Alex (Delirium #1.1)(3)

I nearly went crazy. I knew she must think I was dead. What had happened to her after crossing the fence? Had she made it? She had nothing, no tools, no food, no idea where to go. I imagined her weak, and lost. I imagined her dead. She might as well be.

I told myself that if she was alive she would move on, she would forget me, she would be happy again. I tried to tell myself that was what I wanted for her.

I knew I would never see her again.

But hope got in, no matter how hard and fast I tried to stomp it out. Like these tiny fire ants we used to get in Portland. No matter how fast you killed them, there were always more, a steady stream of them, resistant, ever-multiplying.

Maybe, the hope said. Maybe.

Funny how time heals. Like that bullet in my ribs. It’s there, I know it’s there, but I can barely feel it at all anymore.

Only when it rains. And sometimes, too, when I remember. The impossible happened in January, on a night like all other winter nights, frigid, black, and long.

The first explosion woke me from a dream. Two other explosions followed, buried somewhere beneath layers of stone, like the rumblings of a faraway train. The alarms started screaming but just as quickly went silent.

The lights shut off all at once.

People were shouting. Footsteps echoed in the halls. The prisoners began banging on walls and doors, and the darkness was full of shouting.

I knew right away it must be freedom fighters. I could feel it, the way I could always feel it in my fingertips when I was supposed to do a job, like a drop, and something was wrong—an undercover cop hanging around, or a problem with a contact. Then I’d keep my head down, keep it moving, regroup.

Later I found out that in the lower wards, two hundred cell doors swung open simultaneously. Electrical problem. Two hundred prisoners made a break for it, and a dozen had made it out before the police and regulators showed up and started shooting.

Our doors were closed with deadbolts, and stayed shut.

I beat on the door so hard my knuckles split. I screamed until my voice dried up in my throat. We all did. All of us in Ward Six, all of us forgotten, left to rot. The minutes that had passed since the lights went off felt like hours.

“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 mask 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.