CHAPTER 31
In the garage, Jasha tossed the gear bag and backpack into the front seat of the car. Grace scooted into the back, and Brenna got in beside her.
The plan was that they would drive west on Sniper Alley for three miles—exposed as they drove beside the river—then hook south around Mt. Kav?ak into the Separatist-held neighborhood where Jasha’s mom lived, where the nursery was located,
and where the airport and its mile-and-a-half-long runway stretched out across the flatlands south of them.
Jasha revved the engine, picked up speed, and shot up the garage ramp. At the top, daylight flooded the car. Across the river, Grace saw mortar shells flying out of a dense pall of smoke on the mountainside.
Beside her, Brenna closed her eyes.
Bad sign, Grace thought. Photographers never closed their eyes. Unless, she guessed, they had already witnessed all they could bear. Her hands were fisted around the camera handle, clutching it for dear life. Grace rested her hand atop them.
Engine screaming at the top of its range, Jasha swerved onto the open boulevard, streaking among shell craters like a downhill skier on a slalom course. Dull thuds splattered the trunk and doors of the car. Bullets. The car flew, thumping over the pitted road, rocking unsteadily.
Grace squeezed Brenna’s hand. She looked grim, deathly-pale.
Downtown blurred past, giving way to apartment buildings.
The Golf sped over the Bridge of Peace and Brotherhood where the river veered northward, and continued west toward the heavy shelling and the columns of black smoke rising against the lifeless sky.
Mt. Kav?ak loomed on their left. This was where they would hook around the jutting mountain.
Jasha braked with force, spun the wheel, and careened onto an off-ramp, picking up speed again as he curved southward.
And then he slammed the brakes. Rubber scorched the road, trailing white smoke, and the car slid sideways, flinging its passengers like crash dummies. Grace instinctively threw her arm out to protect Brenna. The Golf came to an eerie standstill.
Grace righted herself and looked out the windshield. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.
“Jesus,” Brenna added.
Two slate-blue T-55 Nationalist tanks were parked at the curve, their turrets aimed straight at them.
Jasha roared, and thunked the gearshift into reverse.
The turrets swung, fine-tuning the car in their sights.
Twisting in the driver’s seat, Jasha grasped the back of the passenger seat, nailed his eyes on the road behind them, popped the clutch, and floored the gas.
Tires squealing, Jasha twisted the steering wheel, snaking the car, avoiding a direct line of travel.
The first tank fired, recoiling, raising a cloud of dust from the ground. A flash of fire belched from the turret.
The shell landed ahead of them, short of its mark.
Jasha over-steered and hit the concrete barrier on Grace’s side.
Grace jumped, pulled her elbow away, and scrambled toward the center of the car, keeping her head low so Jasha could see past her. The car screeched along the barrier, metal squealing against concrete, unable to break free.
The second tank fired. The shell went long, landed on the road behind them.
The car broke free of the barrier and caromed into the swirling dust. The cabin filled with a thick cloud of churning debris. Grace squeezed her eyes shut and lifted the front of her shirt over her mouth and nose, coughing, trying to filter the air.
Brenna cried out.
Heart pounding wildly, Grace shot her hand out to make sure Brenna’s head was down.
Up front, Jasha gasped for air. He’s driving blind. Had to be. No way Jasha had his eyes open with all the crap swirling inside the car. Never letting up on the gas, Jasha twisted the wheel hard left, then right again. The car swung, turning direction, then shot forward.
Suddenly, miraculously, fresh air flooded the car. We’re out! Grace squinted. Clear road. Albeit they were speeding down a one-way road on the wrong side. But out.
In the lee of Mt. Kav?ak, Jasha did the unprecedented.
He pulled over.
And sagged over the steering wheel.
Racked by coughing, eyes streaming, Grace wiped the grit off her face with her sleeve.
Brenna did the same. Her face was black, her hair matted with dust.
Jasha pounded the steering wheel. “They are trapped! My mother. The nursery. The neighborhood. This is only road!”
Brenna took a steadying breath. “What about the trenches? We could cut through on foot.”
“Trenches?? Hah!” Jasha spat. “That’s dangerous.”
Dangerous? Grace nearly laughed.
“There’s a series of hand-dug trenches that cut around the other side of the mountain,” Brenna explained. “The Separatists hold them. At least, they did before last night.”
“Well, hey,” Grace said. “Let’s stretch our legs.”
Jasha retraced their route, blurring alongside a complex of dreary industrial-looking apartment blocks separated by expanses of beaten dirt and parking lots.
They looked like a low-rise version of the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects of Chicago.
An intersection appeared ahead. Jasha jammed the brakes, ripped the steering wheel right, and entered the development along a broad boulevard.
Rusted-out cars littered the road like locust husks.
Weaving between waist-deep shell holes, Jasha drove westward again, through a labyrinth of identical-looking streets.
A narrow service alleyway appeared on their right.
He turned into it and crept forward, easing the car over heaps of garbage, past the carcass of a small black dog, and into a sheltered loading dock. He parked and killed the engine.
They took a moment to regroup. At length, Brenna sighed and touched Jasha’s shoulder. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go find your mom.”
Jasha, face rigid with apprehension, pulled the key out of the ignition and pulled the handle on his door. Lord knew what he’d find at his mother’s.
Grace slid along the back seat toward Brenna’s door. There was no way her crushed side was going to open—much less close again if it did.
“We will go through this apartment building,” Jasha told Grace. “Run across the field to next one, then trenches start and we go to my mother’s building. The nursery is through more trenches beyond that.”
They took the steel steps up to the loading platform.
A stick jammed in the hinge propped the receiving door open.
Brenna and Grace followed him inside. The slash of daylight from the doorway revealed a small, denuded office with spray-painted graffiti on the right, and a long corridor directly ahead, with sets of gaping steel doors.
Storage rooms, Grace guessed. Or maybe mechanical rooms.
The door closed part-way, casting them into shadow. Jasha led, stepping carefully around the garbage and detritus of neglect littering the passageway. He found a staircase door and pulled it open.
“Baka!” A child’s voice called out from above.
They clattered rapidly upward, opened the landing door and stepped into stale air. Grace froze. Brenna plowed into her from behind, not expecting her to stop.
Refugees. IDPs—Internally Displaced People, as the aid workers called them. Women, children, and old or injured men. A hundred or more hushed ghosts huddled in a dim corridor, clutching ragged bundles. Their fear-filled faces all turned in their direction.
A little stick of a girl in a bright pink coat stood bewildered among them, crying “Baka!”
Halfway down the hall, an ancient woman with a scarf tied around her weather-beaten face labored to her feet and pawed the air, signaling the child. “Rahela!”
Rahela raced to the woman and hid in the folds of her skirt.
Brenna squeezed past Grace, hoisting the camera onto her shoulder. A craggy-faced man with a missing leg glared at her and hissed what could only be an obscenity as she stepped past him. She moved forward, recording, ignoring the insult.
Grace squelched the impulse to grab the man and shake him. She stepped over his crutches and followed Brenna, watching in astonishment as others took up the theme, uttering curses and gesturing scornfully at her.
Two young boys ran alongside Brenna, aiming their fingers at her like pistols, and fired point-blank. She stopped, perplexed, and zoomed in on their bald-faced hatred. The larger boy, who had a jagged scar snaking across his shaven scalp, shoved her.
With lightning speed, Grace grabbed the kid by the back of his shirt and pulled him back. “No,” she said firmly. The boy stood there, seething, fists clenched at his side, another militant in the making.
Brenna moved onward, out of the boy’s reach. Grace gave the boy a final warning look and released him.
“Buzzard!” a stringy-haired woman yelled out in English. “You feast on our misery!”
This was an educated woman, Grace thought, sitting in a squalid hallway with two somber-eyed, rail-thin girls nestled against her hips.
Brenna’s knee hitched.
“What have your precious pictures changed?” the woman screeched, sitting up to shake a chapped fist at her. “Nothing! No one aids us!”
The camera tilted, still recording. Brenna tipped her face away from the viewfinder, and turned, bewildered, to her accuser.
“You sell our agony and it feeds you. Clothes you. Shelters you! Then you leave when you’ve had your fill!”
Brenna stared at her with such raw intensity that the woman shrank back, sweeping her whimpering children behind herself.
A hush fell over the hallway.
Brenna pulled the camera off her shoulder. With measured deliberation, she squatted in front of the woman, studying her as if the answers to life were written on her face. She parted her lips to speak—
The woman lunged. Her hand flashed out and slapped Brenna across the face so hard her head whipped sideways.
Brenna cried out, her cheek emblazoned with a hand-shaped welt.
Grace leapt forward and caught the woman’s flailing hands.
“What?” the woman shrieked at Brenna, as she fought Grace. “What could you possibly say?”
Brenna stared at her, dumbfounded.
Jasha took the camera out of Brenna’s hand and steadied her elbow. “Come,” he said, helping her up again. The gentleness in his voice rebuked the violence hanging in the air.
The woman sobbed, her crying daughters’ skinny arms wrapped like vines around her body.
Grace waited for Jasha to get Brenna out of harm’s way, then leaned into the woman’s face. “You have no idea how much she’s done for your city.”
Jasha hustled Brenna past the silent throng and threw his shoulder against the far staircase door. It flew open and crashed against the wall. Grace came up behind them and shut it with an angry bang.
Brenna stood there, stunned, checking her mouth for blood. She looked brittle, on the brink of shattering.
“It’s not you,” Jasha told her. “You represent the world that has abandoned them.”
The staircase door flew open again. The boy with the shaven scalp pushed in, arms flailing, and tried to rip the camera out of Jasha’s hands. Jasha held on.
While Grace tried to pull the boy away, Brenna pushed off the wall and began to run.
A second youth joined the fray, yanking at the camera in Jasha’s hands. Pulling back against their doubled force, he shouted over his shoulder. “Brenna!”
She was racing down the staircase, gaining speed.
He cast a worried glance at Grace. “Go get her,” he ordered, trying to stop the boys without injuring them.
Grace edged around the heaving knot vying for the camera.
Brenna flew down the staircase, gaining speed, a headlong pressure building inside her—filling her like a scream she couldn’t contain or pain she couldn’t withstand.
A wild drumbeat drove her feet down the stairs, two at a time, three—faster, faster, not caring if she broke an ankle, not caring if she fell face-first down the concrete steps.
What have your precious pictures changed?
She turned right at the bottom of the staircase and ran raggedly down the corridor, stumbling, catching herself, ignoring Grace’s calls behind her.
The exit door lay ahead, propped open by a chunk of cement with twisted reinforcement bars protruding from it. Beyond the door, sunlight reflected off the eighty feet of open ground between this building and the next.
She ran out, into the open field.
Crack.
A clod of dirt spat up from the bare earth beside her. A sniper bullet.
She stopped.
Just stopped, and stared at the little gouge in the earth.
Time pulled away. It meant nothing that a sniper could chamber the next five-inch round in his bolt action rifle, aim, and fire again in as little as fifteen seconds.
“Brenna!” Grace’s voice sounded as distant and inconsequential as the peep of a bird in a howling storm.
She lifted her face and circled, surveying the destruction surrounding her. What had her pictures changed? What war had ever been shortened or prevented because photographers took pictures?
“Nothing,” she mumbled. “None.”
“Brenna!”
That woman was right. This quest was bullshit. She did this because she didn’t know what else to do. Not because it changed anything.
She turned in the direction from which the shot had been fired and closed her eyes. The bullet would penetrate her skull in a lightning burst and a vast white bliss would follow.
She wasn’t afraid.
Not one bit.