There is only one way to save her. He must steal time, what may very well be his last act as a thief.
When Slade rounds the corner, Simon hurls the lantern at his face and the big man raises an arm to swat it aside, but before he can, Simon has already dropped to the floor in a slide. Slade’s legs are wide enough apart to shoot through, and, once past them, the boy bounces up and into a hard run. All this before Slade knocks the lantern against the wall.
The shattering matches the feeling inside Simon. This might be the one building in the Sanctuary he has never visited — the police headquarters — and he can only guess which way he is going as he negotiates a series of dimly lit corridors. He enters a room of barred cells, and several men reach for him and rattle the bars and moan and cheer. One of them nearly snatches him, a raisin-faced man with black snot bubbling from his diseased gash of a nose. Simon makes it through one doorway, then another. He could turn this corner and just as easily find a closet, but his luck holds out. A stone staircase rises before him.
Behind him Slade does not bellow, does not scream or curse or growl. He merely pursues, all his noise invested in his movement, stomping his feet and crashing into walls and shoving through the doors Simon closes on him in his passing.
They race up the stairs and out of the basement and down a tiled hallway framed by dark wood and festooned with old photos of policemen who watch them forbiddingly. Simon has never moved faster in his life. His feet hit the floor so hard pain rifles up his calves. The ceiling bulges upward, into a meeting hall, where the noise of his footsteps and the footsteps pursuing him multiplies.
He races now toward the entry, where two deputies appear. They drop their hands to their machetes. They call out for him to stop. And he does, skidding, nearly falling. He does not bother turning around, knowing Slade can’t be far behind, but he spies to his left the staircase that leads to the second level, and he hurries there.
Another deputy appears on the landing, close enough to reach a hand and snatch his collar, but Simon twists from his grip, slipping off his shirt altogether and running bare chested down a long hallway.
He has no plan except to avoid the voices that pursue him. Halfway down the hallway, he pushes through the door of an office. He jumps onto the desk, shoves aside the chair, and worms his way out the window. The sill is spiked with nails and glass, but he does not have time to take care. He slices a finger, spikes his palm, when swinging himself over.
He tries to let go, but his hand won’t loosen, his bad hand. It has been run through by a nail. He yanks at it and the pain electrifies him, not from the nail, not yet, but the tendons twisting and snapping in his wrist. His legs dangle in the air, maybe thirty feet between him and the ground.
He feels eyes on him. He hears voices in the street, a gathering crowd.
In his mind, he calls up the vision of Ella — them dancing to the Françoise Hardy record — and wishes her face to be the last thing he sees. But it is not. Another appears above him, like a risen moon. Slade is not smiling or frowning. His slitted eyes study Simon with a predatory fascination. Then he takes hold of his hand and pats it comfortingly before dragging it off the nail — and letting go.
Chapter 50
AS OFTEN AS she can, Clark escapes the mall — its imprisoning walls, its stale air laced with the tangy smell of fish and woodsmoke — and surrounds herself instead with sky. She spends her days hunting, minding the traps and lures. Though she often finds herself distracted. Her eyes look west. Her feet walk west, her body naturally angling in that direction like the point on a compass. She imagines now, as she did when a sentinel on the wall, mountains. White mountains that appear like teeth nested in black gums.
Then she shakes her head or presses her fists to her eyes. If she thinks about the mountains, she thinks about Lewis. If she thinks about Lewis, she thinks about the final look he gave her — made of equal parts hate and sympathy — before escaping this place.
So she works, and when she doesn’t work, she drinks. That distracts her mind, numbs it, because when she starts to think, she starts to doubt and hate and grieve. The snow is ash and ash is the color of grief. Everywhere she looks, outside and inside herself, she sees death. There was a time she felt nothing but disgust for Reed, but now she understands. He had it right. There is no such thing as the future. The future is what you longed for. There is nothing left for her to long for, except an end to the pain. Death is an end to the pain. Death is the future. Death is curative, medicinal. In her darkest, drunkest moments, instead of Oregon, she feels beckoned by the grave, a deep black hole where she might find her brother. She thought escaping the wall was freeing, but now death seems the ultimate freedom.
She’s sorry she pushed Reed away and she’s sorry she couldn’t save her brother and she’s sorry she betrayed Lewis. She’s so goddamn sorry, and though it’s too late for the others, maybe it’s not too late for him. If she could only find him, if she could only tell him how sorry she was, if she could only get that word out of her, she thinks she might feel better, like coughing up an infection.
Today a warm front moves through, so that fog ghosts between the trees and flows down the river like a second current. The temperature hovers around freezing. Snow sluffs off roofs. The birds are busy, the red flashes of cardinals in the undergrowth, the black nets of crows thrown over trees. More seem to gather by the minute and the air is busy with their muttering.
She prefers to be alone, but the girls call for her this morning and ask her to help, and though she tries to resist them, they beg her and she relents. They are collecting fish from the tip-ups — slitting their bellies and pulling out their guts to use in the shoreline traps — but they can’t seem to reel in this one. It’s stuck.
“Stuck,” she says and tests the line and it hums with tension and when she takes it in her hands it feels like she has taken hold of herself, some central nerve that disappears into a dark place. She rears back — and the line drags — and she waits until it slackens, then reels in until it tightens again, and in this way it takes her a good five minutes before the fish surfaces. She leans over to peer down the hole, more than a foot deep. At the bottom of it, a broad, whiskered, fleshy-lipped mouth gapes. A catfish, a big one, too big, and she orders the girls to their knees to chip and saw away the ice, to accommodate the girth of the massive fish.
Twenty minutes later, her arms ache from fighting the drag, and just in time she hauls out the fish — two-handed, grunting — and it slips and flops and twists on the ice. Snow sticks to it in clumps. It opens and closes its mouth, gaping around the hook. One of the girls gets her arms and legs around it — wrestling it down — and Clark drives a knife into its head and it shudders and goes still. The girls laugh and so does she and the laughter feels strange, exotic, like a language she once knew but forgot.
The fog is beginning to burn away. And the sun seems brighter in the sky, even when filtered by clouds. The crows, thronging in the trees along the river, have been muttering all along, but now they grow wild, kaak-kaak-kaaaking.
When they cut open the fish’s belly, they find a beaver inside, swallowed whole and socked by yellow jelly, like some malignant birth. Clark sits on the ice, for a moment too tired to care about the cold creeping through her pants, and everyone stands around her, commenting on the big fish and the beaver, saying gross and ick and nudging each other and still laughing so that their breath clouds.