Children of the Underground Page 21

Michael shrugged. “I never thought I had a choice. This is the life I was born into. This is what I have to do.”

  “That’s it?”

  Michael’s eyes glanced across the faces of the people in the bar. I tensed up, ready to react if he saw something. His eyes landed back on me. “I tell myself that everyone that I kill is playing the same game as me.” Then he added, as if it was an afterthought, “And I hope that there’s a good reason for all of it. I hope that I’m the good guy.” I couldn’t help but think that he was more like your father than he let on.

  “You could have run like Reggie did.”

  Michael shook his head. “You know that’s not my style.”

  “You seemed pretty confident that there were good reasons for the War when we spoke to Clara.”

  “No. I never said there was a good reason. Just a reason.”

  “What if you find out the reason and it turns out you’re the bad guy?”

  Michael shrugged again. “Then I was born to be a bad guy.” After a pause, he said, “Tell me something about yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tell me something that I don’t know about what your life was like before this.”

  I honestly considered it for about a second. Then I shook my head. “No.”

  “I just want a better feel for who you really are.”

  All I could think of was that I’d helped kill a man today. “Who I am now and who I was then have nothing to do with each other. If I was going to tell you stories about what I was like when I was a little girl, I might as well tell you stories that I read in a book.” Michael looked at me and waited. I had nothing more to say. Maybe a time will come when I can tell you stories, but I need to get some of the girl I used to be back first.

  Michael was right about the drinking. Already the memories of that afternoon were beginning to fade in my head. Soon the only memories that were left were those of the mark’s blood trickling through the crack in the door as Michael slipped out, and the relief I felt when the pressure on that door from the mark’s pushing subsided. Those memories weren’t going to go away, no matter how much I drank.

  “And you?” Michael asked after we were silent for some time. I didn’t know what he meant. He saw my confusion and clarified. “How do you plan on getting by?”

  I wasn’t ready for the question. It struck me like a bat to the head. My eyes welled up with tears. I blame some of it on the alcohol. “I do it all for Christopher.” I clenched my jaw, trying to stop the emotion. “I don’t care if that makes me the bad guy either.” I picked a napkin up off the table and wiped the tears away from my eyes.

  “You were good today,” Michael said, trying to cheer me up.

  “I felt weak,” I told him.

  “You messed his face up pretty good before I got there. That didn’t look weak to me.” Michael leaned in closer to me, putting his elbows on the table. “Listen, there’s always going to be someone stronger than you. That’s true if you’re five-feet-nothing like you or if you’re Jared. In your case, you’re always going to be physically weaker than most men. Your job isn’t to become stronger than them, because you can’t. Your job is to become as strong as you can. It’s to become stronger tomorrow than you were yesterday. It’s to remember that everything you do is practice for the next thing you do. That’s it. He hit you hard in the face. I saw the mark. But you got back up. Two months ago, you never would have gotten up off the floor. And you held the door closed when the mark was pushing on it.”

  “Barely,” I said, but the pep talk was working. I was feeling stronger.

  “Doors are either opened or they’re closed, Maria.”

  A slow song came on the jukebox. Michael’s eyes scanned the bar again. My body didn’t tense up this time. I was too tired. “Do you want to dance?” he asked, staring at the empty space in the middle of the bar.

  “Here?” I asked. “People will see us.”

  Michael shrugged. He didn’t care. I imagined what it would be like. Michael would stand up, pulling my hand, pulling me up off the bench and leading me to the empty space in front of the jukebox. He’d put his arms around my waist, and I would reach up around his neck and place my hands on his shoulders. I’d run my hands over the raised skin on his back where the letters had been burned forever. I’d rest my head on his chest and we would simply sway there, our feet hardly moving. Then I would close my eyes and imagine that I was dancing with your father. I wondered who Michael would imagine he was dancing with. It didn’t matter. The only people we had to dance with was each other.

  The song ended before I could respond. I looked up at Michael and told him that I thought we should go. He agreed. When we got back to the hotel room, Michael climbed into his bed and I climbed into mine. We both slept. If it weren’t for the alcohol, I’m not sure if I ever would have gotten to sleep that night. Before we went to sleep, Michael told me that he was going to call in tomorrow to find out what his next job was. He asked if I wanted to listen. I said yes.

  Thirty-four

  Evan and Addy might not have made it out of the convenience store in Louisiana if Addy hadn’t reacted so quickly to the screaming. They were that close to being caught or worse. The convenience store was small and quiet, the exact type of place that Evan and Addy had been trying to get their supplies from. Only this time, one of the store’s customers recognized Evan from his pictures on the news. She was a seventy-year-old woman making her once-daily trip to the store. She never bought more than a day’s worth of supplies, not wanting to waste anything in case she didn’t make it to tomorrow. She saw Evan and she screamed. That was the first scream. The little old lady never expected any of the monsters that she saw on her television to actually crawl out of her TV into real life, but there Evan was, walking down the aisle toward her. He was carrying a box of generic cereal and a quart of milk in his arms. He wasn’t looking at the lady when he first turned into the aisle. He was looking down at the price tag on the box of cereal, doing the math in his head, trying to figure out if Addy would think it was too expensive. Addy was already at the cash register, waiting for Evan to get back with the rest of their makeshift breakfast. She made him go back for the generic cereal after he’d first grabbed a pricey name brand.

  The old lady saw Evan turn the corner toward her but didn’t recognize him at first. She couldn’t get a good look at him while his head was down, staring at his cereal box. It was his dark, messy hair that first got her attention. Her lips began to curl even before she saw Evan’s face. She hated how the young people neglected to comb their hair. She thought it showed a lack of respect for the rest of the world. Then Evan lifted his head. When she saw his face, she recognized him immediately. She’d seen his face dozens of times. It took her a few seconds before she started screaming, though. She knew that she was staring at the terrorist, but it took her a few seconds to decide whether he was real or merely a figment of her aging mind. The spell was broken when Evan said “Excuse me” as he stepped around the harmless-looking old lady in the soup aisle. When she heard him speak, she knew he was real. The imaginary monsters didn’t speak. Only the real ones had voices.

  Before she screamed, the little old lady pulled a can of condensed soup off of the shelf and threw it at Evan’s back. He was close enough to her that the lilting throw managed to hit him on the back of the leg. Evan turned around. When he did, she picked another can off the shelf. “What the hell?” Evan shouted when he realized that she’d thrown the first can at him on purpose and was about to throw another. He didn’t understand what was going on. He didn’t put it together. She was sure then that the terrorist was going to attack her. In her head, she saw images of being thrown to the ground and torn to pieces by his sharp terrorist teeth and claws. She screamed.

  “IT’S HIM!” she shouted, as if she’d been saving her breath for the past ten years for this moment. It was louder than she’d yelled
since she was a girl.

  “What the hell?” Evan muttered again, utterly confused by the old lady screaming at him.

  “THE TERRORIST!” the little old lady shouted, this time using every molecule of remaining air in her lungs. Until that moment, until Addy heard that word shouted into the air, Addy hadn’t realized the power of the label they branded on Evan. In the world Addy came from, the word didn’t carry any weight. Terror was a part of life. Not in this world, Addy suddenly realized. The little old lady wasn’t brave. It was that word, that label. The little old lady was doing what any of them would do when faced with a terrorist or a werewolf or a zombie. She was doing her civic duty. When no more sound would come out of the little old lady’s mouth, she hunched over, gasping for air.

  Once Addy realized the power of that word, she jumped right into action. She knew she didn’t have much time. She leapt over the counter toward the burly man manning the register. She moved before he had a chance to recognize the words that the old lady had released into the air. Addy planted a hand on the counter and swung her feet over it like a gymnast clearing a vault. The man behind the counter didn’t see Addy coming toward him. He was too busy watching the old lady and the kid in the soup aisle. At first, the man behind the counter thought that maybe the kid had tried to steal the crazy old bag’s purse or something. Then the kid turned toward him. Maybe it was because the word was already floating in the air, but that’s when the man behind the counter recognized Evan’s face too. Over the past three days, the man behind the counter had seen Evan’s face more times than he’d seen his own. The terrorist was in his store. The man behind the counter realized that he was finally going to get his chance to be a hero. He reached beneath the counter and grabbed the pump-action shotgun that he kept there to scare away the meth addicts trolling for easy robbery targets. Then there was another scream.

  Evan’s eyes drifted across the aisles toward the sound of the second scream. It was a younger woman, maybe in her late twenties or early thirties. She had a little boy with her who couldn’t have been more than three years old. The kid had dark skin and curly black hair. The woman screamed and charged toward Evan. She wouldn’t have recognized him on her own either. Like the man behind the counter, it was the word TERRORIST hanging in the air like a scent that made her remember Evan’s face and allowed her to make the mental jump from what she’d seen on the news to her own reality. No one doubted for even a moment that Evan was the bad guy. He was everything that had ever gone wrong in their lives. His very existence was unfair.

  The man behind the counter started to lift the shotgun up toward his shoulder, but somehow it stopped before he could get the barrel any higher than his waist. The man behind the counter didn’t realize that Addy was already standing next to him. All he knew was that despite how he moved his arms, the shotgun wasn’t pointing in the direction he wanted it to. He tried to lift it up again but it was stuck, pointing down to the floor. Then he saw the hand holding on to the muzzle. His eyes followed the hand up to a wrist and then up the arm to the face of the woman standing next to him. He tugged at the gun, trying to pull it from the woman’s grip. Instead of holding on to it tightly, Addy let the barrel slip a few inches through her fingers. The man kept pulling upward, and the gun slipped up toward his face. After a second, Addy retightened her grip on the nozzle of the gun and now pushed upward in the same direction the man was pulling, until the butt of the shotgun slammed into his nose, blinding him with pain. Then Addy yanked the shotgun from the man’s hands.

  “Evan!” Addy shouted. Evan turned toward Addy’s voice. The second woman was still charging at him from the other side of the convenience store, leaving her child standing alone and scared in the corner. Addy threw the shotgun to Evan. She knew that he knew how to use it, that he’d practiced shooting shotguns with Christopher in the woods as a kid. Evan caught the shotgun with one hand. Then he turned toward the woman charging at him while wailing out that wicked, raw scream. Evan aimed the gun at the woman’s chest. She saw the gun and tried to stop running. Her feet skidded across the floor only a few feet in front of Evan. She stopped. The sight of the gun aimed at her chest had instantaneously brought the woman back to reality. Evan squeezed the trigger. He pulled it just enough to feel the tension in the trigger pushing back against the skin on his finger. If he had pulled the trigger any farther, he would have blown a hole clear through the woman’s chest.

  “Everybody calm down!” Evan heard Addy shout as she leapt back over the counter. The chaos stopped. It had lasted only seconds. The motion and the screaming stopped too. As if in a dream, Evan could hear the warbling country music coming out of the store’s speakers again.

  “Go back to your kid,” Evan whispered to the woman standing in front of him. The rage in her face had been replaced by fear. She began to back away from Evan, backing toward the now-crying child. Evan looked back at the old woman who had started it all. She was holding herself up on one of the store shelves, now too weak to stay on her feet on her own.

  “Does anyone else have any weapons?” Addy yelled. She was answered with a less-than-totally-convincing silence. “If you do have a weapon that you’re not telling me about,” Addy shouted, “just remember, it’s not as big as ours.” Addy eyed the shotgun in Evan’s hands.

  Even as Addy did the yelling, all eyes stayed on Evan. Not only was he the one holding the gun, but he was also the television nightmare come to life. “I want everyone to take their cell phones out,” Addy shouted, not lowering the volume of her voice even though the chaos had died down and she needed just three people to hear her. “I want you to give me your cell phones.” They all did as they were ordered; they all handed their cell phones over to Addy, who took them and put them in her backpack. Then she went back to the counter and yanked the landline out of its jack.

  “I don’t want any bullshit,” Addy shouted. “You.” She turned toward the woman with the kid. “That’s your car?” Addy pointed to the only car in the parking lot with a car seat in the back. The woman nodded. “Give me your keys,” Addy ordered. Evan did his part too, pointing the gun back at the woman as Addy made her demands. The woman fished a set of keys out of her purse and handed them to Addy. Addy walked back toward Evan. “Let’s get out of here,” she whispered to him. She was in no mood to press their luck.

  “Not yet,” Evan answered her. He swung the gun around and pointed it at the man behind the counter. The man’s hands were up near his face, trying to stop the blood from pouring out of his nose. The blood was already beginning to dry. “Open the register,” Evan ordered the man. The man followed Evan’s orders. He opened the register. “Give her the money,” Evan said to the man, motioning toward Addy.

  They got eighty-three dollars out of the cash register.

  Addy pulled the car seat out of the car before they drove off, abandoning it on the sidewalk in front of the store.

  Evan left rubber marks from the car’s tires on the pavement as they sped away.

  Thirty-five

  Michael went through the code: three random names followed by three transfers. After the third name, a man picked up. “Hello, Michael,” the voice said. The voice was deep and sonorous, like a voice you might hear on the radio. I was listening on the second handset that we’d requested from the front desk for a conference call. Before letting me listen in, Michael made me promise that I wouldn’t make a sound. I didn’t expect it to be a difficult promise to keep.

  “Hello, Allen,” Michael said. I remembered what your father told me. Allen wasn’t a name. It was a rank. From what I knew, they assigned Allens to soldiers who were either problematic or who showed particular promise. I had little doubt that Michael was both.

  “Nice work with the Philadelphia job,” Allen said. They already knew. It had to be in the news by now. I tried to imagine how they would cover this one up. Suicide? A disgruntled student? “Are you still in Philadelphia?” the voice asked.

&nb
sp; “Yeah,” Michael answered.

  “Okay, you’re going to have to leave right after this call.” My heart raced for a second. Michael looked calm.

  “Why?” Michael asked.

  “Nothing to worry about, but Their network is buzzing.”

  “They don’t know anything, right?”

  “Nothing dangerous.”

  “Okay,” Michael said. “Where should I go? Where’s the next job? I can go now.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to work. You’re just going to have to get out of Philly.” Michael and I looked at each other. We were both thinking the same thing, that they’d found us out, that they somehow knew I’d helped him kill the teacher and that he was helping me.

  “Is there something wrong?” Michael asked. His voice was calm.

  “No,” the voice said. “The opposite—that’s why the next job might take a little while.”

  I could see on Michael’s face that this wasn’t normal. “I’m shitty at riddles, Allen,” Michael said.

  “I’m going to patch you through to someone who can explain,” the voice said. “He’ll debrief you on your next job.”

  The line went silent. “Okay,” Michael said. Then we heard a click as the call was transferred. My stomach churned. I looked at Michael for some assurance. He looked at me and shrugged.

  A new voice came through the phone. “Michael?” I recognized the voice right away. I recognized it in my bones. My joints went numb. Michael recognized the voice too. I saw it in his face.

  “Jared?” Michael asked. I fought the urge to scream into the phone. I wanted to yell at him, What did you do to my son, you bastard? Michael, sensing my reaction, reached down to unplug my handset. When he reached down, I did too. I grabbed his wrist. He looked at me. I shook my head and placed my index finger across my lips, promising to be quiet. I wanted to hear this. I wanted to hear every word. As much as I hated Jared, he was the one we were looking for, the one that might be able to lead me back to you.