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“Yeah, look at it standing there, out of the goddamn water. The river won’t hold them forever. And you’re taunting it. ”
I wrestled with him, trying to writhe out of his grip. I didn’t want to hurt him, but he wasn’t going to tell me what to do, either, so I drew back to land an elbow in his solar plexus—but instead he caught my elbow with one hand and spun me around. I didn’t know he had it in him.
“Look at it!” I shouted at him. “It can’t move yet, not well, not far! This is my chance to talk to it!”
“Fine!” he shouted back. “Talk all you like! But while you waste your breath, take a look around! It’s not alone. ”
I tore myself out of his hands and gasped, because he was right.
One outside the lip of the water. One behind him. One back, and to his right. One kneeling on a bench, heaving and coughing. And there, under the clear plastic shelter of a bus stop, something smaller.
Something watching, in a different way—with eyes still left in a little head.
Its face was burned away, up one side as if it had been hit with a road flare.
“Little girl,” I wheezed.
“I told you so,” Nick said. “Don’t look at her. For Christ’s sa
ke, don’t look at her. ”
She already had me, though. I couldn’t look away. She wouldn’t let me.
The smell of smoke filled me, even though it wasn’t there on the street—it wasn’t there in the air. But it was inside her, and she was talking. I’d asked them to talk, and she was the only one who could answer.
“No,” I said, or I thought I said. It didn’t mean anything. It was only a general objection to the powerlessness of it all, to the helplessness and fear—and to the smoke. I couldn’t breathe. She wouldn’t let me.
Nick was saying something that I couldn’t understand. I felt his hands around my forearms, shaking me. He was stronger than I thought. Stronger than I gave him credit for.
It was hot. Terribly hot—ashes and charcoal. It stung my eyes and seared my sinuses. The church. They were burning the church. No—I’m still inside. I’m still inside. We aren’t all dead. Didn’t kill the rest of us.
How much do you think you can survive? she asked. If you live through the bullets, and they burn down the rest, how long will your heart keep beating?
“I don’t understand,” I moaned.
She didn’t either. It was part of her rage.
Nick was still screaming at me, but I couldn’t hear him. He was right there, in front of me, clasping my face in his hands, and I couldn’t see him.
I was lying down, hiding under a pew by the pastor’s podium. Everyone else was dead. Everyone else was lying between the aisles or on the platform, and two of them were thrown into the empty baptismal font. Their dead eyes opened and saw nothing. I was crying and biting my lips to keep them closed so I would say nothing.
I could see the horses outside the window. There were three of them, and three men arguing among themselves—and there were more I couldn’t see, but I could hear them talking. “Not the end of the world. ” The end of the world. And through the windows came fire, even as the rain came down outside, slapping great drops against the stained glass picture of Jesus on the cross.
Behind Jesus, another cross burned and broke and fell down into ashes; I could see it between the flames and where the windows were breaking, broken, coming down and coming apart.
Everything was coming apart.
And I was burning, and breathing.
Still breathing when the sky opened up above and the fire burned itself down to a sizzling bad smell around me. Across me and on top of me. Above me.
Then a shift, though the sky above me looked the same—all heavy and thick, and swirling low. Nick was there, though. His voice worked its way through the haze in my ears and behind my eyes, but he wasn’t making any sense to me. I couldn’t assemble words from the sounds, but I listened anyway, and after a few minutes the letters arranged themselves more clearly.
“I’d tie you up, but you might get the wrong idea. ”
“The chains,” I mumbled.
“What?”
