Free Into That Darkness by Steven Price Page A

cars, seeing no sign of life. Then she would come upon a crowd shouting and pushing in the rubble and these groups she would slip uneasily past. And then for another long while she would see very few people. But always she felt eyes on her, figures watching from cavernous darknesses in the buildings as she passed.
    The sky was still very white when she rested beside a small schoolyard. She stood at the fence watching the people at work, amazed. The gymnasium roof had fallen and the long corridor of the school had collapsed and firemen were picking through the wreckage there. It seemed so strange to her to see rescuers in uniform. Just two blocks back she had seen shop glass shattered, storefronts looted. As she stood a body was brought up on a stretcher out of the rubble and it looked very small to her eye.
    A circle of people had gathered to watch. A helicopter chopped low overhead and turned and circled back and Anna Mercia raised a hand to her face. When she looked away her eyes were wet and she understood she did not believe her daughter would be at the house. Not truly. But she did not know what else to do. She lowered her face, cowled in her thick grey sweater. Kat was stubborn and clever and wilful and she thought this might keep her safe. But, too, when Mason fell into the lake, how Kat had plunged in to save him from drowning though she could not swim herself. How she nearly lost them both that day. Her daughter’s catlike body on the dock, shuddering and wracking up great sobs of water, her hair in dark tangles at her face.
    She studied the others gathered there in their loose shirts, their dirty shoes. Their faces in the haunted backlit day. Her chest ached fiercely. She knew she would trade any one of them for her daughter’s life. The air smelled of charcoal in the brutal sunlight. She was remembering the sleekness in her daughter’s stooped figure as she rinsed their sedan in the driveway in the late dusk months ago and how the girl had straightened and turned the hose upon the lawn and looked up at Anna Mercia in the window and she felt then a grief she had forgotten was within her.
    There was a fury in the world despite everything and hope was never really possible. She watched the sun glinting on the playground bars, staining red the cedar chips strewn there and shivering against the grooved walls of the garbage bins. The firefighters’ hoses deflated and dry in the courtyard. A swing twisted, untwisted on its chains.
    Poor goddamn kids, one of the men was saying.
    Anna Mercia hooked her fingers into the mesh-wire fence and rested her face against it. She closed her eyes. He might have been talking to her.
    She left them then, went on.
    As she walked she would catch herself muttering. Running old conversations in her head in a soft shadowing voice: You damn well better get those dishes done mister. Or: Kat honey I only got two hands, if you want something it’ll have to wait. Conversations without meaning. Looping them over and over. On her knuckles a tattoo of dirt and dried blood, her bad arm bound tight against her ribs. A darkness pluming out of the southeast over the bones of the city.
    After a time she found herself on the sidewalk of a small block of coffee shops, banks, a dry cleaner across the way. The day was turning warm. Her stomach seemed a cold coiled thing inside her and she knew this was hunger and though she did not feel any pain she knew she must eat. She began rattling the doors, going from shop to shop. When she looked up she saw two black dogs slip out of a bakery two doors down and the second dog paused and raised its snout studying her with hard flat eyes then lowered its head and vanished up the street. She approached uneasily. The glass door stood open on its silver hinges.
    Hello? she called. Hello?
    The interior was dark and she waited in the doorway for her eyes to adjust. The lights were hanging in long loops of cable from the ceiling and the tables were