Stone was silent, his arms tight, almost too tight. Then, he swayed. “I…I gotta stop this bleeding.” He stumbled backward, back into the chair he’d been tied to.
She watched as Stone leaned forward and used his knife to cut away the shirt from one of the dead men, folded the cotton lengthwise into a bandage and wrapped it around his thigh, then tied it in a knot. He cursed under his breath the whole time, a constant stream of florid expressions. Next, he wrapped one of the belts he’d been tied up with around his thigh, over the shirt, and cinched it as tight as it would go, just above the wound. When he had it pulled tight, he slipped the bitter end of the belt between his leg and the leather, leaving a loop through which he passed the end again, creating a makeshift knot. When he was done with this, he was sweating and out of breath.
“We have to move. Get back to the Embassy.”
“But he’s…he’s dead.”
“His goons don’t know that yet. We might still run into trouble. Plus, with Cervantes out of the picture, there’ll be a power vacuum, and a fight to fill it. We don’t want to be around when that shit goes down.”
“Power vacuum?” Wren asked. She felt limp, numb, shocked, unable to process thoughts or emotions.
Stone worked himself to his feet, hopping on his good leg to stay balanced. “He was the big dog in Manila. Now he’s gone, and someone else is going to want to take his place, and it’ll mean an underground war in the process. Don’t worry about it. Our only concern is getting home.”
Wren slid under his arm and took as much of his weight as she could. “Home. I want…I want to go home.” She tried to summon thoughts of home, but nothing came.
She had trouble remembering what her dorm room looked like. Had she ever sat in a classroom, listened to lectures? Sipped coffee and laughed with friends? Gone to sorority parties and had too much cheap beer? She had memories of those things, but they felt more like a movie watched in years past, snapshots and vague notions of things that had happened. It felt like she’d been in Manila forever. Like the person she’d been was gone, and someone else had taken that place. She was still Wren Morgan, still had the same brain and body and soul, but the fabric and substance and content of who she was had been irrevocably altered.
They emerged onto the narrow street in the dim gray of onrushing dawn. Stone peered around, twisting awkwardly to try and find some visual cue as to where they were. He must have seen something he recognized behind them, because he laboriously twisted around and began limping in that direction. He couldn’t put much weight on his leg, but Wren was simply not strong enough to support his weight, so he had to hop.
It would be a long walk back to the Embassy.
18
It seemed almost anticlimactic, in a way. The last several days of chase, hunting for Wren, rescuing her, fleeing Cervantes and his men, only to have it all end with a few bullets in a back room. Now they were adrift in Manila again, alone, and still hurt, still hungry, still exhausted. More so than ever. The question remained, though: were Cervantes’ men still after them? Stone didn’t dare relax his guard, didn’t dare take even a single moment to relax until he knew they were safe.
And the streets of urban Manila were anything but safe, even under the best of circumstances.
It took over two hours for them to find their way to a major road, where they happened upon a taxi disgorging a young couple. Stone pushed Wren into a hustle, hobbling after her, putting more weight on his leg than was really advisable. Wren slid across the ripped upholstery, holding on to Stone’s hand as he clutched the roof of the car and lowered himself in.
The cabbie turned his head slightly, the international unspoken gesture meaning “where to?”
“The US Embassy, please,” Stone said.
“No, no,” the cabby said. “I don’ go dat par. Only Pasay City. Tapt Abenue? LRT EDSA? Go nort’, get dere easy-easy.”
Stone had to work through the scruffy, gray-bearded old man’s thick accent. Tapt? Taft, Taft Avenue. A pretty major thoroughfare in the Pasay City area, and one that would take them, as the man had said, pretty close to the embassy. “That’s fine,” Stone said. “Take us to the station, then.”
“Okay-okay. Comin’ up, quick. Not par.” He slewed the wheel to the right and into traffic, cutting off a rumbling old half-ton truck.
Wren clutched Stone’s hand with panicked strength as the cabby swung the car through traffic, stopping with inches to spare between their car and the one ahead of them, jamming the accelerator so hard the car jolted forward, slamming them both into the seat. After a few minutes of this, the traffic congealed to a standstill, and their forward progress was halted. A raised roadway or train platform ran between the north and south traffic, and through the cracked-open windows Stone could hear the incessant honks of cars, the squeal of brakes and the rumble of diesel engines, motorcycles buzzing, voices raised above the din, a traffic policeman’s whistle shrilling. He found his eyes growing heavy, despite the throbbing in his leg and the constant ache in his side.
Stone rolled down the window farther and sucked in deep breath of the humid air, hot already despite the early morning hour. Beside him, Wren rubbed her eyes.
“I can’t keep going much longer,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been awake and running for a week straight. I don’t even know what day it is, or the last time I ate something. I’m dizzy, and shaky.”
Stone fought a yawn and pulled her shoulder against his side, wrapping his arm around her. “I know, baby. I know. Me too. We’re almost there. A train ride, and we’re there. Stay with me, okay?”
She nodded, jerking as the cabby rocketed the car forward, slipping between two buses and a jeepney to cut through to the far right lane. “I’m with you.” She blinked hard, then sat up, shaking her head as if to shake away sleepiness. “Will anyone else come after us?”
Stone could only shrug.
A few more minutes of start-stop-start-stop, and the cabby jerked the wheel to bring them to the curb. “Out here, station across street.”
Stone dug the correct amount in Pesos out of his pocket, along with a tip, and then shoved the door open and hopped away from the car, balanced on one foot. He extended a hand to help Wren out.
MRT Taft was a madhouse. Even MRT Shaw in all its insanity couldn’t compete with the sheer crush of humanity flooding into and out of the Taft transit station. People flowed in every direction, holding briefcases over their heads, lugging babies on their backs, bags of groceries in their hands, moving in ones and twos and larger groups. A voice squawked in distorted Filipino over the PA, then again in what sounded like barely intelligible English, announcing arrivals and warnings to stay away from the tracks. A set of stairs led up to the platform, and a sluggish knot of people were traffic-jammed around this stairway, arrivals and departures mixing until there was simply no way to move, except with the mass of bodies.
Stone felt his stomach drop at the sight of what he had to navigate, with a reopened bullet hole in his side and another fresh one in his thigh, a gash on his head and a mouth that hadn’t tasted water in hours and an empty stomach. He’d be elbowed, his leg bumped and kicked, and it would take forever to get into the station.
“Let’s get this over with,” he sighed, adjusting his grip on Wren’s shoulders, forcing himself to use his injured leg as much possible to save the strength in his good one.
Together they entered the press of travelers waiting to ascend to the elevated train station. Within minutes, Stone had been elbowed or bumped so many times he was sure his wounds would be bleeding again, but there was nothing he could do, except deal with it and hope.
Getting up the stairs was hell. He had to use his wounded leg to push up, and nearly screamed with the pain of the effort at each step. Behind him, people were shouting their frustration at his torturous progress. Wren set her shoulder under his armpit and helped him lift up to each step, groaning and using every ounce of strength she had.
It took them nearly ten minutes to ascend the steps. They found a pillar and Stone slumped down to his ass, heedless of the stares he drew. He spotted a vending machine across the station, and pointed to it, handing Wren the last of his Philippines Pesos. “Get us some water, huh?”
She returned after a moment with two liter-bottles of water, and a panicked expression. “I think there’s someone here looking for us. I think I recognized him from the first place Cervantes held me. He was looking around like he was waiting for someone.”
