The Few Part 11: In Search Of

John and Eddie sat in the alley for nearly half an hour before either of them felt the urge to move. John was the one who decided that they should at least try to look for Wendy, Mike and Sierra, despite Eddie’s protests that the other three were dead.

John refused to accept that his wife and children may have been killed. When Eddie refused to come with him to search, John simply walked off alone. Eddie sat defiantly in the alley and watched his father walk off, and finally sensing that there weren’t any other real options, he reluctantly got up, following John at a distance, with John occasionally looking back to make sure he was there.
Having looked earlier through the empty stores, John thought it best to begin searching in the old public housing developments that The Others had vacated when they went to live in the houses. Slowly he walked Main Street towards Fifth, toward the housing developments that they had attacked what seemed to John to be an eternity ago, but in reality was only a few days.

As they approached the buildings, John stopped and motioned to Eddie to walk alongside him. When Eddie didn’t come forward, John turned around and walked back to him. Eddie just looked at the ground.
John stood beside his son, both of them perfectly still, until Eddie became impatient, and the two of them walked off together to the dark, battle-scarred buildings. When they came to the first one, on the corner of Fifth and Woodwork, they stood quietly, almost reverently in front of these buildings that had seen so many of the killings that they had seen just one of. After a moment, the two took a deep breath and walked in.

The inside halls of the building, although well built, showed many signs of the runs that had taken place there throughout the years. The thick plaster walls were adorned with gunshot marks and blood stains. Ricochet marks lined the floors – a patchwork of cracked tiles, and, in the places where tiles were missing, cement.
Large, solid-wood doors lined the hallway, leading to one- and two-room apartments that the town’s desperately poor had lived in, back when the term made any distinction at all.

They passed the old office of the building, which was entirely empty. Patches were missing out of the walls where people had used the plasterboard to repair damages in other places. Since these developments had, in the eyes of the state, been shut down and condemned years ago, there was no use for an office anyway.
As they moved through the building, they pushed open the doors, the latches of which were still broken from some earlier raid on the building, to check each of the rooms for any trace of Wendy, Mike, or Sierra. In each room, they found none.
As they proceeded into the stairwell, they found that the rotten wood of the stair steps simply crumbled under their feet. Determined, they followed the hallway to the other side of the building and tried that stairwell, only to find those stairs also too rotten to climb.
“We can’t get up,” John mused out loud.
“Sure we can, Eddie shot back enthusiastically, climbing the support beams to the top of the wooden rail along the side.
As Eddie attempted to climb the handrail, John made the assumption that the other three would not have done such a thing, and left. Eddie, having slid back down the rail to the floor one too many times, gave up and followed.

The two proceeded back through the building’s main doors to the street. There was no shortage of these buildings, and each one was superficially identical to the next.
They walked up Woodwork drive to the next complex, ad as they neared it, the distant sound of commotion inside gave them some measure of hope.
From the outside, it looked just like the one they had just been in, but as they walked in, they saw groups of women milling about and speaking to each other in the halls, which themselves were much cleaner and less damaged than the ones from the previous building.

John tried asking around if anyone had seen any of the three people they were searching for, but most of the people just ignored him and continued their conversations with each other. As he progressed through the halls, he hoped that one of the women in this building might be Wendy.
Finally, as he neared the end of the hall, he saw a woman emerge from one of the doors and turn off around a corner alone. Figuring this was his best chance to find someone who would talk to him, he ran off after her, leaving Eddie running after, falling behind.

When he got within earshot of the woman, he called after her. “Excuse me... Excuse me...”
“Yes?”
She turned around and John found himself staring into a familiar pair of brown eyes. The woman who had spoken to him the night of the run. The courtesan. The woman who had killed Sam.

John stood silent for a moment, letting his mouth hang open. She smiled mischievously.
“Well hello, John!” she let out in an unrealistically, almost mockingly friendly voice.
He said nothing for a moment, not able to put out of his mind that this person had killed a public figure – even if it was killing that he had been leading in the first place. He wasn’t quite sure what to say, or even if he should say anything at all.
“Hello...” he began, then realized that she had never told him her name. “Hello.”
“It was a shame to see you waste my gift,” she said coyly.
Eddie ran up beside him as he spoke. “Gift?” John screamed incredulously. “What gift? Killing my friend?”
He wasn’t sure it was quite honest to say that Sam was his “friend,” but it certainly made his side of the argument stronger.
“I gave you an opportunity, John,” she said overdramatically, pretending to explain. “I gave you the opportunity to be the leader.”
He took a moment to come up with a response to that one in his head. “Your...” he fought off the urge to curse in front of his son. “Your ‘gift’ almost got me killed!”
She stood calmly, as if she had seen this kind of thing before. “You needed this kind of passion then, John,” she said, her voice moving into a seductive tone as she recited his name for the third time.
Distracted by her antics, aggravated and seeing no possibility of convincing her of anything, he set his mind back to the task at hand, and he turned to walk away.
You’re looking for your family, he kept reminding himself. Remember what you are looking for.
“Leaving so soon?” she asked softly.
“I’m looking for my wife and children.” he said e emotionlessly, and began to walk away.
“Watch for my next gift,” she called after him.
John stopped suddenly. At this point, he really wanted to say something – anything at all – that would phase her, if only for the safety of himself and the people he knew.
Unable to think of anything appropriate, but knowing he had to say something, he turned around and walked back until he stood threateningly close to her. He stood there for a moment, running through the options in his head before he finally said “Keep your gifts to yourself.”
She shrugged and walked away.

Wanting to get out of this building as quickly as possible, John gave up on combing the rooms and walked briskly through the halls, head down, looking for an exit.
As they came outside into what was becoming late afternoon, John began to get discouraged. He stood on the crumbling sidewalk and looked up and down the street at the four- and five-story brick and concrete buildings that lined both sides of the street here.
The people they were looking for could be in any room in any one of those buildings.

Discouraged, John sat down on the curb. Eddie grew restless, sitting by John on the curb, then getting up, walking around a little, then sitting down again, just to let John know he was still there before standing up again. Eventually, he got tired, and sat down, equally discouraged, next to his father.
The two of them sat in silence for some time before Eddie, staring blankly at the caving storm drain across the pavement, spoke.
“What do we do now?”
John didn’t say anything at first. Finally, he said in a soft, defeated voice, “I don’t know what we do now.”
“So it’s over?”
John bristled at the question, not sure what “it” was. “It may be,” he said finally.
They returned to silence.

After some time, as it began to get dark, John suddenly noticed the soft glow of candlelight emanating from windows in a few of the buildings. It was enough to give him a glimmer of hope, and he stood up abruptly and started walking toward the nearest of the lit buildings. Eddie, who had been about to fall asleep, suddenly came to.
“Where are you going?” he called out.
“Inside,” John replied vaguely. Eddie followed, too tired to protest.

As they approached the building, John recognized the tabletop door from the building they had attacked. He pushed at it, and it opened as smoothly as it had the night before.
Inside, the halls were empty, but adorned by the indistinct hum of people somewhere nearby. He pushed on a few of the doors, which still refused to latch shut after having been kicked in. After trying a few rooms and finding them empty, he wandered back outside, and stared up at the wall of windows looking out over the street, the abandoned plant, and the town.
Only a few of them glowed with the soft light of a tenantry without electricity. He stood and stared at them, figuring out in his head which rooms were lit, and slowly, periodically glancing up to make sure he had counted right.

“There’s only a couple dozen rooms to check,” he said out loud as he passed Eddie, standing by the door. “And only on the first two floors.” Eddie stepped out from the shadow of the building and glanced up at the darkness of the upper levels, then the two walked inside.
As they walked up the pitch-black halls to the rooms that were occupied, the ambient noise from the less-than-soundproof rooms grew louder and louder. Occasionally, they could catch pieces of conversations:

“..but we’re gonna...”
“...and then the tables will...”
“...going to go back and...”
“...nothing I could do...”
“...don’t know where your father is...”

The last one echoed in John’s ears. He ran in the direction he thought it had come from and listened again. At first he heard nothing, but as he listened through the ambient noise, he finally heard a conversation between Wendy and Sierra from behind the door to unit 1165:
“I told you, I think they killed them,” came Wendy’s voice.
Then Sierra with “How do you know for sure? They could be alive.”
“I don’t know for sure, Sierra, but even if they are alive, we don’t have any way to find them.”

He stood there for some time listening to them argue back and forth about whether he was alive or dead before he pushed on the latchless door.
It cracked open with a labored noise and Wendy, who was facing the doorway, suddenly got a blank expression on her face, followed by a overcoming look of relief and suddenly exclaimed “They’re alive!”.
Sierra, now thinking she had won her argument, relaxed in her creaking wooden chair as Wendy jumped up from where she sat atop the room’s nonfunctional radiator and ran over to John.

“I thought they must have killed you!” she said breathlessly. “What happened?”
At the sound of the conversation, Sierra suddenly turned around. When she saw John in the doorway, her face erupted into a big grin. She shot up out of her chair and ran across the room to John. When she was safely within John’s jurisdiction she looked up at her mother with a smug grin and said “I told you.”
“How did you get out?” Wendy steered the conversation back to her concern. “We looked around when they came to the bakery and we didn’t see any of you.”
“I was outside when they came,” John explained. If he had wanted to say more, he could have said he was in this very building, but he didn’t.
“I just hid in the bakery,” Eddie said, disinterested in the explanation now that it was over. I climbed out the window after everybody left.”
Wendy suddenly looked worried. “You two weren’t together, then?”
John and Eddie glanced at each other. “Not until the trial,” John said.
All of a sudden Wendy looked upset. “Wait,” she said to herself, then paused.
John looked at her and let out an inquisitive hum.
“I know you weren’t at the trial.”
“We were in the jail cell,” Eddie interjected.
“Yeah, so were we, but then...”
“They didn’t take everyone into the courtroom,” John answered helpfully. Suddenly curious, and not wanting to talk about his own experience, he turned the discussion to Wendy and Sierra’s experience.
“What happened to you?”
Wendy looked away, not wanting to talk about her experience anymore than John did. Sensing the silence, and overcome with the joy of seeing John and Eddie alive, Sierra was more than happy to fill the void.
“They came in with guns,” she started, changing her tone of voice to make it sound even more dramatic. After a moments pause she added, “I don’t think they wanted to kill us, though.”
This surprised John, since it seemed to him that “they” wanted nothing other than to kill them, but he chose not to interrupt and let her continue with the story.
“Everyone tried to run away or hide or something,” she started, then got a goofy grin on her face. “Well, everybody else but us.”
“Sierra!” Wendy burst into the conversation. Turning to John, she said “Yes, of course we tried to get away.”
The girl’s grin disappeared, and Wendy took up the story. “Anyway, nobody was cooperating, so they started shooting. I don’t think they were shooting at a person, just at all of us together.”
“They were shooting at people,” Sierra protested. The turned to John and said “They killed lots of them. Kind of like when we...” she caught herself and stopped, embarrassed that she had almost brought up the topic.
“Kind of like what the hunting club people did,” John offered.
“Yeah. Anyway, they told us to go down to the courthouse, but we didn’t know where that was so...” In her excitement, her explanation melted into one long, garbled string of words that John couldn’t understand at all.
He let her finish the lengthy, unintelligible explanation, then glanced at Wendy for the English version.
Trying to be as concise as she possibly could, she told the rest of the story, staring blankly and emotionlessly into space, with John affirming every few sentences with coaxing syllables of “yeah” and “uh-huh.”
“They told everybody to go to the courthouse. Most of us did, but a few people wouldn’t go, and they just shot them.” She paused for a moment, trying to figure out where to go from there.
“The court was crowded,” she offered. “We really didn’t all fit, but of course that didn’t matter to them. Eventually the judge came and got us, and the defense started talking about all of the things we had done.”
“We didn’t do anything,” John interrupted. “We didn’t even get guns, remember?”
“Right,” she replied. “But everyone else did.”
John was uncomfortable that she didn’t make the distinction between them and the people who had actually done the things they were accused of, but he let her continue.
“Anyway, then they let the people from our side speak.”
“What did they say?” John asked with genuine curiosity. “I can’t imagine how they’d defend themselves.”
“Well, everyone was talking at once so you couldn’t hear much, but it was basically self-defense. That they wanted to kill us too, and that they’d tried to kill us before.”
“Then somebody somewhere started shooting and we all panicked and ran away. There was some kind of commotion out in the lobby too, I think, but we didn’t stay around to see it. We just came back here because it seemed like a good place to stay.”

John thought back to their jailbreak, and grinned at Wendy’s description of it as “some kind of commotion.” His mind drifted through the whole episode, from pulling down the bars, to looking for Wendy and Mike and Sierra through the dust, to feeling their way out amidst the gunfire.
Suddenly his mind hung on the thought of Mike.
“Mike!” he said out loud. The other three stopped. There was a moment of tensely held silence before Sierra spoke.
“Mike’s probably dead,” she said matter-of-factly. “He’s into all that death stuff.”
“That doesn’t mean he wants to die!” Eddie protested vigorously. “Besides,” he said authoritatively, “he’s not dead.”
“How do you know,” the other three said, almost in unison.
“Well, I don’t know for sure, but I just don’t think...” his voice trailed off.
Suddenly John spoke. “I’m going to find him.” Without waiting for affirmation or protest, he turned abruptly and walked out and down the hall, leaving the other three in a stunned silence.
As he walked out of the building, they stared after him as he walked down the dark street into the night.
“I still think he’s dead,” Sierra articulated proudly.

Nobody said anything else.

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