Walking Through Fire, page 23
Adam plucked at his jeans. “But, why was Mr. Lee going to kill us?”
“Just because we were there, Adam.”
She read the confusion in her son’s eyes and it broke her heart. He would be a teenager soon. These too-simple explanations wouldn’t work much longer.
Crouching down next to the pew blocking the door, Rachel peeked out. The view was distorted because of the red stained glass window. Mr. Lee had gotten away from the wolves. He wrapped his duster around himself and disappeared in a glow of blue light. Captain Lewis stood there, his wolves pacing circles and whining. He glanced around and then walked towards the church.
Rachel ducked down, her eyes glued to the handle.
It jiggled, but the lock held.
She saw a shadow press against the stained glass window. Captain Lewis peering in. If he looked down he would see the top of her head.
The shadow disappeared. Footsteps rang against the stone steps. A whistle summoned the wolves. There was one last scratch against the door.
Rachel exhaled. Adam crawled from underneath the pew still against the vestibule wall and stretched out, using his backpack as a pillow. He yawned. “Why didn’t you tell Captain Lewis that we’re here?”
“Because,” Rachel said, thinking fast. “We’re going to the hospital. He’s busy with New Babylon.”
“Oh.” Adam closed his eyes. Within minutes he was asleep, but Rachel wondered what Captain Lewis was planning. She pushed through the doors into a one-room sanctuary lined with stained glass windows. Communion table up front, piano to the left, organ to the right. A plain door tucked in the far left corner. Rachel checked that it was locked—it was—and then pulled the piano bench across it. They’d hear, at least, if someone tried to come in and they could go out the opposite way.
Rachel returned to the vestibule and leaned her back against the post of the pew so she was physically close to Adam. She wanted to be able to hear him breathing, just like when he was an infant. Her exhausted mind wouldn’t stop spinning. Overstimulated. That’s what parents say when their children get this way.
She kept staring at the door, worrying about it, imagining she heard sounds from outside. It was like the monster under the bed. She’d have to check again. No sign of any person or wolf outside. From far away she heard the screech of one of the energy vultures.
Finally, she stretched out parallel to Adam and fell asleep.
Rachel couldn’t move when she woke up. Not like the night before—the Gravitron effect—but a rebellion of all her muscles. She groaned as she sat up, hamstrings, biceps, all the words from art anatomy careened through her mind as their actual parts screamed in agony.
“Hey, Adam?” She looked to the pew, but he wasn’t there. “Adam!”
“Right here.” He bounced through the sanctuary doors.
“Ugg,” she wiped her face, “aren’t you sore at all? That’s so unfair.”
“Check out the bathroom. There’s running water and everything.”
“Really?” Hope was enough to get her on her feet. The bathroom was like the rest of the church, serviceable and cozy. Adam had been right; the toilets and sink still somehow worked. There were paper towels in the dispenser, flower-scented hand soap, and little paper cups in a neat stack. Even a mirror. Rachel washed her face then stripped down to take a sink bath, running water through her auburn hair. She used a paper cup to drink the icy water over and over. It felt so good pouring down her burned throat.
The sanctuary smelled clean, like the lemon scent in furniture polish. Outside light filtered through the colorful stained glass windows—various scenes of Jesus’s birth, death, and resurrection. Worn red carpet covered the floors. Two rows of pews and an aisle up the center that led to the raised altar. Behind that the standard choir area, podium, tables with golden communion dishes. Adam was over at the table.
“Look what I found. Bread!”
“That’s for communion. I’m not sure you should be eating it.”
“There’s no one here, Mom. Stop being such a scaredy-cat.”
Rachel walked toward the altar, letting her hand drift over the pews as she walked. A plain wooden cross stood in a circle of thorns. Crown of thorns, she corrected herself. Little white votive candles were set out in neat rows. A book of matches sat nearby.
“Hey, look what’s under here. Coloring pages and crayons. Why would they have crayons in a church?”
“Some churches have children sit with their parents during the sermon. These activity sheets would keep the children occupied.”
“Oh.” Adam continued to dig through the cabinets of the communion table. “Did we ever go to church? I think I remember.”
“We used to. But we quit going after you were diagnosed. We spent so much time at the hospital. You were considered high-risk because of your initial white blood cell count. And then you got a fever. So, we pretty much moved in to the children’s hospital.” Her foot moved against the carpet, making the sound of corduroy pants swishing.
“There was a little desk in all the rooms, remember? I set up my laptop, plugged in my cell phone. There was even a post office off the lobby of the main hospital.”
He made a noncommittal sound.
She kept staring at the votive candles. “There was a chapel at the hospital too. I guess we could have gone. But, I really didn’t have anything to say to a God who allows children to get cancer. You were young, but … some of the children there were so little, running around in teddy bear hospital gowns pulling their IV poles behind them. I couldn’t stand it.”
Adam came to stand beside Rachel and slipped his hot hand into hers. They stood together staring at the candles.
Then Adam broke the moment by dashing forward. “Look at this!” Adam waved one of the coloring pages he’d spilled earlier.
The paper showed a cartoon drawing of a man in an Old Testament robe holding two stone tablets while standing on a mountain. Below him a group of people were kneeling to an idol in the shape of a bull.
She shrugged, “The Ten Commandments. It’s a story to explain how humans are supposed to get along. Don’t murder, don’t steal, that type of thing. The point is that while Moses was getting the holy rules, the people were already making Ba’al.” The name came to her easily, after hearing Levi and Mr. Lee both use it the day before.
Adam studied the picture. “What’s a Ba’al?”
“One of the gods people in the Middle East used to believe in.” Even as she spoke, Rachel wondered: the creature from the Old Testament was back in the world.
Adam wasn’t listening. He’d set down the coloring page and was leafing through the others. “This stuff is cool.”
“I know, but we’ve got to go.”
“Eat.” Adam held out the basket of bread pieces. She ate two pieces, then her stomach rumbled and she took a third piece. They weren’t that big. Feeling guilty she held it up in the air toward the altar and said, “Erm, thank you. And, also, please bless our journey.” She raised the bread from forehead to chest, right shoulder to left in the sign of the cross. “Sincerely, amen.”
Adam jumped down the stairs and ran down the aisle to the lobby of the church.
“Go to the bathroom and then fill up our thermoses with water, okay?” Rachel started to follow Adam and then did an abrupt about-face. Almost against her will she approached the candles again, her hand hesitating over the matchbox. She lit a match, closed her eyes, and whispered a prayer before lighting candles. For both her parents. For little Daisy. For Craig. For Scott. For the priest who told them to run to the church. The lit candles flickered and then remained steady as Rachel walked away from the sanctuary.
Outside, scorch marks on the street were a sign of the previous night’s fierce battle. Suddenly a door from a house down the street opened. A middle-aged Hispanic woman supported the priest from the night before. He stumbled and favored his left side.
“We saw you walking yesterday,” the woman said. “But, we didn’t know whether you were with that devil. Then we saw him attack you.”
“Right.” Rachel was too tired to even argue about how unfair that was. “We know him as ‘Mr. Lee.’ Does he come and do that thing with the lightning and jars often?”
The priest said something in Spanish and the woman translated. “The devil has come three times. He tells us to leave out a tribute or he will pick whom to sacrifice to his god. We know that he is coming when we hear the thundering hooves. Last night John should have been hiding. He shouldn’t have been out.” The priest covered his face with his hand.
Rachel nodded. “I’m sorry. For John.”
Rachel nudged Adam and they walked down the road, leaving the neighborhood behind. It wasn’t long before they came to the I-95 junction. Adam started to go south, following the sign to the hospital.
“Hold on, Adam.”
“Why?”
Rachel swallowed. The road looked the same in both directions, north and south. Nothing to differentiate the choices, except, if she squinted, black somethings. Energy vultures, or soul-eaters, or whatever they were, swooping against the yellow cloud cover over Baltimore’s center. The hospital was familiar; that’s where you went for medicine and healing, pre-firestorm. But, post-firestorm—this was a world where ancient gods walked and magic worked. Without a vehicle there wasn’t time to try both.
“Come on. We’re going north.” And may God have mercy on us if I’m wrong.
THIRTY-FOUR
They’d only been walking for half an hour when Adam suddenly dropped to the ground, groaning. “My arm.”
Rachel kneeled down and, with Adam’s help, unwrapped the bandage. She couldn’t hold in a gasp. During the night the black blob had grown from the size of a half-dollar to a solid black ring around his arm, the tar-like substance sitting two centimeters off of Adam’s skin. The area of the arm below the ring was pale, the blood supply cut off.
Rachel’s stomach clenched. “Can you wriggle your fingers for me? Do they feel numb at all?”
“No, they hurt. The whole arm hurts. All the way to my shoulder.” He shook, his legs jittered, his face contorted. “Mom! Make it stop.”
“Can you wait an hour? Try to get to the next green sign?”
He ignored her, banging his right fist on the ground.
“Okay, alright, hold on.” Four capsules left. She could give him a double dose—all four at once—or try to make it last. The pain wasn’t going to stop—the argument for pacing it out—but they needed to move fast, before he was too incapacitated.
These were the moments when she hated being a single mom. She was tired of being in charge, trying to guess what to do.
“There are four pills left. Two is a normal dose.” Rachel touched his shoulder. “How many do you want?”
He looked at her, his mouth hanging open, panting.
“You know your body.” It was hard to let him make the decision, but she had to trust him. “We have to keep walking.”
“Two of them. I need two.” His hazel eyes pleaded with her. “I’m sorry. After that, I’ll walk.”
Choked up at his determination, Rachel shook her head, “You don’t need to be sorry.” She handed him the water.
He popped the pills.
They walked again.
Mile after mile, the landscape didn’t change as they headed northeast up the I-95 corridor. No people, no animals, no cars, just the road and the burned out vegetation that used to be trees on either side of the highway. The sun hung in the sky, a dim lightbulb behind yellow clouds. Anxiety clawed at Rachel, soured her stomach. When she saw beads of sweat on Adam’s forehead, she kept walking, one foot in front of other. Just like him. There was nothing else to do.
Daydreams came easily with walking. She remembered how happy they’d been when Adam was released from the hospital. How she’d arrived with one bag of pajamas and socks and come home with stuffed animals, toys, gifts, and a seven-inch binder of instructions from the hospital. Dividers in the binder with headings like: General Information, Diagnosis, Treatment Plan, Drug Information, Blood Counts, Family Needs, Nutrition, Glossary. That first night home, Adam had walked ahead of her into the house and then run into his father’s open arms. Pure joy. She wasn’t sure which of them had teared up first, but soon Craig, Rachel, and Adam were in a tight hug, reaffirming, reminding each other through touch that, for the moment, all was well.
“This is our exit.” It was hard to speak, the air hot and dusty. She passed Adam the thermos, before taking a drink herself, and put it away.
By midafternoon they were away from city streets and into a flattened suburbia that would soon be rural. They followed a main road with abandoned neighborhoods by the side. Where had all the residents gone? Pre-firestorm they would have seen tractors in the green corn fields, cars zooming to the big box department stores, parents buying school supplies or planning one last trip to Ocean City. Now trees that survived grew and twisted into improbable shapes or were half shorn off, as though cut by a giant razor.
Finally, the road sloped down. Wild grasses grew along the sides of the road here, an indication they were getting close to water. They followed the road as it curved under a metal bridge and they reached the banks of the Susquehanna River. Rachel wrinkled her nose at an unpleasant odor of rotting vegetation. Across the river, a speck in the distance, Rachel could see a town. It had to be LaPorte.
“Do we have to go across?” Adam asked. “It’s creepy.”
She heard his fear. “This is one of the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay. Even if we try to walk south, we’ll eventually have to cross. This may be our best chance. So,” Rachel exhaled, “yes, we need to cross here.”
“There’s something in the water,” the eleven-year-old said. “I saw it over there.” He pointed to an area about the size of a swimming pool covered by bluish-green scum. “It smells gross.” Adam frowned.
Rachel looked but there was no ripple or movement. “That’s an algae bloom. It stinks because it’s decomposing. Give me your pack.” She adjusted the straps and put his bag on top of hers. Her shoulders protested and she rolled them forward to stretch.
“This bay used to be beautiful, scenic, the largest estuary in the United States.” Couldn’t blame the Mesopotamian gods, though. It turned rancid long before the firestorm. “The oysters couldn’t filter all the crap people put in the water. Crabs died, fish developed lesions and then died, the dead zones spread until there was nothing.” Rachel put her hand under Adam’s chin until he looked at her. “The good news for us is that it’s safe to cross. It is not, however, safe to stand here.” She gave him a confident smile and took a step into the water. “We can do this.”
Silt swirled up into water already lacking clarity. Warmth surrounded her boots as she moved forward, the sucking sounds making her cringe.
She reached her arm back, and pulled him forward into the water.
A few feet from the shore the silt gave way to stones. Rachel slipped to one side, the weight on her back unbalancing her. “Be careful, the rocks are covered in algae. You can’t see where to put your feet through the dirty water.”
Adam said, “I can’t think right because of the pills. My head’s fuzzy.”
Rachel had to concentrate on not slipping. When she looked back at Adam, his face was white with fear, his arms out for balance as he slid one foot at a time across the rocks. His bangs were wet with sweat. Rachel’s heart squeezed. She looked across to the other side. It shouldn’t be taking this long, but their pace was tortuous. They were only halfway there. The river was shallow, maybe four feet in the center, but that came up to Adam’s chest. The smell from the bloom was becoming more intense. This is the worst part, she thought. If there is something, it will come now, when we are farthest from both sides.
“Mom, I can’t do it.”
Guilt about putting her son through this, anger that she had to, made Rachel sound harsher than she meant to. “You have to! This isn’t a ride where you can get off in the middle.”
With a whimper, Adam closed his eyes.
“We have to keep moving,” she said. “This is the hard part where we can’t give up, even though we’re tired and thirsty and we can’t see the end. I can’t walk across for you, I wish I could.” She took a deep breath and struggled to soften her tone, “But, I can walk with you.”
Rachel waited for him to pass her so she could help steady him from behind, but she wasn’t fast enough when Adam slipped. His eyes and mouth flew open as he tilted forward, his wounded arm going into the brackish water. Her outstretched hand clutched at his shoulder.
A zing pulsed around them. Like touching an electric fence, the vibration ran from her toes up her spine to her clenched teeth, leaving a metallic taste in her mouth.
“Go.” Rachel whispered from a throat too dry. “Be brave and go as fast as you can.”
“Stop it!” Adam screamed at her. His face contorted with emotion too strong for words. “You’re the one who is scaring me.”
“I’m not scaring you!” Rachel felt something happening in the water, energy running over her body. “I’m the one who is saving you!”
She couldn’t breathe; the packs were too heavy, but she didn’t want to let them go. They wouldn’t survive without their packs. She pushed Adam forward, using her own body to force him into his fear.
The blue-green scum of the algae bloom undulated, the smell nauseating, the motion its own rhythm in water that was still. Brownish shells bobbed to the surface, each one about two feet long, a spike-like tail behind, widely spaced eyes that looked like bumps. Five pairs of jointed legs. Except that some of the legs were missing, the shells had holes, the gills didn’t bother to move. Rachel urged Adam, tried to shield him from looking at what was swimming toward them.
Zombie horseshoe crabs.
THIRTY-FIVE
Rachel scanned the other side of the river. A combination of dead and living trees started a few feet from shore and climbed up the sides of a steep hill topped by boulders. Near the top she could see the entrance to a cave. They could take refuge amongst the boulders or start a fire with dead wood and go on the offensive. Why hadn’t she grabbed the matches from the church? Rachel looked to her left. The crabs were closer. Three in the front, a few behind them, more erupting from the blue-green scum downstream.
