Chapter 7: Cellar

The smoke was so thick that I carried children out of the clinic by feel.

Bixby handed them to me through the back door one at a time, coughing, with his white beard gone grey with ash.

Jonas passed them on to the families waiting in the yard.

The crates burned behind us with a loud, dry crackle.

When the last child was out, Bixby came through the door with the list of forty names still in his fist.

"Go!" he shouted. "They'll come for the noise!"

He was right.

The helicopter, the fire and the screaming had called the turned for a mile around.

They came out of the tree line in a ragged gray crowd.

The line broke.

Two hundred people scattered into the fields, and Bixby ran with a group of mothers toward a stone barn on the hill.

Jonas had his hand around my arm.

"Not that way," he said. "The barn has one door."

"Where?"

"There."

He pointed behind the burning feed store, where a steel hatch lay flat in the weeds.

It was a root cellar.

He heaved it open, shoved me down the ladder, and followed me in.

The hatch crashed shut over us.

He dropped the bar, and it was dark.

Above our heads, I heard feet dragging across the boards.

A great many feet.

Something scratched at the hatch.

Then something else.

I stood against a shelf of canned peaches with my heart hammering, and Jonas stood very still a foot away from me.

I could hear us both breathing.

"They'll lose interest," he said. "An hour. Maybe two."

"Okay."

"Don't talk."

"Okay."

I did not move.

He did not move.

The dark was so complete that I could only find him by the heat of his body and the rhythm of his breath.

"Jonas," I said.

"Don't."

"You said nobody touches me unless I say so."

"I did."

I reached out and found the front of his jacket.

"Then I'm telling you."

For a moment I thought he was going to refuse.

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