Free City of Savages by Lee Kelly Page A

Mom to never mention Mary, even if she died?”
    “You know Mom. She doesn’t talk about anything . It took her over a decade to bring us to our old apartment.”
    “True. Okay, wait, hold on a second,” Phee grunts. “My butt is killing me. This tub’s as hard as cement.”
    She shifts her legs up and over me and almost kicks me in the eye. After some finagling, we end up with our knees hanging over the side of the empty bathtub, our heads propped up by towels on the tiled border, like we’re sunning ourselves under the torchlight.
    “All right, I’m ready,” Phee says, and I crack open the spine to continue.
    March 6—It’s been days. I haven’t been able to stop to write down what’s happened until now.
    Suffice it to say, no one came to save us. So we had to save ourselves.
    Mary somehow shaped Sky’s stroller into a weapon, and the three men dressed in cycling gear helped her stab the glass and gut the windows of the train. Each one of us carefully crawled out of the belly of the beast, and then we worked on rescuing the other cars. If I didn’t have Sky, I might even have laughed, been excited by the bizarre Saturday adventure.
    “You ruin everything,” Phee teases.
    “Would you be quiet? I’m trying to get into this.”
    But my nerves were so fried all I could think of was getting home.
    Once everyone was out, we reconfigured the stroller and rolled Sky down the tunnel with the rest of our ragtag crew. It was so black that the dark had texture. The dull blue light from people’s phones did little to light the way, and hardly anyone had a lighter. Now that New York is smoke free, smokers are rare commodities, I suppose. It was just Mary and the lithe teen, Bronwyn, along with every member of a group of sixty-year-old women from Kansas, visiting for a girls’ luxury weekend away.
    The women with lighters leading the charge, we all walked carefully on the tracks to the next subway stop, a group of about fifty of us. Mary announced at some point that we were between 33rd Street and Grand Central. It was clear from both her lighter and her stroller-weapon move that she was somehow leading our pitiful brigade. She said the power must be out, that it might be the whole city. And that once we got to Grand Central, we’d know what was going on.
    We hear a moan from the bedroom. And then a startled gasp.
    “She’s up,” Phee whispers. “Ditch it.”
    I close the book and shove it in between Phee and me as Mom frantically opens the door.
    “What are you two doing?”
    Shadows carve out Mom’s eyes and cheeks, and she looks ancient under the torchlight. I can tell she’s half-asleep. For a second I consider coming clean and telling her that we have her book, that we stole her past, and let her wake up tomorrow and write it off as a dream.
    “Just talking,” I say.
    “Tomorrow’s our first day in the fields,” Mom mumbles, visibly more relaxed now that she’s found us safe and sound. “You both need to rest. We’ve got a big day ahead of us. Come on, out of the tub.”
    We begin to climb out as she limps back to the room.
    “When do we finish?” Phee whispers.
    “Tomorrow.” I think of this morning, how it feels as if we’ve lived lifetimes since then, and I realize I’m excited for a new day. Even if it means we have to wait. “Hey, Phee?”
    “Yeah?”
    I put my arm on her shoulder and help guide her into the dark. “Happy birthday.”
    We stumble back into the room and I return the journal to the folds of my backpack, then push the bag to the center of the floor under our bed.
    I climb in next to Phee and drift in and out of sleep. I dream of dark tunnels. Heroes fighting by firelight. And lonely, beautiful woodsmen.

7    PHEE
    I sit down on a rock in the shade of the trees that border the Great Lawn and massage my bruised ribs. For, like, the tenth time this hour. There’re hundreds of workers in the fields, collecting corn from the stalks and plucking apples from the trees.