In the dark the Swiss grabs my throat, shoves me so hard against the wall my jaws snap shut on my tongue. Blood fills my mouth. I spit it into his face and laugh.
Can’t control the laughter. Merriment is helium in my balloon. My nitrous oxide.
“Why do you care? It won’t do you any good. Nothing can help any of us now. Soon we’ll be dead, too.”
His fingers are a ring tightening around my throat. One good squeeze and my laughter dies, bottling up below the seal. I see stars. I see a light hurtling toward me, and voices whispering just beyond. I have seconds until the end, and I’m taking the Swiss with me on the ride.
“Pope just had to screw with me one last time. And you’re wrong, you know.”
“I am never wrong.”
“This time you are.”
There’s a perverse pleasure in withholding what I know is true from this man in his final moments of life. So I do not speak of Pope’s final request: it might bring the Swiss joy.
There’s not enough room for a bold thrust, but the scalpel’s edge is more deadly than a razor. The blade skates across his throat, shudders as I scrape up the last of my energy to drag it sideways. The Swiss gasps; his pupils widen enough that even I can see them in this dim space.
His hand tightens. This is it. The end. Lights out. Ladies and gentlemen, Zoe has left the building. But he slackens and slumps to the ground and his fingers slap against the concrete. I reach out, shove his face with my foot as hard as I can muster.
The voices are getting louder. The light is drawing near. This is it, my tunnel, my emergency exit.
Then my world flashes yellow and I see maybe the world has a surprise left in her yet. There’s no tunnel, and the voices belong to actual people.
Hopefully they will bury us far away from the Swiss.
SIXTEEN
Are you for real?” Sergeant Morris asks the question across her desk.
A slow nod through air soup.
She pulls the vials and packets from the bag and lines them up. Soldiers marching across paperwork mountains.
The ground undulates beneath my feet. Or maybe I’m the one swaying to and fro. One palm flat on the desk doesn’t make a difference. My world is shifting sands.
“There’s more where that came from. But if you want it, you’d better move fast. There’s no security now, and the CEO is dead. It’s just a matter of time until the place is gutted.”
“I’ll send some people over. It would help if you’d go with them. We need all the meds we can get.”
“Okay.” My words tilt. I slap my fist on the desk, next to my hand. It’s heavy. The air is stew. No, I’m holding something. A white sack. Not a sack—a lab coat, the ends tied together to form a crude swag that would make Huckleberry Finn proud.
Sergeant Morris grimaces. “What’s in the sack? Shit, girl, it’s bleeding.”
“It’s nothing,” I say. “Nothing at all.”
“Nothing, my ass. Nothing doesn’t look like Aunt Flo came to visit and wound up moving in her furniture.” She tries to take it from me but it’s my burden to carry.
I sit, trapping the swag between my knees. “It’s nothing.”
I don’t die. At least, not then. And for a time I’m not sure if I’m sorry or glad. My baby still lives, though, and that is something. It dances inside me, celebrating our victory. We are still two.
The sun beams at me through a window.
The groan comes all the way from my toes when I sit, press a hand to my sutured wound so I won’t pop open like a worn teddy bear. I am surrounded by women. They watch me with wary eyes and sullen faces.
“What is this place?”
No answer. They chatter amongst themselves with foreign tongues.
“What happened to the man?”
They stare at the oddity in their midst. I have nothing more than cobbled-together sign language—mostly obscenities.
“Jesus Christ.”
The women cross themselves. Head to sternum. Shoulder to shoulder. Religious figures—those they understand. One of the squirrels breaks away from the pack. The rest of them stare at me as though I’m a spaceman. Maybe I am. I’m from another world, I know that much. We look at each other, all of us trying to find a way to bridge the language chasm. My language is, in part, descended from theirs, and yet the pieces that now belong to the English tongue are useless to me here.
I drag myself to my feet, one hand on my arm. Pain slices through me. I am white-knuckled, dizzy, displaced in this reality. Hands grab me, hold me steady. Mouths tsk.
“I’m okay, I’m okay. I have to keep going,” I say.
“You are going nowhere today.”
My head jerks up, because those are words I understand. Amongst the static they are clear and bright and shiny. They belong to a boy not yet old enough to scrape a blade down his skin.
“I went to the English school in Athens,” he explains. “My name is Yanni. In English, I am John.”
His hand dives into his pocket, retrieves a pouch filled with tobacco and a box of white papers. He crouches on the dirt floor, pushes the tobacco into a neat line on the paper using his leg as a table, seals the edge with his spit, and lights up. One of the women reaches out, flicks his ear. Screeches at him until his head sags. He offers me the hand-rolled cigarette, one end soggy with spit. “Would you like?”
Humanity has crumbled, yet here are people who would still instill good manners in their children.
“No, thank you.” I watch as he shoves the damp end greedily into his mouth and sucks deep. He can’t be more than eleven, maybe twelve.
“Where am I?”
He speaks with the women. Arms flap until they reach a noisy consensus.
“Not far from Athens. My people found you. They were looking for…” He puffs on the cigarette, drawing deep like he means it, flipping through his catalog of English words, looking for one that fits. “Supplies. Clothes and things we can maybe swap with other people.”
“There are others?”
Again he consults the women.
“Some,” he says. “And some…” He shrugs, tries to look cool as he flicks the cigarette ash. “My people do not talk to strangers.”
“You’re talking to me.”
“You are sick. When you are well, you will go.”
Sounds of children scooting a ball across the ground end the conversation. He drops the cigarette, grinds it into the dirt with a worn boot heel, his body humming with tension. Wants to run and join his friends.
“Wait.”
He stops.
“The man—the one who was with me. What happened to him?”
More talking. Solemn words.
“Your husband lives. But for how long, who knows?”
He must be mistaken.
