The Wounded

I picked up the torch and shone it at his face. “Oh yeah, what else did Pelo tell you?”

Joseph looked mischievous, his beautiful eyes shining more gold than green under the light. “He warned me.”

I bit down on my tongue in shock. “Warned you about what?”

“About your little friend. He said you were rather close on the journey home.”

My fingers curled into a fist, begging me to punch something.

“Can you do me a favor?” I asked in a tight voice, my lips barely moving as I spoke.

“What? You’re not going to ask me if I’m worried about this ‘friendship’ you have?” he said with mock hurt.

I ignored him. He knew. He knew how I felt, what I was capable of. The idea that there was something going on between Rash and me, other than friendship, was ridiculous and didn’t deserve any attention.

“Just do this favor for me. You warn Pelo that if he doesn’t stay out of my business, he’s going to be sorry.”

Joseph face settled into seriousness. “You know, you really should give him a chance.”

I crossed my arms angrily. “He had his chance. He threw it away.” I could feel unwanted tears brimming and teasing my eyelashes. “Just tell him, ok?”

Joseph grabbed at me with both hands and swept me into an awkward embrace, my back pressed into the armrest. “Ok.”

We had to leave, all three thousand of us, minus those lying in the crater. But now I didn’t want to. My body was reluctant, juiceless. I’d been squeezed too hard, and I wasn’t sure what was left. Joseph dragged me along. I walked, carrying Orry, next to Pelo, trying to see what my father was, and what was underneath all the energy and scatty movements, but I came up with very little. I thought about to giving him a chance as Joseph had asked, but I didn’t know how.

I trailed my hand along the filthy, graffiti-covered wall. The black loops and straight brush strokes were hypnotic and a good distraction from the anticipation of sliding on my belly along the collapsing concrete incline.

We stopped when we hit a wall of people in front, and someone at the front cried out. “Babies!”

People muttered, “Babies, babies,” and someone reached for Orry.

I snatched him to my chest and looked to Joseph. He smiled down at me kindly and nodded. “It’s all right, this is how they did it when we arrived.”

I let hands pull me to the front of the line. Hessa was being passed up into the concrete pipe, another person’s arms stretched out ready to receive him, and then he disappeared into darkness. He was quiet but for a little squeak. It sounded as if he had lost his voice.

A woman with kind eyes and thick tendrils of red-brown hair fixed into long, looping plaits smiled at me. “You go up, dear, and we will pass Orry to you.”

I felt small and warm, cradled by these people’s compassion, but still scared to let Orry go.

The woman beckoned with her fingers and tugged at Orry’s hand-knitted cardigan. “Go,” she said, gently but urgently.

I placed Orry gingerly in her arms and hoisted myself into the pipe.

*****

Inside was a network of interlacing torchlight, all held between grimacing mouths as people lay on the concrete slab with their feet atop of each other’s shoulders.

I followed their light, wiggling up, getting a shove or a hand pulling me up as I went. If this were the Woodlands, people would just go. There was no thought, no conceiving of others’ needs. But here they were, forming a human ladder to help me up, to help Orry.

When I reached the top, I turned around and waited, arms stretched into the darkness, my fingers longing for the weight of my baby. I watched as Orry was carried with so much care, like he was as delicate and breakable as a thin, shelled, sugar egg. They talked to him as they passed him, muttering unintelligible words of comfort, until he was safe in my arms. With Orry in my arms, I looked down, feeling like I might cry. The ladder was laden with more helpers, waiting to bring him safely to the ground, to join Hessa in the alley.

Sometimes I worried that bringing Orry into their world was a mistake, that the pain and violence he has had to witness would damage him in some way. But when I saw these people, the way they treated him as precious, the kindness and strength they exuded with their actions, I knew he would be ok. If we could pull this together, he would be better off for knowing life here with the Survivors.

*****

It was a different feeling, walking away from the car park. Thousands of words clashed and ground together in the air. The wind was still strong and biting, with tiny teeth of ash and grit, but we were louder and stronger. We poured in and out of the buildings, with scarves and masks over our mouths, holding onto each other when one threatened to topple over the edge, heading home with a purpose.

When we hit the first tangle of bodies, now buried deeper in the black soot but still painfully visible, it went quiet. Words were ripped from our mouths as the wounds that were delicately gauzed over reopened.

Pelo was the first.

He turned away from us, tugged at a vine still bumpy and budded, not ready to show petals, and pulled it from the earth. Solemnly and deliberately, he threw it into the crater. We all followed its arc and gasped when it landed, clumsily draped over a jeaned leg. Hysterically, I waited for the leg to move. It didn’t.

The sound of hundreds, and eventually thousands, of hands ripping at the sparse flowers nestled in between ropey tree trunks and peeking shyly out from under slabs of broken road was strange. Stranger still was the sound and sight of them whizzing through the air and landing on and in between the bodies. It was beautiful and heartbreaking. There would be no burial for these Survivors. This was the best and the only thing we could do.

I gazed down at one long-stemmed flower lying over a small, delicate hand, facing palm upward, almost as if it were holding it. I stared long and hard, willing those fingers to close around the stem. Joseph put a hand on my shoulder and said, “We have to keep moving.”

I lifted my eyes slowly, casting them over each and every lost Survivor. I wouldn’t forget them. I took a step forward, bending my toe awkwardly over a loose section of asphalt. I pitched forward onto my hands, managing to stop myself from falling face first into the hole with Orry, my hand sunk deep into the insubstantial ash.

“Rosa!” cried Joseph as he put his arm under me and helped me up. I was lifted off the ground like a crab from the water, my arms and legs dangling in the air.

My eyes caught sand pouring, moving like a cascade of water over a person’s back.

“Stop!” I said sharply, still hanging in the air with Orry gripped to my chest. “Look over there, what’s that?”

Joseph hung me there as he searched the edge of the crater. “Oh my God.”

I could feel his arm shaking from my weight and scrabbled to put my feet on the ground.

I sat down and shielded my eyes. The morning sun created a flat and angry shadow that ran like a knife through the center of the crater. “Is that a…?” I didn’t want to say it. Hope clawed its way out of my throat. It kind of stung, because it didn’t seem possible.

“It’s a person. Look! Look!” Pelo yelled as he tugged on peoples’ sleeves and directed them to where we were looking.

Joseph smiled, and I gri

It was so far away that we couldn’t tell if it was a male or female. It was right on the other side of the crater, close to where the town began. But it was a definitely a moving, living person, gradually and doggedly scaling the cliff.

We were still, watching closely, gasping as the person slipped and rolled back down a few meters, like they were climbing up a waterfall slick with moss. They gained a little ground but kept skidding down.