On the Edge of Gone Page 28

  “I brought all the food I can—”

  “That’s not it. We need the scooter back.” She leans forward, her arms crossed over their scooter’s handlebars. “I know we owe you for knocking you into the water. And the food and ketamine. I wouldn’t ask if we didn’t need it.”

  “I can’t right now,” I say automatically. I considered it before: with Iris back, I don’t truly need the scooter anymore. Still, if I return it now, I’ll need transport back afterward. They’d find out about the ship. The best approach is to come along with Iris and travel back together on her canoe.

  “We’re transporting people out of their shelters. Some shelters have energy stocked to help recharge our scooter. But with only one scooter . . . it’s slow.”

  “Others are coming to help,” I blurt out. “People from the east are getting choppers ready to airlift people out.”

  Emotions run over their faces too fast for me to identify. “You’re—Really?” Nordin says. “Are you sure?”

  “We picked up on radio transmissions.”

  “You’re sure? Sure sure?”

  “Yes!”

  He whispers something I can’t make out and exhales deeply.

  Samira looks more stunned than anything. “When? We heard something like this before.”

  “I don’t know. But it’s something, right?”

  The both of them are silent for a while. Help is coming—why aren’t they happier?

  “We should tell—” Nordin starts.

  “We can’t sit and wait,” Samira cuts in. “Even if they’re on their way, we don’t know how many choppers they have. There are too many people in the shelters, besides.”

  “Where are you even taking people? Have you been east?” I tap my thumb against the handlebars, wondering if they’ve spent the morning bringing across anyone I saw at the Weesp shelter.

  “Will you give us the scooter or not?” Samira asks.

  “We should show her,” Nordin says.

  “Show me what?”

  Samira rubs her cheek, smudging the film of dirt on her skin. “We’d be breaching their trust.”

  “We’d be trusting her.” Nordin gestures at me. “She brought us food. Isn’t working together what this is about?”

  “OK.” Samira stares at me for a long time. “OK,” she says again.

  “OK what?”

  “We’ll show you,” Nordin says.

  The Olympisch Stadion is still standing.

  Samira and Nordin navigate past the surrounding structures, dodging two bloated, facedown bodies with none of us saying a word, until our scooters’ headlights illuminate the stadium’s outside walls.

  “Can’t you just tell me what you’re . . . ?” I say as we drag our scooters onto a slab of stone. Nordin helps with mine. It screeches as a metal rod drags past the shell, and I stumble back, falling on my ass. Nordin barely keeps the scooter from slipping away. “Sorry! Sorry.” I scramble to my feet. “Just—the noise—”

  “No worries.” He offers a pained smile.

  I clutch my side of the scooter again. This time, we avoid the rod.

  “We found other survivors,” Samira explains. “People who either never made it into a shelter or decided to leave. They have supplies. Enough to sustain a small group. They let us bring Nordin’s parents.” She continues to talk as we clamber across the rubble of a collapsed section of the stadium’s outside wall. Farther off, hints of light dance against the dust in the air.

  • • •

  There are people inside. “We helped others reunite with their families. We planned for all of us to go to dry land, but . . . the shelters . . .”

  “We want to get as many people as possible out before we leave,” Nordin adds.

  We’ve reached the highest part of the rubble, allowing an unobstructed view of the stadium. I sweep my flashlight around. We visited the stadium for a school trip two years ago. They’d talked about the 1928 Olympics, the sad fate of the winning Dutch gymnastics team, the Marathon tower and how it had carried the first ever Olympic flame. The tower is gone now. I hadn’t expected the spectator areas to remain intact—and some portions are completely collapsed, the seats crushed or swept away—but it’s like a brush and wet cloth would be enough to restore other sections to their original state. Shards of curved seats jut out from the rubble I’m standing on. The entire center of the stadium is underwater, the grass hidden under pitch-blackness, but it’s so perfectly oval it’s almost possible to imagine that the water’s surface is simply the field itself. Only the debris sticking out of the water—cars and stone and twisted metal—ruins the picture.

  And there are people. One group sits only a dozen meters to our right, where intact chairs meet rubble, and two other groups sit across the stadium, visible only by the glow of their lights.

  Engineers aside, I haven’t seen this many people outside in over a week.

  “There’re twenty-six of us,” Samira says.

  A beam of light lands directly on us, coming from the nearest group. “Who’d you bring?” a male voice calls.

  “A friend. She’s not staying, but she can help.”

  Within minutes, six of us sit in a circle: Samira and me and four others—mostly Samira’s age, early twenties—who are unfolding a map of Amsterdam and trying to keep it steady against the breeze blowing around the stadium. They’re smiling or eager, which is the weird thing. I thought they’d be suspicious.

  They expect me to help. It makes me nervously scratch at my jeans again, makes me want to tell them I ran away from work and could barely get out of bed that morning, but more than either of those, it makes me want to live up to that expectation.

  They’ve circled areas on the map with pink highlighter. “Shelters?” I say, but immediately realize they can’t be. One circle is by the blue-tinted water of the Sloterplas, and several others near Centraal Station, where there aren’t any shelters. Downtown is the least logical place to dig massive basements.

  “Guess again,” one guy says, his eyes twinkling. I forgot his name—Turkish, started with an O.

  I check the circles again, aware of every second that passes without my answering. They’ll think I’m dumb, they’ll think I’m—“Water,” I say. All the circles are near water. Big pools of water, like the Sloterplas, the Nieuwe Meer, the Gaasperplas, and the IJ, but also wide canals like the Amstel. I look back up at the faces surrounding me and see I got it right.

  “Harbors!” a blond girl says. She’s the only one who might be my age or even younger. She’s got springy hair and eager, wide-set eyes partially obscured by a set of goggles. Her name was R-something. She’s the only one still focused on me. The others are glancing past me, lifting a flashlight to look. I almost turn when R-something’s meaning dawns on me.

  “You’re planning to get people out by boat,” I say.

  “Not bad, right?” a voice behind me asks.

  I don’t have to turn. I know who that is.

  “Hi, Denise,” Iris says.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  “YOU’RE—” I START FOR THE FIFTH TIME.

  Iris and I sit side by side on muddy stadium seats, staring at the black depths below.

  “This is where you went earlier today,” I finally say.

  “And before.”

  I think back to her searching for the barrels yesterday. Was she lying? What about before then?

  Tzz-tzz, tzz-tzz—“Why?”

  “Those people you were just talking to . . . That’s Osman.” She points at the Turkish boy with the cheerful eyes. “I’ve mentioned him before. He helped with the festivals sometimes. We went to the party in Belgium together, but he and his partners went back to Amsterdam early. I don’t know what happened to them—they split up or they died or . . . Osman won’t tell me. But it’s just him left. Kristin, the black-haired girl: we found her on our way back to Amsterdam. We’d been trailing the new shoreline. She’d found intact canoes and was dragging them onto dry land. Without her, we wou
ld never have been able to reach Amsterdam.” Next, Iris points at the blond girl with the goggles. “I met Rens and his friend at the party—”

  “His?” I blurt out, understanding a moment later. “Oh. No, sorry, I get it.” Then: “It was a queer party?” I realize suddenly how little I actually know about the parties Iris goes to. Does she talk about them? Do I just not listen? I don’t even know. It’s a stupid thing to get hung up on now, but the realization makes me frown.

  “Yeah. I told you I’d stayed in Belgium longer because we’d met someone who might be able to offer us permanent shelter. Rens, his friend, and two others—they’re on the other side of the stadium—were all in on the conversation, too. The woman we met has a private shelter, Denise. Underground. Big enough for over a hundred people. She has generators powered by running water and wind. Sun lamps. Fertile earth. She wants to start a community. A way to survive until the surface is safer. She was even pursuing a lead for insects for protein and fertilizing plants. We went back home to find and bring back our families, and . . .”

  Her eyes frantically search mine for a reaction. I’m still focused on her hands, which lie still and folded in her lap, the exact opposite of mine. Tzz-tzz.

  “We don’t need . . . We have the Nassau,” I say.

  “The others don’t.”

  “So you were helping? Saying goodbye?”

  “A bit of both, I suppose.”

  I let it sink in. “So their plan is to return to Belgium now that they’ve found their families. But first, they want to help people from the shelters escape.”

  “It won’t be easy. We need to reach the harbors. Most boats will be gone or damaged. Even if we find one, Osman will need to know enough about electronics to get the boat working. We need to be able to navigate the rivers and canals to get us close to the shelters, then ferry people across the shallow water between the shelters and boats using the canoes—oh, and we have a scooter, the other day we found—”

  “You found Samira and Nordin. My friends from in town.”

  “Oh. Oh! I hadn’t met them yet, but Osman told me . . . They’re the ones that got you your scooter?”

  “They want it back to help with this plan.” I already knew I’d give it to them. The only question was how, but with Iris here, I can simply leave the scooter and we can go back in her canoe together. Something about Iris’s words keeps me from being too relieved. “You keep saying ‘we.’ The Nassau is leaving the day after tomorrow.”

  “I just want to do what I can, while I can. I can’t—can’t leave—” She draws up one leg and stares at the water in the center of the stadium. She’s silent for a minute. Two. “I lied about finding a temporary shelter,” she says, so quietly I barely hear her. “After the party, while we discussed that permanent shelter, our car was stolen. We went back to Amsterdam on foot. Me, Kev, Rens, that friend of Rens’s. Others.”

  “That’s hundreds of kilometers.”

  “For the impact and air blast, we found a ditch. We cupped our ears, like those emergency instructions said, and . . . we lay there for hours, waiting . . .”

  “You weren’t supposed to be outside during the impact.” My voice hitches.

  “A nearby building collapsed. Most of us were hurt. Rens’s friend got crushed by a car that . . . and Rens . . . he just bled and bled. I thought he’d die. His ears still barely work.” There’s that blankness on her face that I’ve come to recognize. It breaks, flickers to anguish, back to blankness, like a stuttering recording. “This girl we met at the party, her legs were broken. We tried to carry her, but she died a day later. And we’d lost most of our food and . . .”

  Iris is shaking. I should say something. Or hug her. Do what a sister does. Iris would ask me whether it was OK to hug me; then she’d wrap her arms around me, press her face to my shoulder, whisper all kinds of soothing things. I asked Fatima, didn’t I? I can ask Iris, too.

  “I’m sorry,” I say instead, which seems so inadequate as to be laughable.

  Across the stadium, light flickers as one of the groups moves across the seats.

  Iris keeps going. “Then we got caught in the flood. The tail end. Wasn’t as bad as here. We swam out, but we still lost Kev and a boy who . . . And we had to take filters from bodies we found . . .” Her voice breaks again. She makes a frustrated sound. “I have to help them. OK? I can’t sit on the Nassau and eat my belly full. It’s bad enough having to lie about where I’m staying.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was over. We were safe on the ship. I wanted to be there for you.”

  But you lied, I want to say childishly. I shut the words inside. What Iris went through . . . It’s everything I expected to happen after we’d need to leave the Gorinchem shelter; it’s everything I worried about when Mom was late, or when we got kicked off the Nassau; it’s everything I thought would happen to Samira and Nordin when the ship took off and I left them behind in the cold. It’s everything I fear will happen to the people in the Weesp shelter.

  “Do you need a hug?” The words sound stilted.

  But I said them, at least.

  “I would like that,” Iris whispers.

  I tell the group the scooter is theirs, and they tell me about their plans to find boats, and how to get them to work without keys or codes or the right fingerprints. Nobody knows how to actually sail a ship, but they’ll figure it out, they say, or maybe even find someone with the necessary experience in one of the shelters.

  “Are you doing all right?” Rens asks. She—he, I correct myself—sits by my side. He wipes his goggles free of dirt every few minutes and stares at me with big blue eyes barely visible beyond the plastic lenses. “You look a little shaky.”

  “I wasn’t prepared for all this.”

  On my other side, Iris bumps into me. We share a smile. I’m jittery, but I know this is right. This little circle of people, congregated around the light placed in our midst. Alive, hopeful, and making plans. Iris’s words echo in my head: People can survive a lot.

  For the first time, I’m actually helping them do so. And I don’t have to steal food from the ship or sneak anyone on board. I’m like Samira and Nordin; I’m like Dr. Meijer. Maybe, in a day and a half, Iris and I can leave knowing that we did what we could.

  So why am I still so . . . so off?

  “Is anyone hungry?” Osman climbs to his feet. “Denise, we can’t offer much—”

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  “Anyway.” Iris’s voice is so abrupt by my ear that I jolt away. “Let’s talk about priorities. We don’t know when the helicopters are coming, so . . .”

  I watch Osman leave as Iris talks, his flashlight aimed at the aisles in front of him. Not far ahead is a VIP booth, the glass gone but the rest miraculously intact. I wonder how much of the structure below us is intact, too. The cafeteria, the dressing rooms, the museum . . .

  “Denise!” Iris calls. “I—What do you think about—”

  Unease threads into my spine. Why is Iris so loud? Why ask for my opinion? They all know the situation better than I do. Some have even made it to dry land and connected with other survivors.

  In the distance, Osman’s flashlight beam changes direction. He makes his way up rather than sideways, lifting his legs high and stepping from seat to seat.

  “Here.” Iris presses a finger on the map draped across Kristin’s legs. The sound of paper tearing zips through the air.

  “Iris, what the hell?” Kristin says.

  “What’s wrong?” I say.

  “Just look here—what if, what if we—”

  Automatically I look at the spot her finger poked a hole in. Then back at Osman. Iris doesn’t want me seeing him. For some reason—

  The beam of Osman’s flashlight lands on a curved blue shape.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  IRIS’S EYES ARE WIDE. “’NISE. PLEASE UNDERSTAND—”

  Osman is facing two barrels. Three. Who knows how many others are tucked away beyond t
he reach of his flashlight.

  I stand before I realize it. I’m about to run to Osman. But then what? Snatch the barrels from under his hands and carry them back by myself? He doesn’t even know anything is amiss. He drops his flashlight, freeing his hands to open one barrel.

  Protein bars, I think. The protein bars we’ll need once our other supplies run out.

  “Denise?” Samira asks.

  “What’s going on?” Rens looks from me to Iris.

  I should talk to Iris. She’ll explain. No, she’ll lie. She’ll say she didn’t know. I should—I don’t know what I should do.

  I turn and run.

  • • •

  Not until five minutes after I leave the Olympisch Stadion do I remember that I had planned to leave my scooter behind.

  I can return it later. First, I need to tell Els what I saw. The Nassau is leaving in two days. If those barrels don’t get back on time, the entire waiting list—everybody’s frantic hope of getting their loved ones on board—will go up in smoke. Els warned we’d be in trouble even if we don’t let more people on. A single setback, and we won’t have enough reserves to fall back on.

  The scooter scrapes over debris. It careens dangerously left. I flinch at the sound, instantly slow the scooter down, then rev it back up when it still seems to behave normally. I need to get home. I want to read every page of that chapter about feline fur loss, even if I can recite it by heart. I can do that after we take off, though. The barrels come first. I’ll tell Els; she’ll send people to retrieve the supplies. Whether they’re the stolen barrels—and I refuse to think about how the thefts happened only after Iris came on board—or the ones swept away in the flood, we’ll bring them back. We’ll be celebrated.

  I navigate around a bent streetlight, check my compass for south.

  Celebrated.

  Except we’d leave Samira and Nordin and his parents, and Osman and Rens and Kristin, and all those anonymous silhouettes across the stadium, with nothing. Iris would be joining them. She knew about the barrels and lied—she’ll be kicked off the Nassau for certain.