9. Stormy
Stormy
The bunker is six feet by eight and made of poured concrete and it holds cases of water, three rifles I do not know how to use, a chemical toilet, a case of batteries, and me.
The war happens directly over my head.
I sit with my back against the wall and the knife in my right hand and I listen to my own building being torn apart.
Every shot lands on the plate above me like a hammer.
There is a moment when something detonates and the entire ceiling of the bunker jumps and dust comes down in a sheet and I bite the inside of my cheek until it bleeds because I will not scream and give away this hatch.
Then there is a stretch of silence that is worse than the noise.
Then a lot of shooting all at once, close, right above me, and a sound I understand immediately is a body hitting the floor eight feet from my head.
Four in. Four hold. Four out.
I am doing the count for the first time in a month and I hate it and it works anyway.
More silence.
Then footsteps.
They are wrong. That is the first thing. I have spent a month underneath this man learning his weight on concrete and these are lighter and quicker and they are moving in the stuttering way of somebody who is looking for something.
They stop over the hatch.
The plate sits flush and buried under swarf and old rubber, and a man could stand on it his whole life and never know.
But there is blood on that floor now, and dust, and something heavy has been dragged across it, and I understand with total clarity that he is up there looking down at one clean rectangle in a filthy floor.
A boot scrapes the edge.
I stand up.
He hauls the plate. The bar holds it for one second, two, and then the welded eye on the underside tears out of forty year old concrete, and grey light and cold air pour in.
He drops through.
He lands badly because it is an eight foot drop and he is looking down the wrong way, and he comes up onto one knee with a pistol in his hand and a strip of blood down the side of his face, and he sees me.
Here is what he sees.
He sees a hundred and twenty pound woman in a borrowed sweatshirt in a concrete box with no exit.
He has seen a hundred of me. He has loaded a hundred of me into vans.
The whole business he works in runs on the reliable fact that when a man drops into a small room, the woman in it goes into the corner and gets small.
I see it happen on his face. That little slackening. The math being done and coming out easy.
I go for him before he finishes it.
I do not go for the gun. Claw told me once, in passing, with a torque wrench in his hand and no idea he was teaching me the most important thing I would ever learn, that going for the gun is how you get shot, because the gun is the thing they are already thinking about.
So I go for the arm holding it, and I do not go politely.
I come off the wall with my whole weight low and I take his wrist with my left hand and I drive it out and down toward the floor, and the pistol goes off once into the concrete and the sound in that box is a spike through both my ears and I keep going anyway because I already decided.
The knife is in my right hand.
Thumb here. Never overhand. And you do not stop deciding until they are on the floor.
I put it into the side of his throat.
He drops the pistol. Both his hands come up to his neck, which is the last mistake he gets to make, and he goes over sideways against the water cases and slides down them and there is so much of it, so much, it is on the concrete and on my sleeve and on the toe of Berry's donated boot.
I stand over him with the knife still in my fist and I do not go into the corner.
I am not shaking.
That is the part I will think about for the rest of my life. My hands are dead steady and my breathing is even and there is something enormous and hot going up through the middle of me, and it takes me a second to identify it because I have not felt it since I was a child.
It is not relief and it is not horror.
It is fury, and it has been waiting eleven weeks in the dark for somebody to come down a ladder.
"You don't get to take me," I say to the dead man on the floor. "Nobody gets to take me."
The building has gone quiet above.
I pick up his pistol with my left hand, because two is better than one, and I put my back to the wall by the ladder and I face the open hatch, and I stand there in the settling dust in a dead man's blood and I wait to see what comes down that hole next.