American War(58)

Sarat grabbed her sister by the arm and together they ran from the tent. Outside, the sound of gunfire echoed, its source ever closer. Some of the refugees stepped out of their tents and asked about the commotion, but this time Sarat said nothing.

She led her sister to the administrative building’s side door, and unlocked it with Albert Gaines’s key. She locked the door behind them and they ran down the stairs to the office in the basement, turning the hallway lights off as they went.

When they were inside the office, Sarat and Dana pushed one of the large bookshelves against the office’s front door, and then the table against the bookshelf. Sarat turned off the lights in the room. She led her sister to the closet, and then made to leave.

“No, no, you can’t go out there,” Dana said, holding on to her sister’s arm.

“I gotta go find Mama,” Sarat replied. “I’ll nudge the shelf and the table enough to open the door a little, and then you push it closed behind me.”

“Please, please,” Dana begged. “You know you won’t find her before they find you. They’ll kill you out there. I can’t lose my whole family, I can’t lose everyone I love. Please don’t go out there.”

Sarat looked at her sister, astounded not by the black-glistened tears on her face or the panic in her voice, but at the dark calculation she’d already made. Sarat led her sister into the closet; they huddled together on the floor.

The gunfire grew closer, screams drowned in its echo. It came at times in a rapid back-and-forth. Sometimes there were only single shots, or a parade of single shots, short silences between them.

The sounds continued into the night. Then in the earliest morning hours came a brief pause. And in that silence Dana, exhausted and delirious with fear, slept.

Sarat remained by her sister’s side. In the blackness the twins were only the hushed sigh of their breathing, the rise and fall of their chests. Outside, the sound of gunfire had faded but there were still other sounds.

Sarat listened: boots against dirt; a militiaman asking something unintelligible and his superior responding: you know exactly what to do; the sounds of pleading, of cursing; a line of feet shuffling in unison, drawn closer, closer, ordered to kneel; more pleading, a man saying: I’m not with them, I swear, I swear. His voice coming through the walls of the building in which Sarat hid, clear as though he were pressed against it. Then nothing. Then a line of single gunshots, one after the other. Then nothing.

The shots were closer than any that had come before, and for a moment Sarat believed the men had entered the building.

If it’s going to happen, then let it happen, she thought, but I won’t die crouching.

She eased quietly away from her sleeping sister. She pulled her folding knife from her pocket and stood up. She eased the office door open just enough to slide through, then she closed it behind her.

The corridor that led from the office to the stairs was dark and the walk seemed endless. As she approached the door, she tried to imagine what the killers looked like. She pictured them as the Northerners she’d seen on television, who always appeared tall and muscular, their complexions ghostly. In her mind they were of a different breed, a different species.

She climbed the stairs to the building’s side door and she put her ear to the door and listened. There was no sound. She opened the door and peered outside.

For a moment she believed she’d mistimed the day. She had thought it was two or three in the morning, the slaughter closing in on its twenty-fourth hour. But the sky above was midday bright.

Then the light began to fade, quickly, giving way to a black sky. It stayed dark until, from somewhere far to the north, she heard the whistling arc of another flare, and soon the fraudulent daytime illuminated the camp once more.

Sarat walked slowly, keeping near the wall. There were sounds of men cursing in the distance to the southeast and southwest, in Georgia and South Carolina. There were sounds of chaos too: of tents being torn apart, of women muffled mid-scream. Sounds of gunfire, but not as rapid or sustained as it was a day earlier.

A great fire burned in the gut of the Alabama slice. The flames curled around plumes of black smoke. There were men in the distance, burning bodies. They brought kindling in the form of tent covers and clothes and mattresses. The fire skipped and cracked and traced higher and higher into the sky.

Sarat turned the corner to find a line of bound corpses near the wall. They were men, young and old. They’d been lined up against the wall on their knees, and where the bullets had gone through them there were splatters of dull red on the wall.

Sarat stood frozen. She looked at the bodies. Most lay flat on their fronts or on their sides facing away from her, but those she could see had grotesque, unrecognizable faces, cracked open at the forehead, contorted in silent agony.

The bodies made damp pools in the dusty ground. There was a heat to them. Sarat felt it against her skin, damp and real as steam from a boiling pot. She knew what it was. It was the heat of life extinguished. The heat of something leaving.

In the mass of crumpled bodies she saw a face she recognized. It was Eli, the Virginia Cavalier she’d seen when she went to talk to her brother. Quickly, the faces surrounding him began to register in her memory: they were rebels from her brother’s clan.

Suddenly all her courage disappeared. She stood paralyzed with terror, incapable of unseeing the pile of corpses at her feet, among whom she was now certain her dead brother lay. The sounds of burning and of screaming and of killing continued relentless around her, the sky overhead beating dark and light like God’s great heart itself.