Vanished (22 page)

              She starts the engine and the truck roars to life.  I’m surprised, with how tiny she is, that she can shift through the gears but somehow she manages and turns us left into the alley behind the grocery store.  She kills the lights as soon as we turn on forty-ninth and edges into the parking lot behind the bank.  Across the street is the library where we just learned the men who terrorized her camp are hiding.    

I don’t like this.  They are hiding in plain sight, meaning they aren’t afraid of us and that kind of reckless carelessness is dangerous.  

              I can’t shake the unsettling feeling I have even when I tell myself it’s just nervousness.  Focusing on the next step of the plan I signal for Celia to kill the engine. 

              We go to the back of the truck and let down the tailgate so the men can climb down. 

After a lot of debate Celia finally agreed to only take men over the age of eighteen that could fire a gun.  That left us with six. 

              I watch them climb off the back of the truck; Celia’s dad – who won’t look me in the eyes – there’s a big guy with a buzz-cut, Chris, and the kid they call “Toes,” who swore to me that he was eighteen even he looks twelve, a black guy named Louis whose daughter was one of the rape victims and also one of the suicides, and Ricardo and Juan, brothers, they smile a lot but they don’t seem to speak any English.  I’m not sure these two, or Toes, know what they’re getting themselves into but it’s too late to turn back now.

              Using hand signals, I gesture toward the side of the bank and run over to the back of the building, pulling my gun out of my shoulder holster and holding it down at my right side.  As I edge around the side of the building, I hold up a finger and point towards the roof of the library.

              There’s a fire burning on the roof and two men are loitering around it.  I watch for a minute as one of the men takes a drink from a bottle then pitches it off the roof.  The bottle shatters less than thirty feet away from us in the street. The other man has a gun slung over his shoulder and he’s looking away from us our position, toward the city.  I’m about to step out onto the street and lead Celia and the others through the shadows to the library when I hear one of the men yell, “What is that? Hey man, look at this.” He’s pointing his gun at the sky. 

              The guy who threw the bottle turns to look the same way as his friend and suddenly spins and takes off at a run in the opposite direction, disappearing from sight. “Hey, wait for me,” the other man yells but suddenly there’s a flash of light so bright I have to look away.  I peek through my fingers and see the man suspended in the air above the roof, his legs and arms flayed back, his face contorted in pain. A fountain of white light pours down on his and the man’s body literally disintegrates before our eyes as the roof becomes a fiery inferno of blazing bright white fire.

              I hear Celia scream something behind me. She’s pulling on my sleeve and I realize we should be running. We get behind the bank and out of the direct path of the painful bright glow and heat coming from the library.  “What the hell…?” Celia says, panting and putting her hands on her knees. 

              Using the butt of my gun, I shatter the glass door at the back of the bank and we run inside.  We move, silently through the dark building until we see bright light through the glass windows facing the library across the street.  I turn to look at Celia staring out the window and I can see the flames reflected in her steely grey eyes.

Men run screaming from the front doors of the library with their clothes burning and their hair on fire, clawing at their faces.  Not one of them makes it to the street as the light coming from the sky melts their skin on contact turning them into piles of steaming, bubbly flesh on the stone steps.  

              I have to see what is causing this.  I dash up the stairs to my left pressing against the wall away from the bright light beaming through the windows but where I can still see out of them. A golden disc shape object hovers about three hundred feet in the air above the library, showering down white fire.  As soon as the fire makes contact with anything solid, it consumes it. 

I sense the others behind me watching too. 

Minutes later the raining fire stops and I stare down in disbelief at the smoldering foundation where great building made of stone and filled with knowledge used to be.   The destruction is so quick and clean that I barely register when it’s over and the disc shaped object shoots up into the sky then veers north toward the city…toward St. Raphael’s. 

Trin

Chapter Twenty-One

Trin

              When I suggest we borrow a few weapons from the training level they don’t argue.  Collin makes a beeline for the archery room and Zayn and I check out the guns.  I don’t want one of the big guns but I would like to have a back-up just in case something happens to my gun.  A small black one catches my attention. Carefully I lift it off the pegs on the rack, and grip the handle.  It’s a little smaller than the gun Logan gave me and much older but it fits nicely in my hand.  

              “Here,” Zayn says, fishing the matching bullets out of a stack of boxes on the counter.

“Thanks,” I put the two boxes of ammo in my backpack and look around for a holster that will fit.  There’s a box of used holsters and after two tries I find a single shoulder holster that the gun fits nicely in.

I notice he doesn’t seem too interested in the guns, “Aren’t you going to get something?”

“I’m not really a gun type of guy.”

“Oh,” I say, “what type are you then?”

He shrugs and clarifies with a shy smile, “Blades before bullets, I guess.”

I can’t help but like Zayn who is, at heart, a nerd like me.  “OTrin, Braveheart, let’s go get you a sword.”

I follow Zayn out to the training room and watch him put several swords through a series of exercise.  He glances up at me while holding a sword with both palms up like he’s weighing it. “It wouldn’t hurt for you to have a little something either in case you run short on ammo,” he says, tossing the sword in the air and catching the hilt with one hand.

He has a point.  I am hoping not to use any of the bullets in my back-pack but what if I went through all of them? How will I defend myself if that happens? Throw rocks and call them names? No. “OTrin so what else is there around here?” I ask, looking at the barrels.

“You should try a machete, a girl with a machete, now that’s bad-ass. A girl with a gun ehhh, not that big of a deal” he holds out his hand and pivots it a little side to side.  He rifles through a couple of the barrels and finally pulls a curved case the size of my arm from one of the barrels and unsheathes the blade. The blade is used and dented but when he takes a test-swing at the wooden dummy the sharp edge wedges deep into its midsection, splintering wood chips out.

He yanks the blade out and hands the machete to me motioning like he wants me try. “Go on,” he says, “picture your worst enemy and swing.”

My worst enemy.
Judge
. I grip the machete with both hands and draw back mimicking Zayn’s movement, then I take shift my weight forward and swing out in a straight line driving the machete deep into the dummy’s throat, nearly taking off its head.

It feels good and I step back grinning, heat rushing to my face. I smile over at Zayn wanting him to share in this good feeling with me but he’s frowning, “What?”

“You surprise me, that’s all,” he says, looking away.

“How so?”

He shrugs, “Never mind.”

“No really, how do I surprise you?”

He inhales slowly, “Well, take Jasmine for instance,” he holds out his hand, “don’t take this the wrong way, Jaz is great, but she grew up sheltered and pampered. No one has ever harmed a hair on that girl’s head but she scared of everything…everything,” he runs his hand through his long bangs, “but you…I think your childhood was a living nightmare and you’re not afraid of anything.” He shrugs, avoiding my eyes, steps back and pretends to be hitting a golf-ball with his sword, “so that’s it, that’s how you surprise me.”

My heart is beating as fast as the thwacking noises we keep hearing from the archery room, probably Collin playing with a crossbow.  I’m not sure what to think of Zayn’s observation but I know he’s gravely wrong about one thing, “I am afraid of something” I tell him before I remember I don’t talk about these things. 

He looks up at me and there’s something extraordinary about the way his hazel eyes invite me to tell him. When I don’t he turns away to take another imaginary golf swing, “Can I ask you a personal question, Trin?”

My first instinct is to tell him no.  I’m not big on those kinds of questions.  Curiosity gets the best of me though. “OTrin.”

“Who did you picture?’

“Huh?”

He takes a deep breath, “Just now when you tried out the machete, you pictured your worst enemy.  Who was it?”

“Why?” I ask, suddenly feeling defensive.
Where’s he going with this?

“It was your step-dad, wasn’t it?”

I narrow my eyes at him. “Why do you care?”

“It’s just…” he sits down on a bench and bends forward, propping the sword against the bench and runs his hand through his hair then looks up at me, his eyes suddenly full of anguish, “I have to tell you something.”

My stomach clenches with apprehension and I hold my arms over it. When I don’t answer he stands up and starts to pace back and forth, dragging the sword behind him. What could he possibly have to say that would make him so agitated? “Zayn, stop pacing, you’re making me dizzy.  Just say it, whatever it is.”

He stops and meets my eyes. “A couple of years ago my dad saw your step-dad get arrested in a bar for beating the shit out of some old guy for taking his bar-stool.  I didn’t think much of it until the next day when I saw you in the nurse’s office.  She was grilling you about a burn on your ankle and you were telling her you got it from a lawnmower.  She went like this,” he curls his finger at me, “and you leaned over the desk and she started whispering but I was close enough to hear her.  She said it was your sixteenth injury for the year and technically she should have reported your family to social services after the sixth.  You stuck to your story and lied well, blaming it on extreme clumsiness.  I watched her look at the clock – it was nearly lunchtime – then look back at you, sigh and write you a pass to go back to class. I still remember that look of simultaneous relief and horror in your eyes.  That’s when I knew…”

              I remember the moment he’s describing but not as well as him and I certainly don’t recall Zayn being there. “You knew…” I choke out, “knew what?”

              “I knew I had to do something to help you.”

              He looks up and sees the confused frown on my face, “I tried,” he shakes his head, “but you didn’t want my help.  In retrospect, I know I shouldn’t have taken ‘no’ for an answer” he sighs, “at the very least, I should have tried to be your friend.” 

             
What is he talking about?
I think. “
You didn’t want my help”
his words echo in my mind
…
and then it clicks. Zayn wrote the notes. YF is
Zayn
.  “It was you?” I whisper.

              He looks up at me and there something defeated about the way he drops back down on the bench, “I should have told someone on your behalf. Instead, I decided to believe your stories about clumsiness…because it was easier for me to ignore the nagging voice in my head telling me to
do something
that way.”

              I don’t know what to say except, “YF…where did you get that?” I would have never guess YF was Zayn.  Zayn Carter.

              He looks surprised that this is my only question and shrugs, “It’s an acronym, Trin, it stands for…

              “Your Friend,” I say, just now getting it.

              “Yes,” he says with a sigh dropping his head down, “only I wasn’t a very good friend to you giving up so easily, was I? I saw the bruise the other day when we came to pick you up and I read between the lines in the note your dad left you…” his voice trails off for a moment and I try to digest what he’s saying. “I should have done something but I ignored this,” he pounds on his chest over his heart.

             
No. I should have done something
, I think, hugging myself.

              The hunched shoulders, the frustration and guilt in his hazel eyes, the way he’s squeezing the hilt of his sword so hard his knuckles are turning white; he blames himself for not saving me.  I want to throw my arms around him and tell him how much hope his notes gave me, how it felt like I had a guardian angel watching over me.  Mostly, I want to do something to relieve the obvious anguish he’s in.  I take a step toward him, dropping my hands to my side and Collin comes out of the archery room slamming the door shut behind him.

“I’m digging the chick with a machete theme,” he says watching me spin away from Zayn and stick my foot up on the dummy to hold it in place so I can wedge the blade out of its wooden neck.

Zayn gives me an awkward look, stands up, wipes his palms on his jacket and starts rummaging through a nearby weapon barrel.

Collin looks at me and I shrug and point at Zayn afraid of how my voice will sound if I try to speak right now. 

“Good thinking, bro” he says and slaps Zayn on the back, “And that’s why we call him Zayn the Brain.”

Zayn forces a laugh and selects a sheathed dagger from the barrel, “Here Col,” he tosses it to him and glances up at me.  Collin pulls the dagger out of the sheath and nods approvingly, then hooks it on his belt. “Look at my new toy,” he says, expertly drawing the weapon and showing it to us.  “Fast and accurate, hundred foot range, at least. Flawless.”

I put the machete back in its sheath and attach it to my belt saying a silent prayer that I never have to actually hit a real person with it. “Sorry,” I mumble to the dummy for some stupid reason and follow Zayn and Collin to the door. 

It’s much harder climbing the narrow stairs then it was going down. Several times I almost fall but Zayn has his flashlight on me and every time he sees me trip he’s there, helping me to my feet.  Without him behind me, I’d be forced to go much slower. 

I can’t help imagining Logan coming up this stairway, alone, in the middle of the night, and what it must have felt knowing he was leaving the safety of the bunker, possibly going to his death. A shiver runs up my spine and I’m grateful when I hear Collin call back from several paces in front of us, “I see daylight up there.”

We emerge into silence so profound it’s eerie.  There is no evidence of Logan’s departure except the door to the broom closet is open when reach the top.  Apparently he didn’t worry about shutting it on his way out probably because no one can get past the security doors without a thirteen digit code. 

Dashing to the window, I see a flash of light out in the clouds.

“What is it?” Zayn asks coming up behind me, his voice heavy with fear.

“Guys,” Collin says, gesturing up at the sky, “what the hell is that?”

Watching the light drop, my heart convulses. The orange spiral dropping down from the sky is so beautiful that I’m mesmerized but Zayn tugs me away from the window, “Come on Trin,” he says, pulling me backwards across the hallway toward the closet door. 

“I can walk,” I say, prying his hands off my arm.

“Do it then.”

When I turn and look over my shoulder again the sky has turned black and the orange spiral fades away leaving behind a trail of thick white smoke. As the smoke clears I see a shiny golden disc in the sky and suddenly the administrative building across the street goes up in a fireball of white flames.

Time seems to slow down. I know we should be running, hiding, warning the others but I can’t look away.  The golden disc jets back and forth in the sky above the administration building spewing out liquid white light so bright I have to raise my arm above my eyes in order to keep watching.

Another golden disc spirals down out of the sky followed by a third and they both go to work on buildings nearby, pouring the white lava down, like fountains of fire, on top of them.

We stare, transfixed, as the administration building collapses, falling into its own footprint, sending up a cloud of debris so dark the view outside of the window is completely obscured.  Debris from the most efficient, controlled demolition in human history wafts out to St. Raphael’s in a dark, enormous wave and the windows in front of us burst inward. 

“Get down,” someone yells and I feel something slam into me knocking me against the wall and out of the path of the shards of glass. There is an explosion so loud that I’m rendered deaf and all I can do is start to curl my body into a ball as I’m swept off my feet, like a rag-doll, and flung into the wall in front of the office. 

Suddenly I get my hearing back and a roaring, vibrating clamor fills my ears. 

I do a quick assessment of my body, thanks to Judge I know the feeling of a broken bone and nothing feels broken though my ribs on my right side ache and my when I touch the back of my head I feel a warm moisture in my hair and drawing back my fingers there is blood.  I look frantically in the rubble nearby and spot a patch of Zayn’s corduroy jacket a few feet away from me. I look up and see a crater in the ceiling and a flash of gold goes by.

You have to get out of there
, a voice screams in my head,
go now!

“Zayn,” I cry and the patch of sage green corduroy shift and he pushes up onto his hands and knees, looking up at me.  He’s covered in dust and there’s a shard of glass embedded in his arm.

I look up to where Collin was last standing and a chunk of wall is sitting there instead.  Another fragment of St. Raphael’s structure is blocking our way to the broom-closet.  Little pools of white, gold metallic liquid spawn in our path and fire starts to catch on top of their shimmering surfaces.
              There’s a roaring sound to my right but a wall is blocking my view of whatever’s making it. Struggling to my feet a stab of pain makes me cry out.  I look down and see a shard of glass piercing my left heel and blood pooling in my shoe.