Year One (Chronicles of The One #1)(104)

“I will.” Aaron opened the door, glanced back. “Don’t carry it with you.”

Jonah turned the ambulance into the school lot. Got out, turned to Poe and Kim. “Go on and celebrate. We’ll have plenty of volunteers to help unload in a bit.”

He shot them a smile that faded the minute they joined the crowd. He couldn’t take the crowd, not even to go through them to get to his house and close himself in. So he went in the side entrance of the school. He sat down behind the desk, dropped his head in his hands.

He didn’t hear the door open again, or the voices. He was too far away in his mind. He heard nothing but his own tortured thoughts until Rachel touched his arm.

“I couldn’t find you. Poe said he saw you come in here. So we…”

“We’ll step out.” Max took Lana’s hand.

“No. No, don’t.” Pale, eyes deep with misery, Jonah sat up.

“What happened?” Rachel demanded. “Poe didn’t say.”

“We got plenty of supplies and equipment from the hospital. No trouble there. And then we went to try the mall, the one where we had trouble before.”

“Raiders?” The hand on his arm dug in. “You ran into Raiders?”

He shook his head. “No, they’d gone. Trashed a lot, inside and out. Christ, pissed on stacks and racks of clothes. Kim bagged them anyway. Piss washes out, she said. Found the usual vandalism. Broken glass, obscenities painted on walls, garbage in heaps and piles.

“And bodies. People mutilated, rotting. Animals, too. Inside and out. Rats and carrion tearing at them. We…”

He stopped, cleared his throat. “We need to take a crew back, dig graves or … maybe another mass pyre. The bodies have been there awhile. I…”

He looked at Max and Lana.

“The place can be cleansed and purified,” Max said. “We can do that. The souls of the lives lost can be blessed.”

“It needs to be. Aaron felt it, too. We didn’t talk about it much, but he felt it. And I, and I— Don’t we have some whiskey?”

Rachel walked to a cabinet, took out a bottle, a glass. She poured two fingers.

Jonah downed it, breathed out.

“I don’t think it was all Raiders. There … something else. And whoever, whatever, it felt worse. They hanged a woman—an Uncanny. We all felt we couldn’t leave her like that. We had to at least cut her down. We got a ladder. I climbed up to cut the rope.

“I see death,” he told Max and Lana. “That’s my gift. Death, phys ical trauma, sickness. I climbed up to cut the rope, and what was there of her turned, brushed my arm. I saw her life. I saw flashes of who she’d been. I saw what they did to her. I heard her screams. I saw her death.”

He pressed his face to Rachel’s breasts when she put her arms around him. “Her name was Anja. She was twenty-two. She was like Fred. They hacked off her wings before they—”

“Don’t.” Rachel stroked his hair, his back. “Don’t.”

Max pulled up a chair, sat beside the desk. “This is new for you, seeing the life of the dead?”

“Yeah. Just one more gift.”

“It’s hard for you, but I think it is a gift. A gift to those who lived. Someone remembers them. It’s something all of us want. For someone to remember us. We can help you. Lana more than me.”

Max looked at her when Lana said nothing. “You have an empathy. A healing touch.”

She stepped up. “I think you have what you have, Jonah, because you do, too.”

“What does it mean that if I could find the ones who raped her, mutilated her, murdered her, I’d kill them without a single qualm?”

Max rose. “It means you’re human. I’ll go back with you and bury her.”

“When you mark her grave with her name,” Lana said, with a hand on the child who stirred inside her, “when you say the words over her, you’ll free her soul. You’ll ease your own. Mark her grave with her name, say her name.” Lana looked at Max. “I feel that.”

“Then it’s right. Then it’s what we’ll do. I’ll go with you now. We can send a crew for the rest tomorrow.”

Jonah nodded, rose, and shook Max’s hand. “Thank you.”

*

Late in the dark of night, Max lay awake with images ripe and clear in his head. He hadn’t seen, hadn’t felt what Jonah had as they’d buried the desecrated remains of a young woman who’d done no harm.

He hadn’t seen her life, the brightness of it. He’d seen only death, cruelty, only waste. And had imagined too well the fear, the agony of the end of that life as Jonah laid the stone at the head of the mound, as he himself had used fire to carve the name.

Mark her name, say her name. So it was done, and Max hoped the young woman who’d done no harm found peace.

He believed Jonah had, at least for now, in the ritual of respect.

But in the dark of the night, in the silence, in the void between the what-must-be-done, Max found none.

He thought of Eric, how fascinated he’d been with his brother as a newborn, amused by him as a toddler. He remembered how frustrated Eric had been at five and six, desperate to keep up with a brother eight years his senior.

Yet it had been Eric with whom he’d first shared the secret of what he was, what he had. Because there had been trust between them. Brotherhood.