“Cassie,” Sam said in my ear. “Your nose is really big.”
“That’s because it’s broken.” Like my heart, kid. It’s a set.
Poundcake was no longer leaning against Ben with his arm around his neck. His whole big body was draped over Ben’s in a fireman’s carry. And Ben did not look like he was enjoying it.
“That isn’t going to work, you know,” I informed him. “You won’t get a hundred yards.”
Ben ignored me. “Bo, you’ve got Megan duty. Sam, you’re gonna have to climb down; your sister’s taking the point. I’ve got the rear.”
“I need a gun!” Sammy said.
Ben ignored him, too. “Stages. Stage One: the overpass. Stage Two: the trees on the other side of the overpass. Stage Three—”
“East,” I said. I set Sammy on the ground and pulled the crumpled map from my pocket. Ben was looking at me like I’d lost my mind. “We’re going here.” Pointing at the tiny square representing Grace’s safe house.
“Noooo, Sullivan. We’re going to the caverns to meet up with Ringer and Teacup.”
“I don’t care where we go, as long as it’s not Dubuque!” Dumbo cried.
Ben shook his head. “You’re killing it, Dumbo. Just killing it. Okay, here we go.”
We went. A light snow was falling, the tiny crystals ignited in the orange light spinning, and you could smell the oily stench of the fuel burning and feel the heat pressing down on your head, and I took the lead as Ben suggested—well, ordered—Sammy hanging on to a belt loop and Dumbo right behind with Megan, who hadn’t spoken a word, and who could blame her? She was in shock, probably. Halfway across the parking lot, nearing the strip of dirt that separated it from the interstate on-ramp, I glanced behind me in time to see Ben go down under the weight of his burden. I slung Sammy toward Dumbo and skidded across the slick pavement to Ben. On the roof of the hotel, I could see the mangled metal remains of the Black Hawk.
“I told you this wouldn’t work!” I whisper-yelled at him.
“I’m not leaving him . . .” Ben was on all fours, gasping, retching. His lips shone crimson in the firelight; he was coughing up blood.
Then Dumbo was standing beside me. “Sarge. Hey, Sarge . . . ?”
Something in Dumbo’s voice grabbed his attention. He looked up at Dumbo, who shook his head slowly: He’s not going to make it.
And Ben Parish slammed his open hand onto the frozen ground, arching his back and yelling incoherently, and I’m thinking, Oh God, oh God, not the time for an existential crisis. We’re done if he loses it. We are so done.
I knelt beside Ben. His face was contorted by pain and fear and rage, the anger rooted in the unchangeable, ever-present past, where his sister cried for him and he still abandoned her to death. He abandoned her but she would not abandon him. She would always be with him. She would be with him until he took his last breath. She was with him now, bleeding out a foot away, and there was nothing he could do to save her.
“Ben,” I said, running my fingers over the back of his head. His hair shimmered, dotted in crystalline snow. “It’s over.”
A shadow flitted past us, racing toward the hotel. I jumped up and took off after it, because the shadow was attached to my baby brother and he was hauling ass toward the front doors. I caught him and yanked him off the ground, and he commenced kicking and squirming and generally going berserk, and I was sure Dumbo was going to pop next, and three lunatics were too many for any person to manage.
I was worried for nothing, though. Dumbo had Ben on his feet and Megan by the hand, urging both toward the road, having an easier time of it than I was with Sammy hooked under my arm facedown, arms and legs flailing, yelling, “We gotta go back, Cassie! We gotta go back!”
Across the on-ramp, down the steep hill to the overpass, Stage One complete, and then I deposited Sammy on the ground and whacked him hard on the butt and told him to knock it off or he’d get us all killed.
“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” I asked.
“I was trying to tell you!” he sobbed. “But you wouldn’t listen. You never listen! I dropped it!”
“You dropped—?”
“The bag, Cassie. Running out, I . . . I dropped it!”
I looked over at Ben. Hunched over, head down, forearms resting on his upraised knees. I looked at Dumbo. Slump-shouldered, wide-eyed, hand holding Megan’s.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” he whispered.
The world went breathless. Even the snow seemed to hang suspended in the air.
The hotel blew apart in a blinding fireball of neon green. The ground shuddered. Air rushed into the vacuum, knocking the four of us off our feet. Then the debris roaring toward us, and I threw myself over Sammy. A wave of concrete, glass, wood, and metal particles (and—yes—bits of Ben’s effing rats) no larger than grains of sand barreled down the hill, a gray boiling mass that engulfed us.
Welcome to Dubuque.
49
HE DIDN’T LIKE being around the smallest kids at the camp. They reminded him of his baby brother, the one he lost. The one that was there the morning he went out looking for food and wasn’t there when he returned. The one he never found. At camp, when he wasn’t training or eating or sleeping or washing down the barracks or shining his boots or cleaning his rifle or pulling KP duty or working in the P&D hangar, he was volunteering in the children’s housing or working the buses as they came in. He didn’t like being around the little kids, but he did it anyway. He never lost hope that one day he’d find his baby brother. That one day he would walk into the receiving hangar and find him sitting in one of the big red circles painted on the floor, or see him swinging from the old tire hung from the tree in the makeshift playground next to the parade grounds.