Hell Followed with Us(47)
Finally, Joey relents. He nods, and I walk back up to the pavilion, trying not to notice the way the other members of the Vanguard keep too close an eye on me, too hard a grip on their weapons.
The lady in the Vanguard doesn’t bother counting the rest of the ears. She dumps them out, gives them one good look, and says, “Take the supplies and leave.”
We get every box and every crate, but it feels just as hollow as failure.
* * *
Halfway back to the ALC, Faith calls an apologetic stop for a leg cramp, and Cormac takes the opportunity to drag me behind a tractor trailer. I’ve been thinking about the girl the entire walk, and I barely recognize that Cormac is in my face until he’s shoving me. I hit the side of the truck and my guts burn, but slowly. A dying fire, exhausted and smothered.
I snap, “What.”
It takes Cormac a second of seething to put words together—his face flushed almost as red as his hair, pieces of it sticking to his forehead—and when he does, he says, “Do you have any idea how badly you just fucked us over?”
The girl’s broken face swallows me whole when I blink. I want to stick a finger down my throat and get it all out. “I messed up. Leave me alone.”
“Who knows if the Vanguard is gonna answer us next time we call?” He jabs a finger into my chest, right into the empty space of my sports bra. As much as I would love to grab Cormac’s hand and bend it back so hard it snaps at the wrist, I don’t. “And it’s on you. Even if Nick won’t say it, I will. When we run out of food, I’ll make sure everybody knows it’s your fault.”
“Nick won’t let you,” I say.
“I don’t give a shit. He’ll come to his senses. He’ll admit it. Because you want to know something? You want to hear something, Ben?”
He comes up close. Too close, close enough that his hair gets in my face, close enough that I can feel how warm he is. If it weren’t for the mask, I could have tasted him.
Cormac says, “Nick’s been calling you an it.”
Violence that begets evil will always be worse than the violence that ends it. The LORD will guide our hands. We will drive a wedge between the faithless through blood, and they will understand the evil they come from. They will understand the truth of salvation and come to us in repentance.
—The Truth by High Reverend Father Ian Clevenger
Don’t say shit like that.
You don’t believe me? Ask him. See what happens.
And I said, Fine. I will.
The ALC erupts when we bring in the supplies. I clean up and change clothes at Sadaf’s urging, then help with inventory because it keeps me in the same room as Nick. People flow around me, peeling open boxes, handing off packages of socks, cradling painkillers like Fabergé eggs.
“You good?” Aisha says as she piles cans in the pantry.
“What?” She’s staring at me. I’m glad to see her out and about, even if she looks like she hasn’t slept in days. “Oh. Yeah, I’m good. Just waiting for Nick to finish up. Sorry, I’ll get out of your way.”
She picks up a few tins of Spam. “Rough trip?”
“Something like that.”
When Cormac said Nick was calling me it, my first thought was awful: What if Nick is just super transphobic? But that doesn’t make any sense. Nick and Erin are so close, they might as well be siblings. He hovers around her like some kind of guard dog, making sure nobody steps out of line. He wouldn’t dare do something like that, not when he adores her.
And there’s no way he thinks I’m just a Grace. An abomination. No, he can’t. That’s just not an option.
The only explanation is that Cormac is lying. He’s sneered at me in the media room, talked down to me, wants me gone. And now he wants me to turn on Nick. Make a scene. Get myself kicked off the Watch and even out of the ALC.
I’m going to call his bluff.
As soon as we’re done restocking and everyone has taken a small treat from the pantry—a can of pears and juice split among so many people, a handful of stale chips for the rest—I see Nick’s jacket slipping through a crack in the kitchen door, and I give chase. Erin squeaks as I blow past her.
“Nick!” I call. “Nick, can we talk for a second?”
I catch him at the bottom of the stairs to the second floor, leaning against the door with a sign reading: FIRE DOOR—KEEP CLOSED, DO NOT BLOCK. He turns with a start.
“About what?”
I don’t know how to explain without just spilling everything right here. “Can we go somewhere private first?”
He nods for me to follow him up the stairs. I do.
I just have to talk this through, and everything will be fine, it’ll be fine, but my jaw is still chattering with nerves.
Nick takes me to a room on the second floor with a label beside the door: Volunteer Coordinator. Another office. It’s been converted to a small bedroom, complete with a mattress in the corner and shoes shoved by the door. He’s collected piles of books on warfare, white supremacy, religion, and the history of environmentalism, and stacks of old newspapers gone soft around the edges. Containers of plastic pony beads and half a dozen incomplete bead lizards sit on a desk in the corner. And, of course, the windows are boarded shut from the inside.