Chapter 20 #2
The oars came first.
They heard them a long way off, creak and splash, slow and even, coming down the channel from the black willows on the far bank, and every person on that boat went absolutely still.
"Nobody moves," Liam said. "Nobody speaks. Nobody goes to the rail."
The oars came closer.
And out of the fog, into the light of thirty lanterns, the dinghy came.
Cully was at the oars.
He was rowing steadily, and his face was perfectly slack and perfectly empty, and his eyes were open and they were looking at nothing at all, and he rowed that dinghy right up to the side of the sailboat and shipped his oars and sat there.
Nobody breathed.
"Hello," said the thing in the willows.
It said it with a fifteen-year-old boy's mouth.
Liam did not answer.
"That's very good," it said. "The lanterns. The one boat. Nobody alone." Cully's head tilted. "You're the best I've ever had, Liam. I want you to know that. In all this time, in all of it, you're the only one who ever worked."
Liam said nothing.
"I've got him," it said. "I've had him for three days. He's been sitting at that tiller listening to his sister and he never told a single one of you, because he was ashamed."
Chloe's hand found Liam's.
"He's fifteen," it said. "He'll row me anywhere. He'll row me to a door somewhere. There's a lot of doors in the world."
Cully's empty face smiled.
"Or," it said.
And there it was.
"Or you can have him back," it said, "and I'll take her instead."
Nobody moved.
"That's the trade," it said pleasantly. "She's used up. She's been fighting me for nine days and she's got nothing left and you all know it. And the boy has his whole life. And you promised a dying woman in the street that you would get him out."
Cully's hands opened on the oars.
"One word, Liam," it said. "That's all. Say yes."
The fog moved.
Thirty lanterns burned.
And Liam Perry stood up on the deck of that boat and looked down into the empty eyes of a fifteen-year-old boy and said:
"No."
The thing in Cully's face did not move.
"No?" it said.
"No."
"You'll let him go."
"I'm not letting anybody go," Liam said. "I'm not trading anybody for anybody. There is no trade. There has never been a trade. You don't have anything to trade with, because you can't take him, and you can't keep him, and you can't do one single thing to any of us."
He stepped to the rail.
"You beg," he said.
The lanterns hissed in the fog.
"That's all you are," Liam said. "You are a thing that begs. You have been standing outside doors begging for longer than anybody knows and you have never once opened one yourself, and every single person you ever got, you got because they were alone, and frightened, and they loved somebody."
He looked around at twenty-five faces in the lantern light.
"There's nobody alone on this boat," he said.
And Chloe Buck stood up beside him.
She stood up on torn feet with the wound in her side and no ropes on her hands, and she looked down at the boy in the dinghy, and she said:
"Cully."
Nothing.
"Cully, it's Chloe. I know exactly where you are right now. I've been there for nine days and I know how loud it is and I know how tired you are."
Cully's hand twitched on the oar.
"It's not Ada," Chloe said. "It doesn't have her. It never had her. It's never had a single one of them, it just listened, and it took what it heard, and it's been wearing her like a coat it stole."
The boy's face began to move.
"And your sister is not in that swamp," Chloe said, and her voice broke open.
"She is not cold and she is not out there in the dark and she is not waiting for you to come and get her. She's gone, Cully. She's gone, and it is the worst thing that will ever happen to you, and it is not your fault, and you cannot fix it by getting in a boat."
Cully Rook began to shake.
"Come up the ladder," Chloe said.
And the boy dropped the oars, and put his face in his hands, and sobbed like something breaking, and twelve pairs of arms came over the rail and hauled him up out of that dinghy and onto the deck and did not let go of him.
The fog moved.
And out in the willows, somewhere in the dark, something began to scream.
It was not a voice. It was not anybody's dead.
It was a long, rising, wordless sound of pure and total fury, the sound of a thing that had been begging outside doors for a hundred years and had finally, for the first time, been told no by people who had all been standing close enough to hold each other.
It went on for a long time.
And then it stopped.
And there was nothing out there but a swamp full of trees.
The wind went around at dawn.
Cully slept for eighteen hours in the bottom of the boat with Petyr on one side of him and Marla on the other, and nobody left him for a second.
And Chloe Buck sat in the stern with her hands untied and her feet bandaged, and she looked out at the willows, and after a while Liam came and sat beside her.
"Is it still there," he said.
Chloe was quiet a long time.
"Yes," she said.
Liam nodded slowly.
"Then we don't leave you alone," he said. "Ever. Not for a minute, not for a year, not for the whole two thousand miles. And when we get home, there's forty people in that camp and they will take shifts, and it will never once find you standing by yourself in front of a door."
"That's your plan?"
"That's my plan."
Chloe laughed. It was cracked and exhausted and it was hers.
"That's the worst plan I've ever heard," she said.
"It's the only one there is."
"I know," she said.
She leaned her head on his shoulder.
"Liam," she said. "It said something. Last night. Before it started screaming."
"What?"
"It said it was going to sit in the back of my head all the way to Minnesota," Chloe said, "and it was going to be very interested in what we find there."
Liam looked out at the water.
Two thousand miles.
A camp on a frozen lake with a sickness in it, and four crates of medicine in the hold of a stolen boat, and an old woman named Merja with a carved cold face, and a priest who had stood up alone at a fire, and an old man in a wool coat who might, or might not, still be alive.
"Then let it come," he said.
They sailed south at noon.
Five boats and twenty-six people, out of the river and past the bar and into the open ocean, turning east, turning home, with the wind behind them and the willows falling away astern.
Isaiah stood at the mast with the Desert Eagle on his hip and did not look back.
James Wilford sat in the bow with his Bible on his knees and read, at last, the passage he had not been able to read over Nell Rook's grave, and read it out loud, and twenty-six people listened.
Liam took the tiller.
And on the deck beside him, with her hands free and her friends around her and a thing sleeping in the back of her skull, Chloe Buck watched the coast of Washington sink into the gray behind them.
"How long," she said.
"Six months," Liam said. "Maybe seven."
"And then?"
Liam Perry looked east, toward two thousand miles of dead country, and a lake, and a camp, and everything he had ever loved.
"And then we go home," he said.
TO BE CONTINUED