The Wanted

The people of Palma were ready for this. They stepped between the bars on the ground like they were playing hopscotch. Most of the soldiers were already lined up against the concrete wall, disarmed with their hands on the back of their heads. The gunman who’d shot Nafari had been taken down too.

I rushed to where I’d last seen him.

The ground and wall were scorched black. There was no body. I started tipping up debris and calling out his name. “Nafari! Nafari!” I screamed, my voice disappearing, my ears thrumming.

A hand gripped my shoulder. “What are you doing, my man?”

I flinched and swung around, my fists up, ready to fight.

“Whoa, let us help you,” the man said, his voice deep and ti

I tried not to cry as he waited for me to speak. The whole situation was pounding down on me like an enormous fist from the sky. “The man who freed you, who blew the gates is here somewhere…” I managed breathlessly, sweeping my arms over the piles of concrete and segments of iron, pointing to the vague area where I’d seen his smiling face before a blanket of white.

“Nafari!” I yelled again.

The man nodded and started yelling Nafari’s name. Somehow, word traveled, and soon there were twenty people upturning bits of gate and rubble and shouting his name. All the while, others were leaving the compound.

I looked up at the where the gate used to be and saw Desh standing there, beaming. The others were picking their way over the debris too.

“Here!” someone shouted.

I ran to them, my legs grating against sharp rubble. A twisted arm protruded out from under a collapsed shed. The guard’s shed. I kneeled down and grabbed his wrist. A thin pulse blipped under my fingers.

“He’s alive,” I said, relief pouring out of every pore in my body. He was alive.

The others ran towards me, and we pulled the sheets of tin from his body. I gave him a quick physical assessment. He was bleeding badly, but he would live. Some men lifted him up and laid him on one of the sheets of tin. “We’ll take him to our hospital, friend,” one of them said.

I lifted his dangling, broken arm up and placed it over his chest. He opened his eyes and managed a smile. “You did it, Nafari,” I whispered.

“I said call me Naf,” he managed before his eyes fluttered closed.

It had turned around in a matter of hours. Now we were sitting inside one of the cottages in Ring Eight with some residents of Palma. Laughing, drinking, and celebrating freedom.

Pelo slapped me on the back. “This is what we wanted,” he said, sweeping his arm around the scene we could see from the window. Soldiers were being marched to a holding building. People were cleaning up the debris. The thing that made my heart swell was watching the children ru

I sighed. I hadn’t been thinking of her. It had been good to have a break from the torture, but as soon as I let my mind wander, it always went straight back to her.

“Does it hurt?” Elise asked as she dabbed my cut with antiseptic.

Yes.

“No.”

Cups were offered and we cheered to Naf and to the huge success of the mission as we sat on borrowed dining chairs.

Desh shook his head in disbelief. “I never thought we’d be celebrating inside the walls.” He clinked his cup with mine, and we drank. The cider flew down my throat and relaxed my mind. I locked the store for Rosa and filled my cup again.

A Palma local knocked my shoulder and laughed. “Now that you have helped us, are you going to return to your home?”

Home. To me, home was two people, one who might be lost to me forever. I was homeless. The bubbles swirled around my brain. They begged me to let it go. Forget her. Forget it all. I turned to the man and laughed too loud, too hard.

“I don’t have a home, man, I’m homeless.” I hit my leg and chuckled more. “I’m homeless!” Desh’s shaking head caught my attention. “What? It’s true. Isn’t it? We’re all homeless.”

Some of the men laughed, others ignored me. But I didn’t care. I had no grasp on what I actually did care about.

Clink, drink, clink, drink.

Someone patted my back gently, whispering, “I think you better slow down, Joe.”

I shrugged them off.

Everything seemed fu

Everything seemed stupid.

I was weightless, in muddy water, sinking lower and not caring. Laughing too loud and not caring. Allowing Elise to put her arm around my waist and lean her head on my shoulder and not caring.

I let the alcohol carry me off into a dreamless sleep.

ROSA

Gwen lifted her head slowly from where she stared at her knees. A nightdress lay over them but every bone, every angle, of her jutted out like the dress was her skin and underneath was just a skeleton. She didn’t jump up to greet me, but I was already ru

Denis shut the door on us as I whispered hoarsely, “Gwen, Gwen, what… how can… are you?” Each question was cut short with the axe of redundancy. It didn’t matter. She was here. She shouldn’t be here.

She put her hands in my dyed hair and lifted it to the light.

“What have they done to you?” She smiled and those familiar dimples formed high in her cheeks. But there was falseness to her humor.

I blew my relief through my lips like a whistle. “Oh, thank God! You know who I am.”

She laughed sadly. “I’m not crazy, despite my accommodation. Apparently, singing is for loonies,” she said, winding her finger in circles at her ear.

Was she crazy? I cocked my head to the side and examined her like crazy was something I’d be able to see on her face. But then I remembered—I knew exactly what crazy looked like. I knew what crazy sounded like. Crazy squealed and stomped its red, leather-clad foot. Crazy made you jump and turn in circles before you passed through the door.

I doubled over, clutching my stomach, as Este’s squealing echoed through my head and I felt the knife going in and out, looping, never-ending.

No, Gwen wasn’t crazy. But I started to wonder whether I was.

Gwen touched my hand, and I snapped up.

“You ok, Rosa. Where’d you go?”

I laughed unconvincingly. “Sorry, I just can’t believe you’re here.” Why was she here?

I wrapped my arms around her neck and pulled her forward into a hug. She returned it, but she was weak and didn’t move very well. I sat on the edge of the bed, my eyes roaming over her diminished frame. Her sunken eyes, her dirty face. She had a bag hanging of the edge of the bed, and I noticed a tube poking out from under her thin, cotton dress.

“Are you sick?” I asked shakily.

Her bare feet were a purplish blue. I pulled the blanket up over her legs and tucked them under her feet. Watching my hands closely, she shook her head. She couldn’t meet my eyes. I put my hand over hers, which was resting on her leg.

“Gwen, what is it?” I asked, even though I didn’t want to know the answer. I wanted to grab her hand and run—push Denis aside, kick the guard in the groin or the face or whatever I could reach, and run. I could feel the bad answer; it was already carving a deep pit in my stomach. They hurt her. They hurt her like they’d hurt me, and then they’d hurt her more.

Still staring at our hands touching, she said dully, “I can’t feel your hand on my leg.” A sob caught in her throat, and she coughed. “I can’t feel anything from my waist down. The bastards paralyzed me.”