“Let me out!” I screamed, over and over. “Let me out.
I’m one of you.”
And then, a miracle: a small cone of light, a flashlight sweeping down the hall, and the pattern of fast footsteps.
I’ll admit it. I called to be let out first. I’m not too proud to say it. I’d spent five months in that hellhole, and escape was on the other side of the door. Days, years passed before my door swung open.
But it did. Swing open.
I recognized the guy with the keys. I knew him as Kyle, though I doubt that was his real name. I’d seen him at one or two meetings of the resistance. I’d never liked him.
He wore really tight button-down shirts and pants that made him look like he had a constant wedgie.
He wasn’t wearing a button-down then. He was wearing all black, and a ski masked pushed back on his head, so I could see his face. And in that moment, I could have kissed him.
“Let’s go, let’s go.”
It was chaos. It was hell. Emergency lights flashing, illuminating in strobe prisoners clawing at one another to get through the doors, and guards swinging with clubs or firing, randomly, into the crowd to hold them back. Bodies in the halls, and blood smearing the linoleum, speckled on the walls.
I knew from all my times at the Crypts, there was a service entrance in the basement, next to the laundry room.
By the time I made it to the first floor, the cops were flowing in, bug-eyed in their riot gear. The screaming was so loud. You couldn’t even hear what the cops were yelling. Five feet away from me, I watched some woman wearing a hospital gown and paper slippers shank a cop right in the neck with a pen. I thought, Good for her.
Like I said: I’m not too proud.
There was a pop, and a fizz, and something went ricocheting down the hall. Then a hard burn in my eyes and throat and I knew they’d chucked in the tear gas, and if I didn’t get out then, I’d never get out. I made for the laundry chute, trying to breathe through the filthy cotton of my sleeve. Pushing people when I had to. Not caring.
You have to understand. I wasn’t just thinking of me. I was thinking of her, too.
It was a long shot, but I had no choice. I crawled into the laundry chute, as narrow as a coffin, and dropped. Four long seconds of darkness and free fall. I could hear my breath echoing in the metal cage.
Then I was down. I landed in a big pile of sheets and pillowcases that smelled like sweat and blood and things I didn’t want to think about. But I was safe, and nothing was broken. The laundry room was black, empty, the old machines still. The whole room had that moist feel that all laundry rooms do, like a big tongue.
I could still hear screaming and gunshots from upstairs, rolling down the laundry chute, amplified and transformed. It sounded like the world was ending.
But it wasn’t.
Out of the laundry room, around the corner, no problem at all. The service door was supposed to be alarmed, but I knew the staff always disabled it so they could go out for smoke breaks without going upstairs.
So: outside, and to the black rush of the Presumpscot River.
To freedom.
For me, the world was beginning.
How did I love her?
Let me count the ways.
The freckles on her nose like the shadow of a shadow; the way she chewed on her lower lip when she was thinking and the way her ponytail swung when she walked and how when she ran she looked like she was born going fast and how she fit perfectly against my chest; her smell and the touch of her lips and her skin, which was always warm, and how she smiled. Like she had a secret.
How she always made up words during Scrabble.
Hyddym (secret music). Grofp (cafeteria food). Quaw (the sound a baby duck makes). How she burped her way through the alphabet once, and I laughed so hard I spat out soda through my nose.
And how she looked at me like I could save her from everything bad in the world.
This was my secret: she was the one who saved me.
I had trouble finding the old homestead. It took me almost a full day. I’d crossed over the river, into a part of the Wilds I didn’t know, and there were no landmarks to guide me. I knew I had to circle southeast, and I did, keeping the city’s perimeter in my sights. It was cold outside, but there was lots of sun, and ice ran off the branches. I had no jacket, but I didn’t even care.
I was free.
There should have been freedom fighters around, escaped prisoners from the Crypts. But the woods were silent and empty. Sometimes I saw a shape moving through the trees and turned around, only to see a deer bounding away, or a raccoon moving, hunched, through the undergrowth. I found out later that the Incidents in Portland were carried out by a tiny, well-trained group—only six people in total. Of them, four were caught, tried, and executed for terrorism.
I found the old homestead at last, long after it got dark, when I was using the moon to navigate and piling up branches as markers so I could be sure I wasn’t just turning in circles. I smelled smoke and followed it. I came out into the long alley, where Grandpa Jones and Caitlyn and Carr used to set up shop in their patched-up tents and makeshift houses, where the old trailers stood. It seemed like a lifetime ago I’d lain in bed with Lena and felt her breath tickling my chin and held her while she slept, felt her heart beating through her skin to mine.
It was a lifetime ago. Everything was different.
The homestead had been destroyed.
There’d been a fire. That much was obvious. The trees in the surrounding area were bare stumpy fingers, pointing blackly to the sky, as if accusing it of something. It looked like there’d been bombs, too, from the covering of metal and plastic and broken glass vomited across the grass. Only a few trailers were still intact. Their walls were black with smoke; whole walls had collapsed, so charred interiors were visible—lumpy forms that might have been beds, tables.
My old house, where I’d lain with Lena and listened to her breathe and willed the darkness to stay dark forever so we could be there, together, always — that was gone completely. Poof. Just some sheet metal and the concrete rubble of the foundation.
Maybe I should have known. Maybe I should have taken it as a sign.
But I didn’t.
“Don’t move.”
There was a gun against my back before I knew it. I was strong again, but my reflexes were weak. I hadn’t even heard the guy coming.
“I’m a friend,” I said.
“Prove it.”
I pivoted slowly, hands up. A guy was standing there, crazy skinny and crazy tall, like a human grasshopper, with the squinty look of someone who needs glasses but can’t get them in the Wilds. His lips were chapped, and he kept licking them. His eyes flicked to the fake procedural scar on my neck.