Andrew Klavan - If We Survive

The people I saw looking back at me through the darkness were not the same people they had been back in the cantina. I mean, sure, it was still Meredith and Nicki and Jim—of course it was. But it was not the same Meredith and Nicki and Jim. They had changed. Or maybe it was I who had changed. Or maybe it was all of us.

Nicki let out a long sigh. As she passed close to me, it sent a pang through my heart to see the bruise disfiguring her pretty face. She moved to the wall and slid down it wearily, sitting on the floor. Meredith gave a little groan and joined her. Jim settled onto the floor cross-legged. I poured some water from the cooler and drank a few cups greedily. Then I joined them, sitting down next to Jim.

There we sat, it seemed a long time. We went on looking at one another, too tired to do much else, too weary even to speak for a while.

“Amazing,” said Nicki then.

And the rest of us nodded. We all knew what she meant.

“What happened to you?” I asked her. “What happened to your face?”

“Oh,” she said—as if she’d forgotten all about it. “Don’t you like it? It’s the latest look. All the kids are into it. I call it: getting punched in the head by a rebel guard.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or not. I mean, it wasn’t like Nicki to make a joke about something like that. She was more the complain-and-pity-herself type.

“A guard punched you?” I asked.

Now, even more surprising, she smiled at me in the halfdarkness. It was a lopsided smile of… pride, I think it was. She was proud of herself and her eyes were gleaming. And she said, “Yeah. He got mad because I cursed at him.”

I have to admit, that was more surprising than anything. My mouth actually dropped open. Was this our Nicki talking? Our bawling, screaming, please-don’t-hurt-me-I-want-togo-home Nicki?

“Really? You cursed at a guard?” I asked.

She turned to Meredith for confirmation. “Didn’t I?”

“She did,” Meredith said with a small smile. “I was shocked,” she added, not sounding very shocked at all. “I’ve never heard such language in my life!”

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “One of those guards with the machine guns? You cursed him out?”

“He was disgusting,” she said. “The way he was treating us. The things he was saying. I told him exactly what I thought of him.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m not sure that was very smart, but it was definitely very brave.”

Nicki looked down at the floor. I couldn’t tell for sure in that red light, but I thought she was blushing. Then she lifted her gleaming eyes to me and said, “It was because of you, Will.”

Really. She said that. I’m not making this up. “Me?”

“Yes. Because of the way you stood in front of me when we were attacked by that alligator.”

“Crocodile,” Jim said softly. “Or maybe a caiman, I’m not sure.”

“Oh, like, whatever, okay? Giant-reptile-going-to-eat-me,” said Nicki, rolling her eyes. It was kind of hilarious hearing her talk like that—talk just like the Nicki we knew before—here, in this skeleton-filled catacomb, with the gunmen all around us, looking for us everywhere and us with no idea how we were going to get out and get away. “After I saw you do that,” she went on, “I just thought, if Will can do something like that for me, just, like, totally risk his life for me, then I should at least be able to stop screaming and crying all the time and making poor Meredith take care of me like I was a baby.”

“You mean, me standing in front of the croc… the cai… the scaly green people-eater made you stop being afraid?”

“Oh no! Are you kidding? I’m still way afraid. Right this minute I’m so scared I think my head’s going to just come off and roll down the corridor and then explode. I mean, did you see those skeletons in the walls back there?”

I laughed. She didn’t sound afraid to me. “I saw them.”

“I’m still way afraid,” she said again. “But I just thought maybe I could stop acting so afraid. You know? I just thought, even if I wasn’t really brave, I could start pretending to be brave so the rest of you didn’t have to listen to me throwing a fit every five minutes.”

“Yeah, but I mean… that is brave,” I said. “I mean, like, we’re all scared, right? We’re all just trying to act brave.”

“Oh… well… really? I don’t know…,” said Nicki. “I don’t think Meredith is afraid.”

I looked at Meredith. We all did. She was sitting against the wall, her head tilted back. She was gazing up into the darkness above us. When Nicki spoke her name, she glanced our way, but didn’t say anything.

“No,” said Jim. “You’re right. Meredith isn’t afraid.”

“No,” I agreed. “She’s not.”

“You should have seen what she did!” Nicki burst out. Her voice was animated and bright, as if she was describing some cool scene in a movie. “When the guard punched me? We were in that horrible, awful cell. And the guard hit me so hard, I fell down. I mean, I was, like, lying there against the wall, almost unconscious—all, like, dazed. And the guard gave this horrible laugh and he started to come toward me. And Meredith stepped in front of him. And he, like, grabbed her arm? And she just stuck her finger in his face and started screaming at him in Spanish—I mean, like, giving him a lecture, like he was five years old or something. And all the time, the guy is holding a machine gun, right, and grabbing her by the arm and ready to punch her too. Only he didn’t. It was, like, he didn’t dare.”

I laughed. I could imagine that. “What’d you say to him?” I asked Meredith.

She tilted her head to one side a little. “I just told him that if his mother could see him hitting a defenseless woman like that, she would die of shame,” Meredith said. “I told him Nicki might be his sister. I said, ‘How would you like it if someone treated your sister like that?’”

Jim laughed too. “How did you know he even had a sister?” She shrugged. “He knew what a sister is,” she said. “That’s the point.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He didn’t say anything!” Nicki said, practically giggling with glee. “He just finally sort of threw her aside and slunk out of the cell, grumbling.”

I shook my head. “That’s amazing. That’s an amazing story.”

“It is,” Jim agreed.

“It was even more amazing to be there,” said Nicki.

We all fell quiet for a minute. I could see the scene in my mind: Nicki lying on the dungeon floor… the guard looming over her… Meredith wagging her finger in the guard’s face, ignoring his gun, lecturing him about his sister as if he were five years old…

“So why aren’t you afraid, Meredith?” I asked. I looked at her. The red light from the heater played over her pale, still features. She turned aside a little, kind of rolling her eyes and smiling to herself, as if I’d said something ridiculous.

“No, really,” said Nicki. “I want to know too. Why aren’t you?”

“Stop it, you guys,” Meredith said. “You’re talking total nonsense.”

“No, actually, they’re not,” said Jim, like a teacher correcting a mistake. “We can all see that you’re not. We saw it from the beginning in the cantina.”

“The rest of us are all terrified all the time,” I said. “Maybe we’re trying to be brave, or to act brave, or do what we think is right or whatever. But we’re all afraid all the time. I know I am.”

“So am I,” Jim said.

“You know I am,” said Nicki.

“But you,” I said to Meredith, “it’s like it makes no difference to you how things turn out. It’s like you’re…” I hesitated a moment because I remembered the word that Palmer had used when we were in that old temple, when he was whispering to her in the dark. I didn’t want her to know that I’d been awake, that I’d been eavesdropping on them. But there was no other word to describe her. So I said, “Fearless. You’re fearless.”