Chapter 6: Unbarred

Unbarred

The gate at the bottom of the bleachers let them out one at a time and then all at once, and by 9:38 the sidewalk in front of the school was full and the lights over the field were still on, still humming.

The air was still ninety. A car sat at the curb with the engine running and the radio going, and a woman’s voice went out across the lot after somebody’s name. A little kid was punting a football between the parked cars and losing it under a pickup. The whole block smelled like popcorn and hot rubber and the dumpster behind the concession stand.

Adrian came out with his cane in his right hand and his bag on his left shoulder and the black cloth over his eyes, four turns, knotted at the back of his head. He had done it himself that morning, in the bathroom, without a mirror, the way he had done it for ten years.

He got about nine feet.

“Adrian. Adrian. Hey.” Kayla Brandt came around in front of him, walking backward. He knew it was her, and he knew she was walking backward, because her shoes hit the pavement in that pattern — heel first, hard, a little too fast for the distance.

“I’m fine.”

“I know you’re fine. We’re going your way.”

“Kayla.”

“We promised your aunt.”

“That’s not—“ He stopped. There were more of them now. He could hear the crowd reorganizing itself around him the way water reorganizes around a rock.

“It’s on my way,” a boy said, back and left, in a voice that offered no further detail.

“Same direction,” said somebody else, farther back.

Then a girl he didn’t know by name fell in on his right and said, quickly, before anybody could ask her, “I’m actually going to Vine anyway.”

Thirteen of them now. He counted twice, by shoes, by the way each one walked.

“Nobody has to do this,” he said. “I can walk. I can see. It’s the light I can’t take.”

“We know,” Kayla said.

“Then—“

“We know, and we’re going your way.” She had a way of saying a thing twice without repeating it.

Adrian moved his cane to his left hand and let them close in.

A car slowed beside them at the crosswalk and matched their pace for a second, and then the light changed and it went on. At the next corner a horn went twice and a boy peeled off toward it at a jog, calling back, “See you Monday, don’t get eaten,” and the door shut on him and the car pulled away. Somebody else turned into the convenience store lot, where the ice machine sat out back going like a small truck, and said he’d catch up, and didn’t. Two more went at the corner by the Baptist church, and one of them, a girl whose instrument case knocked against her leg every other step, said, “Three days. My grandmother’s. Nothing to do. I can’t wait.”

They walked on. The sidewalk was buckled where the roots came up, and Adrian lifted the cane over the raised slab each time without slowing. He could hear the sprinkler on the lawn of the funeral home before they reached it, the tick of it turning. He could hear the shutter of the laundromat coming down, the runner of it, the little drop at the end.

Five minutes and there were five of them, and the street got suddenly wider. The noise of everybody else had been doing more than he’d realized. It had been holding the night at a distance.

He let out a breath.

“So,” Bryce Donnelly said. “You think it’s coming back?”

“Think what’s coming back?” Owen Rusk said.

“You know what. The fog.”

“It’s not coming back,” Kayla said.

“That’s not a no.”

“It’s a no. The people who study it say a hundred years at least. Maybe more. Maybe never.” She said it to the street ahead of them. “And in a hundred years we’re all dead, so it’s somebody else’s problem, and I’m not going to sit up all night with somebody else’s problem.”

Bryce said, “That’s exactly what somebody says ten minutes into a disaster movie.”

“Bryce.”

“It’s a natural process,” Sean Dooley said. He was a few steps ahead with his hands in his pockets, and he said it the way he said most things, like he was reading it off a card he was tired of holding. “Everything cycles. It hit a critical point, it starts to recede. Same as the ice. Ice covers the land, then it warms up, it goes back, you get a new age.”

“See,” Kayla said. “That’s a real answer.”

Bryce said, “Where’d you get that?”

“Everybody knows that.”

“A hundred years of nothing happening. Where’s the turn?”

“Sometimes I think the football’s actually scrambled your brain,” Sean said, and Owen laughed, and so did Kayla, and Bryce put both hands up and let it go.

They passed the drugstore, which had closed in the spring and still had its gate down. You could hear that it was closed. A store that’s open has a cooler running in it somewhere, and behind that gate there was nothing at all — no hum, no radio, nothing.

A lamp hummed over the sidewalk and then they were past it and in the dark, and then another one hummed.

Adrian listened to the four of them putting their feet down, and thought about which thing to say, and then said it, because it was the smallest true thing he had that would fit in his mouth.

“What if it isn’t a natural thing?”

Nobody answered for about four seconds. He kept walking.

Then Sean laughed, one short note, not even mean. “What,” he said. “You’ve been reading the tracts?”

“I’m just saying.”

“My uncle’s got a whole shelf of those. He can’t hold a job either.”

“It’s the twenty-first century,” Owen said. “There’s no ghosts.”

Adrian said nothing.

Bryce said, quieter, so that Owen and Sean, four feet ahead, did not necessarily hear it, “Sometimes I think it’d be easier.”

Sean said, “What would?”

“If there was something out there.” Bryce didn’t say it loud. “Not like — I don’t want to die. But if there was something out there, then this would be like — preparation. Instead it’s just, you know.” The hand he lifted took in the street, the shut drugstore, the four lamps working out of sixteen. “This. Forget it. It’s a stupid thing to say.”

Neither of them took him up on it, and the four of them went along the way they’d been going, and the talk came back around to the weekend.

“Three days,” Kayla said. “I’m sleeping until noon every single one of them. Eleven-fifty, watch.” She said it to the whole street. “People are going to put me in a documentary.”

Adrian lifted his cane over the raised slab in front of the shoe repair place, which had closed in the spring.

The thing he didn’t say, walking up the hill with the four of them: after long enough in the dark, being looked after was harder than walking home alone. Dana and Toby were different. That was all of it, and there was no way to say it to somebody already walking him home.

“Five more blocks,” Kayla said.

Two blocks later Bryce said, to nobody in particular, “Coach pulled me in the office after the game.” The strap of his bag went around one finger and around again. “B-minus by the sixth week, or I’m in street clothes for the scrimmage. He said it like I was a piece of equipment he was renting.”

“So study,” Kayla said.

“I study with the TV on.”

“That’s not studying. That’s sitting near a television in a studying position.”

“It’s studying with company.”

Adrian heard the walk signal at Vine start its chime, and a car come up the hill behind them and turn off somewhere. Two blocks up, a screen door banged. Somebody was cooking something on a grill at that hour, or maybe it was a fire in a yard barrel and there was nothing on it but pallets.

“All right,” Owen said at the corner, “this is me.”

“You’re going the wrong way.”

“I’m going around.” He was already going around. “Monday.”

“Monday,” Kayla said.

“Monday,” Sean said, and went up the alley by the shoe repair place, and Adrian heard the lot fence take his hands and then his weight and then let him go on the other side.

“There’s the dog,” Kayla said.

Scrap came up the hill dragging a length of clothesline that was not his, and when Adrian clicked twice he came down the last thirty feet so fast that he skidded on the grit and put his head into Adrian’s knee.

“He got out again,” Adrian said.

“He’s the worst dog in Pennsylvania.”

“He’s not.”

“He is, and you love him, and that’s fine.”

Toby was up at the top of the block, and that was a different set of footsteps — short, fast, one of them heavier than the other because of what he did when he landed on the right foot. Adrian heard him stop. Heard him not say anything, which was how Toby handled most of it. Then heard him say Kayla’s name like a question.

“He’s fine,” Kayla said. “Nothing happened. We walked him home.”

“Nothing happened,” Toby said. It came out flat. Then: “Thanks.” It came out like he was annoyed at the word for existing.

Bryce said, “Nice dog.”

Scrap went up the walk after Toby, dragging the clothesline.

The first sign had gone up at the top of the street, where it came out onto the avenue, and the second at the bottom by the loading dock, and the third one he dragged the last forty feet himself, holding it by the crossbar so the feet wouldn’t catch in the brick.

It was the kind of barricade the city used when it took a street apart: black panel on a steel frame, a crossbar welded between the feet so it wouldn’t walk off in the wind, red letters. ROAD CLOSED. He had never once seen anybody look at one of them twice.

He set it square across the mouth of the street and stood back and looked at it. The lamp behind him put his shadow up the bricks and brought it down again.

His phone said 9:31.

The street ran downhill between two rows of brick into the old part of the city. Down there it was all shutters and boarded windows and a chain-link fence with a tree coming up through it, and the river came through the gaps at the bottom, and the wind off the river smelled like iron. Halfway down, a lamp was working. Past that one, a lamp had been out since spring.

He dug the pack out of his jacket, put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, and stood under the working lamp with the smoke going up past the bulb. Three of them tonight. He had never set two, or four.

Then he took the earpiece out of his jacket pocket, put it in his ear, and tapped it once.

“Third one’s set,” he said.

“Copy,” the earpiece said. “Go ahead.”

He smoked it down to about an inch. Then he took it out of his mouth, held it, looked at the sign, put it back in the corner of his mouth, and bit the pad of his right thumb until it split.

He crouched in front of the panel and drew the thumb across it, one line, left to right, hard, through the middle of the letters.

He looked up at the sky over the street and said it no louder than he would have said it to himself.

“Unbarred.”

The line of blood went pale and then went out, drawn into the paint the way water goes into a rag. The letters lit red — a red that had nothing to do with paint — and then they were paint again.

He sat down on the curb, hard, and put his head back.

“Hollowed out,” he said, to the street. “Two years of this. Every time. Hollowed out like a—“

He didn’t finish it. He sat with his forearms on his knees and breathed with his mouth open, and the cigarette went out in his hand, and he did nothing about that either. He hadn’t eaten since four and he wasn’t going to now.

Something crossed the sky over the street.

He looked up. Six of them went over, low, dark red, faster than anything that size had any business going, and the one in front put his hand back over his shoulder and closed it on the hilt of the sword he was carrying. He did not draw it. They went on out over the river.

The earpiece clicked twice. It was a different voice than before, flat and quick, reading it off a card: “All elements. The sweep is a go.”

“Copy,” he said.

There was nothing for him to do with it. He stayed where he was with his back against the curb and his arms on his knees, and the street went on running downhill the way it always had.

High over the old city, the three signs came up red at the same moment — one at the top of the street, one at the loading dock, one at the mouth — and drew lines to each other and closed. Inside the lines, a block and a half of streets went flat and grey, the way a street in a photograph is not a street.

From the ground it was the same street.

He got the lighter out of his jacket and turned it over in his fingers without lighting anything with it. The lamp at the bottom of the street worked. The lamp past it had not worked since spring. A moth went at the first one and missed and went at it again.