Savage Drift

^{CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR} JOSIE

I try to get the little kids to go to the skinny mother’s room but they refuse.

“We can fight,” Freddy tells me, bouncing on his toes. “We’re O, like you.”

“You’re not O like me,” I say. “I hope you’ll never be O like me.”

“Well, you’re one of us and we protect our own,” he insists. “We stick together.”

“Yeah, I guess we do,” I tell him. I ruffle his hair.

We start piling furniture against the door.

First we put the big single bed against the door. It is made of wood and heavier than the bunk beds, which are just metal.

Then we pile the bureaus on it.

Like all the doubles, we have two bureaus. Identical, made of particleboard with birch veneer. Both basically empty—none of us even have a change of clothes.

There is one old pair of men’s shoes rattling around in the bottom drawer of one of them. Mario is saving them to barter in case things got bad, food-wise.

There are also a dozen sugar packets in there, and a salt shaker he had lifted from Plaza 900 our first day there. Those could be used for barter, too.

I sit down on a free edge of the bed. My weight can add to our pathetic blockade.

We know it is nine o’clock when we hear the bell over the PA and the lights go out.

Lori tries to herd the other kids into the other room and get them into the bunk bed.

“Come on, you guys,” she scolds. “What would Mario tell you to do? He’d tell you to go to sleep and you know it.”

“But I’m not tired!” Heather protests.

“It’s just stupid to think we’re going to sleep!” Freddy insists.

Lori tries to put a hand on his shoulder and he dodges her grasp.

“You guys need to go to bed,” I say, trying to help Lori.

“I’m staying up to fight!” Freddy says.

“Me, too,” says Aidan. “I owe you, after how I got you in trouble with Venger.”

“You don’t owe me,” I say. “Venger was out to get me from the start. He was just waiting for me to slip up.”

“Well, I’m not going to sleep and that’s final!” he shouts.

“Yeah! We’re not going to sleep! No way.”

“Fine,” Lori says. “You want to stay up, STAY UP! See if I care.”

She goes and stands by the window, looking out into the fluorescent-tinted nighttime sky of our containment camp.

I scratch my head.

“Have you guys ever heard of Mrs. Wooly?” I ask them.

Aidan looks at me askance, like I am trying to trick him.

“Who’s Mrs. Wooly?”

“That’s a dumb name,” Freddy says, still bouncing on his toes.

“I tell you what,” I say. “You guys get into bed—”

A chorus of nos and no ways!

“You guys get into bed and I’ll tell you.”

Three sets of crossed arms and defiant expressions.

“Look, it’s not like you’re going to sleep through the fight!” I tell them. “If the Union Men come, we’re all going to know it. But it’s cold in here. Look at Heather, she’s shaking.”

And she is.

Winter is drawing near and the temperatures are really dropping when the sun sets. I make up my mind to try to trade those men’s shoes for some more blankets, if we make it through the night.

Many people have taken to wearing their blankets shawl-style during the day. The boys have resisted this so far, but their pride about it will probably fall as the temperatures do.

“Get in bed where you’ll at least be warm.”

So they do.

Aidan and Freddy get onto the top bunk. Heather lays on the bottom one. Lori has no intention of sleeping, I can see that, but she lays down with Heather, to help keep her warm.

“What kind of a dumb name is Mrs. Wooly?” Freddy asks again.

“You’re taking the whole blanket,” Aidan complains.

I tuck the blanket around the two of them.

Four sets of big, scared eyes blink at me from that bunk bed.

I sit on the floor.

“The day before the earthquake and the spill, I was on my way to school on the high school bus. I was sitting next to my friend Trish and we were just talking about… I remember we were talking about our bake sale to raise money for immigration reform. Hail started falling, but it wasn’t regular hail. It was monster hail, giant hail. There were hailstones as big as softballs! It was like being fired on by cannons. Our driver, Mr. Green, sped the bus up and lost control. We crashed.”

I can remember the smell of the ice in the air and the blood.

“Our bus crashed in the parking lot of a Greenway superstore.”

“We have a Greenway in Castle Rock,” Aidan says.

I nod.

“That’s where Mrs. Wooly comes in. See, Mrs. Wooly was the driver of another bus, right behind us. And it had kids from both the elementary school and the middle school on it. She had really little kids, as little as five years old, in that bus.

“Mrs. Wooly loves kids. You wouldn’t think it, because she can be very gruff, but she’d do anything to protect her kids.”

Heather takes her thumb out of her mouth to say, “Like Uncle Mario.”

Has she always sucked her thumb? I hadn’t noticed.

“Yes, she is kind of like Mario, only a lot younger. So the hail was crashing in through the windows of the bus and Mrs. Wooly was scared that her kids were going to get hurt. She did a crazy thing.”

Not a peep from the bunk bed, so I know I have them.

“She drove her bus through the front window of the Greenway!

“But remember, I was still in the crashed bus outside, and it was lying on its side so the hail was coming down through the windows, right on top of us. I got hit on the head and that’s where I got this scar.” I run a hand up to the dark gash, the flesh still depressed under my fingertips.

“Mrs. Wooly made the kids get out of her bus and wait where it was safe, in the store. By this time, the engine of our bus had caught fire. It was going to blow and we were all going to die.”

Gasps from the bunk bed. The slight shimmying of excited bodies.

“And then Mrs. Wooly backed her bus up, out into the parking lot. And she used an ax to chop open the lock on the emergency door. Then she helped us get out.”

I pause, not for dramatic effect, but because I remember Niko half dragging me down the aisle.

And then Astrid holding me on that bus. She held me in her arms like I was a baby.

I don’t think I ever thanked her for her kindness to me on the bus and now it is, of course, too late. Far too late.

“Then what happened?” Heather asks.

“Did the other bus explode?”

“It did,” I say, shaking my head to clear it. “Mrs. Wooly drove us into the store and the crashed bus exploded before we even got inside. She saved our lives, no question.”

“Wow!” Heather murmurs.

“We were snug and safe in there,” I go on. “We had all this food and even lights and heat. And all the clothes we could want. Imagine that!”

“Oh man,” Lori says. “I would kill for clean underwear.”

“And toys? Was there toys?” asks Aidan.

“Aisles and aisles of toys,” I tell him. “And candy!”

The questions stop and I can see all four of them, luxuriating in the idea of a safe place filled with games and sweets.

In the Greenway I had spun fantasies about Mrs. Wooly rescuing us in a tricked-out bus and the kids dreamed about returning to their lives and parents.

In the Virtues I told a real account of Mrs. Wooly’s actions and the children fantasized about living in the Greenway.

Imagine that.

Lifted up by my real-life fairy tale, the kids drift off to sleep.

I go and sit out on the bed against the door.

Maybe a half hour later, Lori comes to sit with me.

“Do you think Mario’s going to be okay?” she asks me.

I shrug.

“He’s tough,” I answer. “But he’s old.”

“What do you think is going to happen to us?” she asks me.

“Please,” I say. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what? Don’t talk to you? Don’t try to be your friend? God, what is it with you?”

I shush her. She is going to wake up the kids.

“You think you have it so much worse than the rest of us,” she complains. “You’re all high on yourself.”

I laugh.

She is so totally wrong.

“You’re not even going to answer me?”

“You should go to sleep.”

“You know, if you had just let me do what I had to do with those boys, none of this would be happening.”

“You wanted to have sex with those boys?” I ask her.

She wouldn’t meet my eye.

She stands there at the window, arms crossed against the chill, the unearthly glow of the floodlights outlining her goose bumps in blue.

“No,” she says. “But I could do it. To protect us. It wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

“Mmmmm, you don’t know that. It might be the end of the world for you. Sometimes you can sacrifice too much—”

“It’s all right to do things you don’t want to, if the outcome is worthy.”

“No. It is possible to sacrifice too much,” I repeat. “It is.”

She still wouldn’t look at me.

“I’d do anything to protect those kids.”

“I killed to protect my kids,” I say.

And like a film being projected on the empty Sheetrock wall of our crummy double suite, I see Robbie, gun raised at Niko down at the end of a darkened aisle.

I see the crazed O soldier in the woods, headed for Max.

Oh, the joy I felt when I ripped that face mask off and inhaled, filling myself with rage and lust. And how strong I was when I bashed his head in.

And the father of the boy.

The father who had laid a trap and caught my friends.

My little loves, my devoted Niko, my old-new family, trapped down in the bottom of a pit and that daddy shining a flashlight on them, considering whether to let them live or die.

I sunk my teeth into his neck like a vampire and took out a hunk and he bled out, looking up at the no-star muddy sky.

I had enjoyed it.

Lori comes and stands beside me, wrapping her arm around my shoulders.

What sign of my distress had I given?

Maybe she could see the scenes playing in the reflections of my eyes.

They come around midnight.

First, the rattle of a hand on the lever.

Right, as if we might have left it open by accident.

Then the sound of fingers on the keypad.

Lori and I look at each other.

This is it. If they have the combination, we are dead.

Rattle, rattle, rattle. No.

They don’t have it.

“Hello?” comes a singsong voice. “Anybody home?”

And sniggers. The sniggers cut off by an elbow to the stomach, maybe.

Knock-knock.

“We’d like to see Josie,” the voice repeats. It has to be Carlo.

And then BAM, they try to kick the door in.

“Leave us alone,” Lori screams.

By this time the kids are up and watching from the doorway to the other room.

BAM, BAM! They try the door again.

The bed shakes and the bureaus rattle.

“Hey, we just want to talk to you, Jojo,” Carlo says, the singsong lilt in his voice. “Not so nice what you did to Brett and Juani.”

“Go away!” I shout. “I’m not coming out.”

“You messed them up real bad!” comes a different voice.

“Leave those kids alone,” comes a shrill female voice. Maybe the skinny mom. “We all know you’re up here! We’ll tell on you!”

“‘We’ll tell on you,’” one of them mocks. “Who are you going to tell, Venger? He’s the one who let us up here!”

“Yeah! And anyone who helps Josie is in for it. You should all know that now!” roars another one.

We can hear them striking several of the other doors in the hall.

“You leave that girl alone!” comes another voice.

“Room Three-Oh-Four. Write that down, Ray,” Carlo says loudly enough for them all to hear.

Then BAM, BAM, BAM, they are hitting our door with something, maybe a chain, and the metal is bending, a little, near the lock.

I push against the bed with all my might.

The bed shakes with each chain lash on the door, but the lock holds.

Lori and the kids scramble to help.

The Union Men cannot get in the room.

They stop trying and my ears ring with the sudden silence.

There comes a polite knock on the door.

“Oh, Josie,” Carlo calls.

“What?” I say.

“This door is fully and truly locked. So we’ll catch up with you tomorrow.”