The Brothers (11 page)

“I’ll be back,” Bell says.

“Where are you going?” I say, but she’s gone.

A hand on my arm drags me out of sleep. “Wha—?”

A hand clamps over my mouth. “It’s me,” Bell says. She’s dressed in all black. Her gray-brown hair circles her head like a wreath. “Get up.”

I sit up, trying to calm my heart. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Precisely,” she says, setting heavy boots down on the floor below my feet. She hands me clothes, scratchy and smelling of outside. “Put these on as fast as you can.”

I look at the clothes. “Janitor’s coveralls?”

Bell nods as she helps me strip. “We’ve got ten minutes. Hannah helped me drug the night watch. Robbie got us a ride out.”

My head’s spinning. “What are you saying?” I look up at the camera, but it’s gone, a mess of dangling wires in its place.

“I’m saying move it. We got no time.” Bell pulls me up and tugs me to the door. She shoves a hat on my head and tucks my hair into it. “If we see anyone, keep your head down. If we get separated, head to the garage. Robbie’s waiting.”

“Robbie?” I can’t think. I can’t process any of this. “Is he coming? Are you?”

“I’m coming,” Bell says. “You’re a tough chickie, but you’re still recovering and could use a hand looking after you and that little one. I grew up outside. I’m sure it’s different now, but some of what I know will come in handy.”

I squeeze her hand. “Thank you.”

She puts a finger to her lips and leads me out the door.

Walking down the dark hallway is terrifying. Every room we pass, every hallway we slink by, makes my body freeze with trepidation. I stick close to Bell and try to keep breathing.

Bell skips the elevator and leads us to the stairs. When I see the number five painted on the concrete wall of the stairwell, my legs feel weak. I haven’t moved more than a few feet in weeks. Bell lets me lean on her, but by the time we’ve gone three floors, I can barely stand.

“Two more, puddin’,” Bell says, tugging my hand when I collapse in a heap on the stairs.

I look up at her strong face and pull myself up. “At least we’re going down.”

We make it to the first floor, but I’m breathing too heavily to go on. We wait until my breath doesn’t sound like an asthmatic’s. Then we step out onto the first floor.

The black-and-white checkered hallways are dead silent. Bell looks both ways and then heads toward the garage. The last time I was on this floor, I asked Robbie for the favor that gave me the baby swelling in my stomach. I haven’t seen him since. And now he’s offering to help me again. How I have so many kind people around me is amazing. It gives me faith in this world.

But my thoughts are snapped away as Bell shuffles to a stop. Her body goes rigid.

“What?” I whisper.

“Quiet.” She stays frozen.

I freeze.

Seconds pass in awful slowness. I strain my ears to hear. Is someone coming? There’s a thud from deep down the hallway. I grab Bell’s arm.

A door shuts. Footsteps echo on the tile. Heavy. Male.

Bell snaps to life, tugging my arm. “Run.”

We tear down the hallway. The footsteps tear after us. I look over my shoulder, but it’s too dark to see. Who’s coming? It doesn’t matter. If they catch us, we’re dead.

“This way!” Bell says, tugging. We tear around a corner. The heavy doors that lead to the garage appear. Bell shoves me toward them. “Go!”

I grab her arm. “Not without you!”

She tugs away from me. “Just go.”

The garage door opens. Robbie’s head peeks in. “You’re here. I was beginning to—”

“Take her,” Bell says, shoving me. Her hands scramble at her pocket. She pulls out a tiny gun.

“Where’d you get that?” I ask, horrified. If she’s caught with a gun, she’ll be executed.

She fiddles with the weapon and nods frantically at Robbie. “Take her. Go!”

Robbie looks confused. “I thought you were coming.”

“So did I.” Bell aims the gun at the dark hallway. The footsteps thud so near.

Robbie hears them. He looks between Bell and me. Even in my terror, instinct makes me turn my burned face away. “Come on.” He takes my hand.

“Get your hands off my wife.”

Bell grits her teeth and aims.

The barrel of a much larger gun appears first, and then Dr. Houghtson. He aims at Bell. “I’ll shoot you, Bell. I don’t care if you’re Bashees’ pet. After I got a good look at her face…” He looks at me and shivers. “I’ve got someone in town who’s willing to pay off my debts if I hand her over.”

“And if you don’t, they’ll cut your goddamned balls off,” Bell says, still aiming. “You think I give two shits?”

I stare at the large, silver weapon in Houghtson’s hand. Bell’s gun looks so small in comparison.
Please, please, please don’t let him shoot her
.

Houghtson gives her a sly smile. “When’s the last time you shot a gun, Nanny?”

Bell’s expression doesn’t change. “Don’t need to practice pulling a trigger. Pretty sure I still remember how.”

“Hand the girl over, and I’ll let you and the janitor go.”

Robbie’s hand tightens on my arm. “No.”

Houghtson’s eyes flick to Robbie. “Was it you and her? It was, wasn’t it? Do you know what happens to people who steal from me?”

“Leave Robbie alone,” I say, my limbs trembling with anger and fear. “He had nothing to do with this.”

But Houghtson’s gaze travels up and down Robbie’s frame. “This is who you chose over me? This townie with shit under his fingernails?” He turns the gun on Robbie.

“No!” I scream.

Two gunshots bang from opposite directions. Bell and Houghtson. I scream.

Beside me, Robbie falls.

“Robbie!” I turn to him. He’s lying on his back. A trickle of blood is spreading on the tile.

Movement. I look up. Houghtson aims at Auntie, but she already has her gun on him. She fires again.

This time, the bullet strikes true. Houghtson lurches back as if jerked from behind by an invisible string. He staggers as a bright red splotch widens on his chest. He falls.

I stare at Houghtson. At Robbie. My ears are ringing. I can’t think. I can’t move. Are they dead? Am I?

Bell grabs my wrist. “Move!”

An alarm begins to blat.

I look down at Robbie. “We can’t leave him!”

Bell looks at the bleeding boy. “We can’t save him. He’ll die if we take him with us. Here, he might have a chance.”

I drop to my knees beside my friend. The puddle of blood under his back is so much wider than it was before. “Robbie,” I say, gently shaking him. “Wake up.”

Long eyelashes flutter. Robbie looks into my face and smiles. “You’re not hurt?”

Silent tears drip from my face to his. “But you are. We need to get you out of here.”

“I’ll…slow you down.” His face tightens with pain.

“What can I do for you?” My hands flutter over the wound in his shoulder. So much blood.

Robbie doesn’t answer. The alarm blats.

Bell tugs on me. “We need to go!”

A hand tightens on my wrist. Robbie opens his eyes. “Go, Jan. Please.”

I shake my head, but Bell drags me away. “I’m sorry, Robbie,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”

Bell shoves me down the stairs and into the waiting truck. We peel out to the sound of alarms and my sobs.

It only takes four days to run out of water.

Despite Bell’s planning and packing, her rucksacks of medicine and weapons, changes of clothes and cooking utensils, the container of spare fuel Robbie stole from the garage, it’s water that is our undoing.

Bell and I sit in the back of the parked van, sweating and staring at the last jug with a swig of water sloshing inside. Bell thrusts the jug into my chest. “Drink it and be done. I’m sick to death of staring at it.”

I shake my head and pass it back to her. “You haven’t had a drink today. Who’ll drive if you pass out?”

Bell purses her wrinkled lips. “Add another item on my to-do list. Teach you to drive.”

I don’t say that it probably doesn’t matter since we’re going to die on this dusty backroad. Staring at the jug, I beg it to expand with water. Wasn’t there a story from the Christman where he multiplied a few fish to feed the multitudes? We need a miracle right now, but all we have is each other.

Bell looks at the jug and out the van’s front window. The sun is a force. Inside the hospital, the sun always looked bright and full, pleasant even. Now, without air conditioning, the sun is roasting us alive. During the day, the van is so hot, even with the doors cracked open, I can barely stand it. At night, the temperature drops until we freeze.

But it’s water that’ll finish us. The knotty desert stretches for miles past the hustle and bustle of Albuquerque. Abandoned buildings have all gone dry. We’ve tried more faucets and hoses than I want to remember and all at terrible danger to ourselves. At one house, a man charged out at us, snarling and snapping. Bell fended him off at knifepoint until we could get back to the van and peel out.

I look at the jug and feel my throat tighten. Every cell in my body is contracting, drying out. My mouth is a desert canyon. My tongue is cracked leather.

“Goddamn this,” Bell says, pushing up. She crawls to the driver’s seat.

“What’re you doing?” I ask. “I thought we weren’t traveling during the day.”

Bell starts the van and puts it in gear. “We need water. If we don’t find it, it won’t matter if we’re spotted. They’ll find corpses with our mouths around empty water jugs.” She pulls out a map as she bumps toward the main road.

“Here,” I say, grabbing it from her. “Keep your eyes on the road.”

Bell
humphs
but let’s me unfold the ancient map. I stare at the squiggles in different colors. “How do you know if any of this is still good?”

“I don’t. But towns don’t just disappear, and there was a pretty big one a few miles from us if I’m reading that map right.”

“Thought you said we should avoid towns.”

“Everything I said is out the blasted window until we find water.” Bell dodges a billboard that has tipped into the road, and I rock in my seat. I take this moment to buckle myself in and singe my fingers on the hot metal seatbelt.

As Bell drives toward town, we sit bolt upright, not speaking. Being out in the open like this during the day is terrifying. I’ve cut my hair with one of the stolen knives and Bell has wound hers into a cap. We wear Robbie’s coveralls, but it won’t be enough if someone gets close. Every abandoned building, gas station, and restaurant could have Breeder’s spies. Every corner we turn could lead us into an ambush. I grip the map until my fingers form permanent indents.

If I weren’t so afraid, the scenery would be lovely. Unlike Albuquerque, here the buildings are few and far between. Shrubs and plants dot the brown landscape, and a great stretch of mountains cuts across the horizon. Above, the sky is the bluest blue with fluffy white clouds coasting along. Birds twitter and swoop. Insects buzz. And only the occasional broken-down car or crumpled building mars the beauty of nature.

Too bad we’d die if we stayed out here.

But when we get closer to the city of Santa Fe, the beauty disappears and the human destruction I’m used to starts up again. Picked-over cars lie across highway lanes. Trash scuttles across the pavement. Buildings hide dark rooms and places for people to skulk. If this is what the entire world looks like, the Breeders girls are missing much.

“What if people live in this town?” We drive by a subdivision, houses all crumbling and abandoned on the right. A burnt motorcycle husk blocks our side of the road. Bell drives around it as fast as she can. Through the open windows, the sound of our tires and the pinging of rocks on the underside of the van seem way too loud. Anyone will hear us. And anyone who lives in a desolate place like this will want whatever we have.

I grip my seatbelt and try not to have a heart attack.

We pass rows and rows of houses. Then rows and rows of buildings—old offices and shops, brick and adobe decaying. Tattered awnings flap like tortured birds. The walls are tagged with ominous graffiti. Spray-painted skulls stare back from shop fronts. The words “death to all who enter” scrawl across a former dentist’s office. Bell eyes the building, but turns her gaze back to the road.

“Gun’s in the glove compartment.” She nods to it.

I glance at it and then turn to Bell.

“I don’t know how.”

“Item one hundred on the to-do list: teach you to shoot.”

I open the glove compartment and pull out the gun. The feeling of the solid metal in my lap is severe and strange.

“Things have changed since I been out,” Bell whispers. “Things have definitely changed.”

“What was it like growing up out here?” I ask, palming the gun and trying to breathe.

Bell puckers her mouth, remembering. “When I was a kid, things weren’t so bad. Sure, there was drought, lawlessness, the occasional murder in the street, but there were enough good people ‘round to put a stop to most foolishness. We had electricity ‘bout half the time. They’d run the movie theaters on Saturdays. I remember sitting beside my brother David in the top row. He loved to sit up there. Before he was killed.”

“Sorry,” I say because I don’t know what else to offer.

She shrugs. “When I was twenty or so, things really fell apart. By then, the population had dipped so low that everything ground to a halt. No water, no sewer, no electricity. You take away a man’s refrigerator and all hell breaks loose.” She smiles.

“Cities weren’t safe. I moved with my dad and brother Charlie to a cave for a while. That was as fun as you’d imagine.”

Bell drives through the battered downtown area and the buildings space out a little more. I breathe a little easier.

“When did the Breeders come around?” I ask.

“I got swooped up when I was twenty-five. Bastards killed my dad. Luckily, Charlie had gone hunting.”

“Did you ever see Charlie again?”

She shakes her head and goes quiet. I want to ask more—she’s never been able to talk about the world outside freely before—but I can see each word costs her.

We drive past another dead body lying on the sidewalk. Clothes flutter in the wind around bones and shriveled skin. I turn away.