Andrew Klavan - If We Survive

At that point, I started to come out of my daze.

Get the gun, I thought stupidly.

I looked down. The dead rebel lay inches from my sneakers, staring up at me with empty eyes. His machine gun was still strapped over his shoulder.

I swallowed. I didn’t want to touch the corpse. But I had to. I took a deep breath and squatted down. I took hold of the machine gun. I tried not to touch the body underneath, but my knuckles brushed against his bloody shirtfront. I tried to pull the weapon free, but it was held in place by the shoulder strap.

“Let’s go, go, go!” I heard Palmer shouting.

I knew what I had to do. I had just seen Palmer do it half a second before. Squinting so I wouldn’t have to see the dead man’s face so clearly, I took hold of the machine-gun strap and worked it quickly down over his arm until I could pull the gun away from him.

Then, with a gasp, I jumped out of my squat.

“Get in, kid, go!” shouted Palmer.

Still in a haze of confusion, I blinked and looked up. Palmer had grabbed Jim by the arm and was now shoving him toward the open side door of the van. I started to follow them.

But as Palmer pushed Jim into the van, he spun around and faced me.

“Listen,” he said quickly. “Get in back, open the door. There’s an army of these clowns on the streets and every drunken one of them is about to come after us. When they do, shoot them.”

“What?” I asked.

“You heard me. You’ve got the guts. You can do it. So do it.”

I nodded—but I didn’t really grasp what he was saying. I mean, about five seconds ago—really, it could hardly have been more than five seconds—I was looking down the barrels of four machine guns, literally preparing to meet my Maker. And now I was still alive—which was so wildly incredible I could hardly believe it. And Palmer was telling me—what?—to shoot at people out the back of a van? I’d never even fired a gun before. I’d never even held a gun before. He didn’t really expect me to kill anyone, did he?

But I nodded, all the same. Because there was no time to do anything else. And the next thing I knew, Palmer had me by the arm and was hoisting me up into the van with the others, the same as he had with Jim.

“And, kid,” he said.

I looked back at him.

“Don’t fall out.”

I nodded again. What else was I going to do? And clutching the dead rebel’s machine gun, I stepped up into the van as Palmer slid the door shut behind me.

It was dark inside. Dark and cramped: two bench seats filled most of the space in the van’s narrow interior. My friends were sitting on the benches, Jim in front, Meredith and Nicki in back. Jim was leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees. He was rocking himself and staring at nothing and muttering. Nicki was leaning against Meredith. She was staring too, and trembling so hard I thought she was having some kind of spasm. Meredith held on to her. Meredith’s face was almost expressionless, but she was breathing quickly, nearly gasping, and I could tell that she, like the others, was trying to get over the shock of not being shot, of still being alive.

I was shocked too, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t have time to be shocked. I had to get to the back of the van and do… something—I wasn’t sure what.

Carrying the machine gun, I edged along the side of the benches. I reached the van’s back doors. They were double doors. “Open the door,” Palmer had said. So, okay, I grabbed a handle and pushed one of the doors open.

At that exact moment, Palmer jumped back into the van, back behind the wheel. He put the van into gear and jammed his foot down on the gas.

The van spurted forward, and I nearly went flying out through the open door onto the dirt street. I just barely managed to grab hold of the edge of the door that was still closed and keep my footing and stay inside.

Don’t fall out of the van . I reminded myself of Palmer’s orders. Not “ fall out of the van.” Don’t fall out .

Well, it was a good thought, anyway. But by this time, the van was bouncing and rollicking over the rutted dirt of the back alley, careening toward the far corner of the church. The back door kept slamming shut in my face. I kept pushing it open again. And every time I pushed it open, the van would hit another bump and nearly hurl me out into the road where I would have been left behind.

I tried to think. It wasn’t easy. My mind felt like a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces scrambled. The bright clarity of those moments before I’d been put up against the church wall—that was totally gone. I had left the bright moment of my death behind and was back in life, back in the world. And the world, let me tell you, was a mess, absolute confusion. I couldn’t even get the van door to stay open so I could do what Palmer had told me to do.

I looked around for something that would help. I found it in a pile of tools and other junk lying on the van’s floor. There was a coil of thick rope there. I picked it up. I pushed the door open one more time. I wedged a coil of the rope in the hinges, really jammed it in there. That did it. The rope kept the door from snapping shut as the van continued jouncing and rattling over the road. Now if I could just take care of that “don’t fall out” part.

“Get ready!” I heard Palmer shout from the driver’s seat. “It’s time to rock and roll!”

Well, I had no idea what that meant, but somehow I didn’t think it was going to be good.

I couldn’t get steady on my feet, and there was no way to use the gun while I was being thrown here and there by the bouncing of the van. So I sat down—it was the only solution I could think of. I sat cross-legged—you know, like you do when you’re sitting on the ground around a campfire, ready to cook some s’mores. Only instead of a box of graham crackers on my lap, there was this machine gun. So I sat like that, cross-legged, and held the gun and looked out the open door, not really sure what I was going to see but telling myself that I should get ready because we were going to… you know, rock and roll.

I was looking out at the back alley, the sheds and the garbage and the back of the church. I saw the bloody wall against which we’d just been standing, and I saw the gunmen who’d been about to kill us and were now lying dead or unconscious in the dust.

Then the van swerved, hard, to the left. We turned a corner, with me leaning so far over to one side that, even sitting down, I nearly flew across the floor.

The execution wall disappeared. I wasn’t sorry to see it go. Now, for a moment, anyway, I was looking out at a pile of garbage, and a hill of trees, and a patch of sky covered with black clouds in the background.

Then, almost at once, I heard Palmer let out a roar, and the van swerved again. We were barreling through the plaza, the center of Santiago. I looked out—and I could not believe how much everything had changed in such a short time.

The place where the people had celebrated their new school was completely transformed. It had been a nice little place. Kind of jolly. The church, the cantina, the market stalls. Christmas lights strung up for decorations.

Now the square was decorated with dead people. Men and women lying on the pavement, shot, bleeding on the stones. The Christmas lights were gone—I saw where a string of them had been trampled into the ground. The market stalls were all broken and turned over, their pillars splintered. The windows of some of the other buildings were broken and their shattered glass lay sparkling beneath the walls. A rebel with a gun staggered into view. He tipped a bottle of whiskey up to his lips and took a long swig. Then he fired a few bursts into the air and gave a shout of triumph.