Savage Drift

^{CHAPTER SIXTEEN} JOSIE

We’re in our room. The kids are playing rock chuck, a game Freddy invented using some small rocks and bits of gravel the kids picked up in the courtyard.

Rock Chuck involves setting up obstacles on the floor and then throwing the rocks to knock down the obstacles. Sort of like a pathetic DIY Angry Birds, which I used to play when I was their age.

Mario is playing Rock Chuck along with the kids. They asked me, too, but I refused.

Mario wants me go to the clinic.

My stupid knuckles don’t look right. Swollen, too red. A little whitish ooze growing under the skin near the cut parts.

“Promise me you’ll stay here?” I ask him.

“I’m up next,” he grouches. “Of course I’m staying here. Where do you think I’m going to go? Fly to Mars?”

That gets a laugh out of the kids.

I roll my eyes. “You know what I mean.”

I don’t want him going to the fence to try to tell the reporters I am here. He had whispered the secret of my identity to one of his heavyset paramours at Plaza 900. We have to wait and see.

Mario shoos me off so I go to the clinic.

They house the clinic in Rollins, by the north side of the O containment compound.

Going there means an endless wait in a nasty line.

The doctor had told me to come, sure, but that doesn’t mean I can skip to the head of the line.

The clinic is a suite of maybe four rooms—built to accommodate the colds, flus, and drinking concussions of the Mizzou undergrads housed in the Virtues.

Now it is besieged by malnourished trauma victims suffering all sorts of horrible injuries and maladies.

As I understand it, there are a handful of prisoners with medical training—O types who can be of service. They work shifts along with a couple of Good Samaritan doctors and nurses who are paid by the state to care for us.

I get in line behind a woman with a lined face and streaked blond hair. Her hair is the kind of frosted and tinted blond-girl hair that takes hours in the beauty shop.

She has two inches of dark brown roots and the whole mess is greasy and tied back with what looks like a piece of old mop string.

She turns and looks over her shoulder at me.

I carefully study my weeping knuckles, avoiding eye contact.

“You were out there,” she said. “I can tell.”

Her breath stinks of crazy.

I’m sure mine does, too.

“I was out there.” She tries to smile. “We lived in Castle Rock. And the day the compounds hit, my husband, he just melted away in a pool of blood. We had our own company. We sold insurance. All kinds. Health, auto, home, life, you name it.”

I look up at the ceiling.

“I think of all our policyholders. They must be phoning me and Dave day and night. But what can I do? Dave, he melted away. There was just bones and meat and blood and I just lost it. I mean, I really did.”

I wish that she would stop talking to me.

She is looking away and it is almost like she is talking to herself now.

I sniff my knuckles. They smell, hmmm, sourish.

“I have a five-hundred-thousand-dollar life policy on him, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to collect. Proof of death? How will I get that? He was a pool of blood, like I said. He was blood and bones at the end. His blood was hissing like it was on fire.”

Please let her stop talking to me. I put my fingers in my ears, but I can still hear her.

“I don’t feel right, still. I don’t feel right in the head,” she says, as if explaining why she is waiting on line. “And you don’t, either. None of us do. And I don’t know if we ever will. I just don’t know.”

She is looking into my eyes and I know she won’t leave me alone until I answer.

I lower my arm, withdrawing it from contact.

“Yeah,” I whisper. “We’re all broken.”

“I know it.” She nods. “That’s the truth.”

She and I inch up the line a ways.

My stomach is starting to growl.

And then Aidan comes for me, crying.

And I know Mario has gone to the gates.

I run, Aidan at my heels.

“He was trying to get their attention about the article thing,” Aidan says as we run.

It is like the other day, a crush of prisoners at the gate, all yelling to the four or five reporters on the other side of the second gate, who are yelling questions to them and recording it all.

I see that Venger and a couple others are already there with the tranq guns.

“Where are the others? Get the others!” I shout to Adian.

At first I don’t see Mario and then I see he has fallen and is getting crushed down to the ground.

“Mario!” I scream and I dive into the tangle of bodies, some of them falling, now from the darts, other pushing and fighting and still screaming to the reporters.

“They’re killing us in here!” one man is shouting.

“We’re being starved to death!”

I have a hand on Mario. He is unconscious and I try to get myself over him to protect him from the crush of bodies. One by one the people go dead and limp as the darts fell them.

My rage comes up. An electric fence of adrenaline hums up to fighting pitch. I want to hurt the people, to push them back and make them pay for hurting my Mario, but I shout in my head at my own self.

PROTECT HIM—stand your ground and keep him safe.

Then there are only a few of us still conscious and I see some soldiers come and move the reporters away from the fence on the other side.

I am crouching over Mario now.

“Mario, Mario, can you hear me?” I ask.

His head lolls back on his shoulders as I lift his torso. His legs are pinned under the body of a fat lady. He has blood on his head, but not necessarily his.

I can’t tell if he’s been hurt or is just tranquilized.

I get down on my screaming knees and edge him up from under the tangle of bodies. With my hands under his arms, I drag him over the others.

“Mario! Mario, it’s me!” I yell over the chaos.

I see that his arm is hanging wrong. The hand flapping off to the side in a way hands can’t, when the bones are intact.

I pull him as carefully as I can, though I stumble on the bodies on the ground. I step on legs and arms and hair. Just a few more bruises for them when they wake.

I pull Mario over the other fallen prisoners and lay him on the ground. The arm is wrong. Clearly wrong.

The guards back off and are now pulling bodies off the pile and laying them in rows.

Lori and the other kids swarm over Mario, kissing him and crying.

“Wake up! Wake up!” Heather screams.

“Get back! Don’t touch him!” I shout. “His arm is broken!”

“What do we do?” Lori moans. “Oh my God! Mario!”

And then I see that his breathing isn’t easy. He seems to be gasping.

I bend down and listen to his mouth.

“Shut up, you guys!” I holler.

I listen, is there a rasp? A wheeze?

He might have a punctured lung or something.

“We need to get him to the clinic. Right now,” I tell them. “Lori, help me. I’m going to lift his body and you stay at his side, holding his arm. Try not to let it flop around or grind the wrong way.”

“What do you mean ‘grind the wrong way’?”

“Don’t let it grind any way! Now on the count of three.”

We lift him.

Unconscious bodies are heavy. But not as heavy as dead ones.