Emmy Laybourne - Sky on Fire

She repeated the chorus and I sang with her and so did a couple of the others. We sang softly so our voices didn’t carry very far in the black air – I don’t think.

It was a catchy song. Kind of uplifting, and at the same time sad.

Sahalia seemed to have a talent for picking the right songs for the right moments. That’s something I could never do.

I thought about that for a while as we walked. I thought about Sahalia. She had changed a lot since I had known her. A lot of change, it seemed to me, in a short amount of time. Maybe I had changed, too. That was certainly possible. But I liked this Sahalia much better than I had liked the old one.

‘How much farther?’ Max or Batiste or Ulysses would still ask every so often.

‘A while,’ Niko would still say.

After that happened, like, maybe 50 more times, Sahalia hissed, ‘Niko.’

‘What?’ he said.

‘Behind us,’ she whispered.

There was a little dot of light behind us. Maybe a quarter mile away.

Someone else was on the road.

‘Keep an eye on them, okay?’ Niko asked.

But then, maybe 10 minutes later, we saw another group of travellers ahead of us. They came off the highway and down to our road.

They had 3 flashlights and were shining them all around. Not very inconspicuous. Kind of stupid.

But they seemed to be moving quickly and soon they were quite a ways ahead of us.

‘Who are they?’ Max whispered.

‘They’re travellers,’ Niko answered. ‘Just like us.’

I looked at Sahalia and we smiled.

‘They’re trying to get to the airport. Just like us,’ Niko repeated.

I cannot say how far we walked, that last march. If we had been closer to the highway, I could have calculated it with the mile markers. I imagine we could walk a mile in 30–40 minutes.

When we left Mario’s, it was 8:32 a.m. We stopped for protein shakes and water at 11:15. Then we walked again until 1:30.

Maybe 5 miles?

Well, let’s say 5 miles +/− 2 miles from Mario’s we saw a light in the distance. Much brighter than the emergency lights on the side of the highway. This one was shining in a circle, spinning its head around, like a lighthouse light.

It was a beacon.

‘What is that?’ Max asked. ‘Are we there? Is that the airport? Are we there?’

‘I don’t know,’ Niko said.

We picked up the pace.

Sahalia smiled at me. A big, real smile.

Batiste squeezed my hand.

We could hear a man’s voice on a loudspeaker. We couldn’t make out the words, but you could hear that it was some kind of a message, because the cadence repeated.

As we drew closer, we saw people gathered around the light. They stood a ways apart from one another, in small groups. Some groups were just couples and some groups had as many as 8–10 people. Most of them wore layers and face masks. There were a few people raving and acting dodgy – they must have been type AB.

We made our way up to the group. Slowly, edging forward. Niko had Sahalia push Max. I guess he wanted his hands free in case we needed to fight. He was probably wishing he still had our gun, but I didn’t say anything.

No one moved towards us or anything.

The other people looked as ragged and filthy as we had before Mario’s. We definitely looked the best out of everyone. Relatively clean, with the two cool orange Army face masks (no one else had those).

I felt like if Mario could have seen us, he would have been proud.

The message came on again: ‘You have reached an assembly point for the emergency evacuation of the Four Points area. Remain here until the next bus arrives. Buses will arrive every hour on the hour.’

I was so dazed, hearing that.

We had made it.

Sahalia let out a big whoop of joy. She hugged me and kissed me right on the mouth!

Ulysses went to Max and hugged him and they cried together, and Batiste was hugging me from behind as Sahalia, now with her arm draped around my shoulders, gave another big whoop!

The other people joined in with her. Maybe it took her elation to set them off, but suddenly everyone was laughing, crying, hugging one another, where before Sahalia had made that sound, they were reserved and defensive.

And then I saw Niko. He had sunk down to his knees and had his face his hands.

I went over to him.

‘You did it,’ I said. ‘You saved us.’

‘Yeah,’ he moaned. ‘But I lost her.’

The bus came, just like it said it would, on the hour. Okay, it was 12 minutes late but who cared!

It was a school bus. But painted Army green.

The door opened up and the driver (not Mrs Wooly, of course not) was a soldier wearing an Army air mask.

‘Welcome aboard,’ he said with his metallic-sounding voice. ‘We’ll have you safe and inside in no time.’

We filed onto the bus. Somehow Sahalia had broken the ice and the people from the different groups were starting to talk to one another.

A man with a beard asked me where we were from. When I said Monument, he couldn’t believe it.

‘That’s over 60 miles away!’ he exclaimed. ‘We had a hell of a time and we’re just from Castle Rock.’

I shrugged. But I was happy inside.

‘How’d you do it?’ he asked.

‘It was Niko,’ I said. I pointed to Niko, who had Max on his lap in the seat across from me.

‘No,’ interrupted Batiste, who was sitting with me. ‘It was God.’

The bus went so fast, Dean! The road was entirely cleared. We were in a military zone now and everything was different.

When we passed through the places with big stores and office buildings, it looked like there had been a war. There was bullet spray on the walls, and burned out Jeeps and some of the buildings were on fire.

I saw bodies stacked into a great, long pile. For burial, I hope, not burning. Though I guess at this point, nobody cared.

The closer we got to the airport, the more cars there were. All the fields around the airport were just filled with cars. Cars parked at crazy angles, not like a tidy parking lot, but like a jigsaw puzzle. Crammed in every which way.

Large drifts of the white moss-mold enveloped the cars in places. The moss grew in waves, up and down, ebbing and flowing through the cars. It looked like an art installation, actually. An ocean of car bodies and mold.

And there was Denver International Airport, its white peaks lit up from inside. Rising up out of the car field like a castle.

Everybody cheered. Well, not everybody. There were people like Niko who seemed terribly sad or deeply in shock. But Sahalia and the kids and I cheered and many other people joined in.

We pulled up to a set of glass double doors. We had made it, Dean. We made it to DIA.

IWOKE UP ON A satiny bedspread on the floor.

Around me came the snores of the other cadets.

I tried to sit up and my body protested plenty, but the screaming, brain-hole-drilling shoulder pain of the day before was gone.

I couldn’t figure out what time it was. Was it morning? Night?

From across the space there was a light shining. I squinted. It was Kildow, I thought. He seemed to be reading something.

I closed my eyes, just to rest them for a second.

And then I was being nudged awake by a boot.

Payton looked down at me. He carried a mug of water and was brushing his teeth.

‘How’s the shoulder, Deano?’

‘Better,’ I said.

‘Better, sir!’

‘Better, sir!’ I repeated. I groaned, sitting up. But it was better.

The cadets were eating Pop-Tarts and drinking iced teas for breakfast.

‘Show us where the batteries and lights are. We want to get a little more light going. Don’t they have any generators in here? You know, like those portable ones?’