickly, gingerly, and dropped his keys on the desk with the word processor. His cellphone lay on the table. Someone else had found it.
“How?”
The woman spoke without turning. “It fell in the courtyard when you caught him. One of the children found it and brought it to me. I thought I trained you to be careful.”
“You did. I’m sorry.”
“Sloppy,” the woman replied.
The guard nodded, then returned to the others at the doorway. She left a faint trail of water dripping from her cloak. The four women who’d tried to drown him turned and left.
Now he was alone with her. She moved two steps to the right, picking up something from the table. She had the short, no-fuss haircut of many older women, and her hair was so gray, it looked nearly white. She wore slightly loose black leggings with an overlarge gray sweater that draped, elegantly, down to her thighs. She looked like an Eileen Fisher model. When she turned, the effect became even stranger. She wore a sock puppet on either hand.
“Which one’s scarier?” she asked.
She smiled impishly, she knew exactly the wild effect she had, and this made her seem playful and powerful at once. Here she was alone with him, and it didn’t seem to worry her one iota. He wasn’t in any shape to do her harm—he couldn’t lift his arms; and he felt his legs only because of the constant throbbing in his thighs.