The two girls stare at each other. Clair spits to the ground. “In that case, I’m coming. I can help. I know the quickest way there. And back.”
“Clair—” I say.
“C’mon then,” Clair says. “There’s no time to waste.” She races off, knowing we’ll follow, dashing in and out of the alleyways, slipping in narrow spaces between cottages. Agile and nimble, she quick-cuts around tight corners, sprints through cottages, leaps over fences. Every so often, we bump into a group of girls fleeing down the streets, screaming, going as fast their lotus feet can take them. “Go to the train station!” I order them. But even as I see them hobble off, I know they have no chance of outracing the duskers.
Who are everywhere and nowhere. I have yet to see a single one even though their howls pierce every corner of the village. By the gathering volume of their cries, I know they are still pouring in, an endless stream of them. They are incited by the coppery scent of our blood as they race through the streets, through the cottages, through our clothes, through our skin, through our muscles and fat and internal organs and blood vessels.
“This way!” Clair urges, her voice hushed, and we race faster down the street.
Two cottages ahead of us, a girl rushes out the front door. The screams have panicked her out of her hiding place inside. She’s confused and uncertain as she turns toward us. She never sees—
—the black wind that takes her. In the blink of an eye, an indiscernible black shape swoops in from the side, swiping her off her feet and back into the house, the door smashing into smithereens. The girl’s screams intermix with the duskers’ howls, an eerie, interlacing intimacy.
I grab Clair’s hand, pull her away. Her arm is limp, her feet dragging with shock.
“Krugman’s office, that’s all you think about, okay, Clair? Take us there!”
She nods, but her body is betraying her. She starts to shake, her eyes darting from side to side, trying to make sense of a world gone dark and black and bloody. She pulls off her scarf, wraps it around her head.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“My white hair, it’s giving our position away in the dark.”
“No. It’s the smell of blood that’ll draw them,” I say, removing her scarf, wrapping it around her neck again. “And that’s our advantage right now. We know exactly where they are. Wherever there’s screaming, there’s blood, and that’s where they are. We stay away from the screams.”
She nods frantically, her lower jaw juddering.
“You stay with me, Clair, and you’re fine. Because I know these things, I’ve survived their attacks before. I know how they move, where, when, why. Look at me, Clair, look into my eyes!”
She does, and I pour all my resolve into her eyes, into those pools of fear. I can almost hear the blood rushing through her veins. She nods, slowly, takes a deep breath.
“This way,” she says. “We’re almost there.” When she takes off, she’s found her legs again. Screams—sometimes solitary, often in groups—scald the night sky and we’re forced to circle or backtrack around them.
Hazy dark shapes dart through the village, disconcertingly close. Two girls, trying to escape out of a cottage by squeezing through a window, scream for help, their eyes beseeching. They are wedged in the window frame, and their arms lash against the outside wall. Their bodies suddenly arch straight and taut, their mouths screaming silent cries, their eyelids disappearing behind their eyeballs, exposing the whites of agony. Then their bodies collapse, dangling limp from the window like hung laundry, before being whipped back inside.
We don’t dawdle. We sprint across an alcove, in and out of smaller alleyways. “This way,” Clair says, and we’re suddenly in the wide open, running across the meadows toward the fortress walls. Above us, like a directional arrow, is the long power cable running from the center of town to Krugman’s office in the corner tower. Light pours out his panoramic windows, glowing like a halo.
41
WE RACE UP the spiral staircase, feet thumping on the stairs, hands pulling on the steep, curling handrail. It is eerily empty and quiet. Halfway up, Clair grabs my arm, stopping us. The soft sound of singing lilts from above.
From the deadly sword deliver me;
rescue me from the hands of outsiders
whose mouths are full of fangs,
whose hands are clawed with nails.
We look at each other, then start climbing again. Our steps slower, quieter. We stop; it’s Ben’s voice, trembling with fright.
Then our sons in their youth
may be as fortress walls,
and our daughters like polished pillars
of a fortified palace.
Our cottages will be filled
affording all matter of store.
At the top of the stairs, we follow Ben’s voice. Down the hallway to Krugman’s office. His door is ajar, and through the narrow gap, we see Ben, holding a sheet of music in trembling hands.
The office is illuminated with the soft glow of lamps. A faint drone of electricity—from the cable line—hums in the air. The office seems softened, the contours smoother compared to the previous time when the harsh glare of daylight had lent a sharpness to the interior. Krugman sits with his back to us, gazing out the floor-to-ceiling window on that side of the office. He is subdued, holding an emptied whisky tumbler as if toasting the night, seemingly oblivious to the screams and howls that threaten to crack the window.
Ben stands in front of a set of bookshelves lining the wall. His face is pallid and wan as I signal him to come, finger pressed against my lips. He glances back at Krugman, then tiptoes toward us. His hand slides into Sissy’s.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Krugman says with a subdued tone. There is not a hint of threat or urgency in his voice. As if he has all the time in the world, as if a wave of duskers is not sweeping over his village. “Why don’t you come in? All of you?”
We start retreating down the hallway.
“Because I surely hope you’re not trying to escape on the train,” Krugman says.
I pause. Sissy pulls at my arm, but something in Krugman’s tone …
“Because that would be jumping from the frying pan into the fire,” he says. “In fact,” he continues, somehow knowing he has my undivided attention, “into a volcanic pit of burning lava would be more apropos.” He snickers to himself.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Gene!” Sissy says.
“No, wait,” I say. Raising my voice, I say, “We’re leaving now.”
“That’s your choice,” Krugman says, as weary as ever. “You’ll only be delaying the inevitable.”
Again Sissy tugs my arm. And again, I resist. I turn to Krugman. “You’re too old and fat to make it to the train; you don’t want us to get away. You’re just trying to delay us.”
“And yet you stay, and yet you stay.” He swivels around slowly on his chair, his eyes watery and bloodshot. He smiles sadly, stroking his protruding stomach. “I wasn’t always this heavy,” he says lethargically, as if too tired to push words out.
It’s his resignation, his surrender to fate that alarms me. Because such men are not out to stall or set traps. If he’s delaying us, it’s because he wants to confess something.
The thought chills me.
“You think the train is certain death,” I say. “Tell me why.”
“Gene! Let’s go!” Sissy’s voice is ringed with urgency.
“Tell me why the train is certain death!” I insist.
Krugman taps his palms down on the armrests as if affectionately patting the heads of two toddlers. “Really, do you have to scream? Isn’t there enough screaming going on outside?”
“Okay, we’re leaving,” I say, turning around.
“It is not the train that’s certain death,” Krugman says, and his words flick out with such icy clarity, it is as if he has, for a moment, regained sobriety. “It’s the destination.” His voice then disintegrates into a wet mumble. “Much death and screaming there. Much. Muchly.”
“Tell us what’s in the Civilization.”
He giggles. “It will take time to explain. Much time. Muchly.”
“Gene, don’t fall for it! He just wants to—”
“—keep you from getting on the train?” Krugman says. “Then go, go I say. Off you go now, smack on the bottom, tussle of your hair, peck on your lips, off you go now, little darlings. Don’t let me keep you. Don’t miss your school bus on account of me.”
I walk over to Krugman, smack the tumbler out of his hand. It flies across the office, shattering against the wall. The sound jolts him; clarity shines in his eyes before a glassy fog clouds them again. He walks over to the window, the darkness outside framing him. A scream rips out from somewhere on the grounds below us, at the fortress wall. Its volume and proximity are terrifying.
“Gene!” Sissy says.
I ignore her. I need to know. “It’s the Ruler’s Palace, isn’t it?” I shout. “The train leads to nothing more than heper pens. I’m right, aren’t I?”
Krugman starts giggling. “Give the boy a cookie, please. Give the little detective a smiley face.” He wipes away a line of tears. “That’s only the tip of it,” he says. “You think you’re so smart, you think you’ve got this all figured out. You want the truth?”
Clair screams. A dusker, pale and glowing like the moon, slivers across the glass window like a leech. It can’t see through the one-way glass; it pauses, its face directly in front of the unmoving Krugman, its nostrils flaring. Then it skimmers away. Outside, a black wave of duskers is pouring over the fortress walls.
Krugman wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “The truth, now,” he says with a shaky voice. “Unvarnished for your consumption. Steady yourselves, little children.” He turns from the window towards us. “We’re all alone. Mankind was wiped out generations ago. The duskers took over the world. And we never took it back. We never found an antidote, a cure, a poison. We never found anything but death. The Civilization never existed.”