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***

“Come on!”
Alan’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts. He had grabbed
her arm and was pulling her toward a cluster of boulders that lay a
couple hundred yards away.

“It’s no
use,” Chal said. “We can’t hide.”

“We have to
try,” Alan said. She saw the fear in his eyes, but above that
there was a calm confidence.

“They’ve
already seen us,” Chal said, her eyes glued to the horizon. The
plane was just a speck in the sky, but she knew the kinds of
technology they had.

Alan peered at the
plane.

“No. Look at
the way it’s moving,” Alan said. “That’s
TFR.” Chal looked up as they continued to make their way toward
the boulders. The speck was moving slightly up and down on the
horizon. The buzzing was growing louder.

“What does
that mean? TFR?” she asked.

“Terrain-following
radar,” Alan said. He was already moving toward the denser part
of the chaparral plain, breaking off branches. “It works by
sending the signal toward the ground instead of forward, so that the
plane can track the terrain and hug it closely. It’s to avoid
detection.”

“And they
don’t want to be seen,” Chal said. The territory close to
the Mexican border was volatile, and a rogue aircraft could set off a
frenzy of diplomatic threats.

“Won’t
they see us with the radar?” Chal asked. She was tense as a
jackrabbit who had just heard a loud noise, ready to leap out in any
direction.

“It’s
unlikely that they are using a phased array,” Alan said. “Not
too many planes have those installed.”

“How do you
know this?” Chal asked. They were at the boulders.

Alan shrugged. “I
don’t know what I know,” he said. “Hell, they might
have implanted false information and I wouldn’t have a damned
clue, though I don’t know why they would have. But I know that
it’s got to be a single radar.” He threw the branches in
a heap and went for more.

“Why?”
Chal asked.

“Because
otherwise they’ll catch us,” Alan said, a wry expression
painted on his face.

***

“Marie!
Marie!” Her mom had heard Chal’s little sister crying
under the bed, had zeroed in on the noise of a crying child in that
supernatural sense that all mothers seemed to have. Even with the
sirens blaring.

Chal was in the
doorway and turned back to see her mother on her knees, reaching out
under the bed to Marie. Her arm could not reach all the way to the
back of the bed where Marie was huddled, crying. She had caught the
paper doll in her hand and was clutching it in her chubby fingers,
crumpling and tearing the paper.

“Go! Run! Go
to the kitchen!” her mom screamed again, pointing. Chal
tottered to the doorway and stopped, looking back only once. Her mom
was trying to pull the heavy bed away from the wall and Marie was
still crying.

“Go! RUN!”
her mother screamed, pulling all the while at the bed. The heavy feet
scratched the wood floor, leaving a deep white groove where it
scraped the planks. “Marie! Marie!”

Chal turned and ran.

***

Alan pulled up an
armful of brush. The nettles pricked at his arms and Chal winced as
she saw the trickles of blood that ran over his skin. She bent to
help him, although she did not know what they were doing. The buzzing
was getting louder and louder, and the spec k in the sky was
distinctly a plane now. Chal watched its path. It seemed to be moving
in a broad curve, still bobbing up and down to maintain a constant
distance over the low-lying terrain. Then it hit the playa and the
bobbing stopped, the plane over flat ground.

“Get down,”
Alan said. “Put your head down.”

Chal obliged,
huddling next to the boulder that was not more than a foot taller
than her when she squatted. Some cover.

Alan pushed the
brush close to her body, then placed another armful of brush on top
of her, directly over her head. He was moving carefully,
deliberately, but his actions were growing quicker as the plane
approached. The buzz was loud now, loud enough to distinguish the
type of plane from the sound of the motor.

“Come on,”
Chal whispered. She was frantic, her heartbeat racing in her chest.
Alan pulled the remaining brush over him as he knelt down next to
Chal.

“It’s
fine,” Alan said, huddled next to her. She could feel his
breath on her face. As she breathed, dust and dirt crumbled and fell
off of the branches onto her face.

“It’s
fine,” Alan repeated, and she couldn’t tell whether he
was talking to her or to himself.

“We’ll
be fine.”

***

Her mom had yelled
at her to go and hide in the kitchen, for it was the only room in the
house that did not have windows. She had run barefoot over the cold
red clay tiles – very cold, she remembered, and felt a chill of
goosebumps move over her skin even now – and hid underneath the
sink, the only cabinet that wasn’t completely full with boxes
of papers and plates.

She had bent down
and wedged herself deep into the cabinet. She closed the cabinet door
behind her, her childish mind believing in her panic that a quarter
inch of brittle plywood would save her, that anything could save her.
If she could not see the dangerous world outside, how could it see
her?

It was dark and damp
under the sink, and it smelled like Sunday mornings when her mother
would clean the tub and the rest of the house, and Chal would sit on
the floor and watch Marie and keep her out of the cleaning supplies.
Sometimes her mom would give them bowls with a bit of flour, and then
they added a bit of water and played “cooking” for hours
on end. Chal would be the head chef and Marie would be her assistant.

There was a roaring
that grew louder and louder, she could hear it coming over the
sirens. Explosions rocked the buildings nearby, the sharp cracks
echoing through the streets on the wake of the siren’s wail.
Chal covered her ears, her eyes clenched shut, hoping that she would
wake up at once and it would have all been a dream, but no, the
roaring was so loud that it vibrated the cabinet doors and Chal bit
her lip and tried not to cry.

Then there was a
loud CRACK and the building shook with a deep rumble. The siren wound
down, sounding almost like a plane flying away until only a faint hum
of it could be heard. There was a pause where perhaps it was silent
or perhaps it was simply the ringing in Chal’s ears that
blotted out any noises of doors being closed or opened, of people
walking around, of the world outside. Only one sound made it through
the noise in her ears, and it was a sound that Chal would hear over
and over again in her nightmares for the years to come.

She heard her mother
scream.

***

“Try not to
move,” Alan said. “It’s a good chance their radar
is just picking up motion and heat underneath. They might miss us
completely.”

Chal tried, but she
could not help her body shivering. It was dim under the layers of
brush, sunlight coming in through the cracks of the branches. The
buzzing was so loud that Chal felt they would be spotted for sure.
She closed her eyes and began to pray silently for the second time in
as many days.

The plane was close,
so close. The roar built and built in her ears until it was so loud
she thought she couldn’t take it. Like a quail being flushed
from the bush, Chal wanted to leap out of her hiding place and run,
run as far away as she could.

Then she felt Alan’s
hand take hers, and she twined her fingers into his, gripping them
tightly. She had to be quiet, had to hide, had to be safe. A tear
made its way slowly down the side of her cheek, but her body stopped
shivering. It was so loud.

***

The small girl
inside the cabinet held onto her knees and tried not to cry. A rush
of air carried the smell of smoke and dust under the cracks of the
cabinet door.

The world was gone,
Chal thought. She would open the cabinet door and there would be
nothing left, just a stark black nothing of universe. There wouldn’t
be an apartment, not a brick left on its foundation, not a flake of
plaster. Her head had begun to buzz with an insistent dread, and no
matter how hard she pressed her hands to her ears it would not go
away. The whole world would be this, a dark eternal roar.

She didn’t
know how long she sat underneath the sink, smelling the dusty air. It
might have been only seconds, or it might have been ten minutes. All
she knew is that one moment she heard the buzzing of the gnats inside
her head, and the next the buzzing had turned off, like a switch
flicked down. Her mother was still screaming. Some of the cleaning
supplies had fallen over and Chal could feel the powder soap all
gritty under her bare feet.

Her mother’s
cries subsided into great moans, and Chal pushed the cabinet door
open. There was light outside, still – light, even after all
that noise and tumult. More light, in fact – it was brighter
than normal, and as Chal tiptoed out to see what had happened she was
struck by the brightness, causing her to raise one hand over her eye
in an oddly adult gesture.

The building had
been hit. The sunlight which poured through the window cheerily on
normal days was brighter because the window was no longer there. Half
of the wall had been destroyed by the blast. The bed had splintered
and rubble was strewn across the entire floor. Chal stopped as soon
as she saw her mother.

For an instant, Chal
thought that the moaning person kneeling on the floor was a ghost, so
covered in dust was her mother that she looked white as a spectre.
But as she continued to keen, Chal realized that she was bleeding
from many places on her body – her leg, her cheek – and
ghosts don’t bleed. Then her mother heard Chal, or just sensed
that she was standing there, and turned.

Tears had streaked
the dust on her cheeks, and the tears continued to stream down her
face. Chal was struck by this, even as she saw that her mother was
holding Marie in her arms, and Marie wasn’t moving.

***

“Marie,”
Chal whispered. The roar was over their heads, blindingly loud, and
then it was moving away. Chal held her breath as it passed overhead,
her eyes tightly closed. She felt Alan’s hand, warm over hers,
squeeze tightly as the plane went by.

They sat like this
for another few moments, waiting. The buzzing of the plane eventually
subsided into a faint hum and then nothing.

Once it was clear
the plane was not returning, Chal exhaled and let a shudder sweep
through her body. She had been sweating, she realized, a cold sweat
that had worked its way through the light fabric of her clothes. Her
fingers were damp against Alan’s palms, and she pulled her hand
away in a dazed kind of embarrassment.

“Chal?”

Chal wiped her hands
on the leg of her pants. The pants were dirty, though, and only got
Chal’s hands dirty. She rubbed them against each other so that
the dirt rolled up with her dead skin cells and fell off.

Dead skin cells.
Part of me.

Chal kept rubbing
harder, trying to get every speck of dirt off of her hands. They were
so dirty. She was still rubbing when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

“Chal?”

She stood up
cautiously, shaking the dirt and leaves off of her shoulders. Her
eyes darted over to the horizon where the plane had disappeared.

“Do you think
they’ll come back?” Chal asked, trying to hide the quaver
in her voice.

Alan shrugged. “No
idea. If they did come, it would probably be by ground, not air. Or
else helicopters.” He scanned the horizon and she looked
nervously up with him.

“Are you
alright?” Alan asked.

Chal opened her
mouth to say that she was fine, that everything was fine, but the
only sound that escaped her lips was a low whimper. Then Alan’s
arms were around her and she was sobbing against his chest, her
entire body pouring out her sadness and fear in an uncontrollable
flow of emotion.

“I’m
sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.” She
didn’t know who she was sorry for, Alan or Marie or herself.
Alan didn’t ask her to explain. He just held her tighter.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“How far are
we from the town?” she asked.

Alan and Chal
consulted the map. They stood shoulder to shoulder, peering down at
the coordinates on the folded sheet of paper.

“Not far.
We’ll reach it today,” Alan said, pointing to their
location on the paper. “Let’s go.”

They began to walk,
as they had been walking for what seemed like forever. Now that they
knew the end was near, it seemed a bit easier to move one foot in
front of the other.

Chal looked up. The
sky felt infinite above her head, although she knew that of the whole
earth the atmosphere was merely a thin layer, like plastic wrap over
an orange. It seemed as though she would never be able to get home,
wherever
home
was. Ahead of her loomed the vast mountains that
guarded the playa with its end unseen within the dusting of the
horizon where everything was just a light fuzz of vision. Behind her
the dunes.

Though the mountains
were growing only imperceptibly in her vision, she was startled
whenever she looked behind her and saw the dunes farther and farther
away. She seemed to be walking away from something without ever
walking toward something else. That was the desert.

The road was far
away, then closer, and then they were alongside it. Chal and Alan
made sure to stay back far enough to avoid detection from anyone who
might be driving around looking for them. They came upon the town
sooner than Chal had thought. Her legs were so tired from walking
that even just standing still made them tremble, as though they
possessed a terrible need for motion.

“You should
leave me here,” Alan said.

“What?”
Chal said, taken aback.