Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
Clementine
I look at the radio on the table, everyone standing around it. There’s a staticky, hard-to-understand voice coming out of it. He’s talking to Mike and Mike is talking back, but all I know is I heard the words have to deploy and everyone around the table went silent, even Kim.
Hunter’s there, and he has to deploy, and I don’t even know what that fucking means but I can tell it’s very, very bad and the gym feels like it’s flickering in and out of reality.
I clear my throat.
“Deploy what?” I ask, my voice still a weird, foggy whisper.
“Fire shelters,” Mike says.
We’re all just staring at the radio.
“Oh,” I say. No one answers.
“Deployed,” the voice says after a few more moments. “Cutting communication.”
Then the thing goes quiet. I look up at Mike, frantic, and he just shakes his head.
“When they deploy they turn their radios off as a courtesy,” he explains.
“Courtesy?” I ask, because my brain may as well be filled with sand right now. All I can think of is Hunter, face down on the ground, in a long tinfoil tube. Like a burrito.
“So whoever’s on the other end doesn’t have to listen,” Mike says gently. “Just in case.”
Then I get it, all at once.
It’s so no one has to listen to a man possibly burn to death.
I don’t respond. I just turn around and walk blindly.
I push open a door and walk into a hallway and I walk through another door and down a set of stairs.
It’s dark at the bottom, the lights out, and when I get there I go under the stairs and slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the cold, dirty tile floor.
I’m coming back to you, I think.
Hunter and I on that tiny cot, the morning we left the lookout.
I’m coming back to you, once fire season is over.
I sit very, very still. I keep breathing, and I don’t move, because I feel like if I move the dark around me might shatter, and the thick, inky blackness is the only thing that’s keeping me from screaming.
You said you never loved me in the first place.
I didn’t mean it.
I inhale, I exhale.
Please come back to me, I think. Please.