Chapter 18 #2
"She was here when they brought me," she says, in Spanish, so quietly I have to lean in to catch it. "She was here for a while."
"And then what."
"She got sick." She's looking at the floor. "In the summer. They took her up the stairs and they didn't bring her back down. Then they cleaned the room out and put me in it."
The hallway goes crooked.
I put my hand flat on the wall of the corridor, and my knees want to fold.
I lock them and stand there and take it. She's been dead since the summer.
Two hundred and eighty-one nights I've been counting, and for half of them she's been in the ground.
They cleaned it out and put a child in it, because a room has to earn, and the machine doesn't stop for one dead woman any more than it stopped for me.
My eyes go and I don't have a hand free to do anything about it.
"Hey." The girl's voice, small, from inside the room. "Are you okay?"
A fifteen-year-old in a bunker is asking me if I'm okay.
I get down on my knees on that concrete so I'm not standing over her.
"What's your name?" I put my hand out, palm up, and leave it there where she can take it or not.
"Yoli."
"Yoli." I hold the hand steady. "I was in room three. I was there for nine years. I got out last spring, and I told them I'd come back, and it took me too long." My voice goes to pieces. "I'm sorry it took me this long."
She looks at my hand for what feels like a year, then she puts hers in it.
***
We're forty feet from the trucks when the desert lights up.
Headlights. Six sets, eight, more, all at once, from behind the house and the pole barn and out past the equipment shed.
The whole property goes white and I can see everything.
The women in a line. The club spread around them.
And men coming out from between the buildings.
Not five. Not ten.
They come out of the dark in a wave, and the yard hangs there for one whole second with nobody moving, and I have time for exactly one clear thought.
He was waiting.
Then the shooting starts.
I can't describe the next ninety seconds.
It's noise. Noise past anything I've ever heard, flat cracking noise coming from everywhere at once that hits you in the chest like a hand.
The light's all wrong. People are moving and I can't tell which ones are ours.
Somebody grabs the back of my jacket and throws me down.
I hit gravel on my hip and there's a woman under me and a woman half on top of me, and I'm screaming at them in Spanish to stay flat, stay down, don't get up, and I can't hear my own voice coming out.
Boulder's on one knee eight feet away, firing, his mouth moving around words I can't hear.
Amara's got a woman by the collar, dragging her behind the engine block of the second truck.
Doom's out past the edge of the light and I don't see him, and then I do, for half a second, moving between two men, and then I don't see him again.
I get up on my elbows and I count.
Because counting is what I do. Because it's the only thing I've ever had.
Ten. Eleven. Yoli's flat behind the second truck with Lashes over the top of her. My girl from the eighth door is under the truck itself, both hands clamped over her ears, and she's looking right at me.
Eleven. I have eleven.
Finn drops into the gravel beside me with blood on his face that isn't his.
"Can you drive?" He's already pulling me up by the arm.
"Yes—"
"Third truck. Take five and go, don't wait on the rest of us." He shoves me toward it. "Damon's got the road open. Go."
"Finn—"
"Now, Mila!"
Somebody's screaming Cricket across the yard.
It's Razor's voice first, and then Amara's, and then it's everywhere, coming off every man in the yard.
Cricket. Cricket. Break contact.
And the whole night changes.
The club stops holding ground and starts moving backward, firing as they go, herding, the women going into the trucks in twos with a body between them and the light every single time.
I get five women into the third truck.
I'm shoving the fourth one up into the cab when Yoli goes down.
She's running, and then she isn't.
She folds sideways into the gravel about six feet from the tailgate, and she doesn't make one sound, and the sound she doesn't make is the worst thing I have ever heard.
"Yoli!"
I'm out of the cab before I know I've moved.
I get my hands under her arms and haul, and Finn's there in a second, and between us we get her up and into the bed of the truck and I climb in on top of her.
There's blood coming out of a fifteen-year-old.
"Drive!" Somebody's screaming it and I think it's me. "Fucking drive!"
The truck moves.
I've got both hands pressed down on the hole under her collarbone and I'm talking, and I don't know what I'm saying.
My mother's Spanish is coming out of me. The things you say to a child. Mija. Mi vida. Ya, ya, ya, estoy aquí.
Her eyes are open and she's looking at the roof of the truck bed.
"Stay with me." I get my forehead down close to hers. "Yoli. Look at my face. Not up there. At my face."
She looks at my face.
"There's a doctor." I keep the pressure on and I keep talking.
"Forty minutes. There's a doctor and there's a woman named Sakura.
She's the one who's going to take care of you.
" Her eyes are starting to drift and I get closer.
"She's a woman, Yoli. Do you hear me? A woman is going to take care of you.
And I'll be in the room the whole time. The whole time. "
We had planned to get the women medical attention as soon as we got them off the property, at a secure location.
Now we have an even more dire need for it.
Her hand comes up and takes a fistful of my shirt.
She doesn't let go of it for forty minutes.
The house is somewhere outside Elgin and there's a man in the driveway with a bag, and a woman standing beside him.
The doctor's older, gray, and he moves fast and doesn't say a word to anybody.
The woman comes straight to the door of the truck and puts her hands where mine are without asking permission.
"Sakura. I'm a nurse practitioner." She finds the wound with two fingers. "Move your hands on three. Keep the pressure until I say."
Then she looks past me at the girl's face, and everything in her voice changes.
"Hola, mi amor." She gets down low, into Yoli's sightline. "You're okay. You're going to be okay. What's your name, sweetheart?"
"Yoli," I say, because Yoli can't.
"Yoli." Sakura stays right there in front of her, close, the way you do with a kid.
"I'm going to take care of you. That man is a doctor and he's very good at this. And I’m not going to leave you alone with him or with anybody else for one second.
" She waits until the girl's eyes come to hers. "Not one second. Do you understand me?"
Yoli's hand is still knotted in my shirt.
"She wants me to stay," I say.
"Then you stay." Sakura doesn't look up from the wound. "Let’s get you in the house. Both of you. Now."
They take her into a back bedroom via a gurney and throw the light on. The doctor immediately gets to work.
Sakura talks to her the whole time. Low and steady, in two languages, never once stopping.
I sit on the floor by the head of the bed with a fifteen-year-old's fist wrapped up in my shirt.
Around four in the morning the doctor sits back on his heels and says something to Sakura in Spanish.
Sakura closes her eyes for a second before she turns to me.
"Through and through." She wipes her hands. "It went in under the clavicle and out her back, and it missed everything that would have killed her. She's going to hurt for a long time but she’s going to be completely fine."
I put my head down on the edge of the mattress.
Yoli's hand finally lets go of my shirt.
It lands on the top of my head, and it stays there.
***
Finn comes in at dawn.
He's got somebody else's blood dried along his jaw and his hands won't hold still, and he stops in the doorway of a bedroom in a stranger's house outside Elgin, Arizona, and looks at me sitting on the floor.
"Everybody's out." He says it like he's still making himself believe it. "All eleven. Nobody of ours is dead. Boulder's got a hole through his leg and Kade's arm's broken and that's it."
I can't get a word out.
"They were waiting for us." He leans back against the doorframe like it's the only thing holding him up. "Thirty-two men, Mila. On a property that runs five guards."
"I know."
"He let us come." His voice goes somewhere I've never heard it go. "He knew, and he let us walk right in. He was never trying to keep those women. He was trying to get me."
I look up at him from the floor, with a sleeping girl's hand resting on my head.
"Then he made a mistake." My voice comes out of me raw and steady at the same time. "Because he didn't get you. And I've got eleven women in a house in Arizona, and every single one of them is breathing."