Apollo’s jaw tightened. The electric current filled the air again. But it wasn’t coming from William. The change in the air came from somewhere behind Apollo. The back of his head felt hotter by degrees. He turned.
Nothing down the hill but that copse of trees. The night cloaked them in shadows. Only the tops of the trees were vivid, truly visible. Wind off the East River caused the trees to thrash and bend. The trees stood fifty feet tall. Only after watching them directly did he realize the trees were swaying not with the wind but against it. Apollo trembled, and a feeling of disgust flooded his belly. He felt a sudden conviction that someone, something, hid among those trees and was watching him.
“Did you do what I asked?” Kinder Garten said. “Do I get my Gretta back? My Grace? Where is my family? You were supposed to bring them to me.”
Apollo walked away from the man in the cage, moving along the line of the TB Pavilion, back toward the library. In fact, he started running. As he moved, he kept throwing glances back toward the trees.
“I made you a fair offer, Apollo!” Kinder Garten shouted. “This is on your head, not mine!”
Then the explosions began.
THE DOCTOR’S COTTAGE tore apart. A moment later two more explosions ripped through the Nurses’ Residence. The sounds of destruction could be heard as far off as Rikers Island, waking the men in the units closer to the northern end of the prison. In the morning they’d swear—to fellow prisoners and guards—that they’d heard bombs on the East River. No one believed them.
Apollo hardly believed it, and he was right there running along the path back to the courtyard. How had William Wheeler—no, Apollo stopped himself—that wasn’t his name. How had Kinder Garten called in artillery fire? It wasn’t possible. But tell that to the buildings that had been torn to tinder, the ground that quaked beneath Apollo’s feet.
Apollo heard another thunderous round go off, throaty as cannon fire, but this time he would’ve described it less as an explosion than as a roar. He turned back once, looking over his shoulder quickly, toward the copse of trees. Something passed overhead in the night sky—he could barely discern the size and shape. A missile? A bomb? A military drone? Then there was another explosion. In the library.
This one brought the roof down.
No screaming. No shouting. No crying. No screaming.
Apollo Kagwa ran alongside the Doctor’s Cottage. The bomb had obliterated the dining table where he and Gayl ate macaroni and cheese twenty minutes ago. He sped toward the library. He didn’t understand that he was listening for the screams of children and women until he didn’t hear them. At least if he heard them, it would mean some of them were still alive.
He reached the library. The explosion had toppled the roof and cracked it in half, but it created an opening in an adjacent wall large enough for him to stoop and step through. He didn’t want to. He wished, for just a moment, there was an adult present. Lacking one of those, he would have to do. He crouched now and stepped into the library. Broken glass scattered across the ground like glitter, brick dust floated in the air, a red mist.
A missile had hit the library, but more than half the books remained neatly on the shelves. Their spines were spattered with dirt and glass, but otherwise they seemed fine. The other books littered the floor. Among them Apollo found the first of the dead.
A pair of legs stuck out from beneath one half of the fallen ceiling. They were slim but long, clearly an adult and not a child.
“Who killed my sister?” a voice asked, hardly a whisper.
Apollo fell into a crouch as if the sky were going to fall in. Again. He turned and looked up to see Cal, shocked and disheveled. Her sweater hung half off one shoulder, her hair thrown up into spines of fright.
“I killed my sister,” she said to herself. She swayed on her feet. Maybe she’d been more injured than she looked.
“She wouldn’t be dead if I hadn’t called her back,” Cal said.
“That’s Gretta?” Apollo said.
Now, out past the courtyard, a new sound. Kinder Garten. Calling out in a high-pitched yelp. Maybe they were words, but at this distance it was hard to tell. The distance was the issue though. Kinder Garten didn’t sound far off, like when he’d been in the TB Pavilion. He sounded much closer. As if he’d been freed.
Cal looked to Apollo and brought three fingers to her lips. Urging him to silence, to calm. Maybe she could see he’d been on the verge of spinning into panic.
Now Apollo recognized—understood—that besides Gretta’s there were no bodies on the ground. No other victims he could see. No dead children. No other dead women. Cal slapped his elbow sharply, then pointed to the hole in the wall. They slipped through and back out to the courtyard. Now Apollo found the courtyard full.
Women and children filed out of the Nurses’ Residence with packs on their backs, bags in their hands, all but the youngest children carrying something. The youngest children were all being carried. More astoundingly, even the infants were silent. Had they all survived? They couldn’t have. The population seemed slightly reduced, though Apollo couldn’t say by how much. They moved in two columns. Their postures spoke of exhaustion and fear, but above all there remained great order. They fled in formation. A Special Forces team would’ve admired this level of discipline.
“I’m not a bad man!” Kinder Garten called out.
Apollo turned back, some natural reaction, the desire to shout back, to fight back, but Cal slapped him, hard, on the side of his face. He turned to her, and her face had set into a mask of dispassionate discipline. One hand had slipped into the pocket of her sweater. A knife in there? A gun? Apollo believed—knew—that if he’d spoken just then, given away their position, Cal would’ve taken that weapon out of her pocket and killed him. Better that than sacrifice all their lives. He turned away from Kinder Garten’s voice and followed the others once again.
“Just let me explain myself!”
The Wise Ones threaded through the woods. They passed the coal storage house, moved between the foundry and the chapel. Where Apollo had seen only dense underbrush and hundred-foot trees, the Wise Ones showed him a path through the shadows. They led him, and he followed. They passed the morgue and reached the old gantry crane and ferry slip. When this island had been in operation, this was where the ferry would dock to unload or take on patients and staff.
“We’re not going to swim,” Apollo whispered. No one answered him.
The women and children gathered. This was the first time he’d seen the whole community out like this. They looked too vulnerable here, all exposed. Now he could count them. Nineteen women and eleven kids. That was it.